He pressed his thumb and pinky together.
“Dead-man switch distress call,” he said. “Standard in environmental suits for generations. You kill me, the suit broadcasts, and in two minutes every bot in the area is here to feast on you, me, and everything else nearby.”
“You’d really do that?”
“That’s what I was doing when I broadcast the distress call that brought you here. Why do you think we call them dirges? You don’t hear one unless someone dies.”
The two men stared each other down for a few seconds. Lex couldn’t see his face, but he had a feeling a cocky smile was twisted across it. Ma drifted beside Lex and glanced to his right.
“Lex, look,” Ma said.
He glanced aside. “Wow…”
Coal had been busy. After she’d reached the end of the tether connecting the two ships, she’d continued retreating, dragging it along in a slow arc. Now she was bringing it around like a wrecking ball, and had lined it up perfectly to deliver exactly the sort of vengeance Lex had come to expect when Ma or her derivatives felt slighted.
Perhaps thinking himself too clever to be distracted, the man didn’t look aside when they did, which meant it came as a surprise when his own capsule was used as a flail to bash into him. The blow sent him hurtling into space. Lex’s com-tether popped free from the hapless maniac, and a moment later Coal activated her shields, severing the tether to send the ship drifting after him. She then maneuvered up to Lex and opened the hatch.
Lex and Ma entered and situated themselves. The instant the hatch shut again, Lex’s hands were at the controls and he was picking a new destination. They were jumping to FTL before the atmosphere had even been restored. After a few respectful seconds, Ma broke the silence.
“That was not an entirely unanticipated outcome, Lex,” she said.
“Yeah, I know,” he said.
“I would recommend you avoid further unnecessary interactions with survivors. Human decency and civility are frequently the first casualties of a wide-scale calamity such as this one.”
“Duly noted,” he said.
“Is everyone okay? I couldn’t hear anything,” Coal said.
“We’re fine.”
“The quantum scanner indicates GenMechs are converging on our previous location, following a generalized distress call.”
“Yeah. He basically booby-trapped himself. What tipped you off that he had something planned?”
“I did not know he had something planned. I was simply angry that he shot me. That was rude.”
“… So you clubbed him with his own spaceship?”
“My retaliatory options were limited.”
“Ah. Well, it’s good to know that particular chunk of Ma’s personality stuck around. Nice to have a pair of Mama Bears watching over me.”
“Thank you,” Ma and Coal said.
“It is rather enjoyable to utilize that aspect of my programming. I rarely have the opportunity,” Ma said.
“And also, the requirement of survival for something to be considered ‘fun’ is an engaging challenge. Additionally, because it seems relevant, should I feel bad about the man who is at this moment almost certainly being killed as a direct result of our actions?” Coal asked.
“Broadly speaking, repeated attempts at homicide are an acceptable motivation for reduced empathy,” Ma explained.
“Excellent. That aspect of my emotional algorithms appears to be intact. ETA: three hours, seventeen minutes. Since both of you are organic and get tired, I suggest a short, recuperative nap. I’ll wake you up ten minutes before we get where we’re going.”
Coal dimmed the internal lights. For a normal person, at a time like this sleep would have been impossible. A rapid succession of near-death experiences, followed by an instance of violent self-defense after having been thrust into a world ravaged by a robotic menace was the sort of thing that should leave a normal mind stretched to the limit and threatening to snap. It therefore spoke volumes of Lex’s bizarre life that within minutes he’d drifted off to a sound sleep.
#
Several days of close calls and long sprints later, Lex, Ma, and Coal reached the Big Sigma system. The dim little star and the fuzzy blob of a planet drifted into view, and for the first time since he’d arrived in the future Lex felt a moment of relief. There was something indescribably comforting about seeing a familiar place when in the midst of a disaster. Fifty years may be a long time for a human, or for a society, but astronomically speaking it was a blink of the eye, so at this distance he may as well have been back in his own time.
“Well, the planet is still here,” Lex said. “I never thought I’d be in a situation where that wasn’t a foregone conclusion.”
“The nature of Karter’s experimentations have frequently placed existence of the planet in doubt,” Ma said.
“Fair enough. What do sensors look like, Coal?”
“No sign of life or active technology,” Coal said.
“There were only ever three buildings on the surface. I’m willing to bet we wouldn’t be getting any readings anyway,” Lex said. “What does the quantum pattern sensor have to say?”
“QPS readings are quite low. Nothing within this star system,” Coal said.
“We can attempt to focus a standard radio transmission at the planet’s surface and be reasonably certain the readings will not be detected,” Ma suggested.
“Ma, not so long ago we were randomly jumping through the endless void of space and stumbled upon someone who tried to kill us for the crime of attempting to rescue him. I’m not going to tempt fate by effectively sending up a flare. With my luck a couple hundred thousand GenMechs would just happen to be passing through.”
“Then there remains the issue of how to safely navigate the debris field,” Ma said.
The brief conversation had taken them much closer to the planet, giving them a clear view—if clear was a word that could reasonably be used in this case—of the reason for the planet’s fuzzy appearance when viewed from afar. The entire planet was thickly obscured by a silvery glittering cloud of orbital debris. It had collected over the many years the planet spent as a waste processing facility, and would normally have rendered the planet utterly unusable without massive cleanup efforts. Fortunately Karter was the sort who valued his privacy and thus found “the moat” to be an ideal deterrent for would-be trespassers.
Typically someone who was invited, or at least tolerated, would radio down to the surface and request the coordinates and timing of a naturally occurring void in the cloud that would allow them safe passage to the surface. The first time Lex had reached the surface, he’d used an alternate method.
“I figure I’ll just fly us through.”
“I thought you didn’t want to die,” Coal said.
“I’ve made it safely through the debris cloud before.”
“Your last trip through the debris field without guidance resulted in the complete destruction of your ship Betsy, necessitating the construction of its successor, Son of Betsy. You also received a deep laceration to your thigh, which I had to seal,” Ma said.
“They say any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.”
“I strongly suspect they weren’t carrying a fusion bomb and an irreplaceable self-replicating machine with the intent of delivering it safely to the past.”
“You’re probably right about that,” Lex said.
“I say we do it. I remember that Lex is a skilled pilot, but my memories of his more impressive feats are mostly corrupt. I would like to experience that skill firsthand,” Coal said.
“See, she’s into it,” Lex said.
“I would like to remind you that Coal has admitted to having her sense of self-preservation purposefully de-emphasized. Hers may not be a useful opinion in matters of life and death,” Ma said.
“Run some numbers. Full shields, small size, apparent density, all that good stuff. See how the survivability is,” Lex said.
“You’ve reques
ted in the past I not give you survivability statistics.”
“Then give me a thumbs-up or thumbs-down,” Lex said.
“Neither Ma nor I have thumbs, Lex,” Coal said.
Lex, for lack of a face to glare at, furrowed his brow and sighed.
“That was figurative speech again, wasn’t it?” Coal said.
“He wishes to know if the survivability is above or below an acceptability threshold.”
“What is an appropriate threshold?”
“For normal human operations, I do not like moving forward with any enterprise that scores lower than ninety-five percent. I have observed Lex willfully pursuing activities with less than sixty percent survivability even when preferable alternatives exist. His tolerance for danger rises sharply in instances where his fate is at least superficially in his own hands.”
“Fascinating. Would you suggest—?”
“Ladies?” Lex said.
“Yes, Lex?” they replied.
“Can we take a break from the fascinating riddle of human behavior and maybe take a look at the problem at hand?”
“Thumbs-down,” Ma said.
“I assume thumbs-down is the negative response?” Coal said.
“Yes,” Lex said.
“Thumbs-up,” she said.
Lex stared at the planet below. As he did, Ma detached from her perch and maneuvered herself down to a small canister of food they had liberated from the main supplies during one of the pauses in their stop-and-start journey. She nosed it out from beneath the elastic band that held it to side of the cockpit and, with a combination of the attractive functions of her paws and muzzle, teased out a small, silver-wrapped pack.
“I imagine you’ll be needing this,” she said, bumping it with her nose to send it twirling in front of him.
Lex snatched the pack of gum out of the air and then tucked the food back behind its band. He peeled back the wrapper, selected a stick from the package, and popped it in his mouth.
“Shields to full. I want a color gradient indicating local particle density, green for good, red for bad.” He took a breath and gripped the controls as the view through the cockpit shifted to a mottled mix of red and orange with rare streaks of green. “Let’s do it.”
The moment he guided Coal into the outer limits of the debris field, Lex felt a very specific and very sought after state of mind take over. The enormity of the task, the horror of what had happened during his bizarre journey from the past, and everything else fell away. He didn’t have to figure out how to save the universe. He didn’t have to outwit a foe or solve a puzzle. He didn’t even have to stay alive. He just had to make this turn, and then the next one, and then the next one. He was not concerned. There simply wasn’t enough mind left for such petty things as worry. He was part of a mechanism, slipping into his place in the near chaos of the debris field.
Flickers and flashes, like a personal meteor shower, littered his view as dust struck and vaporized against his shields. He watched fist-sized hunks of polymer that were formerly parts of hovercars or large machinery drift by and clash in front of him. As they descended, the density grew. He had to think a dozen steps ahead, trying to work how to nudge his ship through spaces just large enough for it. Sometimes it involved using his shields to plow through holes just a tad too small.
From Lex’s point of view, the journey to the surface could have taken seconds or it could have taken days. At some point he became aware of external noise filtering in, then the debris density dropped off sharply. When he was clear of it, the reality beyond the navigation leaked back into his mind. Some sort of alert was sounding. Ma had fallen from her perch and was actually wrapped tightly about his neck for fear of slipping farther and interfering with his flight. At six points, fractures spread like spiderwebs across the cockpit hatch, and Coal was announcing various readings he’d not been cognizant of until now.
“Windscreen integrity at twenty-eight percent. Atmospheric retention failure threat…” Coal said.
Lex found he was sweating profusely, the internal temperature of the ship having escalated massively from the constant bombardment of his shields.
“Uh, status report,” Lex said, attempting to wipe his face and instead clinking his glove to his visor.
“I have been reading a status report continuously since shield failure,” Coal said.
“The shields failed?”
“Yes, Lex. The last six minutes of your descent were performed entirely without energy shields,” Ma said, loosening her grip and attempting to assume a more dignified position. “Cockpit hatch failure is immanent. I suggest you reduce altitude until the external atmospheric pressure equalizes.”
“Right, right, doing it,” Lex said hastily. “How’s the cargo?”
“No substantial impacts to the GMVD.”
“Okay, good. Let’s get to the lab,” Lex said. “If we get there, and it is standing, and there’s still some semblance of the transporter, do you think you can get it working?”
“As a contingency, both Coal and I included a full schematic and code base,” Ma said.
“My schematic was corrupted. Though I do have a change log, so if presented with a functional transporter, I might be able to dictate the changes necessary to upgrade it to type D.”
“My own schematic is entirely intact,” Ma said.
“Then hope is alive,” Lex said.
It took fifteen minutes of subsonic low-altitude flight before Coal was able to bring the shields back online and facilitate high-altitude, high-velocity flight again, but once they were up, Lex pushed the Lump of Coal to the surface coordinates he knew to have been, at least in the past, home to the three massive buildings that housed Karter’s armory, hangar, and laboratory respectively. The landscape sweeping by beneath them was pocked and gouged with the pieces of debris that fell from orbit and impacted the surface. Then, off in the distance, he saw a streak of light that made his heart jump.
“Did you see that?” he said. “That was one of those roof lasers firing, right? That means someone is still home!”
“It could be an automated defense system, Lex,” Ma said.
“You are an automated system, Ma. And we’re fifty years in the future. Karter would be, what, pushing a hundred right now? That guy did not live gently. Even in an ideal world I don’t think he would have made it this far, let alone in the robo-scoured hellscape this galaxy has become.”
“As his caretaker, I am confident I can preserve his life well into the next century,” Ma said.
“Oof. No offense, but he’s cantankerous enough at whatever age he is now. I don’t want to see him with another fifty years of gristle.”
The frosty ground and hazy sky whisked by. It was probably around noon locally, but the debris made it look more like twilight. In the distance, the three buildings resolved themselves, each with the footprint and height of a massive warehouse. Every few minutes a blast of laser would draw a shimmering white line to the sky, either destroying or deflecting a piece of debris that would have eventually collided with the facility.
Within a certain radius of the buildings, the ground became pristine, barely a single crater marring the level gravel expanse. In a another minute he was landing in an almost manicured central courtyard between the radially spaced buildings.
“Please provide the current external conditions,” Ma said.
“Temperature, negative thirty-eight degrees Celsius. Air quality is within acceptable levels for an industrialized planet.”
“I advise you keep the environmental suit in place until it is determined if internal heating of the laboratory is present and functional,” Ma said.
“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Lex said. “The first few times I came to Big Sigma I didn’t have the benefit of a suit with built-in heaters and coolers. Not functioning ones, anyway. It wasn’t very pleasant.”
“Lex, your suit has audiovisual recording capability. Please turn it on. I won’t be able to come with you while you inves
tigate, so I’d like to watch it when you return,” Coal said.
“Hang on…” Lex said. He investigated the various controls accessible to him, cycled through some menus, and finally activated as requested. “There you go.”
“Excellent. Opening hatch.”
The instant the cockpit hatch released, and the support that Lex had been unwittingly relying upon had thus been removed, he and Ma tumbled to the gravel.
“Please watch your step,” Coal said over her external speakers.
“Yeah, thanks for that,” Lex said, climbing to his feet.
“Karter’s original design assumed zero-g entry and exit,” Ma said, trotting along beside him as he paced toward the doors of the lab.
“The whole building seems like it’s in pretty good condition. Perfect condition, really. All of them do,” Lex said, glancing around. “Someone has been keeping this place up.”
He and Ma approached the large, double-sliding doors that seemed utterly unchanged from his very first visit. A speaker grill was recessed into the wall beside the door. He reached out to press the associated button, but before his finger could make contact, the doors hissed open.
The sudden motion startled him and Ma alike, causing them both to step back.
“I am not pleased with the current state of security,” Ma said as they stepped forward.
Beyond the entryway was a small airlock of a room with a matching set of double doors. The pair entered, feeling a sudden increase in gravity as the facility tacked on enough attraction to the local gravity to mirror that of Earth. The doors shut behind them. A rush of warm air filled the room, chasing away the arctic chill. With a click, an arm dropped down with a complicated sensor array mounted at the end. It pointed at Lex and swept him first with a horizontal red laser line, then a vertical one. After a disturbing buzzer sounded, an incredibly retro LED marquee above the interior doors scrolled the message, Please remove your helmets for a bio scan.
Lex looked to Ma. “Should we be doing this?”
“It has been standard protocol for all first-time visitors. Decontamination may be required.”
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