Read Mission: Tomorrow - eARC Online
Authors: Bryan Thomas Schmidt
Harry would help me. Wouldn’t he?
I sat back on the bed and looked down at the little girl, her face slack with death. Had she been killed?
My hand trembled, but I managed to touch her cheek with the back of my hand.
It felt cold.
Cold?
Well, of course. She hadn’t just died five minutes ago. But if she had been thrown into a freezer, surely she would look worse. There had been a manual on what to do when people died in space. I hadn’t paid attention other than to pass the test and forget most of the details. But her body had to have been deliberately prepared; raw death wasn’t this pretty.
If the robot had done this to a little girl, what would she do to me? It had to have been an accident; no companion robot would hurt its person. Maybe something horrible had happened and Audrey had become confused?
Still, she had left a prepared body to trick me into this room. The unimaginable slowly sank further and further in. What could she have been thinking?
I should have drunk her damned tea.
What were they talking about without me? Why did Harry let this happen?
Why wasn’t he saving me?
I peeled away the girl’s clothes, gingerly. I had never touched a dead body before, never even seen one up close. It felt completely wrong, like an arm or a leg might fall off. From being frozen? Before she died, she had been healthy. Her ever-so-slightly plump face looked clean and her hair had been combed and trimmed. I searched for a cause of death, but didn’t see anything except maybe the marks on her elbows and feet that could have come from needles to administer drugs or to drain fluids before she was sent off into space.
If only Harry were here. He remembered things like manuals about preparing the dead for burial in space. Harry would have been able to help me figure out what was wrong.
I dressed her again, and then covered her with the sheet on the bed, so that she looked like a lump instead of a dead child.
A million ways to die out in the Belt, but how had
she
died?
I sat in the chair, thinking. Then I moved to the bed. Then back to the chair.
Water would be really, really good.
Hours passed before the door opened. I looked up, hoping for Harry. Audrey came in and bundled up the child in a sheet. She stood and looked at me, holding the dead baby in her arms like a pile of laundry, her head cocked ever so slightly. “Tea?”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
I hoped to find Harry in the kitchen waiting for me, but there was no sign of him. I watched Audrey place her bundle carefully into the freezer, her movements smooth. Then she switched effortlessly to making fresh tea.
“How long have you been alone?” I asked her.
“Eight months.”
“What happened to her?”
Audrey closed the freezer door and turned to look directly at me, her baby-blue eyes fastened deeply onto mine. “Her father killed her. He smothered her. Right after we got here.”
I blinked, surprised. I sipped more tea, buying myself time to think. At least
she
hadn’t killed the little girl. Robot killers were the stuff of scary science fiction, but there were always rumors. “And what happened to him? To the father?”
“Richard? He died.”
She was being evasive again. Even though I knew that, I asked, “Where is Harry? My companion?”
“He went back to your ship.”
I glanced at the hooks by the door. My helmet hung there, but Harry’s was gone. “Did he say why?”
“No. But I’m sure he’ll be back soon. He seemed upset, but I told him that you needed time to think.”
If there were no humans here to rescue, we could take off. That would maroon Audrey on the asteroid, perhaps forever.
Audrey herself was worth something. But her pink slip wouldn’t pass to me, and I didn’t trust SpaceComSec to be any more helpful than they had to be.
I sat back, resolved to escape, but also not to hurry so that I didn’t disturb Audrey. Harry had to take my orders, but she did not.
“Is there any more of your story that you’re willing to tell me?” I asked her.
“I’d been with Richard for a long time. I was his only companion.”
She was surely a sex-bot. There were plenty of people who weren’t as squeamish as me. Audrey continued. “The baby is Carline. We found her mother when she was pregnant—she sold herself to him, dumb girl—and he killed her as soon as she weaned the baby. Launched her body right out of the gravity well here.”
I felt the need to clarify. “You’re telling me that Carline’s mother was a murdered sex slave?”
Audrey nodded. “He told me that I couldn’t tell anyone. He said I had to lie about it for all the rest of my life.”
A slight catch in her voice suggested she felt bothered by this request to lie. And Harry’s instruction video had said he wouldn’t lie. To me, or for me.
Companion robots are programmed with a deep sense of fairness.
The situation felt so strange I had no words for it. I struggled to sound casual. “Was that hard for you?”
“Yes.” She took my empty cup and refilled it with fresh hot water. She set the cup down and sat down opposite me, close enough to touch me if she wanted to. “Before you came, there was no one to tell. I didn’t have to lie.”
“But you’re telling me?”
“Someone has to know.”
“Why? He won’t be able to hurt anyone else.”
She stopped, and if she were Harry, I would say she didn’t like my answer. She wasn’t, and I didn’t know her well enough to be certain of nuances. She fell silent for what felt like a long time, and then seemed to come to the conclusion that she should revert to her most basic self. She cocked her head, smiled, and said, “Tell me about yourself. Why did you become a miner?”
I struggled to shift topics. “I didn’t. I decided to be a dancer, but before I can open a dance company, I need money.”
“How long have you been a miner?”
I had to count in my head. “Seven years.”
“Do you want to mine here?”
Of course I did. “It’s not my claim.”
“I can see that it gets transferred to you.”
“How can you do that?”
“I know where all of the documents are. I’ve been researching how to do this, because I don’t want to be left alone. Eventually, something will happen that I need help with and there will be no one to help.”
“Are you lonely?”
“Robots don’t get lonely. But being alone means that I have a good chance of dying, like Carline died, like Richard died.”
“How did Richard die?”
The door opened and Harry came in and sat down at the table. I stared at him, trying to understand what emotions he was projecting for me. He wore a default easy smile, but not the usual eyes that went with it. Those looked troubled, the way he looked when he had a hard question for me. I reached out to touch him.
He took my hand and squeezed it gently. “It’s good to see you out of that room.”
Maybe we could escape. “Can we both go back to our ship?”
“Of course we can,” he said. “But wouldn’t it be more polite to visit longer?”
Did he understand what she had done to me? I swallowed, thinking. Maybe not. It wasn’t like he felt bad if he were locked up somewhere; that happened whenever we docked at a station. I spoke carefully. “I would like to go home for a bit. We can come back.”
He and Audrey shared a glance. Once more, I wondered what they had talked about while I was locked in the room. I could order him to obey, but some fear deep inside me fluttered up when I thought about it, and caught in my throat. I looked at Audrey. “I’m curious about how Richard died.”
“I can show you.”
I wasn’t really up to two dead bodies in one day, but I’d rather be out looking at something I needed to know than sitting through an awkward conversation with a robot I didn’t trust. We suited up and began following the lines that ran between struts. Audrey’s suit cinched at her waist. Harry’s looked more like a plastic bag. Mine was bulky with life support and left deeper footprints. We walked slowly so the swirling dust didn’t rise above our waists or thicken enough to hide our feet. We picked our way around rocks, and twice we had to hop over crevices.
“He’s not far now,” Audrey said, her voice amplified in my ear. “See him?”
Between the helmet and the dust, I had to look hard to spot a suited body prone on the ground. Ten more slow steps and I could tell that his leg had been caught between boulders.
It shouldn’t have been a problem out here in low gravity. Richard had sprawled forward, hands splayed wide. Three boulders buried his right foot. I couldn’t make out how the fall could have happened. He would have had to shove his foot into a trap. I moistened my lips and waited for Audrey not to lie to me.
“This is what happens when there is no one to help you,” she said.
“Did you set the rocks on him?”
“Someone had to do it.”
I was beginning to understand. “So that you wouldn’t have to lie?”
She looked right at me, her eyes visible behind the shield of her helmet. Blue, guileless. “Yes.”
I had started thinking of her as a victim. “Did you kill him?”
“No. He ran out of oxygen.”
“Did you trap him out here?”
“I had to trap him or I had to lie. I cannot lie and I cannot kill, but he killed Carline and he wanted me to lie. So I had to make a choice.”
I shivered. A million ways to die out here, and one of them was asking a robot to lie for you. Who knew?
We were all silent as we walked back.
How should I handle a robot who had killed in a circumstance where I might have done the same, if for different reasons?
Carefully.
The silent walk gave me time to think. If I abandoned Audrey here, I would have nightmares about a beautiful, lonely robot trapped on an asteroid with her charges dead around her. I would imagine her hugging the dead, frozen child from time to time. Or I might make up stories in my head about someone who landed here and needed Audrey to lie. After all, she was an expensive sex-bot as far as I could tell. Another man might be foolish enough to ask her to lie for him.
I couldn’t leave her here to trap an unsuspecting and lonely miner. But I couldn’t allow a robot capable of murder in my ship, either.
When we got back to the kitchen and stripped down, Harry rubbed my tight shoulders. “Audrey said something about being able to transfer the claim,” I said quietly.
He spoke formally, carefully. “We can. That’s what I went back to the ship for. The process will take a week.”
“What about SpaceComSec and the mayday beacon?”
“I have videos of both of the dead. They will release you from your mayday obligations.”
“Thank you.” I sat still and silent, smelling the slightly oily tang of him, memorizing the feel of his hands, the stroke of his fingers on the long, tight muscles that connected shoulder to neck. “You can fly the
Belle Amis
, can’t you?” I asked him.
His hands both stopped. I wriggled under them. “Keep going.”
“Yes, I can fly her.” He squeezed a little harder, and then returned to his perfect, familiar touches. After a long time, he said, “Thank you.”
A tear rolled down my cheek. A million ways to die out here, but for me it wouldn’t be guilt at stranding Audrey or death at her hands. It might be loneliness. “I’ll miss you.”
He didn’t say he would miss me. He said, “You will be fine. You’re stronger than Audrey.”
I let so much time pass that his touch began to abrade my skin. “You will have to take the bodies. I don’t want to live with their ghosts.”
“We will release them.”
More tears came. Harry stayed with me, wiping them away one by one.
They left the next day. I stood out on the regolith holding onto a line and staring up at the
Belle Amis
as it flew out of sight. That night, I put on some jazz music and danced in the biggest empty room, and from time to time tears fell onto my fingers like glittering stars.
* * *
Brenda Cooper
is a working futurist and a technology professional as well as a published science fiction writer. She lives in the Pacific Northwest in a house with as many dogs in it as people. In addition to her several novels, her short fiction appears regularly in
Analog
and other venues. Her latest novel,
The Edge of Dark
, was released from Pyr in early 2015. Find out more at
www.brenda-cooper.com.
As we consider privatized space travel, one common topic is what role corporations will play. In our next tale, scientist-author Michael Capobianco imagines an astronaut caught in a bind when a corporation is in control . . .
AIRTIGHT
by Michael Capobianco
I never get tired of looking at the Earth. From four light-seconds, the Earth is just a little bigger than the Moon from the Earth’s surface, 38’ in diameter. From eight light-seconds, half that, but still identifiable as a substantial blue and white marble. That’s about where I am right now, closing in on the extinct cometary nucleus they’re calling Ondine. As I get closer every day, it grows appreciably, but it still looks much smaller than the Earth. I can blow it up on my screen until I can see a wealth of detail on the dark gray surface, but mostly I just like to watch it grow on its own.
I always get the equivalent of blank stares from the uninitiated when I explain what I’m doing and why. It’s a quirk of the legal system, mostly. The 2035 International Treaty on the Ownership of Small Celestial Bodies specifies that you have to have actual human being(s) come in contact with said celestial body to take ownership. And, to make matters even more fair, said human being(s) cannot sell, license, or otherwise place encumbrances upon their ownership rights until they have taken ownership.
So I will own Ondine when I get there, assuming that I can “take possession” by putting on the single-use space suit and lighting down on the surface in Ondine’s microgravity. After that . . . well that’s much more complicated.
In any case, my name is Lon Innes, and I’ve been bumming around in earth and lunar orbit for most of my thirty-eight odd years. I was one of the first jockeys of the lunar ferry, so I logged a lot of time in space and got my résumé padded with highly complimentary references that I’m still coasting on today. And that led to me being hired for this mission, which is a doozy. Forty weeks in deep space, which is about forty times more than I care to spend exposed to solar and cosmic radiation, but they provided the appropriate medications and will potentially make it worth my while. Ondine is in a very particular orbit, you see. It’s heading for a close pass by the Earth-Moon system in about three months, which, if everything is jiggered correctly, will bring it back into a lunar capture orbit in about twenty-nine years. It won’t take a lot of delta-vee to get it there; in fact, Ondine’s orbit so closely matches Earth’s right now that it only comes by about once a half century. The rest of the time it’s either slowly catching up to Earth or slowly pulling away. Hardly any eccentricity, either. It’s a celestial-body owner’s dream come true.
Because . . . water mainly. No one knows for sure what’s inside what is almost certainly a very thin coating of organic materials left behind when the outer layer of the comet evaporated into space and put on a spectacular show. But planetary scientists know enough about comets now after exploring twenty or so that they can make fairly good guesses. And the guesses all come down to an enormous quantity of H
2
0, which, at present prices, is worth a few billion cu’s in a suitable microgravity environment that can be reached with minimal delta-vee.
There’s no way to effectively orbit a body as small as Ondine. Its gravity is so low that the best you can do is maneuver into a matching heliocentric orbit close by and use the thrusters to keep your position. And so, when the time was ripe, I dropped MK212 down to within less than a kilometer of the surface, and set the autopilot. Fortunately, Ondine is a fairly regular little guy, almost spherical except for a big crater taken out of the northwestern quadrant (as arbitrarily defined by the mapping software) and a barely noticeable bulge at the South Pole. Also, luckily for me, it’s not a fast rotator, spinning at a leisurely full rotation in 17 hours. I’ve heard some stories from the sole proprietors who’ve been claiming pieces of solar detritus in Earth orbit, and it’s almost impossible to do if the things are irregular and spinning too fast.
I’ve been in full communication with Earth during this whole trip, and that has made everything go a lot faster, but as the distance grew, the time delay became more and more annoying. A three-second lag is a real conversation killer, but sixteen seconds is even worse. Of course, there’s plenty of onboard memory, and I made sure it was packed with every conceivable game, movie, interactive, and simulation, so that’s not been a problem. I pretty much gave up on spoken conversations and rely on audiotext messages, except when I really want to hear someone’s voice in near-real time. That hasn’t happened lately. In this particular case, now that I’m here, I need to report and respond to the big boss’s questions, so I lock my eyes on the main screen, turn on the link, and direct the call to headquarters.
“Hello, folks. As I’m sure you can tell from the sensor relays, I’m here. Everything is, as they say, nominal. I’m going to sleep for a few hours before I stake my claim, so don’t get worried if I’m not reporting.”
Bezospace’s Vice President in Charge of Legal, Donna Sutherland, a chunky, dark-haired woman of indeterminate age, is sitting within the camera view next to BP’s CEO, smiling old silver fox Jonnie Nyvatten. I haven’t seen him since shortly before launch, when he came up into NEO to wish me well and reassure me that, even though there could be no formal agreement between us, BP understood that I would be well compensated and there would be no legal shenanigans once I had succeeded in setting foot on Ondine and could begin negotiations. Neither of us would say anything until that happened, so why was Sutherland here?
Sixteen seconds pass, and I see Nyvatten’s smile widen. “I just wanted to congratulate you on your accomplishments so far, Nebulon. My techies tell me that you’ve used much less than the predicted amount of fuel to reach the hoverpoint, and the Autonomous Unit is fully checked out and ready to go once we’ve reached a deal. Best of luck to you during the most hazardous part of the mission. I have every confidence in you, Neb.”
“That’s fine,” I say. Not much more to say, actually, at this point. Yes, that’s my first name, and that’s why I automatically correct him. “Lon.”
Sixteen seconds. Sutherland leans in a little toward the camera, dark swatch of hair slipping down over that smooth, ivory forehead, and the enhanced stereo effect makes the look in her hazel eyes deep and profound. “I’m looking forward to the signing-over ceremony, Mr. Innes. I’m sure we’ll be able to get you started back to Earth in no time.”
Strangely, this doesn’t sound very comforting.
Did I mention that my sponsors have designed this mission to be as inexpensive as possible? That’s why there’s only one person aboard, if you hadn’t figured that out. While all of the water and oxygen is recycled very efficiently, they did have to provide decent food for a long journey, and that takes up twice as much space if there are two. Saves on rocket fuel, too. And it makes it much easier to divvy up the proceeds.
Even after almost three months, I haven’t gotten sick of the various kinds of bars that fill a good percentage of the storage space in the mid-module. If anything, it’s the lack of variety in texture that gets a little wearing. And the lack of easily readable labeling. I get ready for bed by stripping off my flight suit, nestle into the coolest part of the command space, and pull out what I think will be a crunchy, fried meat roll-up and some “celery with cream cheese” sticks and unwrap them, letting the clear wrappers float up into the disposal airflow. And then it’s sleepy time.
I put my head in the half-clear suit’s helmet, twisting the fasteners tight and the space suit inflates with a loud hiss. I’m not going to pretend this isn’t going to be dangerous. Emergency space suits are foolproof to put on and are reliable, but going out into the micro-G environment of a basically unknown cometary surface is fraught with all sorts of potential hazards, and touching down too hard or at the wrong angle could raise an opaque cloud of regolith dust that would take hours to dissipate. I’ve got many hours of practice with this rig, and I know the maneuvering unit’s strengths and weaknesses, but . . .
It takes about nine minutes to depressurize the crew quarters. Not the most elegant system, but this is basically a second-generation Dragon capsule with an overlay of new electronics, and it doesn’t have any amenities.
Every time I’ve done this before, I’ve been tethered, so it does feel strange to float away from the open hatch. I catch myself on the handgrip on the inside of the swung-wide hatch door, shrug to better situate the maneuvering unit’s harness, and let myself go, executing a 180 and then dead stop.
Prepositions like above and below don’t mean much to someone who’s spent as much time weightless as I have. It’s just
there.
A vast wall of marbled slate, filling up my vision, irregularities masked by the low phase angle. I know that it’s intrinsically very dark, far darker than asphalt, but it seems bright compared to the ring of starless space around it.
It’s time to start documenting this historic mission, for the sake of posterity but also because this is the only way I’ll be able to prove that I conformed to the letter of the Treaty. Mounted over my shoulder is the tamper-proof evidentiary camera that must be delivered intact to the authorities before the claim can be certified. It is protected by an impregnable shell and records on a nonmagnetic substrate that can’t be modified once the images have been laid down. An external laser activated from my glove turns it on. A standard helmet cam also sends an image back to Earth via MK212.
If I try, I can imagine that I’m falling, but in fact I’m propelling myself to a point on the surface where Ondine’s rotation is minimal. I find my shadow, a slightly irregular blob of real black among swirls of dark and lighter gray. Still no sign of the boulders and concavities that show on the imagemap. I’m breathing harder, and there’s a faint tang of ozone.
As my trajectory takes me toward the pole, the shadows start to break out, and I get more of a sense of the approaching surface. There are certainly spots that I need to avoid, but a big, flat area is coming up that should present no problem. The last few seconds it does feel like falling, but when I touch down, there’s hardly any sensation through the boots. A puff of regolith spins up and spreads out on ballistic trajectories, but it’s not a problem.
And suddenly, it’s mine. Whatever good sense that would make me want to just make the claim and get out of there is held off for a minute by sheer sense of wonder. In all directions, broken, crumbling ash like someone had emptied out a thousand cremation urns here. Above, and it truly feels like above, MK212 is a tiny, irregular stylus shape, Autonomous Unit mounted on the docking hatch at the forward end like a small head. Overwhelmed by the sun, no stars are visible, no Earth-Moon, but there’s still a deepness to it all.
But it is, after all, time. I remove the evidentiary camera from its holdtight and hold it at arm’s length, so it can see both me and the surface. With the other hand I pull the metal ball that’s encoded with my information and let it fall. It takes a full minute, but when it’s down the process is complete. No need to say anything, but I do. “Thank you, Ondine. You’ve made me very happy.”
And I’m back. Inevitably, removing the emergency space suit renders it unusable a second time, but unless something goes disastrously wrong, I won’t need one, since MK212’s trunk is pressurized and accessible. And if something goes disastrously wrong, I’m pretty much screwed whether I can do an EVA or not.
My lawyer is located in the Leeuwenhoek complex on the Farside, where they operate on the standard UTC day-and-night schedule, so I can give her a call and expect to find her in her office. The protocol we’ve developed includes a number of encryption algorithms, but, considering the fact that I’m using Bezospace software mounted in Bezospace hardware, it’s likely that it won’t be secure.
Xandra Rawal swims up out of the depths of the viewscreen, and then the back wall of her office crystallizes behind her. Even as a projection, she comes across as a solid mass of chutzpah. First impression comes from the chiseled strength in her cheeks and jaw, barely softened by the stylish sweeps of crimson and blue that enclose the face in parentheses. At the moment, she looks thoughtful, her dark, tattoo-shadowed eyes staring into middle space until they snap on to my image.
“Congrats, Mr. Innes. Your success has already been announced, and is dominating the collective mind for at least a few hours. I have heard from your sponsors, and that doesn’t bode so well, I’m afraid.”
Fuck. I did sort of anticipate this, but it still takes the edge off my elation. Is she waiting for me to say something? The lag is excruciating.
“The contract they offer is, perhaps, the worst of its kind I have ever seen. Certainly the worst aspect of it is an undefined net amount rather than the gross percentage you presumably want. The deductions are computed on the basis of future expenditures that I can only characterize as flights of fancy.”
She scowls down at the audiotext function of her desk. “And they have said right out that this aspect of the contract is nonnegotiable. Now, you and I both know that that would normally be just a negotiating tactic, but, in this case, I’m afraid they’re backing it up with threats.”
“Threats?” I say, knowing that the word will probably arrive in the middle of her next statement. “What kind of threats?”
And indeed, she continues to speak. “I’ve looked through the language of the Treaty and even into the stated intentions of the treaty parties and it’s obvious that they never anticipated something like this. Even though the intent of that section is to give sole possession to any explorer who sets foot on a minor planet, there are no provisions that cover what happens afterward. In fact, Bezospace would probably be within their rights to just turn off MK212 and let you die.”
“That’s why you’ve drawn up the trust, though, right?” Which ties up the rights to Ondine and puts them in limbo practically forever if I don’t make it back. “I’m ready to sign it now, by the way.”