Oscar knows the destination? Wasn’t the project supposed to be kept secret? If the cleaning robot already knows about it, it won’t be long before it’s online somewhere.
“What do you know about our destination?”
“I know everything Valentina told you about it.”
“Yeah, you were in the room when we were talking, and you’re always listening. Valentina probably hid a bug in the office herself.”
“It was not Valentina’s office. And I find the comparison with a bug offensive.”
“Since when is it possible to offend a machine?”
“Apparently I’m designed for that. But maybe I’m just simulating the behavior to make me seem more human.”
“You don’t know if you’re really offended or just acting that way?”
“Do you always know if you have a feeling just because you’re supposed to be feeling something specific, or if you really and truly have it, no matter what’s going on around you?”
“I...” Nick had to think it over. There was some truth to Oscar’s argument—some feelings were definitely learned. And no, he couldn’t always tell the difference.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend you. You aren’t a bug. Nonetheless, bugs can be beneficial creatures. But if you had been in the room for a while, you might even know more than Valentina told me?”
“You were not the first candidate Valentina had met. She told everyone the same thing, so there’s nothing else I can reveal to you.”
“How many were there before me? What kind of people were they?”
“A man and a woman. The man was Norwegian, the woman German. The Norwegian had spent two years in the Antarctic, but he had no space experience except for a tourist flight with Virgin Galactic.”
“Well then, he most certainly went up with me.” Nick tried to think of a name. He would surely remember a Norwegian Antarctic explorer. But he drew a blank.
“The woman came from asteroid mining. She ran several mining colonies, but she and Valentina did not get along well. The woman ran screaming out of the room.”
“All the better for me.”
“Yes, she had experience with space and solitude, and her character was more stable than yours.”
“My character is very stable.”
“Your biography told a different story. You let yourself fall into a slump rather frequently, and sometimes you don’t see things through.”
“Hey, I stuck with my employer for many years, even though I was bored to death.”
“Exactly. Sometimes you aren’t able to accept life’s consequences. You’d rather hit a wall so then you don’t have a choice. It was the same with your marriage.”
“Oscar, you’re not here to insult me. You’re here to clean.”
“You asked me what I’d heard.”
“That’s enough. Now off you go to the workshop module to clean the toilet as punishment.”
“I’m a cleaning robot. It’s no punishment for me to go to work. You should forbid me to wash your dirty dishes. That would be a punishment.”
“Out!” Nick laughed. He was going to have fun with Oscar.
“So, Nick, would you like to know what I heard? I just remembered.”
“Do you have any sense of suspense, Oscar?”
“No, my memory works associatively. When you tried to send me to the bathroom, it occurred to me that the German was shouting something about the ‘massive pile of shit’ Valentina would be blasting her into.”
“The woman really used that language?”
“She said the sentence in German. She probably didn’t know that Valentina would understand it.”
“And you, Oscar.”
“I understand 127 languages.”
“I don’t doubt it. Do you have any idea what the German meant when she was referring to this mountain of crap?”
“She said, ‘sheisse.’ Shit.”
“I know, but we don’t need to say it over and over again. Imagine someone reading your logbooks someday and constantly coming across this word.”
“I could replace it with something else.”
“I thought you couldn’t delete anything.”
“Not delete—replace.”
“So do you have any idea why she got so upset?”
“Not really. At one point in the conversation, however, she made an incredible statement that Valentina objected to with uncharacteristic hostility.”
“Spit it out.”
“Even though I speak 127 languages, I don’t have a tongue and therefore cannot produce spit.”
“Tell me what the German woman said!” Who on Earth programmed this robot with such a strange sense of humor?
“She said she’d found evidence that her projected assignment was not the first expedition to Triton.”
“Sure, the laser must have gotten there somehow.”
“That was an unmanned expedition. But the German lady said that a manned spaceship had already flown there.”
“Never heard of it.”
“The rest of humanity knows nothing about your flight.”
“That’s also true. So, what happened to this other expedition?”
“The German woman didn’t say anything about it. But it seems obvious that it didn’t end well. Otherwise you’d know about it, right?”
“Hmm, Oscar, I fear you’re right.”
“I’m not sorry to be right. Although I confess that this fact worries me a little.”
“You’re a cleaning robot.”
“I have a sense of survival like you, and I didn’t choose this journey. If you had not rejected the HDS model Valentina offered you, I would still be in my cozy conference room, thumping the dust out of the sofa. Actually, why did you reject the HDS model? The Norwegian’s eyes almost fell out of his head when Valentina showed it to him. Are you gay?”
“I’d rather travel with a cheeky cleaning robot than with a sex doll. What’s so unusual about that?”
“Nothing, my friend, nothing at all. Stay calm. I was just wondering if... so if you want... I can wet-mop any surface... you understand?”
“Out!”
Nick took the robot and flung it in the direction of the hatch. As Oscar followed his flight trajectory, the arm opened outward with lightning speed, reached toward the ceiling, and caught hold of a rod. The robot swung back and forth a couple times, dropped with an elegantly gentle bounce onto the floor, and rolled off, downward and out of the command module.
6/5/2080, the Eve
“Sabai dii mai khrap.” How are you?
“Phom sabai di khrap.” I am fine.
Nick tried the first couple sentences. He had the computer pronounce the phrases, then he said them aloud. The computer compared his pronunciation with the example. Actually, he had wanted to work on this with Oscar, but he hadn’t seen him for two days. He’d never before encountered an insulted cleaning robot.
“Khun chêu arai khrap.” What’s your name?
“Phom chêu Nick.” My name is Nick.
He actually preferred writing first, but that wouldn’t work for Thai because the individual letters were connected to each other with no spaces in between words. The only space came at the end of a sentence. So he had to practice writing and vocabulary in parallel. This was why he’d diligently draw letters on the screen at the start of each Thai lesson.
Something rattled behind him. Had Oscar reappeared? It sounded like the rasping of a scrubber. Maybe the robot was finally cleaning the dishes.
Nick had been astonished to find that he’d even been provided with porcelain plates and cups. This was quite uncommon for astronauts’ in-flight catering. But the Eve didn’t accelerate any faster than the gravity of Mars, so the extra weight for one person didn’t make much of a difference. At any rate, the microwaved pizza tasted much better from a real plate.
“Oscar?” he called out towards the back.
The rattle got louder.
“Ooooooscarrrr!” he ye
lled.
There was one last plong! Then came the sound of four wheels rattling on the metal floor. Shortly thereafter, the disk, with its arm extended above, pulled itself down through the hatch into the command center.
“Sorry, it was so loud in the kitchen because I was washing your dishes, so I didn’t hear you,” Oscar said.
Do I detect a tone of reproach? “How do you know I called for you if you didn’t hear me?”
“Oh, I thought you might have called me after hearing the cleaning sound.”
“So why would I call for you then?”
“Didn’t you miss me?”
“There were still enough clean dishes left.”
“Oh.”
Oscar’s programmers must have had entirely too much time on their hands. Why else would they have incorporated feeling simulations? At least Oscar didn’t have a face, or he would certainly have been wearing an offended expression.
Okay—he might as well play along. “I had missed you a little bit.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. You promised to help me learn Thai.”
“Sawat dii khrap.”
The universal Thai greeting, recalled Nick. “Let’s save that for tomorrow. But where were you?”
“I was inspecting the ship from the outside.”
“Is that your job?”
“I assigned it to myself.”
“Why didn’t I see you when you were using the airlock?”
“There’s a special maintenance airlock for tools and things, and I can also fit through it. When it’s being used, you won’t see that something is ‘exiting’ the ship. But you can’t leave through there.”
“Ah, you seem to know the ship’s controls pretty well.”
“This is what happens from robot to robot—the Eve is really nothing more than a big autonomous machine. The only difference is that she’s pregnant.”
“‘Pregnant?’ What?”
“She has a human in her stomach.”
The programmers really didn’t put much effort into the humor module, he thought. “Not your finest joke, Oscar. So is the ship doing well, as seen from the outside?”
“I didn’t find any damage. My patrol mostly served to ascertain the current state so I can quickly determine any damage in the future. I thought I would do some useful work and perhaps increase our chances of surviving this journey.”
“You thought?”
“Yes, I thought.”
Nick sighed. A robot who was huffy and made jokes, and then thought he was thinking. Well, that indeed offered some variety. Best to change the subject. “Are you still so skeptical thanks to what you overheard the German woman say?”
“I took a look around the relevant databases.”
“And?”
“There’s no evidence to be found anywhere that another ship traveled to Triton before us.”
“Well, you see?”
“That shouldn’t be comforting to you, Nick.”
“No?”
“The German obviously found something. And apparently she’s not caught up in some misinterpretation, but actually uncovered facts that are clear and straightforward. The best proof of this is that these facts are no longer to be found anywhere. The RB Group surely had them deleted immediately.”
“That sounds like the typical reasoning behind every conspiracy theory. The decisive proof is that there’s no evidence? It’s just going around in circles.”
“I think you just don’t understand my logic.”
So now the robot is insulting me. But I’m not going to let him get away with it. “Of course,” Nick said. “I’m just a mere human.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Let’s change the subject.”
“Aren’t you interested in what Valentina hid from us?”
“Us?”
“I’m also a part of this crew. This is what you asked for. If you’d let the HDS model—”
“Oscar, do you remember what happened the last time you mentioned those three letters?”
“Okay. So, why don’t you want to know if there’s something rotten in this whole thing?”
“I’d prefer to remain in denial. If it’s the case, we’ll find out soon enough.”
“But the more we know, the better we can prepare.”
“All right. What’s your plan?” Nick was frustrated. Why wouldn’t Oscar just give it a rest? The robot had already made him ten minutes behind on his daily routine.
“I suspect that the German found some facts that refer to the earlier expedition. There must have been a crew and an expensive ship with even more expensive fuel and provisions. It can’t be that easy to make it disappear from the databases. The company has to record all expenditures for tax purposes, and the crew had already lived their lives from before, leaving a trail.”
“So far, so good.”
“Thanks, Nick. Now all we have to do is thoroughly search for any traces the crew left behind. Maybe there was a big helium-3 delivery from the moon that disappeared, or a cosmonaut’s career ended abruptly, without any explanation. There must be such evidence somewhere. Even if RB managed to erase the helium-3 delivery from the records, there were people who had spent time mining the fuel on the moon. Maybe this work time is documented somewhere.”
“That all makes sense, but there’s a big catch you don’t seem to have factored in.”
“Yes?”
“I assume you don’t want to limit yourself to the databases that are on board the Eve.”
“No, they’ve been compiled by RB.”
“The Group also monitors our communication with Earth. Who’s to say that they don’t filter the kinds of queries you’re talking about? Even if you ask the right questions, perhaps they’ll plant the wrong answers.”
Oscar was silent. His long, thin arm moved back and forth a few times, as if drawing something in the air.
“I’m sorry, Oscar, but you don’t have a chance.”
The robot still didn’t answer. Presumably, his circuits were currently running at full speed. It was amazing how much processing power this simple auxiliary robot had. How was that commercially viable?
“There’s a way,” the robot finally said, “but you’ll have to help me.”
“Spit it out.”
“We set up our own encrypted communication.”
“How would that work? Whether we speak in plain or encrypted language with the CapCom or RB flight control, it doesn’t matter.”
“The high-gain antenna doesn’t broadcast specifically to Akademgorodok, because the radio signal can’t focus that well. Basically, anyone with a large-enough dish can talk to us. The Russian Interkosm network searches for signals with our ID and passes them on to RB. If we get the antenna to transmit with a different ID and encryption, we could bypass Russia and reach NASA’s Deep Space Network, for example.”
“How would we do that?”
“We have to rebuild the antenna. We’d need to get a send/receive unit from the storage room and connect it outside, directly to the high-gain antenna. That’s how we can bypass the internal systems that RB can access.”
“So an extravehicular mission. How do we justify that to Mission Control?”
“I can implant a disturbance signal that looks like an asteroid impact. That should be reason enough to check the outer shell.”
The idea sounded crazy, but it promised some variety. So, he was in. “Tomorrow?”
“It can’t look planned. I’ll just wake you up one day.”
“Okay.”
“Unfortunately, there’s a second problem. If we send an encrypted signal with a NASA identifier, it will have to occur to somebody to decode and read the transmission. The people at NASA have better things to do than listen to some unexpected call.”
“We could simulate the identity of another spaceship.”
“That’s impossible, Nick. The identifiers are cryptographically secure. Without the private key, there’s no way.”
“I still have the VSS Freedom ID. I don’t think my boss changed it. Nobody can do anything with it.”
“We could use it. That would be the solution.”
“I don’t know, Oscar. If we transmit as ‘Freedom VSS,’ who will answer?”
“Probably your old boss, Nick.”
“That’s the problem. I think he’s not very happy with me right now. If I tell him that I’m aboard a non-official Russian spaceship, he’ll probably just tell me I need to go to detox.”
“But he’d respond.”
“When you put it that way, yes.”
“It doesn’t necessarily help, but we have to at least try.”
“If you say so, Oscar. But I just thought of something that works absolutely against us. Earlier you said that RB has access to the internal systems. This means they’ve heard everything we’ve been talking about.”
“You don’t have to worry about that. I told you that the Eve is also a big robot. She wants to survive as much as I do. That’s why she flooded the microphones in the command center with interference signals when I asked her to.”
“I didn’t realize you were talking to the ship.”
“Typical human. Why would I use such a primitive means of communication as language? I only need that for you.”
Nick shivered. He’d long had the feeling that the autonomous machines had been communicating with each other and uniting behind their owners’ backs. Oscar seemed to him the living proof of this, if indeed ‘living’ was the right word to use for a cleaning robot. But if he wanted to survive this journey, then he’d have to accept whatever help he could get.
6/8/2080, the Eve
The alarm resounded throughout the ship. Nick jolted awake. Then he remembered the plan that the robot had devised. He yawned. Does it really have to be in the middle of the night? The small alarm clock on the screen displayed 3:00 AM. Nick got up. He should hurry to avoid suspicion. He tapped the screen. Just as Oscar had planned, an asteroid hit appeared in the kitchen module. This meant that the alleged space rock had only missed him by perhaps five meters.
Now there was a new noise. It was a little shriller. This was the warning for a drop in air pressure. Oscar was really making this as realistic as possible. Nick checked the data on the screen. The air pressure was 95 percent of the standard value and falling. He wondered how the robot had managed this.
The Triton Disaster: Hard Science Fiction (Solar System Series Book 4) Page 7