Mission: Tomorrow Read online

  Nikolai waited until their four-year-old daughter was asleep. Pretending that everything was normal, that it was just another weeknight, was incredibly difficult. He was emotionally and physically exhausted, and his wife Tamara could sense that something was wrong, but she too kept up the pretense of normality until their little Olga was tucked into bed.

  As the sun set over St. Petersburg, coloring the skyline in bronze hues, Nikolai told his wife about his diagnosis and everything that had happened since.

  Tamara listened without interrupting, even as she clutched a couch pillow, a mascara-tinged tear rolling down her cheek. When he finally unburdened, having told her the facts and having run out of assurances and platitudes, the two of them stared out the window and shared what was left of the sunset in silence.

  It was only after the sun had disappeared completely in the west that she finally spoke.

  “Why you?”

  Something was very wrong.

  At first it was just a feeling, a sensation in the back of Nikolai’s mind. It seemed that his subconscious had figured out something important, but wasn’t prepared to communicate what it was.

  Nikolai chalked it up to paranoia. Anyone stuck on a one-way trip out of the Solar System in a tin can could be forgiven for having uneasy thoughts. But the feeling persisted, almost bubbling up to the surface until eventually the concern bled from his lizard brain and into the conscious mind.

  Nikolai pulled up the various sets of relevant data on his screen and began crunching numbers.

  ***

  After his wife had finally gone to bed, Nikolai stayed up making a list of people he needed to say “good-bye” to. He kept adding and crossing out names on a sheet of graph paper, until he crumpled up the page and tossed it into the trash bin.

  Farewells would be painful. He didn’t want to do it. Life had already dealt him a bad hand and he felt justified in skipping whatever unpleasant business he could avoid.

  In the morning, he called Popov and accepted the deal, requesting that his involvement be kept a secret for as long as possible. He had little enough time to spend with his family and didn’t want to waste it being hounded by reporters. Then he went to see the only other person who needed to know the truth.

  Petr Ivanovich Gorolenko had recently moved into an assisted living facility on the edge of town. It was nice enough, as retirement homes went. Nikolai was relieved that, with the money his family would receive, they’d no longer have to worry about being able to afford Father’s stay here.

  Like Tamara, Petr listened to his son’s tale without interrupting. He sighed deeply when Nikolai was finished. “It is a great tragedy for a parent to outlive his child.”

  “I have little time, Dad, and a chance to do something meaningful with what’s left.”

  His father straightened his back with great effort. “Claiming an entire planet for Mother Russia is no small thing.”

  “Well, it isn’t exactly like that,” said Nikolai. “Arcadia isn’t like some tropical island in the age of colonialism. Planting the flag won’t claim it as ours. The government wants to land a man there first purely for propaganda.”

  “I see,” said Petr. “The oligarchs in charge are desperate to show that Russia is still a world power. And they’re willing to sacrifice your life to do it.”

  “I’m dying regardless,” said Nikolai.

  “They have the means to prolong your life, and they’re withholding treatment unless you volunteer for a suicide mission. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  Nikolai looked around the sparse, depressing room where his father would live out his remaining years. Was his own fate really worse than that?

  “Of course it bothers me,” he said. “Dying bothers me. Having Olga grow up without a father bothers me. But so what? It’s not like I have a better option.”

  “Your great-grandfather was conscripted into the army on the day the Great Patriotic War began,” said Petr. “Stalin had murdered most of his competent generals by then, and was utterly unprepared for the German invasion. He needed time to regroup and mount the real defense, so he ordered tens of thousands of young men with no training and no weapons onto the front lines.”

  Petr’s words dissolved in a coughing fit. He cleared his throat, and continued in a raspy voice. “Grandpa’s platoon of forty men was given a total of three rifles to fight with. They were told to kill the Germans and capture their weapons, and sent to the front lines. A squad of NKVD—the secret police—was positioned a kilometer or so behind them. Those men were well-armed, and had orders to shoot anyone who tried to turn back.”

  Petr paused again, the monologue visibly taking a lot out of him. He took several deep breaths and pressed on. “Grandpa was very lucky. He was wounded in the first engagement, and by the time he got out of the hospital his platoon was long gone. He was assigned to another division, one with weapons, and fought all the way to Berlin in ’45.”

  “You’ve told this story, more than a few times,” said Nikolai.

  “My point is, our government has a long-standing tradition of solving problems by throwing whoever they have to into the meat grinder,” said Petr. A smile stretched across his wrinkled face. “But also to reiterate that dumb luck runs deep in our family. Perhaps you can beat the odds and last long enough to hitch the ride home on the American ship. So, if you don’t mind, I won’t mourn for you just yet.”

  Nikolai hugged his father. “I’ll try, Dad. I’ll try my best.”

  Nikolai and his family relocated to Baikonur, the desert town in Kazakhstan that housed the world’s oldest spaceport. The dry heat of the Kazakh Steppe was difficult for the Gorolenkos to tolerate, and seemed to contribute to Nikolai’s rapidly worsening headaches, but it was a moot point: he spent almost all of his time in the vast, air-conditioned labs of the Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency.

  He was given crash courses in astronomy by the scientists, in equipment maintenance and repair by the engineers, and in public speaking by the PR flaks. Some of the lessons felt surreal to him—a sole student surrounded by a cadre of overeager teachers.

  The plan was to unveil the mission at the last possible moment, lest the Americans or the Chinese launch a competing one-man ship powered with their superior technologies and snatch the accomplishment away from the Motherland. As far as the world knew, the Americans would get to Arcadia first.

  The Chinese had dominated space exploration for much of the twenty-first century. It was the People’s Republic of China’s skip drone which had explored Arcadia in the first place. Unfortunately for them, China was undergoing a period of political upheaval not dissimilar to Russia’s perestroika of the 1990s. The government lacked the funds and the willpower to support an interstellar project.

  The enormous Indian ship was already en route, and would take over five years to reach the skip point. They wouldn’t be the first on the scene, but they would be the first to succeed—or fail—at establishing a permanent colony.

  The Americans launched the Neil Armstrong with all the pomp and pageantry that was expected of them, and it was scheduled to reach Arcadia in a little over a year.

  The plan had been for the Russians to launch the Yuri Gagarin on the same day, and steal the Americans’ thunder. Despite its inferior propulsion, the Gagarin’s much lower mass would allow the Russian ship to beat their competitors to Arcadia by up to several months. But, by the time the Armstrong had launched from Cape Canaveral, Nikolai hadn’t even seen his ship.

  The Gagarin was being constructed elsewhere, a joint effort between the Russian government, the Antey Corporation, and a number of smaller domestic firms sufficiently favored by the current administration to be awarded the lucrative contracts.

  Another month passed. Nikolai’s headaches continued to worsen and, despite the Baikonur doctors’ assurances to the contrary, he suspected that the nanite treatments might not be working.

  At first, he was perfectly content to miss the launch date. The delay meant more
time to spend with his family. But then he had realized that he actually wanted to go. While Olga was blissfully unaware of what was happening in the way only a young child could be, the situation was taking a noticeable toll on Tamara. She had a hard time coping with the prolonged farewell, and even though she did her best to hide it and stand by her husband, Nikolai hated being the cause of her anguish.

  At some point over the course of this extra month on the ground, Nikolai stopped thinking of the impending launch as a death sentence and began looking forward to this final adventure. He didn’t discuss these new feelings with Tamara, who he felt would not understand, but wrote about them at length in letters he penned for his daughter, to be given to her when she turned sixteen. The letters became a sort of a diary for Nikolai, an outlet for his anxiety, a catharsis.

  The word that the ship was finally on its way to Baikonur came at the last possible moment.

  “This is good news,” Nikolai told Tamara during their last dinner together. By mutual agreement, they decided not to speak again after the ship had launched. Nikolai wasn’t happy about this, but he was willing to let go, for Tamara’s sake. “I’m only going to beat the Americans by a week or so.”

  She took his hand into hers, and her lower lip trembled.

  “I can make the food and water last that long,” he said. “The Americans will take me in. It would make them look really bad otherwise.”

  There was pain and doubt in the way Tamara looked at him, and only the briefest glimmer of hope.

  Later that evening, he tucked Olga into bed for the last time.

  “Daddy is going away on a business trip for a while,” he said, struggling to keep his voice even.

  Olga smiled at him, her eyelids heavy. “Will you come back soon?”

  “I’ll try my best,” said Nikolai.

  “Bring me something nice.” She shut her eyes.

  In the morning, they told him he would sleep through the first two days of his trip.

  “We must lighten the load as much as possible,” he was told, “to make up, somewhat, for the delays. We’ll give you a shot to keep you asleep for as long as it’s medically reasonable. It will conserve air, food, and water.”

  By the time he woke up, the Earth was a pale blue dot rapidly diminishing in the distance.

  * * *

  At first, Nikolai chose not to share his concerns with Anatoly. If he was wrong, he would sound like a paranoid lunatic. If he was right . . . Nikolai tried very hard not to dwell on the implications.

  He pulled up the volumes on astronomy and physics from the ship’s database, and he checked the data from the ship’s sensors against the star charts, willing the results to make sense. He cut down the amount of time spent on maintaining life support systems, and the amount of time he slept. He checked the equations, again and again, but the numbers never added up.

  By then he was getting desperate. He would have to bring his concerns up with Baikonur.

  “Do you want to hear a joke?” said Anatoly by way of greeting the next time he called.

  “Sure.” Nikolai wasn’t in the laughing Mood, but he let the com specialist talk.

  “When the Americans landed on the moon, Premier Brezhnev’s aides broke the bad news to their boss,” said Anatoly. “Brezhnev wasn’t at all happy.

  “‘We can’t let the capitalists win the space race,’ he said. ‘I hereby order our intrepid cosmonauts to immediately launch an expedition and land on the Sun!’

  “‘But Comrade Brezhnev,’ said the aides, ‘it’s impossible to land on the Sun. The Sun is extremely hot.’

  “‘Nonsense,’ said Brezhnev. ‘Just tell them to go at night.’”

  Nikolai stared at the screen, silent.

  “Heard that one, eh?” Anatoly grinned. “That joke is so old, its beard has grown a beard. It seemed appropriate for the occasion is all.”

  “What’s really going on, Anatoly?” Nikolai blurted out the words before he could change his mind.

  The face on the screen stared, eyes widening in surprise. “What do you mean?”

  “I calculated the trajectory, and the ship isn’t where it should be,” said Nikolai. “It’s accelerating much faster than it possibly could.”

  “You must have made a mistake,” said Anatoly, a little too quickly, and glanced downward.

  After so many rounds of verbal sparring, Nikolai looked into the face of the man on the screen and was certain he was hiding something.

  “I taught mathematics at one of Russia’s top universities,” said Nikolai. “My calculations are accurate. A ship the size of Yuri Gagarin can’t possibly accelerate at this rate. And don’t feed me a line about secret technologies, I learned enough about propulsion at Baikonur to understand the basics of skip travel.”

  Anatoly’s visage, normally cheerful and full of life, was grim. He sighed deeply and slouched in his chair, his shoulders slumping visibly.

  “Wait, please,” he finally said, and cut the connection.

  Nikolai felt trapped and powerless. Cut off from his family, his only lifeline a man he barely knew, a man who had apparently been lying to him this entire time. But lying about what? Was this a sick experiment? Did he leave Earth at all, or was he in some bunker in Kazakhstan, serving as a guinea pig for Roscosmos shrinks?

  He felt claustrophobic, the walls of the ship closing in. His head spun and his stomach churned. Was this a panic attack? Nikolai had never experienced one before.

  The salvation from certain death, the chance at fame, the money . . .why would this be offered to him, of all people? How could he be so stupid? This was a fantasy born of a cancerous mass pushing against his brain tissue.

  The screen flickered back to life twenty minutes later, but to Nikolai it felt like eternity.

  “I was hoping we wouldn’t have this conversation for a few months,” said Anatoly. “Some time after the skip.”

  Nikolai stared at his handler. “Is there a skip?”

  “There is a skip, and the ship is right on schedule, accelerating exactly as it should be.”

  Nikolai waited.

  “You’re right, though; the ship is much lighter and faster than you were initially led to believe.”

  Nikolai seethed. “What the hell does that mean, Anatoly?”

  “There were delays and complications,” said the com specialist. “We couldn’t get the life support equipment to work right, couldn’t get the ship’s mass reduced to an acceptable level. We had hoped the Americans would have similar troubles, but they launched on time, and we were out of options.

  “In order to beat them to Arcadia we had to send a ship that was barely larger than a skip drone—nothing large enough to transport a living, breathing human.

  “The best we could do was to send your mind.”

  Nikolai gaped at the screen.

  “Antey Corporation has been developing this technology for a decade,” said Anatoly. “We had to euthanize your body and upload your thought patterns into the computer. Your digital self resides in the Yuri Gagarin’s memory bank. A sophisticated computer program is simulating your environment. But, in fact, there is no air or food, nor the need for such.”

  Nikolai stared at his hands, brushed his fingers against the stubble on his chin and then touched the control console of the ship, felt the slight vibration of the engine. “All this feels real enough to me.”

  Anatoly entered a command into his own computer, and the world around Nikolai went blank.

  He could no longer feel his own body, could not breathe or move, or see anything around him. It was extremely disorienting. Nikolai thought this was how purgatory must feel.

  The physical world returned.

  “Sorry about the discomfort,” said Anatoly. “I had to show you I was telling the truth. This is what it’s like without any interface at all.”

  Nikolai felt his heart thumping fast, his face flushed with anger. How could those things be fake? “You . . .” he stammered. “You killed me!”
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br />   “Your body was already dying,” said Anatoly. “The nanites could only hold off the tumor for so long.” He offered a weak smile. “Think of the advantages—you will last as long as it takes for the Americans to bring you back home.”

  “Advantages?” shouted Nikolai. “You were always going to kill me, weren’t you? All in the name of some propaganda stunt!”

  “No,” said Anatoly. “Sure, we were prepared for this. You were selected because your brain activity and personality were deemed most likely to be digitized successfully and the nanites had been mapping your brain patterns from the beginning. But we would have vastly preferred the alternative.” Anatoly leaned forward and lowered his voice, sounding almost conspiratorial. “I know you’re angry and confused now, but think about it—really think about it—you’re going to make history, twice. You will not only be the first intelligent being from Earth to land on Arcadia, but you’ll be the first successfully digitized human, too.”

  “You are monsters,” whispered Nikolai.

  “You will get to watch your daughter grow up,” said Anatoly.

  Nikolai had no counter to that. He pondered life as a ghost in the machine.

  “Why did you lie?” he asked. “Why the ruse? You could have gotten a volunteer. Hell, I might have volunteered if you had laid the options out for me.”

  “This truly was the backup option,” said Anatoly. “But also, we’ve had . . . difficulties with this process before. Several previous attempts at maintaining a digital intelligence have failed.”

  Nikolai gritted his nonexistent teeth. The emotional roller-coaster ride wasn’t over yet.

  “You’re doing fine,” Anatoly added. “I’m only telling you this to explain our actions. All cards on the table this time, I promise.”

  “What sort of difficulties?” asked Nikolai.

  “The transfer always worked, but the minds couldn’t adjust to the virtual existence. They went mad within days. But they weren’t as good a match as you.”

  Nikolai shuddered.