In keeping with the expectations of my post, I bring with me to this interview a printed still of Mrs. Goedhals, Diandra's grandmother—a gentler form of gotcha! than some of my colleagues practice these days, but no less contrived to emotionally manipulate my ever-shifting target. Once, as Goedhals-Lester eases her bare and tattooed hip past the Specscreen, I ask if she recognizes it. After a long pause she returns, bracing one arm on a bulkhead overhead, dips her face into view and squints. I hold the still closer to my monitor, and after a few minutes—laughter. The crew of Aldrin V is nearing the halfway point on their voyage, and our lag is just past the nine-minute mark.
"That's Ai," she says. "Granny Ai."
In the photo, "Granny Ai" is twenty-two— her age ascertained from the original shot's position in the public-access Facebook Archival Project. Born Aaliyah Goedhals, Granny Ai is seen leaning against the top-deck railing of a cruise ship—a bottle of gin in one hand, two martini glasses in the other. Her uniform is red and silver—scanty, and not altogether immaculate—and her eyes are lidded, her gaze, far-off. At the turn of the twenty-first century, cruise ships were notorious vehicles of indentured servitude for vagabond youth: companies boasting contract packages ripe with promises of adventure, but more often yielding claustrophobic nights of binge drinking and gambling away scant earnings after illegally long shifts. Unreported "overboards" far from shore were not uncommon, either, if evident only from absenteeism at the next day's clock-in. Absentees were promptly "fired."
It is difficult not to draw a grim comparison across the generations: more so when Ai's granddaughter makes it for me. Goedhals-Lester asks Mukherjee if they have any gin on board Aldrin V, but both women already know the answer, and the performance of this comedic interlude seems strained by the time lag between my questions and this response. I have provided the crew with a set list of interview topics in advance, but what I am really hoping to learn is harder to pin down, and even seems at times lost in the vast tracts of space between us. What is it precisely that these four women signed up for? Should they have known better, from all the ill portents at the mission's outset? Is IBC sports commentator Paul Lafferty right when he says they deserve "no sympathy for their current predicament, no sympathy at all"? And what would Terran compassion even look like (if ever we could muster it in a single, collective act) to four human beings hurtling toward their highly probable deaths inside a tin can in the depths of the great abyss?
Half-Life on a Shooting Star
Waking cycles on Aldrin V are an exercise in Zen-Buddhist detachment, enacted both against and through the incessant, material temptations of the crew's immediate surroundings. Mukherjee affects little interest in formalities as she describes day-to-day life on the shuttle, indifferently referring to herself and the rest of the crew as "the girls." The girls consume their RTEs together. The girls take turns scrubbing off the last sleep cycle's detritus of skin and sweat with the unwieldy sonic system. The girls take their time adding the usual spit and polish to their overall façades. "Gotta leave a nice corpse for future Martian tourists," says Goedhals-Lester, passing over Mukherjee on yet another maintenance routine. I am then informed that there are no hair dryers in space.
After a few hours of systems checks, repair work, and experiment monitoring (Aldrin V is also home to a number of secure bacterial colonies undergoing their own, carefully-documented deaths in zero-g), the girls address the most pressing matter of all: What to do on Armstrong after landing? Mukherjee sweeps her Specscreen through shuttle passageways so I can see the main workstation where, even now, with "the girls" dispersed on various personal endeavors, schematics and scale models remain clipped to the table surface, while, overhead, a mag-board looms—one half filled with mathematical squiggles I cannot read, the other with a few choice expletives I most certainly can.
"You're going to ask if we've got a solution yet," says Mukherjee, swiveling the Specscreen. This close, her exhaustion is telling— or are the creases at her eyes a sign of in-flight radiation sickness? The nano-labs embedded in the cosmonauts' skin are intended to stave off the worst of the bombardment in transit; but so too were embeds supposed to help the colonists on Armstrong, even if all else failed.
"Well," she continues, "we don't. We still haven't even got resolution on what's actually happened on site. Base-camp's non-responsive, and we haven't seen anyone moving into vid-line for days. But GC's doing the best they can to fill in the blanks. The real trouble comes if there's irreparable damage to the materials themselves on Armstrong; we're working with finite resources, remember, so right now we're just trying to figure out how to jury-rig fixes in every worst case scenario."
Two hours prior, on my way into the heart of Ground Control (or more accurately, into a vestigial, windowless ventricle just left of the facility's heart), I receive a similar, if differently worded run-down from Lieutenant Colonel Tully Marlow. While we're carting along a vast, underground tunnel, he shows me aerial schematics of Armstrong, and though I have seen them hundreds of times before, in dozens of different media configurations, I struggle in the presence of this great American hero to identify more than the storage lot and living quarters, and my first guess on the intermediate shielding turns out to be a communications array. Shielding, Lt. Col. Marlow explains, is being worked directly into the energy grid while long-term regoliths are constructed out of composite Martian rocks; properly operational, the current system should not so much deflect harmful radiation as absorb, harness, and redistribute it.
"But the power's still on. We're still getting feed." I am stating the obvious, but it has the desired effect. Lt. Col. Marlow runs a hand through white hair fine as fiber-optics, baring for a moment the telltale scarring at his forehead and along his left ear. I regret that I do not have time to ask more about his own proximity to death on past missions.
"That's it exactly," he says. "It's the damnedest thing."
I let the colonel lead me through various possible scenarios. The simplest is that radiation levels just overwhelmed the system's max carrying capacity, but this accords with neither grid specs nor estimated radiation spikes in the wake of last month's unexpected solar storms. So perhaps the grid malfunctioned? Not likely: Lt. Col. Marlow cites GC lead materials chemist, Yuan Li, when he tells me, "That's impossible, because we're not dealing with an array of distinct, interconnected pieces like you'd find in your granddaddy's Ford. It's not a matter of some busted spark plug, you understand?" My high school training is sluggishly roused by his ensuing description of "tethered nanofluids," a system of panels comprising a "wet" layer of suspended, single-walled carbon nanotubes coordinating heat transfers between two solid-liquid interfaces—one exposed to Martian radiation; the other feeding into base-camp generators.
"Oh, like solar paint." I am trying to make up for my poor showing with the Armstrong Base schematics, but my gamble only earns me a tired glance—the look of a man rightly wary of his every word becoming the substance of a half-baked, pseudo-scientific Specsheet headline.
"Something like that," says the colonel. "The point is, unless the chemistry itself turned to junk overnight, a malfunction's simply out of the question. And don't get me started on the directionality of the system: it's solidly grounded, so there's no accidental impact that could have tipped the panels off course."
When Lt. Col. Marlow falls silent, I realize he knows what I am about to ask next.
"And as for these rumors—"
"I don't want to say there's nothing to them," he says quickly. "I can't say there's nothing to them until we've completed our internal investigation. But 'sabotage' is not a word to be thrown around lightly, okay? Not with the ISC in the shape it's in. Foreign relations are strained enough as it is without pointing fingers like that."
Lt. Col. Marlow would know; the International Space Compact is not the only strained element in the wake of the ongoing disaster on Armstrong. When the colonel first met me at the security station, he tried to explain his presence in lieu of
a PR rep by lightly observing that most of that department was otherwise occupied, as if the media—Specsphere and snail, mainstream and counterstream alike—was not already fully aware of the frequency of suicides coming out of a range of agency departments in the last few weeks. To be sure, the clean-up job their passing has left for the rest of GC (on top of the mounting crisis for Aldrin V) is a public relations nightmare other organizations' media reps shudder just to think about. I want to convey my understanding in this regard to the colonel, but it is remarkably hard to espouse sympathy toward a living legend.
By this juncture, too, we have already passed (without comment) two of the most prominent death sites at GC. The second, the stairwell where civilian techie Kaidan Montspierre was prevented from reaching the mess with a standard-issue IM-16 upraised, also saw Private James Holloway lose his life in the ensuing crossfire. (Operations Officer Pol Friessen's later hanging, while more elaborate, may well have been planned to take into account the still-traumatic sound of gunfire for civilian staff in his vicinity.) To be sure, the grief in this building has layers to it, but the grief-stricken know they still have jobs to do: a duty to those far from home and dying—and to those who will be soon.
I am surprised to discover, though, that the guilt doctors have since ascribed to these tragedies (all but one of the victim/perpetrators was shortlisted as a candidate for Aldrin missions past) is also to some extent shared by "the girls" on Aldrin V. Mukherjee herself, though she understands she will necessarily not be around to receive an answer, wonders aloud if Ground Control's mental health nightmare will improve or worsen in the probable eventuality that Armstrong and Aldrin V's crews are completely wiped out. Would the crew of Aldrin V be better off ending terrestrial anguish by swallowing their emergency pills now, instead of waiting for the impending repair job on Armstrong to fail? Is the real tragedy the fact that this whole ordeal is taking months to transpire in full?
"I get that what people on Earth hate the most is this waiting game," says Mukherjee, after evincing sympathy for GC families. "But guess what? I'm not a vid. Michiko's not a vid.
Di's not a vid. Elena's not a vid. We have a lot of work to do if we're going to survive this, but you've all got another thing coming if you think for one second that we're not going to survive this. We just don't have the time, or the energy, or the patience for that kind of talk. So tough tits to all your viewers out there—all your readers or your listeners or whoever it is that logs into these things. Yeah, it's sad that all these people are killing themselves—engineers and communications officers we know, by the way. Even a couple we really liked. I feel responsible for them sometimes, sure. And could we save them all a lot more suffering if we just took our pills now and got it over with? Sure, maybe, who knows? But you know what?" Mukherjee leans close to the Specscreen. "Even if we could save five lives—ten, twenty, a hundred, whatever—I wouldn't do it. Not now. Not when I think about what's on the line, what this mission really represents."
"Yeah?" I say. "And what's that?"
An eternity later, Mukherjee has only a snort and a kiss for me—the latter just blown through the stagnant air of her deep-space sardine can before the Specscreen cuts off. An INC officer pops his head in to inform me that we are out of communications range. We will be in range again in two hours, but by then Mukherjee will have lost interest in our proceedings. Or so Elena Kieslowski tells me when the feed returns:
"Sorry, champ. She's decided she's got better things to do with her last days."
"And you don't?"
Nine minutes later Kieslowski has strapped into one of the emergency restraints on the opposite bulkhead and pleated her hands behind her head. She is wearing a standard-issue tank and shorts, her legs crossed at the ankles, as if dangling off the side of a hammock.
"Well, we'll see about that, won't we?" she says.
Halcyon Days
When a colleague first learned of my intentions at GC, he sent me a 'skin he had come across not long after Aldrin V's launch: Space Chicks with Dicks, logged February 2046. In twenty-eight blinks you got the full, often gory details of how four seemingly docile nymphettes sent to rid "Big Red" of its sixteen raging hard-ons ended up packing a much more menacing set of their own. Six months later, the 'skin already had three critical responses from the peer-review set: "The Anxiety of Conquest: Cock-Ups and Conspiracy in M.h.M.'s Cosmonaut Sequence," "The Dependency Cycle: A Story of Post-Masculinist Resentment on Behalf of 'Big Red'," and "14 Men, 2 Women: The Sexual Politics of Erasure in M.h.M.'s Space Chicks with Dicks."
In turn, I sent my colleague Sapphic Interludes 242: Journey to the New Land of Men, also logged February 2046. The full-length graphic features four women who "dyke out" in transit to Mars (presumably not unlike how producer Alfred Munny "slutted out" on live sloggers while walking the tightly-packed red carpet at last year's Oscars) and meet with a range of "rehabilitative" choices from the fourteen men and two thoroughly worn out women at Arm Schlong Base. By the time I arrive at GC for my interview with Aldrin V, there are twenty-one critical citations logged for this work.
Are these responses really so counter-stream? Last October, GlobeSpec's main screen sported a chintzy split-image of (on the left) a twentieth century B-movie metalloid and (on the right) Carmen Yang's titular Bandit from the 2038 sleeper vid of a street-rat cyborg achingly relegated to a post-apocalyptic South American underworld. The headline? "The Robot Women of (Future) Mars: Love 'Em or Hate 'Em, They're on Their Way!" Far be it from this writer to expect rigorous coverage from the media conglomerate that first brought you Gotcha! Magazine, but in this case GlobeSpec proved only one of dozens of mainstream publications set abuzz in the wake of a live interview with Elena Kieslowski on Murrielle Richembeau's The View.
Admittedly, Kieslowski's selection was ill-advised for this public appearance. You could almost hear The View's producer asking GC for fifteen minutes with "the leggy blonde" and Ground Control's PR department, itching for a nice, fresh face to put on the whole troubled agency, relenting without careful consideration of Kieslowski's file. (And if the incident has taught us anything, it's that passing the onslaught of psych exams required for consideration to any of the Aldrin missions is one very daunting matter, but being adequately equipped for airtime is quite another.)
In her first few minutes, Kieslowski made all the usual n00bian mistakes: Failure to speak in sound-bites, refusal to compress difficult issues into definitive conclusions one way or the other, and flagrant attempts to forward controversial conversations about the future of the International Space Compact—the likes of which even counterstream media would be loath to broach on live broadcast. Murrielle Richembeau possibly even thought she was doing Kieslowski a favor by trying to switch to a different line of questioning, but personal life fripperies are a difficult game to play with a refugee-camp-refugee, and as RCRs go, Kieslowski was not the most stereotypically grateful for her childhood resettlement from the West Bank to Russia just as it teetered yet again on the brink of economic insolvency. I can almost hear the ensuing train-wreck whenever I review the transcript from that November 18 broadcast:
RICHEMBEAU:—it's—I can only imagine, but let me—let me just say that you are—really now—just beautiful. [Audience cheers.] I mean, there's—there was a huge campaign, if I recall—Kaiden, can we put up some of those images? There, yes. Just look at that crowd— the candles, the cards, the—the glasses raised to toast your good health. So many broken hearts here on Big Blue; so many young men—handsome, too, some of them, don't you think?—who look like they'd go to the ends of the Earth to—
KIESLOWSKI: You should see the [unclear]
RICHEMBEAU: Excuse me?
KIESLOWSKI: The death threats. For leaving. For betraying the country that took me in after the raids. Oh, and then there are messages about being a government-funded whore for—
RICHEMBEAU: Oh, yes, yes—from extremists, you mean. Yes, that must be overwhelming. And so it... it must be such a relief to thin
k about getting to Mars and just, like, getting on with things—I mean, they aren't that bad looking either, of course, am I right? Am I? [Audience cheers and hoots.]
KIESLOWSKI: Who, the extremists?
RICHEMBEAU: Oh, no! No no no—the colonists. I mean, have you—I'm sure people are just dying to know if there's any of the men out there that have, you know, caught your eye yet. [Audience cheers.] I mean, there's been no end of genetic comparisons, talk of Mars babies, all that fun stuff. And then we've got—yes, there he is—[Audience cheers and hoots]. Jeph Straughn is a crowd favorite around here. Great jawline. Great smile. Your type, you think? First-dad-on-Mars material, or is that more—
KIESLOWSKI: I'm not—I'm really not interested in that right now. I—
RICHEMBEAU: You're waiting until you get there, of course. Of course. Well—
KIESLOWSKI: No, what I'm saying is—to be perfectly honest—
RICHEMBEAU: Oh, of course, please do, please do—
KIESLOWSKI:—that if everything goes according to plan, and we get there, to Armstrong I mean, we've got so much to do before we can even think about—well, you know—and so, really, it's like I'm going to try my hardest to forget I even have a womb for the first few years or so. You know? And then, maybe, we'll see. If there's time. If everything goes according to plan. It's not like we can't— I mean, I've got eggs on ice, and we have the technology, so if that's ever really a priority, we can just do it, you know—
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