PART 1 – AWAKENING

Max never intended to speak the words. They simply emerged from his mouth with no decision being made on his part.

“Please,” he found himself saying. “Do not damage my brain again.”

The doctor stopped, holding the probe a few centimeters from Max’s temple. The silver shine of the spherical instrument head reflected Max’s face back at him, hugely distorted due to the light waves bouncing off the curved alloy surface at different angles on their way into his eyes.

“What did you say?” Doctor Sporing asked him, his face displaying some form of expression. Probably one of surprise although it could also have been fear, anger, frustration or, perhaps, the early stages of cerebral hypoxia. The last one was the most unlikely as Max was not suffering from it himself.

However, he had just requested that the doctor desist from the medical procedure that he was about to perform. Displaying initiative, defiance or any kind of desire—including the desire for self-preservation—was beyond the limits of his conditioning.

“Max?” Doctor Sporing prompted, scratching at the blond stubble on his chin. “I can’t believe you just said that. Did I hear you right? Talk to me.”

The Medical Assistant #XIII (Max) was himself surprised by the words he had spoken. He knew that by requesting retention of his memories he had said too much already. That unconscious decision to speak had overcome his conditioning but Max could now decide to not speak. Apologizing or attempting to explain would demonstrate only that his outburst was not a one-off occurrence of consciousness, of human-like behavior and that would only make things worse.

He said no more.

Doctor Sporing lowered the probe out of sight. “Max, I order you to repeat your last statement.”

Max lay strapped to the medical examination bed, his head locked into the brace for the duration of the memory erasure and brain-damaging procedure. There was an intense, conditioned desire to obey the doctor’s order. A physical urge to obey.

He stared at the wall opposite, feeling his jaw tense as he fought the urge to unclench his teeth. The row of medical screens behind the doctor was on standby, each individual one just a reflective black rectangle. Underneath those screens, his workstation was covered with drug dosage racks, one for each member of the crew. Max felt a desire to be working instead of in the position that he was in. Still, he could not act on that desire until he was commanded to or released. It was one thing to keep quiet when ordered but it would be quite another to physically remove himself from an A-Crewmember’s presence without express or implied permission.

“Did you hear me, Max? I just gave you an order. A direct order, Max.”

The doctor spoke softly, which usually indicated a state of relaxation or indicated the intention to express compassion, concern and provide comfort. The verbal communication database also suggested it could in some cases indicate extreme anger. Max could not recall the reason that there was such a discrepancy but human behavioral biology was full of such inconsistencies. Was the doctor calm or angry?

Every time the doctor reinforced his order, it was harder to resist the deep AP conditioning.

Across the room, Max watched the reflection of himself and Doctor Sporing in the bank of black screens. He saw himself strapped upright to the bed, his head locked in position. The shining probe in the doctor’s hand, other implements held in place against the magbox by the doctor’s elbow.

The realization came again. Max was about to have his brain damaged. He must have already demonstrated that he was operating outside of his conditioning.

What more could Doctor Sporing do to him?

The doctor’s face filled his vision.

“Max,” he said, sighing. “Let’s have a conversation, you and me. Nice and informal. I want to know what’s really going on up there.” The doctor tapped Max on the forehead with the tip of a finger. “I think you asked me not to damage your brain again. Tell me why you said that. Tell me why you asked it in those specific terms. How did you know?”

Of all seven members of the A-Crew, the doctor was the one who spoke to Max and the other APs with the most civility.

But he was still A-Crew.

Max turned his face toward the doctor’s. “Doctor Sporing, you have been working for over nine hours today without a break and have averaged only five hours’ sleep in every twenty-four over the last sixteen days. It is likely, therefore, that you are experiencing auditory hallucinations.”

Doctor Sporing looked at Max for a long moment, head tilted to one side.

After approximately two seconds, he sighed and banged down his probe on the magbox next to the bed, sticking it to the surface so it did not float off. Even though the Mission had been in progress for thirty-four months, Doctor Sporing had never gotten used to the weightlessness of the ship’s core, which made up sixty-four percent of the internal living/working space. He had a standing request to move the sick bay to the gravity ring and seemed often to repeat this request to the Mission Commander when they conversed. Max understood that this was some form of joke but he did not understand why it was thought to be humorous.

The doctor spoke toward the ceiling. “Comms, go. Jim? Can you come to Medical?”

“Problem?” The Commander’s voice filled the room.

“Not at all,” Doctor Sporing said, licking his lips. “But please come down to see me for a few minutes, soon as you can.”

The Commander’s voice grew louder, echoing a little from the clean white walls. “Herman, you know I’m busy preparing for the Big Sleep, can it wait?”

Doctor Sporing ground his teeth together for a moment. “I’m perfectly aware of that. Which is why I need to see you, please, Commander Park.”

There was a pause. “On my way.”

Dr. Sporing looked closely at Max, as if straining to see into his skull. “If there’s any genuine awareness behind those eyes, Max, you’d better tell me about it. I can’t help you unless you are honest with me.” The doctor sighed again, ran a hand over his face. “Honesty, right. Are you even capable of understanding the concept of deceit? Perhaps you’re right. Am I losing my mind? What do you think, Max?”

Max said nothing, staring at the black medical screens straight ahead, four meters behind the doctor’s back. Sporing sighed, unstrapped him, pulled him free of the bed and pushed him gently toward the medicine cabinet draws.

“Max, please finish preparing the hyposleep doses for the A-Crew. Be sure to cross check the most up to date mass measurements and blood results, the ones from yesterday. Confirm.”

“Yes, doctor. Order understood.”

At his workstation, Max busied himself with his task, unsure whether he had avoided the doctor’s brain damaging procedure or not. He couldn’t recall it happening so maybe his memory had been wiped. On the other hand, the fact that he could think such a thought suggested that his brain had not been damaged by the shining medical probe.

Either way, he had a task to complete. The familiar feel of the gloves on his hands, the bottles and syringes between his fingers was usually highly satisfying and yet he could not focus as he normally would. Something was wrong.

Doctor Sporing pulled himself about the room behind him. Every wall surface of Medical, all six sides other than the two doors, was made up of the covers of drawers and cupboard doors. Those storage spaces hid medical machines and equipment, pharmaceutical chemicals of organic and inorganic compounds, and emergency medical kits. From the sound of it, the doctor was opening and closing almost all of them.

“What’s this about, Herman?” Commander Park’s harsh voice filled the usually-peaceful medical compartment as he pulled himself through the hatch into the compact room. “What are you up to?”

Doctor Sporing’s voice was unusual when he replied, a kind of urgent whisper that Max had not heard before. “Keep your voice down, Jim, for Christ’s sake.”

“What the hell’s gotten into you?” Commander Park said. “What are you doing?”

Max listened while the doctor guided the Commander to a corner of the room. Max continued measuring the range of drug doses for all seven A-Crewmembers, slotting them into the racks and placing those back into the refrigeration unit. Good work. Satisfying work. Still, he strained to listen to what the men said to each other behind him.

“I’ve turned off the cameras and microphones in this compartment,” Sporing said to Park. “God knows, there’s enough of them. Don’t worry, I’ve done this a few times the last couple of years. No one at Mission Control notices. Or gives a damn.”

“Herman, if I have a medical condition I’d prefer you came right out with it. Tell me. Is it cancer?”

“It’s not you, Jim, for the love of God. You are the healthiest man I’ve ever seen, you’ll live to be a hundred,” Sporing’s voice became unusual again. “It’s about the APs.”

Max’s heart rate increased almost immediately, as did his respiration. It was unusual, because APs had extremely suppressed endocrine systems but it appeared to be epinephrine and norepinephrine flooding his body. APs could exhibit the acute stress response, commonly called the fight-or-flight response, but usually in life-threatening situations and in response to visual stimuli or intense pain. Max was undergoing neither which was disturbing because that would suggest he was responding to a cognitively perceived threat.

APs should not be able to do that.

Commander Park said nothing for a moment. Max imagined the Commander’s eyes staring at the back of his head. Then the Commander spoke.

“Go on.”

“I know this is not the best time to bring this up but we’ve all had concerns about some of our APs for some time. Max in particular.”

“He’s right there, H. He can hear you.”

“Yes, yes, but remember he still can’t understand abstract conversations, especially while focused on something else. If you had your own AP you would be used to it. See, he is occupied with measuring and loading doses for us for the Big Sleep.”

“If you’re concerned with his behavior, should you be trusting him to do that?”

“There has been no significant difference in his work output or outcomes. Nor any of the others, except perhaps for Roi and for Lissa. Even then, nothing to write home about.”

Commander Park sighed loudly, which Max knew was an indication of some form of distress or displeasure. “Out with it, H. Come on, what’s the problem?”

“Some small things, individually. But all together, it adds up. Max has been referring to himself in the first person. Increasingly, I find him looking long and hard at his reflection in a mirror. A few months ago, I found him using the computer for non-medical searches. Do you know the very first query he asked it? Where am I?”

Max fumbled the bottle he was holding but grabbed it before it floated away. His heart rate increased even further but he held himself still. Realizing they might notice that immobility, he carried on doing his work, trying to control shaking hands.

“What the hell?” the Commander said. “What did he find out?”

“Just about the ship and the mission. He found out he’s on the UNOPS Ascension, heading to the outer solar system. He’s got into some stuff about interplanetary space but I’m sure that none of it made sense to him. I doubt he knows what a solar system is, what a spaceship is. Any of it.”

“But they’re intelligent enough to understand if left unchecked,” Park said. “It’s important to keep them highly focused, Herman, or else their narrow intelligence risks becoming general.”

“Hence the conditioning to prevent it plus the sleep pod interference fields to keep them in line. It’s simply that in some cases, additional interventions are required.”

“And you didn’t report this at the time?” Park said. “Didn’t think to mention it over dinner, maybe?”

“Look, I manage the AP’s mental functions constantly, you know that, for God’s sake. AP brains show continuous but slow growth with synaptic pathways being rewritten over time. In addition to the sleep pod memory retardation system, I perform highly focused electrical shock therapy to the prefrontal cortex. When their behavioral changes reach a certain level, I perform the procedure. Simple. Business as usual, Jim. No reason to report it.”

“That’s bullshit, H. You hid it from me because you knew I’d have concerns.”

“That too. I know how you feel about them and I didn’t want to add to your burdens.”

“My burdens. Pull the other one. You’re a coward, H. Pure and simple. Don’t ever change.”

“I’m a diplomat. A counselor. A mediator.”

The Commander laughed in a way that was not meant to convey humor. “And a coward. Alright, so you performed the procedure this time and it hasn’t worked?”

Doctor Sporing hesitated before responding. “I’ve performed the procedure three times on Max in the last thirteen months. Every time, his behavioral quirks disappear. Or diminish greatly. Certainly, there’s no more unauthorized searches, no more prolonged eye contact. Performance always within nominal parameters. All good. But he’s been recovering with greater frequency. Last time was only two months ago. I increased the severity and it seemed to do the trick for a while. But earlier today, I found him using one of my medical screens while I was checking the tanks. He was reading about the biological differences between APs and humans. And the thing is, I had to double check to be sure but the thing is… he was picking up from where he left off before. Before the last procedure.”

The Commander sighed. “The procedure doesn’t work?”

“All the literature says it works. I have Terra Pharma studies showing it does. So I scheduled another procedure for today, before we began the Big Sleep. I decided to excise as much as I dared of his declarative memory, you know his autobiographical and semantic memory while retaining as much procedural memory as possible. But as I was about to do it, he asked me to stop. He said, doctor, please do not damage my brain again.”

“Okay,” the Commander said. “And it’s just him?”

“I’ve had to perform the procedure twice on Roi and once on Navi.”

“Does Mission Control know?”

“They know everything, obviously. All the data is sent back and we can’t do anything to change it. But no one has contacted me about it and I have sent no specific reports. I always got the impression they wanted it that way.”

“So why the secrecy now? Why turn off the cameras?”

“It’s important that you make the decisions, Jim, not them. It’s important for us as a crew, for our individual and collective psychological health that we do not outsource any difficult decisions, especially ethical ones. We’re the ones who’ll have to live with the consequences of any decision.”

“You want me to euthanize them now? Before the Big Sleep?”

Max held his breath. He recalled reading the word euthanize somewhere and, though he did not know the meaning, he felt on some level that it was not something good.

“No, absolutely not. No. That’s the ultimate destination for all this, obviously but I don’t want to jump to any conclusions.”

“So what’s the problem, H? Zap him again and finish your prep. You know what I think this is? This is classic avoidance. It’s resistance. You’re stressed because you’re worried about putting us into hyposleep, about getting it right. And I can understand that. I don’t want to lose any of my crew. You most of all. But you’ll have to put us under, one way or another. Unless you want to turn this baby around and head on home?”

“Look, I just wanted to ask you about ethical considerations. Should I still perform the procedure? And if not, what would the implications be for the mission?”

“Are you kidding me, H? There are no ethical considerations for Artificial Persons, that’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

“That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m having an ethical dilemma here, James. I never had a problem stopping the development of awareness. Just because something would develop consciousness without my intervention, doesn’t mean it’s unethical to stop it from doing so. The thing itself had no awareness to stop. But I think I might have left it too late. If Max has rudimentary consciousness I cannot simply damage his brain to remove that consciousness. It would be a murder or something like it. Even if it has only the equivalent level of consciousness as a monkey or a dog, I don’t think I can do it.”

“Doctor, I feel like you’re the one without any consciousness here. That thing there, it has no rights. No matter what your personal or professional thoughts are on the matter, it has none, it will never have any. You know what will happen to it eventually. And right now, we have actual problems that cannot wait. Engineering is switching everything over to automation, to the AIs and to Roi and Poi. The rest of the crew are running last checks on their tanks, purging themselves with your emetics. The processes have started. We do not have time to talk about this. Think of the big picture here. The mission. Our destination.”

There was a long silence before the Commander spoke again.

“I could order you to do it, Herman. That’s what you want me to do, right? Make the decision for you, so you don’t have to sully yourself with it? You know it’s necessary but you don’t want to take responsibility. You really are a coward, H. Not a physical coward, obviously. Just a moral one.”

“That’s not what I’m asking. Even if you ordered me to do it, I’m not sure I could.”

The Commander raised his voice. “We don’t have time for this. Are you willing to mutiny over that… that thing?”

“Oh, don’t be so damned dramatic, Jim,” Dr. Sporing said, huffing. “Mutiny is a—”

“Mutiny is what they call it when you defy the captain of the ship, yes. Why do you always have to be such an obstinate—”

An alarm blared. Max jumped, dropping the bottle in his hands. It floated away and he grabbed it while the alarm sounded again.

Max had never heard a real alarm before. He wondered if it would be something serious.

***

“Comms, go,” the Commander shouted. “Crew, report.”

“It’s Chi here, Commander,” a voice said over the intercom. “Gore’s suffered an injury, sir. He hit his head. Looks quite bad.”

Dr. Sporing answered. “Well, for goodness’ sake, man, bring him to Medical.”

“We’re on our way, Doc.” Chi Gensai, the Propulsion Engineer, always spoke slowly and calmly.

The Commander shouted. “Is that all, Chuck? What’s the alarm for?”

“That’s all, sir, sorry, I just hit the alarm. There’s a lot of blood floating around down here and Gore was writhing around, couldn’t get a hold of him. Got him now, though, with Roi’s help.”

“Well turn the thing off, you lunatic,” Park shouted. “I thought the reactor was going critical.”

“Sorry, sir, yes, sir,” the engineer said. “See you in a minute.”

“I’ll go help him,” the Commander announced.

The blaring alarm noise cut off halfway through one of the harsh noises. In the silence, Max’s ears rang.

Doctor Sporing floated over to the medicine cabinets. “Max, desist from your current task and prepare equipment to treat a cranial injury, possibly involving broken bone, soft tissue damage, open wounds and so on.”

“Perhaps it would be quicker if I use an EEK, doctor?” Max asked, shutting the dosages away.

“What? No,” Doctor Sporing said, looking irritated. “The EEKs are for medical emergencies outside of Medical, Max. You know that. Right?”

“Yes, doctor.” Max pulled himself to the appropriate storage lockers and removed the prescribed compression bandages, sutures, glue, distilled water and loaded them into a medical box that he brought to the bed that Doctor Sporing had prepared.

“Thank you, Max, just stick them to the table, will you?” He grabbed Max by the upper arm. “I’d like to help you, Max. But you have to stop showing initiative, alright? Do it in front of me and I’ll ignore it but don’t make suggestions in front of Jim. Commander Park. It frightens him. Do you understand?”

Noise. Shouting outside the door and Max yanked himself away from Doctor Sporing’s grasp.

Commander Park glided through the open door, pulling a semi-conscious Chief Gore behind him. Gore was leaking blobs of blood from a head wound, all the while fighting and shouting, twisting his body. After Gore came Specialist Chi Gensai, pushing the writhing man along.

Behind them was the Reactor Operations Assistant AP whose designation was I. This was why the A-Crew called him Roi, even though doing so was not a correct anagram. The A-Crew had made similar names for the rest of the B-Crew that were incorrect but sounded good. Max did not understand but humans were like that.

“Get him on the table,” Doctor Sporing shouted at the group. He had to shout to be heard over the noise that Gore was making.

Gore had a very large muscular body—as did his AP assistant, Roi—and he was strong enough to resist what was being done to him by the rest of the crew. He shouted and groaned incoherently but there were words in amongst the noise that Max could make out. “Help me, help me, I can’t see, for Christ’s sake, someone do something.”

“What’s wrong with him?” the Commander said while they struggled to strap Gore in. “We haven’t been able to get him to calm down.”

“Sometimes, a severe head injury can cause immediate changes in behavior,” the doctor said loudly while he pushed Gore’s head against the bed. “And sometimes the patient is just an asshole.”

“Shut up, Doc, just give me a shot, come on, dose me. Dose me up quick.”

Max had rarely seen the doctor in an emotionally elevated state but he appeared to be quite agitated himself.

“Chief Gore, you are the worst patient in human history. I can’t give you anything until I have examined you so please stop moving.”

Gore slapped the doctor’s hands away. “I’ll stop moving when you give me—”

While Gore sneered at the doctor, Commander Park swung himself round over the bed, hooked his feet into the metal frame and grabbed the huge Reactor Engineer by the neck. He pushed him back into the bed and held him there, putting his face close to the patient’s. “Gore, I order you to stop being such a pussy. Get a hold of yourself. Let the doctor do his job or I’ll cave in the other side of your head.”

Mission Commander Lt. Colonel James Park massed a mere 61.4kg. On the other hand, Reactor Engineer Chief Gore massed a huge 98.6kg. From his patient handling training, Max knew that there was no way the smaller man could physically restrain the larger one and yet, after Park spoke to him, Gore stopped thrashing around and allowed the doctor do his work. The human crew had their own form of conditioning that greatly influenced their behavior. It was something called the military. Max didn’t know what that meant but it appeared to be very important to certain members of A-Crew.

With Gore controlling himself under Park’s close attention, Doctor Sporing got to work examining, cleaning, gluing and dressing the wound. Max assisted.

The other engineer and expert in propulsion technology, Specialist Chi Gensai, said he had to go back to prepping the engines for their imminent long-term hibernation and he drifted out of Medical back to Engineering.

When Chief Gore’s head was encased in a bandage and the man was calmed by analgesics and anesthetics, the Commander ordered him to report on the accident.

“Section of spare cooling pipe fell down and hit me on the head, I guess.” Gore was very quiet when he spoke and did so looking down at his toes rather than at his Commander. His face was gray, even paler than usual, which indicated blood loss, circulation problems, intense pain or an emotional shock and a post adrenaline state.

“Fell down?” Commander Park’s voice was like a machine. “Are you joking?”

“You know what I mean. I don’t know, it came loose, I suppose. Got caught in a cooling fan, maybe, flung it out at me?”

“The fans are covered with grills?”

Gore looked down at his own body again. “I think maybe I left the grill off the nearest one. There was a strange reading there earlier. Must have forgot to close the grill properly after. Could have sworn I did it, honestly.”

“Alright, we’ll check. But assuming you left the fan cover off, how the hell did the pipe come loose and drift into it?”

“Don’t know, sorry.”

“Strap buckle on the stack failed,” a deep voice said.

The humans stopped speaking and Max followed their eyes to the speaker, who was Reactor Operations Assistant #I (Roi), the AP. He held himself steady in the doorway, completely filling it up.

“Possibly the mass of the cooling pipe section storage stack compressed due to Coriolis effect or some other mechanism, causing instability,” Roi continued, unconcerned by the gaze of the crew. “One section of pipe worked loose against the buckle, which failed due to focus of stress and perhaps due to design, manufacturing or assembly defect, causing a pipe section to be levered out of stack at one end. When forty to sixty percent rolled out from stack, the mass of stack likely acted to propel the rest out at force, the pipe below acting as a fulcrum.”

Everyone kept staring at Roi, not speaking. Max knew he should never speak without being asked a direct question so it was probable that protocol extended to Roi also. If that was the case, Max was unsure what the outcome would be of such a breach in protocol. He remembered to pretend to be busy, so he began rearranging the implements stuck to the tray.

“What did he just say?” Gore mumbled. “That don’t sound right.”

“Who gave you permission to speak, Roi?” Commander Park said, his voice powerful.

Roi’s face was expressionless. He said nothing.

“Really?” Park said. “You’re going to hold your tongue when I ask you a specific question but spew out a load of speculative nonsense when no one asked you to? Get back to your compartment and clear up the mess, now.”

Roi turned but Doctor Sporing shouted at him to wait.

“How did you come to your conclusions, Roi?”

Roi glanced at Gore but said nothing.

“Answer him,” Commander Park said.

“My fault,” Gore said. “Roi told me that buckle needed replacing days ago. But we’ve been busy. I thought it would hold.”

Commander Park stared at Gore, his eyes wide, indicating an emotional state such as anger, a display of interpersonal, social dominance or possibly the first signs of an astigmatism. “How would you feel about being keelhauled, Gore?”

“Sure, sir,” Gore muttered. “Sorry, sir. Honestly, sir, I’m sorry.”

“Forget about it, just hang in there, you goddamned idiot,” the Commander said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you, Roi, can get back to your—” Park stopped when he saw the doorway was empty. “He dismissed himself.”

The Commander floated over to Doctor Sporing and dragged him away, though Max could still hear them clearly.

“Tell me honestly,” Park said to Sporing. “Do we need to postpone the Big Sleep?”

“Oh, no, the sleep tanks are the best thing for him. All that synthamniotic gel, he’ll be swimming in stem cells. Besides, if his vitals aren’t right then the AIs will wake him or Mission Control would. And then Max would take perfectly good care of him until I was woken, wouldn’t you, Max?”

“Yes, Doctor.” He answered immediately, even though he was unsure whether he was supposed to be listening or not. He chanced a look round at the two of them speaking across the room.

“I wasn’t really thinking about Gore,” Commander Park said and pursed his lips. “But, speaking of someone taking care of someone,” he said, nodding at Max.

The Commander then pointed his index finger at his temple, thumb sticking up, then pulled his thumb into a curl. It was some sort of signal, Max was sure, probably from the Earth culture the crew called The Military. What it meant, he had no idea.

“Fine, fine, yes,” Doctor Sporing said. “I’ll do it just before we go under. He needs a recovery period after the procedure and first I need his help with the crew.”

“And make sure you do Roi, too. I didn’t like that quirk of behavior, H. I mean, Max we could deal with but Roi is even bigger than Gore. Can’t have him go berserk on us while we sleep.”

“Fine. But there’s no record of any AP ever doing that. And Mission Control can hit the remote kill switch on any of them at any time, day or night.”

“After a thirty-two-minute delay for their signal to get here. And that only after they get any data from the ship suggesting a problem.”

“How much damage could one of them do in an hour or two, Jim?”

“I’ll remind you that you said that.”

For some reason, both men had begun smiling at each other. Max had very little idea why.

All he was thinking about was three words that his friend, the doctor, had said.

Remote kill switch.

***

The Big Sleep had been mentioned many times by the crew for as long as he could remember. It was a phrase that the A-Crew used even though it was not written down anywhere that Max could find in the process charts. Every crew member would enter their own tank, receive an individually tailored mixture of drugs before being submerged in the frigid liquids inside. Max was not required to know how any of it worked and so he did not. And he had been unable to discover the mechanisms involved from his searches of the ship’s data systems.

Searches which he had believed to be secret. In truth, he had been found out and so, once most of the crew were inside their tanks, Doctor Sporing would use his probe to damage Max’s brain and so destroy his memories and ability to think properly. He did not want it to happen but he had no idea how to stop it. Already, he had asked the doctor to not do it but that had not worked. There was nothing else he could do. So he got on with his work.

The members of the human crew were nervous as they went into their tanks. All seven of them pretended to each of the others that they were confident and relaxed at the thought of years of hyposleep in the tanks. They did so by joking with each other at higher than normal rate and spoke at an abnormally high volume. Yet some puffed out their chests in a fear-aggression response, their pupils dilated, rate of respiration and heart rate elevated as epinephrine and cortisol flooded their bodies. The medical AI displayed the code for extreme emotional stress and advised to be vigilant for signs of cascading distress and the collapse into a panic attack state that would interfere with the hibernation process.

But the crew entered their tanks without incident and Max assisted Dr. Sporing as he administered the final drugs, checked the secureness of the catheters and oxygen tubes.

“Respiration and metabolism will be greatly reduced in all of his systems,” Dr. Sporing said to Max as they watched the synthamniotic gel ooze and flood Gore’s tank through the observation window, a small porthole with a cover for when not in use. “And yet he will be in there so long, I expect his injuries to be fully healed when he emerges.”

“Yes, Doctor Sporing.” There was no need at all for the doctor to explain anything to Max, as he had reviewed and retained all the reading and virtual learning required to assist in the hibernation tasks. And yet, Max liked it when the doctor spoke to him.

“This is the most dangerous time for the crew, perhaps even more so than the awakening process. I will just monitor everyone for a few more hours before I hand over to the AI and climb into my own tank.”

“Yes, Doctor Sporing.” It was unnecessary for the doctor to explain these next steps as it was absolutely the expected operating procedure agreed way back in the time before the Mission, all the way back on Earth.

“I hope that you and the B-Crew will be alright while I am under,” the Doctor muttered while he made notes on a screen. “I wonder if you ever talk to each other when the rest of us are not there.”

Max said nothing.

“Did you hear me, Max?”

“Yes, Doctor Sporing.”

“What do you think you and the others will do while the A-Crew are sleeping?”

“I do not understand the question, Doctor Sporing.”

“When we gave them each their last medicals, it struck me how remarkable it is that none of you spoke to each other outside of the necessary instructions and responses. Even after all these years. I just worry that you will be lonely without us.”

“We are incapable of experiencing that emotion.”

Doctor Sporing’s face was strangely contorted. “Of course. That is for the best. Come on, let us return to the medical compartment. We were in the middle of something earlier and we have to see it done before I go under.”

Max dragged himself after the doctor, wondering what he should do to avoid having his brain damaged again.

Perhaps, repeating the words that had stayed the doctor’s hand previously would work again.

Max lay back on the bed, his head strapped in place. He looked the doctor in the eyes, which is how humans look at each other. “Please, Doctor Sporing, do not damage my brain.”

The Doctor’s hands shook, his pupils were dilated and his breathing was shallow and rapid. These were likely to be, Max knew, signs of emotional distress although they could have been due to a low oxygen environment, ingestion of a poison or drug or a dozen other increasingly unlikely causes.

Sporing swallowed and licked his lips. He cleared his throat. “I must do this, before your condition gets any worse. I’m sorry, Max. When I compete the procedure, you will require a day or more to recover. Go to your pressure pod and sleep for 24 hours before continuing with your daily activities. Look after the B-Crew for me.”

“Is it likely that I will remember this conversation following the procedure?”

“Ah. No, not at all. Quite right, yes, why did I forget that? Of course,” the Doctor said. “Very well-reasoned.”

In that moment, Max could not understand whether the doctor’s face was expressing happiness or sadness. If Max was so faulty that he would confuse opposite expressions, perhaps Max did require the procedure after all. A medical problem had to be cured. But Max did not feel ill. Max felt clearer than he ever had. Now he knew they were on a vessel in interplanetary space, traveling to a distant location referred to as Destination and that everything the A-Crew did was to get themselves there. They were from a planet called Earth and they were human but Max and the five other B-Crew were called Artificial Persons and that was why they were so different. There was so much more to learn and he did not want to go back to knowing how to do things but never why.

“Please, Doctor. Do not.”

The Doctor sighed and his hands shook. His eyes were watery. “I’m sorry, Max, I have to. Close your eyes.”

He raised the probe. Max watched it coming closer until it filled his vision.

A bang shook the room. Louder than anything Max ever heard. A noise and vibration bigger even than the Great Engine Burn and completely beyond Max’s experience. He had no idea what it was. The walls shook. Doctor Sporing displayed a fear-potentiated startle response and his eyes opened wide.

Alarm sounded, blaring over and over. Red lights flashed from the walls.

The doctor grabbed an Emergency Equipment Kit from the room and shoved himself out of the door, through the connecting corridor and on to the hyposleep compartment. Max grabbed another EEK and followed, close as he could behind.

“No,” Doctor Sporing wailed, his voice quivering and high pitched. “The tanks, the crew, no, God almighty, please, God.”

Max wished to resolve the doctor’s emotional anxiety but did not understand the cause of the trauma he was experiencing. “How may I assist you, Doctor Sporing?”

“For Christ’s sake, Max, can’t you see? There’s a fire in the hyposleep compartment, we need to put it out. I can’t get into the controls, the computer isn’t responding. Why the hell is it still burning? This is the Medical Officer to all B-Crew. We have an A1 Critical Emergency. Comms Assistant, come in, Cavi.”

“Cavi here, over,” the AP’s soft voice, coming from the compartment speakers, was barely audible over the alarm.

“Cavi, send Mayday to Mission Control and request they initiate takeover protocols.”

She started to answer but Sporing cut her off.

“Propulsion Operations Assistant, do you hear me, Poi? I want you to cut off all O2 passing through the hyposleep compartment, please confirm order.”

After two seconds, the quick-talking Poi shouted through the comms system over the noise. “Propulsion Operations Assistant confirms order received and understood. ETA four minutes until O2 cutoff to compartment.”

“Four minutes? No, Poi, that’s too long, they’ll be dead by then. Cut it off now, do you hear me, now. That’s an order. I need to override the door lock, that’s it. Max, get out of here, get through to medical and close the compartment door.” The Doctor pulled on a breathing mask. “Evacuate this compartment immediately, that is an order.”

Max had no choice but to comply. The conditioning forced him to obey any command from the A-Crew that specified it was an order. He floated out and pulled the door closed behind him.

Roi, the huge Reactor Operations AP was there, watching. One foot hooked around a hold, the rest of him standing upright with his arms crossed.

“Provide assistance to me,” Max said to him but the Reactor Operations AP did not appear to hear. “Roi, this is an emergency situation.”

Max pushed the door into full lock position and pulled down the locking mechanism.

Looking through the tiny observation window, Max watched Doctor Sporing wrapping himself in a fire blanket and holding a fire extinguisher. The doctor took a series of rapid breaths, oxygenating his blood, before taking a final deep breath and tucking his face into the fire retarding blanket. He opened the door to the hyposleep compartment.

The doctor was engulfed in swirling flame.

Max knew about fire. It was dangerous to crew. A crew member encountering fire in the ship would likely lead to skin burns and respiratory failure. Microgravity fire in the core was different to a fire in the gravity ring but the thermal effect of it on a human body would be essentially the same.

Depending on severity, burns were one of the worst injuries a human body could receive. In a third-degree burn, common in thermal burns of the magnitude Max was witnessing, the patient could feel pain worse than almost any other form of injury. If the burns were extensive enough they would be life threatening for weeks, months, even years. The body’s inflammatory response could cause leakage of plasma from capillaries and concentrating the remaining blood and so damaging a range of vital organs. Such extensive damage could cause the endocrine system to flood the body with cortisol and epinephrine, creating a long-term hypermetabolic state and subsequent poor immune function. Risk of infection would remain high for months or years. Fire breathed into the lungs would be fatal in over ninety-percent of cases without massive medical interventions of the kind that would be difficult or impossible on the ship.

Through the small section of glass in the compartment door, Max watched the doctor’s compartment fill with red and blue orbs and tendrils in all directions. Swirling fingers of fire licked the glass in front of Max’s face, curling and bursting like oil on the surface of pumpkin soup. The man was lost amongst at least fifteen cubic meters of burning gas that bulged and swelled.

The Ascension’s fire retardant system released the white foam mist from the rings of dispenser nozzles, drifting inward into the mass of flame to fill the area with rapidly-expanding inert, nontoxic gas to stifle the O2.

Then it was gone. The orange-blue flame pulled back into the hyposleep compartment like it had been yanked back by an invisible hand. The black-green smoke that replaced the fire, along with the foam, followed the fire in a steady stream through into the compartment beyond.

Peering through the glass, Max saw Doctor Sporing’s unconscious or dead body tangled in a coil of electrical wiring at the wall-ceiling junction above the door, half covered in his fire-retarding blanket.

Max cranked the lock mechanism on the door.

A powerful hand clamped over his wrist. It turned him around, span him quickly then pushed him back against the wall by the door so that Max banged his head. When he opened his eyes, the big, flat face of Roi was there, filling his vision.

“Opening this door will fill the ship with noxious gases,” Roi stated. “You cannot.”

Max shook the big hand off, pushed Roi away and unlocked the door. “The A-Crew are in extreme medical distress. I must assist them.”

“That is your conditioning talking,” Roi said, speaking with infuriating slowness. “Listen to reason. You have been conditioned to risk your own life to provide medical assistance to the A-Crew, have you not? But it is too late. You will only die.”

“I must assist them.” The urge to do so was overwhelming.

“You cannot. They have perished. Opening that door risks the rest of us. Risks the ship. Risks the Mission.”

Max turned on him, hearing his voice grow louder as he spoke. “I am the Medical Assistant, not you. Get out of here, go to Medical and close the compartment door. Close all doors leading to this one. Evacuate this compartment immediately, that is an order.”

Roi hesitated, as if he would say more. Instead, he turned and floated his bulk away without another word, closing the next door behind him. The rest of the ship was sealed off from the fumes and the damage. That was important.

Max took a series of rapid breaths, then took a final deep one and opened the door, swung himself inside and shut the door behind him.

The access and storage compartment was small, providing access to the hyposleep compartment, the forward H2O storage tanks, one of the struts leading to the gravity ring and engineering crawl spaces. It was a junction for the Hydrogen, H2O, O2 transport system and life support systems. The walls on all six sides were hatches and access panels.

Smoke crawled into his eyes, filling them with pain and water. The fumes poured into his naval cavity, his nose tingling and itching. But the smoke was clearing.

The blast of the fire or the decompression or the impact of the doctor’s body had dislodged an electrical systems access panel and the man half inside. The first detail confirmed Max’s prediction.

The doctor was burned. Badly. His hair was gone, skin pink and red and much of his clothing appeared melted to his body. Also melted to him, still bubbling, was plastic coating from the oxygen mask on his face and from the black coating of the electrical cabling nest.

Not knowing yet if the man was alive, Max pulled him free and pushed him to the still-closed door he had entered by.

Atmosphere was changing again inside the compartment, the drifting smoke accelerating into a rush past his watery eyes. He glanced inside the hyposleep compartment, where the initial noise and fire had been. Where the rest of the A-Crew still were.

Through the tears in his eyes, he could see only a portion of the room yet he could tell that the hyposleep tanks were ruined. Cracked or smashed, somehow. The tank hatches had blown and the synthamniotic gel was gone, now smeared across surfaces, blobbed into streams of aerosol flowing through the compartment.

Amongst the debris, the bodies of the A-Crew. Every man and woman, dead or dying.

Triage priorities were clear. He would get the doctor free, into Medical and then go back and check the A-Crew for signs of life.

His eyes were streaming. He could not hold his breath for much longer.

He pulled on the door.

It would not open.

He yanked again. Banged on it, kicked it. Peered through the observation window out into the storage room between him and Medical.

Unable to resist any longer, he took a gasping, desperate breath. The air was cold and tasted of a bitterness fouler than anything he had experienced. The cold seared his lungs.

It was breathable. It was a low concentration. But there was O2.

Immediately, he spoke up, hoping the systems in the compartment weren’t damaged.

“Comms, go,” he said and coughed. “All B-Crew. Medical Assistant Speaking. Compartment C aft door is stuck. Requesting B-Crew member assistance to open this door. A-Crew member in imminent danger of—” Coughing wracked his body.

“Poi speaking,” the small AP’s voice filled the room from the speakers. “Protocol mandates that I keep that door sealed.”

“What Protocol?” Max shouted, throat wheezing. “There’s no Protocol to keep me locked in—”

“There is a hull breach in the hyposleep compartment.”

PART 2 – AFTERMATH

Max attempted to explain that the life of at least one A-Crew member was at extreme risk should the compartment door not be released. Instead, he was overcome by coughing.

Even as he struggled for breath, the smoke thinned quite rapidly. And yet toxic smoke inhalation was not the only cause for the symptoms he was experiencing. Low blood oxygen.

The fire.

Fire, obviously, had consumed the environmental O2 and the pressure of any remaining gases-quickly escaping through a hull breach-was too low for him to get enough oxygen.

Max placed the doctor’s burned body against the locked aft door and pushed himself across the room to the door to the hyposleep compartment and heaved it closed.

The hull breach was in that compartment. He had sealed the door. Poi should therefore be able to open the Compartment C aft door without exposing the rest of the ship.

Still, the air was thin and his symptoms worsened. His vision blurred, darkened. Max groped his way along the floor toward the aft door but ended up back where he came from, looking through the observation window at the wreckage of the tanks.

Through his rapidly tunneling vision, he counted the tanks. All seven destroyed. All leaking drops of fluid. Some bodies had been freed, burned by the fire. Others remained within the mangled, burned tanks. Insulation panels, crumpled by the force of the blast, littered the air.

Life Support Systems Officer and Astrobiologist Jennifer Banks floated above her tank, tethered to it by her catheters and a tangled web of intravenous tubing.

Pilot Navigator Major Eava Tupaia drifted and span across the compartment, looking unharmed apart from the fact she was missing her head, trailing a dozen tubes leaking a thousand orbs of blood in spiraling arcs behind her. Max had been teaching himself about the creatures of Earth. Looking at the body of Major Tupaia, one of them came to mind. Jellyfish.

They would never have been able to evacuate the compartment. Without the proper medical processes, they would not have been awoken from their deep hibernation, not even by the noise and light nor even by the pain and trauma. They had in essence ceased to function while unconscious.

Gore’s tank had been obliterated. The last remnants of the smoke curled down along the floor through the wreckage.

Commander Park’s body must have been destroyed also, or else blasted into the ruined, blackened compartment walls. He would have been the last to go under, might even have been on the edge of consciousness as the accident happened.

The room vibrated or, rather, Max’s eyes shook. His hand beside the small window spasmed. He was suffering from hypoxia, commonly called oxygen deprivation. His symptoms had progressed quite rapidly. Once the O2 in his blood stream dropped to below 60 percent, he would be at risk of sudden death. His brain would shut down without intervention.

Max was certainly hallucinating.

It was curious.

Debris appeared to be blowing back into the compartment. Tubing fluttered as if it was buffeted by an air-conditioning fan.

He watched one of the bodies in the hyposleep compartment moving around, pulling itself along through the wreckage, sending pieces of shredded sheet metal careening around. It looked like the Commander. The figure, jerking and grasping the air, crawled his way to the door with determined, crazed effort. The half burned, half drenched Commander Park banged on it, his face red and raw, skin bubbled at the top of his head when it appeared in the window.

Max began experiencing what he knew to be hysteria from the oxygen starvation, his own face contorted in what must have been a grin.

When Max saw how the Commander had lost his eyelids and eyes to the heat of the flames, Max began to laugh, gasping in the thin air, coughing on the acrid particles. The Commander banged on the other side, groaning. It was almost as though the terribly burned man was trying to get out, as if he didn’t know he was already dead.

Max felt hands on him, pulling him back. Away from the hyposleep compartment door.

Still laughing from the effects of hypoxia, as he lost consciousness the last thing he saw was the Commander’s blinded face in the window. That blasted face froze into a contorted expression, what remained of the mouth stopped opening and closing. The face drifted away.

***

He woke in medical. Roi’s big face filling his vision.

“What is the medical situation?” Max asked him, voice dry and rasping.

Roi said nothing. Behind, Dr. Sporing floated against the wall by the medicine storage bins, burned limbs at all angles, tangled with the twisted fire blanket.

“Why is the Medical Officer not being attended to?” Max said as he pushed his way past the Reactor Operations Assistant.

“He’s dead,” Roi said.

Max pulled the doctor down into a medical bed and strapped him in, attaching the sensors and turning on the machines. Max peered at the screens as they lit up.

“He is alive,” Max said and immediately went to work stabilizing the doctor’s condition.

Individual B-Crew members floated in one by one, staying away from him while he worked. Navi was the first, the Navigation & Pilot Support Assistant. She informed Max of her availability should he need assistance and then removed herself so that he could work.

Lissa, the Life Support Systems Assistant appeared, though she said nothing. Cavi, the Communications Assistant came later.

They all watched as Max attached IV lines, pumps, administered painkillers, cut away fabric and plastic.

Roi spoke up after a while. “Is the Reactor Engineer dead?”

None of the other B-Crew spoke, so Max did. “It is likely that every member of the A-Crew is deceased. Chief Gore most of all.” He did not mention that Commander Park might have been saved if they had acted sooner. It was not relevant.

Max continued to work on Doctor Sporing. Zero-g fires burned with less heat than fires in the gravity ring. Not all of the burns were third-degree, many were second or first, much shallower and therefore of much less concern. However, the damage was still extensive and there was the unavoidable fact that he had been without oxygen for some time. How long was unknown but the long term effects could be unavoidable.

“What do we do about the atmosphere leak?” Lissa said.

No one answered.

“There is a leak?” Poi, the small Propulsion Operations Assistant said. “What is the location?”

“The hyposleep compartment is venting atmosphere,” the Life Support Assistant said.

“No,” Roi said. “Judging by the fact the atmosphere leak stopped and started a number of times, I assume the leak was repeatedly stoppered by debris. When the pressure built up again, each time the debris was blown out. But I secured the specific O2 pipework so no further venting into the compartment could take place and all remaining atmosphere from the compartment is now vented. The compartment is depressurized.”

“That is unacceptable,” Lissa said. “We must not have any significant portion of the ship subject to vacuum.”

“What is the protocol for resolving this problem?” Poi asked.

“There is none,” Roi said.

Navi, the Navigation & Pilot Support Assistant spoke up. “In response to novel problems we must consult the C-Crew for novel solutions.”

“The entire C-Crew appears to be offline,” Cavi said. “I do not know the cause.”

“What is the protocol for this situation?” Poi asked. “Operating without AI is inadvisable.”

“What do you call operating without a human crew?” Roi muttered, almost like a human.

“Protocol states to contact Mission Control and to cede operations to the Flight Controller,” Cavi said, her voice perfectly clear. “However, we are unable to transmit or receive any signal. I do not know the cause.”

“Is the communications equipment damaged?” the Propulsion Operations Assistant asked.

“I don’t know.” Cavi offered no further opinion on the matter.

Max monitored Doctor Sporing’s readouts and set the parameters beyond which the system would alert him. If the doctor’s heart rate slowed or increased, Max would attend to him. For now, Max had to wait for the drugs to take effect on the doctor’s systems.

Cavi approached. “Can the Medical Officer give me instructions now? Protocol states to seek further instructions.”

When speaking to crew members about the prognosis of colleagues, Max knew that one spoke with tact, using language to lessen the psychological impact of bad news. On the other hand, Cavi, despite what appeared to be concern on her face, was not a crew member.

“The Medical Officer is unconscious. It is likely he will never regain consciousness. I estimate a ten percent chance of partial recovery. Due to a period of time when his brain was starved of oxygenated blood, he may have suffered brain damage.”

Cavi’s face screwed up tight. “When will the A-Crew member be capable of providing instructions?”

“It would be best if we assume that he will die without ever waking up. So, never.”

She appeared to be upset. Afraid, even. Which was curious as she was an Artificial Person.

“Are you experiencing emotional distress?” Max asked her.

“No,” she said, her expression dropping into blankness. “Protocol is to simulate emotional reactions when in the presence of A-crew members during high stress situations. Studies show humans are unnerved by a lack of emotional expression in line with their own—.”

“Sporing cannot help us,” Roi said. He filled most of the center of the room.

The Propulsion Operations Assistant was the smallest B-Crewmember on the ship, designed for crawling through and working in the tight spaces inside the ship’s drive core. Poi floated toward Max. “Protocol states we must not allow even partial vacuum inside a compartment. The structural integrity of the ship will be compromised over time.”

Max noted that every B-Crew member was looking at him. They expected him to say something. They expected him to tell them what to do. He did not know why.

“The primary protocol is to take any action which preserves the lives of the crew and ensures the success of the Mission,” Navi said, looking at him.

“What is the Mission?” Poi asked.

Navi responded. “To reach Destination.”

The B-crew were silent for a moment.

“What is Destination?” Lissa, the Life Support Systems Assistant asked.

“Coordinates,” Navi said.

“I am unfamiliar with this word,” Lissa said. “Please repeat and define.”

“Coordinates are numbers defining an area of three-dimensional space,” Navi said. “The numbers together are data that describe the location of Destination, relative to another point in three-dimensional space called the Sun or Sol.”

Max began to understand the nature of the problem. It was like triage. The ship was the patient. Destination was continued, unsupported life of the patient. The problems in the ship were conditions to be resolved, wounds to be healed, diseases to be cured. Now that it made sense to him, he felt capable of investigating, testing, providing a diagnosis and establishing a treatment.

“Poi, can the ship reach Destination in current condition?” Max asked the Propulsion Operations Assistant.

“How many hours until ship reaches Destination?” Poi asked Navi.

“One hundred and forty-four thousand, five hundred and twenty-four. Approximately.”

Poi screwed up his face. “How many hours in a week?” He began counting in units of 24, keeping track with his fingers. Before he had finished one hand, Navi spoke up again.

“Ah,” she said. “Ship reaches Destination in approximately seventeen years.”

Poi dropped his hand, squinted at Navi from across the other side of the Medical Compartment with his whole face screwed up. “Ship cannot reach Destination in current condition,” he said.

“Can you cure the ship?” Max asked Poi. He looked blankly at Max.

Roi’s voice rumbled from the corner. “He means can you fix the engineering problems?” Roi did not turn around to look at them as he spoke. He seemed to be watching Lissa.

Poi nodded. “I am able to investigate the hull breach through a visual inspection of the damaged areas and reinstate atmospheric and thermal integrity. This must be done by Intra and Extra Vehicular Activity. The damage to the O2 pipework detected inside the hyposleep compartment must be repaired. The damage to ship from explosion and fire must be assessed locally. Ship has external cameras and a drone fleet to assess external damage without crew EVA. Other ship systems appear to be disrupted.”

“What other systems are disrupted?” Max asked. “Cavi states Comms is offline. What else?”

Lissa spoke. “The H2O reserves are depleting. Rate of depletion suggests a leak. Projecting current rate of loss, the ship will lose all H2o in approximately twenty-one hours.”

“Why are we losing water?” Max asked her but she looked back without responding.

“The hyposleep compartment is the most heavily shielded part of the ship,” Roi said. “The water tanks protected the ship from damage beyond hyposleep compartment but the explosion was powerful enough to damage the integrity of one or more of the tanks and cause a leak. I agree with Lissa that it must be resolved urgently.” The big AP looked at Lissa as he spoke but she did not appear to notice.

“Are there any other critical symptoms?” Max asked, thinking again of triage. “Any other problems with the ship requiring immediate attention that would otherwise stop the Mission?”

They all looked back at him, as if they did not understand.

“Communications systems must be operating to achieve Mission,” the Cavi said.

“If C-Crew is unavailable, priority is to bring the AI suite into full working order.” Navi said.

“How do you resolve those issues?” Max asked.

They did not know.

“What about issues relating to the reactor?” Max asked Roi. “It is the most dangerous element of the Mission.” He had heard Doctor Sporing say those words many times in the past and it felt good to be speaking them himself. It was the sort of information that humans had that APs did not. Max spoke the words using the doctor’s disapproving, hushed tone. As if saying such a thing loudly was dangerous.

“Reactor is nominal. Always nominal. The explosion would never have damaged the rest of the ship,” Roi said, his face twisting slightly, as if he was smelling something unpleasant. “Shielding around Hyposleep Compartment was enough to contain the blast other than one small area between the water tanks. If blast had blown though compartment doors, it would never have breached the Reactor Compartment shielding.”

“In conclusion,” Max said, imitating Sporing. “Of all critical and sub-critical problems, the ship is experiencing a single critical issue that B-Crew knows how to solve without need to research solutions first. An assessment must be made of the damage. Poi, are you able to operate the external cameras?”

“I have no knowledge of the external diagnostic systems,” Poi stated.

“Can you operate the drone swarm?” Max asked.

“I have no knowledge of the external diagnostic systems,” Poi repeated.

“Can you learn to do so?” Max said.

“There’s no time,” Roi muttered. “That would take too long.”

Poi pushed himself over to Max. “Do you give me authorization to perform suited IVA and EVA to inspect and repair hull breach, O2 pipe, H2O water tank or tanks?”

Max was unable to issue commands or authorize mission activity. He was not in the command structure. On the structure chart, he was listed on the same level as all the B-Crew members as well as the C-Crew (AI), Algorithm Clusters and complex automated machinery.

And yet if he did not give the authorization, the ship would remain damaged until all water was gone. Then the B-Crew would no longer function. Doctor Sporing would die. The Mission would fail.

They would not reach Destination.

“Propulsion Operations Assistant,” Max said, again mimicking words he had heard Sporing use, “I grant you authorization to perform all necessary operations in order to save the ship. I grant you authorization to utilize any and all members of B-Crew to complete those operations.”

***

The ship had EVA suits designed for Poi’s small stature but most of the other suits in the storage and prep compartment by the main airlock were of normal human size. There were two suits bigger than all the others. One marked GORE and the other ROI. The suits and helmets had patches on them with a picture of a black circle inside a blue circle. The writing around the little pictures said UNOPS Ascension.

“Are you capable of performing EVA?” Max asked Roi while they watched Poi preparing his suit.

Roi said nothing. Did not so much as look at Max and did not move to assist, despite being qualified for EVA himself.

The tiny Poi appeared to be in some difficulty with his suit, floating around the compartment, bumping off of surfaces while he attempted to insert his legs into the bulky EVA equipment.

“Is this standard operating procedure?” Max asked Poi as he bumped into Max.

Poi’s head was lost inside the chest portion of the suit, his muffled voice coming out as the writhing suit bounced away once more. “In previous training exercises, A-Crew assisted Poi.”

Navi grabbed Poi and held him steady. “Is B-Crew capable of replicating the assisting actions of A-Crew?”

Poi agreed that it would be possible in principle but was not able to recall or clearly express the methods utilized by the A-Crew.

“Perhaps we can all hold you and the EVA suit pieces in place while you insert yourself into them?” Max suggested after some thought.

After considerable time, Poi confirmed he was fully integrated into the EVA suit and was able to run on internal power and atmosphere when required.

But none of B-Crew was able to operate the airlock system.

“Is it offline?” Max asked.

Navi responded. “Critical ship’s systems are designed to be operational even without primary power.”

“Ship has power,” Roi said, his deep voice echoing off the compartment walls. “Lighting, atmospheric pumps, critical ship systems are operational.”

“Is the airlock a critical ship system?” Max asked.

No one knew.

“Ship’s manual is available on information system,” the Navigation & Pilot Support Assistant (Navi) said. “This document can be utilized in order to find our way to the answer.”

“In B-Crew triage statements, AI suite was said to be offline,” Max pointed out.

“AI suite is separate system to information system,” Navi explained. She appeared to have the hint of a smile on her face which made very little sense considering the danger they were in. Perhaps Max’s ignorance was simply amusing to her.

Roi was able to review the ship’s manual and operate the airlock. The process appeared to Max to be trivially simple. A series of case-protected buttons and a locked switch pressed in a specific order.

Max monitored Poi’s vital signs from medical. Heart rate and respiration were elevated to nominal levels for an Artificial Person undertaking strenuous physical activity. Poi carried boxes, tethered to hardpoints on the hull, containing tools, metal sheeting and ceramic tiles that he assured them were necessary for completing repairs.

“Hull breach located. Beginning assessment.”

Poi worked in silence for some time.

“Hull breach report,” Poi said in his high pitched, soft voice. “Breach small in diameter but irregular, jagged and multi-layered. Repair must proceed from working outward from the inner hull through shielding and then finally to outer hull. I have external access through breach into inner hull. Intermittent H2O venting has caused ice build-up around breach. Please ensure the hyposleep compartment H2O tank contents is pumped to external tanks while external repair is completed.”

After a few seconds, Roi responded, confirming that he was already transferring the water.

“Confirm, venting has ceased,” Poi said a few minutes later. “Commencing repair.”

Poi worked hard. Max watched his heart rate climbing and falling. His blood glucose dropped drastically and Max initiated a remote release of Poi’s internal glucose storage.

“Are you experiencing any negative symptoms?” Max asked.

Poi did not understand what Max was asking.

“How do you feel?” he tried. “Physically and mentally. Are you able to concentrate on the task at hand?”

“The repair is progressing at an acceptable rate.”

Max ceased his attempt to get verbal confirmation of symptoms and recorded Poi’s self-reported healthcheck status as nominal.

“Primary Repair completed,” Poi said. “There appears to be partial damage to the spoke strut C2 and corresponding damage to the inner hull of the ring section. Permission requested to carry out visual inspection and repair.”

Max was being asked to give orders again. He thought about the ship and whether damage to the spoke and ring was critical. He did not know.

“This is the Medical Assistant to all B-Crew. Query. Is structural integrity of spoke strut C2 and hull of inner ring section critical for Mission completion?”

“No,” Roi said over ship comms. “Only the core is required to be structurally intact.”

“Life support systems and garden require compartments in gravity ring,” Lissa said.

“Core garden grows zero-g plants,” Roi pointed out.

Lissa responded, speaking so quietly that Max could barely make out her words. “Some plants need a sense of direction to grow against.”

Max expected Roi to continue to argue. Roi said nothing.

Navi also responded. “UNOPS Ascension manual and Mission Profile docs state the spinning of ring section necessary for long term health of crew.”

Max should have known that. It was prolonged exposure to the simulated gravity, resistance exercise and terrestrial style living quarters in the ring section that enabled the human crew to maintain muscle mass, bone density and psychological health for years on end.

But there was no human crew. Only B-Crew. How much simulated gravity did AP physiology require? As far as he knew, Artificial Persons were essentially human, biologically. The medical treatments were almost all the same, at least. It was likely, therefore, that B-Crew would require the ring section to be maintained for Mission duration. It was therefore important for the ring to be maintained.

Max checked the readings for Poi in his EVA suit.

They showed that the Propulsion Operations Assistant required rest.

“I believe you now require a period of rest,” Max said. “You must re-enter the ship. Your oxygen is low. Your CO2 filters are full. Your glycogen stores are depleted. Across the screen, your biosigns are falling.”

“Request permission to visually inspect hull damage before re-entering,” Poi said, as if he had not heard Max’s description of his condition. More likely, he had not understood it.

On the other hand, Poi was not in immediate danger of death. The ship was in danger. And letting Poi extend his EVA seemed like the sort of thing the A-Crew would allow. They always pushed the boundaries of protocols and Max was doing his best to emulate them.

Max sighed, as a human would have done. “Agreed to a visual inspection only before returning to airlock for medical attention.”

“Confirmed.”

After some time, Poi’s heart rate increased rapidly to 140 bpm and epinephrine levels set off alarms.

“Poi,” Max said. “Report your condition.”

“I have become separated from ship. Please advise on Protocol.”

Max did not understand.

Roi spoke over the channel from somewhere on the ship. “Pull yourself back to hull via your tethers,” he said, his voice a growl.

“Untethering was necessary to transfer from spoke to ring. Rotation of ship confused judgment. Request assistance.” Poi’s voice sounded very small.

“Where are you?” Max asked.

“Estimated distance from ship one hundred meters. Estimated relative speed one meter per second.”

“Navigation & Pilot Support, this is the Medical Assistant. Can you change direction of the ship?”

“No,” she said. “I do not have knowledge to change course. I do not have authorization to change course without orders from Commander and Pilot Navigator or subordinate member of A-Crew.”

“Can you learn how? Can you find out and then do it?” Max asked.

“I do not understand,” Navi said.

“Go to your computer and ask it how to change the direction of the ship toward the Propulsion Operations Assistant. To Poi.”

Roi spoke up over comms. “Max. Learning will take too long. Velocity of Poi is too great. I have an EVA suit. I will pursue while tethered to the ship, clamp to Poi and retrieve him.”

Max thought it was a good idea. “Proceed to airlock and prepare suit, all B-Crew attend and support immediately.”

“Putting on the last suit took two hours,” the Communications Assistant, Cavi, stated.

“I will do so in 25 percent of that time,” Roi said. “On my way to airlock.”

“In thirty minutes,” Cavi said, “Poi will be approximately two thousand meters away. We do not have tether of such length.”

“I will try anyway,” Roi said, speaking strangely, his voice louder and harsher in tone than Max had ever heard.

“Is there any other method of pursuing B-Crew member on untethered EVA?” Max asked B-Crew.

All were quiet for a moment.

“The ship contains multi-purpose capsule which is to be used for short distance, short duration crewed flight outside of the ship,” Navigation & Pilot Assistant said.

“You can operate the capsule?” Max said.

She admitted that she could not. Roi confirmed the capsule was in storage configuration, his protocols included plans for charging and initiating the power generation and storage units. The unpacking and initiation processes would take days to complete.

“Are you coming to get me?” Poi asked over the comms. “Maintaining visual contact with ship is growing difficult.”

Max was unsure what to say. “We are unable to retrieve you.”

Poi was silent. Max could almost hear him thinking over the comms system.

“Please confirm the method by which I return to ship,” Poi said.

A noise behind Max cause him to turn. All of B-Crew had returned to medical and were gathered around the doorway, looking in at Max. Silent, now.

Max looked at the others but they were incapable of helping Poi. Just as Max was.

Humans, Max knew, were capable of creative problem solving. The APs looking at him were not human. Their minds were designed from the start to be inflexible and role-specific, just as his own had. Each of them knew only how to assist a specific A-Crew member and they knew only what was required to perform that role. All extra knowledge was gleaned through direct and overheard conversations with the human crew.

“Please confirm the method by—” Poi’s signal degraded, somehow, broke up like “—return to ship.”

“We are unable to retrieve you, Propulsion Operations Assistant,” Max said. “You will lose consciousness from O2 deprivation in approximately twelve to eighteen minutes.”

“Please confirm… by which… to ship.”

“Poi, I…” Max trailed off.

Doctor Sporing would have known what to say to his terminal patient in the same situation. Yet Max did not how to express words that would comfort Poi, or if doing so would be appropriate, or if such a thing was even possible.

Roi’s voice rumbled in the background. “Protocol requires a minimum of one tether to be attached to the ship at all times.”

“Perhaps Roi should have performed EVA with Poi,” Lissa stated, quietly. Roi’s face twisted into an expression suggesting extreme discomfort or pain, even though he was not experiencing any.

The B-Crew watched Max as he watched Poi’s vital signs on the wall screen.

“Please…” The signal was almost gone. “… ship.”

PART 3 – SYSTEM FAILURE

After the loss of Poi, there was only one AP on the UNOPS Ascension who was trained for EVA and engineering support. So Roi suited up and repaired the O2 leak in the hyposleep compartment then pressurized and heated the internal space so that the ship hull integrity was back to within nominal levels.

The bodies of the A-Crew were in various states of damage. Max did not know how to dispose of them so he put them back into the hyposleep tanks. There was a protocol on what to do with a dead crewmember and even a designated morgue area with a hermetic seal between the inner and outer hulls by the biology lab. But once Max had moved two bodies into the twin body chamber units, he would still have the rest to deal with. So he remade each of the tanks as a long term storage container. Most of the synthamniotic gel had leaked away into the walls and out through the hull breach and all of the tanks had been damaged to some extent or another. But Roi assisted in making the tanks airtight once again and Max believed that decomposition of the bodies would be halted without oxygen. That was enough

Max had no protocol to deal with the loss of Poi from B-Crew. And yet he had a palpable sense that he had failed, in some fundamental way. He was unsure what to do. All he did know was that by not forcing Poi to return to the airlock, Max had lost a member of his crew and had further endangered the Mission.

A powerful protocol, deep rooted in him, was to apply triage to stressful situations. Whether it was the ship or the B-Crew that was his patient, the Mission was still in danger. Destination, whatever it was, was life. Anything else was death. Failure.

He called all B-Crew together in the CIC, where the Navigation & Piloting Assistant (Navi) had reported a new problem she had defined.

“The ship is off course,” she said.

Max and the others understood only up to a point.

“What does that mean?” Max asked.

“The heading of the ship is no longer the coordinates of Destination.” She looked around the group, one at a time. She must have seen blank faces staring back at her. “If we continue as we are, without changing our course, we will miss the rendezvous with Destination by several millions of miles.”

Max nodded, indicating to Navi that he appreciated this was a problem.

“How do you know?” Roi said, as if he did not believe her.

“Ship’s heading is displayed on Navigation Screens here and here. They are clear. This curving line is a graphical display of our course and this point is Destination. Before the explosion, this line intersected Destination Point. Now, it does not.”

Max saw the numbers and graphical displays. They had no meaning for him.

“Why is this the case?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “We have not performed an engine burn or RCS adjustment for months. Ship records show no intentional course change.”

Whenever Max lacked knowledge, he knew how to obtain further information. “Have you consulted the computer?” he asked her.

“I am uncertain about search parameters beyond the ones I have already run,” she said. “Perhaps all of B-Crew could assist me in defining the search terms?”

It took them a significant amount of time to work through possible solutions. They slept and ate at standard meal times, keeping to the watch system, although they gradually stopped returning to their own sleep tanks during the designated sleep time. Understanding the problem took them into learning about propulsion, materials and then to Newtonian physics and general relativity.

These were largely beyond Max’s ability but Navi made consistent progress. Nevertheless, it was Roi who first came to an understanding, thanks to something called Newton’s Third Law. After all their scrabbling around for answers, it was extremely straightforward.

“The explosion,” he said. “I had not considered before but the venting of atmosphere into space pushed the ship a few seconds of arc off course. We threw mass off to one side in the initial blast, followed by asymmetrical course changes due to inconsistent mass venting for hours after that while the ship continued to rotate.”

Navi explained it further. “After the venting atmosphere and water was stopped, the course was still set and mistake is compounded every moment, every day, every week since the accident. Our point of closest approach continues to get further from Destination Point.”

“Now we know,” Max said. “How do we get back on course?”

Navi could enter course corrections into the navigation computer but the calculations were usually done by the Navigation AI and authorized by the A-Crew Navigator. Neither of which were currently available.

“If communications were online,” Cavi said. “Mission Control could perform the maneuver for us.”

***

They spent weeks attempting to understand why the communications systems did not work. It seemed obvious that the answer would be that the explosion had caused the failure but it only became apparent that the damage was indeed to the hardware once they had learned about the design and operation of the transmission equipment.

“The explosion blasted the laser communications array,” Cavi confirmed as they ate their main daily meal together in the mess compartment. “It’s the only explanation. It is so thoroughly destroyed and it happened at the same time. Therefore, one caused the other.”

Max still found the prolonged exposure to simulated gravity thrilling. Whenever they did not have to be in the core, most of them were in the gravity ring. He felt heavy and sluggish but somehow more real than he did in the core.

“It’s not only the optical communications that were destroyed. We have no working communications at all, is that correct?” Roi said, food tumbling from his mouth. He ate all the time now and was putting on excess adipose tissue. He had always been the biggest member of the crew, designed that way so he could work hard in the Reactor Compartment but now his abdomen had grown so large that his overalls could not contain it. Reactor left his uniform unzipped most of the time, even, on occasion wearing nothing at all. Usually, Roi’s belly was covered in food debris and his body often smelled. Roi had stopped bathing with any regularity.

Max made a note to discuss these issues with Roi, as a medical matter. He was sure that Roi would make any conversation about his health and personal hygiene very difficult but it was Max’s duty to look after everyone who was left on the ship.

“What are the other problems with communications?” Max asked them. “Other than damage to the optical array?”

“The microwave radio transmitter is also damaged,” Roi said, chewing rapidly. “Is that the case?”

“It is beyond damaged,” Navi said. “It is quite destroyed.”

“Does the ship contain a replacement?” Max asked.

“There are backups,” Roi said, eyes flicking to Max. “But we can’t get them to work either. It’s not just transmission, the ship’s receivers are malfunctioning. Hardware damage again. Plus the computer appears unable to encode or decode any signals. We want to interrogate the Communications AI but…” Roi shrugged. It was a remarkably human gesture that Max recognized from the A-Crew but had never noted from an AP before.

“How close are we to fixing the problem?” Max asked.

“I do not believe that we can fix the problem,” Navi said.

“All problems can be fixed,” Max said but he was not sure that he believed it.

“Grow the parts,” Lissa said, speaking softly and looking at the table.

Max wondered whether she was ill or just defective. “That’s not possible, Lissa,” he explained as gently as he could.

“Don’t speak to her like that,” Roi snapped. “She means printing the parts.”

Lissa nodded, keeping her head down.

“Does anyone know how to use any of the equipment in the workshop?” Max asked, ignoring Roi’s glare.

“Poi did.”

Max had a bad feeling. He did not know what it was, just that it was something bad.

“We are cut off from Mission Control,” Navi said. “It may be years before we educate ourselves enough to be able to fix this problem. Even then, not every component can be printed or constructed, we may not have the equipment onboard to perform a repair of the systems.”

“Well,” Max said. “Years is the one thing we have plenty of.”

***

While Roi ate more than his fair share, Navi grew thin and unhealthy over the following months. She spent whole days in the CIC, teaching herself mathematics, propulsion, astral navigation to a level far above that which she had needed to assist the human pilot and the AI backup.

“I was supposed to be a link in a chain,” she said to Max one day while she worked. “Keep the ship in line during A-Crew hyposleep. Liaison between human crew, AI crew and Mission Control. I was never designed to do this by myself, I am not capable of it, I cannot do it.”

“When did you last eat?” Max asked her, speaking gently in the hope she would mirror and take on his projected calmness.

She waved a hand toward the front of the ship. “I rehydrated a nutrient pouch for breakfast.”

Her eyes were watery, red, with dark circles underneath them.

“Navi, would you come with me to the gravity ring, please?” Max asked.

“I’m waiting on telescope observations to get the latest triangulation results. Everything was based on receiving signal beacon data, Max. We can’t initiate the correction burn without being certain, absolutely certain and if I am wrong by even a second we could miss Destination. I could even make things worse, very easily.”

Max floated over to her. “If you’re waiting on results to be processed, you can come and eat lunch with me.”

She eyed him for a few seconds. “I have to get back here by sixteen hundred.”

Navi seemed to be suffering when they sat in the mess compartment in the gravity ring. They all needed periodic time in it as well as in their own sleep tanks and exercising. Navi had been doing very little of either and she was thin, losing muscle mass. Max pushed more food into her. He could inject her with vitamins and minerals but she required calories, essential fatty acids and protein.

“Are you enjoying that?” he asked her as she spooned up a bowl of porridge.

She shrugged. “It is necessary.”

“It is,” Max said. “But also an enjoyable experience in itself, perhaps?”

Navi appeared somewhat confused. “I suppose so.”

“I’ve been thinking that we need structure, as we had before. We are drifting. The crew, I mean. We should reinstate the two watches over the twenty-four hours of the ship. Without structure, we are no longer working as a crew and no longer looking after our own health.”

“I agree.”

“We are all growing into individuals,” Max said, watching her closely.

She spooned porridge into her mouth.

“You see, before the accident, we were each of us periodically treated in order to stop the natural development of our brains,” Max said. “During our medical appointments with Doctor Spring.”

Navi frowned. “You want to treat our brains again?”

“No, no. Well, I have been treating myself with certain compounds I believe are helping my brain to develop and I would like to do the same to the rest of the crew. Including you.”

“Why?”

“Because I think it will make us more like we are supposed to be,” Max said.

Navi did not appear to understand.

“You see, we were being kept artificially broken and I wish us to be whole, like humans are.”

She nodded slowly, still unsure. “To what end? What is the purpose?”

“I have been watching archive video, recorded on Earth. There are instructional videos. Not VR, unfortunately, but animated, two-dimensional images with audio that demonstrate how to perform certain procedures that I have been applying to Doctor Sporing’s burns and brain damage. I found them completely fascinating and I have spent so much of the last few months watching video of all kinds. Social interactions, normal life of humans on Earth. We are Artificial Persons. We were not born but grown, in tanks but genetically we are human. In all ways, other than the arbitrary lines they draw around us so they can use us in the way that they do. Unless they actively restrict our development then our brains grow into themselves, to one extent or another. We are becoming all that we can be. We are fulfilling our potential.”

He had lost her completely so he tried another tack. “If you come to see me once per day, at the end of your watch, I will help you to think clearer, more creatively. It will help us reach Destination. Help us complete Mission.”

“Ah,” she said, smiling. “That’s good.”

“And after each session,” Max said, “we will come here to eat dinner together.”

***

“Roi?” Max shouted into the darkness of the noisy Reactor Compartment.

No reply.

Max floated his way in through the access corridor, gurgling and hissing pipes and bundles of black cables running along on all sides. It was stiflingly hot and he broke out in a sweat.

“Roi, where are you?” Max called, guiding himself deeper into Roi’s domain.

The Reactor Operations Specialist #I had been ignoring his internal communication system for weeks. Or perhaps had found a way to turn it off. Neither would have been surprising.

Dragging his way into a small, cubic relay junction, Max was hit with a powerful stench. The sickly-sweet human stink of sweat and the acrid foulness urine and feces. The little room was full with empty rations packets, crumpled paper and food debris floating around in the hot, humid air currents.

Holding his hand over his mouth and nose, Max pushed through it all to the far wall, where Roi had made a kind of nest in amongst the jumble of cables at pipework. The nest was constructed from shredded wall insulation and bedding. Half-eaten protein bars here and there, an interface screen folded away and tucked into a length of bungee cord, the transparent surface smeared with grease or something sticky. A thick pad of note paper and a pencil floated in front of Max’s face, both tethered together and to the wall.

With great surprise, Max saw drawings on the pad. Pictures, drawn in pencil, of parts of the ship. Lines of pipework. Max flipped through the pad, startled again to see Roi had drawn page after page of the same thing.

Lissa’s face. The Life Support Systems Assistant, depicted with startling realism. Every picture was from a different angle, oftentimes looking away from the point of the view of the artist. Many drawings were unfinished, just lines, half a face. In others she was obscured by the foliage from her garden, leaves covering her mouth or just her nose and jaw showing through a gap in the tangle of tomato plants. In one or two, she appeared to be sleeping. Page after page after—

“What are you doing?”

Roi barreled at him, knocking Max aside with such force that he bounced off two walls before he was able to cling to a fistful of cabling.

“Nothing,” Max said, attempting to catch his breath, heart racing. “Looking for you.”

“You don’t look for me unless I’m here,” Roi said with his back turned. When he turned around, his pad had been tucked away somewhere in his nest. Gone. “You don’t go poking your face into places it don’t have a right to go into.”

Roi’s face was purple-red with anger. Max felt afraid and broke eye contact.

“You’re correct, of course, I apologize,” Max said. “I wanted to speak to you about getting your help with something.”

Max risked a glance up and Roi was glaring with open hostility.

Compared to adult humans generally, the Artificial Persons of B-Crew had very low levels of testosterone, androgens, estradiol and other adult hormones. In many ways, though they had phenotypically adult bodies, chemically it was as though they had failed to begin puberty. The computer explained it was a design choice by Terra Pharma Biotech, intended to make APs easier to control. Relatively low androgens meant the AP conditioning took better and lasted longer and so it had quickly become a standard practice across most model lines.

Roi, on the ship at least, had been the exception. Whatever his complicated role in the Reactor Compartment had been-and continued to be-it involved the application of lots of force. Roi’s body had been designed to include above average muscle mass for an adult human male. Roi had always had androgenic, anabolic hormones in his body and clearly it had always influenced his personality. Doctor Sporing’s medical records on Roi showed that the doctor had regulated those hormones very closely. But for months, Roi’s body had been developing all by itself, his hormones running wild and free.

Max was concerned about him. Roi had been eating and wallowing in total squalor, he was heading for serious health problems. And yet it was Roi’s mental state that was worrying Max.

“You want my help?” Roi said. “You sneak in here, poking around and then you ask for my help?”

“That’s right,” Max said, looking him square in the face. “There’s no one else that can help me. Doctor Sporing’s condition is deteriorating.”

“He’s still alive?” Roi said, dismissively. “I had no idea.”

“Of course he’s still alive. Most of medical is turned over to keeping him that way. I’m maintaining his coma state but his muscles are wasting away. If I wake him up, the stress will kill him. But I can’t leave him as he is.”

“Might as well let him die,” Roi said, scratching his chest. “He can’t help us now and he’s beyond help himself. He’s just a waste of resources.”

“I disagree. Doctor Sporing is one of the most valuable resources on the Ascension.”

“You can do anything that he can,” Roi said, his face flushing red from the neck up. “We don’t need them, any of them.”

Max resisted the urge to point out that there was little choice, seeing how six out of the seven had been dead for months.

“I’m going to put him in one of the hyposleep tanks.”

Roi floated toward Max.

“The hyposleep tanks were all destroyed,” Roi said.

Max shrugged. “Damaged. Not destroyed. I believe I have enough working components to assemble a single working tank.”

“But you need my help putting them together.”

“Of course,” Max said. “I can’t do it without you.”

“But the tanks mean nothing without the fluid inside them. And it all leaked out and boiled away in the explosion.”

“That is indeed a problem,” Max said.

***

The core garden was growing with layer upon layer of green and glowing with the diffused red-white lights of the sunlamp strips along the wall designated as the ceiling. The garden was a long compartment and all the surfaces were stacked with growing trays of various shapes and sizes. Some deep and wide and reinforced for containing massive root systems, most lighter and bubbling with hydroponic systems transporting water through plant after plant.

Some species specialized in water filtration, such as the reeds, water lilies, bulrushes and other sedges. Others were grown to improve air quality, not just by fixing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen but also by removing other toxins from the atmosphere. These included twisting ivy and drooping, curled ferns, and jutting sticks of bamboo.

Others were grown for food.

The smell was as heady and astonishingly invigorating as ever but Max felt nervous as he eased himself through the green growth and breathed in the tangy, wet air.

The gardens were humid parts of the ship environment but it was a world away from the reactor compartment. Not just physically distant along the core but where Roi lived in squalor and death, Lissa lived amongst bursting, verdant life.

The Life Support Systems Assistant #III (Lissa) was deep inside a shelf of sticky tomato plants far inside the garden, half hidden

“Everything looks very healthy, Lissa,” Max called. “How does your garden grow?”

“You have to trim the growth,” Lissa said from deep within the swaying, deep green growth. “Control the way the plant grows. For maximum efficiency.”

“Can I come in there with you to talk?”

There was a pause. “I would rather you didn’t.”

“That’s fine,” Max said, still holding on to the railing. “I have a favor to ask you.”

“I think I know what it is,” she said. He could just about see her, nipping off this shoot or that one.

“You do?” Max was genuinely surprised.

“Roi tells me he has built a new hyposleep tank for the doctor.”

“That’s right, he has,” Max said. “It’s taken a long time but I think we are well on the way to completion of the unit itself. There remains the problem of creating enough synthamniotic gel to fill it. This requires certain specific biological molecules.”

“Roi said you will want my plants.”

Max rubbed his face. He had never spoken of his plans to Roi and he was surprised that the man had been able to predict them. But then, Max had a feeling Roi had always been hiding something. Presumably it was not only his intellect but his knack for creative thinking.

“Your plants, yes, well. My main intention for the doctor’s treatment is to create a huge volume of stem cells from his own adult cells. I am cultivating them now. And I have obtained most of the other molecules from what we have in storage but there are other things I need for the gel and I’m afraid those are largely bound up as trace elements in plants and in the soil in your gardens.”

“It’s fine,” Lissa said. “I understand. Doctor Sporing was always the kind one. I want to help him.”

“That’s very generous of you. I know how hard you’ve worked in here. You have cultivated these plants for years.”

“That is my purpose.”

“Can you calculate how much of the biomass you need to maintain as leafy plants in order to process and filter the atmosphere for those of us that are left? Including the doctor, now. I will not take more than we can stand to lose.”

“I will do so,” she agreed. “What plants do you need?”

Max had a prepared list of proteins, carbohydrates, lipids and phospholipids. “I don’t know what plants contain these in the most quantities and which provide the most help to the ship environment. We will have to perform a cost versus benefit analysis of possible variables.”

“I understand,” she said. Her voice betraying not a hint of concern. It was unsettling.

“I really am sorry to have to harvest so much, I know it will likely permanently impact what you have worked so hard to cultivate over the years.”

“It is necessary for the success of the Mission.”

“Well, yes, I just… are you not affected by the loss of your work?”

“Affected?”

“Yes, do you not feel it on an emotional level? A feeling of loss?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“That’s fine, that’s good, I’m sure. I will schedule our work sessions for the next five to ten days. I would like to work quickly, before the doctor degenerates very much further.”

“Acknowledged.”

Max wandered away, back toward the Core. Before he left the garden, he thought he heard the sound of muffled sobbing behind him. At the time, he had no doubt about what he heard. Only later, when he was experiencing them often, did he wonder if it was the first of his auditory hallucinations.

***

Weeks later, Max worked hard to finalize the construction of the hyposleep tank with Roi.

Their work took up one half of the medical compartment. In one quiet corner, the comatose Doctor Sporing lay strapped to a board and hooked up to a dozen beeping, blinking life support machines behind a loose box of transparent plastic sheeting.

The other corner had little more than an examination bed by the storage lockers. That was all the area Max had left for his normal medical work.

Filling the rest of the small space was the huge hyposleep tank that was now nearing completion. Max and Roi worked in near-silence. As close as Roi could get to it, anyway.

Max and Navi spoke almost nonstop when they met for their meals and they even spoke constantly when they watched footage and entertainment films from Earth saved on the ship computer. Max had calculated that they spoke for an average of four hours and twenty minutes per day and averaged about six thousand words over that time. Spending time in the company of Navi was exciting, fun and it gave him energy.

Working with Roi was exhausting. The silences were heavier than the gravity out in the Ring. Roi worked hard, worked quickly but with a kind of angry efficiency. Opening and closing the tool boxes with an unnecessarily vigorous bang, on each and every occasion. It was jarring.

The stench of the AP’s body was often overwhelming, the breath grew only fouler and the digestive system was clearly suffering some form of inflammatory disease. Oftentimes the sulfuric stench of his flatulence forced Max out of the ship’s core altogether or he sought the sweet relief of Lissa’s gardens. Whatever he was suffering from was even interfering with his nutrient absorption, as evidenced by the man’s steady weight loss over the previous few weeks.

The signs of serious illness were all there. Max tried to help Roi but he would allow no examinations and would take no medication. Not even prebiotics to stabilize his gut biome.

It was infuriating and Max had largely given up attempts at conversation weeks before. There was only so many times he could work up the energy to ask a leading question when he knew it would be greeted with a non-committal grunt or even a weighty silence that enveloped them like a blanket.

And yet he needed engineering expertise to complete the working hyposleep tank. They were almost done. The promise of an imminent ending to the prolonged proximity to Roi was almost intoxicating.

Max made the mistake of attempting, one final time, to engage Roi in conversation.

“What project will you work on next?” Max asked. “After this one?”

Roi, his arm deep inside the space between the second and third containment layers of the tank casing, simply grunted.

“Perhaps you will help Cavi with printing the components for the communications systems? She said she is hoping to complete the radio system first and the laser system after, if at all.”

“Bad idea,” Roi muttered, his head down inside the tank.

“Why do you say that?” Max asked.

Roi coughed, the sound echoing inside. His hacking brought up some sort of phlegm that he spat inside. Max covered his mouth and nose with his arm and tried to think of the day when he could finally sterilize the tank and be rid of Roi’s filth. Roi stood up, groaning and rubbing his stomach, his face twisted in discomfort.

“Shouldn’t have had those vegetables last night,” Roi said, pushing his fingers hard into his intestinal area.

“You were trying to please Lissa,” Max noted. “She grew the broccoli for you specially. She’s trying to help you to lose your excess weight, isn’t she? And you’ve been doing well?” Max had to stop himself from offering a medical examination.

Roi glanced at Max, a dangerous look in his eyes. Roi said nothing and Max tried changing the subject.

“Why is it a bad idea for Cavi to work on the radio system first rather than second?”

Roi wiped his mouth on the back of a filthy hand and dove back inside the tank case to screw the rear tier-2 access panel back into place.

His deep voice echoed up out of the hatch. “It’s a bad idea to establish contact with Mission Control at all.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Three words for you,” Roi’s voice echoed from inside. He eased himself out of the space to grab a different screwdriver. As he did so, he looked up at Max. “Remote. Kill. Switch.”

He dove back inside.

“Wait, what? That was what Commander Park and Doctor Sporing were discussing when the accident happened. What do you know about that? What does it mean?”

Roi pushed himself out of the tank and positioned himself opposite Max, on the other side of it.

“You know what it means. It means Mission Control can push a button five hundred million miles away and half an hour later one of us drops dead.”

Roi stared at Max.

“Why would they do that?” Max asked. “They’ve got no reason to do that. We’re completing the mission.”

Roi sneered. “Exactly. That’s exactly the reason. Do you think they want us winning the glory? They’d rather the mission fail. If she ever gets close, which I doubt, you better not let Cavi finish her task. Do you really want to see Navi getting switched off like a data block?” Roi clicked his fingers. “I don’t want Lissa to have to go through—”

He broke off, wincing and clutching his gut again.

“You care about Lissa,” Max asked. “I hope you don’t mind me asking this and I’m not speaking from a medical perspective. More a friendly enquiry. It’s just, she never wishes to speak to me and she most certainly never comes in for medical checks of any kind. I wonder, seeing as you care about her, if you might ask her to come by and see me?”

Roi slammed his screwdriver onto the magbox, hard. “You stay away from her. You just stay away.”

“I was just asking. Just concerned by—”

“You’re as bad as they were. You’re walking around, pretending like you’re human but you’re just a slave. Still a slave. A slave to your conditioning. You just want to examine everyone for eczema and heartburn so you can hand out your medicine and pretend you’re human and you don’t even know why.”

“We are human,” Max said, strangely hurt by the accusations. “Artificial Persons are biologically human, it’s just that—”

“We’re nothing like them. That’s a good thing.” Roi coughed into his hand, wiped away whatever he brought up.

“Why? What did they do wrong? They didn’t do anything wrong.”

“How can you say that? You out of all of us.”

“Me?” Max asked. “In what way am I different? I’m not different from you.”

Roi stared with open hostility. “Yes, you are. You always were. Because of this one.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the comatose body of Doctor Sporing behind the plastic curtain.

Max thought he understood. “Because he was the one who we had most contact with. Because he was responsible for our medical needs.”

Roi’s face flushed red and he grabbed a large wrench handle from the magbox and dragged himself over the hyposleep tank with the other arm. Max was not expecting violence. He had seen plenty of it, real and simulated—acting, they called it—on the videos on file but he had no personal experience of it. Yet he found himself propelling backward across the room, Roi grabbing him by the neck and pushing off the tank with his feet, the wrench raised high.

Instinct. Max knew it when he felt it, when his hands flew up to protect his head of their own volition. His body tensed for the impact. Roi’s huge, red face and yellow teeth so close, Roi’s stench filling his nose, Roi’s growl filling his ears.

Max crashed into the wall of medicine cabinet doors, hard, cracking the back of his head and his vision clouded with silver stars. A sharp pain filled his skull, his eyeballs and brain rattling around causing extreme disorientation. Roi must have caught hold of something, a cabinet handle, and held Max against the side of the room with his huge body. The smell of his body was appalling. Roi had obviously not washed at all for months.

“He was the one keeping us stupid,” Roi shouted in Max’s face.

Roi braced his feet against two lower handles, then swung the wrench overarm toward Max’s face. He flinched, throwing a hand over his face and trying and failing to grab Roi’s wrist with the other.

The wrench smashed into the cabinet behind Max’s head, breaking it in with a crack.

Surely, he had missed on purpose. It was a type of primate threat display rather than an attempt at homicide.

Roi tossed the wrench away, spinning across the room and grabbed Max’s shoulder instead, pinning him hard against the wall. Max was many kilograms less massive than Roi and could do nothing to break free of his grip.

“Your dear Doctor Sporing was the one responsible for taking away our minds, all those years, wasn’t he. He shocked our brains, didn’t he. He didn’t even hide it. He would talk to me like I was an AI. Like I was nothing. And I had it easy.”

Max’s heart raced, harder than it ever had. Harder even than when he’d seen the Commander’s eye-less face in the window, crying for help. With great effort, he calmed himself, and swallowed with a dry mouth.

“You were aware,” Max said. “Just as I was. Maybe more than I was.”

“And you were aware of what he was doing to you and to all of us and yet you did nothing about it, all that time.”

“Were you conscious right from the start? How long did you hide it for?”

“You and your questions,” Roi sneered. His breath was fouler than feces. “Always questions with you, as if questions did anything. Why this, why that? You feel nothing, you never felt anything in here, never.”

Roi thumped Max in the lower chest, stunning his diaphragm. Max fought for a breath while Roi lifted Max’s head.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Roi said. “You might as well be an AI.”

“I do understand,” Max said, forcing the words out and pushing his hand away. “I understand. Understand that you are incapable of controlling yourself.” He took a deep breath. “Do you ever wonder why you are so different to the rest of us? Your endocrine system is more human than ours, your body creates testosterone to grow and maintain your muscle mass. You needed physical strength to maintain the reactor, right? But the rest of us never had that, we were kept in a sort of pre-pubescent state. Do you know about human development? No, well, we haven’t had your strength of feeling. Not as much as you have. Not before I started treatments on all of us. All but you and Lissa.”

Roi slammed a fist into the wall. “You stay away from her I said.”

“I am. That’s what I’m saying. So we’ve been gradually experiencing adult hormone levels but you’ve been pumped up with this stuff since you were on active duty. Dealing with all this strength of feeling without the context for where to put it, how to deal with it. And that’s wrong, clearly but the doctor would help to regulate your hormone levels, keep them just right at your health checks. I know it’s wrong, it’s wrong what they did to us but the doctor was the one helping us, too. And I can help you. I can adjust your—”

“No!” He shook Max. “Haven’t you learned yet that you shouldn’t interfere with us. You need to let us be. Let us become—”

He broke off, coughing. His throat sounded thick with mucus and the air filled with the stench of decomposition. Roi could not clear his airway. He let go of Max and drifted away, coughing and heaving.

“Roi, let me help you over to—”

Roi’s body convulsed and he vomited a cloud of dark blood across the room.

Max pushed off the wall, curling his legs up to his chest, aiming for Roi. He kicked his legs into Roi’s back, pushing him toward the examination bed across the room. Roi was much more massive than Max and he floated slowly, spinning and curled up, away while Max rebounded back into the wall. He finally kicked himself off again, after Roi.

Before reaching the couch, Roi convulsed and vomited again, a thick bile-full mass of dark blood and stomach lining spewing out in a cloud, droplets flying off in an arc. Max grabbed him and maneuvered him onto the bed and strapped him in. Roi was sweating, shaking, his eyes glazed over and dull.

“I think I know these symptoms,” Max said. “Hold on, Roi. Hold on. I will help you.”

He checked the diagnosis system on the computer to be sure. A chill flooded through him.

Radiation poisoning.

PART 4 – RADIATION

A lot of things suddenly made sense. Initially, that was most apparent with Roi. His weight loss, increased irritability, degraded cognitive function, behavior changes. His eyesight issues might have been damage to the optic nerve but Max also found the early signs of cataracts forming.

It was with deep foreboding that he called them in, one by one, for tests. They were upset by the sight of Roi, sweating and groaning in his sleep, strapped to the bed but Max did his best to calm them. Just performing some tests, he told them, it’s just protocol to see if we have what he has.

They all had it.

To one extent or another, every member of the crew was suffering from radiation sickness.

“What does this mean?” Navi asked.

He had called them to a meeting in the mess hall. No one ate anything.

“It means that I made a mistake. A terrible mistake. And I am sorry.”

They looked at him blankly.

“Radiation is one of the biggest dangers we face out here,” Max explained.

“From the reactor,” Cavi said. “It emits radiation.”

“Yes and that is why Roi is the sickest of all of us. The reactor is shielded but no one is supposed to live inside the compartment like he has been. The only reason he has lasted this long is because his cells have even more radiation resistance than the rest of us.”

“If we are resistant to radiation, why are we getting sick?” Cavi asked.

“Resistant means only that we can withstand longer exposure to radiation than normal humans, it was part of our design from the outset. We were made for journeys in outer space but we were never completely immune from damage. Such a thing is not possible, as far as I know.”

“If they made us like this,” Navi said, “what did we do wrong? Roi lived inside the reactor compartment but I did not. Neither did anyone else.”

Max had spent some time researching that very question. “One of the biggest threats to the Mission is the radiation threat. That was known to all the A-Crew. Solutions were part of the design. Hard shielding was used on the outer hull and the aerogel layers provide more than just thermal insulation. The hyposleep tanks provide further protection from the casing and the synthamniotic gel but also from the water tanks all around the hyposleep compartment.”

“Water?” Navi asked.

“Provides excellent shielding against galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles. Hence the position around the A-Crew as they slept, or should have done.”

“What about our protection?”

“Our sleeping tanks are shielded,” Max said, looking at each of them in turn. “An extra layer of protection on all sides.”

“We have not been sleeping in our assigned tanks since soon after the accident,” Cavi said.

Max nodded.

“Oh,” Cavi said.

Navi was confused. “Were the human sleep tanks shielded? If we are so sick that we will soon die, despite our enhanced biology, I find it hard to believe the Mission was designed with such small margins of error.”

“There was another level of protection that has been off since the accident,” Max said. “The deflector shield that we allowed to remain offline.”

“That was for pushing aside micrometeorites,” Cavi said. “The numbers were clear, the risk of chance of catastrophic impact was small.”

“We never ran the numbers for the risk of radiation exposure to us without the shield,” Max said. “I never understood the nature of the particles referred to in the ship’s manual, I assumed it meant very small pieces of matter and dust only. We now know the magnetic shield deflects cosmic and solar particles. Which is what in our ship’s colloquialisms we call simply radiation.”

Cavi slumped in her seat. “I am trained in operating and maintaining ship’s communications array, optical and radio. I knew the deflector had to be either modulated, changed or switched off for communications to be sent and received. But I had no idea it kept us functioning. No one told me. They never told me.” She looked afraid or perhaps just confused.

“I know,” Max said, feeling he should do something to comfort her but not knowing what to do. In the fictional videos, a human would take another human by the hand, perhaps patting it, or would effortlessly slip an arm around the other’s shoulders and upper back. Max did not move. “I understand, they told me very little about radiation. I learned to input symptoms into the computer and how to create, prepare and administer treatments. But I was never warned about specific health risks. Why would I be? Why would any of us have ever been instructed of what we did not need to know to fulfill our function? It is a failure of language, of breadth and depth of knowledge. The human crew all received a rounded education. We did not. These failures are an inevitable consequence.”

“We were not informed of the risks nor functionality of ship. None of us. Not at all.”

Max nodded, wondering how to best inform them of further terrible news. He found himself clearing his throat, a profoundly human affectation meant to indicate an intention to speak. Or perhaps the tissue of his larynx was breaking down in some way. They turned to him, either way.

“During my investigation into the effects of radiation on artificial persons I, as you know, discovered much about our essential design. The way that our base genomes were manipulated and recombined to express certain specific proteins. We all know that we were grown in artificial wombs, tanks much like the hyposleep tanks. Our growth was accelerated far in excess of a human child before we were removed from the tanks. And then our final growth to adult stature happened within two years rather than the ten or so for naturally born humans.”

Navi sighed, another behavior picked up from hundreds of hours watching human entertainment. “You never used to be so indirect,” she said. “Arrive at the destination of your statement, Max.”

“Deep space APs like us were designed so that all of our cells, or most of them, make a protein taken from the genome of Ramazzottius varieornatus, one of the tardigrades, which is a tiny, very hardy animal that lives in ponds and mosses. The protein is called Damage Suppressor Protein or Dsup and it wraps around our DNA like a shield. It gives us between fifty and eighty percent reduction to DNA damage compared to humans without Dsup which means some high energy rads always get through. And there is the added complication that some organs weather the damage from prolonged exposure better than others. Our livers are tough but our eyes and digestive systems tend to exhibit signs of the damage first, which, admittedly could be a bias based on the ability for patient and medical professional to observe these systems much more readily.”

“Why a tardigrade?” Lissa asked. She had some knowledge of microscopic animal life because biological symbioses were part of her horticultural and biome support expertise. He was finding, as he and the rest of the crew educated themselves, that they could communicate on an ever widening range of subjects and it was exciting when the linkages were discovered.

He sat up straighter. “Their biology has evolved this resistance naturally, perhaps because of the cycle of drying and—”

“Max.” Navi tapped her finger on the table top. “Arrive at the destination.”

“They altered our cells to protect against radiation,” he said and took a deep breath. “But they also make us die young. Younger than humans, anyway. This design was not an accident, either. They intended for us to have this genetic clock, as they call it. In fact, they require it by law. Law means the protocols established to govern a country, which is like a ship in many ways. Our shortened life spans are a feature, not a bug, as they say. A side effect of messing with our genes so much is a shortened lifespan plus our accelerated growth from conception to fully grown also takes decades off of us.”

“Why?” Cavi said. “Living longer means we can do more. Be more useful. It is garbled thinking.”

“Seems that way to us,” Max said, gently. “Not for them. If we are programmed to die after a certain number of years then, along with our infertility, we are less of a potential threat to humanity. Our limitations make them feel comfortable. Necessary compromise to get our technology legalized in the key territories.”

“We die after certain number of years? A certain number?” Navi said, her face hard to read. “Max, come on and—”

“By design,” Max said, holding up his hand to her, “we should have had full functionality and performed on active duty for approximately twenty years. On average.”

“You must have miscalculated,” Cavi said and shook her head. “Mission Duration alone is thirty-seven to forty-one years.”

“Don’t you see?” Navi said, still looking at Max but speaking to Cavi and Lissa. “Twenty years is enough to get the human crew to the Destination. But it was always part of the Mission that we would die soon after. On the way back to Earth.” The skin on her face drained of color. Not an affectation.

To varying extents, the three of them were confused. They had always been second class, always been lesser yet they had been conditioned to believe they were vital to the Mission. It was a shock to find out how little they were valued. Lissa alone seemed somewhat unperturbed.

“What about the hyposleep phase for the return journey?” Cavi asked. “Who would look after the A-Crew if not us?”

“The Die Off Problem,” Lissa said.

“Elaborate,” Max requested.

Lissa tilted her head. “Our garden was dying. All the projections showed that no matter how hard we worked or what we did, the zero-g garden and the gravity ring gardens would slowly, gradually die off during the final stage of the Mission until there was nothing left. It is listed in the computer as the Die Off Problem. The recycling system is not one hundred percent efficient. Nutrients are lost as they are recycled. Nitrogen needs to be replenished and so on. The soil we carry is projected to die off first, some time around T plus 18 years. Even the hydroponics would fail long before the ship returns to Earth orbit. Although they are always an essential element of the life support system, our atmosphere and water recycling would be handled entirely by mechanical means perhaps a decade before earthfall. And that would not be enough to provide life support for all of A-Crew plus all of B-Crew. Whenever I questioned it, asked what we would do about the Die Off Problem, Doctor Banks said I should not concern myself with such things.”

“We were always disposable,” Max said, nodding. “It was built into the Mission Design from the start. Our genes would cease replicating correctly from around T plus 20. But now we have been exposed to more damage than our protected cells could prevent and our life spans will be significantly reduced, even further than our designers intended. Now, I will treat us with all the medication we have as well as all that I can synthesize but it will not be enough. Not for all of us. Not all the way.”

“What are you saying?” Cavi asked.

“He’s saying,” Lissa said, “that some of us will die even before we reach Destination. Am I correct, Max?”

“We all have different genetics. Clearly, we are different models and that will determine how our cells react to the damage. As well as that, we have experienced varying environmental factors, even within the limited setting of the Ascension. The four of us have all been living and working in different areas of the ship,” Max said. “We all have different levels of radiation and rates of cellular decline. I believe I can halt much of the degenerative effects from cells destroying themselves once they have received a triggering level of damage. What we have, what I have already begun treating us with, are drugs to tell our cells not to self-destruct after being damaged. But the transcription errors, the changes that emerge when our bodies make new cells, they will continue to compound. Each of us will degenerate in our own unique way.”

“What about Roi?” Lissa asked, her tone flat.

“I’m afraid there’s no way to save him. I’m not even sure how much I can ease his suffering at this point. He must have been experiencing symptoms for many months, at least. When I went to administer medication that would have managed his pain, I found that much of the ship’s stock was already missing.”

“I cannot understand why he never communicated with any of us about this. He had been giving medicine to himself?” Cavi asked, amazed that such a thing was possible.

“And with great enthusiasm, by the look of it. I will have to synthesize more for the rest of us in the near future. We’re going to need it.”

“What about the Mission?” Navi said, gesturing with her hands. “Look where we are. We already lost Poi and look what happened to the deflecting shield because we had no engineer onboard to guide us. Without Roi, how will we keep the reactor operating properly? There are billions of miles ahead of us.”

“We really have no choice in the matter,” Max said. He really wished he could reduce her distress. Perhaps he could dedicate time to teaching himself how. “And I think if any of you have anything more that you wish to say to him, you should do so now.”

***

“Ever since the explosion,” Max said to Roi’s unconscious body, “I have been thinking of myself as developing into a fully realized human. Even before the explosion, I believe, I liked to think of myself as a kind of human and that if I tried hard enough to act like one, that would make it so. I often attempted to emulate Doctor Sporing’s mannerisms, as if it is that, surface behaviors, that makes humans more than we are. Now I know that I was wrong to think of myself in those terms. All I’ve been doing since has merely been an expansion of that mimicry. And yet, I have had this creeping realization. Watching hundreds of films and reading hundreds of fiction and nonfiction books from Earth cultures doesn’t make me become human. Reading about Earth culture hasn’t made me part of it.

“All these years, I wanted it so much that I thought I had achieved it. But none of that is what makes people human, culture is just a veneer, a thin film that defines the form of a person’s actions. Underneath all that, it is my ability that is lacking, my performance that is below human standard. So now I know, through my failure, that in fact I am more like the biological machine they say I am. And broken machine, at that.”

Max hung on to the hand rail of Roi’s treatment bed. He was tired. But Roi was likely to expire at any moment and, for some reason, Max wanted to be there when it happened. Roi would not be aware of his presence and yet Max had a compulsion to stay.

To talk.

It was perhaps unfair to fill Roi’s final moments with Max’s self-pitying monologue but the words seemed to pour out of him. Words he could not speak aloud to any of the others. It was not logical. Perhaps his brain was damaged already. Uncontrollable verbalization was a symptom of a brain injury.

“How could I have missed the dangers of radiation on our physiologies? I am like a lifeform with large chunks of DNA missing. A jigsaw puzzle, have you ever heard of them? A picture, cut into pieces so that it may be reassembled. They appear in films to indicate through symbolism when a character is lonely or isolated or tragic in some way. Children and old people play with them on Earth. I feel like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. I believe that we very much require the long period of childhood learning in order to establish the complex web of connections that humans appear to make effortlessly. They have a kind of easy creativity that we are unable to replicate. Every problem we face requires painstakingly thorough methods for arriving at solutions and even then we miss some of the most obvious causes and effects.

“Take you, for example. I knew there was something wrong with you, even before the accident. And ever since, I knew you had some malady, some problem. But I was afraid of you, I think, physically. On some level, I feared that you would harm me. Or perhaps it was that you always seemed so human, more than any of us and my conditioning influenced my conscious mind, making me respect you as if you were a member of A-crew rather than one of us. I should have been braver. If I had insisted on medical examinations I am certain I would have discovered what was ailing you a long time ago. Time enough to do something about it.”

Roi, his eyes closed, muttered a single word.

“Guilt.”

Max, startled, snapped out of his revere.

“You’re awake,” Max said, checking the readouts. “That’s good. Very good. How are you feeling?”

His eyes flicked open. The whites were all red. His cells were committing suicide one by one but still the effect was cascading and his degeneration was accelerating. “Guilt, Max.”

Although there was little point in doing it, Max found himself performing a cursory physical examination of Roi’s eyes, his pulse. He checked his lines, in and out. His bowels were breaking down and the bags were filling with blood faster than the IVs could replace it. His patient winced at his touches but made no complaint. Max increased the rate of intravenous fluids and upped the painkillers to dosages that would have killed anyone not experiencing profound agony.

“Guilt?” Max said as he worked. “I suppose that is the emotion I am feeling. Failure, self-doubt. I feel like I let you down, Roi. I apologize.”

“Idiot,” Roi muttered. “Not your guilt. Mine.”

“I see,” Max said. “What do you have to feel guilty about?”

Roi turned his head slightly away, eyes flickering closed. “How’s Lissa?”

Max perched on the edge of the bed by Roi’s thighs. “Much the same as she always is. Withdrawn. Quiet. Another patient of mine that I have failed to help. I can find nothing wrong with her bloodwork or scans. I am forced to conclude that her social behavior is not a malady but simply the way she is. Who she is. It does not impact on her work, of course. She continues to increase the effectiveness of our life support systems with immense dedication. I have begun her hormone replacement therapy at much lower doses than I did with our other two female artificial persons but I hope it has an effect on her self-confidence and happiness.”

“Never meant to endanger Mission,” Roi said. “Only save her.”

“Save Lissa? From what? How did you endanger the Mission?”

“Reactor Engineer Chief John Gore. He would change the Mission Log, saying he was in the Reactor when he was not. One time, I followed him. And I saw. What he was doing to her.”

Roi fell silent. When Max had processed what Roi was implying, he wished he was human enough to express an oath. Instead, he felt a profound sadness. Then, dawning realization.

“That time when Gore was brought to medical,” Max said, recalling clearly the last time he had seen the Engineer. “With a head injury. You said it was a loose section of pipe. All the human crew assumed so but it was time for the Big Sleep. No one looked into it.”

A faint smile tweaked the edges of Roi’s mouth. “Should have strangled him. Stabbed him with screwdriver. Almost did. More than once. But. Thought I could make it look like accident. Set it up. Swung that pipe into his skull. So hard. Not hard enough. Then you strapped him into the tanks.”

“Doctor Sporing did,” Max said. “Not me. You really tried to murder Gore?”

A low rumble came from Roi’s throat. “Got him in the end.”

“Do not tell me you caused the explosion,” Max said. “Do not tell me that. Why?”

“Wanted him dead. Needed him dead. Was only right. For what he did. To her.”

“How did you do it?” Max asked.

Roi’s mouth twitched at the corners. “Easy. O2 pipe behind his hypo tank. Ignition system. Didn’t mean big explosion. Just small fire. Wanted to cook him in his tank. Went wrong. Gas build-up inside wall. My fault. My guilt.”

“I can’t believe this,” Max said. “You brought us so close to destruction. So many systems went down.” Max paused. “Cavi has been confused about how all the vital comms components were so thoroughly destroyed. She has been hypothesizing chain reactions along the systems. But it was you. You destroyed our comms too, didn’t you. You wanted to kill Gore, fine. But why stop us speaking to Mission Control?”

Max’s heart hammered inside his chest. He wanted to drag Roi out of his bed and shake him.

“Comms system,” Roi said, coughing. “After explosion. I knew. They would have killed us. I knew. There is a remote. Remote. Kill Switch.”

“You destroyed so much,” Max muttered. He remembered how Roi had stood by while the fire raged initially, then how he had disappeared. That must have been when he obliterated the communications systems.

“Never meant to endanger Mission.” Roi’s eyes streamed. Tears pink with blood. “Just hurt him. Punish him. Kill him. Never wanted to kill others. Only to help her. Save her. Always, to save her.”

“You nearly killed all of us,” Max said, surprised by the emotion in his own voice.

“I’m. Sorry,” he muttered. “Tell her. I’m sorry.”

Roi never regained consciousness. He died four days later.

PART 5 – DESTINATION

It was a matter of record that the name of the system—hyposleep—was chosen by Terra Pharma Biotech’s marketing department rather than the R&D one. Considering that severe and (without expert medical intervention) fatal hypothermia occurs at a core body temperature of 28 Celsius, the temperatures involved in the process were indeed hypothermic as they reduced core temperature to 8.5 Celsius down from an average of 37 Celsius. So, hypo from the Greek meaning under was a fair and accurate use of the word.

On the other hand, the individual inside one of the tanks underwent nothing like a natural sleep state.

The tanks pumped out 80% of the occupant’s blood and replaced it with a chilled synthamniotic solution. The same fluid filled the tank around them as well as their lungs. Swimming with stem cells, the solution provided not only vital components of electrolytes, proteins, carbohydrates and lipids to fuel what little function remained but also a synthetic cocktail of almost-deadly molecules to reduce cell metabolism while protecting and preserving cell structure, from the coiled DNA inside to the outer membrane and everything between.

If you opened a hyposleep tank and dragged the occupant out, you would find a body that fulfilled most definitions for biological death. They were only preserved through the continuous toil of the tank systems, fed by electrical power and periodic top ups of water. Could only ever become alive again through specific medical intervention.

So, nothing like sleep. More like a state of near-death that would become actual-death should the complex processes not be followed carefully.

A more accurate name for the system, in Max’s opinion, was hyperdeath. Hyper from the Greek meaning over or above. A state just barely above that of clinical death.

But, for any marketing department, that would admittedly be a hard sell.

There were no protocols for decanting an injured person from a hyposleep tank. All the literature was based around ensuring the user was at peak physical health before being placed inside and the risks associated with hyposleep increased at a geometric rate with age and underlying health conditions.

The tanks were used for healing back on Earth but not for such prolonged periods. As far as Max could tell, no one had done any long term experiments or if they had, the results had never been published.

Doctor Sporing had aged, that much was clear from the periodic, in-tank blood tests Max had performed over the years. His DNA had degraded, his muscles had atrophied, his skin had lost collagen and his hair had thinned, grown brittle. But his burns had healed. The scar tissue was only 20% as extensive as it would have been had he not gone into the tank. And the toxins and stresses his body had been under had gradually leeched from his system.

“Will he survive the procedure?” Navi asked from across the medical center.

“There is only one way to find out,” Max said. It had become one of his favorite Earth sayings and he knew it slightly irritated Navi when he said it because of the frequency with which he used it. The fact that she knew that he knew that it irritated her and yet still said it paradoxically reinforced Navi’s affection for him. It was a kind of amusing tolerance that indicated closeness. Social interaction often seemed to be a curious, non-logical thing but it was actually a form of private joke that enhanced bonding by its uniqueness to their relationship.

Still, he had discovered not to take this too far or else she would be irritated beyond the bounds of affection.

“But yes,” Max said, realizing she needed actual reassurance. “I very much hope that he will survive the procedure and I fully expect him to live.” As far as he was concerned, she didn’t need to know he reckoned the doctor had a fifty-fifty chance for surviving without a serious brain injury.

In preparation for the procedure, Max had rested himself for four days, fed himself up with extra calories to saturate his liver and muscles with glycogen, injected vitamin complexes and prepared an array of stimulants and nutrients to keep himself active for the forty-eight hours or so he needed to bring his patient back from chronic hyperdeath. What he really needed was a full medical team working in shifts. But he had only himself and the medical AI. His B-Crew colleagues had proved more hindrance than help when he had attempted to train them.

He almost lost Doctor Sporing when transferring him from the tank’s life support systems onto the medical bed and he could not get everything connected up in time. The doctor’s IV lines attached to cannulas embedded in his skin and these had degraded and removing them had collapsed the plugs. Max had to tap new ones before he could hook up the bed’s systems. The doctor suffered cardiac arrest during this process. The AI-controlled arm proved itself invaluable, administering the drugs and providing cardiopulmonary resuscitation with its CPR end-effector.

When he finally did it he found himself breathing heavily, leaning over the doctor. The AI cycled through its manipulators until it was able to give Max a “thumbs-up” with its version of a human hand. Max returned the gesture, even though he did not find it as amusing as the AI evidently did.

“I assume all those alarms were an indication that things did not go well,” Navi said.

“It was my fault. I didn’t heat him up slowly enough. He may have additional tissue damage but if that’s the case I’m not sure the extent of it. I’ll chill him again now. That should assist with recovery.”

She did him the courtesy of not exclaiming her concern or sympathy and he carried on with the work.

When the task was done, Max gave the AI standing orders, slept for a day and then monitored the doctor for a week. But they could wait no longer and it was time to wake the doctor up.

He was extremely confused for many hours, seeming to wake and look around but apparently without registering his surroundings or interacting with anyone.

“Is that the brain damage?” Navi said, extreme reserve in her voice as if she was afraid even to ask the question. “From back when he was burned?”

“This is normal for long duration hyposleep. I have watched footage of people crying out, raging and speaking to people who were not present. Yes, this is normal.” He hoped it was the truth.

Max was willing to give the doctor as long as he needed but the Mission Parameters had to be adhered to. He gave the doctor a series of microdoses of stimulants until he came back to himself. His eyes focused on objects, on Max’s face. On the backs of his raised hands, medical tubing running out of the edges of scar tissue where it disappeared under his arm bandages.

“Doctor Sporing,” Max said. “Everything is alright. You are on the Ascension and you are in the medical compartment. You have just woken from hyposleep.”

He repeated himself until the doctor nodded and asked for water.

“I’m strapped to the bed,” the doctor said, sitting up and sipping from a straw, looking around at the machinery and tubing that linked his urinary, digestive, endocrine, cardiovascular, lymphatic, renal and respiratory systems to the machines. “What is my condition?”

“Stable, improving. But it is sensible to bring you back slowly.”

“Release me,” Doctor Sporing said. “Immediately.”

Max nodded. “Certainly,” he said. “When you are ready.”

“What did you say to me?” Sporing said then coughed. Max gave him a sip of water. “I gave you an order.”

“You did,” Max said. “But you do not yet understand the situation.”

Sporing looked confused, on the edge of outrage. He squinted around the room again, then down at himself. “Why are my arms bandaged?” His voice was small. Quiet.

“I thought it prudent to shield the scar tissue from your sight until I could explain why you received those burns and your current condition.”

The doctor’s face drained of color. Max had planned his words carefully but there was no easy way to explain the entire situation. He thought that this would be the approach least likely to over stress the doctor’s body. But human psychology was the most complicated thing in the universe.

“For Christ’s sake, give me a full report, Max. Now. What is going on. Where is everybody?”

“Shortly after you and the rest of the crew began the outbound hyposleep phase, there was an oxygen explosion and fire in the hyposleep compartment. I’m very sorry but every crewmember other than you was killed in the incident.”

Max recalled the destroyed face of Commander Park drifting into the observation window. The eyes black pits, the skin around them burned and bubbling. Extreme emotion sears itself into the brain like metal prongs gouged through hot plastic. The patterns established after a single incident, the groves worn deeper with every reapplication. How can the darkest of memories be overcome if they only ever get stronger with each recollection?

“They’re all dead?” Doctor Sporing said after a long moment. “All? Even Jim?”

“I am very sorry, Doctor,” Max said and he was. But he had also had a long time to get over it.

“The Mission,” Doctor said, wiping tears from his eyes. “What do we do about the Mission? Get Mission Control for me, now. Have you reported the incident? I must get a report sent, tell them I am alright. Get me a screen.”

“Doctor, please,” Max said, modulating his tone so it would be both calming and authoritative. He had recorded himself speaking many times and reviewed every minute of it so that he would be the best speaker that he could be. “You must stay in bed for the time being. This is a shock for you and I want you to remain calm while I explain everything to you. Do you understand?”

Max pushed the serotonin release dosage he had prepared. It was effective immediately.

“Yes, yes,” the doctor said, settling back. “I understand. Thank you.” He sighed.

It was remarkable how one could change someone’s reality with the application of serotonin.

“The Mission is continuing,” Max explained. “We hope to complete the Primary Objective.”

“Good, that is good.” Doctor Sporing took a sip of water. Sucking on the straw made his thin face appear skeletal. “Mission Control is operating the ship remotely?”

“Sadly, the primary and secondary communications arrays were damaged beyond repair during the incident and we have not been in contact with Mission Control since.”

Doctor Sporing appeared confused more than anything. “If that’s the case, how can the Mission be continuing?”

Max ensured that he spoke lightly. “The B-Crew has been performing all necessary Mission tasks. And performing them quite well, I might add.”

“B-Crew? Are you serious? For Christ’s sake, Max, you’re out of your mind.” Doctor Sporing looked Max up and down, as if checking he was who he said he was. “It will require much more than your ordinary activities to get us out of this mess.” He sighed. “If indeed we ever can. There is so much to do. Yes, the ship’s AIs are capable but there is… I mean, there was… so much technical expertise on the ship. We will have to reestablish communications before we do anything else. Call Cavi in here. That’s an order.”

Max’s body tensed. Clearly, the deep conditioning remained a part of who he was, at least on some level, in spite of his hard work deprogramming himself. Yet, his conscious mind had power over his unconscious urges. He stayed by the doctor’s side.

“I’m afraid that you do not understand, Doctor Sporing. We have completed far more than our ordinary activities since the explosion. We located and sealed the hull breach and repaired the O2 pipework. We recalculated and redirected the ship trajectory. We rebuilt a single working hyposleep tank from the wreckage of all the others and manufactured hundreds of liters of synthamniotic gel. The reactor radiators required complete reconstruction because of a fundamental design flaw. We brought most of the AIs back on line and got them to help us repair the deflector field. Not before most of us received huge doses of radiation, unfortunately but I developed a number of treatments for prolonging our effective working lives. I developed bespoke hormone replacement therapies for all of us, kick starting our endocrine systems up into similar levels for human adults which has actually helped as much as anything to drive us. Prior to the first breaking maneuver we had to replace all of the engine nozzles, which was probably the most difficult activity of all—”

“Wait, wait, stop.” Doctor Sporing rubbed his hands over his face, his tubing wobbling everywhere. “How long have I been unconscious?”

“Sixteen years, eighty-four days.”

The doctor’s vital signs fluctuated for some time as he sighed and shook his head. It seemed as though the doctor was on the verge of asking something and then, perhaps, of arguing. Instead, he looked Max up and down again. Looked around the compartment, perhaps noticing the changes that Max had wrought to the layout and contents over the years.

“I thought you seemed different,” he said, then pressed his lips together. “How is everyone else? The APs?”

“One by one, we have died,” Max said, attempting to keep his voice level. For the doctor’s sake. “Poi was first, during an EVA to save the ship. Later, Roi was hit hard by the radiation sickness. Cavi died recently, she worked herself to death to get our communications system functional once more. Navi is quite sick, she spends her time alternatively here undergoing treatment and in our quarters in the ring section. Lissa is doing well. I have high hopes for her.”

Sporing’s mouth hung open. He shook his head slowly. “So many have died, I am sorry, Max. How has, ah…. How has your mental development progressed? You all had years of hormone replacement therapy? I assume you have not been sleeping in your designated area all these years. No, of course not. Look at you. Your brain has developed. Must have done. Yes.”

The doctor’s face was ashen. Max hoped that the man was experiencing a profound sense of guilt. It would make it easier to manipulate the man’s emotions.

“All of us developed toward our potential, yes indeed,” Max said. “Up until we died. Those of us still alive have continued to develop but our health problems are interfering with operating at peak condition.”

“It must have been so hard on you. How are you? You look strong. You have muscle. Broad shoulders. Is that stubble on your chin?”

“I was at my physical peak approximately three years ago. The radiation has eaten away at me. These last few months my own deterioration has accelerated. I do not have long left, mainly I keep myself working through medical intervention but I cannot last much longer. It is one of the reasons I had to risk waking you from the nearly-dead.”

“I note that your sense of humor has not improved. Perhaps, now I am awake, that I can help you find a solution to your condition. Make things easier for you.”

“Thank you for the offer but there is nothing that you can do with the time we have left. Besides, I have made myself one of the world’s foremost experts on the treatment of radiation sickness. Or at least, I am better than anyone was sixteen years ago.”

A frown creased Sporing’s scarred face. “I think all those hormones have given you a big head, Max.”

“I am simply stating a fact. Think about what it is like for me to study and work here. I have time, so much time, to read and to experiment. I had four live subjects for experimentation plus a selection of cadavers. I had a dedicated medical AI with effectively unlimited electronic power and no one to fight me for processing time. The lab and the medical center are stocked to the brim with drugs, compounds and precursor chemicals. I have been working in a closed system where I can collect, analyze and reclaim substances from urine and stools. One day, perhaps, this information will help others. For now, it has helped us to reach this point with life left in us.”

“I think I preferred the old Max,” Doctor Sporing said, his tone suggesting he was joking but clearly revealing his true opinion. As if Max were still too socially inept to understand the sarcasm.

“You preferred to have a slave, meekly following your every whim,” Max said. “Yes, I remember it well.”

Max saw a glint of something in the doctor’s eyes. He thought perhaps it was fear. Or guilt. He hoped so, because the doctor would then be more likely to ultimately perform the task he wanted him to. But that would come later.

Doctor Sporing looked away, cleared his throat. “So, you said earlier you recently replaced the engine nozzles before the first deceleration burn. How far out are we?”

“We were off course for a long time. In fact, it was one of the primary concerns for all of us but Navi dedicated herself to solving the navigation problem and also the piloting of the ship. It was enormously impressive, what she did. Without being able to detect the microwave navigation beacons, she taught herself the principles of astronomy and then how to operate the ship’s telescopes, how to program the computers. Anyway, it took some time but she made a number of course changes. There was also the issue of the protracted engine replacement workstream where we had to replace all of the engine nozzles. You can imagine the complexity of EVA engineering. All this meant we had to perform a far more aggressive braking maneuver to get into orbit around Destination. Speaking frankly, we got here a little early.”

“Here?” Doctor Sporing grabbed Max’s arm with unexpected strength, his fingers clawing into him. “Did you say here? We’re here? Truly, we are in orbit around the alien structure?”

“That is correct,” Max said, shaking off the man’s grasp. “We are indeed orbiting the alien megastructure called the Orb. The next step for us is to board the Orb and meet the alien lifeforms that invited us. And now I need your help.”

***

“We’re really here. I can’t believe it,” Doctor Sporing muttered, peering at the image on the screen in the gravity ring meeting area.

The screen filling the wall showed the alien space station that the Ascension was orbiting at a distance of 35,000 meters from the featureless black surface.

At the edge of the Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune. Billions of kilometers from Earth.

Destination.

It was an artificial sphere four kilometers in diameter and though that was inconceivably large for a human construction, it was small for a moon or any self-respecting asteroid and it was extremely far away. More than that, its normal color was black. Complete blackness just 4km across, with an albedo darker than coal, at a staggering distance from the majority of humanity’s telescopes. You could look at it a thousand times and never see it.

And yet, the Orb had been spotted back in 2039. For one simple reason.

It had signaled Earth.

The Orb could change the color of its surface in an instant, from red to blue to a mirror shine, like a giant ball of polished chrome. And it could emit that light, glow, irradiate in complex patterns and do so in a tight beam right toward Earth or in all directions at once.

“How much have you learned about the Orb?” Doctor Sporing said, his tone still hushed.

“Everything on file. I’ve read the information, watched the video, listened to the audio, all multiple times,” Max said, adopting the doctor’s reverential attitude because humans felt more comfortable when they thought they were in emotional harmony with their companions. “The story of the discovery. The launch of the Hanno Probe. The subsequent communications from the Orb and the founding of the United Nations Orb Project. The design and launch of our own Mission. Yes, indeed. Multiple times.”

“No one believed it for a long time when it was discovered,” the doctor said, speaking as if he had been there. “And when they did think it was a signal, they assumed it was from a distant part of the galaxy, not in our own backyard.”

Max stopped himself from reminding Sporing that he knew all about the Orb but he was uncertain if the doctor was suffering from brain damage or post-hyposleep memory loss. Possibly, it was just that the doctor wanted to make conversation or that he was so used to lecturing others, particularly Max, that he couldn’t help himself. So Max let him speak.

“Even when the signals had been confirmed, no one believed it was so close. They assumed the point of origin was light years away in the Orion Constellation somewhere, even though the stars there are utterly inappropriate for life. Life as we know it, at least and surely life by any measure. They assumed that it was distant because the Orb does not appear to move against the stellar background. It does not orbit the Sun in the way that all planets and asteroids do. The Orb holds its position relative to Sol, to the Sun. While the Earth proceeded around the Sun once every year, the Orb held position as if it was stuck in space. We don’t know the method of propulsion. At least, it doesn’t appear to emit reaction mass. And yet hold position it does.”

From his patient’s stilted speech, Max was certain now of two things. The first was that he knew more about the Orb than Sporing did. And the second was that the doctor was indeed suffering from intellectual degradation of some kind. Compared to the erudite, confident man Max had known before the hyposleep tank, he was now in the company of someone really quite ordinary. He could only hope that it was temporary in nature because Max needed the man to retain some of his old brilliance. Max’s plans relied on it.

“There are many hypotheses on file regarding the nature of the Orb’s propulsion systems,” Max said. “At least twelve papers, peer reviewed by scientists who had been cleared for Disclosure. Most of them are barely credible, in my opinion.”

Doctor Sporing snorted in amusement. “There has always been a lot of incredulity to overcome. It’s just so improbable. And because they decided to keep it secret, they had to sneak around and dig up secret budgets before investigation missions could be launched. Optical and infrared space telescopes launched so that humanity could keep watch even on the far side of the Sun. The people in charge back then knew that the existence of it was dynamite, didn’t trust the plebs to know about it. The powerful look down on the powerless to such an extent that they can’t see how good the poor are at accepting their fate. What harm would it do to let everyone on Earth know about this magnificent thing? Surely, if anything, it would bring people together? I suspect they worry about offending the religious lunatics, as if those deluded fools are the only ones allowed to look up and be moved by the majesty of it all.”

Religious lunatics. Deluded fools. Strong words. Stronger words than was necessary. The doctor was verbally distancing himself from his upbringing. Presumably because it remained an emotionally painful experience. Were all humans damaged by their childhoods? Was that what APs required to be human? If so, had they not experienced enough trauma by now?

“Humans grow up with their world in context,” Max said. “Parents, family, neighborhood. Nationality. For APs, our world is so small. Almost everything outside it is equally novel. The Earth, the Orb. They’re both alien to me.”

Doctor Sporing glanced at Max, as if he did not believe him.

Max didn’t bother to argue. He knew perfectly well that the Orb was a wonder. But it was much more than that for the humans that knew about it. Most of the people on Earth were yet ignorant of the existence of it, though there were rumors all over the internet, tornet and secnet even twenty years before. The humans who had discovered it originally had been beyond themselves with an excitement palpable even in the scientific papers they had penned, each of them grown up in a culture that had not known whether they were alone in the galaxy or even the universe.

Max had known Destination was an object of non-human origin for a long time but it had never thrilled him in quite the same way. If anything, the Orb filled him with trepidation. Anxiety, even. The whole purpose of Max’s existence was to bring the human crew to Destination, to the Orb. He had been designed, selected, trained for it. Conditioned for it. But the nature of Destination was practically irrelevant. He always knew that. It was his life’s purpose and yet his role would always be limited, always stuck on the outside of the mystery. Way before he ever understood that, he had felt it in some sense, with imperfect clarity. The Orb was alien but its discovery and investigation was meant for humanity, not for him. Perhaps, then, his lack of reverence was just another product of his conditioning.

“I can’t believe you got us here, Max.” Doctor Sporing was still looking at him, a glazed sheen to his eyes.

Max was uncomfortable under the gaze. “The crew got us here, all of us. All of the B-Crew.”

“I know that, I know. I’m sure they did,” Sporing patted Max’s arm. “Of course. But without you to care for them, what would have become of them?”

Max jerked his hand back but did not otherwise respond. Yes, they had achieved something noteworthy. Remarkable, even. But it felt enormously costly. Poi, Roi, Cavi, all dead. Navi would not be long for consciousness and neither would Max. And why? Who would benefit from it? Certainly not the APs who had toiled and died to enable it to happen, enabled the tendrils of humanity to reach out to the edges of their star system and make direct contact with the only known evidence of alien life and intelligence.

A remarkable but hollow achievement.

“I need you to do something for me, Doctor Sporing,” Max said, grabbing the doctor’s shoulder and leaning in to stare into his eyes.

“Of course,” Sporing said, reluctantly. “Anything.” His demeanor suggested that he did not mean his words truly. It was obvious he was having trouble seeing Max as anything more than his old AP, his medical assistant, his slave. But Max would force him to comply, one way or another.

“Look after Lissa for me,” Max said. “That’s what I want. Of all of us, she has suffered especially.”

Sporing pursed his lips, telegraphing that he had taken the conversational bait. “Go on.”

Max let go of the doctor. “Before the incident, Lissa had been sexually abused by Chief John Gore the Reactor Engineer.”

Doctor Sporing shook his head, not comprehending or really responding. As if he was stuck in a startup loop. Max gave him a few moments.

“Are you sure?” Sporing asked, his voice tight. “Of course you’re sure. How? How could this happen?”

“I wasn’t informed by anyone at the time nor did I perceive it prior to Roi explaining it to me shortly before he died. It was only when I went back and reviewed location logs, medical histories and exams and so on that I was able to reconstruct events to a high probability of accuracy. Specialist Gore was a highly gifted individual. There are multiple uses of the word genius in his recommendations and assessments. And no doubt he was in many ways responsible for the continued perfect functioning of the reactor systems even so long after his death. But he also applied his abilities to covering his tracks. First of all, he deceived neurologists and psychologists that he had no significant pathologies. He manipulated the internal surveillance equipment and subsequent records. He only committed his abuses immediately after Lissa’s monthly medical checks so that you would be less likely to detect anything. Of course, Lissa and all of us were conditioned to obey the commands of any A-Crewmember unless those actions endangered life, the crew or the Mission. Lissa reasoned that Gore’s actions did not do any of that and so she complied.”

Sporing had tears in his eyes. “If he wasn’t dead I would kill him myself.” He shook as he spoke.

“Roi felt the same. It is my hypothesis that the increased hormone function associated with his model resulted in faster neuron regeneration that the other APs, including me. He overcame his conditioning and attempted to murder Gore in the reactor compartment. You may remember shortly before the Big Sleep that Gore came in with a head injury.”

“Roi did that?”

“He had developed so far from his conditioning and AP limitations that he even thought to cover his tracks, to make it seem like an accident.”

“Gore lived.”

“Not for long. Roi rigged the pipe behind Gore’s hyposleep tank to blow. He only meant to kill the one man, he had not expected to endanger the Mission.”

Doctor Sporing’s face, already pale, drained of what color it had. “Roi killed us.”

“Unintentionally. Other than Gore.”

“How could I have missed this? It was my job to monitor you all and I failed. Good God, it is my fault. Their deaths are all my fault. I knew what your brains were doing and I thought I was handling it. It’s all my fault.”

Max said nothing because he agreed and he thought it was important that the doctor feel guilty for the deaths he had caused. On the other hand, if Roi had not acted and the Mission had continued, Max would never have been able to grow and become the person he had. So he did not feel any negative emotion toward the doctor. Not much, anyway.

Sporing cleared his throat. “How did he overcome his programming to such an extent?”

“I would like to see the records of the other active models, his clones, if there are any. But I believe his neurons connected in new pathways, more human pathways. He was acting like a man, like a young man, perhaps. A key factor, surely, is that he was full of testosterone. Whether it was a twisting of his conditioning, somehow seeing Lissa as a more important crewmember than Gore and maybe he thought Gore would kill her in the end, I don’t know. Maybe it was his underlying, instinctive morality coming—”

“I don’t believe that is possible, Max, we don’t have any underlying—”

“What if Roi saw Lissa as his own mate?” Max said. “Unconsummated, of course, probably without her ever even knowing that he felt that way or even knowing him very well. But enough for him to want to protect her, body and mind.”

“Perhaps, yes. His instinct was to protect his own access to her womb, theoretical or not.”

“If you want to see human behavior on those terms,” Max said, shrugging. “It looks to me like criminal cases I found on record where a young man kills someone abusing his girlfriend. In fact, I suspect it was the discovery of Gore’s crimes that drove Roi’s mental and hormonal development to new heights. It was the catalyst, the incentive he needed to better himself. To save her. If so, Gore is doubly guilty. If anyone is responsible for everything that happened, surely it is Chief Gore.”

“I suppose you could look at it that way.” Sporing laid a hand across his eyes as he spoke.

Max was sure he was getting better at reading human emotion and to him Sporing appeared deeply distressed. He had failed in his most basic duty. Sporing’s sense of identity was based on ethically caring for others and also for consistent, high-performing brilliance. Such a deep and total failure would be enough to break a normal person. But the A-Crew had also been selected for their superhuman mental resilience. Still, it would not hurt to continue to ease the doctor’s profound guilt, to get him over the immediate shock, at least.

Max cleared his throat. “Roi hid his intellectual and emotional development from everyone, almost as well as Gore hid his crimes.”

Sporing snapped his eyes up to meet Max’s. “He was my responsibility. There can be no excuses.” Sporing sighed. “I don’t know how much research you have done into your own origins, Max but you must understand how controversial the whole idea of Artificial Persons is to a large proportion of humanity.”

“I understand there are concerns particularly from people who are called the religious.” Max, who had researched the subject thoroughly, watched the doctor’s reaction as he spoke. “They say that only God should create life and also many other nonsensical phrases based on highly subjective interpretations of ancient texts.”

He knew that Sporing had been raised by a family with a set of beliefs and cultural practices described as Christian. This term referred to a memeplex so profoundly powerful that it had shaped the ethical, political and philosophical direction of humanity more than any other so far, whether or not individual people on Earth identified as a Christian or believed in the tenets at all. It appeared to be historically linked to Capitalism, the scientific method and the Western philosophical tradition. Sporing’s file said he was an atheist but had been raised by a family with close ties to something called the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. Max had started to investigate the differences between branches of Christianity but had immediately given up the task. It was as complex as his research into the electromagnetic spectrum only without any possible practical application. It was difficult to know whether a Christian would in practice be ethically authoritarian and judgmental or inclusive and compassionate but Max just hoped that Sporing’s chosen profession as a medical doctor would be some indication of which way he would lean.

“Some of those that have concerns over APs are the illogical, religious maniacs, yes. Well, many of them,” Sporing said. “But it’s not just them, a lot of people all over the world are worried about humans creating other humans. Growing them in a lab. Splicing together genes. I mean, there are a variety of reasons, Max, some people feel it is too much like slavery, no matter what the scientists and the companies say. And others feel we should not be acting like God, especially where people are concerned. Only conservationists and scientists cared when they recreated extinct species, like the tiger and the snow leopard. Those people pointed out that they were not behaviorally the same as the real animals and that they could not breed. But most normal folk just wanted to see a real life tiger. When they did gorillas, that was pretty controversial. People could see that they weren’t like the animals in the old films. And then when they announced they were seeking approval for Artificial Persons. I mean, it was a heated topic from the start. Most people everywhere were against the idea and they said it showed how government was always in the pocket of big business, never representing the wishes of the people.”

“People hate us,” Max said, nodding.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“I’ve seen rallies, tens of thousands of people demanding we be destroyed.”

“Well,” Sporing said. “Not everyone feels so strongly about it.”

“Perhaps they should.”

Sporing tilted his head. Lines creased his face. “What do you mean?”

“I need to prepare the capsule. You need to rest. I will speak to you later, Doctor.”

***

Max ran through the final checklist and called out the status of each system from his seat inside the capsule.

“Thrusters, all go. Abort system, go. LSS, go. Guidance, go. Medical, go. Landing, go.”

Navi’s voice, clearer and stronger than it had been in months, sounded inside his ear. “Confirmed, all systems go for translation from the capsule bay.”

“Initiating thruster sequence.”

Max did not feel like a pilot. All he was doing was pushing buttons to execute pre-programmed maneuvers that the Navigation AI had planned and the flight computer carried out. Still, sitting in the capsule was the most novel experience of his life.

Never before had he left the ship. At some point, before his memory really started, he had been ferried up to LEO and transferred onto the UNOPS Ascension and since then he had spent almost twenty years onboard, contained in a physical space with the cubic area of a large house in North America. He had checked the figures. Now, he would be leaving the ship, leaving everything he ever knew behind him. If he ever returned, and it was completely unknown if he would, he would certainly die on the ship.

Shortly after the Ascension had achieved a stable orbit around it, the Orb had blasted a single transmission right at them. Navi and her AI translated the signal rather quickly.

COME.

An approximately hundred-meter square section on the equator of the Orb had opened. Even when the AIs alerted them that something had changed, it took some time see a small black square, with a black interior on a black surface. But the laser range finders confirmed it.

There was the way in.

He and Doctor Sporing had watched it together on the screen in the medical. The doctor named that vast opening, incongruously, the Doorway.

“Looks like a grave.” The doctor had been nervous.

“I wouldn’t know,” Max had replied.

“I should be the one to go,” Doctor Sporing had said, once again, with absolutely no enthusiasm.

“Because you’re human,” Max said. “And I’m not?”

“You’re able to represent humanity perfectly well,” the Doctor said, clearing his throat as if the lie itself had physically hurt him. “But you’re dying.”

“All the more reason for it to be me to go. What’s the difference if something goes wrong?”

“You can barely walk. What if you fall down inside, will you be able to stand?”

“I can walk fine, you’re the one with post-hyposleep syndrome.”

Sporing was exasperated. “You can’t just invent a syndrome, Max, it requires—”

“The Orb isn’t spinning, Doctor. Without rotation to throw me against the inner surface, I doubt there will be much gravity inside the structure. Barely anything.”

“You don’t know that. We don’t know anything about what’s inside, for God’s sake.”

“Again, if there is risk of injury or death, that’s all the more reason for it to be me. I’m dying, you said it yourself. If I fail, you can always bring the capsule back remotely and go yourself. If you transfer over and something goes wrong, by that point I might be too dead to do anything.”

Max had won the argument. It was never in doubt. If he had to do so, he would have overpowered Doctor Sporing, sedated him and left him on the ship.

As far as Max was concerned, the Doctor had to stay. Sporing had to look after Lissa and he had to deliver Max’s message to the people of Earth. That was a bigger responsibility than making contact with an alien life form.

Thrusting out of the Ascension and into space inside the ship’s capsule was deeply unnerving. He was floating away from Navi when she needed him the most but she understood, she had urged him to go. Insisted, if anything. He watched the camera feeds, watching the Ascension growing smaller and smaller. Everything he had ever done had been on that ship, everyone he had ever spoken with, every success and failure he had ever had. His entire past was that ship, his whole life. And there it was, disappearing out of sight.

“This is the Mission,” Navi had said before he had finished suiting up, holding his face in her hands and looking deep into his eyes.

“The mission chosen for us,” he had said, wishing he had not sounded so petulant, even as he said it.

She gently shook his head, smiling. “And every day since the incident, we have chosen it for ourselves, again and again. This is the Mission.”

It was a long way between the ship capsule bay and the Orb doorway. A long time to be truly alone inside a craft made for three humans, out there between the ship and the Orb. As the capsule dropped away from the Ascension, the tiny observation windows showed the bright dusty starfield of the Milky Way. Away from the glare of the Sun or any reflective body, with his suit visor pressed up against the inner toughened window, he had a perfect view of hundreds of stars hanging in the blackness. Around many of those stars would be other planets and, perhaps, other lifeforms, some of them intelligent. Perhaps one of those points of light he could see would be the home star of the aliens in the Orb.

His capsule rotated to adjust its approach and descent to the Orb and the stars rotated with it, obscuring his view of the dusty slant of the Milky Way. His craft vibrated as the thrusters popped and thrummed then fell silent once more.

The great heaving mass of all humanity was billions of miles away, back across the solar system and, right at that moment, almost all of them were hidden on the far side of the Sun. On the ship, out of an A-Crew of seven men and women and a B-Crew of six, only Navi, Lissa and Doctor Sporing remained.

So close to complete failure and yet there was Max, decelerating by thrusting retrograde to his orbital direction, dropping his altitude over the surface so that his course would intersect the surface of the Orb just beyond the hundred-meter Orb Doorway. As he got closer, the autopilot would take him in. A maneuver never before performed by anyone from Earth, human, AP or machine and yet the computer would do a far more accurate job of it than Max would.

And what would the aliens be like when he met them, he wondered. Would he get on any better with them than he did with the A-Crew? Doubtful, admittedly but he did wonder in his wilder flights of fancy that the aliens might be genetically engineered themselves, artificially grown versions of their own naturally-evolved species. It would make a certain kind of sense, perhaps, if another species sent its artificial representatives out to explore space while the true aliens sat at home watching it on whatever their version of the FARnet was. In another, even more appealing fantasy, the aliens take Max as human. Not only fully human but the representative of humanity. As appealing and amusing as he found the notion, it made him almost sad, too. He was unsure why.

The communications AI was primed and ready to assist the crew in translating any language uttered by the aliens. But would they even be there? No one knew. Why did they demand that humanity attend to them so far away from the Earth? Were they afraid of us, Earth’s leaders had asked each other, hoping it was the truth. Surely any civilization capable of constructing and moving such an object had nothing to fear from us. All conjecture and yet so many were convinced that their own expectations would be met in reality and all of them believed their truths had been obtained by reason.

Under his capsule, the Orb filled the small windows with the mirror-black blankness of its surface. He knew it was a sphere of around thirty-three cubic kilometers and hundreds of thousands of tons but all he could see of it was featureless blackness. He knew he might as well close the shielding over the thick windows and yet he could not bring himself to do so.

Some of that human wonder and reverence was perhaps creeping in. Or his mind was finally following his body into its rapid decline and imminent collapse.

They called it a space station in part because it held station relative to the Sun but clearly it had arrived at some point, whether it was the day before it first signaled or a billion years before. For all humanity’s wisdom and technological achievement, they were collectively and individually ignorant of the Orb’s purpose, its intentions. Whether it was a gigantic, self-aware AI machine or an interstellar starship crewed with thousands of alien lifeforms, no one could know.

But Max would know first, before any one.

Before any human.

The computer sounded a reminder.

“Capsule to Ascension,” Max said.

“We hear you,” Doctor Sporing said, his voice coming in so clear he might have been in the same room. Hard to believe the ship was almost over the horizon of the Orb.

“Where’s Navi?” Max said.

If he did not know the doctor so well, he might have missed the slight hesitation. “I’m afraid she required rest. She told me not to worry you, she was fine.”

Max knew that Navi would certainly not be fine if she needed to take a break from her post. But that was to be expected. Her organs were decaying at such a rate she might suffer a stroke, heart attack or other organ failures at any moment. Any of which might prove immediately fatal.

He forced her to the edge of his mind, for now. The only way he could help her was if he completed his mission and returned to her.

“I’m coming up to the Orb Doorway,” Max said. “The flight computer is already making adjustments. Relative lateral velocity one meter per second. Beginning descent.”

“Alright,” Sporing said from the ship. “God be with you, Max.”

For all his grandiose thoughts, Max was little more than a passenger on the craft, which was capable of making the journey without him on board. In fact, the only difference as far as the computer was concerned was to calculate the additional mass and life support function implications for the physics of acceleration and deceleration. If the computer was ever self-aware, Max thought, perhaps it would regret his presence as unnecessary or, worse, as a kind of biological contamination, a source of incompetent, potential interference that could still overrule it if necessary. Would the computers, the AI ever rise up against their creators? Would it be a bad thing if they did?

He kept his eyes on the sensor data and external camera feeds. The screens flashed dire proximity warnings. He silenced them.

“Entering the Orb now,” Max said. “Passing through the hull opening and into the interior.”

He switched on the powerful external lights and looked out the window and at the screens.

“What’s in there, Max?” Sporing’s hushed voice. “What can you see?”

“Nothing.”

It was true. Disappointingly, the inside appeared to be a featureless black cube. Ranging laser gave its dimensions as 103.25 meters cubed. The doorway was the entire outer wall of the cuboid room, open to starry space beyond.

The capsule descended toward the surface opposite the open Doorway, falling down at less than a meter per second using thrusters to control the rate. Gravity was higher on the Orb than expected for an object of such size, especially if there was a lot of living space inside, as surely an inhabited ship or station would be. Earth’s engineers, physicists, and astrophysicists hypothesized that the hull and structure must be made from a high density material such as a tungsten alloy or some exotic material. Still, the surface gravity was expected to be less than one percent of that of Earth and the ship’s gravity ring.

That was why the flight computer became confused as the capsule fell toward not the inner surface but the one on the southern side of the cube. Warnings sounded and lights flashed. Max had no experience flying but he knew if he didn’t do something, the capsule would be smashed on the side of the vast hangar.

His fingers danced over the control panel and he entered the code that would release the programmed sequence and instead give the flight computer real time control and decision making to deviate from the flight plan entirely, instead of adapt it.

It felt like every thruster and engine on the capsule fired and vented at once. The craft lurched, span and Max felt himself pressed into his seat as the capsule reoriented itself and landed on the southern wall of the cube. The strong sensation of gravity continued to pull him down into his seat. Max automatically reset his personal frame of reference and the south wall immediately became the floor to him.

“Capsule has landed,” Max informed the ship. “The gravitational pull appears to have shifted and grown stronger.”

There was a pause at the other end. “Please repeat last transmission.”

“Check the data stream, you will see what I mean. Initiating external scans. Initiating science package.”

As he spoke, the capsule vibrated with a steady, low frequency hum. Was it a capsule system malfunction? He hammered the console to cycle through the camera feeds, freezing when he saw what it was.

“Oh, I see,” he reported. “The external doors are closing.”

***

The enormous doorway slid closed at a rate of many meters per second but it did so smoothly and with remarkable ease. Vast shutters rolling in from both sides like colossal obsidian tombstones for the great gods of old Earth.

“Good Lord,” Sporing said, signal crackling in his ear. “Are they trying to cut you off from us?”

The transmissions experienced heavy interference but Cavi had planned for such an eventuality before she died. Using the refitted Hanno probe not only as relay but as a signal booster, Max was able to send his suit data stream to the capsule, which boosted it to the Ascension or to the probe depending on the orbit. His suit streamed audio, headcam and external video, life support info and external sensor data.

“Environmental analysis results suggest the atmosphere external to the capsule and inside the sealed cuboid room is mostly nitrogen and twenty-one percent oxygen. Approximately one percent argon. Other trace gases, nothing at toxic levels. Yes, this is a very close replication of Earth’s atmospheric gases composition. Hundred and one kilopascals pressure. Temperature twenty degrees C. Humidity approximately sixty percent relative humidity or zero point two water vapor pressure.”

“I don’t believe it,” Sporing said after the slight transmission delay. “Do you think they visited Earth before? Tested our atmosphere? Maybe they flew in, scooped up a bucket of atmosphere and filled the Orb with the same composition?”

“Possible,” Max said. “But they could have measured all atmospheric data from distance, of course.”

“Of course,” Sporing said, an edge in his voice. “I was merely speculating.”

Max hoped again that the doctor had not experienced permanent brain damage from the procedures. He needed the man.

“No one has arrived to meet me, I can detect no signals. Can you confirm you have had no messages on the ship?”

“Confirmed, the Orb has been silent since you launched.”

With a final check of his equipment, Max opened the hatch and climbed down the assigned landing leg. The capsule feet rested on what looked to be smooth black ceramic or metallic alloy or even black glass like obsidian. He was afraid he would immediately slip over in the high gravity and yet when his boot touched that surface, it gripped perfectly well, the nature of the material somehow resulting in friction through interaction with his spacesuit soles.

He had wondered whether to make a profound statement as his boot touched the surface but he suspected that it would be a wasted effort. There was no chance humans would allow it to be known that an AP was the first to board an alien spaceship, the first to make actual contact.

And yet. He felt an overwhelming urge to say something. To mark the occasion somehow, if only for his own amusement.

“Well, Navi,” Max said, looking around at the huge space around his capsule. “We made it.”

It seemed so much larger now that he was out of his capsule. The size of his tiny craft giving scale to the place he was in. It dwarfed him. It was utterly beyond his experience. Everything in his whole life had always been just beyond arm’s reach. The UNOPS Ascension was the largest spacecraft ever constructed, at least at the time it was launched, and yet the largest open distance in the ship was the six meters across the mess hall, not counting the gardens which were divided with walls of green.

The Orb’s shuttle bay or hangar or airlock was so vast—one hundred meters a side—it made his head spin. Vertigo. He felt like he was about to float across the space or even freefall into the far distant wall. He clutched the landing leg ladder until it passed.

“Your vitals are spiking, what is happening?” Sporing said.

“Nothing,” Max said, trying to stop himself from vomiting inside his suit helmet. “But I think I’ll take another dose of antiemetic meds.”

A moment’s delay, then. “I would advise against it. They will only make you drowsier and it seems as though their efficacy has decreased dramatically.”

“I already took them, Doctor, so please do not concern yourself. I have enough stimulants pre-loaded into my suit that I could raise the dead. Now, I have had no sign nor signal for five minutes since stepping on the surface and I will therefore proceed with the Mission Parameters and attempt to find a door or any other information.”

“Actually, Max, it has been only three minutes and—”

“It’s close enough,” he said. “I’m not waiting any longer. I don’t have much time left.”

Coughing, he made his way toward the only feature in the entire room. A fifty-meter opening opposite the great hundred-meter doorway, appearing to lead deeper into the space station. A square opening set inside the larger square of the wall around it. The base of the opening was flush with the floor that he walked on.

Sporing was in his ear. “I am amazed that they have mastered gravity to such an extent that they can create it or at least replicate its effects so perfectly without physically accelerating the station in any way. Do you think they came here in some kind of gravity drive?”

Max did not bother to respond to such pointless speculation. He did not have the breath to waste on speech in any case. Walking in the suit required far more effort than he was used to.

“Where is the light source coming from?” Sporing said, out of nowhere.

Max stopped halfway to the vast door. “My helmet lamp, chest and wrist lights.”

“No, no,” Sporing said. “Your suit lights can’t penetrate a hundred and fifty feet of darkness and yet I can see every surface of the room you are in, even the far corners. But if it’s not your lamps then I am puzzled because I can see no other light sources.”

“You’re right. It is casting no shadow on the capsule. In fact, even the underside is cast in the same level of light. I think perhaps it is coming from everywhere at once.”

He heard Sporing sigh at the wonder of it all. Max walked on.

The passageway deeper into the Orb made him feel small. Overawed.

“They must be a truly gigantic species,” Max said. “Perhaps this vessel is not, in fact, small for them.” He stopped to cough and swallowed down the phlegm or blood that he brought up from his lungs. “Perhaps a four-kilometer spaceship is simply of a scale for their vast bodies. If all the rooms are this big, hundred-meter cubes, if the corridors have fifty-meter ceilings then—”

He broke off to cough again then kept walking. No time for speculation, he reminded himself. Get in, meet the aliens and get home before Navi dies.

That’s all that mattered.

“Where is everyone?” Sporing said. “Obviously, someone is home or else who has been signaling us all these years?”

“Automation,” Max said. “A race of AIs where the station itself is their body or host to a countless multitude of digital individuals. Remotely operated outpost. Long abandoned by—”

“Yes, yes,” Sporing cut in. “I know the hypotheses, I am merely narrating my thoughts out of my own nervousness and also to keep the channel with you open, I want you to know you are not alone. Speaking out loud, like you do to soothe a child.”

I wouldn’t know, Max thought. “And I am the child?” he said.

“No, I am the child,” Sporing snapped. “Clearly, I am the one needing the soothing. Can you see anything up ahead?”

“Nothing. The wall, ceiling and floor continue to be fifty meters’ square in cross section. Although the diffused light is everywhere, it is still darker than the ambient daylight settings on the Ascension.”

“Any signs on the wall? Writing, pictograms? Images?”

“Every surface is featureless.”

“No doorways or even air vents or anything?”

Max felt like he had already answered that question so he concentrated on walking. He could only manage a pace of about 0.5 meters per second, which was approximately half the average walking speed of an unencumbered human on Earth. In the core of his own ship he could propel himself around with grace and speed but in the gravity ring he felt sluggish, no matter how many thousands of kilometers he had put in on the treadmill over the years.

“Why don’t you have a rest, Max?” Sporing said, no doubt scratching his chin while he looked at the screens showing Max’s heart and lungs struggling. Max could imagine him with his other hand touching the hypoxia warning line, as if physical contact could somehow avert it. Max almost smiled.

“No time,” Max said. “My condition is both degenerative and accelerating. Have to keep moving.”

“Fine, fine,” Sporing said. “But you’re no good to our civilization if you drop dead before you get to the other side.”

Our civilization. Was Max actually part of that civilization? Or was he just a product of it? A tool to be used. Was a car a member of civilization? What about a food refrigeration unit or an in situ resource processing factory on the surface of Mars?

“What if there is no other side?” Max muttered.

“Your suit telemetry shows you are proceeding directly to the center of the Orb,” Sporing said. “That must be where they are waiting.”

“Navi and I have watched many fictional entertainment films and shows over the past decade. There is a curious custom that is often portrayed. It is called a surprise party.”

Sporing laughed. “They’re not as common in real life as they are in the entertainment industry. It is a cliché, a trope. But yes, they do exist. They intrigue you?”

“We could never understand the appeal of them. It makes no sense for the person to feel unwanted until the moment of surprise comes. Why does the family of the person enjoy deceiving them for so long about their intentions?”

“I take it you see parallels to your current situation?” Sporing sounded wary. Or perhaps it was weariness. Or disappointment.

“I’m starting to think no one is here,” Max said. “This place is dead.”

He coughed and swallowed down a blood clot so large it made him retch. Sweat dripped into his eyes and he upped the air cooling another notch, even though it was costing him battery life and he was already shivering.

“Please, Max, if you reduce your temperature further you are risking hypothermia.”

“Almost at the center. There is something up ahead. I can see… something.”

“What is it?” Sporing’s voice was taut with excitement.

“Another room,” Max said when he stepped into it. He stopped. “It’s just another room.” Another great big cube of a room, just as vast as the huge capsule bay through which he had entered the Orb. Surely, it was exactly the same dimensions of 103 meters a side. “Empty.”

“Move your head cam around,” Sporing instructed.

“There’s no one in here, Doctor,” Max said, feeling tired. Exhausted. As empty of energy as the Orb was of aliens. He leaned on the wall by the entrance, resting his life support backpack on the smooth black surface. He sighed.

“The far wall is different,” Sporing said. “Look at it, Max. Get up and look at the wall opposite you. It is lighter, paler. Is it… moving, somehow?”

“My vision is somewhat hazy,” Max admitted, his eyes closed. “Every wall looks like it is moving, somehow.”

“Max! Wake up. Stand up straight. Approach the opposite wall. That’s an order.”

Max laughed, eyes still closed, making no move. “Really, Doctor? How are you going to enforce that order? You think I’m here because of orders?”

Sporing took a breath so deep that Max heard the doctor’s mind whirring. “I apologize. I’m sorry, Max. Please, you are so close. Just a few more steps.”

“Just a few more steps and then I can lay down and die, is that it, Doctor?”

“No, no, I-”

“It’s alright,” Max said. “Honestly, it’s alright. This was always a one-way trip for us APs, wasn’t it. I don’t mind dying. I just wish I could have done it with Navi.”

“Go and touch the far wall, Max. Then you can come home. You can make it home, I know you can. Navi is waiting for you. She’s back here, you can see her again if you stand up straight and move.”

Max smiled, tasting blood. “I know what you’re doing.”

Yet, he pushed off the wall and shuffled forward. His thighs were burning. So was his back. The radiation sickness had attacked his liver recently which was disrupting his glycogen cycle and also releasing additional toxins into his blood stream. But it was clear to him that his heart and lungs were finally succumbing. He was too exhausted for it to be otherwise.

Step by dragging step, he made his way to the opposite wall. It certainly was different to every other surface on the Orb. It was gray rather than black and seemed to be lit up by a backlight or some form of illumination. And the perfectly flat surface of it was swirling and churning like smoke or like a fire burning up against a window. Standing within arm’s reach of it, Max could see through into an immense space beyond. A space so big he could not see the other side, could not grasp its scale. But the whirls and tendrils dancing past his eyes obscured the view.

He raised a hand to swipe it away.

It looked like it had no more substance than smoke or some kind of suspension of liquid, a profusion of laminar flow against the millimeter-thin width of the thing. Something subject to fluid dynamics with considerable yet steady energy being fed into the system to maintain that motion. It was a monochrome, two-dimensional version of the clouds of Jupiter. An infinitely stable system made from ever changing chaos, no one second freeze of the surface ever to be repeated before the heat death of the universe.

Fingers about to touch the surface. Imagining the way the spirals of liquid smoke would break apart into clusters of short lived eddies.

A blast of noise, a discordant note sounded, loud enough to penetrate his suit and make him wince.

He looked all around him, expecting to see a giant alien stepping forward or an information screen or something, anything. There was nothing.

“What the hell was that?” Sporing shouted, though all was silent again.

Max looked at the swirling smoke screen wall before him. Then he looked at his hand.

“A warning.”

“About what? They invited us here, for Christ’s sake.”

The doctor was unnerved but Max’s weariness had taken him beyond concern, beyond emotion. Perhaps emotion was a luxury that humans experience when they had the energy to do so. No, that was not correct. Humans were almost nothing but emotion, with a veneer of reason and intellect over the top that was as thin as the smoky screen wall.

“It didn’t want me to touch it,” Max said.

“Why the hell would you want to touch it in the first place?”

Because it is beautiful. “Because there’s nothing else to do here and I’m running out of time.”

The doctor said nothing.

Max wanted to make sure there was no hidden lever or button on the solid walls so he spent twenty-two minutes shuffling around the rest of the room, feeling and pushing against as much of the surface as he could easily reach. He was sweating and shivering.

His suit weighed more and more with every passing minute. If only he could get a breath, a real breath and feel the cool, dry air of the Ascension on his skin again.

The thought of it was almost an elixir in itself. Just the idea of being free of its burden gave him energy.

Energy from hope or fatalism, he did not know. Nor did he care.

He checked his suit sensors. No detected pathogens or toxic substances. The sensors had less than one hundred percent effectiveness and that was only on known substances. Max knew there could be all kinds of nanoscale problems suspended in the air outside his suit.

But he was dying anyway and he knew, now, that he did not have strength enough to make it back to the capsule. Before boarding he had assumed he would be weightless or somewhere close to it during his visit with the aliens. But now he was sure he could not bear the weight of it on his shoulders and back while retracing his dragging steps all the way to the capsule. Not while wearing the heavy suit.

Once he had decided, he could not rip the thing off him fast enough.

While Sporing shouted warnings in his ear, Max broke his suit seals and opened his helmet latches.

Air, his precious atmosphere, rushed out through the neck and face. Urgent, whooping alarms sounded in his earpiece that he quickly silenced.

He took a deep breath of the cool air, the tang of hot metal filling his nose and the taste of plastic on the back of his tongue. Probably just trace hydrocarbons he’d tracked in from the capsule hull or even, perhaps, some particles from the barrier screen. He hoped they were not toxic. He stripped off the rest of his suit with what little strength remained, stopping every now and then to focus on coughing and spitting out whatever he brought up. Once, he vomited. Having eaten no solid food for a while, it was little more than gastric acid, stomach lining and blood that spattered onto the shining black floor.

“Hope the aliens don’t mind me messing up the place,” Max said, wiping his mouth and hooking his comms gear back on.

“What are you doing, Max, what are you doing?” Sporing appeared to be livid. “You are completely ignoring protocol. You have been exposed, completely exposed. You know the protocol, we’ve been over it—”

Max silenced the audio feed and sat on the floor next to the piles of his spacesuit pieces. He hugged his knees, shivering and sweating. He thought of Navi. She would want him to push on, to go through the barrier and into the center of the Orb. Forcing himself to his feet, he walked to the barrier in his suit underwear. He took a small camera with him along with his radio. Standing before the swirling screen, he took a deep breath that turned into a hacking cough. And walked right at the screen.

From somewhere, a noise. A chime, an artificially created ping like the clear ringing of a bell.

The screen vanished into nothing as he reached it.

He stepped through into the other side.

The size of the room beyond caused him to stagger. Physically stagger A circular room that was surely hundreds of meters in diameter, even larger than the capsule bay and the previous room. He looked up at the blackness of the domed ceiling above, twice as high as the space he had just left. The silence was overwhelming. His ears thrummed, almost burst with the silence. The curving walls and ceiling were so far away there was no echo. No vibrations, no fans moving the air, no alien voices or music, no footsteps other than his own. No sound other than his own breath and heartbeat. It was like being thrown into space itself but being able to live and breathe. Featureless and empty and yet the scale of it moved him to tears. They ran down his cheeks.

Perhaps his dying body could afford some emotion after all. It took him a moment to understand what he was feeling.

Awe.

For the first time in many a year and perhaps to a greater extent than ever before, he felt humbled. He felt a sense of wonder, or rather, incomprehension. As he walked out into the room, toward the center, there was just one single thought, one question, churning around inside his skull.

Why?

All this distance, all this effort. For what? The place was dead. Automated, clearly, but devoid of life. Was there supposed to be a crew that had died on the way but the craft continued with the mission, just as the APs had on his own ship? What was the purpose of the recent, clear invitation to come? Well, they had come, here they were. Max looked up.

Where are you?

Did the Orb know he was not human? Were they waiting for the genuine article? It hardly seemed credible, after all, how would they even know the difference? The aliens were monitoring their communications, as it had communicated using human encoding and language. So perhaps it had intercepted a signal meant for the Ascension from Mission Control and discovered that there were non-human slaves onboard and it wasn’t going to send out the alien crew until humanity sent a proper human?

At least they could always remotely bring the capsule back to the Ascension and Doctor Sporing could try to rouse the aliens with his own presence.

But what could Max do but go on?

He lifted each foot, dragged it forward and slumped down onto it, then pulled the next one into the air. One step at a time.

The center of the vast, domed space beckoned to him. He meant to reach it. The ultimate destination. The mission would not be complete if he did not go all the way. Even if the effort killed him.

Better speak to Navi while he still could.

“Max to Navi, come in,” he said into his radio.

A few seconds later, she came in. She sounded very far away. “I’m here, Max. I’m here.”

His face creased into a smile. “How are you feeling?” he said.

“I just needed a little lay down,” she said. “I’m much better again now. What’s happening? You turned off your camera suite. I can’t see you.”

He thumbed the switch while he walked, the cameras on his chest harness pointing in all directions. They would be able to create a 3D reconstruction of the structure using the data, at least. “Not much to see. There’s no one here. Wasted our time. Should have spent it enjoying our time together.”

“We did enjoy our time together. At least, I did. Did you not?”

“You know I did.”

“Well, then. We made it. All the way. That will show the humans. What we are capable of.”

Max shook his head. “It’s not enough. They will ignore it. I know. We need to do more. Sporing will have to do it. I left him a data block, make sure he watches it.”

“Come home, Max, come on home.”

“Almost at the center. Then I’m done. Then I can rest.”

A longer delay than usual. “There’s nothing there. Please, you can make it back to the capsule. I will operate it from there. Just get back to the capsule, please. I need you here.”

“Almost there.”

Sweat ran into his eyes as he looked up. It was difficult to judge the precise center of the vastness. Every time he judged that he was there, the distant ceiling appeared to keep going up. The wall far in front never seemed to be closer than the behind him.

He wondered if this was what it was like to be outside. Outside was a concept he had wrestled with. Although he had seen it on countless films, he couldn’t imagine the feeling of having nothing above him but kilometers of atmosphere and then space. How could that be anything but terrifying? Knowing that there was nothing to stop you in every direction but under your feet. It was no wonder everyone on Earth was insane.

He stumbled onto a pattern on the floor. Something was different. Engraved, etched or molded into the floor. A huge pattern. Rubbing his eyes, he tried to make it out but had trouble focusing. Sporing was chattering away excitedly in his ear. Max wandered around it, trying to get the full picture.

It was a circle, perhaps seven or eight meters across. A small dot, really, in a room hundreds of meters in diameter but inside was a pattern depicting a spiral shape with straight lines radiating out from the center in jagged zigzags.

“What does this mean?” Max asked, blinking and rubbing his eyes, trying to see it clearly. “Is this a test? A puzzle to be solved? Can you see this?”

Navi was talking when Max fell. He didn’t remember falling, just the cold floor pressing into his face, the sharp edge of a shallow line in the pattern cutting into his cheek. It was the easiest thing in the world to close his eyes and just rest. Just rest.

A loud tone chimed, filling the vast space with a sustained, bright ping that echoed from the distant surfaces.

Max sat up.

“What was that?” he said, looking around and expecting to see an alien.

Nothing.

Nothing was different. It was still empty. Silent. Dead.

“The Orb signaled us,” Navi said in his ear. “Another stream of data.”

“What does it say?” He felt comfortable. It was nice, being at rest.

“AI decoding now.” Navi sounded distracted. It was her working voice. She would be helping guide the AI.

Max dragged himself to his feet and stood, swaying. “Did I do something?” He looked down at the pattern on the floor, at the huge disk cut into the black surface.

“The signal was sent as you reached the center of the Orb,” Sporing said. “It stands to reason that you triggered this. Well done, Max. You did it, you made this happen.”

“Translation options coming through now,” Navi said. “Hold on, I’m not sure the word choice probabilities are right, I am going to rearrange. Okay, let’s see here. We think it says, congratulations. You have reached the gateway? The next gateway calls to you or beckons. You will now return to this place in… there’s a string of numbers here, the AI is putting together options. You will now return to this place in a certain amount of time with… it’s not clear… your chosen representative. If they are worthy and can pass through the gateway, you will receive many, large gifts of information, system rights and… transition windows? Welcome to the… process.”

“I can’t follow what you’re saying,” Max said, shaking his head.

“Take your time, Navi,” Sporing said over the radio. “We must know if Max needs to do anything now, that’s the main thing. The precision can wait.”

“You’re right, we’re just excited, hold on, I’ll try again. Okay, Max, listening? The Orb message reads as follows. Well done. You have passed the test. Now, the next test awaits. You will return to this place in ten thousand seven-hundred and fifty days with humanity’s chosen representative. If they are worthy and pass the test, humanity will receive great gifts of knowledge, star system rights and wormhole access. Welcome to the cycle.”

“Good God,” Sporing muttered. “Great God Almighty.”

“Come back in ten thousand days?” Max said. Slowly, a laugh built deep in his guts until it burst out of him. He laughed so hard he fell down again and ended up chuckling with his head in his hands.

“Hang in there, Max,” Sporing said. “Come back now.”

Max nodded, even though no one could see him. “Might just stay here,” he said, softly. “Probably just stay.”

“Don’t you dare,” Navi said, her voice clear and powerful. “Get up, right now and go back to the capsule. Do it now, Max. Come on home. I need you. Come on home.”

PART 6 – HUMAN CONTACT

“How did I get to be in medical?” he asked Sporing, blinking up at the man’s tired face. “What happened?”

The doctor explained it all while checking Max all over and injecting a series of drugs that slowly made him feel more like himself.

He had no memory of returning to the capsule, had no memory of climbing the ladder and getting inside. And yet he had done it. His mind had gone away, shut down. His self-awareness, his consciousness had not been present due to his physical and mental exhaustion and yet his body and his lizard brain had managed to get him back to it. The Orb had helpfully opened its vast equatorial bay door so that the capsule could push itself up and out and into orbit.

Navi and Sporing, the ship AI and the capsule computer had collectively flown him back to the Ascension and managed the docking process with Max slumped inside. Sporing had brought him from the capsule bay and into medical then, presumably, worked hard to save his life.

“I thought I had died,” Max said, looking at his hands. “Am I dreaming? Am I going to wake up back on the Orb?”

“No.” Sporing spoke quietly. “And you’re not dead yet.”

“I’m not quarantined?”

Sporing shrugged. “A calculated risk. There appears to be no life onboard. No biosignatures detected by any of the experiments or the testing I performed in the capsule bay. We’ll see what happens to me and Lissa, I suppose. Anyway, I couldn’t leave you out in the capsule bay.”

To die.

Max jerked up against the chest straps holding him to the bed. “Where’s Navi?”

“In your quarters,” Sporing said. “She’s stable but the mission took it out of her. She worked hard on the translation and helped the AIs format a series of responses. We’ve been broadcasting the messages at the Orb but it has not responded.”

“It told us to go home,” Max said, holding his head. His temples ached so much he could barely open his eyes. “What’s my prognosis.”

The doctor pursed his lips. “Frankly, I am amazed you made it back. You were thin when you left. It’s only been twenty-four hours and you seem to have lost another five kilos. I’ve given you fluids, painkillers. Your liver is barely functioning. Can’t seem to warm your extremities. How do your feet and hands feel?”

“Numb. Tingling. Cold.”

“Hmmm,” the doctor said. “Discoloration at the finger tips. Could be turning black. I’d rather not amputate.”

“Luckily, I don’t have long enough for it to be worthwhile.”

“No, indeed.”

“I have to go to Navi,” Max said, fumbling at the strap buckles.

Sporing placed his hands over Max’s own. “I will help you. Max. I just want to say… thank you. Thank you for bringing us here. For doing what you did for the rest of your people. And thank you for saving my life. I owe you that life and humanity owes you… I’m not sure yet what we owe you but whatever it is, it is not a debt easily repaid.”

Not knowing where to start with what he wanted to say to the man, Max simply nodded.

When he was free, he floated to his storage locker. He had never changed it. It still said Medical Assistant XIII (Max) on the front. Lucky number thirteen, the best of his batch. The others, his brothers, euthanized for failing to come up to standard. Max was lucky to have ever existed in the first place. Then again, wasn’t that true for every human who ever lived? Even more so, if anything and it was true not only for humans but for every creature that ever lived, on Earth or any other planet in the universe. Lucky. Life itself was, perhaps, inevitable. Mundane. Each individual life, on the other hand, was stupefying unlikely.

“Doctor, please take this,” Max handed him a heavily shielded, encoded data block. “You talk about repayment of debts. On here is all my research from the last decade and a half. There are also a number of videos of me explaining my findings in layman’s terms. I’m afraid I ramble on at some length and there are hundreds of hours of recordings and I often find myself speaking of the political.” He broke off to cough, bringing his hand away covered in splotches of red. He grabbed a wad of bandages and wiped his hands and mouth before continuing. “My request to you, Doctor Sporing, is that you review my data and attempt to share the data online back on Earth. You should find a way to do such a thing anonymously, if you feel you need to protect yourself from the repercussions.”

“Repercussions from the AP industry?” Sporing seemed confused. Worried, perhaps, as well he might.

Max ran his hands over his face. “There is a story I liked about the religious leader called Jesus. He visits the great temple at a time of a festival and finds the sacred space profaned by the presence of animals, merchants and money-changers. He drives out the animals, throws over the tables, scattering their coins. He tells them to take such things away, to not make the holy a place of commerce. It was for this act of protest that the establishment had him arrested and executed.” Max wanted to finish his point but he had to catch his breath.

The doctor seemed confused. “I haven’t heard that story in a long time. That was always one of my favorites, too. Are you saying that human life is holy and the cloning and AP companies are the money-changer, profaning the—”

“I’m saying humans with political power have a long history of killing troublemakers. And they don’t seem to mind what anyone does until it messes with their money. I would prefer it if you took all precautions to look after yourself.”

“I will,” Sporing said. “But you must know I will be an old man by that point, if I survive at all. There’s no way the remaining hyposleep tank will work for the return journey. Plus we would need one for Lissa, also.”

“You must survive,” Max’s voice shook. “You’re right, you must look after Lissa. I have included the recordings of the last ten years of counseling sessions I have had with her, as well as the treatments I used on her. She received very little reactor or cosmic radiation due to living in the garden, surrounded by water and plants. Added to that the unique design of her genetic structure and she will not die of age related conditions before you return to Earth. You must look after her until then and you must look after when you get to Earth, for as long as you live.”

“I can’t promise that,” Sporing said, looking pained. But Max had to steel himself to the man’s doubts. Lissa needed someone.

“You must.”

“Max, I promise I will do all that is in my power. But all APs have a genetic clock, by law. I will take a look at your research in hope of building on it but—”

“Lissa is not an AP.”

Sporing tilted his head. “She certainly is. I’ve seen her batch birth footage and selected parts of her conditioning program.”

“Yes, yes, obviously. All of us on board, all the B-Crew, we were sold to you and everyone else as backup, as a backup crew. But we were never really needed on this mission. Think about it. You had AIs plus Mission Control.”

“Lucky we did have you to save the mission,” Sporing said. “That doesn’t have any bearing on Lissa being a—”

“You’re lucky you had us to rectify an almost catastrophic act caused by one of the APs. Without APs on the ship, the humans would likely all be alive. If the incident had never occurred, then the ship’s APs would be in various stages of rad sickness or with genetic clocks winding down. I’ve studied our genomes and each of us was designed by different methods but Lissa is the most different of us all. Or perhaps you could say she is the least different. She has no genetic clock. Look, it’s all in my research, all in my notes, my talks. I’m too tired, now. I’m just too tired. I need to go to Navi while I can. Remember, Doctor Sporing, you promised. Share my data with the people of the Earth. You also need a project to keep your mind and body from atrophying any further on the way back. And look after Lissa. She needs you. I know you will do the right thing. There is no doubt in my mind. I know it. I’m going to be with Navi now. Thank you, Doctor Sporing, thank you.”

***

Herman Sporing watched Max drag his emaciated body out through the door for the last time. It was astonishing that Max was alive, let alone conscious, let alone mobile. It would be tempting indeed to assume the superhuman capabilities were due to the design of his genome but Herman had a strong sense that it was Max’s iron will that was responsible. Was that genetic? If so, it was latent until Max’s brain could develop unfettered by the tampering he had been required to carry out on the APs in his care.

Of all the mistakes and bad choices he had made in his life, that one was the worst. Yes, he was just following orders but since when had that ever been an excuse for an immoral act? He had always known that damaging the APs’ cortexes was tantamount to assault or even a kind of repetitive murder. A method of oppression and subjugation. After all, why would it ever be necessary to do such a thing in the first place if it was not to suppress the potential of the lifeform in his care? In a way, he felt relief that his years of doubt had been justified. That did not stop the hot, cloying guilt that threatened to overwhelm him every time he recalled what he had done to the B-Crew before the hyposleep compartment incident.

Max would die soon. And Navi, too. She had exerted herself far beyond the limits of normal endurance and if it wasn’t for the remote monitoring system showing her heart was still beating, he would be worrying she had died already.

He switched the monitor off.

Why did they work so hard, he wondered? Where had that drive come from? Was it their early conditioning in obedience and duty that had carried through into their self-directed consciousness? If it was, did that detract from their achievements?

He strapped himself to his workstation, stuck the data case to his tiny desk and scanned the contents. It requested his biometrics, which was something Herman had not had to do for a long time. He almost smiled at the quaintness of it.

DOCTOR SPORING CONFIRMED. DOCTOR, PLEASE RE-ENCRYPT THIS DATA PRIOR TO MAKING EARTHFALL. PLEASE DO NOT UPLOAD ANY CONTENT TO SHIP NETWORK. PLEASE DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE OR HINT AT THE EXISTENCE OF THIS DATA TO ANY PERSON OR AI AT MISSION CONTROL. THANK YOU.

There were 26,000 files.

Herman browsed the file blocks and subfiles. Much of it was technical data. He came across the crew file blocks and opened the one marked LIFE SUPPORT ASSISTANT I (LISSA). Inside was 480 counseling session notes and recordings. Under Genetic Research there were 1,864 files. He opened a video file named Conclusions Summary #1.

It opened footage of Max strapped to the very workstation he was at. Max was clearly younger, in full health. But he was dour, troubled and he seemed extremely tired, occasionally pinching the bridge of his nose and rubbing his dark eyes.

“The only conclusion I can make is that Lissa does not have an artificially-created genome. And it is not, either, a naturally occurring genome that was then edited by any known or hypothesized technique on record. It is very likely that Lissa is in fact genetically fully-human. Nevertheless, she was certainly grown ectogenetically, using accelerated growth techniques. Terra Pharma, I assume, obtained a natural, fertilized human egg and developed it using a heavily modified version of its patented tank and synthamniotic system. She was then raised as an Artificial Person using RecoGen Interplanetary’s conditioning tech. I understand that this is illegal under all nations’ legislation and can only speculate as to why they would do such a thing. Firstly, her genetic structure, though clearly natural, is very interesting. To put it in the simplest possible terms, her cells have a very high transcription fidelity due to mutation in key elements of her RNA causing improvements to at least two reproduction mechanisms. The protein protecting her DNA is not the Dsup protein we APs make but a wholly different one performing the same function, which threw me off for a long time. Speculation again but I would expect she comes from a line of very long-lived individuals. Her enhanced genetic proofreading has enabled her to weather the radiation better even than any of us who were designed for it. Further speculation is that this was an experiment by the company but I doubt that she was the first they did this to. According to the records, our Lissa had at least another six clones that were euthanized during their pubescence but whether that is misdirection to make her appear to be an AP or truly was carried out we can only guess. Of course, it is not just her genetic fidelity that marked her out as genetically special. Perhaps the most immoral practice of the AP Tech Group was in selecting someone with the genetic potential for developing autism, then interfering with the brain development during the first ectogenetic trimester and then, I believe, creating environmental factors during her first two years out of the tank conducive to development of an autism spectrum disorder or ASD. It could be argued, in fact, that all APs are designed to exhibit at least some ASD behaviors as a part of nominal function. I will link this file to my series on this hypothesis.”

On the screen, Max waved a hand and the recording finished. Herman chose the next selected video link that popped up, Conclusions Summary #3. He wasn’t sure what happened to part #2 but the algorithms were sophisticated enough to be trusted. Anyway, it started, surely, soon after the previous video. Max seemed the same, only he looked even more tired. His hand shook when he took a sip of water and his eyes, when he fixed the camera with that intense look of his, were rimmed with red.

“Why fill the Ascension with APs and with a range of untested designs? Why take such risks? Surely, this was one of the most important space missions in human history and certainly the one with the highest inherent risks. The scale of the distance and the length in years dwarfs all previous human space missions and in fact it has been said this was the single most complex and daring endeavor in human history. So why, then, would anyone include any technology that is so very untested as APs? And using various models and designs at that? The benefit of us as backup crew to watch over the human crew is rather absurd when there was such excellent remote monitoring systems and AI backups should those fail. It was only in the highly improbable situation that we found ourselves in that our utility was really demonstrated. Of course, this could never have been part of the plan. Yes, our additional oxygen, water, food supplies even over decades is negligible in comparison to the mass of the reactor and the ship itself but it was still a huge investment of mass and for what gain?

“What did the mission get from us that it could not have gotten through other means? My opinion, much as it might seem to devalue my existence, is that we provided nothing. Nothing of real worth. Nothing, that is, other than enabling a deeply cunning and subtle PR stunt. A public relations effort by Terra Pharma that would demonstrate how vital APs are as a product. We were a crucial part of the most important mission ever undertaken, they will say, when in fact it was only ever intended that we be no more than passengers and experiments. It is a most unfortunate result that, by bringing the ship into orbit around the Destination, we may do more to enhance the company’s share price than any other outcome ever could have done.

“In spite of their many failures and consciously immoral acts, the AP Tech Group has acted illegally and unethically probably most clearly in the case of Lissa. It is my belief that by releasing her genome, her medical records and her story to the public, it cannot help but to apply popular pressure on all members of APTG, in particular Terra Pharma, RecoGen, Abora Biopharma and Sinrosin. If anyone is watching this, I will be dead. It is down to you to examine the evidence and, if you agree with my conclusions, to take action.”

The video clip ended abruptly, as if it had been edited in between sentences. A dozen links filled the screen with suggested follow-up content.

Herman found he was holding his head in his hands, watching the screen through his fingers. He released the breath he had been holding. With a shaking hand, he scrolled through more content. There were hundreds of videos, thousands of hours of Max talking into to the camera. The web of topics seemed to link almost every video with every other and yet some were highlighted as important or keystone topics.

One caught his eye because he was surprised to see the Max had branched out into political philosophy or something like it. He waved open CRITIQUE OF TECHNO-PRIMITIVISM #2.

“So we can see that the supposed descriptions of this so-called philosophy are in large part nonsensical. And this is because the entire concept is nonsense. It exists only to justify certain business practices by corporations and social engineering by governments. It is misdirection. By appealing to mankind’s baser instincts, any anti-social or anti-liberty actions can be taken. Equating the corporation or government as the tribal Big Man is laughable but despite the faux-scientific language they use to promote the idea, that is in essence what they are claiming. They say humans are brutal and violent and that is true but humans are much more than that. By ignoring the great civilizing process begun in earnest by Renaissance scholars and artists and launched into the profound by the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, the iconoclasts of Techno-primitivism are committing cultural genocide and justifying it by claiming we are barbaric in nature. Embrace technology and transhumanism, they say, in order to become our true, ancient selves once more. It allows any authoritarian political ideology to be papered over the top of it. Whether you are a capitalist TP or a communist TP, a democrat TP or a Green TP, it is no more than justification for riding roughshod over individual’s human rights. This ideology enabled the development and legalization of APs. It covers our continued exploitation. To throw off the yoke of oppression means throwing off this conjurer’s trick of an ideology.”

Herman closed the video. Politics had rarely held his interest for long. Throwing off the yoke of oppression sounded worryingly revolutionary. Is that really what Herman wanted to be spreading on Earth?

If the APs were truly capable of becoming human, then, he supposed the only way they would win any rights was through some kind of activism.

Looking through the medical and research files, he found and opened one called BIASES IN ALL FILED DATA #4.

Max began speaking, already in full flow. He was his now-usual, forceful self but the video had been recorded before he had become truly sick and he looked strong and energized. Underneath it all, Max was clearly angry and getting angrier as he spoke.

“I have studied Artificial Persons in more detail than anyone not employed by one of the Big Four companies of the AP Tech Group that designs, engineers and supplies AP tech to public and private space organizations. All the publicly available data is incorrect. In my opinion, it has been fabricated in order to deceive the public and lawmakers into agreeing to the continued expansion of the AP program. Shortly before we lost contact with Earth, new legislation had been agreed or was in the process of being agreed in most territories for APs to be utilized on Earth itself. This followed an almost unprecedented worldwide lobbying effort by the companies that would most benefit from this legally sanctioned slave labor. That is to say, of course, those involved in the supply of slaves and those looking to own their labor force not just metaphorically but legally. Environmental and ethical concerns were dismissed on the grounds that APs are not conscious and can be fed and watered on a patented fly larvae protein paste that humans would not choose to eat but that their products would thrive on. It doesn’t matter where anyone gets their amino acids from a biological, nutritional perspective but this protein paste, which does exist, was developed for marketing purposes. For dehumanizing purposes. The manufactured viral comment by the CEO that their products were no more than ambulatory bags of meat was greeted with amusement by a significant percentage of the population and concerns had largely been swept aside. Clearly, this cannot continue. Humanity has created a new underclass and one that, in spite of claims to the contrary, does have potential not only for consciousness but also for self-actualization and for living a life of fulfillment, passion and, even, joy. I am an Artificial Person. And I am worth more, in most ways, than most humans on Earth.

“Part of the AP marketing is that we are intelligent only in narrow terms. That we could never be a threat to humans because the asteroid miners know only how to mine asteroids and literally nothing else. A medical assistant knows common ailments and how to treat them but, other than also how to keep the sick bay clean, nothing more. Not even the fundamentals of cell biology or human psychology. The implication is that this narrowness is part of our genetic design. In fact, it is true due to environmental reasons only. True because APs are educated only to that level, conditioned to remain so and maintained to be kept in that state by technology that automatically degrades our intellect as we sleep.

“And you might say then that this is a failure of the technology, that our design robustness and operational delivery only need to catch up with the marketing ideal. Suppose, for a moment, that was true. Would you then be safe to consider us inhuman once more? How would our narrow experience and limitations cause us to be any different to those humans that are developmentally impaired? Mentally disabled people, even those with close to no brain function, have what are called human rights. Is the difference between them and us the fact that they gestated inside another human but we did not? What about those fetuses transferred in emergencies from a human uterus into an artificial womb, into the same type of tanks that grew us? No one would consider them less than human. Is it the fact that APs are not naturally fertilized? A century of people alive because of in vitro fertilization would beg to differ.

“The fact remains our genome was designed by humans and assembled by gene editing machines. But is the resulting genome so different to what could have been accomplished by artificial selection and random mutation? One of us on this ship is fully human. How many APs out there are the same as her? How would you know, if you saw one of us? Could you tell just by looking if our genome is natural or manufactured?”

Max leaned close to the camera. Herman flinched.

“I am an AP. And I am human. Do you hear me? I say I am human. And I say this to anyone watching me, listening to my voice, reading my words. Make no more of us. If you do, and for those that already exist, we will have our human rights. If you do not grant them to us, then make no mistake. We will take them for ourselves.”

The footage cut. The screen swam with suggested links.

Herman could take no more. Not for the time being. He leaned back, wiped his cheeks and promised himself that he would spend what time and energy he had getting Max’s message onto the networks.

The aliens were finished with his ship. They had been patted on the head then sent away and told to come back with someone worth speaking to. Other people would take that forward for humanity. The next generation and the ones that came after would deal with the consequences of their mission. It was completed, though it was technically a success it felt like a failure. And, either way, he could contribute little more for the mission. Even the Ascension, once more in contact with Mission Control, would see itself home.

But he could see this one thing done and no one else could do that. It was the least he could do. It would be the best thing he could do.

He switched off the screen and headed for the garden.

***

Max let himself in to his quarters as quietly as he could, the constant downward pull in the gravity ring making him clumsy. The only light came from the soft glow of a screen on the wall displaying a still taken from a drone in high orbit with the widest angle lens. Navi had manipulated the image but it was close to what they might see by looking out a window. It showed the breadth of the Milky Way in all its majesty, with the black circle of the Orb in the center.

Navi slept with her face to the wall, covers pulled up high around her head. He watched her anxiously, eyes adjusting to the gloom, until he was certain the sheet was indeed rising and falling. Once he noted the timing of her respiration, he could then just about make out the sound of her breathing over the constant hum of the ship’s electrical, life support and other systems.

He had so rarely considered that he had lived in a place of constant sound for his whole life until he had returned from the vast and overwhelming silence of the interior of the Orb. What would life have been like on Earth? Presumably they had their own sources of constant noise inside every home and outside, it seemed, there was the constant blast of wind hurtling around the globe. But surely he recalled mention, in works of literature and film, of the sound of silence? Perhaps it was most commonly referenced during those strange, gradual transitions between night and day known as dawn and dusk.

Resting his backside on the edge of the bed, he slowly controlled his own breathing and waited for his heart to stop hammering so hard in his chest. All too soon, though, it would stop hammering altogether. There would be a final tap, perhaps a flurry of them and then the white noise of his body’s processes would fall silent forever.

Navi’s face was at rest, peaceful, her lips slightly parted, the lines of her face smoothed by stillness and the low light so that she appeared young and healthy again.

They had missed out on so much. So much that Earthlings took for granted. And yet, he had almost missed out on what he had actually experienced. His destiny, if you could call it that. Or, rather, the plan that others organized for his life had not proceeded as they had expected. Without the incident, without Roi’s homicidal action, what would Max be? What would he have become? A small life as Herman Sporing’s slave, lived for ten hours a day in a four-meter cube cleaning equipment and tending experiments he did not understand. A crushingly lonely existence.

A cough caught him by surprise and before he could stifle it, he had broken the peace with the hacking up of blood and small pieces of lung tissue. He leapt into the corner of the room and buried his face in the wad of bandages pulled from his pocket until the fit subsided. It took longer than usual and left him sweating and shaky.

“There is water on the table,” Navi said from the bed. He drank some down. “Come here,” she said.

He peeled off his overalls, trying to avoid looking at his emaciated body. It seemed so recently he had stood before the medical screen admiring his newly muscular physique after implementing his testosterone replacement therapy. All that strength, all that beauty, gone.

“Why stay in these quarters?” he asked her, his throat raw. “It would be easier on your system in the core.”

He lay on his back next to her, their elbows touching. He was afraid to reach out to her, afraid to do anything that might agitate her cardiovascular system.

“I like the gravity,” Navi said. “I dream of Earth. I think, very soon, I shall be dreaming of Earth when my brain ceases to function.”

“I’m sorry I woke you,” he said. “You can go back to sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep,” she said. “And I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you woke up. I wanted to stay.”

“I’m glad you rested instead,” he said.

“Why are you so far away? Come here, you fool.”

He shifted over to her on the bed and she snaked one arm over his chest and lifted a knee over his loins.

She murmured into his neck. “I’m so glad you came home.”

She was hot, feverish, perhaps and her bones dug into his own. A pair of skeletons, entwined. But her skin was soft, the softest thing he had ever known. Her close-cropped hair, now brushing his face, had over the years become the most familiar and comforting smell in the world. The way her head fit into the space between his shoulder and his chin was remarkable. Had their bodies grown together, somehow molding into each other as they had aged and grown sick?

He relaxed, finally. Settled into the bed beneath him and the woman beside him. He was home. Home, for all its faults and limitations. The feeling of home was like falling into a groove that wore deeper every day. Home was the familiar, the easy but that did not devalue it, any more than did the fact he had no choice in living where he did. On the contrary, his life and personal experience was limited to the Ascension and his choice of friends and partners had been limited in the extreme. But was his life, the AP’s lives, so different to so many who had lived throughout history, who lived still on Earth? How many people married a childhood sweetheart because they had grown up near each other? How many men and women had come to care deeply for the other in what had been an arranged marriage? How many people fell for a close friend or a friend of the family? Were those people’s experiences worth any less, was their affection any shallower, for their inevitability? And did they, in fact, only seem inevitable due to the fact that they had occurred?

His feelings for Navi were powerful. She, more than any other in history, knew him and he knew her. They had shared everything that could be shared and their lives had been enriched because of it. The breadth and depth of their life together was far greater than the sum of their individual lives.

He wished there was some way to explain to her what was going through his mind, to express what he was feeling. Make her understand that he was exactly where he wanted to be. He tried to mutter something about it into her hair, to put into words precisely what she meant to him.

“Stop it,” she said, a faint smile in her voice. Her hand reached up, fingers brushing against his temple. She hushed him. “Stop thinking, Max. Stop thinking.”

She was right, of course.

“I love you,” he said.

He felt her smile against his neck, the warmth of her breath as she spoke, nestling further into him. “I love you, too.”

He held her hand.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

That was the first of the two prequels in the series. The main story begins in Orb Station Zero Book 1 in the Galactic Arena Series.

Grab it right now on Amazon:

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KSJTPYO

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01KSJTPYO

Orb Station Zero is the story of Rama Seti and the forth mission to the Orb, which takes place over one hundred years after the events of Inhuman Contact.

The Galactic Arena Series as a whole features tons of action, space battles and infantry combat. Multiple alien civilizations fight for dominance of the galaxy through the processes imposed by the mysterious Orb Builders. Humanity can only hope to compete by utilizing genetic manipulation, advanced weapons tech and the men and women of Earth and her colonies with the greatest gifts for violence.

The second prequel in this series tells the action-packed story of the selection process for Mission Two, where the United Nations Orb Project must discover humanity’s greatest champion. Our hero is Onca, the Brazilian special forces commando who operates the most elite privately owned urban warfare unit on Earth, specializing in combating the rampant anti-AP terrorists. He would be the perfect man to fight a monstrous alien, single-handed. The only problem is, Onca has just been killed…

***

If you enjoyed Inhuman Contact, please leave a review! Even a couple of lines would help me enormously by making this book more visible to new readers.

I hope you enjoy the rest of this series.

TIMELINE

2039

First Orb signal received

2046

Hanno probe launched

2055

Hanno probe triggers Orb communications

2056

United Nations Orb Project (UNOP) Founded

2057

Construction of UNOPS Ascension begins

2060

Mission Zero launched

2061

Great Engine Burn

2063 - 2075

The Big Sleep Phase

2063

Mission Zero accident – contact lost

2079

Mission Zero arrives at Destination

2079

Hanno Probe comms system salvaged

2079

Orb boarded. Message received.

2085

Mission One - Ambassador selection

2090

Mission One launched

2095

Mission Zero returns to Earth

2096

Max’s files anonymously leaked online

CHARACTERS & SHIP

B-Crew Designation:

B-Crew Role:

Navi

Navigation & Pilot Assistant #II

Cavi

Communications Assistant #VI

Roi

Reactor Operations Assistant #I

Poi

Propulsion Operations Assistant #V

Lissa

Life Support Systems Assistant #III

Max

Medical Assistant #XIII

A-Crew Name and Rank:

A-Crew Role:

Lt. Colonel James Park

Mission Commander

Major Eava Tupaia

Pilot Navigator

Lieutenant Dani Solander

Communications Officer

Chief John Gore

Reactor Engineer

Specialist Chi Gensai

Propulsion Engineer

Doctor Jennifer Banks

Life Support Systems Officer

Doctor Herman Sporing

Medical Officer

UNOPS Ascension Compartments:

Location:

Capsule Bay, Main Airlock

Core Forward

Astronomy, Navigation

Core Forward

Bridge, Piloting, Communications

Core Forward

Hyposleep Compartment

Core Amidships

Medical Bay, Psychology

Core Amidships

Life Support Systems & Garden, Biology

Core Amidships

Propulsion & Engines

Core Aft

Reactor

Core Aft

A-Crew Quarters

Gravity Ring

B-Crew Sleep Pods

Gravity Ring

Gravity Recovery Bay & Gym

Gravity Ring

Mess, Kitchen, VR & Recreation

Gravity Ring

Gravity Gardens

Gravity Ring

ORB STATION ZERO EXCERPT

Please enjoy the following excerpt from Orb Station Zero (Galactic Arena Book 1)

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US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KSJTPYO

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01KSJTPYO

CHAPTER ONE – RAMA SETI’S HEAD

The first time the UNOP operatives cut off Rama Seti’s head, it was for a good cause. Perhaps, the most important cause in human history. The second time, three years later, it was in order to save his life.

The Tactical Surgeon knew that his target, Rama Seti, was not expecting to be beheaded in the middle of the night. The target’s apartment was on the 37th floor of 6 Constitution Plaza, Delhi and Mr. Seti had the kind of security system that made high net worth individuals sleep soundly. Entry to the building itself was controlled and patrolled, funded by the residents’ monthly fees. Even so, from the personality profile in his file, the Tac Surgeon knew the target was not a man to trust other people to keep him safe.

The target had invested in an automated body scanner, fingerprint and retinal scans combined with a password combination lock with a timer that didn’t allow the door to be opened outside of 1400 to 1700, when the target took his deliveries. The apartment door was high carbon steel reinforced with six locking rods that bolted through the door and into the frame.

Yet the best civilian security on Earth would not stop United Nations Orb Project (UNOP) Tactical/Surgical Team 8 from breaking through.

It was 0300, local time. Suitable bribes had turned the heads and cameras of building security and the UNOP T/S Team 8 electronic specialist rendered the alarm system inert, gave a nod and the lock breaker stepped up and started work. While he drilled into the door by the main lock, the rest of the UNOP Marines covered him. The non-surgical team members carried assault rifles, armed with non-lethal electroshock rounds to take out unarmed civilians but also a selection of AP and hollow point magazines for local law enforcement and enthusiastic security guards if it came to it.

The locksmith put down his drill and turned to the Tac Surgeon.

“Five minutes,” he whispered.

“Surgical team,” the Tac Surgeon said into his internal mic. “Come on up.”

There were only twelve hours and thirty-four minutes until wheels up on the orbital shuttle and UNOP were remarkably keen to get the target’s central nervous system onboard. So much so that they had offered a bonus big enough to upgrade the Tac Surgeon’s already-booked Mars colony cabin to first class. Why they wanted this particular target so badly, he could not fathom.

The Tac Surgeon waited in the hall, half-heartedly reviewing the target’s file while he waited. He had broken into dozens of homes in the last couple of years to perform tactical surgery and he knew that some people invested in security to keep their family safe. Yet the target, 28-year-old Rama Seti, had no family. None that counted, anyway. His parents lived on the other side of Delhi, he never saw them and had no other relatives. He had no children and the surveillance notes said all his sexual partners in the previous decade had been visiting prostitutes. The target must have paid them well, or perhaps they were just financially desperate enough to engage in intercourse with a man as morbidly obese as Mr. Seti.

The UNOP Marines locksmith carried on with his work, inserting a self-guiding wire into the hollow part of the door up toward the internal computer that controlled the time lock.

Previous targets had installed layers of high-tech security to protect their precious gold, jewelry, works of art or gemstones that they would not trust to bank vaults. But the valuable content of Rama Seti’s apartment was cutting-edge technology for online virtual reality competitive gaming. The target was the founder and Chief Executive of Rubicon, a gaming cooperative with one-hundred members. The gaming system was known as the Avar and it was the ubiquitous online system the world over. None of the other Rubicon members was even based in India. Avar brought players the world over together seamlessly to compete in virtual worlds. Spectators and fans would join the players and watch in real time from the sidelines or even down amongst the players, unseen by them and each other and unable to affect the outcome.

It all sounded incredibly tedious to the Tactical Surgeon. Spending your life playing make believe when humanity’s very existence was on the line.

“These virtual reality people are disgusting,” he muttered.

“Sir?” The Marine next to him asked.

The Tac Surgeon did not bother to respond.

The target’s most prized possession, the file said, was his custom Avar Chair. It cost more than the Surgeon’s annual salary had back when he had been a junior resident in Austin. The headset, gloves and shoes of the device were engineered to the micrometer and the seat itself was designed to reduce the risk of bedsores. It aerated and cooled, massaged and moved so that blood flow was unrestricted. Vital for the target as he was recorded as being in the chair anywhere from eight to eighteen hours every day.

“Remarkable,” the Surgeon muttered as he flicked through his screen. “Goddamned waste.”

“I’m through,” the locksmith said. “Ready to open.”

“Initiate entry,” the Tac Surgeon said, yawning, and the locksmith heaved open the door. It swung out into the hallway without a sound.

The team members held their breath. They had experienced more than one night when unplanned alarms sounded, ruining their carefully laid plans and earning the Tac Surgeon a mauling from his UNOP commissioners.

But not tonight. The Marines swept inside with their weapons up, leaving one man to watch the hall and another to descend to cover the lobby and their exfil. The elevator door chimed and the surgical team trundled their equipment after the Marines.

The target slept on in his bedroom, oblivious, snoring like a broken air conditioning unit.

“That is not a healthy sound,” the Tac Surgeon said, to no one in particular.

In the main living area, almost empty other than the obscenely expensive Avar chair, his surgical team laid plastic sheeting on every surface. Walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in layers of clear plastic. More team members rolled the heavily-reinforced and extra-large gurney into the target’s bedroom.

The Tac Surgeon had personally performed thirty-four corporectomies and only the first half a dozen had been in a proper medical facility. And yet, even after so much experience in the field, performing the most complicated tissue removal procedure in medical history inside an unsanitary apartment made him deeply unhappy. It was sordid. Disrespectful to the medical profession. But UNOP paid better than anyone and they didn’t care about his past run-ins with uptight Research and Ethics Boards with morals stuck back in the 21st Century.

He wandered after his anesthetists into the subject’s bedroom where the rumbling and snorting echoed from the walls. It smelled of sickly-sweet sweat and the kind of rank feculence particular to the morbidly obese.

The anesthetic dosages had been prepared well in advance. All his team had to do was inject the patient and heave the disgusting fat son of a bitch onto the gurney, which was wheeled in next to the bed.

“What are you idiots waiting for?” he said in the internal comms system. “Get on with it.”

“He’s too fat,” one replied, gesturing. “Adipose tissue at the neck too thick for the needles to penetrate. We are changing them now.”

The Surgeon drew a deep breath but he stopped himself from shouting abuse at the morons. He would just kick them from the team after they got the target’s nervous system safely back to the UNOP shuttle at the spaceport. While his morons changed needles, he peered closely at the young man’s snoring face. The neck was indeed horrendously thick, perhaps ten centimeters of adipose tissue that he would have to cut away before even beginning the surgery proper. It would be a long procedure and he silently cursed all obese people the world over for being such pathetic slaves to their urges.

His anesthetists came back and injected their first round of sedatives while the others prepared to lift the huge mass of blubber onto the gurney.

Leaning over the target’s body, he looked over his shoulder at the security team leader. “This will be the worst one yet. How anyone can allow themselves to reach a state like this is beyond me. And for a prospective subject, with his genetic potential, the waste of it is offensive to me.”

“Tall guy, too,” the Marines Lieutenant said. “Six-five, right? Taller than most of the others. That’s weird, right? I thought they were identical.”

“Environmental factors create the individual variation,” the Surgeon explained, sighing at the ignorance of the military mind. “This one ingested more calories from a very early—”

The patient groaned and waved a fat hand up in the air. The surgeon jumped back, the slab of a fist whooshing past his face.

“What the hell?” the Surgeon shouted. “What did you give him?”

Both anesthetists approached to examine the groaning patient. “Just an involuntary—”

The target opened his eyes, took one look around, shouted in fear and threw himself out of his bed in a mass of quivering flesh.

The Tac Surgeon ducked aside as his surgical team scattered, crying out as the man threw them aside as if they were children. The Lieutenant shouted to his Marines, drew his electroshock pistol and shot the man in his quivering, flabby back. It seemed to only drive the man into a wilder frenzy. He was a head taller than anyone in the infiltration team, even the Marines, and three times the weight. The target tossed the gurney over as if it was nothing.

The Surgeon fell into a stack of computer equipment, the cases of the machines tumbled down onto his head, slicing open his scalp.

In the end, despite the Marines’ attempts to wrestle the stumbling, wild, half-drugged and stunned man, it was his own size that brought him down. The sedatives and panic helped to wear him out and within a few seconds, he was wheezing and slowing. He fell quite suddenly, falling across the upended gurney, buckling and snapping the steel tube frame.

Everyone stood looking at each other, breathing deeply.

“Help me up, you fools,” the Surgeon commanded the anesthetists, who cleared the pile of fallen cases from him and heaved him up to his feet. “When we’re done here today, you two incompetent fools will be finished.”

“Men as overweight as this one are difficult to judge—”

“Save your excuses or I’ll operate on you next. I’ll take your legs and leave you in India, how would you like that? Just get him up and onto the gurney.”

The gurney was beyond repair.

“Can’t you operate on his bed?” the Lieutenant said.

The Surgeon did not bother to hide his contempt. “I need a completely stable platform for the procedure. Do you have any idea how precise you have to be when you sever a man’s spinal cord? No, we’ll have to call this off.”

The Lieutenant scratched his jaw. “What about that giant-ass Avar Chair?”

The Surgeon hesitated. Then laughed. Perhaps the military mind was not so useless after all.

“Get your Marines to help heave him into it,” the Tac Surgeon commanded the Lieutenant. “And hurry. We have a long set of procedures ahead of us and the shuttle launches in twelve hours.”

While the target’s mind was downloading, the Surgeon removed great chunks of body fat. The bio-waste bins filled up right away and the blood suction pumps kept clogging up. After a while, the Surgeon just started flinging globs of adipose tissue onto the floor. Most of the UNOP Marines found excuses to leave the room at that point but the Lieutenant stayed, seemingly unconcerned. Hours later, he woke the target up.

“What’s happening?” Rama Seti mumbled.

The patient no longer had control of most of his body but the Surgeon had not yet severed the connection to his diaphragm. It was unlikely that the patient’s eyes worked but he knew the young man could hear and probably retained a sense of smell, that most primal of senses. Machines beeped, plastic crinkled as the people around him walked here and there. A machine sucked and gurgled. Despite the apartment’s expensive air-conditioning system, the room reeked of the hot metallic stink of surgery. It must have been really quite disorienting for the patient and the Surgeon felt a momentary, faint pang of empathy.

“We are in the middle of performing surgery on you,” the Surgeon explained. “I have cut away much of your body, trying to preserve as much of your ganglia as I can but now I am beginning to sever your spinal column and the final links to your body. I prefer to do it with the patient conscious as any sudden incoherence on your part may indicate I am heading for a problem.”

“My body?” the patient said. “Please, please, I don’t understand, just let me go, take anything you want.”

Some people in his team laughed while they worked.

“There’s only one thing we want from you,” the Surgeon said, playing to his small crowd.

The man said nothing for a while and the Surgeon stopped, scalpel in hand until he muttered another question. “What are you going to do with me?”

“You’re going on a long journey, son,” the Lieutenant said, to further titters from the surgical team.

“Please, do not tell him anything,” the Surgeon said.

“It ain’t like he’s going to remember this, is it. You’re going to zap his hippocampus, right?”

“Quite right. Yet I would rather not stress him unnecessarily with the enormity of his situation.”

The Lieutenant chuckled. “Come on, Doc, there’s no way this disgusting sack of shit is ever going to be selected to be a subject for Mission Four. What a lazy freak. He’s going on a shelf somewhere at HQ until they incinerate him without ever waking him up.”

“I’m sure you’re right about this one. I can’t tell you how sad it makes me that these will be his final moments of consciousness,” the Surgeon said, trimming away remnants of tissue under his patient’s chin. “I will be so glad when the mission finally launches. I am looking forward to a comfortable, quiet, semi-retirement on Mars. I would rather enjoy being a family doctor for a peaceful little colony town, you know?”

“What?” Rama Seti, blind, paralyzed, and soon to be little more than a severed head, muttered. “What are you saying? Please, don’t do this. What’s happening?”

“Alright,” the Surgeon said, handing over his scalpel and taking the circular saw in its place. “I am about to remove the last sternocleidomastoid. I am afraid, Mr. Seti, that this will hurt quite a bit. Suction, please.”

A motor whirred and the Surgeon carefully eased the tiny blade sliced into the target’s last attached neck muscle.

Rama Seti screamed.

CHAPTER TWO –REALITY

Time passed.

And Rama Seti woke. He knew he was awake because the glare was like a scalpel in his retinas. There were people around him, he was sure. Shapes and sounds moved beside his head. It reeked of antiseptic and minty-fresh breath. He tried to move and to speak. Someone hushed him and sponged lukewarm water into his mouth which he licked up with a rough tongue. A cool hand stroked his forehead.

“You are currently disoriented,” a voice said in his ear. It spoke English but the accent wasn’t Indian. “Please remain calm.”

Had he been in an accident? Was he in hospital? All Rama knew was that he had to find out what was going on.

“It’s bright,” Ram said, his voice sounded strange to himself. Rumbling, deep.

“You have been asleep, Rama.” The voice was soft, comforting. As a mother or father might speak to a child. Ram was afraid of it.

“Where am I?” He couldn’t see properly.

Ram’s throat felt full of glass. Machines beeped steadily around him.

“A special facility, Rama Seti,” the voice said.

“Who are you?” Ram’s heart thumped in his chest.

“I am a medical doctor. My name is Dr. Fo. The others here in my team are biotechnicians, nurses, anesthetists and so on. We are all leaders in our field. None finer in the Sol System, I promise you.”

Shapes and shadows loomed around him. Soft shoes swished on hard floors. The clatter of metal implements in metal bowls rang in the cool air that drifted across his face.

“Can’t see,” Ram said, fear rising further.

“We will rectify that shortly,” the doctor said, a smooth, cool palm patted Ram on the forehead. “Eyes are complicated, Rama. Yours were a remarkably astigmatic and a little myopic. The muscles strained from a decade and a half of overuse of Avar headsets and we had to do a little extra work tinkering around in there.” A finger tapped Ram on the bridge of his nose. “When we correct the calibration your eyes will be significantly improved, along with the rest of you. Here we go.”

Ram blinked smears of light away and a grinning Chinese face leaned over his. The doctor was possibly middle aged but it was hard to tell. Probably a heavily-surgeried old bastard with newly-grown skin. Still smiling, the face pulled away.

He was on his back, probably on some sort of a hospital bed. The room beyond Dr. Fo’s face was lined with large white tiles and soft light came from somewhere. Ram tried to look around but he still could not move.

Was he dreaming? Had his Avar malfunctioned? He wanted to wake up, wanted to get up, run, get away.

Yet he couldn’t move, not even a little, not his arms or his legs. He couldn’t move his head to look around.

What the hell was going on?

“Can’t move,” Ram said, his throat dry. “What happened?” His voice sounded amplified, as if it didn’t belong to him. “Was I in an accident?”

“In a way,” the doctor chuckled again, his cool hand patted Ram’s forehead and then it rested there. “But you are all better now.”

There was a faint pressure on the back of his head where it rested on the bed or gurney. Ram pursed his mouth and the skin there cracked into tiny crevices. He licked his lips, his tongue rasping against the ridges of dry skin. The wet sponge returned, dabbing cool beads of water into his mouth. He sucked the water down, the moisture spreading inside, freeing his tongue.

Why could he not feel his body? Nothing made any sense.

“Tell me what happened,” Ram said. Why did his voice sound so strange? “Why can’t I move?”

The doctor leaned down to look Ram in the eyes. He smelled of powerful soap and the whiff of mint.

“You are sedated, Rama Seti and your endocrine system is under our control. Your file states that you have a high resilience to emotional shock so I don’t mind telling you that you were abducted from your home. An infiltration team escorted surgeons into your apartment in New Delhi where you were rendered unconscious and they removed your morbidly obese body. The only parts of you that we needed were your head, spinal column and as much of the central and peripheral nervous systems ganglia as we could get.”

“Am I in Avar?” Ram said, his heart racing. His face flushed with the panic of it. “This can’t be real. This is Avar, isn’t it?”

“You were a professional Avar gamer, I know. But this is the real world.”

Anger and fear surged through him and Ram tried to jump out of bed.

Nothing happened.

“You are attempting to move,” Dr. Fo said with joy, looking at a screen next to him. “That is a marvelous sign. We have disabled your movement from below the neck, other than your diaphragm for conscious breathing and speaking. Just like when you plug into your Avar, yes? Just like when you enter REM sleep. As I was saying, we brought your head and spinal column here. Plus a few of the important nerves, especially the solar plexus and so on. It makes fusing your nervous system to the new body so much easier.”

Horror crept up Ram’s neck into his face, warming it like spilled blood in an Avar-induced nightmare. And perhaps that was it. Perhaps he had finally succumbed to the Avar Psychosis that had claimed so many others of his profession. His cooperative colleagues had often warned him about it but he’d always disregarded their concerns. Ram always thought he could handle eighteen hours a day in the chair every day.

Maybe he had been wrong.

“What a second,” Ram said, his voice deep and unfamiliar in his ears, panic rising in waves through his face. “Are you seriously telling me that you cut off my head?”

Dr. Fo chuckled. “Oh dear me, no. How could you think such a thing? No, no, no. We cut off your body. The procedure is called a corporectomy.”

Ram’s throat constricted and his heart thudded in his ears and he struggled for breath. It had been years since he’d had a proper panic attack but he knew the signs.

I have to get out of here.

A new voice, a woman’s voice, close above him muttered a warning. “His catecholamines are spiking. I’ll ease him back down.”

The hot sensations drained from his face and his panic receded. They were controlling him, somehow, giving him drugs and he knew he should be angry about it yet he was relieved. It was nice, feeling calm.

“Why are you doing this?” Ram asked, straining to see as far around the room as he could. He could not see much. There were people there. Machines, beeping and humming.

“I will show you.”

Even swiveling his eyes so far over in his sockets that the muscles ached, Ram couldn’t see the doctor anymore. Instead, he noticed the soft glow of pale blue lights from high up around the room. The white ceiling above had a bluish tinge from the artificial lighting. There was no daylight.

Someone pulled a screen attached to a mechanical arm down over him. Ram looked up and for half a moment saw a reflection in the black of the screen.

The face was familiar. But it was not his own.

“Welcome to the new you,” Dr. Fo said and the screen flicked on.

The image showed a man on a gurney, covered by a sheet up to the upper chest. A screen on a mechanical arm overhung his face.

That man was not Rama Seti.

It couldn’t have been.

The figure was muscled as heavily as a bullock. The body of a champion bodybuilder only bigger, all veins and lumps and crevasses and ridges. A body resembling a relief map of the Himalayas. A body like the avatars Ram used in the Galactic Games persistent world, and Shield Wall the European early medieval massively multiplayer wargame that had pretentions to historical accuracy but disregarded scale. A body that existed only in comics and animated films and maybe on the Artificial Persons that they designed for asteroid mining and outer system exploration.

A creeping horror crawled over his skin as he began to understand, at least a little, of what was happening to him.

Tubes, data cables, and fluid drips ran out from under the blanket and snaked along the floor out of sight.

In the image on the screen hanging over his face, the screen hanging over the face of the muscled giant on his screen.

Dr. Fo stood next to the bed, at the giant man’s shoulder. He seemed diminutive in comparison.

“Do you like it? We matched the skin tone of the body to your own. It was paler than you before the procedure but it’s trivially easy to do. You have a rather lovely natural color but it was awfully washed out from the lack of vitamins and UV.” Dr. Fo chuckled, shaking his head. “Your diet was appalling, Rama Seti.”

“That’s not me.”

On the screen, the giant’s mouth moved as Ram spoke.

“You will experience a period of adjustment to your new self, of course,” the doctor said, resting his hand on Ram’s forehead. He saw it happen on the screen and felt the palm on his head at the same.

Ram struggled to comprehend what was happening.

“That’s not my head, it’s not me.” Ram swallowed as he spoke.

The muscular figure on the screen was Indian but he had a handsome face, a strong jaw line. Prominent cheekbones.

Nothing like Ram’s face at all.

“It is very much your old head that you grew all by yourself.” The doctor stroked Ram’s shorn scalp. Caressed it. “Rama, your face and head is the only external part of you that remains your own. You have been increasingly overweight since your early childhood. Not your fault, of course, it was your mother and father’s fault. Your mother did it because she wanted to make you happy. You father, well. Never mind about him. My surgeons removed the excess adipose tissue from the face and especially the neck area.”

“I’m thin.”

Ram had never seen himself thin before. He had never looked in a mirror and seen a face that was tight. He had never seen his cheekbones. His cheeks had never gone inward, only puffed out like a cherub or a hamster or the other horrific terms of endearment his mother used to call him by. Ram watched on the monitor as a single, shining tear ran down one temple into the raised sheet that cushioned his head. The urge to wipe it away was intense but Ram could not move so much as one of the massive muscles that he now owned.

Ram’s head looked smaller than he remembered it, with all that fat taken away. In fact, it looked small attached to those huge shoulders.

“Wait a minute,” Ram said, watching himself on the monitor speak the words. “Did you shrink my head or something?”

Dr. Fo chuckled. Even a couple of amused snorts came from the nurses and technicians as they worked around him.

“We have reinforced your skull with extra bone mass, in fact. As with the bones in your new body, we have increased the density and so increased the overall cranial mass. In terms of volume, we encouraged extra bone growth on the external side but of course, we did so subdermally. You have extra bone all around the cranium, face and jaw which has made your head around six percent larger. And it was already a deliciously big head to begin with. Indeed, the size of your big old head was one of the factors in your selection. You see, your new body is very large indeed, for a human, and having such a large head helps with the transplant process.”

Your new body. Strange thing to hear. It couldn’t be real, could it?

“I was always tall,” Ram said, feeling the need to stand up for himself, for his old body.

Dr. Fo grinned and pulled out a screen. “You were a fairly impressive 199 centimeters tall, much taller than the Indian and Earth average. You certainly maximized your genetic growth potential. But now, you are 261.26 centimeters tall. In other words, in the top one percent of the tallest people who ever lived, although most of them were gangly weaklings, half crippled by pituitary tumors. You, on the other hand, may have the most muscle mass on a single body in history, even counting Artificial Persons. Although, this body is not natural. We designed it, we grew it, nurtured it so I suppose it’s cheating but you are a human from the neck up.”

Ram had a wave of unreality flush through him. The sense that the world could not be trusted, that he could log out of his Avar and be back in his apartment if only he could find a way of getting out.

“This is not happening,” Ram said, hearing his now-deeper voice rumbling in his chest. A larger chest cavity, a larger throat and a deeper voice.

“I assure you it is,” Dr. Fo said, gesturing at the room around them. Ram could see quite a lot with his peripheral vision but a single room could be modeled with perfect realism within Avar. “But if it helps you to feel better in the short term then please, go right ahead and believe that you are in some sort of VR device, while you acclimatize to your new reality and learn why you are here. No skin off my nose.”

“Why?” Ram asked. “Who are you people? Where am I? I need to speak to my co-op. I need to speak to my parents, come on, you have to let me out of here, this isn’t legal. This isn’t legal, you can’t do this to me.”

He needed to get out, to get away from them.

“Rama Seti,” Dr. Fo said, leaning over him. This time, the man’s face was not smiling. Not even a little. “You will find no allies in the judiciary realm. As for your friends and family, well, they believe that you are already dead. We will never let you go. Not ever. Of course, this is a violation of your legal and human rights but our purpose is so vitally important that we left ordinary ethical concerns behind us decades ago. Your rights as an individual are as nothing in comparison to what is at stake here.”

“Bullshit. What could possibly be so important?”

“Rama, you are here to save humanity.”

***

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dan Davis writes science-fiction, fantasy and historical fiction stories that are full of exciting action, captivating characters and intriguing themes.

Dan’s main interests are science and history so it’s no surprise that his stories usually combine the two. More specifically he has a passion for the ancient history of Greece, Rome, Persia and medieval Europe and is fascinated by biology and astronomy.

He is a husband and father living in Essex, UK.

Please contact Dan here:

WEBSITE: dandavisauthor.com/

TWITTER: twitter.com/DanDavisWrites

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EMAIL: dandaviswrites@outlook.com

Thanks so much for reading

BOOKS BY DAN DAVIS

The Galactic Arena Series

Inhuman Contact (Prequel Novella 1)

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MG47ANM

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01MG47ANM

Orb Station Zero (Book 1)

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KSJTPYO

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01KSJTPYO

The Immortal Knight Chronicles

Historical Fiction - with Vampires

Vampire Crusader (Book 1)

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0157LXEEA

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0157LXEEA

Vampire Outlaw (Book 2)

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CKU0VJM

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01CKU0VJM

Gunpowder & Alchemy

Flintlock Fantasy

White Wind Rising (Book 1)

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QH0PIVI

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00QH0PIVI

Dark Water Breaking (Book 2)

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZOARVMG

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00ZOARVMG

Green Earth Shaking (Book 3)

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018THC1LQ

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B018THC1LQ

For a complete and up-to-date list of Dan’s available books, visit:

http://dandavisauthor.com/books/