Present day, Aragonian Sector, Battleship Singularity
“I had a feeling you would be here, Miss Scarlett.”
She did not respond, statuesque as she faced the bed. She seemed not to register that Macintosh had even spoken.
The doctor shoved his hands into the pockets of his white coat. “It makes sense,” he agreed. “He’s on his death bed and you would want to be with him.” He calmly joined her in looking at the Admiral. The man rarely seemed so helpless. “They say that love breaks all barriers, but I never believed it. At least not until I heard about you, that is.” He chuckled, “The Haunted Singularity. Now that I doubt.”
The white-haired woman was silent. Doctor Macintosh began to wonder if she could respond. What did he know about ghosts? He produced a cigarette from his pocket, contemplating lighting one for the first time in years. Any more alcohol would render him tipsy, and this was his next best coping mechanism.
He flicked his lighter open and raised it to the end of the stick. “Don’t smoke in here.”
Macintosh was momentarily unsure where the objection had come from, but eventually realized it was the ghost who had spoken. Without turning around, she had known what he was about to do. Interesting. He closed the lighter. “Smoking. It’s a nasty habit I picked up on my last assignment.” He shuddered, remembering his days healing the miners of the Gamoran Moon outpost.
“I am aware of your record, and I am telling you not to smoke,” she answered coldly.
Doctor Macintosh dropped the lighter into the depths of his lab coat pocket, but kept the cigarette between his lips. “Whatever you say, Miss Scarlett.”
“Do not call me that.” She turned halfway around to look the medical officer in the eye. “I am not Lieutenant Scarlett.”
“Well,” he made a vague hand gesture, “Not anymore.” Clearly, a lot had changed since the Kansas’ disappearance. She wasn’t really human anymore, and it could be argued that Admiral Gives was not technically either.
“I was not and never will be Lieutenant Scarlett.” The very insinuation that some creature like her could have ever been that lovely young woman was an insult to Samantha Scarlett’s memory. I am nothing more than a monster.
“Then what is your name?" Macintosh asked, unsurprised. His original guess had never been any more than a theory.
She returned to silence, but Macintosh wasn’t through. He had questions, and it wasn’t everyday he had the chance to speak with the ship’s ghost. In fact, until today, he had never heard it rumored that she could speak. “Then you are indeed Samantha Scarlett.” Without offering up an alternate identity, she would be stuck with that. “It’s okay. I won’t say anything to the crew-“
“I am not Samantha Scarlett.” Anger of a special variety rose in her eyes, fiery self-loathing. “I am the monster that killed her.” A disgusting, vile creature who soiled and killed everything she touched, mourning the loss of the mission she could never fulfill.
The ship’s burly medical officer faltered under her sharpened gaze. “Killed her?”
“Murdered. Maimed. Wiped from this plane of existence.” The thought would never not anger her. “Yes, I killed her.” It was sick. But that was her existence: blood and guts, and pain. So much pain. There was a brief time in which she had almost been free of it, almost brought joy to someone, but that was all crumbling down around her in ashes, flames and death.
“No one ever found the Kansas. Samantha could still be alive.” Even as the words flowed from his mouth, he knew it was a long shot. The odds of Samantha Scarlett being alive were just below the boundary where it became impossible.
She had ended a good life, a life which had sought to harm none, one of so very few like it. The mere memory made her sick. It twisted her insides into sadistic knots, a terrible, terrible crime. But that was the cruelty of her existence: a tool, a murder weapon that agonized over the crimes she was used to commit. Yet, that was the only existence she had ever known. She would never know another. Death itself would be her only eternal companion.
“I found the Kansas, and there is a reason no one else has since,” she finally replied, letting the doctor shudder unwillingly under her steel-gray stare. It was over. There was no changing the fate of Samantha Scarlett.
Her gaze drifted back to the Admiral. She sent a final thought his way, ‘I’m sorry.’ That day, thirty-two years ago, her master – No, her former commanding officer, had taken undeniable pleasure in Lieutenant Scarlett’s death. Little more than the instrument of death, she had been helpless to stop it.
The doctor’s initial bravado had entirely disappeared. “That would be treason.” Sinking the Kansas was nothing short of it.
“Implying that a monster like me even comprehends loyalty.” She had repeatedly betrayed the most loyal officer on the entire damned ship. Clearly, she held no concept of loyalty.
The hairs on Macintosh’s neck rose. Danger! His instincts screamed at him. Run. This creature was more powerful than he was by a factor of thousands, and yet… There was something about her that just seemed vulnerable. The way she stood at the bedside of a comatose man did not imply that she was so far removed from the weak idiosyncrasies of humans.
“I’m curious,” Macintosh leaned against the wall, again contemplating this entity’s presence. “What was he to you?” Why exactly was she here? Admiral Gives was a lot of things, but a spiritual medium was not one of them – not that Macintosh truly believed he was looking at a supernatural ghost.
He was kind. The Admiral had been kind to her in ways that his predecessors had never been. Others saw him as cruel, and maybe he was, but she supposed that was all in perspective. Perspective changed everything.
But, standing here, it was a betrayal. Another betrayal. Another failure. She had been told not to care. But she did care. She cared about all of them: the doctor, the ensigns, the engineers, and yes, the Admiral too. She sought only to protect them, but she had failed. The ship’s air recyclers provided air to twenty-nine less lives than they had at the start of this disastrous patrol. She had lost twenty-nine, and another few would slip away before the night came, each one irreplaceable. It reminded her of worse times, of her years of misery.
‘Let this be a lesson to you, creature.’ She flinched at the memory. ‘Something like you does not get to care. This is the price.’ Death. The corpses had been laid out before her, stacked like logs, her master all too proud. ‘You are a tool. Tools do not contemplate or deny the nature of their use. They do not get to hesitate.’ Those bodies had started to rot, started to leak onto the deck by the time they were removed. The heavy stench of it had ruined the air filters.
The mess had been left there. The maintenance teams had been too disgusted to touch it, too afraid to face the wrath of her master. So, it had sat, the vile fluids corroding the deck molecule by molecule at an irrelevant rate that was terrifying all the same.
Thirty years ago, at the start of the Dead Years, her master, her previous commanding officer, she corrected herself, had been at the height of his cruelty. But someone had come to her aid in the dark hours of the night, a wire brush and a bucket of bleach in hand. Without a word, the Major had scrubbed the deck until it shined and then sprayed anti-corrosion treatment on for good measure.
That same officer, then a Major, now served as her commander. Had she ever bothered to thank him for that midnight kindness? No, she thought not. Another failure.
“No answer, hm?” Macintosh said, pulling the cigarette out from between his teeth long enough to unscrew the top of his flask and take a swig. “He was a lot of different things to a lot of different people.” During better times, most of the crew had truly admired Admiral Gives, but these were not good times. “Most of them don’t care too much for him these days. Do you?”
“I am forbidden to answer that question.”
The ship’s medical officer ground his unlit cigarette between his teeth, as brutish as ever, “Well, that’s bullshit.”
“That is the decree of the Hydrian bylaws.” She could not help the fact that she cared, but acting on that was forbidden, and speaking of that emotion broke the bylaws. As it had been explained to her, both humanity and the Hydra had elected to abide the bylaws following the War. When they were broken, the results were a certain type of catastrophic.
“The bylaws are meant to prevent computer intelligences from surpassing and deeming organic life irrelevant. They forbid allowing artificial life to gain sentience. What of that applies to you?” Humanity had relatively little experience with AI. Compared to the Hydra, their computer technology had always lagged behind.
“The bylaws stipulate many things.” They were a broad set of universally accepted restrictions. “Among them is that artificial and organic life should never care for one another. Not only is it impossible for artificial life to truly ascertain emotion, but the appearance, the attempt to do so, will create a monster. If a machine were to care for a human, that emotion would be little more than a flaw, and that flaw would grow, consume and create a cataclysm. If a human were to care for a machine, it would encourage such illogical behavior, and thus encourage the cataclysm.” The nature of the cataclysm could take many forms, all of them bad. “Organic life and artificial life are meant to remain separate for the safety of all.”
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“You’re quite well-read,” Macintosh observed.
“I was taught to understand.” She was lucky in that regard. “It is a fact that under normal circumstances, I will never age. I will not die. For all of you, that is not the case.” None of them were permanent, only temporary. It pained her, but that was fact. Between them, Admiral Gives had always been going to die first, assuming she was even capable of dying – and that was up for debate.
Could a creature that was not technically alive die? The obvious answer was no. She would simply exist forever.
“But, in theory, if you chose to, could you disregard the bylaws?” Just how advanced was this ‘ghost’?
“The choices I have will not be mine to make.” Free will was something she did not possess. “Tools do not get to choose the methods of their use.” She was lucky that these last few years, she had served under someone who acknowledged her existence as more than an object.
“That’s not what I asked.” She had dodged the question. Macintosh would not be so easily misdirected. “Could you emotionally disregard the bylaws? Could you care, if you chose to?”
She could not help the pain that rose up. “That is one of the most dangerous questions you could ever ask a creature like me,” she warned. “There is nothing worse than a monster that cares.” And she did care. She cared too much. That had always been her weakness.
Again, Macintosh resisted the urge to run very, very far away from this creature. He worked up the courage to stay rooted to his spot by taking another drink from his flask. “Emotions are their own kind of strength.”
You want me to admit it, she realized. He wanted her to admit that she was flawed, that she was suffering a rational decline. “You are asking me to betray the only person who ever treated me kindly.” She wouldn’t do it. She had crushed those ridiculous bylaws, yes, at the risk of a cataclysm. She knowingly endangered the worlds because she couldn’t seem to avoid it, and she paid for that every time someone died on this cursed ship.
“Kindness, eh?” The doctor sighed. “You sure are a naïve one if you’re going to call the Steel Prince a kind person.”
“Maybe,” she allowed. But she had seen far worse. Admiral Gives, for all of his alleged cruelty, had done his best to keep the bloodshed off the Singularity’s decks. He had helped her understand emotion, taught her how to properly speak. He had taken pity on a creature that had been unable to comprehend her own suffering.
…and he had done all of that in exchange for a promise. Just a promise. No undying loyalty, not even an ounce of her power, just a simple promise. “Do your best for his injuries, please, Doctor. I will give you any support I can.” If any member of the crew was going to survive this mess, they would need it. Then, in six days, she would return to keep that tragic promise.
“You’re not going to ask me to revoke that order of his?” Macintosh inquired. With the concern he’d seen on her face, surely she would try to stop him from taking the Admiral off life support?
She hung her head and carefully restrained her emotions, not wanting to scare anyone with the chaotic monster she truly was. “No.” That too, would be a betrayal, a violation of the trust Admiral Gives had held in her. “He knew what he was doing.” That was all there was to it.
It would not be wise to let Macintosh analyze her further. She remained a nameless entity for a reason. “Ensign Alba will come to your office in about five minutes, Doctor,” she told him. “He will offer you a piece of paper. Take it and analyze it. I believe you will find it quite interesting.”
She did not wait for a response. She just vanished without a trace. Gone.
Macintosh let out a breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. It was a lot easier to breathe without that lingering power of hers stifling the room. “What the fuck did you do?” he asked the Admiral. “She could easily kill all of us.” The ghost, whoever, whatever she really was, held more power in her pinky finger than Macintosh could ever hope to achieve. “And you just had to help her, didn’t you?” Crazy son of a bitch. “You’d better hope she doesn’t fucking lose it.” Macintosh didn’t want to imagine a cataclysm on that scale. On this ship alone, there were nearly a thousand lives on the line.
That was hardly a vote of confidence, but the ghost had learned to ignore such things. The few people that saw her all thought the same thing. Monster. That was all anyone ever thought of her. It never mattered if she didn’t want to scare them. It made no difference if she was calm and gentle. She was not like them, and they feared her. She had spent many days agonizing over that fact, wondering why she was forced to commit murder when they could choose their path, because all of those deaths, the women and the children, they haunted her. She was a being of regret, of sin. Sins so terrible she would lie to the only person who knew her name to hide.
But Macintosh was unaware of that. The alcohol was finally starting to render his mind a little fuzzy as he made his way back to his office and plopped down in his creaky swivel chair.
Five minutes later, as if on cue, Ensign Alba shuffled in and knocked cautiously on the doorframe.
Macintosh didn’t move from where he slouched in his chair. “Door’s open.”
Alba pushed door open wide, unsurprised to find the doctor in some state of disarray. It was a fairly common sight to find him intoxicated at his desk, which was covered in mountains of papers.
“Doctor, Galhino and I found this when we did our initial inspection of the Reserve Power Core. I tried to give it to the Colonel, but he wouldn’t take it.” Zarrey had thrown them out of his office with a few f-bombs and an extra duty shift for good measure. It went without saying that Zarrey’s transition to command was not going well.
“I thought it might be of interest to you, given the sheer amount of…” the young man paled as he offered it out, “blood that’s on it.”
Blood? Just what the hell was Alba holding? Macintosh grabbed it, remembering the ghost’s instructions. It took him all of two seconds to skim the document. “Hell fires in heaven.” The words leapt off the page as violently as a physical attack. ‘Code: Orange’. He closed his eyes, trying not to picture it. “May modern science save us all.”
Ensign Alba shifted nervously between his feet. “Sir, what exactly is a Code Orange?”
Macintosh resisted the urge to down the rest of his flask and forget about this. It would be better that way, not to know what inevitable end was lurking out in the abyss. “A Code Orange is called in the case of a deadly, uncontained biological hazard.” Perhaps it was the worst fate a ship could suffer. “They died because they were sick, Ensign. The entire crew of the Kansas became ill with an untreatable contagion and died. It seems, reading this, that the last of them tried to destroy their ship and stop the contagion’s spread.” And according to the ghost, they had failed. Ending the last of their lives had fallen to her.
Deep in thought, the medical officer registered Alba roughly wiping his hand on his pantleg, as if trying to wipe the virus from his hands. “Don’t worry. If this sheet has been aboard as long as that power core, and no one has gotten sick, then likely, the contagion has died out.”
Macintosh lifted the paper up to the light, illuminating the oxidized handprint. That was a sufficient amount of bodily fluid to transmit a virus, yet no one had gotten ill. Why not? Whatever had killed the Kansas should have killed them too.
“You can go, Ensign.” He dismissed the engineer and scooted over to the microscope on the corner of his desk. He put the paper on the stage and pulled it into focus, rotating lenses until he found the one that delivered the molecular magnification he was looking for, immediately surprised by what he found.
Clinging to the long-dead human blood cells was a virus that he was familiar with. The Red Flu, a space-borne disease fatal on contact and highly contagious. There was just one issue: humans could not contract the Red Flu.
The only Code Oranges ever called on account of the Red Flu had been aboard Hydrian ships found drifting during the War.
The doctor made a closer inspection of the virus under his most powerful lens. Yes, this was similar to the Red Flu, close enough that it could be a mutated strain, but pathogen was binding to the blood cells in a different way than the Red Flu did to Hydra blood. It seemed to be merging with the cell rather than simply attacking and destroying it.
“It’s called the Scarlet Flu, and it is the deadliest disease humanity has ever encountered. There have been zero survivors that fully contracted the infection.”
Macintosh yanked his eye away from the microscope’s eye piece and whirled around to find that the white-haired ghost had once again appeared. Her face was guarded, betraying no care for the lost lives, but he decided to bite at her apparent knowledge of the subject. “If it’s that deadly, why have I never heard of it?”
“The Scarlet Flu is extremely rare, and anyone that comes into contact with it dies without exception,” she replied. “The reason you’ve never heard of it is because no one has ever lived to tell about it.”
The doctor suddenly became very wary of the paper sitting beneath his dusty microscope. A single cough infected with the Red Flu had wiped out entire Hydrian ships. This new virus seemed uncomfortably similar. Likely, in the time that Alba had been carrying that paper, the entire crew had been exposed. “If that’s true, why are we all still alive?” They should be dropping like flies if it was so deadly. Hell, they should have all died when it was initially brought aboard.
She seemed to have expected that question, answering, “You happen to be immune.”
“Immune?” He crossed his arms, “What happened to the 100% fatality rate?”
“The only reason you are immune is because the Singularity happens to be.”
He snorted, “How can the ship be immune? She couldn’t catch a virus if she wanted to. Metal beams and wires don’t get sick.”
The ghost raised an eyebrow, a peculiar human-like expression. “Perhaps not. But perhaps the Singularity deserves more credit.”
Doctor Macintosh huffed. Does she have to be so damn cryptic? Still, he thought it over. Ships didn’t get sick, they were just metal and wires, no biological matter involved. The closest they got were computer viruses, and the Singularity couldn’t even catch one of those because her old computers weren’t set up to do anything but run calculations. So how did a machine that couldn’t even catch a virus become immune? “That doesn’t make sense.”
“No?” the mysterious officer looked at him amusedly, “You cannot believe that a mutated strain of the Red Flu came aboard and no one was exposed.”
“We’ve never had a case of illness aboard this ship that hasn’t been food-poisoning,” he stated that as a fact.
The amusement never left her gaze, combined with her aura of power, it made her seem almost predatory, a wolf eyeing a little rabbit. “Just because no one became ill does not mean that nothing happened. I would suggest you run a blood test on yourself, Doctor.”
He turned to grab the blood testing kit, but when he turned back around, he was once again alone in his small office. Curious, he pricked his finger and slid the sample onto the stage of his microscope.
Five minutes of minute adjustments later, he found it. Mixed in with the normal blood platelets was one that was harmlessly merged with a virus pathogen. He trained the microscope on it directly. The virus microbe seamlessly reached its tendrils into the red blood cell, which continued to carry oxygen as intended. The virus was harmless now, its attacks neutralized. The fatal Scarlet Flu virus had been transformed into an innocuous blood anomaly dispersed sparsely throughout his immune system. The virus had been neutralized. What he saw now were just cells that would render him immune if ever exposed again, functioning like a vaccine against traditional infections.
But it occurred to him that the ghost was right. The primary difference between their own situation and the crew of the Kansas’ was their location. It was the exact same pathogen, but they had been aboard a different ship. That was to say, something about the Singularity was granting them immunity.