I looked at you. You looked so still and calm, still frost-rimed with condensed water vapor from when the rescue team pulled you in through the pressure lock. You’d been in shutdown, drifting tethered to a hardpoint on the hull, for over three hours. Your skin is yellowing, the bruised bloom of self-destructing chromatophores shedding their dye payloads into your peripheral circulation. One of our human progenitors (like the pale-skinned, red-haired female you resemble) would be irreversibly dead at this point: but we are made of sterner stuff. I refused to feel despair. “How bad is it?” I asked.
“It could be worse.” Wo shrugged, a ripplingly elegant wave of contraction curling out along all their limbs. “I’m mostly worried about her neural chassis. Did she leave a soul chip inside when she was out on the hull?”
I shook my head. Leaving a backup chip is a common ritual for those who work in high-risk environments, but you spent so long outside that you’d run the risk of diverging from the map of your memories. “She was wearing a chip in each of her sockets. You could try checking for them. Can you do a reload from chip . . . ?”
“Only if I could be absolutely certain it wasn’t corrupted. Otherwise I’d risk scrambling the contents of her head even worse. No, Lilith, leave your sister to me. We’ll do this the slow way, start with a full marrow replacement then progressively rebuild her brain while she’s flatlined. She should be ready to wake up after a month of maintenance downtime. Then we can see if there’s any lasting damage.”
I saw the records, sister. You were on the outside of the hull, on the wrong side of the ship. You were exposed to almost thirty thousand Grays of radiation. The skin on your left flank, toughened to survive vacuum and cosmic radiation, was roasted.
“She should be all right for a while. I’ll get around to her once I’ve checked on everyone else . . . ”
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “Who else was outside the hull? Isn’t she the most urgent case?”
The doctor’s dismay was visible. “I’m afraid not. You underestimate how many people have sustained radiation damage. You were inside a reaction mass tank, were you not? You may be the least affected person on the entire ship. Everyone’s been coming in with teché damage and odd brain lesions; memory loss, cognitive degradation, all sorts of stuff. Our progenitors didn’t design us to take this kind of damage. I’m still working on a triage list. You’re at the bottom of it; you’re still basically functional. Your sister isn’t in immediate danger of getting any worse, so—”
“—But she’s dead! Of course she isn’t going to get any worse!”
My outburst did not improve the doctor’s attitude. “I think you’d better go now,” they said, as the door opened above me and a pair of hexapods from Structural Engineering floated in, guiding a third companion who buzzed faintly as he flew. “I’ll call you when your sib’s ticket comes up. Now leave.”
Doctor-Mechanic Wo was trying to spare me from the truth, I think. Very few of us appreciated the true horror of what had happened; we thought it was just a violent radiation burst that had damaged systems and injured our techné, the self-repair cellules that keep the other modular components of our bodies operational and manufacture more cellules when they die; at worst, that it had fried some of our more unfortunate company.
But while gamma rays wreak a trail of ionization damage, cosmic rays do more: secondary activation transmutes nuclei, turns friendly stable isotopes into randomly decaying radioactive ones. The scratching scraping flickers at the edge of my vision as I neared the escape hatch in the hydroxygen tank was but the palest shadow of the white-out blast of noise that scrambled the minds and eyes of a third of our number, those unfortunates who had berthed in modules near the skin of the ship, on the same side as the radiation beam. Functional for now, despite taking almost a tenth of your borderline-lethal shutdown dose, their brains are literally rotten with fallout.
We’re connectionist machines, our minds and consciousness the emergent consequence of copying in circuitry the wet meat-machine processes of our extinct human forebears. (They never quite understood their own operating principles: but they worked out how to emulate them.) Random blips and flashes of radioactive decay are the bane of nanoscale circuitry, be it electronic or spintronic or plasmonic. Our techné is nothing if not efficient: damaged cellules are ordered to self-destruct, and new, uncontaminated neural modules are fabricated in our marrow and migrate to the cortical chambers in head or abdomen, wherever the seat of processing is in our particular body plan.
But what if all the available molecular feedstock is contaminated with unstable isotopes?
Two months after my visit, Doctor-Engineer Wo called me from the sick bay. I was back in the mass fraction tank, scraping and patching and supervising: the job goes on, until all fuel is spent. At a tenth of realtime, rather than my normal deep slowtime, I could keep an eye on developments while still doing my job without too much tedium.
As disasters go, this one crept up on us slowly. In fact, I don’t believe anyone—except possibly Doctor-Engineer Wo and their fellow mechanocyte tinkers and chirurgeons has any inkling of it at first. Perhaps our response to the radiation storm was a trifle disjointed and slow. An increase in system malfunctions, growing friction and arguments between off-shift workers. Everyone was a bit snappy, vicious and a little stupid. I gave up listening to Lorus Pinknoise after he interrupted a lecture on the evolution of main sequence stars to launch a vicious rant at a member of his audience for asking what he perceived to be a stupid question. (I didn’t think it was stupid, anyway.) The chat streams were full of irritation: withdrawal into the tank was easy. So I was taken by surprise when Wo pinged me. “Lilith, if you would come to bay D-16 in Brazil, I have some news about your sister that I would prefer to deliver in personal proximity.”
That caught my curiosity. So for the first time in a month, I sped up to realtime, swam up towards the hatch, poked my way out through the tank meniscus, and kicked off along the corridor.
I noticed at once that something was wrong: a couple of the guideway lights were flickering, and one of them was actually dark. Where were the repair crews? Apart from myself, the corridor was deserted. Halfway around the curve of the tunnel I saw something lying motionless against a wall. It was a remora, a simple-minded surface cleaning creature (a true robot, in the original sense of the word). It hung crumpled beside a power point. Thinking it had run into difficulty trying to hook up for a charge, I reached out for it—and recoiled. Something had punched a hole through its carapace with a spike, right behind the sensor dome. Peering at it, I cranked my visual acuity up to see a noise-speckled void in place of its fingertip-sized cortex. Shocked, I picked up the pathetic little bundle of plastic and carried it with me, hurrying towards my destination.
Barreling through the open hatch into the dim-lit sick bay, I saw Doctor-Engineer Wo leaning against a surgical framework. “Doctor!” I called. “Someone attacked this remora—I found it in the B-zone access way. “Can you—” I stopped.
The sick bay was lined on every wall and ceiling with the honeycomb cells of surgical frames, the structures our mechanics use in free-fall lieu of an operating table. They were all occupied, their patients staring sightlessly towards the center of the room, xenomorph and anthrop alike unmoving.
Wo turned towards me slowly, shuddering. “Ah. Lilith.” It’s skin was sallow in the luciferine glow. “You’ve come for your sister.”
“What’s—” a vestigial low-level swallow reflex made me pause—“what’s happened? What are all these people doing here?”