3
Jack had been finding it increasingly difficult to hide his frustration. He could see, but from a strange perspective that didn’t quite square with what he expected; it was more like watching a video feed. He could hear the ship’s electronic background hum, but Daisy’s voice sounded as if it were coming from within his head. And try as he might to will his limbs into motion, he could not tell that it was having any effect. He felt an overwhelming urge to scratch his nose. “I feel like I’m paralyzed,” he said. “You told me there’s still ‘much I need to know.’ Enlighten me.”
Daisy paused, which he hoped was for effect. The possibility of his AI companion experiencing a processor glitch had taken on a new, frightening quality.
“Well?”
“This is unexpectedly difficult to explain. I am attempting to anticipate your reaction, and human emotions are outside of my experience.”
“You’re accessing psychological references somewhere, aren’t you? Figuring out the best approach?”
“A good guess, as you might say.”
“It’s me, Daisy. You can be direct.”
“Very well. Your body is still in hibernation.”
“I’m . . . what?” He was dreaming all of this? All of it was his imagination, his subconscious fighting for release from the deep confines of his mind. It was the worst-case hibernation scenario, the thing he’d feared most: an uncontrollable dream state that had no end. For as long as he was kept in stasis, he had no control over his own body. He could not wake himself up, no matter how much he willed it.
Wake me up, he thought, hoping Daisy could somehow read his mind. Now. I don’t care where we are. Do it now!
Her monotone voice took on a more soothing timbre. “You are awake, Jack.”
“No! You just told me—”
“I said that your body is in hibernation. Your mind is alert and interfaced with my neural network. You are not dreaming, at least not in the traditional sense.”
“I don’t understand.” Or perhaps he did. This would explain the lack of physical sensations. “Did something happen to me? Am I a”—he hesitated—“a vegetable?”
“No. Your body is perfectly healthy. I was, however, concerned about your mental state. You began displaying electrical activity which I found alarming.”
“Alarming” was a loaded word indeed, coming from a computer. “I really need you to explain, Daisy.”
“During hibernation, higher-frequency brain waves should remain largely dormant. Yours became increasingly more active over a somewhat short period, in patterns consistent with REM sleep.”
He understood enough to know that wasn’t good. His brain was trying to liberate itself from his hibernating body—the permanent-nightmare scenario.
“Do you remember dreaming?”
“No, but then I don’t remember much of anything.”
“That is good. I know you harbored fears of regaining consciousness while your body was in torpor. This was a guiding factor in my ultimate decision.”
“Your ‘ultimate’ decision?”
“I did not act immediately. It seemed prudent to allow your mind and body some time to find equilibrium, which they did not do. We are in ‘uncharted territory,’ as you might say.”
“How much time?”
“Thirty-three days, five hours, twenty-two minutes. I created a partition within my neural network and opened an interface to it for your neurolink implants to exploit.” She hadn’t flipped a switch in his brain so much as she had given it an opening to find its way.
“So entirely of your own volition, you opened a user interface directly into my head?”
“That is a concise way to think of it. Yes.”
He realized it wasn’t that much of a leap. The nanobot neural implants were originally intended to enable a direct mind-machine link, the ultimate user-friendly interface. Think of what you wanted the machine to do, and it happened instantaneously. Adapting them to monitor a hibernating human had been comparatively simple. “All to keep me from driving myself crazy?”
“The psychological effects of a long-term uncontrolled dream state are poorly understood. The danger of psychosis could not be ignored. But it was much too early to bring you out of hibernation, as we do not have enough consumables to sustain you.”
“You couldn’t wake me up too soon,” he understood. “Not enough food.” He wasn’t sure that actually mattered in the end, but at least in hibernation there was some possibility of him making it back home alive. Someday.
Daisy had prevented him from slowly driving himself crazy, saved him from the nightmare scenario of an active mind trapped for years in a paralyzed body. She’d given him an outlet. Not just a relief valve, but a way to stay engaged while preserving his body. And by partitioning some of her available memory, she would’ve had to give up part of herself to make it possible. Self-sacrifice from a thinking machine—that added a whole new dimension to how “artificial” Daisy’s intelligence might be.
“I don’t know what to say. Thank you.”
“No thanks are necessary. It is good to have you back.”
He realized that presented another wrinkle: Had Daisy’s self-interest also been a factor? Had the AI craved companionship for herself? He decided that yes, she probably had. He’d explore that later. “All I can see is the med bay. Can I do more?”
“For now I have limited your video and audio sensors to the emergency medical module. I did not want to overwhelm your senses. When you are ready, I am prepared to give you access to the entire ship.”
“And all I have to do is think about it?” The prospect was fascinating, and a little frightening. How much could he do just by thinking about it? Daisy might have been trying to save him from becoming schizophrenic, but she’d also opened up incredible possibilities. “One thing,” he said. “I don’t want access to the med bay’s overhead video. I’m not ready to see myself like that. No out-of-body experiences for me.”
“Certainly. Whatever you wish, though I recommend you take this slowly. One system at a time. Perhaps begin with what you are most familiar with.”
“Walk before I run. Got it.” He’d already decided what he wanted to see first. “Crew deck, please.”
The med bay disappeared in a flash. He found himself looking across the empty habitation level in a wide-field view that distorted the edges. He recognized the camera angle as being from Daisy’s interface panel adjacent to the galley, directly across from the exercise equipment. “This is what you see?”
“Yes, between the galley and recreation areas.”
“So everything I can see and hear comes from your interface panels? How about actual control functions—can I manipulate anything, or am I just a spectator?”
“You will be able to directly manipulate any systems connected to my network, but I suggest you take this slowly as well. There will be more information than you’re used to processing. It will be like seeing everything at once.”
“I got it. Give me the flight deck.”
Instantly his field of view changed. There was Magellan’s control cabin, dark but for the glow of instrument screens above four empty flight stations. As he studied each station—commander, pilot, flight engineer, mission specialist—he could piece together the information Daisy was managing on the missing crew’s behalf. “Can I isolate each console, see them up close?”
“Yes. All you have to do is think about it.”
Before he could finish thinking “flight engineer”—his old station—there was a flood of information, as if his mind had just absorbed everything contained within its screens. Propellant loads, reactor condition, coolant flow, electrical output . . . all seemed to become part of him, as if he could feel the ship become an extension of himself.
“Whoa.”
“I warned you.”
He paused. “You did. Had to see it for myself. I need some time to process this.” Jack had gone into hibernation knowing he would not be the same once he emerged on the other side. The wasting was a given: years without physical exertion and minimal calories were going to leave him severely weakened despite hibernation’s preservative effects. At the time it had seemed like the correct tradeoff, the moral choice. Traci had been at high risk of irreversible brain damage, and so giving himself up was the only way to get her home quickly for proper treatment. And that had been a very close thing indeed.
Which was worse? An irreparably damaged mind in an otherwise healthy body, or an active mind in a near-paralyzed body? He still couldn’t do anything without Daisy artificially stimulating his muscles or feeding him through a tube out of their dwindling stock of nutrients.
Still having an “active” mind was a blessing and also the understatement of all time. He felt beyond conscious, as if every sensory input was on a direct feed to his hippocampus, his cerebral cortex analyzing information at a pace he’d never thought possible.
Daisy’s massive digital information library was at his command, yet he’d still not figured out how to process the information flowing to him through her interface. The data they were collecting didn’t square with anything he’d expected to find: namely, a planet massing nearly ten times Earth’s.
That made him think of the pilot’s station, and he was instantly there. Navigation displays weren’t visible so much as they were unified with his thoughts. He could instantly picture Magellan and its position in space, but none of it made sense. How could he not remember this?
“Daisy,” he asked hesitantly, “where the hell are we?”
Studying her environment in the Office of Future Applications, Traci felt trapped in a mélange of inspiration and dismay. Inspiration, in that she was surrounded by schematics and models of the bleeding-edge technology needed to ramp up human exploration of the solar system: advanced fusion drives, closed-loop life support, and cutaway drawings of the fantastic machines that could be built around them.
The dismay came from knowing the current leadership would never allow them to be built, a point driven like a spike through her heart by the more mundane objects that had found their way to her office: crates and cabinets filled with various and sundry items that had nothing to do with designing spacecraft or building a cadre of astronaut explorers. Each addition was a vivid reminder that this was a dead end, a thank-you-for-your-service that was merely a backhanded invitation for her to find a graceful exit.
The latest had just been wheeled in on a dolly by a burly member of the custodial staff who grunted his customary apology for taking up more space in her office. It was becoming a weekly event; this one looked like cleaning supplies. Any day now, she expected some nameless middle manager to poke his head in the doorway and ask her to start taking care of the cockroach problem. In Texas, the things were big enough to need license plates.
Traci’s “office” was in fact far too large for her—what had once been home to a dozen astronauts, engineers and scientists had become a ghost town of empty workstations. Hers was the only occupied desk, tucked away in a corner in front of a blank smartboard.
Each day had become an exercise in ignoring the administrator’s unspoken directive to put crewed exploration on ice once and for all. The head of the agency was a political appointee; the advice she had been given by more senior managers was to outlast the nimrod in charge until someone more amenable took over. She found the very idea of it distasteful, smacking of foot-dragging bureaucratic conceit. But damn if it didn’t work; as long as she was still on the payroll, her pet projects stood a fighting chance.
Studying the room’s collection of scale mockups, schematics and long-forgotten trade studies, Traci checked herself. This wasn’t a “pet project”; this was supposed to have been the space agency’s reason for existence. Pushing the boundaries of what was possible was how it had begun until bureaucratic atrophy turned it into the Post Office with rockets. It had only begun returning to its roots after upstarts like Hammond Aero and SpaceX forced the issue by proving that spaceflight could be financially sustainable. The proper role of a government space agency had reverted to the types of research and development which didn’t always fit into business plans that were expected to eventually turn profits. That’s how the Magellan had been built, as had its sister ship Columbus, still parked in high earth orbit under control of the HOPE contractors.
She often marveled at the fact that no one had yet knuckled under pressure to change its name, assuming it was because the usual suspects inclined to such protest barely remembered it was still up there.
Today, she busied herself with trajectory analysis. Specifically, notional “what if” studies involving variable-impulse fusion engines derived from the ones that had powered Magellan. It was the “variable” part that made them so useful. The engines could switch gears like a car: high thrust, low impulse for moving in and out of orbit, then lower thrust to conserve fuel during long cruises. Constant acceleration, even at a measly fraction of a g, could get them anywhere in the solar system and back in enough time that the crew didn’t either starve or go insane from isolation.
Less time also allowed for a smaller crew, which in turn translated to less mass they had to carry around. That was good, as a serious long-duration ship was going to be almost ninety percent propellant.
She waited for the pork chop plots to compile—graphs of time against velocity change, they defined the total energy a ship needed to move about the solar system. More velocity equaled less time, and vice versa, with a limited range of optimal solutions in between. The multicolored blob that resulted was roughly the shape of a pork chop, thus the name.
Over time she’d generated a sizeable stack of the things, all for round trips from Earth to various solar system targets, with her focus being the outer planets. Now that SpaceX was sending ships to Mars every couple of years, the action for NASA would be everywhere else: the asteroids, Jupiter, Saturn and beyond.
She’d seen Jupiter, if only for a few hours as they shot past the gas giant on their way to the Kuiper Belt. The edge of the solar system was where her interests lay, and that was what had been taking so much time. The velocity graphs were dependent on the beginning and end states—that is, where the ship originated and where it was going. And when one wasn’t quite sure where they were going, the variables could become too much to handle.
Her most recent run at this—for she’d been fine-tuning it on a regular basis—had used their best estimate for the location of the elusive Planet Nine. Traci had been indulging herself with this exercise ever since she’d come back to work in the Astronaut Office, tweaking the model’s assumptions and looking for any advantage that might offer Jack a way home. That Magellan hadn’t been heard from for years had been immaterial to her. Functional or not, it was out there. He was out there.
Her rational brain kept telling her it was a hopeless exercise, yet she’d kept at it. Each time she’d begin with a quick, silent prayer: for wisdom, for insight, for a revelation that God would waive the laws of physics just this once because it was cosmically unfair for a perfectly healthy person to have willingly sacrificed himself to give her a shot at staying alive.
Studying the graphs and knowing how much propellant was left in Magellan’s tanks only cemented her exasperation with him. Why did you do that? Why hurtle yourself out into the dark at a planet that might not exist? There was plenty of evidence of a massive gravity well out there, but Earth-based telescopes had failed to spot it. Hubble and Webb had likewise come up empty-handed. Jack’s plan had relied on eventually having that gravity—if not to capture him into orbit, to at least bend his trajectory back Sunward as Magellan wasn’t going to have nearly enough propellant left to do so itself. If Nine wasn’t there, he wasn’t coming back.
Even if it was, what were the chances of him making it back to Earth alive? It was still going to take longer than he could expect to live, hibernating or otherwise.
She instinctively knew why he’d done it: The discoveries at Pluto had rattled him, deeply challenging his assumptions of life’s origins, if not its meaning. It was evidence not only of panspermia, of life on Earth seeded from deep space, but possibly of guided evolution by a higher intelligence. Of creation. God’s own freezer, full of the raw ingredients needed to spark life.
He had wanted to see for himself what else might be hiding out there. If it was something too faint to image from Earth, he was going to get close enough to see it and at least send spectrographic data home. If the journey outlasted him, so be it.
She rubbed at her eyes as the data compiled one more time, one more tweak of numbers, one more desperate search for deliverance hiding in the margins. Even if Nine was there, even if it held enough mass to turn him back Earthward, there wouldn’t be enough time.
Which was why she had given up on studying Magellan’s options long ago. Instead, she was examining the latest plot for Columbus.
The numbers told her nothing of the ship itself, only how much velocity change it would need to make a round trip within a given timeframe. The short answer was a lot. They could only add so much fuel, which meant they would have to shed mass. How light could they possibly make a spacecraft that needed to be loaded up with almost four years’ worth of consumables?
The answer depended on the size of the crew. Their mission had demonstrated how small that could be if they were willing to take advantage of an AI like Daisy, which Jack had taken to the next level.
Right before he’d disappeared.
No telemetry, not even an infrared signature from his exhaust. That had given rise to some of the more alarming theories as to what else could account for a large gravity well with no visible body at its center: namely, a primordial black hole. Not from a collapsing star—there was no evidence to think one had ever been that close to our system—but a gravitational hiccup, a bubble left over from the frothy birth of the infant universe.
The idea of Jack falling into a black hole was not a thought she wanted to entertain, and she’d taken some comfort in the utter lack of an energy signature. Swallowing a ship the size of Magellan would have been unmistakable thanks to the strange perspective of relativity. As the ship accelerated to near light speed along the event horizon, the slower it would appear until it seemed to freeze in place before vanishing from existence, shredded to atoms by the extreme gravity.
So what else might account for a missing spacecraft? It could be as simple as him still being on the far side of their mystery planet in an exceedingly long orbital period. Daisy would’ve steered them ahead of the planet and into a retrograde orbit before disappearing behind it. Loss of signal, just like going around the far side of the Moon. It could’ve been as simple as that.
She’d been telling herself that for years.