Medical Officer Lifetime Mender had stopped counting the hours a long time ago, because the hours had stopped returning the favour. She kept a small notebook instead, and in the notebook she wrote down, every day, the names of the people she had seen that day and whether each of them was, in her best judgement, still one person.
The list grew shorter each week. Not because people were dying — though some had — but because the question of what counted as one person had begun to separate its answer from the question. Engineer Loop had seventeen tenses in the same sentence and apologised for none of them. Dr. Causality now prefaced every statement with an index of which branch of herself she was speaking from. Captain Navigator, to his credit, still answered to Navigator. It was not clear whether this was strength of character or a kind of administrative inertia.
Mender herself was holding together. She had her work. The anomaly had taught her a new kind of medicine, one she had no textbook for and no licence to practise and nobody to refer her patients to. She was making it up as she went, the way frontier medicine has always been made up, except that her frontier was not a place. It was a state of having been alive too many times in the same afternoon.
The Kinds of Scar
The first kind was thin. Patients with thin scars had lived, in parallel, a small number of slightly different versions of the same hour. The versions had eventually reintegrated, and what remained was a faint ringing in the personality, a sense of having made every decision twice, a habit of finishing other people's sentences with slightly different words than those people were about to use. Thin scars faded. She had written that in the notebook too, and underlined it, because she had needed to believe it for a while.
The second kind was wide. Wide-scarred patients had spent long stretches of subjective time with themselves in parallel, occupying several branches of the same life and accumulating several branches of the same memory. Reintegration was incomplete. These patients tended to speak of themselves in the plural, not as a grammatical quirk but as an honest description of their current interior arrangement. They were, in a non-mystical sense, more than one person sharing a body. Mender had stopped trying to recombine them. She had begun trying, instead, to negotiate among them.
The third kind was deep. Deep-scarred patients had touched the anomaly directly. They had experienced themselves as a function rather than a person — as the particular pattern by which a body moved through time, rather than as the body itself. Returning to single-body experience was, for them, a form of exile. They rarely complained. They seldom ate. They looked, Mender had written, homesick.
Causality's Session
Dr. Causality came to the medical bay not because she was unwell but because she had asked Mender for a favour. Mender had agreed on the condition that the favour took the form of a medical appointment.
"I need a witness," Causality said. She was thinner than she had been. Her uniform hung on her differently in places that had not changed.
"A witness to what?"
"To a conversation I am going to have with myself. I need someone to record which of the voices says what. I can no longer trust my own memory of which version of me is speaking at any given moment. I need an outside ear."
Mender set her notebook on the desk and activated the bay's recorder. "Begin when you are ready."
The conversation lasted forty-three minutes. Causality spoke in two distinct registers, sometimes changing mid-sentence. The first voice was sharp, rigorous, and given to mathematical asides. The second voice was slower, gentler, and tended to end its clauses in a small rising tone that Mender did not associate with the Causality she had known. They agreed on three points, disagreed on two, and adjourned without acrimony.
"Thank you," Causality said as she left. "I will send the transcript back in a few hours. If I remember."
The Healing That Was Not Healing
What Mender was actually doing, she came to realise, was not healing. Healing implied a baseline state to return to, and none of her patients had a baseline state that the anomaly would allow to exist. What she was doing was witnessing. She was watching people who had been one shape turn gradually into people of a different shape, and she was telling them, honestly, that the new shape was not monstrous, and that they were not alone inside it.
"You are a species now," she had said to Loop, on the morning of what would have been their one-hundred-and-eleventh day in the anomaly, if day had meant anything. "Not a person. A small species, living in one body."
Loop had thought about this for some fraction of a second, which was for him a long time. "All right," he had said. "What are the species' rights?"
She had not known the answer then. She was beginning to now.
The Quiet Epidemic
The crew was transforming, and the transformation was uneven. Some were becoming new things quickly; some resisted, visibly, and were frayed by the resistance. Mender triaged. She spent her time with those for whom a short conversation could turn a bad day into a survivable one. She wrote in the notebook. She slept when she could.
She kept expecting the anomaly to take her too. It did not, at least not visibly. Her own scars, she thought, were of the first kind, thin. She had ringing in the personality. She had the occasional sense of having prescribed medication she had not yet prescribed. She had, once, in a quiet moment off-shift, felt her life unspool in her hand and then roll itself tidily back up. She had recorded the incident in the notebook, neutrally, under the heading self.
The Argument for Staying
At the senior staff meeting that week — the seam between the decks was getting wider, and "that week" was only a polite approximation — Navigator asked, for the record, whether the crew wished to continue pursuing escape.
"The question is premature," Causality said, both of her.
"The question has been premature for some time," Navigator said. "I am asking it anyway."
Loop, the small species, considered himself. "We do not wish to leave. We are becoming. Leaving stops becoming."
Mender watched the room around her, and thought about the notebook, and about the word homesick, and about what it would cost to give the deep-scarred patients back the monotonic time they were no longer shaped for. She said, quietly, that the medical view was complicated.
Navigator heard her. He did not argue.
In Mender's notebook that night, in very small handwriting, there was a new entry. It read: some prisons are also gardens. The question is who gets to tell the difference, and when.