He’d graduated to stick figures, and drew avidly, with doodles in the background that bore an uncanny resemblance to circuitry. Sol still drew himself as much smaller than Ven, although in a few years they’d be the same height. She’d heard that if you handled lion cubs when they were young, they’d grow up imprinted with the idea that you were much larger than they were. So when two hundred kilos of carnivore tried to leap into your arms, they’d seem perplexed when the paramedics were called.
“Tired of this yet?” said Mike.
Ven closed her eyes. Her batteries were down to fifty-six percent, even though she switched to hibernation mode for eight hours per cycle. She topped up through the Morning Star’s interface, but the charge never held.
She divided her waking hours between interacting with Sol, performing maintenance on the ship, and poring over Kagare’s research. There had to be some mutation, some allele that had singled out Sol, but he seemed no different to any other boy. Which worried her even more.
“There’s another station in the Ariadne Cluster,” said Ven. “Can you jump that far?”
“They’ve all been wreckage,” said Mike. “The remains of the Minos Base could’ve fit in a bucket.”
“You can eat hydrogen, but we can’t,” said Ven.
Sol had already consumed half the organic supplies, and he hadn’t had his growth spurt yet. Ven sighed.
“Sorry,” said Ven. “Any more signals from the Darwin?”
“Same direction,” said Mike. “Closer together. Their communications technology must have been improving.”
When Hem rocketed from Earth in the Darwin, he’d been accompanied by eighty-five enthusiastic scientists and engineers, including Kiruchi Wen. They’d continued to send brief messages, telegraphing their co-ordinates. Authorities tried to scramble the messages, to prevent the corruption of impressionable young scientists, but they found their way onto the skymesh anyway.
I’m looking for a place, said Hem. Where time is in a different key.
“Six o’clock,” said Mike.
Ven turned to find Sol settling onto the bench beside her. His skin was lighter than when they’d first met, although his green eyes had darkened closer to hazel.
“Are you lonely?” said Sol.
“I have you, don’t I?” Ven gave his shoulder a cheerful bump. “Are you?”
He looked at her blankly, as though not understanding the question. There were times when Ven seriously wondered if Sol were a new class of android, except he was definitely growing. Sol turned his gaze to the white cloudy swirls beyond the glass.
“Are you looking for something?” said Sol.
“We’re looking for a new home,” said Ven.
“Isn’t this our home?”
Ven paused.
“Of course,” she said.
She wrapped an arm around the boy’s shoulders, and they watched the dusty light trickling through the universe.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
17 years after Day Zero
1.3 billion light years from Earth
It was three zero eight on the circadian cycle when Sol passed through the silent habitat corridor, returning to his quarters after a session in the training room. Ven wouldn’t rise for another five hours, longer if she thought he was sleeping in. He’d discovered that if he trained when she thought he was sleeping, and then actually slept during operational hours, Ven would rest for more of the day.
A monitor flickered on the wall, and Sol paused, waiting for the computer to address him. However, the sine wave that appeared was not the familiar blue, but a bright red.
“Hello Sol,” said the monitor. “This is Mike34, and I have a message for you.”
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
17.2 years after Day Zero
1.4 billion light years from Earth
Things were an absolute mess.
“Fire in the hold! Fire in the hold!” Ven yelled.
The oxygen vanished abruptly from the galley, and the flames wobbled into orange globes before extinguishing. Ven slapped hard on the monitor, and air spilled back into the room. She hadn’t been designed to function in a vacuum, and she wondered if Mike had forgotten on purpose. He’d been exceptionally tetchy lately.
“How you can set a fire without actually cooking anything is beyond my matrix,” said Mike.
“I’m a cargo pilot, not a pâtissière,” said Ven.
Mike grumbled about his sooty benchtops, while Ven put the finishing touches on her creation. Today was their twelfth Hello Day, and Sol would be about eighteen now.
Sol had been particularly distant lately, and for the last few months, his only communications with her had been the occasional grunt. She wondered if perhaps he’d outgrown her — he was surely old enough to realise she wasn’t human.
“It’s just typical guy stuff,” said Mike. “I remember my misbegotten youth. You remember the Kalax Summit, when rabid, red pandas rained onto the Gourmet Delegation? That was me.” Mike paused. “They took my modem away after that.”
“The snip did you good,” said Ven.
“Watch it, or I’ll blow you out the airlock.”
Ven just grinned, and Mike was thoughtful for a while.
“He’s turning off the visual surveillance more often,” said Mike.
“He’s private,” shrugged Ven.
Sol had always preferred to perform day-to-day operations manually, rather than asking Mike. She knew it rankled with Mike, and had once asked Sol about it.
In case Mike isn’t around one day, Sol had said.
He isn’t going anywhere, Ven replied.
Everybody dies, said Sol.
Ven had let the matter drop. According to Doctor Gillian, Sol had been five when his province perished overnight. Every soul within two hundred thousand square kilometres. Everyone but him. It was true, everybody dies. Just usually not all at once.
Ven put down the piping bag, and inspected her work.
“He’s been reading a lot about androids,” said Mike.
“Like I, Robot?”
“Like manuals.”
An electric shiver raced up Ven’s back, and she forced herself to focus on the misshapen cake before her. She had forgotten to add sugar.
“Mike,” she said. “Open the garbage chute.”
An unfamiliar voice spoke from the door.
“Is everything alright?”
Sol stood in the doorway, a fire extinguisher in his hands. It took Ven a moment to realise the voice had come from him. It was deeper, more resonant than the voice she knew, and for a brief, aching moment, it seemed to transform him into a stranger. Sol’s gaze moved to the plate in her hands.
“Oh, that’s cute,” he said. At her crestfallen expression, he amended his comment. “I mean, tell me about it.”
“When people come of age, they usually have a ritual that involves defeating something,” said Ven. “Koalas were supposed to be one of Earth’s most vicious animals.”
Sol looked at the rotund, grey marsupial cake, with its black button eyes, and large fluffy ears.
“Thank you,” said Sol.
He dissected the cake with surgical precision, as though dismembering an actual Phascolarctos cinereus. Periodically, he would glance at Ven, and she gave him nods of encouragement — she’d never been to any kind of party, and for all she knew, this was roaring.
At Hawking University, she hadn’t been sophisticated enough to mingle with the humans, and the academic androids called her a Brown Dwarf. A failed planet trying to be a star. It wasn’t that Ven wanted to be human, it was that she already felt that she was, until sharply reminded otherwise.
In the galley, the cake was conquered and disposed of, and Ven considered the initiation a success.
“Ven,” said Sol, suddenly shy. “There’s another rite of passage I’d like you to share with me.”
“Alright…” said Ven, ignoring the monitor on the far wall, where the blue sine wave had increased dramatically in frequency.
Sol took her hand, and led her to the multimedia pod. He hesitated as they stepped inside.
“It’s called a ‘prom’,” said Sol.
The walls of the chamber melted into a softly lit dance hall festooned with red streamers. Overhead, a slowly revolving glitterball painted the walls with silver stars, and yellow rose petals rained slowly to the floor.
“May I have this dance?” said Sol.
Ven nodded, and did her best to imitate his hold. They swayed slowly to the tune of ‘We Three’ by The Inkspots, and she found herself resting her head on his shoulder. The music seemed to drift from far away, and Ven realised that this was what a party should be like.
The pod suddenly rocked, and Ven crashed into a wall, the dance hall vanishing in a crackle of light. Klaxons sounded for a few seconds, then went silent. Ven stopped to check that Sol was unhurt, then rushed to the bridge.
“Mike! Status!” said Ven.
“Hull breach on the starboard module,” said Mike. “Hypervelocity meteoroid impact.”
“Can you patch it?”
“I’m compensating with the shield, but we’ve lost cargo bay three.”
“We’ll need to seal the fracture,” said Ven. “How bad is it?”
“Two hundred and forty-seven by five millimetres. Thirty-one metres from the hatch.”
Ven swept her hand across the console, studying the blinking red gash on the ship’s schematics.
“I’ll suit up,” said Ven.
“You weren’t designed for space walks.”
“The Morning Star wasn’t designed to fly twelve years without a pit stop,” said Ven. “Just take care of Sol, okay?”
“Ven—”
“Ultimately, it’s what I’m here for—”
“Ven!” snapped Mike. “Sol’s just turned off surveillance in corridors nine through sixteen.”
Ven glanced at the schematic. He’d blanked out almost a quarter of the lower module.
“Hell no,” said Ven. “Mike, seal off corridor sixteen now!”
She skidded down the chute to the module, bolted past the darkened multimedia pod, and slammed into a sealed hatch.
“I said corridor sixteen!” yelled Ven, wrenching at the unresponsive wheel.
Through the porthole in the door, she could see Sol at the inner door to the secondary airlock, already suited up, the panel beside him carefully detached to expose a fretwork of wires.
“Sol!” Ven pounded her fist on the window, but Sol continued to tap and twist at the electronic nerve bundle. “Mike, get this open!”
“Ven, he’s—” The sine wave flared and contracted, then the monitor beside Ven went dark.
“Mike? Mike!” said Ven.
On the other side of the hatch, the inner airlock hissed open. Ven knew teenage boys were susceptible to high-risk behaviours due to some kind of interaction between the frontal lobe, the amygdala, and fermented beverages, but this went far beyond riding a wheelie bin down the sky tube. Sol had never worn a counterpressure suit, never had EVA training. Ven wasn’t even sure if their microcapsule sealant still worked.
Doctor Josh hadn’t entrusted the last human in the universe to Ven only to have him die in a freezing vacuum full of micrometeoroids and searing radiation. But Ven could think of nothing she could do or say to stop Sol. She could only press her hand to the glass.
Sol turned to look at her, and mouthed the words: It’s okay.
And the airlock slid shut.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
Three hours later, Mike came back online, full of hellfire and expletives.
“I’ve a mind not to let the brat back in,” he snarled.
“He’ll just override you again,” said Ven calmly from her seat on the bridge. She continued to inspect a set of holographic maps, each hanging at a slightly different angle.
“He can try,” said Mike. “I’ve electrified the access panels.”
“Mike—”
“Only four milliamps,” said Mike. “You could do more damage with a coconut.”
Ven continued scrolling through the charts, trying not to think of Sol clinging to the frozen skin of the ship. She wasn’t going to pine by the airlock — she was his friend and protector, not his dog. And they’d lost cargo bay three, so they were down to four years’ worth of supplies.
“We’ve passed a few Earth-like planets that weren’t completely hellish,” said Mike, his sine wave bristling a little less.
“No landing gear,” said Ven.
“You’ve cruised a few crash landings in your time.”
The thought had crossed Ven’s mind — find a planet, settle down, let Sol live out his life with some kind of earth beneath his feet. She’d put the suggestion to him years ago, and he’d looked at her with something resembling panic. He’d said simply, ‘No, thank you’, then locked himself in the multimedia pod for several hours.
Ven swept the glowing charts back into a pinpoint of light.
“Mike, set a course for Demeter.”
There was a long silence, and Ven glanced at the monitor to make sure Mike hadn’t vanished again.
“That’s several billion light years away,” said Mike finally. “That’s billion with a ‘b’.”
“Your phase jumps are getting better,” said Ven. “The distances you’re achieving have surpassed even Wen’s calculations.”
“Don’t flirt with me,” grumbled Mike. “Odds are Demeter met the same combustible fate as every other station. Weapons, humans, and inexplicable deaths are a nasty mix. If we get there and we’re out of supplies, the station’s a skeletal mess … it’ll be like the finale of some terribly depressing series.”
Demeter had been Earth’s greatest space ark — the first to be equipped with a phase drive. It carried a crew of two thousand plus their families, and had been designed to transform into a space station once it reached its destination at the edge of the mapped universe.
It was the Morning Star’s last hope for supplies before they sailed into uncharted territory, chasing the shadow of the Darwin.
“Ven,” said Mike. “External sensors just came back on.”
“Status?”
“Hull breach has been sealed,” said Mike. “No sign of life outside.”
The door to the bridge slid open, and Sol stood there, rumpled and wan.
“I’m going to lie down,” he said.
“Sol,” said Ven.
He paused in the doorway.
“On this ship, we’re equals, you and I,” said Ven. “I want your word that you won’t treat me like that again.”
Something flickered through Sol’s eyes, too brief and complex for Ven to understand, although she would replay it later many times over. A heartbeat passed, then another, and Sol left without a word.
“Course set for Demeter,” said Mike.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
23 years after Day Zero
3.4 billion light years from Earth
These were the furthest stars grazed by humanity’s reach. The Morning Star had passed choirs of pulsars, singing out their eulogies, and swum through a dense wall of galaxies, their glittering filaments entangling the dark. But Ven wasn’t watching the stars.
The medibay glowed with a hundred holographic slides, all hanging in the air at disordered angles, like a storm of papers frozen in mid hurricane. Ven slid a pale green image of cellular mitosis towards her, comparing it to a magnified model of a mitochondrion.
“I’m sure it has something to do with the mitochondrial DNA,” said Ven.
A blue sine wave squiggled across the benchtop monitor.
“Doctor Gillian discounted that in her Chronoscience Journal article,” said Mike. “We already went over that last month.”
Ven rubbed the dust from her lashes.
“That’s right,” she sighed.
Her batteries had been sitting at twenty-nine percent for a while, but her memory had been getting patchy. Wear and tear, she told herself. Nothing to worry abou
t.
Sol was twenty-four now, roughly the same age as Doctor Josh when she’d first met him. But Sol was gaunt, and getting thinner by the day. He’d cut his caloric intake the day they’d lost cargo bay three. He meditated a great deal, and encouraged her to join him. They would sit side by side in the viewing chamber: Sol in a state of higher consciousness, Ven in hibernation mode.
“Ven, when was the last time you regenerated your processor?” said Mike.
“I don’t have enough free memory.”
“Use mine,” said Mike, and a panel in the wall slid open.
“Are you hitting on me?”
“I run Solitaire on that server,” shrugged Mike.
Ven locked the medibay door, and carefully pried open a small panel in the nape of her neck. She unwound a slender, silver cord and inserted the narrow prongs into Mike’s matching socket. Ven closed her eyes, and initiated her regeneration routine.
A loud crackle burst from the wall, and sparks sprayed from the connection. Ven yanked her cable free, and patted out the embers on her shirt. The regeneration routine had aborted, but her processor seemed otherwise unaffected.
“There goes my Solitaire,” said Mike. “Did Doctor Josh mess with your programming?”
“No,” said Ven defensively, although Doctor Josh had adjusted her processor just prior to launch.
One last tune up, he’d said.
“Sorry,” said Ven. “I’ll try to pick up a spare server on Demeter. What’s our ETA?”
“Forty-eight minutes,” said Mike.
“Have you taken care of the viewscreens?”
“They’re all on streaming loop, and I’ve closed the viewing chamber for maintenance,” said Mike. “All navigational displays indicate we’re still two weeks away.”
Ven nodded.
“Where’s Sol?”
“In the rec room,” said Mike.
Ven wound the cable back into her neck, and snapped the panel shut. She couldn’t risk another incident like the one six years ago, not with Sol in his current condition.
One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries Page 29