Across the Void

by S. K. Vaughn

  After Igor was done feeling her up with its weird robot appendages, Eve put May through the psychological evaluation. She had taken these before as well, many times, but never with the thought that the testers were actually trying to find something wrong. And she knew they were, because she hadn’t taken such a comprehensive test since she’d first started working with NASA. It took nearly three hours to complete and covered every possible angle, from simple personality inventories to behavioral and cognitive scales to highly complex neuropsychological batteries.

  May was just glad she’d had some time to get her wits together beforehand. She couldn’t imagine having had to do this when she first woke up. It would have been a spectacular fiasco. They probably would have programmed Eve to take over completely. Of course, that had crossed May’s mind as she was doing the evaluation. They had telemetry now. No reason to fully trust May anyway if they saw fit. Footholds were easily adopted by an audience eager to explain the circumstances of failure. Robert was probably hungry for a scapegoat to satisfy Washington and give the press some fresh meat to devour in order to protect the program.

  It wouldn’t be the first time in the history of NASA. May thought of Gus Grissom, the Apollo astronaut and one of NASA’s most infamous “failures.” His capsule sank, nearly killing him, and he came home to a fridge full of beer instead of champagne. Despite his bravery and service, he was demoralized because the powers that be were angry about the loss of their precious, poorly designed, and potentially lethal capsule, a perfectly eggy symbol of their fragile egos.

  May laughed at one of the psych evaluation questions.

  Have you ever considered suicide?

  “No. But the day is still young.”

  32

  Stephen met Raj for breakfast at a diner before going into Johnson for the day. The place was noisy and too brightly lit for their weary, sleep-deprived brains. Truck drivers, factory workers, fishermen, and other rough, boisterous men clomped in and out through the jingling glass door, talking, laughing, and flirting with the waitresses. Outside, diesel engines idled, and the high squeak of air brakes made them flinch.

  “Maybe we could have met at a sheet metal shop or a bowling alley,” Raj complained.

  “I like the noise. And the relative obscurity of the place,” Stephen said. “No one from Johnson is likely to come in here.”

  “I don’t blame them. Still feeling paranoid, then?”

  “A healthy level.”

  “How would a paranoid person know what level is healthy?”

  “I don’t know, Raj. Why don’t you ask the NASA psych crew evaluating May?”

  “You heard about that.”

  “From you!” Stephen said, incredulous.

  “Damn, you’re right. I need more coffee.” Raj poured himself some more from the metal pot on the table and took a deep breath. “They always have good coffee at these places, I’ll give you that.”

  “Thanks. Were you able to find any reports of malfunctions that might have contributed to the ship’s memory blackout?”

  “Nothing. Everything was running perfectly, from primary to all redundancy backups. No way a malfunction caused it, unless it occurred at the exact time of the blackout, erasing evidence of itself. And no, that is highly unlikely. Machines are like people: they get a sniffle before they die of full-blown pneumonia.”

  “Speaking of that, we need to get our hands on May’s recent medical exam data,” Stephen said. “I want to check her blood work for signs of pathogens, and check that against the first analysis of the Europa ocean water samples. I need to see if there’s any evidence to support my theory. Can you get your hands on that?”

  “I doubt I can get the recent tests. All of that is on lockdown.”

  “Have they completely cut off your clearance?”

  “No, but her med data is a special classification. Only Warren and other members of his coven can see it. Probably military types.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “But her AI—”

  “Eve.”

  “She named it?”

  “After her mom,” Stephen said, studying his coffee.

  “Interesting. Her . . . Eve ran some preliminary panels on May when she first woke up. That information was in the SOS pack they sent, so I already have that.”

  Stephen perked up. “Good. That’s something. And it will have to do for now.”

  “So, if you’re able to support your virus theory, how’s that going to tell us anything about what happened to the ship?” Raj asked.

  “Remember when I told you that was your job? But I think you decided to play golf instead.”

  “Oh yeah, golf. Here are my notes.” Raj pulled out some scorecards with notes scribbled on them. He tore one up, then explained, “That’s my actual scorecard. Not relevant. Or pleasant.”

  He shuffled through the others, stopping on one.

  “Okay. Based on my knowledge of the ship, which is pretty good since I designed it, though there may be things that were changed during the building process that I’m not aware of—”

  “Yes, yes,” Stephen said, annoyed. “But I would say your knowledge is an excellent baseline of information.”

  “Agreed. Thank you. So, based on that, I would like to add my two cents to your hypothesis.”

  “Finally.”

  “First, let’s address the data blackout. The probability it was a malfunction is microscopic. The probability it was intentionally perpetrated by someone is very high. Almost like, duh, that’s what it had to be. You know how NASA does things. They don’t do catastrophic failure with no warning. Not for a hundred years, anyway. You can thank AI for that.”

  “What about AI? Could Eve have done it?”

  “Erase her own memory? Not a chance. Not without advanced programming completely changing the entire processor structure, which would take a team of people on board, working for a few weeks minimum. Human paranoia is woven into every line of AI code and has been forever. Thank movies for that.”

  “But how could a person do this right under the AI’s nose?”

  “Nose—that’s funny. They couldn’t. That’s where the ship malfunctions come in. Suppose the ship were to suffer a major power loss, let’s say, like what we have now. The reactor is affected to the point that it doesn’t have the power to run propulsion properly. Internal power gets jacked! Surges, total dropouts, complete chaos for the ship’s delicate circuitry. It can’t handle that at all, so it starts cutting power to nonessential things. Eventually that will include AI. I mean, we have to be talking power that’s been reduced to a dripping faucet in the middle of a drought. Life support gets top priority. The last Mohican. And when there’s no power left for that, it’s lights out, baby.”

  “The vehicle hangar.”

  “Maybe. If things got fucked-up enough. But it wouldn’t be a planned shutdown, since that’s where people would need to go to jump a sinking ship.”

  “So, what you’re describing is the only way to create a situation in which you could intentionally force a data blackout. Which means that’s also intentional.”

  “Again, duh. Why would one exist without the other? Maybe you need some more of this good trucker coffee.”

  Raj poured Stephen some more. Stephen drank it. “Last stupid question—”

  “Yes, it could be done either on board or remotely, using telemetry.”

  “I really don’t like it when you do that.”

  “What, own you with my crazy intellect?”

  “What does your crazy intellect tell you about who might be willing to do something like this?”

  “If your virus theory is true, then my money is on Robert,” Raj said. “Motivation aside, he would have the kind of access one would need to perpetrate this.”

  “Motivation?” Stephen said. “Maybe the virus breakout.”

  “It would have to be something completely out of the ordinary,” Raj said. “NASA has dealt with similar situations before—not this ext
reme, but they have. Don’t forget Robert’s vanity. What would make that Botoxed freak look worse—something completely out of his control, a ‘shit-happens’ type of scenario, or something that could be pinned on him? He might have the ability to pull it off, but—”

  “Not the balls. Gotcha,” Stephen gloated.

  “I was going to say, ‘But there would be no possible way to spin it.’ Nice try. And by the way, guys like Robert don’t need balls. They just pay someone else to have them.”

  33

  “Scanning sample for pathogens.”

  Robert had eyes and ears everywhere at Johnson Space Center. So, to analyze the blood work Eve had taken when May first regained consciousness, Stephen had called in a favor from one of his faculty friends at Baylor Medical School in Waco, Texas.

  The lab had been empty when he arrived in the late evening. During the two-hour drive, he’d spoken to Raj about the Hawking II’s reactor and propulsion issues. Raj was running computer simulations at home, trying to find a scenario that re-created their malfunctions. He’d been at it for hours and still hadn’t made much progress. With all the fail-safe systems, it was difficult to bypass one without activating another. He had also spoken to the NASA engineers who were trying to do the same thing, and they were running into the same dead ends. Raj did discover that, unlike him, they were not exploring sabotage as an option.

  When the Baylor Med AI finished looking for signs of pathology, it too came up empty. But Stephen knew enough about the human genome to know that if May had been infected with a virus or bacterium, it could have left biomarkers in her DNA. Using biogenetic diagnostic programs, he ran more analyses, but those also came up negative for biomarkers. The conclusion from the first two tests was that there was a very high probability that May’s illness had not come from an Earth-based pathogen.

  Because he believed she might have become ill from Europa’s ocean water samples, Stephen ruled out bacteria. The chance that any bacterium, even one highly evolved, could survive in that environment was almost nil. Viruses, however, were well known for the capacity to exist in a dormant state indefinitely.

  The next step was to search for virions, or viral particles, via their associated shell proteins. Stephen had spent the better part of his career compiling evidence that the building blocks of DNA existed in extraterrestrial sources, including those found in viruses. If May had contracted an exotic virus yet to be identified and cataloged by humans, its building blocks would very likely be similar to those in known viruses.

  After completing this analysis, Stephen called Raj and told him to meet him as soon as he got back to Houston.

  “You’re joking, right?” Raj said.

  It was midnight when Stephen got back. He had told Raj to meet him at a bar near the airport. The place was a clock-out dive for roughnecks. Oil and gas drillers and pump engineers, stinking of petroleum, pounded pitchers of beer and whisky shots at the bar and booths. When Raj walked in, they eyed him with suspicion.

  “Sit down. You’re attracting attention.”

  Raj sat down next to Stephen in a booth near the bathrooms.

  “Did you just ask the people from that fleabag diner where they liked to drink?”

  “Funny. I told you, I’m trying to keep us as far from running into people from Johnson as possible.”

  “You’ve succeeded. So what was so important we needed to risk getting the shit beaten out of us by rednecks to talk about it?”

  “When I analyzed May’s blood work, I found no signs of known pathogens or biomarkers in her DNA, so it’s highly unlikely that whatever made her sick came from Earth. Then I scanned her DNA for viral particles, associated proteins, things that even an extraterrestrial virus would require to infect a host. I found some extra amino acids that had attached themselves to her DNA via halogen bonds.”

  “Sounds pretty thin for your virus theory.”

  “It’s enough to make the existence of the virus at least possible, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t get me out of bed for a maybe, did you?”

  “With my ‘thin’ virus evidence, I looked for signs of cancer. Some types can cause symptoms similar to May’s. That’s when I found elevated levels of human chorionic gonadotropin hormone. We know hCG can spike if someone has a tumor. It can even show up when tumor cells are dividing, before they become a mass. But again, that’s thin evidence.”

  “Oh my God. Poor May.”

  “It doesn’t mean she has cancer, Raj. It just means she might.”

  “So you got me out of bed for two maybes, right?”

  “I got you out of bed to show you this.” Stephen handed Raj his lab results. “Cancer isn’t the only reason for elevated hCG.”

  “Are you shitting me?” Raj said aloud as he read the document.

  “Keep it down,” Stephen whispered harshly.

  “Wow,” Raj said, finally looking up. “This would be . . . very, very bad.”

  “Disastrous,” Stephen said.

  “I think we need to tell Robert and the team immediately, Stephen. For the sake of May’s safety. We can’t sit on this, I’m sorry.” He handed back the paper as though it were contaminated.

  “I don’t intend to keep it under wraps,” Stephen said. “But I would like to tell May first, before anyone else.”

  “How the hell are you going to do that?”

  34

  “Commander Knox, why don’t you say something eloquent to mark this historic moment?”

  “Jon, do you even know what eloquent means?”

  May was on the bridge, watching a video she and the crew had made the day they landed the scout vehicle on the surface of Europa. She had gone with the landing party while her pilot, Jon Escher, took the helm of the Hawking II. From the outside camera view, the icy landscape was surreal. Massive cracks and ridges crisscrossed the craggy, reddish-hued ice in every direction. Jupiter loomed beyond the horizon, its swirling, multicolored surface vivid and mesmerizing, so colossal it looked close enough to reach out and touch. No probe or deep telescope imagery had ever come close to capturing the profound beauty the landing party beheld that day.

  The members of the party were on the verge of going out and taking their first steps. Everyone had been nervous getting into their EVA suits. Surface temperature was –160 degrees Celsius, and radiation readings were astronomical. Gravity was only 13 percent of that on Earth, so it was going to be like walking on the surface of the moon, with little force to hold anything down.

  As the big moment drew near, the mood had changed to rapturous, and then Jon Escher opened his big mouth. He was always putting her on the spot, telling her too “loosen up” and “stop being so British.” Asking her to make some grandiose statement was yet another attempt to make her look as though she had a stick up her ass.

  “One small step for man—”

  “That’s enough, Jon. I’m not Neil Armstrong. But since you’ve put me on the spot, I’ll do my best.”

  She looked out the landing vehicle’s observation window, her eyes traveling across cavernous ice floes that looked like superhighways to Jupiter. May remembered what she had been planning to say at the time: how she was filled with pride for what they had accomplished, and how incredibly far they—and she personally—had come. She had thought about sharing memories of first flights with Mom, first solo flights, or other personal milestones as well. But in the moment, those sentiments, and those memories, felt trite and underwhelming.

  This is not just a mission that requires a great pilot. It is a mission that requires a great leader to stand before it in the history books. You have that presence. You will give it the context it deserves.

  That was what Mom had told her the day she accepted the commission, adding that making the mission about herself was a mistake.

  Don’t talk about the “giant step” you’re taking. You’re serving humankind. The more people hear that, the more this mission will give them hope.

  In the video,
she saw her face change when she knew what she was going to say. She would give the moment the historical context it deserved, with the passion of knowing she was doing that as a tribute to her mother.

  “All right, here goes. This is Commander Maryam Knox of the Stephen Hawking II research vessel. Today, December 1, 2067, will go down in history as the day humankind takes its first steps on Europa. As we look out at the icy landscape, its beauty takes our breath away. And beneath all that ice is a promise, for us and our future, held in the one basic element that is the very source of life: water. We might be the first ones to set foot on this planet, but every woman and man who made this possible was here long before us, dreaming of this day. We’re here to make that dream come true.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then the landing party and the entire crew on board cheered and applauded her. The landing party embraced her enthusiastically, most in tears.

  “Bravo, Commander Knox,” Jon said. “I’m honored to have you lead the way.”

  The landing vehicle airlock activated, triggering EVA suit life-support systems, and they stepped inside. When the internal airlock door was sealed, the outer door opened, and the landing party stood in awe. May was about to step out onto the ramp and walk to the surface, but she thought better of it and stopped. At the time, she was thinking about Stephen and how he deserved to share the moment somehow. That was more important than their differences. He was the reason she was there, that any of them were about to make history. This was his legacy more than anyone else’s.

  “The spirit of this voyage is the advancement of science,” May said, “the advancement of humanity. If Dr. Stephen Knox were here, I would insist he be the one to take the first step. But in his absence, I would like Dr. Ella Taylor, his chief science officer, to do the honors.”