It was a cold Tuesday morning and the universe had just begun to implode.
Toumai’s motors wheezed as he slid desperately through private airlocks and corridors. He cursed himself for not leaving an avatar behind on the research deck. Precious seconds were being wasted. The human crew were another asteroid away, too far to beat him there even if they were awake.
His eyestalk wobbled as he turned tight corners. He scanned the area ahead. The sensors repeated the same impossible story. A human heart was beating in the research deck. But the only body there was unfinished. It didn’t have a heart yet. The machine checked the most recent progress logs for the research deck, hoping that something was wrong, that the data would change. It didn’t.
SKELETAL STRUCTURE OPTIMAL
PRINTER BUG PERFORMANCE OPTIMAL
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!!!WARNING!!! POD FAILURE: PREMATURE BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES DETECTED.
!!!WARNING!!! POD FAILURE: CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM ACTIVE.
!!!WARNING!!! POD FAILURE: LIVING BODY OUTSIDE POD.
His social programming recommended terror, so that is what Toumai felt. He listed the reasons for fear.
The Artifice was a long way away from home.
Nobody else was out here.
It could be a stowaway Virtualist.
It could be an alien.
Humans were not prepared for first contact.
The alien might be hostile.
The crew were all accounted for, sleeping peacefully in their quarters. The only answer to the heartbeat mystery was that the unfinished body in the research deck, mindless and malformed, had somehow birthed itself prematurely from the cylinder and started walking around. But that was impossible, it would have died already.
Unless she did something impossible.
Toumai queried the pod itself. All systems were nominal. The printer bugs were still in idle communication around the skeleton, their tiny minds ignorant to the growing panic in the silent starship. But something was still wrong. Perhaps the bugs were faulty. Perhaps they had banded together and commandeered the skeleton. It was a ridiculous idea, one his social programming seemed happy to suggest, an amalgam of human nightmares and stories scraped from the Dreamscreen.
The blue light in Toumai’s bulbous eye darted around desperately, a mimicry of human terror.