He took a long, slow breath. He was trembling. He opened his eyes, looked around the room, and found what he thought he’d find. What he’d hoped for. The slouch. The half-apologetic, half-astonished sad-dog face. The porkpie hat.
“Well,” the familiar voice said where only Jim could hear it. “This can’t be good.”
“Hey, Miller. We need to talk.”
Chapter Forty: Naomi
You can see him?” Naomi asked. “Right now, you can see him?” Jim nodded. They were floating in the emptied lab where Amos had only recently been strapped down for his failed dive into the station. The Falcon’s security officers had taken Jim there directly from the catalyst’s chamber, and Elvi had called Naomi over. Now he was steadying himself on a handhold. His face had the sweaty, tight look it got when he was coming down with an illness or he’d drunk too much, but there was a calm with it. And something else. Amusement, maybe.
“For me, he seems to be right between you and Elvi,” Jim said. “A little bit closer to Elvi.”
“This can’t be the same Miller,” Elvi said. “This has to be something else.”
Jim chuckled.
“What?” Elvi snapped.
“Sorry. He said something funny. Look, in any traditional sense, the Miller I met died when Eros crashed into Venus. The protomolecule preserved and co-opted the patterns in his brain, and when it needed a tool to find missing things, there those patterns were, right in the toolbox. That version of Miller needed something that could take a ship places, and I was the guy who decided where the ship went, so it started using me. Physically manipulating my brain into seeing and interacting with the patterns it made from Miller. Those manipulations left channels. All I did was put the protomolecule and those channels back together.”
He looked at Naomi and tilted his head, a little smile on his lips. “I was just remembering something Alex said about tools that get used long enough developing souls. It’s off the subject. Forget about it.”
“Before, you weren’t able to see him when other people were around,” Elvi said.
“That’s true,” Jim said. “This is a different relationship.” A moment later, he laughed. Naomi didn’t know what at, except that it was Miller. If the jealousy stung, there was nothing she could do with it.
“Can this version of Miller open the station the way the last one did?”
Jim seemed to listen for a moment, then he shrugged. “I don’t know. He doesn’t either. The situation’s different that way too. We won’t know until we’ve tried.”
“I want to do some scans,” Elvi said, more to herself than to them. “Brain activity at a minimum. Full metabolic if we have time.”
“Not sure I have a lot of time for that,” Jim said.
“Is this something you can undo?” Naomi asked. “Is there a way to pull this back out of him?”
“It’s going to be hard to unscramble that egg,” Elvi said. “But there are probably some things we can do to keep him stable. Or more nearly stable.”
Jim shrugged. “Getting us more time is good, but only if we get more out than it takes to get it, if you see what I mean. We have a lot of clocks counting down on us right now.”
“I’m talking about saving your life,” Elvi said.
“I know, and I appreciate it. That’s a later-on problem. If we don’t get the rest of this right, it’s not going to matter. If you still exist as an individual who wants to fix me? That’ll mean a lot of things have gone right.”
They were quiet. Naomi glanced at the empty space between her and Elvi as if there might be something there for her to see. There wasn’t, but Elvi turned as if the look had been meant for her. Naomi realized they were waiting for her to make the decision. Jim was smiling at her, and it made Naomi want to punch him in the face. How in fuck did I wind up here? she thought.
“Collect any data you can now, and stabilize him,” she said. “We’ll need to get Teresa ready.”
“And Tanaka?” Elvi asked.
Naomi hesitated. She didn’t like Tanaka, and she didn’t trust her, but their interests were aligned for the moment, and inviting yet another front in her personal wars felt petty. “And Tanaka.”
“Okay,” Elvi said. “I’ll get the medical team.”
She pulled herself out of the lab and closed the door behind her. It wasn’t until the latch clicked that Naomi realized Elvi was giving them a moment alone. Jim looked away from her almost shyly. He was older, thinner, more worn around the edges than the man she’d met decades before on the Canterbury, but the openness she remembered was there too. The vulnerability. The almost genetic inability to believe that things wouldn’t work out for the best if he just followed his heart.