“You mean, she wasn’t usually calm?”
“Her normal state was to raise hell,” Lum says. She sticks her head out of the crapper, but I notice a tentacle wrapping around the edge of the door. She is dying to shut the conversation off and get in the shower. “The reason Lum offed herself was because of her demotions. She was in High Command a few raids ago. Got bumped down, and she’s been getting bumped down ever since. Causes too much trouble.” Lum screws up her eyestalks. “Speaks her mind,” she says, as if this is a great sin.
“Seems weird,” I say. “Two suicides in a cycle. Taking on that much debt.”
Lum eyes the shower. The steam is, blessedly, cloaking her lower half.
“You ever done it?” I ask. “Ever… you know.”
“No,” she says, smiling. She looks down at herself. “I’m all original. And I’m wasting water. You wanna come in? I can tell you about my crazy ex-bunkmate and you can scrub the barnacles off my back.”
“I’m good,” I say. “Just curious is all.”
Lum seems, if anything, relieved. I can’t get a bead on her. “Suit yourself.” She starts to pull the door shut, then sticks her head out one last time. Considers something. I’m waiting.
“You were in Intelligence,” she says.
“Still am,” I say. “Gunner is just this one time.”
“And other races, they do it too? Off themselves?”
“A lot,” I say.
“But it’s final death for them,” Lum says.
“Yeah. That’s the point,” I say. “They do it when they get depressed.” Here, I’m drawing more from my own experiences than any of my studies. I remember feeling like I wanted to sleep for a long time. Forever, if I could.
The steam is filling our bunkroom. I feel sweat gathering on my back. Lum studies me for a painfully long while.
“I don’t think Mil was depressed,” she finally says. “I think she was… satisfied. Content, maybe. Or resigned. Or maybe…”
“Maybe what?”
“Or maybe she was scared out of her senses, and she couldn’t get anyone to pay attention. So she finally gave up.”
The next morning, I find what may be a clue. It is discovered by my sensitive back: a lump in my mattress or a spring bent out of shape. This is two mornings in a row with an ache in my spines (my mother would, again, call me soft of tentacle). I tear the sheets off my mattress in search of the answer.
All the springs are in fine shape, but running a tentacle across the mattress, I feel a lump. A very hard lump with sharp corners. It turns out to be a small data drive sewn into the fabric of the mattress. This is most curious. I wouldn’t think my beloved Mil would be into sexing vids, which is all I have ever used these for. The drive is locked. I try to access it with the wall terminal, but it refuses my tentacle. Coded to Mil’s secretions, unless it belongs to someone else.
One mystery is solved, and that’s the second suicide. Even with Mil’s memories restored to some prior, stable state, she would have found the drive and accessed some reminder. She had left a note to herself before the first deed, and upon discovering it, gave a repeat performance. Maybe her superiors knew she had left some memory behind, and so they sent her to another ship. To my bunk. Where she is being sexed by Kur.
The only problem with my brilliant theory is that Kur says she’s still trying to hang herself. But that could be explained by the sexing! I chuckle to myself. I will have to tell Kur that one. I bring up my messages on the terminal to pass this joke along and to tell him about the data drive, when I see a message waiting in my inbox from him, saying that he has thwarted another attempt on her life.
Why does my heart go out to her? Why am I not disturbed? And what if she kills herself yet again and they are out of bodies for her in the vats here? They might bring her back as a man, and now it is too late and I already love her.
Listen to me. A cycle ago, I was dreaming of saving enough for a plot of land and a settlement pass, of making a permanent home on some ball of mud. Now I am worried over a woman with a career of demotions and a pile of debt.
I study the locked drive, this lone token of hers. It was sewn into the top of the mattress, almost as if designed to gouge a spine and annoy the resting. Like it was meant to be found. Maybe it wasn’t planted for her at all—but for me.
Two days to planetfall, and a radio tech’s madness consumes me. I should be worried about my own skin. A bad death means more debt I can ill afford. But it’s difficult to stop being a Liaison Officer. I am trained to dig and to study and to know a soul before we destroy them. Now I find myself curious about a soul intent on destroying herself.
It is download day, one day before planetfall. After mess, we file by rank down to the vats and hold our tentacles very still in the tight confines of the scanner. Annual copies were taken in my old line of work, but they were treated casually—few people fall over dead at their research terminals. This time, I don’t move a muscle. I try not to think any stray thoughts. I have a very good feeling that this copy will be needed.
Will I wake up with my current sense of dread intact? Will my first thought be, upon my rebirth, please don’t let me die tomorrow? What a strange life. It is only strange to me because I have studied so many races who only know final death. Their one life is all, and this causes some among them to guard it until it cannot breathe. Others flail and spend it recklessly. And what do we do? We grow bored of it.
Before I joined the fleet, I remember thinking that we were conquerors of worlds. But we are conquerors of death. How many copies of ourselves have we left behind? How many will be enough? The scanner clicks and whirs around my head, recording these disjointed musings of mine, the hollow in the pit of my soul, and what is really eating at me becomes clear:
I do not dread dying tomorrow as much as I loathe the thought of taking lives with my own tentacles. I have studied for too long, read too much poetry, perhaps. I am used to making planetfall with the last of the landing parties, the crafts full of advisors and record-keepers and relic-takers. I land once the bloated bodies of all a world’s poets have already been turned beneath the soil.
So this I dread. And what else? The repetition. The waking up to do it all over again. Death becomes no more than sleep. And even if I put a bullet to this brain, and the next, and the next, swift enough to test the staying power of the vats, there will always be another of me in Second Fleet, and finally I will tire of this as well.
The scanner records these worst of my thoughts. And then the whirring and grinding falls still. Ah, how I wish I could fall still as well. Into some meditative, or more permanent, silent state.
And with this, the mystery of Mil’s second suicide is solved. It is so obvious, I feel like slapping myself with my own tentacles. I squirm from the scanner. As the next Gunner takes my place, I badger the scanner technician to look something up for me on his terminal. He is annoyed, but I have all the charm of a Liaison Officer. All I need is a date. I need to know when Mil performed her last routine backup. I tell him it is a matter of life and death. Of life and debt. And he relents.
The date is near enough that I know that I am right, but I rush back to my bunkroom and pull up Mil’s records to be sure. And yes, her backup was soon after the missing messages but just before her first attempt. Whatever she knows, it doesn’t look bad to a technician on her scans. It is not a black fog of depression, no bright colors of mental imbalance. Just a piece of knowledge, cleverly hidden away.
I fish the locked data drive out of my pocket and study this mystery. If only I had another day or two, I would get to the bottom of this. As it is, the why of it all will have to wait until after Earth. I just hope when I die in the morning, that I’ll be able to piece these more recent epiphanies together again.