Gliese 581

by Christine D. Shuck

  Later that evening, after dealing with several bodies that had been stinking up the individual family Hab units, Nix cooked dinner and they ate in the living room of Lenny and Toya’s family Hab unit.

  “So let’s talk long-term survival. We have extensive supply caches which, if we still had 250+ people would run out real quick.” Nix began.

  “However, with only three, we are in decent shape. We need to get the communications array back online, and...”

  “The communications array was down?” Lenny interrupted.

  “Yeah, the last big sand storm took it out. For all we know, they probably think everyone is dead. So we need to get it fixed and let Earth know we are still here. That said,” Mike looked at Lenny grimly, “You need to understand that they might not come for us.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was bad here. You saw it for yourselves. But it’s even worse on Earth. They might not have the resources to send out another spaceship to us. Not now, and maybe not for years. We need to prepare for that.”

  “And me and Toya and you, we are the only ones left?”

  “Yep. And I’m gonna need both of your help making sure we can survive until Earth can come for us. That means pulling out the A.R.C. embryos, growing them in the artificial wombs they have been developing, and maybe turning one of the Habs into some kind of domestic animal garden of Eden.”

  The Mars colony had a limited version of A.R.C., mainly ova and sperm from domestic animals. There were humans as well, but those hadn’t been tested. The colony had already been poised to begin its first batch of goat embryos in artificial wombs.

  “My dad promised me a cat,” Toya said, speaking for the first time in hours. “I want a cat. Lenny, grow me a cat, okay?”

  “Sure Toya, right after you help me transform the center section of Cairo into a grassland for the goats.”

  “I want a cat, not goats.”

  “And you will get one, right after the wombs finish growing the goats.”

  Toya simply glared at him.

  “Will Earth come rescue us?” Lenny asked, trying to wrap his mind around this new desolate future.

  “We could build a spaceship then and take ourselves back home.” Lenny persisted.

  Michael Nix sighed, “Dude, I can grow plants like nobody’s business. If it likes dirt or water, we’re good. But building a spaceship? That’s all you kid. Go for it. It’s doable, but it just ain’t in my wheelhouse.”

  He clapped Lenny on the shoulder. “Seriously, go for it. Meanwhile, I’ve got some goat embryos to start a’growing.”

  And with that, the discussion was over. They were stuck on Mars. At least until Lenny figured out how to build and pilot a spaceship. Outside the Hab, red dust swirled slowly.

  This Doesn’t Make Sense

  “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.” – Stephen Hawking

  Date: 07.01.2103

  Calypso Colony Ship

  The Mess Hall was empty, quiet between waves of personnel coming through for food. In one corner, Zach Jenkins’ food cooled as he reviewed the piece of code again, reading through it, checking the syntax – it just didn’t add up. If Wyatt were here, she would be able to make sense of it. Whoever had written this was covering their tracks well.

  Jacey would be able to ferret it out too, she had a nose for the rogue code. Zach was brilliant, but when it came to comparing what he could do with Jacey Wyatt, he might as well be in remedial English class.

  He rubbed his eyes. He’d been at this for days. Everyone else was moving on, convinced it had been some weird glitch, but that was not what he was getting. Someone had done this to the ‘Ponics Deck. And whoever had done it had known exactly when to strike.

  In most cases, the decks ran on four seven-hour shifts which overlapped each other. But for something like the ‘Ponics Deck, there was no need. Or at least, there hadn’t been until now.

  The Captain and Nagel Lowry, the head of ‘Ponics now that Sam Sydan had gone off shift and back into Cryo, might not have been willing to call it sabotage, but they had both agreed to immediately bump up the shifts, waking up another Tech from Cryo to handle the 1st Shift instead of leaving ‘Ponics unattended for six hours. So the schedule was now full, with overlaps at either end.

  And yet they won’t entertain the thought that this might be sabotage, Zach thought to himself.

  He missed his sister Mali, who was on board, but in Cryo along with Jacey. She would have known exactly what to say to convince them, but it seemed impossible for Zach.

  “I have to find the other half of the code,” Zach mused, “and then they will believe me.”

  “I believe you, Zach.” Laney’s voice broke through the fog of commands and code.

  He blinked and looked up, surprised to see her standing in front of him. He had been so absorbed in his work he hadn’t even heard her approach. The soft ship shoes that everyone wore were quiet, but still, the girl had snuck up on him.

  On her tray were two muffins, she handed one of them to Zach, “Here, you should eat something.”

  “I have some cabbage and beet soup here,” He said, reaching for the bowl.

  It was cold and a thin skin had formed on top. Zach gave it a half-hearted stir and wrinkled his nose. It smelled bad too.

  “It doesn’t taste good, try the muffin.” Her eyes were a startling shade of green, bright, not pale. He found himself wondering if she wore contacts.

  Laney smiled back at him.

  Christ, he was staring at her like an idiot.

  Zach brushed her fingers with his as he reached for the muffin, took a bite, “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  “How’s Sam’s replacement, Nagel, doing?”

  Laney gave a pained look, “He’s, ugh.”

  She looked around, making sure no one was within earshot and lowered her voice, “Sam was fun, but I swear Nagel Lowry carries around his own personal storm cloud. Apparently we have been doing everything wrong and it is a shock we haven’t managed to kill off more plants while Sam was in charge. The man is impossible!”

  Zach grinned.

  “Side effects of having a bunch of brainiacs, some of us are impossible to work with.”

  “I’ll bet you aren’t impossible to work with.”

  It spilled out, and when she blushed, he couldn’t help but smile in return.

  Laney took the plunge and sat down across from him. Zach was exotic and down-to-earth at the same time – his Asian features juxtaposed with a slight Southern backwoods twang.

  It was a small ship and word spread worse inside the metal walls than inside of a small town. Zach had looked Laney up. She had come from a big family, the same as he had. He had seen how hard she had taken the news of Earth. Her eyes had been bloodshot and swollen from crying for weeks after they woke her up from Cryo. Even after that, she had been quiet, withdrawn, and he often noticed her coming or going from Jacob Carter’s office, which was just down the hall from Environmental Systems. Zach had watched Laney in the Mess Hall and the other common areas, wishing he knew what to say. The truth of it was that seeing her grieving had been almost reassuring. He knew they were all hurting, but she wasn’t afraid to show it.

  “How have you been?” he asked, thinking that, for the first time in a long time, her face wasn’t blotchy from crying.

  “I’m doing okay, I guess. It still hits at weird times.” Laney answered, her brilliant green eyes meeting his gaze.

  “Yeah, me too.”

  There was a long moment of silence.

  Zach broke first, “So, no one else thinks this was sabotage. I feel like Cassandra, doomed to tell the future and not be believed.”

  Laney nodded, “So let’s figure out how to convince them. We need proof.”

  “It’s hidden in billions of lines of code,” Zach said morosely.

  “What search strings are y
ou running?”

  “You know code?”

  “Just enough to be dangerous.” She took a nibble from her muffin and grinned again.

  Zach looked at the girl and realized that, code expert or not, at least she was willing to help, and she believed in him.

  He returned her grin, “All right, yeah, so let me show you what I’ve been running so far.”

  Their heads bent together and Laney eventually moved around the table and slid into the seat next to him to see the screen better. For the next few hours they were absorbed deeply in their work, shoulder to shoulder, only stopping when a new wave of crew members came in, looking for food.

  They were not successful that day or the next, but they kept searching. Zach couldn’t explain why he believed that there was a saboteur among them, but he did. It didn’t hurt that he had a great excuse to spend hours with a good-looking girl.

  Zach’s skin was a smooth olive, his hair jet black, and his brown eyes with their slightly angled corners were warm and welcoming. Laney was pale, with brown hair and forest green eyes. Where his fingers were warm, hers were ice cold.

  “Poor circulation,” she said in response to his surprised look. “My hands are always cold.”

  “Well, we can’t have that.” Her heart jumped when he smiled and enclosed her hands within his, warming them.

  Working on a project together, even something as endlessly monotonous as sifting through millions of lines of code, was, fun, and Zach found himself not wanting to find the proof if only so they could keep looking.

  They met after their shifts. Weeks turned into months as they sifted through the ‘Ponics Deck programs, finding sub-routines and dead ends. It became routine, meet in the galley, work on two tablets, stop and discuss any odd bits, and move on. They would work for a few hours, then say good night to each other and head to their individual coffins.

  By early December, their easy friendship edged into something more.

  “We keep talking about those old action movies but we never get around to watching them.” Zach mentioned one evening as they sat down to look at a new section of code. “Why don’t we knock off early and watch one?”

  Laney grinned, “If you can finagle some popcorn out of the supplies, you’ve got a deal!”

  He laughed, “Aren’t you going to ask what movie?”

  “Nope, surprise me.”

  They knocked off early, neither of them focused on the code. Instead, Zach found that he was nervous. Could he be reading Laney wrong? He had only limited dating experience.

  Later that evening, after they had said good night and returned to their own personal coffins, Zach could still feel the cool tingle of her lips on his. He had selected the original Terminator movie, the director’s cut with the 100th year anniversary edition commentary.

  Laney had never seen it. He had enjoyed watching her jump at all of the right moments, practically crawling into his lap during one of the final scenes in the factory. Later, as they left the small theater room, her hand had fit into his so naturally.

  “Did you like the movie?”

  “I really did! But...”

  “But what?” he asked.

  “I guess I just figured it would be some high lit movie from the way you described it.” Her face assumed a serious expression, “I believe you called it, ‘A seminal storyline that illuminated a string of dystopian worldviews in the years prior to The Collapse.’” She giggled and he pulled her close to him, finally having found the nerve to kiss her.

  It was more than a physical attraction, Zach had realized just how much he liked how Laney thought, what she said, and how she worked on problems. She had a fierce independence, based on the stories they had swapped, and he felt this easy, comfortable attraction to her. Something in the way that she sat, leaned in, twirling her hair around one finger as she stared at the endless lines of code. And her easy smile, which had been showing more and more with each week that passed.

  The next day, in between their searches for evidence of sabotage and long, lingering kisses, they reminisced about their childhood.

  “I grew up in the Everglades,” she said, “There were still plenty of alligators out in the wild, so my parents made sure my brothers and sister kept a close eye on me.”

  Zach laughed, “We didn’t have any ‘gators in Tennessee, but we had plenty of snakes, including the timber rattlesnake.”

  Laney sighed, “I’m so used to the outdoors that is been hard here on the ship. I think I’d even take running into a ‘gator or even a rattlesnake if it meant having dirt beneath my feet again!”

  “I know exactly how you feel. The closer we get to planetfall, the longer it seems to take.”

  Laney had told him how her parents had chosen to homeschool her and her siblings. It had allowed her hours of freedom and encouraged her love of exploration. Her father had worked for World Geographic, one of the countless engineers who had designed spaceships, including the Calypso. She had spent endless hours at the now-defunct NASA Space Center seeing and touching the actual capsules, rudimentary as they were, that had brought Americans to space, and to the moon for the first time. This, bookended with her fascination with plants and their processes had led to dual degrees of Mechanical Engineering and Environmental Science. This had been an apparently irresistible combination for the Selection Committee.

  In the two years before the final selections, the World Geographic Selection Committee had flagged all applications that listed multiple disciplines for special consideration. They wanted folks who were more than just one-trick ponies and Laney had been on the short list. She had sent in her application form two weeks before her seventeenth birthday.

  Stolen kisses and small intimate gestures were where it all stopped, however. Laney had laid it out quite firmly, after all.

  “This ship, it is an artificial construct. I like you Zach, I really, really do. But I want out of these confines, away from feeling stuffed shoulder to shoulder with everyone else before we take this any further. I don’t want your feelings to change, or my feelings for you to change, once we are out of these ship walls.” She had said it earnestly, pulling away once his kisses became more passionate.

  Zach had to admit that it was a little disappointing, but he understood how she felt. It was too close of quarters. Everyone was in each other’s faces right now. There was no real privacy at all. And despite the time that had passed, they were all still working through the loss of friends and family back home. After he had been revived from Cryo nine months ago, learning the news had hit him hard. Like everyone else he had searched for his family. His parents were gone, of that he was sure.

  Later updates had included the knowledge that only a certain rare blood type was being spared. Somehow, it provided just enough resistance to the ESH virus to give some kind of immunity. He didn’t know the blood types of any of his siblings, however, and records were incomplete. His sister Amy had been aboard the Jupiter Supply Ship and she and the rest of the crew had been reported as deceased just a few weeks before Huygens Outpost had ceased all communication and went dark. As for the rest of his siblings, he had no answers, but as he and the rest of the Calypso crew were learning, that was an answer in itself.

  He still had Mika, although she was oblivious, unaware of her loss, waiting for final orbit before she would be pulled from Cryo, and told the news. At least she would have him to lean on.

  Spending hours with Laney reminded him that, despite all of the terrible things that had happened on Earth, and the crippling loss of his adoptive family, he was very lucky to be surrounded by good people. Perhaps that is why it was so important to him to find the person who was responsible for the ‘Ponics freeze.

  One day Zach stopped in mid-scroll.

  “Oh my God, I...” He stared at the line of code. “Oh my God.”

  Laney leaned over, resting her chin on his shoulder, “What? Where?”

  Zach pointed and she stared at it, her lips moving silently as she read the lin
es of code.

  “Oh wow, that’s, that’s...”

  “Elegant?” Zach supplied.

  “Yeah.” She stared at him, and grinned, “You found it.”

  “Yeah, I did.” Zach stared at the code.

  “Time and date? Can we trace it back to its origin?” Laney asked.

  Zach nodded and they bent to their work, shoulder to shoulder, uncovering the last piece of the puzzle.

  Moments later, there was a shift change and some other crew members filed in. As they did, Laney tensed and pointed to a string of commands that identified the workstation of origin.

  “That’s it! Oh my God, Zach, what do we do?”

  “It’s a public workstation,” Zach said, “It could be anyone.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  Zach stood up, closing the notebook, and gathering his belongings.

  “We go to the Captain now, before something else happens.”

  They made their way to the Command Deck. There were two people in line in front of them. Zach stood, shifting from foot to foot, unsure of what to do next.

  Laney stared at him, at the others in line, and grabbed the notebook from Zach, “Come on, we can’t wait on this.”

  She strode into the Captain’s office, leaving the two other crew members standing in her wake.

  “Sir? You need to see this, it’s important.”

  She set the notebook down on his desk and ignored Nagel Lowry, who looked rather outraged, having been interrupted in the middle of a lengthy, and rather boring, oral dissertation on the status of the ‘Ponics Deck.

  A few minutes later, the Captain had several other crew members in for the second round of explanations. The questions were still flying fast and furious as a klaxon alert began to sound.

  NARAs voice sounded over all speakers.

  WARNING CRYOGENICS SYSTEM SHUT DOWN

  SYSTEM FAILURE - CODE RED

  SYSTEM RESET ON ALL CRYO PODS IN FIFTEEN MINUTES

  The room dissolved into chaos.

  Point of No Return

  “Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.” – Arthur C. Clarke