He doubted he would react well. Finding his own body dead of apparent suicide in the helm was enough to prove that.
Currently the captain was in the situation where a clone was alive who had memories she didn’t share. There would be legal and moral considerations as to who retained the right to the very being of Katrina de la Cruz. Fighting for the right to lead the ship would be inevitable, but that would likely be only the first of such battles.
Or they could just read the law exactly as it was written, and terminate the older clone. That sometimes happened too.
IAN could have helped them with this decision, but, well, that was a current dead end.
They entered the medbay. The captain walked right up to the bed and looked down at her own older, comatose body. Her skin paled, then darkened, and her lips went white. She took a sharp intake of breath and turned her back, facing Hiro and Joanna. “Recycle it.”
Joanna gaped at her. “That’s all you have to say? That’s a person lying there.”
“Legally, the moment I woke up, that became just a shell,” Katrina said. “Recycle it.” Striding as purposefully as she could in the low gravity, she left the medbay.
“See, that’s what I told Maria she would say,” Hiro said, glancing at Joanna. “But I think we need her.”
Joanna nodded. “Our only witness.” She moved to check the readings on the terminal beside the bed.
“Seems unethical, besides.”
The doctor rubbed her face. “I hate these problems. There’s never a good answer. Can you check and see if my spare set of prosthetics are here?”
“How often have you had this kind of problem?” Hiro asked as he looked around the medbay while Joanna rooted through a drawer. She pulled out a tablet and turned it on.
“We are given a number of clone-specific ethical questions in med school,” she said. “This is only one of them. We studied things like how to deal with mind hackers who botch a job, or do too good a job. How to judge if a clone’s early death is suicide. Who to blame if someone is cloned against their will or at the wrong time. We had a whole year on ethics.”
“Just one year?” Hiro asked. “That can’t be enough. I’ve had a few lifetimes and I still don’t understand it sometimes.”
The medbay closet held several jumpsuits, a small overturned plastic table, and a collection of shoes. The legs the shoes were supposed to be on were nowhere to be found.
“Where am I supposed to find these legs?” he asked.
“If they’re not there, they’re in my quarters. If they got displaced because of the grav drive failure, they couldn’t have gotten far.”
Joanna was making notes from the machines the captain’s clone was hooked up to. She didn’t look up when Hiro joined her, merely reached her hands out and kept reading digital charts.
“No legs, sorry,” Hiro said, going to the other side of the captain’s bed. Everything in the medbay was meticulous; anything that wasn’t bolted to the floor or magnetically held down was in containers already secured using such methods. “You’re apparently not a messy person, so there’s not a lot of places for the legs to hide.”
The captain, now that Hiro had time to look at her, did not look well. Her long black hair was gone, shaved so that her head wound could be treated and bandaged. Tubes of all sizes came from her body, pumping things in or taking things out.
“She was attacked only two days ago,” Joanna said, looking at the machine’s display. “That’s how far back the data goes, anyway, but from the looks of the wounds, it sounds right. I won’t know until Paul gets IAN online and we can get the locked computers going. Then I hope we can access our logs.”
“They’re fully locked down?” Hiro asked. “But the engines and the nav system had an override.”
“Apparently it’s an emergency lockdown that happens with the resurrection switch. To give everyone time to acclimate before making any rash decisions,” Joanna said, frowning. “Although it could just be another safeguard to avoid sabotage.”
“It seems every single safeguard failed,” Hiro said, shaking his head. “Cutting us out of the computers doesn’t seem like good planning.”
“I’m with you. But they thought that IAN would be around to help make these decisions. We weren’t supposed to be needed. Hopefully Paul can find my logs concerning the captain’s status. Once we unlock Wolfgang’s logs, that should help us identify who attacked her, and we can learn some more.”
“Then I guess it’s safe to say that she wasn’t the murderer,” Hiro said, “unless she’s good at beating herself up.”
“I don’t think it’s safe to say anything right now,” Joanna said. “You’d be surprised what people are capable of.”
Hiro swallowed back his reply. Not really.
Even with the grav drive turned back on, the doctor hadn’t removed the old clone’s restraints. Hiro tested one and Joanna shook her head at him. He raised his eyebrows. “You afraid she’s going to run away?”
“She’s our only witness, if she wakes up,” Joanna said. “And our only suspect if she is somehow involved in the carnage out there.” She jerked her head toward the cloning bay. “It’s safest for everyone if she stays strapped to the bed.”
“What about the captain? The current one, I mean?” Hiro asked. “She gave you an order.”
Joanna sighed and leaned back in her chair. “When it comes to medical disagreements, I have jurisdiction. We may need to protect this one from her. Have you ever had your clones overlap?”
Hiro shook his head, the often-repeated lie coming to his lips. “My lab was ethical to the point of being boring. Have you ever broken clone law, had your clones overlap or anything?”
The doctor was silent for some time.
“This should be an easy answer,” he said. “It’s a yes, no, or I don’t want to talk about it, Hiro, let’s talk about what you think’s been happening in rugby for the past twenty-five years kind of question.”
“Just considering how much to say,” the doctor said. “Memories grow hazy.”
“And we don’t know yet who to trust. Fair enough,” he said.
Memories. He had many. His childhood was crystal-clear. The details of his various lives tended to blur together, though. He was usually grateful for that.
“I’ve lived a long time,” Joanna finally said. “Before the Codicils, even.”
Hiro whistled. “No kidding? So you must have had multiples at one time, or lived in the golden age of hacking.”