“Production,” DJ said.
“And they are?”
DJ hesitated, then spread his hands. “I don’t know.”
Jenny leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest. “They’re not taking my memories. They’re mine, I made them, and I’m not giving them up.”
“Same.” Everything that occurred before I opened my eyes in the spacesuit outside Qriosity might have been fake or might have belonged to someone else, but the memories I’d made from that moment forward were real. Those memories, not the ones from before, told me who I was and who I wanted to be. Eventually, I was going to have to reconcile the stolen memories with the memories I had created, but I refused to let Production take anything else from me.
DJ’s eyes motioned toward the ceiling. “What can we do? The only weapon we have is Ty’s pistol, and no matter what we come up with, Production will be ready for it.”
“Actually,” I said, thinking about Ty’s weapon, “I might know a way we can talk privately. But we’re going to need warm coats.”
FOUR
A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, DJ, Ty, Jenny, and I were sitting in the back of the shuttle, floating a few hundred meters off the port bow of Qriosity. Jenny had cut power to all systems, including heat, and the temperature was dropping rapidly.
Ty held the phone-shaped device he’d used to stop the Teachers at Beta Cephei High. “Are you certain about this?” He’d been surprised when we’d asked him to help, but not quite as surprised as DJ and Jenny had been when I’d suggested the plan.
“Why’re you looking at me?” I asked, pulling my jacket tighter around my shoulders.
Jenny smacked my arm. “Because it was your idea!”
“Do it,” DJ said. “The shuttle’s powered down, so the EMP will only fry equipment that’s still on, which includes anything Production is using to monitor us.” He quickly added, “But we’ve only got about forty minutes of oxygen—”
“How do you know?” Ty asked.
“The cubic meters of the inside of the shuttle converted to liters of air, divided by the number of liters we each consume per minute—”
“It’s math,” I said. “Trust him.” I was less worried about suffocating than I was about freezing, and I was already wearing two coats.
Ty activated his device, but nothing seemed to happen. It was kind of disappointing. He set it aside and rubbed his wrists where the restraints had cut into his skin. He looked uncomfortable sitting between the person he had shot and the person he meant to shoot, and I almost felt bad for him.
“Did it work?” I asked.
Jenny pinched Ty’s arm and twisted the skin. “It better have.”
“It did!” he yelped.
DJ cleared his throat. “This is your show, Noa. What’s your plan?”
“Uh, this was it.” I glanced at them. “Get to the shuttle, where we could talk without being watched. I was hoping one of you could come up with a way to keep us from having to submit to Production’s memory-rewrite thing.”
“Oh,” DJ said. “I just thought you might’ve—”
Ty interrupted. “Are you certain JP said they intended to dissect me?”
With Ty’s usefulness ended, I ignored him. Jenny did too. “We have to do something,” she said. “I’d rather die again than let them poke around in my brain.”
“Was Jenny Perez serious about us having no control over the ship?” It was difficult talking to DJ, working with him, and not acting like I wanted to hug him and hold his hand and hear him tell me we were going to solve this problem. In a way, it was like Production had already reverted us to versions of ourselves who didn’t know each other.
DJ nodded solemnly. “I’ve been trying this whole time to crack the hold they have over Qriosity, but I haven’t made any real progress because there’s nowhere on the ship they’re not watching.”
“Which is gross, by the way,” Jenny said. “And illegal. Isn’t it illegal for them to watch us shower and go to the bathroom?”
Ty rolled his eyes. “It hardly matters. Production isn’t people.” When I looked at him blankly, he said, “You do understand that, right? Production is an algorithm, or an artificial intelligence, if that makes it easier to comprehend. The point is that Production isn’t having a wank watching you lather up in the shower.”
“We’re being held captive by a computer program?” Jenny asked.
“That actually makes sense,” DJ said.
Jenny threw up her hands. “On what planet?”
The shuttle was cooling off far quicker than I expected it to, and a shiver shook my body. “Can we please focus? I’m freezing.”
“Maybe we can hack MediQwik,” DJ said. “That’s what they’ll use to rewrite our memories. If we can make it fake the memory procedure, it might buy us some time.”
“Can you do that?” I asked, shifting my gaze between Ty and DJ.
Ty shook his head. “I can disassemble MediQwik, but I haven’t the faintest idea how to reprogram it.”
“I could,” DJ said. “Maybe. Fifteen hours isn’t very long, though.” Even though it was his idea, he did not sound optimistic.
“Is there any part of the ship that we do control?” Jenny asked. She dug a Nutreesh bar from her pocket.
“You’re not seriously going to eat that, are you?” Ty wore a look of horror as he watched Jenny unwrap the Nutreesh.
“Is it roaches?” I asked. “I tried telling her it was probably roaches. Is it worse than roaches? It’s people, isn’t it?”
“Nutreesh isn’t made from roaches,” Ty said. “Or people. At least, not that I’m aware of. But Gleeson Foods is your program’s biggest sponsor. Every one of those that you eat is more free advertising for them.”
DJ cleared his throat to regain our attention. “Every system is controlled and monitored by Production. Navigation, communications, the reactor, Mind’s Eye. Even the equipment in the kitchen. You couldn’t bake a cake if Production didn’t want you to.”
I laughed bitterly as a thought occurred to me that I felt foolish for not realizing sooner. “We’re not skipping randomly through space, are we? We’re not lost.”
“No,” DJ said.
“What about the shuttle?” Jenny asked. “We turned off the power. Doesn’t that indicate that we have control over it?”
I looked expectantly at DJ. “Well?”
“Sure,” DJ said. “But the shuttle isn’t connected to the ship, so I’m not sure how helpful it’s going to be. It doesn’t have a fold drive like Qriosity does; even if we stole it, we’d die long before we reached the nearest habitable planet.”
“So we’re screwed,” I said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
Jenny shivered. Ty slipped out of his jacket and hung it over her shoulders, which wasn’t nearly as surprising as her letting him do it.
We sat in that cold, dark shuttle in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I kept hoping that inspiration would fill the cramped space with its light, that someone would conceive of a brilliant plan to save us from the fate that we seemed on an unavoidable collision course with. But our silence only filled the shuttle with the stench of defeat.