My simulated hand, which is indistinguishable from the real thing, hovers above ‘Galahad,’ but doesn’t select it. Instead, my subconscious redirects my hand to the folder for when I was ten years old.
The first files are expected. School documents: papers and grades. Government documents: social security card, birth certificate, criminal record, and more.
But what follows is a sucker punch to my soul.
There are photos.
Family photos.
All my family photos, going back generations.
Videos, too.
And virtual recordings.
Just knowing that all of this exists is nearly enough to undo me. I have no memory of these records. I believed my past to be lost, along with my parents’—parents who were still alive and cancer free. On Earth. With the blue sky. The green everything. Life as it was meant to be.
I flinch when a virtual recording starts, triggered by the VCC misunderstanding my shocked gestures. I move to stop the playback when my mother’s voice fills my ears. “Willy, where are you hiding?”
Willy.
The name triggers a cascade of suppressed memories and emotions. The only person to ever call me Willy was my mother. It was reserved for her. Anyone else who attempted to use the name got chastised, by me, and if they used it again, my reaction involved fists. I haven’t heard the nickname since her passing.
“I’m coming to find you.” I turn to a view of my childhood dining room, old world Earth with touches of modern living. The home was modern, but dressed up with a twentieth century sense of style, reflecting my parents’ strong sense of family. That’s what they said.
My mother, Cecilia, is dressed for work, in bright blue full-body coveralls. She was an electrical engineer. Worked on the ships that transported humanity, myself included, to Mars. For all I know, some of her designs might even be part of the Galahad.
She stalks, crouched down, fingers hooked. A mother-troll. But she’s all smiles, and she’s clearly pretending to not know my ten year old self is sitting beneath the table beside her. I drink in the scene. The crystals hanging from the window shades, sending little rainbows dancing across the white walls. The painting of a lighthouse, which went out of style when people stopped using the seas to ship goods. The white and yellow area rug. I remember the way it smelled, and how it felt between my still small fingers.
I walk around the virtual space, circling the table opposite my mother, afraid to let her get close enough to crack open my soul and pour it out on the floor.
A giggle from beneath the table makes her stop.
I crouch in time with my mother, squatting to see my younger self squeal at being discovered. I was a naïve ten-year-old, innocent and childlike until my parents’ deaths. They succumbed to cancer in the same year, within months of each other. When I was younger, I believed that my mother died because she was heartbroken by my father’s passing. But now I’m pretty sure it was because of their work, designing and wiring starships, exposed to a menagerie of toxins. But their work was for a greater good. Like mine was supposed to be. They became my inspiration, and now, bearing witness to my loving mother, I hope to still do her proud.
“How can I fix this?” I ask her, as my child-self crawls out from under the table and into her arms. “How can I make everyone’s deaths mean something?”
“Love you, Willy,” she says, kissing my young forehead.
“Tell me what to do,” I say. “Please.”
The recording can’t hear me. I know that. I’m just desperate.
“Why are you and Dad coming home late?” young me asks.
“Medical review,” she says. “Not a big deal.”
But it was a big deal.
This was the day they found out.
They didn’t tell me. Not right away, but my vague memory of this day is reconstituting in my memory. My parents were different when they got home, far later than they said they would be. “This was the day.”
“Can I VR?”
She shakes her head. “You spend too much time in that thing. A little more reality would do you some good.”
“You know he’s coding, right?” My father’s rich voice comes through the foyer, down the steps from their bedroom, where he’s getting ready for the day, dressing in his own bright blue coveralls.
“Please.” I beg.
She kisses my head. “Two hours, tops.”
My father enters the room. Bright blue. Smiling. Bald head gleaming. He’s as close to sparkling as a person can be, but his luster will be faded by the day’s end. “You really should try his progs. He’s got a future.”
My mother rolls her eyes, but says, “When we get home.” Kisses me again. Smiles. “I expect to be impressed.”
They got home too late.
She never did get to see my work.
The playback ends, and I realize my mother, who really didn’t like anything virtual, had been making a VR recording. For me, I decide, and I slip back out of the program, looking at the list again. There are hundreds of files, each a lost moment from my childhood. A digital treasure.
But too painful to repeat.
Running from the crushing weight inside my chest, I open the Galahad folder and dive head first, without looking, into the concrete slab that is my recent history.
12
Unlike the VR recordings of my youth, I clearly remember the events recorded in the Galahad folder. It covers the past twenty-one years of my life, ten of which were spent inside a cryo-bed. Since I’m not really interested in the past ten years, I narrow my search to the previous eleven. Thanks to a sprained ankle that took a good month to heal and another three to stop hurting, I’m able to rule out my first eight years in the program.
Whatever was done to me, to make my body heal rapidly, was done after that injury.
I narrow things down further by jumping into random VR recordings of trainings, tests, and doctor’s visits. When I’m nervous, I pick at my fingers, peeling up slivers of skin, sometimes drawing a bead of blood. I tried to stop the habit when a psyche eval labeled it as ‘minor self-mutilation’, but lifelong habits are hard to stop. I move forward through the events of my own life, trying hard to ignore the furtive glances shared between Tom and Capria while in my presence—missed by me, but captured by the army of VR cameras arrayed throughout Command.
I’m not sure how Command missed my puppy-dog eyes. Maybe they didn’t? I was paired with Capria after all. But why would they break protocol for me? My emotional attachment should have gotten me scrubbed from the mission.
But here I am, the lone survivor.
Well, not quite lone, but close enough.
And the why of that conundrum is still unknown. So I push past my uncomfortable past and focus on the hands. I move through time, pausing to look at my hands, once a day, racing toward the Galahad’s launch.
There are a few false alarms where I managed to kill the habit long enough for my fingers to heal, but the tiny wounds always return. After a few hundred days, I’m in the zone, scrolling through days and looking at my fingertips with such efficiency that when the system pings an alarm chime, I try to access the recording three more times. Then the shrill ding and red ‘Classified’ icon snaps my mind out of its loop.
“Classified?” I ask no one. I’m a ranking member of this crew. While Tom’s foolery locked me out of many files, and access to the database was password protected, these historical documents, which are literal ancient history, nearly as far from the present as the first moon landing from Jesus, should be easy to access. But they’re not, and that means someone didn’t want me to see them.
I launch a dozen brute force attacks on the encryption, starting them off with Command’s password structure: a single digit number, a common name, a year starting at the millennium, all of which are nearly always followed by a pound, ampersand, or percent symbol. Cracking the password shouldn’t take long, assuming Tom didn’t Synergize these records.
During
the wait, I access the files of the twelve crew members who survived Tom’s mania and escaped to Cognata. Amidst the massive amount of personal history, I find six of the twelve have encrypted classified documents during the same range of dates as mine.
Are they like me? Is that what helped them survive? And if they are like me, does that mean they could still be alive on Cognata?
“What the hell did they do to us?”
I try to think of something that unified these six crew members and myself. The most noteworthy of the bunch is captain Edward Blair. The man in charge of saving humanity. But what’s his connection to the others? Four, like me, are from Earth, but the rest are Martian born. We’re a mix of cultures and races, not that there are many true racial divides anymore. White, black, and everything in between stopped being important when most people had mixed parentage somewhere in their past.
Look at this from Command’s perspective, I think. What separates these people from the others. What separates me?
I shake my head, frustrated. I can’t see it.
A bugle sounds a charge in my ears. The notification is jarring and not nearly as funny as I used to think. I make a mental note to change the sound and slip out of the crews’ records and back into mine. The classified password has been revealed: 4Connelly2027%.
I shake my head. The name and date reveal that whoever set the password knew their space history, referencing the first manned mission to Europa. But for a password, the name and date should really be random. It’s sloppy security, clearly done by a tech-jock not cleared for the Galahad’s crew.
I punch in the digits and access the folder. There are three documents inside. The first is a medical record, which I already know will be gobbledygook, so I ignore it. The other two files are VR recordings, one labeled Procedure, the other labeled Explanation.
Believing the medical record and Procedure will leave me with more questions than answers, I opt for the Explanation VR recording. The title suggests that Command might have anticipated someone would eventually access these files. But I’m hardly prepared for how on the nose the message is.
“Computer Science Officer, William Chanokh, welcome.” The mustached man is a stranger, but his smile is welcoming and his demeanor excited. The hair on his lip seems to be compensating for the lack of hair atop his head. His red coveralls mark him as a medical professional, but offer no clue as to his specialty, though I have my suspicions, which he supports a moment later. “My name is Jared Adams. I’m the lead geneticist overseeing the preparation of Galahad’s crew. My goal is simple, to keep you alive. And if you’re watching this, it’s likely because my work proved successful. Perhaps you’ve noticed how quickly you heal, or how you’re resistant to Cognata’s gravity, or maybe you’re simply a few hundred years old.”
He pauses to smile, and I have time to think. They made me immortal?
On the surface, that sounds great. In my current predicament, vaulting into the depths of space, alone, it sounds like actual hell.
His smile falters. “You’re probably wondering why you weren’t told ahead of time.”
“Fucking right.”
“The truth is, we didn’t know if it would work. There’s a good chance you’ll never even see this video. For all we know, the changes made to your genetic code could turn your insides to slurry during cryo-sleep. But the rigors of a new planet, especially one with the gravity of Cognata, will require an alteration to the human genome. Without it, humanity will be unrecognizable within a few generations, if it survives at all.”
Adams holds his hands up like he can sense my growing outrage. “It’s a lot, I know. But there isn’t a single part of this mission that isn’t experimental. Something like this has never been attempted before, and frankly, the mission is more important than your sensibilities about right and wrong. Did we alter your DNA without consent? Yes.”
He leans in close, all conspiratorial, blocking out the stark laboratory behind him. “But are you alive when you shouldn’t be?” His chair squeaks as he leans back, satisfied arms propped up behind his head.
“Next question,” he says, once again predicting my thoughts. “Why you? And why not everyone? You undoubtedly know that there are eight of you. Perhaps you’re the last surviving members of the crew. Perhaps you’re wondering why your crewmates are aging while you are not. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you’re exceptional. The eight of you represent humanity’s best chance at not just reproduction, but becoming something better. I…we…Command doesn’t just want humanity to survive. We want it to thrive. And that’s going to take time. A lot of time. But with your guidance, all of you, we feel confident that this is not the end.”
But they got it wrong. Tom was better. He just hid it to protect his true self. But maybe skill wasn’t the only qualification. Maybe character was taken into consideration? Since Adams isn’t actually clairvoyant and psychic, I don’t think he’ll clear up that mystery. But he does tackle the next question in my mental queue.
“As for ‘why not everyone?’ It’s simple. If the alterations to your DNA, the details of which are contained in the medical records and procedure files accompanying this VR record, failed and you all died, the human race would still have a chance of survival, albeit limited.”
“Yeah, that didn’t really work out,” I say. “Pause.” The playback freezes. I walk around the man in VR, looking at his laboratory, devoid of personnel. It’s clean. Some of it packaged. They’d finished, I think, when this recording was made. And we were still alive, and probably showing signs of regeneration without even realizing it.
I look into his eyes and see pride. Maybe in me, his creation, his neo-human, or maybe just with himself. His work.
“Why didn’t you alter your own genetic code?” I ask, and come up with the answer on my own. “Because you’re a smart man. Immortality is a curse.”
Life eternal, at least in the physical world, will become a kind of torture, even if not trapped alone on the Galahad. If the escaped crew manages to reproduce on Cognata, endless generations will come and go, the brevity of their lives a continuous and painful experience. I’ve heard it said that no parent should outlive their children. It’s life’s worst potential pain, and for people made ever-living by Adams, that pain is destined to repeat itself until the end of everything.
But that might still be better than solitude.
Short of flying into a star, suicide isn’t even a viable option. I could launch myself into the vacuum of space, but who’s to say I wouldn’t survive, frozen and trapped in my own mind. I got a taste of that existence in the failed cryogenic sleep, and I’m in no hurry to repeat the experience for eternity.
The reality of my situation, made certain by the few answers Adams has already provided, settles into my gut like molten lead, weighing me down and consuming me from the inside out.
My legs weaken. Despair drives me to the floor. I sit beside Adams, eyes on the grated metal floor.
There’s no way out of this.
No escape from my new reality.
“I need to build one,” I say, a plan congealing in my mind. While part of me says, ‘Impossible,’ to the emerging plan, the rest of me says, ‘There is time.’
“Not yet,” I say to myself.
I still have a mission, and there’s a good chance that even after the one hundred and forty plus Earth years (thanks to Einstein’s special theory of relativity) I’ve been away from Cognata, some members of the crew might still be alive, and unlike me, they have no idea why.
I need to at least try to get back to them. The Galahad and its technology, resources, and troves of knowledge will make their lives better…and give me people with whom I can spend eternity. But to do that, I need to beat Synergy, wrest control of the ship’s navigational controls, and figure out how to plot a new course. The final two steps should be relatively easy. Everything I need to know is contained somewhere inside Gal’s memory, and I have time to learn. But beating Tom’s secu
rity... That problem could take as long to beat as I have time to live.
Forever.
I lift the VR headset from my head and lie back on the VCC’s floor, staring up at the ceiling fifty feet above.
I lift my real wrist and look at it for the first time in how long?
“Gal, how long was my last VR experience?”
The neither male nor female voice replies, “Two hundred and twelve hours.”
“Geez,” I say. Though I was in VR for nearly nine days, I feel no ill effects. I’m physically and mentally fine. Better than fine. It would work, I think, with the right prog, I could escape.
“Not yet.” I consider going for a shower, or a snack, or exercise, but I don’t need any of them. So I get back to work, slipping the VR headset on and doubling my efforts to break through Tom’s security.
I won’t emerge for another five thousand, two hundred and seventeen hours.
13
It’s settled. I’m immortal.
There’s no doubting it now. Not only did I find confirmation from Jared Adams, the man who tinkered with my genetic code, but I also spent the last two hundred seventeen days fully immersed in VR, without a break.
I’m slightly disoriented. Part of my brain is telling me that the VCC isn’t virtual; that Galahad isn’t real. But I have a lifetime of experience telling me otherwise. The VR headset is in my hands. I can feel the floor and smell the slight ozone tang of the large room. Had I used the virtual skin’s face mask, which simulates smells and tastes by spritzing chemical nanoparticles into the nose and mouth, the illusion would have been even more convincing. While my eyes and ears were fooled by the long stint in VR, I’ve been smelling the air in this room for the better part of a year.
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