Lost in Transmission by Wil McCarthy Page A

while there was still work being done.
    So he dusted himself off, climbed gingerly back onto the railing, and slid four decks down to Engineering.
    There, Money Izolo's crew of five was down to just himself and Peter Kolb. And Peter didn't look too happy. He was holding his eye and glaring balefully at a waldo hanging down from the ceiling. This was one of those things you could stick your arms into, to operate robotic arms inside one of the reactor cores. But it necessarily had some solid and angular parts, whose indentations were clearly visible in the flesh around Peter's eye.
    “Hi, Petes,” Conrad said, pulling out the sketchplate which held his to-do list. (He was a big believer in lists; they had saved his life more than once during the Revolt, and were anyway vital in holding entropy at bay.) “You okay?”
    “I think I popped my eyeball,” Peter complained.
    “
Popped
it? No way.” Conrad immediately felt better about his own bruises, and guilty for whining about them, even to himself.
    “He's fine,” Money said from across the room. He was staring intently into a holie display on one of the wall panels and waving a wellstone sketchplate at it to absorb the image, and presumably perform some calculation on it. “Quit clowning around, you. I need those cooling parameters updated.”
    “No, seriously,” Peter insisted. “I'm hurt.”
    “Let me see,” Conrad told Peter. And then, when Peter didn't pull his hand away, more firmly: “Let me
see
. That's an order.”
    Reluctantly, Peter uncovered the wounded eye, and Conrad couldn't suppress a groan of disgust. “Eeew. Yuck.”
    “Did I pop it?” Peter asked worriedly.
    “You did
something
to it.” Truthfully, Conrad couldn't really tell what he was looking at. There wasn't a lot of blood, and as far as he could tell there was no eyeball jelly leaking out or anything, but something unpleasant had happened to the eyelid, and to the eye underneath. There were vertical gashes of pink and white where nothing like that was supposed to be, so that it barely looked like an eye at all.
    “All right,” Money relented. “Go visit Stores and have yourself reprinted. But hurry back—I need those numbers or we're going to vent some irreplaceable coolant mass. Understand? Mass we'll have to do without for a hundred years, or maybe forever.”
    “Yes, sir,” grumbled Peter, brushing past Conrad and hurrying out the door.
    “You could be more sympathetic,” Conrad said.
    It was an understatement, but Money just shrugged. “It's always something with that kid. Maybe he'll be more careful next time. Meanwhile, power demands on this fusion reactor are jumping around like spit on a heat sink, and the cooling system is not keeping up.”
    “I'm surprised that isn't automated,” Conrad said. “You've got hypercomputers, right?”
    “Well, yes and no.
Newhope
was designed with people in mind. There are built-in tasks for us, and of course there are always issues the designers didn't foresee. For example, this predictive cooling algorithm looks as though it was based on some kind of weather program, like for a domestic climate controller. It never has worked very well, and until we get it replaced, I'm using Peter.”
    “I see.”
    Money turned back to his panel for a moment, then looked up at Conrad again. “Was there something you needed?”
    Conrad nodded, glancing once at his sketchplate for confirmation. “Yeah, but it's pretty much just a status report. I'm trying to stop by all the stations today that still have crew, and see how everyone's doing. Looks like I've got your answer, or part of it anyway.”
    “Things could be easier here,” Money admitted.
    “You have a lot of issues like this?”
    He pursed his lips for a moment. “Oh, a few. Five or six. Keeps us busy enough.”
    “Okay,” Conrad said, nodding and frowning with the false wisdom he had learned at leadership school. As probably the smartest of the former Blue Nudists, Money was not