THE OUTGOING: FRAGMENTS
His mind ached. That's the only way he could describe it.
And blackness. Aches and blackness.
And also a familiarity. He'd been here before.
Some feeling was coming back, snatches of movement somewhere on his limbs, and a perception of light although his eyes were closed.
Memories. Dim, unfocused memories, no images, just memory, aching and memory.
The word came to his mind--revitalization--important to know but not why or what.
Hearing. He heard what? Liquid. Liquid running. And words. Someone was speaking.
Memory. . .last time he was told. . .what?
His limbs tingled now. He tried to open his eyes but they refused.
". . .survey of system. . .co-ordinates. . .declination. . ."
They were not his words. Last time they were. . .what? Last time they were his words, meant for him, but what did they say?
The aching increased inside his head and moved to his limbs. His body tingled, his eyelids fluttered, trying to open.
He could feel things dragging across his body and his mind said tubes and. . .electrodes?
"Comprehensive survey of the ship's. . ."
Now his eyes were open, and the scene was familiar and unknown. Objects--tubes?--were snaking down and behind his body; the aching eased inside his head, but his hands and feet felt like they were exploding. And outside the curved door of the. . .tube? Pod!. . .was a rectangular metallic object with tentacles. I know it, but what?
". . .required before re-intubation. . ." Not his words.
He remembered his words from before: "You have arrived." That was all he was told before. "You have arrived."
The pod door rotated right and the Rectangle reached its tentacles and pulled him from the pod, gently, the suction fingers cool and firm against his flesh. Robot.
#
The robot carried him from the zero-grav of the pod storage to the weakest section of the rotating gravity-circle. By the time he arrived, he had recovered his memory and the aching had reduced to a feeling of numbness in his fingers and toes. He dressed in a light-blue booted jumpsuit provided by the robot, then was led--he walked, tottering slightly--to the outer full-strength gravity-circle area. There the robot gestured to a desk and chair with an illuminated screen on the wall. He sat and began to read.
There were ten questions, seemingly silly in their simplicity, from easy spelling to easy math. At first puzzled, he then realized it was to judge his mental capacity after being revived. He answered each and the screen changed.
"Greetings to Navigation Specialist Emilia H. Aulard."
Who is that?
As he read on, it was clear this Aulard was expected to perform certain scientific measurements and inspections, none of which he, Jedidiah Darnley, was qualified to do.
He leaned back in the chair, trying to clear his thoughts. How did I get here?
#
His father was a farmer back on Earth. A religious man, he raised his family away from the cities and towns of the ungodly rulers. With a wife and three children, he eked out a decent existence of subsistence agriculture utilizing a minimum of technological aid. Any excess crop they sold locally, and, known as a decent mechanic, he would take on short-term jobs repairing machinery as they came available.
So he was not a Luddite, not by any measure, nor did he reject modernity. In a country ruled by a secular oligarchy, he simply preferred to avoid the moral quandaries inherent in any governmental contact, and the higher the technology used, the more regulation the governmental bodies imposed. There were many obligations he could not avoid, but those he could, he would.
How to raise his children, for example, was highly regulated. Zachariah, his oldest son, Kezia, their daughter, and Jedidiah, the youngest, had to be schooled in particular subjects at particular ages. Their DNA and medical, scholastic, and familiar histories had to be filed quarterly with the State. That his wife was a talented teacher was immensely helpful, for they knew of many families in similar circumstances whose children the State removed for trivial reasons, usually involving education.
Their father was highly gratified when all three of his children opted to stay and work on the farm after reaching their majority. The family added acreage, increased their crop sales, and were doing well enough that Zachariah, the oldest, had started building a home for himself and his recent fiancee.
Jedidiah was twenty-six when the Government men arrived. They landed their copters on the fields, either ignorant or uncaring about the damage to the crops nearing harvest. Jedidiah and his siblings were marched to a large cargo helicraft, not unkindly but the threat of force was an undercurrent in the way the orders were given, and it could not be overlooked that all of the Government men were armed.
There were no goodbyes, no explanations.
The helicraft disgorged them at a spaceport, where they were herded onto waiting shuttles. Deliberately, it seemed to Jedidiah, the Government separated the three siblings and they all loaded onto different shuttles.
The shuttle trip took many hours, but finally arrived at a humongous spaceship. On the trip, Jedidiah sat quietly, trying to remain calm. He listened carefully to the mutterings of his fellow passengers. Among those who seemed most knowledgeable, there was an edginess, almost a panic. The Why was never clear, many rumors circulating about impending war or existential disaster or even Government-ordered genocide, but what was unmistakably clear, where they were all in agreement, was that whatever prompted this action, it was hurriedly assembled.
They were off-loaded in small groups of ten or twelve. Armed Government men walked them down long corridors, through thick bulkheads, to a cavernous room filled top to bottom, many rows deep, on both sides of the doorways, with pods. That's how the Government men referred to them, and that's what Jedidiah thought they looked like. Pods.
One by one, their skin was scanned to confirm their identity, they were made to strip and step into the pod, and the pod door was sealed.
#
Jedidiah stared at the screen. It reminded him of his studies at the farm, all lessons being taught from remote schools. He spoke the words so familiar, "New screen," and a second screen appeared. His pulse increased. Maybe.
"Home, root." The screen filled with icons, mostly documents with a few images scattered throughout. He read the titles and couldn't believe his luck; they hadn't bothered to secure the documents with even a simple password. Either the claims of haste were correct, or they didn't care who could access the files.
For hours he would open a document, skim it for insight, then move on to the next. The robot brought him food and drink, unasked. It was a biscuit, he assumed nutritionally complete, nearly tasteless, as was the drink. He wasn't hungry, anyway.
There was a lot of bureaucratese in the reading, and jargon beyond his understanding in parts, but he eventually understood his role, or rather the role of Emilia Aulard for whom he was the apparent stand-in.
The ship was essentially an Ark, with all crew and passengers in suspended animation. All functions were autonomous, utilizing self-healing equipment and repair robots, with two exceptions. Major maintenance and repair issues that might arise required the revitalization of a System Specialist to engineer and authorize the corrective action; emergencies were robot repaired to stabilize the situation first, but afterwards the Specialist must be revitalized.
The second exception was when the Ark approached a star system that had a planet possibly similar to Earth. Then a Navigation Specialist was to be revitalized; he or she would confirm the automatic readings and make an informed decision about colonization. There were three choices: not suitable so the Ark continued on, a good match for immediate colonization, or a close enough match if terraformed before embarkation. The last choice would really be a desperate gamble since terraforming was theoretical.
Once the Specialist had completed his duties, and completed a review of the general condition of the Ark, he was to re-suspend. If for some reason he did not complete his tasks within a defined period, or he did not re-suspend after formally finishing the tasks, one of the Mission Commanders would be revitalized to assess the situation.
"So, Mr. Robot," Jedidiah said to the rectangle patiently waiting next to him, "I guess I need to see if I can understand the scientific readings. Screen off." The first screen was back. "Where should Jed Darnley-Aulard start?"
#
The gist of Aulard's responsibilities, he soon discovered, were to confirm and acknowledge the scientific readings already taken by the ship's sensors. He could have simply marked it complete on the screen and been done, but he felt an obligation to be truthful, for the suspended passengers if not for Aulard's sake. He'd bring up a primer on whatever instrument he was to confirm, study the readings until he felt he understood, and then mark them off; the sophisticated algorithms were near infallible, so he found naught to dispute.
The conclusion was clear: the planetary system they were approaching was not sufficiently Earth-like to inhabit. He confirmed that. So after a few more days of general inspection of the Ark's condition, he would be done.
The torus still replicated the twenty-four hour cycle of Earth, the artificial sunlight dimming into night and night awakening into day. Here and there the lights failed to illuminate--dead from age, he supposed--but then it degenerated into a weird twilight effect with a diffused light from multiple directions, making multiple, overlapping shadows.
Day after day, the robot found him wherever he was at noon--Earth-time noon, there was no real noon on the Ark. But mid-way through the light cycle, there it was, with a tasteless drink and a tasteless biscuit. He asked for something else, anything else, but that was all the robot offered.
To carry out Aulard's duties, he needed a people-mover, one of those wheeled stick devices, to cover the miles around the torus efficiently. He had the robot bring him one. But most days he preferred to walk to the location to be inspected, taking in the sights, such as they were.
Signs of the hasty construction of the Ark were everywhere as he walked the gravity-circle. It was obvious that it had once been one of the smaller torus space stations that had orbited Earth, mostly as a space hotel. The hotel buildings were still there, but the parks and lakes had been removed and only the elevated pathways and the metal contours forming the terrain remained. Soil, plants, and water, requiring constant maintenance, was anathema for an Ark, so it must have been jettisoned and the space station grafted onto the Ark.
It was dissettling. Row upon row of hollow buildings stretching ten, twenty, stories upward. Below the walkways, sometimes a hundred feet down, were the sheetmetal forms of what once were rolling hills and lakes. And it was all quiet--totally, eerily, silent. There were no window lights, no movement, just the stark bare metal and painted walls that, no matter how bright and colorful, exuded emptiness. Not even the action of rust or decay could intrude.
It was the strangely shadowed lighting that brought the object to his attention; it struck in just the right way to halo the thing. He didn't know what it was, laying at the bottom of what would have been a hill gently sloping to the hotel facade had there been soil. It was white, a dull white, and about the size of his hand.
He found a ladder the metalworkers used to access the lower sections and made his way down to the object. But his discovery was mundane, anticlimactic. It was simply a biscuit. One of the tasteless biscuits.
Maybe it was the sheer loneliness, maybe just the realization that those in the pods were, after all, people. But when the screen brought up the requirement to inspect the pod storage, he suddenly thought of his siblings, somewhere among those pods. Bring them out, he thought. The urge was strong, so he opened a new screen and searched for his brother and sister by name.
It had no record of either.
He tried Aulard. Three names appeared, along with their pod location.
He put in his name, Jedidiah Darnley. Nothing.
"A map of the pods," he asked. A new screen appeared, showing general locations. He zoomed to a scale where the individual pods were apparent. And he sat back in shock.
There were many pods in black, no longer functioning. Zach and Kezia? No!
He asked for a list of names on board. It gave a short list, maybe two hundred. All were in one pod section. The thousands of others were unknown. They never put the information in.
The path to the pod storage units went past the revitalization station, where the pod he'd been revived from still sat, awaiting his return. It was a bright grey, almost silver, cylinder. He paused before it, studying the construction. On each side was a smaller half-cylinder holding the pumps and valves and circuits of the suspension hardware, mirror images, as one was a backup in case the other failed. A metal tag next to the door, neatly engraved, read "00180 E. H. Aulard".
Not my pod? How can that be?
He visited the pod storage section that had named occupants. It was the closest storage module to the torus, and the smallest of them. Its size and location made it the most protected from rare collisions with space objects and cosmic radiation. The pods were numbered, one to two hundred eighteen, and also had the occupant's name. All were functioning properly, and only one was missing from its space. 00180.
He moved quickly through it to the next, much larger module. Here was the scene he remembered, rows and columns of pods to right and left, twelve he counted up one column and thirty down the row, and three deep he knew from the map. Over two thousand. And there were five such modules. The pods looked different, somehow. They were less polished, dull instead of a glossy grey. And they were packed closer together. He quickly realized the crowding meant there were no backup systems; a failure was death for these souls.
The clear doors on most pods were fogged opaque from moisture inside, and the dim overhead light glimmered off the droplets mimicking motion as he walked past, a sign they were functioning. But he could see dark pods that had no glimmer, no sign of life. Some were singular, but there were groupings also of these dead pods. Dead souls.
Immediately on his right, past a few dead pods--there were figures visible, but he consciously didn't see them--sat an open, empty pod on the ground level. His blood ran cold at the sight. Quickly he scanned the room, hoping to see other open pods. There were none.
It had a plastic tag with a number--00942--but no name. But a phrase came to mind: "You have arrived." And with it came clarity to his thoughts.
#
He checked the last box of the last inspection and sat back in the chair. The screen said, "Thank you. Please return to your cryogenic chamber to continue the voyage."
Jed turned to the robot, "Not yet. We still have work to do. Come with me."
The people-mover and robot moved at the same speed past the empty hotels until he stopped on the pathway above the lone biscuit. It felt foolish, but he had to look to be sure, and, yes, it was still there. He turned and studied the hotel, a bright yellow building with red accents, but for all that giving a feeling of antiquity, of uselessness, of death.
"Let's go," he said to the robot, and they entered the hotel.
The lobby was huge. It was also silent and dark and tomb-like. It felt sacrilegious to enter here, as if profaning a gravesite, and that's why he had the robot accompany him. He needed the companionship, if only from a robot; at least it moved and responded as if alive.
Most of the ground floor walls were clear plastic, allowing the artificial twilight from outside to invade the atmosphere, with ghostly shadows holding the corners and nooks. There were no people, but it felt like there were; there should have been, and he felt them there.
The elevator did not work, no power, so he sought the stairs. A twinge of fear struck as he realized the rectangular robot was likely not able to follow, but it surprised him, agilely climbing. The robot even switched on a light to illuminate the dark stairway without his asking.
They visited every room on the second floor that overlooked the biscuit below. Each room was laid out identically. The furnishings had been left; chairs, beds, appliances, all were intact. Some were disheveled or out of place. Hurriedly abandoned. But nothing out of the ordinary was found.
Third floor, fourth, fifth; nothing. But in the sixth room on the sixth floor, he found what he expected to: Emilia H. Aulard.
She was sitting, back to him, at a table on the balcony, the clear sliding door to the room open. Her head was bowed down onto the table, as if napping. As he approached, Jed noticed her jumpsuit, dark blue on her shoulders, was stained brown in streaks down the seat and legs. The stain continued onto the carpet.
He cautiously edged around to the opposite side of the table. Her long gray hair was intact, and her skull and hands had some desiccated skin, but mostly she was a beige-white skeleton. There was nothing to suggest her features when alive.
On the table, just beyond her hands, sat a biscuit and an empty container for liquid. It was a macabre and also mundane scene, sad and ridiculous.
#
"Workers." He spat the word at the robot. "Like you. That's all we are to them. Ten thousand workers to do the bidding of our masters." He pinched a piece of biscuit off and bounced it off the robot. It quickly moved to sweep up the piece.
"I could free my brother and sister. Hell, I could free them all." He lobbed another piece of biscuit, missed. The robot moved to sweep it up. "And then what?"
He'd left Emilia Aulard where she was, untouched. Frankly, he had to admit, he had no idea what to do about her. A rage inside that wanted to desecrate her remains for causing his situation alternated with a strange reverence for her balcony as a holy site. So he walked away and left her to her fate, whatever it was.
Another piece of biscuit bounced from the robot. Again, it swept.
He'd spent the last few days walking. Walking and thinking. And coming to no conclusion, no decision. He didn't want to get back in that pod, but there was no point in staying outside. It all led to here, sitting at the desk with the screen frozen on "Please return to your cryogenic chamber to continue the voyage."
And he'd also spent some time just looking out the windows, and the stars seemed sparse, fewer than he remembered from clear Earth nights. He knew, intuitively, that was not a good thing. But there was nothing to be done about it.
He pitched another wad at the robot and the screen changed. "Prepare to revitalize Mission Commander. . ."
Jed turned to the robot as it moved toward the torus center, doubtless to attend to the requested pod. He threw the remaining biscuit at it, which hit and rolled away.
The robot continued on.
END
His mind ached. That's the only way he could describe it.
And blackness. Aches and blackness.
And also a familiarity. He'd been here before.
Some feeling was coming back, snatches of movement somewhere on his limbs, and a perception of light although his eyes were closed.
Memories. Dim, unfocused memories, no images, just memory, aching and memory.
The word came to his mind--revitalization--important to know but not why or what.
Hearing. He heard what? Liquid. Liquid running. And words. Someone was speaking.
Memory. . .last time he was told. . .what?
His limbs tingled now. He tried to open his eyes but they refused.
". . .survey of system. . .co-ordinates. . .declination. . ."
They were not his words. Last time they were. . .what? Last time they were his words, meant for him, but what did they say?
The aching increased inside his head and moved to his limbs. His body tingled, his eyelids fluttered, trying to open.
He could feel things dragging across his body and his mind said tubes and. . .electrodes?
"Comprehensive survey of the ship's. . ."
Now his eyes were open, and the scene was familiar and unknown. Objects--tubes?--were snaking down and behind his body; the aching eased inside his head, but his hands and feet felt like they were exploding. And outside the curved door of the. . .tube? Pod!. . .was a rectangular metallic object with tentacles. I know it, but what?
". . .required before re-intubation. . ." Not his words.
He remembered his words from before: "You have arrived." That was all he was told before. "You have arrived."
The pod door rotated right and the Rectangle reached its tentacles and pulled him from the pod, gently, the suction fingers cool and firm against his flesh. Robot.
#
The robot carried him from the zero-grav of the pod storage to the weakest section of the rotating gravity-circle. By the time he arrived, he had recovered his memory and the aching had reduced to a feeling of numbness in his fingers and toes. He dressed in a light-blue booted jumpsuit provided by the robot, then was led--he walked, tottering slightly--to the outer full-strength gravity-circle area. There the robot gestured to a desk and chair with an illuminated screen on the wall. He sat and began to read.
There were ten questions, seemingly silly in their simplicity, from easy spelling to easy math. At first puzzled, he then realized it was to judge his mental capacity after being revived. He answered each and the screen changed.
"Greetings to Navigation Specialist Emilia H. Aulard."
Who is that?
As he read on, it was clear this Aulard was expected to perform certain scientific measurements and inspections, none of which he, Jedidiah Darnley, was qualified to do.
He leaned back in the chair, trying to clear his thoughts. How did I get here?
#
His father was a farmer back on Earth. A religious man, he raised his family away from the cities and towns of the ungodly rulers. With a wife and three children, he eked out a decent existence of subsistence agriculture utilizing a minimum of technological aid. Any excess crop they sold locally, and, known as a decent mechanic, he would take on short-term jobs repairing machinery as they came available.
So he was not a Luddite, not by any measure, nor did he reject modernity. In a country ruled by a secular oligarchy, he simply preferred to avoid the moral quandaries inherent in any governmental contact, and the higher the technology used, the more regulation the governmental bodies imposed. There were many obligations he could not avoid, but those he could, he would.
How to raise his children, for example, was highly regulated. Zachariah, his oldest son, Kezia, their daughter, and Jedidiah, the youngest, had to be schooled in particular subjects at particular ages. Their DNA and medical, scholastic, and familiar histories had to be filed quarterly with the State. That his wife was a talented teacher was immensely helpful, for they knew of many families in similar circumstances whose children the State removed for trivial reasons, usually involving education.
Their father was highly gratified when all three of his children opted to stay and work on the farm after reaching their majority. The family added acreage, increased their crop sales, and were doing well enough that Zachariah, the oldest, had started building a home for himself and his recent fiancee.
Jedidiah was twenty-six when the Government men arrived. They landed their copters on the fields, either ignorant or uncaring about the damage to the crops nearing harvest. Jedidiah and his siblings were marched to a large cargo helicraft, not unkindly but the threat of force was an undercurrent in the way the orders were given, and it could not be overlooked that all of the Government men were armed.
There were no goodbyes, no explanations.
The helicraft disgorged them at a spaceport, where they were herded onto waiting shuttles. Deliberately, it seemed to Jedidiah, the Government separated the three siblings and they all loaded onto different shuttles.
The shuttle trip took many hours, but finally arrived at a humongous spaceship. On the trip, Jedidiah sat quietly, trying to remain calm. He listened carefully to the mutterings of his fellow passengers. Among those who seemed most knowledgeable, there was an edginess, almost a panic. The Why was never clear, many rumors circulating about impending war or existential disaster or even Government-ordered genocide, but what was unmistakably clear, where they were all in agreement, was that whatever prompted this action, it was hurriedly assembled.
They were off-loaded in small groups of ten or twelve. Armed Government men walked them down long corridors, through thick bulkheads, to a cavernous room filled top to bottom, many rows deep, on both sides of the doorways, with pods. That's how the Government men referred to them, and that's what Jedidiah thought they looked like. Pods.
One by one, their skin was scanned to confirm their identity, they were made to strip and step into the pod, and the pod door was sealed.
#
Jedidiah stared at the screen. It reminded him of his studies at the farm, all lessons being taught from remote schools. He spoke the words so familiar, "New screen," and a second screen appeared. His pulse increased. Maybe.
"Home, root." The screen filled with icons, mostly documents with a few images scattered throughout. He read the titles and couldn't believe his luck; they hadn't bothered to secure the documents with even a simple password. Either the claims of haste were correct, or they didn't care who could access the files.
For hours he would open a document, skim it for insight, then move on to the next. The robot brought him food and drink, unasked. It was a biscuit, he assumed nutritionally complete, nearly tasteless, as was the drink. He wasn't hungry, anyway.
There was a lot of bureaucratese in the reading, and jargon beyond his understanding in parts, but he eventually understood his role, or rather the role of Emilia Aulard for whom he was the apparent stand-in.
The ship was essentially an Ark, with all crew and passengers in suspended animation. All functions were autonomous, utilizing self-healing equipment and repair robots, with two exceptions. Major maintenance and repair issues that might arise required the revitalization of a System Specialist to engineer and authorize the corrective action; emergencies were robot repaired to stabilize the situation first, but afterwards the Specialist must be revitalized.
The second exception was when the Ark approached a star system that had a planet possibly similar to Earth. Then a Navigation Specialist was to be revitalized; he or she would confirm the automatic readings and make an informed decision about colonization. There were three choices: not suitable so the Ark continued on, a good match for immediate colonization, or a close enough match if terraformed before embarkation. The last choice would really be a desperate gamble since terraforming was theoretical.
Once the Specialist had completed his duties, and completed a review of the general condition of the Ark, he was to re-suspend. If for some reason he did not complete his tasks within a defined period, or he did not re-suspend after formally finishing the tasks, one of the Mission Commanders would be revitalized to assess the situation.
"So, Mr. Robot," Jedidiah said to the rectangle patiently waiting next to him, "I guess I need to see if I can understand the scientific readings. Screen off." The first screen was back. "Where should Jed Darnley-Aulard start?"
#
The gist of Aulard's responsibilities, he soon discovered, were to confirm and acknowledge the scientific readings already taken by the ship's sensors. He could have simply marked it complete on the screen and been done, but he felt an obligation to be truthful, for the suspended passengers if not for Aulard's sake. He'd bring up a primer on whatever instrument he was to confirm, study the readings until he felt he understood, and then mark them off; the sophisticated algorithms were near infallible, so he found naught to dispute.
The conclusion was clear: the planetary system they were approaching was not sufficiently Earth-like to inhabit. He confirmed that. So after a few more days of general inspection of the Ark's condition, he would be done.
The torus still replicated the twenty-four hour cycle of Earth, the artificial sunlight dimming into night and night awakening into day. Here and there the lights failed to illuminate--dead from age, he supposed--but then it degenerated into a weird twilight effect with a diffused light from multiple directions, making multiple, overlapping shadows.
Day after day, the robot found him wherever he was at noon--Earth-time noon, there was no real noon on the Ark. But mid-way through the light cycle, there it was, with a tasteless drink and a tasteless biscuit. He asked for something else, anything else, but that was all the robot offered.
To carry out Aulard's duties, he needed a people-mover, one of those wheeled stick devices, to cover the miles around the torus efficiently. He had the robot bring him one. But most days he preferred to walk to the location to be inspected, taking in the sights, such as they were.
Signs of the hasty construction of the Ark were everywhere as he walked the gravity-circle. It was obvious that it had once been one of the smaller torus space stations that had orbited Earth, mostly as a space hotel. The hotel buildings were still there, but the parks and lakes had been removed and only the elevated pathways and the metal contours forming the terrain remained. Soil, plants, and water, requiring constant maintenance, was anathema for an Ark, so it must have been jettisoned and the space station grafted onto the Ark.
It was dissettling. Row upon row of hollow buildings stretching ten, twenty, stories upward. Below the walkways, sometimes a hundred feet down, were the sheetmetal forms of what once were rolling hills and lakes. And it was all quiet--totally, eerily, silent. There were no window lights, no movement, just the stark bare metal and painted walls that, no matter how bright and colorful, exuded emptiness. Not even the action of rust or decay could intrude.
It was the strangely shadowed lighting that brought the object to his attention; it struck in just the right way to halo the thing. He didn't know what it was, laying at the bottom of what would have been a hill gently sloping to the hotel facade had there been soil. It was white, a dull white, and about the size of his hand.
He found a ladder the metalworkers used to access the lower sections and made his way down to the object. But his discovery was mundane, anticlimactic. It was simply a biscuit. One of the tasteless biscuits.
Maybe it was the sheer loneliness, maybe just the realization that those in the pods were, after all, people. But when the screen brought up the requirement to inspect the pod storage, he suddenly thought of his siblings, somewhere among those pods. Bring them out, he thought. The urge was strong, so he opened a new screen and searched for his brother and sister by name.
It had no record of either.
He tried Aulard. Three names appeared, along with their pod location.
He put in his name, Jedidiah Darnley. Nothing.
"A map of the pods," he asked. A new screen appeared, showing general locations. He zoomed to a scale where the individual pods were apparent. And he sat back in shock.
There were many pods in black, no longer functioning. Zach and Kezia? No!
He asked for a list of names on board. It gave a short list, maybe two hundred. All were in one pod section. The thousands of others were unknown. They never put the information in.
The path to the pod storage units went past the revitalization station, where the pod he'd been revived from still sat, awaiting his return. It was a bright grey, almost silver, cylinder. He paused before it, studying the construction. On each side was a smaller half-cylinder holding the pumps and valves and circuits of the suspension hardware, mirror images, as one was a backup in case the other failed. A metal tag next to the door, neatly engraved, read "00180 E. H. Aulard".
Not my pod? How can that be?
He visited the pod storage section that had named occupants. It was the closest storage module to the torus, and the smallest of them. Its size and location made it the most protected from rare collisions with space objects and cosmic radiation. The pods were numbered, one to two hundred eighteen, and also had the occupant's name. All were functioning properly, and only one was missing from its space. 00180.
He moved quickly through it to the next, much larger module. Here was the scene he remembered, rows and columns of pods to right and left, twelve he counted up one column and thirty down the row, and three deep he knew from the map. Over two thousand. And there were five such modules. The pods looked different, somehow. They were less polished, dull instead of a glossy grey. And they were packed closer together. He quickly realized the crowding meant there were no backup systems; a failure was death for these souls.
The clear doors on most pods were fogged opaque from moisture inside, and the dim overhead light glimmered off the droplets mimicking motion as he walked past, a sign they were functioning. But he could see dark pods that had no glimmer, no sign of life. Some were singular, but there were groupings also of these dead pods. Dead souls.
Immediately on his right, past a few dead pods--there were figures visible, but he consciously didn't see them--sat an open, empty pod on the ground level. His blood ran cold at the sight. Quickly he scanned the room, hoping to see other open pods. There were none.
It had a plastic tag with a number--00942--but no name. But a phrase came to mind: "You have arrived." And with it came clarity to his thoughts.
#
He checked the last box of the last inspection and sat back in the chair. The screen said, "Thank you. Please return to your cryogenic chamber to continue the voyage."
Jed turned to the robot, "Not yet. We still have work to do. Come with me."
The people-mover and robot moved at the same speed past the empty hotels until he stopped on the pathway above the lone biscuit. It felt foolish, but he had to look to be sure, and, yes, it was still there. He turned and studied the hotel, a bright yellow building with red accents, but for all that giving a feeling of antiquity, of uselessness, of death.
"Let's go," he said to the robot, and they entered the hotel.
The lobby was huge. It was also silent and dark and tomb-like. It felt sacrilegious to enter here, as if profaning a gravesite, and that's why he had the robot accompany him. He needed the companionship, if only from a robot; at least it moved and responded as if alive.
Most of the ground floor walls were clear plastic, allowing the artificial twilight from outside to invade the atmosphere, with ghostly shadows holding the corners and nooks. There were no people, but it felt like there were; there should have been, and he felt them there.
The elevator did not work, no power, so he sought the stairs. A twinge of fear struck as he realized the rectangular robot was likely not able to follow, but it surprised him, agilely climbing. The robot even switched on a light to illuminate the dark stairway without his asking.
They visited every room on the second floor that overlooked the biscuit below. Each room was laid out identically. The furnishings had been left; chairs, beds, appliances, all were intact. Some were disheveled or out of place. Hurriedly abandoned. But nothing out of the ordinary was found.
Third floor, fourth, fifth; nothing. But in the sixth room on the sixth floor, he found what he expected to: Emilia H. Aulard.
She was sitting, back to him, at a table on the balcony, the clear sliding door to the room open. Her head was bowed down onto the table, as if napping. As he approached, Jed noticed her jumpsuit, dark blue on her shoulders, was stained brown in streaks down the seat and legs. The stain continued onto the carpet.
He cautiously edged around to the opposite side of the table. Her long gray hair was intact, and her skull and hands had some desiccated skin, but mostly she was a beige-white skeleton. There was nothing to suggest her features when alive.
On the table, just beyond her hands, sat a biscuit and an empty container for liquid. It was a macabre and also mundane scene, sad and ridiculous.
#
"Workers." He spat the word at the robot. "Like you. That's all we are to them. Ten thousand workers to do the bidding of our masters." He pinched a piece of biscuit off and bounced it off the robot. It quickly moved to sweep up the piece.
"I could free my brother and sister. Hell, I could free them all." He lobbed another piece of biscuit, missed. The robot moved to sweep it up. "And then what?"
He'd left Emilia Aulard where she was, untouched. Frankly, he had to admit, he had no idea what to do about her. A rage inside that wanted to desecrate her remains for causing his situation alternated with a strange reverence for her balcony as a holy site. So he walked away and left her to her fate, whatever it was.
Another piece of biscuit bounced from the robot. Again, it swept.
He'd spent the last few days walking. Walking and thinking. And coming to no conclusion, no decision. He didn't want to get back in that pod, but there was no point in staying outside. It all led to here, sitting at the desk with the screen frozen on "Please return to your cryogenic chamber to continue the voyage."
And he'd also spent some time just looking out the windows, and the stars seemed sparse, fewer than he remembered from clear Earth nights. He knew, intuitively, that was not a good thing. But there was nothing to be done about it.
He pitched another wad at the robot and the screen changed. "Prepare to revitalize Mission Commander. . ."
Jed turned to the robot as it moved toward the torus center, doubtless to attend to the requested pod. He threw the remaining biscuit at it, which hit and rolled away.
The robot continued on.
END