Lifeline

He tightened his grip on the d-cube, wishing he could crush the information out of the three-dimensional memory module. Terachyk knew that when they manufactured the d-chips in vacuum, once in a while a cosmic ray plowed in and ruined the matrix; he could use that as an excuse. But even if he did, if the performance information were somehow lost, Brahms would find out again. Terachyk had been head of the Computer Applications branch of Orbitech 1 before being promoted to division leader. He knew that nothing was truly erasable anymore; ways existed to resurrect deleted information.

Linda Arnando had discovered that fact the hard way.

He could do nothing but deliver the information, and somehow talk Brahms out of another RIF.

He turned the last corner and stood in front of Brahms’s main office. The darkened offices of the other two division leaders looked painfully empty and ominous. Brahms had put the Filipino boy Ramis in Tim Drury’s private quarters, where Drury had held open checkers tournaments for some of his friends, but the offices themselves remained vacant. Terachyk reached out to rap on the door.

“Come in, Allen.” Curtis Brahms stood from behind his desk and reached for his glasses. He grasped the wire-rimmed frames, and as he swung them up, his eyes met Terachyk’s. One of the lenses had shattered, but Brahms did not acknowledge it. He tossed the unnecessary glasses back down on the desk and motioned for Terachyk to take a seat.

Behind the director, a holotank showed a starscape. Brahms glanced toward it. “Ramis is well along on his journey. That’s footage we’re seeing from his camera. The colony’s morale seems to have improved remarkably already!”

Terachyk felt his face grow warm. He forced his eyes away from the acting director.

Acting director … Terachyk wasn’t sure he could convince himself that their situation was only temporary, but he held onto that hope for the strength to play this through until things really were better on Orbitech 1.

“I take it your efficiency study is complete?”

“The second study.” Terachyk leaned forward and pushed the d-cube across the table.

“That’s what I meant.” Brahms raised a brow at Terachyk’s tone.

Flipping the black solid around, Brahms inserted the d-cube into his desk unit. A series of graphs appeared in the holotank—statistics underscored by explanations. At the touch of a nested menu, tiny portraits sprang up next to the data to fill the image.

“You’ll need time to study it, of course,” Terachyk said.

“I trust your conclusions, Allen. That’s why you’re our main assessor.”

Terachyk shook his head. “It’s not that simple. I’ve taken days to compile this. There are some extenuating circumstances and they need to be looked at carefully before you start pronouncing death sentences.”

Brahms looked up sharply. “I have not said there will be another RIF! This is just a precautionary measure.”

Terachyk felt afraid, but maintained his position. “Of course.”

Brahms lounged back to take in the display. A descending list, numbered from 1,247 to one, appeared in the tank. Next to the names and numbers floated another set of scores: FIRST EFFICIENCY SURVEY RANKING.

As Brahms digested the rankings, Terachyk stared stone-faced at the bottom 10 percent. Many of the names at the bottom of the list had received the same ranking in both the first and second efficiency studies; Brahms highlighted those names in red. Other names, higher up on the list, he marked in yellow—still low, but showing some improvement. As Brahms took in the names, Terachyk felt sickened and giddy.

The rankings were so cold—they showed a quantitatively correct, business-school evaluation of what Brahms had chosen as the most critical factor of survival: efficiency. But how could you compare the tasks of a maintenance electrician with those of a pharmaceutical chemist? It didn’t matter what hard luck the person had run into—physical illness or broken equipment, even sabotage by other workers. All of the soul of human experience was missing from this evaluation—no mercy, only judgment.

And the part that made Terachyk most afraid was that Brahms himself believed in it.

Terachyk broke the silence filling the office. “So you are not even considering …?” He let the question hang in the air.

“Another RIF?” Brahms sounded on edge. His body looked stiff, but his voice came out cool, modulated. “That’s something we’ll always need to consider, Allen. You were there. You saw how people reacted. It wasn’t easy, but we’ve survived this long. The wall-kelp is helping us, but you know as well as I that our colony is not static. We are standing on the razor’s edge of survival. It will be a long time before we can be sure of our balance.”

Brahms sat up in his chair. Terachyk kept his eyes on the tiny pictures of the low-ranking people sorted out by the arbitrary scores Terachyk himself had assigned.