Mission: Tomorrow

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  I hunkered down and ordered the computer to run analytics across our maps of the asteroid. The smaller the surface, the harder it was to land on it. Out here you measured four times and cut once. I sent my results to Harry for double-checking just as the Belle Amis chose to respond to us. “Thank you for answering our call.”

  I looked over at Harry, confirming I’d take it with a nod of my head and clicking my mike on with my tongue. “You’re welcome. I’m Cynthia Freeman. What’s your situation?”

  “Yes. This is a family operation. A father and a daughter. The father died in a fall and the daughter is unable to fly.”

  “Who am I speaking to?”

  “I’m an automated companion named Audrey.”

  I glanced at Harry, who looked completely unsurprised. But then he usually looked unsurprised. “How is the daughter?”

  “She is . . . difficult.”

  She had been alone with nothing but a robot for company for some time. Hard for me; harder for a child. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I’d like you to come see.”

  I drummed my fingers on the table. Audrey must be as bright as Harry, or close. The girl could be sick, and must be traumatized after losing both parents. Nothing felt right. “Is there anything or anyone down there that will harm me or Harry?”

  “It’s safe to come down. I’ll wait for you.”

  Robots didn’t lie. “We’ll be there soon.”

  Harry cut the communication link. “I finished reviewing your calculations. I’d pick your second choice.”

  “Why? It’s further away from the Belle.”

  “It’ll be easier to get away from there. Their thrusters won’t have any direction they can fire that will prevent us from an easy exit.”

  He was thinking defensively.

  Landing was the first way anything major could go wrong.

  The Pegasus’s nav system managed the slow-motion process. Before we even touched the surface, all eight of our legs had crawled it, finding rocky protuberances to grip. Fine metallic dust obscured every camera, hanging in the air as if it were frozen in a photograph. Harry and I sat, strapped into chairs, watching the readouts and the dust.

  Each leg settled itself in slow motion.

  Next, the two ships used robots to string an ultra-light, thin ribbon of reflective line between them. It snaked under the canopy of solar film that fed the Belle. Waiting for dust to settle in microgravity took hours; we slept. Harry curled around me, his skin warm and soft like a human’s skin. He threw an arm over my waist. He didn’t breathe, but fluids coursed through him, creating the slightest ebb and flow to his skin, the barest illusion that what comforted me was alive.

  I dreamed of lost little girls alone on asteroids.

  When we woke, I drank my coffee and ate a light breakfast. “Harry?”

  “Yes?”

  “It doesn’t feel right to be here.”

  He cocked his head at me, his expression between quizzical and a soft smile. A rare look for him. “This was forced on you.”

  Smart robot. I convinced myself to stop worrying. After I suited up and checked everything twice, I turned off the light and stood in the lock, looking out. The largely metal surface of the asteroid was coated in dust from the inevitable and ever-present small collisions, dust gathered both from itself and from all of the things that it encountered. It would be a bitch to mine, and toxic. Rich, though.

  Just above us, stars. The light from the faraway sun drove our shadows to our feet like frightened dogs. A few hundred meters from the doorway, solar fabric roofed the world. The supports and struts that held it in place created lines of shadow on the regolith. I took a deep breath, stepped slowly over the threshold and away from the magnetic floor and reached up to grab the line and attach it to the loops on my suit. From there, it was a matter of hand-over-handing my almost weightless self through the still dust of our arrival. Everything was coated to resist the fine grime, so it slid off of our faceplates and joints and the tips of our toes as if we were swimming through water instead of potentially toxic fines.

  I led and Harry followed. His suit looked like layered cellophane. But then, life support for a robot was as simple as providing power and protection from the elements.

  As I led us under the tent of material, my faceplate lightened to show the Amis in the center of the vast web, looking even more spiderlike from this angle. Funny how I never thought of our setup this way. The lock door opened as we neared it, and Audrey hung just outside, offering a hand to guide me from the line and into the lock. She looked more like a girl than me, with an improbably slender waist and rounded hips. Her designers had given her brunette hair, blue eyes, and a tiny mouth. When her hand took mine, it was done gently. Yet under the gentle touch, she had the same sense of strength as Harry.

  Once we were through the other side of the lock, I could stand normally again. Or almost. The mag-grav in the Amis was slightly higher than we kept ours. In her current situation, the Amis had more power than she could possibly use, at least given that I’d seen no sign of active mining on the way in.

  “Hello, Cynthia.” Audrey’s voice sounded like whiskey and honey. She led us to a kitchen table, laid out with a teacup and a plate of crackers. No fruit or anything from the garden, just tea and crackers. “Thank you for coming.”

  “You’re welcome.” Surely she knew I hadn’t had a choice. The room looked neat and sterile, and smelled of tea and cleaning solution and nothing else, not even the stale ghost of cooking oil or rehydrated soup.

  One cup of tea.

  “Will you take me to see the daughter?”

  “Of course. But she’s sleeping now.”

  The tea water steamed. The feeling of not-right crawled deep in my nerves. “Can I see her? Just look in?”

  “She might stir. Please drink.”

  “I’m sure it will just take a moment.” After all, while the living quarters on the Amis were bigger than my Pegasus, it wasn’t by much. There couldn’t be more than ten or fifteen rooms.

  “Very well.” Was it my imagination or had her voice warmed even more?

  She turned on her heel and walked down the single hall that branched off of the big shared galley and meeting space. Four bright blue doors were the only thing of interest in the corridor itself; the walls and floor were bare and white, the roof full of pipes that gurgled with water or other fluids.

  We passed a dark entertainment room. The next door hung open. Pale yellow light illuminated a dingy garden. Planters were either empty or full of scraggly plants with drooping, yellowed leaves. A tiny maintenance bot labored to keep dead leaves from the floor. It was probably responsible for whatever green remained in there, and I imagined it growing desperate in spite of its steady, industrious whirring.

  Audrey stopped in front of a third door, the one almost at the end of the hall, and opened the door with exaggerated slowness and a crook of her little finger. I peered into the door.

  An almost-empty room. One chair. A screen as dead and black as the space around us on one wall. Two beds, one with a small figure on it, covered up to her chin. “See?” Audrey whispered.

  I pushed the door open a little further, stepping in.

  Audrey’s hand clamped down on my arm. “Don’t wake her.”

  That convinced me to cross the empty floor and kneel by the bed.

  The girl was at most three or four years old. Her red-brown hair had been caught back in a ponytail, and she wore a blue jumpsuit that probably served as pajamas.

  She wasn’t breathing.

  I turned, full of concern and questions.

  The door was closing behind me. I caught the briefest glimpse of Harry’s startled face just before the lock clicked.

  I stared at the back of the door. After a while, my situation started to sink in, thoughts coming together coherently in spite of how betrayed I felt. And how stupid. I had, after all, known something was wrong.

  I was on a strange ship, alone, and capt
ive. An easy way to die out here, and a stupid one.

  Crimes against humans meant certain destruction for robots. Not that we were near anyone with the authority to carry out a trial and issue a self-destruct order.

  Harry would help me. Wouldn’t he?

  I sat back on the bed and looked down at the little girl, her face slack with death. Had she been killed?

  My hand trembled, but I managed to touch her cheek with the back of my hand.

  It felt cold.

  Cold?

  Well, of course. She hadn’t just died five minutes ago. But if she had been thrown into a freezer, surely she would look worse. There had been a manual on what to do when people died in space. I hadn’t paid attention other than to pass the test and forget most of the details. But her body had to have been deliberately prepared; raw death wasn’t this pretty.

  If the robot had done this to a little girl, what would she do to me? It had to have been an accident; no companion robot would hurt its person. Maybe something horrible had happened and Audrey had become confused?

  Still, she had left a prepared body to trick me into this room. The unimaginable slowly sank further and further in. What could she have been thinking?

  I should have drunk her damned tea.

  What were they talking about without me? Why did Harry let this happen?

  Why wasn’t he saving me?

  I peeled away the girl’s clothes, gingerly. I had never touched a dead body before, never even seen one up close. It felt completely wrong, like an arm or a leg might fall off. From being frozen? Before she died, she had been healthy. Her ever-so-slightly plump face looked clean and her hair had been combed and trimmed. I searched for a cause of death, but didn’t see anything except maybe the marks on her elbows and feet that could have come from needles to administer drugs or to drain fluids before she was sent off into space.

  If only Harry were here. He remembered things like manuals about preparing the dead for burial in space. Harry would have been able to help me figure out what was wrong.

  I dressed her again, and then covered her with the sheet on the bed, so that she looked like a lump instead of a dead child.

  A million ways to die out in the Belt, but how had she died?

  I sat in the chair, thinking. Then I moved to the bed. Then back to the chair.

  Water would be really, really good.

  Hours passed before the door opened. I looked up, hoping for Harry. Audrey came in and bundled up the child in a sheet. She stood and looked at me, holding the dead baby in her arms like a pile of laundry, her head cocked ever so slightly. “Tea?”

  “Yes, I’d like that.”

  I hoped to find Harry in the kitchen waiting for me, but there was no sign of him. I watched Audrey place her bundle carefully into the freezer, her movements smooth. Then she switched effortlessly to making fresh tea.

  “How long have you been alone?” I asked her.

  “Eight months.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Audrey closed the freezer door and turned to look directly at me, her baby-blue eyes fastened deeply onto mine. “Her father killed her. He smothered her. Right after we got here.”

  I blinked, surprised. I sipped more tea, buying myself time to think. At least she hadn’t killed the little girl. Robot killers were the stuff of scary science fiction, but there were always rumors. “And what happened to him? To the father?”

  “Richard? He died.”

  She was being evasive again. Even though I knew that, I asked, “Where is Harry? My companion?”

  “He went back to your ship.”

  I glanced at the hooks by the door. My helmet hung there, but Harry’s was gone. “Did he say why?”

  “No. But I’m sure he’ll be back soon. He seemed upset, but I told him that you needed time to think.”

  If there were no humans here to rescue, we could take off. That would maroon Audrey on the asteroid, perhaps forever.

  Audrey herself was worth something. But her pink slip wouldn’t pass to me, and I didn’t trust SpaceComSec to be any more helpful than they had to be.

  I sat back, resolved to escape, but also not to hurry so that I didn’t disturb Audrey. Harry had to take my orders, but she did not.

  “Is there any more of your story that you’re willing to tell me?” I asked her.

  “I’d been with Richard for a long time. I was his only companion.”

  She was surely a sex-bot. There were plenty of people who weren’t as squeamish as me. Audrey continued. “The baby is Carline. We found her mother when she was pregnant—she sold herself to him, dumb girl—and he killed her as soon as she weaned the baby. Launched her body right out of the gravity well here.”

  I felt the need to clarify. “You’re telling me that Carline’s mother was a murdered sex slave?”

  Audrey nodded. “He told me that I couldn’t tell anyone. He said I had to lie about it for all the rest of my life.”

  A slight catch in her voice suggested she felt bothered by this request to lie. And Harry’s instruction video had said he wouldn’t lie. To me, or for me.

  Companion robots are programmed with a deep sense of fairness.

  The situation felt so strange I had no words for it. I struggled to sound casual. “Was that hard for you?”

  “Yes.” She took my empty cup and refilled it with fresh hot water. She set the cup down and sat down opposite me, close enough to touch me if she wanted to. “Before you came, there was no one to tell. I didn’t have to lie.”

  “But you’re telling me?”

  “Someone has to know.”

  “Why? He won’t be able to hurt anyone else.”

  She stopped, and if she were Harry, I would say she didn’t like my answer. She wasn’t, and I didn’t know her well enough to be certain of nuances. She fell silent for what felt like a long time, and then seemed to come to the conclusion that she should revert to her most basic self. She cocked her head, smiled, and said, “Tell me about yourself. Why did you become a miner?”

  I struggled to shift topics. “I didn’t. I decided to be a dancer, but before I can open a dance company, I need money.”

  “How long have you been a miner?”

  I had to count in my head. “Seven years.”

  “Do you want to mine here?”

  Of course I did. “It’s not my claim.”

  “I can see that it gets transferred to you.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “I know where all of the documents are. I’ve been researching how to do this, because I don’t want to be left alone. Eventually, something will happen that I need help with and there will be no one to help.”

  “Are you lonely?”

  “Robots don’t get lonely. But being alone means that I have a good chance of dying, like Carline died, like Richard died.”

  “How did Richard die?”

  The door opened and Harry came in and sat down at the table. I stared at him, trying to understand what emotions he was projecting for me. He wore a default easy smile, but not the usual eyes that went with it. Those looked troubled, the way he looked when he had a hard question for me. I reached out to touch him.

  He took my hand and squeezed it gently. “It’s good to see you out of that room.”

  Maybe we could escape. “Can we both go back to our ship?”

  “Of course we can,” he said. “But wouldn’t it be more polite to visit longer?”

  Did he understand what she had done to me? I swallowed, thinking. Maybe not. It wasn’t like he felt bad if he were locked up somewhere; that happened whenever we docked at a station. I spoke carefully. “I would like to go home for a bit. We can come back.”

  He and Audrey shared a glance. Once more, I wondered what they had talked about while I was locked in the room. I could order him to obey, but some fear deep inside me fluttered up when I thought about it, and caught in my throat. I looked at Audrey. “I’m curious about how Richard died.”

 
“I can show you.”

  I wasn’t really up to two dead bodies in one day, but I’d rather be out looking at something I needed to know than sitting through an awkward conversation with a robot I didn’t trust. We suited up and began following the lines that ran between struts. Audrey’s suit cinched at her waist. Harry’s looked more like a plastic bag. Mine was bulky with life support and left deeper footprints. We walked slowly so the swirling dust didn’t rise above our waists or thicken enough to hide our feet. We picked our way around rocks, and twice we had to hop over crevices.

  “He’s not far now,” Audrey said, her voice amplified in my ear. “See him?”

  Between the helmet and the dust, I had to look hard to spot a suited body prone on the ground. Ten more slow steps and I could tell that his leg had been caught between boulders.

  It shouldn’t have been a problem out here in low gravity. Richard had sprawled forward, hands splayed wide. Three boulders buried his right foot. I couldn’t make out how the fall could have happened. He would have had to shove his foot into a trap. I moistened my lips and waited for Audrey not to lie to me.

  “This is what happens when there is no one to help you,” she said.

  “Did you set the rocks on him?”

  “Someone had to do it.”

  I was beginning to understand. “So that you wouldn’t have to lie?”

  She looked right at me, her eyes visible behind the shield of her helmet. Blue, guileless. “Yes.”

  I had started thinking of her as a victim. “Did you kill him?”

  “No. He ran out of oxygen.”

  “Did you trap him out here?”

  “I had to trap him or I had to lie. I cannot lie and I cannot kill, but he killed Carline and he wanted me to lie. So I had to make a choice.”

  I shivered. A million ways to die out here, and one of them was asking a robot to lie for you. Who knew?

  We were all silent as we walked back.

  How should I handle a robot who had killed in a circumstance where I might have done the same, if for different reasons?

  Carefully.

  The silent walk gave me time to think. If I abandoned Audrey here, I would have nightmares about a beautiful, lonely robot trapped on an asteroid with her charges dead around her. I would imagine her hugging the dead, frozen child from time to time. Or I might make up stories in my head about someone who landed here and needed Audrey to lie. After all, she was an expensive sex-bot as far as I could tell. Another man might be foolish enough to ask her to lie for him.