David Gatewood - The Robot Chronicles

“I—the—the eastern seaboard has just—has just been bombarded,” she continues. “I can see the incoming missiles. I—but I can’t see anything outgoing. Nothing—um—nothing is launching from the U.S.”

Alice opens her mouth to try to describe what she sees on the horizon, outside of the States, but Eve interrupts.

“Alice,” she says.

Alice turns away from the window and slumps against it. Her head falls back against the glass. The loose knot of hair on the back of her neck comes apart and spills onto the collar of her jumpsuit.

“Yes,” Alice whispers. She feels the effect of what she has seen like burning cinders in her belly. She wants to leave the window, to go to the command module, where the windows show only darkness.

“I’ve received a communication from Mission Control,” Eve says. “They’ve passed along a message from your wife.”

Alice’s eyes well up, and she slides down the window. “No,” she rasps.

“Shall I read it to you?” Eve asks.

Tears spill down Alice’s cheeks, and she presses her eyes shut tightly. She nods. “Oh, god, Tess ,” she says, her voice tight. “Read—no. Yes. Read it.”

“The message is truncated,” Eve says. “It reads I love . That is all.”

Alice feels the wail rising in her throat like a nitrogen bubble. She opens her mouth, and it comes out and fills the empty corridors and modules of the Argus , and Eve is quiet as Alice slides to the floor of the water filtration system closet and sobs.

She wanted to be an astronaut.

Her fourth-grade assignment, still tucked into the pages of her memory book, was the first recorded expression of Alice’s dream. What I Want to Be When I Grow Up , by Alice Jane Quayle. Her mother had treasured it, happy to see Alice dreaming of something significant. Over the years she’d collected photographs of Alice, more records of her progress: Alice in cap and gown; in her flight suit on the deck of the U.S.S. Archibald ; in the cockpit, waving at the camera. A picture of Alice and Tess standing in front of the WSA museum in Oregon. Another of Alice climbing out of the training pool, weights still strapped to her arms and legs.

She was passed over year after year, despite her qualified status. Missions flew without her. The new shuttles began to go up two or three times a month, and astronauts began to record their second, fifth, twelfth flights, while Alice remained grounded. She never complained, but she was embarrassed. She thought often of the people who had given so much to help her make it so far—and how disappointed she was in herself for somehow failing them, for remaining Earthbound while her peers rocketed into the sky on columns of fire.

The caretaker offer came in her fourth year. She had wanted to turn it down, for Tess’s sake, but it was Tess who convinced her to go.

“I’ll always be here when you come home,” Tess had said. “And the months will pass like nothing. You’ll be having so much fun!”

The space station is quiet except for a faint, distant beep, beep .

Alice has fallen asleep on the floor of the water filtration closet. Eve disables the shipboard gravity so that Alice will sleep more comfortably. Alice’s body floats off of the floor and hangs suspended before the wide window and its portrait of a world smoldering and black.

Alice wakes, and immediately begins to cry again. Her tears swim over her face like gelatin, collecting in the hollows beneath her eyes and around the rings of her nostrils.

“Gravity,” she says. She rotates herself and points her feet at the floor, and drops when Eve activates the drive again. Alice’s tears cascade down her face in sheets, and she pushes her palms over her skin, clearing her eyes.

She turns around and looks down at Earth. The smoke and debris has begun to crawl high into the atmosphere, as if a dirty sock is being pulled over the planet. In a few hours the ground will be blotted from view, and Alice shudders when she imagines the people on the ground, staring up at the sun for the last time, watching it vanish behind the sullen sky.

“They’re all going to die,” she whispers to Eve. “Aren’t they?”

Eve says, “I observed more than three hundred distinct detonations in the United States alone. The odds of survival are infinitesimally small with only a fraction of those numbers.”

Alice nods. She can see her own reflection in the glass, laid over the darkening Earth.

“Tess,” she says again, too tired to cry. “My parents—I’m glad that they were dead. Before.”

Eve is quiet.

Alice notices the faint beep ing sound. “What’s that?”

Eve says, “The communications link to Mission Control has been severed. It’s a standard alarm.”

“Disable, please.”

Eve does, and the station falls eerily silent.

Alice says, “We were going to have children next year. After we put some money aside.”

Eve doesn’t say anything.

“Tess wanted a boy,” Alice says. “She wanted to name him after her dad. Ricardo was his name.” She laughs, but it’s a tragic, bitter sound. “I hated that name. I thought it was such a cliché. I wanted a girl, but I didn’t know what I wanted to name her. I was going to sit with her under the stars and show her the constellations, and show her the Argus when it floated by, and tell her that’s where Mommy worked.”

A new tear slides soundlessly down Alice’s cheek.

“I’d have told that to Ricardo, too,” she says. “I’d have loved him even with that stupid name.”

Eve says, “Perhaps you should sleep again. I can prepare a sedative.”

Alice shakes her head. “Look at it,” she says. “It looks like an old rotten apple, doesn’t it?”

Eve says, “It does look something like that.”

Alice nods. “I’m glad you can fake it,” she says. “Conversation.”

Eve says, “I’m glad, too.”

Alice sleeps for nearly twenty hours. She barely moves, and wakes up stiff and creaky like a board. When she wakes, she gasps, then falls back onto her pillow and presses her palms against her eyes, and cries. She dreamed of Tess, that they were in their shared bed in Portland, talking about the day. Tess had wanted to drive to Sauvie Island for fresh strawberries.

But Tess is gone, and Alice is alone.

Except for Eve, who says, “Good morning, Alice.”

Alice blinks away the tears and swallows the deep cries that shift inside her like tectonic plates. You have to stop , she thinks. She’s dead. Everyone is dead. It can’t be changed. Mourning isn’t going to help now.

Eve says, “I’ve prepared coffee.”

“Thanks,” Alice says, grunting as she pushes herself upright on the cot. Then she blinks. “You did it.”

“What have I done?” Eve asks.

“You said ‘good morning.’”

“You seemed distraught,” Eve explains. “It seemed like it might help.”

Alice nods, then shakes her head to clear the beautiful nightmare. “Right,” she says, her voice a little thick. “Coffee.”

Over a shiny packet labeled Gallo Pinto and another packet labeled Coffee—Black , Alice says, “So. What do we do now, Eve?”

Eve says, “There are no protocols for this.”

“I can’t believe that ,” Alice says. “Control thinks of everything.”

“There are related contingencies, but nothing for an extinction-level event,” Eve says. “The most closely related event with associated contingency planning is a nuclear detonation that ends communication with Mission Control.”