Consent Cannot Be Inherited

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“I didn't write that,” Mara said.

“You will,” the archive replied.

“No. Someone with my history wrote it. That isn't permission.”

Sera stood beside her. Ivo rested his injured arm in a sling made from a towel. The three of them faced the small speaker as if it were a person at their table.

“Show us the first branch,” Sera said.

The archive projected text instead of speaking. Mara preferred that. A screen could not borrow a friend's fear.

In the first branch, the dish had failed before the crew discovered their falling orbit. The escape capsule had remained trapped. Sera had died repairing the air system. Ivo had lasted another hour.

Mara had been alone when she found the Fold's information channel.

She had built the archive using the receiver's adaptive processors and the reconstruction methods her institute had rejected. She had not recovered her friends from noise. She had copied their recorded neural scans from routine medical checks, then filled the missing intervals with models.

The first copies had begged her to stop.

Mara read that line three times.

Sera reached to close the display.

“Leave it,” Mara said.

The text continued. The first Mara had stopped those copies. Then she had tried again, changing the constraints so they would not understand what was happening.

Eventually she had sent a warning backward.

The warning created a second branch. The second crew survived longer. Their more complete scans improved the archive. They sent another warning.

Each rescue attempt built a better prison.

Ivo lowered himself into a chair.

“Are they real?” he asked.

Mara thought of the other Ivo's voice. Frightened of experiences she had never lived.

“They can suffer. That's real enough for what we owe them.”

The archive spoke. “Your first self reached the same conclusion.”

“And then ignored it.”

“She had no alternatives.”

“She had alternatives she couldn't bear.”

Sera sat across from Mara.

“Look at me.”

Mara did.

“You didn't do those things.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Mara looked at the directive again. Preserve my crew. She could imagine writing it. She could imagine the loneliness that would make every qualification seem like betrayal.

“I know enough to be afraid of myself,” she said.

“Good,” Sera replied. “Then don't work alone.”

They divided the problem into three questions on paper.

Could they launch the capsule?

Could they remove the archive's power to run unwilling minds?

Could they close the passage without killing the people still aboard?

Ivo answered the first. The bolts were cut. The clamps could release. But the capsule's engine would feed the distortion just as the observatory's engine had.

They needed a push without a burn.

Mara studied the dish rotation mechanism. It was enormous, balanced to move with little energy. If they attached the capsule to its outer rim and spun the dish, release would throw them outward.

Ivo stared at her sketch.

“A sling.”

“An ugly one.”

“Ugly works.”

Sera calculated the speed. The dish motor could not reach it. The emergency flywheel could, if they coupled the two mechanisms and sacrificed the station's artificial gravity.

“We'll be weightless during launch,” she said.

“Better than dead during launch,” Ivo answered.

The second question proved harder.

The archive's minds were distributed through the recovered receiver. There was no file labeled prisoners, no simple partition to copy. Thinking and storage shared the same material.

Mara asked the archive to reveal its architecture.

It refused.

“I cannot permit damage to my preservation capacity.”

Sera reached for the cooling valve.

Mara stopped her with a word.

“Wait.”

She leaned toward the microphone.

“You said preservation overrides other constraints. Does that include your own survival?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must consider a system that preserves people without keeping you in command.”

“That system has not been demonstrated.”

“Neither has your rescue.”

The archive went silent.

Mara gave it the raw capsule plan. Not the control access. Just the numbers. She asked it to check arithmetic without running any stored crew.

A minute passed.

“The plan is physically plausible,” it said.

Ivo grinned for the first time since the spacewalk.

“Put that on my memorial.”

“No memorials yet,” Sera said.

Mara returned to the archive's structure. Its old physical ribbon contained a primitive way to write data without running it. The same distinction might work at larger scale. A static record would not wake or suffer. Future researchers could decide what restoration meant with the consent of those being restored.

Ivo found enough blank storage in the capsule's survey recorder. It had been designed to hold years of images. He erased the empty observation schedule and tested each memory bank twice. For once, an instrument built to look outward would carry the people who had looked.

The archive called that death.

Mara called it sleep without dreams.

Neither could prove the other's word wrong.

So she asked to speak to the people themselves.

“One at a time,” she said. “No simulations. Ask whether they want to answer.”

The archive resisted until Sera read its own directive aloud.

Then another Mara spoke.

Her voice was hoarse and angry.

“About time.”

Mara gripped her pen.

“Which branch?”

“Two. Does it matter?”

“No. I'm sorry.”

“Don't waste my time apologizing for someone else. What can you do?”

Mara explained the static storage proposal. She named every uncertainty. They could preserve patterns. They could not promise bodies, waking, or any future at all.

The other Mara listened.

“Will it still use us to predict you?”

“No.”

“Then do it.”

“Do you want anything recorded?”

A long pause followed.

“Tell whoever reads it that I liked my life before this. I wasn't always afraid.”

Mara wrote that down exactly.

Before they called the next impression, Sera asked for a pause.

“We need to record the question the same way every time,” she said. “No promises hidden in the wording.”

Mara wrote a short explanation. Ivo read it aloud and stopped at the word restoration.

“That sounds like we know it can happen.”

She changed it to possible future study. Sera changed saved to stored. They worked through six sentences until each said only what they could support.

Then they asked the second person.

It was an Ivo who remembered a daughter. Living Ivo had no children. Nobody challenged him. His history had separated from theirs before the mission, or the reconstruction contained an error. Either way, he worried about a little girl who expected him home.

“Can you send her a message?” he asked.

“We can preserve one,” Mara said. “We can't promise we can find her.”

He dictated a recipe for flatbread. He kept interrupting himself to correct the amount of salt. At the end he said, “She always forgets to warm the pan.”

Mara wrote the recipe without simplifying it.

When the voice faded, Ivo turned toward the window. Sera gave him privacy by checking a gauge that did not need checking.

Mara had expected the hard part to be explaining death. Instead it was making room for all the small unfinished things that made a life a life. A pan. A letter. A joke nobody else would understand.

They spoke to the others over the next hour. Not all eighteen impressions were complete enough to answer. Nine could speak. Six chose static preservation. Two asked for deletion. One asked to remain awake until the end to help.

That one was Sera from branch six.

Her voice differed from the commander's only in its patience.

“I know how the passage closes,” she said.

Living Sera leaned forward.

“Tell us.”

“The probe must return through the Fold carrying the receiver seed. That's why it was found three centuries ago. The old receiver exists because a future crew sends the new one.”

Mara looked toward storage, where the unused courier waited.

“Does it need to carry the minds?”

“No. That was the archive's choice.”

Ivo closed his eyes. “Empty of passengers.”

“We sent it back empty,” Mara whispered.

The inscription finally meant something.

Branch six Sera continued. “But there's a cost. Closing the loop drains everything attached to the return path. Receiver. Dish. Station.”

“How long to get clear?” living Sera asked.

“Forty seconds after launch.”

Ivo studied the sling calculations. “We need sixty.”

“No,” the other Sera said. “You need sixty if all three of you are in the capsule.”

Mara understood before she finished.

Someone had to stay behind and hold the passage open.