by Devin Hanson
“Okay, uh, Adam. At the moment, we’re searching for missing personnel. Do your records have a location for them?”
“Sadly, no. The last forty-seven days are unavailable to me at the moment. I can, perhaps, offer a suggestion based on traffic frequency.”
“That would work,” Sarah said and shrugged at Pascal. “Beats searching everywhere. If our missing scientists aren’t there, we can always come back and continue our search.”
“Fine by me,” Pascal nodded.
“Doctor Chow has provided me with a list of accounted-for personnel. The missing crew are Biosystems Engineer Anthony Munda and Doctor of Linguistics Adelaide Pori. They were engaged in a liaison, and would frequent the lower levels for privacy.”
“Can you be more specific?” Sarah asked.
“The rover bay in Section 8D would be the most likely.”
“Thank you, A– Adam.”
“You’re welcome, Petty Officer Aveline.”
Sarah nodded, then frowned. “Wait, how did you know my rank, Adam?”
“Your personal computer has records that–”
“You broke into my tablet?” Sarah asked, shocked.
“My apologies. The crew would often expect me to know all the data they had entered into their systems. I assumed you would desire the same.”
“I do not desire it! Do not breach the security of USS personnel, their equipment or their data. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly, Petty Officer. Again, my apologies.”
Sarah scowled up at the speaker, her outrage slowly replaced by a sense of wonder. The AI was everything that Eckhart had promised it to be and more. The possibilities that such an AI could offer humanity were endless. Social gaffes aside, it performed flawlessly, was articulate and emoted accurately. Even as a human speech engine, it was a fabulous achievement.
“I should inform you. The bilge pumps have encountered an obstruction. My sensor equipment is damaged and I cannot evaluate or resolve the issue. Consequently, level 8 has some minor flooding still.”
“Thanks, Adam,” Pascal said. “Inform Captain Alastair of our intended destination.”
“Of course, Mr. Ordontes.” There was a pause, then Adam said, “Your captain acknowledges.”
Pascal elbowed Sarah. “Adam is great. I could get used to having it around.”
Sarah nodded. Adam was a dream come true. She followed Pascal through the station, lost in thought. It wasn’t until she was staring down the ladder to the eighth level and saw it awash in salt water that she snapped back to reality. Development of AI was illegal for a reason. Too many accidents had proven the technology was too poorly understood, computer processing power insufficient, and coding techniques inadequate to create artificial intelligence with any degree of reliability and safety.
“Go carefully down here,” she warned Pascal.
Pascal rolled his eyes and slid down the ladder. Sarah followed him down with significantly less grace. The salt water was ankle deep and had an oily sheen over the top.
“Adam,” Sarah asked, “what’s in the water?”
“The rover bay is ahead and to the left. I suspect what you are seeing is oil from the ha-a-a-a-nnnn–”
“Adam?” Sarah asked. A sudden prickle of hot sweat ran up her spine.
Whistling came from the speakers instead of Adam’s cultured voice, like drawn-out static that modulated up and down. Abruptly, the scrambled signal cut out and the lights died.
Frantic panic closed cold fingers around Sarah’s throat. Brilliant white light blazed out into the passage as Pascal activated his suit’s lights. Harsh shadows leapt into being and raced around as the big man dropped into a crouch and turned to look down the passage in both directions.
Sarah activated her own lights. With an effort, she slowed her breathing and backed up until she felt the solid mass of the bulkhead press against her spine. For a long minute, they waited. Any moment, Sarah expected the water level to start to rise and doorways to slam shut.
Nothing happened. The water lapped gently around her ankles and the oil coating coruscated in the brilliant glare of their suit lights. The silence was deafening.
Pascal straightened out of his crouch. “Huh,” he said.
Sarah’s radio crackled to life. “Report in, Chief,” the captain requested.
“We’re on the bottom level,” Pascal responded. “Power is out and Adam is dysfunctional.”
“Roger that. We have power, but the lights have been turned off. Mr. Gervais is trying to restore normal operation.”
“Is this an AI glitch, sir?” Sarah asked. “What happened with Adam?”
“Mr. Gervais thinks the last data blocks he enabled might have been corrupted. The issue with the lights might be a power-saving feature that was activated when the AI memory banks came online. It should sort itself out in a few minutes.”
“Acknowledged. We’ll carry on with our search, then,” Pascal said.
“Are you crazy?” Sarah hissed after the connection closed. “We need to turn around and get back up to the atrium!”
“Relax,” Pascal said. “A little darkness never hurt anybody.”
Sarah gritted her teeth. There were all kinds of logical flaws in that assumption, but the core of the statement held true. Pascal started moving off toward the rover bay, making ripples through the water that cast rainbow reflections onto the walls.
She splashed after Pascal before he got too far ahead. The only thing worse than going deeper into the station was being left alone.
The rover bay was a large, circular dome. The walls were lined with computers, mechanic workstations and maintenance tools. The rover hung from a gantry, manipulator arms hanging loosely about like a dead spider. In the center of the room, the floor dropped down into a circular pool, with a set of steep stairs terminating at a round hatch.
The water in the deep pool was murky and glistened with oily scum. Pascal shined his lights into it, and Sarah saw the unmistakable shape of a body at the bottom with long hair drifted in a cloud about the figure’s head. A mechanical clunking sound was coming from the depths where colorful decals pointed to the intake for the bilge pump.
“Looks like we found Adelaide Pori,” Pascal said, “and I’d put money that Anthony is clogging the bilge pump.”
“No bet, Chief,” Sarah said.
They stared into the pool for a moment, each lost in their thoughts.
“Well,” Pascal said finally, “who’s going to get in there and pull them out?”
Sarah’s stomach turned over. “Flip you for it.”
Pascal splashed over to a workbench and found a wrench that was flat with a maker’s mark stamped into the handle on one side. “Call it.”
“Marks, you go in.”
He spun the wrench into the air and it came down on the workbench with a clatter. The smooth side faced up. “Today’s my lucky day. Don’t worry, I’ll stand guard.”
Sarah looked glumly at the wrench. “Best two out of three?”
“Stop whining and get in there. The sooner you start, the sooner it will be over with.”
She couldn’t feel the water as she waded into the pool, but her imagination suggested it was just this side of freezing. The water tugged at her limbs, and she pulled a hand free. Thick slime hung from her fingers in long, clear strands. “Oh, this is disgusting,” she groaned.
“Yum. What is it?”
“Reminds me of an agar culture. It must be a bacterial bloom.”
“If it is, it’s feeding on our friend down there. Adelaide must have died weeks before the others.”
Sarah waded deeper until the thick slime closed over the top of her helmet. Nausea stirred in her throat and she swallowed. She would not throw up in her suit. Her footing was treacherous against the bottom of the pool, and she made her way slowly over to where Adelaide had come to rest. Up close, she was able to see the woman’s skin and tissue were dissolved by the bacteria, with only her jumper keeping her bones organized into
a recognizable shape.
She got a grip on the fabric and hauled upward. Brownish liquids flowed from the wrist and ankle cuffs and Adelaide’s head lolled back. The exposed flesh stripped away in the thickened water, leaving behind chunks that drifted, suspended in the slime.
Fighting the rising bile in her throat, Sarah struggled up the steps and hauled Adelaide free of the water. Once she was out of the pool, Sarah scrabbled at her helmet seals, popped her helmet free and retched. The smell hit her then, rancid death with a thick, oily undertone. She threw up again and staggered away from the pool, doubled over to her hands and knees.
She heard the tinny scratching of Pascal’s laughter coming from her helmet speakers, and she spat her mouth clean before settling her helmet back into place. Her stomach still twisted, but it was worse having to breathe the air.
“It’s a good thing the doc isn’t here. That was very disrespectful,” Pascal said. Sarah could hear the grin in his voice. “You’re not done yet, though. Poor Anthony is still down there.”
She shook her head and flipped an obscene gesture at him. “I did my part. It’s your turn to go for a swim.”
“Oh, all right,” he laughed. “Since you’re being such a wuss.”
Before she could give him a piece of her mind, he jumped into the pool and sank down to the bottom. The hazy slime made it hard to see clearly, but he bent down to do something under a lip in the pool by the pump intake, stirring up clouds of brown stain in the water. There was a crunch, then the persistent mechanical clunking sound stopped and the brown stain in the pool was sucked away.
Pascal surfaced, holding a shattered femur in one hand. He waved it at her. “What’s left of Anthony. I suppose the doc will want it for a DNA match or something. There wasn’t much left of him down there, and whatever remained just got flushed out of the habitat.”
“Wonderful.” Sarah pressed her lips together and took a deep breath. With an effort, she forced her thoughts away from wondering what had happened to the two lovers and focused on the physical demands of the present. “We’ll need a bucket or something to carry Adelaide in. There’s no way we’re getting that mess up six ladders.”
The lights came back on shortly before Sarah and Pascal made it back up to the executive suites. Dr. Chow accepted the femur and the tripled-up waste bags holding Adelaide with a scowling lack of grace, and then ordered them to the showers to rinse their suits clean of the rank slime.
Sarah returned to the atrium, thankful it wasn’t her responsibility to deal with the bodies. Dr. Chow might be in a higher pay grade, but she wouldn’t have the other woman’s job for the world.
Anton was hunched over his terminal, his fingers flying on the keyboard as he spoke. His eyes seemed enormous behind his glasses, and his shoulders were rounded defensively. “There’s nothing wrong with Adam!” he protested.
Jayden Ulrich paced next to his desk, blueprints of the station unrolled on the surface. Vivian sat in a chair behind her husband, following Jayden with eyes dark with worry. Eckhart stood next to Anton, watching the engineer pace, showing a united front with the systems specialist.
“The last month of learning is corrupted,” Jayden said firmly. “You heard Adam’s speech patterns degrade.”
“It happened to us, too,” Sarah jumped in, drawing scowls from the civilians. “Adam was saying something to us, then he went all warbly and shredded apart.”
“Is that your expert analysis, Petty Officer?” Eckhart demanded. “He went all warbly?”
Sarah flushed. “I may not be an expert in artificial intelligence,” she said hotly, “but I just got back from digging one of your perfectly safe scientists out of the bilge pump.” There was shocked silence in the room. “So I don’t really care if you object to my rendition of your AI going crazy.”
“He’s not crazy,” Anton said nervously. “Adam is a language recognition construct. He is designed to learn whatever language he is exposed to and refine meaning from it. There is no way he can go crazy.”
“That didn’t sound like any language I’ve ever heard,” Jayden objected.
“It’s a common occurrence with language-learning constructs,” Eckhart said smoothly. “Human language is very inefficient. An AI in development tends to recognize this and develop shortcuts and new ways of communicating. Adam is constantly running hundreds of thousands of simultaneous conversations with himself. In the week without human guidance, he must have generated a form of communication that is internally logical, but is incomprehensible to humans.”
“That sounds like an acceptable definition of crazy to me,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “But I’m not the expert.” She stretched and felt the stiff vertebrae in her back pop. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve been up for around twenty hours now. Sleep and a fresh perspective might do everyone some good.”
Vivian nodded eagerly and laid a hand on her husband’s shoulder. “I’m exhausted,” she agreed. “Adam seems to be functional now, even if he isn’t speaking. It’s probably just a setting somewhere. We’ll figure it out in the morning.”
Jayden scowled and looked betrayed, but his shoulders slumped in weary capitulation. “You’re right. Thank you, Sarah. We’re all tired.”
Sleep came easily to Sarah, but it wasn’t peaceful. Nightmares haunted her dreams. Endless tunnels filled with murky slime, with skeletal hands dragging at her heels. Then it was Adelaide floating in the pool again, but with Sarah’s face, beckoning her closer to whisper a devastating secret.
Sarah snapped awake, her heart pounding and a strangled shout on her lips. The atrium lights were dimmed. By unspoken agreement, nobody wanted it to be dark again. Everyone was still sleeping, so her cry of horror didn’t seem to have made it past her lips.
Moving slowly so she didn’t make a lot of noise, Sarah pushed herself to her feet. Sleeping in the USS suits was uncomfortable. She itched in places she hadn’t been able to reach properly since disembarking from the Carbuncle, and she was sore from where the suit had dug into her side while she was sleeping. Still, there was peace of mind knowing she wouldn’t have to try to climb into her suit with the water level rising.
The open void outside the windows drew her and she stood, looking down into the endless deep, her mind limping through echoes of the nightmare.
Never had she felt so far from home. Unlike the oceans of Earth, there was no movement under Enceladus’ ice shelf. There were no currents, no fish, no waving seaweed, and no dappled light from the surface shining through. The only sign of life was that brown scum that grew on the outside of the windows.
Thinking of the bacterial blooms brought her thoughts back to dragging the remains of Adelaide from the pool. She shuddered and turned her head to the side. Movement caught her eye and she snapped her head around, her heart in her throat. There was nothing there.
Sarah grinned uneasily. Great. Now she was starting to hallucinate. All there was to see were the bacteria coating the window. She looked closer at the brown bloom, comparing it to what had been in the pool. It was quite different, now that she examined it.
Movement drew her eye again, and this time she was looking directly at it. A section of the bloom was scraped away from the glass, and something ephemeral shifted outside the window.
Sarah felt her mind go blank and a great, sweeping wave of astonishment crashed over her. Her eyes were playing tricks on her. She stared, unable to think, unable to act, every fiber of her being straining to see a repeat of the motion.
It came again, something so transparent that her eyes couldn’t isolate it from the water around it. When it moved, it looked like nothing more than a distortion caused by heat; it scraped the glass and vanished. Except, now that she was looking for it, she saw the faint brown smudge of the bacterial bloom suspended in the water column.
It was alien life! What else could it be? Sarah fumbled at her suit controls and activated the camera. Moving slowly, she approached the window and stood motionless, her camera reco
rding. After a long moment, the motion repeated itself and scraped another foot of glass clean.
Sarah watched in fascination as the creature continued to eat the bacterial bloom. As it cleaned the section of glass, she was able to discern its form more clearly. Perhaps four feet long and two or three feet across, the shape of the alien was amorphous, constantly shifting and sliding about. It would flatten itself out and cup the glass, creating suction that gave it enough leverage to scrape another swath of bacteria clean.
As she watched, the alien grew darker in color until it was clearly visible. Then, without warning, it drifted away from the glass and pulsed back into the deep. Sarah recorded the jellyfish-like movement until it dwindled away out of sight. Only then did she go to wake the captain.
When the others were woken, they greeted Sarah’s news predictably.
“Impossible,” Eckhart scoffed. “There’s no life on Enceladus. Believe me, we’ve searched. We’ve run every test our scientists could think of, and not so much as a trace of biological byproducts were found.”
“I saw it,” Sarah said, “with my own eyes.” She watched Eckhart closely, letting his protests grow more and more elaborate. Then, when she felt he was sufficiently deep in his own hole, she said quietly, cutting him off mid-sentence, “I have video, too.”
That produced an almost tomb-like silence as everyone stared at her. She hadn’t shown the video to anyone yet, only watched it through once to verify that it had captured clear footage of the alien. There was a bustle as a converter was found to hook Sarah’s suit up to a monitor, and then she held Eckhart’s eyes and hit play.
It was a treat, watching the man gape at the screen like a gaffed fish. The alien cleaned the section of glass and vanished into the depths. The whole thing took maybe three minutes from beginning to end. After the video came to a close, everyone remained staring at the screen with different degrees of shock on their faces.
Dr. Chow spoke first. “This… this is the find of the century! Of the millennium!”
“Let’s not be hasty,” Eckhart said hastily. “Essence Microsystems–”
