Mission: Tomorrow - eARC Read online

  “All this, just to land a computer program on Arcadia,” said Nikolai. “Two dozen skip drones already landed there, getting air and water and soil samples. Why would anyone care?”

  “It’s not the same. You’re still a person. A rational human being, capable of emotion and thought. A Russian. Your achievement will matter. Sure, there will be a few detractors, the Americans will argue like hell that a digital person doesn’t count, but we’ll sell it to the rest of the world if we have to shove it down their throats.”

  “I’m capable of emotion,” said Nikolai. “Right now, that emotion is anger. Right now, I’m contemplating whether I should take part in your publicity stunt at all. Maybe I’ll tell the world about what you people have done to me, instead. Or maybe I’ll say nothing at all, play dead, and leave your glorious first-place finish devoid of meaning. How is that for a rational human being?”

  Nikolai cut the connection.

  Nikolai struggled to come to terms with what he was. Even now, the virtual reality he inhabited felt real to him. He felt hungry, and tired, and hurt when he tentatively bit his cheek. He was capable of feeling anger toward the government and love toward his daughter. Did the lack of the physical body make him any less human than a handicapped person, a quadriplegic unable to control his limbs?

  He was never an ardent patriot, and now he was more disillusioned in his country than ever. But would carrying out his threat gain him anything beyond a fleeting moment of satisfaction?

  And if he was to comply, if he was to return to Earth in a few years, would Tamara come to terms with this new him? Would Olga? He had no answers, only an ever-growing list of uncertainties.

  To their credit, Anatoly and his superiors gave him an entire day to think things through before reestablishing the connection. Anatoly looked like he hadn’t slept, was buzzed on caffeine, still wearing the same shirt from the day before.

  “What we did to you was crap,” he said without preamble, “but I won’t apologize for it. Exceptional deeds aren’t accomplished through kindness. It’s not just Russia, either. All of human history is one tale after another of achieving greatness by ruthlessly building upon a foundation comprised of the bones of the innocent.

  “How many slave laborers died to erect the pyramids? The gleaming New York skyscrapers are inseparable from the legacy of smallpox-infested blankets being given to unsuspecting natives. You have already paid the price for humanity’s next great accomplishment. Why refuse to reap the benefits?”

  Nikolai closed his eyes and pictured Olga’s face. She might or might not accept the virtual brain-in-a-jar as her father.

  He thought of all the doors his success could open for her.

  “I’ll do it,” said Nikolai evenly. “You can tone down the rhetoric.”

  Anatoly straightened visibly, as though a heavy burden was lifted from his shoulders.

  “There are conditions,” said Nikolai.

  “What do you need?”

  “One, I want to talk to my wife. I want her handling things on that end, from now on, because I don’t quite know how to tell the real from the virtual, and I don’t trust any of you.”

  Nikolai held up two fingers. “Two, when I get back you hand the computer or the data bank or whatever my consciousness is stored in over to her, for much the same reason.”

  Anatoly nodded. “Done.”

  “I still hate the callous, cynical lot of you. But I’ll make the best out of this situation and find solace in the fact that my name will be remembered long after all your gravestones are dust. Speaking of that legacy, we’ll need to work on my speech. Something tells me ‘one small step’ isn’t going to go over well, in my case.”

  “We’ll have speechwriters float some ideas,” said Anatoly.

  “Finally, have your programmers work on some adjustments to my gilded cage. If I’m to eat make-believe food, making it taste this bad is needlessly cruel. Tonight, I’d like a thick slab of virtual steak, medium-well.”

  Nikolai settled in for the long journey. There would be time enough to sort out his feelings, and to learn how to live as this new kind of being. He knew one thing for sure: like his great-grandfather, he would persevere and return home.

  Yuri Gagarin, the tiny ship carrying the future hero of humanity, accelerated toward the skip point.

  * * *

  Alex Shvartsman is a writer and game designer from Brooklyn, NY. Over 70 of his short stories have appeared in InterGalactic Medicine Show, Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, Daily Science Fiction, and many other ‘zines and anthologies. The best of these are collected in Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories. He’s the winner of the 2014 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction and the editor of Unidentified Funny Objects annual anthology series of humorous SF/F. His fiction is linked at www.alexshvartsman.com.

  Next, award-winning Aussie writer Lezli Robyn takes us on a journey in which the first female aborigine astronaut discovers the NASA probe Voyager 1 has come back to life for surprising reasons in . . .

  A WALKABOUT

  AMONGST THE STARS

  by Lezli Robyn

  Tyrille Smith checked that her tether to Voyager 1 was secure, and confirmed the oxygen, radiation and pressure levels on her biosuit were within acceptable parameters, before painstakingly detaching the thermal blanketing on the panel in front of her to reveal a section of the spacecraft’s control hub. She’d spent the better part of the last three years studying the specs of the dated systems, while travelling to the far reaches of the Solar System, and beyond, so she traversed the space probe with ease, checking the radios, propulsion equipment and various computer systems for anything out of the ordinary.

  While former NASA specialists had been able to verify that the flight, science and command program parameters hadn’t been altered using computer diagnostics completed from Earth, none of the scientists had been able to confirm why the space probe had powered up all its systems again in 2027, two years after it had gone completely dark. Over the years the science systems had been disabled, one by one, to preserve its most basic thruster and altitude control functions. Now, not only were the twelve science instruments on the probe completely active—including the plasma spectrometer and the photopolarimeter systems that had been previously determined to be defective—but Tyrille had just confirmed on her previous EVA excursion out to the probe that the radioisotope thermoelectric generators were now running at full efficiency and the propellant tank was almost filled to capacity again. Not with hydrazine, but another foreign—very alien—substance that she had to use specialized equipment to take a sample of.

  Tyrille sealed the panel she had been working on, and gingerly opened the next one. Voyager 1 had been in operation since 1977, and while it had not deteriorated in the vacuum of space, it had become an antiquated time capsule, in its own way. She carefully replaced the data storage and tape recorder with much more modern, but equally low-energy drawing, digital equivalents, and then hesitated, biting her lip. Why would someone—no, something—refuel and repair the science instruments, only to then disappear? They clearly had the expertise to contact Earth. If they could reach Voyager 1, why not announce themselves?

  The implications were staggering, and so very exciting for Tyrille. All her life, she had wanted to become the first Aboriginal Australian astronaut to walkabout amongst the stars. Not only did her name literally mean “space” or “sky” in her native tongue, but she was descended from the fabled Boorong clan, who had been renowned for their astronomical knowledge. Believed to have been the oldest astrologists on Earth, most of the clan had died out long before she was born, although some of the last members were scattered around the northwest region of Victoria. She had been blessed to have been the great-granddaughter of one of the last Elders of the clan, and remembered many a night spent around the campfire as he told her the Dreamtime stories of how the deeds—or even misdeeds—of the creation spirits, Nurrumbunguttias, had led to the formation of the constellations. She had gr
own up wondering, if there were extraterrestrial life in the nearby stars, what form would they take? And would they have their own Dreamtime story about how the Solar System was created?

  “Are you in some distress, Tyrille?” asked the disembodied voice of I.R.I.S. her Interstellar Robotic Information Support drone. “You are holding your breath. Please exhale.”

  She signed. “No need to worry, Iris. I am just woolgathering.”

  “I do not understand the context of that term and how it affects your breathing.”

  Tyrille sighed, again, a little exasperated. “It’s not important. Can you please confirm my connections are secure before I close the panel?”

  I.R.I.S. ran the relevant diagnostics. “Confirmed.” Then a second later: “To gather wool, would you not need sheep?”

  “It’s an expression, Iris.” Tyrille wrapped the data storage and tape recorder up and tethered them to the EVA assist drone, then attached most of the bulkier tools to it before sending it back to her spaceship. “I use it as a way to say I am lost in thought.”

  “You are not lost, Tyrille. I have our location stored in my navigation array. We are exactly 198.027 374 55 astronomical units away from Earth. For clarification, that is 0.000 960 063 833 22 parsecs or 29 624 473 571 kilometers, or —”

  “I get the point,” Tyrille interrupted, bemused, “but thank you for the reassurance.” She rotated to confirm the drone’s return to her vessal, the sight of which never ceased to impress her.

  She remembered vividly, the first time she saw the Venturer. Ten thousand metric tons of spacecraft had dominated Earth’s orbit, with the nuclear power source stored in huge radiator wings attached to a body composed of seven nuclear-electric propulsion modules. It was no wonder the construction team had dubbed it ‘The Dragonfly’—for that was what it resembled.

  Well, what it used to resemble.

  The chemical rockets used to boost the Venturer out of Earth obit into an escape trajectory were ejected first. Then the nuclear-electric modules took over flight control, boosting the spaceship up to an acceleration of three hundred and ten kilometers per second within a year. It spent the next fourteen months rocketing towards the space probe at that speed before four of the modules were ejected. Then the spacecraft spent another year decelerating to match velocities with the space probe.

  The last two modules were ejected just before she reached Voyager 1, leaving just her life support module, so that her spaceship now resembled nothing more than a common housefly; albeit the most important space fly in human history. It had enough juice to return her to Pluto’s perihelion by 2038, where mankind was scrambling to build a waystation she could refuel at, to ensure she could rendezvous with Earth before her resources ran completely out.

  They had expended more fuel than had originally computed to reach the space probe, and by her calculations, she only had two more days to complete all her tests of Voyager 1 before needing to—

  “Gathering more wool?” I.R.I.S. interjected, interrupting her thoughts.

  Tyrille grinned sheepishly, and returned her gaze back to Voyager 1. When her ship had first pulled alongside the space probe, thirty-eight hours earlier, she should have been able to see the lights from her spacecraft reflect off a distinctive piece of polished metal attached to the side. Yet the Golden Record—the disk containing Earth sounds, images and salutations in hundreds of languages that had specifically been placed on Voyager 1 as a greeting to extraterrestrial life—had been removed from the probe. Presumably taken by those it had been intended for.

  In shock, she had reported the news of the discovery on the next scheduled data pulse, and while the response from Earth was delayed, it was by no means devoid of excitement. For the first time in fifty-eight years all propulsion on Voyager 1 had been halted so she could perform a serious of evaluations, tests and upgrades—with the expressed focus of trying to discover any evidence extraterrestrials could have left behind.

  “Iris, can you please confirm the helmet cam is in operational order?”

  “Yes, Tyrille,” the robot replied with perfect intonation, “it is functioning within nominal parameters.”

  Tyrille loosened the tether, and pulled herself around to the one part of the space probe she had deliberately avoided until this moment. “Iris, in a minute you are about to witness history in the making.”

  “Technically, every minute becomes history, once it has passed.”

  She groaned, fogging up her helmet for a split second. “Have I ever mentioned you are too literal for your own good?”

  “Yes,” I.R.I.S. replied. “However, accuracy is a fundamental component of my programming.”

  “A fundamental flaw, mayhaps,” she muttered, more to herself than the benefit of the robot. She pulled out a small handheld probe she’d nicknamed the Screwdriver, after her favorite science fiction series, and began an array of tests on the small area of paneling that had once held the fabled Golden Record. At first she saw nothing, which is exactly what she had expected, but then when the light passed directly over the center, it seemed to reflect off a small geometric shape imprinted on the surface of the panel. It looked somewhat akin to a snowflake to the naked eye, but her device registered that the crystalline-appearing substance pulsed with energy.

  Strewth! It’s alive!

  Better still, the readings displayed on her helmet’s holoscreen confirmed it was alien.

  For a moment, Tyrille couldn’t move. She could barely breathe.

  She made the effort to exhale, and then inhale—or risk I.R.I.S.’s ire—but continued to float there in a state of shock.

  “The readings indicate there is a foreign object attached to side of Voyager 1, Tyrille.”

  No bloody kidding, Tyrille thought, nodding, before realizing I.R.I.S. couldn’t see that action. “I see it, too, and am ascertaining what to do with it . . .whether it’s safe to bring aboard or not.”

  “It appears to be extraterrestrial in origin.”

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious. I am aware of that.”

  As usual, I.R.I.S ignored her sarcasm—or simply didn’t recognize it. “I would note that its location is presumably an important indicator of its function.”

  Tyrille frowned. “How so?”

  “It’s been placed in the exact same position the Golden Record was once located. The logical conclusion would be that it was—”

  “— the extraterrestrial’s response to the Golden Record!” Tyrille exclaimed. “Or at least their equivalent.”

  “Indeed.”

  Tyrille’s mind raced with the implications. If this specimen was somehow an alien life-form’s greeting to the human race, that could explain why Voyager 1’s fuel tanks had been replenished and its systems automatically turned on again: it was the most unobtrusive—and even courteous—way for the aliens to alert humans to their presence. And perhaps, to even encourage them in their goal to make contact.

  Or it could be the extraterrestrial version of a Trojan horse, Tyrille thought wryly. “Iris, is there any indication that the specimen could cause any harm—or come to any harm—if we were to bring it onto the spaceship?”

  There was a long pause. “No, Tyrille, there is not. However, while it does not appear to require a breathable atmosphere, due to being discovered in the vacuum of space, the composition of its crystalline structure and its method of power conduction are unknown variables. I could not give you a definitive calculation of how it would react in the Venturer’s oxygen-rich environment without further testing.”

  “Which we do not have time to do, given our short window.” Frustrated, the astronaut bit her lip. She had to decide now. Even if she sent their preliminary scientific readings to Earth for analysis and a decision, she couldn’t wait the amount of time it would take for them to simply receive her data pulse, let alone wait for their reply to wing its way across the expanse to her. Not when Venturer had to start making its long voyage back to Earth within forty-eight hours.

  Well . .
. bugger. I suppose that settles that then. Tyrille looked down to see her hands were in no condition to carefully excise the specimen; they were shaking in anticipation and fear. She closed her eyes, trying a breathing exercise to settle her nerves, then opened them again, her gaze darting around vast darkness until it settled upon the familiar golden glow of the sun.

  The first Dreamtime story she had ever been told had been about how the Solar System, and the rest of the Universe, had come to be. Earth had been a featureless black disc until Pupperrimbul (one of the Nurrumbunguttias that had taken the form of a bird with a red patch) had cast an emu’s egg into the sky to create Gnowee, the sun. Eventually, all of the Nurrumbunguttias left Earth to form the many other bright lights across the cosmos; the smoke from their campfires forming the Warring, which was still visible from Earth as the Milky Way.

  That knowledge comforted Tyrille. She liked the thought that the spirits were surrounding her, guiding her, so when she eventually returned her gaze and concentration onto Voyager 1, her hands were much steadier. She felt much more grounded in her heart and mind.

  She used the laser setting of her “Screwdriver” to cut out a small a section of the side panel. She was careful to take a wide birth around the specimen, so as to not damage it, but also ensured she left as much paneling behind as possible to protect the probe’s vital instruments.

  Wary of allowing anything to touch the delicate-appearing crystalline structure—even a specimen bag—she made her way to the spacecraft, holding the panel segment gingerly in her open palm.

  I.R.I.S. met her at the open airlock, sealing the outer hatch after she had entered and then helping divest her of the equipment she wore about her body—tasks Tyrille usually completed on her own. She grinned. Sometimes she forgot how curious the robot could be. It was such a human affectation. “Would you like to see it, Iris?”