Bad At Dying

Written because the Expanse is the first thing to fire my imagination in 6 years. If it could unfire it again so I could manage to wait til the next book or season without exploding, that'd be great.

'Uh, bossman? Could I get an assist in the cockpit?' Alex's voice held an unusual note of hysteria in it.

Frowning, Holden closed out of the inventory list on his terminal and jogged towards the ladder. This far out into the Oort Cloud, they really shouldn't have been near enough anything to elicit those tones from the typically phlegmatic pilot. Even dire news from the inner planets took the better part of a day to reach them and thus could be responded to in a leisurely fashion.

Everything seemed calm as Holden swung up the ladder into the cockpit. The lighting was dimmed into late-evening mode, the occasional console LED glowing dully.

'What's up, Alex?' Holden asked. In another second though his brain registered the anomaly in the ship he otherwise knew so well. One of the shadows was completely the wrong shape. And Alex was staring at it like he'd seen a ghost.

'Can you see him too?' Alex whispered. His tone was halfway between quizzical and panicked. Like he was hoping this was all some sort of silly joke but his adrenal glands had overreacted just in case.

See who? Holden nearly said. His speech had shut down though. His throat had closed up. Because the human silhouette was just about the most familiar thing Holden had ever seen. An occasional blue firefly floated softly around it, idly illuminating flashes of shabby suit and week-old stubble.

''Sup,' said Miller.

Helplessly, Holden opened and closed his mouth a few times. 'Miller.' That was all he could manage. For the moment, his brain had gone completely silent.

'Don't know whether to be relieved I'm not crazy or worried that we're both crazy.' Alex was trying for bemused in an over-casual sort of way.

'Or worried that none of us is crazy and there's a zombie on the ship.' Moving silently for such a big man, Amos was standing behind Holden's left shoulder, hand groping for a piece that wasn't strapped to his hip because they were really truly in the middle of nowhere and they were on their very own gunship and why would he need to have his pistol on him right now?

'Hey what are you guys all doing up here…. Whoa.' Naomi pulled up short and as a crew, they stood and stared.

Holden cleared his throat and found his voice. 'Thought you were gone.'

'I was gone.'

'You don't look awfully gone,' said Amos helpfully. Casual as anything, he shifted just so, until he was partway between the shadowy figure and the captain.

Miller held up both hands in a universal gesture of non-threat and took a very slow step forwards. The soft glow of the ceiling LEDs lit most of him whilst casting his eye sockets into deep shadow. In those dark pools, twin prickles of blue light flickered. His lips were a sick black-brown, and branching threads of blackness ran from his collar to finger up his right cheek.

'Did he look this creepy the whole time he was haunting you?' Naomi asked Holden. Her gaze fixed on Miller was more fascinated than horrified.

'Uh. Yeah.' Holden thought about it. 'Yeah, you really get used to it after a while.'

Miller coughed delicately, like he had something to say. The effect of it was ruined by the chaff of blue fireflies that floated out, turning an otherwise human gesture into an underscoring of alien-ness.

'So I have a proposition for you all and I need you to keep an open mind.'

'We're conversing with an alien figment and you think we might have a problem with close-mindedness?' Alex snorted.

'Wait, are you a figment still? Or are you really here now?' Naomi looked ready to start taking scientific samples.

'And if you're a figment, how come you're suddenly a team player? Would have seriously helped to have you visible to all and sundry in the past.'

Miller made hushing motions before the rapid-fire questions became a torrent. 'Still a figment.'

'So how are you…?'

'More processing power now. Made it possible to run a five-way.'

Holden felt a stone settle into his guts and take up residence. 'More processing power from where…'

'Again, I'm going to remind you of open-mindedness and not being hasty…'

'Miller are you in my ship?' Only half a year of restraining the urge to physically assault a figment held Holden back. He could see it from Miller's guilty wince that he'd guessed pretty close to home.

'Technically, no.'

'Technically?' Alex asked.

'Technically…. I am your ship?' The upward inflection made it sound like a question, but it wasn't. The belter whose head nearly touched the ceiling was hunching his shoulders forward defensively like a kid that had been caught pinching lollies.

'But how?' from Naomi came at the same time as 'Oh shit no,' from Amos.

Holden thought about it for a long moment. 'You can't be. I burned the last bit of protomolecule and we've had no contact. And the Roci's been pulled apart from head to tail fixing all the damage after Illus. We would have noticed something during the repairs.'

'Not to mention I've been doing repairs and maintenance the whole way out here and never seen a single wire out of place.' Amos had his beefy arms folded over his chest and calm disbelief on his face. Holden wished he shared Amos' confidence.

'The Roci's gel matrix had several orders of magnitude more processing power than it needed and the capacity to self-replicate. I guess Martians built redundancy. The protomolecule let my subroutine have a lot of slack to pursue its questions. It gave me time to set up a seed crystal.'

'Seed crystal,' Holden repeated dumbly.

'Yeah well, that's putting it simply. Basically I re-built a malleable system into something more flexible, then worked from there.'

'How… flexible?' asked Alex uneasily. He'd turned in his chair and was eyeing the controls of his beloved gunship.

'Uh… I'm in more than just the computers.'

'How much more?'

'Put it this way… if you'll let me stay, you'll never need to dock for repairs again.'

Now they were all looking uneasily around them, like the floor was going to start quick-sanding beneath their boots.

'Miller, is this ship made of protomolecule?' Holden realised how choked his voice sounded. He couldn't help it. He'd had nightmares where his surroundings turned to alien goo. It felt like the walls were closing in on him now. He had to stare at them hard to confirm they weren't actually melting.

Miller appeared to realise how much he was distressing them. 'I don't want to die… again. But you can wipe me, and the Roci will become inert again. Her components have the ability to reconfigure, but only when given the appropriate commands.'

'Why did you do this?' Holden's question was almost plaintive. Sick anger roiled in his gut around the heavy lump of stone already sitting there.

'I didn't want to go.' The ex-cop lifted his hat off then ran long fingers through his hair. 'I didn't want my consciousness to end when the protomolecule put me back in my shoebox.'

'You were happy enough to die on Eros. Before you even knew that you'd be able to save Earth by doing it.' Naomi pointed out bluntly.

Miller sighed. He looked genuinely regretful. 'I'd had a lot of shit roll down on me. Most of it I brought on myself with a lifetime of bad choices. Being a cop squeezed the last bit of human outta me long before the protomolecule did. Then I made a bad choice that put me in the right place at the right time.' He shrugged. 'If a lifetime of bad choices all led to that, then it was worth it. But I got given a second chance, and I couldn't not grab it.'

Holden felt pity collide with his anger and tried to fan the righteous flames back up. 'You didn't grab a second chance. You grabbed our ship.' He reminded himself that he'd given Miller a second chance once before, and the unstable detective had shot an unarmed man in the face.

'And what's to say you ever got the human squeezed back into you?' Amos, as always, asked the pertinent questions.

Miller shrugged, another eloquent belter shrug. 'Julie Mao. She became my conscience when I'd lost mine. She gave me a reason to live right after I decided to die. Then the thing that brought her back to life decided to bring me back too. Julie would have grabbed onto that chance with both hands. I couldn't not.' He looked for a moment like he was groping for more words. Then he gave up and just looked at them helplessly, like he was willing them to understand.

Alex cleared his throat. 'That's all very fine and dandy, but when the captain told you not to shoot anyone, you went ahead and shot just about the first guy that pissed you off.'

Amos nodded and chimed in. 'Yeah, and now you're packing a rail gun. What happens if you get trigger happy with that?'

If possible, Miller looked even more embarrassed than he had when he first admitted to infiltrating the ship. 'Seriously, I've changed.'

'Yeah, now you snort out blue sparks and call alien-puppeteers master.'

'That was the old imaginary me. The new imaginary me just repairs your ship and streamlines your firmware.'

'You're trying to tell us that the protomolecule gave you the time and the tools to upload your consciousness across mediums and you decided to use that ability to covertly become a really clever ship-board computer.'

'Yeah but like, really clever.'

'You know, I did think the Roci had been really on-point lately.'

'Not the point of this discussion, Alex,' Naomi said flatly.

'Sorry,' the pilot responded sheepishly. Miller tipped his hat just slightly in Alex's direction. It took Holden a second to realise that the ex-cop had taken it as a compliment.

'You said "if we let you stay".' Naomi's voice held challenge. Miller nodded slowly.

'So you are going to give us a choice here?'

'You'd have a choice sooner or later anyway. You could always lace the Roci up with explosives and abandon ship. I wouldn't be able to do anything. But I can give you the codes to… delete me. If that's how you vote. For the record though, I'd rather you didn't.'

'He'd rather we didn't,' Amos half-chortled.

'Least he's being honest about it,' Alex pointed out. 'Way I figure it, you didn't have to show up at all, did you?'

'Nah, coulda just hung around in the gel matrix, re-watching your terrible noir films.'

'Hey!'

'They're dated.'

'They're classic.'

'Why show up now then?' interrupted Holden.

'I only managed to fully integrate last Tuesday. Then I had to grow a few giga-joules more processing power to run a five way simulation so I could talk to you all.'

Alex cleared his throat. 'Not to ask the obvious question, but why didn't you just use an actual physical holographic projector?'

'Not flexible enough. Too prone to damage. Plus you probably would have noticed the cockpit growing a new part.'

'But it can do that now? The ship can grow new bits?' Amos was looking decidedly thoughtful.

'Could we all stay on target here? We need to vote on whether he… it… stays.' Holden's heart was pounding and he no longer knew if it was fear, anger or something else. Miller was staring at him intently from electric-blue pupils. The others were all staring at Miller. The moment seemed to stretch.

'If he's telling the truth about his integration, captain, then he can kill us all any time.' Alex tactfully pointed out.

'Let's not put that idea in his head.'

'Oh no, he's totally correct. I could but I won't. Can't state that highly enough. Will in fact do my best to not get you killed. Micro-asteroid dodging, advanced point-defence cannon targeting, you name it.'

'Of course, he might not be telling the truth about any of it and just trying to buy time for the protomolecule to infect us all,' Naomi suggested with a sort of fatalistic pragmatism. Holden looked at her in horror.

'Again, can you not suggest things like that?'

'If it helps this discussion at all, I can prove I am in fact running using the ship as substrate.'

'How do you prove …?'

Before Amos could quite finish his sentence, and before Holden could tell the mechanic off for toying with things best left alone, their acceleration cut off, sending all of them gently floating off the floor. All of them except Miller, who leaned casually back against the counter and crossed his legs at the ankles. 'I can, if you want, drive the whole shebang.'

Only Naomi had had time to engage her boot mags before the gravity slowly eased back up to 0.3g as the Roci recommenced acceleration. The transition from weightlessness to acceleration gravity was more subtle than Holden had ever felt. Alex wouldn't have been able to manage it even had he put all his concentration behind it.

'I know that doesn't solve your worries about me being protomolecule influenced, but I can promise you there is not an atom of protomolecule aboard this ship. And I was always upfront with you about the protomolecule's influence, wasn't I Holden?' Miller's tone was flat-out pleading now.

Holden contemplated how easily Miller could have ramped the Roci up to five g and pinned them all to the floor for this negotiation. Then he pictured worse still, Miller cranking it up to a sudden fifteen g and turning them all to strawberry jam. He shuddered.

'Would you give us a few minutes of privacy then?' Holden asked grimly.

Miller inclined his head then dis-embodied in a shower of drifting blue pinprick lights. They rapidly winked out until in seconds the space he had occupied was empty. They all stared at it for several seconds longer.

'If he's not protomolecule, why does he look so much like it?' asked Amos.

'He's probably still listening to every word,' Alex pointed out.

'No doubt. But it's easier to vote on this when he's not staring at us.' Holden felt profoundly unhappy at all the developments of the evening, but also very aware of where this vote was going to head.

'I vote for regrowing ship parts,' Amos cheerfully chipped in.

Holden accepted that with a nod then looked to Alex. Alex shrugged. 'He really could have killed us any time. Plus, it would be pretty much murder to wipe him.'

'He might just be a really good computer simulation. How do we know if he's even conscious?'

'You never do. But you're referring to him as a him.' Naomi spoke slowly like she was thinking it through and Holden could tell that she too had made her decision. 'We owe him. A lot. I vote he stays.'

'He stays then,' sighed Holden. 'But we never, ever mention this to anyone outside of this ship.'

'No arguments here,' agreed Amos. 'I'd rather they didn't take apart our ship to figure out how he ticks.'

Holden allowed a moment of silence for it to sink in. A moment just in case anyone was going to change their mind. His crew mates look back at him, their expressions ranging from resolute to patiently expectant.

'Miller, you can stop pretending to have left now,' Holden said.

'I seriously did leave,' Miller responded, appearing where he had been like someone turning up a dimmer switch.

Holden shuddered. 'Could you dial down the protomolecule make-up at least?'

'I'll try but it will take some time. This is how the visual cues were wired from your head, which in turn was taken from my self-image at the point of my first death. It was the only thing I had to work with. I was a lot more focused on getting my sense of self across than my skin tone. And as for the privacy stuff, I can legitimately take my awareness elsewhere. You'll have to call my name to call me back though.'

Amos raised his eyebrows appreciatively. Pragmatic as always, he clearly enjoyed the idea of a ship that assisted in its own upkeep.

'Unexpected or not, I think this counts as a reunion of sorts.' Naomi was half-smiling in her quiet way. 'Reunion and a welcome to the ship.'

'You know, I did think I saw a bottle of finest imitation whiskey in the mess the other day,' Alex drawled, catching on to Naomi's drive.

'You guys realise I won't actually be able to drink any of that,' Miller said morosely.

For the first time, Holden started to feel a little bit cheerful. 'That is too bad. We'll pour some on the floor for you, and you can watch us drink.'

Miller half-sighed, half-smiled. It would have to do.

fin