One Giant Leap

by Heather Kaczynski

  I had to keep thinking ahead or the horror would consume me.

  The shuttle came to a stop. Luka opened the hatch and we climbed out. I tried catching a glimpse of the shuttle drone’s cargo, but it was shrouded in darkness.

  Luka led the way down the tunnel, and I hustled to catch up. “This weapon. Do you—nobody really told us what it does. Is it stable? Is it dangerous to us? To Earth, if we take it back?”

  His eyes jerked to me when I said if, narrowing. “That is not something I know.”

  “If we need it, we need it. I just want to make sure we aren’t going to kill ourselves trying to take it home. Is it secure in its container? Not, like . . . radioactive?”

  He shook his head only slightly. “Not radioactive. It is inert, at the moment.”

  “Why didn’t your people take it with them when they left, originally?”

  “I was not born when it happened. Perhaps they tried, and failed in the attempt.”

  I swiveled away from him, wishing I hadn’t gone there, hadn’t poured more grief into his cup. “So we can’t take Odysseus home?”

  “Not unless you want to arrive six months after the vrag.”

  I cringed. “Right. So . . . where are the other ships?”

  “The computer will know.” He stopped in front of a bare stretch of wall, both hands pressing lightly against it.

  “This is your computer?” I asked.

  “Everything is the computer.” His fingers flew over the flat surface like a speed painter, creating prisms in the dull canvas, interacting with strings of colors in ways that I couldn’t understand. It certainly wasn’t any kind of typing I’d ever seen—his fingertips swirled and swiped, never leaving the surface.

  He let his hands fall, and the colors slowly faded back to white. “There is a hangar of spacecraft on a deeper level. We should go quickly.”

  “Wait. What else can you learn from the computer?” I asked. “I mean . . . does it show records of what happened here? This weapon, maybe—what it does? Maybe they even have more information on the vrag we could use.”

  He eyed me warily, but I could see that he hadn’t thought of this before. “It is a massive computer, and very old. It stores more data than the sum total of your entire civilization. It may be useful, yes, but I don’t know how to begin to sort through so much information.”

  Well, damn.

  Cassie, I may be of assistance.

  Sunny? Had she heard the entire conversation through my helmet’s radio, or only my side of things? I wasn’t used to computers interrupting my conversations.

  She showed me, in intentions more than words, how she could sift through the information faster than either one of our slow, biological brains, find any information relevant to us, and store it in her own memory.

  I tapped the side of my helmet. “I have a friend who says she can help.”

  Luka only raised his eyebrows. “I am not sure if your computer will be able to interface with this one, as it is not of our making.”

  “She seems to think she can. And anyway, don’t all computers speak the same binary language?” I had no idea if that was actually true; his computer spoke in colors, after all. “Now . . . how do I plug her in?”

  Cassie, you will have to remove your helmet. I will attempt to connect with the alien system wirelessly.

  “If you say so.” Luka watched curiously as I reached both my hands to undo the latches. I ripped it off and put the helmet on the console, taking a deep breath of alien air. There was a faint, unfamiliar scent to it that I couldn’t place; something like heat and metal.

  “Sunny’s going to try to connect wirelessly to the computer.” We waited. Lights on the wall before us stretched out like some kind of alien mural, not unlike the view screen on Exodus, flashing and dissipating like different colored water droplets falling and melting into snow. I kept trying to read some meaning into it, but I might as well have been trying to decipher messages in raindrops.

  “Is it working?” I asked in a whisper. “Did Sunny connect?”

  Luka watched the screen with attentive eyes. “Something is happening. I’m not exactly sure what. Can’t you ask your computer?”

  “No. I can ask, and I think she can hear me through the radio, but I can’t hear her without the helmet on. We have to be directly connected.”

  We fell into uncomfortable silence. I had the urge to talk again, to say something, anything to break the silence. Grief and fear filled the empty moments. Had to keep acting like this was all normal, according to plan. Just keep following the plan.

  Luka grabbed my arm. Something was happening on the screen. “I think it’s working. There’s a message here. It says Sunny will take approximately three hours to download the pertinent information.”

  “Then we have things to do.”

  We left Sunny to do her work. Luka and I traveled deeper into the bunker, taking alien versions of elevators and escalators down farther into the dark.

  “How do you know where you’re going?” I asked over the sound of our shoes hitting the oddly soft ground. “I thought you’ve never been here before?”

  He touched his fingertips to the wall. It lit beneath his skin, revealing a network of illuminated, orderly lines, swirling in static circles like a tornado. How deep below the surface were we? “My people have achieved the ability to create maps.”

  Sarcasm, from Luka? I couldn’t be quite sure.

  He led me into a pitch-black cavern. Even in the darkness, it felt vast; the air was chilly and damp, and I had the feeling of being adrift in an inky ocean. The tang of moist dirt was in the air, and as lights began to dawn high over our heads, I realized why.

  This was a massive natural cavern, entirely rough stone. No smart walls here. The ceiling glowed dull yellow. And as the light steadily grew more intense, I realized the entire cavern roof was actually writhing.

  “Light worms. They feed on the rock,” Luka said quietly. “Simple organisms, but quite useful. The only living thing to escape complete annihilation, besides ourselves.”

  Billions of individuals above our heads, a dome of golden light enough to fill up the entire football-stadium-sized cave. It was amazing. But what I saw beneath the lights completely took my mind off the ceiling.

  A fleet of alien spacecraft lined up before us. Nearest to us was the smallest, four or five in a row that were about the size of a giant Humvee. A few, not unlike Odysseus. And on up from that, until the largest at the very end was another ship like Exodus, taking up an entire half of the cavern on its own.

  “A small fleet,” Luka said. “In storage.”

  “So . . . which one is our ride home?”

  Luka headed down the row, and I followed at a distance behind. I couldn’t help but marvel at each and every one. My heart was pumping. No other human has ever gotten to see this. And then I realized, Sunny wasn’t here recording this. Nobody would ever believe me.

  Then I pinched myself for being so selfish. At least I might still see home again.

  Luka stopped in front of one that was roughly the height of three double-decker buses stacked on top of each other. It was rounded, like most of the megobarian technology I’d encountered, with a sharp sickle-edge disc at the front, not unlike a certain famous TV spaceship.

  But beyond that, there was nothing remotely human about it. For one thing, it was a pale robin’s-egg blue that shimmered unusual colors as the light shifted. I reached out and touched it, and the skin was ever so slightly flexible under my hand, like a turtle egg. I couldn’t help but wonder where they got this, what it was made out of, how it worked. I owed it to everyone we’d lost to learn the answers.

  “Not the biggest one?”

  “The largest one requires at least six megobari to pilot it together. This is the fastest craft I can pilot alone.”

  Once he touched the side of the ship and ensured via some technological telepathy that it was functional, he sent me back upstairs to Odysseus by way of one of their weird
elevators. Alone, underground on an alien world, I had a clenching in my chest at seeing Odysseus again. My last tangible link with Earth. The thing we’d built with such hope and expectation.

  And we were leaving it behind in this alien mausoleum.

  Swallowing hard, I pushed through my shifting feelings and went aboard. Turning my brain off, I worked fast unloading supplies, trying to outrun my emotions. Food was important. Food and water and medical supplies. Nothing else.

  When I came back out, Luka was there. Behind him about a hundred feet, in the same place where his family had arrived the first time I saw them, was the blue ship.

  “I won’t even ask how you did that,” I said, too weary to wonder anymore.

  We moved supplies from Odysseus onto the megobari ship. There had been enough food inside Odysseus to last six people for a year. It would be more than enough for me and Luka, for what he assured me would not be a long journey home.

  Inside, the blue ship was like Exodus in miniature: off-white and minimalist. I went alone to retrieve my helmet when Sunny’s three hours were up. “You finished, Sunny?”

  I transmitted backups of the data that seemed most promising, Cassie. They are saved on my hard drive aboard Odysseus.

  Oh, no.

  “Luka!” I shouted as I ran up the ramp into the megobari ship, still snapping my helmet on. He was kneeling over the last few packs, pulling straps tight. “Luka, we need to transfer Sunny’s hard drive to this ship. Can we do that?”

  He looked confused. “You have her on your suitboard.”

  I shook my head. “Just an auxiliary. She sends everything to the ship. All the records of the mission. The megobari data. All of it.”

  He hesitated. “Your hardware is not compatible with our hardware. It’s not as though I could simply plug Sunny in.” His arms stretched out, gesturing to the space around us.

  My eyes followed, stomach sinking. He was right. There was no physical port anywhere. No circuit boards or wires. Only smooth surfaces. This ship was hundreds, maybe thousands of years evolved beyond the kind of computer Sunny was.

  I growled in frustration, hands balling. “Without her memory stores there’s hardly any point in going back to Earth with just the weapon and no idea how to activate it. And we have no proof of what happened here. No one on Earth will believe a word we say. Can you please at least look at it? See what we could do?”

  Sighing, he let me lead him to the place where Sunny’s central core was stored. He and I popped open the control panel together, and after a few minutes, I prodded, “Well?”

  His face was inscrutable, eyebrows gathered as he stared into the network of chips and motherboards. But then he was shaking his head. “It would be like trying to play a record on your cell phone.”

  “Could we just take Sunny’s memory chips with us, find something to plug them into when we get home?”

  “This machine is so massive and complex, I do not even know where the memory storage units are, let alone the ones holding the data we need.”

  Sunny helpfully interjected from Odysseus’s speakers. “Cassie, my memory is fragmented, stored in numerous data banks and backup units throughout the ship. You would need to remove every single one to ensure you have a complete record.”

  We didn’t have the time or ability to do that, even with Sunny helping us—the more of her brain we disconnected, the less helpful she’d be. We’d be taking her offline, and she was the only one who knew where her brain was even kept.

  My suitboard would have to do. It was a much more limited memory, but maybe I could use the other crew members’ extra suits as data accessories. I could retrofit and link them together into something workable.

  The backups of their feeds had been sent to Sunny, too. Up until their last moments. I’d forgotten that. I had a first-person perspective of each of their deaths. Their last images of life.

  A deep, gnawing pit opened in my chest, threatening to swallow me whole.

  “There may be a way,” Luka said, interrupting my spiral into dark thoughts. His expression was grim. “You are not going to like it.”

  Nine

  LUKA LED ME wordlessly into one of the compartments off the bridge. There was strange equipment in this room, with three stations set up side by side that looked like examination tables. Some kind of empty research lab.

  He gestured for me to follow him. While he got to work at one of the stations—a tall, glassy black cube that was either slightly translucent or just very reflective—I hoisted myself onto the table beside him to watch. The table lit a soft white light at my touch.

  The machine began to whir softly, and Luka glanced up at me, his eyes catching the light from the glowing surface beneath me.

  He held a delicate, shimmering black capsule, about the size of a thimble, gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. I leaned toward him to get a better look. It glittered in the low light.

  “I can download Sunny’s program and her entire memory stores to this device. Alone, it is inert. Useless. It needs an entire system of support. A network of output, input, energy source, temperature control. For Sunny, all of that is built into Odysseus. She and the ship are nearly one and the same. Removing Sunny from Odysseus would diminish her capacity, making her nearly useless to us. There is only one other mobile platform that we know is compatible with the program that can provide all of the above.”

  “What?”

  “You.”

  Understanding dawned slowly. “Luka. Tell me you don’t mean . . .”

  His silence was the answer.

  “Wait, wait. This can’t be our only option. Why can’t we just—bring Sunny back with us on a memory chip or something?”

  “Do you have a memory chip that can store this amount of data?”

  “Well, no, but—when we get back—”

  “Do you have ready access to a comparable machine on your planet? Sunny is already one of the most advanced systems your people have created. She is incredibly complex and delicate. She is as close to artificial intelligence as humans have yet achieved. You can’t simply plug her into any computer terminal on Earth.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Sunny was so complex and unique that I hadn’t even been able to practice interfacing with her in training, only a less-powerful prototype. There was only one of her, and she was integral to Odysseus.

  SEE might have options, but the thought of approaching them for help made me wary. They weren’t like NASA; they were a corporation looking for profit. And I’d never forget the cold look in Clayton Crane’s eyes as he told the techs to keep Hanna locked in the HHM, even while she was pounding on the door in a panic.

  I wasn’t in a hurry to ask him for any favors.

  I dropped my head into my palms. This was getting beyond even my ability to comprehend. I tried to trace all the possible threads to their apparent ends, but everything was becoming tangled.

  “Your brain has already networked and interfaced with her programming,” Luka said gently, taking a step closer. “I would do this for you, Cassie, except that your chances of success are so much better. Your brain waves were already demonstrated to be suitable, and you’ve had training. Not to mention that I . . . I already have one.”

  “So you’ve had this done?” I began to relax about an inch. It was alien medicine, but it was still medicine. Tried and refined and methodical. Not something we’d jury-rigged in a desperate hour.

  He bowed his head forward, reaching up one hand to pull his hair aside from one ear. I had to slide off the table and stand, our toes almost touching, to see what he wanted to show me: an inch-long white scar in the soft skin behind his earlobe, hidden in his hairline.

  My soft exhale rustled his hair, and he straightened. “It is—or was—standard procedure. This is a research vessel equipped with medical robotic tools and what you would call 3-D printers. Each crew member would receive an implant, and we would then be linked to each other and to the ship. How do you think we are able to learn so many of
your languages and communicate with the ship by touch, even after we changed our DNA?”

  I shrugged. “Okay, that’s . . . really cool.”

  A ghost of a smile passed over his face. “I can implant this safely using the tools we have on board. Your body would provide the electrical energy and temperature regulation necessary for Sunny’s program to continue to run within you. Your nerve endings will interface with it like any other neuron.” His voice went clinical; I could tell he was fighting to keep his face expressionless. “It would take some time to adjust, but you would be able to continue to communicate with Sunny, access her stored records, and make use of her considerable abilities. By the time we return to Earth, the connection may be permanent.”

  Luka wasn’t a robot. The fact that he had removed emotion from his tone told me he was trying not to influence my decision.

  He took a half step closer to me, offering the device in his palm for my inspection. His voice hitched lower, but was still absent of intonation. “Do you consent?”

  I opened my mouth to respond but nothing came out. My first thought was yes, do it, whatever needs doing. But my self-preservation instinct was fast on the heels of that yes, yanking it right back into my mouth. “Pros and cons,” I said hoarsely, then swallowed hard as I realized how dry my mouth was.

  He didn’t hesitate. He held up a hand and ticked off his reasons. “Pro. You gain a powerful computing accessory to your own mind, and with it, the information we may need to help save Earth. Con. The processing power in your head might be overwhelming. Your body may not be able to keep up with it. It’s possible the heat output would not be well regulated by your hypothalamus and it could burn your skin. And this has never before been done on a human. The long-term effects are unknown.”

  My heartbeat sounded loud in my ears. “But I’ll live? I won’t be comatose or anything?”

  “You have already been networked with Sunny with no ill effects. It will be little different from when you were networked via your helmet, except you will not be able to turn it off.”