by Peter Riva
Shaking her head, she urged me to sit up, swing my legs over the edge of the bed and try and stand. “You’ll need to visit the lav.” It wasn’t easy, I felt queasy again, but I kept going, with her help, and slowly eased myself to land my feet on the ground. I could feel a humming beneath my feet. It was then I noticed that the room was not square. It was nearly square, but it didn’t have a right angle anywhere. Poured plastic, that’s what it looked like.
“Where am I?”
The door slid open giving me a glimpse of hospital beds beyond, dozens of people milling about, all dressed the same, many different races, and even a dog with a white vest was sitting attentively looking in at me. The people wore white tunics, baggy white trousers, yellow shoes. Everyone I could see had short-cropped hair, neatly pulled back. Some had headscarves. Others had green necklaces or brightly colored triangles on their sleeves. The door slid shut behind a smiling Aten, young and beautiful. “Simon, my, you are making progress! Up already! Bravo.” Her happiness was infectious, I smiled back. “You ready Simon? I know you want to know all, but we’re only going to let you know a secret a day, help you ease into your new life. Okay?”
I nodded and pointed at the bathroom across the room. Aten took one arm, the nurse the other and I made my way across the floor, haltingly, until I reached the sink and stared into the mirror above. It was me, a ten-year-old me, as I remembered. DNA coding was powerful stuff. I turned to Aten, “How’s my memory?”
“How do you think? Anything you almost can’t remember?”
“You mean besides the past ten years?” I stopped. What was the last thing I remembered from my life? Or a first memory? “I went to sleep in my ET bedroom saying something really dumb as last words. Going back in time, I remember my dad when I was a kid about this age. And I remember Angie, dear Angie. Did they make the ingot?”
“Okay, here’s your secret quota for today, but first, you need to use the toilet?” I nodded.
When they got me back to bed, all tucked up, Aten began, “Simon, Angie is with us, she is the skin of Earth One that you are traveling in. The crew has nicknamed the ship Infinity Beyond, and you know where they got that from! Your vid record that everyone has had access to. Your grousing over the name became quite the talking point after launch when Cramer’s father christened the ship. This ship and colony are following your philosophy, share everything, no petty secrets, no holding back, share and share alike. We offer everything out in the open, on the Path.”
“How long have we been traveling?”
“Now I said only one, but you seem to be doing better than I was! So, okay, one more bit of information. On this leg? Six years, four days and a few hours.”
Something was different from when she was Ra. “A few Aten? A few?”
“Well, being human means I don’t need to tell you every detail anymore, this brain doesn’t work that way automatically anyway. Six hours, forty-two minutes, and twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four—you get the idea—seconds.” And she laughed.
“Aten, I need to know something important before I fall asleep here. I’m already exhausted. Are you well, are you still … well … still my same companion on the Path?”
Aten waved the nurse from the room. She sat on the bed, took my hand in hers, and looked me in the eyes, “Simon, old friend, only to you would I explain. I am Peter, I am Apollo, I am then Ra, and now I am Aten. All the same. My name changed to suit my form, nothing more. People were worried I would be schizophrenic, but it is impossible. How can I be when it is only a name? I am me, just as you are you.” She bowed her head.
“Ah, head bowing, denoting subservience, friendliness, amicable manners, silly bending over posture.” I smiled. It was my little test, reminding Aten of the first time Ra and Apollo were introduced to Cramer.
“Silly human,” Aten said grinning, and then she smacked my arm. “Always wanted to do that when you got silly.” And she jumped down off the bed and ran for the door. Stopping, she turned and said, “It’s night now, drink that juice by the bed, we’ll wake you for breakfast in four hours.” Flipping off the lights as she left the room, I heard her chuckling as the door closed. The dog was waiting for her.
6
THE TERROR OF WAKING
As is usual with me, I had made assumptions and asked all the wrong questions. But then the ever-smart Aten knew I would and let me goof away from the truth. When I first woke, I had wanted to know about me, how old I was, how old she was, if everything was okay. What I should have asked was simpler: Where the hell were we and how long had we been traveling?
Aten, standing next to my bed a day later, laughed when I finally asked her. She replied, “Good to see the Simon of old coming back to us. Okay, ready, all in a rush? One, we’re about six months away from the exoplanet we’ve identified as habitable, the one named Angelica after your Angie. Two, I am on my sixth rebirth cycle …” She saw my look of concern, “Relax, every one passes at night, I awake the same person in the morning, clock set back at minus eighteen years. My body, thankfully, remains healthy and the same, some changes, but nothing I can’t cope with.” She stood and then spun around, arms outflung. “Quite pretty, don’t you think?” I nodded, tried not to drool. I always had a serious imaginary lust for Meg Ryan. I tried to remind myself that looks are not what’s inside. Male libido is always a headache.
Aten continued, guessing my thoughts, “Keep those thoughts pure, will you old friend?” I nodded again, feeling stupid. “Anyway, I’m spoken for. As soon as we make landfall, I am planning to have a baby.” She expected me to be shocked.
I wasn’t. “I knew you would. Nature always wins out over nurture—or especially Cramer’s plans. Cramer’s sperm I presume?”
Aten turned her face from me, reached the window blind control, clicked it open, blanking out the hospital nurses’ station view. She paused, looking worried. “Well, no. It is Cramer himself I am hoping to make a baby with. Nothing frozen to use.” Her face was implacable, determined. “And even if he’s not doing as well as you … he’s still comatose … I’ll find a way.” I took her hand as she shrugged and continued, “Doctors have little hope, but as long as he’s breathing and there is brain function, I keep hoping.”
Cramer and Aten? I shook my head. I had warned Cramer that he didn’t know what he was unleashing, but he’s not one to listen.
Wait a minute!
“Why is Cramer along on the ship? Who’s taking care of the SynthKids and your brothers and sisters coming out of System?”
For the next hour or more, Aten explained it all to me breaking her rule of one secret a day. It was clear she needed someone to confide in. Sharing experiences and facts, relating openly to others was not the same as sharing with someone who both knew and loved you. Sitting there in the hospital room, the decorative lighting patterns on the ceiling causing ripples of shadows across our faces, Aten recounted the past hundred and eight years since I was replanted. That’s the term they were using now, no longer a jump. I guess it is like a transplant in a greenhouse; replanting sounded more reliable. The only problems were with humans into SynthKids. I was the first, following lessons learned from cramming the huge intellect of Ra into Aten.
Cramer was second.
Cramer, an almost invincible person, had an accident that left him crippled, dying, unable to fend for himself. He explained to Apollo that he was not going to become a mental vegetable, so he dosed himself and started the process without anyone else’s consent or approval. Apollo had no recourse except to complete the replanting or else Cramer was dead anyway. Typical Ralph Cramer, headstrong to the end, or the beginning. But his transfer had not gone so well. They had used his DNA for the SynthKid, but they had to freeze Cramer for the four months while the embryo developed, ready for the replanting. Those four months degraded his brain signal strength and he never regained consciousness.
Once human, Aten had been immediately chosen as the interstellar crew-leading member, they needed her. Apollo had origi
nally been slated to go, leaving Ra behind, but once Aten was well and capable, it made more sense to have a human leading the away crew on Earth One. Aten explained it the logical way, “Apollo stayed behind Simon, he had to.”
I have to admit that, at hearing that news, my heart sank. My old friend Apollo was lost to me. Having Ra, sorry Aten, here was a blessing, but Apollo was like a son to me, as Peter had been. I felt mournful.
Aten would have none of it. “Simon, there is so much to do, so many adventures waiting, you really need to think ahead, not dwell on the past.” She went on, infected by the journey even after more than 100 years as if they left yesterday or were arriving tomorrow.
She explained that the hope was that, with the now legendary Simon along who surely would recover (I was glad they had been sure), humankind could find a solid re-beginning on Angelica. “And we have a great crew Simon. I’ll tell you all about them later. There is no one you know from before, but they really are tops, some are crew born on board, most are simply regenerated to extend their age. Everyone is celebrating your return now, feeling less worried about landfall.”
Then her mood turned sad again and Aten talked about Cramer. She felt responsible for not being there to help in his planting. Although he was technically alive and medically doing fine now finally out of hibernation, his prognosis was not favorable. He was in the room next to mine, breathing on his own, but showing no signs of waking up. I asked, “How long was I like that before I came to?”
“After hibernation? When your Glasgow index got to two, we took you out, and then you went to three pretty quickly. It took another two weeks ‘til you woke, already at nine, then you went to sleep for another week and really frightened us. Cramer’s been four weeks at two to three already, we keep hoping.”
I am a little ashamed to say my first thought was that I had beaten him, could tease him later. Then I thought, there might not be a later, and here I was sitting with Aten, who was clearly in love with Cramer and expecting him to father a baby. So I changed the subject.
For a while, we talked about the ship. I’d seen the plans, of course, but in the end, they redrew them and built a different type of ship. “The engines I designed relied on taking the free matter, so-called dark matter, relying on ample baryonic and axion particles, floating among the planets and stars, and using that as fuel for the reactors, but the limitation, given the need to keep the ship spinning for gravity, was that navigation became sketchy for instrumentation and, what’s worse, my engines, pushing from behind, would need servicing every year or so. The most modern studies showed that dark matter is not baryonic at all, but that it is made up of mainly axions, weakly interacting massive particles. Perfect for my engines. Such dark matter being so small would not clog them up, but anything released from the ship, including ionized fine dust, could find their way into the nacelles or worse clog the radiation infusers. To solve the problem, we simply remade the whole ship, back to front. It was Cramer’s idea when he made Angie into a titanium-beryllium skin ingot. That gave us the concept and the engineers agreed. If we put the engines way out in front, in clean space, the super skin of Angie’s alloy would be more than strong enough to protect us from any engine ion discharge. And, in addition, by ionizing the skin of the ship, the skin becomes a negatively charged surface, repelling any small debris or gravel sized asteroids that get past my engines. So far, it has worked brilliantly. The two engines are almost a half kilometer out front with graphene tethers, the brutes are larger, much wider, of course, to catch all the matter, dark or otherwise, that they can convert into thrust, and we are being towed to Angelica. “Just so you know, we are still thrusting, almost eighty percent of the speed of light now. The pilot’s bridge is the tether point and does not spin, but directly behind is the swivel joint so that the crew quarters can spin to simulate gravity.
“Any day now we will have to turn the whole thing around and power up backward to try and slow down. I’m a bit worried about that, in case the engines cannot be restarted, certainly there will be the question of moving backward and trying to find enough dark matter for them to ingest. What I’m hoping for is a really dense cloud of normal dust, perhaps from a broken up star, something we can tack in until we’re barely drifting, then we’ll calculate forward speed off Alpha Centauri B gravity wells and estimate planet fall.
“But we’re calculating different trajectories to make sure that if we can’t get the engines to work backward, we can drift to Angelica if possible.
“Apollo has been working out a possibility as well, using Alpha Centauri A’s sun’s gravity. It well may provide the braking we need if the main engines won’t re-kindle.” Aten smiled, “It’d be a shame to come all this way and miss landfall, no?”
Her optimism was wonderful. However, I was frightened. Long before the Event, I had been marooned deep in space, on that asteroid, sans ship or companions who had all died when that shard hit us. But this wasn’t just deep space, this was not any deep space I could recognize as I looked through the vid window beneath my bed, this was empty, vast nothingness space, with no hope of rescue if things went wrong.
I shook off the pessimism. This was my friend I was able to talk to, person-to-person. I owed her a show of strength, not weakness. “So, Cramer’s along for the ride as well, eh? I’ll go check on him. Any other surprises for me?”
Aten looked at her hands, folded in her lap. She signed. “Yes, sorry. As you know SynthKids age ‘til eighteen, and then stop. Okay, we’ve deactivated the self-termination, well, set it to skip that moment and restart the clock. It seems to be working for me, with no side effects, I am glad to say, but then I wasn’t out for as long as you were. My three days to your decades. We have no idea if your “switch” was damaged, if it will go to failsafe and deactivate you at eighteen or—and this may be worst of all—if you will recycle at your present age, staying ten.” She looked me in the eyes, searching for distress she may have caused. “Sorry Simon.”
I looked back into her eyes, smiled, and said, “Well, eight more years with friends and loved ones ain’t so bad if the recycling is broken. Or, for that matter, staying a kid may be fun. Don’t worry about it Aten, I’ll be fine.” I paused, and said emphatically, “So, let’s get going here, how old is Cramer?” It made her happier to talk about him, that was certain.
“I am so happy to be able to talk to you again dear Simon.” She hugged me, I hugged back. “Well, Cramer—we’re not sure, either seven or eight. His problems have been more severe, we had to put him on life-support twice. Bouncing him in and out of hibernation changes the actual life cycles.”
I slapped my hands on my thighs, “Well, time to stop sitting here and feeling useless. Take me to Cramer’s room.” Still holding on to her arm, I made my short, ten-year-old way out the door, got a round of applause from the medical staff in the adjoining room, saw that dog in the white vest watching me, tail doing a little thump, thump on the clean floor, turned right, and Aten pushed the opening mechanism pad next to the door that stated, “Cramer, Ralph: Constant Care.” I looked at Aten, smiled, and put my skinny arm around her waist. If she was in love with Cramer, she needed my support as much as Cramer needed help.
He simply looked asleep. Peaceful. Unlike Cramer. I went over and picked up his arm. A child’s arm. The exoskeleton he was wearing, pulsing his muscles, arching back muscles, twitching tens-neuro impulses to train and condition muscles and bone—all this made no sound but made Cramer appear as if he had ants in the pants.
A kid’s jibe.
Time to prod him awake, if I could. “Hey, Cramer,” I poked his rib cage, “I’m here now, where the hell are you? Got ants in your pants?”
No reaction except from Aten and the attendant nurse who both looked puzzled. I comforted Aten, explaining that even with my young voice, inside he’d know it was me, teasing, prodding him. “He doesn’t know anyone else’s voice here Aten, he’s never heard you, yet. He needs to wake up Aten, we have to stimulate him awake.” An
d so for the next days, hours at a time, I recounted everything of our adventure to him, giving him my critique of what a bully he was, how I duped him, how he really was little more than my lackey. I laughed at and, I hoped, with him. My version of the Event could hardly be interpreted as his, but it was fun as hell to be doing something while I regained my strength, did my stretches, keeping an eye for any real movement from him. I ate meals at his side, accidentally spilled my drink all over him, whistled, and sang.
Did it help? Well, it helped Aten to see her two friends conversing, even if it was a one-way conversation. However, after the second week, the medic in charge called a meeting with many people in the room and asked me to desist. He felt there was perhaps subliminal psychological damage being done with my berating, cajoling, and pressuring Cramer to wake up. He reported that Cramer was showing only minimal brain activity as I spoke to him. When I refused to stop, the doctor fetched Aten, who looked indecisive.
Aten was diplomatic, “Simon, Cramer has been under Todd’s care for decades, and he may know what’s best for Cramer.”
“Yes, that may be true,” I turned to the doctor, Todd, “Sorry doc, but if Cramer doesn’t fight, he won’t ever wake up. He had been dead once, and he didn’t know it, deep inside the System where Peter had taken him.” I looked at Aten, “Can you remember?” Aten shook her head. That was interesting, how much can she remember from early days? How mature was she when she technically killed Cramer, as that Princeton shrink evaluated? Oh yes, under five-years-old as a human behavior model showed. Okay, normal childhood memory lapse—“Aten, trust me, I won’t be harming that thick-headed guy we know. He’s tougher than anybody I know. He’s in there and doesn’t know there is a different reality, a wake-up reality.” I turned again to Todd, “Okay, I have a question doc—what happened to me the first time I woke up?”
