Hangman

Somewhere between Planet York and Planet Manchester, a blocky space vessel swam through the immense expanse of the void like a colossal fish. It wasn’t a particularly big ship. It wasn’t a particularly fast ship either, nor was it even a particularly nice ship. What it was, was a cheap ship. From the peaceful exterior, no one could see what was happening on board. Something was dead in the bridge; a high ceilinged room with white-painted walls and with a thick, black carpet - frayed at the corners - covering the floor. It swung from the ceiling, hung among cheap strip lights, dangling and swinging from an electrical cable. It was watching the room through a single, lifeless eye. It missed half its face and the other half was drenched in dried gore, making it unrecognizable. There were only two of us alive on this ship, and yet we must have encountered at least twenty of these corpses – all completely identical, hanging in the same way, from the same light - before we left the task of removing them to the robots, which I quickly programmed to throw any corpse it found out through the airlock and into the emptiness that lay there. If the body could see, it would see the pneumatic doors hiss open and a maintenance droid rumble into the room, slice the rope from which the watcher hung and cart it to the airlock, as I had programmed it to do. In the games room, we sat, playing hangman.1

“It’s hydrochloride.” She said, excitedly fidgeting with her hair.2

“Yes, well done.” I replied, my voice flat and toneless; sounding thoroughly bored. I don’t think she noticed.3

“It is fun, playing hangman. One of my favourite games.” She said. She didn’t seem to mind the fact that we had played no game other than hangman since the corpses started showing up, at the beginning of the journey. She always suggested it, and I knew she would throw a strop if we didn’t, and playing hangman for half an hour every night was far preferable to having the power cut out at critical points and the automatic doors slamming automatically in my face. That is the power a computer technician, the profession that we shared, in its natural habitat. How could she never get bored of the stupid word games? Was it some sick game to drive me insane? It wouldn’t be surprising, knowing her. You see, we didn’t get on. Actually, that might not be true. I think she liked me but, well, I think she likes just about everybody. She seems to see life with an unfaltering optimism, a belief that life should be a game; that life is a game. But if you did something to annoy her, she would have a half hour strop and then take a cold and extremely well calculated revenge at some point within 30 days. Being repeatedly forced work and travel with her did not make me view her any better. On every business trip we would be made to take, and there were many, far, far too many, I would get sick of her company before she even said “hello” and she would learn to leave me alone after the first week or so of space travel, normally after at least three tantrums. We would then enjoy the next few months of the journey blissfully ignorant of the fact that the other was on the same vessel as one, occasionally bumping in to each other in a hallway, where she would attempt to strike up a conversation (that I knew would go to the same place as a train at rush hour, when there’s construction on the line and people trying to kill themselves by throwing themselves on to the track at inopportune moments, or, to put it in rather less words, nowhere) and I would just ignore her. But not this time, apparently. This time, she seemed to have developed the annoying habits of trying to be friendly, and being extremely boring; a terrible combination. And she never seemed to remember that we had played the same game, using the exact same words, every day for the past 4 weeks. I was beginning to count the days until we arrived on Planet Manchester. It was always too many.4

After our game, I wouldn’t see her again until breakfast the next morning (or the in-flight equivalent), and that was when the corpse appeared. It was always in the bridge, it was always hung from a light, the same light even, it always had a bullet wound to the face and it was always completely unrecognisable as anything other than something that was once human. Neither of us knew how the corpses got there; as far as we knew, there were only two people one the ship. I couldn’t sleep for a few of the so-called nights after I saw the first corpse, but after a while I gained the ability to just block it out. Interestingly, she seemed as shocked and appalled when she saw the last corpse as she had when she saw the first. Maybe she was easily affected by this sort of thing.5

The next ship-night, I couldn’t sleep. I often couldn’t towards this point in a journey; I think it’s a foul combination of the dry, recycled air, lack of sunlight and lack of proper day-night cycles (they are simulated, but the brightening and dimming of the cheap electrics doesn’t quite give the right effect), but in every journey I can remember, I have not got any sleep for at least one twenty-four hour period at around the four-week mark. It was thee o’clock, ship time, and I was drinking coffee in a lounge. I assumed that Sarah was in her rooms; sleeping, watching the film screen, playing hangman against the computer, something like that – I didn’t know her well enough to take a more accurate guess. I soon discovered I was wrong.6

From somewhere towards the front of the ship, I heard a scream, followed by the ringing, electrical zzap of a laser gunshot. I couldn’t pinpoint the sound’s exact location but I knew where it was nevertheless; the corpse in the bridge! I sprinted down the white-walled corridors, through large, steel, automatic doors. I climbed down white plastic ladders that gave as you put weight on them and cut into your hands, jumping from about halfway down each one. I knew the way well and, finally, I made it to the bridge. I was too late. A fresh body hung from a light, swinging gently. Wet blood covered the remnants of the face. But this time I noticed something else. Two shallow grooves were pressed into the inky carpet. They led, like a path, to the body, before turning away 180o and returning to from where they had come. On closer examination, the tracks leading away had a trickle of oil running within them, pooling at the valley bottoms. How interesting. I followed the tracks, as the maintenance droid cleared up the blood and noisily vacuumed the carpet behind my back. The marks took me to a wiry metal grill set in the wall. I knew this was one of the ventilation shafts that took air from the living areas, into the recycling and pumped it back out, quite dry but definitely breathable. They said that any air you breathed had been through someone at least four times already. I didn’t doubt them. Kneeling on the soft floor, I looked in to the shaft. Two red LEDs looked back, then faded away. There was something familiar about those lights, but I couldn’t quite place it. I went back to my bed and tried to sleep. I dreamed that I was playing hangman, except instead of a stickman hanging from the gallows, a bloodied corpse swung back and forth on the page. I looked up from the sheet and into the electronic eyes of a robot. 7

“The word is ‘Killer’” I said, before awakening.8

The next ship-day, Sarah was fixing a damaged droid in one of the workshops, where she spent exactly two hours forty every day, and I played a game on the ship’s computer. Later, we played hangman, as usual. Then she went to bed, as usual. I didn’t. I strode down the hallways towards the bridge. I had decided that I was going to get to the bottom of this. From under my arm, I took out a webcam, cheap and low resolution, but still usable, and a low powered laptop. I set them up in the corner of the room, the camera pointing in to the centre, wired up to the laptop and, with a press of a button on the computers keyboard, set the camera to record. Then I went to bed, and actually got to sleep rather well.9

The next ship-morning, as the cheap lights were still in their annoying, orange sunrise setting, I made my way back to the bridge. There was no sign of a corpse but that didn’t surprise me; the droids would have cleared it up hours ago. I stopped the camera from recording, and scrolled through the saved video. At ten past three, I saw Sarah enter the room. She sat on the pilot’s chair and checked that we were on the right course. We obviously were, so she soon stood up again. A gunshot sounded from the laptop’s tinny speakers. In the recording, a small metal robot, a pest hunter, used to kill the vermin that hide in the bowels of the engine, stood on its rubbery, tire tracks, holding up a scrawny metal limb that ended as a smoking gun. Sarah screamed and staggered back, a gash in her cheek; the las round must have gone wide, just clipping her face. She ran forward and grabbed at the exposed pipes on the robot’s flank, dislodging one of them. A trickle of fuel ran out of the pipe and the droid raised its gun once more and shot Sarah in the eye, or near enough to make no difference. It hung her from the ceiling on a wire like it would a pest it had slain, turned on its tracks and rumbled out, leaving a trail of oil. But this still didn’t explain it. How were there so many corpses?10

“Hullo, Lloyd.” I turned round to meet whoever had spoken my name. It was Sarah. She was alive. “Do you want to play hangman?”11

“Actually, I’m not feeling too great... maybe later?” How could she be alive? I had seen her die!12

“Awwww, fun-spoil. You’re in a moody mood.”13

“Look, just shut up, please!”14

“Fine. I’ll just go and repair the robot I found in a vent over there.” This statement didn’t really sink in on me, at the time.15

Later that day, Sarah asked if I wanted to play hangman. Disturbed by what I had seen earlier, and by the prospect of playing hangman with the living dead, I declined. Bad move. Strop time. She ran off, screaming abuse. Later, I was walking across a powered bridge that extended over the cargo bay, fortunately full to the top with metal containers, but the bridge only when extends when it is turned on, when the power is cut a spring mechanism causes its two halves to split apart and pivot upwards, before resting vertically. Exactly as I was over the centre point, it raised. I landed on my head on the metal of a container below and passed out. 16

I woke up in the medical bays, at four thirty - ship time - and looked around the room. In the next bed along, lay Sarah. Beside the bed, a screen told any who could be bothered to read it one single phrase: UNIT DECEASED. CLONING REPLICA. Of course! I thought. We installed a replicating system. When you go into medical, your memories and genetics are saved to the system. If you die, a clone is created to take the role in staffing the ship that you have vacated. The clone has all the same memories as the original did when it was saved, but none of those gained since. Sarah had a migraine on the second day of the journey and went into the medical bay. It would have created a save then. Just like a computer game. So these Sarahs were just clones, ghosts, lingering spirits. But why did the droid (which, I realised she damaged and then repaired, every day) want to kill her? The solution was painfully simple. Due to compatibility issues between the robot’s outdated (and so cheap) OS and the cutting edge (but still cheap) Cloning Machine, the droid would register her as dead, therefore another, live Sarah could not be her and therefore must be an imposter. The robot was just doing its job.17