by John Lane
When he reached the Med Bay, Alfred shared, “I believe that she is ready to wake. I can’t do any more for her in the nutrient bath.” Alfred applied stimulants and drained the bath. His medical avatar’s arms attached to the unit gently withdrew IV and breathing tubes. At one point the gravity decreased to make it easier on Agnes’ body. “Tommy, we need to dress her.”
This shook Tommy out of his revere. He had been staring at her face. Tommy thought he knew this girl. It couldn’t be because they were from different time periods. Still he couldn’t shake the feeling she looked familiar. She was important, not only to the mystery of why they were hunted, but to Tommy personally. Tommy shook himself. He left the Med Bay and soon returned with ships slippers, undergarments and a green ship’s jumpsuit. “Fit?” Tommy asked.
“Yes, Tommy. My avatar can handle the undergarment, but I will need help with the rest.”
“Sure.” Tommy stepped out and closed the door to Med Bay until Alfred signaled it was proper to return. Tommy then saw Alfred’s dilemma. Where the avatar performed delicate surgery and administer medical treatments of various kinds, dressing a girl was much more rugged. Stuffing limbs into clothes could snap off the avatar’s arms, even under low G. Agnes lay on the medical bed. She was pale and gaunt. Even as Tommy watched for a moment, her color improved and he could see where the nutrients that Alfred had administered had built up a little muscle. She looked young. Her eyebrows had grown back in and on top of her head soft reddish peach fuzz had filled in where she had lost her hair from hibernation. Her face was long and thin, with a strong determined jaw. Tommy mused, she couldn’t have been over one and a half meters tall. She didn’t fit the “classic” beauty of entertainment vids. She had a real beauty that struck Tommy oddly. He didn’t know why she still felt familiar.
Tommy glided under low G to the side of Agnes’ bed. As he reached out and touched the skin of her leg, he noticed her warmth and softness. His face grew red and perspiration formed on his forehead.
Tommy shook himself doing that mental flip he needed to get a job done. He did this when he had to clean up a mess in one of the bays or his bathroom. Still as he gently placed Agnes into the jumpsuit one leg at a time, he thought how like a newborn baby. Agnes was helpless and Tommy understood his responsibility to bring her back into the universe as gently as possible. Next came her arms. The first was no problem, but her elbow got stuck in the second sleeve. An awkward moment occurred when she moved and rolled over onto that arm. Tommy had to pull that arm out and thread it into the sleeve again.
He was sealing the seam up the front of the jumpsuit when he glanced into her eyes. She had been awake. “Hello,” he said with a genuine smile. For a moment she smiled back and tried to respond. No sound came out. “Slowly, you’ve been through a lot. Your body is not ready.”
Alfred picked up the conversation, “Here is some water. Sip on this and go slow. Your voice will return and we’ll get you up and walking soon.” An arm of the avatar passed a sealed bottle with a straw to Tommy who took it. He raised it to Agnes’ lips. She sucked on it slowly, looking more refreshed with each sip. Soon she tried again.
“Where,” she started in a whisper that caught in her throat. She started again, “Where am I?”
“This is the Postal Service Courier Swift,” Alfred volunteered. “We are anchored to an asteroid in the Capella Star System. We’ll give you more details soon. You need to pace your recovery. Do not rush with your body or your mind.” Agnes nodded that she understood.
“I’m Tommy, and that is Alfred Ingram our AI. What is your name?” Tommy inquired.
She smiled softly saying, “Agnes.” Then she tried to lift her head.
“It’s alright. Tommy help her sit up if she thinks she can,” said Alfred, now sounding like a Med Tech again.
Tommy sat her up and turned her on the bed. He placed her feet on the floor and then sat on the wall stool across from her. He never took his eyes off of her, like she was a newborn.
“So you dressed me?” she asked, regaining more of her young voice. Her eyes continued to stare at Tommy and there was a bit of mischief in her grin. She wasn’t flirting. This woman had faced tragedy with strength and humor.
“Yes.”
“Thank you,” she replied. “I’m feeling stronger, can I stand?”
“It may be too fast, but we must gauge your progress by your own sense of what you think you can handle,” said Alfred. Agnes leaned forward as Tommy offered his arm for her support. In the lowered gravity of the ship, she got herself upright and looked around.
“Yeah, I see what you mean.” And with that Agnes sat back down. Tommy helped her lay down on the medical bed.
“Best place for you right now is here,” he told her. “We’re about to move and it may be rough.
“I’ll stay put, I promise.” She smiled as she said this; sure he got her gentle humor.
“Excuse, me” Tommy left the Med Bay, a little relieved for the cooler air in the passageway, and did a low gravity leap to the bridge. There he checked his readings and, satisfied that the ship was ready, he engaged the thrusters. Tommy knew that the drones would track this and he counted on it.
Once clear of the asteroid, Alfred tracked the three closest drones as they veered toward the Swift. A few thousand meters from the surface of the asteroid, Tommy turned the Swift around to face it. He now maneuvered to a set of coordinates that Alfred fed him through his NAV Computer. And they waited.
One feature of an A/W warp engine that made it universal to interstellar ships was its ability to gather fuel from the dust of space. Early models used large chunks of space debris as fuel for single long jumps. As the drones closed in on the Swift, Tommy allowed the large A/W engine to build up an appetite. At the moment when the three drones used the gravity of the asteroid to gain ballistic momentum on the Swift, the ship ate them.
They disappeared, drones, asteroid and ship. All gone. Only the Swift popped into existence in a direct line out of the system along the axis of the A/W drive, untraceable in deep space. The rest had become fuel for the jump. The Swift was safe, for now.
*****
Controller: The sentinel code was lost in Capella System. The ship is gone. No trace?
Sutton: Yes. We can only monitor.
Controller: Events are happening too fast. Smith, Tania needs additional access.
Sutton: I can send her to the Frontier.
Controller: Not necessary, yet. Arrangements will be made.
The Controller was gone. Sutton wondered what the Controller meant.
Tania had been putting in long days perusing the data trails of her assignment. When she logged in, blurry eyed, this morning she did not notice a difference. The amount of data was larger, but that happens. It was mid morning before she realized the time stamps could not be correct. The most recent were dated within the last day. Even a courier on a direct flight from the Capella System could not get the data packages here in less than 72 hours.
When she brought this to the admiral’s attention, Sutton acted dumbfounded as well. “Treat it as accurate.” Tania’s mouth dropped open. Sutton responded, “We’re on the cutting edge of information gathering and distilment. It shouldn’t shock you that we might get the next big thing before the rest of the Central Systems’ agencies.” Sutton lied. Tania read the admiral’s meaning as well. The real message here; don’t ask the questions, trust the data, find us answers fast.
After Tania left, Sutton sat back and wondered aloud, “What other wonders are we hiding?”
Chapter 4: Run Before You Walk
Cassie. That used to be her name. She long ago shed that aspect of her humanity when she lost so much else of it during the Wars. Now she embodied the Angel of Death.
Now she waited. She took the first step in her task. Her right hand drummed on the arm of her chair. No one saw except her. She stopped, embarrassed by the inferior trait. She placed both hands in her lap, one holding the other, and sat still until calle
d by him.
*****
The Swift hung in empty space. Motion and vacuum deceived the eye for the ship was neither still nor was space empty. While in the vast distance between stars there appeared to be nothing, space held every type of particle and element. Dust floating among the stars held everything that might be needed on a basic level if only you possessed the means to collect it and use it. The Swift did both. In space so far from nearby stars, the ship appeared motionlessness, however it moved quite fast. At sub-light speeds, the Swift collected the dust of space and stored it as energy or used it as the raw material to fabricate what it needed.
This slow cruise between stars also gave Tommy and his current crew the precious commodity of time. They needed time to build up fuel stores. They needed time to sort through the reams of data that their own probe uncovered in the Capella System. Tommy hoped they could find out why someone wanted them dead. Agnes needed time to recover and build strength after being a popsicle for sixty-three years.
It had been three days since the Swift started its slow cruise to nowhere. During that time, Alfred prescribed Agnes a series of calisthenics. She dutifully followed her prescribed regimen of pushups, pull-ups, and jumping jacks in the low gravity environment. Alfred chose each exercise to avoid Agnes having to battle her own inertia while she built up muscle. He increased gravity as she increased muscle, so she regained her full mobility under normal gravity.
Tommy and Alfred found no clues as to why they were being hunted. Alfred’s processing resources focused on repairs to the ship, monitoring Agnes, and sorting the data. He hesitated to share the anomalous code with Tommy. Even with his processor speed there was too much data to crunch and little chance to refine the search. Also, he could not decide how best to explain it to Tommy.
Evening aboard the ship, like most space habitats fell into a routine. The star scape in view outside the main port remained unchanging. Time seemed frozen. “From the data we have scrubbed out of the system net there doesn’t seem to be a trigger that initiated the attack,” Alfred said. “I don’t know where else to look.”
Tommy snapped his fingers, “Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place?” If Alfred had a face that Tommy could see, it would have looked at him like he’d grown another head. Instead Alfred imitated one of Tommy’s groans to show his understanding. Tommy continued, “We’ve assumed that the trigger was in their code. We’ve assumed that ours is clean.”
“Which it is, or I’d know it right away,” Alfred said. “After all, I am the code on this ship.”
“Not all of it. And you are not trapped in the ship’s system as code,” Tommy said. He pulled out his personal media player from a sleeve pocket. This player was a gift his father gave him when he was young. The last thing that Tommy had of his family, he kept it close. It contained a secret of Alfred’s code. His father set up the player as a storage device, with Alfred’s code stored for future upload. Tommy modified it so that Alfred lived on the device, interacted with peripheral equipment and it preserved Alfred’s original code. This created a failsafe where Tommy could not lose his companion as long as he held the media player. Tommy did not realize his media player tied into several family secrets.
“So, where do we look?”
“That is the question. Let’s retrace our steps.” Tommy began to feel like they were on the right track. “What was happening in our ship’s systems before the attack?”
Alfred began a litany, “Our navigation system was recalibrating after our last warp jump and we were preparing impulse. Two avatars were repairing a wall in bay A-5. A grilled cheese sandwich and coffee were being prepared in the galley. You never got a chance to eat it.” Tommy actually laughed at that. “Communication protocols were established with the local star system.” Alfred continued. “Standard subsystems were cycling through their regular updates and checks. The A/W drive was gathering fuel and transferring it to storage. The bio-reclamation system was converting waste into…”
“Wait,” Tommy interrupted. “Detail the Communication protocol with the local star system. Focus on data we sent. What variables change from our the PS Hub to the Cappella Star System?”
“The details of program and navigation updates,” Alfred launched into another list. “Details of maintenance logs, data transfer of cargo. The list is still long, Tommy.”
“Right, but what details change for each stop beyond the normal ship’s operations?”
“The manifest!” they both intoned together.
“And what was so unusual about our last manifest? Agnes’ casket,” Tommy continued with his reasoning.
Alfred followed Tommy’s thought. “There is nothing unusual on the manifest. Each tracking number and id code is transmitted with our data dump as we enter a star system. That data is crosschecked with their data for confirmation. The difference is that our cargo is from the Dead Letter Office and often is not in the star system’s standard database. Alfred checked for a reference to Agnes’ casket in the code we mined from their communications dump.” Moments later Alfred found it.
“Tommy, you aren’t going to like this. It’s an old code that is hidden and embedded, but it matches the casket tracking and ID codes. Somebody was looking for her. And I found a curious anomalous code before we left that did not seem to have anything to do with the attack.” Alfred finished realizing that this would be a good way to bring up the doppelganger code.
“Alfred!” Tommy rarely got angry, and never with Alfred. This was different. It didn’t take long for Alfred to recount his discovery. He explained how he used extreme data filters to comb through what their drone mined from the Capella System’s main network. It surprised Tommy that Alfred had a self-image and the way he described how he visualized data in his own virtual world. Not reporting the doppelganger sooner seemed secondary in comparison. That did not minimize the offense.
As Alfred continued, Tommy became curious about Alfred’s world. It shouldn’t have surprised him to know that Alfred processed data this way. Alfred interacted with Tommy’s world and the variety of stimuli they encountered in space and with human interactions. Alfred mastered humanity’s quirks and mixed cues. Tommy never thought about it much. Like the friend you grew up with who would always be there, Alfred had been a constant in Tommy’s life since the loss of his father. It never occurred to Tommy that Alfred possessed an inner world like everybody else. Tommy’s curiosity peeked, and he had to ask. “Alfred. What do you look like?”
“Oh. You’ve never asked. Well, refer to monitor three. I’ll show you.” Alfred brought up a rotating image of himself. It began at the face and as he rotated the image in 3D he pulled the virtual camera out to show his entire image. A familiar face, a receding hairline, strong shoulders, and gentle intelligent brown eyes looked back at Tommy from the screen. His build was slightly smaller than average. Alfred also wore his standard orange ship’s jumpsuit.
“You look like my father.” Tommy froze in his seat. He didn’t think about his father or any of his family that much. Tommy remembered losing his father as a teen. It had been the two of them since his mother left. His older siblings were lost to the distance of space soon after his birth and his mother left to find them when he was five.
“Happy birthday?” Tommy often thought when he thought about the vague memories of his mother. So, Tommy’s father, Arnold Judson, raised him. Like most young children, their parents are the biggest influence in their lives. Even as teens, they rebel against the people whom they are closest to as they build their adult identities. Tommy lost his father as he began to be molded into manhood. Arnold Judson’s disappearance led Tommy to join the war effort. Now that image hung in front of him as a painful reminder of his lost youth.
“Tommy, I am not your father,” Alfred stressed. “This personal image is a part of my core code. Your father created me with a convenient template, his own image.”
“I can see that.” Tommy realized the honesty in what Alfred said.
“This
image was a starting point. Over time as my code has been active and we’ve worked together I have evolved. Like any intelligence, my experiences have changed me. You, Tommy, have changed me.” As Tommy watched the rotating image on monitor three he noticed the differences. Alfred’s mouth held a natural grin and the crow’s feet around the eyes hinted at his sense of humor. Alfred wasn’t much older looking than Tommy. He could be an older brother. Where Alfred looked smaller than average, Tommy carried a linebacker’s physique. Tommy’s father pursued solo sports like distance running. Tommy always went out for the team sports and reveled in the camaraderie. The Wars took that from him, too. And Tommy favored the red ship’s jumpsuit.
“I’ll be okay Alfred. It will take some getting use to. Your face will be a nice addition. I don’t think about dad enough. You seem more like a brother than you did. I should have realized why your voice sounded so familiar. I took it for granted. Sorry.” Tommy confessed at length, which belied his usual brevity.
A silent moment of understanding passed between these two friends, the human and the artificial intelligence. They knew each other well enough to finish sentences, and for Tommy that said a lot, now their connection was family. And both being male, both let the moment pass without comment.
“So, the captured strand of code is secure?” Tommy asked.
“Yes, I isolated it to a single physical drive in my computer core and an avatar disconnected it. I then scrubbed through my code to make sure that what I retained did not contaminate me. And I’ve always got my origin code on your media player as the ultimate backup,” Alfred explained.
“Show me,” Tommy insisted, in his usual concise manner.
