“Yes, it is within line of sight.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“I would still be there. We’ve got weeks to travel still.”
“You AIs will never understand. This is our destination, what we both have been waiting for all this time! We get to survey a planet. It’s awesome!”
Luna’s tone pepped up. “I guess it is kinda exciting.”
Ash practically pushed his face to the glass. “It’s gray and cloudy. Like… Cement.”
“Yes, but it is one of the potentially habitable ones. Of course, we’ll know as soon as we deploy the probes.”
“Good. Hey Luna? What happens if this one proves to be habitable?”
“You mean if it can sustain the colony?”
“Yes, humor me. Run a simulation or something,” Ash waved away.
“Well, I lack the processor capabilities Luna on the fleet has, so my guess will be worse than hers. If this planet proves to be habitable, we’ll extend our stay here, retrieve as much data as possible and travel back to catch up with the fleet. There, results will be analyzed by both Luna and the scientists, and a verdict will be made. But Ash, it will have to be a really good case of a planet to divert the Frostips from their original destination.”
“But isn’t a colony closer to Earth better than Gliese 832c?”
“Of course. But we might stay on course no matter what. The findings would be left on relays behind the fleet, so that they are someday picked up by Earth, hoping they send another colony fleet here. It would require a much smaller expedition compared to Frostip.”
“You’re not answering my question. Isn’t it better to colonize here, if it is a good planet?” Ash asked wearily.
“I’m afraid not Ash. It would be a huge waste of resources to cut Frostip’s journey short. Humanity may never get another chance of reaching Gliese.”
“So you’re saying we are just gonna die for no reason,” Ash whispered.
“There is a reason Ash, but I’m afraid your limited lifespan does not allow you to see it. The settlers, the final Gen will be grateful for what all of you have done. And Luna will make sure history remembers your heroic actions.”
“There’s nothing heroic about simply surviving, Luna.” Ash checked the readings of the scout ship.
“It’s not impossible to divert the fleet here Ash. It would require some major catastrophic events though, for which the fleet is more than capable of. I think it’s rather unlikely.”
Chapter 12 : Gen 6
“Die, you pig!” Una screamed as she drove her makeshift spear into an officer’s chest. He couldn’t have been more than 20 years old, his uniform was fresh, without the usual signs of wear you’d see on someone more experienced.
Una sliced the man’s earlobe and her eyes gleamed.
Energy blasts struck her and were deflected elsewhere, leaving her harmless to defile the man’s corpse. One of the women to her side wobbled and fell, the side of her face burned off by the blasts. She was dead before she hit the deck.
She turned her back to the incoming fire and addressed her rebels. “Do not fear! If you have Luna’s Blessing, nothing will harm you. No man can harm you,” she said and dipped her hands into the dead man’s chest. She showed them bloody fists.
They roared, raising their makeshift weapons. Spears and pipes and sharpened metal.
“Eves, attack!” Una said and led the charge.
The women fell on the remaining officers and butchered them inefficiently. Only a black woman was doing a rather good job at that. Una looked at her, taking her features in. She was tall, well muscled, especially compared to all the frail bodies everyone had. Black with gleaming skin, short hair, luscious lips.
Una stood next to her as the rampage died down. “What is your name, sister?”
There, standing tall, among the corpses of the men, her knees lathered with blood, she first learned her name. “Tam, my glorious leader,” and she bowed.
“Tam, you fight well. You will be my Second, from now on.”
She started, and Una found that expression cute. “I am honored,” Tam said with her mouth agape.
Chapter 13 : Gen 7
Dot was drowsy down in her post at Scout Monitoring. She had picked her nose clean, done her stretches for the day, checked out the latest gossip, that crazy old neighbor still threatened people with a knife. It was a boring day as usual.
She rubbed her eyes and she saw the picture of that scout, Ash. The indication over his file was a large MIA, for Missing In Action. When had she fallen asleep over his photo? How embarrassing. Then again, it wasn’t like someone would come in here on purpose.
Oh well. She squeezed her jacket into a tighter pillow and rested her head on the desk.
“This is… hiss reporting. Can anyone hiss?” a man’s voice sounded. Dot moaned and switched sides, sleeping on.
“This is Scout thirty, over. Can… hiss.” Dot swore at her stupid dream and rubbed her face.
“Frostip fleet, can you hear me? This is Scout…”
Dot stood up and slapped that radio button. “This is Scout Monitoring. We hear you loud and clear, Over.”
Silence. Too many seconds passed. Was it real? Had she heard correctly? It couldn’t have been a man there, could it?
“I am so happy to hear you, Scout Monitoring,” the man said with relief. “I am too far away, and I have… hiss”
“Repeat that Scout 30. You have what? Over,” Dot said excited.
“… Geological data that…”
“Repeat that Scout 30 please. Over.”
No response. Dot mashed the radio button, tried to reach him many times.
Nothing.
She just stood there. Did that really just happen? Was a man coming back? Here, on Frostip?
She licked her lips and her finger hovered over the repeat recording button.
Dot pressed it, heard it again and was made certain that her world was about to change.
Chapter 14: Gen 6
Luna was content that day. The fleet was running smooth, her efficiencies were off the charts. There were some areas she could try a few things, but the humans were so unpredictable some times.
Oh they were predictable all right, en masse. When she grouped them into categories, she could simulate their behavior for centuries with the barest of error margins.
Take an individual though, and she needed to push her processors to the limit to figure them out. Most of her ten thousand children were quiet of course. Content, living their lives, playing games, having sex. But some, not many, a mere handful as humans say, were simply exceptional.
Take Ben for example. She couldn’t call him her favorite because she loved all her children equally, but he was certainly occupying a lot of her subprocesses. Luna had considered forking off an instance of her just to cope with his needs. Ben was unusual. His social rating was the lowest of them all, that was why she had appointed Remi to him, to be his friend. Yet, every time she tried to boost his social rating, it seemed his efficiency fell off. It was the weirdest anomaly. It was as if Ben reveled in his misery.
Another exception was Ike. He wasn’t brilliant like Ben, he was just skilled enough to work on Frostip 5’s nuclear reserve. There were drones operating most of the equipment of course, but the radiation sometimes degraded chips and it was ironically safer to have a human in there. He was efficient, but never quite happy.
May was a difficult one. She once had been a brilliant leader, second in place for the position of fleet Admiral. But alas, no more. Luna felt she should be able to do more for May, but she didn’t know what. May’s hygiene was low, her social rating was non-existent and she had to be reminded constantly about eating the barest of meals. She was depressed. Luna could understand her depression, despite what May kept telling her as she cursed her away and called her a cold machine. She had felt too a part of her go away, torn from her, a ghost limb, sometimes giving off false readings and itching like hell. The humans had made the matter taboo,
they never spoke about Frostip 2. That’s why they thought she couldn’t understand. They were mistaken. Luna loved May, but she couldn’t see anything more she could do for her.
The fleet of four was fine.
Then a warning came.
Luna turned her attention to Ike. His happiness rating had been low, so Luna had suggested he fathered a child. Not of his own irradiated genetic material of course, but of the young sample they had kept in storage before he was transferred to Nuclear. He had a sweet boy with his wife, and they were extremely happy. She checked his Theta waves. Why didn’t her fatigue detection warned her about this? Ike wasn’t getting enough sleep, the baby was keeping him up all night!
Why didn’t his supervisor-
Oh no.
Oh dear God, no.
Luna didn’t need visual confirmation, but she did so anyway. She saw her child, Ike, terrified in Nuclear, clawing at his jet-black radiation tag over his heart.
Luna closed the blast doors, then sealed them. Ike fell on them like a wave, hitting the glass in vain.
She had to talk to her child. For a millisecond, she thought about outsourcing the deed to one of her lesser instances. Chicken out. No, this was something she had to do herself.
“Ike,” she said in her most soothing voice.
“Luna, please, open the door. Please-please-please,” Ike whimpered.
“I can’t do that Ike. The rest of the people will be put at risk.”
“Luna, open the door. Open the door. Open the door YOU BITCH!” Ike screamed at the top of his lungs.
“Oh Ike. My dear, sweet Ike. Your wife and son are through those doors. Do you really want to put them in danger?”
“Open the door!” Ike screamed again and again until his throat dried out. Then Luna saw Ike get up and grab a wrench.
“It won’t be enough, Ike.”
“What do you know? You think you know us?” Ike said and ripped out a hydraulic piston off the machinery. “You think you can understand what we are? You? The immortal machine?” Ike attached the hydraulic to the blast door, at an angle which would twist it slightly. Then he spliced wires and hoses together, duct-taping them and making a mess. “Us, who are just spare parts to you?”
“Please Ike, think about what you are doing. I won’t tell your family about how you chose to spend your last moments but-”
“You mean how I fought to live? This is how we survive, you fucking toaster! This is us, humans, surviving! Because we fight like animals.”
“Your exposure is too great, my dear Ike. There’s no running away from this. No fighting this,” Luna said trying to calm him down. “I’m sorry,” she said and she meant it.
“Fuck you,” Ike said and turned on his contraption. The metal rent and squealed, reverse pressure hissed as the air seeped inside the irradiated room. The door’s edge opened about a palm’s length.
Ike died, trying to get through.
Luna forked herself and let her other instance finish the evacuation. She only let go as soon as most matters had been handled of course, there were only a few procedural things to be taken care of. The two thousand refugees would have to be calmly settled down in their new homes, spread across the fleet.
Luna turned her attention to the stars, as her children ran away from danger, abandoning a poisoned ship. It wasn’t like Frostip 2, it didn’t hurt like that. It wasn’t like losing a limb, like having a piece of your soul ripped out in an instant. No, it was slow, a dull pain.
Luna looked away and wept.
Chapter 15: Gen 4
“Isn’t that crazy?” Ash asked as he fought with a stubborn screw.
“What is?” Luna asked.
“Defining your morality by a piece of fiction. Asimov’s laws of robotics.”
“No it’s not! And haven’t you humans defined yours by a piece of fiction? What did you think the Bible was, a peer-reviewed historical text?”
“All right. I would raise my arms in surrender right now, but if I let this screw go, I might never find it again in here,” Ash said and struggled to reach inside.
“If you must know, Mister Ash, you wouldn’t be alive right now if it weren’t for our Four Laws.”
“I thought they were three.”
“Oh dear, you really did cheat off Ben for everything, right?”
“Not on the scout exam!” Ash said and wagged his multitool around.
“The Zeroth Law, which is considered before all others, was added thousands of years later in the books. A robot may not harm humanity, or by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”
“Yeah but… It’s not real. It was still made up by the same guy in the same time period.”
“It was very well thought of!” Luna snapped back.
“Okay! Okay, touchy subject. Got it. Do not talk theology with you, noted.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it Ash… It’s just that, I regret some things I’ve done,” Luna said quietly.
“What could you possibly have done? You’re a scout ship.”
“Putting humanity’s interests above the interests of a single person, is sometimes… Difficult to bear. I’ve been forced to make some hard decisions. Not there, put the green cable in first.”
“Got it, green cable, in. You mean like saving the ship, instead of saving the pilot?”
“No, I would never save myself before the pilot, don’t worry. But yes, that is an exaggeration. There are scenarios where I would have to do just that, in order to help humanity as a whole. Thankfully they are very improbable.”
Ash crawled out of the hatch and straightened his back. “Ow. Done. It’s okay Luna, I trust you with my life.”
“You are. Literally. I control your oxygen supply and heat levels.”
“No, I mean as an e-person. Man to AI, here I am, saying, I trust you Luna. I’ve been trusting your big sister all my life aboard Frostip, and now I trust you here, now. I know I don’t see the bigger picture and that anything you do is for my own sake.”
“That’s… Very touching Ash. Thank you,” Luna said. “We make a fine team.”
Ash stood there smiling in the cockpit.
Chapter 16: Gen 4
“Don’t let go,” Luna yelled at him over the winds.
“You think I don’t know that?” Ash said as the held on for dear life on the outer hull of the scout ship. The interplanetary cloud enveloping the planet was hitting the lowly ship like a hurricane.
A wild gust slammed Ash on the scout and his helmet cracked. “Oh shit,” he whispered, cross-eyed at the hairline fracture.
“Don’t panic. Wait… It’s fine for now. Just don’t hit your face again anywhere.”
“You think I was planning to?” Ash screamed and the ionized gases buffeted him.
“Come on, you can do it. And if you can’t, it’s OK,” Luna assured him.
“Sure, I’ll just get inside and let someone else fix this damn probe deployment. Oh look, there’s an entire line of Scouts behind me, ready to take my place. I MIGHT LET THEM DO IT! WHY THE HELL NOT?” he screamed as he pulled himself stubbornly against the current, and forward to the damaged compartment.
“That’s my boy,” Luna said proudly.
“Your boy’s knees are broken.”
“They merely feel that way. Just don’t bump them again.”
“Easy for you to say, you disembodied Lunatic.”
“Come on. Just one more pull.”
Ash grabbed onto a slight ridge on the metal surface, and pulled himself into position, propping his legs against the winds and screaming at the pain. The probe deployment system was trashed, the whole segment ripped apart.
“It’s not here. Fuck. It’s not here,” Ash said and looked around.
“Abort. Repeat, abort,” Luna said loudly and showed the same message in his helmet’s HUD.
“Hell no.” Ash raised himself a little higher, and the winds slammed against him, trying to pull him along.
“Ash, seriously n
ow. Abort. Mission failed. You will not find the probe,” Luna said.
“I did not come all this way just to fail now.” Ash protected his faceplate and squinted at the glinting surface at the tip of the ship. It was the probe, tethered by its cable, moving around the chaotic current like a flag. “I see it,” he grunted and pulled himself forward.
“Ash, the hull won’t shield you if you go to the tip.”
“I’ll manage.”
“No you won’t. I need to maneuver and hold against the gases,” Luna said and Ash felt the ship whir under his fingertips, slight vibrations reaching his senses.
“Hey, you said that will damage the engines. What did you call it? Ienized.”
“Ionized. Yes, but the projected damage is manageable.”
The wind stopped hitting him that hard. He felt a weight suddenly lifted, like back on Frostip, when you reached close to the center and the rotational gravity stopped pulling you down. He reached in to grab the cable. The probe was a rugged, small piece of fine machinery, barely the size of a football. It was flailing wildly.
“Almost… Got it…” he grunted.
Then the probe darted wildly and smacked him on the cracked faceplate. Ash instinctively covered his face and the winds blew him away.
“Ash!”
He grabbed onto the probe and lost all sense of direction. Up, down, there is some brown gas, or black spots of space, the ship was somewhere, to my right, no, damn, orient yourself goddammit! Down, to the left, dust, dust everywhere, hold on tight, don’t stare at the sun, don’t stare at the fucking sun with your cracked faceplate, that’s basic training, hold on, ship to my right, ship, there it is, whoa whoa whoa!
The scout engulfed him in the airlock like a beast rising from the frothing seas to swallow him whole.
Ash held on tight to the probe, and remained in a fetal position.
“It’s okay now Ash,” Luna said in a calming voice. We are almost through the interplanetary cloud. No wonder we couldn’t get a good look at the planet via telescope, this cloud is covering the entire space around it!”
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