REAP 23

by J J Perry

  2.1

  LAUNCH + 8 DAYS

  In the small galley, Leila and Suresh were assisting in the preparation of a meal for the crew. Suresh was working on the programming of the cook robot. Leila was double-checking the food delivery system, the storage mechanisms, and the connections with recycling in Engineering below. “It’s going to take a while to get used to this gravity compared to the moon,” said Suresh. “I feel heavy.”

  LBS engines were now accelerating at about twelve meters per second per second, about 1.2 times g, Earth’s gravity. Leila, who weighed fifty-eight kilograms at home, would now tip the same scales at seventy kilograms without gaining one gram of mass. On the moon with its reduced pull, the scales would have read about ten kilograms. Fortunately, they had spent part of every day in quarters with normal gravity.

  “You have grown.” Leila smiled, perfect white teeth gleaming from succulent lips.

  “My body has not changed.”

  “No, but we are both enlarging. The faster we go, the bigger we become compared to people on Earth.”

  “General relativity, of course. Time is also dilating. As is a part of me.”

  “There you go again, Suresh. Sex, sex, sex. Is that all you think about?”

  “I think about it because we so seldom connect.”

  “That’s why you had two other wives. I’m the one you look at, and they were the ones you played with. Nothing has changed for me.”

  “Now I have but one. You. And you need to please me.”

  “I didn’t read that in the contract.” Leila tugged with vigor on a cable stuck in the conduit, wrenching it loose.

  “What do you want from me, my sweet?”

  She revolted at his insincerity, his juvenile attempt at manipulation as she adjusted the wires to reduce tension and create slack. She tightened a set of screws, grunting as she spoke. “A woman needs passion, humor, caring, little gestures of affection to foster feelings that promote union, as you call it. It’s called romance.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “No, I am teasing, genius.” She used the term as an epithet. He undoubtedly heard it as a compliment. Two could play with anger’s ugly cousin, she thought.

  “You are vexing and perplexing.”

  “As I should be.”

  “Feelings are all chemical, thus alterable,” he said as he pushed away from the cook-bot, switching it from service to function mode.

  “Oh, it feels sooooo good to have power,” the cook-bot said. “I could be an Idaho politician. Dick Tater.”

  “It looks like our trajectory is almost exactly as predicted,” Chen said with no small amount of pride. He spoke to Cyrus and Savanna, pilot and copilot in Command and Control, CAC. “We’ll be in the exact line of flight in a few hours, make a small correction, and be on course for the next almost five months. One more big turn, and we’ll be ready for nap time.”

  “Do you want me to fire the rockets, Commander, or let the computer do it?” asked Cyrus.

  “I’d feel better if we watched the computer do the first burn. It’ll be in control for a hell of a long time, and I’d like to feel comfortable with it before we get too far from home. What do you think, Vanna?”

  “I’d feel better too. Although it is nice to flip some switches that are not in a simulator.” She hated being called Vanna, but Chen was one loose dude, as he described himself, that she let it go uncorrected.

  “You should learn to love sims,” said Chen. “You never die in one.”

  “You also never fly,” responded Cyrus.

  “Reality is overrated,” remarked Savanna. “Mankind has made that apparent.”

  “Oooooh. Philosophy so early in the trip,” Cyrus mocked. “Less than a day in space, and it comes out. This could be a long trip.”

  “It will be the longest trip ever, smartass.”

  “You have a point.”

  “Are you two going to get along?” asked Chen. “It’s way too early in the trip for friction.”

  Cyrus looked at him. “This is getting along. That was just one of her many terms of endearment.”

  “Hey, Chen,”—Savanna smiled—“is there a simulator for Frisbee? Is that how you became the champ?”

  “No and no. It took a lot of sand burn and sunburn,” Chen grunted and looked back at the screen. “However, that’s an interesting concept. I bet I could write software to make a Frisbee program. We have excess computer capacity.”

  There were three redundant computers that did all the flight and other computational work, simultaneously and in parallel. They were located in unheated space, under the skin of the crew module, operating between five and twenty degrees Kelvin, at bit above the outside temperature. Some of the circuits were colder, allowing for superconductivity as well as stable quantum computing. The craft could operate on one processing unit and usually did. The three computers could be configured to work either in series or parallel depending on the needs. There were scores of five hundred petabyte storage devices accessible to the computer for specific applications in addition to the yottabytes contained within each computer.

  “Are you not happy that some administrator twenty or thirty years ago when they requested budgeting and grants made it sound like this much computing power was skimping?” Cyrus said.

  “I love it. We have games with ‘holo-repos’ and messages from each of us where we can feel and smell the other person.” Holographic reproductions displayed objects living or inanimate where all five senses were stimulated. Tapping in several places to bring up a display, Chen looked up. “What do you think, Clercqy?”

  “I like leaving the planetary disk, following the original trajectory. The small boost we would get from Saturn is negated by the deviation we need to get there. Besides, control back home would go fractal. And I’ll go homicidal if you call me Vanna or Clercqy again, Chenie.”

  “They can’t touch us.” Chen twitched his eyes to his communicator, a small gold-and-black device clipped to the front of his shirt. Savanna barely noticed.

  “They could send out a ship from Titan,” Cyrus chipped in.

  “Touché,” Chen said as he left the workstation. “As you were. I’ll go find someone else to harass.” Cyrus and Savanna looked quizzically at each other as he left without further explanation.

  “That was abrupt,” Cyrus said. “One week out, and he’s acting strange already.”

  “He got a message. Cryptic. He glanced at it so fast I wasn’t sure he even looked.”

  “The high and mighty commander.” The words dripped with disdain.

  Savanna tried to ignore his tone but not Chen’s brief flickers of attention to his communicator for the week. At first, she thought his actions were a quirky tic. Yet he somehow knew what the messages were a type of code, or shorthand perhaps. His sudden change in demeanor and instant departure made her uneasy. Something wasn’t right with either of these men.

  2.2

  LAUNCH + 8 DAYS

  Lucinda and Maricia, the two medics, were activating and evaluating the medical bay on the fourth floor. They spent so much time together they were often called Salt and Pepper in part because of hair color. Lucinda’s brown hair contrasted with the long, straight blond hair of Maricia. Raul called them Sugar and Spice because it fit their personalities.

  Medical was at the center of the ship and mission. It had a D shape, as did all the floors, with a twenty-meter-long straight wall adjacent to the LBS and a curved outer wall that at the maximum was about six meters from the inner wall. The lift and stairwell were on the straight wall and divided the floor into two sections, large and small. The ceiling was roughly two and a half meters high. They were in the well-lit large bay. Each section had a color code by protocol developed by some committee with architects, ergonomists, and psycho-socialists, as Lucinda frequently put it. Medical was green, “a life color.
” Lucinda laughed. Their floor was a smooth uniform moss color without visible seams but cushioned slightly similar to rubber or carpet. The outer wall was a pale yellow-green random pattern, the straight wall a light blue green. All ceilings were white, for several reasons, of course. One of them was that when the ship was configured in the landing or horizontal mode, the white would be a wall that was toward the bow.

  The medics were activating and testing two medical robots, med-bots, attractive human females in appearance, feel, and smell. These machines contained, either internally or by connection to the main data mine, all medical knowledge. Human medics had training similar to physicians from previous centuries but relied on their far superior counterparts.

  “Dr. Einstein.”

  “Yes, Lucinda.” A brunette and deeply tanned female robot, the standard 175 centimeters tall, responded with an airy, gentle Brazilian accent. She was dressed in a sleeveless double-breasted pale green tunic that fell to her hips. Her pants matched, made of scrub material that looked like cotton but contained stainless steel and Kevlar threads. Her hair was mahogany in a pageboy cut with curls and waves that battled for control. She stood facing Lucinda, who was seated at a desk with a computer terminal displaying information and the start-up protocol. “What do you need?”

  “I am going to test you.”

  “Ready.”

  “Tell me about yourself and your associate.”

  “I am Dr. Lola Einstein. She is Dr. Ivanna Gnawcoeur. We are class CMD-12 medical robots, renamed for this mission. We have been functional two years, two months, and ten days. Our software is version—”

  “Thank you,” Lucinda interrupted. “That’s fine. Suppose I have pain in the left side of my head and I see flashes of colored bright lights. What’s wrong with me?”

  “Which symptom started first?” She cocked her head with a realistic appearance of concern.

  “The flashes.”

  “Highest probability is a migraine headache. Do you mind if I ask you more questions?”

  “Don’t ask. That was just a test.” Lucinda made entries into the computer. Without turning, she called, “Dr. Gnawcoeur.”

  “Yes, Lucinda,” she responded in a breathy voice with a gentle, vague Scandinavian accent. “How can I help you?” The med-bot named by Chen as Ivanna Gnawcoeur was structurally identical to Lola Einstein and dressed in the same style, though the color of her outfit was midnight blue. She had the Chinese word for strength tattooed on her right deltoid. Her hair was blond, long, straight, and today bunched in a pony tail that ended at the middle of her back. Her face was stunning in perfection. “I want to test you.”

  “Ready.”

  “I don’t feel too good.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “I think I’m gonna barf. My belly hurts, and I’m passing brown water, not poop.”

  “How long have you been feeling this way?” She made eye contact with each question, her baby blues moving like the most compassionate person on the planet.

  Lucinda smiled. “About twelve hours.”

  “If you were sick, you would not smile. But you said this was a test, so should I ignore your inconsistent behavior?”

  Lucinda nodded.

  “What started first, the diarrhea or the discomfort?”

  “The diarrhea.”

  “Point to where your abdomen hurts.”

  “Here.” Lucinda rubbed her abdomen below the navel.

  “Have you had these symptoms before, Lucinda?”

  “Many times.”

  “You have colitis, possibly chronic with a recurrence. It could be infectious, Crohn’s, or ulcerative colitis as the most likely etiologies. Would you like a more complete list?”

  “I want to know what you would recommend.”

  “Blood and stool tests are recommended as well as a look at your colon. When may we start?”

  “Thank you, Dr. Gnawcoeur. The test is over.”

  “It was not much of a test. May I return the favor?” She smiled.

  “I don’t need testing, thank you. Your basic functionality is intact. Can you get me a cup of water, Lola?”

  Dr. Lola Einstein swayed gracefully to a cabinet, pulled a Lucite cup from a shelf, and placed it under a faucet and filled it three-quarters full. She returned it to Lucinda. “Here you go!”

  “Actually, can you give it to Maricia?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She walked to Maricia and handed her the cup.

  “Thank you,” said Maricia. “What do the square root of three and George Washington’s birth year have in common?”

  “They have the same four digits, 1-7-3-2. That is way too easy for an Einstein, Maricia.”

  “Sorry. I’m simpleminded.”

  “Actually, your IQ is 128, hardly simple.”

  Maricia laughed. “OK. That’s enough for you. Do you know everyone’s IQ?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who has the lowest?”

  “You are tied with Commander Wong.”

  “Really?” Lucinda interjected. “My husband, the CO, is not as smart as the rest of us. Interesting.”

  “History shows it doesn’t take superior intelligence to be a leader,” Maricia said.

  “Most of the time it looks like utter stupidity. It’s refreshing to know Chen is not plain dumb.”

  “He has a PhD. You must have known what his IQ was, Lucinda.”

  “No, I didn’t. We don’t talk about that kind of stuff. Lola, what is the IQ of Dr. Parambi?”

  “One hundred sixty-seven.”

  “Is that the highest IQ of all the crew?”

  “By far.”

  “That’s no surprise,” Maricia said. “He is the smartest. He knows it and shows it. I’m almost jealous.”

  Lucinda looked at her with a second of mocked disdain then normalized her face. “Eat your heart out,” she said.

  “That’s my job,” Dr. Gnawcoeur said.

  Both women laughed. “Where did that come from, Ivanna?” Lucinda asked.

  “It was a little malware inserted by Commander Wong.”

  Lucinda was looking over Dr. Jekyll, one of two mobile but not anthropoid computers. They had all the medical programming found in the CMD-12s plus much more. “Mar, the engineering on these SMD-702s is the best I’ve seen. There is hardly a seam or crack visible. I can barely feel the cracks.”

  “You are rubbing my chest, Lucinda. Are you aware that I am aware?” His voice had a refined British accent.

  “Yes. This was part of my evaluation of your status now that we are on our way.”

  “Are you going to give me a mathematical problem?”

  “Sure. How about the square root of the quotient of pi divided by Fibonacci’s golden section number?”

  “There are two golden section ratios. Do you want the number less than one?”

  “But of course.”

  A screen popped up filled with over a hundred digits starting with 2.2546 and on. “It looks like he got it wrong, starting with the eleventh digit,” Lucinda said.

  Jekyll began to speak but stopped when Maricia giggled. “I wouldn’t know.”

  When she stopped, he continued. “I am certain this is correct. I did a brief self-test and recalculated the—”

  “I was teasing,” said Lucinda, interrupting. “I was thinking you might be smarter than Dr. Parambi.”

  “By the IQ metric, we all far exceed the maximum test results.”

  “And you are more humble than the good doctor. You seem to have tolerated liftoff fully intact. Can you test Dr. Zhivago?”

  “By telemetry, he is at 100 percent functionality.”

  “That’s the nicest thing you’ve said about me all day,” phonated Zhivago with a soft Russian accent as he popped a slight flash from a crevice above his bin
ocular lenses.

  At the end of the session, Lucinda and Maricia walked to the left arm in arm, laughing and savoring the day together in friendship, and descended to the mess hall for a drink of tea, Long Island iced tea.

  2.3

  LAUNCH + 11 DAYS

  Communications and Navigation was on the sixth floor below Command and Control, the CAN under CAC. Raul sat in a COM chair, fingers flying across a virtual keyboard, speaking, pointing with his eyes, and nodding as he created a huge volume of text over twenty-eight minutes. He never took longer. His tested attention span was twenty-eight minutes. This process demanded complete concentration. As he finished, he appended the commander’s executive summary for the day and sent the traffic off to Earth. “There you go, Suresh. Eleven days of data and history so far.”

  “And the note to the senator?”

  “Yeah. It went in the earlier transmission with the personal stuff. This was the official packet.”

  “You are very fast at this.”

  “Maricia makes things efficient. She seems so laid-back, but she is incredible at creating time for fun by decreasing time burned at work.”

  “Are you up for a little exercise?”

  “That was the plan. Maricia is testing the bots and can’t make it. Is it just the two of us, or is Leila joining?”

  “I don’t know. She seems to have a project going on that has her stumped.”

  “Stumped in engineering? A faulty mop or something?”