Strangers Among Us

The Dog and the Sleepwalker-1

THE DOG AND THE SLEEPWALKER

James Alan Gardner

To the Dog, the starship’s bridge was quiet. He’d been told there was actually a din of chatter in the minutes leading up to a warp jump—members of the crew constantly calling out readings. But the noise was restricted to the brain-chip connections that linked everybody else. The Dog had no augmentations, so all he heard was the soft shifting of people in their seats on the rare occasions when they had to push buttons with their actual fingers instead of just doing it with their minds.

After a long period of silence, the captain cleared her throat. “Mr. Bok,” she said aloud, “are you ready for jump?”

“Yes, Captain,” said the Dog.

“Very good,” she said. She looked to make sure the Dog’s hand was hovering above the insultingly large red button that was the one and only feature of the Dog’s control console. She nodded and said, “Jump in three . . . two . . . one . . .”

The captain’s body went slack. So did the bodies of everyone else on the bridge.

Except the Dog.

Whatever warp-space was—and whenever the Dog asked, crew-members answered, “It’s hard to explain”—whatever warp-space was, it played hell with electronics. And with fancy nanotech particles. And hormone implants. And all the other add-ons that 99.9 percent of humans were now augmented with, beginning before they were born.

All augs had to be shut down an instant before a jump, for fear they’d blow a gasket and injure or kill their hosts. That meant everyone went unconscious—people depended so much on their built-in devices, they went comatose without them.

Except the Dog: he had no devices. He was an un-retouched human with no role in the world except to hit the red button that would restart every person and gadget on the ship when the jump was over.

He didn’t push the button. He settled back onto his jump-couch.

Now the bridge was totally quiet. The crew were still breathing, but nothing more.

The ship’s systems were shut down too. No gravity. None of the faint sounds that usually filled the background: the distant hum of the engines, the whisper of the ventilators. Everything off.

The room wasn’t totally dark, thanks to light-emitting diatoms in transparent sea-water tubes that ran across the walls and ceiling. Their glow was as dusky as twilight, but the eyes of the crew had amplifiers that let them see as easily as if everything was under floodlights.

Or so the Dog had been told. His own eyes were simply accustomed to the dark.

He pulled his zapper out of his pocket. It was nothing more than a battery with two metal terminals on top. In the normal universe, pressing a button made a blue electric spark arc between the terminals. When the Dog pressed it now, the result was a flat orange ribbon that rose from one terminal, a little like a candle flame. The other terminal surrounded itself with a cloud of utter blackness.

Okay. The ship was still in warp-space. Whatever that was.

When he started this job, the Dog had been told that less than one percent of warp-jumps fell short of completion. “Up and out in no time at all” . . . that was the phrase everybody repeated. A starship left normal space and returned several light-years from its starting point with no time elapsed during the gap. That was the theory—what crew-members believed.

In the Dog’s experience, almost every jump took longer. He pictured warp jumps like jumps in skiing: skiers came down those ramps then soared into the sky, sailing, sailing, till they hit the bottom. Starship crews believed they jumped flawlessly, touching down exactly where they aimed. But usually, they didn’t; they landed short, then had to coast the rest of the way to where they wanted to go.

A ship might only need a few seconds to settle out of warp-space and back into the normal universe. Then again, it might take longer. Hence the need for the Dog: someone who wouldn’t press restart until he knew for sure that the ship was back in safe normality.

Ship designers had tried alternatives: hundreds of automated tricks intended to eliminate the need for Dogs. The tricks never worked reliably; warp-space had a knack for causing malfunctions in human-made devices. Either the ship would restart prematurely, in which case most of the crew died in agony as their body-mods went haywire . . . or the ship never booted at all, in which case a boatload of comatose crew-members eventually froze or suffocated because the ship’s life-support systems never came back online.

In the earliest days of warp travel, someone joked they should just train a dog to push a big red button when the reboot time came. But no one trusted a dog enough to risk an entire ship and crew on canine judgment. Eventually, humans were used instead—humans who for one reason or another didn’t have augmentations. Such people came to be known as Dogs, even if no one ever used the name to their faces.

Crew-members seldom talked to the Dog at all. Talking was a dying skill; children still learned to do it, to encourage the development of their lungs and their sense of hearing. But most people stopped speaking aloud when they reached adulthood. Every voice the Dog had ever heard was raspy with disuse.

Except for the simulated voices of computers. Computers could talk just fine . . . and they did it to keep the Dog company. Actual humans were edgy around him—he was outside their comfort zone. People tended to treat him as if he were stupid . . . maybe even dangerous. “Different” meant “Can’t trust him.” There’d been incidents where Dogs suffered emotional breakdowns from lack of personal interaction.

So computers had to fill in the gaps. They chatted and provided connection. It worked . . . mostly. Virtual intelligence software was almost good enough to simulate human contact—good enough that the Dog seldom thought about how lonely he was.

Not while the computers were running. Which they currently weren’t.

The Dog tried his zapper again. It still produced the orange ribbon and the black cloud. This jump was shaping up into a long one—if the ship didn’t slip quickly back into normal space, the wait was often substantial.

The ship’s clocks, of course, would register zero time, as would the internal clocks of the crew. They’d congratulate themselves on another perfect jump. No one would ask the Dog otherwise.

He unstrapped himself from his jump-couch and floated out of the bridge. Every hatchway was open, as per standard jump procedure. Normal space always came with the risk some meteor pebble would punch through the hull; you had to keep all hatches closed so any air loss from the breach was confined to a single section of the ship. But warp-space had nothing in it—no pebbles, no matter at all. The greatest danger during a jump was going too long with life-support off. A place like the bridge, where a dozen unconscious people were breathing in a relatively small space, could run into problems. Opening all the hatches let everyone share the full supply of oxygen.

Even so, without active ventilation and CO2 scrubbing, the bridge got musty fast. The Dog liked to go elsewhere if the lag-time looked lengthy. It meant one less person breathing the bridge’s restricted air.

And what did it hurt if the Dog roamed the ship? No one would know he was gone.

By the light of tubes filled with glowing plankton, the Dog floated down a corridor. He knew the ship well; he’d been its Dog for ten years. There was no point transferring anywhere else—career advancement didn’t exist for Dogs.

Years ago, Dogs carried out other duties besides pushing the restart button. Gradually, however, such assignments were discontinued. Regular crew-members complained that Dogs mishandled every chore. The Dog didn’t believe it—more likely, the crew were just ill-at-ease with Dogs working beside them. But it meant that a job on one ship was exactly the same as another . . . so why would the Dog go elsewhere?

Without augmentations, he was just a Dog. And he couldn’t get augs because . . . well, when he was young there’d been medical reasons, but now it was simply because he was needed the way he was. Dogs were valuable, even if they weren’t valued. If the Dog got augmented now, he couldn’t compete with people who’d been amped since they were in utero. Rather than be an inadequate version of everyone else, he’d rather just be a Dog.

He drifted down to Engineering. It was the biggest space in the ship: a cube three stories high, with lighting tubes thick on every surface to give a bright clear view of the machinery. Lots of light. Lots of air. When a warp-jump went long, the Dog amused himself by zooming about in zero G. Metal pipes and computer columns formed towers throughout the chamber, giving the Dog an obstacle course he could weave around. He could fly like a weightless bird, while down on the floor, crew-members stayed earthbound, strapped in their seats.

That’s how it usually went . . . but today when the Dog arrived, he discovered a sleepwalker.

Crew-members often moved during jump-sleep. They pushed imaginary buttons or lashed out at monsters in their dreams. A few spoke slurry words, saying more than they did when awake. But in all the Dog’s time on the ship, this woman was the first who’d managed to unstrap herself from her jump-couch.

She was broad in body and face, but her hands were slim and wiry—apparently the ideal physique for engineers, since everyone else in Engineering had a similar build. The Dog had run into the woman on numerous occasions . . . sometimes almost literally. All crew-members walked around with an air of distraction, ignoring their surroundings as they mentally conversed with each other or scanned schematic diagrams that the ship transmitted into their brains; but this woman stood out from the rest for her strength of preoccupation. Several times, the Dog had been forced to dodge into hatchways to avoid her: as if she were sleepwalking even when she was awake.

Now she really was sleepwalking: eyes open but gaze blank. The woman moved as if in a dream . . . but that dream seemed to involve dismantling the ship.

She’d been at work for several minutes before the Dog arrived: reaching into machines and pulling out component pieces. Some of the pieces still floated close by her; others had drifted away in the absence of gravity, getting caught in the room’s tangle of equipment or else bouncing lazily off the walls.

When the Dog saw what she was doing, he launched himself toward her. He grabbed her shoulder and tried to pull her away from the access panel where she was silently taking things apart. She howled and fought his grip, shouting sounds that weren’t words.

She was strong—stronger than the Dog. He’d never had muscle enhancements. On the other hand, he was awake; she wasn’t. She was also accustomed to having every single action fine-tuned by chips and implants. With her mods shut down, she was uncoordinated. She flailed, all her movements off balance. The Dog took a clout to his jaw, but he got her away from the equipment. He pushed her clear, sending her floating toward the ceiling.

That gave him time to catch his breath. And to rub his jaw. His bones were weaker than hers—especially his jaw versus her knuckles.

The Dog surveyed the circuit-boards and other components caroming in all directions thanks to his tussle with the woman. More than a dozen machine parts were flying loose around the room. With every system safely shut down, the ship might not have been damaged by having its bits pulled out; however, restarting the ship was out of the question until everything got put back in place.

If the woman had only pulled out one or two pieces, the Dog might have tried putting them back himself—square pegs would fit in square holes, right? But with so many parts yanked free, there was just too much chance of mistakes. Every piece had to be returned to its proper location; and the job had to be done fast, before everyone ran out of oxygen.