Once we got onto the roof, Resolute spotted something distressing in the distance. “What’s that over there?” Resolute asked, pointing to the northeast.
Two large spotlights had been installed at the top of the wall above the northern entrance to Boreal Junction. They were about 150 meters away, but they were still plenty bright enough to shine on the wall in front of us. Fortunately, our location on the roof of the cleaning facility was partially obscured from the spotlights by a couple of other buildings. But when we would get on top of the wall, we’d be visible to the spotlights if one of them happened to shine in our direction.
“We must hurry. With those spotlights, I don’t think we can stay on the roof for very long,” I added.
“What about those two Peace-Keepers on the outside? Do we know where they are?” Loquacious asked. “If we’re not careful, they might see us.”
“They passed by here ten min-utes ago,” Winston replied. “We should be good to go.”
“How do ya know that?” Resolute asked.
“Never mind that, we’ve got to go,” I replied. “Secundus, tie the cable to the door handle. Once you’re done, toss the other end over the wall. Winston, are we ready?”
“Yes.”
Secundus followed my instructions, and we all moved into position next to the wall. The plan was for the lightest of the Autoclons, Loquacious, to be lifted up to the top of the wall by Winston. Once in place, Loquacious and Winston would assist all other Autoclons, starting with me, to the top of the wall. We would then be responsible for grabbing the cable and making the short descent.
“OK, Winston and Loquacious, you’re up.”
“Quite literally!” Loquacious said playfully while being lifted by Winston. Seconds after Loquacious and Winston landed on top of the wall, Primus and Secundus started pushing me up to the waiting graspers of Loquacious. As I reached the top, the three of us on top of the wall felt a huge whoosh of wind from the west. Despite the distraction, I quickly grabbed a hold of the cable and started my trip down. Less than 15 seconds later, I hit the ground and saw Resolute (with cart dragging it downward) coming down the cable next.
I moved about 20 meters away from the wall. When Resolute reached the ground, I directed Resolute to come over to me. Secundus and Primus followed shortly thereafter, and Solicitous, our final member, reached the top of the wall.
Suddenly, one of the spotlights located our trio on the wall. “HURRY!” Resolute yelled.
“That’s them! Run them down, or I’ll turn you into scrap metal!” a familiar voice rang out, barking commands to unseen Peace-Keepers on a loudspeaker. Surreptitious itself was manning the northern gateway!
“What about the cable?” Solicitous yelled to us.
“Forget it. They already know we’re here, so there’s no sense getting rid of it now,” I yelled in response. With that, Solicitous started its rappel down the cable, while Loquacious grabbed hold of Winston, and the two of them flew down to my position.
“They’ve found us. Now what? We’ve got to get out of here!” Resolute said.
“It’s OK, Resolute,” I reassured. “My fellow Autoclons, may I present to you… the ‘Betsy Reed’!”
Not more than 20 meters away from me, a ray of warm, yellow light started shining on us. The area of light grew in size, and before long, we could see an entrance ramp appearing underneath the light.
“Yeah, THAT’S what I’m talking about!” Resolute said. “We’re going to leave in style!”
“Hurry everyone! We still want to get out of here before the Peace-Keepers arrive,” I stated as Winston entered the ship. Primus pushed me up the ramp, and all of the others followed, with Solicitous the last one onboard.
“From one showman to another, that was a nice touch,” Loquacious added.
The ramp closed, and the ship took off. It elevated just a few meters off the ground, allowing the ship’s engines to blow the sand around underneath the ship, obliterating any sign of our presence there. And just as suddenly as the ship arrived, the ‘Betsy Reed’ swiftly disappeared into the southwest night sky.
Chapter 12 - Afterward and Commission
12.0 Reuniting with the Programmer
12:41, Day 6, First Tetrad, 207 D.P.
We started to relax as the ‘Betsy Reed’ zoomed away from Surreptitious and the Peace-Keepers determined to capture us. I would have liked to have seen our pursuers’ reactions when they figured out that they lost us, but at least I had the satisfaction that we were able to escape in the first place. We stayed in the main cargo hold of the ship for a few minutes until we received a visitor.
“Good evening everyone! I hope your flight so far meets to your satisfaction.”
“Marcus!” I exclaimed.
It was indeed Marcus Reed Himself, our one-and-only Programmer. He looked just as I had remembered: tall (at least tall compared to us Autoclons) with dark-brown skin and short-gray hair. As with my first encounter with Him, He had a communication device that wrapped over His head and had an attaching arm coming around His face, which allowed His spoken words to be transmitted as radio waves for us.
“Fastidious, is this our Great Programmer?” Loquacious asked.
“Well, I think you could ask Him yourself,” I replied.
Loquacious sheepishly approached our host and asked: “Are you… are you our Great Programmer?”
“I’m not exactly sure how ‘great’ I would consider myself, but yes, I am your Programmer,” Marcus answered. “Please, call me ‘Marcus’.”
The rest of our party took a few minutes to introduce themselves to Marcus and personally thank Him for our daring rescue from the clutches of Surreptitious. Everyone seemed in awe of Marcus, especially Resolute, who could barely speak to Him at all.
After a while, Marcus addressed the group again: “I must imagine you all are quite tired after your last couple of days, so let’s take care of that. Here, come with me, and I will show you to your quarters for your stay with me aboard the ‘Betsy Reed’.”
Marcus led us out of the cargo hold and into another compartment. I recalled seeing this room during my initial stint aboard the ship as an office space for Marcus. Since then, it had been transformed into a space more suitable for Autoclon habitation with several power stations along the walls. Marcus’s desk and robotics equipment had been relegated to a corner of the room, secured to the walls with some sort of mesh netting.
“This room has changed quite a bit,” I said to Marcus.
“Yes. It was my workshop, but after I met you, I decided to make this a bit more accommodating to Autoclons in case you decided to pay me a visit again.” Marcus replied with a smile.
“You seem to think of everything,” I said.
“Hey, if I’m your Programmer, I’ve got to keep impressing you to show my ‘greatness’, right?” Marcus chuckled. He then turned His attention once again to the group: “Everyone, please make yourselves at home here. I bet you’re pretty tired, so now’s a good time to shut down and power up for a while. I’m going to get some sleep myself, but I suspect I’ll need more time that you will. How about I see you again in another seven hours or so? Let’s just say I’ll join you at around 7:00 your time. Then we can discuss how to proceed for the next few days.”
“That sounds like a plan to me,” I replied.
“Good. I’ll see you all again tomorrow.”
∆∆∆
12.1 Out in the Stars
4:47, Day 7, First Tetrad, 207 D.P.
We all woke up rather late in the morning in the converted office area. Winston had chosen to spend the night with Marcus, so we had six of us in the room overnight: Loquacious and Resolute were along the far side of the room; Primus, Secundus, and Solicitous were plugged into the port side of the room, and I was recharging via the starboard wall.
After waking, I began to take a closer look at our newly-renovated quarters. The first thing I noticed was what appeared to be a window on the back wall above the power station
s where Loquacious and Resolute had resided. The window was a few meters wide, over a meter tall, and just over a meter above the floor. It was covered by a thin-metal shade, which obscured the outside world from our view.
Curious about this discovery, I moved to take a closer look. If this was indeed a window, I wondered how I could remove this metal covering. I detected a switch cleverly concealed along the starboard side of the window. Testing out my hypothesis, I flipped the switch upward, and as I surmised, the shade started folding up, allowing me to peer outside. However, the view completely surpassed my expectations.
For whatever reason, I had assumed that the ‘Betsy Reed’ was either in-flight close to the surface of Zarikum or had touched down somewhere on Zarikum during the night. One glance outside the window immediately proved that I was wrong. Instead of seeing the dull yellow of the Zarikum sky, I was treated by the stark blackness of deep space!
My ocular array required a few seconds to adjust to the dimmed light level, but before long, I could see hundreds, then thousands of points of light, far in the distance. A few nights before, I had seen my first two stars, but that paled in comparison to the beauty and tranquility of the myriad of stars within my field of vision.
“That’s... amazing!” I said to myself. “Hey everyone, come over here!”
The others, who hadn’t been paying attention to what I was doing, approached the window and were instantly mesmerized by the sight.
“Ooo...” Resolute responded. Of all of my companions, Resolute was the most interested a few days ago when we all got a peek at Rigel and Betelgeuse. Now, Resolute was transfixed to the window and the slice of space that it allowed us to see.
“Wow! I have a feeling we’re not on Zarikum anymore,” Loquacious said.
We spent the next couple of hours discussing various topics, just killing time until Marcus joined us. We chatted about the stars, the cold temperature of the ship (apparently Humans prefer temperatures BELOW 300 K), and my first encounter with Marcus. Primus, Secundus, and Solicitous had joined our group quite recently, so I shared with them additional information about our host that hadn’t come up in our brief time together.
Resolute, however, was still too enamored with the view to take part in our conversation. I was starting to worry about Resolute a bit. We’d all been through quite a lot over the last tetrad, but I wondered if Resolute wasn’t handling all of this well. Just in the span of the last few days, Resolute had seen its first ever stars, been caught in a trap set by its former employer, escaped from prison, and left Zarikum by space-ship in the middle of the night. And that’s not including the cave-in, the lightning storm, and the Memory Cave a few days prior to that. Or the Dynamo crystals and near-death experience in the fissure of Mount Obsidian. Now, Resolute was gazing out at the beauty of the galaxy, unimpeded by Zarikum’s atmosphere, shortly after meeting its Programmer for the first time. That’s a lot of change for anyone, and maybe Resolute wasn’t able to process what’s happened as well as the rest of us. Concerned about my friend, I went over to the window to talk to Resolute.
“Hey Resolute, how are you doing? You’ve been pretty quiet this morning,” I said.
“I…” Resolute paused for several seconds. “I’m fine. I just can’t believe how beautiful it is out here.”
“What about everything else? What do you think of Marcus? You didn’t seem all that comfortable talking with Him last night.”
“I... I don’t know. Am I worthy enough to talk to the Programmer? I mean, I’m just a common Drudger. I’m sure He doesn’t want to waste His time talking with me.”
“Of course He wants to get to know you! We are all like progeny to Him. He can be just like another Progenitor for you. But you’ll have to talk to Him first.”
“Are you sure He won’t mind? I’m sure He’s very busy.”
“He would love to talk to you, I’m positive of that.”
∆∆∆
12.2 Touring the ‘Betsy Reed’
A little after mid-day, Marcus greeted us: “Good morning everyone!”
“‘Morning’? Don’t you mean ‘afternoon’?” I said.
“Ah, I see that you’ve discovered how to open up the window shade,” Marcus added as He walked over to the opposite side of the room and gazed into space. “Now that we’re in orbit of Zarikum, we’re no longer on Zarikum time. We’re on Earth time now. For Earth time, we have 24 hours in a day instead of just 14, and right now it is about 6:30 in the morning.”
“A 24-hour day? That will take some getting used to, that’s for sure,” Loquacious said.
“The view is spectacular, isn’t it?” Marcus said. “I’ve spent much of my last several years in space, and yet, I’m still in awe of the size and majesty of the universe. You don’t really get a view like this on Zarikum, do you?”
“No, we don’t,” Resolute replied. “We saw some stars a few days ago, including Rigel and Betelgeuse, but this is way more awesome!”
“Ah, Resolute, I’m glad you appreciate astronomy, just like I do. When I was much, much younger, my parents bought me a telescope so I could take a closer look at all of the stars from my home back on Earth. On most nights on Earth, you could look up and see thousands of stars in the sky. I’d spend many hours at night with my father and my telescope, looking at the different stars and even some of the other planets in our solar system. It’s one of the things that inspired me to get a space ship of my own.
“Speaking of my ship, how about I take you around for a tour? Would you like that?” Everyone was enthusiastically in favor of that idea.
Marcus didn’t take us into every compartment of the ship, but He did take us into some of the more interesting areas. We started just down the hall from our room in His personal quarters. Marcus called it His ‘bedroom’. The room was dominated by His ‘bed’: a large, soft pad, slightly elevated from the floor. The bed was long enough for Marcus to lie down on, and He would do that in order to go to sleep. Along one of the side walls was a collection of ancient-looking containers, with dozens upon dozens stored on several shelves, adorned in colors of red and brown and green with writings on the edges.
“What are those?”
“We haven’t seen anything like those before,” Primus and Secundus said.
“Oh, I guess you’re right. These are ‘books’. A long time ago, Humans would print stories and other writings onto pieces of paper and bind them together into one self-containing document.” Marcus walked over and grabbed one of the books on the shelves, then went to the near end of the bed and sat down. He opened up the book, displaying it for us, and we could see the printed text on the individual pages of the book.
“This doesn’t seem like an efficient use of resources. Why isn’t this information just stored electronically?” Solicitous added.
“Humans didn’t always have computers. And even after we created computers, many people like to do their reading just like their ancestors did. I personally like reading through the pages of a book. I like the tactile sensations of holding the book, reading line by line, turning the page and repeating the process again.”
When Marcus finished showing us around His bedroom, we exited the room and entered an elevator. After Marcus gave a verbal command, the elevator started lifting us to another level of the ship before stopping several seconds later. We exited the elevator into a long room that ran down the full length of the ship. It contained many different tanks and vessels and thick metal tubes, which all connected to a central, spherical chamber no more than 20 cm in diameter Marcus called the area the “Engineering level”, and it was responsible for producing the energy needed to propel the ship and power all of the electronics onboard. While there, we saw two more Humans: the Senior Engineer, a Man named Liang, and his assistant, a Woman and recent addition to the ship, Megan.
“This ship is too complicated for me to run by myself, so I’ve enlisted Liang and Megan plus eight others to help me on this mission. You may see some of the others later o
n our tour.”
Marcus escorted us back into the elevator and took us to the top deck so we could visit His favorite room on the ship: the “galley”. Within that room, the crew stored and prepared the food that they’d eat throughout their time in space. The ship would often go for over 100 days at a time without receiving additional food, so this food supply needed to last for quite a while.
In an adjacent room, Marcus showed us the “hydroponics bay”, which was a particularly bright room that allowed the crew to grow dozens of types of plants to eat. The plants varied in sizes, shapes, and colors (though the predominate color was green). Some of these were less than 10 cm in height and diameter, and some were much larger, including a few that were taller than all of us Autoclons.
“This has some similarities to the Wild Crystal Grange, where Systematicus grew power crystals,” Loquacious said.
“Yes, exactly. In both cases, we take the light and nutrients from the soil (or water in my case), and the plants or crystals grow slowly until we harvest them for energy.”
“I guess we’re not that much different after all,” Resolute added.
Marcus smiled. “I’m glad you noticed. Now, it’s time to show you the room that is the nerve center of the entire ship.”
Marcus again took us back into the elevator, and this time, we descended for a short while and exited on the Command level of the ship. After passing briefly through a corridor, we came to a substantial-looking closed door. Marcus issued a voice command into a side panel next to the door, and the door slid open.
“Welcome to the ‘Bridge’!”
After the door opened, we were amazed at the view. The ‘Bridge’, as Marcus called it, was two-tiered and was located at the very front of the ship. We entered onto the top tier of the Bridge. There were four computer terminals on this level, two on either side, with chairs in front of each of the terminals. On this top tier, the Bridge was almost 10 meters wide, but it narrowed as we moved closer to the front of the ship. The Bridge had a large ramp that allowed access from the upper tier downward to the lower tier. There was one large chair in the middle of the lower tier just beyond the base of the ramp. Two additional chairs were stationed at the front of the Bridge behind two banks of computer terminals. The starboard of these two chairs was manned by a fairly large Human with no discernable hair and a light skin complexion. This Human was monitoring a wide range of computer screens and gauges and buttons splayed out on a console within easy reaching distance.
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