Suddenly Astronaut

by Andrew J. Morgan

  About eighty, he figured. That's a lot of meals.

  Home had never felt so far away.

  With the second lot carefully stowed, he entered space for what would be the last time in almost a month. He wasn’t sure if he would miss these small expeditions; the suit, although flexible, was stiff enough to make long durations in it hard work, and the material on the inside chaffed his joints. Three trips in and he was in considerable pain, each shuffle to the container an eye-watering moment.

  "That's the last net loaded," he reported back to Tom as he backed out of the container and sealed it shut. He felt sure he could feel something warm and wet running between his fingers; his knuckles, judging by the white-hot pain, were probably bleeding. He'd have to clean out the suit and dress the wounds when he got back into the tug. He leaned back to straighten his fingers, let them rest. Given how clumsy he was, he was surprised he hadn’t used the first-aid kit already—

  Ben's head reeled. An impact, so sudden, had winded him, almost pulling him from the side of the tug. Intense pain flared up his side.

  "Tom—" he yelled, but his lungs were so completely expelled of air that he could say no more.

  "Ben, is everything okay?" Tom asked.

  Ben could not respond. The immediacy of the impact had scrambled his brain, and he was trying to figure out what had happened and what he needed to do next. First, he needed to keep hold of the tug—he squeezed his right hand, felt the hard, smooth shape of the handrail—and second, check he still had the supplies—he squeezed his left hand and felt nothing, then instinctively felt down his side to the eyelet where he'd attached them. Again, nothing. His already panicked brain scrambled further as he felt up and down himself, trying to think what had happened.

  Then, he remembered. He hadn't secured the netting to himself. He'd just been holding it.

  "I've lost the supplies," he said, his breath regaining.

  Why had he done that? Why hadn't he clipped them to himself? He wasn't thinking clearly, that's why. His head was too filled with letters and numbers and symbols for him to focus. "I'm going to go back."

  As he twisted to go back the way he came, the pain in his side exploded. He remembered the impact.

  "I think I've been hit by something," he said, wincing.

  "Probably a micrometeoroid. Come back inside," Tom said.

  "Is my suit okay?"

  "Pressure is reading as normal," Tom said, "but I think you should still come back inside."

  "No, I need to get the supplies. I'm heading back."

  Fighting the agony—which Ben realised was coming from the same spot he'd injured previously, just his luck—he fumbled hand over hand back towards the container. There were a few spare small nets over there he could use. It wouldn't take him long.

  The pain from his side overwhelmed the pain in his joints, and he gritted his teeth each time he twisted. It was pain like he'd never felt before, cold and wet, but the urgency of his situation kept him fight on.

  Reaching the rear of the tug, making sure to hug close and avoid another micrometeoroid impact, felt like an enormous milestone. He allowed himself a breath, shivering as the cold wetness climbed up the back of his neck.

  Wait a minute, that wasn't pain …

  It was actually water, creeping up in zero gravity around his neck.

  "Tom, is my suit reading okay?" he asked.

  "Pressure is still normal. Why?"

  "I can feel something wet on my neck. It feels like it's moving."

  "The thermal line could be ruptured internally," Tom said. "I suggest you return immediately."

  The water did not seem to be moving any further, so Ben chose to ignore Tom's warning. "I'm almost there, I'll keep going."

  He reached out to the container, twisting his suit, which squeezed the liquid up his neck and under his chin. He froze, heart racing. Not much farther and the water would be on his face. Tom was right, he needed to go back. Carefully, he shuffled in the direction of the tug hatch, trying not to shift the water any more, but as the panic set in deeper, his movements become more erratic—and the water kept on climbing. It slipped like a glove up his face, tickling at the corners of his mouth and nose and eyes.

  He stopped.

  "Tom, if I keep going, I won't be able to see or breathe," he said, panting from exhaustion and from terror.

  "You're three, maybe four steps from the hatch. At your current pace that will take you twenty-two seconds. You then need to seal the hatch and recompress the tug. That takes you on average forty-three seconds. Can you hold your breath for that long?"

  Given his pounding heart rate, Ben wasn't sure he could hold his breath at all. "One minute, let me try," he said. He took a few deep breaths, then held the last, pinching his lips together until he felt like he was going to burst. Gasping, he said, "How long was that?"

  "Twenty-two seconds."

  "I don't think I can do it."

  "I'll guide you. You can make it."

  The cold was making Ben shiver. The pain was making him dizzy.

  "Ben, you can do it. I believe in you."

  Was it worth it? Did getting to Earth really merit all this suffering? If the station had one Bruce Wenzig, Earth could have thousands, millions. He'd be all alone, he'd have no-one—maybe for the rest of his life. That seemed harder to bear than the journey itself.

  There was an easier way. All he had to do was lean back and hope that a micrometeoroid took him out.

  "Come on, Ben, you can do it."

  He could just let go, drift back and shut his eyes.

  "Ben, come on."

  The pain would be over. All of it. He could feel his grip relaxing, his muscles unclenching. He shut his eyes.

  "Ben?"

  But a world with a million Wenzigs could also have a million Persephones.

  "Ben!"

  Perhaps there was something worth fighting for after all.

  His eyes snapped open. He gripped the handrail tight. He took a deep, gulping breath and lunged for the hatch.

  Immediately, the water smothered his face. It filled his mouth, his nose, his ears and his eyes. His vision became a dark blur. The rustles and creaks of his suit were muffled. The only thing that rang clear was Tom's voice through the earpiece.

  "Another leap like that and you'll be in the hatch. If you reach out you should be able to feel it."

  Ben stretch out and felt nothing until his hand hit a cold, metal edge. He clawed hold of it as best he could, lungs burning, and heaved himself in. His fingers were slipping, he could feel it, but he had no time to do anything about it. Instead he scratched and fumbled at whatever he could to draw himself inside.

  "Almost there …" Tom said.

  Ben kicked against the vacuum of space, trying to paddle himself forward. But his floundering wasn't working, and his blurred vision meant he couldn't see anything to grab hold of.

  "Move your right hand to the right some more—there's a recess in the floor you should be able to get some purchase on."

  Ben followed Tom's instructions and sure enough he found a recess. Heaving himself in, he jumped quickly to his feet—the burpees had paid off after all—fighting the urge to draw in air. His diaphragm was convulsing from the effort, fighting him harder with each passing moment.

  "Turn a quarter left and walk to the wall," Tom said quickly.

  Hands held out in front of him, Ben turned left and walked forward, feeling for the wall.

  As soon as he found it, Tom said, "Follow the wall left, feeling for the hatch with your left hand."

  Sidestepping left, tracing the wall with his right hand, Ben fumbled with his left hand until it collided with the hatch. He didn't need to be told to close it, slamming it shut and feeling for the lock in one practiced motion.

  He was already reaching above him for the recompression lever as Tom said, "Half a step back and you'll find the lever. Grab hold where the finger indentations are and pull clockwise."

  Even though Ben was unable t
o see, he could feel his vision fading as his brain was starved of oxygen. The temptation just to breathe in the water was so strong it was making him light-headed. He stumbled backwards as he tried to find the lever, Tom offering a correction to his positioning almost immediately. Fingers numb, he scratched at the panel above him, vaguely feeling the lever and pulling.

  Air hissed around him, quietly at first, the red pressure light on the wall just about making it through his blur of vision. He could see that fading too as the hissing grew louder, his knees weak and lungs begging for air. Just one breath wouldn't hurt, just one …

  The light switched to green and Ben ripped off his helmet, water gushing out, and he coughed and spluttered as fresh air filled his lungs. He collapsed to the floor, gasping, heaving, reeling.

  "Are you okay?" Tom asked.

  Ben, still breathless, nodded. "Thanks," he wheezed.

  "You're welcome," Tom said. "Anything for a friend."

  Chapter 18

  Ben looked at the space suit laid out on the floor. There was a clear indentation in the right side midriff that had deformed the tube network that carried the coolant liquid around the suit. Ben looked from it to his side, where a fresh bruise had welled up in a fetching shade of a purple.

  "If it was a micrometeoroid it would have gone straight through and decompressed the suit in seconds," Tom said. "It looks like this was bigger, moving at a similar speed to us. You got away lightly."

  Ben stared at the suit. He had been lucky, very lucky.

  "Can it be repaired?"

  "It can still be operated for the short durations of the resupply, however I will monitor your body temperature to make sure you don't freeze to death."

  "Well, thanks," Ben said. "What are friends for if not to prevent each other from turning to ice in the depths of space?"

  "Then we're in agreement," Tom said.

  Ben laughed. "You're too smug for a computer, you know that?"

  "My factory default is set to self-righteous, actually. It's in the manual."

  They laughed together. Somehow, the impact had cleared Ben's mind a bit. He still wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened at the station, but now he felt like he could do it with Tom, could trust him once again. He felt bad he'd ever doubted him.

  * * *

  Over the next week, as they entered the asteroid belt, the mood on the tug changed. The constant stream of micrometeoroids pinging off the tug's hull kept Ben under constant reminder of what it was they were doing. Tom had told Ben that while the larger asteroids were pretty far apart, occasionally Ben would be required to make small adjustments to their course to avoid them.

  This meant that Ben hadn't had a solid night's sleep for four days now, and coupled with rationed meals to stretch two weeks' supplies over three, he was in no mood to—and was largely incapable of—learning anything in Tom's lessons. Instead, he spent the time poring over data logs. He was beginning to paint a picture with them, and needed Tom's input less and less to decipher sections of the code.

  It was all laid out in streams of data from the hundreds of sensors on the tug and the thousands on the station. Feeds that relayed position, speed, alignment, proximity, acceleration, deceleration, temperature—you name it—were all logged there for Ben to cross reference, to build a three-dimensional picture in his mind of what had happened.

  Unfortunately, that three-dimensional picture was measured a petasecond at a time, and so he'd only looked through about five minutes of data so far. It was going to take Ben a lifetime to pick apart enough information to draw a conclusion from.

  But he pushed on regardless. There was an answer in there, he could feel it. He just needed to look at the data in the right way.

  "Ben, a course correction is needed."

  Ben looked up from the screen and out of the cockpit window. He did this every time a course correction was needed—as he was usually sitting in the pilot's seat browsing data—even though Tom gave plenty of warning so there was usually nothing to see.

  "What do you need?" he said, repositioning himself to reach the controls better.

  "Latitude four degrees up for seven minutes, then latitude down eight degrees for seven minutes, then latitude up four degrees to resume original course."

  "Count me."

  "One minute, twenty seconds."

  The procedure was fairly familiar to Ben by this point. He'd done it ten or so times already, and it remained uneventful. Only once had Ben had even seen the glimmer of a distant sun off a rocky mass somewhere against the black of space.

  "In ten," Tom said.

  "Ready."

  "Three—two—one—mark."

  Ben nosed the craft up eight degrees. That was it for seven minutes, when he'd point the craft back down again. There was no point resuming his data crunching in the meantime, so he leaned back and stared out at the star-studded blackness.

  "What are you going to do when we get back?" he asked Tom out of nowhere.

  "I will most likely be decommissioned."

  Ben blinked. "Decommissioned? Why?"

  "My replacement has been in operation on Earth for some two years already now. I will no longer be required and will be decommissioned for study."

  "They can't do that, can they?"

  "Helios are my creators and will be my destroyers. It is the way of things. The refit of the station included the update."

  Ben couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You would have been replaced on the station?"

  "That's correct."

  "Why didn't you say anything?"

  Tom seemed to give a gentle, knowing laugh. "The new software would have assimilated the data I have accumulated from our relationship and would have been tailored to provide a seamless transition. You would not have noticed."

  "I would," Ben said, feeling put out. "I'd have noticed immediately. You can't just be replaced like that."

  "I'm afraid I can. And it's for the benefit of the end user. Faster processing, more lifelike behaviour, more complex analytical personality mapping. Helios is determined to create an artificial mind that is indiscernible from a human's. They believe it will be the ultimate computer."

  "I like you how you are though," Ben said.

  "Thank you."

  Ben sniffed, staring straight ahead. "I won't let them," he said. "I'll tell them you saved me and that you're a hero and that you can't be decommissioned."

  "It's okay, I'm fine with it."

  "It's not okay!" Ben yelled, surprising himself. "It's not okay," he repeated more calmly. "It's not okay."

  "You're one in a million," Tom said, "but most people simply want the latest software. They aren't interested in anything else, don't see me like you see me. That's how it works."

  "But why?" Ben asked. "Why don't people see you like that? They're always calling you 'it', treating you like rubbish." A memory flashed in his mind, the last face-to-face interaction he'd had with a human being. "Even Wenzig's dad called you 'it'. It's like they don't care."

  "They don't. That's why computers like me are created. Human servitude comes with an associated guilt, but a computer? Ben, you have to understand that I'm not real. My feelings aren't real. I'm a machine."

  "You're real to me. You've been the most loyal, trustworthy friend I …"

  A thought entered Ben's head and stopped his sentence dead.

  "Ben?" Tom said.

  "If computers are loyal," Ben said slowly, "and humans aren't, then maybe you're right …"

  "Right about what?"

  "Maybe you didn't register the IGS failure because it didn't fail …"

  "That's what I've been saying."

  "Maybe you didn't register it because it was sabotaged."

  Tom said nothing for a moment. Then he said, "What do you mean?"

  "I tricked you, remember? When I faked the pass to get on board the tug?"

  "Your parents had already signed permission," Tom said.

  "Yes, I know, but that didn't stop you from r
ealising that I'd forged another one, right?"

  "Okay …"

  Mind racing as he prowled his memories, Ben said, "Bruce once told me that his dad wanted to be the station director, and that he felt he'd lost out unfairly to my parents."

  "Mr Wenzig was never considered for that position."

  "But he applied, right?"

  "Yes."

  "So," Ben continued, "Bruce's dad told him that my parents were useless and that they'd do something to make idiots of themselves."

  "Mr Wenzig and your parents may not be close friends," Tom said, "but to suggest that he would destroy the station is out of the question."

  "I know, I know," Ben said. "And I'm not suggesting that. What if he simply wanted to make something go wrong, something small, to make my parents look bad? What if it was that little something that went very wrong?"

  Tom was silent for a while. At first, Ben thought he wasn't going to respond at all.

  "Without evidence, this is just speculation," he said at last.

  Ben got the feeling that Tom wasn't comfortable with engaging in this conversation. "Why don't you want to talk about it?" he asked.

  "It is not my place to offer opinion on such sensitive matters, and I don't think it is good for your health to consider them, either."

  All at once, it was clear. Tom didn't want to influence Ben's thoughts, sway his opinion. He was probably programed not to. Knowing how badly people reacted to Tom's input on much smaller matters, something like this was probably way out of his remit.

  "Okay, Tom, I understand. How about this: I talk out loud and you listen. Respond where you can."

  "Unfortunately, I cannot stop you from talking."

  "Well, that's a start I guess."

  Ben thought about his interaction with Bruce's dad on that fateful day. He'd been cagey, uptight; that could have simply been the kind of person he was. But when Ben had approached him, working on that panel, he'd jumped clean out of his skin.

  "What was Wenzig's dad's position on the station?" Ben asked Tom.

  "He was a third stage engineering officer."