179: PREPARATION

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The crew aboard the ship are a lot more cautious about the AI idea than we are, but do have to concede that they didn’t have a better solution. Eventually everyone agrees that if we can’t get a reliable AI from Antarctica or come up with a better solution, they’ll use my brain. Asteria starts going through the AI to confirm that the plan is viable on the computing end of things, and every doctor we have access to starts combing through Dr Kim and Tal’s research to ensure that it’s viable on the biological end of things. I’m infected with the life-extending geneset, and we wait for it to take.

Then one day, Dandelion takes me to the medical dome to kill off the synnerves for my cybernetic eye and give me a new implant: a radio.

“Why?” I ask.

“Communication. Our best chances of getting this brain interface to work is by using the infrastructure that’s already built to support it – the chronostasis pods. And long-term sensory deprivation is no joke, Aspen. You’ll be conscious while you’re learning to interface with the computer systems. You’re going to need sensory stimulation and communication while the connection builds.” She holds up a tiny radio. “If you can’t learn to communicate fluently with this and this alone, with your brain, this whole plan can’t go ahead. We’re not putting you in there without a line of communication. The captain and I are getting them implanted, too, so we can practice with each other.”

I nod. Dandelion doesn’t spell it out, but the reason why we’d all get the implant is obvious. If I die, one of them can interface with the ship instead.

This surgery is apparently more complicated behind the scenes than the eye one, because they need to implant the synnerve in a way where it won’t interfere with the cerebral stimulator when I plug that in. But that was all worked out ahead of time; all I have to do is lie still while the autodoc implants a tiny little ultra-low-range transceiver under my skin and hooks it up to a new injection of synnerves. Mapping synnerves to the transceiver is old tech; it’s the same thing they did for Captain Klees’ foot, for Tinera’s hand. And this is the third time somebody’s implanted the new synnerves to grow into my brain. So I’m not particularly worried about any part of this.

The transceiver speaks to an actual radio, one of the Hylaran radio rings, that I wear around my neck. This keeps the size of the implant down and allows me to turn the radio off or switch channels manually without having to just endure random electromagnetic noise until I learn to control the implant. Dandelion, Captain Klees and I designate an unused frequency for practice.

“This is so cool,” Tal says. “It’s like you guys have magic rings that give you telepathy.”

“It’s still radio,” I point out. “You can hear or broadcast on the same channel with a normal radio.”

“Yeah, but not with my mind! This is some preneek Full Interconnection shit!”

“Yeah, that’s what I don’t like about it,” I mutter. But it’s a bit late to be wondering about the psychological implications of too efficient electronic access and constant interconnectivity. The goal here is to permanently hook my brain into a giant computer, so. Complaining about an admittedly extremely helpful radio connection would be silly.

Tal and Dandelion develop training exercises, signal patterns that we ‘listen’ to for ten minutes or so a few times a day and try to interpret. Being able to tell if something is being broadcast is something we all learn pretty quickly. Technically, that’s enough for a binary signal, and therefore sufficient for communication, but only very slow, tedious communication based on a memorised binary code. Hopefully, we can get something better than that; Tal talks about us learning to ‘hear’ transmissions in our heads as if we were listening to a radio and ‘talk’ as if talking into a microphone, but I think that’s a little optimistic. Improvement is rapid, though; within a few days, we can reliably interpret on/off signals of about half a second in length, and by the end of the week we’re down to a tenth of a second and Captain Klees can distinguish high and low amplitude. We develop a handful of little codes, quick signals that mean ‘come here’ or ‘look over there’ or give an additional emotional inflection to something we’re saying. Dandelion in particular leans hard into this, and I don’t know if she’s doing it so we learn as quickly as possible, or if it’s just easier for her than speaking out loud, where you have to be physically a lot closer to people.

As the shuttle becomes more and more complete, we all start to worry more and more, because while the design isn’t as reliable as we’d like, none of the engineers can find any kind of ship-destroying bomb in it.

And then, the day that the shuttle engines are declared fit for purpose (to the best of our ability to test them) and attachment to the shuttle begins, Captain Klees strides into our dome with a letter in his hand.

“Everyone!” he calls, radio pinging Dandelion and I for attention and waving the letter dramatically. “They’re sending the clamping equipment through.”

It’s late, and most of us were getting ready for bed. Tinera’s hair drips water over the floor as she rushes over to snatch the letter out of his hand; he lets her. I ping him a sort of radio question mark’ he just grins wider, and explains while Tinera skims the letter.

“The docking clamps. For the shuttle. Since the plan, so far as Antarctica knows, is to pack us into that shuttle, have it attach to an airlock on the Courageous, and then, presumably…” he mimes an explosion with his hands. “Well, they want to do a low mass transfer for the clamps; reserve the whole Vault just to send those.”

“Why?” I ask, as Dandelion and I simultaneously radio an enquiry. “They usually want to exchange as much mass as possible with each load. The less loads they have to send us, the more stuff they can send between Mars and Venus.”

“The clamps need the space. Because they’re not sending us metal blocks or rods and bolts. The clamps were prebuilt on Mars.”

“Why?” Tal asks.

“Good question! They say it’s because they’re delicate and important equipment, and Mars has engineers and manufacturing facilities for this specific task but – ”

“But Mars can presumably build engines, too, and they’re pretty fucking important.” Tinera frowns at the letter. “Yeah, this is suspicious as fuck.”

“Logically,” Dandelion says, “the docking apparatus would be the best place to put a bomb or something. They’ll need to do a lot of damage to the Courageous if they want to stop us from being able to supply the Hylarans; at the very least, they not only need to destroy Pod Launch Ring 2, but do enough damage to the ship’s structure that the ring can’t just be ejected and let the ship use Pod Launch Ring 1 or 3 instead.”

“I bet they can do that,” Tal says. “We’re living in the cool space future now. I bet they have just unbelievably powerful bombs.”

“I’m sure they do,” Dandelion says, “and I’m sure they have something that can do that that they can send through a Vault intact, but the tricky thing from their end is making absolutely sure that it goes off at the right moment. They’re not here to send a signal; they can’t rely on timers because they won’t be here to set up the launch, they can’t rely on anything that might be accidentally triggered or damaged during assembly or during the launch itself. Setting up something that’s triggered by the docking process sounds like the best way to do it.”

So when the clamps arrive, we just… don’t put them on the shuttle. Why would we? We weren’t planning on docking directly with the ship anyway; it’s too dangerous. They’re loaded very carefully onto a truck (although we probably don’t have to be that careful; they’re presumably designed not to blow up during assembly and testing, so I’m sure being hauled onto a truck won’t hurt them) and drove very, very far away by a handful of Hylaran engineers and transport personnel. They take extra batteries to triple their travel distance from the camp. Two days later, they return, explaining the timed equipment they rigged to simulate a successful docking attachment for the clamps; one day after that, the simulated docking takes place, and the weather monitoring equipment detects some slight seismic activity far from the colony and a mysterious cloud of dust.

“They didn’t have to take it as far out as they did,” Elenna remarks, looking over the data. “A few hours out would’ve been fine.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Hive says.

To Antarctica, we report the successful attachment of the docking clamps to the shuttle. It’s complete. Just some final tests and some fuel synthesis, and then… well.

We need to make some final decisions about what’s going on that shuttle.

I’m checking the colony hydroponics one day when Celti approaches me. “Your captain’s having a medical checkup, so I thought I’d come to you,” he says. “We’ve just had a meeting and finalised some decisions. We want more than a hundred of your colonists.”

“How many?”

“We want two hundred and fifty.”

I almost drop a radish. “Two hundred and fifty? Are you sure?”

“Is that a problem?”

“No, it shouldn’t be. From the ship’s perspective, the more colonists you take, the easier things on the ship will be. It does mean seriously ramping up food production down here – ”

“We were planning to maximise that as fast as possible anyway. This just means it’ll go to helping hands instead of to storage.”

“Fair enough. But you’re aware of the social dangers?”

“Yeah. That was… kind of the impetus. We’ve been terrified of people from space coming down and overwhelming us and what that’ll mean for the safety and quality of life of our people, but we’re starting to worry about the opposite. I mean, if we take just a small number of people, to teach us to garden and grow and use your tech, aren’t we putting them at risk of what we’re trying to avoid for ourselves? Our two people are going to have a future together, build a cooperative culture together. If they make up one fifth of the population, that’s too small. It puts them at risk f being pushed into our ways of life against their will.” He scrunches up his nose. “I still don’t understand why you were all so upset about Tinera and Dandelion’s medical treatment. If some similar misunderstanding happens in the future, something we haven’t thought of because neither culture has even considered that the other culture might be different, and it happens when there’s not a spaceship hovering above to advocate for the victim? We don’t want you overwhelming us, but we should try overwhelming your people, too, if we can avoid it.”

“More people is more culturally risky for you.”

“More risky in some ways, less in others.”

“The more we send down, the longer it’ll take to get everyone down here and acclimated.”

“Are we in a hurry? You guys need a long time to make sure the ship is indefinitely liveable anyway, right?”

I nod. “I’ll let the captain know. I’m sure the ship will be very happy to hear the news.”

“Good. Have a good harvest, Aspen.”

“I intend to.”

Celti walks away, and I mentally ping Captain Klees with a non-urgent tone, letting him know that I want to speak to him about something when it’s convenient. I turn back to the radishes.

The future is going to be scary for all of us, I think.

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