Second Chance by David D. Levine Page A

I could not withdraw from her gaze. “I’m sorry, Chaz. But I want you to know that this is for everyone’s good. I... I do respect your judgment. And you’ll have to respect mine.”
    She turned and left, leaving me shaking my head in bafflement.

    -o0o-

    Puzzled though I was, I meant to do as Nuru asked... leave off my nocturnal investigations, at least for a time. But when I powered the screen up again, just to close down my work before I went to sleep, it chimed and displayed something that made my breath catch in my throat.
    The data from Alpha had been arriving in apparently random order, determined by its physical location in storage rather than chronologically. I’d been waiting for weeks to see what I saw on the monitor now: a purple rectangle, representing a block of Alpha data that didn’t correspond to anything already in Cassie ’s database.
    To my surprise, it wasn’t coast-phase data from after the cutoff. It was in a completely different part of the database, one with which I wasn’t familiar.
    I bit my lip, but after a brief battle with my conscience, curiosity won out. I tapped the purple rectangle with my stylus.
    The data turned out to be in the medical/lifesystem section.
    Specifically, the crew reconstruction and vival instructions for Charles Eades.
    Me.
    Here was hard evidence that my vival instructions had been deliberately wiped from the system. Which only confirmed what Matt had told me. Though the news was a twist of the knife in my gut, it wasn’t a surprise.
    But then I noticed something that was a surprise, and told me the situation was more complicated than it had at first appeared. Immediately adjacent to the purple area of new data from Alpha, I saw a thin red stripe indicating data that was present in both databases, but slightly different. There was no reason I could think of for this.
    I looked more closely. The Alpha data was a straightforward prologue to the following code. The Cassiopeia data replaced one instruction in that prologue with a jump to another section of the database.
    I followed the jump.
    It led to a completely separate datastore, in a different hive—temporary mission data, not instructions that had been loaded preflight.
    The linked data turned out to be identical to the new data from Alpha, but with a more recent timestamp. About eighty years more recent.
    I stared hard at the screen, rubbing absently at the hot rough tissue of my new tattoo. It itched almost as much as my brain.
    Matt had said the crew had voted not to vive me. But then I’d been vived anyway, and no one knew how this had happened.
    Here was the answer. Someone, probably Bobb, had deleted the data, but later someone else had restored it from backup. And whoever had restored the data had put it in an obscure temporary datastore so the reinstatement wouldn’t be noticed. The link to the restored data was extremely subtle—the only reason I’d spotted it was that I had an unmodified copy of the original data to compare it with.
    I drummed my fingers on my chin. The user ID on the data in the temporary store was some random number, not any of us—whoever had restored the data had concealed their identity. But I could check the system audit log. It was a write-only record of all significant system activities, intended to be impossible to evade or to modify after the fact. We had mostly ignored it in our training; the only reason it was present in Cassie ’s systems at all was a general requirement for all government software.
    The audit log told me that the restore had been performed using a temporary ID to obscure the user’s true identity. But that ID had been created only a few seconds before it was used, and the creator’s name was clear in the log.
    Nuru.
    I shook my head. It made no sense. Matt had said the vote not to vive me had been unanimous. As our commander, if she’d disagreed with the decision she wouldn’t have allowed it to go forward. Why would she then sneak back and