We stood behind that one, but slightly above it, as the stations we were near were slightly elevated. Oddly, in my experience, they all had tall chairs shaped for humans. The consoles all had dedicated push buttons and switches and dials, not adaptive consoles like the ones I’d worked with all my life, even back on Wisewell, the frontier settlement where I’d grown up, been orphaned, got married, had a kid, and left the first chance I’d been offered. Those consoles and chairs were the thing that brought home, unsettlingly, that everybody on this ship really had been a Terran human. Knowing something intellectually and realizing it in your bones are very different.
Because of our elevation, and because the command chair was turned toward the back of the room, we could see that the seat was not empty. And that the jumpsuit-clad person in the chair had been there for a very long time, and was not likely to move from it under their own power ever again.
On the other side of the bridge, Tsosie and I kept on walking. The tinkertoys were back, and watching those modular lattices click apart ahead of us and click together behind us as we got farther and farther from the egress made me even more unsettled than the dead body in the command chair had. We could cut our way out through the hull if we had to—a rescue hardsuit, especially backed up with the physical power of my exo, was more than capable of rearranging the generation ship’s superstructure. I wouldn’t do that unless our lives were in imminent danger, however. It would kill any crew members in the areas of the ship I would inevitably decompress in the process.
And piss off the archaeological team.
Assuming for the moment that there were any crew members left on this ship—an assumption that was seeming less and less probable with every weirdly echoing step Tsosie and I took—it was my job to save them, not murder them.
There had been skin cells in the dust I collected, at least. And all of them were Terran. People like me and Tsosie, only six hundred ans removed. Six hundred of their ans—years, to use the old style—and closer to a millennian for us, I guessed. Time gets really funky when you’re zipping around the galaxy at relativistic speeds and information still travels either through white space packet, or by slow boat or electromagnetic progression.
That’s one of many reasons why I am not an archinformist. They have these plots of events happening at different times and in different places and where the information fronts of those events intersect. It’s like trying to read a contour map while somebody spins it in the air in front of you and the colors keep changing.
So. A ship full of missing Terrans. Missing, bar one: the body that we—or one of our sister ships still inbound—were going to have to come back to collect and transport eventually.
Inside the hardsuit, I licked my lips uneasily. The hairs on my arms horripilated and my palms grew cold.
Intuition is a real thing, though there’s nothing supernatural about it. It’s not without mysteries, however. The human brain (and presumably, the nonhuman brain as well) gathers and processes a lot of information in excess of that which we are consciously aware. It doesn’t use words or often even images. It deals with feelings and instincts, and that glitchy sensation that you can’t trust somebody, or that something is wrong.
So when I say that I had the increasing, creeping conviction that the generation ship’s endlessly rolling wheel was deserted, that it felt empty, I don’t pretend there was any higher knowledge behind it. But I was sure there were plenty of subtle clues, even if I couldn’t have named a one of them.
My conscious awareness was pretty busy riding herd on a half dozen exotic ayatanas and the processing issues that all of them were having with the alien (to them) environment and my human sensory input.
There’s a common misconception that wearing an ayatana is sharing your brain with somebody else. And it’s not, exactly. It’s more like having someone else’s memories and opinions and experiences to draw upon… along with their neuroses, preconceptions, trigger issues, and prejudices. Because nothing in this galaxy can ever be simple.
But I had two different methane species loaded, including one from a Darboof staff member. That was the species that was driving the fast packet we’d seen. Or had been driving him, at least: they might be gone now, too.
I’d also gone deep in the Core General archives and pulled the most archaic human ayatanas I could find, and a couple of systers recorded around the time of first contact with my species.
It’s generally contraindicated to load more than a couple of ayatanas at once, but I’m a trained professional with years of experience. Kids, don’t try this at home.
Inside my head, the methane breathers in particular were having fits about what, to them, was a blinding, flesh-melting level of light and a profoundly unfriendly hot environment. Balancing that and keeping myself alert in the confusing, constantly altering environment of the microbots and the creaking ship took up a lot of my attention. Managing my pain levels—they’re chronic—took up a little more.
So I didn’t notice that we hadn’t heard from Sally in quite some time—not until Tsosie said her name, and nobody answered.
I stopped with a foot in midair. Because when somebody else says something is broken you can’t be totally sure until you try it yourself, I idiotically echoed, “Sally?”
The silence was immediately twice as loud.
I put my foot down very gently and groped for our uplink. There was nothing on the other end. Not even the quiet feeling of connection that usually radiates down the senso from a linked AI when you tune into it. For a second, the bottom dropped out of me, and I flailed in the panicked certainty that Sally was gone and we were trapped here on this weird ghost ship, and that all our friends were dead.
I admit it: I am not the galaxy’s best at not immediately producing the worst-case scenario. Fortunately, I’m also aware of this tendency, after years of rightminding and some time in a nice, secure environment, and so I bumped my GABA and serotonin levels up and my cortisol level down and took six deep breaths until the sensation of my heart squeezing tight around a shard of glass eased up somewhat.
The brain is—mostly—an electrochemical meat machine. The fact that you can tune it is why humanity still exists, centians after the Eschaton and the crazy desperate nonsense of those who could afford to escape an Earth we’d declared doomed attempting to save themselves at any cost.
Crazy desperate nonsense like this big old ship I was standing on.
I looked over at Tsosie, and saw his face pinched and his brow dewed with beads of sweat behind the faceplate. He’d stopped moving, too, and when we halted the clicking of the tinkertoy microbots silenced. They were frozen mid-peel, as if somebody had hit pause on the animation.
“What are the odds we’re blocked from coms, and they’re fine up there?” I asked him, trying to sound reasonable. “And they’ll get in touch with us momentarily?”
“If it can be done, Sally and our crew can do it.” He sounded like he believed it, too. Some people just have solid neurochemistry. Or more robust rightminding.
Or less trauma, I supposed.
Maybe I was a little freaked out by the entirely empty ship. Entirely empty, except for one dead person and a weird tinkertoy machine. Entirely empty of the thousands of crew members it was large enough to contain.
“What are the odds that something terrible went wrong and they’re all dead?”
“Have a little faith,” said Tsosie. “Come on. Keep walking. Let’s do our job and trust them to do theirs, what do you say?”
“I don’t know much about faith,” I said to Tsosie, ten steps later.