Inhuman Contact (Galactic Arena)

by Dan Davis

  “Where are you?” Max asked.

  “Estimated distance from ship one hundred meters. Estimated relative speed one meter per second.”

  “Navigation & Pilot Support, this is the Medical Assistant. Can you change direction of the ship?”

  “No,” she said. “I do not have knowledge to change course. I do not have authorization to change course without orders from Commander and Pilot Navigator or subordinate member of A-Crew.”

  “Can you learn how? Can you find out and then do it?” Max asked.

  “I do not understand,” Navi said.

  “Go to your computer and ask it how to change the direction of the ship toward the Propulsion Operations Assistant. To Poi.”

  Roi spoke up over comms. “Max. Learning will take too long. Velocity of Poi is too great. I have an EVA suit. I will pursue while tethered to the ship, clamp to Poi and retrieve him.”

  Max thought it was a good idea. “Proceed to airlock and prepare suit, all B-Crew attend and support immediately.”

  “Putting on the last suit took two hours,” the Communications Assistant, Cavi, stated.

  “I will do so in 25 percent of that time,” Roi said. “On my way to airlock.”

  “In thirty minutes,” Cavi said, “Poi will be approximately two thousand meters away. We do not have tether of such length.”

  “I will try anyway,” Roi said, speaking strangely, his voice louder and harsher in tone than Max had ever heard.

  “Is there any other method of pursuing B-Crew member on untethered EVA?” Max asked B-Crew.

  All were quiet for a moment.

  “The ship contains multi-purpose capsule which is to be used for short distance, short duration crewed flight outside of the ship,” Navigation & Pilot Assistant said.

  “You can operate the capsule?” Max said.

  She admitted that she could not. Roi confirmed the capsule was in storage configuration, his protocols included plans for charging and initiating the power generation and storage units. The unpacking and initiation processes would take days to complete.

  “Are you coming to get me?” Poi asked over the comms. “Maintaining visual contact with ship is growing difficult.”

  Max was unsure what to say. “We are unable to retrieve you.”

  Poi was silent. Max could almost hear him thinking over the comms system.

  “Please confirm the method by which I return to ship,” Poi said.

  A noise behind Max cause him to turn. All of B-Crew had returned to medical and were gathered around the doorway, looking in at Max. Silent, now.

  Max looked at the others but they were incapable of helping Poi. Just as Max was.

  Humans, Max knew, were capable of creative problem solving. The APs looking at him were not human. Their minds were designed from the start to be inflexible and role-specific, just as his own had. Each of them knew only how to assist a specific A-Crew member and they knew only what was required to perform that role. All extra knowledge was gleaned through direct and overheard conversations with the human crew.

  “Please confirm the method by—” Poi’s signal degraded, somehow, broke up like “—return to ship.”

  “We are unable to retrieve you, Propulsion Operations Assistant,” Max said. “You will lose consciousness from O2 deprivation in approximately twelve to eighteen minutes.”

  “Please confirm… by which… to ship.”

  “Poi, I…” Max trailed off.

  Doctor Sporing would have known what to say to his terminal patient in the same situation. Yet Max did not how to express words that would comfort Poi, or if doing so would be appropriate, or if such a thing was even possible.

  Roi’s voice rumbled in the background. “Protocol requires a minimum of one tether to be attached to the ship at all times.”

  “Perhaps Roi should have performed EVA with Poi,” Lissa stated, quietly. Roi’s face twisted into an expression suggesting extreme discomfort or pain, even though he was not experiencing any.

  The B-Crew watched Max as he watched Poi’s vital signs on the wall screen.

  “Please…” The signal was almost gone. “… ship.”

  PART 3 – SYSTEM FAILURE

  After the loss of Poi, there was only one AP on the UNOPS Ascension who was trained for EVA and engineering support. So Roi suited up and repaired the O2 leak in the hyposleep compartment then pressurized and heated the internal space so that the ship hull integrity was back to within nominal levels.

  The bodies of the A-Crew were in various states of damage. Max did not know how to dispose of them so he put them back into the hyposleep tanks. There was a protocol on what to do with a dead crewmember and even a designated morgue area with a hermetic seal between the inner and outer hulls by the biology lab. But once Max had moved two bodies into the twin body chamber units, he would still have the rest to deal with. So he remade each of the tanks as a long term storage container. Most of the synthamniotic gel had leaked away into the walls and out through the hull breach and all of the tanks had been damaged to some extent or another. But Roi assisted in making the tanks airtight once again and Max believed that decomposition of the bodies would be halted without oxygen. That was enough

  Max had no protocol to deal with the loss of Poi from B-Crew. And yet he had a palpable sense that he had failed, in some fundamental way. He was unsure what to do. All he did know was that by not forcing Poi to return to the airlock, Max had lost a member of his crew and had further endangered the Mission.

  A powerful protocol, deep rooted in him, was to apply triage to stressful situations. Whether it was the ship or the B-Crew that was his patient, the Mission was still in danger. Destination, whatever it was, was life. Anything else was death. Failure.

  He called all B-Crew together in the CIC, where the Navigation & Piloting Assistant (Navi) had reported a new problem she had defined.

  “The ship is off course,” she said.

  Max and the others understood only up to a point.

  “What does that mean?” Max asked.

  “The heading of the ship is no longer the coordinates of Destination.” She looked around the group, one at a time. She must have seen blank faces staring back at her. “If we continue as we are, without changing our course, we will miss the rendezvous with Destination by several millions of miles.”

  Max nodded, indicating to Navi that he appreciated this was a problem.

  “How do you know?” Roi said, as if he did not believe her.

  “Ship’s heading is displayed on Navigation Screens here and here. They are clear. This curving line is a graphical display of our course and this point is Destination. Before the explosion, this line intersected Destination Point. Now, it does not.”

  Max saw the numbers and graphical displays. They had no meaning for him.

  “Why is this the case?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We have not performed an engine burn or RCS adjustment for months. Ship records show no intentional course change.”

  Whenever Max lacked knowledge, he knew how to obtain further information. “Have you consulted the computer?” he asked her.

  “I am uncertain about search parameters beyond the ones I have already run,” she said. “Perhaps all of B-Crew could assist me in defining the search terms?”

  It took them a significant amount of time to work through possible solutions. They slept and ate at standard meal times, keeping to the watch system, although they gradually stopped returning to their own sleep tanks during the designated sleep time. Understanding the problem took them into learning about propulsion, materials and then to Newtonian physics and general relativity.

  These were largely beyond Max’s ability but Navi made consistent progress. Nevertheless, it was Roi who first came to an understanding, thanks to something called Newton’s Third Law. After all their scrabbling around for answers, it was extremely straightforward.

  “The explosion,” he said. “I had not considered before but the venting of
atmosphere into space pushed the ship a few seconds of arc off course. We threw mass off to one side in the initial blast, followed by asymmetrical course changes due to inconsistent mass venting for hours after that while the ship continued to rotate.”

  Navi explained it further. “After the venting atmosphere and water was stopped, the course was still set and mistake is compounded every moment, every day, every week since the accident. Our point of closest approach continues to get further from Destination Point.”

  “Now we know,” Max said. “How do we get back on course?”

  Navi could enter course corrections into the navigation computer but the calculations were usually done by the Navigation AI and authorized by the A-Crew Navigator. Neither of which were currently available.

  “If communications were online,” Cavi said. “Mission Control could perform the maneuver for us.”

  ***

  They spent weeks attempting to understand why the communications systems did not work. It seemed obvious that the answer would be that the explosion had caused the failure but it only became apparent that the damage was indeed to the hardware once they had learned about the design and operation of the transmission equipment.

  “The explosion blasted the laser communications array,” Cavi confirmed as they ate their main daily meal together in the mess compartment. “It’s the only explanation. It is so thoroughly destroyed and it happened at the same time. Therefore, one caused the other.”

  Max still found the prolonged exposure to simulated gravity thrilling. Whenever they did not have to be in the core, most of them were in the gravity ring. He felt heavy and sluggish but somehow more real than he did in the core.

  “It’s not only the optical communications that were destroyed. We have no working communications at all, is that correct?” Roi said, food tumbling from his mouth. He ate all the time now and was putting on excess adipose tissue. He had always been the biggest member of the crew, designed that way so he could work hard in the Reactor Compartment but now his abdomen had grown so large that his overalls could not contain it. Reactor left his uniform unzipped most of the time, even, on occasion wearing nothing at all. Usually, Roi’s belly was covered in food debris and his body often smelled. Roi had stopped bathing with any regularity.

  Max made a note to discuss these issues with Roi, as a medical matter. He was sure that Roi would make any conversation about his health and personal hygiene very difficult but it was Max’s duty to look after everyone who was left on the ship.

  “What are the other problems with communications?” Max asked them. “Other than damage to the optical array?”

  “The microwave radio transmitter is also damaged,” Roi said, chewing rapidly. “Is that the case?”

  “It is beyond damaged,” Navi said. “It is quite destroyed.”

  “Does the ship contain a replacement?” Max asked.

  “There are backups,” Roi said, eyes flicking to Max. “But we can’t get them to work either. It’s not just transmission, the ship’s receivers are malfunctioning. Hardware damage again. Plus the computer appears unable to encode or decode any signals. We want to interrogate the Communications AI but…” Roi shrugged. It was a remarkably human gesture that Max recognized from the A-Crew but had never noted from an AP before.

  “How close are we to fixing the problem?” Max asked.

  “I do not believe that we can fix the problem,” Navi said.

  “All problems can be fixed,” Max said but he was not sure that he believed it.

  “Grow the parts,” Lissa said, speaking softly and looking at the table.

  Max wondered whether she was ill or just defective. “That’s not possible, Lissa,” he explained as gently as he could.

  “Don’t speak to her like that,” Roi snapped. “She means printing the parts.”

  Lissa nodded, keeping her head down.

  “Does anyone know how to use any of the equipment in the workshop?” Max asked, ignoring Roi’s glare.

  “Poi did.”

  Max had a bad feeling. He did not know what it was, just that it was something bad.

  “We are cut off from Mission Control,” Navi said. “It may be years before we educate ourselves enough to be able to fix this problem. Even then, not every component can be printed or constructed, we may not have the equipment onboard to perform a repair of the systems.”

  “Well,” Max said. “Years is the one thing we have plenty of.”

  ***

  While Roi ate more than his fair share, Navi grew thin and unhealthy over the following months. She spent whole days in the CIC, teaching herself mathematics, propulsion, astral navigation to a level far above that which she had needed to assist the human pilot and the AI backup.

  “I was supposed to be a link in a chain,” she said to Max one day while she worked. “Keep the ship in line during A-Crew hyposleep. Liaison between human crew, AI crew and Mission Control. I was never designed to do this by myself, I am not capable of it, I cannot do it.”

  “When did you last eat?” Max asked her, speaking gently in the hope she would mirror and take on his projected calmness.

  She waved a hand toward the front of the ship. “I rehydrated a nutrient pouch for breakfast.”

  Her eyes were watery, red, with dark circles underneath them.

  “Navi, would you come with me to the gravity ring, please?” Max asked.

  “I’m waiting on telescope observations to get the latest triangulation results. Everything was based on receiving signal beacon data, Max. We can’t initiate the correction burn without being certain, absolutely certain and if I am wrong by even a second we could miss Destination. I could even make things worse, very easily.”

  Max floated over to her. “If you’re waiting on results to be processed, you can come and eat lunch with me.”

  She eyed him for a few seconds. “I have to get back here by sixteen hundred.”

  Navi seemed to be suffering when they sat in the mess compartment in the gravity ring. They all needed periodic time in it as well as in their own sleep tanks and exercising. Navi had been doing very little of either and she was thin, losing muscle mass. Max pushed more food into her. He could inject her with vitamins and minerals but she required calories, essential fatty acids and protein.

  “Are you enjoying that?” he asked her as she spooned up a bowl of porridge.

  She shrugged. “It is necessary.”

  “It is,” Max said. “But also an enjoyable experience in itself, perhaps?”

  Navi appeared somewhat confused. “I suppose so.”

  “I’ve been thinking that we need structure, as we had before. We are drifting. The crew, I mean. We should reinstate the two watches over the twenty-four hours of the ship. Without structure, we are no longer working as a crew and no longer looking after our own health.”

  “I agree.”

  “We are all growing into individuals,” Max said, watching her closely.

  She spooned porridge into her mouth.

  “You see, before the accident, we were each of us periodically treated in order to stop the natural development of our brains,” Max said. “During our medical appointments with Doctor Spring.”

  Navi frowned. “You want to treat our brains again?”

  “No, no. Well, I have been treating myself with certain compounds I believe are helping my brain to develop and I would like to do the same to the rest of the crew. Including you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think it will make us more like we are supposed to be,” Max said.

  Navi did not appear to understand.

  “You see, we were being kept artificially broken and I wish us to be whole, like humans are.”

  She nodded slowly, still unsure. “To what end? What is the purpose?”

  “I have been watching archive video, recorded on Earth. There are instructional videos. Not VR, unfortunately, but animated, two-dimensional images with audio that demonstrate how to perform certain pr
ocedures that I have been applying to Doctor Sporing’s burns and brain damage. I found them completely fascinating and I have spent so much of the last few months watching video of all kinds. Social interactions, normal life of humans on Earth. We are Artificial Persons. We were not born but grown, in tanks but genetically we are human. In all ways, other than the arbitrary lines they draw around us so they can use us in the way that they do. Unless they actively restrict our development then our brains grow into themselves, to one extent or another. We are becoming all that we can be. We are fulfilling our potential.”

  He had lost her completely so he tried another tack. “If you come to see me once per day, at the end of your watch, I will help you to think clearer, more creatively. It will help us reach Destination. Help us complete Mission.”

  “Ah,” she said, smiling. “That’s good.”

  “And after each session,” Max said, “we will come here to eat dinner together.”

  ***

  “Roi?” Max shouted into the darkness of the noisy Reactor Compartment.

  No reply.

  Max floated his way in through the access corridor, gurgling and hissing pipes and bundles of black cables running along on all sides. It was stiflingly hot and he broke out in a sweat.

  “Roi, where are you?” Max called, guiding himself deeper into Roi’s domain.

  The Reactor Operations Specialist #I had been ignoring his internal communication system for weeks. Or perhaps had found a way to turn it off. Neither would have been surprising.

  Dragging his way into a small, cubic relay junction, Max was hit with a powerful stench. The sickly-sweet human stink of sweat and the acrid foulness urine and feces. The little room was full with empty rations packets, crumpled paper and food debris floating around in the hot, humid air currents.

  Holding his hand over his mouth and nose, Max pushed through it all to the far wall, where Roi had made a kind of nest in amongst the jumble of cables at pipework. The nest was constructed from shredded wall insulation and bedding. Half-eaten protein bars here and there, an interface screen folded away and tucked into a length of bungee cord, the transparent surface smeared with grease or something sticky. A thick pad of note paper and a pencil floated in front of Max’s face, both tethered together and to the wall.