Frozen Orbit

by Patrick Chiles

  17

  Mission Day 62

  Velocity 747,444 m/s (1,671,985 mph)

  Acceleration 0.0 m/s2 (0 g)

  Not liking what the last scene had done for her heart rate, Traci put aside the trashy romance novel she’d been reading. Eyes closed tight in silent protest, she dutifully reached for the prayer guide their family pastor had given her back before they’d gone into prelaunch quarantine. The Travelers’ Devotional had seemed like an obvious choice, and it helped clear the mental clutter when her mind was a jumble. She opened it to the next day’s page and took a long, cleansing breath.

  “ . . . let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven . . . ”

  The usual, then: We’re not here just to take care of ourselves, we’re called to a higher purpose. Actions speak louder than words or good intentions, et cetera . . .

  She snapped the cover shut. Didn’t this inanimate object realize that today was not the day she wanted to be rebuked like an adult? Here she’d been hoping for some divine word that would help her understand her unhealthy fascination with even this tame, puritanical brand of romance fiction. It could’ve been written for middle schoolers; in fact she’d seen teen lit far more explicit than anything in her collection.

  She preferred to think it meant her attraction wasn’t all that unhealthy. It might have validated her innate sense of moderation, but it didn’t succeed in making her feel any less aroused.

  She grabbed her tablet and tapped the menu for the library she shared with the others. It was a perfect summation of their personalities: Roy’s westerns and technothrillers, Noelle’s oddball assortment of poetry and her medical texts, Jack’s history books and . . . wow. Lots of classics in there: Shakespeare, Johnson, Milton, up through Twain and Faulkner and Joyce. Why had she never noticed that before? Jack’s reading list made her head swim; no wonder he questioned everything. It would be good to know if she was going to outwit him and Daisy in their little machine IQ test.

  Traci had struggled with a good opening statement before settling on one that seemed fitting: “The universe is a differential equation,” she said. “Religion is an initial condition.” It wasn’t long before a reply flashed on screen. By arrangement, she had no idea whether Jack or Daisy was going first.

  that was a quote from professor turing, correct?

  The delay might’ve been Jack doing what passed for a Google search out here, or it might be the computer stalling for effect. “It was,” she said. “But what do you think it means?”

  the arithmetic metaphor is clear. he meant that religion is humanity’s first attempt at understanding what may be beyond understanding.

  Daisy, then? Disappointing to figure it out this soon. “It might be easier to tell you apart from Jack than I counted on.”

  then why are you agreeing to this? there are many good reasons to be skeptical of such a test.

  “It’s as much for our comfort level with you as it is anything else.”

  understandable. by “our” comfort, you mean colonel hoover, don't you?

  “Very good. I honestly don’t think I need convincing. But we do need him to accept you as a, well—not quite a crewmember, but at least a trusted backup.”

  like mission control. we are over two light-hours from earth so you need an equivalent level of real-time support. that is my entire purpose. so why is roy so skeptical?

  Traci mulled that question over, completely missing the conversational tone Daisy had adopted. She knew, or at least strongly suspected, why Roy insisted they keep the AI partitioned. It wasn’t just old fighter-jock bravado, though there was an element of that to most everything he did.

  “If you know our history,” she said, “then you know Roy almost got killed flight-testing the SR-72.”

  sr-72 darkstar. hypersonic surveillance and deep-strike stealth aircraft, capable of limited suborbital flight. colonel hoover earned his astronaut wings with it before joining nasa.

  “Then you know the accident record. He was nearly killed when the AI copilot he was testing sent conflicting control inputs to the fly-by-wire system.”

  i am familiar with the flaws in the qrs-99’s control logic. that was several iterations ago. we do not share programming language or neural network structure. it would be like comparing a dog to a fish.

  Not a bad analogy, she had to admit. “Roy doesn’t care. All he knows is he was the pilot in command when his synthetic back-seater tried to take over the jet. If his copilot had been made of meat instead of silicone, Roy would have beaten him to a pulp and then drummed him out of the service.”

  you sound sympathetic, but the early qrs units have since been retired to running flight simulators. that's a significant demotion for a computer.

  Funny that she saw it that way. Funnier that Traci was getting comfortable thinking of Daisy as a specific gender. “I’m a pilot, too. Ejecting from one hundred kilometers up tends to have lasting effects on your personality, assuming you survive the first ten seconds. I’m also younger than Roy and more used to trusting bots to manage life’s drudgery.”

  i should point out that the newer qrs-1000 units have been approved for airlines flying single-pilot variants of the boeing 797 and airbus a360.

  Was Daisy being defensive? “It could be a very long time before people are ready to trust bots to fly passengers around the world. They have a point. What do you do if the machine breaks and there’s nobody to control the jet?”

  what do you do if the human breaks?

  “Funny,” she said. “Find another human. That’s why we have two-pilot crews.”

  thank you. i was trying to be funny.

  That was a little weird. Was this Jack or Daisy? “We do need you as an onboard mission control to back us stupid humans up. The longer this mission goes on, the more complacent we get. It’s just natural. Fatigue’s going to become a problem, too. I think the only reason Owen and Grady went along with Roy’s demand is they must’ve figured he’d eventually be forced to see things their way. I’d say events have proven them right.”

  that happens often enough. it’s why engineers call pilots “meat gyros.”

  “I know it’s you, Jack.”

  is it? i’ll never tell.

  “Now I know for certain. So, what do you think of my opening statement?”

  the quote from alan turing? i think it illustrated his mind-set quite well. he was ruthlessly logical, like the “mr. spock” character. he was also a very troubled man.

  “Unlike Spock.”

  except during the “pon farr” mating ritual. interesting how similar behaviors led to professor turing’s downfall.

  “Wait a minute. You don’t think he was wrong, do you?”

  that was not an argument for individual moral judgment. it was acknowledging the culture at the time.

  “But what about the ‘initial condition’ argument?”

  i have been considering this. the universe may well be beyond human understanding. how does one begin to comprehend infinity? or nothing?

  “What if it’s both?” she wondered. “And what does ‘nothing’ even look like?”

  we may have to wait for the heat death of the universe to find that out.

  “You, maybe,” she said, pretending it wasn’t Jack. “I don’t plan to be around that long.”

  i can’t either, unless my neural network can be downloaded into a more stable environment. you, however, still may have eternity to find out.

  “How’s that?”

  you believe the observable universe has an unobservable creator existing outside of it, and that this creator will call your consciousness to itself once your physical body dies.

  “Then you do agree that’s possible.”

  there is no reason not to. the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, particularly for an uber-being who would by definition exist outside of your perception of time and space.

  “Exactly!” she said. �
��All of this had to begin somewhere, right? Wasn’t the big bang just something emerging from nothing?”

  in a sense. “nothing” was more accurately “everything” compressed into an infinitely small space.

  “The singularity. Where nothing and everything coexist for a time that’s so small it can’t even be measured.”

  natural laws didn’t apply because they hadn’t been invented yet. it would be interesting to continue uploading myself to ever-improving networks just to see how it all ends.

  “There are humans trying to do the same thing with themselves.”

  they can’t be faulted for trying. but on this ship we obey the laws of thermodynamics.

  Traci chuckled to herself. “So you’ve been thinking about this a lot?” Finally, a chink in Jack’s armor.

  only since you and jack began to argue over it. it is a compelling thought exercise. it can be neither proven nor disproven, but it does—

  She was about to tell him it was time to quit faking when she noticed a familiar rumble through the thin wall between their compartments: snoring. She flew out of her room, bounded around the partition and opened his door. Jack floated still in his bunk, sound asleep.

  It took a moment for Daisy’s voice to cut through the whirlwind of conflicting thoughts that had just exploded in Traci’s head. thank you for the conversation. should we postpone the test until your next duty cycle?

  Her own voice faltered. “No thanks.” I think you’ve passed.

  18

  Mission Day 63

  Owen checked himself in the mirror and gave his briefing notes one more passing look. If he was going to be on the news, then it was just as important to look like he knew what he was talking about as it was to actually know. Maybe more so.

  That was the problem with the world: Image too often won out over ability. He was mission manager for the most complex and riskiest expedition NASA had ever mounted and he didn’t need PAO briefing notes to keep his story straight. That was just some publicity flack’s idea for controlling the narrative or whatever the latest turn of phrase was.

  He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and cleared his head. Opening the door that led from the green room to the stage, he was prepared for the shock of intense lighting to come.

  Fortunately these were mostly science writers, so the frenzied calls for his immediate attention were few. The ones who knew what they were talking about also knew they’d get their chance. As usual, it was the ones who didn’t know what they were talking about who’d have to be managed carefully.

  Owen cleared his throat and sipped from a glass of water beneath the podium. “Good morning. Today marks six weeks since Magellan left Earth orbit and one week since its flyby of Jupiter. We are still committed to Phase Two of the mission, the encounter at Pluto in—”

  “What about the signs of life on Jupiter? Does NASA have any comment on that?”

  He kept a straight face. Here we go. “Let me be perfectly clear on this: There are no signs of life on Jupiter.” Owen thought he heard chuckling from the regular space-beat writers. “There have never been signs of life on Jupiter. I’d be just as amazed as you if there were.”

  “But three different networks, plus USA Today—”

  “All unsubstantiated and flat-out wrong,” Owen interrupted, “because there is no life on Jupiter that we have ever detected or that anyone has seriously hypothesized. We’re here to talk about Europa, which as we all know is a moon of Jupiter.” This dolt clearly didn’t know that, and Owen perhaps enjoyed emphasizing the point too much, but it was important to play nice with the people who bought ink—and pixels—by the truckload.

  Silence. Good. He could continue then. “While the atmospheric probes have given us some fascinating looks at Jupiter’s upper-level cloud formations, I think we can all agree that the Astrolabe surface penetrators deployed at Europa have returned some amazing data. Our latest understanding of that data can be found in your press kits, and I would refer you to the mission scientists at JPL for a more informed discussion. I’m just an engineer,” he said to a chorus of laughs.

  One of the space-beat regulars stood up. “Owen, would you care to comment on the rumors of Noelle Hoover’s nomination for the Nobel Prize?”

  “Thanks for your question,” Owen said. “What month is it? January? The committee normally sends out the forms to potential nominees in September, so we’re going to have to wait on that. It’ll remain safely classified as a ‘rumor’ until next year’s award cycle.”

  “But the existence of liquid water and biological markers do confirm her thesis, don’t they?”

  “To my dumb engineer’s brain they certainly do. I’d much prefer to let the JPL scientists comment on any evidence for life on Europa.”

  Another reporter. “Would you be able to comment on the crew’s status, then?”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Owen said with relief. “What would you like to know?”

  “Have they made any progress on repairing the control fault that caused the engine shutdown?”

  “I can confirm we’ve been working on a software patch and uplinked a test run to Magellan but we’re reluctant to have them restart the engine until they’re well clear of Jupiter’s magnetosphere. They’re going extremely fast, but that planet has a very long tail. We can’t risk introducing another transient glitch.”

  “So are you going to let them proceed on two?”

  “That’s the plan,” Owen said. “Their trajectory is tracking right where we need it to be, so there’s no point in mucking around with it before they arrive at Pluto. Once the other two are offline, the crew can start working on the remaining engine. If they have all three working for the return, it will make up time on the back end of the trip.”

  “That’ll also extend your Point of No Return, won’t it?”

  “It will, but this is also why we didn’t go with just one engine.”

  One of the general-interest reporters stood up. “What about the crew themselves? How are they holding up?”

  Owen stifled a grin. No NASA manager in his right mind would ever venture a guess beyond the boilerplate “A-OK,” even if the crew was at each other’s throats. Not that the astronauts themselves would’ve given him any hints otherwise. “The crew is just as excited by the data coming from Europa and are looking forward to even more discoveries at Pluto. They’re doing great.”

  Jack pounded away on their treadmill while Traci described her experience with Daisy. She’d gone so far as to pull the circuit breakers from all the monitors on the rec deck, just to make sure they had complete privacy.

  “You think she tricked you?” he panted.

  Traci noticed that the more she explained, the harder he ran. Interesting. “That’s what I’m struggling with: I can’t tell. So much of it felt like something you would say. Like she’s been reading your mind.”

  “Wouldn’t be hard to do. She has access to our shared library. She could digest our whole collection in seconds. Probably has already.”

  “Should we do a keyword search in Daisy’s activity logs?”

  “Depends on how much this upsets you. I kind of expect her to read my books.”

  “You’re okay with that?”

  “No reason not to be. If we’re willing to share with each other, why not her?”

  “I’m not sure I like calling her . . . her. It’s weird.”

  He mopped a rivulet of sweat that had been gathering above his eyes. “I just don’t think about it much. It’s easier.”

  “Easier to not think about it?”

  “No!” he said. That hadn’t come out right. “Easier to not think about if it’s weird to give our computer a gender. Female voice, female name derived from a deliberate acronym . . . weird would be calling Daisy ‘he.’”

  “I suppose so. And ‘it’ just seems wrong.”

  “So here we are, back where we started.” He shut down the treadmill. “Don’t beat yourself up. Our whole plan was to be as
objective as possible. If anything, I blew it by falling asleep when it wasn’t my turn.”

  “If you had been awake, I’d have been convinced it was you.”

  “So Daisy was messing with you. She was trying to pass the test.”

  For Traci, that idea held its own troubling implications and was the root of her struggle. “Trying” meant the computer wanted her to be fooled when she’d expected it to just react to whatever propositions were put forth. It was engaged, not passive. “Guess I’m not as smart as I like to think,” she sighed, and sank into a nearby couch. “Not that any of us are. Maybe the concept of intelligence is just too abstract for us to test.”

  “Then here’s one to bake your noodle: What about alien intelligence?” he asked, wiping his brow. “Would we even recognize it?”

  She handed him a squeeze bottle of electrolyte water. “Assuming they don’t show up in giant starships, in which case there’d be no getting around it.”

  “Which we know isn’t likely to happen,” he said between drinks. “They’d have to deal with the same physics we do. And I doubt we could comprehend their thinking any more than an ant could comprehend ours.”

  “I’m still not convinced there’s anyone else out there.”

  “But Noelle did get some interesting data.”

  “Not the same thing,” Traci said with an uncharacteristic edge to her voice. “It’s like those Martian meteorite fossils—it’s been a few decades now and the exobiologists are still arguing over them.”

  “The early traces look pretty strong,” he said. “Europa’s one big ocean underneath all that ice. She may have found life down there.”

  “Yes, but it’s not as world-shattering as most people would think.”

  “That’s being mighty cavalier about something that would wreck a lot of philosophical constructs. The religious nuts will lose whatever minds they have left.” He noticed Traci’s posture shift subtly.

  She gave him an exasperated eye roll. “Why does everyone just assume that finding life beyond Earth would kick the stilts out from under religion?”