Escape

The terminal screen gave off a faint glow. Generations of genetic engineering, and that glow was all I needed to see the whole room, though only in shades of grey. That barely mattered. The quarters weren't different from any others. I could have navigated it blind. A bed in the back left; a table, right of the door; some chairs; a dispensary unit built into the wall by the table and the terminal on the right-hand wall. Below the terminal was the body of Resident Judk. She'd been stabbed. Her species' internal fluids had leaked out and dried. The fluids gave off a sweet smell, almost like benzene gas. From behind me, Oues spoke. Their mandibles clicked intermittently.

“I don't percieve any personal objects. Reclamation already come through?”

I shrugged. It was reflexive; Oues couldn’t see me. While my ancestors had enhanced their eyes, Oues’s ancestors had chosen to discard theirs altogether. The clicks were some sort of sonar I think.

“Maybe. Or maybe she hadn’t the need for much stuff. Some don’t. There’s not much in my quarters either. Grab her back limbs; let’s get moving.”

Instead, Oues kept up their clicks as they walked about the room. Their head tilted at various angles to catch the sound. I tried to be patient, but it had been a long rotation so I probably only gave them a minute.

“Alright, supreme judicator. You find a clue? Do you know who did it? No? Then come on. Limbs, move.” This time Oues did step over. Together we picked the body up and started to shuffle our way over to the door.

“Do you not possess curiosity?”

"About what?"

“The death of Resident Judk.”

“No.”

"A killing was done on our station and you neither possess worry nor interest in the event?" Oues pressed.

One of the issues of having so many cultures and species all working together was an inability to read subtle, emotional cues. It is something we were all required to work on, but it is difficult and slow going. Now, I don't feel like I was being subtle about my desire to not talk and to finish work. But perhaps, to Oues's culture, I was inscrutable. Regardless I responded by releasing cycles worth of anger and packing as much venom into my words as I could.

“No, and I’ll tell you why! First, we are seventeen percent points away from escaping. And yet, every new model predicts we’ll be crushed by a black hole before we can get there. And we’ve lost contact with every other station. So either I hit the cosmic lottery and was sent to the one station too incompetent to harvest energy efficiently or we’re the last hope for lifeforms from our universe to survive. And you know? I don't know which is worse! And finally, on a personal note. This morning I’ve been informed my rations are going down. Again. So now I’m doing the same work on fewer nutrients with only the dim hope that I'll be crushed to death before they have me on fractions of a fraction of what my species requires. So no. The murder of a rank and file engineer on section three does not interest me.”

Oues became quiet, besides the rhythmic clicking. After I calmed down I did feel bad for blowing up on them like that. They weren’t the source of my anger. And it wasn’t like Oues was having fun at the heat death of the universe themself. The mature, socially considerate decision on what to do next would be to apologize. But then again I did enjoy the silence. Oues could talk about nothing from section three to twelve with only their clicks as a gap. And I could wait to apologize till closer to twelve. The silence continued to hold. We reached the stairs and began the climb down.

Somewhere around section eight Oues stopped.

"That unusual sound, did you feel it?"

I listened but couldn't hear anything. But then I wasn’t designed to hear as accurately as Oues.

"Where is it coming from?" I asked.

Oues gestured toward the door that led onto section eight's main corridor. We set the body down and shuffled up to the door. Now that I was closer I could hear it, or maybe it was louder. Muffled shouts, joyous screams, and laughter. Confused, we opened the door and stepped out. All along the walls, the old, unused screens were warming up. The speakers of the PA system clicked on. The screens lit up with words while the PAs blared an audio version. I hardly registered for me the audio. I was too stunned by what I was reading.

||DIMENSION GATE POWER: 100%||

||THANK YOU TO DR. KENWUG FOR BREAKTHROUGH IN OPTIMIZED POWER CONSUMPTION OF DIMENSIONAL GATE||

||ROTATIONS TILL DIMENSIONAL JUMP: 3||

||PLEASE CONSULT YOUR HANDBOOK ON SURVIVING IN A NEWLY FORMED UNIVERSE||

There was no way. I’d resigned myself to death so many times. Now, three rotations to jump. I reread the message, sure that I’d missed something. Something terrible had to be coming. But it read the same the second, the third, and the fourth time.

Beside me, Oues shouted something. They were leaping up and down. A distant part of me noted the humor in how that looked. But I couldn’t smile. I stared at the terminal screens. I stared till they turned blurry from tears.

Life continues in the face of bad news and good. So does bio-processing. We still had to pick the body back up and haul it down to section twelve. Oues talked all the way. I hardly noticed. We handed the body over to the processing team. Oues got a call for another bio clean-up on section 5 and I began to sign out.

Before I could leave, one of the processors called out to me.

“Hey, found this in the cadaver’s hair.” She held out a necklace. An old, stylistic depiction of a heart hung from the chain. “Take it to reclamation, will you?”

“Why bother? Three rotations, brand new universe. We won’t need reclamation anymore.”

The processor made a sign with her right limbs and waved her left. I'd guess a cultural symbol to ward off bad luck. Something like that. When she turned back to me she was snappy and clearly offended.

“Don’t set the house on land not seen. We follow protocol till the jump.”

I grumbled but agreed and took the necklace. On the way up to reclamation, I gave it a look. It was metal. Lightweight but that didn’t narrow down the material by much. Plenty of light synthesized metals or alloys. Probably an iron-based alloy. Twenty-six protons of near-useless material, for fission and fusion.

There was a slit along the edge of the heart. I pried it open, and a data spark fell out into my hand. That sent a shiver right through me. I’d never seen or held a data spark. On the station, where up till now energy was always drip-fed to only the most vital processes, a data spark was like a fable. Something from the far-off times. I don’t remember making a conscious decision, but I found myself changing course and heading into the nearest access corridor and toward an emergency terminal.

A tap, and the terminal and its lights came on. It lit the pipes and wires that filled the back end of the station. The terminal screen showed a familiar readout.

||INPUT DIRECTIVE||

I tapped out what I wanted.

>Analysis data spark

I hit command. There was a loud squeal of metallic protest. I stepped almost right out of my skin before I recognized that the noise was an old port cover opening. When I'd calmed a little, I dropped the data spark into a tray and closed the port manually. The terminal screen blinked twice and the readout changed.

||DATA SPARK ANALYSIS: 3%||

||DATA SPARK ANALYSIS: 35%||

||DATA SPARK ANALYSIS: 79%||

||DATA SPARK ANALYSIS COMPLETE||

||DATA SPARK CONTAINS SCHEMATICS CREATED BY WENNIE JUDK FOR ALTERED DIMENSION GATE COMPONENTS||

My mind conjured up visions of possible secret alteration to the dimension gate. Explosives rigged so that, before we jumped, the gate would blow. Or worse when the gate went live it formed a collapsing dimensional vortex that sucked us into a singular point. My mind is a very pleasant place. And that sarcastic thought helped me scale back my panic, make another rational decision: To ask more questions.

>Analyze alteration

||DO YOU MEAN: ANALYZE ALTERATIONS TO DIMENSION GATE COMPONENTS ON LOCAL DATA SPARK?||

>Yes

||583 CHANGES TO CURRENT COMPONENTS||

||4 ADDITIONAL COMPONENTS||

||SIMULATIONS PREDICT CHANGES WILL REDUCE POWER CONSUMPTION OF DIMENSION GATE BY 13.93%||

I’m not the smartest creature but even I was starting to piece things together. Dr. whoever they were, who got the credit for fixing the gate, they killed Resident Judk. Her quarters in section three meant she was a low-ranking engineer. But she solved a problem they’d likely been working on for cycles, maybe their whole life. Anger, jealousy, and click, dead Resident Judk, fame and acclaim for the doctor.

If I told the judicators doctor can't remember the name of would be jettisoned. Justice served. But did anyone else know how to update the dimension gate? I didn’t know. Maybe? Maybe not? Back and forth in an erratic orbiting motion one what-if scenario after another played out in my head. I was stuck in inaction. I could press a button and the information on the data spark would be everywhere. But would we all die because of it? In the end, I walked away. Data spark in the tray. The terminal showed the same readout. Someone else's problem.

I took the necklace to reclamation. I returned to my quarters. Ate a fraction of my recommended nutrients. Went to sleep and pretended I'd never seen a data spark. Another escape.