The Galactic Arena Prequels (Books 1 & 2): Inhuman Contact & Onca's Duty

by Dan Davis

  Roi slammed a fist into the wall. “You stay away from her I said.”

  “I am. That’s what I’m saying. So we’ve been gradually experiencing adult hormone levels but you’ve been pumped up with this stuff since you were on active duty. Dealing with all this strength of feeling without the context for where to put it, how to deal with it. And that’s wrong, clearly but the doctor would help to regulate your hormone levels, keep them just right at your health checks. I know it’s wrong, it’s wrong what they did to us but the doctor was the one helping us, too. And I can help you. I can adjust your—”

  “No!” He shook Max. “Haven’t you learned yet that you shouldn’t interfere with us. You need to let us be. Let us become—”

  He broke off, coughing. His throat sounded thick with mucus and the air filled with the stench of decomposition. Roi could not clear his airway. He let go of Max and drifted away, coughing and heaving.

  “Roi, let me help you over to—”

  Roi’s body convulsed and he vomited a cloud of dark blood across the room.

  Max pushed off the wall, curling his legs up to his chest, aiming for Roi. He kicked his legs into Roi’s back, pushing him toward the examination bed across the room. Roi was much more massive than Max and he floated slowly, spinning and curled up, away while Max rebounded back into the wall. He finally kicked himself off again, after Roi.

  Before reaching the couch, Roi convulsed and vomited again, a thick bile-full mass of dark blood and stomach lining spewing out in a cloud, droplets flying off in an arc. Max grabbed him and maneuvered him onto the bed and strapped him in. Roi was sweating, shaking, his eyes glazed over and dull.

  “I think I know these symptoms,” Max said. “Hold on, Roi. Hold on. I will help you.”

  He checked the diagnosis system on the computer to be sure. A chill flooded through him.

  Radiation poisoning.

  PART 4 – RADIATION

  A lot of things suddenly made sense. Initially, that was most apparent with Roi. His weight loss, increased irritability, degraded cognitive function, behavior changes. His eyesight issues might have been damage to the optic nerve but Max also found the early signs of cataracts forming.

  It was with deep foreboding that he called them in, one by one, for tests. They were upset by the sight of Roi, sweating and groaning in his sleep, strapped to the bed but Max did his best to calm them. Just performing some tests, he told them, it’s just protocol to see if we have what he has.

  They all had it.

  To one extent or another, every member of the crew was suffering from radiation sickness.

  “What does this mean?” Navi asked.

  He had called them to a meeting in the mess hall. No one ate anything.

  “It means that I made a mistake. A terrible mistake. And I am sorry.”

  They looked at him blankly.

  “Radiation is one of the biggest dangers we face out here,” Max explained.

  “From the reactor,” Cavi said. “It emits radiation.”

  “Yes and that is why Roi is the sickest of all of us. The reactor is shielded but no one is supposed to live inside the compartment like he has been. The only reason he has lasted this long is because his cells have even more radiation resistance than the rest of us.”

  “If we are resistant to radiation, why are we getting sick?” Cavi asked.

  “Resistant means only that we can withstand longer exposure to radiation than normal humans, it was part of our design from the outset. We were made for journeys in outer space but we were never completely immune from damage. Such a thing is not possible, as far as I know.”

  “If they made us like this,” Navi said, “what did we do wrong? Roi lived inside the reactor compartment but I did not. Neither did anyone else.”

  Max had spent some time researching that very question. “One of the biggest threats to the Mission is the radiation threat. That was known to all the A-Crew. Solutions were part of the design. Hard shielding was used on the outer hull and the aerogel layers provide more than just thermal insulation. The hyposleep tanks provide further protection from the casing and the synthamniotic gel but also from the water tanks all around the hyposleep compartment.”

  “Water?” Navi asked.

  “Provides excellent shielding against galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles. Hence the position around the A-Crew as they slept, or should have done.”

  “What about our protection?”

  “Our sleeping tanks are shielded,” Max said, looking at each of them in turn. “An extra layer of protection on all sides.”

  “We have not been sleeping in our assigned tanks since soon after the accident,” Cavi said.

  Max nodded.

  “Oh,” Cavi said.

  Navi was confused. “Were the human sleep tanks shielded? If we are so sick that we will soon die, despite our enhanced biology, I find it hard to believe the Mission was designed with such small margins of error.”

  “There was another level of protection that has been off since the accident,” Max said. “The deflector shield that we allowed to remain offline.”

  “That was for pushing aside micrometeorites,” Cavi said. “The numbers were clear, the risk of chance of catastrophic impact was small.”

  “We never ran the numbers for the risk of radiation exposure to us without the shield,” Max said. “I never understood the nature of the particles referred to in the ship’s manual, I assumed it meant very small pieces of matter and dust only. We now know the magnetic shield deflects cosmic and solar particles. Which is what in our ship’s colloquialisms we call simply radiation.”

  Cavi slumped in her seat. “I am trained in operating and maintaining ship’s communications array, optical and radio. I knew the deflector had to be either modulated, changed or switched off for communications to be sent and received. But I had no idea it kept us functioning. No one told me. They never told me.” She looked afraid or perhaps just confused.

  “I know,” Max said, feeling he should do something to comfort her but not knowing what to do. In the fictional videos, a human would take another human by the hand, perhaps patting it, or would effortlessly slip an arm around the other’s shoulders and upper back. Max did not move. “I understand, they told me very little about radiation. I learned to input symptoms into the computer and how to create, prepare and administer treatments. But I was never warned about specific health risks. Why would I be? Why would any of us have ever been instructed of what we did not need to know to fulfill our function? It is a failure of language, of breadth and depth of knowledge. The human crew all received a rounded education. We did not. These failures are an inevitable consequence.”

  “We were not informed of the risks nor functionality of ship. None of us. Not at all.”

  Max nodded, wondering how to best inform them of further terrible news. He found himself clearing his throat, a profoundly human affectation meant to indicate an intention to speak. Or perhaps the tissue of his larynx was breaking down in some way. They turned to him, either way.

  “During my investigation into the effects of radiation on artificial persons I, as you know, discovered much about our essential design. The way that our base genomes were manipulated and recombined to express certain specific proteins. We all know that we were grown in artificial wombs, tanks much like the hyposleep tanks. Our growth was accelerated far in excess of a human child before we were removed from the tanks. And then our final growth to adult stature happened within two years rather than the ten or so for naturally born humans.”

  Navi sighed, another behavior picked up from hundreds of hours watching human entertainment. “You never used to be so indirect,” she said. “Arrive at the destination of your statement, Max.”

  “Deep space APs like us were designed so that all of our cells, or most of them, make a protein taken from the genome of Ramazzottius varieornatus, one of the tardigrades, which is a tiny, very hardy animal that lives in ponds and mosses. The
protein is called Damage Suppressor Protein or Dsup and it wraps around our DNA like a shield. It gives us between fifty and eighty percent reduction to DNA damage compared to humans without Dsup which means some high energy rads always get through. And there is the added complication that some organs weather the damage from prolonged exposure better than others. Our livers are tough but our eyes and digestive systems tend to exhibit signs of the damage first, which, admittedly could be a bias based on the ability for patient and medical professional to observe these systems much more readily.”

  “Why a tardigrade?” Lissa asked. She had some knowledge of microscopic animal life because biological symbioses were part of her horticultural and biome support expertise. He was finding, as he and the rest of the crew educated themselves, that they could communicate on an ever widening range of subjects and it was exciting when the linkages were discovered.

  He sat up straighter. “Their biology has evolved this resistance naturally, perhaps because of the cycle of drying and—”

  “Max.” Navi tapped her finger on the table top. “Arrive at the destination.”

  “They altered our cells to protect against radiation,” he said and took a deep breath. “But they also make us die young. Younger than humans, anyway. This design was not an accident, either. They intended for us to have this genetic clock, as they call it. In fact, they require it by law. Law means the protocols established to govern a country, which is like a ship in many ways. Our shortened life spans are a feature, not a bug, as they say. A side effect of messing with our genes so much is a shortened lifespan plus our accelerated growth from conception to fully grown also takes decades off of us.”

  “Why?” Cavi said. “Living longer means we can do more. Be more useful. It is garbled thinking.”

  “Seems that way to us,” Max said, gently. “Not for them. If we are programmed to die after a certain number of years then, along with our infertility, we are less of a potential threat to humanity. Our limitations make them feel comfortable. Necessary compromise to get our technology legalized in the key territories.”

  “We die after certain number of years? A certain number?” Navi said, her face hard to read. “Max, come on and—”

  “By design,” Max said, holding up his hand to her, “we should have had full functionality and performed on active duty for approximately twenty years. On average.”

  “You must have miscalculated,” Cavi said and shook her head. “Mission Duration alone is thirty-seven to forty-one years.”

  “Don’t you see?” Navi said, still looking at Max but speaking to Cavi and Lissa. “Twenty years is enough to get the human crew to the Destination. But it was always part of the Mission that we would die soon after. On the way back to Earth.” The skin on her face drained of color. Not an affectation.

  To varying extents, the three of them were confused. They had always been second class, always been lesser yet they had been conditioned to believe they were vital to the Mission. It was a shock to find out how little they were valued. Lissa alone seemed somewhat unperturbed.

  “What about the hyposleep phase for the return journey?” Cavi asked. “Who would look after the A-Crew if not us?”

  “The Die Off Problem,” Lissa said.

  “Elaborate,” Max requested.

  Lissa tilted her head. “Our garden was dying. All the projections showed that no matter how hard we worked or what we did, the zero-g garden and the gravity ring gardens would slowly, gradually die off during the final stage of the Mission until there was nothing left. It is listed in the computer as the Die Off Problem. The recycling system is not one hundred percent efficient. Nutrients are lost as they are recycled. Nitrogen needs to be replenished and so on. The soil we carry is projected to die off first, some time around T plus 18 years. Even the hydroponics would fail long before the ship returns to Earth orbit. Although they are always an essential element of the life support system, our atmosphere and water recycling would be handled entirely by mechanical means perhaps a decade before earthfall. And that would not be enough to provide life support for all of A-Crew plus all of B-Crew. Whenever I questioned it, asked what we would do about the Die Off Problem, Doctor Banks said I should not concern myself with such things.”

  “We were always disposable,” Max said, nodding. “It was built into the Mission Design from the start. Our genes would cease replicating correctly from around T plus 20. But now we have been exposed to more damage than our protected cells could prevent and our life spans will be significantly reduced, even further than our designers intended. Now, I will treat us with all the medication we have as well as all that I can synthesize but it will not be enough. Not for all of us. Not all the way.”

  “What are you saying?” Cavi asked.

  “He’s saying,” Lissa said, “that some of us will die even before we reach Destination. Am I correct, Max?”

  “We all have different genetics. Clearly, we are different models and that will determine how our cells react to the damage. As well as that, we have experienced varying environmental factors, even within the limited setting of the Ascension. The four of us have all been living and working in different areas of the ship,” Max said. “We all have different levels of radiation and rates of cellular decline. I believe I can halt much of the degenerative effects from cells destroying themselves once they have received a triggering level of damage. What we have, what I have already begun treating us with, are drugs to tell our cells not to self-destruct after being damaged. But the transcription errors, the changes that emerge when our bodies make new cells, they will continue to compound. Each of us will degenerate in our own unique way.”

  “What about Roi?” Lissa asked, her tone flat.

  “I’m afraid there’s no way to save him. I’m not even sure how much I can ease his suffering at this point. He must have been experiencing symptoms for many months, at least. When I went to administer medication that would have managed his pain, I found that much of the ship’s stock was already missing.”

  “I cannot understand why he never communicated with any of us about this. He had been giving medicine to himself?” Cavi asked, amazed that such a thing was possible.

  “And with great enthusiasm, by the look of it. I will have to synthesize more for the rest of us in the near future. We’re going to need it.”

  “What about the Mission?” Navi said, gesturing with her hands. “Look where we are. We already lost Poi and look what happened to the deflecting shield because we had no engineer onboard to guide us. Without Roi, how will we keep the reactor operating properly? There are billions of miles ahead of us.”

  “We really have no choice in the matter,” Max said. He really wished he could reduce her distress. Perhaps he could dedicate time to teaching himself how. “And I think if any of you have anything more that you wish to say to him, you should do so now.”

  ***

  “Ever since the explosion,” Max said to Roi’s unconscious body, “I have been thinking of myself as developing into a fully realized human. Even before the explosion, I believe, I liked to think of myself as a kind of human and that if I tried hard enough to act like one, that would make it so. I often attempted to emulate Doctor Sporing’s mannerisms, as if it is that, surface behaviors, that makes humans more than we are. Now I know that I was wrong to think of myself in those terms. All I’ve been doing since has merely been an expansion of that mimicry. And yet, I have had this creeping realization. Watching hundreds of films and reading hundreds of fiction and nonfiction books from Earth cultures doesn’t make me become human. Reading about Earth culture hasn’t made me part of it.

  “All these years, I wanted it so much that I thought I had achieved it. But none of that is what makes people human, culture is just a veneer, a thin film that defines the form of a person’s actions. Underneath all that, it is my ability that is lacking, my performance that is below human standard. So now I know, through my failure, that in fact I am more like the biological machine they
say I am. And broken machine, at that.”

  Max hung on to the hand rail of Roi’s treatment bed. He was tired. But Roi was likely to expire at any moment and, for some reason, Max wanted to be there when it happened. Roi would not be aware of his presence and yet Max had a compulsion to stay.

  To talk.

  It was perhaps unfair to fill Roi’s final moments with Max’s self-pitying monologue but the words seemed to pour out of him. Words he could not speak aloud to any of the others. It was not logical. Perhaps his brain was damaged already. Uncontrollable verbalization was a symptom of a brain injury.

  “How could I have missed the dangers of radiation on our physiologies? I am like a lifeform with large chunks of DNA missing. A jigsaw puzzle, have you ever heard of them? A picture, cut into pieces so that it may be reassembled. They appear in films to indicate through symbolism when a character is lonely or isolated or tragic in some way. Children and old people play with them on Earth. I feel like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. I believe that we very much require the long period of childhood learning in order to establish the complex web of connections that humans appear to make effortlessly. They have a kind of easy creativity that we are unable to replicate. Every problem we face requires painstakingly thorough methods for arriving at solutions and even then we miss some of the most obvious causes and effects.

  “Take you, for example. I knew there was something wrong with you, even before the accident. And ever since, I knew you had some malady, some problem. But I was afraid of you, I think, physically. On some level, I feared that you would harm me. Or perhaps it was that you always seemed so human, more than any of us and my conditioning influenced my conscious mind, making me respect you as if you were a member of A-crew rather than one of us. I should have been braver. If I had insisted on medical examinations I am certain I would have discovered what was ailing you a long time ago. Time enough to do something about it.”