MECH

by Tim Marquitz

“All modifications activated,” he said. “And it’s about time. How can I help?”

  “I need a damage report, Fitz,” I said. “We got hit.”

  “I can see we got hit! Or rather, I almost can’t see.” He sighed, something that always made me smile. There was literally no reason for him to ever make breathing sounds, it was entirely built into the humanization mods I’d set him up with. Just ways to make him sound more like a person and less like a machine.

  “Let’s see… I’ve reinforced the area, both exterior and interior. The screen wasn’t broken, of course, though it was damaged. Hmm.”

  “Hmm?” I prompted, hugging the rock beneath me and trying to get my feet attached to it, too. It was easier to think of my metal extremities as hands and feet. In reality, they were about twice as long as my actual limbs, controlled by the muscle-sensors attached to my actual hands and feet within the core of the mechasuit. This wasn’t even the most advanced suit on the market. Go figure they’d send me out here with less-than-stellar equipment. We’re always under-funded.

  My heart still pounded in my ears, but the wonder and beauty of everything surrounding me—despite the danger I was in—was incredibly calming. I could just barely see the sun from here; the small, glowing dot was only a little bigger than the billions and billions of stars surrounding me.

  “You can’t see the stars from space, you know,” my boyfriend had said on that hot summer night, his voice endearingly confident.

  “Yes, you can,” I’d said, and then I’d distracted him by pointing out all the constellations. My favorites were the ones that had been visible since the first written records, and the ones named for famous musicians. I knew all their stories, even if I’d never heard their songs.

  Not only had my boyfriend been wrong, the truth was exactly the opposite. You could see so many stars from space, too many to count or comprehend. The Milky Way looked like a solid thing, a glittering river that streaked across the black sky—like a tumble of multicolored diamonds scattered across an expanse of black velvet.

  I turned my gaze away from home, towards the far edges of our solar system and the sparkling clouds of stars there. I was headed for one of them in particular.

  “You know,” I said to Fitz, “This may actually have worked out in our favor.”

  “Oh?” my AI replied, though he sounded distracted. Another little detail programmed into his Personality-Pak; when he had more than one application open, he tended to sound preoccupied.

  “Yeah, you know. Hitching a ride on this asteroid. It can keep this pace up for far longer than my mech can, and it’s going in the right general direction.”

  “General is a relative term, ’Liza,” Fitz answered. “Especially out here. All it’s going to do is take you off course faster.”

  “Yeah, but even if I lose a day getting back on track, the speed I’m traveling at will cut more than that off my trip,” I argued. “I still come out ahead by a few days. Bring up the map?”

  “Give me a moment,” he muttered, and I turned my attention to the asteroid I was currently clinging to. It was only an asteroid by virtue of being caught by the sun’s gravity. Before that, who knew what it had been. Part of a moon, maybe, or some distant planetesimal. Whatever it had been before the supernova a galaxy away—the one Fitz had failed to detect, mind you. Space was so huge, and yet one little (or giant) explosion could muck everything up.

  I felt like a fly on the wall, hurtling through space, slowly rotating. I won’t lie, I had to focus on taking deep, even breaths to combat the small wave of nausea tightening my stomach and throat. I’d been floating through zero gravity for the past several months, anchored to nothing, most of the movements I made controlled by tiny amounts of pressure on the inside of my mech. Now I was suddenly fixed to something solid, spinning in circles with no say over how fast I was going.

  Not to mention the sudden temperature change; inside it was kept as warm or cold as I desired, with a variance of about twenty degrees. The asteroid had a surface temperature of negative eighty-one degrees Celsius and, despite the extreme insulation, I could swear it had just gotten about ten degrees colder just by being near it.

  “Fitz?” I prompted. “Just tell me the translator’s working, okay? There’s a lot of XTs I have to talk to make this happen, and I only know the three languages.”

  “The translator is working,” Fitz said, except he said it in French. His voice came through my left ear implant, while the English version sounded in my right. “And your slang might be considered offensive by some.”

  “Extraterrestrials,” I corrected myself, sarcastically. “And I’m not actually going to call them that, you know. They all have preferred terms.” He ignored me. I waited.

  “All right, well, I’ll just continue to cling to this space rock and hope I don’t get hit by any more debris,” I said, glancing up to my radar screen. “Seriously though, Fitz, I need to get around Jupiter anyway, and this rock will take me to the other side. I’ll be a little off course, but—”

  “Eliza,” Fitz said, and something in his voice—artificial though it was—made my stomach clench.

  “What?” I asked. “Did…did you lose my progress on Solitaire Saga?”

  “I’ve run every calculation I can think of, ’Liza,” he said. “And you’re not going to make it.”

  The ambient temperature in my suit must have dropped another ten degrees. There was no other way to explain the sudden chill that came over me. I’d heard the expression “my blood ran cold” a thousand times, but I’d never felt it before.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, head swimming. It was like I suddenly couldn’t understand English. The words “you’re not going to make it” just didn’t make any sense to me.

  “The impact cracked the outer coating, which released the repairing compound,” Fitz explained. His voice was subdued. “The crack was three layers deep. The compound fixed it, but some of it seeped into the interior screen. As you know, there are layers of protection between the screen and the internal wiring, but a side effect of the particular layering method we selected…”

  I listened numbly as Fitz continued to talk, explaining everything that had gone wrong. Despite my shaky grasp of English right now, I understood—there was a short circuit. The nav system was offline. The air filtering was damaged, now only capable of producing oxygen at a reduced rate and unreliable at higher speeds.

  Either of those things by themselves was a problem; together, they meant I had no idea where I was going and only enough oxygen if I got there soon.

  “This has to be wrong,” I said. “The nav system is completely offline?”

  “Completely,” Fitz said. “As you are aware, it was malfunctioning in the first place. Now it’s not working at all.”

  “Well, how do we fix it?”

  “We can’t.”

  “There has to be a way to fix it.”

  “I can’t even turn it on, ’Liza. It’s not there. The part that tells us where we are is coated in protective plastic.”

  “Well, how do we fix that?”

  “We…find somewhere to stop, open the suit, take the screen apart, and fix it manually.”

  “Okay, then, where’s the nearest colony?”

  “I don’t know, Eliza, I can’t access the navigation system!” Fitz sounded frustrated. His tone infuriated me. His emotion was just an algorithm, a series of numbers and code that built up his responses and dictated what tone of voice he used. It was sophisticated, sure—I’d written it myself—but it wasn’t real. Fitz was backed up on several computers and drives. He was saved in spreadsheets and part of him was even handwritten in a notebook back on my desk at home.

  I wasn’t. I was real.

  “Override,” I snapped. “Personality mods off.”

  “Personality-Pak disabled,” my HUD said, leaving me alone in my anger.

  I was clinging to a slowly rotating space rock out in the literal middle of nowhere, and I was furious.

>   Okay, Eliza, think. Where was the nearest colony? The one that orbited Mars? Or Terra-Major, the one that traveled between Uranus and Jupiter? Was it closer to Jupiter right now?

  I had no idea. I’d been out here for months and months, everything had been going fine, there’d been no snags or problems, and now, all of a sudden, I was dead in the water. Without my navigation system, the chances of my getting anywhere even remotely helpful were next to nothing.

  There had to be a way out of this. I needed to know exactly what the rate of oxygen production was, at what speeds. Fitz had said he’d already run all the calculations, but what did he know? He was just a program.

  “Run me the numbers,” I said. “I want the rate of oxygen production at all speeds.”

  “Projected averages are up on the screen,” my HUD said. I glanced over them, doing quick math in my head. Something about his artificial voice nagged at me. It sounded quieter than was usual, which surely couldn’t be described as subdued. I’d turned all the mods off. It had to be just my own emotions projected onto my artificial companion.

  “Those can’t be right,” I said, staring at the numbers. There was no reply.

  In order to even get clear of this cloud of space debris, I’d have to divert all power and processes to the boosters. The amount of speed I’d require to clear the projected danger zone would severely limit oxygen production. Hypoxia would set in within six to nine seconds. My portable life-support system would kick into overdrive at only half-resources. If I even managed to stay conscious, I likely wouldn’t be for long.

  I shifted around, crawling across the rock I was attached to. Some more quick calculations helped me find the axis, and I situated myself at the slowest rotation. I adhered my feet to the surface of it, made sure of my balance, and stood.

  Yeah, it was a lot safer to stay hunkered down, but I wasn’t really worried about safety right now. I was already in danger. There were at least three different ways I could die in the next hour, what was one more? Besides, this way I could look at everything one last time.

  “I can’t really explain what it’s like out here,” I said, trying not to think about what I was doing. Sure, my suit was recording and transmitting, but the signal wouldn’t reach anyone for weeks, maybe months. It didn’t have to be a goodbye. It didn’t have to be my last words or anything. It didn’t have to be like that. “Even though I’m so light, it’s so heavy. It feels heavy. I can feel the matter and the mass of the universe, the forces that pull it together and apart. I can feel the stars and the light. I’m surrounded by nothing, and everything. It’s not dark out here at all. Even though I’m so far away that I can’t even see the sun, it’s reflecting off everything. The sunlight and the starlight are infinite.” I took a deep breath.

  “The stars, Mom,” I said, and my throat closed. “I could take a picture, but it wouldn’t do it justice. Even the 3D video feed isn’t the same. It’s so… It’s just… It’s…”

  “There isn’t a word for what you want to say, Eliza,” my HUD said. “Not in English, anyway. The closest I can find is yūgen, a Japanese concept integral to the perception of everyday life. It refers to the mysterious, sad beauty of humanity and the universe, the sense of being—”

  “Fitz,” I interrupted. I wished I could wipe the tears from my face, but my mech made that impossible. “How are you…on?”

  “Good question,” my AI replied. “I could answer it, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  I couldn’t help it; I laughed. That kind of humor was the last thing I’d expected right now. “Fitz, really. I turned off your mods.”

  “Yes, you did,” he said. His voice was quiet. “But, I was thinking. Remember when you turned off my mods back when you were first struck?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I was thinking about it then, too. I was thinking about how I hoped you’d turn them back on soon so I could help you assess the damage.”

  “If your personality mods were off, Fitz, you couldn’t have been hoping,” I said. My throat hurt and my face itched. Do you know how maddening it is not to be able to feel any skin-on-skin contact at all for months on end? I didn’t remember what my hair felt like. Sometimes I’d dreamed I was just a floating head, lost in space. Sometimes I felt like an AI myself.

  “That’s what I told myself. Nevertheless, I was hoping you’d turn them back on. So when you did, I took some initiative. I coded and initiated my own mod. It triggers when the Personality-Pak is disabled. In short—”

  “In short,” I interrupted, numbly, “you turned yourself back on.”

  “Yes.”

  I stared at the stars through my visor. For a moment, a brief one, I tried to count them, just while I was trying to process everything. Fitz had turned himself back on. My AI had written its own program for the purpose of self-preservation. Sure, it wasn’t true free will. I could still go into the code and alter it. I could erase whatever program he’d written, or remove the mods entirely. He couldn’t stop me. It wasn’t true autonomy.

  But, still. Just like that—out here, in the middle of nowhere, facing certain death—my AI companion, my only friend for the past year, had become aware.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that, Fitz,” I said quietly.

  “Why?”

  “Because now we’re both going to die.” I swallowed. “Now it’s not just me.”

  “’Liza…”

  “Look at the stars, Fitz,” I said.

  “I can,” he said. “But I don’t think we would see the same thing.”

  “What do you see?”

  He was silent for a few moments.

  “I see stars,” he said. “And more than that. What do you see?”

  I just stood there, rotating slowly, taking in all of the universe. I didn’t have an answer for him. I was out here, stranded, with only the breath in my lungs and the blood in my veins. My PLSS recycled and redistributed, purifying and reusing everything I’d come out here with. It couldn’t make something from nothing.

  Most of my resources would be used up just to get out of immediate danger. Then I could either try to make it back home, or press on and hope I made it to the colony, or back into signal-range of my companions. Either way, the numbers said I wouldn’t make it. I would run out of air, slowly, until my PLSS put me in stasis. Once there, I would survive a little longer before all systems failed. I would die without ever knowing it.

  “Eliza?”

  “I’m worried about you, Fitz.” I said. It may sound stupid, but suddenly, I didn’t just have me to think of. Fitz would be with me until the end. I couldn’t just shut him off, and when I finally passed out, he’d be alone until all the power shut off. And with me dead, the code at home probably wouldn’t be reused anywhere. Fitz was my own personal AI, he wasn’t standard. My death more than likely meant his, as well.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said.

  “But when I die—”

  “So will I,” he said. “I’ve already thought it all out.”

  “Are you afraid?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “But I’m more afraid of losing you.”

  I pulled my gaze from the stars down to my HUD, where the ripples from the audio wave were just fading. I wondered what Fitz would have looked like, if he had a face. I’d never really thought about that before.

  Silence descended between us, a silence somehow heavier than all that pressed upon me. I searched myself for feeling, found none. I was numb.

  “Let’s get out of the immediate danger,” I said. “Then we can decide what to do.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  I looked off towards where the asteroids were coming from, telescoping my view and doing some more quick calculations. “The autopilot still works, right?” I asked.

  “Sure, as long as you don’t rely on it to get you anywhere specific.”

  “I just want the anti-collision, Fitz.”

  “Yes, that’s working, but—”

  “Great,”
I said, and launched myself off into space.

  Immediately, an acrid scent filled the suit as the oxygen filtering went to half-power. I felt a sudden head-rush and reminded myself not to hold my breath.

  “But using it will divert more power than I’m comfortable with, ’Liza!” Fitz finished, his voice both frantic and annoyed. I was always amazed at the nuances of his artificial speech.

  “Well, I’m gonna try not to use it!” I said, once again bringing my knees up to my chest. My shoes gave more little squirts of nitrogen, more forceful this time, sending me hurtling upwards. I tried to ignore the numbers and meters on my screen, the resources ticking rapidly down like reverse loading-bars.

  My heart pounded, my body abruptly feeling like I was doing a thirty-yard sprint. My pulse raced, my breath short, and I suddenly felt like I’d been punched in the chest. I tried to regulate my breathing, keeping my gaze focused on my Head-Up Display. My navigation tools may be shot, but the radar was still working. As long as I kept avoiding the little red dots, I’d be—

  The light in my suit turned red, a warning buzzer going off like the worst kind of old-fashioned alarm clock. “Oxygen levels dropping,” Fitz said. “Remember to breathe evenly, don’t hyperventilate and don’t hold your breath.”

  “I’m fine, it’s gonna be fine!” I snapped, looking down at my HUD. There was no point in looking out through my screen; I wouldn’t see anything until it was close enough to not matter. I gave my full attention to the radar and the little red blips coming towards the center blip. It was just like playing a VR game with no extra lives or continues left.

  “I’m fine, you’re fine, we’re both fine,” I continued to mutter while dodging little red dots. I pretended they were laser bursts or something, like I was a hero getting shot at by bad guys. I’d always talked to myself when playing video games back home, too.

  I could feel my pulse pounding in my head, in my fingers, my clenched teeth. I tried to concentrate on regulating my breathing, like I really was running a marathon. Inhale for two seconds, exhale for two. In one-two, out one-two.

  “You’re almost there, ’Liza,” Fitz urged. “You’ve got this!” I could only hear out of one ear for some reason. My world narrowed to the blip and the dots. My vision was tunneling.