Andromeda Expedition

by Carlos Arroyo González

  He glanced at the manual Viper had given him. It was a photocopied copy, held together by a staple in one corner. It was full of cigarette burns and whiskey stains. The cover showed, in a minimalist design, half of the android's silhouette; the other half was the Watson Robotics logo, an interlocking W and an R. Underneath it read “Nova 4.7.” The pages rustled as they were turned. It detailed technical aspects, precautions and maintenance rules. All illustrations were in black and white. The functionalities section ranged from domestic service to affective simulation service.

  Nova walked in and set the tray on the table. She turned on the music and took Fox by the hand.

  “I don't feel like dancing right now, Nova.”

  However, he let himself go. For a few moments he almost managed to forget everything, but when the dance was over, the darkness returned to take its place. In reality, it had never moved from there, he had only managed to camouflage it by dancing very close to an imitation of a girl. Somehow, he felt even emptier. Like after a binge.

  “What do you recommend me to do in my situation?”

  “You know what to do, Fox.”

  He looked at her, and pointing at her, he said:

  “I know it. I know that program. Did I activate it when I asked you that question, or something like that? What was it called... Minerva? It was a program that had the slightest idea what you were talking about., because it was a stupid program, and yet a lot of people came to believe that it understood them and helped them, when all Minerva did was return questions in the form of affirmations, ask questions that were triggered by certain words, and things like that. That's it, right? A more sophisticated version of the same thing. ‘You know well what you have to do, userName.’ That sentence is stored in there and you would have said it anyway if I had told you that my favorite shoes broke. Am I wrong?”

  “I don't know, Fox. Are you wrong?”

  “That's exactly what I mean. Well, I'll play along. I'd rather be the one in that moldy closet in the middle of the woods.”

  “You'd rather be dead.”

  Something about that machine returning his words in the sweet voice of a young girl made his blood run cold.

  “And that's why I've decided to go millions of light years away from Earth with someone I don't even know, just to get the money to buy a stupid memory control implant. What do you think?”

  “Sounds dangerous, Fox.”

  “Can you feel emotions?”

  “My core program can simulate them. It evaluates external and internal conditions, information received from sensors, and any relevant information stored in the database, and draws a logical conclusion that determines what emotion I should express. This can be translated into expressions and attitudes.”

  “Have you ever felt afraid?”

  “On April 19, 2275, I was beaten and thrown into a dumpster. I was there for two days. During all that time the emotion of fear manifested itself. The intensity reached the maximum level.”

  “I am afraid to go to that place, Nova.”

  “I know. “

  “I wish there was another way.”

  “Have you thought of telling another human being? What you've confided in me.”

  “I've thought about it. And I've also thought that it would mean spending the rest of my life in a cold, maximum security government cell. They're not nice.”

  “It's the water, isn't it? What terrifies you about that planet is the water. I noticed that when I mentioned it earlier. You can carry human technology that allows you to gain buoyancy.”

  “It's not that.”

  “Humans are afraid of the unknown.”

  “Yes. You could... survive there?”

  “Erebus has oxygen and nitrogen, albeit in different proportions than Earth. My system would automatically readjust when I entered its atmosphere.”

  “You'll come with me.”

  “Yes, Fox.”

  “Is there anything you need before we leave? We may not be back for a long time.”

  “My system is...”

  “Self-sufficient,” Fox said. “You know what? I'm gonna go with what I'm wearing, too. Not that I have much to choose from, don't you think? You could say my system is also self-sufficient. I'm the pinnacle of human evolution. I need the address of that guy Viper was talking about.”

  “That information is confidential.”

  Fox gawked at her.

  “Just kidding, Fox.”

  Wet earth under the splendor of the shadows,

  As the fire rises to the stars.

  Let the hours stand still!

  Let the pillars of the earth tremble!

  Fiodr Capablanca, Lyrical Anthology

  In the streetcar, Fox watched the city at his feet speeding by. A child was painting in the mist of the window. He had written “ass.” He met Fox's gaze and laughed proudly at his feat, secretly sharing it with that stranger. Fox smiled back.

  At that moment a shower of heavy drips began to fall, which the speed of the streetcar turned into slashes on the windows. The street lights blurred like the paint splatters of a crazed artist's pictorial experiment.

  The pilot's house was on the outskirts of the city, to the north, near the mountains, and as Fox stepped off the streetcar, he felt the bite of the frigid air under the thick fabric of his coat.

  The entrance was flanked by two dirty brick columns on which two even dirtier creepers climbed. A crooked oil lamp lit the cracked steps leading up to the door, on which was a boot-shaped knocker. To the right a ramp spiraled down into a dark parking lot.

  Fox knocked with the boot. Each knock echoed like a gunshot. No one opened. He looked around. A peacock with feathers so ragged it looked more like a malnourished, awkwardly disguised duck, passed in front of the gate crestfallen, or perhaps looking for some worm to pick up in its beak. Fox grabbed the boot and knocked again, this time with more force. A shotgun blast in the middle of the storm.

  A disheveled man appeared, wrapped in a frayed bathrobe in which his little body barely occupied a thousandth part. His eyes were alert, reddened, shining under thick, tousled eyebrows, dotted with gray hair. His legs peeked out from under the fabric of his bathrobe like two pale, twisted, hairy wires. He wore cotton espadrilles as thick as another pair of feet. On the instep was a duck with its beak wide open. He squinted his swollen eyes.

  “I'm here on behalf of Viper,” said Fox.

  “Well, that's all of us. Isaac Norton,” he shook Fox's hand, “Can you wait here for a moment? I've got everything upside down.”

  He went back inside, adjusting the belt of his bathrobe.

  While Fox was waiting under the hallway, he picked up a crystal ball on top of a stack of engineering magazines on a small table. It was cracked and as dirty as the columns and the weird peacock. Inside the ball was a Cytrus spacecraft, like the one that had been used for the first landing outside the Solar System. As he shook it, a blizzard enveloped the craft, making it almost invisible. Fox imagined the whistling of the wind and a canned voice through a cloud of static noise announcing to land immediately. On the other side of the door there was banging and clattering of junk and things being dragged and dropped to the floor.

  When it opened, the foyer looked even more cluttered than before.

  The interior smelled of gasoline. On the ceiling was an emblem that looked like it had been drawn with children's markers. A diamond with an “I” and an “N” intertwined in the center. The storm was raging against the window. A clap of thunder shook the house.

  His footsteps echoed through the mansion. It was as if someone had taken an old luxury mansion and tried to renovate it, but in the attempt had left it even more dilapidated. The floors were salmon-colored veined marble, the cracks of which looked like they had been reshaped with the gravel Fox had seen in the driveway. The lamps, most of them chandeliers with large hanging crystals, had undergone a kind of modernization process, which seemed to have consisted of spraying them with brightly colored
sprays. When lit, their crystals looked like opaque neon fragments still struggling to shed light through that layer of phosphorescent paint. They descended some damp little stone steps and came to an interior courtyard decorated in the Andalusian manner, with the walls covered with flowerpots and a well in the center. It was covered by a canvas awning on which the rain drummed like shrapnel. Although they were outdoors, the air seemed warmer there.

  A face buried under a chaotic blond beard. Old-fashioned glasses, with frames of the same golden hue as his beard. Flesh brimming over a shirt buttoned to the last button. On his white coat the Edelmann Corporation logo. The man looked at them through his glasses.

  “Dr. Max Edelmann will be our medic during the mission,” Isaac said. The blond-bearded man bowed his head and raised a glass of red wine. A ray of sunlight slipped through the clouds and through a hole in the tarpaulin to finally glint off his glasses. “This will be our newest member, Fox Stockton, who will be the muscle of the crew if things get ugly. He served in the Niobium War,” Fox felt a renewed respect for Viper. “She's his android. She's coming too.”

  “So, no longer serving in the corps, Mr. Stockton?” Edelmann said.

  Fox looked at him, trying to get through the glare of the lenses of his glasses.

  “Complications,” he said.

  Edelmann nodded slowly. The glow in his glasses intensified.

  “I see.”

  Fox felt the desire to break that glass and make him swallow it piece by piece.

  “Well,” Isaac continued. “I'll take advantage of the fact that we're all gathered here to hand out the uniforms. Our mission will be to find the neural catalyst, bring it back and collect the dough. And of course to bring back any possible survivors of the Albatross Expedition. While we're at it, I'll take the opportunity to put my new creation to the test under extreme conditions. I myself have been in charge of testing it. You will see it right away. From now on we are all part of the same team, and no matter how bad we feel about any of our companions, we will give our lives for them. But be very clear that if any of you endangers the rest of the team, you will be abandoned without hesitation. Come with me, please.”

  Isaac adjusted his frayed bathrobe and stepped through a glass door. They entered a huge room. The entire expanse of white marble floor was covered with the same emblem he had seen in the foyer. It looked like it had been painted with a paint roller. The room was illuminated by the dim light that filtered through the methacrylate ceiling. The smell of fuel was more pronounced there. The central part was a huge expanse where a soccer match could have been played. There swarmed all sorts of shoddy and shabby-looking contraptions, bumping into each other, falling and jumping over each other, filling the room with the echo of their screeching and backfiring, their flickering lights oscillating across the room like the gaze of a deranged sphinx. In the background, dunes of nuts and bolts and useless material, a desert formed by ideas that never came to fruition.

  Isaac walked towards the center of the room. The soles of his flip-flops squeaked on the marble.

  “Magnificent, don't you think?” He said. “I feel almost naked, as if I've opened a window to the inside of my brain. The fruit of years of hard work and effort. I would be grateful if you would not reveal any of my secrets. There are some of these that are only prototypes, and have not yet seen the light of day. Some of them will be a revolution, you will see. And you will be able to say that you saw it for the first time.”

  Fox felt his head spinning. He saw a thing that reminded him of the slovenly peacock at the entrance. It spun on itself as a column of black smoke spiraled wildly upward toward the plexiglass ceiling. The jalopy stopped spinning and shot out against the wall, where it came apart in an explosion of nuts and bits of scorched sheet metal. The whirring of the engine stopped with a gurgling wail.

  Isaac removed a painting depicting a man fishing on the bank of a river. He was picking up the line, on the end of which was a robotic fish looking at him with its red light eyes. The man looked like he was about to let go of the rod and run away. Isaac pressed a button. Seeing that nothing was happening, he pressed again. Finally he punched it. One of the wall panels behind him slid open. A maze appeared whose galleries were made up of more of those gizmos, but there were also rows and rows of what looked to Fox like weapons.

  “Here they are,” Isaac said, showing them a row of olive drab uniforms. “I prepared many more just in case. Take one in your size,” he took one himself, “and as you can see, I have sewn on the emblem with the name I have chosen for the mission.”

  Fox watched as Isaac enthusiastically put on his uniform jacket. It seemed to be made up of the patches Isaac had been collecting from scraps and old clothes. Here and there were patches held together with duct tape. On the left shoulder was a patch showing a bare-breasted young woman tied to a rock. Underneath, in red letters outlined in black it read:

  ANDROMEDA EXPEDITION.

  Fox tried to find some similarity of their mission to the Greek myth but found none. He supposed it just sounded good to Isaac. Or maybe he already had the patches and wanted to put them to use anyway.

  Fox picked up a large size and handed a medium to Nova. As he did so he realized that the only thing that differentiated them was the label.

  “And look, look at what I have here. One of my latest creations. I've already submitted the design to the RJA, I'm waiting for their response, but I'm sure they'll find it revolutionary. I'm already preparing a complete batch for when they make me the offer.”

  He picked up a suit and showed it to them. It was completely black. It had shoulders, knees and chest reinforced with thin plates of what looked like carbon fiber. The helmet, a hulk whose shape was faintly reminiscent of an insect's head. The only thing breaking up the dark uniformity was the Isaac Norton Enterprises logo, embossed in white on the chest and left shoulder with ragged stitching. The white thread he had used dangled at several points. At least, Fox thought, the whole suit didn't look as disastrous as everything else he'd seen so far.

  “Fireproof, integrated oxygen tank, temperature regulator. It has a chromatic camouflage system that adapts to the environment from the observer's point of view.”

  He pressed a button on the suit's forearm. It seemed to Fox that nothing changed. Maybe a slight glow, but it could just be some reflection coming from the next room.

  “It's so light that the wearer feels like he's wearing nothing but a silk cloth. There are no sizes. The suit automatically adjusts to the wearer's anatomy in the most ergonomic way. Take one.”

  Fox put it on. He didn't feel the fabric fit his body or anything like that. It was just a suit that weighed like it was made of granite.

  “Good. Finally I wanted to show you these beauties.”

  On a slanted counter was placed a series of light rifles that despite having the rounded cut typical of the New West, also possessed filaments that gave them a unique look. They were of a metallic white color, with some details such as the stock painted in red.

  “Three firing modes. Very easy to use. First you remove the safety, like this. Then to choose the mode you just turn this little wheel. This little screen will show you the remaining battery and the current firing mode. I hope we don't have to use them, but just in case, you'd better practice a little before we leave.”

  Fox knew those guns. They were very light and fit so snugly on the forearm that he didn't even need to tighten his fingers to hold it. He was glad that at least the weapons were not made by Isaac.

  Isaac then showed them an endless array of sensors, flashlights, various gadgets. All bearing the unmistakable stamp of Isaac's hand. Fox saw nothing but loose nuts and splices, recycled parts, plywood patches and duct tape. At that point he seriously considered getting out of there, giving Nova back to Viper and going back to his hole, where maybe he could get drunk until it all sorted itself out on its own.

  “Finish taking a look around and grab what you need. We'll leave right away.”

/>   “I have a question,” Fox said, “Is the spacecraft in which we will travel twenty million light-years away also your work?”

  “Of course, my friend. There's nothing to worry about.”

  With that, he left the room.

  Fox gazed at the swarm of junk. The corridors seemed to crisscross towards infinity in that gallery of botched jobs.

  When he turned around he did not find Nova.

  “Nova?”

  He advanced between the bifurcations of those walls formed by all kinds of crazy things that he preferred not to look at. After several minutes he found the android. Nova had stopped in front of the internal structure of an android. She watched with her chrome-plated aluminum eyes those silicon and nickel innards. A cyborg designed using Isaac's methodology. A mesh of plates and heterogeneous pieces extracted from different places. A creepy face as if terrified of its own existence. When he looked closer, he saw a series of drawings made with felt-tip pen, as if Isaac had somehow tried to correct that horror: eyebrows, a clumsily painted nose. Or perhaps it was the android's own work, in an attempt to regain his sanity.

  “That android of yours is impressive.”

  Fox turned around. Dr. Edelmann was staring at him with his hands in the pockets of his jeans.