Proxima Trilogy: Part 1-3: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  I run through the dark night, dragging the sled behind me. I even considered leaving the sled behind. Then I could cover 35 or perhaps 40 kilometers per hour. But I would risk losing Eve, too. I didn’t even dare to ask her what she thinks of this idea. She certainly wants to be there when we find Adam.

  The only problem with that is, she would also have to witness it if we cannot save Adam. I am not sure which pain will be worse: having lost Adam, or having to watch Eve grieve for the loss of her sibling. But that’s a wrong assumption, I tell myself, without really believing it. We are not going to lose Adam. He will be waiting for us at the ice block.

  Adam is clever. A few hours in the darkness won’t be a problem. He could stand this for days. While he does not have any food with him, the ice is made of fresh water, and a human being takes three or four weeks to starve to death. His suit will keep him warm for about one week. He has air to breathe, unlike Francesca and Martin back when they had to walk through the vacuum on the surface of Enceladus to reach the lander. And I managed to save them even under those circumstances. Now my task is much easier. I have to return to the block of ice, pick up Adam, and go on toward our destination.

  Whether it is really that easy depends on one issue—will Adam still be waiting for us at the ice block? That is the decisive factor. I know roughly where the ice block is located. From a distance of two or three kilometers I will be able to detect it via radar. Once I am only a few hundred meters away, I can contact Adam by helmet radio. But if he set out on his own, I won’t have much of a chance of finding him. He is too small for the radar to detect, and I would only discover him once he is also within helmet-radio range.

  I hope Adam is level-headed enough not to leave the area of the ice block! He might never find the block again if he moves just 50 meters away in this eternal darkness. Walking in a straight line in absolute darkness is impossible for a human being. Adam might believe he is walking straight toward the north. Instead, he could be walking in a curve. At some point he might turn around to walk back but just walk in a curve again. But it wouldn’t be the same curve. Please, Adam, sit down and wait for us!

  It is time to warn Eve. While the environment looks just as bleak as before, the ice block should soon appear in the radar image.

  “Shouldn’t you be able to see the ice block?” Eve asks. She must have been thinking along similar lines.

  “Just a moment... yes, there it is!” A dot is blinking on the radar horizon, and it is slowly getting larger.

  “Marchenko,” Eve says.

  “Yes?”

  “We will find him.”

  “Yes,” I reassure her.

  It is definitely the ice block. Now it can’t be long before we are in helmet radio range.

  “Eve, you can start trying to reach him via helmet radio. We are getting close enough.”

  Her messages sound calm, almost stoic. “Adam, please come in,” she says. Marchenko can imagine how much self-control this requires.

  Adam does not answer. I aim a brief laser pulse at the ice block. The distance is approximately 500 meters. Now the helmet radio definitely should be able to reach Adam. Yet Eve’s calls trigger no reply. I slow down. If Adam does not answer, I have to start scanning the surroundings more carefully. Perhaps Adam’s helmet radio has failed, or he is unable to answer for some reason. He might be standing or sitting somewhere around here, waving at them. Or he could be asleep and not even notice they are here.

  The ice surface shows no sign of Adam. They reach the block and circle it. Still no sign of Adam. Eve keeps calling him via helmet radio. She is probably clutching at straws, fulfilling her part of the job to the bitter end. It is unreal. I circle the ice block several times, hoping that Adam might suddenly appear. I increase the radius of the search circles. At least his body should be somewhere, shouldn’t it? In this area there are no deep fissures he could have fallen into. I remember the mishap in the forest, when Adam fell into the pit. That was only a few weeks ago, yet it seems to have happened in another lifetime.

  This planet means bad luck for Adam and Eve. The Creator’s plan must have had gaps from the very beginning. Nothing fits the story they were given at the beginning of the journey. Had they ever really stood a chance?

  No, none of us did, I tell myself, but you are just avoiding the issue. It’s true. I am trying to lessen my own guilt. It is my fault Adam is out there somewhere. I am responsible if he dies on the eternal ice. I failed to protect and save him. And I am probably going to kill Eve the same way.

  Eve. I have to get a grip on myself. I am not alone. Nobody can absolve me of the responsibility for Adam’s death. Yet I have to take care of Eve.

  “It doesn’t look good,” I say via helmet radio.

  “We can’t give up,” she replies. I am surprised, because I did not expect such a clear-cut voice.

  “He is not here anymore.”

  “As long as we have not found his corpse, he could still be alive.”

  That is true, as I know from experience. In my former life, I rose from the dead myself. I never told Eve about it. Ultimately, Proxima b is not Enceladus. Having been lucky once does not give you the right to be lucky again.

  “Just a moment, I am stopping the sled,” I warn Eve. I take the ropes off my shoulder. “Don’t move away from the sled. I just want to take a closer look at the area around the ice block.”

  I leave the sled standing about ten meters from the block. Then I activate all my sensor systems and scan a three-meter-wide strip around the block. I notice something near one corner. In the infrared image, an unremarkable spot appears in front of it. It is not quite as dark blue as its surroundings. I increase the contrast. The spot is approximately one-tenth of a degree warmer than the ice. Did someone sit there for a while? I cannot detect any natural cause for it.

  I start a simulation. What kind of traces would a medium-sized man in a thermal suit with a specific heating capacity and a body temperature of 37 degrees leave behind? The program concludes that a human being might have been sitting there. But it cannot calculate when exactly he got up and left. It is only clear that it can’t have been more than an hour ago. If we had arrived faster, Adam would have been still here. But why didn’t he wait, rather than march off, obviously in the wrong direction?

  I am scanning the ground using high resolution. Half a meter from the block I notice a bright spot. That is not ice, and it looks as if it did not originate on this planet. I carefully dig the object from the upper ice layer, melt the surrounding ice, and analyze it. The artifact consists of ceramic, metal, and plastic. It appears to be an electronic module. It is damaged. Did Adam try to repair his universal device? That would explain why we cannot contact him.

  “He was here,” I say, “just an hour ago.”

  “Yes, I can still feel him,” Eve says.

  That is impossible, I think, but I don’t say that out loud. I am willing to grasp for any straw. “Eve?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you feel where he went?”

  “Unfortunately, no. And you, Marchenko, can you somehow measure it?”

  I admire Eve. She seems so cool and calm, so composed. “No, I am not able to do that. He might have gone in any direction. An hour on foot means three-quarters of a circle with a five-kilometer radius. That is almost 60 square kilometers. It would be easier for us to find a grain of sand on a beach.”

  “What can we do, Marchenko?”

  I think about this question. I really would like to answer with a whole list of options. But there is nothing there. Should we randomly search an area which increases with each minute he keeps walking? Messenger is currently on the other side of the planet, but even if the ship were directly overhead it could not detect Adam from orbit. What if we simply wait to see whether he will return to the block of ice?

  “I have no idea except to wait for him here,” I say.

  “That makes no sense. Adam left because he had a reason to. He is not going to come back.”<
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  I know. Even if he wanted to turn around, he would hardly find the ice block. Adam is all alone in icy darkness, without the technologies built into my robot body. He wanders around aimlessly out there, and it is my fault. But I cannot give in to the pain.

  “Marchenko?”

  “Yes, Eve?”

  “We should get on the way. Adam would have wanted us to. He is not stupid. He did not wait for us here, so he had a good reason, a way of getting to safety some other way. Right now we cannot help him.”

  “That is true.” I look at the ice block where Adam was sitting. I use the arm on my back to scratch a message into the hard ice: ‘We are waiting for you at our destination, Adam.’ Then I return to the sled and take up the ropes again.

  “Can we get going?” I ask.

  “Yes,” says Eve. Suddenly her voice sounds quiet and brittle. I pull on the ropes and start running. It feels good to be moving. I run as fast as I can. But it is in vain. Even if I put all my energy into locomotion, I can still easily think about things. I am launching a complex climate simulation for Proxima b, which uses up a large part of my computing capacity. Now and then I listen to the helmet radio channel. I can hear Eve sobbing quietly. My robot body cannot shed tears.

  April 10, 19

  He is not going to die, not here and not now. Adam trudges across the icy plain in utter darkness. He cannot waste any more time—unlike what he’d done three days ago when it took him half an hour to get the idea of asking Marchenko 2 for help. It had been the worst half hour of his life, a time during which he had felt like a living corpse sentenced to death by freezing and, most of all, having to wait passively for the end.

  Then his eyes fell on the universal device that he had already written off as useless. It wasn’t defective at all, because he had recently used it to transmit a message. While he still considers Marchenko 2 weird and mad, it would be better to be rescued by a madman than to die a miserable and senseless death on the ice.

  It turns out his hope was well-founded. Marchenko 2 is more than ready and willing to race to his rescue as quickly as possible. They were not able to talk long, as Adam had to conserve power in his device, but it was obvious Marchenko 2 was very pleased with the opportunity to see his lost son soon. He would bend over backward to save Adam from certain death.

  Of course, Adam realized his own Marchenko would be on the way back to pick him up. But when would they have noticed his absence? What if Eve slept through the rest of the day? And how are they supposed to find each other in this seemingly-endless darkness, without any radio contact? The idea of waiting for his possible rescue—without any message, blind and deaf—seemed many times worse than the possibility of definitely meeting his rescuer in a week.

  However, that option meant walking ahead into the thick blackness surrounding him. When he had left there were clouds in the sky, so he could not use the stars to orient himself. However, the radio connection with Marchenko 2 helped. He only had to take a bearing of his transmissions now and again in order to correct his route. They exchanged a few words every two hours. This did not just show Adam the right way, but also freed him for a brief moment from his utter isolation.

  Adam could have never imagined having endless space around himself, yet feeling locked up in a tiny cell at the same time. But the darkness seems like an enclosing wall to him. He takes one step after the other, always carrying his prison with him. He can’t even hit his hand against the wall to make sure it is still there. Adam had once read that, back on Earth, confinement in a darkened cell was used as a form of punishment, a kind of torture. Now he understands how cruel this method can be.

  Whenever he cannot stand it any longer, he briefly switches on his helmet lamp. For that moment he feels released from his dungeon. He looks at his surroundings and sees the ice shimmering in bluish colors. His destination is the open sea, where they started out with their sled. His rescuer is moving toward him from there. In the light of the lamp, Adam searches for the tracks the sled left behind when they came this way before. He hopes this might relieve his loneliness, but he doesn’t find a trace.

  The icy plains look like nobody ever walked here before, and there probably won’t ever be anyone after him. In different circumstances he might feel great now. He is setting foot on places where no human being had ever traveled before. He could give names to each ice formation because he is the discoverer of this area, the secrets of which are shrouded in great darkness.

  It is a real pity he cannot enjoy his hike. But that is only natural, because he is far from being safe. For one thing, there are crevasses in the ice that might appear at any moment. Luckily, these don’t occur too often, because the surface in this basin is very homogenous and relatively young compared to the age of the planet. Didn’t Marchenko mention that a meteorite must have crashed here several hundred thousand years ago?

  Adam is not afraid of crevasses. It’s not because he is particularly courageous. No, it is simply not possible to be afraid of them, just like you don’t worry about being struck by lightning when the weather is fine. If he should really encounter a crevasse, it would happen all of a sudden. He would only notice it at the instant his foot stepped into empty space. He would have no chance to undo the step. He would simply fall into the crevasse, never to be seen again. He hopes—should that happen—to die instantly. Otherwise something else would happen that he is even more afraid of: His suit heater will eventually fail, causing him to freeze to death.

  According to the onboard suit system, the heater can function for eight days. Three of them have already passed...

  Together with Marchenko 2, he has analyzed how far he can deactivate certain subsystems. But there are few options. He only switches on the helmet lamp when he really cannot stand the darkness any longer. He limits the communication with Marchenko 2 to what is absolutely necessary. As long as he keeps walking, the suit heater runs at minimum power. But now and then he has to rest, has to sleep. Then his body does not generate enough heat. While the overcast sky hides the stars from him, the clouds at least keep the temperatures from dropping even further. It gets slightly warmer with every kilometer he advances toward the day-hemisphere.

  Yet it is going to be a tight race. He has been lucky that Marchenko 2 took his time traveling across the ocean floor. By now, he is moving toward Adam on the ice. If everything works out, they will meet on the 16th. However, the energy supply of his suit will run out a day sooner. Adam runs the calculations again and again. No matter how he figures it, he will have to survive 24 hours in the cold. The system forecast might not be completely accurate, as it could be only 22 hours, or perhaps 26 hours, but it will be somewhere within that timeframe.

  Perhaps he can keep walking for those 1,440 minutes. That is the only solution he can come up with right now. As long as he keeps moving, his body will function as a heater. Once the support of the LCVG fails, he will gradually cool down, but it might be enough to keep him going. He is still not nearly close enough to the edge of the ice sheet. As soon as he lies down and falls asleep, the cold will overpower him, mercilessly. Then he will never get up again.

  Marchenko 2 promised him this would never happen. Yet Adam knows the difference between wish and reality. Even a robot equipped with a human consciousness cannot defeat the laws of nature. Adam keeps adding one more step, one more step... He will try to keep to his part of the agreed-upon meeting plan. He almost hopes to be surprised by a crevasse. By now, the idea of a quick, painless death no longer seems so terrifying. Perhaps such an ending would be better for anyone who ended up on this planet under circumstances like his. Adam feels like he has been bad luck for everybody. That’s probably not what his Creator intended for him.

  April 11, 19

  It always happens when she is still half asleep: Eve’s arm feels around for Adam, but his spot is empty. Then she is startled, and abruptly wide awake. Her subconscious, which takes over control while she sleeps, must not have accepted the fact she has lost her siblin
g.

  She doesn’t discuss it with Marchenko. Overall, they talk much less than they used to. Eve tells herself there is simply less for them to talk about. Previously, she quite often spoke for both herself and her sibling. Adam is gone now, and their voyage also goes on without incident.

  “Are we making good progress?” Eve asks. She wipes the salty moisture from her face. Since when have I been sweating so much at night?

  “Yes, very much so,” Marchenko answers. “At this pace we are going to get there before the end of the month.”

  Months, weeks, days, these terms have lost much of their meaning for her. When she wakes up, it is dark. While she sits outside and listens to the creaking of the sled’s runners, darkness envelopes her. And when she rolls herself up in her blanket again, it is dark. She does not even notice whether her eyes are open or closed. I hope it is only the terms which have lost their meaning, she thinks.

  Since Adam is no longer on board, they only stop sporadically. Eve relieves herself in the tent, as Marchenko suggested a while ago. She tries to not pay attention to the stench of her urine, nor the smell of sweat that permeates her clothing. Under these conditions it is impossible to follow even minimal standards of hygiene. Her hair is matted. She does not even dare dream of taking a shower, like back in the station, as that would trigger painful memories of Adam. Eve just wants to arrive at their destination.

  She also doesn’t sit outside as often anymore. To her, the surroundings seem to have changed, becoming harsher and more inhospitable. Marchenko tells her that they are still traveling through the long valley. Tomorrow they will cross the ridge at its end. However, Marchenko does not expect this to cause any problems. He thinks that the incline should be easy to manage.

  Eve, who is currently sitting on the front part of the sled, raises her nose. She has partially separated the connection between her helmet and her LCVG. If she tilts her head back slightly, some fresh outside air will flow in under the visor. The air is considerably drier than it was at the beginning of their journey. It is not only her nose that tells her that, as Marchenko confirms the fact. Even though they are still zooming over an ocean, the climate is a continental one. The air is so chilly that it can absorb little moisture. This has the advantage that Eve can almost always see the night sky. Clouds only appear rarely now, and then only at a high altitude.