by Sophie Ward
The biggest breakthrough in the last ten years had been the understanding that artificial intelligence could only evolve as an adjunct of human intelligence. There was a certain symbiosis in the relationship, Arthur conceded, but plenty of people existed without an inbuilt operating system and Arthur himself preferred to stick with wearables instead of implants. Something his dead mother had said to him once when she was ill about her brain being ‘invaded’.
He programmed the connection sequence that would allow the airlocks to open between his ship and the landing module. The music changed to a live recording of Qualia at Coachella. Zeus issued a series of visual commands but did not interrupt. The instructions repeated across the lens of his glasses and on the console.
Allow 15 minutes for the environmental controls to regulate.
Maybe that’s what a tumour felt like; an invasion. As a child he thought Rachel meant aliens. Those were the sort of invasions he had heard of. Or zombies. His favourite book had been How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse. At night he would ask his parents to show him their teeth so he could be sure they were who they said they were. ‘Show me your teeth!’ He remembered the trepidation while he waited. Greg would pull faces and try to show one tooth at a time and Hal laughed and showed a full set of gleaming enamel but Eliza took the opportunity to ask Arthur if he was ‘feeling alright’ and if there was anything he wanted ‘to talk about’. He never told her about Rachel’s alien brain invasion but somehow she knew his fear was connected to her anyway. Or maybe she assumed everything was about Rachel.
Prepare for atmospheric change in E minus 10 minutes.
He lifted each foot into the weighted boots attached to the chair, unstrapped his harness and leant against the console, his breathing laboured. Dead mother and living mother. Mummy and mum. The same way they had called him ‘baby’ (mummy) and ‘darling’ (mum). He preferred mom now in any case, it was less intimate. Not long after Rachel had died a teacher at school had told him he was lucky ‘to have a spare one’. Possibly this was meant to be reassuring and Arthur had appreciated the logic but it had set up a pattern of concern for other children who had only one of each parent and sometimes not even that. The situation seemed irresponsible given how likely it was for grown-ups to die at any moment. In all the stories he was told, the fairy tales and Roald Dahls, the Lemony Snickets and J. K. Rowlings, the parents were either dead or gone, with very poor provision made for their absence. For several years, Arthur guarded over his less fortunate friends with daily enquiries on the health and whereabouts of their parents. The same friends who had been warned by said parents that Arthur might be sad and sensitive because his mummy was ill and his mummy had died, and who were therefore especially careful not to show off about the wellness of their own families. He was relieved when bullying became a thing at school and he realised most kids didn’t have extra parents so he could stop worrying. He was the odd one out.
E minus five minutes to completion of phase three; full connection with Deimos docking station.
His breath was still uneven. He untied the weighted boots from the chair and strapped each one up. The monitors and portholes were dark now; each one dimly relaying the walls of the Voltaire crater. Arthur closed his eyes and tried to focus on the next stage of the operation. Whatever Zeus had given him had not helped his blood pressure. He could feel his pulse thumping in his fingertips.
‘Captain Pryce? Audio contact re-established.’
‘Fine. I need to stabilise my BP.’
‘Your blood pressure is no longer elevated, Captain Pryce. All vital signs within normal range. You can proceed to the docking station as soon as phase three is completed.’
Arthur shook his head.
‘That’s not right. Run diagnostics again.’
‘Running diagnostics. Sixty seconds to full connection with …’
‘Deimos.’
‘I’m sorry, Captain Pryce?’
‘You didn’t finish the sentence. Sixty seconds to full connection with Deimos.’
‘Forty-five seconds.’
The crater was making him dizzy. He could take being in a titanium can in space but being underground as well was making him sick.
‘Zed, brighten external lights on monitor feeds and bring up the relay from the Mars Station.’
‘I have no contact with Mars at this time, Captain Pryce. Phase three complete in four, three, two, one seconds.’
There was a tightness around his head. Arthur’s field of vision started to close down. He put an arm out to balance himself but the boots seemed to be pulling him to the floor and he began to fall. From what seemed a great distance, he watched the amber light on the monitor switch to green as the dock door slid open. The light went out and he was plunged into utter darkness, the entire ship blanketed around him. And still he fell.
The high-pitched alarm of the docking system brought him round. He was seated at the console, boots on, head in hands. A whoosh of air filled the Spirit. It smelled of rotting plants and chalk dust, the ozone of an air filtration system heavy with decay. Arthur took a deep breath. The pounding in his chest reduced to a regular two beats instead of an erratic three.
‘Welcome home, Captain Pryce.’
Sure, home. If home meant danger, loneliness, an unacceptable risk of failure. Like all those times he arrived at US immigration on his Green Card or his shiny new passport. Welcome home. Unsmiling Officers. Two-way mirrors concealing sweaty guards with gallon coffee cups. Massachusetts, Texas, Florida, just visiting. Still, California had become his home, eventually. He didn’t think he’d be able to say the same for a shallow crater on the smaller of Mars’s two moons but he was glad to be there. Already the base’s air pumps were taking the edge off the panic he’d felt in the last hour. Panic? That was putting it too strongly. What was the matter with him? This was his job, his first love. He needed to get it together.
‘Captain Pryce. I have run diagnostics again and all systems are normal. Radiation levels contained. We can investigate further when you debark.’
‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’
‘Of course, Captain. You must celebrate a safe return.’
Arthur looked up from the console. The crater walls were still not visible.
‘Lights. And focus the cameras. I can’t see anything out there.’
‘It is night time, Captain Pryce.’
‘Hilarious. Focus the cameras.’
It was hard work getting to the other module. Arthur made his way to the back of the ship slowly. The boots should have barely anchored him but every step was an effort.
‘You should wait in the cockpit, Captain Pryce.’
‘Wait? Wait for … Fuck me, what was that?’
From beyond the ship came the sound of further chambers being opened. Spirit shifted and vibrated from the new forces.
‘Zeus. Why have you started phase four? Don’t open any more hatches until we are on base.’
‘Please return to your seat, Captain.’
The ship continued to move. Arthur felt the ground listing. He pushed forward to the connection hatch. The ship now opened on to a small, dark chamber.
‘Light failure in connector field.’
‘Captain Pryce, I am no longer controlling local systems.’
‘That is not protocol.’
It was not unusual for an OS to suffer teething problems integrating with a new interface but the Deimos base had been programmed by the same team as the Zeus system. There was no love lost between the jockeys and the trainers and Arthur acknowledged the small thrill he felt at Zeus’s shortcomings. Still, the systems better connect soon. He grabbed his torch from the carabiner on his belt and held on to the hatch door. He bent to climb in, using all his strength to lift a weighted leg over the metal rim. His foot fell to the ground on the other side.
There was no landing capsule. He could feel the emergency tubing on the other side of the hatch and after that, nothing.
‘Abort landing.’ Arthur pull
ed himself back into the Spirit and yanked at the boots as he made his way back to the pilot capsule. ‘Abort landing. Seal all hatches. We are losing ground contact. Jesus, we’re sinking.’
‘The rescue crew will be here shortly, Captain. Please stay in your seat.’
‘What the fuck? Stop screwing around. We are not stable, Zeus. We need to pull away.’ Arthur grabbed the seat harness. ‘Disengage. Repeat. Disengage.’
‘Captain Pryce, you are on board the drone boat. There is nothing to disengage from. You have landed successfully. Please remain calm.’
A flash of light crossed the cockpit. Arthur wheeled round, straining against the harness. A large exterior lamp was trained on the ship, the beam dipping in and out of range of the cameras and portholes. It was not possible.
‘Zeus. We are in the Mars orbit on the moon Deimos. I have connected with the Deimos base.’
‘That is incorrect, Captain. We are on earth, in the Atlantic sea, approximately 200 miles from Jacksonville, Florida.’
He could feel it now, the sensation from all previous missions. The memory of an extreme fall, the jolt of the controlled landing and the rocking of the water below the drone boat. He had been through this on every re-entry into earth’s atmosphere but he was not on a return mission. He was 250,000,000 km away. He jabbed at the console readings but could make no sense of the output. The information was both completely familiar and unintelligible. There were no alarms, no unusual data. Everything on board the Spirit was calm. Except for Arthur.
‘Am I awake?’
‘It is not possible to answer that question.’
‘I don’t know what the fuck is going on and that is not helping.’
‘If you are not awake I am a projection of your sleeping mind and cannot be relied upon to answer accurately.’
Arthur kept swiping at the screens in front of him. ‘What if I am awake?’
‘You cannot know.’
The ship was definitely rocking. Not magnetic field rocking. Full on, rising-and-falling, out-to-sea rocking.
He took a deep breath. ‘Check your logs. How long have we been gone?’
‘Three hundred and seventy-seven days, four hours, thirty-four minutes and fifty-six seconds since take off, Captain Pryce.’
‘Check again.’
‘Three hundred and seventy-seven days, four hours and thirty-five minutes.’
‘So why don’t I remember it?’
‘It is not possible to answer that question.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ His lungs felt as though someone was sitting on his chest.
‘Please remain in your seat, Captain Pryce.’
Arthur pulled off the rest of the harness and tried to stand up. His knees buckled and he fell back into the seat. Full gravity.
‘Lock the main hatch.’
‘The rescue crew will be boarding soon, Captain Pryce. Please return to your seat. You are behaving erratically.’
A shout from outside the ship brought Arthur to the front viewing window; a line of thick glass obscured by condensation.
‘The rescue crew? From Space Solutions?’
‘NASA has outsourced rescue operations to a subsidiary of Page Industries.’
‘Right.’ It was comforting to hear the familiar names. All the companies had a deal with each other, it made sense. ‘Why are my comms systems not working?’
‘You are nearly thirteen light years from earth. You are currently landing on earth.’
‘That’s it. I’m shutting you down. Overriding OS Zeus. All systems manual. Maintain current program. Lock hatches.’
The sound of static filled the module. ‘Captain Pryce? This is Mission Control. You appear to be experiencing problems with your OS. We are overriding the system. Hatches are open and crew standing by. Welcome home, Captain.’
‘The guys upstairs are waiting.’
The doctor sat on the bed by Arthur’s legs, his Southern voice too resonant for such proximity.
‘I heard you had a bumpy landing.’ He stared at his notebook with rheumy eyes and swiped through a few pages. ‘You don’t have any system implants? Well, maybe that’s just as well. Looks like your OS is still offline anyway.’
Arthur couldn’t move his legs away from the doctor’s body; they lay as the nurse had left them on top of the bed covers. Both men studied the oddly angled limbs, the fringe of ginger hair on Arthur’s shins brushing the navy blue wool of the doctor’s suit.
‘But how are you feeling in yourself? Anything bothering you? More than the usual post-mission lag? Tests are good. Bone density, muscle wastage, all better than could be expected after such a long trip. Feels heavy, don’t it? But you’ll be running track again in no time, gravity be damned.’
They looked again at Arthur’s legs. Outside the second floor window of the low building, he could hear the grass-hoppers sing. It was spring. He had left in the autumn, he was certain. He didn’t recognise the facility but he guessed he was in the old military rehab hospital, on the South-East corner of the main base.
‘But hey, nurses say you haven’t eaten. Are you crazy? After all that mush?’
Arthur nodded. The guy was sixty or seventy. He’d remember the first Mars missions; Mariner and Odyssey.
‘The bosses are going to be disappointed if you clam up like this when they visit. And it’s me they’ll blame. What’s up, kid?’
The pressure on his chest was worse than in any other trip he had taken. Every breath felt like he was bench-pressing his lungs. But that wasn’t why he was quiet.
‘Where have I been?’
‘What do you mean? They brought you straight from quarantine to here. They want you back in Pasadena, sure. And you’re about ready to get home, I’ll bet.’
‘Before that. Where was I before that?’
The man in the blue suit sighed. ‘Look, Captain Pryce, it’s all going to be fine. Rest up and I’ll let them know they can see you tomorrow. It’s been a year, they can wait a few more hours.’
At the door, the doctor pointed at him in mock admonishment. ‘And you eat all you can. It’s not every day you come back to earth.’
Arthur waited for the door to close. As the doctor’s footsteps receded, he jammed his elbows behind his back and levered himself forward until he was sitting upright. He checked the room. The benefit of being in the rehab unit was the low-tech outfit: no cameras, no motion sensors, windows that opened. He put a hand down to his legs and tried to rub some life back into them. He needed to get out of the room and make it to an unregistered phone. If he called home, spoke to Greg, he could find out what had happened. His mom would be monitored by the company. There was no one he could trust here. He had spent time on this base, not in the rehab unit, but around. Training, socialising. All the doctors were on call in the main medical unit at some point, getting to know the new crews and new kit. Arthur had never laid eyes on the man in the blue suit.
The window opened on to a large grassed courtyard, palm trees and benches in each quadrant. On three sides, the old building stood exactly as it must have done a century earlier, white painted stucco and metal windows. A new glass hallway made up the fourth side, housing a central reception area with a long desk that faced out to the car park. Arthur leant on the window ledge and tried to hold himself steady. He couldn’t see any doors into the courtyard other than from the glass hallway. If he dropped down from the window and landed on the grass below, he would be covered by the trees from the reception area, but there was no way of getting back into the building without being seen. He held tight to the frame and leant out a little further. The window below him was open.
Blue suit said he had been away for a year. But his journey was six months. Six months to Deimos, but he hadn’t got there. Which, if true, had to be known by mission control, by the company, by every single engineer and data analyst on the program, whatever they said about a year mission. Why was no one talking to him about the aborted mission? If not true, he was still inside the Voltaire crater
on Deimos experiencing some sort of elaborate hallucination or breakdown. Either of which conclusion didn’t bode well for his sanity, or cognitive function as Zeus would put it.
Zeus. Arthur sat down in the open window ledge and stared around the room. He could have used the OS now. With an implant, he would be automatically connected to the base station and direct access to Greg, who was with Hal in Los Angeles and one of his primary contacts, though the line would be monitored. He tried to remember the last thing Zeus had told him. He was light years from earth but he was back on earth? That was how it felt to Arthur; he hadn’t seen anyone he recognised since the rescue, though they had all known him, and the base, the food, the scent of the air itself was familiar yet different, as though his sensory input had been altered as easily as a monitor’s colour settings. An OS didn’t have feelings, only facts. He was home but he was not home.
From the corridor came the sound of voices, a bump against the wall. A guard was stationed outside his room. He pulled at the hospital gown and turned back to the courtyard. He wasn’t going to get far but at least if he made it downstairs he might get to a phone. The outside world called to him as loudly as if he were a child again. An inch at a time, he dragged his legs through the window opening until he sat facing out, and let go.
He landed hard and lay on the rough grass, his breath knocked out of him. He waited while the pain focused. Above him the earth tilted in a violet sky. Arthur saw the light of old stars and the shimmer of dust and his planet’s solitary moon, a thin scythe of blue one hand’s reach away.
‘Arthur?’
The voice brought his head round to the open window on the ground floor. A dark-haired woman in a diaphanous dress that held the colours of the sunset.
‘Arthur, what are you doing? Are you alright?’
He knew her.
‘Did you fall? My god. Shall I get help?’
‘No!’ His chest ached with the effort.
‘But baby, you’re hurt.’
A head of curls, a curve of hip. Baby.
He sat up, one arm locked for support, and stayed hunched over on the ground. He saw folds of the dress fall from the window, followed by canvas shoes and bare legs. She ran to him and crouched beside him.