Iris held his breath, struggling to remember what the numbers and letters Yan was pointing to meant. The code was supposed to tell him what the ship was doing and where. He peered at the glowing screen again. “On and off,” Iris muttered. “I don’t know what you’re pointing to means, but the rest of it is on and off, and it’s frequent. Tenth deck, and this”—he pointed to a running line of code—“this would be quite central, I think.” A moment of contemplation, and Iris sat back on his heels in awe. “You found the brain.”
Yan raised an eyebrow. “Close. I found a bundle of signals. Whether or not it’s the brain remains to be seen.”
“That’s why you’re sitting here. You’re tracking the signals over time, to see if it’s random.” Yan could have plugged into the ship at any other location, but he chose to be in the corridor directly connected to the cargo bay. Iris made a deliberate choice to ignore the coincidence.
The engineer gave him a thumbs-up and reached for the thermos. As he stretched, Iris noticed the torn hem of his shirt had a wide strip of navy fabric missing. Near the pile of discarded cigarettes lay a single black marker.
“I should go,” Iris pushed out, his ears turning a deep shade of red. “I have a lot of work to do.” He rocked to his feet and took a few, quick steps backwards. Yan didn’t say anything. He just gave Iris a short nod and lit another cigarette. The cargo bay suddenly seemed impossibly far away, and he couldn’t reach it fast enough.
“One last thing,” Yan called out over his shoulder. “Did you ever see what it was that attacked Ishtan?”
His hand already on the cargo bay doors, Iris froze. “I found him unconscious, but—”
“That’s not a yes.”
“He was unconscious when I found him. No need to let suspicions run wild.”
Yan chuckled. “I’m very particular about my suspicions.”
Iris slinked to cargo bay and shut the door. Of all the people whose company he’d been in, Ishtan was the last suspect Iris would entertain. But he was quickly learning that grasping at straws gave Yan a sense of control he so desperately needed. Theyallneeded some certainty in this time when each new moment brought unfathomable new dangers. Iris too was adrift without a rudder, the ship and the company all uncharted territory. Yan more so than others.
Isn’t this a good thing?VIFAI asked, tone innocent and coy.Your engineer doesn’t hate you.
“Not my engineer.”
Iris knelt by the pile of bones and fished out what looked like a radius. He knew bone, its texture comfortably familiar. This particular one had fractured radially. Dirt caked the jagged splinters, lined the cracks. How many more unnatural deaths would Iris discover if only he dug deep enough? How much violence would he unearth?
“Did you find anything useful on generation ships before we got attacked?” Iris asked. With a mild, induced vertigo, VIFAI uploaded all the texts. “Read them, please, aloud,” Iris asked. He could retrieve the texts from his own memory if he wanted to. Most monks did just that. Learning new information was too unnecessarily taxing and time-consuming when you had such a convenient alternative at your disposal. But Iris needed a human voice, even if mildly inorganic—a safe voice. A voicethat knew when to press him and when to back down.Please, he asked again in his mind.
Seven generation ships have been identified so far. OnlyAscension, docked at P’Ilani, carried any living passengers. All others passed en route.
“Any violence?”
Almost always. But never enough to wipe out the whole ship. Most experienced complete infrastructure collapse instead. First generation teaches second generation how to repair pipes and drain coolant, second generation slacks off, third generation doesn’t know how to repair pipes and drain coolant. Water reclamation fails. Oxygen reclamation fails. Everyone dies.
Iris pulled another radius from the pile and placed the two side by side. If he worked diligently, he could finish assembling at least another three skeletons before he needed to rest again. “Try to sound less thrilled, please.”
No routine immunisation. Everyone dies. Hit by a meteorite. Everyone dies. Cabin fever—
“Everyone dies.” Iris picked up a child’s femur and set it aside for later. “Have you been able to recover any images from the other seven ships? Anything similar to the murals we’ve seen?”
VIFAI played two descending pitches—negative.We don’t have anything on hand, and I can’t go to the feed for more.
Any records of early AI systems being discovered on any of the ships?The question formed itself in his mind before Iris could fully comprehend what he was implying.
Again, two descending pitches.
In theory, could there have been early AI systems?
Ask your engineer, VIFAI laughed and blipped out of their chat before Iris could chastise it.
Then theNicaea wasspecial. Unremarkable when it came to the survival of her crew, but perhaps unique in how they perished. Iris couldn’t stop fidgeting with the fractured radius before him. Radial fractures were never accidental; they required someone to deliberately twist the bone,hard, to hold out against struggle. Bullet wounds to the head were also deliberate. And there was the matter of the verylackof bones throughout the rest of the ship. There had been violence, and Iris had no stomach for it. Naturally, to quell his unease, he ventured to sit with the most violent thing he could conjure in recent memory.
By the time Iris squeezed through the crack in the cargo bay door, Yan had already packed up his things and gone, and the corridor was engulfed in a familiar, ear-ringing silence. A few minutes of walking, creeping around corners, and Iris found Ordan’s body exactly where he had left it. In the space of a day, the ship had wrapped itself around Ordan with vines and fragile tendrils, and erected a cradle, lifting the body from the floor almost a metre. White, bioluminescent fungi peered through the blanket, and in their dim, blue glow, Iris saw he was not alone. The second station security guard stood over the body, head bowed. At the sound of Iris’s footsteps, he jerked away and around, only to sigh with relief. “I thought something was coming to end me,” he said with a stiff smile.
Not this time. Iris gave him a deep bow.
“You’re doing well, considering the shape they dragged you in.”
