“I am if it has relevance to the fact that we—and the thousands of people we carry on the ship—are dead in sixty or so years if we can’t figure out what happened and prevent it from happening again.”
Hiro felt cold sweat break out on his forehead. That fact was taking some time to sink in. Humans weren’t afraid of the specter of death that sat sixty years off; for a clone, it was terrifying. They were dead in the water. And Wolfgang put them there?
“We can’t be the only ones guilty of violent crimes,” Wolfgang said. “We need to figure out what everyone else is capable of.”
“Are you sure you’re not trying to shift the blame?” Katrina asked.
Another silence. A chair creaked. They must have relaxed enough to sit down.
“Captain, none of us knows what happened. It could have been you. It could have been me. We can’t be guilty of the crimes because we don’t have the memories of doing them.”
“That’s pretty impressive moral relativism,” she said, a sarcastic edge to her voice. “You should go into ethics and theology.”
He didn’t respond to that. Hiro wished he could see them. He edged closer.
“Do you wonder why they paired us together?” Katrina asked. “They had to know it wouldn’t be a good match if we learned who the other was.”
“I haven’t had time to wonder,” Wolfgang replied. “It’s possible they didn’t consider how we would work together.”
“They did all that psychological research in addition to studying our criminal records to make sure we would cooperate,” de la Cruz said. Then she added bitterly, “So we wouldn’t all kill each other once the isolation of deep space got to us.”
“Another system failure,” Wolfgang said.
“Add it to the list,” she replied.
Hiro reached the edge of the door and peeked in. The captain sat at her large desk, a majestic porthole out to deep space behind her. Wolfgang sat in the chair opposite, back to Hiro. He was leaning forward intently.
“I propose a truce,” he said. “We both were once hunters. We understand each other. The crew needs strong command. Until we find evidence, we point to no one.”
“We need the crew files,” she said. Hiro noticed she didn’t accept the truce.
“They’ve been wiped.”
“Joanna may have backups. She’s at least seen them,” Katrina said. “Go help her do the autopsies, get that information out of her.”
“And the truce?” Hah. Wolfgang had noticed it too.
“For now. We have bigger problems. We’re dying, Wolfgang. Nothing is as important as that.”
“Fine. I’ll talk to the doctor tonight,” Wolfgang said. His voice was getting louder. Belatedly Hiro realized he had to get out of the doorway or he’d be caught eavesdropping. He ran a few steps down the hall, turned, and started walking toward the captain’s office as if he had just gotten there.
Wolfgang nearly ran into him. “What are you doing out here?”
Hiro took a step back. “I had a question for the captain. I’m the only one she didn’t give an order to. I was going to go check out navigation again, but I wanted to know if she had other orders.”
Wolfgang stepped out of the doorway to let Hiro in. The captain sat at her desk, her back to them, looking at the rotating stars.
“Captain?” he asked.
“Has anyone collected the body in the helm?” Katrina said without turning around.
“Not that I know of,” Hiro said, dreading Katrina’s inevitable follow-up.
“Then go and cut it down and let Wolfgang take it to the medbay with the other bodies,” she said.
“Aye,” Hiro said, dread dripping from his voice.
“I’ll be right behind you in a moment,” Wolfgang said. “I need to talk to the captain a bit longer.”
Hiro exited the office, trying not to let his walk betray how badly he wanted to run the hell away. What did those two do?
A world without mindmapping technology at the ready was foreign to Hiro. Mindmapping technology had revolutionized cloning by allowing adults to be born with the full memories of the previous clone. Before then, genetically identical babies could be grown, but they would grow into whoever their environment shaped them to be.
But then people learned how to map the mind, not just the DNA.
In the old days, a machine took the mindmap while the subject was asleep. A person’s first mindmap could require weeks of going to the cloning clinic every night to fully map the brain, but once the technology improved, it was a matter of minutes. Subsequent mindmaps took a fresh look at the brain every time, needing only minutes to record a person’s new experiences, memories, and emotional growth.
The modern era of cloning was born. Or woken, some might say.
The problems of security came up soon after, since mindmapping tech could allow scientists to read some of the key parts of someone’s personality as clearly as they could read genetic abnormalities in DNA. The best mindmapping scientists could figure out that you were a compulsive liar as a child, and your first time lying had been when you were four, but they wouldn’t be able to tell you what that lie had been.
Despite that gossamer covering of privacy, a good mindmapper could tell an awful lot about a person. And a really good one could sever those connections, letting those memories, experiences, or triggered responses go floating off untethered to eventually fade away. These scientists eventually got the moniker mind hackers and were reviled or sought after, depending on where you were in society and how much money you had.
Some mind hacking was done to erase the effects of debilitating PTSD. Some people went into DNA hacking to resolve genetic abnormalities. Some had the legitimate (but mind-numbingly easy) job of making the clones sterile on a DNA level as the law required.
And some just went rogue and hacked whatever the highest bidder wanted them to. Luckily, high-level mindmapping was difficult, and not many people could do it well. Most of the best hackers went underground after the Codicils were passed.
At this moment the Dormire was unable to make new mindmaps or clones. If someone died, the only map they would have available would be the one they had made when the voyage started.
Hiro considered all of this as he headed back to the helm, the silent Wolfgang behind him. That backup they all made at the beginning of the journey: If all IAN’s logs had been wiped, where did that specific backup come from?
“He was eavesdropping,” Wolfgang said.
Katrina nodded. “That’s obvious. Why didn’t you confront him?”
“I’d like to see what happens,” Wolfgang said.
“A reactionary,” Katrina sneered. “Unsurprising.”
“Believe it or not, I learn from mistakes,” he said. “Running headlong into things before you have all the information, that’s foolhardy.”
She waved away his statement as if it were stale smoke. “Fine. Let’s see how he takes this information. If he reveals what he heard, we unite and throw him in the brig for mutiny. If he doesn’t, then we just watch him.”