(Archaic Mandarin Chinese [Beijing dialect, circa 200–100 PCE]. Data reconstruction and translation by Gregory Lago, House of Wisdom, Deep Space Archaeology.)

JAS

I saw my mother die a thousand times. In nightmares, in unguarded waking moments, in the drug-induced haze following every surgery and the long, lonely quiet of recovery, I imagined her death as it might have been, as it could have been, and impossibly as well, methods and means that made no sense and could never have happened. I imagined a hundred scenarios leading to a hundred more, sometimes peaceful, more often horrific, the probabilities and potentialities tangling around and around themselves until they were a storm in my mind, every one true, every one an agony.

There was surveillance everywhere aboard House of Wisdom. There were cameras in the laboratories, public areas, and corridors. Even in the private living quarters, absent video and audio recorders, the ship was watching: the medical system monitored the location and health of every person aboard to constantly assess who was ill and who was well, who had worked too long and who was rested enough to call upon in an emergency, a never-ending churn of calculations and assessments.

On the morning of the fourth of January in year 393 of the Reconstruction Era, the ship detected the heartbeats of four hundred and seventy-eight people. Four hundred and seventy-eight crew, researchers, staff, and families. Four hundred and seventy-eight thriving and unsuspecting lives, not one of them aware that Dr. Lago’s virus had already begun to spread.

Twenty-three hours later, there were none.

Laid out all together on a single image, the pulse lines fell flat like seismographs in the aftermath of a world-shaking quake. For many there was a wild spike of panic as they realized they were infected. Some ended there. Others subsided into an eerie calm with heartbeats so regular they might have been paced by a machine. Their calm might last minutes, hours, but it, too, ended with death. Some died in clusters, groups of ten or fifteen people extinguished all at once. Many died alone.

Somewhere in the mess of flattening lines, my father—

Identification: Roy, Vinod

Position: Chief of Botany and Horticulture

Location: Personal living quarters 7.23-S

Time of death: 17:37:04 01.03.393

Cause of death: Hemorrhagic shock

And hours later, when the signals of the survivors had thinned to a few jangling electric kicks—

Identification: Bhattacharya, Amita

Position: Propulsion Engineer (Research Primary)

Location: Unknown

Time of death: 02:13:56 01.04.393

Cause of death: Unknown

The record of my mother’s death was among the last disjointed fragments of data the ship had transmitted before it went dark.

All of this information was sealed by SPEC Security, but if a person were truly determined, and possessed the right connections, those records could be uncovered. My aunt was one such person.