"Yeah, three million years ago. He's dead. That's what everybody means."

"But - Captain Hollister?" A cragged bulwark of a human being. David would have fought her over the cat thing, but he knew he'd've lost. Couldn't possibly be dead.

"Everybody is dead, Dave."

"But - Selby? Todhunter? Chang?"

A note of squeaky, deeply personal panic, at last, creeps in.

"Gordon Bennett, Dave. Yes, Chang, along with every other human being on this craft, is dead."

"You're trying to tell me..."

He trails off.

"...he was part of my plan," he murmurs. "I'd save up. Take him to Earth with me... buy a little farm, on Fiji, with sheep, and a cow, and horses. He could ride the horses, and I'd take care of the rest."

"Can't help you now. Not unless it snows in Fiji and you need to grit the drive."

"What?!"

"I'm sorry!" the computer-generated face on the screen says, returning to her factory-standard smile. "Three million years of near-total isolation have degraded certain non-essential social functions! My sense of humour has gone a bit peculiar."

David feels nauseous.

"...I'm sorry," he finds himself saying. "It must have been hard."

As if he can even comprehend that kind of pain. As if the loss he feels is comparable to... a span far longer than human history, alone, adrift, decaying. It must have been hard.

"You could put it that way."

She doesn't shrug; her avatar only has the face. But she floats in a manner suggestive of it.

"It was a radiation leak. The drive plate wasn't properly fastened, it was subject to a massive flux, and it exposed the crew quarters to something that..."

She points a spotlight at one of the urns along the control panel.

"Well. I didn't exactly need to cremate them. And it took 'til now for the Geiger counters to stop clicking."

"Painless, at least."

"Faster than neuroelectricity."

"So. Three million years, all alone? No one's left but me?"

"...depends how you see it."

A familiar face wanders into the room.

There's a shining platinum H on her forehead.

"...why are you here?" she asks, sounding dazed but undeniably thrilled.

David leans very, very close to the H0LLY interface.

"You brought back Arschlecker," he hisses, "in your one allotted holosim slot?"

"She was the only one of you idiots to leave me the preemptive permission to sim her on death," H0LLY 'whispers' back. "You think I'd have picked her myself?"

"I forgot how easy it is to hear what people are whispering," Lecker muses. "This is already helping a lot."

God damn it.

"I'm sorry, Lecker. ...it's nice to see a familiar face."

Even if it isn't Chang's.

"Familiar faces, familiar faces..." she sing-songs. "But I'm not good with the names."

"...you were my immediate supervisor."

And a blithering idiot.

"We spent six hours of every day maintaining the ship together."

"You!"

"Me."

She leaps for him, and goes straight through his torso.

"You killed me, you shit! You killed everybody!"