Mission: Tomorrow

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  “How nice to know such a monster’s face hasn’t been forgotten after only a couple of centuries. And this is Caligula, and this—”

  “Is this hell?” interrupted Tarter.

  “Certainly not,” answered Typhoeus. “Hell has literally billions of inhabitants. Where would they all fit here?”

  “Then what is it?”

  “A very special world,” replied Typhoeus. “There is a hell, of course. I call it Hades, others call it other things, but it’s where damned souls go to rot for all eternity.” He paused. “But not all of them remain there. For example, King Sisyphus there decided to lead a revolt of the damned against Zeus, and since he was able to cross the barrier from hell to heaven, the gods decided to create a very special place for exceptionally vile and dangerous souls. And to make sure they remained there, they created a creature, a Hekatonkheir giant who was stronger and more vicious than any of them, and he became what I think I shall call ‘the Keeper of the Flame.’”

  “How come no one’s ever heard of all this?” said Tarter.

  “Don’t blame your cultural illiteracy on others,” said Typhoeus with a smile. “This domain was discussed in Homer, in Hesiod, in Aeschylus, in Ptolemy, even in Plato and Virgil.”

  “All ancient deists or atheists,” said Tarter.

  “It is also mentioned in Hellenistic Jewish literature, in 1 Enoch,” continued Typhoeus, “which stated that God created the pit and its guardian, which are both known as Tartaros.”

  “So you’re Tartaros?”

  Typhoeus shook his head. “I told you: my name is Typhoeus.”

  Tarter frowned. “Then I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you do.”

  Tarter just stared at him.

  “I called myself Tartaros while I served as the keeper of the pit until the true guardian came along,” continued Typhoeus. “I have reclaimed my name of Typhoeus since the instant you landed. I have waited a long, long time for you: the one true Tartaros.”

  “Me?”

  Typhoeus nodded his head. “A being so cruel, so lacking in compassion, so creative in his capacity for evil, that no one in his charge will ever be able to outwit him, to revolt or escape from him and his world.” He extended a hand. “Welcome, my lord.”

  “Tartaros,” said Tarter, considering the name and nodding his approval. “It’s very similar to Tarter, as if someone was hinting.” He stared at his companion. “You’re the Hekatonkheir giant, aren’t you?”

  “In my true form.”

  Tartaros who had been Tarter looked around. “Well, let’s finish the chef’s tour.”

  “Follow me.”

  And when it was done, they returned to the surface.

  “Wait a minute,” said Tartaros, suddenly stopping. “I’ll need a helmet.”

  Typhoeus shook his head. “No longer.”

  “All right,” said Tartaros, emerging from the corridor and taking a deep breath of what passed for air. “The ship can be a little uppity, a little contrary. Don’t let it pull any shit with you.”

  “I’ve had experience with uppity, contrary entities,” replied Typhoeus.

  “Then good-bye and good luck,” said Tartaros. “By the way, what do gods eat?”

  Typhoeus grinned. “Anything they want. And the beauty of this world is that it always grows back.”

  Then he was aboard the ship, and a moment later Tartaros was alone on his planet. He created a corridor—somehow he knew how to do so—and decided to give his domain a more thorough inspection before deciding which of his few thousand subjects his predecessor had ignored for too long.

  Mike Resnick is, according to Locus, the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short science fiction. He is the winner of five Hugos from a record 37 nominations, a Nebula, and other major awards in the United States, France, Spain, Japan, Croatia, Catalonia, and Poland. and has been short-listed for major awards in England, Italy and Australia. He is the author of 74 novels, over 250 stories, and 3 screenplays, and is the editor of 42 anthologies. His work has been translated into 26 languages. He was the Guest of Honor at the 2012 Worldcon and can be found online as @ResnickMike on Twitter or at www. mikeresnick.com.

  Next, in another look at the way corporations might play in space, a work-from-home sysadmin faces a crisis when the space rock he’s charged with shepherding safely to Earth changes its trajectory and has a . . .

  MALF

  by David D. Levine

  I see it, Jamal typed in the chat window, just as Marissa shouted the same in her headset. An excited burble of talk and text followed, messages filling my right-hand screen and my ears as I peered at my main display for a glimpse of the incoming package. And then I saw it myself: a tiny streak of bright white light in the gray Atlantic sky, bobbing and weaving as the pickup boat rolled on a light swell.

  The camera operator zoomed in and the streak swelled to a slash, a long band of incandescence that split the sky, its leading edge a brilliant four-pointed star. “It’s so bright, mon,” came Raphael’s voice in my ear. “Hurts the eye.” He was on the pickup boat, too; this was his package, the culmination of over four years of work, coming in hot and heavy, and he’d flown to Ecuador at his own expense to see it in person. Not the choice I’d have made, but I could see the appeal.

  The camera zoomed out, zoomed out, but the slash of white grew too fast to follow and the view switched to a static shot from shore. A curve of black smoke cut across the gray clouds with a coruscating star at its tip, reaching down from heaven at orbital speed to touch the sea. And then, fifteen eternal seconds after it had first appeared: splashdown! A tremendous waterspout spewed from the point of contact, a foamy white geyser rising eighty stories into the air before dissipating into fog and fumes.

  Pandemonium on the audio channel; the chat window a chaos of congratulatory messages, many in all caps, scrolling too fast to read. And then, audible even above the excited chatter of happy Space Resources employees, came the rolling thunder of the package’s entry and splashdown, the crawling speed of sound making it tardy in its arrival.

  That package had once been an asteroid, minding its own business somewhere between here and Mars. But then Space Resources Corporation had fitted it out with rocket engines, mining robots, and an automated refinery, all supervised remotely by Raphael, who had remade it into a lifting body with a silicate ablative crust and a core of solid refined molybdenum. After settling to the continental shelf, it would be hauled to the surface by the pickup boat, brought back to shore, and turned into a big pile of glorious cash.

  A distinctive queep announced a private message: You’re next, Jorge! accompanied by a grinning animated emoticon. It was my boss, Amanda, reminding me that with the successful arrival of Raphael’s package, mine would be the next to be welcomed home.

  Not that I needed to be reminded. A constant presence in the upper right corner of my main screen was a countdown clock, superimposed over a photo taken from the balcony of my little condo in San Francisco. Of course, it wasn’t “my” condo yet, but the papers were all signed, and when my package came in—three days, two hours, thirteen minutes, and eight . . . seven . . . six seconds from now—the money would pay off my Space Resources loan, buy me the condo, and still leave enough for a modestly comfortable retirement.

  I glanced at my left-hand screen, where my package’s orbital track still lay almost on the money line. Looking good, I texted back to Amanda with a thumbs-up emoticon.

  But wait . . . almost on the money line? I frowned with concern. Three days to entry was no time for almosts. I called up a more detailed view. Yes, there was a deviation from the optimum orbital path. Not big enough to trigger an alert, but worthy of attention.

  I signed off from the ongoing celebration and squirted myself a cup of coffee. There wasn’t any sign of what had caused the deviation, which was worrisome, but it might just be a minor variation in the solar wind or an unexpected burst of gas from some internal cavity as the asteroid dr
ew closer to the sun. In any case, I wanted to correct it as soon as possible; if my baby hit the atmosphere at even a slightly wrong angle, it could burn up on entry or go tumbling irretrievably away into space. No payout for anyone if that happened.

  I composed a thrust sequence to fix the deviation, ran a quick simulation to verify it would have the desired effect, then queued it up on the Deep Space Network for delivery to my package. Once the sequence hit the head of the queue, it would take only twenty-five seconds to crawl at the speed of light to the incoming asteroid. Hardly anything by comparison with the day and a half of turnaround time I’d had to deal with at the beginning of this job, but it was enough time for me to sip my coffee and ponder my situation.

  I’d been working for Space Resources for just a hair shy of five years, shepherding asteroid 2019 CN 1018 in its conversion from a random hunk of space rock into a sleek, profitable package. My official job title was “Asteroid Miner,” which looked cool in my online profiles, but in fact I was just another work-from-home contract sysadmin—albeit one who couldn’t ever touch the systems he was admin-ing.

  It was tricky, tedious work. The asteroid itself was an all-natural product, rife with voids and inclusions and impurities that required constant fiddling with the mining manipulators and automated refinery. Its orbit was subject to perturbation by other asteroids, solar winds, and magnetic flux, which had to be compensated for in order to hit the half-kilometer target circle. And the thrusters, manipulators, grinders, refinery, and all the other hardware and firmware had been “tested and proven”—in other words, already five years behind the times—when they’d been bundled up and scheduled for launch over twelve years ago.

  That last detail was why I’d gotten the job, actually. After my parents disowned me, aborting my college career, my fabulous uncle Roberto had found me a job doing maintenance on an ancient manufacturing control system. I enjoyed the work, but it had turned into a trap: between the eighty-hour weeks and my lack of degree, I had never been able to train up on anything more recent. As my skills grew more and more outdated, I’d found fewer and fewer job openings, so when this opportunity had appeared—just happening to require expertise in the obsolete operating system I’d been wrangling for my whole career—it had been a godsend. In effect, my baby and I were made for each other.

  But obsolete hardware and software weren’t my only source of pain. A licensing snafu had delayed the launch for nearly three years, during which time the equipment had sat in a hot, humid Florida warehouse with its seals decaying, lubricants deteriorating, and software undergoing whatever mysterious bit-rot causes intermittent bugs. It all added up to my job being a constant battle against nature and machine, leaving almost no time for real-world socializing. In fact, the only human being I’d seen this week was my cleaning lady. All my other interactions were handled online or by delivery drone.

  My global co-workers were okay, I guess, with most of them very willing to answer a question or lend a hand at any time of day or night. Which was a good thing; like taxi drivers, we were independent contractors, each having bought into the project with our own savings—or, in my case, a hefty loan, cosigned by Uncle Roberto—and pretty much self-supporting. Space Resources Corporation was little more than a corporate shell, an investment vehicle for the owners who’d put up the big bucks to launch the hardware years ago. But though I could always ring up Jamal or Kyra or Miyuki for a chat, it wasn’t the same as hanging out at the bar with friends.

  Even when I managed to pry myself away from my screen long enough to socialize in the real world, which hadn’t happened for months, the results were highly unsatisfying. I’d moved to Jacksonville for a boyfriend, but it hadn’t worked out because I spent too much time and attention on work—an accusation I couldn’t deny—and for the same reason I hadn’t found the time to move elsewhere or even make any local friends. So I hit the bars, where I got hit on by crackers with less brains than a Florida alligator, and went home lonely and frustrated.

  Suddenly, a descending tone interrupted my self-pitying thoughts, accompanied by a red-bordered error popup I’d never seen before. Transmission rejected, it read.

  I looked deeper. My command sequence had been accepted by the DSN for transmission to the package at the first available opportunity, as usual. It had gone through the queue and been transmitted without apparent problems. But the asteroid’s command processor had not accepted the command, returning an error code I wasn’t familiar with.

  I tried not to worry. It might very well be just a malf—a temporary malfunction. I sent the command sequence again.

  While I awaited the result, I checked the DSN network status, the solar weather report, and anything else that could have interfered with transmission of the command sequence. No sign of any issue. The package’s navigational beacon was still sending out its regular omnidirectional ping, indicating that it was still present and at least somewhat alive and giving me a fix on its location, but told me nothing about the package’s attitude or the state of any of its other systems.

  Then came another descending tone. Transmission rejected.

  I pressed my lips together and tried not to panic. My baby’s hardware was old and cranky, and I’d had problems before, but I’d always managed to get it back online eventually.

  I looked up the error code. It supposedly indicated authentication failure—basically, lack of the correct security certificate for the encrypted command stream—but according to the notes other miners had added to the documentation over the years, it was more likely indicative of a hardware problem in the main antenna. I sent a please-reply ping via the secondary antenna to test that out.

  Six minutes passed in anxious silence while the command worked its way through the DSN queue, the transmission sailed across space to my package, and the reply came back.

  Descending tone. Transmission rejected.

  I screamed a curse at the screen. The neighbor’s dog barked back at me; my apartment walls were ludicrously thin.

  Then the barking was joined by another, different error noise. Orbital track parameter violation, read the popup.

  Whatever had sent my baby off its course, it was getting worse.

  Queep. A message from Amanda: Just spotted your track violation. What’s up?

  Of course she would have seen the error on her console as well. I took a moment to calm my breathing before replying; I needed to maintain the appearance of being in control. Looking into it, I temporized.

  Another queep. This message came from Stan in the Orbital Tracking Center. Unauth orb tranf burn on 2019 CN 1018 at 13:37 UTC, it read in his usual telegraphic style. Pls advise.

  I swallowed and stared at the screen, where the detailed orbital track view showed my asteroid moving further and further off course. Not only was it not answering my commands, but according to Stan it had fired its main engine to move itself into a different orbit without my having alerted OTC first. This wasn’t exactly a capital crime, but it was a violation of protocol and too many of those could reduce my payout.

  The time stamp, 13:37 UTC, was right around the time the package had begun to deviate from its planned course.

  While I was trying to figure out how best to reply, two more queeps sounded, both from fellow asteroid miners expressing concern.

  I took out my earbuds and took a quick walk around my little office, kicking a discarded Hi-Kaf Kola can into the corner with a satisfying clatter. This was bad. Very, very bad.

  Having unknown issue, I replied to everyone. Investigating.

  The first thing I did was to write up and send off a new thrust sequence to put my package back on its original track, though my confidence of success was low and dropping. I also sent a command to execute a system status diagnostic scan, but didn’t have much more optimism about that. While waiting for those results, I tried to figure out what the heck was going on.

  Setting aside the communication problem for the moment, what could have caused my package to fire its
main engine? It had been almost exactly on course, and a quick scan of the orbital tracking display confirmed that there were no natural or artificial objects anywhere nearby or ahead; the automatic collision avoidance algorithm couldn’t have—or shouldn’t have—triggered the burn.

  As I worked, more and more queeps sounded, anxious queries from all over the company. One thing about working in space: everyone can see right away when something goes wrong. I changed my messaging status to Busy/Offline and tried to focus.

  I was just reviewing the log files when the results of my commands came back: Transmission rejected. Transmission rejected. I swore, but not too loud, and kept looking.

  Nothing stood out from the logs, at least on a first glance, up to the end of the file about forty-five minutes ago. The next hourly data dump would arrive in fourteen minutes . . . or it wouldn’t.

  Then the doorbell rang.

  Startled, I checked my calendar to see if I should have been expecting anyone. And, indeed, I should have: it was my cleaning lady. The last few hours had been so crazy I had completely forgotten she was coming today.

  Despite my jitters and concern, I unplugged my earbuds and walked downstairs to the building’s front door. She was such a tiny little old lady that I hated to shout at her through the intercom. “I’m sorry, Cheryl,” I told her, “I’m really, really busy right now. Could you come back tomorrow?”

  She gave me the stink-eye and consulted her phone—she was so old-fashioned she still kept her calendar in her phone—before assenting. “All right,” she groused, “just this once.” She might be a tiny little old lady, but she could still be pretty straightforward. “Normally I wouldn’t, but I can see you’re really frazzled. Is everything all right?”

  “I’m sure it’s just a temporary glitch,” I said, though I was beginning to worry that it was far worse than that. “But I really need to keep an eye on it, so if you’ll excuse me . . .”