Above the desk, affixed to the wall, was the spacious display wall now black and devoid of power. Not a good sign. The wall in front had a pair of fire extinguishers still attached and a glass-cover control panel full of old-style hardware buttons, lights and switches each with labels underneath. None of the lights were on—again, not a good sign.
To the left, the two kiosk-like terminals stood side by side, one higher than the other. I imagined the last operators to use them were a short guy and a taller one, both having adjusted the heights for comfortable operation. Was it the tall guy’s fleece I wore? Were they the murdering sons of bitches that’d taken so many lives as they slept in stasis? Who knew? They weren’t here and neither were their remains. The terminal displays were angled for easy viewing and touchscreen operation. Both were black, but both had a red standby light.
I glided to the higher, right-hand terminal avoiding the floating chairs, the wrappers and the mug. Using the side of the display for some light leverage, I rotated my body into a standing position. No reason when weightless, but it just felt right I guessed. I tapped the display willing there to be power.
The screen stayed black but then a message appeared in white text:
Terminal Starting Up. Please wait...
“Yes!” I said, doing an air-punch, tennis champ style.
On Earth, I used to get mightily pissed waiting for devices to start up. Now, I was pleased seeing those lame old periods appearing and receding beside the please wait. The terminal had a good excuse—after all, it’d been on standby for a while.
The display turned white and a new message came up above a red rectangle:
User Authentication. Please place RFID hand in the red box...
I did as I was told, my huge hand taking up the entire allocated height. Any longer and maybe it might not have worked. The terminal went about reading my RFID pip, my fingerprints and my life signs. Apparently, I was still Dan Luker and I wasn’t dead.
Welcome Daniel T. Luker (JA-01015).
Then Tiro spoke.
“Welcome back Daniel T. Luker. How can I help you?”
I smiled. Then I broke out into laughter, the laughter of joy at hearing the voice of the network. And the laughter of that familiar voice that reminded me of C3PO from the classic Star Wars movies.
“Why are you laughing, Daniel?”
“Please, just call me Dan. And it’s nothing. Tiro, what the hell happened? Why’s everyone dead? Where are we? What year is it?”
“Dan, I cannot answer those questions.”
“Why not?”
“The network is down to one of three duplicates. The remaining network has sustained damage and is running on emergency power. The links forward of Module 4 have been severed. A system reset occurred yesterday. Stored files have been compromised but I am attempting recovery. The communications array cannot be reached.”
“A system reset? Yesterday? How can that be? Who reset you, Tiro?”
“User Arnold T. Reichs, JA-00008, executed the reset.”
“So this Reichs is alive?”
“At the time of reset he was alive. I do not know if he is still alive, Dan.”
“Tiro, how many others are alive?”
“I am aware of just one other person.”
“Who? Mike Lawrence, maybe?”
“No, it is you.”
Not funny, I thought. Not that I believed Tiro to be capable of humor.
“There may be others since the personnel monitoring system is offline.”
“Tiro, what about the pods? Are there any in green status? Is anyone still in stasis?”
“No, all stasis pods are now offline. Yours recently went offline.”
I said nothing for a few moments, trying to absorb what Tiro had said. I had a million questions, but after reset Tiro was now of limited use to me. I had to try, though.
“Tiro, can you reach Module 1? Who’s captaining the ship?”
“Module 1 is unreachable. The links to module 4 have been severed, the back-up EM links are unpowered, therefore I cannot reach modules one through four. I cannot answer your question on who is captaining this ship.”
“Okay, well who’s this Arnold T. Reichs then? Can you bring up his info page for me?”
“Here is his information page, Dan. As you can see, he is a thirty-year-old man and a Juno Ark Investor.”
A photo-realistic full-body 3-D model of Reichs appeared on the display. To the right of the slowly rotating image was an information column. I drew closer to the display, studying the small, pot-bellied guy in a gray suit and red tie. I reverse-pinched the face to zoom in. Along with the suit, his sandy, side-parted hair and gold-rimmed round specs spoke of wealth and a life in the corporate jungle. His face, complete with prominent blue eyes and thin, smug lips, was slightly pudgy.
Too many brunches at the country club, I thought.
I looked again. To say prominent eyes was being kind—bug-eyes would’ve been harsher, but more accurate.
Whatever … he was clearly super-rich if he was Investor Class—most on board were merely Colonists like me.
Looks like the concept of class was alive and well, I thought. And why not? There’d always been a hierarchy, always would be. Just the way it is.
I read the information column. Much of it was redacted and covered with the words, Insufficient Clearance Level. I was sure Reichs wouldn’t have this trouble as a VIP investor. But it did tell me a few other useful things. Born in Dallas in 2040, it stated he was founder and CEO of San Francisco based Thinking Kinematics Inc. I’d never heard of the company before—although I wasn’t very interested in the world of business. Thinking Kinematics sounded like one of those robotics or artificial intelligence companies that had taken everyone’s jobs over the last few decades. Still, who was I to say? My Juliet would’ve known. I saw her face in my mind’s eye, despite trying to focus on the task at hand. I pushed the thought of her to where it belonged—in the special place deep in my mind and my heart, ready to find later when I had the time and space, when I was ready to give the honor her memory deserved.
I refocused on the display and Reich’s info page. The only other thing that wasn’t confidential was his pod location: Level 20, Aisle 1, Pod 4. Not that I thought it’d be of any use given he was logged resetting the network yesterday. Clearly, he wasn’t in stasis. But where the hell was he? What was he playing at and why was he the only other survivor so far?
I took a last look at his face and memorized it. I wasn’t sure why—it wasn’t like there was anyone else on board to confuse him with. More cop’s habit.
I spent the next hour grilling Tiro as if he was chief suspect in a murder inquiry. In a way, he was. If he were human, I might have been tempted to charge him with obstruction. But he wasn’t pleading his right to silence—he just didn’t know and I doubted he could lie. Tiro was just a severely compromised AI computer. However, talking to him did reveal something. The info pages of those who’d been shot in their stasis pods. Over ninety percent of them were either crew or military. This cannot have been a coincidence. It just didn’t tell me why.
There was one last thing I wanted to see before leaving Tiro to his quantum circuitry.
“Tiro, pull up my info page, please.”
“Certainly, Dan.”
There was no reason. Just curiosity mixed with a sense that if I existed in Tiro’s database then I existed to the outside world. Whereas I couldn’t see most of the other travelers’ data, I could see my own.
Daniel Travis Luker
Colonist JA-01015
DOB: 10-Nov-2038
Place of birth: Boise, ID, USA
Age at launch: 32 years
Eyes: Brown
Weight: 225 lbs
Height: 6’ 5”
Place of Residence: Los Angeles, CA, USA
Former job: Police Officer
Marital status: Single
Children: None
Next of kin 1: Marlene Rose Luker (mother)
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Next of kin 2: Nikki Alexis Luker (sister)
The 3-D body model flattered me, I thought. My mental image didn’t quite match the powerfully built guy on the screen. I zoomed into my inanimate face. The chiseled jaw and prominent chin made me look like a tough brute. That wasn’t how I felt about myself. At least not most of the time. I guessed my adversaries might not feel the same. Juliet used to tell me I had a Roman nose. I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly. She seemed to like it. The hair was right, though, the dark brown, close-cropped style barbered for ease of maintenance more than anything else.
I had one last request before leaving the control room.
“Tiro, what’s the status of the artificial gravity system? Can it be restored?”
“The AGS is offline due to insufficient power. It cannot be brought online at this time.”
“Worth a try.”
“No, it is not worth a try. There is insufficient power.”
“Sure Tiro … so you said.”
I said my goodbyes to Tiro—like he cared—and made a mental note that if I ever met his programmers I’d get them to add some common sense with a dose of humor thrown in. I drifted out past the jammed door and headed to a place I told myself I wouldn’t go. But I’d changed my mind. It was worth a look and my appointments book was empty for the foreseeable future.
Moving up nineteen levels when you knew where you were headed was quicker than I’d anticipated. In zero-g, once you get going only air resistance slows you down. The trick was gliding accurately enough up between the gaps in the banisters. For a guy my size it was feasible but took practice and readjustments as I ascended. In less than a minute, I reached the metal grate ceiling of the topmost level—Level 20, the home of Reichs’s stasis pod. I wondered for a moment whether all the rich dudes were up of the top floor. Wouldn’t surprise me. Something about being above everyone literally may have reminded them of their social standing or wealth or some such nonsense. What did I know?
His pod was number four on Aisle 1. There was only one aisle here so that was easy enough. Pod four was up the other end. I flew there observing the pods either side of the aisle. One thing stood out: every one of them bore the bullet holes of the executioner’s gun. Apart from the obvious, I didn’t really know what this meant. The only theory I could come up with was that someone—or more likely a group of someones—went after the power structure on board—marines, crew and the powerful except for Reichs who was still living and breathing. Or was yesterday, as the pedantic Tiro pointed out. I assumed he still was. What does that say about Reichs? I wondered.
I reached Pod 4 and found it wide open, the canopy sitting vertically. There were no bullet holes and there was no Reichs. But there was something. As I examined the inside of the pod more closely there was something different about it. As expected, preservation fluid had long since drained away but something else lined the base of the pod. I drew my finger across it to confirm what my eyes saw in the half-light. Dust and grime. The same dust and grime I’d only seen so far on the pod canopies. This told me one thing: Reichs hadn’t just emerged from stasis. He’d been awake for some time. For how long, I couldn’t tell.
Wherever he was, I hoped he was one of the good guys and that he’d found a way out. I hoped the empty pods were a sign someone had made it down to Aura-c and set up base. I hoped my friend Mike Lawrence was amongst them. Or maybe they’d called Earth for rescue. That’d be a long time coming. And we’d be a long time dead if we couldn’t go back into stasis while waiting. One thing was pretty clear, though—I wasn’t about to get any answers in Module 5. My best chance was getting to Module 1—command, navigation, comms and sensors. If there was any place I could find out what the hell was happening it was Module 1. I about-faced and glided toward the other end of the aisle and the airlock to Module 4. I just hoped life support was on and I could reach the pointy end of the Juno Ark. I said a silent prayer for Kate Alves, Evert Rietmuller and all those who’d perished in the cold, gloomy graveyard of Module 5.
4
Saturday, 6 November 2066, Nikki Luker’s Home, Los Angeles
The single story Spanish colonial style home was modest by the standards of the neighborhood. With three bedrooms, a small yard and what was little more than a plunge pool, Nikki Luker’s home was dwarfed by the multi-million dollar properties of South Beverly Park. But it didn’t matter. Dan Luker’s sister, Nikki, had bought it with her own money all by herself. She was hot property herself after her breakthrough role in last season’s new Webflix original series, The Colony. Focusing on the adventures of colonists traveling on the first interstellar sleeper ship, everyone knew it was based on the Juno Ark project. Actress Nikki Luker—better known to most people as her character, Angelica—was a tall, striking blonde with classic movie-star looks that turned heads on screen and off. She was young, beautiful and becoming increasingly famous. Nikki Luker had the looks, the career and the life many dreamed of.
To Luker, she was still his little sis, the one he’d been protective of growing up in the less-than-glamorous surroundings of Meridian, Idaho. They’d been close even before their father passed away when Luker was fourteen and Nikki was just eleven. Combined with their mom, Marlene, it was just the three of them on the good ship Luker, through the storms and the calm. Now, they all lived under one roof again, Luker forced by circumstance and Marlene by loneliness ever since her kids upped sticks and moved to L.A. Nikki had jumped first. It was an offer on another TV show she could hardly refuse. Even before her first Webflix audition, she’d impressed the casting people there and the rest was history. Luker had followed four years back when she’d had a more minor role. Looking for a change of scene, some new challenges and to be near his family, he’d transferred to the LAPD. Since his dreams of playing professional soccer had fallen apart all those years ago, he’d been happy to live out his career as a cop. But in June, just five short months ago, everything changed. Now, he just wanted to leave it all behind.
Luker sat with his mom at the outdoor dining table on the backyard patio. Another fine California day awaited them. A day of no work, just relaxation and play.
Nikki said, walking out with a large tray of cooked breakfasts, “How’s the coffee, guys?”
Marlene said, “Very nice, Nikki.”
Luker said, “Different league to what we get at work. I saw the new machine.”
Nikki sat down and distributed the plates.
She said, “Yeah, barista-made coffee for the domestically inept.”
Tucking into a supposedly healthy hash brown and an organic sausage, Marlene said, “I don’t know that that’s true anymore—you’ve come a long way in the cookery department, Nikki. This breakfast is very nice.”
“Thanks, Mom. All down to a great teacher,” she said, smiling.
Luker said nothing. He sipped his black coffee and looked skyward at object high above, glinting in the same sun that drenched the yard in the morning light. The giant interstellar ship, the Juno Ark, flew over the west coast in low Earth orbit. Only its elongated outline and that of the orbital shipyard to which it was moored were visible.
Nikki followed his gaze as Marlene continued to enjoy her breakfast.
Nikki said, with a mischievous grin, “Isn’t that the Mayflower?”
Luker didn’t smile. The joy had been wiped from his life earlier that year. Not wiped clean—he still took solace in the fact he had his mom and sister—but things would never be the same again.
Marlene looked up and said, “No dear, the ISS Mayflower is the spaceship from your TV show isn’t it? That’s the Juno Ark, Nikki.” She clucked and rolled her eyes.
Nikki said, her face fake-serious, humoring her mom, “Yeah, you’re right. Thanks, mom.”
He said, “You know, I’ve been watching that thing since they started building it. Seems to change every week. Couple more years and she’ll be complete.”
The distant hum broke the Saturday morning peace.
Luker’s hear
t raced with the recognition of what it was.
He said, “Did either of you order anything?”
Nikki said, “Not this week. Except for the coffee machine that’s already here.”
Marlene shook her head. “No, dear.”
The quadcopter hovered above the grass, past the small pool, then descended to its usual landing spot. Underslung was the standard container for that model of drone—about two by four feet.
After the rotors stopped, he jogged over to it and read the info display that popped out.
“I didn’t get a notification,” he muttered to himself, reading that it was for him.
The drone said, “This package is for you, Daniel T. Luker. Please press the red rectangle with any finger to accept.”
Luker pressed the touchscreen, the drone recording his fingerprint signature.
“Please stand at least six feet back while I release your package and depart. Procedure will not commence until I have detected a clear radius. Thank you for using SkyMail.”
Luker shuffled back and stood next to the pool. The quadcopter powered up and lifted off with its bay doors open, leaving behind the brown weatherproof box on the lawn.
Home Planet: Awakening (Part 1) Page 3