Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  She opened the door. “Hi, Jay. Come on in.”

  He offered the plant. “To keep you company … Valerie.”

  She waved him inside and shut the door, wondering when he would manage to be less awkward using her first name. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She let him misinterpret. Experience suggested the plant would be dead within the week. Marcus’s jibe once about ten left, brown thumbs was sadly just. She set the plant, whatever it was, on the coffee table. “Can I get you something cold to drink?”

  “No, thanks,” Jay said. “Please, sit.”

  Well, she was home on bed rest, at least as far as he knew. She returned to her recliner and put up her feet. Once she sat, he settled on the sofa. “How are things, Jay?”

  “Fine. Well, not fine, if you mean my dissertation, which is why I wanted to meet.”

  Who’d of thunk she would ever miss small talk and office gossip! It didn’t look like Jay had either to offer, and that was okay. She was beyond eager for any diversion. It would be days until the Sun again rose over the Humboldt Crater area. Ethan’s bot had some residual charge to carry it through the long night—more charge, in fact, than required, because they had not been moving it—but it didn’t have night vision. And before sharing CIA satellite images with her, Tyler had had them de-rezzed to utter uselessness. She could get greater detail by buying commercial imagery—if the Agency were not monitoring imagery purchases in that lunar region, and if she weren’t worse at making sense of infrared imagery than at sustaining houseplants.

  At least with Jay, she could be useful. “Okay, what’s up?”

  He squirmed. “I used several of the databases you suggested as training sets. For some asteroids, the neural net learned quite well. But for others ….”

  Not so much, she completed the sentence. “Okay, I suggested several possible training sets. Which did you use?”

  “The Apollo and the Aten asteroids. Then I tested the net with sightings of Amor asteroids.”

  She took a drink from the water bottle beside her chair. “Sure I can’t get you a drink?”

  “I’ll get something myself.” He pointed to the back of the house. “The kitchen is through there?”

  Tyler would have a cow if he knew she had allowed anyone to wander unsupervised around her house. Well, everything classified was on the second floor, the kitchen wasn’t anywhere near the stairs, and, anyway, Tyler would never know. She had no plans to follow Jay into the bathroom, either, if he should decide to visit there. “Right. Glasses in the upper cabinet to the left of the sink. Ice and cold water in the fridge door.”

  As the ice dispenser rumbled, she thought about Jay’s method. The Apollo asteroids were a group of Earth-orbit crossers. The Aten asteroids stayed within, although they sometimes approached, Earth orbit. Well, the Aten population was not quite that easily defined, but close enough. The Amor asteroids, however, his test cases ….

  Jay returned, tumbler in hand, ice cubes tinkling. He sat.

  “What defines the Amor asteroids?” she prompted. A mentor’s job was to help him see the problem, not solve it for him.

  “Near-Earth objects with orbits not crossing inside Earth’s. Most have aphelions outside Mars’s orbit.” He paused for a sip. “Amor being another name for Cupid, and these rocks never getting anywhere near Venus, I don’t get the group name.”

  Not important, any more than that the plural of aphelion was aphelia. A spellchecker would show him the latter. “And?”

  He pondered. “The Amor asteroids orbit farther out. They have longer orbital periods. The three-year training period I used doesn’t correspond to many orbits for the Amor rocks.”

  “And?”

  “And I need to extend the time period covered by the training set.” He smiled. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. Think astronomy for a moment, not AI. How are the Amor asteroids different?”

  His forehead wrinkled. “Some of them get near Mars? Mars disturbs their orbits?”

  “That, too.”

  “Ah.” He smiled. “Jupiter.”

  “Which is?”

  “I know this one. Jupiter is big. It has more than twice the mass of the other planets combined. And Jupiter’s orbital period is … almost twelve years. My neural net’s training period hasn’t begun to encompass effects from Jupiter’s gravitation.”

  Despite his ever more fervent intentions to address the problem solely with additional datasets and longer training periods, she eventually got Jay around to seeing the benefits of incorporating some astronomy smarts. That led, in turn, to the messiness of calculating asteroid orbits with more bodies involved than the Sun and an individual asteroid, and the somewhat awkward and unintuitive mathematical technique known as perturbation theory.

  He was not getting it. “You know, I took a few physics classes way back. I ended up in computer science so that the only numbers I would be dealing with would be zero and one.”

  “Nonetheless. You really should understand this.”

  “Wikipedia is our friend.” He whipped out a much-folded datasheet. “Umm, Valerie? I’m only getting weak cell signals. May I use your WiFi network?”

  “Sorry, it’s down.” Because Tyler insisted her home network be down if anyone but she were inside the house. It was the only way he had agreed to her allowing anyone inside, ever, even with an agent dropping by immediately after the visit to re-sweep for bugs. That was after he accepted, grumbling, that for her to refuse to meet with Jay would only increase the flow of worried coworkers to her door. It was just CIA paranoia, of course. She had known Jay for more than a year, long before Ethan spotted the first alien.

  “I can fix that for you.”

  All the evasion and deception boiled over. “I’ll have a new router from Amazon tomorrow. I think I can manage to configure it.”

  “Of course you can,” he mumbled, eyes cast down. “Just trying to be helpful.”

  Adding fresh guilt to an already toxic stew of emotions. “I know. Look, Jay, I apologize for snapping at you. I’m just a little tired.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I should have known better than to stay so long.” He stood, waving her off as she reached for the lever to lower the recliner’s footrest. “I’ll show myself out.

  Chapter 17

  “It’s almost as much of a hog-pen mess in here as my son’s room,” Marcus said after tripping over yet another of the dark, almost-matching-the-walls starfish robots. Here was the alien base, on their third, most thorough reconnoiter yet—and mess was an understatement.

  It did not help that they made their way through the debris by the dim red lamps Ekatrina had rigged to preserve their dark vision—or that, after the biologists had been made to see reason, the archeologists were not ready to let anything be moved.

  What part of explosive decompression did they not understand, Dirtside? The positions of things found inside meant nothing.

  Ilya half cleared his throat, half coughed. The ubiquitous lunar dust was getting to him, too. In the dim red light, his dust-coated pressure suit, nominally eggplant purple, appeared almost black. “Simon is, what, thirteen? Cheer up. The messiness, and I will presume the surliness, will get worse before they get better.”

  “But it does get better?” Marcus asked. He missed Simon as much as the boy’s mother. In a way, more: Val, at least, was communicative. Simon hadn’t answered a text or email in days.

  “Sometimes. At least when they get a job and move out.”

  Marcus’s company this incursion was Ilya and Donna. A pace and a cable-length apart, they shuffled into the deeper recesses of the alien facility, heads with helmet lamps sweeping left and right as they went—in the most part, illuminating nothing. The tubes projected only ultraviolet, equipped with custom LEDs Ekatrina had printed. Here and there a surface glimmere
d with faint spatters, an alien protein fluorescing when touched by UV. That, at least, had been a useful finding by the biologists.

  Donna contributed, “When we’re finished here, take home your Ekatrina Special magic lamp. UV will show you everywhere Simon and any visiting young lady have had fun.”

  “Umm.” Marcus had watched enough crime and forensic shows to know saliva and semen fluoresced in UV light. Blood did not so fluoresce, most TV notwithstanding, unless first treated with luminol. “Thanks for that?”

  “Here I thought you brought me along for my biological insights.”

  Ilya tripped over something hidden in the gloom, grabbing for balance at the nearby corner where a side tunnel split off. “This is stupid. Who knows what we could discover, only we’re not supposed to touch anything.” He muttered something in Russian.

  “What’s that?” Donna asked.

  “If we could levitate, they would order us not to touch the floor.”

  As if solving a maze (and perhaps they were), they took every left-hand turn as they came to it. Where a side tunnel had fallen in, or looked to be on the verge of collapse, they surveyed for biological evidence as best they could by overlapping their UV beams (still finding no more than faint traces), then reversed course for safety’s sake. Where a door stuck, its frame warped by the ancient meteorite strike, they pried it open with a long-bladed screwdriver.

  Rubble. Dead bots. Never mummy dust beyond what bits of shed skin would explain.

  “Where are they?” Donna burst out. “It’s as cold and airless here as outside in the lava tube. Why didn’t some of them mummify like Goliath?”

  “You’re assuming there were more,” Ilya said.

  Donna snorted. “Have you counted the number of personal quarters? Four, if not. The amount of equipment they brought with them? The number of consoles in the control room? Of course there were more aliens here than Paul Bunyan and Goliath.”

  “Here is a theory,” Ilya said. “The decompression happened long after mummification. The loss of pressure blasted shriveled bodies into dust, then sucked out the dust through the ceiling fractures.”

  “Then why didn’t someone rescue Goliath from the lava tube?” Donna countered.

  “Bigger picture here, guys,” Marcus said. “Why would you assume extra dead aliens? That they planned ahead, for more people to come, that they weren’t using much of the base’s capacity yet, is a whole lot simpler.”

  Donna shrugged. “Okay, fair enough. Sorry. I got carried away.”

  They reached the dead end of another side corridor. They turned around, having encountered only the same faint traces of alien proteins as in every other passageway they had so far surveyed.

  “Where are they?” Ilya muttered. “It’s a mystery.”

  I don’t much like mysteries, Marcus thought, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let this one go.

  * * *

  In the all too familiar cramped confines of a tractor cabin, the whoosh of air slowed to a murmur. The console beeped.

  Marcus removed his helmet. Meeting here had one virtue: depressurizing the airlockless cabin blew out most of the dust they tracked in. Compared to his pressure suit or the inflatables, the cool air filling the cabin was like an April day in the park. Too bad his eyes already felt like they had been rolled in sand. “We can’t keep on like this.”

  Yevgeny’s helmet had also come off. “Your wife is jealous?”

  “Not exactly. Pissed that I can’t say anything about when I’ll be home.”

  The Russian smiled. “Of course you can predict a time. When that date approaches, you make a new forecast.”

  “You’re not married, are you?” Of course, Marcus knew very well his counterpart wasn’t. Had never been. “Don’t you care Dirtside is holding us back?”

  “Perhaps you should have brought an archeologist. We had no reason to.”

  A jest to match Marcus’s marriage crack? No country had had an archeologist on the Moon when all this began. Why would they? Recently, Tyler and some nameless FSB apparatchik had strategized how an archeologist might “happen” to vacation on the Moon, and then “happen” (and why would that be?) to drop in on the “miners” near Humboldt Crater. Even as both agencies wrestled with this unlikely scenario, they had disagreed over whose citizen would be the wandering tourist. No way could two such vacationers be made plausible.

  Marcus said, “It’s not viable for us to stay here, doing next to nothing. Set aside the fact that the inflatables aren’t intended for long-term use, our prolonged presence, rather than real miners, is bound to raise suspicions. All the caution has become counterproductive.”

  Not to mention that, ironically enough, we faux miners will end up with black lung.

  Yevgeny rummaged in a console drawer, removing an energy bar. He tore off the wrapper and took a big bite. “Sawdust of the gods.” He chewed and swallowed. “Raising more suspicion, you mean.”

  “I do. You know about Liu Yun, right?”

  “The Chinese astronomer who is now a guest at Daedalus Base.”

  And also the son of a Central Committee member, Liu Ping. As Yevgeny must also know. “That’s the one. We’ve allowed him free run of the base.”

  “As agreed,” Yevgeny said.

  “And he found time to steal a small sample of the chondrite ore.”

  “As expected.” Yevgeny studied the crescent Earth out the cabin window. Debating with himself how much to admit knowing?

  “We’re kind of in this together, you know.”

  “Very well. What you did not expect was that our Chinese friends would plant keystroke loggers at your observatory. The security team did expect them to make the attempt at Base Putin, and they did not disappoint.”

  Marcus nodded. “Here’s the thing ….”

  “So we are at last coming to the point?”

  “We have to work faster. To identify the proper expertise to replace us. To get away from the dust and the cold.”

  Finished with the purloined energy bar, Yevgeny pushed the empty wrapper through the one-way valve of the cabin’s disposal bin. “What do you propose?”

  “I suspect the most promising part of the facility is the control room. Would you agree?”

  “If their computers held up as well as other technology we’ve seen, then yes.”

  Marcus took a deep breath. “Near the alien airlock, the base is in large measure intact. The ceiling cracking doesn’t become too widespread until deep inside the base. We move aside the worst of the rubble, close off side and back tunnels, epoxy the cracks in the front, and move inside. We’ll get a lot more done in a shirt-sleeves environment. Just not suiting up every day will save us a ton of time.”

  “And beyond the area you would repressurize? If and when it becomes appropriate, how would we get there for study?”

  “By closed off, I don’t mean forever. We put up new airlocks, at least for corridors that don’t look too unsafe to access. Mooncrete is nothing but regolith, gravel, and water, and we have plenty of those. Compared to the construction we do daily at Daedalus, casting mooncrete arches is trivial. As for metal hatches to install in the arches, we cut apart some ore crates and weld the panels. In the main, I expect we can use the aliens’ own interior door panels. If those will no longer hold pressure—but I’ll bet you they will—we can patch them. There’ll be odds and ends of hardware to add, small motors and gaskets and such, but those can be printed.”

  “Hmm.” For awhile, Yevgeny was lost in thought. “To pressurize the large volume you describe will involve far more oxygen than do our inflatables—”

  “Our spare tanker has more than enough water to gen up an initial oh-two supply. As for the inevitable slow losses, we’re already producing water and oh-two from the regolith.”

  “Fair enough.” Yevgeny pondered some more. “Sheltered from unfiltered day
light Sun and bitter nighttime cold, our cooling and heating demands would be much reduced. We would need to run power cables down the lava tube from the solar-panel arrays on the surface. For ease of keeping in touch with Dirtside, we could run fiber-optic cables up the tube to our antennae. Maybe put up a string of ceiling lights in the tube, to make the passage easier when we do go out. As a technical matter—and if the cracks are not too numerous, and if they prove to be pluggable—yes, it could all work.

  “But to adopt such an approach is not merely an engineering matter. How do you propose that we sell this change?”

  “There’s that,” Marcus said. “For public consumption, we’ve switched our approach from strip-mining the surface to tunneling. Anyone believing we’re here to mine should have no problem accepting that we’re now tunneling off the lava tube to access the main body of a buried chondrite. Bringing our heavy-duty equipment into the lava tube supports that interpretation, as does whatever rubble we bring out. Whatever mooncrete we cast, we do on the surface. Anyone watching will suppose the beams and arches are tunnel bracing. Some of them even will be.”

  Yevgeny nodded. “You have been thinking about this. And for private consumption?”

  “There’s the challenge. A thousand Dirtside experts will offer as many reasons why what I propose won’t work, or might contaminate the trace biological evidence, or that some rubble we want to move could be a priceless archeological relic that must be preserved in situ. So ….”

  “A mere thousand?”

  They had reached the critical juncture. Marcus wondered: would the Russian make the leap? “In my experience, it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.”

  “How do you propose hiding such unsanctioned activities long enough to require forgiveness? For one thing, why would our superiors suppose we’re making support beams? I would imagine your CIA is keeping an eye on us by satellite.”