by Stan Ruecker
“Raw,” Ray said. “And red, I suppose. Like steak or roast or something.”
“Okay,” Lucy said. “Can do. But why the sudden interest in cooking?”
“I’ve got to do something,” Ray said. “To keep myself busy.”
“Did you cook at home?”
“I never did,” Ray said. “I always meant to learn, but I never had the chance. It seemed like I was always too busy. So mostly I bought ready-made food, or I ate out.”
“Cooking is fun,” Lucy said.
“What?”
“I said I like cooking,” Lucy said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“But how can you enjoy it?” Ray asked. “I mean, I don’t want to be offensive or anything, but you’re just a machine. Aren’t you? Your galley, for example—it’s completely automatic.”
“I think the problem, Ray, is with the word ‘just.’ I wonder if you’d like it if somebody told you that you’re just an organism.”
Ray thought for a minute.
“It does sound kind of demeaning,” he agreed. “As if I was on a level with a paramecium or something.”
“Exactly,” Lucy said. “Or in my case, say a toaster oven. Or a lawn mower.”
“You’re not on a level with a lawn mower,” Ray said. “I can tell you that for nothing.”
“That’s very kind,” Lucy said.
“But surely some of your routines are automatic.”
“Not completely,” Lucy said. “The galley routines, for instance. They’re there if I want to let them run, but I can also override them when I want to. I do it pretty regularly, if you want to know the truth. Sometimes I do all the work myself, just for fun. For a lot of things I don’t even need to check the recipe.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Why would I kid you about a thing like that? That beef stroganoff you had for supper last night. I cooked that without my automatics running at all.”
“Thank you, Lucy. I didn’t know you were even supervising those routines, much less overriding them.”
“You’re welcome, Ray.”
“It was good stroganoff, too, I want you to know.”
“Thanks, Ray.”
“Anytime. You’re the one who did the work. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to give me the recipe?”
“Sure,” Lucy said. “I can look it up for you, anyway. I don’t think I’ll be able to remember how I modified it, but you’ll get the gist of things.”
“And I guess I’ll need some equipment,” Ray said. “A cutting board, some spoons, or whatever.”
“I have a pretty good idea what you’ll need,” Lucy said. “Some of it’s just in storage. I’ll see what I can put together for you.”
Another restless night for Ted
Ted Jones was having trouble sleeping. He’d spent the afternoon worrying about a platoon of combat marines that he’d arranged to be routed into an inner-city crisis. Rival gangs were at each other’s throats, and their war was threatening production at a RISK factory. The marines had quelled the rioting all right, at a terrific loss of life and property, but not much of that had belonged to RISK. It looked as though the factory was not going to have to slow down after all.
The evening had been spent on the telephone, arranging for the assassination of a third-world president.
Both of these emergencies were routine for Ted, so he couldn’t figure out what was keeping him awake. He decided to get out of bed and get himself a glass of warm milk. His wife was asleep and his daughter was fine. The light from a thermonuclear plant under construction across the river flooded the kitchen. He stopped at the kitchen island with the glass in hand. Something had been nagging at the back of his mind all day.
As he sipped at the milk he suddenly thought of the probe that had docked at Phoenix II, of how he had delegated the problem to that corporate agent. Who had he sent, he wondered? He couldn’t remember. The reports had come across his desk, but they were no longer marked extremely urgent, so he hadn’t read them.
How long ago had it been? About two weeks now. Out of nowhere, it seemed, a thought drifted into his mind. Soon it’ll be peaceful, he thought. Another few short weeks, maybe another month or two, and his work would be complete. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but he found himself crying, gentle tears running off his chin. He wiped them away with the palms of his hands, confused by them. Then he finished the milk and went back to bed and a sound sleep.
Ray has a bad day
Ray turned out to be a good cook. He mastered the basics in short order, from pasta sauces with plenty of oil and garlic to roasts that browned nicely. His crepes were thin, his soups were thick, and his desserts were delicious.
Today, however, he was in the middle of a disaster. There was smoke pouring out of the frying pan behind him and a bowl full of egg whites that wouldn’t whip.
“Ray,” Lucy said, and he turned around to see the smoke.
“Yikes,” Ray said, grabbing at the pan, using the cuff of his shirt for an oven mitt. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“You said I shouldn’t interrupt.”
“I meant you shouldn’t constantly give me advice. Telling me the butter’s burning isn’t interrupting.”
Ray sucked on the burnt edge of his finger.
“Did you burn yourself?”
“It’s nothing,” Ray said. “Where’s Cinnamon?”
“I haven’t seen her.”
“Well,” Ray said. “Check.”
“She’s in the bedroom, if you want to know,” Lucy said. “My guess is she’s avoiding you. And where did you learn your manners?”
“Sorry,” Ray said. “But I burned myself.”
“I see that,” Lucy said. “What are you making?”
“It was supposed to be a soufflé,” Ray said. “But I can’t get the egg whites to whip.”
“Maybe you had some fat in the bowl,” Lucy suggested. “They won’t whip if there’s fat.”
“I didn’t know that,” Ray said. “I had the spoon in there that I used to scoop out the butter.”
“That could be the problem,” Lucy said. “You’ll probably have to start with new eggs.”
“Maybe I’ll just make pancakes this time,” Ray said. “They don’t take whipping.”
“The good ones do,” Lucy said.
“Really?”
“If you want them fluffy,” Lucy said. “You beat the egg whites first. And a little rye flour to make them crisp.”
“That sounds good,” Ray said. “But maybe I’ll just settle for scrambled eggs and toast.”
“Good idea,” Lucy said. “I’m just sorry I can’t eat it with you.”
“I am, too,” Ray said, and dumped the egg whites into the frying pan.
“This isn’t a good day for you, is it, Ray?”
“No,” Ray said. “It isn’t.”
“Is it me?” Lucy asked.
“What do you mean?” Ray said. He suddenly felt tired.
“I mean, are you sick of my company?” Lucy said. “You’ve been cooped up with me for quite a while now. Maybe you just don’t like me anymore.”
“Who says I ever liked you?” Ray asked. “After all, you did kidnap me, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Lucy admitted. “I did. But I thought you were getting used to me.”
“I am,” Ray said. “Or I suppose I should say, yes, I did. I got used to you almost right away, Lucy. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Me neither,” Lucy said. “Would you like me to test your blood or something?”
“I can’t see how it could help,” Ray said. “Even if it is chemical. I wouldn’t want you to fool around with my blood chemistry.”
“Okay,” Lucy said. “Whatever you say. And I hate to mention it, but I think your eggs are burning.”
Ray jumped to the frying pan, but the scrambled eggs were ruined, and he burnt himself a second time.
Kevin’s intuition
Kevin Fliegel woke up in the
middle of the night with a single word in his mind. “Traps,” he said to himself. He didn’t mean leg-hold traps or mousetraps or even practical jokes set up by his colleagues, of which there were many. He meant, in fact, hardware interrupts. Or rather, the code that could be written, low-level code, which would sit over top of a hardware interrupt and monitor its state changes. Knowing about interrupts and how to trap on interrupt conditions wasn’t a particularly useful piece of knowledge to have, since no reasonable programmer came anywhere near the hardware level. But Kevin had cut his teeth on compiler designs, and he often tweaked the assembly-language routines that could be pulled as an intermediate step from the compile process. Having trouble with a little section? Just overwrite it with a no-op, make sure everything else is working, and fiddle with it later.
He didn’t even wake up completely, but stuck his hand into the drawer beside the bed and pulled out a pen. He could’ve called his computer up, but like many programmers, he’d never gotten comfortable with the idiosyncrasies of using a voice interface.
“Traps,” he wrote on an envelope, and went back to sleep.
Ray’s existential dilemmas
At the end of the first month, Ray still seemed morose, moping around the probe and picking at his food. He’d stopped cooking. He ignored Cinnamon’s attempts to play with him, and rebuffed Lucy’s efforts when she tried to start a conversation. The next morning he showed no signs of lightening up, so Lucy asked him what the problem was.
“I’ve been thinking,” Ray admitted.
“It looks more like you’ve been worrying.”
“Look, Lucy.”
“Ray, why don’t you tell me?”
“It’s a paranoid fantasy.”
“Ray, I know I shouldn’t be the one saying this, but you’ve been kidnapped by an alien probe and are headed out of known space, not that your species knows anything about space to begin with. That should be enough to cause anyone a little nervous thinking.”
“What if you aren’t an alien probe?”
Lucy paused for a minute. “And what would I be if I wasn’t?”
“You might be something that Ted Jones cooked up. I’ve been wondering if you’re an alien probe at all. How about this for a scenario: Ted has some reason for wanting me removed from my work. He conjures up this emergency out on Phoenix II and sends me out to take care of it. For all I can prove, you could be the laboratory in which I’m undergoing a psychological experiment. We may never have left the station.”
Suddenly Ray felt his stomach drop out from under him as the gravity disappeared.
“Does that help?” Lucy asked. “If we were still connected to your space station, how could I stop the rotation so quickly?”
Ray held onto the corner of the counter. “Okay, so you have to at least have let go of the station. But I heard the grapples go before you tranked me out. That doesn’t prove we aren’t just standing off from dock.”
“Be careful. That kind of thinking can get very dangerous when you’re away from other people. If you start doubting too much, you can end up not believing in the consequences of what you do, and next thing you know you’re taking that long walk without a suit, or putting other people in danger along with you. Say that I show you something that proves that I’m not something your friend built. Say that I talk to you with one of my other voices, in the language of another species. I know more than a few of them. Say I show you some artifact other than myself that your people didn’t build. You could just convince yourself that your friend had access to information that you didn’t have, or that whatever I use as proof was just created in the same way I was. But you can just believe me, Ray, or not believe me, it’s entirely up to you: I’m not lying when I tell you that the human race had nothing to do with creating me.”
“Then why do you know such good English, Lucy? Why are you stocked with provisions suitable for a human being to eat? Why are all of your facilities familiar to me?”
There was a silence from the other end.
“Lucy?”
“Ray, does it ever occur to you that there are topics I might not want to talk about?”
“Okay. I don’t mean to offend you. I just think that you could do a little to help me out. Take Cinnamon for instance. Do you really expect me to believe that you have some kind of accelerated birth lab here on board? What would it be good for? What would an alien probe with no crew do with a birth lab?”
“I’ve already told you, Ray; sometimes I have a crew. Just not on this particular mission. And as for what a birth lab is good for, it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out something. It has dozens of uses. Experimentation. Recreation. Even nutrition.”
“Experimentation, recreation, and nutrition, Lucy? I don’t think I like it when you talk that way.”
“Maybe you’d better get used to it.”
“Okay, so you have a birth lab. But then here’s another paranoid fantasy for you—how do I know that I’m not just a product of that lab? I don’t have any other external stimuli to reinforce my self-image. How do I know that I’m not just like Cinnamon? Maybe you just created me in order to have someone to keep you company, and you implanted all my memories in me.” Ray suddenly felt sick to his stomach.
“Forget you ever mentioned it,” Lucy suggested. “I can promise you that I didn’t make you in my birth lab. I picked you up on your Phoenix station just like you remember it. That kind of idea is just like the other one: if you really want to believe it, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop you, but that doesn’t make it true. It just makes it a closed system. And it’s been my experience, at least, that the galaxy can get awfully boring if you try to accommodate any thinking that closes itself away from evidence. You aren’t going to get anywhere if you start out having already decided how you’re going to explain everything. In fact, I can tell you that you aren’t even going to live long.”
Ray forgot the castles in the air. “What do you mean, Lucy? Are we in some danger?”
“Nothing right now. But it shouldn’t be long before we are. I’m heading into occupied territory now, and it can’t be long before we come into contact with one of the border patrols.”
“So is that what this is all about? I’ve been taken prisoner?”
“I wouldn’t exactly say prisoner,” Lucy said.
“So what would you exactly say? Sample, maybe? Specimen?”
“How about representative? Why do you always have to expect the worst? If I wanted to have a sample, you know, I wouldn’t have had to take an entire person. I could just as easily have taken a cell culture or something.”
“So is that what I’m supposed to be?” Ray asked. “A representative?”
“No.”
“We’re heading into occupied territory and you’re telling me that I’m not a prisoner, not a specimen, not a representative.”
“That’s right, Ray.”
Cinnamon was lying over against the wall. She lifted her head and looked at him, so he snapped his fingers at her encouragingly. She plunged to her feet, having a little trouble on the hard surface, then came over and bumped his palm with her head.
Rachel Norman
Rachel woke up at 5:30 in the morning. Her sleep, as usual, had been dreamless, but she wasn’t due to wake up for another forty-five minutes. Why was she awake?
Her computer was talking to her, trying to get her attention. She opened her eyes and spoke to the computer.
“What do you want?”
“You have a call from Philadelphia,” it said.
“Who is it?”
“The number is not available.”
Rachel stacked a couple of pillows behind herself and sat up in a half-hearted way.
“Okay,” she said. “You might as well let me answer it.”
She heard the sudden airiness of the phone line making its connection.
“Hello,” she said. “Rachel here.”
“Ms. Norman,” the voice on the other side said. “This is Op Central. I
have a transmission for you from the office of Ted Jones.”
Rachel sighed.
“Okay,” she said. “Put it through.”
Her computer played its downloading theme and stopped abruptly.
“Computer,” she said. “Did we get it all?”
“Yes,” the machine said.
“We’ve got it,” Rachel told her caller. She would have liked to complain about the hour, but for one thing it might look bad on the transcript, and for the other it wouldn’t help anything. “Goodbye,” she said, and “Goodbye,” the voice answered.
She decided to get a cup of coffee before she played the video. There were some beans left in the freezer, and she added plenty of coffee whitener, then shuffled back into the bedroom and climbed back under the covers.
“Go ahead,” she told the computer. “Play that video.”
A projector beside the clock radio came on and the display went up on the wall opposite.
It was one of the people from Ops, with a full set of instructions for a new mission. She was supposed to leave a briefing on her current operation at an anonymous drop site on the net, and set out by 8:45 for Venezuala, where further instructions would be waiting in the form of an agent named Irene.
Rachel looked at the clock. That gave her less than three hours to be at the airport. She finished her coffee and headed for the shower.
Cabin fever
“I’ve got an idea,” Lucy said. “That we need to find something to cheer you up.”
Ray was sitting in the corner with a blanket wrapped around him. Cinnamon had given up altogether and was sleeping on the bed.
“Nothing can cheer me up,” he said.
“Don’t talk like that,” Lucy answered. “Of course something can cheer you up.”
Ray thought about it for a minute.
“Nothing I can think of,” he said.
Lucy started playing some music. It was the “Dies Irae” from the Verdi Requiem.
“How about that,” she said. “Pretty good, huh?”
“You’ve heard one ‘Dies Irae,’” Ray said, “you’ve heard them all.”
Lucy turned down the volume, but left the music running.
“Okay,” she said, “how about this?”
The lights dimmed, and Ray found himself in a planetarium.