by Stan Ruecker
“What if,” the announcer began, “there were life on other planets?”
“Lucy,” Ray said.
The lights came up a little, as if dawn were breaking.
“Yes?” she said.
“A planetarium is nice,” Ray said. “But I think you might want to reconsider the show. At this point I’m already fairly convinced there’s life on other planets.”
“Good point,” Lucy said, and the lights came on the rest of the way. “But I had to go with what I had, and I figured what the heck, I’d give it a shot. There’s got to be something you’d like, Ray.”
“Maybe I’m just homesick,” Ray suggested. “We’ve been away from Earth for over a month. I’ve never been gone for that long before. In fact, I’ve never been gone at all.”
Now that he thought about it, the feeling was a bit like homesickness. He was lethargic and wistful, both at the same time.
“We can’t go back,” Lucy said. “At least not yet.”
“We can’t, huh?”
“No way,” Lucy said. “Sorry.”
“But there is a chance we’ll go back?”
“A pretty good chance, actually.”
“I don’t suppose you want to talk about it?”
“Not really,” Lucy said. “Just take it from me—there’s a good chance we’ll see Earth again. Right now what I’m more worried about is you feeling homesick.”
“Maybe it’s not homesick,” Ray suggested. “Maybe it’s cabin fever.”
“Cabin fever?”
“Yeah, you know. A person starts to feel cramped after a while, living in a confined space. Eventually you shoot your refrigerator or whatever.”
“It sounds serious,” Lucy said. “Certainly for the refrigerator.”
“You know what I mean.”
“How about a space walk?”
Ray considered.
“Maybe,” he said. “Is there anything out there to see?”
“Just space,”
“Is it any different from the space you show me on the video displays?”
“No, I guess it isn’t.”
“Well, it doesn’t sound very exciting,” Ray said. “Sorry.”
“How about your flute?” Lucy said. “Isn’t that interesting?”
“It is,” Ray admitted. “But I’m afraid I’m kind of tired of it right now. I need something else. Some kind of novelty.”
“Oh,” Lucy said. “Now I get it. You want to look at something that’s different from the things you’ve been looking at.”
“Yes,” Ray said. “That’s it exactly.”
“Well,” Lucy said. “Why didn’t you say so? I think I know exactly the kind of thing you might enjoy.”
Ray is reborn
They landed on a small moon orbiting a planet resembling Jupiter.
“Where are we?” Ray asked.
“It’s a solar system not too far from yours, Ray.”
“What do you mean by ‘not too far?’”
“Well, it isn’t one of your immediate neighbours, but it’s within five or six stars.”
“That’s quite the perspective you have there,” Ray said. “And where are we landing?”
“It’s a moon,” Lucy said. “I want you to go out and take a walk around.”
“I don’t suppose you could just manufacture me a stairmaster or something?”
“You’d get exercise that way,” Lucy said. “But you wouldn’t get novelty. We’re here so you can see something you haven’t seen before.”
“I’ve seen moons before,” Ray said.
“You haven’t seen anything like this one,” Lucy said. “And besides, it’ll do you good to get outside me for once.”
“What about breathing?” Ray asked. “Does this moon have an atmosphere I can breathe?”
“It doesn’t have an atmosphere at all,” Lucy said. “Which is why I’m going to manufacture you a suit.”
“You keep everything you make, don’t you, Lucy?” Ray asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s more or less true.”
“So the fact you don’t have a suit that’d fit me means I’m your first human passenger, doesn’t it?”
“First human being I’ve ever had on board,” Lucy admitted. “But you weren’t worried about that, were you, Ray?”
“No,” Ray confessed. “It was just a thought. How long will it take to manufacture a spacesuit?”
“Only a few minutes,” Lucy said. “In fact, the first part of it’s ready now.”
Ray looked around.
“Where are you going to put it?” he asked.
“Over by the airlock,” Lucy said. “The one you used to get in here in the first place. There’s a locker built into my bulkhead there.”
Ray went down the access ladder into the lower corridor. Sure enough, there was a pair of coveralls in the locker.
“So there’s no atmosphere,” Ray said. “What else can you tell me?”
“Parts of the surface are a bit banged up,” Lucy said. “There’ve been meteor showers in the past, and with no atmosphere to protect it, the surface got hit. But there’s nothing recent.”
“Like our moon at home,” Ray said.
“Exactly,” Lucy answered. “But there’s a couple of interesting features to this one that make it different from anything you’ve seen.”
“That planet, for one thing,” Ray said. “It sure is big.”
“Very big,” Lucy said, and a left boot appeared in the locker. “But that’s not important. Not really.”
“And that’s quite the atmosphere they’ve got there,” Ray said.
It was true the planet was exhibiting every sign of a storm underway.
“It’s nothing you’d want to breathe, that’s for sure.”
“How confident are you in the safety of this space suit?” Ray asked, as the right boot appeared in the locker. “It doesn’t seem very substantial.”
“You can’t cut it or tear it,” Lucy said. “And the air supply is good for a hundred hours, which is quite a bit.”
“Where do you keep the air?” Ray said. “I don’t see any tanks.”
“There aren’t any tanks,” Lucy answered. “The air is tucked away. Sort of here and there.”
“So there isn’t a tank?”
“No.”
“And no helmet, either?”
“Would you like a helmet?”
“Don’t I need one?”
“No. The suit generates a field that keeps the air in. There’s also audio transmission and reception, so you can talk to me while you’re out there.”
“Why not video?”
“My cameras can track you. I don’t want you to go so far I can’t see you, Ray. What if you got into trouble?”
“If I got into trouble, how quickly could you react, anyway?”
“Pretty quickly,” Lucy said. “I have remotes that can go like stink.”
“So that’s it?”
“Pretty much,” Lucy said. “But don’t forget your gloves.”
There were a pair sitting in the locker.
“Is there anything in particular I need to know?” Ray asked. “Or am I just sort of walking around out there?”
For some reason, Ray was suddenly aware that his heart was racing. Having lived in the ship for so many weeks, it suddenly seemed dangerous to leave it. He tried telling himself that was ridiculous—after all, Lucy wasn’t exactly home sweet home. For one thing, she’d kidnapped him. But still he hesitated at the door.
“What about Cinnamon?” he asked. “Will she be okay?”
“You aren’t going to be gone that long,” Lucy said. “Cinnamon will be fine. What’s the problem, Ray?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just reluctant, suddenly. You wouldn’t just leave me here, would you?”
“Of course not,” Lucy said. “I give you my word of honour.”
“And how do I know what that’s worth?”
“What else have you got?
”
“Good point,” Ray said, and opened the airlock.
“Now remember,” Lucy said. “Just over that first rise, that’s where I want you to go. You’ll lose your line-of-sight on me, but I’ll have an antenna up so we can still communicate.”
“I was the one who said he had cabin fever, wasn’t I?” Ray asked.
“Yeah,” Lucy said. “I’m pretty sure it was you.”
Ray stepped out onto the barren moon.
Kevin pursues his new hobby
Kevin flipped through the results of his most recent system integration test and made a note to talk to the programmer tomorrow. The program did what all good computer programs are supposed to do, and caught bad data as it came in. There was no way for anyone to enter someone’s name where a date should go, or divide any number by zero, or put the user into a situation where nothing they did would have any effect.
Except if an electronic mail message came in while someone was changing the font. If that happened, the computer locked. So something was wrong somewhere. It wasn’t Kevin’s job to find out where—he just had to break it. It would be up to the original programmer to find the problem and make the fix. Then Kevin could try to break it again. He made the appropriate entry in the system test log and shut down his computer.
He had development work of his own, of course, for time that wasn’t already spent either in maintenance or testing. Ordinarily he’d have stayed late—he was out on Phoenix II to work as a programmer, it was what he enjoyed doing, and so he did as much of it as he could. But lately he’d lost interest.
He took his jacket out of the locker and headed down one of the administrative hallways. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t allowed access down this corridor, but it cut ten minutes off his walk home, and he was in a hurry. As usual, all the bigwigs had gone home by the time Kevin came through, and he didn’t see anyone.
When he got back to his apartment he grabbed a plastic-wrapped sandwich out of the fridge and settled down in front of his home computer. It had a network link, and Kevin had sufficient computer access to monitor any hardware-level activity on the station. And that was all he needed to track this alien program.
What Kevin mounted was an enormous monitoring program. It kept track of the hardware interrupts on every piece of equipment on Phoenix II, filtering legitimate requests and recording the rest. Whenever a suspicious request appeared, Kevin flagged and stored the register status on the related processor. In effect, he took a snapshot of the computer’s brain every time it did something unusual. And he wrote the result to a hard drive that couldn’t be changed once each snapshot went on to it.
He started the system running while he finished his sandwich. Within a few hours he’d captured several tetrabytes of information related to unauthorized transactions. All written to the drive that could only be written to once.
The question with any large amount of data, Kevin recited to himself, is not whether it has any use in itself, but whether it can be manipulated into the form required for a particular use.
Kevin started by copying the whole works from that special drive into regular files on an empty computer, a computer completely isolated from the rest of the system.
The data instantly disappeared.
He checked again, and there was nothing on the computer.
He performed the copy a second time, but kept his monitoring program going to watch what happened. The data went from his locked storage into the new storage, but as soon as it reached a critical size, it started manipulating itself. Part of it split off and wrote a smaller sequence into the drive partitions. Part of it just went invisible, but continued running as a background process. At various places around the system, bad sectors started to appear on the disks: one here, three there. An entire cylinder went inaccessible through a chain of lost allocation units.
Is it destroying storage? Kevin thought, wanting to just stop it. But he held himself back.
This is an isolated machine, he told himself, flipping through the hardcopy. Whatever it has done to the net has already taken place. This is just a test.
He got to the last page. Data transferred: zero bytes.
He ran a couple of tests, correlated the answers with the electronic tare he had taken before starting. Just under 30% of the storage had been rendered inaccessible by one means or another. Of secondary storage. Lord only knows what had happened to the smaller and faster main memory. His monitoring utility showed itself as the only resident process, quietly running its checks on an otherwise silent computer.
“Kevin,” his apartment computer said. “You have a call from Karen.”
Karen was his immediate supervisor.
“Kevin here,” he said.
“How’s it going?” she asked. “You got that funny virus nailed down yet?”
“I don’t think it’s a virus,” Kevin said. “At least, it’s the biggest virus I’ve ever seen. It also moves too fast, and it isn’t just replicating. It looks more like it’s doing a very intelligent job of moving itself all over the place, in pieces, and hiding itself.”
“Pieces, you say. Hiding.”
“Yeah. Like the hard drive doesn’t show it’s there, the active memory doesn’t show it’s there, but it’s there.”
“Like body odour,” Karen said.
Kevin thought that was crude.
“I think I’d like some time off work,” he said, although he hadn’t thought of it until basically after he’d spoken.
“To work on this virus thing?”
“Maybe for that,” Kevin said. “Does it matter what it’s for?”
“Not really,” Karen said. “How long do you want?”
“Can I have a week?” Kevin asked.
“You’ve got, what, maybe six months in vacations backed up?”
“Twenty-two weeks,” Kevin corrected.
“I think you can take one,” Karen said. “But you’ll still be available for emergencies, right?”
“Anything you say,” Kevin said. “Do I have to wear a beeper?”
“Are you leaving your apartment?”
Kevin bit his lower lip, peevishly.
“I might,” he said. “What if I had like a big date or something?”
“If you have a big date,” Karen said, “she’d better like computers, that’s all I can say.”
She paused.
“Do you have a big date?” she asked.
“No,” Kevin said. “I’m just going to work on this project of mine.”
“Then we can get ahold of you if we need you,” she said.
“Good,” Kevin said, then remembered his manners. “And, uh, thanks,” he said.
“No problem,” Karen said. “But send me an e-mail to make it official, okay. Then you can start your holidays right away Monday.”
“Thanks,” Kevin said, meaning it this time. Karen wasn’t so bad, really. She was just too blunt. “I’ll let you know what I come up with.”
“It’s probably just a practical joke, you know,” Karen said. “Somebody’s pulling your leg, and you’re going to end up looking like an idiot.”
“I don’t know,” Kevin said. “This thing is pretty smart. I don’t think anybody here has the brains to pull it off.”
“I’ll refrain from commenting on that,” Karen said.
Now that, Kevin thought, is more like what a guy should expect from somebody like Karen.
“I should get back to work,” he said.
“Okay,” she answered. “But keep me posted, okay?”
“You’ll be the first to know,” Kevin answered, and they hung up.
Moonwalk
Ray walked away from Lucy, and the feeling of anxiety disappeared. He realized he hadn’t been moving very much, lately. He held his arms out and windmilled them. He jumped up and down, seeing how high he could get by bending both knees and jumping with his feet together. Definitely higher than on Earth.
“Ray?” Lucy said, and her voice was right in his ear. “Are y
ou okay?”
“Yeah,” Ray said. “Yeah, I’m fine. I feel good.”
“I thought maybe I’d gotten the oxygen mix wrong,” Lucy said.
“No,” Ray said. “It’s nothing like that. I was just—confined, Lucy. I felt too locked up.”
“Well, I did kidnap you,” she said.
“But still,” Ray said. “Thanks for letting me out. I mean, look at this. I never would have gotten to see this if it hadn’t been for you.”
Ray looked around. There were mountains and valleys and rocks and all the usual moonscape.
“You really should take a look over that rise up ahead,” Lucy said.
“Do you think I should?” Ray asked. “I mean, do I need to? I have to say, this is pretty good, right here.”
Ray took a couple of leaps. He picked up a handful of rocks in his left glove, and threw them one by one with his right. They flew so far he lost track of them. He scuffed his feet through the dust and made a word, then another word.
“What are you doing, Ray?”
“Nothing,” he said. He jumped back, careful not to smudge the last letter.
“Thanks, Lucy,” the message said.
“You’re welcome, Ray,” Lucy whispered in his ear.
“Now about that horizon,” Ray said, and shaded his eyes with his glove against the light from the gas giant nearby. “How far did you say it was?”
“No more than half a kilometre,” Lucy said.
“Okay,” Ray said. “Time me.”
He took off, running as fast as he could. There were a few rough patches, but he watched his feet, keeping his weight as low as he could so he didn’t wind up airborne. He hit the top of the rise at a dead run and skidded to a stop.
“Two point six minutes,” Lucy said. “Is that fast?”
“Pretty fast,” Ray said. “I think. It seemed fast to me.” He was definitely puffing.
“I don’t suppose I need to worry about my air supply, huh?” Ray asked.
“It cost you a bit,” Lucy said. “But you’ve still got a day or two.”
Ray finally noticed what was in front of him. It looked like some kind of cataclysm, like a city of rectangular stone buildings that had fallen over like dominoes, every which way.
“What is it?” Ray asked.
“Go closer,” Lucy said. “As far as I know, it should be safe. When I was here before it was clearly abandoned.”