160: BOBBY

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Hey there, Aspen. How’re you doing?

Dr Kim says you’re too weak for visitors right now. She won’t let us send you a voice message either, says that you’re fighting the infection hard and getting to agitated could be a problem, but I finally managed to convince her to deliver this. I’m not sure how reading something is less draining than listening to it, but we work with what we have, I guess.

I think your were wrong, by the way. We absolutely are living the plot of Hadrian’s Last Ride. I joked as much to Xanthe, now that we’ve got radio communication back, so they’ll probably watch that for movie night or something.

Fun fact about the radio – it’s been put under very high security. Someone tried to destroy it again after we used it and explained the Vault, and I can’t figure out why, because what else is there to keep us from telling the ship about? Our use of it is unrestricted; Elenna’s allowed in, and we’re allowed in, and nobody else is allowed near it. So something’s going on there.

And while we’re on fun facts: paper. The Hylarans went absolutely bonkers for paper. They keep wanting to touch it. I showed them origami and now the colony is covered with little paper shapes. Apparently the texture of dry wood pulp is something amazing to these people, which I guess makes sense? Given their complete disconnect from any living things up until we arrived. I wish you were out here. You’d be able to do sociology at it and make us understand what’s going on.

There are dandelion shoots in the desert, and people keep going out there to stare at them. There’s a rule against touching them, since they’re worried that excessive handling would cause damage, but they all touch them, I’ve seen them do it. Which is fine; if the dandelions die, they can plant more. They have been. The remnants of the anti-terraformation movement died the instant those things burst from the soil, I don’t think anyone has the heart to uproot one. Random people, with no central organisation or control whatsoever, have been taking any seed they thing can survive in the sand and low nitrogen atmosphere out here (which is a lot of them, since the ship’s been dropping terraformation plants for specifically those conditions) and just heading out into the hills to throw them around. Most of them probably won’t sprout, but it’s fine. We have big seed stockpiles on the ship. You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen a Hylaran openly weeping atop a sand dune as they hurl grass seeds into the wind. I’m sure you probably have a lot of thoughts about plant distribution and rainfall and how this affects the soil stability and whether that’s going to affect the movement of floodwater and stuff like that.

The crew on the ship are pruning back your roses in the Greenhouse ring. They’ve also constructed some big tanks and started a salmon farm, and I’m honestly kicking myself over the fact that we never did that. I mean, a lot of weird stuff happened with the movement of the ship when we were flying, so it probably would’ve just resulted in water everywhere and suffocated salmon the first time something went wrong with Amy, but we could have tried. Now that they’re stably in orbit they don’t seem to care. I guess the long-term endurance of ship parts is no longer a concern; it’s all just got to stay together long enough to get everyone awake and down. I hope they drop us some salmon meat when they’re grown, I want to see the Hylarans eat something with a texture that’s not just nutrient brick.

Also, I want to eat something with a texture that’s not just nutrient brick.

Tinera and the Friend still in quarantine too, and I’m getting pretty concerned. Have you seen or heard from them?

Tal’s been hanging out with Elenna a lot. Elenna apparently knows basically everything there is to know about radios. Ke also knows a fair bit about asteroids; as you know, meteor impacts are pretty common on Hylara and they need to keep an eye on the sky in case anything might threaten the colony. Nothing big enough to penetrate the ground deep enough to damage the Vault every hits, apparently, but they Hylarans have to be on the lookout in case they ever need to move the surface colony, and Elenna has about a billion statistics on the probability of that sot of thing that I tuned out after ke admitted the chances were ‘astronomically low’. But ke and Tal will talk. For. Hours. Hurry up and get back out here. Don’t leave me alone with these people.

Everyone else is doing fine. Celti and Hive are working together now that the whole Vault thing and plant seed thing are done and can’t be undone; both are pretty evasive about why there’s so much security on the radio and why anyone would want to still prevent communications. Max is their usual cheerful self. I’m certain they don’t know any more about your infection than I do, but they get a bit upset if I ask about the Friend or Tinera, so that’s. Interesting. My foot’s going great, by the way. I can’t believe I’m all meat again. I haven’t been all meat for ages.

Tal’s also been hanging out with that Mama AI a fair bit, and playing around with our computer, of course. Ke says that Mama’s architecture is similar to normal AIs, all Earth tech, which is unsurprising, and not the architecture of the systems here. Ke says ke doesn’t understand the local systems well enough to do much but ke knows Mama. Says I need to tell you that kes old Earth friend Bobby Tables would go nuts on a system like this.

Do you remember when Tal came out of chronostasis? All that drama with CR1? All that shit you had to pull to get Denish back alive because of the stuff with the airlocks. It’s great to finally be in an atmosphere where airlocks don’t matter and we’re not constantly battling bad safety protocols run by glitchy AI. Especially since we don’t have Denish to go ham on any problems with a power tool down here. All we have is Tal’s computer obsession and jokes about kes friend Bobby, and that’s almost more insufferable than hours and hours of talk about how radios work.

Do you think it’s weird that taking down the radio tower even worked? I mean, I would’ve expected the ship itself to have radio capabilities, if only for communication during the automated launch so that Antarctica could keep tabs on it, but apparently Mama’s radio systems broke during the landing and there was no reason to fix them, so we can’t talk to Mama by radio. Which is a pity; it would be great for you guys to be able to contact the Courageous directly from in there. Or even for us to be able to radio you. A no-go, though; if you want to talk to or through Mama, you gotta use voice or visual aid. Or there’s probably like, ports or something, for electronics. At least this AI is a lot easier to work with than Amy.

All’s stable out here, you focus on getting better.

Hope to see you out here again soon!

Adin

(Tal says hi)

———

I read the letter a few times, partly for information, but mostly just because it’s nice to hear from a crewmate. It’s genuine, so far as I can tell – his handwriting, contains agreed-upon communication codes that the Hylarans wouldn’t know and couldn’t fake. It might have been doctored acter being written, but I doubt it; it’s written in pen on a physical page and there’s no sign of anything being erased from or added to the page after the fact. Hylarans probably wouldn’t even know how to doctor a message on wood paper.

There are two code phrases in the letter that I recognise. Hadrian’s Last Ride, of course – the captain is treating this as a hostage situation and has informed the crew on the ship, according to the letter. The second phrase is the part about pruning roses. I didn’t have roses in the Greenhouse Ring. That means that the ship is currently playing dumb and continuing to cooperate with the Hylarans on supply drops and planning for colony expansion. Presumably they’re waiting on us to figure out what’s going on or try to resolve any issues; if we can sort everything out without needing to involve the ship, that would be ideal. Because once they start restricting drops or, worse, taking physically aggressive action, that makes everything a lot more dangerous and puts a black mark on the history of a colony that’s going to be hard enough to establish peacefully as it is. They’re aware that there are problems, they don’t know the details (because Captain Klees doesn’t know any details), but they’re not escalating the situation by taking action. Good. There’s no emergency extraction clause, no way to get back up into space, and nowhere for them to go but down here. We don’t want big shows of force. We don’t want more conflict than absolutely necessary.

There’s a third thing in there structured like a code phrase – Tal’s Earth friend Bobby Tables. This isn’t a code I know, it’s not something we set up in advance. My guess is that Tal wants to tell me something our codes don’t account for and is relying on some pop culture reference that ke assumes I know, or possibly Bobby is a real person from Tal’s past that ke’s talked about before and I’ve forgotten. Either way, I don’t get the reference; I don’t know what the captain’s trying to tell me. Something about the CR1 incident, saving Denish, airlocks… the captain wouldn’t ramble about that for no reason. Something about the ring ejection? I ejected CR1 to save Denish; is that relevant somehow, in some way that the captain doesn’t want the Hylarans to read in the letter? I don’t see how that could possibly be relevant. The spaceship I’m currently in is not only grounded (buried, in fact), but wasn’t designed with detachable rings.

Mama and Amy’s programming. Comments about airlocks, about how they’re not needed down here, references to how we don’t have Denish to cut through airlocks and ‘all we have is Tal’s computer obsession and jokes about ke’s friend Bobby’. Tal opened the Amy-locked airlocks no problem, combed through the rewritten safety protocols and fixed everything so the doors weren’t frozen shut any more.

I glance at the locked door to my room.

Then talking about Mama’s lack of radio connectivity. Radio’s not an option; Tal needs some kind of physical electronic port to unlock the doors. I think that’s what I’m being told. There are electronic ports in the room, under the TV, behind the solid plastic sheet that protects them from needing to be sterilised, but that part protective cover is easily removable for obvious reasons. Not useful to me in here; I don’t have any kind of computer to plug in and I can’t do what Tal can do. But it does mean that there’s other ports on the ship that Tal can use. I suppose I just need to be ready to run, whenever they do whatever they’re going to do. Mama’s smarter than Amy. I hope they’re careful.

Other interesting information in the letter: apparently the crew on the ship are settling back into their old home, starting up salmon farms and soforth, ready to be up there for the long haul. Good for them. I’m kind of mad about missing the Hylarans’ introduction to paper. And to plants! It’s the sociological experience of a lifetime and I’m in this stupid room, missing it! I need to break out soon, if only for that. The stuff about the radio is interesting. I’d assumed that the radio was originally sabotaged to stop us from talking to the ship, but it looks like Captian Klees and Tal have unrestricted access, and it’s somebody else that the Hylarans as a whole don’t want talking to the ship. I have no idea what that means. (Or maybe they were stopping us, and the security is just to stop people from pointlessly breaking the radios now that it no longer matters.)

Captain Klees doesn’t know what’s up with Tinera or the Friend. Unlike me, he wasn’t even allowed to write to them. That’s interesting. If I had to guess why, I’d say that it’s because a letter like this invites a response, if only to prove it was received, and if Dr Kim’s doing something like this with Tinera, she absolutely won’t be cooperating. Dr Kim can trust me to write a measured response, but there’s absolutely no way that Tinera would play along with that. I’m not sure about the Friend; I would’ve expected it to cooperate under these conditions, but I’ve never been good at predicting the behaviour of Friends.

I read the letter again, even though I’m pretty sure I’ve gleaned all the information from it. It’s nice to hear from the outside. It’s nice that Captain Klees and Tal are safe.

Don’t worry, my friends. I’ll find a way to join you soon.

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