Adam's Rings

by Matthew D. White

  In his head, he had proven his abilities as a pilot to the demanding standards of a station-borne AI. The orbital mechanics, flight planning, piloting, and experimental dross of the operation had been his doing, such as it was beyond the range of Draco’s direct instruction and intervention.

  He was proud of the accomplishment, to be sure, and to have the experimental load of Janus’s rock cores was an added bonus. He didn’t have a perfect image of how he would study them, but regardless of the particulars, it’d be an operation he’d be repeating fifty times over. Adam ran through the processing in his head for the hundredth time, imagining the workflow he’d need to hit all of the scanning devices. Draco could handle the data transcription, that much was clear, but to have the AI assist in making sense of what they found remained to be seen.

  There was nothing else of interest for Adam on the tiny, empty world. It had nearly taken his life, but he had earned his keep and with any luck would return with enough data for the trip to be worth the effort. Not wanting to waste time in the launch window, Adam began the procedures to leave the moon behind him.

  Although his ship was heavy with the combined mass of the extracted rock, the booster stage easily pushed them through Janus’s escape velocity and sent the lander flying along its way back to Draco Station. Adam had initially been concerned over the launch, but it merely took a touch of the controls to clear them off the nonexistent atmosphere, the rocket’s exhaust blowing up a wide cloud of dust in the process.

  The flight path was set to take the lander counter to the orbits of the planet’s satellites and instead have the ship intersect Draco as it cleared Saturn on its next pass. As Adam had anticipated, Saturn again hung in front of the flight deck, casting its pale reflected light across the control panels. Regardless of him going many times the speed of sound, the body appeared motionless, as if unencumbered by a human’s definitions of speed, size, or distance. It’d grow enough over the coming days, Adam knew, and before too long the field trip would be complete and he’d be back to work as the arrival of the next team grew increasingly close.

  A Triumphant Return

  Dr. Moroder found the whole exercise continually problematic. While she had taken to her work seamlessly upon her arrival, or more appropriately awakening, she found herself drawn to the boy on the far side of the planet. After wasting no time in building a communications satellite, literally from scratch in a manner of days, she had now found herself lost without him for over two weeks.

  It was not in her nature to crave contact or companionship from other fleshies; her mind was active enough most of the time and constantly churned over the data that was pouring in from the arrays. In a way she was the human collection appliance which would turn the background noise of the universe into a wonderous tapestry of creation, by which all of Earth would understand the world in which they lived. The mission could have been accompanied by a coronation and a crown, for as much as the doctor respected it, yet here she was, looking forward to chatting with some boy who didn’t belong anywhere close to her side of the solar system.

  Gemini Station kept the channel open for a full hour every day during the recalibration of the arrays, and while bursts occasionally arrived from Earth, Draco Station had remained dark. It wasn’t that she feared for the integrity of the facility itself; after the initial badgering, Gemini had reluctantly posted a daily status for the outpost on her primary command display, and so far it had yet to dip out of its solid green status. More than twice since the blackout, she had been tricked by the system, spurring her to snap to attention with the brief bursts of static. She felt at once annoyed by the action, yet at the same time embarrassed she had become apparently soft toward other people in her domain. When a message from Adam finally did arrive, it caught her by surprise.

  “There you are!” she exclaimed at the smiling face that appeared on the monitor. “I haven’t heard from you in ages.”

  “It wasn’t that long. Besides, I thought you enjoyed working on your own,” Adam replied after his brief salutation.

  “Yes, but that’s different,” Erin stalled. “I didn’t expect you to go dark without warning is all.”

  “I suppose that’s accurate,” Adam admitted, “but I was only taking your expert advice.”

  Erin shook her head. “Which is?”

  “As you said, I should make the most of my time here. Check it out,” Adam replied and held a silver tube up to the camera.

  Erin looked quizzical. “You… made the most of your time by repairing the plumbing. Dare I ask what you did to ruin it to begin with? Nothing involving another slipped multi-caster beam, I hope.”

  “No, no, no.” Adam shook his head. “This is the first core from the crust of Janus. You’re looking at a few hundred million years of history.”

  “You… Went to Janus?”

  “Exactly,” Adam replied proudly. “Planned, executed, and recovered perfectly, if I do say so myself.”

  “Well I’ll be; you’re starting to think for yourself. You weren’t even bluffing,” Erin said approvingly.

  “I figured you’d say something like that.”

  “And you took core samples?”

  “Yes. A hundred and fifty meters of the damned things.”

  Erin laughed. “Bulky, much?”

  “You have no idea. It’s taken me forever to get them out of the lander.”

  “I see. And how will they be contributing to your plan for world domination?”

  “I don’t know; I haven’t thought that far ahead yet,” Adam admitted, attempting to draw more information from her. “Why, do you have any good ideas?”

  “Of course, and plenty of them. You’ve got a billion-dollar lab over there; I’d work your way down through the layers and scan for all the mineral densities. That way you can create a timeline for the successive impacts, and if you can measure anything radiological, get an estimate for the age of the moon. If there’s anything out of place, you can identify bombardments from extra-solar objects.”

  “Thanks. I’m glad I wasn’t too far off.”

  “Why? Dare I ask what you were considering?”

  Adam set the tube aside. “Well, I was thinking since all I need is a strong, multispectral imaging system, if I set the cores outside the station, could you image them using Gemini?”

  Erin sighed. “Now I know you’re full of it. Didn’t you just say you have work to do?”

  “Of course, as do you,” Adam replied. “Thanks for the advice. I’ll let you get back to business.”

  “Anytime. It’s good to hear you’re back in one piece. Until next time,” Erin said and closed the channel, again leaving her in the silence of her command center. Come to think of it, the name was a misnomer, unless she could really be the commanding officer of herself and still claim the title.

  Adam’s return was a relief across the board, and on some level, she was happy that he was able to make use of his youthful drive. Pulling meaningful data from whatever he had recovered would likely be more arduous than they both made it out to be, but it wasn’t as if he had anything else to do for the moment. If nothing else, having the practice would pay dividends once it came to performing his actual function. She smiled to herself, knowing she wasn’t alone, even if she was the most isolate person in the history of humanity.

  ***

  Standing in the docking bay, Adam had a workbench covered with the filled tubes, numbered one through fifty. On an adjacent table was the mass spectrometer, set to feed the first sample through the center. With extreme care, Adam released the clamshell halves of the tube and pulled it apart, revealing a delicate structure of gray, porous, and striated rock that was intermixed with bits of shiny specks. From what he had seen in person, it wasn’t all that much different the deeper he went. The sight was unremarkable in its banality, how it was markedly similar to a pile of snow scraped from his street back home and mixed with random bits of tar and road grit. He locked it in place and felt the stepper motor on the si
de begin to pull the metal sleeve into the box.

  At every centimeter, the machine paused to image the sample and roll through a battery of tests. As it slowly chugged forward, the screen on the box began to populate with dozens of numbers. “What did we find?” Adam asked his station, checking them over.

  “I find it amazing you didn’t destroy these during your travels,” Draco said. “This material has a remarkably low density, but at the same time is fairly robust. At this time, I’m confident the water content acted as a binding agent to hold the moon together and keep it from losing mass during collisions.”

  The screen showed the percentage content of a range of lighter elemental metals, as Adam had expected to see. “That’s accurate. It was like walking on a dry, or I guess in this case frozen, sponge-like foam.”

  “These upper layers are built from the clouds kicked up by other impact events, while a local event would pulverize it into a hardened plate. Time will tell whether you went deep enough to find the source of your impact crater.”

  “Don’t say that. There’s no way I’m gonna turn around and go do that whole run all over again.”

  “It’s just as well; you’re beginning to run short on time. Twenty-seven days.”

  Adam knew the day of the next crew’s arrival was approaching quickly, but the number seemed decidedly smaller than he had imagined. He was conflicted over the coming change to their operation. On one side, he knew it was the ultimate purpose for the station, but at the same time, his current life seemed calm and familiar. “Great. Do you think I’m ready?”

  “From all that I can observe, yes,” Draco confirmed. “Although the only one who can truly answer that is you. You’ll need to prove yourself as the mission commander without the benefit of their lifetime of preparation. I can teach you from a book, but I cannot give you the confidence that only comes from tempered failure.”

  The prospect was continually daunting as Adam continued to watch the sample feed through the machine. Maybe he would turn out to be the technical expert of the station, but at the moment, he felt nothing of the sort. The first tube completed and Adam replaced it with the second, mulling over his prospects within his head. He refrained from saying anything more.

  Three more samples passed through the spectrometer before Draco spoke up again. “I’m detecting an anomaly between millimeters one-two-zero and one-four-four. Please extract a sample and deposit it in the microscope in the lab for further analysis.”

  The announcement was surprising, but Adam complied with the AI’s request and scanned down the exposed, foamy material until he located the area in question. He sliced it away with a razor and deposited a thin layer of the sample on a glass slide. “Done. On its way.”

  With Draco continuing to draw the current core through the spectrometer, Adam carefully made his way up the access ladder and into the lab. The scanning electron microscope was about the size of a small refrigerator, overbuilt like a kiln and fitted with an array of controls across a screen outside. Adam placed the slide in the testing chamber and waited on the machine to cycle. Altogether, he spent as little time in the lab as he was physically able, with each experience carrying with it a harbinger of destruction. Between the fire in the now-discarded support pod, his impromptu surgery, and occasional psychotic breakdowns, Adam was content in letting a dedicated medical officer call it their home.

  He sighed as the device began to hum, thinking back on the questionable decisions that had previously led him to question his purpose. Three more of the Orbital Genesis growth pods were built into the opposing wall to Adam’s left, and he scanned across each one in turn, wondering to their purpose now that he was seemingly the only astronaut they were planning to produce. He paced down the room and paused at the last one, noticing a thin layer of condensation had built within the chamber, as well as a bit of grime which had settled across the padded back wall.

  “Do you ever clean these things?” Adam asked his overseer, looking closer. He felt a chill run down his spine. “Are they… used?”

  “Yes, in a manner of speaking.”

  The response was familiar to Adam as a method for Draco to disconnect the conversation and pull it away from a touchy subject. After several exposures to the AI’s literary device, Adam identified it instantly and continued to press. “No riddles. Tell me precisely.”

  “Draco Station had the capability to produce six concurrent units to staff needed positions.”

  “You mean astronauts,” Adam corrected. “People.”

  “Yes. As I was saying, the station initially had six pods to build its staff, although the objective was only to have three. If any of the subjects were deemed to stray from the conditioning to an unacceptable degree, their processes were terminated and material recycled for the remaining units.”

  Adam felt his blood freeze solid. “You killed them. Us, people like me?”

  “Absolutely. As you can attest, you have free will to exercise your life as you wish. While the program is able to provide a genetic predisposition to your specialty and fill your developing mind with enough suggestions to push you down this path, ultimately the choice would have been yours alone.”

  “And if I had chosen wrongly, you would have killed me and fed me to someone else?” Adam indignantly replied.

  “Yes, but you never would have felt it. Your mind would have succumbed to an accident within the fantasy world and a fast-acting toxin would have terminated your life process with no delay or suffering.”

  “Jesus…” Adam choked on the words. “How in the hell did anyone go along with this? Not only are you admitting to harnessing eugenics to build people, but that you cull the herd if they stray from your idea of perfection? What the hell kind of blasted abomination did you make me?” Adam grew more animated, waving his arms. “You build me gene-by-gene, silently knowing you’d kill me if I drift away. I’m not human at all; I’m your damned pet. I’m a damned engineered chimera!”

  “Adam, that is a gross misrepresentation of a generation of work back on Earth. Guiding natural processes at an accelerated rate does not make you an abomination any more than simply training a student to learn certain subjects of interest.”

  “No, that is completely different!” Adam paced the room, seething at the prospect of it all. “And five others? You killed five people so that I could stand here and have this heaped on my shoulders?” He groaned, digging his fingers into his scalp.

  “Do you know how many astronauts humanity lost in accidents throughout their attempts to reach the stars? How many test pilots? Scientists who learned the dangers of radiology the hard way?”

  The words flowed through Adam’s head without his hearing. “How do I live with this, what you’ve told me, what you’ve done?”

  “You will live as you do every other day, except you have a clearer picture of the sacrifices that necessarily conspired to make your life livable.”

  “Sorry, but I think I could have gone without knowing.”

  “Commander, might I remind you that you were the one who asked.”

  “Yes, and you are under no explicit instruction to act as you have.” Adam sighed again, listening as the microscope hummed beside him. “How much longer do you need on this thing?”

  “Several hours, depending on the material concentrations that are identified. You are free to go and continue feeding the spectrometer downstairs.”

  “I will, and then I want an open channel to Sergey.”

  ***

  Mission Control was normally on their game. On most occasions, when Adam had requested a response from the team on Earth, he had one within eight hours of sending the transmission. Today, he had cleared twelve hours and some minutes without sign of a response. Apparently, calling out an entire operation in an extended lashing for being morally deficient was grounds for a more well-worded response than what he would have normally received.

  When the awaited message did arrive, it was not accompanied by the face of his handler Sergey, but
by Dr. Dreher himself. He looked old and tired, as if the subject at hand had taken the last of the energy from his mind.

  “Adam,” he finally said, “I’ve listened to all of your concerns and I hear every one of them. Trust me, I wish there was another way to move people about; we’ve tried it a lot of ways. Sadly, Orbital Genesis has been the only successful method we’ve found for establishing a permanent colony beyond the inner solar system and ensuring our survival as a species. You are the proof-of-concept, standing at the tip of the spear. You’re the culmination of many peoples’ life’s work, of which you should be honored.”

  “Yes, there were ones that didn’t make the cut. In four of the five cases, their mental faculties did not mature in the correct method to allow them to function in space at your level; they would have been a dead weight for whatever we might have attempted to accomplish. In the case of the fifth, he would have been too dangerous. We are continually refining our embryonic development, as well as the imprinting, both of which are critical to building the astronauts we require to make this dream a reality. Future generations of crew members will progress much more smoothly.”

  Dreher paused. “On another subject, I am pleased to hear that Draco Station has identified you as having the necessary training to perform your function when the first full crew arrives from Earth. Now this is something that we need to have a chat about. The Hydra orbiter is managed by a crew of five. They will require your assistance to take the pair of existing heavy capsules to Titan and make landfall, take readings on the surface, and leave behind a barebones installation when you return to Draco.”

  “You will fully fuel the Hydra and provide them with one of the booster engines, which will take their crew to the orbit of Uranus, where they will remain for additional studies, deploy their own draw for refueling, and prepare for a maneuver to Neptune once the geometry becomes viable.” He paused and leaned into the camera.