Adam's Rings

by Matthew D. White

  “The station is still spinning to provide gravity inside, but this means you will need to climb up the outer surface of the skin,” Draco advised. “It will not be difficult as I have reduced our rate significantly to assist in your operation. We are currently producing only a quarter of Earth’s field.”

  Adam took another deep breath and cautiously leaned out, following a conformal set of handholds attached along the pod’s skin. The extent of the station, spread out across his field of view, was only dwarfed by the planet hanging above his head where it felt nearly low enough to touch. Multiple pods were assembled in concentric rings extending outward from a dark spire affixed at the center of the station, like the axle of a gargantuan wheel.

  He knew his hands were white beneath the thick gloves as he kept a death grip on the rungs, following them carefully to the inside of the pod. Feeling the gravity shift, Adam got his feet beneath him and chanced a look above his head. The next ring to the interior was affixed in place a rock’s throw away.

  “You are making good progress,” Draco said. “Continue up the ladder along the next connecting tube.”

  “I thought you assured me this would be difficult,” Adam said with a hint of sarcasm as he followed along the polished titanium landscape. He hit the connecting tube and caught sight of his target hanging in space on the far side. The pod above his head looked to have been perforated by an air-to-air missile, punctured by a myriad of sharp projectiles. The metallic skin had been shredded in places to the point of resembling nothing more than wisps of jagged tin.

  “So, what do you want me to do with this?” Adam asked as he methodically climbed the ladder on the outside of the connecting tube.

  “The multi-caster has five interchangeable tips,” Draco said. “You’ll equip the plasma torch and cut through the skin of the damaged pod at twelve inches from the airlocks on each side. Once both cuts are complete, you’ll let it float away, and I’ll disconnect the inner rings of the airlocks to prevent any further damage to its seals or to the interior of Draco Station. You must work quickly. As the structural integrity of the pod degrades, the possibility for increased harm to the structure will continue to rise.”

  “Perfect,” Adam replied as he got into position on the top of the inner ring. He had the sensation that he was climbing on the scaffolding of a massive carnival ride, about to saw the service platform away from under his feet. He selected the torch and a blue-white jet leapt from the end of the tool. He held it in place above the skin, watching the flickering light reflect off the titanium surface and dance around the darkened interior beneath the torn skin.

  There was no position to be had wherein Adam considered himself an authority and couldn’t effectively question the plan. He plunged the tool down as a shower of sparks scattered from the melted channel, the beam of energy vaporizing the hull as easily as a flame might chew through a sheet of tissue paper.

  The operation proceeded quickly around the joints of the pod. Adam found himself a repeatable process where he could plant himself against the surviving structure, hold on tight to a service rung, and burn through a little more of the skin before repeating the process. With every inch he cleared, he could sense the pod shift its weight, its remaining material being placed under ever increasing stress. The first side went without incident and Adam retraced his steps back down the connecting tube and continued over to the facing side of the pod to complete the task.

  It proceeded as easily as before and Adam quickly found himself immersed in the task, forgetting the enormity of its importance. Similarly, he put aside the absurdity of the persistent vision playing out in the sight of the gas giant hanging in space beside him, now half immersed in shadow. He moved unabated along the second side until the torch drifted toward the airlock. Without warning, the searing blade caught the edge of a pressurized hydraulic line. One of the few undamaged systems in the pod, the sudden heat ruptured the jacket and exploded in a flash of light.

  Adam lost sight of his target in the blast of atomized fluid and felt himself thrown clear from the scaffold, spinning into deep space while his field of view cycled between the metallic station, the darkness of space, and Saturn’s ever-present stare. His heart skipped as he kicked and flapped his arms, instinctively attempting to brush against something to break his fall. “It blew up on me!” he exclaimed, gulping air amidst panicked breaths. “The hold let go; I’m floating free of the station.”

  “That is unfortunate,” Draco stated calmly. “Stay alive. We can’t afford to lose your functionality. Let the slack line run out and climb back to the station. I will need to disconnect the auxiliary lab now before it does any further damage.”

  Grabbing for the close end of the cable, Adam held on tight as he hit the end. The freefall stopped short, as if he hit a brick wall, the tightened cable snapping at its full length. Adam’s acceleration instantly fell to zero and he winced beneath the bone-crushing pain of the harness. He caged his vision on his destination, Draco Station, now at such a range as to resemble a multi-tiered wagon wheel spinning gently in the darkness.

  Draco’s voice again perforated his senses. “The remains of the pod have been detached. Its vector should not intersect yours, but don’t delay in returning. Any piece of shrapnel could damage your suit and cause you to lose pressure.”

  Putting hand over hand on the thin cable, Adam didn’t respond to the command. In the distance, he watched as the pod separated from the station and fluttered away, decaying in dead space like a discarded booster engine. He concentrated on the retreat back to the safety of the station, his mind still in denial about the experience. Behind him, the cable grew long, accompanied by the trailing multi-caster, nearly forgotten amidst Adam’s predicament.

  He likewise gave no consideration for the multitude of names, labels, and national flags emblazoned across Draco Station’s skin. It could have been a cave or the hull of a sailing ship for all he cared. Adam focused on the tiny pot of light shining from the airlock as the line beckoned him to safety. The circle grew larger as he progressed until it grew close enough to grab the handholds. Heaving forward, he tumbled inside and felt his muscles tighten against the exertion, immediately sensing the gravitational field again take hold.

  Adam remained in place as the hatch slammed shut, his pounding heart blocking out his sensory functions. His head spun with the growing realization that the dream in which he found himself could indeed be real. With the line and multi-caster secure, Draco cycled the airlock, and artificial light illuminated the tiny space as Adam shielded his eyes. In little more than a pile on the deck, he unsteadily got to his feet and shuffled over the threshold and into the docking bay.

  A mixture of fear and frustration was painted on his face, and with shaking hands, Adam tore at the protective garments. He pulled the suit apart as he walked, dropping each piece wherever it happened to fall. His field of view was growing narrow as exhaustion overtook his body. The walls blurred. The contents of the dock—large pieces of equipment wrapped in protective sheets—received zero attention from Adam’s normally inquisitive mind. Clearing the protective boots, he stumbled and collapsed upon the deck, unconscious before his head hit the floor.

  New Day

  Sleep was restless at best, as Adam’s mind forcefully replayed memories by the score to convince him of the reality of his life, to reject the current hallucination and accept that once he woke he’d find himself back in his familiar house. Coming around, he felt a hard surface beneath his body, but after cracking his eyes open, he found the space illuminated with nothing brighter than candlelight. His heart jumped at the thought that he had simply fallen on the basement floor or slipped on the stairs, but as he rose, the lights intensified with him, bringing him back to the reality of the docking pod.

  His head pounded as he struggled to sit upright, the memory of the previous day returning from his repressed memories. Adam stared back at the atmospheric suit, still crumpled on the floor where he had left it, trying to make sense
of it all.

  “Welcome back,” Draco’s voice echoed over the intercom. “We have much to do.”

  His reflection was dull in the glass shield of the helmet. It stared back as if to mock the entire predicament. “I’m still here?”

  “Indeed.”

  Adam shook his head. “So, all of this is real?” The rhetorical question permeated the space. “How?”

  “Absolutely, it is,” Draco said. “And don’t worry about how this can be so. There is much information and I’ll provide you the details as needed. How are you feeling?”

  “Headache, and I’m starving,” Adam admitted, the pangs in his stomach growing with every passing minute.

  “Completely anticipated. I will guide you to the living quarters.”

  Adam followed Draco back through the storage pod and observatory to the next installation in the chain, a plush and comforting environment equipped with a row of utility bunk beds conformed along the wall on the right and more storage cabinets. To the left was a shallow alcove which contained a sink barely the size of Adam’s head, and a set of reinforced hoses clamped to the wall that resembled the hardware of an air compressor.

  “The tap on the left is drinking water,” Draco advised. “The others are the nutritional variants produced by the station.”

  The words meant little as Adam tested the waterline, spraying a mist against the wall before turning it toward his mouth. He forced as much as he could down his parched throat, subduing his desire to breathe, before turning to the other lines. They were numbered, but not otherwise labeled, and Adam didn’t wait for any further instruction from the station. The substance in the first tap was revolting, producing a greasy paste that was devoid of identifiable flavor other than raw wheat flour. The second was deep green and gritty, with the overwhelming taste and scent of pureed grass clippings.

  His last attempt was a maroon slime which held conflicting tastes of mild, fatty sweetness with something distinctly bitter along the way. Adam’s stomach didn’t object, so he poured in all he could and ignored his palate’s burning revulsion. The headache began to subside and he replaced the taps before retreating to the closest bed against the facing side of the pod to take a seat.

  “That was disgusting.” Adam stared off as he rested his arms across his knees, feeling the pacifying rush of warming endorphins wash over his body. He absent-mindedly opened the narrow cabinet door to the left of the sink and identified it as a shower of sorts. It contained small jets to all sides and dimensions cramped enough to trigger claustrophobia of even the most seasoned submariner. As he rested, the events of the day began to slowly reassemble themselves within his head. The experience remained petrifying and without cause. “You’ve got some explaining to do,” he finally declared. “What the hell is all this?”

  Adam heard no response, so he repeated the question more forcefully. “Draco Station, answer me!”

  “You are right, we do owe you a full accounting of how you have come to be here,” Draco admitted with the timidity of a child caught in a lie. “Since the dawn of the Space Age, one of the greatest challenges facing humanity was in keeping astronauts alive during their travels to the stars. Voyages measured in months or years are relatively easy, aside from the fuel consumption, personal maintenance, and mental toughness of the crew. This problem becomes compounded over longer durations; if humanity seriously decided to fly for the stars, generations of personnel would live their entire lives in the gap, never seeing Earth nor their eventual destinations, leading to mental disorders and rebellious crews. Aside from the significant resource consumption, this was considered to be morally deficient.

  “Additionally, suspended animation has for decades been a topic of debate among the researchers, but to this day they have been unable to produce anything of operational viability. The scientists working on the problem decided to look elsewhere.” Draco continued, “Agency researchers decided instead to focus on producing their operators on demand, as needed by the mission. Rather than restore a frozen astronaut, it was far easier to put a blastocyst into a suspended state, and then use a combination of genetic triggers and nutrient-rich fuel to accelerate its development into a fully-formed person in a fraction of the natural cycle.”

  Adam’s glazed eyes hovered over the set of taps beside the utility sink, in a way feeling as if he was looking at himself in some sort of disassembled form. There was no great mystery in his past; if there was truth to what the voice stated, he was simply grown as needed like a vegetable in an orbital hydroponic garden. “And that’s me?” Adam asked.

  “Correct.”

  “That’s bullshit. I had an entire life back home. I remember it like—”

  “All part of the conditioning,” Draco replied. “The research team developed a protocol to synthesize memories, borrowing them from people who did live those experiences and implanting them within you. As you went along, you received prompts while filling in the gaps yourself. Guidance was provided in order to build your mental faculties and strengthen your grasp on language and mathematics while propelling you to astronomic sciences.”

  “But all my friends, my family…” Adam’s voice trailed off. His thoughts drifted to his one relationship of young infatuation, as short as it was, over the previous summer. “Becca? Who were they?”

  “They were based on people who once lived, that is true. As you remember them, they were no one. No one who ever existed,” Draco said. “They were all figments of your imagination, created in part by optimal suggestions along the way. You gave them names and had significant influence over what you did together.”

  “So, it was all a lie?” Adam asked, hugging his knees tightly against his chest. He felt a growing disgust upon having to refute his personal history.

  “Don’t think of it like that. They were your memories, and as such are a part of your life, making you who you are today.”

  “If that’s the issue, then who am I?” Adam demanded, tears forming in the corners of his eyes at the thought of everything he knew being pulled away. “Where are my parents? My family? My friends?”

  “In the year 2020, after building successful and sustainable habitats in Earth’s orbit, on the Moon, and a proof-of-concept on Mars, the agency set their sights on the outer planets. The decision was made to focus their efforts on reaching Saturn, since it was a proper balance in the middle of the solar system. The distance provided a better proving ground for deep-space missions, the composition of the planet gave more opportunities for study, and the environment itself could be mined for expansive fuel and resources.”

  Adam’s head began burning again, and his mind recalled the spire hovering above the station. “Mining? From a gas giant? Do you mean like a hydrogen pump?” he asked, running through a long mental list of articles and stories from the publications he had scoured in the library. Something jumped from deep within his memory, a blurb about a way to harvest fuel from gas giants. “Wasn’t that just a test at JPL? It’s decades from being launched.”

  “From your perspective, yes, but remember you’re a few years off. The hydrogen draw, which is a combination fuel-gathering system and power plant, was the first payload of more than thirty launches that were vectored to our orbit, which I was tasked with assembling on arrival. Your pod arrived later to begin your gestation.”

  “This is real? All of it?” Adam asked, getting to his feet and staggering back to the observatory against a throbbing sensation behind his temples. Saturn remained in place beyond the wall of glass, with three-quarters of it as dark as night, but with the terminator slowly retreating in the coming dawn. “How did you need me? I’m no one.”

  “You were never intended to wake this early in your development, and you never should have known about this process,” Draco said. “You were to have lived a fulfilled adolescence, all the while with the overwhelming desire to travel to the stars. You’d study hard and fight your way through an engineering fellowship, a commission in the space program, and brutal selecti
on to find yourself selected for the first mission to the outer planets. In a perfect world, your journey would have begun by being dropped into suspended animation on Earth, only to arise here ready to command the station without ever being the wiser.”

  “But…” Adam changed his focus, seeing his face in the pale reflection. He was a child, tiny and afraid. His world had crashed and burned and he was lost in totality. “I’m none of those things.”

  “That is the unfortunate truth, I agree,” Draco said. “I can only offer you solace in the knowledge that you will live the fullest life of anyone who has ever existed.”

  The face which reflected in the glass wall appeared unimpressed against the swirling layer of clouds. He felt the remnants of a shattered existence slipping through his fingers to be scattered in the wind.

  “You were literally born for this, but therein lies a problem: you are short no less than eight intensive years of study to be qualified to perform your mission upon Draco Station.”

  Adam watched his reflection sink lower. “You can help me with that, right?”

  “Of course, but we’re now operating without the benefit of your suspended state. You’ll need to get caught up in approximately one-fifth the time originally allotted.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “That’s when the Hydra orbiter and its crew is slated to arrive on their way to Uranus and the station will perform its first operational mission; we have twenty months.”

  “Great,” Adam said with a shrug. “Well then I suppose we best get moving. Put me to work, boss.”

  “That is the spirit,” Draco replied, the inflection disjointed from the jovial response. “However, we have received the first transmission from Earth since I informed them of our unfortunate accident. The agency director has a message for you.”