Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology

by Amy J. Murphy

  Something that wasn’t difficult to spot, though, was the warning indicator that appeared in the cockpit after flying through the section of the solar system where the asteroid belt supposedly was but that I didn’t see any actual signs of. After just over two years of flying in the shuttle, a red light flashed on the cockpit dashboard. I consulted the manual they gave me and it turned out that the light was to note a possible malfunction in the primary engine nozzle.

  A long sigh escaped from my throat and I leaned back in the cockpit chair and closed my eyes. Shabby’s repeated reminder that I was on my own came back to me. Upon knowing what the light indicated I knew exactly what I could do to fix the problem: absolutely nothing.

  I had undergone a ton of training before my departure, but I wasn’t trained on how to do a space walk. If I tried to do the same kinds of things I saw astronauts do outside of the international space station I would surely die. There’s a big difference between sitting in a shuttle in outer space and someone who actually does space walks. That’s not the type of astronaut I’ll ever be.

  All I could do was hope the light was malfunctioning. The rest of that day I told myself that the light was probably like the “Check Engine” indicator in a car. They were always breaking and tricking drivers into getting their cars worked on even when nothing was wrong. Every time I’d go check on the light, it would still be on. Nothing was noticeably wrong with the shuttle, though, and eventually I was able to ignore the warning. After all, there was nothing I could do one way or the other.

  Sometimes, when I was bored or in a sour mood I’d spend a couple minutes belittling the light.

  “You piece of crap. Not even a billionaire’s money could make you work. You’re worthless. The rest of the shuttle works, why can’t you? I dare you to actually be broken. I double dog dare you.”

  Five hundred million miles between yourself and the next closest human gives you an odd sense of humor.

  That, or I was slowly losing my mind. Both were possibilities.

  6

  Seeing Earth from space was neat but I’d seen enough movies that took place amongst the stars that I knew what to expect. Mars was fascinating and more colorful than I thought it would be, but its terrain was much like our moon’s. Jupiter, though, sweet Jupiter, was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

  The entire planet looks like a painter spilled orange, red, brown, and even hints of blue watercolors in a circle and then swirled them all together. There are no clear lines between each color, no place where you see land or water or clouds, there’s only one giant and beautiful mixture that haunts you long after you’ve seen it.

  Added to that are the sixteen official moons and dozens more unofficial moons that orbit the gas giant. Europa is the lightest of sky blues and looks like someone scribbled all over it with a red pen. Io resembles a ball of orange granite with speckles of black imperfection. Callisto looks as if the entire moon is black rock covered in molten lava. Ganymede is grey like our own moon but its texture makes it look like a black and white version of Earth rather than a lifeless, crater-ridden sphere.

  Being near Jupiter is being near the random and chaotic and diverse beauty that the solar system has to offer. Everywhere you look you’re reminded of the infinite possible differences between each object that fills the universe, and in that you remember how precarious mankind’s place in the galaxy was all along.

  A series of rare circumstances had to come together for simple life to exist and then many more unlikely factors for humans to eventually evolve from that life. Looking at it that way, it’s not the least bit surprising that something like the Great De-evolution eventually came about to signal our end. After all, the norm throughout the galaxy is the lack of life. The little we had been afforded through a series of miraculous coincidences was eventually going to return to what it had been everywhere else in the galaxy. We were fools for never appreciating that while we had the chance.

  I grew up with people speaking to their phones as if they were alive and to their GPS systems as though they were intelligent. My mother was fond of asking her phone random trivia questions that popped into her head, listening in amazement at the facts that the phone doled out in its computerized voice, then saying, “She’s so smart.” My father referred to the car’s GPS as ‘her’ and remarked on how helpful she was when she updated routes based on traffic.

  It should have come as no surprise then that a pair of software engineers at the Anderson Space Center spent much of their time programming a similar piece of software for the shuttle. The two men were known as Laurel and Hardy because of their propensity for knocking things over, breaking things, and most memorably, one time slipping on a wet floor. It soon became apparent to me that scientists and mathematicians thrived on the existence of nicknames.

  “The program will talk to you whenever you want,” Laurel had said to me.

  “You can talk to it like it’s a normal person,” Hardy said in agreement.

  That was when, I kid you not, Hardy knocked over his coffee cup and then, as he went to clean it up, knocked Laurel’s coffee cup over as well.

  Laurel took a deep breath and advised me to step away from the table until his associate was done making a mess. Then he remembered the program and, supremely happy with himself, said, “He’ll be able to hear you anywhere in the shuttle, so you always have someone there.”

  They must have noticed a look on my face that I didn’t realize I was giving, or else they had expected me to say something other than what I did, which was, “Um,” because both of them asked what was wrong.

  “I don’t think I want something listening to everything I say.”

  What I didn’t mention was, “Unless his name is Bob and he can sleep on my pillow and his warm breath would be the first thing I’d smell when I woke up.”

  The computer system they designed was none of those things, and so it never stood a chance.

  “You’re skeptical now, but you’ll grow to love ISACC,” Hardy said, his pants making a ripping noise as he bent over to clean a puddle of coffee off the floor.

  This time, I know I cringed when I asked why they had named it that.

  “Intelligent Space Accompanying Computer Companion.”

  “Um...”

  “Just try it,” Laurel said as he ignored his associate’s mess and typed some commands into the computer. “Okay, he’s active. Just talk like you would to anyone else and see how you guys get along.”

  I scratched at some invisible thing that was making my eyelid twitch. “What do you want me to say?”

  They were losing their patience. “Don’t talk to us. Talk to him. Don’t be rude.”

  But before I could say anything, I heard a robotic voice, albeit slightly less monotone than the ones my parents had liked speaking to, say, “We’re going to become good friends.” The program was smart enough to sprinkle in an inflection of humor when it added, “After all, we’re going to be spending a lot of time together.” And then, in a mock valley girl accent, “Like, a super long time, you know?”

  As I said, it didn’t stand a chance.

  The only parts of my training that I didn’t enjoy, or that I at least didn’t mind, were the few sessions I spent having to talk to ISACC at the programmers’ behest. Each of the three sessions were spent with me staring at a clock, trying to will the minutes to go by faster than they were.

  “What do you like to do in your spare time?” ISACC asked me.

  “I enjoy taking computers apart,” I said.

  “Oh,” the program replied, its software confused on whether it was supposed to sound supportive or horrified. “Oh, that’s very interesting.”

  Laurel and Hardy narrowed their eyes at me in disapproval.

  I added, “Sometimes when I get frustrated I just take a wrench and smash the closest piece of electronics I can find. Do you ever do that?”

  ISACC offered the humming sound of someone who was pondering this information very seriously, then
said, “No, I can’t say I have. Maybe we’ll get you started on some new games once we’re in space. I’m quite fond of chess. I also like to play cards.”

  “No thanks. I get the most fun from breaking computers. The louder they are, the more I like to take them apart until they stop working.”

  “Oh dear,” ISACC said.

  Laurel and Hardy stepped forward and said that was enough for one day. It didn’t matter. I knew that as soon as I was in space and watching Earth become smaller in the distance I was going to turn that dumb program off.

  Maybe if it had mentioned Risk I would have reconsidered.

  I was at Jupiter a lot longer than I was at Mars because the Legacy was programmed to enter into a partial orbit of the gas giant in order to perform a gravity assist. One of the many things I learned in school that proved to be wrong was that there’s no gravity in space. For the most part that’s true. But everywhere you go in our solar system, no matter how far away you are from the sun, its gravity is still pulling you back toward it. That’s why vessels pick up speed if they fly toward the sun and why, heading away from it, the Legacy was gradually losing velocity.

  In order to pick speed back up and to readjust the trajectory to get me near Saturn, the shuttle entered into Jupiter’s orbit for four spectacular days. Breaking back out of orbit would allow the Legacy to slingshot in a way, getting its velocity back up to 17,500 miles per hour as it continued toward the edge of our solar system again.

  The entire four days that I went around the enormous gas giant I stared at the swirls that were never ending. Being around Jupiter for a couple days, albeit in orbit from just under a million miles away, I almost got used to its size. It’s over three hundred times the size of Earth. It’s easy to say that, just like it’s easy to say there are suns in the universe that make our own sun (which is about a thousand times the size of Jupiter, making it over a million times larger than Earth) look like a tiny marble. At a certain point, though, it’s impossible for the human mind to comprehend the difference between numbers and actuality. I knew Jupiter was colossal compared to Earth but words couldn’t possibly have prepared me for its sheer enormity.

  The reality is that when you fly near Jupiter and see how large it is, you believe in things you never would have believed before. Maybe for some that might mean having some religious epiphany. For me, it meant coming to the understanding that the Great De-evolution wasn’t the end of Earth as much as it was the beginning of something else.

  Billions of people fading away over the course of a lifetime only seems cataclysmic because it’s happening to us. But the great red cyclone on Jupiter is twice the size of Earth—a storm capable of causing more damage than anything humans ever could have done—and yet it’s been going on for as long as we know and will continue to rage across Jupiter’s landscape for the foreseeable future. Its level of power and violence far surpasses one species fading away over a generation. Jupiter is a reminder that the human extinction, taking place on one tiny planet, is pretty trivial.

  7

  It took another seven years to reach Saturn. If the trip had been a straight line it wouldn’t have taken a third of the time, but after using the gravity assist from Jupiter, the Legacy’s computers had to factor in that Saturn and Jupiter, while in nearly identical elliptical orbits, were nowhere near each other in their respective positions around the sun. That meant that while the average distance between the two planets was only ninety-three million miles, I would have to travel much further to reach the next step on my way out of the solar system.

  During the seven-year stretch, I occasionally looked back at Jupiter, but mostly I gazed out at nothing but the stars. While the people on Earth were adapting to entire cities becoming ghost towns and entire countries being disbanded, they also no doubt faced familiar threats such as torrential rains, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires. In place of those things, all I had was the endless parade of dazzling stars in the distance. Millions of them all around me. Some were white dwarfs. Some were red giants. In the distance, however, they all seemed the same.

  And while the billions of people on Earth would become millions and then thousands and then dozens and then, finally, no one at all, the stars around me would always be there. An extinction is taking place on Earth but not in outer space, where millions of years go by and nothing of consequence changes. A giant sun will last for twenty million years. Our own sun will live for twenty billion years. But in the time it takes them to collapse and explode into a supernova, other stars around the universe will have replaced them.

  Of course, everything is about perspective. I could focus on a collapsing star and think about the giant celestial body that is no longer able to provide light to its own solar system. It would be quite a loss for the local band of planets and moons. Or I could realize there are billions of other stars and the absence of one is no big deal. The same goes for Earth, where one species is fading away but every other species will thrive without mankind to torment it, kill it for fun, pollute its habitat.

  From the animals’ perspectives, the Great De-evolution is anything but a disaster. It’s a new sun giving way to the possibility of life where it hadn’t previously existed.

  Of course, it’s easy for me to have these thoughts because I’m detached from what is happening back on Earth. Maybe if I saw footage of Seattle with no one around except the person filming it or Chicago with a dozen inhabitants struggling to get through the winter by themselves or the wildlife overrunning Boston I would agree that it was a tragedy. Out here, though, amongst the stars, it feels like no loss at all.

  “You’re going to freaking love Saturn,” Shabby said. He frowned then before adding, “If you make it that far.”

  Like always, everything the project team said to me combined equal parts excitement and caution.

  He went on to tell me that even more than seeing the sun up close or Jupiter or anything else in our solar system, Saturn was the one thing he would most want to see in person. The first time someone on the Legacy project shared a similar sentiment, I had asked why one of them weren’t going.

  “Too old,” most of the responses had been.

  “Travis, that rich bastard, didn’t want anyone smarter than him joining him on the trip.”

  Touché.

  A couple times a week, Shabby would sit down next to me in the cafeteria and start going on about Saturn again. It turned out that he wrote a paper about the planet all the way back when he was in second grade. Shabby was nearly twice my age, so that had been about two decades before the Great De-evolution began. The book report had grown into a love of science and astronomy and had led him to work for NASA until the Great De-evolution began, then for Travis.

  “It’s the chameleon of the solar system,” he told me. “It can range in color from being various shades of yellow, gold, or orange. Sometimes it has reds and blues. Sometimes greys. Depending on your angle, the rings around Saturn will either be invisible, making the planet look like a combination of Venus and Mars, or the rings will be vibrant and make Saturn look like nothing else in our solar system.”

  His passion for what he was doing, the way he could talk about Saturn day after day, was how I felt about Bob. I could have asked him what he would have done if he woke up one day and Saturn didn’t exist anymore. Maybe then someone would have known what I was going through. Instead, I kept silent and continued listening to him go on about what Saturn’s rings were made of.

  Laurel and Hardy spoke to me less frequently about ISACC. I think both of them got the message that I wasn’t enthusiastic about having a computer as a roommate for the rest of my life. The last time they came over to where I was sitting in the cafeteria, Laurel accidently stepped on Hardy’s untied shoelaces, sending his friend tumbling into the table next to mine. When Hardy got up his nose was bloody and he was so angry that both of his hands automatically curled into fists. He opened one fist just long enough to grab a handful of the mashed potatoes on my plate, which he
threw at Laurel’s face.

  “Guys, come on!” I said, annoyed that a portion of my lunch was flying across the room.

  The few other people in the cafeteria took pictures of the melee on their phones so they could send them to everyone else they knew. This proved two important things. The first was that scientists were no better than everyone else when it came to enjoying human misery. The second was that not even the slow extinction of mankind could make people leave me alone while I ate lunch.

  “Promise me that if you get to Saturn you’ll send a communication back to Earth with a bunch of pictures.”

  I promised Shabby that I would. And when I got to Saturn I did just that. The pictures and a brief message to accompany them were transmitted by the Legacy back toward Earth. I had no way of knowing how reliable the communication device was or if Shabby would ever see the message, but it was the least I could do for him.

  I never heard back from the Space Center, though. After years of travelling through space without knowledge of what was going on back where I had lived, I had no way of knowing if anyone was even there anymore. It was entirely possible that a wildfire had forced an evacuation of the entire facility or that the engineers and team members were all so old that they too had left to join one of the final communities.