The Disturbance: Hard Science Fiction, page 24
“I’m afraid Alpha Omega has the final word.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. They even kidnapped me and threatened my child, to make me toe the line. The opinion of a retired scientist won’t deter them.”
“I understand. I didn’t realize the company was so criminal. It donated billions of rupees to fight polio in India. If I understand you correctly, Alpha Omega might resent my interference.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Then we must transmit your message to the ship secretly.”
“That’s practically impossible. Transmissions via the Deep Space Network have to be approved from the top.”
“Is there no one there who owes you a favor?”
“Me? I’m just an insignificant CapCom.”
“A former crew member, who now has a post at NASA?”
“I was never very good at networking. I just wanted to do my job.”
“We learn here from childhood how important those unofficial networks are. I happen to have an acquaintance at the Indian space agency, ISRO. Did you know the Indian Deep Space Network has a ground station very near here? I supervised the current manager for his Master’s thesis. I’m sure he’ll be happy to send a message for me.”
“But then won’t you owe him a favor?”
“That’s not how it works. It’s not seen as a business transaction like it is there. Yes, it may be that his nephew needs a mentor at some point. But I would be happy to do that. Every favor is a kind of payment into a social account, from which you are repaid at some point. Everyone is networked with everyone.”
“I understand,” said Rachel. “How do we proceed?”
“You send me a message, and I’ll send it on. As soon as the ground station in Byalalu is in the correct position – in twelve hours at the most – they will send your message.”
“Thank you so much. I’ll write it now and send it to you. Hopefully the crew will know what to do.”
“It’s only the first step,” said Rashmi. “I myself have no idea how to eliminate the disturbance.”
“But you figure it’s possible?”
“Be glad you’re not a physicist. The physical constants in our universe are predetermined – by the Big Bang, or the gods, or whatever. This disturbance has altered them. To bend them back, it would be very advantageous to be a god.”
“Dear crew,” she said, speaking into her camera at home after Alishondra was asleep. She was speaking faster than usual. She had to finish it quickly.
“I see it as my duty as CapCom to tell you the truth. The disturbance that resulted in Christine’s death is much more dangerous than Mission Control and Alpha Omega have led you to believe.”
That was the truth. She explained what Professor Rashmi had told her.
“I don’t know why the success of the mission is being prioritized over your lives,” she said.
That was a lie. Chatterjee had shown her. But how did you break it to someone that they weren’t human? What would happen if the crew found out the whole truth? She was just a cog in the machine. She couldn’t repair the parts of the mission that had been broken from the outset.
“I’ll do everything I can for you as CapCom,” she said in closing.
That was a promise. Whether it turned out to be the truth or a lie was up to her.
Shepherd-1, May 6, 2094
What a shitty night. Benjamin hadn’t slept for more than twenty minutes at a stretch. He kept touching the lump at the back of his head. If he pressed it, he definitely wouldn’t have any more sleep problems. But then what would happen to him? Was he really a machine that could be turned off at the press of a button? David didn’t appear to be experiencing after-effects from his shutdown. But could he be sure it would be the same for him? What if his memories were reset when he was switched back on? He could wake up with no idea of everything that had happened in the last few weeks.
They had outsmarted Mission Control by switching Eric off. What was Eric’s role here? Was he one of the crew, or more one of them? In the experiment with the drill, he had been just as surprised as Aaron. He wasn’t aware, then, of what he really was – he wasn’t fully in the loop either.
One good thing had come out of all this. Benjamin was no longer alone with his suspicions; his hunch had become fact. He folded the blanket that had been wrapped around him, undressed, and walked naked to the shower. The illusion Alpha Omega had constructed was amazingly successful. He was even convinced he smelled of old sweat, and it bothered him so much that he longed for a hot shower.
He met Aaron and David in the control room. They were floating upright in front of the large screen, watching a four-day-old soccer match from Earth. It struck him as bizarre. Why were they still interested in humanity’s ridiculous customs? They had just discovered that they weren’t members of that species. But Aaron and David were really into it. They were discussing the players’ tactics. Benjamin felt slightly envious of their shared interest.
“How long does that have to go?” he asked. “I’d like to discuss our future.”
“Stop video,” said Aaron, and the ball froze in the air.
“We can watch the rest later,” said David. “But don’t you dare tell us the score.”
“I don’t even know who’s playing.”
“It’s the Champions League. Bayern Munich versus Real Madrid,” said David.
“München,” Aaron corrected him.
The word sounded strange, but Aaron would know.
“Well, how does our future look?” asked David, slowly tilting his body back.
“Brilliant,” said Aaron. “How else would it look?”
He mimicked David’s movement. They both rotated around the axis of their hips.
“Are you guys drunk?” asked Benjamin.
“Can we even get drunk?” asked David. “We can pour alcohol into ourselves, but it probably just passes through unchanged. I assume. Then the effect is probably simulated by our consciousness.”
“I feel drunk after just one glass of wine, and my reaction time slows,” said Aaron. “It’s real, even if it’s just a psychological effect.”
“Like phantom pain,” said Benjamin. “That feels real too. But there’s a big difference.”
“Which is?” asked Aaron.
“The feeling is simulated. It’s not real. The human body can’t just shake off intoxication. But we can, theoretically.”
“We can’t even see our own blood realistically,” said Aaron.
“You haven’t tried,” Benjamin argued. “I wonder what would happen if we removed that illusion, knowing that’s all it is: an illusion. Maybe we could learn to control it.”
“You figure it’s a conscious process?” asked David. “If I decide not to feel cold anymore, I suddenly feel warm?”
Benjamin thought back to the experiment with his forearm. The pain was intense, but then abruptly it was gone.
“Maybe it’s not that simple,” he said. “Maybe we have to push past certain limits set for us. Our consciousness could have some kind of tolerance range. It interprets everything within that range – heat, pressure, pain, cold – as sensations. But when it becomes too much, it stops; it becomes desensitized. This could open up a range of actions far beyond what humans are capable of.”
“Interesting idea,” said David. “I assume these tolerance ranges correspond to human physical limitations. What can humans withstand? Fifty, sixty degrees Celsius? Minus fifty? And how bad does the pain have to be before we get past it? We should definitely test that out.”
“Weren’t we going to discuss our future?” asked Aaron.
“This is our future, my friend. Humans lied to us and cheated us, sure, but maybe they also gave us something that makes us more than they are – a much more capable body. That’s our future, for sure.”
“Give me your finger,” said David.
The hotplate glowed red. Benjamin tapped his head with his index finger.
“Aaron, do you want to try?”
“Do I look stupid? That’s a bullshit experiment. We could borrow Eric’s finger, he won’t feel anything.”
“That’s mean and it wouldn’t prove anything,” said David. “We need to know how much we can withstand. And we can only work that out for ourselves. Well?”
Benjamin shook his head. He hated pain.
“Fine, I’ll try it,” said David.
He looked at his ring finger as if he were saying goodbye to it. Then he placed it on the hotplate. He instantly jerked it back and drifted backward.
“Hold me still, please,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Benjamin held David’s left shoulder and Aaron held his right.
“Ready,” said Benjamin.
David pressed his finger against the hotplate again. This time he didn’t pull it away. He breathed faster. Sweat broke out on his brow and he gritted his teeth. The sound was horrible, but the smell was worse – burnt rubber, not flesh. David relaxed. Benjamin looked at the hotplate. David’s finger was still on it.
“The pain’s gone,” said David. “It’s amazing. At some point, I felt like I could just block it out. So I did.”
He moved his arm. The finger was stuck.
“Help me with this.”
They all pulled David’s arm. The finger was baked onto the hotplate.
“You should have used oil,” said Aaron.
They pulled again. The finger let go with a popping sound. David looked at it. The underside was dark brown and flattened, but the joints still functioned and the skin moved.
“Pain?” asked Benjamin.
“No. But you should see my finger the way I see it – covered in huge blisters.”
David touched it.
“There are no blisters,” said Aaron. “The bit that was touching is brown and flattened.”
“I thought so. The experiment was a success, right?”
“Congratulations, Dave,” said Benjamin.
“Want to try it?”
“No, thanks,” said Aaron and Benjamin with one voice.
For the second experiment, they needed a bottle of liquid nitrogen. It took them 15 minutes to find one in storage.
“Let’s just try it here,” said David.
“You’re in a hurry to know,” said Benjamin.
“Sure, aren’t you? I want to know what we’re capable of.”
David’s strategy was sensible – not wallowing in the past but thinking about the future. Benjamin hoped he would start thinking like that too. David was in high spirits.
“OK, this time I’ll try,” said Benjamin.
David clapped him on the shoulder with the hand with the burned finger, and didn’t bat an eyelid. It couldn’t be that bad.
Aaron lifted the bottle, inserted a flexible hose into the outlet and opened the safety valve.
“Hold your hand under it,” he said.
Benjamin did as he was told and was reminded of experiments in physics class. They had turned small soft sausages into large hard ones and then shattered them into thousands of pieces by striking them with the edges of their hands. He realized those weren’t his memories. Whose were they? Were they synthetic or had Alpha Omega stolen them from real people?
“I’m turning the tap,” said Aaron.
“Oh, wait, I prefer the other hand.”
He removed his hand and held the other one under the end of the hose, from which a white vapor flowed and spread out into the room. The vapor was cool, but not icy. But then came a transparent liquid. It looked like a stream of piss, but the color was different and this urine was hot, hot, hot. His skin was on fire, even though Aaron was quenching it the whole time. Was this what freezing felt like?
“Shit, that hurts,” he said.
David squeezed his shoulder.
“I think that’s enough,” said David.
“No, don’t stop, Aaron,” said Benjamin.
He’d come this far. He wanted to experience the moment when the pain stopped. They were now enveloped in a cloud of vapor. The vapor wasn’t nitrogen. Nitrogen was transparent. It was the water in the air condensing.
Something happened. Benjamin didn’t notice until he looked at his hand. The pain was gone. He was expecting immense relief, but no, it was more like someone had flipped a switch. Pain on, pain off. He could control it by thinking about it! This was great. Benjamin felt like one of the superheroes from the comics he used to read as a kid. Or thought he remembered reading. It was weird. He had always believed he was in control. But now... he had the power to harm himself. Was that what true freedom felt like?
“It worked,” he said. “I feel... somehow freer.”
“See?” said David.
Aaron closed the tap, removed the hose and put everything away.
“Let’s go to the airlock,” said Aaron.
“Are you sure?” asked David.
Aaron was hovering in the middle of the main airlock. His space suit lay below him.
“We discussed this already,” said Aaron.
“What if we somehow need oxygen?” asked David. “What if we get our energy from a fuel cell, and you need the oxygen to...”
“If my energy runs out, I’ll collapse. Then you guys pull me out and charge me again, done.”
“Sounds so simple.”
“Don’t worry, Dave, I’ll survive.”
“Aaron’s right. He’ll be fine.”
“If you say so.”
David pressed the button. The door slid across and sealed with a satisfied clunk. David didn’t move.
“Now vent it,” Benjamin reminded him.
“Oh, right.”
David pressed another button. They watched on screen as a red light illuminated the airlock. Aaron waved at them. Benjamin watched the display slowly count down from 100, as the room emptied of air. Aaron grimaced. He clutched at his throat as though he were suffocating. David reached for the safety button, but didn’t press it.
“Look, he’s laughing,” said Benjamin. “He’s jerking us around.”
At 30 percent, Aaron was no longer acting. He really looked like he was suffocating.
“Abort?” David called into the microphone.
Aaron shook his head. He couldn’t speak anymore. Benjamin began to sweat. It wasn’t easy watching your friend suffocate. He should have volunteered to go into the airlock first! Now Aaron was turning blue. David had the camera pointed directly at his face so they could still make it out in the red light. Aaron’s eyeballs bulged slightly. That was the negative pressure. But it wasn’t even an atmospheric pressure difference. Human skin could withstand that without bursting. And they weren’t human. They were different. Something special.
Aaron’s head jerked around. Those must be convulsions. Benjamin wasn’t sure that was normal.
“We’re stopping,” said David.
He obviously had the same impression. But Aaron protested, waving his arms wildly and shouting ‘no’, although there was no sound without air. The convulsions stopped. David took his finger away from the button. Aaron patted himself down. Yes, everything’s still there, Benjamin wanted to call out to him. The disadvantage was that without a space suit, Aaron had no radio. Maybe it wasn’t so smart to go outside without their suits. But at least they didn’t have to worry about an air supply. Aaron gave them two thumbs up. I’m fine, he was saying, you can pump the air back in now.
“What was it like without air?” Benjamin asked.
“Try it yourself,” said Aaron. “At first, you really feel like you’re going to die, and it’s a shitty death. I wouldn’t wish suffocation on my worst enemy. But suddenly you’re back again. It’s like a switch was flipped.”
Yeah, he had experienced that too.
“What now?” asked David. “What other amazing abilities can we discover?”
“None for now,” said Aaron. “I had an idea while I was in there. Remember how I found Christine? Her helmet was shattered. I thought she was dead.”
“We all thought she was,” said Benjamin.
“Yes, but now we know we don’t need oxygen. Christine had probably just powered off, and we stupidly thought we were disposing of her corpse in space!”
That was logical. Surely Christine wasn’t the only human on board.
“Now we know better,” said David.
“Jeez, guys, are you just acting dumb or are you really this dense? Let’s get her back! And switch her back on!”
“But we fired her corpse out into space weeks ago,” said David.
“Her body, not her corpse, and we didn’t fire it, it was hardly moving. She can’t be far away.”
“Aaron, that’s a great idea,” said Benjamin. “We’ll have the original crew back together.”
“Yeah, let’s take some time to figure out a plan,” said David.
“You have a message from Earth,” said the ship’s computer.
“Play it,” said David.
Their CapCom Rachel appeared on screen. They couldn’t see the usual NASA and Alpha Omega logos in the background, and the sound quality was worse. Benjamin looked at the file. It was encoded with a lower bitrate requiring less transmission capacity, and it hadn’t arrived via the usual X-band channel. The sender was on Earth, but they didn’t have a precise location. The file had a header made up of six letters: ISTRAC. That must be India. The computer confirmed his guess. Why was Rachel sending the message from an Indian Deep Space antenna?
Aaron played the message. Rachel seemed somehow different – less professional, even a little anxious. She spoke quickly, as if she were expecting someone to come after her, and got straight to the point.
