by KB Shaw
“Excuse me, sir. I believe I know where we are.”
The captain straightened up and gave Rosa a serious look. “Oh you do, Ensign Costas? And where do you think that is?”
“If you will come to the bridge, sir, I will explain.” The captain followed her back to the bridge.
“Well sir, we have crashed on Pluto. It is a dwarf planet on the outer edge of the solar system. That is why it’s so cold and the daylight is so dim.”
She punched a button on the control panel. A faint image flashed onto the view screen. “That’s Charon, Pluto’s moon. When Pluto’s orbit is closest to the sun, both the planet and the moon share a common atmosphere. Its nearest neighbor would be Neptune, the blue-colored gas giant Beth had detected. The more distant objects are in the Kuiper Belt.”
Sparks had a wide grin on his open, friendly face. He started typing into his Com unit.
The captain’s head twitched slightly. “Anything more, Ensign?” asked the captain.
Rosa was puzzled.
The captain twitched a second time. “I’m waiting, Ensign.”
“Well… sir, uh…” said Rosa, “Well sir… Pluto is Mickey Mouse’s dog.”
Sparks let out a hearty laugh as the captain’s mouth widened into a grin. “Well done, Ensign. Have Sparks radio our location to the rescue patrol.”
Rosa turned to Sparks and gave the order. She had finished her task.
“Way to go, Rosie!” said Sparks as the bridge of the shuttlecraft began to fade and Rosa’s room took shape about her.
Did he call me Rosie? Didn’t I reprogram the simulation to avoid that name?
“Good job, Rosie!” came Cameron’s voice over her multiCom.
“Why you! You know I don’t like being called Rosie!”
Cameron laughed. “Sorry… I must have made a typographical error when I was writing the program.”
“Yeah, I bet! And then there’s the rank thing, mister. I made you a captain in my simulation, and you made me a lowly ensign!
“I… I…” Cameron’s face turned crimson.
“And what about that Mickey Mouse clue! I would have figured it out without that clue!”
“Mickey Mouse?”
“Yeah, when you had Beth tell me that she thought it was a ‘real Mickey Mouse planet.’”
“Honest, Rosa, I didn’t write a clue like that into the program.”
“Was that another one of your typos, then? Programs don’t just write themselves.”
Without warning, both Rosa’s and Cameron’s rooms went black.
Chapter 41:
Door to Nowhere
STARS SHONE brilliantly in the blackest of black voids engulfing Cameron and Rosa. As they looked at each other in disbelief, space suits took form around their floating figures.
“Is this your program?” Rosa could see Cameron shaking his head within the protective helmet of his suit.
“Not yours either, I take it,” came his response over her in-helmet speakers. She, too, shook her head.
A rusty-brown surface strewn with rocks firmed up beneath their feet. Cameron saw a distant wall of ragged red stone forming behind Rosa. He shifted his focus to Rosa when he heard her gasp in surprise. She was looking skyward over his shoulder—an expression of awe on her face. Cameron swiveled around to find himself facing a towering red-rock cliff. He craned his neck in a vain attempt to see the top. The cliff seemed to rise forever—they were at the bottom of an immense canyon. Cameron turned back to face his friend. “Look behind you.”
Rosa slowly turned around, absorbing the breathtaking vista before her. “This place would dwarf the Grand Canyon back home!” Suddenly, she was startled to feel Cameron grab her waist from behind and lift her into the air.
Cameron laughed as he set her gently down. “The gravity seems to be less than Earth’s. What do you estimate the height of these canyon walls to be?”
Rosa replied almost immediately, “Maybe five or six miles high.”
“I agree, but I don’t see a river running through the valley floor.”
“But judging from this canyon, there must have been massive floods on the planet sometime in its history.” Rosa gazed up at the brownish sky and added, “The atmosphere must be thin, with little or no oxygen. There’s no bluish look to the sky like on Earth.” She looked back at Cameron. “What’s that in your hand?”
Cameron raised his gloved hand to see. “Duh! It’s my multiCom. I was using it to guide the Shuttle Crash simulation. Maybe we can get more information about this place.”
Rosa crowded next to him to view the data he might retrieve. But Cameron’s gloves were bulky and clumsy. “It’s useless!”
“It wouldn’t work, anyway, even if the gloves were a tight fit,” said Rosa.
“What?”
“The touch screen wouldn’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Because it needs direct contact with your finger. The touch screen isn’t pressure sensitive like a keyboard. It’s electrostatic, or heat sensitive—something like that.”
As Rosa was speaking, the multiCom flashed to life. A static-etched logo of some sort flickered briefly, then disappeared. It was a circle within a circle, but the circles were broken on their right sides; an arrow extended from the break to the center of the circles.
“What’d you do?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all,” said Cameron.
Again, the multiCom flickered on. It read, “PLANET DATA.” The visual display showed a rotating reddish-brown planet. They also noted a white polar cap—was it ice? Was it frozen water? Or was it CO2? As the display rotated, they could see a deep scar, stretching at least 2,000 miles across the surface.
“Is this the valley we’re in?” Cameron pointed at the tiny display. “It’s a little more than half of Earth’s diameter… and two moons…”
“That was a clue in my simulation,” said Rosa.
“According to the readout,” said Cameron, “it’s a summer afternoon, local time, and the surface temperature is well below freezing…” The images flickered and died. Cameron shook the multiCom several times. “Well, that’s just great! What’s up with this blasted thing?”
“We have to answer two questions, Cameron. First, where are we?”
“And second,” said Cameron, “how did we get here?”
They stood silently at the base of the mammoth red rock precipice. The only sound they could hear within their pressure suits was the quiet whisper of air being circulated.
“I’m pretty sure I know where we are,” said Rosa. “Let’s look at the facts.” She scuffed her foot in the dry, dusty soil. “Look at this dirt… the rusty color… the lack of any moisture…”
“And this canyon!” said Cameron.
“Add to that the data on your multiCom.”
“The planet’s size being roughly half that of Earth…”
“And?”
“Summertime temperatures below freezing…”
“What else?”
Cameron tried to remember what else the multiCom display had told them.
“The moons…” said Rosa.
“Oh, yeah, huh? This planet has two moons.”
“Any bets that their names are Phobos and Deimos?”
“My money’s with you,” said Cameron. “We have to be in one of the canyons of the Valles Marineris, on Mars. Well, that answers the first question—where we are.”
“But we still don’t know how we got here.” Rosa thought a moment. “Could this be a glitch in the Shuttle Crash program?”
Cameron looked troubled by the question. “Aren’t we supposed to be safe in these simulations?”
“If we die in a simulation, do you think we’d die in real life?” There was fear in Rosa’s eyes.
A few meters away, a sudden gust of wind kicked up a whirlpool of fine dust. The small Martian dust devil slammed into the two explorers who stood, unprotected, on the surface of the barren planet. Rosa was almost blown off her feet. Cam
eron braced himself against the face of the cliff and quickly extended his arm toward her so she could grab hold and keep herself from falling.
“¡Mierda!”
“Just a gust of wind,” said Cameron, trying, unsuccessfully, to sound calm.
“Like hell it was! Mars’ atmosphere may be dense enough to create winds that can raise dust from the ground, but it isn’t dense enough to allow a wind with enough force to affect us… to nearly knock us over.”
“You’re right,” said Cameron, “And the answer is no.”
“No?”
“Yes, no.” Cameron managed a tense smile. “No, I don’t think this is a glitch in the shuttle program I wrote.”
“Well, what about that ‘Rosie’ thing — when Beth Stein called me ‘Rosie?’”
“I admit it. I wrote that in to make you mad.”
“But I did an override, remember?” She could see Cameron nod in agreement. “Yet, the radioman still called me Rosie at the end. And then there was the Mickey Mouse clue.”
“What Mickey Mouse clue?”
“C’mon Cameron! This is no time to play around. You didn’t have Beth Stein tell me she thought Pluto was a real Mickey Mouse planet?”
“I swear. I never put that into my program.”
Another blast of wind buffeted the duo, knocking Rosa off balance. She fell face-forward toward Cameron, who instinctively enfolded her in a protective grasp. The top of Rosa’s helmet clanged against Cameron’s faceplate.
During Cameron’s embrace, Rosa could feel his heart pounding through the layers of their suits. She looked into his eyes. Cameron’s face flushed a warm red. There was nothing unusual in that, but it was unusual that Rosa felt the hot rush of a blush course through her entire body. Cameron put his gloved hand gently against Rosa’s visor as if to caress her face.
“Well, uh…” Rosa straightened up, trying to regain her composure. “IHT program characters don’t just make things up on their own.” Then she recalled something else. “And a couple of the characters had a strange sort of twitch.”
“You know, I remember something strange happened during your Solar Rescue program. If I could only remember… I think it had to do with dinner… with going to eat… Yes! That’s it! When I was called to dinner, I paused the program, and after it began to fade, the radioman…”
“Sparks.”
“Yes, Sparks. After I’d paused the program and it began to dissolve, Sparks turned.”
“He what?”
“Sparks turned and looked at me. Then the program faded, and there you were on the screen.”
“That’s it! The IHT artificial intelligence programming must be malfunctioning.”
Cameron considered that possibility for a moment. The vision of Socrates Jones’ head moving up the stairway without his body popped into his mind. “Let’s assume that you’re right…” Cameron stopped in mid-sentence. “Shit!”
The shock of hearing Cameron utter such a word registered heavily on Rosa. This must be bad. “God, what is it? What’s wrong?”
Cameron pointed past Rosa, up the vast canyon. “Look at that. The canyon is being erased. The simulation must be crashing.”
Rosa turned in time to see the upper end of the canyon being steadily obliterated. It looked like someone was taking an eraser to a chalkboard and rubbing it out, leaving behind a jumbled trail of reddish-brown chalk dust.
“Wait! It’s not being erased,” said Cameron. “It’s being obscured by a giant wall of dust.”
“A dust storm?”
“Yeah, but this storm is driving a wall of dust a couple of miles high right toward us!”
“Cameron, if this is your simulation acting up, you need to give the emergency abort command.”
“Emergency abort authorization: Cameron, 2-24-51,” said Cameron loud and clear.
The wall of dust moved closer.
“Emergency abort authorization: Cameron, 2-24-51!” he repeated even more forcefully.
Nothing.
“Emergency abort authorization: Cameron, 2-24-51!” Cameron was on the verge of panic.
“Damn it! Nothing’s happening. “
“What if it’s your simulation, Rosa? What if, somehow, your simulation didn’t shut down before I initiated mine?”
“My program?”
“No time to waste, Rosa. Give it a try!”
“Costas program override authorization: Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere.”
The leading edge of the dust storm pelted them with grains of red sand.
“Execute Costas program override authorization: Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere!”
Cameron shepherded Rosa toward a slight depression in the wall of the cliff. It wasn’t much protection, but it was all he could find. They put their arms behind each other’s back for support and stood in the shelter of the small relief with their backs to the wind.
“What is going on?!” Rosa had to shout to be heard over the noise of particles viciously striking their helmets. “How did we get here? There has to be a reason.” Rosa noticed a dim light reflecting off the cliff. “What’s that?”
Cameron saw it too—a faint blue-gray light wavering on the rocks, about waist high, directly beside them. He moved his free arm to touch it, but it vanished.
“Look, it’s on your suit now,” said Rosa.
Cameron removed his hand from the wall and looked down at his suit. The light was gone. It was on the wall again. As soon as Cameron reached out, it vanished.
“It’s the multiCom! The multiCom’s working again.” Cameron moved his free arm so he and Rosa could view the tiny screen. It displayed the same logo as before—two concentric broken circles with an arrow—and the words “Don’t worry!” flashed at the bottom of the screen. Then the screen went blank.
The storm began to worsen, blotting out the rays of sun… turning day into dusk, and dusk into night. The rock cliff against which they huddled seemed to melt away. In the darkness before them, they saw a distant doorway.
It was a quaint painted door—the type that opened at both top and bottom. How odd, thought Rosa. It was white with brightly colored tulips and a watering can painted in the reliefs of the panels. The door flew open, first top, then bottom. She and Cameron could see through the doorway. It seemed to go nowhere.
Red dust blew by them and was sucked through the portal in a steady stream. They could feel some power from beyond the doorway tug upon their bodies, as if invisible tendrils were trying to pull them in. They tried desperately to resist the force, digging their heels into the rocky soil. Their hands scrabbled over the rock wall, frantically seeking something to latch onto, but the force was too much. Rosa and Cameron lifted off their feet and hurtled through the air, somersaulting through the doorway, into the black void beyond.
Chapter 42:
The Color of Life
THE ROOM, if it was a room, was devoured by light specked with a billion bits of sparkling static. A faint hiss of electrical energy buzzed in their ears like some faraway mosquito. No floor, wall, or ceiling was visible, yet they were standing on something solid. They were alone and dressed in their ordinary clothes.
“What’s going on? Is this a computer malfunction? Did we screw something up?” Rosa reached for Cameron’s hand and squeezed it.
The firm pressure of Rosa’s hand triggered thoughts about the game of Time Tag, stirring some vague memories. Something clicked inside Cameron’s head. “Did you create your Sparks character from scratch or did you get him from the Academy database?”
“Sparks?”
“You know, that blond guy with the accent—the radioman in your Solar Rescue simulation? Your Sparks character!”
“My Sparks character?” Rosa was incredulous. “You’re crazy! My Sparks model was a girl—a red-haired girl. You’re describing your Sparks character.”
“I didn’t have a Sparks character in my simulation.” Cameron was beginning to understand. His mouth upturned slightly, displaying just a trace of a smile. “
Remember the message on my multiCom when we got pulled into the Mars simulation? It said ‘Don’t worry.’” Rosa nodded. “Well, I think I know what’s happened.”
“¿Qué?”
“We’ve been pulled into someone else’s simulation.”
Rosa was dumbstruck. “Whose?”
“Sparks’s.”
Rosa pondered the idea a few moments before commenting. “You know, I noticed him at his keyboard when Beth Stein was gathering information about Pluto. I bet he programmed the Mickey Mouse clue into your simulation in real time. That means Sparks wasn’t an IHT character. He was a real person.”
“He has to be a genius to modify all these programs as we go,” said Cameron. “It took me almost two weeks to create the Shuttle Crash simulation.”
“Just the fact that he was able to enter into our simulations so seamlessly is mind-boggling.” When Rosa started to relax her grip on Cameron’s hand, Cameron tightened his slightly and smiled. Rosa felt the renewed warmth of a blush on her face as she smiled back. Cameron started, hesitated for an awkward, eternal instant, then leaned in to kiss Rosa. Rosa closed her eyes and began to rise up on her toes, pursing her lips in anticipation.
“So,” came a third voice, startling the young couple. “I’m sorry, is this a bad time?” It was the large blond man they had known as Sparks. He looked worried.
Rosa and Cameron discreetly let their hands drop to their sides. Now Cameron was blushing too.
“Do you know who I am?”
“You’re Sparks,” said Rosa. “You’re the one controlling this simulation.”
“Well it’s not a simulation really, but, yes, I control it. You’re quite safe here.” He seemed distracted for a moment, as if considering the meaning of what he had just said or wandering down some stray line of thought. His brow furrowed with concern. He quickly collected himself and smiled warmly. “I assure you I mean no harm. Quite the opposite, really.”
Rosa was still wary. “If it’s not a simulation, then what is it?”
“I guess it could be best described as a bubble of white noise within a simulation. A safe harbor, if you will.”