26
The garden had wilted, Mother’s vegetables and herbs roasted by the intense heat of a too long summer. All around her were shades of yellow turning a drab brown, where once had been lush green. It had always been green this time of year. Summer’s halting slide into fall had faithfully yielded bounties of homegrown herbs and produce which she would spend weeks meticulously preserving with her mother. Daddy’s grain fields lay fallow, the distilleries across Kentucky no longer desiring his supply.
This couldn’t be right. It was September, when the damp heat gave way to crisp air and the promise of fresh apples from the orchard. She’d been gone so long and had craved nothing more than Mother’s home cooking.
It had been so long, and none of this was right. The farm looked as it should when they hunkered down for winter, buttoned-up and sterile. It wasn’t hot at all. It was cold. So very, very cold.
Traci shivered, drawing her arms close. She realized she was soaking wet and had no clothes. How had she come to be here? And what was that incessant beeping that clamored for her attention?
A voice called her name.
“Traci.”
It was both familiar and foreign. Impossibly calm.
“Traci, can you hear me?”
Yes. Is that you, Jack?
“It is not. You named me Bob.”
Bob? I don’t know anyone—
The vision of her parent’s farm swirled away like scraps of paper in a whirlwind, replaced by a gauzy light and indefinable shapes. Yet the cold remained.
“Please remain calm. You are awakening from hibernation.”
Hibernation? But I just lay down a minute ago. And I’m so cold.
“Your core temperature is returning to normal. You will still feel the aftereffects for some time.”
She tried to sit up only to find herself pushing against nothing. There was no bed beneath her. How was this? She blinked hard as all about her began to spin. She screwed her eyes shut as her hands scrabbled for purchase.
“We are still coasting. The effects of microgravity will be disconcerting. Please limit your movements until you are fully conscious.”
“Who are you?”
“I am your artificial intelligence crewmate. You call me Bob. Do you remember?”
Bob . . . who was—? Her eyes snapped open. Lights and shapes remained indistinct, though she could hear clearly, or thought she could. Was she talking in her sleep?
“I . . . I remember.” She was suddenly aware of being thirsty. “I need a drink.”
A silver, skeletal arm brought a squeeze bottle of bright green juice to her lips. “This will balance your electrolytes. Drink slowly.”
She ignored his warning and took a long pull from the nipple, almost choking on the room-temperature liquid. She gasped and tried again, savoring the feeling before swallowing. That was better. Her mouth no longer felt as if it had been filled with sawdust.
“Can you tell me your full name?”
My full name? He’d said Traci, hadn’t he . . . “Traci Elizabeth Keene.”
“Very good. Do you know what day it is?”
“What . . . of course not. Maybe Thursday?” Why was that significant?
“Good. You remember that you were supposed to awaken on a Thursday. Flight day 524.”
She’d had a feeling that days on the calendar meant nothing now. “Was I supposed to remember that, too?”
“Yes. Preassigned cognitive tasks are part of the awakening protocol. What is the square root of 144?”
How the hell was I supposed to know . . . wait. “12.”
“Excellent. That was the next cognitive task. Now, can you tell me where you are?”
I thought I was at my parents’ house in Kentucky. That’s obviously wrong . . . “Columbus . . . Ohio? No, wait. Columbus. I’m on the spacecraft Columbus.”
“Welcome back. It is good to speak with you again.”
It all came back now in a flood. She’d been in hibernation for almost a year while their ship had sailed ever deeper into the solar system, increasingly farther from home. The thought itself was dizzying, never mind her hazy vision and latent vertigo. “Thanks,” she muttered. “I’m really cold, Bob.”
“Your core temperature is up to 95.1 degrees, enough to safely regain consciousness. You should begin feeling better soon. Try taking a longer drink.”
This time she was able to grasp the bottle with her hands and took a long pull, the room-temperature fluid filling her stomach. “Hungry, too. When can I eat?”
“Not for a while yet. Recovery protocol requires you to rebalance your fluids first. Any food you eat right now would become rather messily undigested.”
Meaning she’d throw it all up. “Understood,” she said weakly. “Can I at least get some coffee?”
“Yes, after you finish the electrolyte juice.”
One thing after another, she thought, although Bob was proving to have a decent enough bedside manner for a computer. “I still can’t see very well. It’s all light and color. Shapes are fuzzy.”
“Sight will return soon after you—”
“Let me guess,” she interrupted. “After I balance my electrolytes.” She drained the bottle. “Now can I have some coffee?”
Traci huddled in the empty crew wardroom, still in her underwear with a sleeping bag pulled around her for warmth. A lap belt kept her in her seat while a fresh bulb of coffee floated in front of her.
“That’s your third cup,” Bob noted. “Aren’t you feeling jittery?”
“Are you kidding? I’m just now feeling awake!” It had been the longest, deepest sleep of her life and the fatigue still pulled at her, like waking up from a too heavy nap. As her head cleared, she spent her time puttering about the galley before finally taking a chance on a breakfast burrito. Sans the customary hot sauce, at Bob’s insistence. No matter how flavorful it might have been on Earth, the body’s unaccustomed balance of fluids in microgravity made most food unspeakably bland and hot sauce was a prized commodity.
She scrolled through the screen on a nearby terminal, reacquainting herself with the ship and their environment. Mission day 524, distance from Earth an improbable thirty-five astronomical units: thirty-five times the distance between Earth and Sun. Relative velocity just over three hundred thousand kilometers an hour, with a deceleration burn programmed to begin in four days.
She scrolled through the menu until she found the communications logs. Predictably there was nothing for her attention from the last year, Cayman Control knowing she’d put up a rather large “do not disturb” sign. But there were others . . .
Her sleep-saturated eyes popped open. “We heard from Magellan?” she asked in surprise.
Whether intentional or not, Bob had been leaving her alone after she climbed out of the pod. His interface panel chimed. “Yes. We began receiving datalink messages several days ago. I have been communicating regularly with my counterpart Daisy.”
And there, buried within the densely coded chatter between the two AIs was a single, simple message for her:
YO TRACI.
CALL ME.
XOXO JACK