Adam's Rings

by Matthew D. White

  Adam felt a brief chill run down his back. “Don’t give me a big head or anything,” he added, trying to push the thought away.

  “Is this troubling to you?”

  “Maybe a little,” he admitted. “Don’t worry, I’ll talk it over with the doc when she arrives for the trip.”

  ***

  Without warning, the world of Draco Station had crashed into that of Planet Earth, and Adam was becoming acutely aware of the scale of the task ahead. For most of his memory on the station, he had considered the entirety of humanity, literally everyone else alive, with no more than a wave of the hand and a mild dismissal. The idea that there were likely billions of people around the planet who knew his name was a painful revelation that he wished he could unlearn.

  On most days, his problems were his own, levied against the station or to Mission Control, but to be someone of high regard? Adam felt as if with that mantel he had no right to gripe about the petty and insignificant. The understanding that someone somewhere looked up to him and that they could one day be dependent on his conduct gave him a renewed sense of purpose. His body might be dust and memories, but that didn’t mean he could throw aside such a high commitment and honorable calling.

  Ambassador

  Adam was waiting in the observatory when Erin finally arrived from her last transit from Gemini. He heard the airlock cycle and her footsteps approach but found his gaze transfixed on the planet rotating outside. Seeing it now and taking in its every wisp of cloud and subtle undulation gave him a newfound appreciation which he had long since taken for granted.

  “Hey, thanks for the greeting,” Erin announced. “Nice of you to let me in.”

  “Sorry, I’m just thinking. Didn’t want to lose my train of thought,” he said, hardly looking away.

  Erin raised an eyebrow but took a seat beside her host. “Thinking about what?”

  “Just our place in all of this.” He sighed. “Do people really look up to us back on Earth?”

  “Of course,” she replied. “People have respect for tremendous dedication. Is that all that’s bothering you?”

  “I think so.”

  They sat together in silence a minute longer, watching the yellow orb rotate gently outside. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

  “Aye.” Adam nodded. “I’ll certainly miss this.”

  “That’s the thing with life. There’s always a new adventure. Imagine seeing Earth like this. As far as you know, it’s only weeks away.”

  He thought back to the globe in the museum so long ago. The memory was tattered, dusty, and frayed in his mind, the magic long since bleached from the surface. “You think it compares to this?”

  “For you, very much. The detail is incredible from orbit,” Erin said, “from the clouds to the oceans. Forests, deserts, mountain ranges. A million years of survival spread out before you like a scroll.”

  He leaned back. “We’ll see. Tell me,” he finally turned, “if we’re admired, that puts our issues in a new perspective.”

  “Not as much as you think,” Erin advised. “We all have our tics, and no one’s as saccharine as others think. We’re all just people.” She got to her feet.

  “So, we’re people?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve had the time to think about it,” Erin replied. “Come on, no more moping. Let’s see this ship you’ve built so we can get to flying.

  ***

  The greater concern over his mission for humanity faded into the darkness as Adam took a final pass through his command center. There would be extensive discussions with the scientific teams back on Earth, lectures to the public and all manner of public relations, but it didn’t shake the sense of unease at the thought of leaving his home behind. Granted, it would only be months, as far as he was concerned, although nearly a decade of aging would wear at the polished metal surfaces before he’d again set foot on Draco Station.

  All the data had been copied over and the payloads delivered. The screens were dark, save one with a lone mission emblem, leaving the room illuminated by the emergency strip lighting along the edges of the floor. “Draco, I’m going to miss you,” he finally said. “I’d never been able to do it without you.”

  “Your concern is noted, although I am unable to reciprocate,” Draco replied. “You have been an asset to the mission, and I fully expect you to skillfully continue to execute your required duties.”

  “Thanks. It’s comforting to know you’ll keep the place afloat.”

  “There’d be no other way. You’d best be moving; the doctor is waiting.”

  Adam hung his head and retreated from the room. The final screen went dark behind him, followed by the shuttering of the observatory windows.

  In the transport’s command module, Erin looked up as her companion finally entered. “Say your goodbyes?”

  “Yup,” he said. “I’m trying to remind myself that it’s not forever. It’s more like leaving for the weekend.”

  “As far as we’re concerned, that’s pretty accurate,” Erin said with a nod. “You’ve done a good job giving Draco some personality. Gemini is still more stoic than I am.”

  “You sure you’re not just being facetious?” he asked rhetorically.

  “No more than you,” Erin quipped as she settled into the seat beside the commander, tightening the restraints across her waist and shoulders. “We about ready for this burn?”

  “As we’ll ever be,” Adam replied, watching her every move.

  His heart unexpectedly skipped and his mind fluttered away, for a moment transported to an imagined past. Somehow, he wasn’t a nameless business associate flying a bus at the behest of his superiors. In the command module, things were more personal; decisions that he made could easily extinguish both their lives without anyone else being the wiser. The responsibility of acting as a protector fused with a similar memory beneath an identical starfield, instantly truncating every second between the days, rendering the entire passage near instantaneous.

  “Hey,” Erin said, snapping her fingers. “Cap’n Adam!” she said again.

  Adam shook away the sensation. “What?”

  “You spaced out for a second there.” She caught his eye. “Don’t go crazy now. Playing hide and seek once you snap and go on a murder spree would be lame in this tin can.”

  “Right,” Adam said, letting the memory fade. “Launch window’s open. Let’s get moving.” He hit the pneumatic control key to his left and heard a pop as the transport disconnected from the station and began to drift away from the spinning ring.

  A map of the telemetry tracked the opening movement of their process as the engines ignited, nudging the ship ahead of Draco and closer toward the planet below. Adam felt himself be pressed into the seat as they picked up speed. It wasn’t the roller-coaster ride of the probe launch mission, although he was keenly aware of his passenger beside him. The force grew as the came closer to the gas giant’s eternal hurricane, gaining velocity enough to kick them free of the gravitational well on the far side of the planet.

  On the screen, the ship’s cursor advanced a miniscule amount as they rolled forward. “Most aggressive… trip… I’ve taken…” Erin’s words were staccato above her shortened breaths and tightened core, which continually fought against the acceleration’s drive to collapse her chest.

  “No kidding… Don’t worry… It pass soon… gaining speed…” Adam replied, his focus locked on the gauges before him. The force began to ease back as the acceleration stabilized.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” Erin said, taking in a deep breath.

  “We’ve got a few hours on this side of the planet,” Adam reminded her. “It’ll get a little worse when we go in for the hook.”

  “So, we’ve got some time.” The doctor spun her seat to face the officer in charge. “Have you given any thought to what you will talk about?”

  “To who?”

  “Mission Control. The media. Dreher hasn’t let it slip, but I’m sure we’ll get sent to at least one hearing
with some government folks. Probably some academic lectures too. My advice: save the dry stuff for the scientists. As for the rest, you remember what it was like when you first woke up on the station, right? Give them a vision of what we’re building out here. Excitement, wonder, majesty; these are what stir people to action.”

  Adam nodded. It was a reminder that Erin was still the professional, brought as intended through the program to espouse all that was meant by their high position. “Is there anything lined up for you?” he asked, genuinely wondering how different their arrival on Earth would be.

  “Not yet, but remember we’re still years away. I’m sure it’ll be more focused, since my mission is fairly well-established and nowhere near complete.” She paused. “I know you still want to find answers.”

  “To what?”

  “As to whether you’re human,” Erin clarified. “It doesn’t need to, but I know the whole thing still gets you in a twist.” She smiled. “We’re here, we’re self-aware, and we take responsibility for our actions. That’s as human as it gets.”

  “Even if we’re not entirely the same?”

  “All that happened is that we were hooked up to a machine while developing; no big deal. I don’t think I’m tracking on you.”

  “Draco gave me a full rundown of it all a while back,” Adam said. “There was more genetic work done beyond that to keep us viable out here. Logically, there’s a point where they make enough changes, deactivate enough synapses, and mutate enough genes that we cease to be people and are… what?” He shrugged. “Skin-covered machines? Hollow vessels? Products like the stations themselves? We just perform our function until we expire.”

  “It’s no different than if we had been brought from Earth,” Erin corrected him. She sighed, thinking back on the conditioning within her formal program. “It’s something you understand in training. There are circumstances out here that are dangerous and a whole lot that will kill you without giving a thought. It’s entirely within mission parameters that you do something on purpose that will end your life or that Mission Control knowingly tells you to take such an action. It’s not them being evil; it’s the reality of life at the edge. If the mission really matters, you’re able to make that choice.”

  Adam sank back and relented. “Maybe it’s easier when you’ve had the chance to make the choice.”

  “I don’t doubt that. I’ve had the benefit of developing my own conclusions,” Erin said, relaxing her harness. “If you want to know what I’ve found, I’ll show you everything.”

  ***

  The burn around the planet completed with little more than some pressure and the occasional vibration as the tiny craft sliced through the upper layers of atmosphere. Erin and Adam floated in the cargo hold, watching through a rear-facing port as their home began to recede into the distance. It went without saying that what lay in front of them was untold darkness, forever by any reasonable measure, wherein they would be drifting for years to come.

  “It’s almost time,” Erin regrettably whispered.

  “I know. Best we get on with it.”

  They remained a moment longer, drifting in silence along with the visage of their overseer, before Erin led their procession via a string of handholds to the Orbital Genesis tubes against the wall. She took a deep breath and slipped inside the one to the left, moving to close the canopy as Adam caught the shield of glass.

  “Listen,” he said, their eyes catching, “this might be it. If we don’t make…”

  Erin stopped him mid-thought with a shake of her head. “None of that talk from you. We’re going to be fine. As far as we’re concerned, we’ll only spend a minute apart.” She smiled as the glass fell and separated the pair, continuing her gaze until the swirling fumes overtook her body. The doctor’s features soon relaxed and her shoulders fell as if asleep.

  Adam choked back a tear as her eyes slid closed and allowed himself to float back, looking over the control panel to the side which displayed an array of green statuses. He felt a chill descend in the building sense of isolation and he looked to his matching tube, a sense of hope and fear mixing within his mind. Fighting the urge to step across the threshold, the mission commander returned to the flight deck.

  One last time in the pilot’s seat, Adam was overcome by the deafening silence around him. He switched on the flight recorder. “Sergey, Doctor Moroder is out and I’ll be following close behind, so this will likely be my final transmission until we’re on final approach. Thank you, for everything. I know how much harder all of this must be for you than it is for me. I also realize you’ve got some time before we arrive, so please indulge a request.”

  Adam sighed. “I want to understand how I fit into humanity. When we arrive, I’d like to meet my parents.”

  ***

  Suppressing the fear and claustrophobia, Adam relaxed as the canopy of his own tube dropped into place before his chest. The atmosphere instantly began to mix with a rush of the life-preserving chemicals, swirling to all sides and enveloping him in a fog. His field of vision began to narrow, and within his head, Adam began to lose his grip on how long he had been in the tube. He superimposed two scenarios, one where he had just stepped into the coffin a minute earlier and the other where he had been there forever. The pair of conflicting hypotheses diverged little; he was no longer certain that time itself was even passing anymore. Adam’s eyes flickered shut.

  He blinked, intently aware of a miniscule change in the transport bay. He looked closer at the racks of equipment, sure that something had changed in the shape of the shadows. The lock on the pod released, and Adam’s heart jumped at the sound. There was no need to immediately evacuate the Genesis tube; something must have gone wrong. The glass canopy lifted away and he floated free once again. The fear within his mind gave way to his collected training. Adam pushed away, aiming for the flight deck and the nexus of all information on the ship, hardly noticing the status of his companion when a booming voice echoed through the space.

  “Welcome to Earth, Captain Montgomery.”

  Adam froze and braced for impact against the far wall, holding on tight as each word processed. Sergey’s inflection was immediately recognizable. “You’re here?” he managed, his voice dry and cracking but still loud enough for the intercom’s microphone to pick up.

  He laughed. “My friend, you have that all wrong. Two years, three hundred eleven days, and six hours: that’s what it takes to ship you halfway across the solar system.”

  The astronaut’s eyes flashed about. “That’s… that was it?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised. You’ve missed your share. About a dozen new kids in the building, five or six weddings, the director’s wife beating back cancer, and me flipping my roadster last spring.”

  It couldn’t be true, Adam told himself as he spun about and pushed forward to the flight deck. He passed the bulkhead and caught a glint of blue from the leading array of windows. There in the distance, scarcely larger than a marble at arm’s length, rested a single turquoise orb. Adam’s heart skipped at the sight, just large enough to identify land from sea and with a closer inspection, catch the random swirls of cloud above.

  The sight smote Adam’s heart, the tiny dot presenting itself as the whole of human existence, a thousand wars and constant strife fought for a speck of dust thought by the species to be eternal, while at the same time remaining unimaginably small and fragile. He continued to stare and refused to blink, as if it were a vision so fragile that any glance away or a whispered word would cause it to evaporate into the ether. The only source of life in all the cosmos rested before him, so close as if to touch.

  “Cap’n, you still with me? The ship says your breathing a little fast.”

  Adam tore his focus from the view. “Yeah, I’m still here.”

  “Good. You’ve got a couple days on approach, but the computer will handle most of the flying. Best check in on your co-pilot.”

  Still lost in the embrace of the planet outside and wrapped up as it had
enveloped the whole of the universe to leave them the sole inhabitants, Adam tore himself away. His heart beat faster at the thought of seeing Erin again, a growing sense of worry as to her current state. Her glass canopy had just released as Adam floated across the cargo area, and he caught himself at the edge of the bulkhead nearest the pod.

  Dr. Moroder looked about the cabin, blinking hard and fast as if to sway a persistent vision. She caught sight of Adam above. “What’s wrong?” she immediately demanded.

  “Nothing. We’ve made it,” he said, in a tone of faint surprise.

  “That can’t be,” Erin replied, shaking her head. “We just launched.”

  “I said the same thing. Come see for yourself,” Adam replied and gestured to the flight deck.

  Erin’s eyes widened. “You don’t know how to lie that good,” she said and pushed off from the tube, sailed past Adam, and on to the forward capsule.

  “Hey now, I’d lie for you, and that’s the truth,” Adam added with a smirk, egging on his braggadocios companion.

  She stopped at the sight, realizing she had tried and failed to call Adam’s bluff. The moment of solace turned into a minute as she traced her eyes across the tiny orb. “I don’t think it’s changed since I left it,” she admitted, “but however they implanted the memory, I don’t think they did justice to the detail.”

  “You’ve got that backwards,” Adam replied. “You’ve never laid eyes on Earth before. All you’ve seen is what you’ve imagined.”

  “Welcome home, Dr. Moroder,” another voice spoke up.

  “Jim!” Erin exclaimed. “You’re still here?” She turned to Adam. “My liaison back here. I don’t think I ever sent him more than the minimum updates required by the admin.”

  “That sounds very much like you,” Adam said. “What’s the plan for getting on the ground? You left it a little ambiguous before.”