Severance (3 page)

“Yeah. Right.” Harold shook his head and sidestepped the
woman, entering the hospital basement behind her.
They should be happy they
even have a job.
There were a lot of people on board who’d jump at the
chance to mop perfectly clean floors. Seventy years into its voyage, the
population of the Argos was going through its latest malaise. A ‘Crisis of
Purpose’ was what the news feeds called it, usually when captioning a picture
of someone fiddling with himself on a park bench.

Harold walked past the emergency room waiting area, down the
hall, and into the elevator, riding it up to the fifth floor. Here, he walked
past the nurse’s station to his office.

§

“Dr. Stein?”

Harold stopped and turned back to Cliff at the nurse’s desk.
“Hey, Cliff. What’s up?”

“Dr. Kinison was looking for you. You just missed him.”

“Ahh, okay. Thanks.” Harold tried to think of a way to avoid
the ship’s senior naval doctor for a bit longer. A soft vibration from his
pocket as his terminal received an incoming message. He looked at it. A message
from Kevin.

“How was your weekend?” Cliff asked.

“Hmm? Oh, good.” Harold looked up, distracted. “I went to
see the new orchestra that’s just formed up.”

“Were they any good?”

Harold blinked, remembering the experience. “Wow. No. Still,
nice to have a new way to kill time.”

“Isn’t that the truth.”

Harold smiled and backed away from the small talk as
gracefully as he could. Some days he had more patience for it than others.

In his office, he tapped at the desktop display to bring up
the latest genetic variance survey. The Argos had passed through a wave of
extremely high–energy radiation a year earlier, and the damage, thought minor
at first, had since gotten much, much worse. A host of growths, cysts, and
other odd–looking complaints had swamped their front–line medical staff. A
stalagmite erupting on the graph of cancer rates wasn’t even their greatest
concern; with the tools available, cancer was easily treated and even more
easily found. It was the subtler damage that was more worrying, and far harder
to find.

He had closed the survey and opened up the code for one of
his automatons when he remembered the message from Kevin and looked at his terminal.
Nothing there. Frowning, he poked around the archive, looking for the message,
not finding any trace of it. Kevin must have recalled it. Odd, but not a
terribly big deal — if it was important, the boy would certainly send it again.

Setting his terminal down, Harold examined the code and
began wrapping his head around the problem he’d been working on. He pulled up
one of the trial genomes he’d been working on, sighed, then started the
debugger. One at a time, he stepped through the changes his automaton would
make once let loose. Pausing at the error he’d been stuck on for the past week,
he growled, then leaned back in his chair, tugging at his beard.

With the long–term viability of the ship’s population at
risk, the captain and mayor had stumbled into one of their rare agreements and
ordered mandatory rounds of genetic screening to take place. Over 2000 nano–biopsies
per individual, analyzed for statistical variations and compared against
baseline samples stored in each individual’s file. What would be done with the
problems found was as–yet undecided; the gene–tinkerers were able to repair the
damage, but only on a small scale.

But that wasn’t Harold’s problem. The ship’s senior naval
medical officer, Dr. Kinison, would be the one planning the triage. Harold just
had to figure out a semi–automated procedure for making a single repair. Gene
tinkering had always been done on a case–by–case basis, with multiple levels of
human oversight for every change to the patient’s genome. They simply didn’t
have enough time to do that for the entire population, a surprising problem on
a ship where spare time was never in short supply.

“Which is why you need to smarten up,” Harold told the
automaton, pointing at the screen accusingly, “and stop turning this guy into a
flipper baby.”

Plastic letters held in place by chipped brackets on the
front of the locker announced that its contents belonged to L. Stein. Cast in
green–gray plastic, its edges rounded off by decades of human erosion, the
locker was equal parts ugly and homely. But it opened and closed and kept stuff
inside of it, making it one of the few things on board the ship that could
still claim to perform all of its assigned tasks well.

The Argos’s second–greatest burglar and assistant ship’s
engineer yawned and yanked the door open past the point where it jammed. Inside
hung a maintenance uniform, which she quickly changed into. The uniform itself
had no distinguishing marks, notwithstanding the very distinguishing solid
orange hue of the fabric. Every engineer and technician wore a similar one,
though none were identical, depending on how well each owner took care of it.
Other technicians began streaming in and changing. With nods and thin smiles,
Stein acknowledged her colleagues as she put on her tool webbing. She closed
the locker door, leaning into it, and left for the main office.

The maintenance office was wider and taller than most rooms
on the Argos, thanks to its location on the unfashionable but roomy first
level. Tool benches lined the back and side walls, bracketing the large table
in the center of the room. The Big Board — essentially a wall–sized terminal —
dominated one side of the room, displaying a list of the recent maintenance
problems around the ship. Below that it displayed issues lingering from the
previous day that had proven particularly troublesome to fix or that required
repairs on a larger scale than a day or two. At the bottom of the list were
months– and years–long projects and repairs. The Board displayed only a
fraction of the known maintenance issues on board the Argos; many others,
though very real, simply weren’t going to get fixed. If the Big Board were to
display all the known faults on the ship, the wall would have had to be a half
kilometer taller, which would necessitate a substantially larger ship to
accommodate it, and the larger list of problems which would go with that, and
so on.

Stein sat down in a battered chair, propped her feet up on
the table, and examined the list of issues. As the team lead, she was
responsible for allocating staff and resources to all newly identified problems,
normally the chief engineer’s job, but Curts had been busy with other work over
the past year. A few months earlier he’d offloaded the responsibility to her,
an honor that she’d accepted with mixed feelings. She had the technical
aptitude for it, just didn’t enjoy the demands the role placed on her soft
skills.

All of the older and medium–term issues already had
resources allocated to them, leaving all the problems identified in the past
few hours for Stein to handle. Anything that couldn’t be fixed within that time
would be communicated to Curts and the swing shift supervisor during the next
shift change. Of the new issues, there were just under thirty heating and
cooling problems that morning, making it fairly similar to the last several
thousand mornings. Her eyes scanned the complaints, picking out the usual
patterns. Two more residences around Europe–3–midships complaining about the chill.
The floatarium was too hot. A whole slew of shops along Australia–2 complaining
of stagnant air. Some bureaucrat says it’s too hot in America–3, right near the
aft. Another one, next door, says it’s too cold. And finally, just as a bonus,
someone in the garden well complaining. Probably a Whiner, but Stein didn’t
recognize the name.

Keeping a ship the size of the Argos at a livable
temperature wasn’t a terribly difficult task from a theoretical point of view.
They had a reliable power source, in the form of two massive matter/antimatter
reactors. And little heat had to be added in the first place — the Argos’s
multi layered insulation was in excellent shape. It was mostly a matter of
circulating air from the hot parts of the ship to the cold ones. This was no
small task. Massive circulation fans, venting, and ductwork — having been
installed for the job — were all constantly in the process of breaking down.
Consequently, the maintenance team on board the Argos had been well occupied
for the past two hundred and forty years. And even with the ship stopping soon,
their role was still an important one — the Argos would stay at least partially
populated for years to come.

“Who the fuck is complaining in the garden well?” Bruce said
from behind Stein’s back. Stein turned, not showing any surprise at the
stealthy arrival of her friend. Despite his bulk, Bruce had a natural affinity
for moving quietly. “Like a fat whisper,” he had once bragged. She considered
mentioning the strange light she’d observed the previous night, but seeing
other technicians streaming into the room behind him, held her tongue.

She returned her gaze to the board and looked at the
complaint he was referring to. “Janice Carow? No idea. Never seen the name
before.”

“I’ll give her something to complain about,” Bruce said. He
stroked his chin.

“Of course, Bruce. It’d be irresponsible of me if I
didn’t
let you rough up an old lady.”

Bruce then pantomimed grabbing a small woman and breaking
her back over his knee. She laughed, then caught herself. She wasn’t worried
for Ms. Carow’s safety — in all the years that they had been friends, she had
never known Bruce to do anything more than threaten to break an old woman’s
back. But she knew she shouldn’t encourage this too much further, not in front
of the rest of the team. She moved to the front of the room, ignoring Bruce as
he stood flexing over his imaginary victim’s shattered corpse. She took a deep
breath.
Being in charge sucked.

The rest of the maintenance team clustered around the Big
Board, chatting. Stein cleared her throat. “Okay, everyone. Work.” She rubbed
her face and looked at the Big Board. “Jean and Forth, you’re still working on
the damper calibrations on L3. Rob, have a look at the Europe–3 problems —
probably just air balancing again. After that, go help out Jean and Forth.
Bruce, I want you to check out these stagnant air problems on Australia–2.
After that, you can go see Ms. Carow in the well and find out what her beef is.”

“Oh, she’ll have some beef when I’m done with her.”

“Bruce,” Stein said firmly, shaking her head. “Be good.” She
assigned the rest of the team their roles. Finally, she turned her attention to
the last technician in the room.

“Gabelman, go check out the pencil pushers.” She gestured at
the conflicting complaints from the government workers in the aft. “Remember
these guys don’t want to hear what the problem is, or why they’re morons, or
why no one will ever truly love them — even if it’s all true. Just tell them it
will get fixed. They will give you shit, which you will accept, gladly. Do not,
under any circumstances take any advice from Bruce on how to handle them.” The
young technician had joined her team only a couple of weeks earlier, and after
a couple mishaps, Stein had grudgingly started supplementing her instructions
to him with tips on customer relations. It was all common sense, stuff he already
should have known, and she was disdainful of having to mention it explicitly.
But Curts had told her to, and open insubordination wasn’t her style; she
preferred the casual, indifferent variety. Longer lasting, less likely to get
her fired.

And none of them wanted to get fired. Challenging work
though it was, roles in the maintenance department had long waiting lists and
strict term limits. When the Argos was originally conceived and built, no one
really knew how fifty thousand people were going to manage themselves in a
confined space for over two hundred years; initially, most behaved like they
were just on an extremely long vacation. But after a decade of tropical drinks,
people began getting restless, and after a few highly festive riots, the ship’s
leaders cobbled together an economic plan for the ship. A currency and limited
free market was created, allowing enterprising sorts to busy themselves in the
grand human tradition of gathering filthy lucre. On top of that, a system of
job rotation was implemented for the meaningful — and thus highly desirable —
positions in the public sector.

As everyone got up to leave, Stein lingered behind,
pretending to work on something on her terminal. Finally alone, she crossed the
big meeting room and entered the supervisor’s office, where Curts normally
presided, and sat down in the big chair. Another little ritual of hers. They
all liked their jobs, but she liked hers more, and definitely more than she let
on. Not the ability to order people around so much, though she knew that’s what
most of them probably thought. No, she just liked being in charge of
stuff
.
Every morning she allowed herself the momentary self–delusion that she hadn’t
sent them off to fix
the
ship. They were fixing
her
ship. And
this battered maintenance office was the drafty and damp seat of her power.

Her moment over, she levered herself out of her chair and
walked out of the office. The heating complaint from the floatarium — a simple
task that she could have easily assigned to someone else — had caught her eye.
There was someone up there she wanted to talk to.

Outside, Stein turned north and began walking down the
street, picking her way past the thicker slicks of grime and puke and a hundred
years of neglect.
Fifty thousand people on this god damned ship, and no one
wants to swing around a mop.
She caught the escalator upstairs. “What the
hell happened to you people?” she wondered aloud, not for the first time.

§

From the outside, the Argos looked like an imperfectly
rolled cigar, three kilometers long and three hundred meters wide, its outer
surface lumpy, bulging in a variety of places. In cross section, the ship
looked like an onion, the majority of livable space concentrated in the four
outermost layers, where the pseudo–gravity caused by the ship’s slow rotation
was most comfortable. Aside from some low–rise apartment complexes within the
garden well, few people ever had cause to go higher than the fourth level,
other than the handful of maintenance and naval personnel who worked in those
areas. This was the domain of ship systems, and storage space, and bare rock.
In the aft, the ship’s main engines and control systems occupied this central
space, partially jutting out behind the ship.