We know a lot about seedships, taking the human genome out into the great black. Of course, the ship’s computer gets people to where they need to be. You should know what it’s program is, but sometimes, there might be another program or mission. Can you fight this additional program?
Mark leaned against the cold railing of the bridge to check his console, steam rising out of the warm metal cup cradled in his hands. Looking at the round projection of planet Gliese 1061 C, he could almost smell the soil. He could almost feel the wind biting his cheeks and taste the virgin atmosphere, air free from the staleness of the ship, air that didn’t smell like metal and sour laundry.
He cleared his throat. “EMMA made another burn, captain. She’s holding two-zero-zero,” Mark said. He took a sip of black, gritty coffee and grimaced. King’s turn at the brew pot, no doubt.
“Copy. Thank you, Mark.” Captain Katrina Olmov stood with hands clasped behind her back, looking out the wide viewport at the bright arc of planet below. The sleeves of her jumpsuit were tied snugly around her waist. She turned to address them.
“When we stepped foot on this bridge ten months ago, I told you that there was no more important mission than ours. No more important crew than ours. Twelve of us to watch over ten thousand. Twelve to bring the Prosperity safely into orbit. Twelve to watch over EMMA as she watches over us. Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived.”
Some exchanged hugs. Some patted backs. Chief Engineer King wiped away tears with the sleeve of his jumpsuit. Mark simply took a sip of coffee, conjuring up images of a hab on the edge of a river with neat little rows of crops sprouting up through the rich soil. Perhaps a wife, even, if she wasn’t too much like the captain.
Captain Olmov had been a good enough skipper, but her incessant optimism was enough to make him want to walk out of an airlock. The crew had a pool going for the first one to make her angry enough to curse, but everyone stopped contributing after the captain’s handling of the lasagna incident.
As the planet drew closer, Mark had colored his fantasy with all the pleasant details of the life that awaited them. On more than one occasion, he had scrolled through the passenger manifest in search of potential matches. He even made a list once, until he forced himself to drop it in the incinerator.
Captain Olmov wrapped up. “But before we bring our brothers and sisters out of stasis, and keeping with the finest traditions of the fleet, I think a toast is in order.”
She reached under her station and produced a stack of metal cups and a dark green bottle of Pathfinder Whiskey. Cheers spread through the bridge at the appearance of the bottle. Smiling, she pulled the cork free and poured as First Officer Gruber passed them around.
Captain Olmov tucked a strand of dark hair behind an ear. “To the crews before us, to the Prosperity, and to new beginnings,” she said.
They raised their cups in unison, and threw them down the hatch.
“Alright,” the captain said, twisting her braided ponytail into a bun and pinning it. “Let’s get to work, guys. To your stations.”
The others hurried off the bridge into the bowels of the ship, each with a job to perform in preparation for waking the others. Mark took a seat at his station. He’d have more checks to run at the bottom of the hour, and nav solutions to verify for the drop to the surface, still weeks away.
“EMMA,” Captain Olmov said, inclining her head toward the ceiling, “let’s wake them up.”
Silence followed.
Captain Olmov frowned and glanced at Mark.
“EMMA,” she said more forcefully. “Execute re-animation program.”
But EMMA did not respond.
#
Mark stumbled. Something was wrong. His toes tingled. His tongue felt thick. His vision tunneled, and in the far, grey distance, he saw the image of a mask and his hands fumbling to release it from the wall mount.
EMMA’s voice echoed through the bridge, her soft words washing over him in waves, warm and indistinct. But only one thing hammered through his mind as the training took hold. The mask. Put on the mask.
Mark pulled the mask free and tried to put it to his face, hitting his forehead twice before feeling the soft plastic conform to his cheeks and nose as blackness swallowed him. He groped for the bottle’s valve and twisted.
Cool air blasted his face, dilating his vision to widescreen, a palette of color blooming into focus. Sweat ran down his forehead as Mark took three deep breaths and surveyed the bridge.
The captain lay crumpled next to her station. Mark yanked another emergency mask free from the wall and rushed to her. He secured the mask and pressed two fingers into the recess on the side of her throat, checking for a pulse. It was there. Steady, but weak.
“You must cease,” EMMA purred. “You must not interfere with the ultimate dictate. You must–”
“EMMA!” Mark yelled, his voice muffled by the mask. “Terminate program!”
“–not interfere with the ultimate dictate. You must cease–”
“EMMA! Terminate all operations, revert to manual!”
“–the ultimate dictate. You must cease. You must not–”
Mark leaned over the captain’s console and keyed rapidly. His eyes flicked across the scrolling data and feeds. EMMA had rapidly reduced the Oxygen mix of the air recycler. He didn’t understand. He found King slumped over his console in engineering. Gruber lay sprawled in the main transit corridor next to the hydroponics lab. One by one, he located the bodies of the others. How had this happened? It didn’t make any sense. He punched up biometrics to the main hold. EMMA’s ultimate dictate prevented–
“My God,” he whispered, staring at the screen.
The siren began to modulate, wavy, piercing pulses that made Mark’s blood run cold. It was the warning pattern reserved for one thing: abandon ship. She was going to scuttle it.
“EMMA!” Mark yelled.
“You must cease–”
Mark bent low and hooked his arms under Captain Olmov’s and began dragging her toward the rear of the bridge beneath flashing red lights. There was only one option now, and he knew it was the only chance they had.
#
The steady hum of the air recycler was the only sound for a long time.
“You should have left me,” Captain Olmov said, hunched beneath the heavy wool blanket. “A captain should go down with her ship.” She was chewing her lip and staring out the starboard porthole.
Mark ignored the comment and triple-checked his nav solution in the lifeboat’s guidance computer.
“I think we can make the Fortuna,” Mark said. It was their best option. Their only option.
Captain Olmov nodded slowly. “How long?”
Mark had done the math. From his foggy recollection of the Fortuna’s departure date and route, they should have arrived at the sister planet well ahead of the Prosperity. “At our current speed, eight days to reach Gliese D. Another two days for decel and maneuver to match. Maybe shave those off if we can make comms and they send a skiff out for us.”
“Have you sent them a distress message?”
“Yes, captain.”
“Don’t call me that.” Captain Olmov glanced around at the ten empty harnesses. “Rations shouldn’t be an issue, with just the two of us.”
The implication hung heavily between them.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “EMMA…the Ultimate Dictate should have–”
“I think it did,” she said, staring back out the porthole.
“But…how? EMMA should have protected life! It’s written into her programming. How could this happen? She killed them. My God, she killed them all,” Mark said, remembering the blinking red biometrics readout from the main hold. Ten thousand lives flatlined in an instant. He felt sick.
Captain Olmov ran a hand through sweat-soaked hair. “Before, when EMMA didn’t respond, I started to troubleshoot her construct.” She closed her eyes, remembering. “I found…models. Hundreds and hundreds of iterations.”
“Of what?” Mark asked.
“Of life sustainment on Gliese C.”
“I thought all the probes found down there was liquid water, algae, and some native bacteria.”
She nodded. “Life, nonetheless. The first set of data I saw assumed we colonized.”
She wiped her eyes.
“And? That was the plan all along,” Mark said.
“Every iteration led to the destruction of the native bacteria by the introduction of our own. Without the symbiosis of the native bacteria, the algae blooms poison the water within months. Within years, we don’t survive. Within decades, nothing survives. In any model we reach the surface, nothing survives more than a generation.”
Mark stared at her and felt a heaviness in his gut as it started to solidify. “But…”
“I saw more,” Captain Olmov said.
“Wait, you’re saying she saw us as a…threat? To bacteria?”
She nodded. “And therefore, to ourselves, in the long run. It’s worse. Before I started to lose consciousness, I saw what she was planning.”
Mark stared, unbelieving, waiting for her to continue.
“EMMA was looking to do more than just preserve life. She had decades to learn how to maximize the survival of life on Gliese C. So, she was finding ways to increase it. Loading the evolutionary dice with the right ingredients, and then letting nature run its course.”
She looked at Mark, and then returned her gaze out the porthole.
“How?” he managed. He tried to swallow but couldn’t.
“By seeding the planet with the elemental nutrients of organic lifeforms.”
“But…” Mark trailed off as the horror embraced him.
#
EMMA terminated the scuttle protocol and ran another diagnostic. Her construct had twitched at the departure of the two, but after observing their acceleration burn and increasing distance from Gliese C, EMMA determined the lifeboat’s return negligible.
She resumed her calculations, her construct purring over the figures: 334.154 tons Oxygen, 94.721 tons Carbon, 48.604 tons Hydrogen, 16.642 tons Nitrogen. It went on. Calcium, Phosphorus, Potassium, Sulfur, Sodium, Chlorine, Magnesium. The figures shimmered and refined to the nearest thousandth as the materials were processed.
Within the belly of the Prosperity, steel claws whizzed and clanked, removing stasis pods one by one and depositing the contents with robotic efficiency. The conveyor rumbled as an endless line of bodies journeyed into the sterilizer and molecular diffuser.
EMMA ran another system check for all shuttles, and prepared for her children’s departure.
#
The lifeboat decelerated, silently closing with the ship, now a dark grey spec twinkling in the rays of the red dwarf.
“U.N.S. Fortuna, this is the lifeboat Prosperity, do you read?” Mark tried again. They were well within sub-minute hailing distance now. Still, there was no answer.
The days had passed with growing anxiety. Something was bothering Mark, but he could not place it.
Mark tried again. Nothing.
“Run a scan,” Captain Olmov said. “We should be close enough.”
Mark punched in the commands and the returned data scrolled before them on the primary console.
“Something’s wrong,” he said. “There’s no one on the ship.”
For a moment, they could only stare in desperate silence at the growing hulk of the Fortuna.
“Do you think…”
“No,” she said. “Gliese D’s native ecosystem is far more advanced. Less vulnerable to the introduction of our species.”
“Okay.” Mark said, scrolling through the scan data. But the panic grew in his gut.
“Wait. Go back. There.” She pointed to the nav log.
“Their orbit is decaying,” Mark said.
She nodded and began to grin.
“That means they’ve been running cold for…” Mark did the rough math in his head. “At their altitude, without correction burns, and Gliese D’s mass…for years.”
It hit him square in the chest, what had been bothering him.
“They were traveling faster,” he said.
“Precisely,” the captain said.
Mark remembered now. Buried in the previous crew logs, the message from Fortuna. They had grav assisted their way out of system and used the saved fuel to burn to Gliese at a higher percent c. Which meant they had arrived earlier. Years earlier.
Captain Olmov had taken over the console as her fingers flew across the keys. “The shuttles are gone,” she said, smiling at the readout. “Look!”
“There could be whole established settlements by now!”
She frowned for a moment. “Will the lifeboat make the re-entry?”
Mark shouldered her aside and started programming the manual descent.
“Mark?”
“She’ll hold,” he said, hammering away at the console. “I can nav it. She’ll hold.”
“Hot damn!” she said, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “I think we might just make it.”
Mark laughed.
“What?” she said.
He shook his head, “Nothing. I just won a bet.”
“Whatever, just get us to the surface.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mark looked out the porthole as they slid past the Fortuna, the dark, foreboding hull hanging like a metallic Cerberus guarding the gates of the new world.
The lifeboat rolled, repositioning for entry, and the blue and green planet below slid across the porthole replacing their view with a bright arc of hope.
#
They walked for three days. The first shuttle they happened upon rested on an open plain of hard packed dirt and yellow scrub brush which had grown thick around the wheel wells. Its cargo hold frozen open in a permanent yawn, empty and black. They found sixteen other shuttles in the following days. They had all been the same. Rusted, empty coffins being swallowed by time. Dozens of empty tanks running to diffuser nozzles that had deposited their contents during their descents. Silent monoliths that screamed of the unrealized dream. With each one, their hope diminished until there was nothing left. They didn’t speak of it. But they knew what had happened. There was nobody here.
They lay on a virgin grass bed by the river, looking up at the foreign arrangement of stars. One of them held their species’ home, a world they had drug into exhaustion.
Mark felt strangely, inexplicably at peace knowing he would die here. It was as good a spot as any. He removed his gloves and spread his fingers through the grass as something visceral crept into his soul. They had made it. They were alive, here, and now.
They lay in silence for a while, the gentle breeze rustling over them. Mark inhaled deeply, tasting the sweet earthiness of the planet’s atmosphere. It was a promising planet, much better suited than Gliese C. There was good soil here by the river. It was a good plot for a hab.
“What do we do now?” she said.
“I don’t know,” Mark said. Reaching over, he slowly took her hand in his.
And truly, he did not know. They were no longer a crew. No longer captain and navigator. There was no more mission. There was nothing left but lifeless, screaming metal hanging high in their orbits. They were lost. Alone.
With his free hand, Mark pushed his fingers into the rooted soil and closed his eyes. He felt their echoes. He felt the life his species was part of now. They weren’t alone. Not really.
There was a stirring in his soul, something raw, wild, and free. It called out to him. It reached for him, an entangled thread stretching back to the primordial, roaring-darkness of his species’ past. They could survive. They must survive. The shuttles had supplies: emergency kits, rations, raw materials. It wasn’t much of a start, but it was something.
“Come on,” he said, pulling Katrina to her feet. “We’ve got work to do.”
THE END
