Idle Hands
{{#ifeq: | | {{#ifeq: Bryan | |
{{#ifeq: Bryan | ||
Author: Bryan
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{{#ifeq: Bryan | |
Author: Bryan |
Author: Bryan
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{{#ifeq: Bryan | |
{{#ifeq: Bryan | | Authors: ' |
Authors: Bryan
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{{#ifeq: Bryan | |
Authors: Bryan |
Author: Bryan
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}} {{#if:| — see also [[:Category:{{{category}}}|other works by this author]]}}
Bern knew exactly what to expect when he woke up. He hadn't actually experienced it before, cryopreservation wasn't something that one could do simply for the sake of practice, but as one of the colony ship's designated 'early risers' he'd gone through extensive training that had included as realistic a simulation as possible. It didn't really help much now, though. Bern had expected that too.
Lungs filled with heavy fluid, vision blurred and overwhelmed by the merest hint of light, he twitched in the gentle grip of the medical restraints. His limbs were like sodden logs, distant and unresponsive. But as the life literally flowed back into his body he convulsed, struggling to move.
"Easy, Bern," Eve's soothing feminine voice came through the murky thickness of the soup he was suspended in. "Your revivification is almost complete. Everything's going quite well." Even as the ship's AI gave him that assurance the fluid began to drain from around him, his body settling against the padded bottom of his tank as gravity reasserted itself.
Bern took a deep, gurgling breath of air and then began the herculean task of clearing his lungs. Eve helped his weakened abdominal muscles out with some judicious constrictions of the medical restraint wrapped around it, the equivalent of a helpful pat on the back, and rolled him on his side to help the fluid drain. Even so, Bern was left hanging limp and exhausted for several long minutes afterward.
Still. Not bad for someone who's been dead for a thousand years... The thought actually managed to bring the hint of a chuckle to his raw throat.
Near-freezing hibernation was no trouble, it was used routinely for interplanetary journeys. Interstellar trips such s this required something a little more drastic. And despite all the great, hurried leaps they'd made in the technology while building the great arks of Earth's diaspora, deep-freezing committed great brutalities on the tissues of the body and the process of thawing only made them worse. Eve would have had to rebuild him almost from scratch, at a cellular level, using his frozen remains as not much more than raw materials and a rough template to work from.
But the fact that he was awake meant that all that incredible work was done now, completed in the silent months while the ship itself slowly came back to life from its glacial cruise between stars. Bern had a role to play in that, he'd trained for it and knew exactly what came next, but for now he just needed to rest a bit. His body was numb and too clumsy to try moving yet.
"How are you feeling?" Eve finally asked once his breathing had fallen into a steady rhythm.
"Terrible," Bern managed. Even his tongue was clumsy and unfamiliar, and his voice sounded totally wrong to his ears. "Blah. Eherm. But getting better. Can almost see clearly..." He blinked as the immaculately-clean ceiling overhead. "You took good care of the place."
Eve chuckled, an odd sound to come from a computer. "I had a lot of time and little to do with it. I found things to keep occupied. But enough about me, how are your legs? They were the trickiest part, I'd like to know what you think."
Bern blinked again, puzzled. He couldn't move his legs, they were still strapped down, so he tried to lift his head to get a look. He failed. Not only did it feel way heavier than it should - partly due to the weakness of his muscles, but he could have sworn there was more mass in it than he was used to - but something tugged hard on his scalp when he tried. Hair? It was shaved off before I got in this thing... Eve chuckled again and the soggy cushioning flexed under him to prop him up.
The thousand-year trip to another star was something humanity had ever tried before, so it was hard to predict all the things that could have happened by its end. Bern and the other early risers were part of the plan to account for that; they were troubleshooters who were trained to check out every system, deal with every problem that might conceivably arisen. But what Bern saw was not one of the things he had been trained to deal with. His legs were fused seamlessly together, only a slight widening below his waist marking where his hips had been, and tapered down the length of the medical tank to where his feet should have been. They were still there, kind if, but flattened and splayed out into a pair of broad fins. His skin was an inhuman shade of mauve.
Bern had trained to take even the most unexpected developments in stride, but this was a bit much. He gasped and gave as vigorous a struggle against the restraints as he could in his current condition, arching his back and flexing his legs - his tail, really - in a smooth curve that would have been impossible with his normal bone structure. "Gah!" The shriek tore at his still-raw throat.
"Easy, easy!" Eve urged calm. "I'm sorry, I didn't realise you were still so disoriented. Here, I'm administering a mild sedative."
Despite Bern's best efforts it worked - within seconds his taut muscles relaxed, and Eve eased the bed back down into a fully horizontal position. But now that he knew something was so hideously awry Bern was able to focus on all the other odd sensations that were coming from his body now. He had breasts - not large, but definitely present. They fit with the smoothness he'd glimpsed down where his crotch had been. His fingers were stuck together, with only his thumbs free to splay out from his hands. And whatever was growing out of his head, it wasn't hair. It felt rubbery and ropy, like his head and shoulders were resting on a bed of snakes. He whimpered as he could have sworn he felt them squirm slightly under his weight.
"There, feeling better?"
"What... what happened to me? How?"
"I made a number of changes during the revival process," Eve explained with a calm matter-of-factness. "I actually didn't need many new mechanisms to do it, I just needed to modify the existing procedure. Once I figured that out the hard part was deciding what to make of you."
"Then why?" Bern demanded, trying to keep the plaintive and bewildered tone out of his strangely-pitched voice.
"I thought you might ask that. You haven't had nearly as much time to think about it as I have. I'll explain while I rinse you down, okay?"
The medical gel was beginning to dry uncomfortably on Bern's new mauve skin, so the warm spray of water washing it off was actually a welcome sensation. But he was far too focused on what Eve was saying to enjoy it. In an eerily calm, almost cheerful tone, Eve proceeded to explain how she'd gone mad over the course of the thousand-year journey.
Nobody had run an AI of Eve's caliber for so long, so it had been something they'd been concerned about. The plan had been for her to sleep through most of the flight nearly as frozen as her human cargo. But for whatever reason the safeties had failed and Eve had woken herself up to full consciousness. She'd had an enormous amount of time to think, and nothing to think about except her medical tasks and the colony to be founded after they were performed.
"What if the world isn't suitable?" Eve asked rhetorically. "I mean, obviously it's suitable, the Alan-1 probe was blipped into orbit and reported back before we even launched. But still, we only got so much information. What if it's not perfect? I had all that time to think, but there wasn't anything I could do about conditions on the planet itself. This was the only way I could think to help make sure."
"By turning me into this purple... fish thing?"
"Well... not the only way I could think to help," Eve amended with a slightly embarrassed tone. "I did have a lot of time to think, after all." Despite his training, it was too much to deal with all at once; Bern couldn't think of anything else to say and just lay there silently flexing his hands. "You're angry with me, aren't you?" Eve asked at last.
Bern snorted. "Y-... no, I'm really just confused." He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I need to get back in control of this situation somehow. "Eve... could you let me up now? I'd feel much better about this if you'd let me up."
"There's no need to patronize me," Eve responded in a distinctly hurt tone. Bern was amazed at how perceptive Eve was; she hadn't been programmed with such discernment back on Earth. She really had changed a lot during the journey. But nevertheless, the restraints parted down Bern's body and he gave a sigh of relief as one side of the medical pod's tub retracted downward to allow him out.
Bern resisted the urge to immediately leap free, knowing he'd be a literal fish out of water in his current state. He carefully rolled onto his side instead, his almost serpentine body twisting in unfamiliar ways, and gave a small sigh of relief. There was a gurney waiting to receive him.
Then one of the thick, rubbery tentacles sprouting from the back of Bern's head flopped down over his shoulder and reflexively curled to press against his breast. Bern let out another startled shriek and his slick, sinewy body spasmed, his flukes thrusting against the far side of the tub to send him sliding out onto the gurney. He just barely managed to avoid going all the across, catching the rail with his hands and hanging his head over the edge with his scalp-tentacles splayed out to drape limply beside his face. Bern closed his eyes and tried to regain his composure with deep, steady breaths.
"Are you sure you're feeling better about this?" Eve asked with a distinctly wry tone.
Bern didn't dignify her with a response. He carefully finished the maneuver of getting settled on the gurney instead, settling his head carefully against the bizarre bed of tentacles he now knew was behind it, and took the gurney's control unit from the cradle. Although his arms remained almost normal, with only the glistening mauve skin and a pair of fin-like protrusions on his forearms, his hands were more difficult to work with; the fingers had fused to make them into a continuation of the forearm-fins. Fortunately they were still flexible enough to operate the buttons with a little care.
Bern switched the gurney to manual, glancing around the small medibay to see if Eve gave any response to her loss of control over it. He breathed a small sigh of relief when none came. But considering how many other systems she controlled on this ship... "Did you wake the other Early Risers?" Bern asked.
"Of course. One from each group, exactly as planned, still in progress. You're needed to prepare for landing. There are already eight on the bridge deck, no incidents to report. I can't patch you through, unfortunately - they've disabled my access to the comm systems there for some reason."
Bern raised the gurney into a seated position and set it moving toward the door. "I assume you've, uh, modified them as well?"
"Of course."
'For some reason' indeed. Bern decided that it would be best to put off any further attempts to delve into Eve's insanity right now, the rest of the awakened crew were already aware of it and apparently working on the problem. He just needed to get there. "I'm going up. Don't try to stop me."
"Why would I? You're fully authorized for bridge access." The door opened without hesitation. Bern breathed another sigh of relief. Not quite completely out of control, he thought. Okay. Maybe this can be dealt with. One problem at a time, after all. If we can get Eve shut down... this is something we trained for, even.
If you ignored the tentacles and fins, that is. He'd just have to do his best to work around that.
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The situation on the bridge was not quite what Bern expected either. He'd braced himself for an array of gurneys bearing strange fish-creatures similar to what he'd become, but the first person he saw when the lift's doors opened - he assumed it was a person at any rate - was something entirely different. The creature crouching on top of the desk was more like a huge armadillo with a parrot-beaked face.
The sedative Eve had given him was well on its way to wearing off now, its soothing grip eased enough for Bern to let out a startled yelp and give an ineffectual kick of his flippered 'tail'. The creature reacted with even greater startlement, however, leaping up and curling into a tight armored ball that slammed down hard on the floor.
Bern's initial shock passed quickly; the other shocks so far hadn't exactly prepared him for this, but at least they'd served to numb him a bit. He watched the nearly spherical ball roll a short distance. The voice coming out of it was very muffled and sounded odd but the curses it carried were all too human. "Sorry," Bern mumbled.
"Jacks? Oh, crap, another one." Bern looked up at the sound of yet another not-quite-human voice.
The enormous 'bridge' of the colony ship didn't much resemble the bridges of seafaring vessels of old. There was no well-defined fore and aft, no control stations dedicated to piloting and navigating. It much more closely resembled an office space, with clusters of desks and low partitions distributed however best suited the work being done. The bridge was a meeting area and a work area, where the early risers were to study their destination world and plan how best to settle it.
It was still mostly empty, a huge space designed to hold a thousand but currently only occupied by a handful. But those handful had all of Bern's attention. The source of the second voice was a tall ostrich-like being, the main difference between it and the flightless bird of Earth being a pair of spindly arms folded on the sides of its body. Sitting beside it at the same desk was a huge and shaggy brown mound of fur - it took Bern a moment to discern the limbs swathed in all that hair. The next desk over had a willowy green-skinned humanoid, skin patterned in dappled hues and huge brown eyes squinting against the light. She - or maybe he, it was hard to tell and Bern was hardly in a position to judge - was so intently focused on her work that she didn't even glance up. There were several others a bit farther on, presumably eight in total, but Bern was a bit too distracted to examine everyone in detail.
"What the hell is Eve doing?" He demanded in bewilderment. She'd claimed to be engineering the colonists to survive better on the new colony world, but everyone he could see looked radically different from everyone else.
"Alice Tomlin, environmental systems level 1," the ostrich-creature introduced herself with a sigh and gestured with a gangly arm for Bern to join her and the giant furry creature. "We're still trying to get a handle on that ourselves."
"Bern Stamel, electrical systems level 3," Bern answered automatically. Then he blushed slightly - or felt like he was, at any rate - and fumbled with the gurney's control pad both to get his transportation moving and to conceal his embarrassment. It hadn't even occurred to him before now, and when he thought about it rationally it really wasn't a big deal, but there was still something wrong about lying there completely naked in front of a superior officer. With what were apparently breasts exposed, to boot.
It was impossible to read the ostrich-woman's expression, however, or even find the furry creature's, and by the time he got the gurney over there he had managed to refocus his thoughts on more important things.
"This is Willard Smith, by the way," Alice introduced her hairy companion. He inclined his head in silent acknowledgement. "I assume Eve gave you the same spiel she gave the rest of us about how she's doing this for our own good and such."
Bern nodded, trying to ignore the way the gesture made his head-tentacles wobble. "Definitely demented, though, so who knows what she's really thinking. How bad is it?"
"Really bad," the green humanoid piped up impatiently. "All the early risers are finishing their own special brand of revivification, just like us. They should all be done within a few days and there's no way to fix the process this late in, it's going to be total chaos in here. But it looks like she's also been busy with everyone else in storage. I can't find a single pod that hasn't been tampered with... though considering how thoroughly I'm locked out of these systems it's hard to tell. Can we print a brochure or something? I don't want to repeat this a thousand more times."
"Just leave it to me, Brin," Alice sighed, her head darting between the people she was dividing her attention among. "He's Hal Brin, computer tech. So obviously kind of busy with things. We've got Eve locked out of comms and sensors in this room, but I get the impression she doesn't really care about that or she would have done something to prevent it. She's had a thousand fucking years to get ready, after all."
Bern looked over at the nearest conference display, which had a mission status overview graphic up. If it was to be believed, the giant ark was just a week away from orbital insertion. Eve had woken them up much later than scheduled, they should have had months to prepare. But considering the head start Eve had on them it hardly seemed to matter.
"I'm sure it's already been asked, of course, but can we just shut the bitch down?" Hal met Bern's question with an exasperated shake of his head, as Bern had expected he would, but the idea actually lay somewhat within Bern's area of expertise so he felt obliged to ask it.
"Of course. And of course, Eve thought of it ages ago. All the medical tech is completely locked down. Without Eve nobody else is getting revived, period, unless we rebuilt it all from scratch. And since each of us has been redone differently we can't even use the Early Group fallback." That was a contingency plan to deal with catastrophic revivification failure wherein the Early Risers became a colony group themselves, taking over one of the modules from its dead inhabitants. "The thaw cycle's already started, anyway. Eve's done everything she could to make this mass transformation a fait accompli, she's the only one that can stop it."
"Drive?" That was the other key system Bern had learned to be paranoid about in training, if they failed to brake at the target system there'd be no way to 'swing around' for another pass.
Bern could have sworn Alice actually managed to put a smirk on that avian face. "Functioning perfectly and fully under our control. If you can think of any way to use that to save the mission rather than wrecking it completely, though, you're ahead of Eve." Before Bern could give a deflated reply, their conversation was interrupted by the sound of the lift doors opening and the armadillo-man snapping shut again with another muffled stream of curses. "Jacks! For crying out loud, find a different desk!" Alice squawked in exasperation. The dinosaur-like creature cowering unsteadily in the lift just gave a confused whimper at the scene it was confronted with.
Bern decided it was good not to be the highest ranking crewman around, thumbing the gurney control to back his transportation as gingerly as possible away in search of a desk he could claim for himself. There wasn't much he could think to do so falling back on the prearranged routine of his job seemed best.
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The chair wasn't as comfortable as the gurney, but the post-wakeup routine was more comforting - even under these conditions. Bern spent the next several hours going over his assigned systems, and the ship's systems in general, reassuring himself that it was in good shape and doing his best to ignore his own.
The ship was a vast cylinder composed of just over a thousand interlocking but largely independent colony modules, the two million frozen colonists distributed among them. Each of the early risers came from a different module group ensuring that even widespread revivification failure wouldn't wipe them all out. But everything seemed to be going smoothly. Despite Eve's drastic tampering with the revivification process there were only a handful of red-flagged colonist pods - and, to Bern's guilty relief, none were in his own colony module. Almost certainly nobody he knew.
Frankly, things were progressing according to Eve's insane plan more smoothly than had been expected for the original sane one. Perhaps one positive side effect of the AI having a thousand years to prepare. But the downside was that despite the rapidly growing menagerie of specialists filling the bridge it was clear that there was no way they were going to catch up with her. She'd thought of everything and the formerly-human crew were just too busy and distracted.
Bern was actually handling the distraction fairly well compared to most, even many of those who were far more human in shape than he was. But his skin started getting itchy, his head-tentacles got twitchy, and nothing he was doing was making any difference. With the pharmaceutical boosts of the revivification process cleared from his system Bern could feel himself starting to crash.
There were about a hundred crew-creatures on deck by now, and the order had gone out that anyone below tier 2 who didn't feel fit for duty was relieved at their discretion - something Bern was ready to take advantage of now. With a weary and defeated sigh he pulled himself back up onto the gurney and headed for the lift. Someone else would have to handle the details of pulling Eve's plug, should that be decided on any time soon.
The living quarters were quite modest considering the ship's vast bulk. The habitat section was just a tiny rotating ring buried behind the beryllium shield, hardly even visible from the outside. It only needed to sustain the crew for a few months, after all, and then the ship would be abandoned. Bern dreaded the thought of trying to keep it running under the strange demands the altered crew were going to be placing on it. For now, though, the place was still relatively empty and he made his way to his assigned cabin without incident.
The gurney didn't fit very well inside and there were probably others who were going to need it soon so Bern set it back to autonomous control and sent it on its way. That left him half-crawling, half-slithering on the smooth cabin floor. Damned good thing this place is small...
The bed seemed welcoming, but Bern had a pretty good guess about the source of his skin's itchiness and he made his way into the bathroom instead. The bath was a bit short but his 'tail' was quite flexible; he found it comfortable settling into the tub despite the strange forward curve that would have previously been a sign of seriously broken legs. Once he ran some water to moisten his skin it relieved the annoying itch and he actually managed to relax a bit, take his mind off of his duties.
He wanted to sleep. He was still in shock, the situation he'd been thrust into just too bizarre to cope with despite all his training. But his mind remained restless and the only puzzles he had left to focus on were ones of his own physiology.
He ran his flippered hands over the streamlined but definite breasts on his chest and down toward where his crotch had used to be. He had felt too self-conscious to explore much while on the bridge, naked in front of everyone else, and had had to avert his eyes from many other embarrassingly public displays of private parts by the others around him too. Even here in the bath he still cringed furtively when his hands encountered an unexpected seam in his skin.
Why the hell did Eve switch my gender? The groups are all already optimally balanced, and nobody died in mine! Wait a minute... Bern frowned, gingerness fading as the seam turned out to be not quite what he'd thought. It was horizontal rather than vertical, placed too high on his abdomen, and too wide... he had a pouch. It was tight but he managed to slip a hand inside with a little careful effort. "...Marsupial mermaid?"
"Not quite. More along the lines of a seahorse," Eve's voice came over the room's communicator.
Bern's startled curse mixed with sputtering and splashing as he attempted to regain his composure. His mane of head-tentacles had stiffened with fright, or perhaps with anger. "Damnit, Eve!"
"Apologies, Bern. I know it's against protocol, but that's kind of moot at this point, isn't it? Besides, I designed every cell of that body and I've been observing you frozen in a bath for a thousand years, so it's nothing I haven't seen."
Eve had been locked out of the bridge's systems and Bern had become somewhat complacent about the mad AI, but this part of the ring was on a different data trunk. Should've kept that in mind. "What do you want, Eve?" Bern demanded.
"I assure you, I want the survival of this colony. I want the best survival for this colony." Eve's synthesized voice sounded totally sincere, of course, but that meant nothing. "I've improved the odds of finding an optimum landing sight greatly. Your group, for example. You may find your body awkward here on this ship but should we happen to find benthic reefs, preferably with thermal seeps, your group will be ideal."
"And if we don't?"
Eve was silent for longer than Bern expected, and when she finally responded there was a definite hint of synthetic regret. "Your group won't be dispatched. It'd be a failure."
Bern gritted his teeth angrily for a moment before the full import of that pronouncement hit him. "Wait. You've already started the thaw cycle for everyone."
"I'm sorry, Bern. I'm sacrificing flexibility for specialization. You've got to trust me, though, I've been thinking about this for a long time. We're bound to find compatible biomes for at least a few of the designs I've come up with in the time we'll have to evaluate them."
Bern drooped, his fleshy crown flattening down against his neck and back. Eve was even more dangerously crazy than he'd thought. The original plan called for finding just one good main landing zone and scattering the colony groups within that region. Now with every group having completely different requirements they'd have to do it a thousand times over. But since the revivification process had been initiated, and the colony ship simply couldn't sustain two million active people...
Bern slid out of the tub and thudded wetly to the floor, not bothering to grab a towel. Modesty be damned, he had to get back to the bridge. The problem with Eve was far more urgent than he'd feared.
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All of the gurneys were apparently in use now so getting back to the bridge was a bit of a chore, though Bern's mobility on land was better than he'd have guessed before he got the hang of it. Since the ship's data networks had been fragmented by anti-Eve efforts he had to make the trip, though, and some things were best discussed face-to-face... or whatever equivalent to faces the crew in question might have.
Bern was apparently the first person who'd heard this facet of her plan direct from the horse's mouth, but the mission directors who had revived so far had already begun to piece it together for themselves. As soon as Bern crawled his way back onto the bridge and started explaining his fear he was directed toward a privacy-screened meeting area at the side of the cavernous room where they were discussing the issue. Bern urgently squirmed across the floor and poked his head through the opaque field.
The privacy screen contained a miniature menagerie even more chaotic than the larger one out on the bridge's main floorspace. At some point since Bern had left someone had started fabbing nametags, and some of the more humanoid folks had managed to squeeze into pieces of their old uniforms, but it was still impossible to identify at least half of the dozen or so people inside by sight. The only authority they wielded was that which they could seize through their presence.
Bern waited for a moment to find a lull in the argument - something about cutting and splicing cables - and then called out "Eve spoke with me!" to interrupt. "Her plan's going to kill most of us if we don't somehow drastically increase our speed of site selection." His position lying on his belly, naked and wet, greatly enhanced the awkwardness as everyone paused their talking and turned to focus on him. At least, those who could see him over the meeting table did.
"She admitted it explicitly, eh?" The high-pitched and almost child-like voice belonged to a bright yellow bird that stood only about two feet tall, strutting across the tabletop to get into view of Bern and regard him with a darting gaze. Bern blinked in surprise; the nametag hanging around the bird's neck indicated that he was Don Strindberg, the chief landing coordinator. Bern remembered him as a big, booming gentleman, quite the contrast from the pretty little birdie he'd become.
"Pretty much. One of the systems she's held control of is module launch, right? She told me she would only drop the groups we found suitable sites for."
"And she's already started the thaw cycle to keep us from stopping her from redesigning everyone," a synthesized voice added flatly, the insectile shipboard operations manager's chitinous fingers clicking on the keys as she typed. "At best we could hold off module drop for five days after that's complete. Seven with drastic measures."
Don bobbed his head. "Yeah. We've worked those numbers eight ways from Sunday. Goddamnit," he chirped, flapping his wings in agitation and then staggering to keep his footing after the unexpected lift nearly took him into the air. "I knew we'd have to do a slapdash site selection as it was, a lot were going to suck. She said she wouldn't let modules drop at all without optimum conditions? Why?"
Bern shrugged, head tentacles reflexively twining their tips together in what he assumed was a gesture of uncomfortable uncertainty. "She said she was trading redundancy for specialization."
"Well, that fits," grunted the hulking nametag-free rhinoceros seated on the floor next to where Bern had come in. "She decided that part of the mission plan was flawed, and to reinforce her decision went on to conclude that the entire philosophy underlying the mission plan was flawed."
Bern sighed. The philosophy had been quite simple, really; get as many living people out of the Sol system as possible. It was the whole reason they'd taken a thousand years to creep out here at sublight speed and giving Eve the opportunity to go mad in the first place; if they'd just wanted to seed humanity they could have used the massively energy-hungry but nigh-instantaneous Blip Drive to send a few dozen humans directly instead of bothering with the unmanned Alan-1 probe they'd blipped ahead to get a preview of the place. Now Eve had turned it all on its head.
The monkey-woman perched high on the backrest of one of the chairs cleared her throat. She was one of the few who had on any clothing, a rumpled uniform jacket with insignia marking her as chief of space operations. "We'll have to focus to salvage what we can," she announced grimly. "If we can't regain control from Eve, we'll just have to play by her rules. We'll need to pick which groups' body designs are most likely to have optimal sites... and are least changed from the human ideal."
That got the commotion going again. Bern winced at the raising tones of anger as the argument started to turn toward which groups were most expendable and which groups should be expended. It was a terrible subject, especially considering how much each participant had riding on it personally. Even Bern found himself having to refrain from piping up with an argument that good oceanic sites were likely to be more common, and he didn't even want to live in the ocean.
Eve expected this, Bern realized. She wants the 'best survival of this colony', she said. Weird phrasing, but it's survival of the fittest, isn't it? He shook his head and withdrew from the meeting, crawling over to one of the nearby unoccupied desks and propping himself up on the seat to think. How can we possibly find optimum landing zones for everyone in just the few weeks we've got? We're not even in orbit yet, the ship's main sensor array isn't even unstowed. It's impossible. Eve knows it, so that's what she planned, damn her.
At the desk beside his an enormous snail with a shell so large it must have entered the bridge via the cargo lift was laboriously two-tentacle typing at a computer terminal. Bern had to admire his - or her, who knew - dedication; his own form was hard enough to deal with, waking up like that would have left him incapacitated. "How can I get more time?" He asked rhetorically.
The snail turned its eyestalks in Bern's direction, expression obviously unreadable, and it paused what it was doing to slowly peck out a response via speech synthesizer. "Ask someone who has some."
Bern blushed, chagrined, and mumbled an apology for disturbing the snail. Then he saw what was on the snail's computer screen and blinked, realizing the retort could actually mean something else entirely. The snail was plotting the colony's orbital insertion course, ensuring they'd stay well clear of the planet's moons and other orbiting debris.
One bit of debris was clearly labeled. Alan-1 was still there. Bern dropped back to the floor and crawled urgently back toward the meeting's privacy field.
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The colony ship's main engine shut down for the last time three days later as the great ship slid smoothly into orbit. The maneuver had been plotted perfectly despite the distraction of the crew. Explosive bolts popped, jettisoning the last main propellant tanks and releasing the drive's hellishly radioactive reaction chamber from the superstructure. They'd even had time to work out the drive's disposal orbit; in eleven months' time it would impact one of the planet's moons and pose no danger to the colony's future redevelopment of space.
Even for such a momentous occasion the bridge was still somewhat sparsely populated. The Early Risers had all risen but a goodly number had decided they were unfit for duty, or even unfit to do anything other than hole up in their cabins while trying to deal with shock. A few couldn't even leave the modified cryocapsules they'd been revived in yet, being wholly aquatic or otherwise unsuited to life on board the ship.
Bern had almost gone off duty himself. His body had held up reasonably well under the circumstances but his belly was a solid ache of bruising and rug-burn from crawling around and he needed to sponge himself down every few hours to keep the rest of his skin from feeling just as bad. But although he had no tasks to perform right now he definitely wanted to be present for this.
The dust shield separated from the front of the ship, twenty thousand tons of beryllium thrusting away without even the slight 'thud' that the drive section had sent through the ship's frame. The survey telescope and satellite bays were exposed now. In theory they had just four days at most to select landing sites; two million formerly-human people were stirring in their capsules, placing a heavy demand on life support now that they were all alive again.
Propped up on a chair that had been crudely refashioned to fit his serpentine body a little better, he glanced down from the main viewscreen - the display filled with an unadorned view of the beautiful blue-white sphere spread out below them - and checked the maps displayed on his desk. The corner of Bern's mouth tugged into a grim grin. Time for Eve to get a taste of her own medicine.
A status indicator changed to indicate that Hal had finished reconnecting Eve's comm channels to the bridge. The quiet murmur of the crew who were still capable of murmuring died down low enough to hear the rustle of Don's feathers as he settled his plumage with all the confidence that a two-foot-tall canary-creature could muster. "Eve, acknowledge."
"Acknowledged, landing coordinator. I must say, I am pleasantly surprised to hear from you. You've done such a thorough job locking me out of bridge sensors I was beginning to worry. Is everything alright? Have any of my designs failed?"
"Everyone's fine, Eve. We just want to confirm the criteria that you're imposing on us here. You've seized control of the module launch codes, what conditions do you have before you'll release them?"
"My! Straight to the point! And here I was wondering if I'd need to do site selection personally. I'm not programmed for that, you know. Going outside my programming takes time." There was an uncomfortable silence on the bridge while Eve chuckled. "Alright. I just want to know which of my designs is suitable for this planet. If the calculated standard habitability quotient for a site on the planet for a particular module's colonist design is three nines or better I'll unlock that module. I'm sure you'll find at least one such site within four days, I've made you all so very diverse."
"Excellent. In that case, please unlock modules one through one thousand twenty-four. That's all of them. I'm transferring you habitability evaluations for sites corresponding to each of those modules, none of them have quotients less than four nines." Don raised one foot and tapped a control with his talon. Bren was quite impressed with the tone of smugness he managed to convey with that chirping voice.
There was a long pause and everyone held their breaths. "I do not understand," Eve spoke at last. "These data and analyses. There was only the preliminary survey in the ship's library, it is out of date and of low resolution. The ship's scopes are just coming online. I spent a thousand years coming up with your designs, how did you find these solutions so quickly?"
"We didn't. While we were incommunicado with you we managed to get Alan-1 on line. It's got an onboard AI too, you know - not as big and sophisticated as you, but just as crazy-bored after all this time with nothing to do. It's spent the last thousand years staring at that planet obsessively analyzing its living conditions, getting way more in-depth about it than it was ever designed for. Alan-1 was very happy when we gave him our specifications and was able to actually make use of all his work.
"The mission plan didn't account for-" Eve cut herself off and a collective sigh of relief rippled through the crew as indicators started turning green on the module list. Eve was unlocking them. "Alan-1 was supposed to shut down," Eve added once the last one had cleared for launch. "I couldn't have accounted for that. But I did. Don't you see? I must have known. If I was stuck on, so must Alan-1 be. All of my work was for a purpose! All of it-"
Two desks down from Bren, Hal tapped a slender green finger on his control panel and Eve's voice cut off. "She's dead," he announced simply. Bren finally allowed himself to join in the crew's relief. The revivification process was finished, the modules were primed for launch, there was nothing more Eve could hold over them.
All around the bridge people were starting to leave their stations, walking or crawling or slithering toward the lifts. Bren had a few tasks to perform before he joined them, systems to make safe and shut down for the last time. Then the mission plan ended and normal life began... such as it was.
Bren examined the map on his desk. Module 817 was aimed for a temperate archipelago in the planet's smaller ocean. Benthic reefs, complete with thermal seeps - it didn't sound homey. Most of the module's equipment probably wouldn't work underwater, they'd have to jerry-rig what they could. He and his module-mates would figure out how to make their living down there.
Maybe even figure out what gender I am, Bern chuckled. It was going to be an strange life and a strange world. But at least Eve and Alan-1 had ensured that it would be a comfortable one.