Ghosts

Fiction by Rob Zimmerman

I awake to a flashing light of bright blue and fiery orange. As my conscious thoughts return and my eyes start to focus, I recognize the blur of colors as a holo display hovering above me. Scrolling graphs with my vitals came into focus and a singular line of blue text flashes above them:

Memorygram Unit Connected

I am still Dahlia Locarno, but I am more than that now. I feel the first sting, an odd tinge of an unfamiliar smell, strange lighting, and muffled sounds when I try to remember yesterday’s lunch. Two memories overlap and respond to my attempt at recall. One feels right. It is stewed vegetables in a thick curry, carrots, potatoes, and squash. I remember mixing in warm white rice and adding a dash of salt. I recall the heavy smell, the taste. It is all comforting.

The second is a lentil dish with tomatoes and parsley. It is wrong. I like it more than I should. I hate lentils, but in this place I love them. It smells like nothing at all that I know. But I know what lentils smell like. My temples begin to ache.

“It’s working, then?” I ask.

A voice replies from beside me, Dr. Ngoro’s warm timbre is familiar.

“Oh yes, no problems. Your own memories are at 99.97%. Negligible loss. Very good. Have you tried accessing Henrietta’s?” He asks.

“Yes. It’s very unpleasant.”

“That will fade. But yes, yes, it all went very well. I will be back to check on you in a few hours. After that, the captain needs you.”

“Yes, the captain,” I mutter. “The ship…the accident…danger.”

I nod, turn my head to the side, and fall back to sleep.

When I awake, I am led back to my quarters by a nurse whose name I cannot remember. He holds my arm by the elbow, though I feel steady with the ship’s reduced gravity. He leads me around the second torus to my room, 36B. Part of me remembers this is the wrong room. I live in 45C, but I know this to be Henrietta’s memory and I push it away.

“Thank you, David,” I say to the nurse as we reach my door. His name comes to me from somewhere in my mind that is unfamiliar and mechanical. Again, Henrietta. She was always better at names than me. I wish she was here with me instead of cold, dead memories jammed into my skull.

David helps me to my bed. I assure him I am okay, but he insists. As I go to lay down I nearly tumble and he catches me gently. I pull my covers over myself and quickly fall back to sleep. Dreams come, but they are cacophonous and wear at me rather than provide rest. I am talking to two people at once. One of them is my mother, scolding me for forgetting my lunch at school. One of them is me, tall and lanky, shy and quiet, peering down from above. I feel intense hot hatred when I hear my own voice and awake covered in sweat.

I have been given sixteen hours to recover by Captain Emmanuel. Normally recovery time is several weeks, but we do not have several weeks. We have only days left and I am needed now. Precisely sixteen hours after my procedure began she calls me on the holo. I see her face hovering before me as I lay on my back, chiseled olive features pursed impatiently. I tap my wrist to answer.

“Captain,” I nod the best I can in bed.

“Dahlia, I hear the procedure went well?”

“Yes, I’m still getting used to Henrietta—”

“I know. It’s a tough situation. We’re out of time. I need you in the engine room as soon as you can stand. Now, ideally.”

“Yes I—”

“Dahlia I need to go,” she interrupts and her face winks out of view.

I sit up too fast. The ship gravity is reduced to conserve power and I hurtle forward in a somersault towards the wall. I hit the wall but not hard. My forehead aches and I curse under my breath. Holding handrails and door latches, I make my way to the torus corridor and inward towards the ship’s core. I know the way, but doubly so. I can’t tell if it is the gravity or Henrietta’s memories of being a smaller, shorter person, but I am clumsy. Twice I miss a handrail, but I’m so close to the station’s axis that it barely matters. I only fall a few centimeters, slowly, and I catch myself.

Through the hatch to the core, I make my way past the sealed emergency bulkheads. They are shiny and new, missing the 43-year patina of dull oxide that normally covers the unpainted parts of the ship. I graze the bulkhead with my finger and feel the icy cold of interstellar space, separated by a few centimeters of aluminum and thin titanium nanite-fiber.

A memory triggers, a strong and sour one full of flashing red and terror. It is Henrietta’s, her very last. I remember a hard shaking of the ship. My own memory plays alongside it with a softer shaking, felt from a toilet on the inner torus. But Henrietta’s overwhelms me and I hear a great hissing, klaxons, and massive gears turning and squealing as they force shut the emergency bulkheads. The room looks similar to the one I am in now, but reversed. Henrietta was on the other side of this bulkhead.

The memory plays back in my head against my will with stabbing intensity. “Containment failure in engine six!” I yell with Henrietta’s voice. I see her hands before me pressing buttons in a blur from pure muscle memory. I don’t know what they do, but I see red lights flashing on a console turn yellow then gray. Henrietta was shutting off interconnects, isolating something. The hissing grows louder, and I run to the wall console. Our hand touches the console and establishes a link. Words appear on a screen above her hand:

Synchronizing Memory

I know this is the last record of her before she died. The final moments are lost, embedded in her frozen skull somewhere alone in interstellar space. I pull myself back to the present. No time for ghosts. The ship needs power restored, and Henrietta is the only person that knows how do it.

The next hour is intense and draining. I am moving from console to console, trying to figure out why engines three, five, and seven have overloaded. Engine six is destroyed, we know this, but the others should be salvageable. We can survive the loss of one engine. Not four.

I don’t know what I am doing, but I know how to do it. Henrietta does. Did. To make progress, I dig back in her recall. Sometimes to school, where I see young hands scribbling notes about quantum point sources in a lecture hall in Boston.

I move to a console in the back of the pod and on the way, I catch my first glimpse of myself in a reflective panel on the wall. I have a shaved line down the center of my head and a scar with fresh, dark stitches.

I feel anger. Hatred at my own face. “I’ll kill her.” The thought is intense inside me.

I remember another time, an interaction. For this memory I have two viewpoints, Henrietta’s and my own. We were on the observation deck, after several gin sodas. After the Captain’s monthly party.

“I wish you’d seen Earth,” Henrietta says, swinging one leg over the other, smoothing her blue dress with her fingers. Her face flushes and her eyes are fixed on my knees.

“I can’t believe you are sixty years old,” I laugh. I know she has been in cryo for most of this time. Biologically, we are both in our late twenties.

“Being born on a ship must be… I just wish I could have shown you Boston, New York!” she says.

“Well I’m glad they put you in cryo when they did. Otherwise we’d probably never be friends,” I say. For me this comment is small, obvious. A statement of facts.

I feel Henrietta’s view. When I hear myself  I am overwhelmed with warmth and anxiety. I know what is coming now, in hindsight. She is jittery, stomach fluttering. She sneaks glances at me, at my legs, at my neckline showing through my purple suit. Infatuation, lust, all of it. I feel it for myself. It is actually quite pleasant.

But then I feel guilt. Guilt that I never felt the same way about her. The memories continue, Henrietta fidgeting, hemming and hawing about whether to try something. I am oblivious, having a great time, laughing. Then eventually she reaches out to kiss me, and I pull away. The feelings collide and coalesce into a shared shame and embarrassment.

Brought back to the present I am at a loss for words. I thought we were fine. Just friends. I probe her other memories and I find nothing, nothing like the hatred. The murderous rage. But I saw it. Whenever I see my own face, I hear it again. I feel it again. Henrietta wanted to kill me.

An hour later I am stuck. I know the problem with engine four is in the synchronizer, but neither I nor Henrietta have the expertise to reprogram it. It has a backup mode for a lost engine, but it relies on the compute unit inside the engine itself being present, not blown into space. I call the captain and she answers immediately.

“Status?” Is all she says. She is looking away, dealing with something else.

“I’ve repaired or bypassed the broken interconnects, but I need help reprogramming the synchronizer. Is there anyone who can help me?”

“I’ll send Elan down,” she says.

“Is there…anyone else?” I ask.

“Dahlia, please. We’re hours from freezing to death in interstellar space. Work with Elan. Captain out.” And again, she disappears. A few minutes later I hear the hatch open and a tall, lanky man with deep-set green eyes and an unkempt beard appears. He stinks of stale sweat and has a grin on his face that I despise.

“So. Now you need me,” Elan says.

“So. I need you. The ship needs you.” I answer.

“I thought I was ‘unworthy to serve’.”

“You’re the only one who knows how to reprogram this thing,” I point with my foot at the synchronizer box on the far wall.

Elan starts to speak, “Henrietta—”

“Is dead. Your mistake killed her.” I interrupt. “In your limited time out of the brig, I recommend you help.”

“I’d never hurt Henrietta. It was a mistake,” he insists.

I pull myself upright towards him, trying to bring my face centimeters from his own, but the gravity and jumbled muscle memory signals take me too far and our foreheads briefly touch.

“Fix it!” I yell.

“Why? You don’t know how? Computer Technician First Class can’t reprogram a simple synchronizer? I can’t believe they promoted you. What’d you do, sleep with the Captain?”

“Damn it, Elan just fix the thing. You blow up half the ship, kill Henrietta, and you’re still sore about some damn promotion!”

One of Henrietta’s memories bubbles into my mind. She was angry, thinking of me. Jealousy fills her. The next part is quite technical, but parts of it make sense to me. Disabling safeties, altering the proton mix, triggering the engine overload. There is a fantasy entangled with it. An image, incomplete and from the imagination, of my body exposed to cold vacuum, eyes boiled over and red, breathless. She meant to kill me.

Even if Henrietta wanted to kill me, she was the one in the engine room. Why would she blow the engine intentionally? It would be suicide.

Then I remember, my own memory this time. I was on the toilet in the inner ring. She didn’t know that. A cold thought comes to me. She wanted to kill us both. It doesn’t feel right. Henrietta seemed fine. Upset, sure, but not like that.

Elan is on the floor, his computer pad plugged in to the synchronizer unit, keying away at some geometric lines and shapes of code. It is whirring past, he is using his neural implant and the words and text are a blur.

“How close are you?” I ask.

“I’m busy. You’ll know when you know,” he says.

You’ll know when you know. A memory triggers. It is Henrietta’s.

“You’ll know when you know,” Henrietta says. But it’s not right. In this memory I’m looking at Henrietta. It’s not her memory. It’s not mine. It’s—

I pull out a computer pad and pull up personnel records. I search for Henrietta, medical, list surgeries. There it is. Another memory transfer.

“Henrietta had your memories?” I ask.

“What?” Elan responds.

“When you were in stasis. She was your backup.”

“Yes. You should know this. If you ever paid attention.”

“It wasn’t Henrietta. You tried to kill me.” I say.

The anger, the hatred, I’ll kill her. I recall the memory again and it’s wrong. Darker hues, I’m standing too tall, looking down at my face. Not up. It’s Elan’s memory, transferred to me through Henrietta.

“You missed. I was on the toilet.” I say.

“I’m not going to miss this time,” he says. I feel a violent shaking, a hissing.