Alone in the Dark, page 15
part #3 of Lunar Age Series
“Yep, I’m awake. Sorry about dozing off on you. I guess I missed Rozhdestvenskiy, huh?”
“Don’t worry about getting some extra sleep. You needed it. I knew what was coming, so I got in a nap yesterday afternoon and went to bed early last night. As far as Rozhdestvenskiy is concerned, it’s just a big hole in the ground. Don’t worry, you’ll see plenty of them on this trip and there’s always the trip back. You ready for a bit of breakfast?”
“That would be great, Sam. Is there anything I can do?”
“I got it. You can be the cook for our lunch break.”
I took advantage of the stable cabin and gingerly got up from my seat and went and did my business in the small bathroom. When I came out, Sam had the two breakfast meal kits warmed up. She had a cup of coffee from the kit and it filled the cabin with the warm aroma of coffee. Sam knew that unlike my mother, I didn’t care for coffee and I had to laugh when I saw the alternative breakfast drink was a cup of Tang. It made me think of my dad. I smiled at Sam and said, “Thanks for making breakfast.”
“You’re welcome. Besides, I’m going to put you to work driving when we start back up. It’s going to be a long day. I’ll let you drive the next five hours and then I’ll drive the final five. The Major plans to make the first overnight stop just to the west of Karpinskiy crater. That’s the model for each day. We do a four hour segment followed two five hour segments with a half hour rest break between each segment. That leaves us with a nine hour rest window and then we get up and do it all again.”
We were eating standing up and I leaned back against the bunks and finished my meal. When Sam was done with her meal, she visited the bathroom and I did the same when I finished eating. When I came out, Sam had me take the left seat. She handed me my helmet and said, “Okay, kiddo. The first thing I want you to do is retract the solar array.” The rover had an extendible solar array on the roof. Given enough time, it could completely recharge the batteries provided there was sunlight shining on it. The Major had timed our trip to occur during the period where the far side of the Moon was experiencing its two week long period of sunshine. Although we didn’t need to recharge the batteries, topping them off when we were stopped for any period was the prudent thing to do.
With the array retracted, Sam reached for the radio and said, “Rover One, we’re ready to roll.”
“We hear you, hang on a second.”
A minute went by and then I saw Rover One start forward. I started to give our rover some power and Sam said, “Hang on a moment. Let’s let him get a little lead on us.”
I eased off the accelerator and waited. Sam finally said, “Okay, keep this amount of distance between us. I know it seems like a lot but there’s a reason for it. The rover’s tires occasionally kick a rock back towards us. You follow too close and you get a rock in the windshield. That low lunar gravity means the rocks travel farther before they fall so we have to stay back further.”
I settled down to the job of following Rover One at the correct distance. We rolled along at mostly forty kilometers per hour, slower if the terrain got rougher and a little faster if the terrain was smoother. It seemed like we were going really fast, but the reality was most of the time we were going no faster than my dad would have been driving down a neighborhood street back in Saint Charles. The big wheels of the rover smoothed out the bumps and what the wheels didn’t catch, the cushioned seats soaked up. If it got really bumpy, it was time to slow down.
After I’d been driving for a couple of hours, I got my wish about seeing down into Plaskett crater. We had to detour further to the west to avoid a crater on the very rim of Plaskett. The crater was called Plaskett U, and on the south side of the crater, the land sloped off to the east and gave us a view down into the main crater. There are some craters that are exactly what you expect. They are nothing but a mostly flat depression in the ground. Then there is the other type where there’s a central peak in the middle of the depression. I know there’s got to be a reason craters come in the two different types. All I know is that Plaskett was the second type. The floor of the crater was pockmarked with small craters and out in the very center these massive rocks sprang up. I’d seen a picture of Crater Lake on Earth once and if you pretended the crater floor was water, then it looked a lot like Crater Lake.
I got to enjoy the views down into the crater for about an hour. After that, the distance to the crater from our location started increasing and it seemed like very quickly the crater dropped from sight. I asked Sam about it and she said, “You are used to how big the Earth is. The Moon is far smaller so the horizon is a lot closer than you realize. On the Earth, we’d probably still be seeing the crater, but here, it’s already dropped down below the horizon. There’s other tricks the Moon plays on our eyes. Things can seem a lot closer that they actually are. The longer you’re out here driving, the more you’ll notice and get use to.”
From Plaskett crater, our course took us mostly straight south. Our next waypoint was Milankovic crater, however, we were in a gap between big craters for the moment. I finished out the rest of my shift driving through that gap with nothing to see but the rolling lunar landscape dotted with smaller craters. Eventually I saw Rover One roll to a stop and then the radio came alive and Sandy’s voice said, “Let’s stop here and take a break.”
I grabbed the microphone and said, “Roger that Sandy. Taking a break.”
Sam showed me how to deploy the solar array on the roof and make sure it was charging the batteries. With that done, I climbed out of the driver’s seat and grabbed a couple of meal kits for us. I brewed a mug of the coffee for Sam and mixed up a packet of apple juice drink for me while the meals heated in the microwave. When they were done, I popped into the bathroom to relieve myself. When I came out, Sam was busy eating her meal. I was curious about something that I had noticed while I was driving. “Sam, are the rear view cameras on these rovers good enough to keep track of us way back here where we are following? I mean, what if something happens and Sandy or the Major doesn’t see it in the monitor?”
“Good question. We’ve got the rovers linked with a heartbeat signal. If the heartbeat signal from our rover stops or the time it take the heartbeat to get to Rover One suddenly gets longer, an alarm will go off in Rover One. That way they’ll know we have a problem.”
“So if the system is always checking how long the pulse takes to get between the vehicles, then couldn’t you use the pulse coming from Rover One to automatically adjust our speed to maintain our separation?”
“If we were on a paved road, there’s a switch you can enable to do exactly that. We aren’t on a paved road and the distance between us means that Rover One might need to be speeding up at a time when we need to be slowing down to avoid an obstacle. Wouldn’t be a good thing to happen, hey?”
END OF THE ROAD.
After lunch, Sam and I switched seats again. She made sure I had my helmet next to me and was cabled to it. She dropped the solar array and then called Rover One to let them know we were ready. Once they started rolling, we continued our southerly heading to reach Milankovic crater. Sam had been driving for about an hour before we reached the area around the Northwest edge of the crater. The ground was rougher here with the crater rim rising above us and blocking our view down into the crater. From the top of one of the hills, we did catch a glimpse of the eastern part of the crater but that’s all we saw of Milankovic. We traveled along the western wall of the crater for almost an hour before the hills started falling away. We continued to the southwest for three hours across the rolling terrain. Finally, Rover One pulled to a stop after we had been paralleling a crater wall for the last forty five minutes. We stopped on the Western side of Karpinskiy crater where the crater wall now formed a slope down into the one hundred and one kilometer wide crater. The view was spectacular, however, it had been a very long day. Sam put up the solar array and checked that it was charging. Since we weren’t moving, we both climbed out of our pressure suits and very quickly hit the bunks. Sam was nice and took the upper bunk to save me the struggle with my ribs.
I heard the door to the bathroom close and it woke me up. It was only two in the morning, but then I remembered we had started yesterday at the same time. The Major had decided to delay leaving by one hour each day which would have the benefits of allowing the rover batteries to charge a little longer, let us get a little more rest, and gradually shifting our schedule back to normal. I lay there trying to wake up until Sam came out of the bathroom. She was wearing a standard suit liner which was basically ultra modern long john pajamas. The liners were better suited to wearing inside the pressure suit than normal clothes like I had been wearing yesterday.
Sam saw I was awake and said, “Morning, sleepy head. Why don’t you get cleaned up and I’ll get breakfast ready. You can check your E-Pad while you eat. This is your last chance to get any messages and send them if you want to.”
“Huh? I thought we were cut off once we left the base area.”
“No, we stayed quiet on purpose, however, we’ve had a network connection all this time.”
“How’s that work? We’re hundreds of kilometers from the habitat. I thought radio waves just traveled in straight lines? On Earth you have the atmosphere to bend them, but here there’s nothing.”
“When the Major and his buddies were exploring during the early years of the outpost, they set up a solar powered radio repeater network everywhere they went. If they ran into a problem, it could be a matter of life and death so it was worth the time and expense to set it up. The Major picked this spot for our overnight stay because it was the end of the original trail and this is where the radio coverage ends. From here on out, we’re on our own.”
I nodded and then went and got cleaned up in the bathroom. There wasn’t much room and there wasn’t even a built in shower like I’d seen in some RV’s. I cleaned up the best I could with some wipes and then pulled on my suit liner. Sam had the meal kits heated up by the time I got out. I had Tang again while she had another cup of coffee. It was a little weird sitting around in what were essentially pajamas having breakfast with a lady I wasn’t related to. Sam might be way older than me and sometimes more than a little scary, however, she filled out her suit liner very attractively. I picked up my E-Pad to cover up my discomfort and checked my messages. My mom must have talked to Miss Gayle because there was enough homework sitting in my in basket to last for a couple of weeks. The other two messages I had were from Myra and the second one was marked urgent. She said Kat was missing and was wondering if I had seen her. She thought maybe Kat had come by to keep me company while I was home sick. Kat had never done anything like that before and certainly had never left Myra willingly. It was really out of the ordinary that Kat couldn’t be found. I could only think of two reasons Kat would turn up missing and neither were comforting. Either Kat had suffered a hardware failure or Kat had been stolen. Neither one of them made much sense. If Kat had suffered a disabling hardware failure, then Myra would have surely found her sitting whereever she had broke down. If someone stole her then it would quickly come to light because we lived in such a small place and people talked. Not to mention you’d have to keep her caged and be constantly on guard for Kat to escape. It just didn’t make sense.
Sam noticed I was frowning and asked what the problem was. I said, “Myra says Kat went missing yesterday morning. Mom told Miss Gayle I was sick to cover me being gone. She might have said a little more because Miss Gayle sent me two weeks of homework to do. Anyways, Myra was checking with me to see if Kat had decided to spend the day keeping me company.”
“The Major is going to send out an announcement about the mission this morning right before we leave. No need to cover up now, we are way beyond anybody being able to stop us. You can tell Myra where you are and that we haven’t seen Kat.”
Sam nursed her coffee a bit while she was thinking and then said, “Kat is a strange one. She doesn’t behave like I thought a robot cat would and she behaves with way more intelligence than a real cat would.”
“I know, right? I went to Psuche Neural with Myra for Kat’s checkup. Myra was worried about them deciding the beta was over and they were going to take Kat back. Sam, did you sign the non-disclosure with Psuche Neural?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Just checking. So anyways, Dr. Ashton was real nice about it and said she wouldn’t dream of taking Kat from Myra. I asked her if Kat’s behavior was because she was an AI. She said Kat was intelligent, but not sentient. She said what I sensed as sentience was really just emulated behaviors that Kat expressed. Hmmm.”
“Hmmm, what?”
“Well, I just realized Dr. Ashton never actually answered my question about Kat being an AI. She implied Kat wasn’t and she talked about intelligent systems that mimic the behavior of biological entities. She never actually said Kat wasn’t an AI.”
“Maybe you’re reading too much into an expert in the field trying to explain to a layman what’s going on without all the common language to do it.
“Maybe”
I wrote out a reply to Myra telling her what was going on. I told her I was sure Kat would show up soon and said I was sorry I wasn’t there to help her look. I suggested she try contacting Dr. Ashton to see if she could help.
I looked at her first message and it was confusing at first. It just said that she had talked to Ananyu and they had decided it would be nice for the four of us to have dinner together before we went to Prom. I wasn’t aware that I had made any Prom plans, much less that I was taking Ananyu. I puzzled over that a bit and then remembered that Ananyu, Nina, and Adam had come by after the New Years dance to keep me company for a while. I was still bruised and sore from the beating I took and must have looked a mess. My mom wouldn’t let me go to the dance and Ananyu had been stuck going alone. I remembered telling Ananyu I was sorry for missing the dance with her. She said it was no big deal and I could just take her to the next dance. Thinking about it now, the next school dance was the Prom. On the other hand, the actual next dance was the Valentine's Day dance the habitat hosted. I knew well enough how Ananyu didn’t want to be more than friends with me so I guess the Valentine’s dance was a little too intimate for her and she just defaulted to the next dance which was Prom. I didn’t mind taking her to the Prom, but I’d have to talk to her when we got back and let her know it was okay if she wanted to go to the Prom with someone else. No sense tying her down with me for an important dance like the Prom if there was someone else she was interested in and I was sure I could find someone to go with. I sent Myra a brief reply back saying that was fine with me.
I also sent an email to my parents to let them know I was thinking of them and I was okay. I checked my E-Pad to make sure the MCN newscast for yesterday had been downloaded. I’d watch it while we were driving. It was still too early for today’s newscast to be available and by the time it was, I was sure we’d be out of range to receive it.
With breakfast finished, Sam and I climbed into our pressure suits. We were a little early so we spent some time enjoying the view down into Karpinskiy crater. Karpinskiy didn’t have a central peak, yet it did have an odd circular ridge that formed a u shape that opened out to the southwest. Neither Sam or I had any idea what caused it, however, Sam said it reminded her of a pressure ridge that forms in ice like she had seen when she’d been in the Antarctic.
The Major’s voice came over the radio and asked if we were ready to roll. Sam replied yes and Rover One started moving off. Sam let them gain the long lead on us and then she started us rolling. That brought up a question I had and I asked, “Sam, yesterday we were following the old exploration trails that led to here. How does the Major know which way to go today?”
“The Moon has been mapped from orbit with very good detail for a long time now, hey. The Major sat down with some of the geologists at the Habitat and worked out what they think is the safest route. Then Sandy stepped in and asked Dr. Ashton if we could borrow something called Project Logan. I suspect you know more about that than I do.”
“Yeah, all that was done before you came to work for Sandy. It’s under non-disclosure but basically, we just made the parts. They assembled them at Psuche so we never saw the final product. There should be four of them and they probably look like an industrial version of Kat only much bigger.”
“From what Sandy told me, I figured they were some kind of rover. Anyway, they are out front of us checking out the route. If there’s a problem, one will sit at the problem site to warn us while the other three figure out a work around.”
“I’m hoping we get to see them during the trip. If these things are anything like Kat, they should be pretty cool.”
“I’ll be happy with not seeing them if it means a boring trip. We still have about two thousand kilometers to go. No roads, no gas stations, no hotels, and no outside help if we get into trouble. Boredom is good, hey.”
OFF ROAD
Sam had said she wanted a boring trip and she got her wish on the second day of travel. We were only going about forty kilometers an hour if we were lucky and it took about forty five minutes before Karpinskiy crater fell to our rear. Our next waypoint was Tikhov crater which was around two hundred and fifty seven kilometers away or roughly about nine and a half hours away. We were headed to the southeast across a rolling plain pock marked with about a billion craters ranging from tiny ones mere centimeters across to a few relative giants that ran about twenty kilometers in diameter. The route that the Major had selected stayed out of the craters for the most part. There were no breathtaking vistas to see. Just lots and lots of rocks in muted grays.
Lunch time was spent out in the middle of that plain. There was a change from the routine of yesterday in that today we’d be doing two five hour stints of driving followed by a four hour shift. That way, whoever finished up driving would have a shorter time of it and hopefully not make mistakes because they were tired. We finished up the day about three hours south of Tikhov. The crater itself hadn’t been that much to see. Just a depression in the ground about eighty kilometers across and bombed out with numerous smaller craters running around five kilometers in size.
