Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 by Elizabeth Bear Read Free Book Online Page B

comprehensible to life from ours
. He sneezed again and wiped his nose on the camphorated cloth.
     
    0500 Hours

Monday 6 November, 2062

HMCSS
Montreal
Earth orbit
    I wake early, ship's time, alone in my bunk and wearing the kind of bad attitude that makes you hate living in your own skin. I know what it's about, too. I haven't had a drink since we left Earth, and I've been a borderline alcoholic for twenty years. Self-medication is a wonderful thing.
    You don't need it anymore, Jenny.
Yeah, right.
    So I can sleep nights, when two months ago I couldn't. Somebody loves me and isn't shy about showing it. My monsters are all dead now. Dead and buried. Lost and gone.
    So why am I waking up mornings wanting a drink? Or thinking about the vial of diminutive yellow pills in my blazer pocket?
    Oh, hell. Today is another test-drive day. I get to jack into the
Montreal
live and for real, take her up and out, and put her through her FTL paces. Not the virtual reality simulator, like the one Leah is probably flying right now, somewhere on Earth. Not a model. A real, live, deadly powerful ship with some three hundred souls on board.
    I roll over out of the bunk, hit the floor palms flat, and start my push-ups. Endorphins. Good thing. One, two, three, four, nose dipping down to almost touch the porthole in my floor, nothing out there now but the trackless dark—
    The trick is not using the prosthesis. It's too strong. Fortunately, in partial gravity, one-handed push-ups aren't as hard as they are planet-side. Get the blood moving.
Good morning, Richard. Any progress?
    “Yes,” he says. “And it's complicated in here. I'm not certain there's any differentiation between the worm and the programming.”
    I stop with my right arm extended, left arm folded against my chest. Even the new prosthesis is heavy, although it's lighter and stronger than the twenty-five-year-old one it replaced. If I didn't keep up with my PT, I'd look like the Hunchback just from carrying the damned thing around. “No differentiation?” I say it out loud, and bite my lip.
Richard, what does that mean?
    His image drums fingers on immaterial thighs, then the hands come up in an encompassing gesture. I imagine a sailor pulling ropes. “It means there's no worm, per se. Nothing I can deactivate without ripping the programming out entirely. And you need it where it is. It was skillfully done. But if I could decompile the code, Castaign and I might have a chance.”
    That software runs the wetware that keeps me walking. Nanoprocessors along my damaged spinal cord, improving its functionality; the reflex boost that makes me potentially able to
steer
this improbable starship. My left hand, gleaming steel under a polymer film that handles the sensory information. All souvenirs of a very, very bad accident half a lifetime ago, upgraded and enhanced with new, radical nanotechnology that cost me a few weeks on tubes and monitors in a hospital bed.
    There's a rub. The source of that medical miracle is the grounded alien spacecraft that Valens and Charlie discovered on Mars. The technology that also gave us the
Montreal
's quasi-understood stardrive and my ability to control it. Technology we've back-engineered, or at least copied . . . but that, in my layman's estimation, we don't understand worth a damn.
    It's beyond irresponsible and into criminal. So how did I come to sign on for this little charade?
    Thereby hangs the tale—
    “I'm working on it, Jenny,” Richard says in my ear, as I realize I've lost count of my push-ups and ease back onto my knees to stretch.
    The worm, or the tech?
    “Yes.” Expansive, expressive hands. Long knotty fingers, with no physical reality whatsoever. Richard is made in the image of a physicist dead since the previous century. He's
not
Richard Feynman—just an artificial persona, a program meant to mimic the original. A persona that somehow clicked into self-awareness; a feat my friend Elspeth hasn't been able to reproduce. “I've