But even Jimex didn’t need to know that.

Her next appointment was with Eric Holt, the expedition’s physicist. At twenty-eight, Holt was one of the youngest people on the ship, and a little insecure about that fact, in Park’s opinion. He was constantly putting on airs, lazily drawling his sentences, trying to blend in with the more cynical and experienced academics. His insecurity was not entirely unfounded, either: the space-born, with their augmented and extended lifespans, tended to believe that adolescence ended around age twenty-five. So to many of them, Holt was just a young buck, brimming with testosterone—despite his two doctorates from Shoemaker University. In response, Holt tried to act as if nothing affected him, as if everything was perpetually just all right. As if it were all part of an interesting story he would tell someday in the future.

But today, he had none of that self-assurance, pretense or otherwise. Before he arrived, Park’s inlays told her that Holt’s heart rate was elevated. And when he came in, his thin decksuit showed dark patches of sweat around the collar.

“Good afternoon, Holt,” Park began. “I was thinking—”

“I’d like to use the MAD,” Holt said rapidly. “Now.”

Park closed her mouth. “Of course,” she said after a moment, her voice neutral, offering no judgment or rebuke. Meanwhile she was thinking: Something’s wrong. Holt was looking at her in a daze, as if he’d been drugged; his eyes were glazed over with fear like a dumb animal’s.

Park reached over to boot up the Mood-Altering Device. Holt’s eyes followed the green spark of its activation sequence greedily. “Can you tell me what’s bothering you?” she asked him as it flashed to life.

The physicist’s hands were shaking. His face had a bony, scraped look. “I was having a nightmare,” he said. His voice was faint and a little muffled.

Park kept her expression pleasantly interested. “And what happened in the nightmare?”

Holt didn’t answer; he just stood there staring at her, kneading the skin around his eyes. After another moment, Park held up the plastic helmet of the MAD and helped Holt with its dangling straps and buckles and sticky microsuction cups. She averted her gaze as the MAD began beaming its euphoric green light into Holt’s brain, slackening his body until he was slumped in his seat. His mouth hung open slightly. In Park’s opinion, there was something disturbingly private about using the MAD—as if she were witnessing someone reach orgasm. She turned away to set a timer on her inlays. Two minutes was usually sufficient.

Then Holt gave a low groan. Park looked at him sharply—he should have been comatose with bliss—but instead he was plucking at the cables hooked to his helmet.

“It’s not working,” he said. He sounded close to tears. “Something’s wrong.”

This had never happened before. Park checked the helmet for malfunction, but the MAD was working fine. She angled it toward her face and felt the gamma rays bathing her brain in a warm cerebral massage. “It seems fine,” she said, trying to sound confident.