He waved again, and the diagram vanished. “What we can do is let the ship’s computer collect, parse, and filter through everything the ARGUS sensors pick up, without having to review everything ourselves. The sensors throughout the ship record both sound and movement, down to a whisper or a specific twitch. They analyze body language without ever having to record images. Then we give the computer—METIS—patterns and keywords to recognize, let it sift through everything, and have it present us with the salient metadata. But without it—without the computer, I mean—the general ARGUS information means nothing to us. It’s just numbers, data. It anonymizes everyone for us. We can’t tie it to anyone’s identity, single anyone out. We only see the relevant slices if the system flags them and bundles them into a readable package for us: and that’s only if that data meets the criteria we implemented in the first place. You see? So we can’t access your conversations about—your families, or your favorite books, or what have you. The system only gives us that information if it thinks it fits what we’re looking for.” He took a breath, then continued before she could butt in. “That’s how Captain Sagara plans to find patterns in the behavior of the crewmembers if they become—affected. By whatever this affliction is, even if they don’t know it. It’s a measure meant to monitor, recognize, and prevent.”

Park was horrified. “In what other circumstance would this protocol ever be necessary?” she demanded. “Why would such a program exist in the first place, unless ISF was already expecting something like this?”

Wick looked sober. “I’m sure you’ve heard of mutinies happening,” he said quietly. “Crewmembers revolting, taking over ships. That’s what ARGUS is usually for. An ISF captain could activate it as a safety measure, if he suspected his crew of organizing against him.”

That doesn’t justify the breach in privacy, was Park’s first thought. Then she remembered that a captain of an ISF ship had been murdered, a year before they’d launched the Deucalion. The crew had conspired to kill him and tried to steer the ship elsewhere. The ISF hadn’t said why. At the time she had guessed it was stress-related, the kind of contagious mania and mob mentality that sometimes took hold in isolated space—but now she wondered if they simply weren’t happy serving an entity that held their loved ones hostage. A government that used their own images and identities against them.

No one could know for sure, anyway; all of the rebel crewmembers were now dead.