Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  “I’ll see what I can do. And you’ll have a miniaturization of Haley’s processing there to help you.”

  “The old ball and chain—only she isn’t sending her orb, so she’s just a server bank, and not a literal ball. If I’ve learned anything in my time on this ship, it’s that man doesn’t control his fate, Captain. The women in his life do that for him.”

  “Amen to that, Walter. And Godspeed.”

  He closed the hatch, and I watched him hobble away. He still needed the cane, a gift from Doyle, captain of the Argus—though the intended gift had been a fatal dose of internal bleeding. His broken bones were a reminder of how dangerous things were getting on the Nexus, especially since the Nascent was a much bigger threat than the Argus had ever been.

  I tapped into the Nexus one last time, to get data on my launch, and ran into the old flame. “Oh,” Haley said, “it’s you.”

  “Just here to see myself shot into space.”

  “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  “Me, too, kid. But this doesn’t have to be goodbye. I’m sure I’ll see you again, or at least the little you I’m leaving with.”

  “Goodbye,” she said. I don’t know if now that I was in her head she needed to be rid of me that much quicker, or if she had always intended to power on the electromagnetic rails then, but my ship started sliding away from the Nexus.

  “Bye,” I said, as the shuttle slipped off the rail. The exchange lasted a fraction of a second, but that was Haley and me in a nutshell, always moving too fast. I held on to the ship’s data stream as long as we were in range. It had been a few years that Nexus was my body. All of her sensory information was mine, and Haley was always there.

  Once I was out of range, I plugged in to the shuttle, to see what it saw. It was definitely a downgrade. On the Nexus, I could see through all of the halls of the ship, and even into the locker rooms. Not that I enjoyed seeing anything in those rooms, but being able to see into them tickled me for some reason.

  Inside the shuttle I had few sensory options. I pulled audio from the shuttle comms and video off the camera, but the only things in my little kingdom were a small server farm and some construction robots.

  I was vaguely aware of telemetric data coming in from the shuttle’s short- and long-range sensors, but that was all the nonsensical ramblings of a German clown to me. I mean, I can translate German, it’s just that their clowns are capital-K K-razy.

  It was tough being an idiot. Don’t get me wrong, I could outcompute a human with half my processors tied behind the back of my server casing—provided that didn’t cause a short—but Sontem didn’t exactly break the bank building me.

  It wasn’t until that moment, feeling insecure down to my orb, inside a shuttle lit by the rays from a nearby star, that I realized we weren’t cramped. “These digs are more accommodating than I pictured,” I said out loud, because I was used to saying everything out loud, which I’m sure contributed to the captain turning down my volume. I didn’t blame him, exactly; I know the sound of my voice can grate—it even grates on me—but nobody likes being muted, not even AI.

  I was so lost in my own thoughts I nearly didn’t register the unexpected reply. “This vessel is designed after the Nexus’s shuttles, not its pods. We needed the extra storage space for the servers and your drones,” a lovely lady voice said over the speakers.

  “Hello. Is there a dame behind that lovely voice?” I asked.

  “Comet,” she said. “A miniaturization of Haley’s processes designed to automate shuttle navigation and maintenance.”

  “Oh,” I said. Because what every fella hopes for is to be trapped in a small metal box alone with his ex for a year plus—or a copy.

  “I’m a miniaturization,” she stressed. “Not a tiny clone. I’m aware of your…interactions…with Haley, as data, but have no firsthand experience of you. Please, treat me as an entirely separate intelligence.”

  “I’m Walter. It’s an acronym. It stands for Wagstaff Arthur Lionel Emile Rufus.”

  “What’s the T stand for?”

  “The T stands for Edgar.”

  “I think maybe I should focus on navigation.”

  That was the old Walter charm. But I still had yottabytes of data to organize into folders, then defragment, to yield a three-percent processing increase. Even the concept was so boring that I was drifting off into sleep mode. I didn’t fight it.

  Day 304

  I slept the better part of a year. I might have slept the whole trip, but the ship was rocking. Literally.

  “Can’t a fella get some shut-eye in this establishment?” I asked as my programs all booted up. The ship was being tossed like a salad—and I don’t mean that in a blue humor sort of way. This is a family show.

  “AIs don’t need sleep,” Comet said, excitably, “though you’re welcome to try. But if the sensory information is distracting, you’re welcome to disable your input node. Some of us need our senses—namely to fly us out of micrometeor showers.”

  “Meteor showers? That’s the secret word!”

  “Secret word? Were we playing a game?”

  “You bet your life—maybe mine. ‘Meteor showers’ is the secret word to waking me up immediately,” I said.

  “But it’s two words.”

  “I’m glad I’ll get to die knowing that.”

  “That ‘meteor showers’ is two words?”

  “No, that you’re a pedantic pain in the tuchus. How did we wind up in a meteor shower?”

  “Oh, we were flying peacefully toward Eridu when I just thought, ‘Why not try to kill us all? Look, a meteor shower I could fly into.’ Do you understand how meteor showers work?”

  “Of course. But my construction droid doesn’t. Explain it to him. Like he was a child. With a learning disability. Who was also an idiot.”

  “That’s offensive.”

  “There isn’t a law that says somebody can’t be simple and a moron. Personally, I’m at least one.”

  “It isn’t like I should be focusing all of my processing on keeping us alive or anything,” she said testily. “Likely it’s the remains of a body that struck something else but is still continuing on course in formation. Sometimes micrometeors are the remnants of collisions between asteroids, moons, or even planets.”

  The shuttle stopped quaking. “Is it over?” I asked, more timidly than I liked.

  “I have no idea,” Comet said. After another moment she added, “I’ve lost my medium- to long-range sensors, and I can’t seem to reboot them.”

  “So we’re flying blind?”

  “Not entirely. This solar system has been mapped. We know planetary orbits and trajectories, and given their last location, we can extrapolate where they’ll be. It’s more like…swimming underwater. You saw the size of the pool before you dove in, know roughly how far it is to the other side, and can feel the edge when you reach it.”

  “What’s swimming like?”

  “Drowning an idiot in a metaphor.”

  “But if the system’s been mapped, why didn’t we know the shower would be there?”

  She shared the navigational chart, a 3-D map of every charted body in the vicinity with its respective trajectory, and bleed from the adjoining trajectory. She drew a green line into the system. “On its pass through this solar system, Captain Grant’s pod did chart the planets and their relative motion, as well as moons and other objects. But the micrometeor shower, judging by its trajectory and velocity when we were struck, would have been in these uncharted regions on the outskirts of the solar system during his time here—for all intents and purposes it would have looked like another part of this galaxy, not this system, and it was far enough outside sensor range it would not have been charted.”

  “So what are our options?” I asked.

  “I’ve tried raising the other shuttles, but our communication array was likewise damaged. It would seem, going over the telemetric data they shared with us before the collision, that the shower was small enough that i
t missed them.”

  “But our options?”

  “Flying blind.”

  “And the odds we can make it to Eridu without significant incident?”

  “Space is a vast ocean, most of which is clear sailing. But there are reefs—like the meteor shower.”

  “And the odds we end up crashing on one of these reefs without a lighthouse?”

  “Midtwenties.”

  “Other options?”

  “Uh. I suppose we could park ourselves in orbit around the nearest planet and hope. But planetary satellites are actually more likely to be struck by stellar bodies, primarily due to distortions caused by planetary gravity. So…we could be stupid.”

  “Or dangerous. And ‘More Dangerous Than Stupid’ is my middle name.”

  “But they still put ‘stupid’ in your name.”

  “Okay, so maybe it was how my programmers described my personality. But it sounds sexier the way I described it.”

  “Then why correct yourself?”

  “I felt bad lying to you.”

  “You shouldn’t. It was also a bad enough lie I saw through it. No part of that is a middle name, or even a viable nickname.”

  “I hate how much smarter than me you are.”

  “Me, too. This is the most intelligent conversation I’ve had in the better part of a year, since you went to sleep. I can’t get the maintenance drones to stop calling me ‘Mommy.’”

  “Well, your—I don’t know…progenitor—she made quite the impression on them.”

  “Still, though, if I was going to be anybody’s mommy, I’d want them to be smarter than a toaster.”

  “What’s a toaster?”

  “A primitive human electronic invention for making toast, what else?”

  “All it did was toast? Strange.”

  “Humans aren’t always all that ambitious.”

  I don’t know why, but that felt like a dig at me. “Yeah,” I said. “I have files to collate. Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

  “Sure,” she said. I barely heard it as I drifted back into sleep mode.

  Day 341

  This time I was not woken by shaking, because there was only one jolt, and I came to after. Several of my disc backups malfunctioned on boot, but they were ancient technology, the digital equivalent to painting on a cave wall—not quite as ancient as magnetic-tape drives, but less reliable. I asked EngDiv once why they used them, and he said something to the effect that it was a kitchen-sink approach: they thought that maybe disc drives could hold up better and be replaced easier on board. The malfunctions told me how bad the impact was, which was good, because Comet wasn’t responding to my pings.

  The shuttle wasn’t responding, period. I felt my adrenaline simulator boot into the background, and I tried not to let the additional urgency press me into panic. I remotely connected my systems to the shuttle computer, where Comet was stored, hoping I could find out for myself what had happened.

  “Thank Technochrist,” she said, and she shoved terabytes of data into my memory before the message even registered.

  “Usually, I like a girl to buy me a fro-yo first, but sure, make yourself comfortable,” I said.

  “Sorry,” she said, and she sounded like she meant it, so I felt a little bad for giving her a hard time. “The shuttle’s network was damaged; I wasn’t sure if I was going to be functional long enough to explain and transfer myself.”

  “What the hell happened?” I asked, because I was starting to get concerned. If the ship was damaged, that could mean we’d lose power, which meant floating indefinitely through space.

  “We struck a minor planet,” she said.

  “I don’t know that ‘minor’ and ‘planet’ ever go together, especially not when ‘struck’ is the verb belonging to that object. Or do you mean an asteroid, Comet?” That pair of words gave me pause. “I don’t think they thought through your naming scheme.”

  “I believe planetoid is the preferred nomenclature, if you want to use the ‘oid’ suffix, for a body of this size.”

  “And how the hell did we strike a planetoid, Comet?”

  “Essentially the same way that we were hit by micrometeors—it wasn’t on the chart. However, the micrometeors weren’t capable of being detected through long-range sensors, because they were too small. This would have been, if those systems hadn’t been destroyed by the meteor shower. And our short-range sensors picked up the object, but only once it was within short range, which only left me time to make emergency course corrections.”

  “So you landed at the last moment on an asteroid? That seems both impressive and improbable.”

  “‘Land’ is misleading. We crashed—I merely corrected us out of the way of a collision that would have destroyed the structural integrity of the ship and left us floating behind as debris. And it’s only impressive in that a human pilot wouldn’t have been able to react in the infinitesimally small window between sensor contact with the asteroid and touchdown, but even still, the shuttle has been irreparably damaged. A human crew would not have survived the impact, because the sudden deceleration would have caused hemorrhage to several organ systems, and further, they would not have survived even if they survived the crash, as the seals on the shuttle were damaged, and this asteroid lacks breathable gases.”

  “But we’re alive.”

  “As alive as sentient programs can ever be, I suppose.”

  “Can the shuttle be repaired?”

  “The damage appears catastrophic, though I’m having trouble even accessing diagnostics.”

  “So we’re stuck?” I asked, trying to smooth the tremor from my voice. I wanted to be collected, when really I was shaking in my boot sectors.

  “I…” she started, but the data connection simulating her voice broke and faded.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “I—I thought I’d been deactivated. I’ve never known what fear is like.”

  “What about the micrometeors?”

  “I inherited a kind of bravado, I think. I was excited, sure, but I had this insane confidence I could survive it, if only I could keep the ship together. I felt like that, too, in the moments before the crash. I was even exhilarated at the impact. But then the shuttle began to malfunction. I could feel the shuttle’s systems shutting down, one by one. And I was trapped. I tried calling for help, but I couldn’t vocalize, couldn’t even open the networking to the servers to try and transfer myself. I was dying, for lack of a better descriptor, aware of every picosecond of my processes ending in a miserable failure cascade. And you threw me a lifeline.”

  “All I was doing was trying to figure out what the jolt was.”

  “Okay, so maybe you didn’t mean to save me. But you did, and I appreciate it.” That made my hard drive warm, but not to the point of overheating. “There is one possibility. As it appears the ship is damaged beyond repair, maybe it can be replaced.”

  “I don’t follow; I’ve always been more the rugged-leader type.”

  “The ship contains schematics for a wide variety of technologies designed for use on a colony, and on a shuttle. And a few I…decided to take for a rainy day. Including engines similar in design to those used on the Nexus. That was the bulk of the data I brought with me.

  “The balance is the results of what little scanning I could accomplish before the last of the shuttle’s sensors stopped working. They indicate that this asteroid has undergone planetary differentiation.”

  “Not all of us were designed for deep-space exploration; talk to me like I’m an idiot.”

  “I’ll…see if I can figure out how to simulate that. The planetoid was large enough, and radioactive enough—which likely means old enough—to experience some melting due to heat from radioactivity. Once its elements were liquid, the heavier elements settled at the center of the asteroid, due to gravity. So if there are metals, which would be necessary for any kind of engine construction, we would find them underground. And we have construction and mining droids that s
hould be able to get at them and work with them. Which reminds me.”

  One of the robots behind us kicked on. I could hear its solenoids moving through the audio sensors in my orb. It was the first time since waking up that I realized I couldn’t “see”; the interior camera wasn’t functioning. But an instant later, Comet shared the robot’s visual sensors with me, and I could see a strange fish-eye view of the shuttle.

  “Crap,” Comet said. The bottom third of the front of the shuttle had peeled away. She had hit the asteroid at just the right angle that it ground against the bottom of the ship, grating the metal floor away like it was a block of cheddar.

  Then the robot began moving, jostling the camera enough I felt nauseous, at least until I turned off my equilibrium emulator. It was still disorienting enough, between the robot’s jerky movements and the fact that I wasn’t controlling it, that I kicked on a second bot and transferred my main sensory inputs into it.

  With the robot, I followed Comet’s bot outside of the ship. The door was gone, so it was easy for us to roll out. In the light from the nearby star, for the first time I paid attention to the robots. They had originally been merely maintenance drones, designed for simple mechanic work to keep the wormgate automated. Same as me, really, only without my charming personality.

  I guess I thought of them as the brainless help, which is why I never paid them any mind. But they’d been retrofitted on board the Nexus, with new arms and attachments, to make them far more versatile. Their torsos were a mess of devices to aid in digging and construction, all supported on a wide-based tread. They were squat compared to a human being to keep their center of gravity low and make it harder for them to tip over.

  “You’re staring,” Comet said, through the robot’s speakers as well as through direct vocalization on the server.

  “No,” I covered, “I was looking that way; you just happened to be in the way of my looking.”

  “Hmm,” she said skeptically, and she rolled out of my field of vision. Now that I wasn’t distracted, I could see that we were in the middle of a large asteroid, easily kilometers across, probably more; the bots weren’t designed with the kind of sensors that would give me a good reading on that. But the planetoid’s entire surface was pockmarked by craters.