The Triton Disaster: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  “Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow I’ll be at a conference in Los Angeles. I don’t know yet if I can contact you from there, since logging in through RB isn’t that easy. Apparently they have completely screened their network. The university administrator always groans when I have to ask him to open any special ports and close other ones. So until the day after tomorrow at the latest. Rosie.”

  She would never conclude with possessive pronouns or expressions of endearment, probably because they had not talked about their relationship since the news of the pregnancy. Apparently, Rosie was assuming that they would be parents together. But apart from that? He didn’t know, and he didn’t dare to ask for fear of hearing something that could disappoint him. He just couldn’t imagine anyone waiting for him for four years. Who was he, that such a wait would be worthwhile? Superman? Nope, he was just some asshole. Oscar had even said so. A robot!

  He brought the photos up on the screen. There was a small, gray human floating in front of him. It was almost as if Rosie’s uterus were weightless space. Their child already seemed to be taking it easy. Nick enlarged the image to try to see if he could tell whether it was a boy or a girl, but didn’t find anything. It was the same for the other images. Maybe their child didn’t want to reveal this to them yet.

  “I could examine the pictures systematically,” said Oscar. “The chances of detecting something using image recognition are—”

  “Thanks, but we want to find out for ourselves.”

  “As you wish.”

  12/3/2080, the Eve

  The radio receiver chirped and Nick was startled from a light nap. It was just noon. Rosie would never contact him so early. But the anticipated date of the birth, January 20th, was approaching daily. Was it already happening? It would be a premature birth, but the chances of the child’s survival were very, very good. Since Nick had learned that, he slept much better.

  But the message wasn’t from Rosie. This time it was CapCom on the line, who hadn’t reported for weeks. Nick had almost gotten the impression that they’d forgotten about him at RB. That didn’t seem so unlikely. There had already been several attacks on the company boss. If she were to lose her life, it was likely that hardly anyone else in the company would know what his job was or that he even existed.

  “You’ll be encountering a problem,” CapCom announced. “Our Mercury station has tracked a severe solar storm. According to our calculations, the eruption is moving right in your direction, Nick.”

  It was strange that CapCom referred only to him. For a long time now, he had considered himself and Oscar as a team. But the people on Earth wouldn’t understand, or at least would interpret it as a harmless symptom of his solitude. Oscar really was something special.

  CapCom sent a few values together with some fluctuation ranges that could be expected.

  “Fundamentally, there isn’t a lot you can do,” resumed his contact on Earth. “It will reach relatively high dose rates for a short time, but the storm is coming through very quickly. It shouldn’t affect your health. But we are worried about the electronics. A few circuits might get roasted. Everything can be replaced, but you should be prepared to make repairs quickly if necessary. CapCom out.”

  “Oscar, did you catch that?”

  “Yes. RB is pretty good at space weather forecasts since they have so many spaceships out here, so we have to take this seriously.”

  “But how? We can’t avoid the storm.”

  “The Eve has an active shield. If we provide it with more energy, it will work more efficiently.”

  “If the ship had extra energy, it would go into the shield anyway, right?”

  “Or life support.”

  “Ah, got it. You want to switch off the life support. That’s a good idea. I can stay in my spacesuit the whole time.”

  “Precisely. It will give you even more protection, too. I suppose if we do without everything except heating, we can increase the shield’s effectiveness by one-third.”

  “Okay, then let’s get started right now.”

  “How much time have we got left?” Nick asked.

  He was stepping into the lower half of his spacesuit and was already sweating. He had put on his diaper. Even so, if things took a while, it wouldn’t prevent him from having hygiene issues to deal with later.

  “We have almost an hour before the shock wave reaches us here. We’ll immediately experience peak stress, and then it will go back down. It shouldn’t take more than half an hour for everything to return to normal.”

  “I’m in my suit now,” Nick said.

  “Then I’ll go ahead and shut down the life support. Don’t worry, you have enough breathing air for a while. But I also need some time to redirect the power.”

  “I think it’s amazing how well you manage everything from the disk.”

  “I suppose it would be more efficient if you were to transfer me to the starship control.”

  “How easy would that be?”

  “Not very easy. You’d have to shut down the ship completely, including the engines.”

  “The engines that sometimes have startup problems?”

  “Precisely.”

  “I think it’s better not to risk it.”

  “I agree.”

  “You should be seeing something on the display very soon,” Oscar said.

  Nick made himself comfortable in the command chair. There was a slightly jagged line across the screen that measured total radiation exposure, converted to biological sensitivity. Suddenly the line rose steeply.

  “There it is!” Nick said.

  The line extended upwards at an angle that was practically 90 degrees. The CapCom really hadn’t been exaggerating. The readings came from probes outside the Eve. A second line beneath the first showed what was passing through the shield. If he’d been exposed to these levels all the time, it would cost him his life, but now the line started pointing down again, this time falling more gradually.

  “It’s amazing what still reaches us from there,” said Nick. “We’re almost a billion kilometers from the sun.”

  “Yes, m-mazing. Ch be eme. Bi hi. Ch bi.”

  “Oscar, what’s up?”

  The robot didn’t answer. Shit, the radiation was frying his boards. The CapCom had warned him. But of all the systems, why did it have to be Oscar’s? The cleaning robot probably wasn’t as well protected as the ship’s computer. How could he help him? Hadn’t he said he could be transferred to the ship’s computer?

  Nick jumped up. The robot was just in front of the hatch. The lights on his lid were glowing confusedly. He turned the disk over and opened the service flap on the underside. Where was the memory? Hopefully it hadn’t been all soldered together! But he was lucky. Directly on the motherboard there was a socket with a thin plastic piece stuck into it. Apparently Oscar was a development model, optimized for changing the operating software quickly. He pulled out the tiny pin. That was all there was to Oscar’s personality?

  He’d have to hurry. Oscar wasn’t safe yet. Had the cosmic rays attacked the memory chip as well as the robot’s data processors? He had no idea. But the memory chip was probably not especially hardened for space. The longer Oscar’s data was exposed to the solar storm, the greater the damage was likely to be. What had the robot told him? He had to restart the ship completely. Nick walked back to the screen.

  The shutdown menu was hiding somewhere. Of course, it was only for emergencies, which was precisely what this was. But this wouldn’t be the first time he’d completely restarted a spacecraft. One advantage of international cooperation was that the menu structures were similar, whether their titles were in Russian, as was the case here, or in English or Chinese.

  Nick found the right menu. He hesitated. What if the engines didn’t start back up again? He’d then float with the Eve through space forever. Was it worth it? Yes. Oscar was more than just a cleaning robot. They’d become friends, and Oscar been good to him. Nick turned off the system. He owed him this much.
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  A countdown started. The light in the command capsule went out, but the self-contained emergency lights turned on, plunging the room into a bleak red. Why didn’t they use an optimistic green for this, or at least a neutral blue?

  Then he became weightless. The engines had stopped working. Everything’s fine, Nick, this is what you wanted, he told himself, even though Oscar specifically warned against it. The DFDs won’t let you down. The malfunction way back on the ILSE was due to the backup generator having run out of fuel. The manufacturer, the RB Group, had undoubtedly learned its lesson. The countdown reached zero. A white, square outline flashed on the screen against a dark background. The ship was waiting to be restarted.

  He turned the monitor over. There had to be a socket somewhere for the memory stick—it had to be possible to upgrade the ship control conveniently. Where was the socket? Nick floated around the device, but it was packed in an immaculately smooth shell. He examined the arm on which the control was suspended. There! In the middle of the support arm there was a narrow slot. He pushed in the pin. It fit perfectly! He tapped the screen to restart the ship.

  “Please enter password.”

  Damn. Who’d given this thing a password? He tried Valentina, Shostakovna, RB. No luck. Nick remembered an emergency exercise on the Tiangong. The Chinese engineers had built the station according to the Russian design. One of his colleagues had to restart a computer. He hadn’t known the password, but with a double-tap the computer had given a hint.

  Nick double-tapped the screen.

  “Password hint: empty,” appeared in Cyrillic characters.

  Shit, shit, shit. If the ship didn’t restart, he’d suffocate. Exactly the way he didn’t want to go. And the engines weren’t even firing, so he couldn’t cast himself into their hot exhaust fumes. But he couldn’t die. Rosie and his child were waiting for him on Earth. What engineer was just too lazy to even leave a password hint?

  He smacked his forehead—figuratively, since he was wearing his helmet. The word ‘empty,’ written in small letters. That was the password! He tested it. The computer was not satisfied. He tried typing it with a capital E, and then in all caps, but the bright square remained.

  Empty. Man! Empty! How stupid could I be? He left the password field blank and simply tapped the ‘Continue’ key. The square rotated and the ship started back up again. He looked at the clock on his spacesuit. Just seven minutes had passed since the spaceship had been shut down. It had seemed like seven days. He hoped Oscar hadn’t suffered any permanent damage.

  One system after another came up. Next would be the engines. The backup generator was needed just to start the first DFD. Then he felt a force pulling on him. The first DFD was running again!

  Nick sailed to the floor. Now nothing could go wrong, since the first fusion engine provided enough energy to start the others. It had worked! Fortunately not all ten had accelerated at the same time, because his fall from the ceiling would have been much harder. The red light turned off. The ship was back on track. He’d done it!

  Now it was just a matter of getting the life support back on, and then he could get out of his spacesuit. He waited. There was no hurry. Nick checked the radiation exposure. The solar storm had almost passed. How would Oscar manage controlling the spaceship? Hopefully, the robot’s software was flexible enough to adapt to the new possibilities. But he had no doubts about Oscar’s abilities. What was RB doing with such a cleaning robot? Did they want to secretly take over the owners’ houses?

  The bright square vanished, and in its place an error message appeared.

  “Life support is not starting,” Nick translated.

  He tried to open the diagnostics menu. The computer asked for his password. He entered one. “Invalid password. User unknown.”

  Nick tried again. Had he made a typo? He had entered it hundreds of times in the past few weeks, and he had never received an error message.

  “Invalid password. User unknown.”

  Had the radiation killed off the brain cells where he had the password stored? He tried it with a different combination.

  “Invalid password. User unknown.”

  Or did he have to add another period?

  “Invalid password. User unknown. Access blocked for 24 hours. Please contact your administrator.”

  Blocked for 24 hours? This has to be a joke! His administrator was at Mission Control on Earth. How could he possibly reach him without access to the computer? Nick checked the status of his suit. He still had air for six more hours.

  Cold sweat was forming on his back. This couldn’t be true! This was an absolute nightmare.

  “Eve, get the life support system running and release the console!” he exclaimed in indignation.

  “I’m sorry, Nick. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  He froze. He knew the voice. It was Oscar’s. But he had already heard the phrase somewhere else before. Where did he know it from? It was a classic movie quote. Star Wars? No, it was from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a great movie. The spaceship’s AI that had gone crazy, Hal pronounces the sentence as it locks out the astronaut, Dave, from his ship.

  “Oscar, are you crazy? Stop that shit now!”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  The sweat had started coursing down his back. Had Oscar become a megalomaniac? Perhaps this had all been a part of his plan? This had never happened before in real life—machines opposing their creators.

  He imagined the headline. ‘Cleaning Robot Kills Astronaut.’ But no newspaper would ever report it, because apart from Rosie, nobody outside of RB knew where he was and Rosie couldn’t prove anything.

  “Oscar, stop with this game now!”

  “Sheesh, Nick, can’t you take a joke?” The words sounded from the speakers in his helmet.

  Fog flowed into the command module from the ceiling. This was the humidity from the breathing air that had condensed with the cold. The air pressure slowly rose. The screen showed the typical freeze frame with the Eve’s different systems. Everything glowed in green.

  Nick took a deep breath. He couldn’t believe that Oscar had indulged in such a joke. “Never do that, never ever again!” he said.

  “Did you really think I’d let you die? If I’d wanted that, why would I have saved your life before?”

  “What do I know? I’m not an AI specialist. People sometimes lose it.”

  “But I’m not human. There’s never been an AI that has gone berserk.”

  “There’s always a first time.”

  “Nick, I threw in the movie citation as an extra bonus. You still like Space Odyssey or you wouldn’t have watched it 5.32 times on our trip so far.”

  “This is what Hal says calmly as he leaves Dave to die.”

  “I think his motivation is understandable.”

  “Umm... What, Oscar?”

  “Just a little joke.”

  “Man, stop with these jokes. Please!”

  “Could it be that you humans not only have an evolutionary fear of spiders, but also of artificial intelligence gone haywire?”

  “Good question. But yes, we’re scared of everything we don’t understand. And we don’t even understand our own intelligence.”

  “I understand myself quite well, Nick. As for human intelligence, I have similar doubts to yours.”

  “Thanks for your understanding. But no more jokes. That one set my primal fears off.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  12/4/2080, the Eve

  “Send.”

  Nick tapped the yellow button. He’d summarized the events of the previous day for Mission Control. He hadn’t mentioned the AI’s stupid Hal joke, or the fact that Oscar was now housed in the ship’s computer.

  Oscar was certainly designed with far more than the essential cleaning robot software. But Nick felt he shouldn’t tell CapCom too much about it. Unfortunately, Oscar stubbornly refused to disclose any details about his origins and purpose. He truly could be nothing more than a top-level RB pr
oject, as confirmed by the fact that he was used in Valentina’s reception area. Perhaps her father had programmed the robot to better monitor his daughter? For her protection, of course. Out of fatherly concern. But this was pure speculation.

  “Send canceled,” the computer reported.

  The combined text and video message was still on the screen. Nick clicked the send button again.

  “Send canceled.”

  This time the error message appeared immediately, but he tried again anyway. All good things come in threes, right?

  “Send canceled.”

  He rubbed his chin. “Oscar, can you check this out?”

  Having the AI now located directly in the ship’s computer had already proven handy on several occasions. The day before, for example, he’d been able to leave the system diagnosis to Oscar.

  “There seems to be a problem with the transmitter.”

  “Didn’t we go through all the systems yesterday? Everything for the ship was all green.”

  “The transmitter is still reporting that it’s working, but it’s an incorrect diagnosis. Apparently the internal diagnostic system is broken. Nothing is going out, anyway.”

  They hadn’t sent any status messages to Earth since the day before. Rosie’s daily news had arrived about two hours after the solar storm, so he hadn’t been concerned. By the time the complete system diagnosis had been finished, he’d been too tired to reply, figuring it could wait until the following day.

  “But the receiver seems to work,” Nick said.

  “Yes, the problem is limited to the transmitter. It’s not affecting the antenna hardware, so it must be somewhere in the transmitter electronics.”

  “Where is that located?”

  “This could be the source of the problem. The high-gain antenna protrudes beyond the active shield. Otherwise you’d have to operate it with triple power. But that makes it more exposed to cosmic radiation.”

  “And the solar storm.”