The Girl With Acrylic Eyes

by Greg Krojac

  The board listened intently to everything he said and then the Chief Finance Officer of MSC, Jo Leiko, stood up.

  “Raef, thank you for coming to talk to us personally with this request.”

  Raef nodded.

  “Thank you all for convening the meeting at such short notice.”

  Jo continued.

  “We have listened carefully to everything that you have said, and your reasons for wishing to retrieve the android are not without merit. However, we feel unable to release funds to support such a venture. Put simply, we fail to see any cost benefit.”

  Raef did his best to change their minds.

  “But you had no problem in investing in the project to send her there.”

  “True. But we knew that the android would not return. You’re trying to move the goalposts.”

  “But –.”

  “No ifs or buts, Raef. We know why you are making this request..”

  Raef knew that he was beaten. If he’d been honest with Karen at the beginning, perhaps he wouldn’t be in such a mess now. Perhaps Coppélia would still have wanted to go on the mission. Jo Leiko was correct. It was too late for ifs and buts. His life was in ruins and it was his own fault.

  Raef didn’t waste any time by staying on the planet, leaving Mars as soon as his shuttle was refuelled. As the craft left the Martian atmosphere, he went over to his bunk and tried to relax. However, his mind had no intention of showing leniency and continued to throw a slew of memories and alternative choices into his thoughts. Perhaps he should have factored in the android’s retrieval into the project’s budget in the first place. Perhaps he should have waited until he could achieve more funding and not be so hasty and impatient to get his Mars project underway. Whatever he should have done, he didn’t. And now it was too late to rectify the situation.

  As he approached the Moon he cast his gaze between Earth and its natural satellite. Both looked so peaceful, the Earth spinning slowly on its axis and the Moon appearing to refuse to do so (taking 27 days to rotate once on its axis) as if it were too shy to show its other face. The course had been automatically set for Earth as soon as he was beyond Mars’s carbon-dioxide atmosphere – Raef didn’t have to do anything but enjoy the ride. But the ride had been anything but pleasant.

  The Moon had been used as a testing ground prior to the colonisation of Mars and a substantial settlement had been built at the south pole, where Shackleton Crater was bathed in almost constant sunlight and solar arrays provided ample solar power to provide for all Shackleton City’s energy needs.

  Raef set the controls of the shuttle to manual, overriding the automatic pilot, and pointed the nose of the shuttle at an area on the Moon’s equator, well away from the inhabited areas of both poles. He couldn’t face life without Karen and the children, and that was all he had to look forward to now. She’d made it clear that failure to rescue Coppélia meant the failure of their marriage. And he had failed spectacularly. He had failed as a husband and as a father. They would be better off without him.

  He locked the thruster controls so that they would continue to accelerate. To slow the shuttle down, manual intervention would be required and he had no intention of intervening. As the craft got faster and faster and the Moon got larger and larger, he looked at a digital copy of a wedding photo that he took with him whenever he travelled. The shuttle accelerated more and more, the Moon’s surface rushing up at the same velocity to meet the plummeting spacecraft. Suddenly, he leapt out of his seat and dived at the controls, stabbing at the console in an effort to override the manual setting but it was too late; his fate was already sealed.

  22

  There was little that Coppélia could do to occupy herself whilst she waited for a rescue that may never happen. In a way it was fortunate that she needed so long to absorb the sun’s energy between bouts of activity; she could put herself into sleep-mode and not feel the hundreds of days passing by. She had been gradually increasing the radius of her walkabouts and had recently taken steps to increase the distance of her expeditions. She didn’t have to connect to anything back at the landing shuttle whilst she absorbed energy, so she didn’t see any reason not to stop and recharge her solar cells on the journey. This journey would be in three parts. That is, she would venture as far as she could, charge her solar cells for two hundred and ninety-four Earth days, walk some more, then recharge again before making the final leg of her journey to wherever she would end up.

  The scenery was quite repetitive, climbing up and down ridges all day long – except that days didn’t actually exist on the planet. Coppélia worked with an arbitrary time measurement system of Earth time, treating twenty-four hours as one day, but there was nothing to distinguish one day from another; no sunrise to speak of, no sunset, no bright day, no dark night. Just a series of twenty-four hour long segments of twilight.

  It was hardly discernible but Coppélia’s enhanced eyesight detected a slight change in the consistency of the planet’s surface. The rocks were the same non-slippery glass outcrops, but the areas between the ridges were covered with an even finer grade of sand than she had previously experienced. Taking this into consideration, she continued with increased caution. She’d trusted the surface’s integrity previously, but a new variable had been introduced and required her to revise her safety evaluation. Progress would be slower, but at least she would experience something new.

  She’d got used to operating with only one good eye and a lifeless left arm since a solar flare had fried the intricate optical circuitry of her right eye and caused her acrylic eyeball to have a dull, parched and wrinkled appearance. Her right cheek also had scorch marks where the wayward flare had kissed it. At first, these imperfections had bothered her, like the wound she had self-inflicted when removing the tracking device, but logic quickly prevailed and she accepted the damage that had been done to her – she had no other choice. It wasn’t as if there were a local android repair shop that she could just pop into and get things fixed. Stumpy wasn’t on Proxima b.

  She climbed to the top of a ridge, scarcely taking any notice of her damaged left arm. Her internal gyroscopic balancing software compensated well for the effect that the lifeless arm might have on her ability to negotiate obstacles and didn’t slow down her progress at all. She looked into the distance. There was nothing spectacular about the view – it looked like every other view that she had seen since her arrival on the planet. She wondered if this was typical of the entire planet. She imagined that perhaps the dark side and what one might laughingly call the bright side shared the same topography. There would be only one way to find out, but she hoped that she wouldn’t be trapped on the planet long enough to discover if she was correct. She’d left a digi-map of her proposed route back at the landing shuttle, but didn’t hold out much hope of anyone coming to rescue her just yet – after all, unless there had been sudden technological advances in spacecraft propulsion, it would still take over twenty years for someone to make the journey. She descended the ridge carefully, not wishing to drop onto the sandy surface too quickly as she was unsure of its integrity. As she arrived at ground level she gingerly placed her right foot onto the surface, as somebody might be reticent to plunge their whole body into a hot bathtub. She hesitated and lowered her foot very slowly until she could feel the familiar solid ground approximately 4.68 centimetres below the surface. Buoyed by the feeling of security of solid ground beneath her feet, she stepped onto the sand and took a few cautious steps. Everything seemed normal and she felt more confident.

  After walking about a hundred metres, she turned to face the ridge that she’d just left behind. Suddenly she felt the planet’s surface give way and she looked around for something to grab hold of with her good arm, something that would prevent her from being sucked right down into the bowels of the planet. But there was nothing. She didn’t panic – she was unable to panic due to her programming – but her CPU went into overdrive searching her subroutines for a recommended course of action.

>   Then – just as quickly and unexpected as she had started sinking – her descent into the sand stopped. Something solid was preventing her from sinking any further. The sand came up to just above her knees. Relieved at the realisation that she wasn’t going to be sucked under and spend eternity in a sandy tomb (or at least until her solar cells gave out) she stood still, combing her memory banks for a possible solution.

  Fortunately for Coppélia, she wasn’t bounded by human physical restrictions. The gravitational force suffered by the human body is a constant, depending on the environment. A human on the Moon would weigh one sixth of what he or she weighs on Earth. A human on Mars would weigh 38% of his or her weight on Earth and, on Jupiter, 234% of his or her Earth weight. However, Coppélia had been designed and built with an internal gravity compensator. She adjusted her weight to be almost weightless in relation to the planet’s gravitational pull and leaned back.

  Soon she was floating on the surface as if she were relaxing in the Dead Sea. She didn’t make any sudden movements and gently paddled her way towards the more solid ground, not an easy task with only one functioning arm. It took a lot of arm-leg coordination to avoid going round in circles. Climbing out of the alien quicksand, she remembered to recalibrate her gravity compensator to prevent her from floating up into space. She noticed that the sand simply dropped off her, just as the water had done back in Karen’s swimming pool, leaving no trace.

  Making a note of the quicksand pond’s coordinates she promised herself that she would return and investigate further. The hard surface that had stopped her sinking didn’t feel quite the same as that which she had encountered under the rest of the areas that she had explored. She wanted to know what it was.

  23

  Raef’s death hit Karen hard. Reports said that he had suddenly veered off course and his shuttle nosedived at high velocity into the surface of the Moon. The wreckage hadn’t been found yet, but it would only be a matter of time. NY2 City had sent out a search and rescue team but everybody involved knew that it was really a ‘locate and retrieve the body’ team. Karen hated that their last moments together had been fraught with tension and mistrust. Death was no respecter of feelings and had stolen him from her whilst neither particularly liked the other. But they did love each other.

  Rumours abounded that he was in financial trouble and had committed suicide, adding to Karen’s sense of guilt, for it was she who had forced him to approach his peers with a begging bowl, asking for funding to rescue Coppélia. She honestly didn’t know if she would have left him or not, and that decision had now been ripped away from her. She would never know.

  But death doesn’t stop the world turning and the living have to get on with their lives, And – as far as Karen was concerned – Coppélia was one of the living. She was still trapped on the planet and the odds were extremely favourable that she was alive. She had no need for food, water, or even a breathable atmosphere. She was damaged – that was clear from the last video message that Mission Control had received from her – but damage can normally be repaired. The one main requirement for her to continue functioning was solar energy and unless some sort of natural disaster caused the red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri, to explode or extinguish, she was guaranteed existence for infinity. But that’s all it would be, an existence. She would be alone on the planet, with nothing to do and no one to talk to. If she’d been just a basic android this would have been no problem, but Coppélia had been given feelings and emotions; she would feel the pain of loneliness. The thought of her friend being sentenced to an eternal isolated hell terrified Karen.

  Raef’s body was found six days later trapped amongst the mangled wreckage of his shuttle craft. It was hoped that he had died on impact, but his contorted and burnt body, his death mask a horrific testament to the terror that he must have felt for those final few seconds spoke of a brief and final battle to vainly cling on to life. Karen and the children travelled to Mars for the funeral but followed advice to not view the body prior to its cremation; it would have been too distressing and rather than saying goodbye would probably have resulted in them recoiling in fear. It was best that they remember him as he was when he was alive.

  The service was brief and conducted according to Raef’s own wishes; a few words from family and friends and then the cremation of his already desiccated remains. The ashes were then placed inside a drone rocket and launched into space, to travel through the cosmos forever.

  Karen would never get used to seeing her husband wandering among the guests at his wake, thanking them for attending the funeral – a hit-or-miss affair that depended upon someone happening to be in Raef the hologram’s line of sight when he spoke – but the speech he made at his own funeral was uplifting and told of his hopes for the future of his family and of mankind,

  He left his share of Syber Android Industries to Karen; a rather fitting gesture really since it was SAI and Karen’s search for Coppélia’s origins that had brought them together. His financial interests in the Mars Settlement Company were distributed equally between Felipe, Lucas, and Carolina, with their mother acting as an advisor to the children until they were of an age to take control of their decisions themselves.

  Karen was now on the horns of a dilemma. She’d only recently seen Raef’s ashes sent into space, and she wished to show no disrespect to her late husband, but there was the question of what to do about Coppélia. Every day, every month, every year of inaction was another day, month, or year added to the android’s sentence. Although she was now the majority shareholder at SAI, she knew that she couldn’t just walk into the office and tell the board and other shareholders that she was sending a second mission to Proxima b; the move would no doubt be vetoed by the other shareholders – they had given Raef short-shrift when he’d approached them to fund a rescue mission. No, another strategy was required.

  Thirty years earlier the world had been enchanted and captivated by Coppélia and the mission to Proxima b – perhaps people could be motivated to turn their enthusiasm into dollars and make Coppélia’s return a reality.

  24

  Five hundred and eighty-eight Earth days after leaving the quicksand, Coppélia arrived back at the landing shuttle. Everything was as she had left it, which was no surprise since she was the only inhabitant of the planet. She looked around the landing shuttle, evaluating each component’s usefulness for the project that she had planned. What she was looking for was an open-ended tube. Nobody had known what kind of problems to expect on the planet so an emergency kit – including two shovels, for which Coppélia was very grateful – had been assembled and formed part of the ship’s inventory. The problem was that tube. It needed to be two metres in diameter and perhaps two metres long. It also had to be very strong.

  She looked inside the deGrasse Tyson but there was nothing inside the space vehicle that could serve her purpose, so she went outside again, walked a short distance away from the landing shuttle, and took another look. As she scanned the structure of the vehicle, her eyes rested upon one of the legs of the cradle that surrounded the space-pod. She took a closer look. The landing suspension unit of each cradle-leg was wrapped inside a protective metal tube, just the right size for what she had planned. Of course, removing it would take some time, but time was a commodity that she had plenty of.

  She checked her energy levels and faced a choice; should she start her task now and have to stop working to recharge her solar cells, and then resume the task two hundred and ninety-four days later, or should she start the recharging process now and hopefully be able to remove the protective tube in one clear Earth day (once her cells were charged)? It appeared to be six of one and half a dozen of the other, as humans might say, but she decided on the former so that she would have more time to dismantle the cradle’s leg.

  She fetched the high-intensity laser-cutting equipment from inside the landing shuttle and started the slow process of removing the landing suspension’s protective sleeve, cutting it away from where it was anchored to
the main assembly. Inside Coppélia’s body, nano-motors worked hard to minimise any detrimental effect that her damaged arm might have on the task, applying increased or decreased torque to her right arm exactly where it was needed. As the last anchorage point was freed she checked her energy levels again. They were getting critically low so she stopped her work and walked to the other side of the landing shuttle. If she had remained where she was during the recharging process she may have been tempted to carry on with the disassembly. Although she had no doubt that she could easily resist any temptation, she saw no reason to tempt fate.

  Two hundred and ninety-four Earth days later she returned to the task at hand. The foot of the landing shuttle’s leg was reasonably easy to remove, even one-handed, and soon the deGrasse Tyson was on a slight tilt, the suspension of one of its legs being damaged beyond repair and having no foot.

  Now the problem was how to slide the tube off the disabled leg. If the engines of the spacecraft had still been functioning, Coppélia could have delicately manoeuvred the vehicle upwards so that the metal tube just fell off the stricken leg, but with no fuel, that wasn’t an option. She had no choice but to remove it manually. She would have to physically lift the landing shuttle off the tube.

  She had no idea of how physically strong she was but thought that this would at least be an interesting experiment, even if she failed. As long as she didn’t surpass the tensile strength of the materials that she was constructed of, she should be ok.

  The space between the surface of the planet and the base of the deGrasse Tyson was just large enough that she could crawl underneath, which she did. She studied the bottom of the craft and calculated the optimum position to apply lift. Edging her way to this position, she confirmed her calculations. If she had had any muscles, she would have flexed them before attempting the lift, but instead, she prepared herself for the weight that she was about to bear.