That’s going to cause a mess. She’d managed to launch the payload, this she knew with certainty. Other memories were blurred, slipping away as she tried to grab on to them. Between the emergency disentangle and whatever recovery drugs Doc was giving her through the coffin, Helen’s memories were starting to stutter.
So what made them cut the media Feed? It was an extreme step. Establishing contact with the Golfball had been a well-publicized event. Far Reaches hired the best operators and navigators to run their offworld exploration exploits and Ivester loved to show that aspect off whenever possible. Ted had enjoyed it of course, shaking hands and chatting with every warm body in the room. A media blackout was against Ivester’s “transparency” policy. He showed off their mistakes so the wins would glow brighter. So what did I miss while I was out there?
The coffin’s computer was a dead end, its network access cut off. Undaunted, Helen continued to poke around in the coffin’s subsystems, driven by a need to do something.
“I don’t know who decided what, but everything went dark,” Dr. Hofstaeder’s voice continued blithely. “They’re taking you straight to medical to get checked out, so relax and enjoy the trip.” As Doc said the word “relax,” Helen felt so much better. A flood of warmth and smiles started between her shoulder blades and crept forward.
“Can you at least shut down the supersuit so I can wiggle my toes?” A crawling sensation started in her feet and calves, prickling like little needles. The needles and the smiles disagreed, coming together somewhere in the middle and making her decidedly uncomfortable.
“Not until we can open the lid. If it makes you feel any better, Ivester’s pulled the entire team. Everyone’s sequestered in the third-floor conference room. XERMo will be on hand to oversee the next steps and Ivester will be addressing the group shortly.”
That can’t be good. XERMo was the government oversight team; they stayed invisible most of the time. Far Reaches made sure they were brought in on every major incident. And a major incident is not what we needed today.
“Can you pass a message to Ted, have him get me a link in so I can see the meeting?” Helen stayed focused on Hofstaeder’s voice by main force of will, staring into the black in front of her face.
Wait. When did I lose the video? The soothing lines and whorls of the Insight were still painted on the screens that hung in front of her face. At some point Hofstaeder’s angular face had vanished. Helen couldn’t remember when that had happened.
“I’ll make sure you get a copy of the recording later.” Hofstaeder was a little too quick to answer, a little too eager to agree, voice pitched a little too high.
The whisper started in the trailing edge of Hofstaeder’s reassurances. In the dark of the coffin, an echo of the scream that had chased her back up the rabbit hole struggled to come to the fore. Helen closed her eyes and focused on that memory. She tried to pick out words, phrases, anything to tie it down to an actual language. It gave her something else to do, some other place to hold her focus until she could get loose.
“Helen, are you all right in there?”
Helen opened her eyes again, irritated, train of memory interrupted.
“I’m fine, Doc. Wake me when we get there.”
“And how are you feeling?”
It was the kind of idle chatter you used to hold focus to keep a patient from going into shock. What was worse, Helen should have felt some sort of concern, some brief spark of panic. Nothing. Everything’s fine. It calcified the idea that she was being manipulated, handled. Helen couldn’t stir up the impulse to be angry, but she could tick off those boxes. She knew what she should be doing, even if she didn’t have the drive to make it happen, not yet.
“Doc, what aren’t you telling me?” Helen rooted around in her own head, looking to reconnect with that moment of panic, the memory of whispers that made so little sense.
“I told you, they’re moving the coffin to keep you out of the spotlight. The press swarmed the Mortuary.”
“No, that’s not it.” Helen found the feeling she was looking for, the memory of panic, and let it rise. The fear helped counter whatever chemical Hofstaeder was dripping into her system. Now there’s an idea. Helen ran her fingers across the keypad again. The screen woke up and began giving her information. All operators had top-level access to the chemical drip from the coffin. Hofstaeder could override it, but it still belonged to Helen, she had the final say. She’s been keeping me distracted. The list of drugs paraded across her line of sight, names she was intimately familiar with. One name in particular left her cold.
“Doc, what are you loading me up with? They won’t let me back into a coffin for weeks after this.” The offender was an anti-psychotic, the silver bullet if an operator snapped and lost the link between reality and the inside of a waldo. It was not, should not, be applicable here.
“It’s standard procedure after a bad drop-out,” Hofstaeder explained.
The excuse was weak, spoken for the mission recordings, and Hofstaeder knew it. Helen could hear the lie in her voice. Every operator knew the names and effects of every damn drug on their own personal biology. Custom cocktails were standard for the higher-end operators and Helen was no exception. That Doc would be using the big guns on her meant something had gone very, very wrong. The little spark of panic flared up and Helen directed it right at her current problem.
“Bullshit.” Helen ground the word out between clenched teeth, not bothering to keep her opinions to herself this time. Someone needs me quiet and compliant. She might not be able to move her body, but any operator was far from defenseless. The difference was that Helen had no compunctions about twisting the coffin computers to her own devices. Those little flickers of terror and panic were bringing her back to herself, making it easier to resist, easier to tackle the problem at hand. An adult lifetime spent operating every type of waldo, every type of remote system meant Helen knew, in great detail, exactly what the coffins were capable of. She knew better than Hofstaeder exactly how to fight back from inside the machine.
“Wait, Helen.”
Helen ignored the doctor, continued to hack the coffin’s computer from within. She changed the drug mix, taking out the worst offenders and countering what Doc had given her. A drip of stimulant, a kiss of dopamine by-product, and everything came into focus. Her decisions belonged to her again.
“Talk fast, Doc.”
Hofstaeder was bargaining now; she knew what Helen was up to. “Give us five more minutes. Once they get you to the medical wing, we can get you properly checked out.”
Helen had tracked down the subroutine that kept most of her body paralyzed within the supersuit. She examined it, checking the up and downstream connections before making any adjustments. On the outside of the coffin, it would take less than five keystrokes to set her free. From inside the code, it required her changing just one variable.
“Helen, we are trying to get you into isolation before . . .”
“Before what, Doc? And stop screwing with the recovery drugs, I’ve revoked your access.”
“Helen.”
Helen released the body lock and keyed in the exit sequence to open the coffin lid. The lights inside the coffin started to glow, giving her a better sense of the edges, the tightness of the space.
“I didn’t snap, Hofstaeder, there’s no reason to isolate me, the only reason I’m not walking around already is because you’re keeping me in here. So what the hell else is going on?” Now that Helen had regained control, she felt compelled to move, to push forward into the light.
“I can’t give you all the details, Helen, I don’t have them.”
“Then I’ll have to go ask myself. You said Ivester isolated everyone on the third floor?” The lid on the coffin rotated out of the way and Helen got the impression of a tight warehouse room that went straight up into the black.
“Sorry, ma’am.”<
br />
A hand came down from the dim-lit space outside the pod and slapped Helen on the forehead. She had enough time to register a Far Reaches insignia and a flash of bright white before she was stunned back into the dark.
CHAPTER THREE
The alien whispers receded. Stripped into broken phrases and impressions, they disintegrated in the light as Helen opened her eyes.
“She’s back!”
Helen winced at the shout and turned her head to find the source. Someone had unlocked the supersuit while she’d been unconscious. The tiny pops from the various tubes coming free made her shiver. She wiggled her toes. The numbness that usually came with a long-term tour hadn’t had time to settle in. It took her a moment to remember that her trip to the Golfball had been cut short. She was back early, and for the worst possible reason.
“Keller, she’s up!” the tech on station repeated, not taking his eyes off the controls. Helen sat up, drawing her knees to her chest, rolling the tightness out of her shoulders. The coffins were gel-lined, built for work shifts of eight hours or more. This time Helen felt sore all over, like she’d been banging around the inside of a tin can.
The recovery rooms at Far Reaches were designed with transition in mind. Eenie-maintained walls of duct tape grey, floor of thick, soundless blue carpet, and lights that never reached more than half their possible intensity. The transition from a day- or week-long wholly in-your-head experience back to the squishy heft of the real world wasn’t always a smooth one. It could take a few hours to make all those connections feel real again.
The imposition of other people into your personal space was part of the process. In the early days of the program, operators had retreated, becoming isolated from their peers, their families. In extreme cases, they might be unwilling to connect with the world around them at all, save through the same kind of waldo system that had gotten them into trouble to begin with. There were still a few of them out there, operating long-haul asteroid miners, only coming out of their self-imposed stasis to maintain the meat that housed their minds.
In quieter moments, Helen herself felt the pull constantly, the siren-like call to plug back in as soon as possible, to return to the waldo. For most operators, it was a constant, unspoken battle. Manic bouts of physicality, tattoos, sex parties, extreme sports, all to push off thoughts of blessed isolation for just one more shift. True to an operator’s isolationist mindset, Helen was already regretting waking up from this mission.
When Ingat Keller showed up, his expression was somewhere between panic and annoyance.
“Just what the hell happened up there?” Keller was a slight man. Normally his skin had a warmth that matched his demeanor, but something had drained all the bright right out of him. Even the garishly patterned shirt that made him stand out in a crowd seemed oddly diminished, colors washed out.
“Something ate the Golfball!” Helen answered without forethought. Keller ran flight operations, and unlike Hofstaeder, had been an operator himself. Inside the hyper-competitive environment that Far Reaches encouraged, having Keller in your corner was something not to take lightly. You didn’t hide shit from Keller. Helen swallowed twice, trying to clear the gravel from her voice. Keller cracked the twist-top off a water bottle and passed it over. Helen accepted it gracefully.
“You’ve got about a minute before Ivester and the rest of management get down here, so talk fast.”
“We didn’t have time to figure out the specifics, but Keller . . . Something ATE the goddamned Golfball,” Helen explained tersely. She gripped the edge of the coffin with her free hand, feeling the line of the rubber seal press into her palm. The underlying drive, the need to get out there and do something, to act, was still inexplicably there. Like she’d forgotten to close the door behind her and a hurricane was coming.
“You got the payload deployed, right?” Keller was all business, standing stiffly, carefully back from the coffin. This was not going to be a conversation, everything was being recorded. His tone told Helen to hold her flood of statements and questions, told her to be careful. Something’s wrong, something’s up.
“Yes, the payload launched,” she admitted. The lights in the room came up; she could feel the shift in the air as the outer doors opened in anticipation of visitors. He should know that, why doesn’t he know that?
Keller visibly relaxed, “Okay, maybe this isn’t as bad as it might be.” He rubbed his hands together and paced a few steps back and forth, footfalls muffled by the carpet. He was making her nervous. Keller’s agitation, his body language, the fact that he was avoiding looking her in the eye, all spelled out disaster.
“Keller, where the hell is Ted?” Helen spoke the words before the question had formed in her mind.
“He’s in ICU, they shifted him to County Medical.” Keller kept pacing, still not looking at her. All the drugs in the world couldn’t counteract the chill that crawled up Helen’s spine.
“ICU? Keller, what happened to Ted? How the hell does a NAV end up in ICU?” The words came out in a rush. A NAV didn’t have the full-body hardware to link into a waldo. They didn’t take the physical or psychological risks that came along with total immersion. They ran everything from the command center, not so affectionately called the Fishbowl. NAVs kept all those connections at arm’s length except the quantum entanglement Feed itself.
Helen’s feeling of urgency was replaced by a hole, a sick empty space, like she’d checked off a box and had nothing new to replace it with.
Whatever had happened to Ted, she was sure she only had part of the story, but she couldn’t get around those holes in her memory.
Keller bit his lower lip. “Look, we get through the debrief and we can work through all the details.”
“That bad?”
The sick feeling in her stomach turned to acid. She imagined it chewing away at her insides.
“I’m not gonna lie, it’s bad. But it’s in the hands of the medical team now. We need to focus on what happened out there and how we keep you two from taking the hit for it.” Keller jerked his thumb towards the sound of expensive leather shoes rattling down the stairwell. “Hofstaeder’s on hold for the moment. You need to focus on explaining just what happened out at Otlyan23 as best you can without pissing anyone off.”
Helen took a deep breath and swung her legs out over the edge of the coffin. Damned if she was going to be caught sitting down. She needed to be on her feet to face the fallout.
“Operator Vectorovich.” Dr. Ivester came through the door first. Close on his heels were the pair of XERMo reps that had been in attendance when the Golfball had gone live.
The eXoplanet Exploration and Resource Management oversight team had practically moved in as mission-time had approached. You couldn’t work with the kind of equipment Far Reaches shot into space without XERMo’s sign-off. Helen had met the government agents before the launch. They had been there in the background for the photo op, lots of handshaking in the place of real interaction. The look on the Ivester’s face said the speeches for both the good mission outcome and the bad had been scrapped.
“Dr. Ivester,” Helen returned evenly.
“I didn’t expect you awake so soon.” Ivester stopped abruptly, looked her up and down, ending his assessment at her eyes. He was a head taller than both she and Keller, skin a shade lighter than Helen’s and hair in that early state of grey that said, “Fuck it, I’m distinguished now.” The room light reflected off glasses with heavy, translucent frames. They allowed him to carry his computer screens with him at all times.
“Let’s be civilized. Get out of your supersuit and meet us in Conference Three for the debrief. Make sure Keller gets your hard drives and speak to no one else until you are debriefed, do you understand?”
Helen nodded. “Understood.”
Ivester breezed out, the XERMo guys following without a sound. The CTO had that effect; he set a course and dragged eve
ryone else along in his wake.
Helen didn’t take the time for a sigh of relief. She threw Keller a woeful glance, got a shrug in reply, and continued her walk across the carpet to the locker room.
Her brain was still trying to process, trying to set the order of events straight. Everything that came back down the link between her and the waldo was recorded. All the data from her heart rate to the feeling of the waldo joints disintegrating should have been stored somewhere. Not only for future analysis by the techs, but as a “cover your ass” in case something went wrong. Far Reaches’ impeccable information gathering was one of the reasons they’d been able to stay ahead of their competitors. Her job during a debrief would be to put it all in context. Between the context and the data, she and Ted should be exonerated.
Helen continued to try to figure out what she’d missed. What was behind the feeling that she needed to turn around and get back out to the Golfball right NOW.
Which is stupid. And impossible, Helen reminded herself. Protocol demanded an operator be kept out of the coffins after a bad drop-out. She wouldn’t be able to run so much as a training mission after this until she had Hofstaeder’s checkmark.
Probably shouldn’t have pissed Doc off.
The neoprene supersuit peeled off, releasing the layer of conductive gel it had held close to her skin. The shower was hot, the towels were dry, and the clothes she had in her locker had not yet picked up that vague pong of warm sweat socks. It helped her feel more human, a little less close to the machine. Not completely, but a little.
Helen exited the Mortuary with her hair still wet and headed for the mission rooms. The sound of her shoes on carpet was overridden by everyday noise. The interstellar mining duties of Far Reaches continued around her. With over a hundred paired OPs and NAVs, and even more support personnel, the bread-and-butter operations dwarfed Line Drive by comparison. The heart and soul of the company continued to putter on around her as if the world hadn’t changed one bit.
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