The scan results tell me exactly what Starille had - her implant is burned out. What she hadn’t told me was that it was actually damaged in the process. She’ll be unable to use it at all until it gets swapped out for new hardware, which means surgery.
“Well, that’s not good,” she says, her face pulling into a resigned line when I show her the data. “But hey, at least I can get it done on-ship instead of having to go to a starbase.” She plasters a half-smile on her face that’s meant to convince me she’s okay. It’d probably work on anybody else. “Is there any other bad news?”
I hold her gaze for a moment, unsure whether to call her on this particular bluff, then turn back to the screen. “No. Everything else looks either fine or like fallout from the implant burnout. You probably ought to eat some more oranges, though.”
“Dr. Fritz is always saying that. So, are you satisfied? Should we move on to the computer core?”
I stare at the screen for a moment longer, willing the data to be different. I’d been expecting to find… I don’t know, something in the data. Something that proved that Shipmind had tampered with her brain, or deliberately left her hurting, or some other damning evidence. But the scans had come back all green, 98% similar to her previous checkup, which is easily within the bounds of someone changing their own mind. I can’t prove anything with this. “Yeah, I guess.” I move towards the door. Starille doesn’t follow, tapping at the computer screen. “What are you doing?”
“Making sure that Shipmind gets a copy of the data.”
“Whoa, hey!” I say, moving over to stop her. “That’s your private data! They have no right-”
“I’m giving it to them, Sarah. We need this! This is the first time we- they’ve disconnected someone, and so learning about the consequences is going to be really important. You can’t-” and her knuckles go white on the keyboard “-you can’t ask for the dissolution of the whole Shipmind in one breath and then complain when I try to make it easier in the next!”
I back off. What else can I do? She finishes the sequence with vicious stabs on the keyboard, then stalks off ahead of me.
“Okay,” I say, “So, what am I looking at?”
“This is the core computer database. It contains all the logged data, reports, personal files, and matter transposer schematics on the ship.”
Mostly it looks like a holographic cylinder made of colored squares to me. “Do you have it on easy mode, or something?”
Starille shrugs. “I use this visualizer all the time. It helps me find bad sectors and deal with drive failures faster than checking the data manually. But, yeah, it is a little bit easy mode. I thought it’d be easier to explain this way.”
I’m realizing the error in my plan as I stare at the hologram projector. I don’t know anywhere near enough about the computer core to tell whether she’s bullshitting me or not. I’ll just have to wing it and see if I can catch a gap in her knowledge base. “So, this is data. What about programs?”
She fiddles with the console, and a different projection shows up. There are lots of colored lines dancing on multiple graphs, and looking at it kind of gives me a headache. She points to one. “Here, this is astrogation, that one there is the deep-space scanners, that’s the automated distress beacon,” the red line she points to has clearly shot up from a state of dormancy as of about a month ago, when I locked the hyperspace core.
I interrupt, and point at one that’s spiky and waving up and down rapidly, well above all the others. “What’s that?”
“That’s the implant network connection. Shipmind, in real time.”
We watch it for a minute. “So, you really could shut it all down from right here?”
She shuffles uncomfortably. “Most of it, anyway. That was my plan, remember?”
I sneak a glance at her. She’s gazing at the Shipmind line, seemingly totally enraptured by it. She also looks like she’s about to cry. I cast around for a distraction. “So, uh, why couldn’t you?”
She shakes herself. “Huh?”
“I mean, how’d Shipmind stop you?” I’d been trying to break her out of her yearning, but now that I think about it, I don’t actually know the full story of how Shipmind got her. “Did they set a trap for you, like they did for me?”
She takes a deep breath. “Yeah. They knew that the computer core was a vulnerable spot for them, and that I was still on the loose, so they’d set up a forcefield around it to prevent anyone from getting close, and put a couple of bodies on guard, there and there.” She points to a couple locations in the room.
I raise my eyebrow. “That can’t possibly have been enough to stop you.”
She turns back to the console and puts up a quick hologram of the room, with a cylindrical forcefield indicator around the computer and two security icons for the guards. “True. I can hack around a simple forcefield in my sleep.” The forcefield indicator disappears, and two more appear around the security, locking them in place. Another icon, presumably Starille, pops out of a vent. “The thing I wasn’t expecting was…”
The entire image rotates ninety degrees, and the Starille icon drops to the new “floor”, away from the core and any exits out of the room.
“They turned the entire gravity generator sideways just to catch you? Why didn’t we feel it in the maintenance shafts?”
Starille shakes her head. “Nah. Any commands to shift the gravity generator would have been in the main computer, and I would have seen them. They actually took the generator from the Runabout and physically brought it right next to the room so they could catch me with it.” She huffs. “I thought I was done for.”
“I bet they offered you the same deal they did for me, huh?”
She glances at me over the hologram, eyes glittering with the reflected light. “Not… exactly. Sure, they explained themselves to me, gave me some food, but after spending a week with you I wasn’t just going to take them at their word.”
“What, they didn’t try to bribe you with sex?”
Starille glares at me. “We weren’t trying to bribe you with sex, either, Sarah. You were the one that brought it up.” Her face softens into a half-lidded, sarcastic look. “Besides, the only person I had any kind of crush on at the time wasn’t available for them to bring in.”
I frown at that. Surely capturing Starille was more important than whatever that body was doing at the time?
Starille sighs. “Anyway, I said I wanted to check the computer to make sure the ship was okay. I told them if they were the same people I knew, then they needed to trust me.” The hologram rotates back upright, and the Starille icon moves back to the computer.
“Oh, I bet they loved that.”
Starille leans forward and puts both hands on the railing around the hologram. “You know, I thought it was odd at the time, but they actually did? Sure, they were nervous, but something about being asked…” she shakes her head. “I originally thought I’d just go ahead and crash the computer anyway, like I’d planned, but with them just standing there behind me, letting me do it, I thought maybe I at least owed it to them to look over what was going on."
She taps a few buttons, and the display changes. “What I found was this. I don’t know what it is, or where it came from, but just… look at it! It’s beautiful! A masterpiece of network coordination! A true blending of minds, without sacrificing the individual! This is the real core of Shipmind, Sarah. And when I saw it, I knew I couldn’t just destroy it. I knew that I had to at least try it for myself.” She gazes up in awe at the thing, enraptured by it.
I am too. A beautiful, multidimensional nexus of light, data packets constantly streaming in and out, no one stream given priority over the others. Even with my lack of knowledge about advanced computing, I can see why someone might call this a work of art. I stare up at it, unable to look away, horrified.
It’s the Erinyes Device.
