Strangers Among Us

The Dog and the Sleepwalker-3

“Usually,” the woman said. “Probably enough for our purposes.”

“So all we need is a reader.” The Dog tried to remember if he had anything like that in his emergency supplies. No. Everything was deliberately low-tech. “I don’t suppose you’d have some kind of battery-powered reader?”

“Why would we?” the woman said. “We all have readers built in.” She brightened. “But if we’ve really settled back into normal space-time, I can just boot my augmen—”

“Don’t!” the Dog interrupted.

“Why not?”

“I’ve heard it’s not good to boot up in a vacuum. I mean, when no other systems are working. Because your augs will try to sync with everything else around them, and if they can’t . . . things go wrong.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve just heard stories from other Dogs. If your implants try to connect, and nothing answers back, some of them just . . . wait. Meanwhile, other augs do start on their own, but they assume that everything else is running too, so they start pumping out hormones or whatever they do, and it’s all . . . it can go bad very quickly. Like a machine where half of the pieces start and half don’t, so they grind against each other.”

The woman grimaced. “I get the picture. And it’s ridiculous.” She sighed deeply; the exhalation started her moving backward. “Don’t get me wrong, I believe what you’re saying. I’m an engineer. I know how short-sighted machine designers can be. Someone says, ‘We don’t have to worry about weird situations that can’t possibly happen.’ Then the situation happens and someone’s brain explodes.” She looked at the Dog. “That’s what you’re talking about, right?”

“Probably not a literal explosion,” the Dog said. “But . . . imbalances. Maybe very bad.”

“Always?” she asked.

“It varies. You all have different implants . . . different natural metabolisms . . . it’s unpredictable.”

“So if I reboot, I might be okay.”

The Dog didn’t answer. He had no idea what the odds were for “okay” versus “dead”, or anything in between.

The woman took a breath. “All right. Look down there.” She pointed to one of the other engineers, strapped unconscious on his couch. “If I can’t finish this myself, he’s the person to wake up next. He’ll know what needs to be done.”

“We could wake him now,” the Dog said.

“No. I know what needs to be done too. And I got us into this mess.”

“You didn’t. It just happened.”

The woman gave him a thin smile. “Nice try. If this works, the drinks are on me.”

She reached both hands behind her head and rummaged through her hair. Augmented people always had reboot switches, but the locations varied; the Dog felt relieved that the woman didn’t have to undress to reach hers. After another moment of rummaging, she said, “Ah, there.” She gave the Dog a look, then her whole body jerked.

She jerked again.

She started swearing like someone who’s just gashed her finger . . . but she didn’t stop. She kept going, words shooting uncontrollably out of her mouth: a flow of profanity in multiple languages, all shouted at the top of her lungs. She gave the Dog an embarrassed look, as if she wanted to apologize but couldn’t—some wild part of her brain had seized her voice, and the rest of her brain had no access.

At least the woman hadn’t died immediately; on the other hand, brain dysfunction was bad. The woman must have realized the same thing because with a lurch, she turned back as quickly as possible toward the access panel, wanting to get the job done while she was still able. An involuntary jerk sent her floating away from the machinery—like her voice, her body was developing a mind of its own.

Tics. Spasms. She looked to the Dog for help, even as she threw curses in his direction.

He flew to her side and put his arm around her waist. She continued to convulse, but didn’t fight his grip. He guided her back toward the machinery.

The six unattached circuit-boards were tucked into the pages of the manual books. The books themselves were tied by their strap to a pipe beside the access panel. The Dog took one of the boards out of the book that held it and offered the board to the woman. She reached out, but couldn’t control her hand enough to do anything useful. The Dog took her hand gently and moved the RFID chip beneath her shaking fingers.

After a moment, the woman thrust her hand toward one of the empty sockets inside the panel. Carefully, the Dog inserted the circuit-board into the slot.

They did the same thing five more times. The Dog found the process painful . . . not holding the woman’s warm body, but having her scream in his ear and seeing her twitch in frustration as she tried to control herself enough to get the job done. Her voice had become ragged with continuous yelling. And the Dog could feel her tiring from so much exertion—weak trembles underlay all her other spasmodic movements. When the final board snugged into place, the woman’s body seemed to slacken even though she continued to writhe and curse hoarsely.

“Is it fixed?” the Dog asked her. “Can I restart the ship?”

She shoved him toward the exit door. The room was getting stuffy—the woman’s shouts and exertions had used up a great deal of oxygen. But the Dog still took the time to guide her to her jump-couch and secure her thrashing body in the straps. He hoped she wouldn’t twist free in the time he took to get back to the bridge. If she was spinning around the room when the gravity came back on . . .

The Dog didn’t have time to worry about that. He was getting dizzy from lack of oxygen. He’d been exerting himself too.

Back at the bridge, almost unconscious, the Dog hit the big red button. Within a second, everything resumed as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Almost.

The Dog ran back to Engineering. By the time he got there, the other engineers had already unstrapped the woman from her couch—she was still shaking and screaming. As they hurried her to the sick bay, they gave the Dog hostile looks: what are you doing here, gawking at our friend?

The woman herself seemed too dazed to notice. The ship coming back online would have jolted her hard: some of her augmentations would suddenly reconnect, disrupting what remained of her metabolic balance. The Dog wanted to follow her to sick bay and hear what the doctor said . . . but then the captain called him to the bridge to explain numerous anomalies detected after the jump.

Such as nine heavy “carbon storage sinks” dangling from an open access panel in the Engineering room.

Reports had to be filed, then carefully hushed up. It was bad for morale if the crew were forced to acknowledge how deeply they relied on an unaugmented nobody. Even the captain seemed eager to put it out of her mind.

When things finally grew less hectic, the Dog went to sick bay to see how his Sleepwalker was doing. By then, she was under sedation; the doctor said she would stay in that state till the ship reached a planet with a full-service medical center.

“She’ll be all right, won’t she?” asked the Dog.

“Eventually,” the doctor replied. “We’ve reached the point where we can replace pretty much any part of the body that gets damaged.”

“Even her brain?”

“Sure. We take full brain backups whenever people sleep. We’ll restore everything as of last night—she’ll lose less than a day of memories.”

“Oh,” said the Dog, “that’s all right then. I guess that’s good.”

He went back to his Kennel.

The captain would call when they needed him again.