Beyond Flesh

by Gardner Dozois

  But the real work is done in the eight booths at the back of the control room, where each operator strips naked and dons a skintight SLIPPER suit and helmet not awfully different from scuba gear, allowing her to link up in real-time with her avatar on Europa.

  To see Jupiter looming permanently on the horizon.

  To feel the shudders of the hourly quakes.

  To hear the crunch of treads on ice.

  To smell metal and composite baked by radiation.

  You can even taste the surge of energy when linked to the generator for recharging.

  It’s all faux reality, of course, the work of clever programmers who have created a system which translates digital data from the elements themselves into simulated “feelings,” then reverses the process, translating an operator’s muscular impulse to reach, for example, into a command to rotate an antenna.

  The best operators are those who know spacecraft and their limitations, who have proven that they can commit to a mission plan. People who simply like machines also make good operators. For J2E2, AGC tries to find those who can fit both matrixes.

  And who are willing to take the risk of permanent nerve damage caused by the interface.

  ###

  Rebecca operates Earl’s truck as he rocks the Volvo. He has chained the two vehicles together, and is learning that undoing his prank is easier than doing it, since the tightness of the driveway is forcing Rebecca and the truck to pull the Volvo at an angle.

  But she expertly guns the motor just as Earl gets the Volvo’s front wheels on the pavement. With a hump! and a whoof! and a reasonable amount of scraping, the Volvo shoots free. “That was suspiciously close to good sex,” Rebecca says, delicately wiping sweat from her eyes.

  Now it is Earl’s turn to blush, something he can’t remember happening in years. (He is old enough to know better about this, too.) He had been thinking the same thing. “You like cars,” he says, lamely, fitting her neatly into that subset of the operator personality matrix, something the operators do both consciously and instinctively, like long-lost tribesmen smelling each other.

  “Guilty, Officer,” she says, and looks at the truck, with its complement of nautical equipment. “And for you it must be boats.”

  “Two of them. A runabout and a forty-five-footer.” The tribal recognition isn’t strong enough to overcome their mutual antagonism. Note that there is no invitation to take a sail.

  “See you on Europa.”

  ###

  On Europa, science is marching more slowly than usual. Element Rebecca is tasked with drilling a hole through the icy crust at a site seven kilometers north of Hoppa Station. The same spot Element Earl was scouting the day the science package arrived.

  Now, from a distance, at the macro level, Europa’s surface isn’t as rugged as that of the rockier moons in the solar system. The constant Jovian tidal forces working on the ice and slush tend to smooth out the most extreme differences in height.

  But at the micro level, down where a wheeled or tracked element must traverse, the surface resembles an unweathered lava field, filled with sharp boulders, crossed with narrow but deep fissures, cracks, and cycloids. These, of course, were mapped by Element Earl on his original recon—collecting that data was one of his primary goals, so it could be beamed to earth, turned into a three-dimensional map file, then uplinked to Element Rebecca.

  The problem is, new cycloids can form in days, changing the whole landscape. Before Element Rebecca, her traverse delayed due to other equipment problems, gets five kilometers from Hoppa, her map ceases to be useful. And there she stops, asking for guidance.

  ###

  Earl Tolan is what they used to call an unsympathetic character, back when people still made such judgments. You wouldn’t like him, on first meeting. He is smart and also opinionated, a combination which has made friends, family, and co-workers uncomfortable, since he has a bad habit of telling others how best to live their lives, and with great accuracy.

  You could wonder—Earl does, in his rare reflective moments—whether this trait was magnified by his twenty years in space ops, where you don’t open your mouth unless you’re sure of your facts, or Earl prospered in that field because it suited his nature.

  He’s also bullheaded and fatalistic. See above.

  He has paid for his sins, however, in two failed marriages and the cool, distant relationships with his three children. His first marriage, to Kerry, the girl from his hometown in Tennessee, crumbled under the weight of too many moves, too much travel, ridiculous working hours. Kerry, who had put her own career on hold, understandably resented raising three children by herself. Earl, even less sympathetic in this period of his life than at present, started a relationship with Jilliane, a co-worker, which destroyed the marriage as quickly and thoroughly as if targeted by a cruise missile.

  The collateral damage was to Earl’s relationship with his three children, aged twelve, ten, and seven at the time of the breakup. His oldest daughter, Jordan, decided that the divorce was probably only seventy-five percent Earl’s fault, and managed to forgive him, and even made friends with Jilliane when she and Earl married.

  But the younger two children, Ben and Marcy, were lost to Earl. They are cordial, exchanging Christmas cards and the occasional phone call, and possibly seeing each other every two years. But their lives no longer intersect.

  Jordan, who is in touch with her father more frequently, saw what you would see, if you spent time with Earl. His energy, for example. It is formidable enough when employed on a project such as J2E2, but is downright memorable when put to use on, say, a weekend vacation with Jordan and her family, or on a remodeling job at her small house in Tucson.

  Maybe this will help: Earl has learned some of life’s harsher lessons. He works less. He flosses more often. He no longer allows a first impression to be his only impression.

  ###

  “Guess what. We have a problem.”

  It is the day after the cute meet in the AGC parking lot. On the floor below J2E2 mission control, Earl is buttoning his shirt after a shower and pro forma medical check, having just pulled the maximum authorized SLIPPER shift in taking Element Earl back to Hoppa Station. Gareth Haas, the Swiss deputy flight director, shows up. With him is Rebecca Marceau, half out of her SLIPPER suit. She is sweaty, her skin is lined with smeared marks from suit sensors, and her green eyes are red. At first Earl is almost disgusted by the sight of her.

  Then he tries to be charitable, knowing that he wasn’t looking any better half an hour earlier, knowing that, let’s face it, in physical terms, with his stocky build, thinning hair, thick jaw, and heavy brows, he’s not much of a prize on his best day.

  Especially with the results of his tests, just received this morning before his shift.

  “I’m listening.”

  Haas and Rebecca explain the difficulties. “Rebecca,” he says, meaning Element Rebecca, “can’t get to the site.”

  Earl feels sick to his stomach. “Something wrong with the map?” The map derived from Element Earl data.

  “The map’s perfect,” Rebecca says. “But Tufts Passage seems to have gotten tighter.” She is referring to a tunnel in an ice hill just large enough for Element Earl (which is, in fact, about the size of a supermarket shopping cart) to pass through. “I’m stuck. Can’t go forward, can’t back up.”

  “That’s pretty goddamn strange,” Earl says.

  “It might have been something as simple as the heat of Earl’s passage melting the ice,” Haas says, trying to be helpful.

  “The power module’s right on my butt, too,” Rebecca says, “and Asif’s even fatter than I am.” She means Element Asif, named for its operator, a Bangladeshi Earl doesn’t know well.

  “So you need me to map a new route.” What Earl wants to do is walk out of J2E2 mission control and never look back. To go to his forty-five-footer and take a sail, and maybe never come back. But what he says is, “Let’s do it.”

  “You’re outside your margin,�
�� Haas says. “I can’t ask you to do the job.”

  “I’ll get the doctors to sign a waiver.”

  “They won’t. You know that.”

  “It’s so risky,” Rebecca says. “What if he has a failure while you’re linked.” This was a genuine problem: Ten years ago, during an earlier AGC SLIPPER operation on Mars, an operator happened to be linked real-time when his rover suffered a catastrophic failure. The operator suffered a stroke and was never the same again. Hence the limits and mission rules.

  “Earl won’t let me down,” Earl says.

  “He’s got all the power he needs,” Haas says, agreeing, “but he’s had the Big Chill. He’ll be going back into the cold without a bake. The accident rate is substantially higher—”

  “I know that, you know that, we all know that,” Earl snaps. “We also know that you wouldn’t have asked me if you didn’t need me. So let’s go.”

  Rebecca requires further convincing. “What about the doctors?”

  “Don’t tell them I’m getting back in the suit.”

  Angry at their clumsiness, he chases them out of the dressing room. As he begins to don the suit, however, his mood changes. What if something did happen to Element Earl? The human operator knows that a mission is finite, that his linkage won’t go on forever. But the elements on Europa are powered by radio-thermal generators that can give life for hundreds of years. Unless an element is totally destroyed, it lives on, diminished, possibly blind, but capable of responding to stimuli or processing data.

  He zips up the suit, feeling a surprising pang of sadness. For Element Earl, or himself?

  ###

  It is always a mixture of pleasure and terror, being linked via SLIPPER to an element on Europa. One of Earl’s first instructors, knowing Earl’s fondness for sailing and things nautical, compared it to Acapulco cliff diving. After a dozen sessions in the SLIPPER suit, Earl decided that his instructor was an idiot. Linking with an element was only like diving off a cliff if the moment of fear and exhilaration were stretched to an hour. Yes, there is the wonder of feeling that you are crunching Europan snow beneath your “feet,” navigating your way through the jumbled heaps of ice like a child picking his way through a forest.

  But you must also endure the sheer discomfort of the SLIPPER suit: the data leads that bite and scratch; the sweat that oozes from your neck, armpits, and crotch (occasionally shorting out a lead), then cools to a clammy pool in the small of your back; the stomach-turning smell of burnt flesh (which no one can seem to explain); the data overlays that mar your pristine vision; the goddamn chatter from Haas and his team, who treat all operators like children with “special needs”—all while feeling that you are being flung across the universe on the nose of a star-ship driven at near-light speed by a drunk.

  Somehow, Earl forces himself to accept the usual stresses while ignoring the protests from the medical support team as he drives Element Earl back out on the trail. (The doctors have been conditioned to look for conditions that could be linked directly to SLIPPER side effects. Other than that, they give the operators great license, especially since each operator has already released AGC from liability now and forever.) For amusement, he watches the thermal readout of his element’s temperature. It dropped sharply as he exited the Hoppa shelter, and now it climbs slowly as friction and the general expenditure of heat are displayed. It reminds Earl of waiting for a download on his first computer forty years back.

  Except for the thin wall between booths, Earl and Rebecca could reach out and touch fingertips. Yet each exchange of data must go from Earl to Hoppa Station to Element Earl to Element Rebecca back to Hoppa and La Jolla, a round trip of 964,000,000 miles in a fraction of a second, thanks to the SLIPPER technology, which pumps data at 300 times the speed of light. For years Earl grew excited every time he thought about the process; now, of course, he finds even the tiniest glitch or lag to be an annoyance.

  Today he even finds the traverse of Europa to be less than totally engaging. He is recovering the same ground as the earlier traverse, in essence, crawling through an icy ditch for the second time.

  But then he emerges onto a spot of flat ground, notes the tracks of Element Rebecca and its power unit on his original route, and veers off.

  This is more challenging, up and down the slopes at an amazing five kilometers an hour. It feels like sailing in the open sea.

  Then, just as Earl has grown comfortable with the traverse, Element Earl stalls on a slope that is slightly too steep. He is also in a shadow. Several data packets are squirted back, forth, and around, their tone as close to panic as the operators and mission control ever get. Earl is encouraged to let Element Earl slip backward down the icy slope in search of traction. Meanwhile, the Hoppa base unit will try to find a passable route—

  Now the temperature readout, having gotten no higher than a sixth of the way up its scale, starts to plummet, like a barometer just before a storm. Earl finds this troubling, but knows that turning around now would mean doom.

  “Back up twenty-two meters,” Haas says on the voice loop. “We’ve got something here.”

  Element Earl slowly retraces his path—blindly, since the camera only points forward—but surely, since each turn of his wheels has been recorded and can be replayed precisely in reverse. Out of the shadow into the light.

  Then forward into what appears to be a narrow passage in a wall of ice. Left. Left again. Temperature rising again. Good. Had it dropped much more, Earl would have had to begin the lengthy disengagement process—

  Ping! It’s Element Rebecca pulsing him, in direct line of sight. One more turn to the left, and Element Earl has visual, not only on Rebecca, but on Element Asif, the power rover, behind.

  There is time for one slight push, an expensive one in terms of power. An electrical arc leaps between them, a common enough event when two machines touch in a vacuum. The event startles both Earls, and causes the displays to drop out for a moment.

  Then all is well. Element Rebecca slews free, and continues backing up, clearing the way for Earl to approach Asif. “The drill site is that way. Follow me.”

  ###

  “How do you like the work so far?” Earl has checked into Rebecca’s background and knows that the J2E2 mission is her first. Just as he knows that her personal history makes him look like a model of stability, with three marriages (none lasting longer than four years) and at least one other semi-famous liaison. No children. Remembering a phrase from his youth, Earl has decided that Rebecca has commitment issues.

  “Europa? It reminds me of home.”

  “You must have grown up someplace very cold and a long time ago.” Which is a joke, since by 2026, after thirty years of global warming, there aren’t many cold places left on the planet.

  “It’s not so much the cold,” she says. “It’s big Jupiter. My parents were teachers in B.C., British Columbia. We lived in a place called Garibaldi, which had this gigantic rock face hanging over it. It always creeped me out. Jupiter feels like that.”

  They are having martinis as they watch the sun set from the stern of Earl’s boat, the Atropos, in its slip in Mission Bay. Both have been drained by the experience on Europa today, which required them to operate for six hours in Rebecca’s case, ten in Earl’s—much longer than the usual three. In spite of his initial feeling that he and Rebecca will never have anything beyond a professional relationship, Earl has accepted her invitation for a drink. A tribute to his stamina, she says.

  Hoping to control the agenda, he suggested they come to his boat. Where he pours a second round, as a tribute to her courage, he says, and now Earl is feeling the effects of the alcohol, something he does not enjoy. But he would rather stay here overlooking the Pacific than return to his condo.

  “How about you?” she says. “You’ve been doing this work almost from the beginning.”

  Earl is not one for introspection or emotion, or so he believes. “It’s a great way to be on the cutting edge of exploration at an age when everyo
ne else is retired.”

  She nods, amused at the banality of this. “Yeah, let’s strike a blow for our demo. Age shall not only not wither us, it shan’t even slow us down.” Then she looks at him closely. “Earl, forgive me, we hardly know each other, but you don’t look well.”

  And then, his barriers eroded by vodka, he starts to weep. “I’ve got a growth in my neck.” In spite of his reservations, he reaches for her, and she takes him in.

  ###

  During the next week, the elements on Europa move into position. Element Earl stays in Pathfinder mode, blazing a trail to the crevasse picked out years ago by prior orbiting imagers. Element Rebecca follows, and deploys her drilling rig. Element Asif sets up nearby, a portable power station for the submersible operation. And the cargo element begins its trek from Hoppa carrying the submersible that will soon be sinking through Europa’s ice into the mysterious darkness below.

  The operations run relatively smoothly, with only nagging glitches caused by momentary loss of signal and a few jounces from J-quakes.

  Here’s the funny thing about elements like Earl and Rebecca: They are only being operated during critical maneuvers, perhaps a few hours out of every twenty-four. The rest of the time, when not powered down or recharging, they are autonomous.

  There is a persistent feeling among all operators that their elements retain some of their personalities, even when the link is gone. It’s silly, of course. As Earl’s idiot instructor once said, “A turned-off light bulb doesn’t remember that it used to give light!” To which Earl, in spite of his agreement with the instructor’s point, answered, “A mobile computer with several gigabytes of memory is not a goddamn light bulb.”