Midway: Chapter 32

  “I don’t understand.  What exactly are we thinking has happened here?” Johannes asked as he knelt down to inspect the packing material in which the simulants had originally been placed for long term storage.  It was now broken into pieces and strewn about the floor.  “I mean, do we really think that they somehow activated themselves, and for no apparent reason decided to storm the bridge and take control of the ship?”

  “Of course not,” Maharet snapped.  They were standing in the sim-bay where the four simulants had been stored since the New Horizon’s original launch.  They were androids who looked, felt, and even smelled, exactly like the four principle mission founders.  Thanks to the exhaustive research of their programmers and the quantum computers in their heads, they also thought and behaved almost exactly the way their original progenitors would have.  Their primary function was to be the first to descend to Haven’s surface since they were far more resilient than the human crew, and could neither infect nor be infected by, any microscopic life on the planet.  They were supposed to remain deactivated and in long term storage until the arrival though.

  “Somebody must have reprogrammed and commandeered them somehow…” Dhika claimed as she thought over the situation.  “That would explain the head count situation too…  Take over the simulants, then have them do your work so you can show up for your normal routine, and nobody’s the wiser…”

  “Damn,” Johannes exclaimed bitterly as he stood up and threw some of the packing material down on the ground in anger and frustration.  “Double damn,” he added, feeling like a single damn was simply insufficient.

  “It would have taken some pretty fancy programming too Johannes,” Dhika added.  “It’s possible of course, but they were designed to have fixed and unalterable programming.  Even if they don’t wind up physically damaged, we’ll be very lucky if we can restore them to their original programming.  They’re very sophisticated equipment.  Quite frankly, if you’d have asked me yesterday if it was even possible to reprogram simulants this sophisticated, I would have had to answer that I couldn’t know for sure.   I might have even just said it couldn’t be done at all.  I certainly couldn’t do it… and I certainly couldn’t tell you who on board could.”

  “One problem at a time,” Johannes said in response to the potential difficulties in restoring their original programming.

  Maharet looked on, rubbing her chin while listening to all this.  Her face brightened and she looked up and snapping her fingers, “Uzodimma!   We never did figured out how he was able to reprogram the Brainchip logs, if he could do that, then… maybe he could do this?”

  Dhika looked doubtful.   “Maybe, but… no.  He would have had to leave his room to reprogram them.   They had to be physically powered up before their programming could be accessed.  There’s no way he could do that unless he had a way out of his room… or he had an accomplice.  If he could get out of his room, why not just go barricade himself on the bridge?  Why even bother with the simulants?”

  “Damn, this just doesn’t make any sense!  What the hell is going on on this ship!??”  Johannes could not remember ever being this frustrated in his life!   Angry sure, but he’d never felt so one step behind in everything, so beaten, so outsmarted, so… so impotent!  At that point, his PAN received an incoming communication, and he heard a soft tone coming from his wrist scroll.  With a flick of the air in front of it, one post of the small scroll pulled itself away from the other post which was attached by Velcro to a wide fabric bracelet.

  “It’s Uzodimma…” he said partly to Maharet and Dhika, but mostly to himself out of curiosity.   “He wants to talk to me…”

  “About what?   What does that mean?” asked Maharet.

  “I have no idea… but whatever it is, I have a feeling that he has a piece of the puzzle that might help us put all of this together.”

   

  “Do you have any idea why I asked to see you Johannes?” Uzodimma asked.

  “I have some ideas, but no not really.  I’m obviously very curious though.”  The two were sitting opposite each other in Uzodimma’s living room.

  “Surely you have some guesses… please indulge me, I have so few opportunities to entertain, and you will leave as soon as I reveal my secret…”

  Johannes sighed, frustrated at the waste of time at this critical moment for the ship.  “I imagine that you are either going to admit some role in the current situation, or you’re going to give me a piece of the puzzle which will help me to put it together for myself.”

  Uzodimma frowned, then got up and walked over to the window.  Since this suite was to be his entire world for the rest of his life, he was given one of the larger family suites which had several windows.  The idea of his imprisonment was explicitly not to punish him, but to protect the rest of the crew from him.  Like most of the living suites it had windows embedded in the floor as opposed to the ceiling, two in the living area and one in each room. 

  The windows were embedded in the floor which was the outer surface of the habitat ring, where most of the crew’s suites were.  This and the inner surface of the ring were the only place where there could be windows since the leading and trailing edges of the habitat ring were shielded with layered protection against the kind of debris which had damaged the shuttle and killed Anaru.  When all the lights of the suite were turned out, one could see the starscape continuously pass before the windows as the habitat ring rotated.  With the room lit up as it was though, all that could be seen out of the windows was an empty black void.

  The outer layer of ablative substance could be continually replenished and pasted over with new material.  It served as the regular defense against the fine dust of the interstellar medium.   Even though the dust was very sparse, with the speed at which the ship was travelling it continually sanded away at the hull over time.  To protect against the larger, more lethal bullet sized projectiles there was a multilayered synthetic netting which was able to absorb and capture those impacts instead of allowing the bullets to rip right through the ship.  Anything larger than a few centimeters across though, and both layers of defenses were meaningless.

  They would use the defenses on the leading edge as long as possible, preferably until it came time for their twenty year deceleration burn which required turning around and facing the rear of the ship to the incoming chaos.  Alternatively, if at any time there was a catastrophic failure of the ship’s forward shields, they could rotate the ship earlier in response.   When the current emergency was declared, the responsible crews were already in the planning stages of a rotation maneuver to inspect the leading edge of the ship.  They needed to check on it after the shower that had killed Anaru.

  “It’s the latter, Johannes.  I asked you here so that I could give you a piece of your puzzle.  I cannot solve it for you entirely I’m afraid, but I can at least correct one important misconception for you.”  Keeping his hands clasped behind his back, he turned around to look at Johannes.  “I did not murder that man.”  He studied the old man’s expression for an indication of how he received the information.   He could see that Johannes was a little surprised, but seemingly more over his general lack of surprise, than over the actual revelation itself.  “You don’t seem terribly surprised.”

  “I’m not.  I know I should be, but… somehow I’m not,” Johannes admitted with a deep sense of disappointment in himself.  “It never fit perfectly that it was you, but it seemed to fit well enough…  I’m sorry.   You didn’t protest the accusations, but Uzo… you never actually confessed, and we never did figure out how you manipulated the Brainchip records.”

  “That of course, is well beyond my abilities.”

  “Why Uzo, why would you accept the blame for something like that.”

  “Well…,” The man sighed gravely, “I was that man’s victim before whoever his true murderer was,” he admitted gingerly.

  “Of course…  I knew there were multiple victims.”  Johannes looked at the man with a face filled with nothing but genuine and wholehearted sympathy.  “Oh Uzo…   I’m so sorry.”

  Uzodimma simply raised his hand and aimed the palm at Johannes to indicate that his sympathies were at this time unnecessary, unproductive, and unwanted.  He sat down again, opposite Johannes.  “How did you know there were more?  For that matter, how did you know there were any victims at all?” he asked.

  “I found a diary he wrote… he described what he did but he never named any of his victims.”

  “I see… anyway, that’s why I was pleased when you showed me that image.  I was in one way of course very happy that he was dead, and that he had suffered so brutal an end… but I was also filled with guilt, Johannes.”

  “Guilt?  Why ever would you feel guilty!?  You were a victim!”

  “Yes, but I never really believed that I was his first or last victim.  When I saw that image… it became undeniable to me that there’d been at least one other.   I felt guilty because if I’d come forward with it, or if I’d been able to kill him myself, any later victims would have been spared all of the misery I suffered.”

  “But Uzo, you can’t-” he held up his palm, again stopping Johannes.  

  “Please, I appreciate that you wish to express your sympathy, but that doesn’t help me.  It really just hurts me because it makes me feel like a victim who needs your sympathy.  I don’t want that.  I know you mean well, but… it’s humiliating.”  Johannes kept quiet, and let Uzodimma continue to unburden himself.

  “I felt guilty because I could have prevented any further victims.  It was in this spirit that I took the blame when you accused me.   I figured this was the least I could do for whoever did kill him, who I indirectly wronged.  It also pleased me of course, simply to see the murder scene.  He deserved to have returned to him every bit of misery he meted out, although sadly… simple physical torture could never adequately repay him.  To be honest though, I also found it kind of exciting to be part of a conspiracy, to keep and be in on secrets.  After all, such things are so rare in our little community.  These are the reasons why I did what I did.

  “Something bothered me though; something scared me about the real murderer.  As pleased as I was about his actions, the fact remained that he did things that I… well that I never could have done.  We were both subjected to the same abuse and humiliation, and yet where he wound up exacting a violent vengeance, I wound up doing nothing.   What we suffered was as far as I can imagine essentially the same, but our responses to it were so extremely different…  I don’t know why, but I turned my misery inward and tried to forget it while he saved it all up and then doled it out onto the perpetrator of his misery.  

  “While I could take joy in that act having occurred, I could never commit such acts myself.  I was worried that it was part of a pattern of behaviour, or an omen of things to come, that maybe he wouldn’t be satisfied with just this one violent act, that maybe it would set something free in him.   I was afraid that instead of covering for someone I felt I owed at least that favour, I was instead setting free an existential danger to the ship and crew.  

  “He contacted me through the communications system one day after I was judged, and I warned him about this.  I explained why I had done what I’d done, but that it was provisional.  I explained that if anything else happened which I could reasonably suspect was his doing, I would expose him immediately.  That is why I called you here today, to keep that promise.”