Murder on The Skeld

Chapter 8: Who is the impostor?

"So what's it say?" Owen asks as soon as I turn away from the screen.

I sigh and glance at the screen again, stalling because I desperately want it to not be true.

"None of the files looks particularly different," I say. "We all have nearly identical DNA."

"How is that possible?" Charlet asks.

I turn to face the trio where they're standing by the bedside, cautiously keeping an eye on each other.

"I suppose Grady was right," I say. "The aliens can copy us even down to our DNA."

Owen puts his hands on his head and sighs. "So much for hard evidence."

Charlet moves closer to me to get a good look at the screen.

"But it doesn't make sense", she says. "Why would they go through all that trouble of erasing the data if it doesn't matter? There has to be something more... something else they were hiding."

"Maybe," I say, "but I can't read all of the diagnostics. Pich and Rachel could."

"Wait..." Yuki says. "What if it's Benny?"

We all turn to look at her.

"He's the only one we haven't scanned," she says. "We don't know what these aliens are capable of. What if they can survive a stab to the heart? What if Benny stabbed himself just to be left alone?"

"Well..." I say, "then we still have a problem."

"And a knife," Owen says, pointing to the control panel.

"Right." I pick up the knife beside me and gesture to Charlet to move away.

She rolls her eyes and returns to the beds, where I'm out of range for a quick attack. I put the knife on the scanner, placing it so the blade is outside the circumference. After another scan, get back to the computer and soon have a fifth file and compare it to the others.

"Must be Benny's DNA," I say after a while, "It's not identical to any other file but it's clearly human."

"Buck," Charlet says. "I know Owen is the impostor and Yuki believes me. What can I do to convince you?"

I think for a long while. Owen does look the most guilty but I need to hear out both sides. Maybe his position makes more sense once I've actually listened. And then there's Yuki. What if she's right about Benny? We don't know what the aliens can do, what they require to stay alive. Pich could still be alive for all we know. And that is a concerning thought...

"Okay, let's do one thing first," I say. "Then we can talk."

"And what's that?" Charlet asks.

"Form a line," I say, "and walk to admin."

We walk out and through the cafeteria to reach the admin room. It's only when I see the glaring error message on the screen that I remember.

COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM DISABLED

"Right," I say, and we continue our walk through storage, into the left corridor and through a doorway on the right.

Communications is a small room with blue walls and a monitor on each one. The wall opposite of the entrance complements the screen with a keyboard and a chair.

The others line up by the right wall and I put myself in the chair to see what's wrong with the system. After a few clicks, I see that a necessary service has been manually stopped. As I try to run it, I find that a few necessary program files have also been deleted so I initiate a program repair.