***
Stepping onto Gemini station was nothing short of surreal. While Adam had spent every waking minute of his recent life on Draco, to see it change by such a minute degree was enough to make him pause and take notice. The colors of the walls were slightly different, given modified lighting configurations, and he could see far enough to each side to tell the inclination change in the airlocks between the ring’s pods were greater, owing to the station’s smaller size.
“I’m… I’m sorry,” Adam apologized. “It’s hard to express how strange all of this is.”
“You don’t say? You’re the one who showed up on my doorstep this morning.” She turned to face some unseen receiver. “Gemini, if there are no other surprises you’re hiding from me, please continue the day’s collection.”
“Understood, ma’am. As you wish.”
Dr. Moroder crossed her arms over her chest. “I think you have some explaining to do.”
“Agreed,” Adam said, stepping closer. “So there I was, a month into my freshman year of high school, when I woke up on a space station.”
Realization
“People don’t just wake up in space.”
“I’m telling you that they do.” Adam leaned forward on the operator’s seat in Gemini’s command center. As with the station’s other features, it had enough similarities with his home to feel familiar, but enough subtle differences to keep him off his game. “You said it yourself that I look like I’m twelve. How do you explain that?”
“I didn’t say that you look like you’re twelve. I’d give you the benefit of the doubt and say twenty,” Moroder replied.
“Then tell me I’m lying,” Adam said. “Tell me I’m full of it and that there’s a plausible way for undergrads to be pulled through flight training, flash-frozen, and shipped to the outer planets.”
“I’m not a M.D., I’m an astronomer,” Moroder corrected her guest. “There are other smart people back home who are able to figure out those sorts of things.”
Adam shrugged. “Well I wouldn’t ask your AI about this. Mine’s been pretty tight-lipped about the whole experience.”
He thought for a moment, studying the doctor’s expression. It was so strange. Her face was familiar in such an odd sense, but he let the premonition fade. If he had been good at reading people at one time, the skill had long since atrophied. “Where are you from?” he finally asked.
“On Earth?” Dr. Moroder said, as if she had never anticipated such an odd question. “Officially, Hazelton in North-Central Pennsylvania, but I pulled up most of the stakes when I stared my first graduate degree,” she replied. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason. I’m just trying to understand you a little better,” Adam said with a casual shrug. “What made you decide to switch the rural life for one in space?”
“I don’t know.” Moroder sighed and casually glanced off at the screens displaying the latest data collections. “It’s just always interested me.”
“I can understand that. It’s pretty much how I got my start, too,” Adam admitted, pulling off the serious path of questioning and letting their talk drift to the benign. She began to describe the workings of Gemini’s deep space imaging mission and Adam did the same about Draco, walking the doctor through his own assignment for as much as he feigned to understand.
She waved him off as he started to describe the opening vector calculation of the ring particles’ movement. “I’ve still got issues with the notion,” Moroder stated. “I can believe that you know your way around a theoretical station. How did you learn all of this?”
Adam shook his head. “There’s been no official mission for Draco since I woke up. It’s been under construction for years, and I’ve been studying real and theoretical operations for most of my waking hours. I’ve got a lot of time to make up for when I should have been under and force-fed all the training.”
“That still doesn’t make any sense. You weren’t in a lecture hall while preserved in the trip…” she said and continued. “You—we, were in a coma, technically dead for five years.”
“No, that’s not how we came to be orbiting Saturn.” He shook his head. “We were born here.”
“Leave me out of this,” Moroder said, waving off her guest again. “You can believe your own delusions, but I know where I came from. I asked you, and I didn’t bust my ass for a decade to be who I am today, only to be told it never happened to begin with.”
Adam saw the wall approaching. It needed to come down, so he gripped the wheel tighter and maintained the heading. “You said you were from Hazelton, right?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever go to the Jacobs Science Center?”
Moroder’s eyebrow began to rise. “Of course. Out east by the city, but it was one of my favorite places to go with the family.” She looked, away lost in a brief but peaceful flicker of nostalgia.
“Was your favorite part the giant globe that could project the whole of the planet’s weather patterns at once?”
If Moroder had appeared vexed before, her expression instantly shifted to fully-petrified. Adam at once had her full attention as her eyes flashed over and caged on him. “How did… How did you know that?”
“We’re from the same program and we share some similar base memories. The last time you left, you watched the evening star fall behind the building, didn’t you?”
The doctor fought a deep sense of unease, nearly turning green in the process. “You’re from there, too, aren’t you? And now you’re just screwing with me, right? If you were from the area, you’d have gone to the same places and know similar things. The GlobeWeather project was there for years, so that’d be an easy guess for you to make, and any doof with a brain can read a sky map.”
The grit between the bricks was visible, and Adam clenched his teeth in his mind as he waited for the impact. “True, but did you ever watch the Perseids?”
“The meteor shower?” Moroder looked taken aback. “Of course. It came around every year and was easy enough to see once you got out into farm country. It was about the most interesting thing that ever passed through town out there.”
“Tell me about going to see it.” Adam leaned forward with a gentle smile.
“A friend of mine lived on a family homestead out away from town,” Moroder said, her eyes growing damp at the thought. “I’d spend time out there when I got the chance all through school. He was a great guy until he died in a car crash our sophomore year. I never heard from his parents after that. I think they were just too traumatized to talk to any of his friends again. There was a big stonewall back away from the house on the crest of a hill that gave a spectacular view…”
“Let me guess,” Adam interrupted, “him and his friends had built up the center with more rocks to create their own private citadel and blast each other with paint guns on the weekends. There was one massive rock on top of the wall that was the perfect bench to watch the shower rise above the tall cluster of trees at the base of the hill, am I right? The first time he brought you out to see it, you nearly twisted your ankle in the dark, but you fell in love with the sight and spent the whole evening wrapped up in each other.”
The hit was dead-on-accurate, delivering a crushing blow to its victim, enough to puncture a lifetime of satisfied delusion. Dr. Moroder looked literally green and sick to her stomach as Adam continued. “We share memories. Memories of someone else. I sat next to you that night. Your friend was a useful addition to your memory, enough to drive you to become who you are today.”
Moroder’s body shivered and fear crept into her voice. “Why… how…” she stammered. “Why did you tell me this?”
Adam sighed, realizing he’d been holding his breath. “Because I can’t lie to you.”
She didn’t avert her gaze from Adam’s eyes, but picked up her voice. “Gemini, is what he saying true?” she asked the same question Adam had demanded so long ago. “Gemini, answer me!”
This time, there was no ethereal voice to g
uide her along. For once, its soft touch was absent or unwilling to present itself as an authority to their discussion.
“If it doesn’t respond for hours, it’s waiting for guidance from Earth,” Adam said, assuming the default programming of the system. “It’s balancing the need to preserve your mission with the ways in which it needs to distort the truth.”
“Get out.”
“Excuse me?” Adam asked, taken aback by the statement.
“Get. Out. Now,” she growled. “I don’t want to see you here on my station!” Moroder’s vocal intensity gained with each word.
Adam got up, stepping carefully back from his host, arms raised as if to protect himself from some unknown onslaught. “Stop. There’s no reason to lose your mind.”
“No, get off my station.” Moroder closed in on the boy.
Continuing the debate through every step of the retreat, Adam backtracked to the hatch of the lander. “Look, the truth doesn’t cost us our humanity. It doesn’t change who we are or what we will become. It just changes the way we got here.”
“Shut it.”
Adam’s voice ran silent as Gemini powered on the articulated hatch and swung it into place, again sealing him in the diminutive space beside the lander’s flight deck. Once again, he felt himself isolated in his own private universe, locked away from the bustle of the world. He flopped into the pilot’s station with a sigh. “Well, I’m getting nowhere fast,” he muttered to himself with a shrug, for once not having Draco’s comforting voice to reassure him of his actions. He looked toward the closest blank screen as if it were a friend. “But I can’t blame her. S’not like I’d have taken the news any better.”
***
Moroder was firmly planted in the captain’s seat as she forced herself to remove the day’s excitement from her mind and focus on the equipment outside. There was no use nor solace in the exercise as the boy’s words had thoroughly perforated her mind. She pulled her legs to the seat, gripping her knees against her chest as she fought to ignore the inevitable consequences of the new truth.
She was still human, right? Whatever that meant? Her mind had not lost its sharpness in the revelation as she yet retained the knowledge that had carried her through the mission so far. Why did he have to say it?
Wracking her brain, she fought through the spider webs of memory and time to dig up the fall night under the meteor shower. The friend from her childhood… He and Adam did bear a passing resemblance, but it must have been a coincidence; there was simply no other way to explain away such an occurrence. It could have even been the years of separation between them, as through his loss she had never seen him grow up and the full decade of learning and spaceflight could have played its share of tricks on her mind.
Earlier in her studies, she had taken a passing interest in philosophy, ethics, and studies of a few world religions. After all, the sciences had prepared her very well to answer the questions behind how the universe had come into existence but did nothing to answer ‘why?’ Although the specific knowledge of the classes had long since atrophied, there was nothing she could remember that dealt with the concept of morality when it came to artificial humans, much less the sticky realization you might have just woken up to the understanding that you were one. Most research back on Earth had steered clear of the quandary altogether, with most labs content with producing artificial tissues from existing genomes without the possibility of creating conscious life.
Her base-level denial came from that sudden reconsideration of her early years. Even if it all was internal to her mind, it was as real as Gemini Station itself. The two worlds felt equivalent, and she was not about to question the humanity of someone who had striven hard through life, even if the subject was her person. Regardless, and through her faults and failures, Moroder had known she was alive and couldn’t logically change that memory.
The scar.
Her first year in college, Moroder had lost her footing trying to run between buildings during a growing ice storm. She had made it to the last step before the coefficient of static friction gave up and sent her sprawling into the aging wood post to her left. She had gotten to her feet, unable to sense the broken skin in subzero temperatures, and had calmly proceeded to the next class. It was minutes later that the girl who sat beside her made the keen observation that she was dripping blood to the point of it pooling on the floor. A trip to the infirmary and a few stitches later, she’d had the eight-inch gash in the outside of her leg sealed back up and went on with her life. The dim outline and indent of the blow had stayed with her ever since.
She turned about and pulled the leg up of her flight suit. Throughout her time on the station, she had never thought to look. Her shin was… clean. At the sight, Moroder checked her right side, as if to double-check a faulty memory, but found it flawless as well. There was no sense in fighting what she could so clearly see with her eyes. She hated to admit it, and as much as her spirit screamed to remain in denial, the boy appeared to be right about her, maybe about everything.
Receiving the truth was evidently a hard business. For as long as she had called Gemini home, she had been integrated into the mission’s fabric, its family, if you will. The AI was her companion and Earth was within relatively easy reach, but removing the trust from that small circle of associates? None of it made sense. Somehow, that old construct she had lived by had caught fire and burned to the ground, leaving her alone and listless against the crushing burden of reality.
There was no reason to hold the boy responsible for what he had simply revealed to her. She should have been thankful, and under a hundred other scenarios, she likely would have. There was no reason to ask a computer how to be human, and Moroder knew in her heart that an apology was well in order. She gave a long sigh before forcing herself to her feet and again left the command center, this time without her ever-present pride, making the brief journey through the pods of the ring and opening the hatch in the docking bay.
She found Adam seated in the crew compartment, reading from a silver tablet. His eyes flashed up as she approached, for a second fearfully searching for clues as per her visit and evidently suspicious of the circumstance.
“I thought you wanted me gone,” he said after an uneasy pause.
“I know, but you’re right,” Moroder said. “I need to apologize. I can’t hold your best intentions against you.”
“It’s okay,” Adam replied. “I had the same reaction and blew up just like you when I pried it out of my AI back home. The truth can be like a rose.”
A thin smile flashed across Moroder’s face. “Thinking about it, no one is saved from having existential crises, whether they’re born like normal people or like us.”
“No, ma’am. We’re alive and all in this together.”
“Well, Commander Montgomery, I’m glad to have you with me on this adventure,” she said, extending a hand. “You can call me Erin.”
***
The researcher’s sudden change of heart struck Adam as he got to his feet and accepted the handshake. “Nice to meet you, again, Dr.— I mean Erin,” he said with a smile. “So, what does Gemini Station do?”
Erin laughed. “That’s a big question. Day-to-day I manage data collection of deep-space objects. We’re creating a massive catalog of imagery to ultimately create the most expansive sky map ever attempted. In the future, we’ll be using Saturn’s complete orbit to create forced perspective within the data and be able to measure distances across the universe in extremely fine detail.”
“Wow…” Adam stopped, attempting to process the scale of the operation. “No small feat. They couldn’t do it from Earth?”
“No, it’d have an insufficient parallax. Saturn’s orbit is thirty times longer than Earth’s, and if we had gone to Uranus, it’d take decades longer for a result, likely beyond the lifespan of a single researcher. I’ve still only gone through a fraction of the work that will be required to get a useful product.”
The pair talked long through the
day on the inner workings of Gemini, with the AI remaining quiet across most of the day without anything to add. Adam’s original observations were confirmed: the station was indeed much smaller than Draco, signifying a more focused mission along with a reduced crew. He wondered if Mission Control had planned for additional staff or if it was a one-person operation by design.
His skills in conversation were as rusty as an old car frame, but he came around to the idea of personal interaction. Erin was overly expressive in both her face and hands as she passionately detailed her work to map the sky and bring the civilization as a whole one step closer to the stars.
“How about you?” she finally asked. “Where does Draco fit into all of this?”
By that time, they had meandered from the docking bay and around the station to a familiar observatory with the pale-yellow mass of their guardian slowly rotating in the distance. “I don’t have a lot right now.” He sighed. “I wish I could tell you more, but it’s still under construction. We’ve got redundant stations for most of the functions, plus a pretty sizeable biological lab and mechanical support center for getting material to the moons and other outer planets.”
“You haven’t been there yourself?” Erin asked, taking her eyes away from the gently drifting sphere on the facing side of the glass, half immersed in shadow.
“I’ve sent a few probes, taken radar imagery, but that’s about it. The first time I stepped off the station was to come find you.”
Erin shook her head. “I think you could stand to take some of this a little more aggressively. I mean, come on, you’ve got the run of the place with no boundaries. Go explore! At least until the rest of your crew shows up and you have to pretend to be all proper-like.”
Adam laughed. “You’re asking for a lashing from my AI. He’s already in conniptions over me coming here.”
The idea of the risk-averse AI caught Erin as entirely expected but amusing regardless. She wondered how different the two AIs were, if they had any different core programming at all, or if they had adapted to their crews over time.
Adam's Rings Page 10
