“Why were you asking about a map of the ship?”
Jenny pointed at a door off the corridor. It wasn’t labeled, but it looked like every other door on the ship. “Scuff marks,” she said. “That girl had been limping, so I followed the scuff marks left by her boots from the galley to here. Thankfully, Qriosity’s cleaning bots hadn’t gotten to them yet.”
Qriosity’s fleet of rarely seen cleaning robots kept the ship from getting too gross, though they refused to pick up my clothes off the floor of my quarters, which made them kind of useless to me.
“What’s inside?” I asked.
“That’s the second problem,” Jenny said. “The door is locked.”
“What’s the first problem?”
“I would swear this door wasn’t here yesterday.”
“Seriously?” I asked. Jenny didn’t look like she was joking, but her sense of humor was often bizarre.
Jenny said, “Yes!” and fired off an exasperated sigh. “My quarters are one deck up, and I walk this way to reach the garden at least once a day.”
“Maybe you never noticed it before.”
But Jenny glared at me and said, “I notice everything. There are two labs, three empty crew quarters, a storage closet, and three service tunnel access doors between my room and the oxygen garden. This door was not here yesterday.”
Jenny seemed so certain that I found it difficult to doubt her. If I’d learned one thing in our time together, it was that Jenny had a good memory. She could remember things I’d said to her that even I’d forgotten. But it didn’t make sense that a door to a room appeared out of nowhere, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
“I’m sorry, but this door was here,” Jenny Perez said. “It has always been here.”
“Then show it to me on a map!” Before Jenny Perez could answer, Jenny said, “I know, I know. You don’t have a map. Because you’re useless. Go away now.”
The figure of Jenny Perez burst into a swarm of dazzling lights and vanished into the vents.
I stood in front of the door and pulled on the latch, but it didn’t budge. When I turned around, Jenny was watching me.
“All the doors on this ship can be locked from the inside,” she said, and I knew it was true from experience. If I hadn’t been able to lock the door to my quarters, I never would have been able to keep DJ or Jenny out. “But they can also be locked and unlocked by voice command.”
“They can?”
Jenny nodded. “If you lock a door, you’re the only person who can unlock it.” She must have seen the confusion in my eyes because she added, “You spend a few hours locked in a toilet and see if it doesn’t make you obsessed with finding out how the door locks work.”
“Fair point,” I said. “But if the scuff marks led you here—”
“Then the girl in medical is probably the one who locked this door. Which means she’s the only one who can unlock it.”
“You really are turning into a good detective,” I said. “I’ve watched every episode of that stupid show, and I wouldn’t have thought to do what you did.”
Jenny managed to look both insulted and flattered at the same time. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Noa, but you’re not very observant.”
She wasn’t the first person to tell me that, and she wasn’t wrong. Becca used to say that I couldn’t find a clue with a map, a compass, and GPS.
“But, while I definitely want to know where this door came from, what’s behind it, and who the girl in medical is,” Jenny said, “the questions I most want the answers to are: Did somebody kill her? And, if so, who?”
FOUR
I SAT IN MEDICAL WITH Kayla’s body while Jenny showed DJ what she had discovered. I didn’t want to be alone with the person who might have been murdered, but DJ thought someone should stay with her in case she woke up. It was sound logic that I couldn’t argue with.
Not much had changed since I’d left. Kayla remained still; her eyes were closed. But her skin looked a little warmer than it had before. If I hadn’t known she’d been dead a couple of hours earlier, I would have guessed she was sleeping.
There were more questions than I knew what to do with swirling about in my mind, but there was one that I kept returning to.
“MediQwik? What can you tell me about death?”
“Death occurs at the cessation of the body’s biological functions.”
“I was dead, right?”
“Correct.
“But you revived me the same way you’re attempting to revive the patient on the table now.”
The lights in the room dimmed for a moment before MediQwik said, “The method by which your body’s biological functions were restored is different from the methods currently being employed due to the unique nature of your injuries.”
I shook my head. “That’s not… I just meant that we were both dead and you revived us.”
“The current patient has not yet been revived.”
“Right, but I was,” I said, trying not to get annoyed. “I was dead and then I wasn’t.”
“Correct.”
I took a deep breath before asking my next question, not sure what I wanted the answer to be. “Where did I go when I died?”
This time when the lights dimmed, they remained so for nearly sixty seconds, and I thought I might have broken the computer. Eventually, they returned to normal. “According to available data, your biological processes ceased to function at a location outside Qriosity. Your destination, extrapolated from your trajectory, was airlock three on deck two.”
I laughed at the answer because it was technically correct but also ridiculous. “Okay,” I said, trying again. “Do you know what consciousness is?”
“Consciousness is a being’s state of awareness of its own existence.”
I wasn’t sure how accurate the definition was, but it sounded good enough. “What happened to my consciousness when my biological processes ceased? What happened to me when I died?”
“MediQwik is a Portable Medical Diagnostician and Care Appliance, not a philosopher, and is not designed to dispense psychological care.”
It had been silly of me to expect a computer to know what happened to me when I died. I’d been able to put the experience out of my mind until this stranger had had the bad luck to show up dead. Now it was the only thing I could think about.
Maybe we were no different from machines. When my body shut down, I simply ceased to be until MediQwik turned me on again. The thought of being dead wasn’t as terrifying as the thought that I was little more than an accidental blip in the history of the universe. When my body was beyond repair, the soul of who I was would simply stop existing. I had come from nowhere, and I would return to that abyss when I died.
I stood over the body on the table. “Are you in there? Can you hear me? Of course you can’t. You’re still dead. Mostly dead, I guess. I don’t even know anymore. This is stupid.”
I screamed when Kayla’s eyes opened. She sat up and grabbed me by the front of my shirt. She was surprisingly strong. “You’re supposed to be dead. You should’ve died.”