Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,23

I was in port, a place to keep a few extra belongings that I didn’t need on ship. I realized then, that if I never returned to this room, I wouldn’t miss it. Something about that caused a burgeoning sadness to bubble just beneath the surface. The Persephone, not Daedalus, had been my home for the past several years. And by all indications, the Persephone was gone.

I dashed a hand across my eyes, surprised to see the moistness gathered there. I blinked them rapidly, fighting back the tears that threatened to spill forth. It was in that blurry moment, when everything was out of focus, that I saw the small flashing LED on the console panel.

A slight chill went through me at the sight. It shouldn’t have—the LED indicated a message on my home system. But Sarah should have automatically connected as soon as we were in range and forwarded anything from the home system onto my implant. She hadn’t notified me of anything.

Sarah, why didn’t you forward this message on?

Accessing message metadata, now. There was a brief pause. You told me not to, Langston.

That pushed the slight chill from my spine down into my stomach and soured it into a twisting ball of something oily and foul. I had given Sarah no such orders. At least, the I that I was now had given no such orders. But a previous me—or rather a previous instantiation of Sarah—could have embedded that code into the communication. “Play the message,” I said aloud.

A window obligingly opened in my vision. I didn’t recognize the origin code, but I recognized the sender easily enough, even through the partially tinted face-shield of a vacc suit. How could I not?

It was me.

I stared into the face of a dead man.

Somehow, it was more than just a coil I had once worn. The face looking back at me had lived for months while I—the me that I was now—had sat in cold storage on a server, only to see the light of day in the event of this other me’s death. He had experienced aspects of life that I had never experienced, that I never could experience, since they had been swept away by the river of time. And judging by the general state of this other me, the sweeping had not been a pleasant process.

Burned flesh, red and raw, stood out beneath the helmet, and the face was twisted into a grimace of agony. “I don’t know if you’ll ever see this,” the other me said. The voice was mine—the voice I remembered, not the voice I now owned—but ragged and hoarse with pain. “I don’t know if it will make it back to Daedalus. But I had to try.” There was a pause then, and I realized the branch of me was communicating with a branch of Sarah. “I’ve only got a few minutes. Not enough time to tell it all. I’m uploading a file. Recordings of what happened aboard the derelict. The Persephone’s gone. Can’t raise them. No accident. Someone is doing this.”

He shook his head, swallowed, and forced out more words. “The derelict wasn’t in the Persephone’s database, but maybe you can find it. Or track down the coils. Shit. The coils. One of them…” He paused again, and something in his eyes, just visible through the composite of the face-shield, made me shudder. “They should have been dead. No air. No pressure. No heat. They should have been dead. But one attacked me.” Another head shake. “I’m almost out of time. It’s all in the video. The heat. Christ. The heat.” He reached out a hand, shaking and trembling, though from pain or acceleration I couldn’t tell. And then with a final wave, the window went blank.

Sarah, how long is the attached video file?

Run time is six hours, seventeen minutes, thirty-six seconds.

Shit. No time to watch before my meeting with Chan, and I couldn’t blow her off. Sarah would have to do the heavy lifting, at least for now. Analyze the video. Identify the derelict vessel that… that I mention. Try to do facial recognition on any deceased aboard the ship. I paused, wondering how to phrase the next bit. And look for any atypical behavior exhibited by any of the coils present. Another pause as I thought things through. Any atypical behavior exhibited aboard the derelict or aboard the Persephone. And postulate likely causes for aberrant behavior.

Understood.

That should cover the basics. It would take a while for Sarah to pore over