Status Quo: The Chronicle of Jane Doe

by Chris Kuhn

  “No,” I responded, “she was online and running, but we had some trouble. Coates ran three diagnostics, but all the errors turned out to be false positives.” Abeen narrowed her eyes, then started typing again without moving or touching the tablet.

  “Odd... Maurice, can you reach out and see if Anna is talking to Pridemore?”

  Maurice was the name Abeen had given to the tablet I was holding. As absurd as it sounded, the Abanshi could mentally communicate with technology. It had always sounded like bullshit. I still didn't totally believe it - even after repeatedly seeing it happen. The Abanshi didn't have gear, they had “friends”. Thanks to my time working with Abeen, I found myself naming things and even talking to them. Abeen had approved of my behavior. She'd even informed me that I was Anna's favorite technician.

  It was the first time I'd gotten a compliment from an inanimate object.

  Maurice the tablet came back with the diagnostics. Apparently, Anna was no longer showing any errors. That was kind of good news... except it did nothing to explain what I'd seen earlier. Not good enough. I shared my thoughts with Abeen, who bobbed her head for a moment before responding.

  “We can't take Anna offline right now," she said. "Especially with the impending arrival of the VIPs. So here's the plan... You're off duty, so go get some rack time and I'll keep Anna on the monitor. We'll see if any new problems pop up. If they do, Coates will wake you up and get you back in there. Don't get too trashed on the whiskey you have under your seat.”

  I turned white as a sheet and smiled nervously. Abeen narrowed her eyes - her attempt at a smile? - then collected Maurice from my hands.

  Many of the senior officers were moving about now, talking with one another. Byers had left the stage. I wasn't sure what I'd missed while I'd been talking with Abeen. Hopefully nothing that will screw me over. It wasn't likely. I'd be staying on the ship, after all.

  Looking around the room, I caught a glimpse of Craig in his element. He was discussing procedures for our guests and asking about quarantine protocols. He was clearly excited to be part of this, and the enthusiasm on his face made me smile. For a second, I remembered why I'd slept with him.

  But only for a second.

  As the conversation wound down, Wiley made his way back to the front of the room.

  "Alright everyone," he said by way of closing, "I trust you know your jobs. We have a busy few days coming up, and even though we won't be directly engaging the Brood, we will be in an infested system, so stay alert." He glanced down at the tablet in his hand. "I do have one last note before I cut you all loose." He paused after saying it, staring at out at the now-standing crowd. Reluctantly, people sat back down.

  The holographic display behind the Captain shifted, displaying a video feed from a ship-side camera. In the distance, I made out a large freighter exiting Dakarta's atmosphere. The holographic video then froze on the ship, then zoomed in on the pixelated image.

  “The Melbourne got some glances of Free Trader ships coming and going during the evacuation," Wiley said. "They obviously couldn't engage, but they did dispatch a few fighters. It shouldn't shock anyone that these pirates are taking advantage of the situation. Any time you have a crisis, there will always be vultures looking to loot what they can get. I doubt these folks would be stupid enough to engage us, but keep an eye out. If we can disrupt their activities without compromising our mission, we will."

  Wiley swiped his had across the tablet, and the holographic display went dark.

  "Questions?" he asked, looking around the room. No one responded.

  "You're all dismissed."

  Personal Log 416: Is it really home if it's not where your heart is?

  *audible sound of ice clinking in a glass*

  A girl walked into a bar.

  She didn't order a drink. She couldn't. She was sixteen.

  She asked for water and a turkey sandwich with extra pickles, then sat in a corner and pulled out a little booklet. Her presence in the corner garnered a few curious looks, but no one approached her. The girl wasn't breaking the rules, and the bar's patrons had other things on their minds.

  The girl ate her sandwich and drank her water and read her booklet. The document was dry and technical, and until recently, the girl wouldn't have had the slightest interest in reading it.

  Now she did. Now she was obsessed.

  The document was an overview of electromagnetic field dynamics as they applied to spacecraft reactors. It was a complex subject, and well above the girl's education level, but she'd been making remarkable progress.

  She wasn't interested in all spacecraft reactors. Not even most. The only one she cared about was the Hynes-Sampson SA-312-B. She wanted to know how it worked, and specifically, how it could fail.

  The SA-312-B was the reactor that had been installed aboard a transport ship owned by Morning Star Technologies. It was the kind of reactor that had malfunctioned twelve days prior; the kind of reactor that had shot a stream of anti-helium through the port RCS coupling during atmospheric entry. In the precise moment that this had happened, the vessel had been attempting to make a course correction. The ventral RCS thrusters had been firing, both port and starboard. The port thrusters had suddenly quit, their fuel supply having been disrupted by the blown coupling. The starboard thrusters had not been affected so quickly. They'd continued to fire for two extra seconds, and the transport ship had rolled upside down. Its canopy had become the leading edge as it crashed through a wall of superheated air. The canopy was strong - incredibly strong - but it hadn't been designed for the heat. It started breaking down at the molecular level. The superheated air had made its way into the passenger compartment, raising the internal temperature by a thousand degrees.

  None of the passengers or crew had survived.

  In the end, it would be concluded that an anti-helium stream had slipped through a gap in the reactor's mag fields, a gap left by three burned-out coils. This theory would initially be rejected, even though it was correct. The probability of two coils failing at once was remote. The idea that three of them had failed- providing a sufficient gap for the anti-helium to escape - was simply absurd.

  But the coils hadn't failed simultaneously.

  Two of them had gone out independently over the previous nine months. They had never been replaced. For another company, such an oversight would have led to bankruptcy and prosecution. For Morning Star Technologies, gross technical negligence was routine - the price of doing business during wartime.

  The lawsuit went as expected. Families were compensated with big checks and public apologies. Morning Star donated money to college funds and memorial services. People were outraged, but only as long as that outrage was newsworthy.

  Most of the passengers' families got their payout. The family of the woman in seat forty-seven did not. She'd registered under a false name, and - as Morning Star would argue - they had they had no obligation to hunt down her true identity.

  The woman in seat 47 didn't normally use a fake name, but she'd been faced with extenuating circumstances. She'd had to buy two tickets instead of one, and she'd had to do it without the transaction being detected. Even at the rock-bottom prices offered by Morning Star, she'd waited and saved for many months so that no one would know she'd been hiding the money.

  In the end, she hadn't used the second ticket.

  The woman had planned to fly with her daughter, but her daughter had not come. Her daughter had refused to meet the woman at the spaceport.

  The woman had left anyway.

  She'd lifted off with three hundred other passengers, headed to a place she had never been. After hours of fitful sleep, the woman decided to send a message to her daughter. She'd told her daughter that she wasn't angry, that she understood why the girl hadn't come and that she didn't blame her for this choice. But it wouldn't matter, she'd explained. The girl could come later. She'd told her daughter about the man she'd met, the man who lived there and would help her get started. And even if the man
didn't follow through on his promises, the woman assured her daughter that she was a person of many talents and she'd find a way to do it. And when this happened, she'd send for her daughter. Her daughter could come then, and they'd live together on rolling plains of a whole new world. They'd live under the purple skies, and there would be fireplaces and wine and festivals and singing and all of the things that had been lacking before. Everything that had been missing would now be present, she'd explained to her daughter, everything imperfect would now become perfect, and the woman and her daughter would have a wonderful life together, a life free from the things that had made it not wonderful before.

  Shortly after sending that message, the woman had strapped into her seat. The ship was about to enter the atmosphere of a promising new world.

  She never made it.

  When the lawsuit was finally settled, one family was left alone in their grief. They would never even get an apology.

  Log 005: People who need other people.

  I arrived at my quarters with no recollection of having walked there.

  The cramped space was divided in half, and I had a grand total of six square meters that was actually mine. Not bothering to change, I plopped onto my under-padded bed and stared out of the tiny window.

  Windows. Bad for combat. Good for morale.

  I wondered if someone had done the math.

  I saw the Earth shining in the distance - we were approaching Arcadia Base Alpha. Earth's moon. The moon was on the other side of the ship but the Earth was clearly visible, bathing my room in a soft blue light.

  I rolled over, staring at the inside of my quarters. I looked at the bunk across from mine.

  Empty.

  My roommate was gone, and that suited my mood just fine.

  I actually got along with Alicia, but she was like a puppy on cocaine - incapable of sitting still and in constant need of affection. The downside to this was that she wanted to 'fix' my introverted tendencies by dragging me to social events. The upside was that she was never around long enough to actually do it.

  A dozen photos adorned her wall locker, and I knew they were her friends from back home. Beneath the faces, written in glittery orange marker, was each person's comm ID. On the rare occasion that Alicia was actually here, she'd be talking endlessly with people across dozens of Coalition planets. She seemed to have no shortage of fans anywhere she called, and the conversations could last for hours.

  I didn't have friends - not really - and the few people I talked to always called me. My brother, who was always finding clever new ways to avoid sobriety. Acquaintances from high school that I hadn't seen in years. An ex-boyfriend.

  My ex-boyfriend wanted war stories.

  Of course he did.

  Zack had never really liked me. He'd dumped me, then regained interest once I'd joined the Navy. Zack couldn't join the Navy. Medically unfit for service. He didn't call me out of love; he called me because I was his dealer, his source, his proxy for the life he'd imagined.

  Sometimes he was nice.

  Once or twice, he'd asked how I was holding up under the stress of combat. But that was the wrong question. He didn't get it. The tiny amount of combat I'd seen wasn't the source of my stress. During my time on the Pridemore, we'd mostly chased Free Trader pirates, done "show of force" missions, and provided humanitarian aid in the wake of Brood infestations. Not a compelling war epic, but that was beside the point.

  The idea of combat didn't scare me, probably because I was an idiot. What scared me was the universe after I got out: the allegedly safe place from which my non-existent friends would inquire about my well-being. I was terrified of fucking up, of being broke, of falling through one of life's many cracks. In the universe outside this ship (and, far too often, within it), technical competence was insufficient. Sometimes you had to make people like you.

  Combat was easier.

  A year prior, one enterprising Free Trader had actually taken a shot at us. Luck had been on its side that day. The heavy laser had hit us before we got our shields up and caused modest damage to one of the starboard power conduits. I'd been part of the damage control team, and that experience had changed my life.

  In that moment, I'd watched a thousand flavors of bullshit disappear. No one had critiqued my uniform or lectured me on professionalism. There'd been no obnoxious paperwork to fill out (although that came later). In that moment, when I'd been down there fixing the conduit, it had only mattered that I was good at my job.

  Maybe I can tell the people at home that I want to get shot at more often.

  I played with the whiskey bottle now in my room, holding it in front of my face. I'd intended to get drunk and wallow in self-pity, but that seemed like too much work.

  I set the bottle down and stared at the ceiling.

  As far as I could determine, there was about a fifty-fifty chance of my re-enlistment getting approved. Some days I was desperate for that to happen. Other days I was more ambivalent. Part of me thought that if they denied the request - thus removing my laziest career option - that I might ultimately end up in a better place.

  Maybe.

  I did have a few skills. I'd been trained as a Coalition naval reactor tech, but I could probably learn my way around any type of power plant. The real problem was paperwork. Just because you could do something didn't mean you could be legally hired to do it. Navy training didn't translate particularly well into civilian certifications. I'd need a job where they could look the other way. Somewhere far away and poorly regulated.

  The Disputed Systems sprang to mind. Asteroid mining, mineral extraction.

  Maybe I can wear a hardhat. A purple one, decorated with Alicia's orange glitter pen.

  As I was weighing the pros and cons of purple hardhats and leaving Coalition service to become a Free Trader, the door to my quarters flew open. Alicia came in, and I knew there was a problem.

  She was on the verge of tears.

  Uh-Oh.

  It was time to be a roommate. Or a friend. These were not skills I'd mastered. There were, however, some basic things that I knew I should do.

  I stood up and hugged her like I've been told good little Humans are supposed to.

  She returned the gesture eagerly, and then began sobbing into my cover-alls. Although the sobbing was bad and the hugging was good, I somehow felt like I'd caused a problem.

  "Hey," I said gently, moving strands of clumped brown hair away from her face, "what's wrong?"

  She clenched her face a little tighter, but didn't respond. I was going to have to guess. I took my best shot.

  "Was it Brian?" I asked. I knew there was a man named Brian. Brian was surely culpable.

  "No!" she said emphatically, shaking her head. She withdrew a data-tablet from her cargo pocket and shoved it at me.

  I looked at the tablet.

  It was a test of some kind. I played with the screen, trying to figure out what was going on. It didn't take long.

  She had failed the OCS pre-test.

  Alicia had wanted to be an officer. I couldn't exactly blame her. I didn't see how any sane person would find her present job – security monitor - to be fulfilling. The problem was that she couldn't be accepted into the OCS program - or even be considered, really - without passing the entrance exam.

  "What was the problem?" I asked delicately. "I mean, which subjects?"

  "It's all there," she said, throwing herself on her bunk, sobbing loudly, and facing the wall.

  I played with the pad, and felt a flicker of hope as I discovered the answer. She had struggled with the technical portions of the test.

  Reactors. Weapons. Power systems.

  "Hey," I said, kneeling next to her bunk, "can you retake this test?"

  She nodded, her head still facing away from me.

  "Good," I said. "Will you look at me for just a second?"

  She grudgingly complied.

  "I can help you with this," I said, trying not to smile at my newly discovered usefulness.


  She looked doubtful, so I scrolled to a section she'd done poorly in.

  Defensive shipboard weapons.

  "Here," I said, handing the tablet back to her, "ask me a question."

  "Okay," she sniffed, then started scrolling through the list. I presumed she was looking for the hardest question she could find. "Okay," she said again. "What is the minimum engagement range of the M676 CWIS array?"

  "Fifty meters." I replied.

  I thought Alicia would be happy to see that I was useful. Instead, she threw the tablet on the ground, sobbingly wailed, and rolled back over to face the wall.