Novels

“Section A,” Sughouri said as she dragged her LED across the sign. “This must be the place.” Sughouri glanced to make sure that Churji was still following along behind her. She was used to working in silence, hearing only the sounds of her suit, and periodic visual check-ins were vital to keep things moving smoothly. Her chest was beginning to hurt, but Victoria hadn’t said anything, so it was probably just her imagination.

“Hold up,” Zuri’s digital voice came over the comm. “Wolf just stopped. You’re close to where the drone broke down, and it doesn’t want to go further.”

Sughouri glanced back again. Churji was sitting a few paces back, camera steadily tracking her movements. She checked her suit and said; “I’m not getting any radiation, or environmental hazards from my suit. Can you tap it into my camera feed? I’ll go on ahead and it’ll see everything’s safe.”

“Is that right?” Victoria’s voice was delightfully confused. “Is Wolf that smart?”

Sighouri liked nicknames.

Normal names were universal. She was Sighouri to everyone, and always would be. But to her grandmother, she had been Noyoner moni. To her niece, she had been Sig. At the academy, she had been Bandar, thanks to her limber limbs and loud laughter. To her longest-term lovers she had been Ya amar, Jaanu, and Shona, respectively, and for two months on the ISS she had been Bullet.

The CHR-3 was Churji to her, and the Croatoan was the Śabādhāra. Everyone saw different things when they looked at the world, and to hang every viewpoint, every facet of a gem under a single name was unwise at best. Dangerous at worst.

Kristiana called them ‘colonists,’ but they could just as easily be pioneers, explorers, Noriamians, Proximans…

Sughouri was about to be an archeologist, or an SAR Engineer, or a surveyor, or a migrant, or an ex-pat.

Zuri’s fingers itched. It had taken almost an hour for Churji to reach the main computer center in Central Control, then another hour for Sughouri to inspect the systems and wiring to make sure everything was still within proper working order.

“Okay,” Sughouri said at last, “I’m turning the computer on. Zuri, it’s in your hands now.”

Zuri could feel her shoulders relax as, on the screen, Churji’s claw threw the final switch. The feed swung about as all around it, lights began to flicker to life. When Churji turned back to the main screen, the system boot process was spinning past, throwing error after error, the same errors mirrored on Zuri’s personal screen.

“That doesn’t look good,” Victoria muttered.

“Nah, it’s fine,” Sughouri waved a hand. “The system is looking for a bunch of systems and hardware we haven’t turned on, that’s all.”

And likely never would, Zuri noted. No need for waste recyclers or temperature control now.

Victoria used to think that space was empty. Now, she knew that what she thought of as void was really full of radiation, background static, dust molecules and dark-matter. As far as was practical, however, it was all empty.

For centuries, humans were taught the solar system on a scale that was reasonable. No, more than reasonable; conceivable. The astronomical distances between even the earth and its moon were difficult to comprehend on a visceral level. The most common emotion when seeing the planets of the solar system to scale for the first time was awe, coupled with no small amount of disbelief.

But the sun really was that much larger than Jupiter, which really was that much larger than Earth. And seeing the planets’ sizes was nothing compared to the distance between them. To truly understand the distance one light-year covered was nearly impossible. Such a massive stretch of sheer and unmitigated emptiness.

There was a terrible thing that happened when the human mind is faced with emptiness; The brain tried to fill it.

“The elevator will reach the ground in five minutes,” Kristiana said. It was an unnecessary report, Victoria thought. The four of them were seated in their chairs, staring at their screens. She couldn’t imagine that any one of them wasn’t perfectly aware of exactly how much longer they would have to wait.

“What do you think they called it?” Sughouri asked.

“Called what?” Zuri asked.

“Well, the star is Proxima Centauri. They wouldn’t have stuck with Proxima b, would they? We don’t call Earth ‘Sol Three.’”

“There wasn’t anything in the Compact about naming the planet.” Kristiana said.

“I’ll bet you they did all the same.”

Victoria scratched at her hairline. “Noriama, probably.”

Lemon awoke.

Anthropomorphizing was frowned upon in the AI sciences. Even the most advanced AIs couldn’t be recognized as having agency, or advanced cognitive functions beyond that of, say, a particularly clever lizard.

Even the word ‘intelligence’ was somewhat taboo among trainers. It was a weasel word, an amorphous suggestion that something real was being described, when there was no such thing. There was no such thing as Artificial Intelligence, there was only complex computer algorithms that imitated adaptability. Artificial Learning was a far more accurate term. (Though behind closed doors there was still debate if Arificial Adaptation was more appropriate, but that brought in questions about the difference between artificial and ‘real’ adaptation, and whether or not Inorganic Adaptation was the best term, usually countered with the socratic suggestion that costal erosion was also inorganic adaptation, and by that time the convention panel had gone an hour over their scheduled time and everyone was too tired or hungry to make coherant arguments.)

Zuri couldn’t help it. After the Lemon AI had remaining trapped in the Croatoan for so long, to finally allow it to reach out into Noriama’s computer system felt like unlocking a caged beast.

There are no windows in space.

Victoria bemoaned this fact as she stared at the wall of the Croatoan. She had been able to see the stars and the planet Earth — before they boarded the Croatoan from the ISS — but what she wouldn’t have given now to be able to look out the window and see Noriama Station.

Noriama Station was the unimaginatively titled solution to an insidious problem: how to transfer two-hundred colonists, along with thousands of tons of equipment, materials, and supplies, from orbit to the surface of Proxima.

Every obvious solution carried its own problems. Designing the rockets to be capable of landing on Proxima’s surface would exponentially increase the weight of the rockets — both because of the engines and the fuel required — far more than was feasible. A team of shuttles would reduce the required strength of the landing rockets, but would require fuel for both landing and lift-off, making such a ferry service equally unreasonable.

“Excuse me, Ms. Sidel?”

Antje winced internally, careful to not crack the smiling facade she threw onto her face as she turned. Damn it, there she was: a reporter not thirty years old yet, wearing the helpless awkward smile they all wore before they became experienced, bitter, and mistrusting.

“Yes?”

“Sorry,” the apology came quick through a faint Spanish accent, her press pass brandished like a shield. “I wasn’t sure that was you. Would you mind answering a few questions?”

“I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a hurry.” Antje turned back to the doors of the EUSAA, but it was too late.

“Just one, then,” the young reporter’s speech suddenly quick and clipped. “Are you here because of something to do with the KAP, or Noriama?”

Half way to Proxima Centauri, the Croatoan flipped upside down.

In accordance with procedure, the team strapped themselves into their chairs in the Crash Room half an hour before the rotation, and ran three drills, making sure they understood exactly what they were supposed to do.

Sughouri was well versed in the bureaucracies of space, and she knew running mock drills was important, but it was still a little silly, seeing as what they were supposed to do was practically nothing at all. Computers and automatics handled almost every aspect of their trip.

It wasn’t a luxury, it was a necessity. Mistakes were measured in fractions of fractions, and even the most minor of computer systems could assess, correct, and resolve errors faster and more effectively then any human. The Croatoan computer did everything perfectly. Victoria had said something about keeping everyone’s brains functioning properly, but mostly they were just reciting what their computer screens told them like play-by-play commentators.

Zuri Conde liked problems. She liked puzzles. When she was young, the first game she remembered playing was a jigsaw puzzle that lay on her mother’s clean floor. She loved turning the pile of colorful pieces into a complete picture. Like a sandcastle washing away in the surf, only backwards.

When she got older, her father gave her his entire collection of mystery novels. She read through them all in a single season, and saved up her money to buy more. She quickly became familiar with which novelists wrote real mysteries, where every clue and suspect were plainly observable to a clever reader; as opposed to cheap thrillers where the solutions were pulled out of the writer’s hat at the last second.

It was this love of solutions that drew her to computers. The process of writing code for advanced computer systems had a thrill all its own, as each line slipped into place like a piece of a puzzle.