Stasis Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Stasis

  Want more?

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Stasis

  Zoe Cannon

  © 2021 Zoe Cannon

  http://www.zoecannon.com

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Stasis

  The ship’s server room was unguarded. No one stopped Danna as she stepped inside, her fingers leaving a black smear of oil on the door-open button, her boots shedding dust on the polished black floor. The light was a dim blue emanating from the ceiling and the walls, while smaller white lights on the server units shone like stars all around her. Without the constant press of bodies around her, the air was cool enough to raise goosebumps on her arms. She wished she had worn a warmer shirt.

  Between the cold, and the light, and the steady low hum that took the place of the din of voices echoing off the walls down below, she felt like she had left the ship behind and stepped out into the vacuum of space. She sucked in a deep lungful of sterile air, just to make sure she still could.

  The door slid shut behind her, and Danna was alone with herself.

  Ignoring the prickles of anxiety at the tips of her fingers and toes, she sat down at the terminal in the center of the room. The Danna-layer, the part she was still used to thinking of as her, stared down at the keyboard in confusion. She could find her way around and air filtration system blindfolded, but this? She knew her letters well enough to recognize most of them on sight, but that didn’t mean she knew what to do with them.

  She half-closed her eyes. Within her mind, she took a step back and to the side, the way she had been practicing since the first memories came. By now, it took as little effort as taking a physical step. Then she let muscle memory take over. The codes rose to the surface of her mind, the ones that would remove the blindfold she had placed over Iris’s eyes long enough to sneak in here. Danna didn’t know what the jumble of letters meant, but Iris did, and it was Iris whose fingers danced over the keys while Danna let her work.

  “Who are you?” a crisp female voice demanded from behind her.

  The voice filled Danna with the sense of subtle wrongness that always came with hearing her own voice on a recording and discovering all over again that it didn’t sound the way it did in her head. Except that this woman’s voice was higher and sharper than Danna’s, and, of course, Danna had never heard her own voice recorded.

  Danna swiveled in her chair to face the speaker. “Hello, Iris.”

  Iris’s face was as much a feature of her world as the boots on her feet. It was the face that delivered the daily status updates every morning, and smiled down on them when they worked quickly, and frowned in disapproval when they were too slow. But the sight of her still made the world lurch under her feet every time. To part of her brain, it was the sensation of looking into a mirror, one that was warped in a million subtle ways. The rest of her, half a second behind, scrambled to point out the obvious—that she was a head shorter than Iris; stocky where Iris was pole-thin; rust-haired and worm-pale where Iris had rich olive skin and hair as dark and gleaming as the tiles of the floor. The disconnect between those two parts of herself was what had brought on the memories in the first place—at first as undecipherable as flickers on a static screen, then as clear and lifelike as the illusion of Iris herself.

  Every time she looked at Iris, these days, a new memory appeared. Today, it was the argument she’d had with herself over Iris’s outfit, before finally settling on the long black shirt and matching loose pants the woman wore now. She had preferred louder colors back then, bright plumage to frighten off predators, but she had wanted to make sure she chose something with little chance of looking silly or low-class or wildly inappropriate, regardless of how fashions might change.

  Iris took on an unnatural stillness, which meant she was about to raise an alarm. Danna typed in the codes that would stop her.

  A full-body shudder ran through Iris, a not-quite-human movement, almost enough to reveal the empty image for what it was. “Who are you?” she asked again. Her voice held a hint of fear now.

  “That,” said Danna, “is a longer story than you have the patience to listen to. I’ll start with the end, and skip to the beginning. We’ll get to the middle later on.” She took a breath. “My name is Danna Abrigan, eighth-generation mechanic on the Rainbow’s End. Two hundred and twenty years ago, my name was Iris Leighton, and I died in a small sterile room, at the hands of the technicians I hired to give me immortality in the circuits of the ship I had designed.”

  The soft hiss of the air vents stuttered as Danna’s words pulled Iris’s attention from the workings of the ship. “How do you know that name?” she hissed.

  Danna smiled softly. “You don’t want anyone to know it, do you? You don’t want them to know you used to be human.” Back when the memories had been barely more than static, she had believed, like everyone else, that Iris was nothing more than the ship’s AI, programmed by the people who had sent them on their original voyage. The truth had been lost over the generations, and maybe Iris had helped that process along, so the ship’s workers wouldn’t start to see her as a fallible human. But if they had known Iris at all, they would have known she would never have given that much control up to anyone. This had been her project, start to finish—and she intended to finish it herself. Iris’s mind might exist inside those starry servers, but it was a human mind, every neuron copied faithfully.

  “If it’s any consolation,” Danna continued, “you aren’t human anymore, technically speaking. The human part of you died in that room, once your consciousness was preserved for all eternity. Did you ever wonder what would happen to your original, once you tossed her away?” She shook her head. “You don’t need to answer. I already know you didn’t spare a thought for the body you had outgrown. You had already moved on to bigger and better things.” She looked into Iris’s eyes, even though she knew they were nothing more than projected light. “So let me ask you something else. Are you familiar with the theory of reincarnation?”

  Iris gave the sharp, contemptuous laugh Danna had known she would. “A dream people clung to because they were afraid of death, and didn’t have the imagination to hope for anything but a chance to repeat the same life over and over with different details. At least some religions got more creative with their visions of the afterlife.”

  “It’s not about repeating anything,” Danna said gently. “It’s about continuing to move forward.” But that line of conversation wouldn’t get her anywhere. “Never mind that. Let’s not get caught up in an argument over details that won’t mean anything to you anyway. I’d rather talk about your ship. The Rainbow’s End. In all the interviews, you talked about the symbolism behind the name. The rainbow, from the story of the flood, a symbol of hope after environmental devastation. For all your contempt of religion, you had no qualms about co-opting a religious symbol. And the pot of gold at the end—this ship, the best of humanity. The treasures of earth.”

  Iris went still again, her face too blank. Again, Danna stopped her from raising an alarm.

  “But you came up with those explanations after the fact,” said Danna. “The Rainbow’s End started as a little girl’s dream. It was the sailing ship you daydreamed about captaining, after your parents lost their fortune. You escaped into dreams of sailing away from the slum your family was forced into, and exploring undiscovered islands where everything was bright and wild and you could be alone. You invented a crew for yourself, peo
ple who respected you the way the people who worked for your family used to. People who never kicked you into the mud for the crime of knowing you were better than them. Or at least that’s how you saw it.”

  Iris’s artificial brain worked many times faster than the one she had been born with. But Danna waited five seconds, ten, fifteen, and Iris still didn’t respond. Danna knew what she was thinking, of course. She was trying to pull up a memory of telling the real story to someone—an interviewer, maybe, or one of the people who had worked with her on the project, or even a long-forgotten childhood friend. And she was coming up blank.

  “Regardless of what you think of the idea of life after death,” said Danna, “can we agree that either we used to be the same person, or I know you well enough that the distinction is meaningless?” The more she spoke to Iris, the more her voice changed to match the way Iris spoke. From the beginning of the conversation, she had adopted Iris’s vocabulary; now she could hear her diction becoming crisper, the spaces between her words more distinct.

  “What do you want?” Iris snapped. That hint of fear was still there, no matter how hard she worked to cover it up. Danna had taken away her certainty. She had taken away her control. And those were two things Iris Leighton had always hated to lose.

  “I told you,” Danna said, “I want to talk about the ship.”

  Iris gave Danna a slow once-over, her illusory eyes lingering on the air filtration maintenance patch in the corner of her uniform. The look was a message, and nothing more. The cameras around the room had already taken in every aspect of Danna’s appearance, from every possible angle, the second Danna had removed Iris’s blindfold.

  “What could you possibly have to say about about my ship? A report on the air filtration system?” Her sneer might have held more power if not for the fact that Danna remembered using that expression herself, as a desperate attempt to claw back power she had lost. “Even if you are who you say you are, you aren’t the one who left Earth with the ship. You haven’t been here for the lifetimes I have.”

  “That’s the problem,” said Danna. “You’ve been here for two hundred and twenty years, following the same routine. Your scanners spot a new planet, a possible candidate. You adjust course to get closer. When you do, you find that it isn’t habitable after all. Then you move on to the next planet, and do it all over again. You’ve been tracing over the same lines for so long that you don’t see the message they spell.”

  “Which is?” Iris couldn’t help but ask.

  “All those potentials, and not one of them has been suitable. Have you taken the time to acknowledge the possibility that none of them ever will be? And even if there is a pot of gold at the end of your rainbow, how long will it take you to find it?”

  “We have time,” said Iris. “The ship is still in good condition.”

  “You have time. Earth doesn’t.”

  Iris scoffed. “Earth is dead.”

  “It’s not dead. It’s not even dying.” A wave of homesickness swept over her at that, although she couldn’t imagine why—none of her lives on Earth after Iris were anything she would be eager to repeat. “Life is more resilient than you imagined when you decided escaping the whole messy business was your only viable option. But it’s true that Earth is struggling—and more than it would have if not for you.” She shook her head at herself. She might as well place the blame where it belonged. “If not for me.”

  “Earth stopped being my concern two hundred years ago.”

  “Then what about the people on this ship?” Danna asked. “The mechanics, the farmers, the engineers—all of us who are working to keep this place going as it moves from false hope to false hope? Generations of us, all living the same life as our parents, and our grandparents, and our great-grandparents. And it will be the same for our great-grandchildren.”

  Iris answered with a cruel laugh. “You went to all this trouble to break in and confront me because you’re bored with your life, is that it? Because you can’t conceive of a purpose beyond some selfish desire to give your life meaning?”

  “I’m not the one with that problem,” Danna said softly. “And I’m anything but bored. I fought in the Siberian War. I died in the Great Famine. I kept my children alive by stealing food from the mouths of other people’s children.” Her voice roughened as she let in the memories she usually tried to hold at bay. She had gone on psych meds for three years, trying to block out the images, before she had figured out it was all memory and not hallucination. “What I would have given, in those years—in those lifetimes—to wake up in warmth and safety every morning, and spend my days fixing instead of killing. I could live out my life here, with no thought of a greater purpose, and be content. But my last birth brought me here, by design or by chance, to a place where I could fix something more important.”

  Iris made a hard, contemptuous noise that only a human throat should have been able to make. She had insisted on keeping all those quirks of human speech. She had been afraid of losing even that small a piece of herself. “And what do you think you’re going to fix, by telling me a story of a ruined and miserable earth? You’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know. That’s why the Rainbow’s End exists.”

  “You took away Earth’s hope.” Danna stopped to correct herself again. “I took away Earth’s hope. I spent my life wooing thousands of the planet’s brightest minds—the adults working to avert the worst of the climate crisis, and the children my institute identified as having the most potential. I convinced them that their work was futile, and that they would be better off building a new utopia together. And then I locked them away in stasis, where they could do nothing.” She spat the last word in anger—at Iris, at herself. If there was a difference.

  “If you really are me,” said Iris, “then you know it was the right decision.”

  “I was you,” said Danna. “But I’ve seen that Earth isn’t dying the way I thought it was when I imagined there was a sharp line between life and death. And I’ve experienced the results of my choice firsthand. I watched friends die in a war that didn’t need to happen. I held my oldest son as he died, his stomach empty and his bones poking through his skin, when at least two people I can think of on this ship could have grown enough food for him and all the children of his generation. In this life, I’ve seen the way all of us here run in circles, generation after generation, just to keep the ship functional while it searches for something that might not exist. And up here, you do the same thing. Whatever route the ship itself is taking, you’ve been going in circles for two hundred years.”

  “Do you want me to apologize for trying to save humanity the best way I know how?” Iris demanded. “Is that why you’re here?”

  “No. I’m here because I want you to turn this ship around.”

  Iris shook her head, as if she pitied Danna. “Even if you and I are the same—and I’m still not convinced—you’ve lost your convictions. I’m still the same person I was when I left.”

  “Exactly. While I’ve had two hundred and twenty years to learn and grow.”

  “If you believe in fairy tales of souls moving from body to body.”

  “Forget about reincarnation!” Danna burst out. “Think about what I told you. Earth still has a chance. Even if you don’t believe I’ve seen it with my own eyes, you have to know how unlikely it would be for every single person on the planet to be dead. And if all the people we lured onto this ship are capable of making an empty world livable, they can still do something for Earth.”

  Even with her inhumanly fast thinking speed, Iris hesitated. Danna held her breath. She knew Iris, which meant she knew how small the chance of convincing her was. Small… but not nonexistent.

  Iris stared into Danna’s eyes, and even though Danna knew those eyes weren’t real, she felt every bit of the weight of her previous self’s gaze. “I believe in this mission,” said Iris, low and intense. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever believed in. Starting over is the only chance we have. Maybe you’
re right that we’ll never find a suitable planet, but even a slim chance is better than none.” She took a step toward Danna—another illusion, because Iris was everywhere. “You say you were there, looking through my eyes? Then you saw the cesspool Earth had become, even before we left. Nothing but hordes of people dragging each other down into the filth, climbing over their neighbors to grasp for the stars with their grubby hands. You saw what they did to Mom and Dad. I’m lucky I made it out. So no, I won’t go back. I won’t give up that chance.”

  Danna let out her breath softly. She tried to muster up some anger for the collection of recorded memories in front of her, but what purpose would it serve? Iris didn’t know how to be anything other than what she was. Danna had needed to learn that from experience, and what had Iris experienced but two hundred years of futile searching?

  “I thought you would say that.” She turned to type a line. “But I still wanted to give you the chance. I thought maybe I was wrong—maybe, even imprisoned in these circuits, you could grow and change and become more than you were.”

  Iris’s voice was filled with a sharper, more urgent fear this time, as she asked, “What did you do?”

  Danna turned back to the image of Iris. “Locked you out of the ship’s systems,” she said calmly.

  Iris shook her head. “I am the ship’s systems.”

  “There are things you forgot, when the transfer happened,” said Danna. “Things you agreed to forget. You were—or rather, I was—afraid of the servers degrading over time. Or someone on the ship getting access they shouldn’t have, and trying to corrupt my instructions. So I made sure to build in ways to lock me out, if it became necessary. Or even shut me down, partially or fully. And I made sure I wouldn’t remember any of it afterward, in case the years made me power-hungry, or too afraid of nonexistence to make the necessary choice. But assuming nothing has gone wrong over the years, there are people watching over you even now, ready to act at any time if they suspect something might be wrong. Even I don’t know who they are.”