Second chances

Mr Vikarion left a message for Cia in the public EM channel. Asking whether she'd had a chance to consider his "offer".

CJ asked in Alliance if she could tell him to fuck off and leave Cia alone. I suggested that really, that was Cia's decision. CJ doesn't think Cia knows what's good for her. I suspect she's right. But I remember a conversation I had with Cia, when we were talking about things that were important, and I would not try to take away her choices.

I was contemplating telling KJ about the "offer" though - Vikarion isn't red to us, but I suspect that's mostly because he's too far away most of the time. He's Sansha through and through, and I don't trust him having influence over Cia.

Cia came on comms later, and I did what I'd promised and passed the information on. Vikarion runs a program Cia called "Significance" which is cloning for non-pilots. There's a slow scan, and if you get killed you can come back from where the backup was taken. You lose the time since your last scan, the memories. Are you really you any more?

Still, Cia enrolled her entire crew. But the enrollment was cancelled when she left White Rose.

Vikarion's offer was to re-enroll them.

I decided now was a good time to tell her about Eva's theories, the ones she presented to the sleeper conference, about Memetic Infection. Eva thinks that with the right technology and information, it would be possible to infect a mind with something like a computer virus. Pilot minds are partially wired into a computer, and computers get viruses all the time. Eva thinks we're most at risk when jumping from body to body, especially when we've just been podded.

If it's possible for sleepers to suborn people who have been podded, then it makes sense that if they have months to work on the brain copy that's going to be implanted, that the Sansha might be able to do that too.

I suggested to Cia that she not entrust the minds of her crew to people she didn't completely trust. That I knew Silver used a similar program, and that I trusted him a lot more.

Cia told me more details about the program. What it did, how much it cost. That Silver used a commercial business rather than running his own.

If I had 5000 crew and I wanted them all enrolled, it would have cost 50 million, and to recover from a complete loss, 75 million to regrow them all. That's a lot of money.

But if I was flying my Rapier with only 500 crew, that's a very reasonable amount.

I could give them a second chance.