Read Mission: Tomorrow - eARC Online
Authors: Bryan Thomas Schmidt
She came to a decision.
“Mason, call Bruno. He has to find a way to gain some height.”
It was getting dark outside, and the interior of the wing was lit only dimly by lights strung along the spars. They glowed like faint stars in the semi-dark. The real stars were invisible, hidden by layer upon layer of dense cloud overhead.
He knelt at the base of the wing, gathering strength for another attempt. He tried to calculate how many journeys he would need to make. He would have to alternate between wings, crawling out to drain one tank, then dragging himself back to work on its counterpart on the opposite side. Only that way could he keep the
merleta
balanced.
“—need you to do what you can—”
That was one of the men on the command station, his voice was squeezed to the point of unrecognizability on the congested narrowband channel. Yeah, yeah, thought Bruno. Let’s change places, and you can see how easy this is. He wiped sweat from his eyes.
Tania had explained the plan to him. They had diverted one of their aerostats, an unmanned airship the size of a small town. But the aerostat couldn’t survive in the shear zone, where fast-moving air masses generated ferocious turbulence. He needed to find a way to climb to meet it. That meant shedding more weight.
On an impulse, he pulled up the command interface again. To his surprise, there was more green than before. Evidently the return to level flight had convinced the
merleta
’s AI that conditions were less critical than before.
Hardly daring to hope, he called up the maintenance subsystem. Options that had not been available before were now illuminated. He flipped through screen after screen until he found the page with the controls for the algae tanks. The overlay lit up with a schematic of the
merleta
’s internal plumbing, a tangled network of lines like the subway map of a small city. The tiny icons representing the vent valves glowed green: responsive to commands.
He sat back on his heels, forcing himself to remain calm. He needed to plan his next moves carefully.
“That’s great, Bruno,” said Tania.
“I can dump pretty much everything,” the Brazilian said. He sounded as if he was smiling. “The only problem is that some of the tanks outboard of the damaged section aren’t responding. The pipes must have self-sealed.”
“It may not be critical,” Mason observed. “It looks like he can still drain better than eighty percent.”
“I think I can get those too, though,” Bruno said. “I’m sending the maintenance robots out on the wings to open the valves manually.”
Tania closed her eyes. Thank you, she thought. It’s about time we caught a break.
“How far away is your airship?”
“It’s still a long way behind you, but it’s picked up a tailwind. You need to start climbing soon.”
“I’m on it,” said Bruno. “Out for now.”
Tania looked around and saw Tom and Mason exchanging high-fives. She frowned.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she said. “The hard part is still to come.”
They nodded and turned back to their instruments.
With much of its load gone, the
merleta
was unstable, jolting violently as it climbed. The airframe flexed and moaned in protest. Bruno sat strapped into the command chair, tensing as each impact slammed the craft sideways. It felt like being shaken in a giant’s fist.
Radar showed the airship creeping closer, a bright dot against a backdrop of swollen thunderclouds. The storms behind the Landis were dissipating now but there were new convection cells boiling up from below, exploding up from the lower atmosphere with frightening speed. He ran the simulations again. The most optimistic projection gave them no more than an hour before the new storm hit, right about the point where the two craft were predicted to come together.
He resisted the impulse to divert more power to the maneuvering engines. He had to trust the AI to have chosen the best option, balancing speed against the load on the airframe. He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing.
When the radar showed the airship less than five kilometers away, he freed himself from the chair and started to pull on his flight suit. His hand caught in the torn sleeve and he frowned. That was something else he needed to fix.
He found tape and some plastic sheeting in the supply closet and used it to improvise a patch, wrapping the tape tightly around his arm. The plastic would not survive the corrosive rain of Venus for long, but it might last long enough to spare him any more acid burns. Satisfied, he pulled on his helmet and checked the oxygen levels in the miniature airpack.
“How the hell is that thing still flying?” said Mason.
Seen through the cameras on the underside of the Landis, the
merleta
was a sorry sight. Fragments of paneling trailed behind the damaged wing and the cluster of antennae on top were little more than tangled wreckage. The faceted canopy of the observation deck had been torn away, only a few shards of clear plastic still clinging to the twisted remains of the frame. Two of the engines were stopped, propellers turning idly in the wind.
“Buoyancy, baby,” said Tom. “And Brazilian engineering.”
The image on the screen was the ghostly green of night vision, but it was remarkably sharp. Tania could make out a tiny figure on the rear deck, the plastic bubble of his helmet reflecting the lights of the airship.
“We see you, Bruno,” she said into the microphone.
“I can see you too,” he said. “What do we do now?”
“Mason’s lowering a cable. If you can fasten it to something, we’ll try to winch your ship in close enough that we can drop a ladder to you. Think you can do that?”
“I think so,” Bruno said. “See if you can get it across one wing.”
“Why the wing?” Mason asked.
“Just do what he says,” Tania told him. “Tom, hold her steady.”
The cable dropped into sight in the top right corner of the screen, coiling and twisting in the wind as it fell towards the other vehicle. The end plunged out of sight just ahead of the
merleta
.
“Left just a hair,” Mason instructed. “Don’t foul the propeller.”
The cable started to slacken, draping itself across the wing. “Perfect,” said Bruno. Something spider shaped scuttled across the surface of the wing, reaching for the cable with metal pincers.
“He’s using a robot to grab the cable,” said Mason. “Smart.” The robot crawled back towards the center of the wing, dragging the cable with it.
“Got it,” came Bruno’s voice through the speaker. “Want to send me another?”
The rounded belly of the aerostat loomed above Bruno like a moon about to fall. Flickers of lightning reflected from the rain-wet hull. Tethered beneath the giant, the
merleta
lurched and jolted, twisting on the anchoring cables. Downdrafts from the airship’s huge propellers battered at Bruno with hurricane force as he scanned the underside for the promised ladder.
“Going to bring you closer,” said Tania’s voice in his ear. “Can you cut your engines?”
He ordered the AI to stop the last two motors, and the
merleta
swayed, now simply deadweight dragged behind the larger vehicle. He glanced forward to check that the cables were still holding.
“Where do I look for the ladder?” he asked.
“We’re going to open a hatch on the underside,” Tania told him. “Should be almost directly above your head.”
“Copy.”
Abruptly, a square of light appeared in the gray expanse overhead.
“I see it,” Bruno said. “Looks good.” His heart was thumping at the thought of making the climb. He wished he had time to improvise a climbing harness, so that he could simply anchor himself to the ladder and let himself be dragged aboard.
“Fifty meters to go,” said Tania.
Out of the corner of his eye, Bruno saw one of the cables suddenly go slack. A moment later, it began to fall, twisting in the air, no longer attached at the upper end. The
merleta
dropped and he fell heavily to the deck.
“What the hell just happened?” Tania demanded.
“I’ve lost the Landis,” said Tom. The image on the main screen blinked out.
“They found a way back in,” said Mason.
“Oh, hell no. Not now.”
She called up the command interface and searched for assets still under her control. A video window popped up in the corner of her field of vision. The miniature face of Derek Kelly looked out at her.
“I’m sorry, Tania, but we have had to revoke your command,” he said.
“Not now, you asshole,” she screamed at him. “We were just about to save him. Give it back!”
It would be three minutes before Kelly would hear her words, another three before he could answer her. Even if he restored control, it would be too late.
She waved the video away, cutting the recorded message off in mid-sentence.
“Bruno,” she said. “This is Tania, can you hear me?”
“— hear you. What’s happening?”
“We’ve lost control of the airship,” she said. “You have to get aboard now.”
“— can’t climb. Think . . . my arm —” A ripple of static washed out the rest of his transmission.
“Listen to me, Bruno. In a few minutes that ship is going to rise. We’re not controlling it any more. You have to get aboard. It’s your only chance.”
The main screen was dark but she could see the situation clearly in her mind. The
merleta
was tethered only by a single cable now, dangling a full hundred meters below the Landis, rocked by the winds. No human being could make such a climb. She almost sobbed in frustration.
Bruno’s voice came through with sudden clarity.
“—have an idea,” he said.
The sky was almost completely dark, the rising thunderclouds visible only as somber masses against the gray-black murk beneath. The wind tugged at him and the cloudscape swung sickeningly around him as he twisted in the air. Fifty meters below, the battered
merleta
was still lit brightly by the airship’s spotlights. He watched it spin beneath his boots and fought the urge to throw up. Then the lights went out and the outline of the
merleta
vanished in the darkness. He caught a last glimpse of the red light at the tip of one wing before an arm of cloud swept across it and hid the aircraft from his sight forever.
He let himself dangle limply, cradling his injured arm. In the glow of his helmet light he could see the plastic patch on his arm starting to bubble and discolor where the acid rain had touched it. Water beaded on the backs of his gloves.
A flicker of lightning from below revealed something in the air nearby, like a piece of white rope. When the lightning flashed again he recognized it as a stream of water falling from above. The airship was shedding ballast, dumping water from its tanks so that it could rise.
Bruno was rising, too. The maintenance robot’s rear legs gripped him under the armpits, the manipulators at the tips digging painfully into his chest. The machine’s other six arms were locked to the cable. It climbed with mechanical single-mindedness, one leg at a time, indifferent to his weight, pulling him inexorably upwards. His helmet knocked against the robot’s carapace as it slowly ascended the cable.
He twisted his head back and looked up. The hatchway was still open, a glowing rectangle in the darkness above, almost within reach now. He smiled to himself.
“I’m coming home,” he said.
* * *
Angus McIntyre
is a computational linguist by training, with degrees in linguistics and intelligent knowledge-based systems from the University of Edinburgh. Born in London, he now lives in New York, where he works as a software developer. Prior to moving to the United States, he was a researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, working on computational models of language evolution. He has also lived and worked in Milan, Brussels and Bangkok. He is a graduate of the 2013 Clarion Writer’s Workshop. He is an enthusiastic if not particularly-gifted amateur photographer, likes to travel, and speaks five languages with varying degrees of fluency. He lives in Manhattan with his girlfriend and the world’s least friendly cat.
Next, in Sarah Hoyt’s fun twist on the time travel trope, three roommates get more than they bargained for when their quest to invent instant package delivery opens a portal in time with surprising results.
ON EDGE
by Sarah A. Hoyt
It was the summer of ’32 and I was living in a dilapidated Victorian in the Colorado Springs suburb of Greater Denver, with two mad geniuses, both of whom were trying to court me.
As a group we were recipients of the Bezos grant for developing a system of instant package delivery.
We weren’t the only recipients of the grant, which was structured as both a stipend and a contest. Twenty teams had been given sufficient to live on and create a prototype for a year, and the team that created the winning system would get the prize of twenty million.
We were one of the smaller teams, and also probably the most odd.
Kenyon was tall and dark-haired, with the sort of complexion that, when exposed to sun turns a little less pale, maybe. Since he was a theoretical physicist and mathematician, exposure to the sun, rarely happened.
Xavier was a little shorter and a lot darker, with broad shoulders and huge hands, which nevertheless were very good at assembling together the tiniest components. He was an electrical engineer. Kenyon and Xavier had been friends since kindergarten and had assembled their first computer together at eleven. Sometimes I thought they spoke a private language that only other geniuses could understand.
Me? I was the administrative assistant. Oh, that’s not what they’d called me in the grant application. I believe they’d called me a general synthesis specialist and both of them piously believed I could take a lot of information and come up with something new.
They had no backup for this belief, beyond the fact that I’d taken degrees in math, languages, art and biology, and I could convert their convoluted theories into smooth write-up that made it all sound sane. Was it sane? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t understand most of what the men said, even when they said it at length.
But I do remember the time I thought it was all crazy.
It was late at night, in summer, and we had the windows open, leading to a slow creeping of the number of mosquitos in the room. They wormed in through the rips in the ancient screens and clustered around the candle we’d stuck on an old, empty bottle.
By its light we were sharing a new, full bottle and a loaf of French bread, which constituted our dinner for the evening.
“You realize,” I said, “what he’s asking for is nothing less than teleportation? A transporter system if you will,” I said.
Kenyon nodded. “I think the Alaska University team is trying that thing. Molecular building and stuff.” He waved around with a piece of French bread. “Vats of molecules and nano builder things. Like magic.”
“And ours isn’t like magic?” I said.
Xavier was doing something to a circuit board that involved a soldering iron and a great deal of smoke and zapping. He had it pushed right up to the light of the candle. His big hands moved swiftly and with minute precision. “Well, if we’re going to talk about that,” he said. “The only ones who don’t seem like magic are the guys at Pacifica, who are experimenting with fast guided rockets.” He made a face. “Someone should have told them the other name for that is missiles.” He made a gesture with his left hand that seemed to denote the spreading tendrils of an explosion.
“Yeah, but we are working on what? Teleportation? Magic tricks?”
There was silence for a long while. Look, maybe it was because it had been so long. A long summer of watching them assemble what looked like a gigantic computer, a long summer of getting the impression both of these very intelligent men were courting me, but never having one of them actually say anything unambiguous enough to be sure, a long summer of listening to them talk in what seemed like a strange code.
The silence lengthened, so absolute that I could hear Kenyon break a piece of bread. He gestured with the bottle of wine towards my empty glass, and I covered it to indicate I’d had enough. Outside a cricket chirped loudly and inside, across the large coffee table, Xavier zapped something with the soldering iron.
Kenyon dug into his pants pocket and took out a coin, flipped it midair. It was a quarter, and it came down, a shining, silvery streak in the candlelight. “Heads, or tails?” he asked, but before I could answer, the coin fell, perfectly balanced, on edge.
He grinned at me. “There is no reason it shouldn’t fall on edge,” he said. “All right, given weight and gravity and surface area, it has a greater probability of falling on one side or the other, but it doesn’t mean that a not-statistically-insignificant number of times it won’t fall on edge.”
“So, magic and tricks,” I said. “I’m not complaining, exactly. They gave us a grant. We can use it, but—” I sighed. “But I’d like to have a chance at the big time.” Big time, real relationships . . . something. Something beyond talking a lot and playing with circuit boards, and setting coins on edge. “Is that a trick coin?”
He shook his head. “No. There is a way of throwing it. A flick of the thumb, that makes it more likely than not to land on edge.”
I didn’t say anything. It would be easy to say something, and get this conversation going. We’d done this before. They would speak through the night, happily spinning nebulous theories.
Apparently, the fact that I was silent wouldn’t stop them. “See,” Xavier said, putting down the soldering iron and reaching for a piece of bread. “In some ways distance doesn’t exist. Or time. Well, they exist, but in a mathematical way. Time is an abstraction of the human mind and every piece of matter in existence touches every other piece. Some people have theorized that the universe is a hologram. And if you work from that hypothesis, then it should be possible to move one piece of matter from one place and time to another, without passing the space intervening. Other people have worked on this theory, for instance—”
“And your magic bullet is?” I said.
“Beg your pardon?” Kenyon said.
“If other people have worked on it, your magic bullet to get it to work for you is . . . ?”
“Oh.” He grinned at me. “That is where Xavier comes in. We’re building a computer that will perceive time/space in its intrinsic togetherness, so that to it the universe will be just one hologram, a flat set of coordinates, where matter can be transposed from one side to the other.”
“Really,” I said aware my voice sounded sarcastic. I’d heard all this before, as they added chips and circuits and soldered and talked. “Just a trick of the thumb for the computer.”
“Uh, what?” Xavier said.
“I think Cass is tired,” Kenyon said, his eyes shining with something like amusement. “Maybe we should show her the test?”
“Not tonight,” Xavier said. “I need to iron out the bits of code, unless we want to send a package to last Wednesday again.”
“Last Wednesday?” I said.
“Next Wednesday, actually,” Xavier said. “We tried to send something across the living room, yesterday, but what we did was send it to next Wednesday. At least from the energy or whatever, Kenyon calculated that it went some distance in the future, no further than next Wednesday.”
“I see,” I said. “That will not solve the problem of instant package delivery.”
“Probably not,” Kenyon said, and looked away from me, “Hey, Xav, have you considered that perhaps a person needs to go through with the package?”
“What?” Xavier dropped bread crumbs perilously close to the soldering iron he’d taken up again, as he bit into a chunk of bread.
“Perhaps a person needs to go with the package. Oh, sure, I mean, the computer can move things because it doesn’t have the perception of time and space we have, but maybe some perception of time and space is needed, or—”
“Or we’ll end up anywhere at all. Yah. But building a transporter portal the right size is going to take forever, and I don’t think—”
“We don’t need a portal. Just an area of conductivity we can attach the computer to.”
“Uh.”
They’d quite forgotten I was there. I should tell them that there were laws against human experimentation—and animal experimentation should it come to that—but I didn’t think they’d hear. They’d just nod, then go back to arguing over something that made no sense at all.
I left and climbed the stairs in the dark to my room. Downstairs, I heard the click of the keyboard that meant one of them had dragged his laptop in. Mostly Kenyon talked, a bright stream of words, and Xavier interrupted with monosyllables, often in a questioning tone.
Up in my room it was very quiet, save for the hum of the mosquitos and the song of the crickets. I pulled back the sheers and stood at the window, looking down at the lights of the cityscape, and wondering, precisely, where all this was leading.
I didn’t even know I had any interest in either of them. I wasn’t raised to expect a man to support me, or necessarily even to get married. But there is a madness that comes to women in their mid-twenties. Or perhaps it was just that I suffered from an unwarranted attraction for very smart men who most of the time didn’t seem to notice I was around. My mother had accused me of collecting geniuses as far back as kindergarten. I thought it would have been much easier if I’d collected them like my brother used to collect butterflies, with a pin through the heart.
At any rate, I’d helped Xavier and Kenyon win a grant, and we had money through the fall, and after that, when the first snows of Colorado flew, they’d probably admit defeat and go on to do something or other with large computers and circuits and soldering irons and I’d—
I’d probably go back to college and study something else. And learn to stay away from dreamers who dreamed in calculations and science.
I closed the drapes and went back to bed. It wasn’t until I was almost asleep that I thought about the package they’d sent to last—or was it next—Wednesday. Did they mean that? At least, they should have managed to make it disappear, right? Or had they just misplaced it and hoped really hard?
I woke up with the sound of banging. One of them—or maybe both—was in the kitchen and doing something.
We hadn’t any dishes between us, but this house had come with full cabinets of dishes and baking ware, which we’d used to warm up pizzas, mostly.
Now, from the sound of it, the two of them were banging pans together. Perhaps they’d given up on instant teleportation and started working on a garage—or kitchen—band.
I grabbed my robe, put it on, and went downstairs on my bare feet, because if there’s one thing you can be sure of is that two geniuses, together, in a kitchen, are as likely as not to make something explode.
But when I got downstairs, they’d moved the noise into the dining room, the place where they’d set up their supercomputer and all its accoutrements. On one side of the dining room, connected to the computer, there was this . . . platform built of pizza pans.
They heard me come in—a miracle, over the din they were making—as a pan fell, and grinned madly at me. “Ah, just in time for the experiment,” Xavier said. “Kenyon here, is going to be our package delivery man, and, if everything works, he’s going to step on that platform there, and he’s going to appear on the other side of the dining room,” he said. “With the package clutched in his hands.”
If I’d had the slightest notion that anything would happen beyond maybe Kenyon getting a very mild electrical shock, from those leads that connected the computer to the pizza pans, I’d have protested. But all I could think is that he was wearing boots, after all, so even the small amount of electrical current flowing onto the pizza pans would make no difference.
Xavier did something at the computer, which was really just a naked bank of chips and circuits and a spaghetti confusion of wires. He nodded to Kenyon who put safety goggles on and grabbed a carefully wrapped box, then leapt onto the pizza pans with a resounding clang and . . . vanished.
I jumped after him.
It wasn’t sane. It wasn’t rational. It wasn’t what any human being in the history of science should have done. It was the instinct of someone who’d just seen the impossible and wanted to unsee it. I jumped after Kenyon, because I was sure I wasn’t seeing things right and that if I just got there I would see him clearly.
I landed on soft dirt, and heard something like a scream, and Kenyon was grabbing my arm and pulling me upright, and he threw the carefully wrapped package at something.
It was hard to know exactly what I was seeing. Once, when I was ten, I’d had anesthesia for an operation, and as I was coming out from it, what I saw seemed like a jumble of colors and sounds, and nothing made sense. Someone later had explained this to me by saying you have to learn to see. Babies have to learn to use their eyes and how the shapes they see translate to three dimensional objects. Until they do that, all they see is a jumble of colors and movement.
The colors and movement I saw were relatively familiar. I was sure the green things nearby were plants. I wasn’t sure what the huge thing in front of me was. It might have been a parrot grown to a million times the size, with claw arms.
“T-rex,” Kenyon said, with certainty, as he tried to shove me backwards. I stepped back, but I didn’t fall through the pizza platters into the dining room.
“This is not the other side of the dining room,” I said indignantly, as if by saying I could make him fix it.
“I kind of noticed.” he said, and stepped back again, retreating into the shadow of a plant.
The alien parrot thing that he thought was a T-rex sniffed the air and made a sound like a bull with laryngitis, and Kenyon whispered, “We must somehow have traveled back in time.”
“This is not next Wednesday,” I said.
“Not unless next Wednesday is really interesting.” He smiled a lopsided smile. “Right, we have to find our way back. Xavier should be calculating how to get us back right now.”
“You were supposed to make sure the computer got the right coordinates. What kind of coordinates did you have in mind?”
At that moment there was a sound not quite a zap, and a kind of glowing light over a spot to the left of us. The parrot-rex turned towards it, and Kenyon pushed me upright and towards it. “There, move it.”