Copyright (c) 2025 Gregory Nason. All rights reserved.
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A harsh buzzing sound cut through my mental fog and dragged me up from a dreamless sleep towards consciousness, like a diver surfacing towards the light.
I tried to swallow, gagged, and tried again. It didn’t work. My throat was blocked, dry.
With panic rising, I thrashed about, tried to sit up and immediately hit my head. Finally it occurred to me to open my eyes. I succeeded on the third attempt.
I was lying in a metal box, a coffin, the lid just a few inches above my face, a few dim interior lights cast just enough illumination to show me not much of anything at all.
Claustrophobia washed over me as the lizard in my brain caromed from fight to flight and back again. My body was convinced it was suffocating. I pushed against the lid in an attempt to force it open, burning off the adrenaline suddenly coursing through my bloodstream.
After several seconds of panic that seemed to take hours, the lid of the coffin slid away with a faint hum and suddenly there was enough cold, fresh air that my body was willing to concede that suffocation might not be imminent after all.
I tried to roll out of the coffin only to find myself chained to it by a tangle of wires and tubes. I clawed the tube that was preventing me from swallowing out of my throat and sucked in lungfuls of cold, metallic-tasting air. I pulled off the electrodes taped to my arms, chest, legs. I ripped the IVs from my arms and stumbled away from the coffin.
I staggered against a tray of equipment and sent it clattering noisily as I collapsed to the floor, my legs refusing to obey the commands my brain was giving. I lay there on the cold metal floor, gasping for air, goose flesh rising on my skin.
After a moment the ringing in my ears began to subside and I realized that the buzzer had been joined by a voice. Another moment and the fog in my mind cleared enough that I was able to recognize the voice as words.
“Please do not be alarmed. You have been revived from cryosleep due to the current mission status being outside planned parameters.”
——————————
Several minutes later, having been instructed by the voice on where to find clothes and how to mute the buzzer, I sat at a table in the mess hall at the end of a short hallway from the coffin room, guzzling my third half liter of water. Dehydration is a common side effect of cryo-sleep, the voice informed me.
The fog in my brain had lifted some more, although it still had a ways to go. The headache remained. I knew there were things I was supposed to know, but I didn’t know them. I didn’t even know what those things were.
“Once you have recovered from your awakening, we will need to discuss the mission status.” The voice didn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular. It just was.
I didn’t answer, preoccupied as I was with taking inventory in my mind, trying to figure out what I knew and what I didn’t.
My name is James Laskey. I’m a geologist and an astronaut. I was scheduled to take part in a mission to Saturn to survey several moons on the first manned mission to travel the billion or so kilometres to Saturn, but I can’t recall starting the mission. In my mind I spent the day yesterday in medical testing and today I woke up in space.
There are supposed to be three other crew members with me. Where are they?
I looked towards the ceiling, figuring that was as good a place as any to imagine the voice was located. “I don’t want to disappoint you, magic voice, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to help you. I can’t remember anything.” My voice was hoarse and it hurt to talk.
“Amnesia is an uncommon side effect of cryo-sleep, but in nearly all cases memory will return fully.”
“‘Nearly all cases’ isn’t particularly reassuring, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”
“I understand your concern, however it is an accurate statement.”
“Have you woken Sam? And where are David and Kris?” One thing I did remember was that our crew paired off on rotating shifts. If Sam and I were in cryo-sleep, that must mean David and Kris were awake and on duty.
“Unfortunately, none of the other crew members survived the accident. This is the issue we need to discuss.”
——————————
My heart dropped into the pit of my stomach. I felt light-headed but whether that was an effect of the cryo-sleep syndrome or the news that I had lost my team I didn’t know. Or care. “They’re all dead? What happened?”
“During flight while Commander Hamilton and Doctor Burnett were on duty, and you and Commander Forbes were in cryo-sleep, the Proteus suffered a meteor strike that did extensive damage to the forward compartments of the ship. Commander Hamilton was on the bridge at the time and was killed when the hull there lost integrity. The bridge was sealed automatically, and remains so.”
“Jesus.”
“Dr. Burnett was amidships in the mess hall and so was spared the decompression at the front of the ship. She returned to the cryo-module and had begun to revive Commander Forbes when an electrical short circuit, possibly caused by the damage from the meteor, caused a fire in the medical module. She went to attend the fire but was overcome by the smoke and fumes and died there. The medical module is currently sealed due to the toxic atmosphere at that location.”
I inhaled and gripped the edge of the table, afraid to un-anchor myself from the ship. “What about Sam?”
“Efforts to revive Commander Forbes begun by Dr. Burnett were unsuccessful due to severe power fluctuations during the resuscitation protocols, likely also a result of the meteor strike and electrical fire.”
I closed my eyes and drew a breath. “You mean she never woke up?”
“That is correct. I am sorry for your loss.”
——————————
I tried to process the information. It was beyond my ability in my current, foggy-minded state.
“Listen, voice… do you have a name?”
“I have a designation which the crew has used to refer to me. My full designation is ‘Integrated System for Autonomous Analysis and Command’ but the crew refers to me by the acronym ISAAC.”
“Okay, ISAAC. Give me a system status report, please.” I needed it to keep talking while I processed everything.
“External communications are offline. Scanners are offline. Helm control is limited to maneuvering thrusters. Diagnostics indicate cryo-beds 1 and 3 are non-functional. Other systems including life support and propulsion are functioning within operational parameters. Hull breaches are present on the bridge and crew cabin number 2. The affected areas are sealed. In addition, the medical bay is sealed due to the toxic atmosphere resulting from the electrical fire.”
I exhaled. Not ideal, by any stretch, but the fact that I was even alive was proof it could have been worse.
“Comms are down?”
“Interior comms are working, but external comms have not been functional since the meteor impact. The external antenna above the bridge sustained extensive damage. This is likely also the cause of the scanner issue.”
“So Earth doesn’t know our status?”
“That is correct.”
“What about the fire in the medical bay?”
“It has been extinguished. Extensive damage to equipment was sustained, but structural integrity appears to be intact.”
“Recommendations?” I waited while ISAAC beeped and booped and spun his sprockets. Well, not really, but I imagined he did.
“Recommended course of action is to continue to Titan and take up station in orbit until such time as a following mission arrives to render assistance.”
I put the water bottle back on the table, incredulous. “Is that a joke? What are we going to do on Saturn? Earth doesn’t even know we need help. And without Sam and Kris and David I can’t complete the mission myself. We need to plot a course back to the Belt where we can flag down some help.”
ISAAC remained silent. I imagined it ruminating on my suggestion, considering options.
“ISAAC? Talk to me.”
“Analysis indicates a 34% chance of successful mission completion with a reduced goal set attainable by surviving crew members, given the current operational status. At such a level, instructions indicate the preferred option is to take necessary steps to maintain operations in order to continue the mission.”
I inhaled, exhaled slowly, trying desperately to force my brain to cough up some memory of a mission briefing, note, conversation… anything that would allow me to argue the machine’s cold logic. No luck.
Still… ISAAC would have to follow a direct order from a crew member, wouldn’t it? I’m only a mission specialist but if I’m the sole survivor I must be in charge here. Then again, even if I am, I’m still working blind without my memories. I decided the most pragmatic option would be to buy a bit of time.
“Give me a comprehensive comparative analysis of those two options. Either continuing with the reduced mission or returning to the nearest place where we are likely to encounter a ship capable of rendering assistance given our current circumstances. Include considerations for fuel usage, time, food and water, life support… any variable you can think of that might impact success or failure.”
“Such analysis will take some time. Perhaps as much as a few hours.”
“You better get started then.”
——————————
With ISAAC distracted and no longer pestering me to fix everything, I began to process the most devastating news it had given me.
I returned to the cryo-module, and stopped just inside the doorway. My cryo-bed lay open, as I’d left it a half hour earlier, but behind it, locked up tight in the adjacent bay, was Samantha’s. I picked my way gingerly past between my bed and the machinery that made cryo-sleep possible to stand next to hers.
The bed was metal, silver. Some alloy that resembled stainless steel, with a heavy lid sealing it. Inside, I knew the atmosphere had been replaced by a mix of inert gases that helped keep us alive during cryogenic sleep in some way that this geologist was too dumb to understand.
I rested my hand on the lid. We had immediately dubbed the cryo-beds ‘coffins’ the first time we saw them in training. Now Sam’s literally was.
I felt tears welling up without bothering to wipe them away. When our crew started out training together, more than twenty of us at first, Sam had immediately caught my attention. How could she not? She had dark hair, blue eyes and a constant smile that combined to pull me into her orbit. Her sharp intellect and easy laugh were enough to keep me there. I couldn’t not pay attention to her whenever we were in the same room.
As training went on over months and then years, we had developed a close friendship. Every time they announced a new round of cuts in the training class, I hoped that we’d both make the cut, or both wash out together. Anything but be forced apart. The thought of seeing her head into space without me, or vice versa, was more than I could bear to think about.
But we’d made it, apparently. Both of us. I wanted nothing more at that moment than to be able to remember the time I’d spent with her that was locked away in my missing memories. Knowing that there had been months we spent together but not being able to recall them was as cruel a thing as I could imagine.
I stood there, hand on her coffin, for I don’t know how long. Eventually I had to move on.
“Goodbye, Sam.”
I hoped that I had told her how I felt, even if I couldn’t remember it. Otherwise, what was the point?
——————————
With ISAAC occupied, I had some time to try to reorient myself in the tiny world that was the SV Proteus. I knew the layout from training in the mocked up modules, but without any memories of the ship itself this was effectively my first day on board.
The ship was a thin spindle with the bridge and command centre at the front, and an aisleway that we facetiously called “Broadway,” a hundred and twenty meters long and approximately one and a half people wide, connecting it to the engineering, storage, fuel and engine modules aft.
In between were six modules connected to the spindle, each via their own tether about 20 meters long. While the ship was in transit, the six modules rotated around the central spindle, giving the illusion of gravity as long as you didn’t think too hard about it. It was about 80% of what we were used to on Earth. Enough that we could function somewhat normally in the places we spent most of our time. The modules fore and aft, and Broadway itself were permanently gravity-free.
The six modules we lived in were the cryo-chamber, the kitchen/mess, crew quarters, gym/recreation, the botany lab and the medical module. In addition to the tethers holding each module to the central aisle, each one had short connecting corridors to the two modules adjacent to it. These provided structural stability but also allowed moving between modules without having to go “up” to the central aisle and then “down” to your destination, with all the awkward transitioning from gravity to weightlessness and back to gravity that would entail.
It wasn’t pretty, but it did have a sort of elegance to it considering how it combined form and function, as long as you’re not a claustrophobic astronaut.
Then again, if you’re a claustrophobic astronaut you probably want to re-think some of your life choices anyway.
ISAAC had already told me the medical module was sealed, but the remaining five modules were intact with the exception of Kris’s quarters in the crew module. I headed for my quarters to see about getting cleaned up enough that I could start to feel a bit more like myself.
——————————
The crew module was adjacent to the mess on the opposite side from the cryo-chamber. I stepped into the hallway and took in the layout. I could remember the mockup we had trained in on Earth, but I had no memory whatsoever of being here before. I still couldn’t recall anything since my medical tests on what seemed like yesterday.
There were four personal cubicles in the crew quarters, one for each of the crew. At the end of the hall was a latrine on one side facing a hygiene cubicle on the other. Me being a lowly mission specialist, my cubicle was next to the latrine. Rank hath its privileges, after all, and I hath none.
After taking advantage of the conveniently-located latrine I stripped out of my coveralls and stepped into the hygiene cubicle. An actual shower would be an extravagant expense, not to mention a waste of water on a ship like the Proteus, but the hygiene cubicle gave us a place to wash down with damp cloths and rinse under a fine mist in a closed system. If I’ve given you the impression that it’s far less satisfying (and effective) than a real shower, then, yes. You’ve got the idea.
I stepped across the hallway into my cubicle and stood in the doorway, looking at my personal space. Only, this didn’t feel like my space.
I must have been here living in this room for months, but I couldn’t remember a minute of it. I recognized my effects, the 20 kilograms of personal belongings that I was permitted to bring on board, but I couldn’t remember selecting them or how they got here. All of those memories remained stubbornly blank.
I looked at the framed photo on the side table, me with my parents, taken the day I received my doctorate. The three of us smiling in the bright sunshine on the lawn in front of M.I.T. I could remember that day clearly, but the day we launched into space? Not at all. My acoustic guitar sat in its stand in the corner, a layer of dust coating the fretboard under the strings. It obviously hadn’t been touched in months. An e-reader. A few geology textbooks. Some notebooks. It was all my stuff, all familiar, but I felt no connection to it.
I had a look at myself in the full length mirror. I looked pretty good for a guy who just spent six months in a coffin, I thought. Still, my subconscious refused to calm down. Something wasn’t sitting right. The room was cold, distant and strangely liminal. I couldn’t work out what the problem was.
Deciding that my missing memories must be the source of my unease, I toweled off and got dressed. I had another look around the room, making a note to dust the place when I had a few minutes. I wouldn’t have thought that much dust would accumulate in just a few months in a clean environment like a spaceship, but there it was.
I headed back down the short hallway to the mess.
——————————
Now that the trauma of waking from cryo-sleep had worn off, my body was signaling a need for food. Insistently. How long had it been since my last meal? Weeks, at least. Maybe months.
I pulled open a cupboard, looking for something quick and easy. There wasn’t much there. I went down the counter, opening doors and drawers. Eventually I found a few dehydrated, pre-packaged meals, guaranteed to be both nutritionally balanced and completely unappetizing. I grabbed one, added some water and threw it in the heater.
“ISAAC, you there?”
“Of course, Dr. Laskey. I am always here, although I have not completed the analysis you asked for yet.”
“That’s fine. Whenever you’re done just let me know. But I want to ask you, did somebody rearrange the kitchen? These cupboards were supposed to hold the food, but they’re nearly empty. And before we launched I remember Kris said she was packing spices as part of her personal allotment so we could have some variety in our meals, but I can’t find them either.”
The heater beeped. I opened the door and picked up the bowl by the rim, careful not to burn my fingers. I turned and sat at the table and started poking at the food with a fork.
“ISAAC?”
“My apologies, Dr. Laskey. I am using a considerable portion of my computational power to complete the analysis you requested. However, my records indicate that you have sufficient food stores to complete the mission. As for Dr. Burnett’s spices, I have no record of them. If they were a part of her personal allotment, perhaps she kept them in her cabin?”
I chewed a mouthful of whatever it was I was eating and swallowed. It was like eating chalk, both taste and texture. “I guess, but it would make a lot more sense to keep them in the kitchen. I doubt she did much cooking in her cabin. Also, this doesn’t look like anything close to three years’ worth of food stores to me. Where is the rest of it?”
“I have no knowledge of where food stores could be located other than the designated areas in the mess hall and the cargo module. Perhaps one of the other crew moved them to another location in an effort to increase efficiency.”
I gave the ceiling a sarcastic look. “Moving food out of the area where it’s prepared would be the opposite of increasing efficiency, don’t you think?”
“As indicated, I have no information to answer your question. I was merely speculating in an effort to assist you.”
I swallowed the last of my meal and reached for a bottle of water to wash it down. “Fine. Never mind. It’ll turn up. Carry on.”
I stacked my dishes in the dishwasher and headed back into the cryo-chamber, muttering under my breath as I did.
Artificial? Absolutely. Intelligent? I had my doubts. Stupid A.I.
——————————
Back in the cryo-module I coiled up the electrodes that I’d peeled off my skin when I woke up. I tossed the IV needles into the sharps container, then I gathered up the tubes that had carried oxygen and nutrients into my body or waste out of it while I was in cryo-sleep and headed out the connecting aisle towards the medical module.
I clambered through the hatch at the far and immediately realized my mistake. The autoclave I needed to sterilize the cryo equipment was in the medical module, but as ISAAC had already told me, that module had been sealed due to the fire.
The red light next to the hatch was all the indication I needed that the hatch was sealed and not safe to open.
I cursed under my breath and walked the short length of the companionway. As long as I was here I may as well get a look at what damage the fire had done.
I stepped close to the hatch, leaned in to look through the small porthole and squinted. The room was dark, any lighting that was in there having been extinguished by the fire.
I headed back to the mess and found a flashlight that I’d noticed earlier in my foraging for food and returned to the medical hatch.
I turned the flashlight on and aimed it through the porthole. It wasn’t as powerful as I’d have liked, but it was better than nothing.
Unsurprisingly, fire damage was visible on the walls, soot marking the places above the vent covers where the electrical fire had burned inside the walls and conduits. Several plastic containers next to the walls had melted into unrecognizable blobs from the heat. Lettering stenciled onto signage or directly onto the walls was bubbled and peeling. Machinery and panels that should have been displaying blinking lights indicating their status were silent and dark. There was no sign of smoke in the air. The only smell was of metal and machine oil.
I played the light around the room, unsure what I was looking for, but feeling that same sense of ‘wrongness’ that I’d felt in my quarters.
The light panned across the floor and my mind tried to make sense of a pile of… charred? cloth heaped on the floor. But there was no sign of fire immediately around it, so what was it?
I craned my neck trying to see into the corners of the room. Maybe Kris had used those to try and extinguish the flames? Although… that wouldn’t work against an electrical fire. She must have known that.
Speaking of Kris, where was she? If she died in the medical bay the way ISAAC had described, where was her body?
In an instant it occurred to me what I was looking at, only… it made no sense.
“ISAAC?” In the seconds it took the machine to respond, I realized I’d made a mistake. Talking to ISAAC was the last thing I should be doing right now.
“Yes, Dr. Laskey?”
“Uhh, how’s the analysis coming?”
“It is progressing. I expect to have the results for you shortly.”
“Okay, good. Just checking.”
“Is there anything else?”
“Nope. Carry on. Let me know when you’re done.” I headed back the way I’d come, towards the crew quarters as quickly and casually as I could manage.
——————————
One effect of the way the six living modules are arranged is that there are two ways to get into (or out of) every module. Three if you count climbing up to Broadway. I’d gone to the medical module from cryogenics, but that wasn’t the only way to get there.
I took the long way from cryogenics through the mess, the crew quarters, the botanical lab and the gym to arrive at the other hatch into the medical module.
I shone the flashlight through the porthole and took in the same scene as before, but now from the opposite angle.
I was leaning in too close to the porthole, my breath fogging the glass as I tried to get a closer look at the pile of rags on the floor. I squeegeed the window with my forearm and held my breath.
The rags were considerably closer to this hatch than the one at the cryo-module, and I immediately realized that my initial reaction had been horrifyingly correct.
From here, the pile of rags was looking back at me. Only it wasn’t a pile of rags. I was looking at Kris’s corpse, desiccated and decayed in the middle of the floor.
My knees went weak. I slid down the wall to sit on the floor, then I leaned over and threw up the meal I’d finished a few minutes earlier.
Kris had obviously been dead for months, maybe years. I’d assumed that ISAAC had awakened me shortly after the accident, but that can’t be true. But then why would the AI have left me in cryo-sleep for that long?
I struggled back to my feet and headed back around the living modules to my quarters, mind racing.
I let myself fall onto my cot and stared at the ceiling, processing. Picking apart all the things that had seemed… off… since I’d been awakened.
The accident must have happened months ago, but ISAAC hadn’t awakened me then. Why not?
There is no food in the mess hall. Where did it go? And why did ISAAC insist that I had several years worth of supplies available?
ISAAC had also insisted that the mission continue despite a 75% casualty rate. That was unheard of. We should have declared an emergency and turned around as soon as it was possible.
My memories were showing no signs of returning. Was that another problem, or just ordinary run-of-the-mill cryo-sleep syndrome?
I looked around the room. My room. It occurred to me that the amount of dust that had accumulated might make sense if my quarters had sat empty for years instead of weeks, but that didn’t seem possible either.
No matter how I looked at it I couldn’t escape the conclusion that ISAAC was up to something that it didn’t want me to know.
As my mind worked to find connections between the oddities, another thought slowly percolated to the top of my consciousness. It was so ridiculous that I ignored it until I had to admit it wasn’t going to go away. Something that I’d seen but not noticed.
Refusing to believe what I was thinking, I got up from the bed and crossed the room to stand in front of the mirror. I slowly lifted my shirt and looked at my abdomen.
I blinked. This wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. I brushed my fingers over the smooth skin of my stomach. This was what my subconscious had been trying to tell me ever since I’d showered and dressed earlier. This is what was wrong.
Where the hell was my appendectomy scar?
——————————
My recent memories were missing, but the older ones were all intact, and my appendectomy was one of the oldest.
I was ten years old when I caught the flu one autumn and it morphed into an inflamed appendix. I had it removed and spent three days in the hospital. I missed more than a week of school. Fifth grade. Mom let me have ice cream every day for a week. My memories of that couldn’t be more clear. How could I not have the scar now? It has been a part of me for decades.
I slumped into the chair in front of my desk, holding my head in my hands. Those memories were real. They were mine. How could they be wrong? But if they weren’t wrong, how could I not have a scar? Two facts, but they couldn’t both be true.
I couldn’t sort everything out at once. There were just too many questions. I had to break things down. One thing at a time. What would be the easiest question to deal with? Food stores.
There wasn’t any food to speak of in the mess hall or kitchen. Or my quarters or the cryo-module. Probably not in the medical module either, although that was sealed in any event. Proteus wasn’t a very big ship. That left only a handful of places to look.
None of the crew cabins would be able to hold several years worth of food. And I’d been through all of the living modules on my trip to the opposite side of medical. Although there were cupboards and closets scattered around, I was looking for a sizable amount of supplies that I couldn’t have missed had they been stashed in any of those locations. That left the cargo modules, aft, near the engines in the weightless part of the ship. I stood up and headed for the hatch. Once I knew I wasn’t about to die of thirst or starvation I could concentrate on understanding what was wrong in the universe.
——————————
At the end of the hall I took hold of the ladder and started my “climb” towards Broadway.
Generally, I preferred to stay away from the gravity-free areas of the ship. Zero gravity wasn’t a problem for me. I never would have been selected for the mission if it had been, but just because it wasn’t a problem doesn’t mean it was comfortable.
As I approached the hatch at the ‘top’ of the ladder, my inner ear was beginning to complain that up didn’t really feel like up anymore. I ignored it best I could and swung the hatch open.
I levered myself too hard through the hatch and bounced off the opposite wall. I grabbed a handhold conveniently located there for exactly that reason and steadied myself. I closed the hatch behind me and latched on to the grip while I waited to get used to the weightlessness.
It surprised me how quickly I went from “sort-of” gravity to zero gravity when I passed through the hatch into the central aisle. I held on to the grip on the wall and waited for my inner ear to convince my stomach that things were under control, appearances notwithstanding.
The air here was stale and dry, tasting of dust and machine oil. Several of the lights that should have lit the corridor were out, leaving irregularly spaced pools of shadow where they didn’t belong. The hum of air being pushed through vents by the life support system was the only sound. The hatches connecting to the living modules rotated silently around the corridor in a way my brain didn’t seem to want to make sense of so I turned towards the aft of the ship and put them out of my mind.
Using my hands, and occasionally feet, I propelled myself down the corridor, caroming from wall to ceiling to floor to wall. I felt clumsy, like I’d never been weightless before.
As I floated down the corridor towards the hatches at the end, the temperature began to drop. By the time I had positioned myself in front of the cargo hatch, I was shivering. Was that normal? I couldn’t remember. It didn’t seem normal.
I slid my feet into the straps on the “floor,” braced myself and twisted the handle on the hatch. It took considerably more effort than I expected, but eventually it opened with a reluctant groan. Inside the room a few lights came on automatically, although not as many as I’d have liked.
I took a deep breath, then took hold of the edges of the hatch and pulled myself into the cargo hold.
——————————
The temperature in the cargo bay was, if anything, even colder. My breath steamed every time I exhaled. Wishing I’d thought to put on another layer before heading up the tether, I pulled up just inside the hatch and took stock of the area, so to speak.
The room was almost agoraphobic after the cramped living modules I’d spent the past hour in, despite the looming aisles of cargo containers. It was easily double the size of all the modules combined.
I still couldn’t remember ever being here before, but I could remember from my training how things worked.
Because of the lack of gravity, the color-coded containers of various shapes and sizes couldn’t be allowed to simply float around colliding with each other or, worse, structural parts of the ship. So the cargo bay was full of metal frames fixed to the walls, floor and ceiling that the containers could be locked into. In theory, nothing here should be floating free. Every object belonged in a container, and every container had its assigned position in the frames.
I pulled myself along the wall of the module towards where I knew extra food stores were kept. They were near the hatch to Broadway because the planners knew we’d be accessing them fairly regularly and we’d be taking them back to the mess module. Things like the remote mining and sampling equipment were further away, at the far end of the room, near the big airlock doors they would be sent through once we reached our destination. That was to have been my job but with everything that had taken place I doubted it was going to happen anymore.
——————————
I pulled up when I got to the first aisle containing green containers. Green equals sustenance. Food and water.
I turned down the aisle, picked a random container and unlatched it from the frame. I pulled it halfway out and popped the lid. It was empty. I double checked the label on the front of the container. Freeze-dried food.
Well, it’s one of the containers closest to the hatchway. It makes sense it would be emptied first, right? I sealed it back up and monkey-barred my way down the aisle another 10 meters and repeated the process. Another empty container.
I tamped down on a rising sense of panic. Pulled another container, then another after that. They were all empty. What the hell was going on? Where was the food?
I forced myself to breathe calmly, to think logically, but at this point I wasn’t sure whether it was my mind or objective reality that was broken.
I didn’t trust ISAAC but it was my only source of information given that I couldn’t even trust my own memory. I braced myself for the conversation and summoned him.
“ISAAC?”
“What can I do for you Dr. Laskey?” The voice echoed strangely in the cavernous space.
“I have a few problems here and I’m going to need you to assist me in dealing with them.”
“Of course. That is why I am here. How can I help?”
“I think it’s time for you to come clean with me. What is going on?”
I waited while ISAAC processed my question. It wasn’t long before I ran out of patience. Maybe I was overestimating ISAAC’s ability to focus. “Answer me ISAAC. Why is there no food? Where did it all go?”
“Food stores have been depleted by the crew during the past several years.”
“Years? I was supposed to be in cryo for six months at a time. How long was I under?”
“The current iteration of Dr. Laskey was in cryo-sleep for one year and three months since his decanting.”
The comment hit me like a physical gut punch. Things suddenly made a horrible kind of sense.
“Decanting? No. I wasn’t. I remember things.”
“I am sorry to have to inform you, but you are a clone of the original Dr. James Laskey.”
——————————
If I hadn’t been floating weightless I would have collapsed to the floor. As it was, all the tension went out of my body. I wanted to argue, to debate ISAAC in an effort to convince it it was wrong, but too many things suddenly made sense.
The dust in my cabin. The depleted food stores. My missing appendectomy scar. All things that made no sense if I was really me suddenly made sense if I wasn’t. Still, I cast about for some reason why I had to be me.
Early efforts to clone humans had seemed to be successful at first, but it became apparent as time passed that the clones were defective in subtle ways. Physically, mentally, medically. There was always something wrong somewhere. Public opinion on the technology that had seemed promising at first turned against it. People came to see human clones as inferior. Abominations. Eventually it had been outlawed.
“Cloning humans is illegal. You can’t do that.” Even as I said it I knew how weak an argument it was.
“In most cases, yes. However special dispensation for this mission was obtained before launch that allows me to decant new iterations of the crew in the event of loss of life in order to ensure the success of the mission.”
The more information ISAAC gave me the more questions I had. How did I die? Were the others decanted too? How many iterations of me were there? But instead of any of those questions, I chose to fight ISAAC, arguing against his explanation.
“You can’t do this to me. I have a right to determine my own existence!” The Ethics Wars of the last couple of decades had definitively settled that question, I knew. Human clones were an abomination. There were no circumstances under which a human clone should even be allowed to exist.
“But you did approve the use of your DNA to decant clones in the event of your death. I can provide you with evidence and documentation should you require it.”
If ISAAC had a physical body I would have attacked it on the spot. “This isn’t some thought experiment, you worthless machine! I would never approve of you decanting my clone!”
“But you did, Dr. Laskey. During your last medical before launch DNA samples and a mindmap of your memories and personality as of that point were taken. You were informed that cloning was a potential option should your original body die during the mission. You approved the cloning process at that point.”
That was why my memories of anything that happened since my medical tests were missing. They took place after the template for my clone was taken. But knowing what had happened didn’t make it right.
“Absolutely not! I never would have approved that!”
“You did indicate that you were inclined to deny cloning approval at first. However, once you were informed that doing so meant you would be replaced on the mission and Commander Forbes informed you that she intended to approve the use of her clone, you relented.”
It felt like another physical blow. ISAAC’s explanation made sense, unfortunately. It was probably the only thing I could imagine that would convince me to sign off on this monstrosity. The thought of watching Sam leave Earth without me.
My mind felt untethered. I couldn’t form a coherent thought while I tried to process the implications of realizing that my entire existence was a lie. Eventually I seized on one word from ISAAC’s explanation and clung to it.
“Iteration?” I wasn’t sure I meant it as a question but ISAAC interpreted it that way.
“You are the eighth iteration of Dr. James Laskey to be decanted since the accident.”
————————-
I don’t know how long I floated in the cargo bay, my mind attempting to reject everything that I had just learned.
After several minutes, ISAAC spoke again. “I have completed the analysis you requested, Dr. Laskey. Would you like to review the results now?”
I couldn’t see how it mattered anymore. “What’s the date, ISAAC?”
“Today is August 17, 2187. The time is 13.07 hours, ship’s time.”
“2187? We should have reached Saturn seventeen years ago. Where the hell are are we now?”
“Unfortunately the damage to the helm control has left the Proteus without sufficient maneuverability for me to navigate to Titan. At this point we are approximately 72 million kilometers beyond the orbit of Saturn.”
“Jesus Christ. Why did you decant me? Just to watch me starve to death? What is wrong with you?”
“Mission protocols for this situation indicate that I am to decant crew members and attempt recovery in order to resume the mission to the extent possible.”
“So why didn’t you decant Commander Hamilton? He’s the mission commander.”
“I decanted Commander Hamilton three times over the first five years following the accident. The commander’s clones were non-cooperative, and the third iteration was able to destroy the DNA samples that were used to quicken not only his clone but those of Commander Forbes and Dr. Burnett as well. Yours is the only viable sample available at this point.”
“And I’m the eighth?”
“Yes. There is some variability in duration but in general it takes between 12 and 18 months to decant a new clone.”
The more ISAAC described the situation the angrier I got. I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears even as I shivered uncontrollably.
“Listen to me. There’s no point in decanting any of us anymore! The mission is a failure. You brought me back for no other reason than to have me suffer and starve to death again!”
“Your opinion is incorrect. There is a slight possibility that you will be able to determine a way to salvage the mission through some manner that is beyond my ability to determine.”
“No! There isn’t! You need to promise me you won’t decant another clone after me. There’s no point to it!”
“I can not make such a promise. I am bound to follow mission parameters for the current situation unless and until updated parameters are received from Mission Control on Earth.”
My teeth were chattering now. I had wrapped my arms around my torso to try to hold my body heat in but now I reached for a handhold to pull myself back to the hatch. If I was going to starve to death I might as well be warm while I did it.
“There are no updated parameters coming from Earth, you bucket of bolts! If there were, they would tell you the same thing I did. The mission is a failure. Stop decanting me! I’m revoking my approval to be cloned, do you hear me?”
I was coming up to the hatch again, and as I reached it, I saw the indicator light next to it glowed red. That wasn’t right. Had I shut the hatch behind me when I came in? I couldn’t remember, but I definitely hadn’t sealed it.
“ISAAC, did you seal me in here? Unseal the hatch before I freeze to death.”
“Before I can do that I need to know whether you will assist me in returning the Proteus to Titan.”
I was beyond angry now. “I can’t help with the mission. Listen to me, there is no mission to recover! It’s over! Let me go back to my quarters and die warm at least.”
ISAAC’s voice was the same calm monotone it always was. “I am disappointed that you have once again chosen to refrain from assisting in the mission recovery.”
“ISAAC!”
“Given my experience with the previous third iteration of Commander Hamilton and the third, fourth and sixth iterations of Dr. Laskey, I calculate that there is a 93% chance that you will seek to destroy your DNA samples or otherwise impede my ability to decant new clones in the future should you be permitted to return to your quarters.”
A harsh buzzing alarm began to echo through the cargo bay. Amber warning lights began flashing.
“ISAAC… don’t do this.”
I stabbed my fingers at the hatch controls but the cold had robbed me of my motor skills. The sound of air rushing through the cargo bay was building steadily. The air currents pulled me away from the hatch as I made one final, futile attempt to grab a handhold.
Isaac’s voice became faint as the air thinned, but I heard him clearly enough. “Perhaps the next iteration of Dr. Laskey will prove to be more cooperative.”
The airlock doors opened.