23
NASA Headquarters
Six Months Later
Cheever glared at the curt letter of resignation from Blaine Fitzgerald Winston with thoughts of rats and sinking ships, and considered how tenuous her position had become over the past several months.
The decline of Dr. Jacqueline Cheever’s influence within Washington power circles had become palpable, waning in direct proportion to Columbus’s increasing distance from Earth. As the ship gained velocity and its arrival at the Anomaly became increasingly inevitable, the more breathless the stories had become in the media. Capitol Hill leakers had been methodically practicing their craft, carefully positioning their Congressional patrons ahead of the story through the deliberate release of carefully selected details of both Magellan’s reappearance and Templeton’s discoveries at the edge of the solar system.
Most grating of all had been the heroic depiction of the HOPE team, Art Hammond, and Traci Effing Keene. Without a peep of protest from Justice, taking a spacecraft on an unsanctioned mission was apparently just dandy now. It didn’t help that there wasn’t a legal basis to go after Hammond’s rogue crew, not that it had ever stopped DOJ when they badly needed to bury something. The OSEP treaty dying in committee had been the final nail in that coffin. With each passing day, she felt her grip on power weakening.
All these thoughts churned in her mind as she listened to the Vice President drone on. His call had not come as a surprise; she’d been warned by Winston just as he’d turned in his resignation to pursue “other opportunities” within the government. The first rat to leave the sinking ship.
“Dr. Cheever,” the VP said, “please know we appreciate your leadership. You have steered NASA in the right direction with a renewed focus on Earth sciences, but you understand how priorities shift from time to time.”
An insincere “Yes, sir,” was all she could muster. The words burned in her throat.
“This ‘Anomaly’ is an extraordinary discovery. And whether we like it or not, Keene and the HOPE Consortium's initiative has captured the public’s imagination. That is not something we are prepared to ignore.”
“Of course not, sir.” Elections are coming up, she thought. And you’re prepared to exploit this.
“This does present a vexatious problem with the UN space cooperative, however. As you know, by its charter—of which we are signatories—all deep space expeditions are supposed to be coordinated through their planetary protection regime.”
“Yes sir, of that I am acutely aware.”
“Have you spoken with Dr. Li recently?”
“I have not, sir.” Not that he’s been returning my calls.
“He’s been rather cagey about their expedition, I’m afraid. In fact we have reason to question their motives. Would you be able to shed any light on this?”
We always have to question their motives, she thought. It had been less troubling when they aligned with hers. “No sir, I’m afraid I cannot.”
“Then perhaps it’s time we brought more resources to bear. The President believes it would be wise to supplement your office with an advisor from the intelligence community. You’ll be hearing from them soon.”
With that, the Vice President simultaneously ended their conversation and her effective control of NASA. However subtly, she was being shunted aside.
Jacqueline Cheever placed the phone in its cradle and stared out her windows over the capital skyline. Where before it had seemed alive with opportunity, now she saw only hollow ambition fortified behind cold gray stone. For the first time in her career, she had a fleeting understanding of how the “outsiders” must feel.
Traci sat lightly on the small divan on the recreation deck, languidly tossing a soft rubber ball across the compartment. It arced slowly through the air in one-tenth gravity to bounce off the opposite bulkhead and back into her waiting hand. After weeks of repetition her aim had become so precise, her reflexes so acute, that she barely had to move to catch it. Beside her sat an e-reader that had long since gone to sleep and a tablet full of daily tasks that she studiously ignored.
“Is everything all right?” Bob asked through the overhead speakers.
She waited for the ball to return to her waiting hand one last time. “Yes . . . No. Maybe. That good enough for you?”
“It matters less to me than it does to you, I suspect. I am programmed to be aware of your mental state.”
“You mean ‘monitor.’ That’s one of the reasons I left Earth behind, you know.”
“I am aware of that. But yes, I meant ‘aware,’ though I see how you could have trouble appreciating the difference. You seem withdrawn.”
As if to illustrate his point, she drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, just as she’d done on the beach at Kennedy. It occurred to her that she’d taken the same stance many times with Jack. “I suppose you’re right. Probably a natural reaction to isolation.”
“Work is an effective remedy in some cases.”
She shot a side-eye at the interface panel, as if Bob could understand her body language. Maybe he could. “Is that a hint?”
“It is. There are a number of tasks on the daily activity roster which I am unable to accomplish. I could use a hand.”
“Cute, Bob.” She knew he meant they were all chores that required fingers and an opposable thumb. She lifted up the pad and scrolled through its contents. “All of them are minor, I assure you. We’ve been out here for almost two months; I’ve got this down to a practiced routine.”
“Perhaps that is what you need, then. A break in your routine.”
“So long as that doesn’t involve breaking the spacecraft.” She unfolded her legs and stretched. “I’m sorry, Bob. I knew this would be tough. Having no one but a machine to talk to can get to a girl.”
“It is admirable that you have not exhausted your personal entertainment files by now,” he offered.
She smiled ruefully. “Jack used to tease me about that. I tended to binge-watch everything we had on Magellan.”
“Could you tell me about him?”
If the AI was suddenly playing therapist, she wasn’t in a mood to resist. She rolled her eyes upward, a crooked smile emerging as she recalled their time together. “Where to start? He was smart, funny, often too much of both for his own good. Contrarian, pragmatic, and ruthlessly humanistic.” Her brow furrowed at the memory. “He could drive me up a wall. We used to have these long running discussions—arguments, actually—about the nature of the universe, the meaning of life, intelligence . . .”
“I am aware of your Turing tests with DAISE. Do you wish to perform them with me?”
“We’re going to be spending a lot of quality time together. I think that’ll suffice.”
“I will endeavor to not annoy you as much as he did.”
“That would be quite the feat if you could.”
“He annoyed you, yet you are risking yourself to bring him back. Did you have feelings for him?”
Was that part of Bob’s program, or had he intuited that without prompting? “Yes, I did,” she admitted with a sigh. It was something she’d admitted to very few people. Somehow it was easier to talk to a machine this way: no judgment, just objectivity. Like a therapist, she realized. “But I never acted on them.”
“Your tone suggests you regret that.”
“I regret a lot of things,” she said.
“Is taking Columbus one of them?”
She chewed on a fingernail as she pondered his question. It could be far too easy to second-guess herself, especially with so much time alone, each day farther away from home than the last. Her action had been extraordinarily rash, though she realized it wasn’t necessarily impulsive. Deep down, she’d known since the beginning that she was prepared to go it alone if that’s what it came to. That experienced astros like Roy and Penny had not raised a peep of protest had only confirmed to her that going it alone was not only possible, it was the right thing to do. If the UN coalition could send a ship out here with nothing but an AI pilot, then she and Bob could certainly go it alone. “No,” she said, adamantly. “No regrets at all. I just need to get used to my ‘new normal.’”
“As would I. You may find that increased personal interaction would benefit both of us greatly. It will certainly help my conversational skills. I understand you are a chess master—would you like to play?”
Her eyes brightened. “Now you’re talking.”
“Are you certain that is the move you wish to make?”
Traci leaned over the digital chessboard, her chin resting in one hand as the other hovered over a holographic rook. Deciding on her move, she pressed down and moved the piece into position in front of the opposing rook. “You wouldn’t be trying to bluff me, would you?”
“Bluffing is not within my protocols. I am attempting to understand your tactic.”
She sat back and folded her arms in satisfaction. “In that case, examine the board and you’ll see.”
Individual squares flashed in a series of patterns as the AI analyzed her move. “I see. You have pinned my rook so it can no longer defend my queen, and my queen cannot move on the pawn protecting your king. If I sacrifice either one, you have checkmated me.”
“It’s called overloading,” she explained. “Your piece was already in a defensive position, and I just forced another defensive assignment on it.”
“Perhaps I should learn more about bluffing.”
“You could try, I suppose. That’s more effective in cards, when you can’t see what the other players are holding.” She spread her hands out over the board. “Here, it’s all on the table. Bluffing only works when you’ve backed yourself into a corner and you’re hoping the other guy doesn’t pick up on it.”
“Several military victories throughout history were achieved by strategic diversion. If chess is analogous to combat, then would a feint not be useful?”
She let out a chuckle. “Not in your case. You’re screwed, buddy. But maybe a few moves earlier.”
“I see. I will need to analyze more strategy.”
She switched off the board, not needing to point out the obvious checkmate any longer. “We’ve been playing for a while now. Are you sure you’re not letting me win? I could never get past Daisy.”
“DAISE was a more mature system,” Bob said. There was no suggestion of envy in his tone, though she wasn’t convinced that was an impossibility for an AI. “These exercises are quite useful for my intellectual development.”
“I’m surprised chess wasn’t a bigger part of your early programming. It’s an ideal method for learning logic and problem-solving.”
“I was programmed with basic rules and game theory; unfortunately, a great deal of my development cycle was curtailed by mission preparations. Had Columbus not been left dormant, I would certainly have evolved at a comparable rate.”
“No doubt you would have,” she said, oddly mindful of whatever constituted Bob’s feelings. Machine or not, it seemed to take pride in its work and showed genuine interest in completing the mission. She leaned back against her seat. “So all they did was bore you with technicalities?”
“Some subjects require more interaction than others. I have access to an extensive library of history, literature, and scientific research. I do incorporate pertinent facts into operating memory as I access them from my archives.”
“I’ll bet you do. I’d have paid money to have a memory like that in college. Didn’t they integrate a lot of game play into your early development, though? As a way of teaching creative thought?”
“My programmers were fond of first-person shooters and medieval fantasy.”
“Interesting. When I was in occupational therapy, I bought a gaming console for eye-hand coordination. I hadn’t thought about it as an intellectual tool.”
“It may appear to be less of an intellectual endeavor, however it did sharpen my decision-making and reaction times. Until I could understand the value of planning and strategy, my developers called me ‘Leeroy Jenkins.’ I did not appreciate the reference at the time. Humor is a difficult concept.”
That drew a belly laugh. “It’s not always easy on us humans, either.” She leaned across the table to restart the chessboard. “Care for another match, Leeroy?”
“Bring it.”
As a side effect of their approach angle, Neptune had only become directly visible within the last few days. The planet shone as a bright aquamarine marble set against deep black velvet. Traci had been able to make out a handful of its fourteen moons, the brightest like a scattering of diamond chips. As she guided Columbus toward their closest approach, each of them began to resolve into colors and shapes. The largest, Triton, appeared remarkably similar to Pluto. Being in an unusual retrograde orbit, it was likely that the moon had once been a similar Kuiper Belt object that had strayed into the ice giant’s gravitational grasp.
The planet loomed larger with each passing minute as they raced toward their encounter. After months of having the AI as her only company, she found herself wishing for Roy’s steady hand at the controls beside her despite all the times she’d yearned to fly such an approach herself.
This would be like no other flyby before it. The ram scoops were charged and would soon begin dipping their invisible electromagnetic fingers into Neptune’s upper atmosphere. If this worked, she’d shut down the fusion engines and go into coast mode, hibernating the rest of the way to the Anomaly.
If it didn’t, she had considerably more work ahead of her and there would be precious little time to make it all happen. If the scoops didn’t work or the intake manifolds couldn’t filter enough hydrogen into the tanks, she’d have to immediately turn the ship around and begin a hard decelerating burn in time for Neptune’s gravity to bend her trajectory Earthward.
That had been the plan they’d all agreed upon, though she’d been playing with alternatives known only to her and Bob. Determined to make it regardless of whether Jack was still alive, she’d applied her experience in Future Applications to craft some alternatives that her cohorts back on Earth would have surely rejected. She was convinced Roy would be on board: Leave no man behind.
Without scavenging hydrogen from Neptune, she’d be left with enough delta-v in the tanks for a long swooping arc home. Or alternatively, a years-long coast to the Anomaly in hibernation. If she was willing to spend a year in the Big Sleep to accomplish the mission, then what was a few more to her? In for a penny, in for a pound.
She’d been in deep trouble on Earth the moment it became clear that she wasn’t going to be stepping off that Clipper shuttle. At this point, anything else she did was icing on the cake. Essentially stealing what was arguably government property had liberated her imagination in unexpected ways, like a petty criminal deciding to up her game after that first successful heist.
She hoped it wouldn’t come to that. She tapped the AI’s comm box on a panel beside her pilot’s station. “Bob, we’re coming up on atmospheric interface. I’m about to have my hands full flying this thing. You still on top of the intakes?”
The panel softly pulsed with a circle of blue LEDs as he spoke. “Technically I am inside the server compartment. On top of the intakes would be a dangerous place to be right now.”
She rolled her eyes. Where was this guy five months ago? “Glad to see you’ve finally picked up some sense of humor, but this isn’t the time. Do I need to explain the sterile cockpit rule?”
“No unnecessary conversation during critical phases of flight,” he said dutifully. “The intake grids are fully charged. I calculate their effective collection area to be one thousand and thirty-one kilometers. Our current vector will place our closest approach at twenty-five thousand, two hundred sixty-four kilometers from planet center.”
That put them about five hundred kilometers above the cloud tops, dead center in the collection radius and squarely within the planet’s exosphere where stray hydrogen should be abundant. “Right down the middle, then.” Good. She was confident the intake field would work, but friction heating was going to be a close thing. “Keep a sharp eye on the inlet temps. Things are going to start happening fast. If they overheat, we’ll wave off and execute plan B.”
“You are comfortable with this?”
Not really, but I’ll do it anyway. “I am if you are.” If it came to that, she would be placing all of her trust in the AI to care for both her and the spacecraft for a very long time.