"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!"

"What in the name of Jesus Christ are you talking about," asks David, who flinched away when she attacked because apparently his reflexes aren't calibrated for ghosts.

"I'm an idiot!" she wails. "And you knew I was an idiot, and that you were the one doing my job and half of a dozen others too, and you got yourself suspended over your stupid bloody cat! And I didn't know a drive plate from a dim bulb, and - I couldn't do it alone - and everyone -"

She leaves off the tirade in favour of more sobbing. It's faintly tinny, owing to her mostly intersecting the console he was sitting at.

...God.

She's an idiot and an entitled little twerp, but does that actually mean she's wrong? He was holding this ship together, Hollister said so when she was ranting at him. But - it was like one of those stupid lifeboat ethics problems he was so bad at. Do you let them kill your cat before her kittens come because she's sneezing and they think it might be zoonotic, or do you kill the hundred and eighty-three souls aboard by consigning them to do the work they were hired to do?

And it's not like Snowy would have survived. Not with that kind of radiation.

He puts his head in his hands.

"Ding dong!" H0LLY says. "Ding dong! There is an unknown nonhuman lifeform entering the living quarters! Emergency! Ding dong!"

"...an unknown nonhuman lifeform?" David asks.

Ding dong? he thinks privately.

"It has been crawling through the vents. The grating underneath it gave way moments ago, releasing it into the body of the ship. Ding dong!"

Lecker sits up, half of her face making it out of the console. "Did the grating give way, or did you open it deliberately?"

"Ding dong!!!!!!!!"

David rises from his seat. "I... suppose we should check that out."

"You should, certainly," Lecker says. "And I'll tag along for moral support! Because I can't touch anything, and that means I'm about as useful as a condom dispenser in the Vatican."

"Perhaps we'll build you some kind of robot body," David comments as they walk.

"A robot body! What a fascinating idea! I can't believe that in three million years, neither I, an enthusiastic student of engineering, nor H0LLY, a tenth-generation shipboard AI with a mind of unfathomable power, thought of that!"

"Well, I thought you might be less blocked on the ideas side and more on the thumbs."

"...it is possible that you could help some of our previously discarded ideas. What with the thumbs."

Walking, walking. It's a fairly large ship. For all that most of it could be conveyed by half a dozen plywood sets.

"...what's it like?" he asks, helpless to stop himself. "Being. Dead."

"Like being on holiday with a crew of Germans."

"Isn't half your family German?"

"Hence my first-hand familiarity."

They turn the corner, and happen upon a... remarkably human-ish woman. Her ears are triangular and furry; her teeth are disconcertingly pointy; she has a long, lashing tail. Also she's a metre tall. But other than that, she's spot on.

Also, she's wearing a pink silk suit, of remarkable quality and a style that went out of fashion slightly over three million years ago.

She's paused at an unusually reflective wall, and is admiring her own ass. "If God existed," she muses, in a completely unremarkable South London accent, "I'd tell her she could retire now. Not much more point, is there?"

"H0LLY."

"Yes, Dave?"

"Is that a smegging catgirl."

"The suffix seems unnecessary. You don't call yourself a humanboy."

"She's a biped. Cats aren't."

"At the beep, you will have gone 2.987 million Earth standard years without having seen a cat."

Pause.

"Beep."

"Why would cats have evolved into such an incredibly humanoid form? And where did a breeding population of - actually, hang on. Hold it. Wait."

He swallows. "Is she... Snowy's descendant?"

"Yeah. ...Snowy was the only living thing left onboard, she'd got into the cargo bay and it had separate shielding. So... I locked the doors, and. She only had the one litter, but I enlisted the scrubbers to herd the kits into the medipods whenever a new one came about, touched up the genome and introduced variation. Eventually I stopped needing to, so I started doing something else."

He's stopped listening by "Yeah". He approaches the girl, looking happy for the first time since he started moving again.

She notices him and jumps back in alarm, her tail straightening and her scalp tensing into an impressive mohawk sort of hairstyle. "I- I'm big! My body is big and I'm scary!" she hisses.

"You don't need to be scared, I'm... I'm a friend."

"...I don't know you. All my friends are dead."

He... should really feel more upset about that, but he finds himself laughing, sort of helplessly.

"Well, there's a coincidence for you. So're mine."