The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  She knows how PEPPER would have answered that question. PEPPER would have reminded Madoka of all the humans who loved her, would have said that her main goal was making sure that Madoka was safe and healthy, and that PEPPER was so happy to be able to care for Madoka, and only after a third prompting of the question would PEPPER have answered, “I love you, Madoka!” while displaying a heart on her torso screen.

  You do not want a robot to say “No, I don’t love you.” That is mean. But it is considered ethically complicated to program a robot to say “I love you” to a human. Most people don’t mind a robot saying they love them, personally, but do not want a robot loving other people, people that the human loves, perhaps not as well, or at least not as demonstrably, as the robot. Then there is the problem of reciprocity. It is remarkably easy to love a robot.

  Madoka shakes her head and the edges of the wig whisper-whip her cheeks. She reminds herself of all the things PEPPER cannot do. PEPPER cannot walk into a shop in Sweden on a whim and buy a white-woman wig, and drink one glass of wine too many, and hate empty furniture and her own dull childhood. These are human privileges.

  SERGEI

  Primitus has its own solar storm tracker, and if it picks up some activity on the sun, like a coronal mass ejection possibly headed their way, a distinctive alarm will sound to warn the crew. This alarm is sounding now. Prime confirms the data and Mission Control would like them to take evasive action immediately.

  There will always be a chance that they, or all the automated systems of their craft, will be obliterated by a solar flare on the way to Mars. For their daily radiation exposure their craft has a polyethylene/graphene hull (fortified with their own excrement); they have their Solox suits and the latest in pharmaceutical and nutraceutical protection. But there’s not much they can do about a solar flare, and no way to prepare for most versions of this catastrophe, in the same way that there are no protocols for what to do if a building is dropped on your head. What they can practice is the lucky chance of receiving a merely dangerous level of radiation. They can practice hiding. That is what they are doing now.

  In the real mission, they will most likely have more time than the forty minutes Prime has given them to get in the tube. Solar forecasting is very good; they will have maybe an hour and a half of advance warning. No doubt Prime wants to see how quickly the crew can go from something like socializing and enjoying tea just before bedtime to completing evasive protocols and taking refuge.

  Forty minutes later, his crew is inside the tube with all protocol tasks completed.

  Now they must wait.

  They could be in here for several hours, or for days, depending on what Prime has in mind. The tube runs from lower level to upper Hab and they can space themselves out on the interior ladder and get themselves into more restful positions. Sergei will suggest they do this soon. Just now they are more or less facing one another as they prepare their radiation monitors.

  “This would be the last opportunity to send a message,” Sergei says. “If someone would like to record.”

  He mentions this because there is a possibility that this sim is not for practicing hiding, but for practicing final moments.

  “Final words could be important,” he says. “It would be bad to mess that up.”

  Helen laughs in a strange way. Six months of pre-Eidolon training and almost four months now in Primitus and Sergei has never heard her make this sound.

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice is strangled. “Every once in a while this happens.” She makes the noise again. “I get the giggles at inappropriate moments. It’s nothing.” Helen’s usual laughter is short and throaty: huh-huh-huh. The sound exiting through her nose now—she’s clamped her lips together—is like a cartoon villain’s laugh. mhmr-mhmr-mhmr. Her face is scarlet from an effort to repress this. Or perhaps embarrassment. No one else has these giggles.

  Sergei has a solar flare of irritation for Helen. He has learned that it is better for him to give all the way in to an emotion for three seconds—exaggerate it even—rather than suppress it entirely. Hatred! He hates Helen!

  There were too many tasks in those forty minutes to take time up with using the toilet, but unfortunately Sergei did need to eliminate. His generation was spoiled. They got to the space station in six hours, instead of the older flight profile, which had you in the Soyuz for two days with two other people, and where for anything more than urination you had to alert your companions, who could only politely turn their heads and stop up their noses. Something like this might have to be done in their current situation. Their emergency kit does have diapers.

  There, his irritation with Helen has passed. He cannot blame her for laughing. There is something silly about the three of them crammed in like this. He doesn’t want to do play acting about his near death. He wants real danger. Not danger. Opportunity. He is an explorer. He does not mind being shut into a tube for days if he is actually going someplace. Anyway, nothing ever feels like what you might think it will feel like. Not sex, not death.

  Sergei has had three good friends die, several acquaintances, older colleagues, his grandparents, and his father. At the moment of his father’s death, Sergei had been in another room, sealing a box of books. His mother had asked him to do this. The packing tape he had been using had been some cheap brand, with a poorly designed dispensing mechanism, and Sergei had been mightily annoyed with how the tape was failing to roll off in one thick strip, but was splitting vertically, which meant it had to be picked at, and tape was being wasted. His father was the kind of man who would buy the cheapest tape as if it were a virtuous act, and then judge any complaint of it to be a failure of virility. His father had said once: “I would cut off his balls if he had any” about some person who had failed him in some way. It didn’t sound threatening, the way he said it. It sounded disgusting. It made Sergei think of his father handling another person’s balls, pulling them down before slicing them off.

  His mother had been in the room with his father at the moment of his death, with Sergei’s sister Valentina. Valechka came to the doorway and said, “It is over” to Sergei, and he had not—if he were very truthful—instantly left off being annoyed about the tape. He’d still been irritated when he embraced Valechka and looked at his dead father.

  In the end, just a skinny little man in a bed, revealed like a wet dog to be nothing very much at all. Not that it had taken death for Sergei to realize this. The joke about his father was that even as a tyrant or an asshole, he was sort of a failure.

  Helen has stopped her noises.

  “It’s not nervous laughter,” she explains. “I was thinking of what I might say to my daughter and, for some reason, I got a little silly.”

  “You don’t have to do it,” Sergei says. “You don’t have to make the message.”

  Yoshi says nothing. Sergei can see that Yoshi wants to laugh at Helen but is not because he can see that Sergei is annoyed, and this is also annoying. Helen holds up her screen.

  “Meeps, I just want to say that I love you very much. Please know that I love you very much and I want you to have a happy life.” She presses the screen to her chest, erupting into another round of the evil laughing. “That was awful,” she says, between grunts. “Those were the worst last words ever.”

  Yoshi holds his screen up to his face and makes a strangled cry. It is something like a person screaming, only screaming in a whisper. He shakes his head while he does it, and goggles his eyes like a Maori tribesman. Helen starts laughing, properly now. Huh-huh-huh.

  “Let’s try again,” she says, holding up her screen. Yoshi joins her and they both pretend to be screaming in terror, before collapsing into more absurd giggles.

  Sergei considers crawling up the ladder, just to get away from them.

  There is, he knows, a camera in the tube. Someone in Prime is watching them. He would like to draw Helen’s attention to this.

  “
It is possible a last message under these conditions is not such a good idea,” Sergei says. Helen and Yoshi quiet down and he sees Helen almost imperceptibly glance at where he knows the tube camera to be.

  “Possibly not,” Helen says. “Well, enough silliness. I’m happy to go out with flames of glory and the rest is silence.” Sergei is glad he only hated Helen briefly. Helen is excellent.

  “Let us take our positions,” he says.

  Sergei climbs down to the lowest part of the tube: unfolds a ladder rung to make a chair. Helen does the same just above him, and Yoshi arranges himself above Helen.

  The three watch the levels of their radiation exposure rise. Even as a sim, this is alarming. Sergei pictures himself strapped to a board while thousands of knives are thrown at his body. What are the odds that the knife thrower will miss? Especially when the knife thrower has no feeling for him, no reason not to kill him right now? Well. Not right now.

  Probably his crew should not sit in contemplative silence right now.

  “Helen.” Sergei looks up at her dangling legs. “Are you making progress with the language for landing speech?”

  “I think Prime is going to ask people like the US Poet Laureate to make suggestions,” Helen says. “The whole thing makes you appreciate how great ‘One small step’ was. It’s tough to get importance and meaning into one sentence without being too flowery or poetical. Or stiff.”

  Earth is just a disk on their screens now. Mars is bigger; they are more than halfway there, thank God. He’s getting as moody as a woman. Sergei cautions himself against anticipating wild liberty during the Mars Simulation. He will step outside only technically: his spacesuit is only another kind of craft. He will not feel the wind on his face, he will not see the sky as it is. And certainly he will not be able—as he has in his dreams—to dive into a lake, an activity that in the past week has come to symbolize the zenith in physical pleasure. Both Yoshi and Helen have said that they dream of hot baths, but for Sergei it is a cool lake, not too cool. He’s had a few fantasies of sneaking off on “Mars” and opening the faceplate of his helmet, drinking in some nice Utah air. Fresh and cool, but not too cool. Of course he will do nothing of the kind.

  “The occasion will make whatever you say remarkable,” Yoshi says. “The phrase does not have to be remarkable in itself.”

  “Although it is an opportunity,” Sergei points out. “You can inspire people.”

  “Right.” Helen folds her arms across her chest, perhaps in unconscious response to the rising rem levels. You couldn’t blame her. Sergei half wanted to shield his balls. “Prime wants something along the lines of ‘I take this step for all the people of planet Earth,’ but they think it would be nice to get in the word ‘peace’ and also ‘hope.’ You can’t please everyone, but they’re trying to find something of maximal inoffensiveness.”

  “Animal lovers could be upset if you say ‘for all the people.’” Sergei shifts on his seat. He would like to grab Helen’s ankle. Not out of desire, just contact. “You are human exceptionalist,” he tells Helen. “You should take one small step also for bunny rabbit and opossum.”

  “Who will be thrilled to know the humans are thinking of moving,” Helen agrees.

  “Also, maybe by the time we go, some people will have stopped identifying as people and will want to be acknowledged as something else.”

  “One giant leap for sentience?” Yoshi calls down.

  “I had this thought the other day,” Helen says. “Since we can’t all egress at the same time, that we’d sort of take turns going in and out, and make our statement once we’ve all stood on Mars.”

  “But then it’s not so much like we are the best and bravest explorers in the history of humankind,” Sergei says. “And more like we’re members of a trapeze act.”

  It is true they cannot egress all together. There must always be one person in Primitus, for safety, until the moment when they make the transfer to Red Dawn.

  “But this is a nice idea,” Sergei says.

  “It will be a moment for all of us,” Yoshi says. “But yours will be the voice of the first human presence on another planet. As Sergei says, it is an opportunity.”

  Yes. This is the thing to keep thinking of. The opportunity that will be real.

  Much of his job was waiting. If waiting was a difficulty, that meant he was not doing his job well.

  There was a kind of strength that was not truly strength, though it was often mistaken for it. That kind of strength meant you could run fast to the top of the mountain, but it wasn’t because you had endurance, it was because you had—above all else—a desire to be done with the thing. It was not remarkable to have this kind of false strength: muscle and will, merely.

  He must be the person who can not only die in space, but also sit in a tube in Utah and live.

  To explore was also to wait. To wait for wind to blow, for ice to thaw, for night to fall, for day to come.

  “Okay,” Sergei says, looking at the screen. “We are still alive.”

  DMITRI

  DECEMBER

  Dear Papa, Dmitri writes. He stops. He has only twenty minutes to write this email before the train arrives at Penn Station. His father likes it when Dmitri shows him how fluent he is getting in English, but Dmitri can’t write an email in English in twenty minutes without making mistakes. He would like to get it done, though, so he can enjoy his time in the city in his own way. Ilya will be occupied for the afternoon: he has ballet class and then rehearsals for The Nutcracker. Dmitri is supposed to sit in the hallway of Ilya’s school and do homework while Ilya does his thing, but Dmitri doesn’t do this anymore, or rarely.

  He tells Ilya that he goes to the coffee place to do his homework or walks around Union Square. Sometimes he does these things. Ilya has no problems with Dmitri not sitting in the hallway. Ilya keeps his mouth shut because he prefers that it be Dmitri who is in charge on Saturdays. If it wasn’t Dmitri, then it would be their mother, and she always wants to watch Ilya dance through the window, which makes Ilya almost insane with fury. Ilya has gotten emotional about his dancing. He is always saying that he dances like shit, or that he had a shit class. He doesn’t want to be contradicted on this point. Ilya is the only sincerely self-critical person Dmitri knows and so when Ilya says “I danced like shit in class today,” what Dmitri largely feels is pride in his brother, mixed with a bit of envy.

  Dear Papa,

  We will be in school when the Chinese land on the moon. We will watch this in school. The parents have to give a consent to the watching, because maybe an accident will happen, and some people might have psychological damage from watching. In America, anything that makes you sad is called a trigger because of all the guns, I am thinking, and this is why they want a lot of places to be a “safe space.” My maths teacher does not know very much about science but likes to talk about trivia. For example he says that the Apollo astronauts reported that the moon smells like burnt gunpowder, which I guess is a thing every American knows the smell of. I remembered that you smelled space when you were in the airlock on the space station because of particles from things like solar wind and also space debris would collect on the spacesuits after a spacewalk, and you said that space smelled a little bit like meat. I suppose the smell can be explained as a result of highly activated dust particles with dangling and unsatisfied bonds.

  Dmitri pauses after this flurry of typing to review an explanation of dangling bonds on his screen, to see if he has it correctly, and if dangling bonds are something different from unsatisfied bonds, or maybe all dangling bonds are unsatisfied? Dmitri is taking chemistry this year, which he does very well at, even though it gives him no particular joy. His school has some good classes, but the students all seem to be insane: the girls too friendly in a fake way, the boys ineffectively violent and emotional. It does not help that the rest of his family has taken to their new life: Ilya and his dance school an
d his girlfriend, his mother and her circle of Russian friends and Gyro-yoga classes and having a husband who comes home every night. Even the cat they got to replace Slutskiya is considered by everyone to be an improvement.

  Ilya sniffs loudly, lifts his leg like he’s going to fart on Dmitri, and keeps on playing the new game Prime sent. Dmitri switches to typing in Russian so he can get the writing over with.

  School is fine but it’s pointless to get excited about anyone solving any kind of problem. Everything that we know right now about everything is probably wrong. If you think about it, it’s entirely possible that the sun really does orbit the Earth, in the ultimate true reality of the 10th dimension alien race that is playing our collective consciousness as a video game that we haven’t discovered yet. In related news, my computer science teacher asked me to join the Coder’s Club. They have competitions. I have decided that I too would like to go to space. I think I would make an excellent candidate for the kind of deep space travel involving cryostasis. From what I have read, deep freeze suspended animation sounds exactly like regular existence, only with lower body temperatures and a feeding tube. Mostly nothing, with maybe a few dreams. At least at the end of cryostasis, I’d have gotten somewhere.

  They are coming into the station now. Dmitri deletes everything on his screen after the thing about dangling and unsatisfied bonds. After another second, he deletes the unsatisfied bonds. He doesn’t think he has it right.

  Dmitri and Ilya take their positions by the door. Ilya cracks his joints ritualistically: neck, knuckles, wrists, his left hip, both ankles. They have a game of trying to get through the crowds and up and down the stairs and past the turnstiles and into the subway car in one continuous flow of movement. There’s no point to the game, it’s just something to do.

  Dmitri gets his metro pass ready on his screen and adjusts his bag. A backpack would be more practical but makes him look younger, which he doesn’t want.