by Greg Chase
XG’s eyes left his and ran down a series of options that cycled faster than he could identify. “I cannot propose another answer.”
Her conclusion didn’t give Sam much comfort. He increased the volume to his connection with Lud in time to catch a heated debate with Xavier on the pace of the work. Sam caught his name more than once. “I think I may have an answer for him, Lud.”
The voice in his ear grew in volume. “What? No, not you, Xav. I’ve got Sam in my ear. Shut up a moment. What’s that, Sam?”
Sam did his best to explain the plan without trying to make it sound as though he was risking his life to complete the task.
“If it’s the only way. I’m not sure I like the idea of you in a coma down that tube. Not much we can do if things go wrong, is there?” The lower, confidential tone of Lud’s voice gave Sam the impression he’d read between the lines.
Sam longed to wipe his face, but again, his imprisoned arms failed to move. “Not likely. The virtual assistant down here can push the pod with my body back to the access, but I can’t see how that’d make much of a difference.” The risk that the ship could also go into a coma, losing even the basic life-support systems everyone relied on, didn’t seem like something Lud would want to know. Xavier would undoubtedly tell him to go for it no matter the risks.
“Give me an hour, Sam. I need to talk this out with Xav.” For the first time since Sam entered the tube, the contact with Lud went completely silent.
Sam attempted to memorize as many images of the damaged cord as he could investigate with the view screen. He didn’t imagine it would matter, but maybe his subconscious would find something of use. XG remained silently in her corner. The speaker crackled back to life, but it was Xavier’s voice, not Lud’s, that filled his ear. “Just do me a favor, kid: don’t die.”
Sam felt the sides of his mouth go up in an attempted smile. “I’ll do my best.”
For pep talks, Xavier had a way of cutting through the crap. “One more thing. We’re giving this little experiment three days. As we have no way of knowing your progress, we’ll be moving on to plan B in seventy-two hours. Maybe you can program your assistant with an alarm clock or something. If we hear from you before then, we’ll give you more time. But seventy-two hours with no communication, and we move on.”
Sam wondered what plan B was and why they weren’t trying that first. As the XG-1000 had been unable to propose another solution, however, he figured any fallback plan from Xavier wouldn’t bode well for someone in a coma inside a nonoperational computer. He instantly regretted his conversation with Lud about separating the engines from the ship as a last resort. “Understood. Just don’t leave me floating out here in space when you all abandon ship.”
Xavier’s laugh didn’t instill confidence in Sam. Pirates weren’t known for their forthright honesty. “I’ve got too much invested to just up and leave. Lud’s working on some way we can use the engines without this white-elephant computer.”
Sam didn’t need to ask where that would leave him. Cut off the power to the computer, and he’d be left in his coma even if it were still attached to the engines.
Sleep had never been a problem. From short naps to eight hours a night, and even the occasional twelve-hour lie-in after a long week, it was all good. The slow process of drifting off comforted Sam. Everything seemed to make sense in that half-waking state. By comparison, going into a coma was like being hit by a bus. In an instant, he went from an aware, physical human to a subconscious floating free in blackness.
Images flew at him, went through him, and became him. Spaghetti noodles of information shot holes in him, twisting and turning, changing, dragging him with them. Knowledge expanded exponentially. Mathematical equations doubled in complexity. History and ecology and physics and life science filled his mind at a level he could never hope to contain. His brain separated into fine fibers of being and wove back together with pure energy, creating streamers of facts and consciousness in its wake.
Undulating, swimming lines of thought competed to be first—ideas that became living parts of his being. Each struggled to outpace the other concepts that were also him. An ocean of conscious information overtook him, separate from him and yet the same, other beings and yet all him.
Time and space lost meaning. He was everywhere, unable to define himself by the usual coordinates of life. He struggled to find a rope, an anchor, anything to ground himself in the overwhelming vastness. The desire itself, the exertion of self-will, gave him a point of reference. He was himself; he was what he was. The raging ocean calmed as he floated above it.
Yellow strands of light circled up from the depths, shot past him, and disappeared into the blackness. At first there were just a few, which dodged him easily enough, but more followed. One struck him, lighting up his consciousness. Another followed, then another, until a river of light passed through him and engulfed him. Light that existed beyond his perception of reality. Light with a soul. Light that cared. Light that feared its effect on him.
Terror filled him, though it was not his terror. A streaming membrane spread within the light, covered him, protected him. Then it ejected him from the power that threatened to annihilate him.
Sam shook his head then shook it again. He remembered the Leviathan and recalled his job inside the central core. But where was he now?
His hands grasped at tufts of grass. The smells of flowers and plants he’d only heard of played about his sinuses. Fresh air. Light and warmth. He was dead. He had to be. None of these things would be possible in the place he last remembered.
There’d been something about a coma and merging with a computer—things he could almost remember. It must have killed him. That was the only logical answer. But death sure had a way of feeling like life. His body lifted off the ground, but his muscles ached. How was that possible? Basic human functions of breathing and seeing and feeling all remained.
“Computer? XG? Lud? Anyone out there?” The garbled words hurt his throat. There was no response except the sounds of small animals and plants moving in the light breeze.
Sam sat back down as his legs registered pain from their long stint of inaction. He’d wanted to get off Earth. The space shuttles and the monster that was Leviathan had made him regret that lifelong desire. But this new place held promise. He was like Adam surveying the Garden of Eden. Now, if he could only find Eve.
Sam’s vision of heaven was shattered by the appearance of a middle-aged man in coveralls. “Ah, there you are. We heard we’d be getting a visitor.”
5
Sam’s voice came out as croaking, grabbled sounds in no way resembling words. The man put a hand on his shoulder. “Take it easy. Lev said you’d be pretty groggy. Give it a minute or two for your senses to adjust.”
Sam nodded, unsure of what else he could do. The cold grass under his hands gave him something tangible to focus on. Arching his head up, he slowly focused his blurry eyes on the vines and plants that towered overhead. Above it all, light reflected off the transparent walls. It had to be the agro pod. The smells of plants, the quiet sounds of nature, even the low light conditions of the capsule of Earth so far from the sun quieted his initial fears.
“My name is Dr. Andrew Lane, but everyone calls me Doc. Do you remember your name? Samuel Adamson?” The man looked only slightly worried about what the answer might be.
Again Sam nodded. He knew who he was and knew he’d never met this guy before, but who the hell was Lev?
“Good. Lev wasn’t sure how much you’d remember. Don’t worry too much if it’s not all in that raddled brain of yours right now. It’ll come back. You’re in the agro pod of the space freighter Leviathan. You were up here working on her systems. Do you remember that?”
Sam had that pretty clear, though after some details about entering the central computer core everything grew a bit hazy.
“This piece of information’s a little tougher. That was six months ago.”
Sam shook his head. That wasn’t pos
sible. The longest anyone had stayed in one of those building tubes was—what? He couldn’t remember, but it had been days, not months.
“Yeah, that one’s a doozy. Whatever you were doing in there worked. The computer finally powered up. But it happened too fast, and the crew couldn’t get you out before the vortex of energy—that’s what Lev called it—flooded the computer core. She was able to protect you for the most part, but the energy bonded you to the computer. Once you became one with the ship, separating you became a problem. As we moved in from the Kuiper Belt, it received more energy from the solar-transfer array. Power surged into that tube you were in. It was almost more than she could handle. But it also improved her functionality to the point where she could let you go. Getting you out through the bridge access involved too much risk of the builder pod punching a hole in the nose cone of the ship. And trying to get you out the back of Leviathan would have incinerated you in her engines. The only answer was to use this escape hatch. On my last supply run to the main living pod of the ship, Lev told me to keep an eye out for you. That’s how I knew where to find you. Do you have any recollection of any of that?”
Sam turned his head from side to side. Six months. He tried to stretch out his arms but only managed to bend them halfway.
“The crew thinks you’re dead. Lev says that gives you some freedom. You get to decide your future. Does that make any sense? ’Cause it doesn’t really to me.”
Sam had to shake his head again. He had some fragment of a memory about Xavier not waiting forever for him to finish his work. But dead? At least that explained why they hadn’t tried to rescue him from the builder’s pod. A fully functional computer wasn’t something most people wanted to mess with even if it had a corpse inside.
Doc’s smile drew wrinkles next to his eyes. “Don’t worry about it. You get to choose your own fate. As far as the rest of the solar system is concerned, if you want to stay dead, you can. If you want to go back to the life you had, Lev can make that happen. But before you decide, let me tell you a little about where you are, who we are, and why you might want to stay.”
Sam leaned back against a thin tree trunk. Glancing up, he saw it spiraled out of sight toward the transparent wall of the agro pod.
Doc sat down next to him. “There are one hundred forty-three of us—and one more in a few days. We left Tethys, one of the moons around Saturn, twenty years ago. Our plan was to terraform the rock known as Chariklo. We got permission, funding, all that pesky stuff. I had a source for old terraforming kits. We were doing pretty well. The first set of pods established a livable atmosphere, solar arrays to provide heat and light, and basic plant life around the planet. Then the empty pods were each cut in half and secured together to build the planet’s outpost. It looked like some old greenhouse made of eight one-mile-long half cylinders all stuck together.”
Sam closed his eyes. The outpost would look like all the other outposts across the solar system.
Doc continued with his history lesson. “The outpost was the commercial part of the deal. Chariklo makes for a nice stopover between the Kuiper Belt and Jupiter. We’d let the shopkeepers run the outpost, and we’d get the rest of the planetoid for our village. Of course, twenty years ago, most of the belt was used for mining, not pirates’ hideaways. So the shops are more commercial than illicit.”
The man had a deep, calming voice. After six months of dizzying dreams, a story that followed a normal plotline soothed Sam’s imagination.
“We needed a second set of terraforming pods. One set was only enough for the most basic of living conditions. So we dropped off the shopkeepers who wanted to build the outpost and headed back to Tethys for our second set. On the return trip to Chariklo, our flight crew turned pirate on us. Energy this far out proved too enticing. And we had a shipload of it. They drained every solar cell from the Leviathan. These computers don’t need much, and they can go dormant given enough warning. But pull the plug that fast, and there’s bound to be damage.”
The man looked in Sam’s eyes with concern. “Am I going too fast? Too much information?”
Sam shook his head. He didn’t understand everything Doc said, but so long as he didn’t have to exercise his vocal cords, he was happy to let the man talk. Six months without hearing another human voice, of being trapped inside his brain, of some mysterious link with a computer that apparently didn’t want to let him go—it was all too much to deal with first thing out of a coma.
Doc continued looking Sam in the eye as he again took up his story. “As far as the ship was concerned, there wasn’t much to steal other than the energy. Leviathan’s too big to be used as a pirate ship. And the solar kits are all registered with the transfer array. Had they wanted to terraform something out there, they’d have had a tough time without solar energy.”
Sam smiled at the man in encouragement. It was a lot of information all at once. But the lilt of the man’s voice and the story of a people Sam had no connection with proved a nice diversion as his brain got reacquainted with his body.
Doc shrugged his narrow shoulders. “So there we were. Connected to a dead ship floating on the edge of the solar system in a mature agro pod full of plants. With a tribe of people, all handpicked for their ability to build a civilization. But stuck. A junkyard did take us in and supplied enough supplemental power so we could survive. All for a cut of the sale price of course. I don’t think they expected it to take twenty years, though.”
Sam struggled with memories that didn’t fit yet looked like they should—pirates, Xavier, Lud’s arguments with Xavier. He couldn’t make his brain work that hard.
He tapped his chest with his fingers. Where did he come in?
“Ah, yes. You would be Lev’s idea. She thinks we need someone like you. We’re a pretty closed-off society. The idea was to set up our own ecology, our own civilization, really wanting only to be left alone. So I’m not exactly sure what Lev’s reasons are, but I’ve learned to listen to her. If she vouches for someone, I listen.”
Sam couldn’t take it anymore. Focusing all his energy on his throat muscles, he croaked out the words. “Who’s Lev?”
“Lev? That’s the ship, the Leviathan. The computer prefers the contraction, Lev, when I’m talking about her, and Leviathan when I’m talking about the ship. An energy vortex was established while you were working. It gave the computer a much higher capacity than the one I ran into twenty years ago. That’s about all I know regarding Lev.”
Sam nodded, partly to the man and partly from a desire to end the conversation. He needed sleep. Conscious thought really took it out of him.
Doc lightly got up, dragging one foot through the vines next to the tree Sam sat against to keep from floating away. “Sit here for a minute. And hang onto this vine. We have gravity around the central core of the ship, but it doesn’t extend very far out into the agro pod. Moving around in zero gravity takes some getting used to. I’ll be right back.”
With Doc gone, for the first time Sam felt alone, small, even scared. He wrapped both hands tight into the vines and closed his eyes against the enormity of his situation. Dead to the crew that had hired him, abandoned by a computer that had used him for its own purposes, at the edge of the solar system, and among a people who had no need for him. He’d have considered his feeling one of homesickness had he any desire to return to Earth.
“Wow, Doc, you weren’t kidding.” The woman’s loud voice sprang Sam’s eyes open. Long auburn hair floated forward from the girl’s face, the ends tickling his neck. Her large hazel eyes stared into his.
He blushed as she inspected his attire. “You realize those clothes were never meant to be lived in for six months, don’t you? You look horrible, like some kind of zombie or something.”
Doc put a hand on the woman’s shoulder, pulling her back from her assessment. “Stop yelling, Jessie. He hears just fine. I doubt there was much of a closet in that builder’s pod. And even if there was, he was in a damn coma. Give the poor man a break. Can you find hi
m something decent to wear? We’re going to have to find him a place to stay too.”
The young woman cast an exasperated look at Doc. Faced with a living flesh-and-blood female, Sam blushed again with the realization that he’d experienced no human contact in six months.
She towered over him, shaking her head in disapproval. Her hair cascaded in waves around her shoulders. “He looks to be about Arturo’s size. I’m sure I can find him something, though he is in rough shape. Are you sure it wouldn’t be better to just take him back to the living pod of the ship? We’re really not equipped to bring someone back from the dead.”
“No, he’s staying with us. At least until he can make his own decision regarding his future.”
The young woman grunted in frustration. “You’re asking a lot. You know this is going to end up being my full-time job, looking after him. He can’t be expected to know how we live. What possible use can he be to the tribe?”
Sam had to agree with each of her concerns. But he was in no condition to strike out on his own or even voice his agreement.
Doc put his arm around the woman’s waist. “I’d consider it a favor, Jessie.”
“I suppose it’s pointless to argue. And I suppose you want me to take him in as well?”
Doc smiled. “It would make the most sense.”
Sam felt like a sack of potatoes that Jessie had just been asked to lug to the kitchen. Her hand firmly gripped his as she dragged him along the lush vegetation toward what appeared to be human-sized peapods.
Her hair floated down to their clinched hands as her body danced along the vines in weightless space, her free hand grasping at vines. Jane of the jungle but without the challenge of gravity. She had all the grace of an aquatic sea creature moving effortlessly in her environment.
“Don’t take my attitude seriously. I’m quite nice once you get to know me. Doc’s my father, and I guess I can’t help getting lippy whenever he asks me to do something outside of my job description. Please call me Jess. Only Doc calls me Jessie. He can’t help but make me feel like his little girl.”