Chris looked at Al with a questioning look on his face and replied, “Hear what? Oh,…that? What is that?”
The screaming sound approaching them became louder and louder, the corridor amplifying the sound, throwing it into circles and propelling it down the passageway, until,
“It’s a robot—look out!” Chris cried.
It was indeed a robot; small, no bigger than three feet tall, rolling on a single ball and coming full blast towards them. It seemed intent on going as fast as it could, in a forward direction: in their direction. Right down the middle of the corridor. Quickly, they both stepped away from the center and moved to the sides of the passageway.
Al realized that if the robot hit the door, as fast as it was going, it could damage the door and possibly make it unusable. They might lose the use of the one reliable lift to the rest of the ship.
“Quick, jump over here Chris!” Al yelled. Chris leaped, and just as the robot went past them, Al braced his back against the wall, and—kicked. The little mechanical assassin ricocheted off the wall to the side of the door, and then the wall next to it, to go struggling in the opposite direction. They could hear it trying to return to its suicidal run, but it only made it ten feet or so before it started wobbling like a drunken sailor, made some slow, erratic circles, and then fell to the floor.
Chris stood there stunned, “What was that all about?”
“I have no idea.”
“How did you do that?”
“What…oh, I don’t know. It just kind of happened. I thought it might damage the door.”
“Well, it didn’t hurt the door, and you sure put the hurt to it. I think I might have to start calling you Al the robot killer. Ha—you are the robot killer that killed a killer robot.”
Al didn’t find it quite as funny as Chris apparently did.
They walked over to get a closer look at this crazy little machine and after a short inspection, they determined it had to be one of the service robots.
“It was probably designed to clean and maintain the ring,” suggested Al.
Maybe half as wide as it was tall, it was cylindrical and moved about on a basketball sized sphere with a rough surface that protruded from the bottom. Three little extendable arms, evenly spaced around his body, were equipped with various tools and pincers that lay crumpled against its body. Painted on his midsection was a faded number nine.
The poor thing was not ‘dead’, but it was banged up pretty good. Al became aware of a muffled whisper coming from a speaker simulating a mouth, so he knelt down and heard…sorry, repeated over and over. He told Chris to bend down and listen so they could both wonder why this robot would attack them and then be sorry for it.
They left the broken robot, picked up the manual and their list they had dropped during the rampage, and rode the lift up to the hub. From there, they made their way to the hiber-pod bay.
The robot episode they left behind, to be replaced by the problem at hand. How to wake someone safely from a very long sleep.
After a thorough search, there was only one hiber-pod technician with all green lights from the list of twelve. All but one had the troubling red light under the door to the control panel. The lucky person’s name was Anastasia Kossalowski.
“She’s young,” Al said to Chris.
“And she’s cute,” Chris said with a grin.
“Yeah, but can she help us?”
“The list says she is a hiber-pod technician. She’s the only one with all green lights and our only real chance. We have to wake her up,” Chris pointed out.
Al reluctantly agreed.
The standard restoration procedure was not all that difficult if you knew a few things. Once activated, most of the revival procedure was automatically performed by the pod. A person just had to know which buttons to press, when to push those buttons, and how to set the timer.
They worked together, Al pressing the buttons and Chris double-checking him with the manual. When it came to setting the timer, they discussed it and decided to use the recommended six hour time table for maximum safety. To set the timer for less naturally raised the risk of something going wrong. They had plenty of time.
When Al pressed the last button, a timer came on set for six hours and steadily began counting down. The glow brightened inside the pod, making the girl’s face look all the more angelic as the light shot from the window over her features, and reflected off the backs of the pods before her. Deep inside the unit a muffled, steady, ticking began.
They decided to leave her for an hour. The risk was very low in the beginning, so they ran back to their quarters, cleaned up, grabbed a little something to eat and drink, and ran back. Passing the place where the robot attacked them, they noticed the strange mechanical creature missing, with no sign of it having been there—except the dent beside the door. Chris grabbed a blanket and a bottle of water for the girl in the pod, and Al grabbed some clothes for her, water for them, and some food packs. They went back to get comfortable and wait for her to wake up from her long slumber.
While they waited, they talked. Chris did most of the talking, and Al mostly listened.
“How old do you think she is?”
“About your age?”
“Yeah, she looks about eighteen…maybe nineteen. Does she look old enough to be a technician? What if she can’t do it…wake up my mother?”
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
“You will like my mother; everybody likes her. She’s a great engineer; very busy, though. My dad cried when we left, first time I’d ever seen that. I’m gonna miss him. Should we check the pod again?”
“If you want, I just checked it, though.”
“Any idea why that crazy robot acted like that? It could have killed us.”
“It was crazy, wasn’t it” Al replied.
Chris was nervous and rattling on, “Where do you think we are?”
Al chuckled, “We could be anywhere. But we know we are in a ship, that’s a start.”
The humor went right over his head, and Chris continued, “I haven’t seen an observation area yet, have you? Maybe there’s one past the bridge door. If I had designed this ship, I would put the windows in front of the ring, so you’d have an unobstructed view of what’s in front of you. Do you think your keys would help open the bridge door?”
“I didn’t see a place for a key, but I didn’t look all that closely,” Al replied while thinking, this is going to be a long five hours.
Thirty minutes before the timer reached zero, there was the sound of a whining motor and the front of the pod slid down into the floor. The mist inside disappeared, and they got their first good look at Anastasia.
Dressed in a tight-fitting silver suit, she was so short and petite she reminded Al of a china doll—and a fragile doll at that. Her hair was short and brown, parted in the middle, and she appeared as if she’d only been sleeping a few minutes.
The timer had reduced itself to zero minus thirty seconds when she groaned, looked around, thought for a couple of seconds and said, “Where the hell am I?”
The timer clicked to zero, and an alarm went off.
****
Chris caught her as she tried to take a step out of the hiber-pod and started to fall, and laid her down on the blanket they had spread out on the floor. After a few minutes, she recovered enough to talk, but was very confused.
“This is not at all what they told me. I was supposed to wake up on a soft fluffy bed, with nice people all around me in white coats and name tags that said, Hibernation Specialist. Where are your nametags? Where are the white coats?”
Al quickly explained, “Anastasia, we couldn’t find any white coats or name tags for that matter. We are the only people awake on this ship, and something has gone terribly wrong. We need you.”
She shook her head, paused for a second and said, “Nobody calls me Anastasia. That name is way too formal and takes too long to say. Everybody calls me Ana. What is it you need me to do?”
; Al and Chris took turns filling her in on what they knew. She asked an occasional question, but for the most part, she just listened. Al told her of his experience when he woke up and his subsequent amnesia. Chris followed with his awakening, and the year he spent alone exploring the ring. They told her how they met, their discoveries since then, and explained their trepidations about waking his mother. They ended with their dealing with the kamikaze robot and then waking her.
Ana grinned and said, “I want my money back…this is not what I signed up for.” Al and Chris laughed, and it felt good. The new group of three was going to get along just fine.
Chris asked the top question on his mind, “Just how old are you?”
Ana hesitated, and it looked like she might not answer, but she did, “I just turned twenty-one before we left, why…does that matter?”
“No…no, it doesn’t matter, I was just curious. You sure don’t look that old,” stuttered Chris.
She responded, “I’m a lot older than I look. It’s been a problem most of my life.”
Later they found out she was what they called a child prodigy. She graduated high school at fourteen, college at sixteen, and was now a registered hiber-pod technician. Because of all she had accomplished, she was always touchy about her age. Ana was a china doll with brains and an attitude.
Still unsteady after her revival, they helped her over to Chris’s mother’s pod, where she inspected the control panel and told them the meaning of the worrisome light.
“It’s an indicator light that warns us she has been asleep more than the recommended lifespan of the unit. It’s a good thing you didn’t try to wake her the standard way, there are specific treatments needed, and she might not have made it.”
Ana needed rest and food, so they decided to head back to the habitat ring. One more day would make little difference to Chris’s mother, and they wanted Ana at her best when she started the procedure to wake her. One on each side, they helped her to the habitat ring.
On their way back they scrounged some clothes that were closer to her size, and as they strolled through the park, they picked some fruit from the overburdened trees to take back with them. As it turned out, she also loved apples.
Chris and Al set her up in the quarters next to theirs, where she could have some privacy, but still be close. The two men returned to their quarters and left her alone to get a shower, eat, and rest.
Three hours later, she was outside their quarters and knocking on their door.
“I’m tired of sleeping. I think I’ve had enough sleep to last the rest of my life…so isn’t there something we should be doing?”
They invited her into the room, and they took a seat at the little table. Ana said she had showered, changed into her clean coveralls, laid on the bed for two hours, and decided she couldn’t sit still any longer.
Ana told them, “We need to get some things together before we can revive your mother. She’s going to have to be moved to the medical center before she wakes up, so we’re going to need a floating stretcher. Most of the stuff we’ll need will be in the medical center. We’ll also need to prepare the recovery room.
Al nodded and said, “I’m ready if you are. Are you ready Chris?”
“I have been dreaming about this for a very long time. You better believe I am ready.”
“Let’s grab what we might need and take it with us,” suggested Al, “It may be a while before we get back here.”
They didn’t have a lot to pack, so it wasn’t long before they were on their way to the hiber-pod bay. Ana liked flying almost as much as Chris, and she was pretty good. But they had little time to play, so they moved on.
The lights came on as soon as they entered the recovery room in the medical center.
Chris looked around and told Ana, “We’ve been all over this place. There is not much here.”
She smiled and tapped her foot on the floor, “Most of the good stuff is under here.”
Ana was right, there were tiny recessed handles for the floor panels, and underneath was the real inventory of the medical center. The storage space below was more than adequate, with a place for everything.
“They did that because it was the safest place to store things for the long journey. Once we got to Avalon, we could unpack it all and be ready for patients in about a day.”
Chris admitted, “Actually, it’s kind of smart storing everything underneath. I sure never thought of it.”
“There are all kinds of things under these floors. You don’t waste any space in a spaceship, and it is a lot of space. When you walk into any of these modules, you only see about half of what’s there—you didn’t get the tour?” She asked.
Chris glanced at Al, and replied, “No, we missed that. Sounds like it might have been fun.”
“And very helpful,” Al added.
“Yeah, that too.”
Chapter Six
They were ready to wake Elizabeth, with everything laid out on tables by a bed in the recovery room. Within arm’s reach, was everything Ana could think of that might be needed. She had never done this before; no person on Earth had slept this long, and, therefore, there was no precedence for waking someone after the recommended length of time from a hibernation pod. She would have to count on her skill and training to pull this off.
She programmed the pod for this unusual type of revival and set the timer for eight hours.
“You mother has been asleep for a long time, and she is not young. It’s going to take a little longer to do this safely,” she explained.
They stepped back and got comfortable; settling in for the long wait. The two men were asleep within an hour, but Ana stayed awake and monitored the hiber-pod. She wasn’t sleepy anyway.
When the front of the pod slid down, thirty minutes before the timer went off, Ana told the now awake men to put Chris’s mother on the floating stretcher. They floated her to the medical center, where they moved her to the bed they had prepared.
Elizabeth looked drawn and gray as she lay before them. Ana hooked her up to the machines that would monitor her vitals and quickly administered two injections. The bed was equipped with an internal I.V. unit, which she hooked up and then opened the valves to allow the fluids she had prepared to enter her veins.
“Now we wait a little longer,” Ana said while watching Chris.
“I’ve got all my fingers crossed—that’s not bad luck…is it?” Chris grinned.
Ana said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Al laughed, and Chris tried to act embarrassed.
Elizabeth’s color improved. She started breathing more regularly and before long, she began to blink her eyes, and then finally they flew open.
She looked around, noticed Chris, and whispered in a voice he could barely hear, “Christopher, what are you doing here?”
“I’m here to welcome my mother to the waking world,” Chris declared. “Did you miss me?”
“Um…of course I did Christopher, you were in my dreams. Now, what is happening? You’re not the people who were to wake me. Is everything ok?”
Ana admonished her, “You need to rest for a little while before you talk too much.”
As she was waking up, they slowly told her their stories and, like it or not, she became the fourth member of their party; two young people, and two not so young.
Al asked if she recognized him, to which she replied, “I’m sorry…Mister Clark, but I don’t recall ever meeting you.”
She preferred to be called Liz, and like Ana hesitated to tell her age but for a different reason. She finally admitted to being forty-three.
She was tall for a woman; about five-ten and thin, with long blonde hair and confident blue eyes that reflected her professional demeanor. She was not going to be laying around for long. They stayed with her for several hours and then used the floating gurney to move her to the habitat ring. Ana relocated into a larger quarters across the hall, and Liz moved in with her. As expected, Liz was quick to recover. Within a few hour
s, she was up and helping Ana make their place more livable.
Ana wished out loud, “It sure would be nice to have some sheets and pillows, and maybe some towels.”
“Why don’t you just ask the robots? They’ll get whatever we need.”
“I don’t know how to call them with the computer terminals down.”
“We don’t need a terminal. We have three hab robots per section in this habitat ring. They are stored under the floor of the corridor when not needed—here, I’ll show you.” Liz got up and walked out to the passageway, with Ana following right behind.
On the floor in the middle of the corridor was a faint circle, with a button on the wall and a tiny Service label. Liz pushed the button, and a small lift rose up from below. They boarded the open elevator and pressed the down button.
Under the floor was a small room with three robots lined up, waiting for orders. Liz stepped in front of the first robot, which had a few small dents in its body, and said, “Robot Nine, we require sheets, light blankets, pillows, and towels for four people. Work clothes for Anastasia Kossalowski and Elizabeth Morris, and…coffee, with cream and sugar. Bring everything to Living Quarters number fourteen.”
Robot Nine acknowledged the order, boarded the lift, and within thirty seconds he disappeared with the lift. When the platform came back down, Ana and Liz returned to their quarters and resumed setting up their apartment.
Fifteen minutes later the robot returned with their bedding and towels. It was leaving their quarters and headed down the corridor for its second trip when Chris and Al opened their door and stepped out.
Al saw it first and yelled, “Hey…robot.”
The robot stopped, turned around and said, “How may I be of service?”
“Come closer,” Al ordered.
The robot beeped, and then advanced to stop in front of them.
“Didn’t the robot that went nuts have a nine on it?”
Chris replied, “Yes, it did.”
“Why did you try to kill us?” Al asked the robot.
AL CLARK (A Sci-Fi Adventure)(Book One) Page 4
