in my mind. It was an odd sensation, hearing something that no one else could hear. Or maybe “hearing” wasn’t the right word, since the auditory processes of the ears weren’t really involved. Most people went about their days to the beat of a soundtrack that only they could hear.
I watched the events unfold again, in real time, but I did my best to ignore whatever the branching me had focused on and concentrate instead on everything else happening. I sent a constant stream of instructions to Sarah, pausing the video, zooming, enhancing, homing in on small details that might lead to any kind of clues. Sarah’s analysis had come up empty, but the human brain was still the best pattern-recognition hardware around, even when it worked on intuitive leaps and not quantum entanglement.
After four hours, I had made it through just over two hours of the video and learned absolutely nothing useful. I stopped and stood, stretching and working out the kinks. Hunger gnawed at my stomach. This new coil, with its extra pounds of muscle, was going to require a calorie intake that would have had the nanobots in my old body working overtime to keep off the weight.
Movement caught my eye and I turned in time to see Chan reaching back to pull the cable from her access jack. She stood too, stretching. I had seen her do it hundreds of times on the Persephone, and it had always been a guilty pleasure to watch, an exercise in elegantly arching the back and artfully extending her arms over her head, reaching so high that it seemed to pull her all the way up to her toes. Her new coil, while trim and graceful, didn’t quite do it justice.
“Did you find anything?” I asked, the words coming out slightly rougher than intended.
Chan frowned slightly, probably wondering at the harshness of my tone. I kept my face neutral. After all, I couldn’t exactly tell her that I used to get a cheap thrill out of watching her stretch, and now, in her new coil, that thrill was gone. There were lots of ways she could react to that, but none of them were good.
“Maybe,” she said. “Sarah ran facial recognition on the passengers and didn’t turn anything up. I tried that, too, with no luck. Which is suspicious in and of itself. Those coils were perfectly preserved, so if they had ever had any form of ID—corporate, government, or otherwise—I should have been able to get a match.”
“Erased?” I half asked, half stated.
“At least their images. That’s a much easier hack than trying to take out someone’s backup. Or even just wipe their Net presence.”
“Which leaves us nowhere,” I muttered.
“Not quite. There was one face they didn’t bother with.”
I thought about that for a moment. Most of the coils in the video were pristine, but one… “The guy in the airlock?” I guessed.
Chan nodded. “He was… enough of a mess, I guess, that any standard facial recognition wouldn’t have helped anyway.” The corner of her lips twitched into a lopsided smile.
“But you didn’t use standard facial recognition, I take it,” I said when she didn’t immediately continue. It wasn’t the best time to play games, but I couldn’t help but smile as well. This was the Shay Chan I remembered from the Persephone: teasing and mysterious. It was good to see that side of her again, much better than the fearful and uncertain Chan that had responded to my call.
“I did, actually,” she replied. “I just wrote a little algorithm first. I based it on medical software commercially available to study the effects of depressurization. That gave me enough data and code to reverse engineer their process. So, what I ended up with is something that takes the end result of depressurization—unappealing as that is—and undoes the damage.”
A request to view video popped up into my vision. I closed the window with the footage from the shuttle and accepted the new feed from Chan. The bloated and distended image of the corpse from the airlock sprang to life before me, zoomed in to show only the horror left of his face. I started back as it filled my vision, which, given that the window appeared to be the same relative distance from my eyes regardless of where I moved, did absolutely nothing.
“Christ, Chan. Warn a guy.”
“Sorry. But I want you to get the full effect, so I had to start with the before image. Now, when I run my