Severance (55 page)

“Where did you hear that?”

She grinned. She had him. She fired a shot into the wall
beside him. “I’m asking the questions here,” she said, starting to enjoy her
role. She wondered if this was how Bruce felt all the time. “And I’m right,
aren’t I?”

The shot seemed to startle him. He worked his jaw around,
almost visibly assembling his next sentence piece by piece. “It’s not that
simple, Laura.”

Another shot into the wall on the other side of him. “Make
it simple for me.”

Helot held his hands up defensively. “Okay! Okay. That
figure is accurate. I don’t know how you heard about it. You are a remarkably,
infuriatingly resourceful young lady.” He rubbed his hands against his pants
leg. “Yes, on paper, we only need about 1.4 megatons of antimatter to stop. But
it’s not that simple; we have to account for all sorts of contingencies. Burn
efficiency, equipment failure, that sort of thing. In simple terms, there is a
chance
we have enough fuel to stop the whole ship. But it’s not a great chance.”

Stein felt her pistol sag. “What kind of chance?”

Helot looked away from her. “Not a great one.”

“What chance, Helot?” she shouted. Her gun snapped up to
point directly at him. “What exact odds? You’ve calculated it out, I’m sure.”

He rubbed his face. “About eighty–seven percent.”

A strange mixture of emotions surged through Stein. She was right
and felt suitably elated about that.
Who doesn’t like being right?
She
was also talking to a monster, which tempered her self–satisfaction somewhat. “
There’s
an eighty–fucking–seven percent chance you could save the whole ship
?” she
hissed.

“It sounds bad when you…hiss it…like that,” Helot said. “But
there’s a ninety–five percent chance if we just decelerate the core. And when
you do the math, with the right weightings, that is the better choice.”

The flux of emotions slowly settled into a steady state of deep,
primal revulsion. For the first time, she saw the simple truth and beauty
behind the idea of ‘just killing a guy.’ But a better plan was on its way. “You’re
an abomination,” she said, both stalling for time and meaning it sincerely.

“Maybe,” Helot agreed. “Although I accounted for that, as
well. If you get the weightings right, even a monster can make the right
decision.”

“The weightings,” Stein said, again nearly hissing. “You’re
murdering fifty thousand people. For what? To save a few hundred? Your chosen
few hundred? I notice you’ve stacked the invitation list pretty heavily with
your buddies. Can you trust a monster to pick who lives and dies?”

Helot looked away, obviously uncomfortable. “I guess not.
But I did it. And compared to the hard decision that preceded it, that part was
actually pretty easy.” He looked at the stack of unconscious people in the
corner. “If you can only take a few, then yeah, you’ll take the competent
people who can follow orders.”

“And leave the rest of us ornery folk behind.”

Helot chuckled. “Ornery is one thing. I could deal with
that. But you people…” He paused, then shook his head. “Not you. You are
actually different, aren’t you?” He smiled. “I read your file. The mostly sane
canned baby. You’re okay, I think. Must have been something to do with the
process.” Another chuckle. “Because you’re obviously not Sheeped.”

“I’m not what?”

“Very long story. Not relevant here. My point was, most of
the people on the ship are…” he said, trailing off. “Did you know there are people
out there who go around peeing on things? Just for the hell of it? Because of
the interesting smells? I wonder how useful they’ll be on the ground. I wonder
how long it will take for them to freeze to death.
I wonder if they’ll make
a fucking game out of it.
” He shook his head. “No, picking the guest list
was the easiest part.”

“And what gives you the right? You’re not even elected, you
fuck.”

Helot tilted his head back, his mouth open, laughing silently.
“Have you met our mayor? Would you want him to make this call?” Helot saw
something on Stein’s face that he took for a sign of agreement. “Exactly!” He
sat back triumphantly for a few seconds before his eyes flicked down to her
hand hovering over the terminal and its glowing bomb trigger. Remembering where
he was, his voice softened. “Look,” he said. “I understand why you’re upset. No
one should ever be given the right to make the decision I made. But someone
gave it to me. And once I had that right, that responsibility, I couldn’t pass
it off.”

“It should have gone to a vote. Or a lottery.”

“I looked into that. There would have been a riot. A larger
riot. Way more people dead that way.”

“
You looked into it?
You wrote a little report on it,
did you? Looked up democracy in the dictionary maybe? Decided it didn’t fit
here?”

“Listen,
you little shit
,” Helot said, a single
finger thrust out at her. “I’ve been making this decision for the last twenty
years. Looking at it from every angle. This is the best way.” He looked her in
the eye. “You’d have done the same, I bet.”

“The hell I would.”

“I felt the same way at first. You’ll come around.” Helot
looked at his hands, turning them over in front of him. “Look, Laura. You don’t
fully understand what we’re up against.” His hands clenched up for a moment,
balled into fists, before he allowed them to relax. “Do you know what happened
a hundred and ninety years ago? Well, it probably happened a millennia or so
before that, but it didn’t really make a difference to us until we smacked into
the light cone.”

She couldn’t think of what he was referring to. 190 years
was right around when they’d discovered they were off course.

“The ship passed through a pulse of very high energy
radiation. Our shielding wasn’t entirely effective. A lot of people became
sick. Really, awfully sick. Does that ring a bell?” He waited for some sign of
agreement, which she didn’t offer. But it did sound familiar. “It was, I’m
told, worse than you’ve heard,” he continued. “Cancer rates through the roof.
Birth defects — really bad ones. We almost didn’t make it.” He swallowed. “But
a few years passed, and the anti–cancer meds seemed to work, and the gene–tinkerers
stopped the worst of the damage. On the surface, it looked like we’d gotten through
it okay.”

Stein stood up, no longer comfortable on her knees, taking
the terminal with her. Gun still carefully leveled at Helot, she took a couple of
steps back and leaned on the reactor control console. “On the surface?”

“There was a problem.” Helot looked away. He seemed
uncomfortable. “Did you know that within a generation, the average IQ on board
the Argos probably dropped about 45 points?” Helot wrung his hands together. “We’re
the descendants of scientists and engineers, Laura. Some of the smartest people
on Earth. Now, how many people out there,” he waved his hand to the north, “do
you think have shit their pants today?”

“What?”

“We got dumb,” Helot summarized. “All of us, in differing
degrees, some not as bad as others, got dumb. You can believe that, I’m sure.”
Years of handling public complaints lent her little cause for disagreeing. “We
noticed it happening,” he continued, “but couldn’t figure out why. Too dumb, I
guess. It wasn’t until maybe twenty years ago that the navy docs finally pieced
it together. It was the gene tinkering. There was a problem with the software.
A concurrency issue they called it. Two programs interfering with each other.”

“We’ve been made dumb?”

Helot nodded. “Accidentally, yes. It’s so…” He chuckled. “
It’s
so stupid.
” He watched her carefully for a reaction which wasn’t
forthcoming. “We — my predecessors I mean — were just trying to make everyone
docile. Sheeping they called it.” He looked over at Sergei’s slumped form. “So,
that one was on us. But there was some even weirder stuff going on in those
tinkerers, real mad–scientist shit that we’re still trying to piece together. Whatever
it was, we can see the impact it had when those two programs started
interfering with each other: stupidity.” He looked her in the eyes. “Do you get
it now? Every person born in the past two hundred years has been put through those
stupid tinkerers.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Amen,” Helot said. He leaned back against the wall and
stretched his legs out. He looked like he was enjoying getting this off his
chest. “Here’s the thing, though. Although this specific problem was
insane
,
and completely unexpected, the ship has long had contingency plans for something
like this. That’s the reason it even can split in two. Plan A was always to
stop the whole ship with the whole population. But the ship’s designers
anticipated the possibility of the population decreasing, due to disease or
famine or some other reason…”

“Space wasps?”

Helot looked at her blankly. “Sure. So, they made the ship
capable of Plan B: the engine core could separate and arrive at Tau Prius as a
smaller, more efficient ship.” Helot patted the deck beneath him. “This ship.”

Stein felt physically ill as she thought of a question and
the probable answer at the same time. “In Plan B, the rest of the ship is left
to drift away. Empty.”

“That was the original intent, yes,” Helot said, now avoiding
eye contact.

“But that’s not what you’re doing.”

Helot’s face paled. “Not long after the cosmic bombardment,
when the extent of the genetic damage became apparent, my predecessors began
weighing their options. ‘Modified Plan B’ was what they came up with. A pretty
antiseptic term for what they were proposing.” Helot rubbed his pant leg again
and licked his lips. “In this plan, we keep the ship’s population relatively
high. The genetic repair work continues, attempting to repair any damage caused
by the external radiation. Then when we reached Tau Prius, if the symptoms had
waned, we would stop the whole ship as normal.”

Stein finished the story. “And if that didn’t work, you
would arrive, take the best and healthiest of the population with you, and
discard the rest.”

“Yeah.” Helot blinked and poked at the corner of his eye
again. “They left the decision to me. Imagine reading that memo your first day
on the job.”

Stein felt her face flush. “Don’t you dare feel sorry for
yourself.”

Helot smiled sadly. “I don’t. But honestly, what would you
have done, Laura? Save the whole ship?”

“Obviously! They’re healthy! You’re throwing lives away
because they’re too stupid? Because they messed up your goddamned weightings?”
she spat the last word out. “You decided that fifty thousand people were dumb
enough to be shed off. To save fuel.”

“Laura, please…” Helot began, almost whispering.

“No! You’re murdering thousands of people. To save fucking
fuel!”

“Laura!” Helot hissed. “Want to guess what my job is here?
It’s to start a colony on Tau Prius III. It’s not to protect every person on
this ship. It’s to start that fucking colony. Out there are fifty thousand
people who would be
useless
on the ground. Tau Prius III is a frozen shithole.
Have you seen the brochures? Half these people would be dead within a year. I
know it.” He looked away, shaking his head. “You know it.” He turned back to her
and pounded the floor, ignoring Stein’s hand as it wavered over the terminal. “Those
people out there, they’re not healthy. They’re dumb as rocks. Really, it was no
choice at all. The best chance of starting this colony is without the morons. I’ve
run the calculations.”

“You’ve run the calculations?” Stein’s eyes widened. “You
keep saying that. Holding your spreadsheet up like it’s a security blanket. You
think you can figure out whether or not to murder people because a computer
told you?”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about, Laura. I was groomed
to make this decision. All modesty aside, there is
literally no one better
suited to make this call
. So, when I say that I’ve run the calculations,
that means something!” Helot’s nostrils flared. “If you spent the last two
decades in my shoes you’d do the same thing.”

“Then maybe it’s your shoes that are the problem,” she spat.
“
Asshole,”
she added, because that too needed to be said. “I’ve at least
met the people you’re talking about killing. When was the last time you left
your little calculation–nest?”

Helot laughed. “Laura Stein, speaker for the people? Did you
know I talked to Curts about you? I know who you are. You
fucking hate
the people.”

Stein smiled through clenched teeth. “Yeah, I maybe do. But
you don’t even know them.” Her terminal flickered. On the screen there were now
two buttons,
Boom 1
and
Boom 2
. She frowned. The sound of a door
opening, her heart skipping, hand fluttering over the terminal. She ducked down
behind the reactor again. “Stay back!” she yelled. “I will blow the crap out of
this fucking ship if you come in here!”

“Please don’t,” Bruce said. He rounded the reactor behind
her and stopped, looking down on her. “We need that to live.” He waved at
Helot. “Hey, Captain. Nice work with all the treachery.”

“Who the hell are you?” Helot asked, eyes wide.

Bruce walked over to Helot and extended his hand. “I’m
Bruce. We haven’t met yet, but I’ve been quietly foiling you for some time now.”
He waggled his hand in front of Helot’s face. “Well, sometimes not that
quietly.”

Some moans from the corner of the room. The two naval
technicians were awake again, and to judge by their somewhat alert expressions,
may have been for some time. Sergei was coming around again, as well.
Time
to get this show on the road.
“Bruce,” Stein said. “I’ve got two buttons
here, marked
Boom 1
and
Boom 2
.”

Bruce turned around to look at her. “Are you actually going
to do it?”