Chronicle of Nautilus

Chapter 2: The Search

Claire sat on a bed, going through the files Landau gave her, scrolling from one screen to another looking at the data without pausing. Her empty eyes, shining in red, stared to the center of the holographic screen.

She stopped, took the data chip out from the comms device standing on the table and broke it in half. She then, lay down on the bed. Stretching and yawning, she lay and felt her muscles relax. Claire closed her eyes and the images she had scrolled for the last hour came back to her. Thousands of different windows of data floated in the darkness. She dragged out the windows with peoples’ pictures closer and pushed the rest of the data into the background. And then, taking her time, one by one, she scrolled the list of criminals. Each of them, on the top right corner of the file, labeled 'dangerous':

A male ugly brute with a broken nose...  age 45. Crime: a gun for hire, possession of illegal firearms, two kills, one of them official of the city government. Current status: worker at the engine number 5. Last time checked: two months ago.

A male face with fat cheeks, small burns on its forehead… age 67. Crime: leader of an unauthorized religious movement. Current status: teacher of politics. Last time checked: one year ago.

A thin female face with sharp nose… age 37. Crime: destruction of public property on massive scale. Current status: farmer at level 2. Last time checked: a week ago.

The list went on and on. Murderers, fanatic ideologists, terrorists, she now knew them all.  

On board the colony ships a prison was considered to be a total waste of human resources. On Nautilus a special kind of refined procedure came as a punishment - reconditioning. By destroying or reassembling neural brain connections it was possible to change personality or even delete and create memories.

 Those who committed small thefts or hurt someone without planning and those who committed murders or other physical crimes, often received a partial memory wipe and had their character patterns adjusted. Criminals of the higher caliber - those who posed the direct threat to the safety of the ship received total personality changes and plastic surgery. Most of the time after procedures, the ‘renewed’ citizens had to work at some forgotten corner of the ship where they had as less interaction with other passengers as possible.

Claire could accept that some shopkeeper killed his wife and could not remember it, but what about someone who shot ten of his co-workers and dropped his weapon knowing that he would be 'reborn'? Some maniacs felt they could do anything because of the reconditioning. Little did they understand that after the procedure they would become mentally inferior, broken people who would only vegetate for the rest of their lives.

She went through the lists, looking at the peculiarities of committed crimes. The problem was that none of the criminals were competent enough to do something complex. Their plans were often weak and had too much of a tunnel vision. A good example would be a person who tried to bomb the security headquarters and made explosives from domestic products. It did almost no damage as the bomber mixed the substances  in a wrong ratio. There was an exemplary criminal she caught herself, a man who had uploaded malicious thinking programs to the main network for no particular reason at all.  “Just for fun,” he said. The programs caused disruption in many vital sectors – from water recycling to weather control, ten people died due to his ‘fun’. For most criminals imagination was not the limit, they only lacked particularity. Landau thought well of giving her these files. She stored them in her head and could recall at any time.

 ******

The main door of her house opened and a man in white tight uniform walked in, his skin tanned, eyes black. He looked at the mirror and fixed his white silky hair, pushing them away from the shoulder line, binding them behind his back. He took off his shoes and joined Claire, taking a seat on a couch by the bed where she lay. He noticed Claire working in her semi-trance state and decided not to disturb her. He picked her comms device and began reading daily news.