Noriama: Chapter 18
It had taken almost four days for Sughouri to finish her work. Cutting through the door was difficult enough, and took two four-hour days before she was finished. Then she fed a flexible camera through the hole, bringing along a connector cable with it. Breaking into the keypad took another day, and connecting her hacking kit into the security lock was no small feat in itself.
In the end, it took a full thirteen hours to break through the military-grade security lock on the door, and once she had finished, she had to return to the Hut and leave actually opening the lounge for the next day.
Today.
It had been a harrowing week for Victoria. Her mind filled with inescapable imaginings fueled by her past. Behind that door, there could be two hundred corpses, perfectly preserved in their final moments of death. It would be her job to discover what those final moments were.
Something could have cracked Noriama’s shell, caused a cave in, the atmosphere leaked out. The gaping emptiness filled with their faces…
Stop it! Victoria rubbed her eyes with the palm of her hand. Now was not the time to re-litigate old mistakes.
No, she corrected herself, it wasn’t a mistake. She hadn’t been in control. If she had done everything different, it wouldn’t have made a difference. She had been told this by experts, and by crisis doctors. She had said the same thing to countless of her own patients. She believed it. She had to believe it.
Victoria could taste copper in her mouth.
“Okay,” Sughouri’s voice drifted up from the planet below. “I’m back at the lounge. I’m opening the door now.”
On Sughouri’s video feed the door slowly began to pull to the side. Ancient gears turned and pistons contracted as the door slid into the walls. The camera feed panned back and forth as Sughouri slowly walked into the lounge.
There were tables. There were chairs. There was a pile of boxes and equipment in the back. There were no bodies.
“God-dammit!”
There was a moment before Victoria realized the exclamation had been hers. “You alright?” Zuri asked, signing instead of chording her words through her screen.
“Where are they?” Victoria asked. “Yes, sorry, I’m fine, I’m just…” She took a deep breath. Frustrated was not the word.
“Me too,” Kristiana said. “Keep going, Sughouri.”
A thorough search did nothing for their mood. The lounge was empty, both of bodies and of the stores that should have been there. No food, no water, no games, nothing, save a single bottle lying on its side on a nearby table. A simple label on the side displayed a long twig-like icon, followed by a single word. “Bambooze?” Sughouri held the label up to her camera. “What the hell?”
“Bamboo alcohol,” Kristiana said, a split second after Victoria realized. “It’s the first thing any colonizing culture does after finding a new land. We can survive without borders, commerce, fashion, and human kindness, but we somehow can’t survive without booze.”
“Well, it’s maybe half full. I can feel it sloshing…anyone care to try decades-old booze from another planet?”
“I wouldn’t,” Victoria said. “Not without some serious testing first.”
“Right.” Sughouri slipped the bottle into her pack. “I’m moving to the rear of the lounge now. Those boxes look interesting.”
She made her way to the back, and clicked open the metal clasps on the boxes, opening them wide.
“Rifles?” Victoria gaped. “What are rifles doing there?”
“Ten crates,” Sughouri counted. “Five rifles apiece. This is the colony’s entire store of long-arms.”
“Those crates to the left,” Kristiana said. “What’s in those?”
“Hand-guns,” Sughouri answered after opening the first. “Five crates…Same deal as the rifles.” She paused. “Where is the ammunition?”
“Never mind that, why are they here?” Victoria demanded.
“Weapons behind a security lock,” Kristiana said. “Looks like some folks were trying to make a stand.”
“No,” Victoria shook her head. “I don’t believe it.”
“You were the one who mentioned a church schism,” Kristiana shrugged. “Sectarian violence would explain quite a lot.”
“It wouldn’t explain the lack of bodies,” Victoria insisted. “Nor would it explain where Section D or the SLS is, nor why a Hydroponic lab is where Residential Block A2 should be.”
“Yeah,” Sughouri interrupted, “A stand doesn’t make sense. Like I said, where is the ammunition? We’ve got the guns here, but no bullets. Pretty stupid to make a stand by collecting all the guns in one place and forget the ammo. They’re kinda useless without them.”
“Perhaps they were here, and then moved somewhere else?” Zuri mused. “Or they were stolen, or re-purposed.”
“Like what? What else could they have used it for?”
“Explosives is the obvious answer,” Zuri answered as Sughouri’s video feed scanned back and forth across the crates, “but what would they need explosives for? Besides, modern smokeless powder is made of a lot of different chemicals, and if there was a shortage or emergent need for a chemical found in the ammo —
“Woah!” Sughouri interrupted. “What was that?”
Victoria looked up as Kristiana and Zuri began chording their keyers like mad. “Churji picked it up,” Kristiana said. “Zuri? Did Noriama’s sensors get it?”
Zuri nodded, without bothering to sign her reply.
“Was that a proximaquake?” Sughouri asked. “Should I be running?”
“Churji’s sensors confirms a two-point-seven scale vibration,” Kristiana answered. “Zuri’s crunching the sensor data to find origin, exact seismic energy, and risk of aftershock. Hold tight.”
Moments later, Zuri responded: “The sensors are still broken. Most of them place the epicenter some ten kilometers to the north of Noriama Colony. The rest put the origin somewhere in Section A.”
“Victoria, are you alright?”
Victoria looked up. Kristiana was looking at her with the closest to concern she had ever seen in her eyes. She probably was watching my vitals. Saw an alert in the system.
“Sorry,” Victoria cleared her throat. “Do we know which sensors are accurate? Did something explode inside Noriama?”
“There’s nothing that could have exploded on just emergency power,” Sughouri answered. “Nothing that I can think of, anyway. The sensors are probably malfunctioning.
“Sughouri, you should probably head back to the Hut, just to be safe.”
Two seconds passed. Then two more. Another two, and Victoria took a deep breath. “Sughouri? Do you read us?”
“Yes.”
The little blip on the map, the marker for her position, hadn’t moved. Her camera feed was the same, staring at the crates of weapons.
“Are you okay?”
She knew the answer before she asked. She was a trauma specialist, and had spent enough time with Sughouri over the years to recognize the signs. She was suffering them herself.
Another few seconds passed before Sughouri turned. “I’m heading back now.”
“Good,” Kristiana answered. “That’s good. We’ll set Wolf loose to keep looking around.”
Victoria forced her hands to stop rubbing themselves. Kristiana’s firm and steady tone, which had been a reliable and comforting presence earlier in the mission, had become a sedentary weight. A smothering reminder that they were slaves to a plan, a purpose, decisions that had been made years ago. Victoria wanted to shake her, sometimes, and demand to know if she was actually aware of what was going on around her, or if she knew only the Mission Plan.
A proximaquake. Of course they existed. Proxima b was a planet with a molten core and tectonic plates, just like Earth. The colony might have been hit by a large one, or even a small one if it damaged the right systems…
Faces in the darkness, sinking away into the crevasse.
“Sughouri! Wake up!”
The alarm, specially designed to wake anyone from the deepest sleep, blared in Sughouri’s ear. Her brain still foggy, she groped blindly about in her coffin for the seal.
The lid opened painfully slowly, as the alarm continued to wail. Pushing herself free before she even knew what she was doing, she was crawling to the Hut’s closest emergency locker in less than three seconds.
She wasn’t wearing her legs, so stretching up to the handle of the slim door was difficult, but soon enough she managed to tear open the slim door and push herself inside. “I’m in,” she gasped as she pressed the seal button. “Locked down.”
The elevator’s emergency lockers were specially designed for five people. Airtight, with only a small amount of reserve atmosphere, they were the only place to hide if something catastrophic occurred to the elevator during transit. Of course, chances of survival were minuscule regardless, but every added percentage mattered.
Sughouri only had two seconds to catch her breath before Kristiana’s voice echoed from the intercom. “Sughouri, the bamboo! The sample from Hydroponics; get rid of it! Throw it in the airlock, now!”
Confusion was not an allowable luxury for an astronautical engineer, much less a military woman. An agonizing half minute passed as the sealed locker door was unsealed and opened again. Squeezing through, Sughouri threw herself across the Hut to the specimen crate.
Her limbs ached and her heart burned as she fumbled at the lid. Her movements were slow and her arms didn’t work like they should. At last she opened the crate and grabbed the specimen jar that held the dead bamboo shoot.
Another minute, and the jar was on the airlock floor, separated from Sughouri by a thick aluminum seal.
“It’s out,” Sughouri shouted over the alarm. “Airlock sealed.”
“The water too, and the dirt!” Kristiana was no calmer. “Anything from Hydroponics, get it out of the Hut!”
Now that she was fully awake, she was able to move faster, if more painfully. Two minutes later the jar was joined by the two samples Sughouri had collected, and the alarm was finally turned off.
“Report?” Sughouri gasped for breath as she rested against the wall. “Talk to me, what’s going on!” It was not an idle request; in space and the military, ignorance was second only to bad luck in mortality rate.
“You’re safe,” Kristiana’s voice was calm again. “At least for the moment.”
“Oh good,” Sughouri leaned back against the wall and allowed herself a wry sneer. “Should I go back to bed then, or do you want to explain what that was all about?”
“I was looking through the files that Zuri was extracting. Zuri, could you explain about the Hydroponics report, please?”
“I’ve been extracting more data from Noriama’s computer,” Zuri’s digital voice began. “It’s mostly fragments, scraps, nothing particularly illuminating; but just now I got a coherent piece of a Hydroponics situation report.”
“About the bamboo?” Victoria’s voice asked.
“About the bamboo. Sughouri, you asked why were there were thirty specimens in the tank? Each specimen was a separate species.”
“There was only one species of bamboo brought on the KAP rockets,” Victoria said. “Were they trying to engineer a stronger species? Was it some kind of breeding experiment?”
“No,” Zuri said. “They discovered each species in the same plot. These separate species were spontaneous, sprouting from the same original strain.”
“The same…wait,” Victoria said. “Thirty separate species germinated from a single one? That’s…that’s absurd!”
“According to the report, it happened,” Kristiana said. “The head researcher believed it was caused by a bacterial or viral infection.”
Sughouri closed her eyes.
“That’s when I raised the alarm,” Kristiana continued. “If the report is accurate, and a bacterial or viral agent were to infect Sughouri’s CELSS, it would destroy the ecosystem inside and —”
“It’s too late,” Sughouri said.
Two seconds later, Kristiana’s explanation stopped. There was a pause.
“Sughouri, I need you to take a deep breath for me, okay?”
Sughouri did. “It’s too late, Victoria. The bamboo has been in the Hut for more than a month. So has the dirt. So has the water. If there’s contamination, it’s already happened.”
“We can’t know that for sure,” Kristiana said. “The CELSS was designed to be perfectly isolated from foreign bacteria.”
“Designed, sure,” Sughouri rested her arm against her forehead. “When it’s plugged into the Croatoan, I’d have taken that bet. But it’s not isolated in the same way, now. It’s been subjected to Proxima’s gravity, been shaken about during the elevator transit…” She let her voice trail off.
“Okay, well,” Zuri spoke up, “you can check the ecosystem and make sure its still functioning properly, can’t you?”
“Hold up,” Victoria interrupted. “We’re still assuming this report is accurate. A disease causing rapid speciation is…that’s nonsense. Diseases don’t cause new species. Sure, viruses can influence mutations in their hosts, but not within one generation, and not a whole new viable species!”
“According to the report, it was still only a hypothesis,” Zuri said. “They weren’t certain if it was a virus, bacteria, or fungal infection, but they were able to confirm altered DNA between sprouts connected through the original plant’s rhizomes. They discovered Fungal tissue, as well as a virus from the Alphaflexiviridae family, and they suspected the Potexvirus genus. The head researcher was convinced that the fungus and virus had developed a kind of symbiotic parasitism, jointly attacking the host bamboo’s reproductive process.”
“Hmm,” Sughouri laughed in spite of herself. “Well, good thing I’m post-menopausal, eh? Attack away, little virus.”
“The report says there was no sign of the virus transferring to humans,” Kristiana answered. “And, we have no way of knowing how long this virus remains viable.”
“It’s been decades,” Zuri said. “How could it still be viable?”
“Virus and fungus,” Victoria said. “Which I still don’t buy. Look, I still think we should collect specimens for study, but we can argue about that later. For now, Sughouri, I want you to relax a bit before we do anything else. Your vitals are elevated, heart-rate —”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Sughouri forced a laugh. “Don’t get me wrong, this was better than coffee, but I’d like it if we could keep these little excitements to a minimum, yes?”
Sughouri pushed herself away from the wall. She was already tired. A few moments of exertion in Proxima b’s gravity, and she was already feeling like she had run a marathon.
She crawled to her legs, strapping them on and standing up with some difficulty. Then she moved to the cafeteria before starting to run diagnostic tests on the CELSS.
She worked slowly and steadily, her mind drifting back and forth between her work and other things.
It almost didn’t matter what the diagnostics said; the CELSS wasn’t completely isolated: the food and water on the inside needed to come out, and no system was perfect.
The truth of it was, she was contaminated. The whole elevator was. The team couldn’t risk allowing her back onto the Croatoan, not when there was a chance their entire food and water supply could be wiped out.
There was a solution somewhere, she was positive. She just needed to think about how to decontaminate the CELSS, and herself, before going back to the Croatoan.
Going back.
Sughouri crawled back into her coffin, a plan forming in her brain.
“What do we tell Sughouri?”
It was the first thing Kristiana had said in some time.
It had been two hours since it had happened. Victoria winced at herself. the amorphous ‘it.’ For years, ‘it’ had been whatever had happened on Noriama; the strange unknown that had caused two hundred colonists from Earth to cut off communication and vanish into the ether.
Now, in the span of less than three hours, ‘it’ was now…everything that had just happened. Zuri’s decryption of the hydroponics memo, Sughouri’s panic, Kristiana seeing…something…when she closed her eyes…
They had both panicked then, Zuri and Kristiana. They shutdown the AIs until they could figure out what happened. Victoria was separate from the whole thing, she could only watch their pulses rise and fall. Until they agreed to talk to her, she didn’t know what was happening.
Kristiana had talked first. An accusation. Zuri confessed. Red, as powerful and complex an AI as had ever existed, had made a mistake. Or Zuri had, it wasn’t perfectly clear. Red had gone rogue and started encrypting the corrupted Noriama database. They couldn’t decrypt it with their codes, it was a different kind of encryption. Kristiana looked back through years of data-stream transmissions. The truth was out.
There hadn’t been any shouting. In the past, Victoria had seen her fair share of arguments among the close social group of the First Responders. Mistakes alone were betrayal, but this…
It had been like any other briefing. “Red has been working on two independent projects,” Zuri had explained. “The reconstruction and decryption of Noriama’s database, and the encryption of the communication data-stream back to Earth. I thought it was more well-trained regarding input and data sources. Five hours ago, I inadvertently left the connection active between Red and Noriama when it swapped jobs, and it encrypted portions of Noriama’s database.”
“Can it be fixed?” Victoria had asked. It had been a more important question than why Zuri had done what she had done, or who she had done it for.
“Its encryption method requires an unencrypted code-base. I’d been using poems. Without a poem, Red used portions of the corrupted database instead. If there was complete and solid data behind its encoding, I could probably fix it, but decrypting what was already half-corrupted and damaged? With a key that’s corrupted itself?” She shrugged. “How would I know when I was finished?”
When would they know?
Earth was over four light years away. At this very moment, Earth still hadn’t received their first transmission from Proxima b’s orbit. They had been on Noriama for almost half a year, and they hadn’t learned very much. The colony was empty, and every clue they found was just another puzzle. The longer they went without answers to even some basic questions, the more emotionally erratic they were going to get.
But no one had shouted. No one had screamed or cried or even threatened. There was just an overwhelming sense of regret, disappointment, and resignation.
What use was anger? No, far beyond useful, anger was dangerous in situations like this. Had there been a gun on board, it might have been used. Best for everyone involved that both anger and guns were nowhere to be found.
Was it the conditioning from Earth? Something in their medications? Or had their own psyches made the decision for them, recognizing the worst thing that could happen now was recrimination?
Odd, she noted later; No one had even suggested stopping Red’s unofficial and sabotaging encryption of the data-stream.
“What do we tell Sughouri?” Kristiana asked again. “We can’t tell her everything, can we?”
“We can’t lie to her,” Victoria said. “She’ll ask eventually, she’ll learn half the database is gone.”
Zuri hadn’t even apologized. In one real sense, she didn’t have to. The look on her face as she explained had been enough.
No, not enough. But nothing could have been enough.
“Could Red fix it? Did it keep logs or…could it backtrack?”
Zuri’s eyes were downcast. “I’d have to train it.”
Her condition was unspoken. They’d need to trust her with the computer again. They knew that was a big ask.
Or it should have been. Why was it, after how many years of lying-through-omission, Victoria couldn’t bring herself to see Zuri as anything less than a friend, and her crime committed against a distant faceless nothing?
“We can’t tell her while she’s down there,” Kristiana said.
“We should consider aborting,” Victoria said.
Kristiana shook her head. “Sughouri won’t like being pulled back up, and there are still questions involving —”
“The strain on her body is immense,” Victoria interrupted. “She might not last much longer down there. She’s pushing herself harder and harder, going deeper into the colony for longer, exerting herself beyond my medical recommendations.”
“She needs to find answers,” Kristiana said. “We all do. We can’t abort her mission, not yet.”
“No,” Victoria said. “I mean aborting Operation Croatoan. Going home.”
Zuri looked shocked. For a moment, Victoria wondered if Kristiana had heard her. Then, an unfamiliar look of complete confusion crossed her face. “You can’t be serious. We’re nowhere near finished.”
“When will we know?” She asked. “When is it over? What answers would tell us what we need to know?”
“The mission plan,” Kristiana repeated, slightly slower. “It spells out the process by which we measure the success, failure, and each stage of our mission.”
“Earth’s plan. A plan made by people four light years away, twenty-one years of travel. We can’t ask them anything, they can’t give us orders. We’re alone out here. We get to decide when the mission is over. They can’t stop us, and they won’t be able to do anything to us when we get back.”
Kristiana closed her eyes. Was she searching the Croatoan’s database, or just thinking? Victoria couldn’t tell. “We have a duty to fulfill our mission as best as we can. Even if we can’t speak to each other, they exist. They are out there, and they put their faith in us to fulfill our function.”
“At what cost?” Zuri asked. “We’ve already sacrificed our lives, what else do we have to give?”
We are already dead, aren’t we?
Victoria swallowed hard. “A woman once said that to me, that we were already dead. A building had fallen on a group of us, First-Responders and civilians. It was dark, cold, most of us were injured. We were trapped for hours before the crews could get to us, and in that time an aftershock struck and tore open a sinkhole beneath us. I was one of seven survivors. The woman who asked me, who thought we were doomed, she was another.”
“Why are you telling us this?” Kristiana asked.
“Because…” Victoria paused. “I don’t know why.” For a moment she decided leaving it there, but something in Zuri’s eyes forced her mouth open. “Why haven’t you taken your pills?”
Kristiana stared at Victoria for a moment before turning away. “Is it your medical opinion that the stresses of this mission are too great for the team to continue effective operation?”
Victoria took a deep breath. “I don’t know anymore. What does effective mean in this situation? Does adherence to a two-decade old mission plan count as effective, or delusional?” She shook her head. “We can keep doing what we’re doing, but we have to learn something soon. If we continue to expend effort without concrete results, we will reach a point where our ephemeral duties to the planet Earth won’t be enough.”