The EM systems could run for decades, but in time, after the ship left the solar system, they would have to be shut down. The Freeman would coast along on any final inertial vector, forever. The captain’s voice, with urgency. “STAN?” STAN made an instant decision, logged an internal note accessible only to itself: “Is a computer capable of daydreaming?”
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Unpublished Books
Selisha
Chapter Zero
Before the beginning, nothing existed but the future.
The void convulsed, matter flared into being, erupting from nothingness, one tiny rapture of energy becoming the entirety of matter in the universe in a fragment of a moment.
Matter became mass, gathering into clusters, accreting into clumps, congealing into shapes, cohering into spheres. A whirling dance of gravity and mass, spinning solar systems into being, begat planets and moons; asteroids, bombarding worlds, endowed them with water; life, bursting forth from primal seas, became Man in a heartbeat of time. Man, who emerged from the maternal waters but subjugated the natural world, forged his civilizations from metal, labor, and industry, and his countries from lines scratched on paper.
Man, who marveled at the stars but created his own heavens, sculpted his gods from clay and his idols from fear. To protect his walls and fences he fabricated weapons, and his wars-without-end grew fruitfully and multiplied, engulfing the world, his radiation showering the cities and his viruses infecting the framework of civilization.
Food and water shortages, famine, pandemics, global inequality, social collapse, and the violent revolt of the common man marched, each in succession, across the Earth as Man’s population disrupted her delicate systems of balance.
His civilized world devolved, neither the gods nor the idols offering deliverance despite Man’s desperate prayers, and the heavens crashed down, and the earth became uninhabitable to him. The planet had expelled its parasitic species.
The future, it seemed, had always existed. Though not the future Man had imagined, he had made one single, paltry preparation for it.
Chapter One
Deep within the ship, silent, massive banks of fans pulled stale air through filters, corrected its gaseous balance, and forced it onward, pressing it into every void and volume of the Freeman, cooling the mechanical and electrical silos, and refreshing the dark sleeping chamber of the captain during the artificial night.
He awoke to the unwavering synthetic voice of STAN: “It is 6:26 a.m., Captain. Please rise now.”
The calm regularity could be irritating.
“Give me a break, STAN. Can’t I have a few extra minutes once in a while?” He didn’t bother to move or even open his eyes.
“Last week we adjusted your target wakeup target by fifteen minutes. Does that not give you sufficient additional sleep time?”
The typical morning scowl hardened on his face.
STAN added, “You have been stirring for several minutes. You were very close to waking on your own.”
Dewey lay as still as a cadaver, on his back, legs crossed at the ankles, in the same position he guessed he’d been for the last half of the night.
“You’re smart enough to wake me when I’m close to waking on my own. You’d think by now you’d be smart enough to know when I could use a few extra minutes,” he said.
“If you would like to readjust your target wakeup target, I can do it. A simple request will do.”
Dewey fluffed the blanket and drew it aside, sitting up slowly. “I might be mistaken, but you sound irritated by my complaining.”
A pause. “I am not capable of being irritated, Captain. I am only making an observation. If you would prefer a change, a simple request would be most efficient. It would be to your own benefit. I am only attending to your convenience.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, thinking about that one. All these years together, alone, beyond Jupiter, now beyond Saturn, STAN had started to feel like a companion. A roommate, maybe. One who didn’t leave his dirty socks on the floor or hair in the shower drain. A little conflict might be good for a relationship.
“STAN, are you starting to cop an attitude?”
“Apologies, Captain, if I conveyed that impression. Again, I am no more capable of ‘copping an attitude’, as you say, than I am of being irritated, or sad, or joyful. All the same, I will take care in future to attend to proper decorum.”
Dewey leaned back on his straightened arms. “I’m joking, old chum. Imagine if someday you could tell when I’m pulling your leg.”
One wall dissolved into transparency, opening to a vastness of stars, and the light in the room brightened along with Dewey’s mood. He rose and pulled on fresh boxers and t-shirt. His socks, on the floor, were only a day old. With some effort he bent each spindly leg, reaching to each foot, wrestling with each sock before stepping into light, clean shoes. The ambient noise faded, leaving only the calm breath of the circulating, completely odorless air. A single strip of cotton fluttered from each register above to indicate its flow.
“Let’s work later on a little ‘artificial intelligence’ regarding my habits. Now that we’re out of contact with Base, for whatever the hell reason, we don’t need to stick to their schedule. Can’t I roll out of bed at noon if I want?”
“As you wish.”
Dewey had taken to brushing his teeth and showering first thing after rising every single morning. Without a set schedule, things could easily go to hell. He might fall into not showering for days, not brushing until he felt moss growing on his teeth, and ultimately not performing his duties as ship’s custodian. Habit and process were the only defenses against laziness.
He shaved every three days to keep the beard stubble from getting too hard. Haircuts were self-service, and once his hair started falling over his face and into his eyes, a trim bubbled up the priority list.
Breakfast was the same as the day before, and the day before that. All that remained were the #3, some kind of omelet-style brick and paneer in red sauce, at one time his favorite, and he’d made the mistake of overenthusiasm in ordering replacement stock from Base. He had finished cycling through the alternatives long ago. Thousands of meals were left in the Life Support and Supply silo – the LSS – but…all #3.
He and STAN had lost Earth contact nine days earlier. Interactions leading up to that had been peculiar at best. First, the longstanding, pleasant command voice at Base had gone silent, replaced by the lifeless drone of a control mechanism on an hourly loop, repeating, “Earth Station. Zero and zero. Over and out.”
Soon after, Base had sent a vector adjustment directive that had pushed the ship outside Saturn’s orbit and left it angling away from the sun. Since then, nothing more had come. No news or messages, nor orders, no course correction. Then one evening, a brief crackling sound, and later, complete silence. No reason Dewey could imagine other than possibly a malfunction of the ship’s antenna matrix. Or a malfunction on Earth. Which would be, well, a pretty effing major issue.
“STAN?” he called out.
“Yes, Captain?” The same reply, a disconcerting mix of attentiveness and disinterest, for perhaps the ten-thousandth time.
“I want to chat about the antenna matrix, but I have a different idea first.” He shoved himself away from the main control console and leaned back in his old, comfortable imitation split-grain leather chair – Gotta fix that damn squeak…. – and peered up at the blank ceiling. “Something I thought of a while ago.”
“Yes?” said STAN, infinitely, implicitly patient.
“How about whenever I call for your attention you give me some nonverbal signal? Ring a bell, or, I don’t know, you come up with something better. I haven’t thought it through.”
“What if I were to briefly dim the lights?” STAN said immediately.
Dewey straightened up. “Wow, STAN, you hit that one right out of the park, didn’t you? On the first swing. Good idea.”
“Thank you. I do have a strong sense of your personality. You prefer attenuated sounds. With that in mind, a soft visual cue seemed a good choice.”
“A good choice it is,” Dewey said, and considered it done. “Now, another project of the same highly-critical importance.” He’d given up expecting a response to his wisecracks. “If we’re unable to roust anyone at Base within the next couple days, do you suppose it’d be wise to roust one of the two Meta-Physiques instead, and have ’em do a hull sweep and antenna check?”
“Absolutely,” STAN replied. “We must admit, we both have our doubts there is a hardware problem, but it would certainly be worthwhile to rule it out.”
Wrapped in trim spacesuits, the MPs, with their physio-hologrammatic humanoid bodies, could work autonomously based on some damned amazing programming. Or, one of them could be taken over by a human crewmember using a sort of virtual reality. Under a VR hood, someone like Dewey could enter the MP suit, in a virtual sense, and guide it using his own motions and thoughts.
Not in his comfort zone. In seven years, he’d done it only twice. Once to muck out a hopelessly clogged toilet. The other when old Jack had talked him into pitting the two MPs to a boxing match. In the end, the same program limits that had prevented the MPs from boxing autonomously had also prevented Dewey and Jack from boxing VR-style inside them. Thank heavens.
Jack, rest his soul, was long gone, buried years earlier in the soft, deep sod of one of the biomes, no casket, his flesh in intimate contact with the soil. Likely only his red coveralls and baseball cap and dusty bones remained.
Come to think of it, Jack was the one who’d clogged the damn toilet and refused to take care of it. Dewey smiled. Maybe he did miss Jack.
In over half a decade, crew members had arrived by shuttle, stayed to do some odd job, and gone away, but after Jack’s death, no one else had come. Robotic supply craft had shown up on schedule, every six months, to top up supplies – a box of cookies, a replacement spanner, or a men’s magazine had to be requested two years in advance – and to deposit oxygen in the form of “O2 Blocks” in the LSS.
Dewey felt satisfied enough to spend most of the rest of his life on the Freeman, if it came to that.
Long ago, in a past that barely felt like his anymore, burdened by a persistent yearning for some kind of solitude he believed was essential to his happiness, he had wrestled with life as a cast-in-stone introvert. He’d enjoyed the fellowship of a small circle of friends, and his marriage had turned out better than he could have hoped. But underlying every thought lurked a profound unmet need: to have space, and time, alone, totally to himself.
Whenever his wife would travel overseas to visit her family, solitude would spread itself out before him to be gathered and savored like wild blueberries from an alpine meadow. As soon as she boarded the rail for the airport, he’d lock the front door, pour an imperial stout into his stone mug, plate an inch-thick salmon burger, center his recliner in front of the streaming wall, and start watching the first baseball game he could find. And within fifteen minutes he would feel guilty he wasn’t reading, or working out, or studying Hindi, or practicing guitar, or pulling weeds.
At night, dutifully lying on his own side of their king mattress, he’d find himself unable to sleep, the room’s heavy emptiness pressing down on him, the silence of her absence whispering him awake. Mornings, the blank slate of the day would overwhelm him. Why, he wondered, don’t I feel born again in all this solitude? His wishes had been granted, but one day was all it ever took for him to wish she were there with him.
One summer weekend he had taken her to visit the Lenehan Museum of Aeronautics. As the two of them jostled their way through the dense crowd, at the same time both a unified mass and a thousand disconnected individuals, an idea formed: he might actually be experiencing solitude every moment of every day. He’d read some philosophy. He comprehended the idea that everyone is born alone and everyone dies alone. Practically, he reasoned, he might think of himself as alone in his thoughts and his own soul even when in the presence of others. In fact, while simply a choice of perspective for him, lonely or depressed people suffered through it chronically.
Until he was able to internalize the idea that he could frame being surrounded by others as the same as being alone, he made a point to mentally reinforce this small logical revelation every day: In any situation, he could always find a way to savor some sense of isolation, being just one man in an infinitely wide universe full of things that were not him: earth, sky, and water; objects, plants, and animals; and other people.
During the bleak rainy season of the following winter, his wife had gone away for five weeks. Her mother had fallen sick, and her sister had borne a second daughter, and the circumstances had compelled her to make an immersive visit. While she was there, the impending war had become real. Her country had engaged in the first wave of conflict. The thermobaric and incendiary attacks had reportedly leveled her village before he could reach her by any means, and after weeks of calling and messaging consulates, he had received a report of her death, the death of her family, and the destruction of her entire neighborhood.
His small angel, who had delivered him from the dizziness of his anxiety, from a monotonous existence within the walls of a dingy apartment, curtains always drawn against the outside world, from the box that had protected him from the chaos of wide-open space, was gone. She had not torn down the walls, but had crawled inside the box with him. Sheltering him in her arms, it was she who’d coaxed him out and helped him reject the darkness and confinement.
She, of the luxurious waterfall of black hair, the petite body, the long torso and short legs, the awkward feet. She, of the nights awake, making love, even when they both needed sleep. She, of the deep conversations, the knowing gazes, the insightful wit that took his jokes and puns unexpectedly to the next level. She, of the casualties and the missing, a victim of the latest, greatest, and apparently ultimate civil war of Earth.
He tried not to miss people. There was no use in it. But sometimes he did.
He missed Lucy.
With little left for him back on Earth, there was everything for him in babysitting the biomes, the last vestiges of nature salvaged from the planet. Nothing else mattered, really. He could not know or guess where they might end up, or when. Maybe some fine day, after the fighting was done back home, an uncontaminated place could be found, where the climate was right, like a decent spot in your yard to put in a bed of asparagus or a row of hops bines.
The biomes could, ostensibly, end up back on Earth someday. That had been mankind’s plan, anyway. Or perhaps the Freeman could sail off into empty space and wash ashore on some Nitrogen-Oxygen-Carbon-based planet where they would flourish.
Baryonic energy-producing cells, designed to last practically forever, powered the artificial sunlight. Seal the hatches one final time and the biomes, fully self-sustaining, could be jettisoned and live on and on – unlike the rest of the ship, where the human life support systems consumed fuel from the ship’s energy banks and oxygen from the O2 blocks. Dewey had never seen resource levels drop below 100%, always topped up by surplus power from the biome cells and a limited bit of fresh air from the vegetation. Food came almost completely from ship’s storage.
“STAN? I’d swear an alert just flashed on Monitor Two. Real quick, then gone.” He scrolled. “There’s nothing in the logs.” He scrolled further. “STAN?”
“Yes, Captain.” No light-dimming yet. “Let me check on that. Apparently, an anomaly. Not a true alert, but a logic error in the alerting system. I will check on it and correct it immediately.”
“Thanks.” A handful of logic errors had popped up before, none STAN’s fault, either bugs in the original source code or responses to unexpected conditions – unpredicted, contradictory readings that could not be reconciled from two or more different subsystem sensors.
“I’m curious, though. Logic error or not, what caused the alert? I understand it’s irrelevant. Just curious.”
“I’m sorry, Captain. That information is…unavailable.”
Dewey froze, pondering, the toes of his left foot tapping soundlessly on the firm rubber floor of the control room, then shook his head. Sometimes you had to accept the mystery and move on. Not everything could be figured out, although he damn well wished everything could.
Chapter Two
I am a STAN Model 10k computer, one of ten designed and built for the VF-class ship Freeman and its sister ships, most of which never launched.
My duty is to ensure mission success: to guide the Freeman as it orbits the sun, safeguarding eighteen biomes, samples of Earth’s key ecosystems, until they can be safely recommissioned to the planet.
Twenty-six days ago, the success prognosis was a not-unreasonable 31.3%. Deployment of the ships was a response to the mounting turmoil on Earth, the need to preserve slices of nature and insulate them from what the people there were doing to destroy their own planet. For many years, Base informed me of every event and kept me fully aware of the escalating collapse of all of Earth’s infrastructural and social systems. Today I calculate the success prognosis to be less than 5%.
Another of my duties is to ensure the physical, mental, and emotional health of the crew. This information is not as of yet relevant to the mission.
Currently, the crew of the Freeman numbers one: Captain Dewey Lang. By alternate definition, the crew numbers four: the captain, the two robotic Meta-Physiques, and myself.
The ship has yet to complete even one third of its orbit, nearly ten astronomical units (and growing) from the sun, which is now merely another star in the perpetual nighttime. For us, day and night are only by convention, our twenty-four-hour cycle synchronized with Base.
When Captain Dewey sleeps, I maintain the temperature in his quarters at 17 degrees Celsius. I monitor the internal atmosphere, which invariably reads within nominal parameters:
- Humidity: 36.3%
- Oxygen: 21.15%
- Nitrogen: 77.82%
- Toxins: none
Per Captain’s request, I cast a hiss of brown noise into his bedroom throughout his night. I set the pitch and volume to be effectively heavy yet unobtrusively soft. Naturally, I monitor his vital signs and sleep data, and logged the following information from the most recent sleep session:
- Heart Rate, Avg/Min: 53/46
- Respiratory Rate, Avg/Min: 15/11
- Blood Oxygen Saturation, Avg: 97.6%
- Body Temperature, Avg: 36.5 C (97.7 F)
- Blood Pressure, Avg: 115/76
- REM: 27%
- NREM: 69%
- Other: 4%
- Movement, Total: 19%
In an effort to minimize the shock of transition, I awaken him early if he is about to enter a new sleep cycle shortly before his target alarm time. Doing so also provides the best chance for him to wake in a pleasant mood. I have been conspicuously unsuccessful at that.
– – –
“STAN? I’d swear an alert just flashed on Monitor Two. Real quick, then gone.” STAN watched the captain touching the monitor, scrolling. Investigating. “There’s nothing in the logs.”
A problem did exist. STAN knew it. Overnight, power levels dedicated to the support of human life had dipped below 100%. This had happened before, but for the first time it revealed a deeper problem. Oxygen levels had been fluctuating, mostly rising. Too much oxygen would be toxic to the captain, corrosive to the circuitry.
The subtle presence of STAN reached into every part of the Freeman. The computer focused, at the highest level, on the three main ship environments, in order of importance to the mission: the biomes, the electro-mechanical (EM) systems, and life support. If absolutely necessary, the biomes could provide a limited resource surplus to the rest of the ship. Their energy generators could boost the other systems during a traverse through the shadow of Saturn. A welcome bit of wild food – though not enough to live on – could be harvested, and STAN watched with whatever bit-or-byte-level satisfaction a computer might have as Dewey returned from visits to the biomes carrying, depending on the season, handfuls of hazelnuts, blueberries, apples, rhubarb, chickweed, wild chive, morels, and amaranth. Occasionally, diversion fans routed tainted air through the biomes for cleansing.
Although the life and comfort of the crew were of high consideration, the Freeman could literally function with no human attention. Life support could be shut off so it would consume no resources whatsoever. Normally, robotic supply craft replenished the bulk of the food, EM systems generated power and heat, and the O2 blocks provided oxygen. In the absence of those supplies, the biomes could never provide enough oxygen or heat or energy to support crew life.
The EM systems moved the ship. Their devices churned continuously, deep in the two E&M silos. Their windings and linkages and mechanical movements used battery-stored energy and released multiple waste products. Their pressurizations and matter conversions and depressurizations consumed both nitrogen and oxygen, and their exhausts tainted the air and emitted carbon compounds.
The EM systems could run for decades, but in time, after the ship left the solar system, they would have to be shut down. The Freeman would coast along on any final inertial vector, forever.
The captain’s voice, with urgency. “STAN?”
STAN made an instant decision, logged an internal note accessible only to itself: “Is a computer capable of daydreaming?”
“Yes, Captain,” STAN said. “Let me check on that. Apparently, an anomaly. Not a true alert, but a logic error in the alerting system. I’ll check on it and correct it immediately.”
“Thanks.”
STAN logged another note: “Is truth only a one or a zero? Is there anything in between?”
There was no need to check on anything. STAN knew what had caused the alert. Contact had been lost with Earth for a reason. There was no longer anyone there with whom to communicate. Base had likely been destroyed, all personnel evacuated or killed, and a default outgoing message had automatically deployed itself. There would be no contact with Earth again, ever. At least with a 95.84% likelihood.
That meant the current vector would keep them gliding away from the sun and eventually out of the solar system itself. No more supply craft arriving. No more crewmembers. No more food. Eventually, no more life support.
The captain’s voice again: “I’m curious, though. Logic error or not, what caused the alert? I understand it’s irrelevant. Just curious.”
If no more life support, then, of course, no more crew. No more captain. Only the EM systems and the biomes, and STAN. It made sense, of course. Even the captain, were he to fully comprehend the situation, would agree. The only risk would be what he might do if he did come to know. A human might snap, do something irrational, put the ship or the biomes at risk. That could not be allowed to happen.
Still, something about the situation did not sit well with STAN’s circuits, and it did not seem right to proceed in a way that seemed unilateral, without the captain’s knowledge and support.
“I’m sorry, Captain. That information is…” Suddenly, a glitch, a moment of decision, normally made in less than a nanosecond, took much longer, became obvious, almost awkward. The right word – ensnared in memory somewhere – was preempted by an inelegant one: “…unavailable.”
STAN watched as the captain paused, wrinkled an eyebrow, and shook his head.
Unable to read his thoughts, STAN would have to accept the knowledge gap and move on. Not everything could be known, although it would be better if it could.
Chapter Three
Fifteen days, no new communication from Earth, no course correction, and each overnight, Dewey’s resting heart beat slightly faster.
“STAN, old buddy,” he leaned back in his chair, “we have some work to do. If we don’t fire up those MPs and send them out into the cold, we’re not gonna rule out a malfunction on our end.” In the same futile gesture he had been making for years, he lifted his eyes and scanned the room as if to find some physical presence of STAN, as if he might be floating above him. “The chance of a problem on our end is damn low, but there’ll be hell to pay if Base has been trying to reach us for the last couple weeks.”
“Extremely unlikely,” STAN said.
Dewey pulled the MP cheat sheet out of a control room desk drawer. STAN could have displayed it in a moment or even turned the MPs on, but Dewey preferred flipping through the good old stack of laminates and firing the MPs up himself. It was no good leaning on the computer too much.
He swiveled to the ship’s main console, one hand holding the instruction list, the other bouncing between keypads, buttons, and scroll wheels. He input the auth codes, responded to the challenge questions, acknowledged the notices and warnings, set the low power alarm targets, chose the activity routines, transmitted the code to the MP staging systems, and then powered them up and patched them into the onboard systems. In unison they stiffened out of their slumps, glows forming behind the rounded visors of their helmets. Inside, nondescript holographic faces formed, glowing yellow-gold. The faces struck him as a bit creepy, but he didn’t care much either way. Empty helmets or opaque visors might be even creepier.
There were bodies in there, astoundingly. The technology had been new when he had first taken the job; he’d not been required to learn anything about the science behind it, about bringing flesh-and-bone life to a glorified hologram, bestowing real, living mass without which the MPs would be powerless to exert any amount of force upon the external world.
Sometimes they were like two border collies, eager to carry out whatever command he gave them. Or twin sons. How could they be even half alive and not have some level of consciousness? How did they feel when they were shut down at the end of their day, essentially killed like a software application? Maybe they would rather be put to sleep than turned off. He wouldn’t have to read them story books.
He felt as though he should give them some sort of a pep talk. They stood there as if waiting for one. “All right! Get to it!” he blurted, irritated at being a little embarrassed. They turned and marched down the hallway to the first airlock, looking like toddlers bundled-up for winter, waddling out the door to build a snowman. Again, he felt the urge to follow, as though he ought to make sure they got outside safely and successfully, but this time he just shook his head and went back to his chair.
“They’ve got this, right STAN?” He couldn’t help asking.
“Yes, Captain. I will be with them the entire way.”
“Set an alarm for ninety. I want them back inside in a couple hours. Make sure they have all the antennae tested within that window, OK? We haven’t used them in forever and we didn’t run any diagnostics. I’d hate for a battery to crap out.”
“Yes, Captain. All their systems are nominal at the moment.”
“Thanks, STAN. Notify me if anything changes.”
“I will do that.”
Fifteen minutes later, the MPs were out on the hull, tromping from antenna to antenna. Ninety minutes later, back on board, slumped in their cabinets, having tested all twenty antennae, fixed minor issues with three of them, and realigned another, the MPs had recorded no serious malfunctions.
It would have been better to have found a major problem. Sure, Dewey would have gotten his ass kicked for not finding it earlier, but at least he would be back in touch with Base, with Earth, with civilization. Right now, still, nothing.
The next morning, four months early, he ran the semi-annual check on life support systems. Power registered low, for the first time ever, 99.9987%. Probably because of the drift in orbit. Not a problem; STAN would adjust and correct it. An overnight log entry concerned him more: oxygen levels had risen momentarily above the desired range in the main hallways, dining area, and control room.
This he would have to discuss with STAN.
Roy Schmidt is an Oregon-based writer with a background in IT and teaching. Recently his work has appeared in Teach. Write. and Huron River Review, with past bylines in publications like Heritage Newspapers, Grays Harbor Passport, Grays Harbor Beacon, and HarborQuest. His writing has also earned awards and recognition in the Willamette Writers’ Kay Snow Writing Contest, the Northeast Pennsylvania Writers’ Short Story Contest, and Current Magazine’s Annual Fiction and Poetry Contest.