Michael Siemsen - Exigency

“I’ll be fine,” she repeated.

“Minnie, hyperschizoid perso—”

“I know what I’ve got, John.”

“It won’t be what you remember. Just hear me out for a second. The metabed on the way here and your meds have concealed an intensifying disorder. You know how they’ve got our v-clones in the system? Well before launch, the docs and psychs and I slid each one of us ahead twenty years, forty, a hundred, and we went back and adjusted for post-metabed, various meds, weight gain, environmental changes, exigency measures, etset. So I—and all the docs at the Center—know exactly where you’re at right now. Metabolically, you’re twenty-eight, well past HSPD’s peak. We need to figure out some alternative meds for you.”

Minnie rubbed her knuckles together and avoided his gaze. He was right, but she still hated when he was right. And more, she hated that she had a weakness —something more to worry about.

Childhood episodes dwelled in her memory with strange clarity alongside other key milestones. Her first crush. The episode that ended on the school roof. Her first thesis. Flying a homemade skimmer over her neighborhood and getting caught. The attack during a road trip during which she tried to throw herself from the vehicle at 300 km/h. Ah, memories.

Her regular hallucinations had been harmless enough. A neighbor kid named Otto and his dad that were, retrospectively, far too captivated by her ideas, and always seemed to show up whenever she’d conceived new concepts. Otto and his dad, of course, turned out to be imaginary.

Some illusions were quite enjoyable. Commercial transports from the nearby airport would often change course at Minnie’s will, flying in circles or performing impossible stunts. Occasionally, the transports would control Minnie and she’d have to run where they commanded. While still little, this had proven fun. Experts always said that imagination-heavy playtime was a critical component for cognitive development. Perhaps the crazy had made her smart.

The real danger revealed itself when the Hyper in HSPD made its presence known. Minnie only vaguely remembered the imagery—melting walls and sinking floors, hard surfaces turning to slowly enveloping tar or molasses, the slinking, malevolent entities of extreme hallucinogenic drug overdoses—but she clearly recalled the emotions. Crippling fear and panic. Her worst and last attack had introduced her to “chasers,” as the psychiatrists called them. Some see insects, others see zombies or some variant of crazed human attackers. Oddly enough, Minnie’s chasers turned out to be cats. She wasn’t normally afraid of cats, but this was what her capricious brain had decided to conjure. Thousands of yowling cats pursuing, their glowing yellow eyes intent on catching her and licking the flesh from her body until she was only bones.

Her father had at first looked to homeopathic remedies: hyoscyamine, ergot, belladonna, and such. Minnie could function okay on them, but they’d cast a color-dulling overlay on the world, and killed some of the lucidity that made her brilliant. After rejecting countless novel surgery proposals, father and daughter agreed she’d take whatever meds the doctors deemed appropriate.

Minnie’s rubbing knuckles were growing sore as she became aware of John’s waiting face.

“There’s an option,” she said. “In Threck Country for sure, but I don’t know about here. It’s a hallucinogenic fungusflower some farmer Threck consume for entertainment. They call it alditz . The effects come from a pure, separate fungus that accumulates on the stigma. Similar chemical makeup to some of my meds. It’s widely available… if we could get there. Not that we needed another reason.”

“You know all that off the top of your head?”

“One of my first tasks when Angela’s probes began populating her botany database. Like I said, I know what I’ve got. We just weren’t supposed to land over here, were we?”

“Good thinking. Probably would’ve been nice to share that information with your mission commander. You had your last dose about six hours ago, correct?”

“Something like that.”

“With zero sedation, your profile says that you could go a week or more without symptoms. Do you agree with that assessment?”

Minnie wrapped the blanket around her tighter. She didn’t like beginning a countdown clock. “I guess. And if you’re thinking about sedating me—”

“I’m not. Just trying to plan for everything, Minnie.”

“Good. Because I’d be useless. And you know I don’t like when you call me that.”

“Sorry. In the systems, your M’s… It’s hard when everyone else—” John stopped, apparently recalling he wasn’t a member of everyone else . He let out a deep breath, nodding. “Right. Sorry, Minerva.”

Her irritation with him had reached its traditional peak, but she’d lost the energy to argue. Besides, if she didn’t guide them to a new subject, she may just have to kill him. “I didn’t mean for that to come out bitchy. It’s just that it catches me off-guard every time. Nothing against you personally. I actually don’t like it from most people.” It was a lie. He had no place using an endearment. “Moving on, do you have any ideas on how we get to the other side of the planet?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing.”

Minnie sat up straight. “Good, because I do.”

If the Backup Habitat survived the station’s destruction, Minnie could use it to communicate with any other survivors on the planet or still in orbit. She had some thoughts about the supply pods as well, but didn’t know enough about their subsystems, only the fact that they’d all been repurposed as Epsy’s GPS satellites. With the right gear, she could connect to the pod network, but then what? The right gear . What were the chances there? How had the EV faired? Once the tasty flesh filling departed, had the Hynkas’ interest remain? Had at least one skimmer survived the abuse? When would Minnie’s stomach begin aching? What productive task or research could she do on her fone?

She couldn’t sleep.

Sharing the cramped tent with John had kept her warm, but her mind raced, refusing to settle. John didn’t exactly snore, but his breathing had grown progressively louder and more strained sounding, as if he were lifting a heavy object with each exhale. How could Aether stand sleeping with him for all those years? And then Aether was all she could think about.

It was unlikely that Aether was dead. Objectively, this much was certain, and true as well for the rest of the station team. Even those flung directly away from orbit were not in immediate danger. An EV could sustain two people for at least a week. Water supply was probably the biggest limiting factor. If properly rationed, a pair could stretch an EV’s water tank over 8-10 days. They’d all have their SSK supply of calorie bars after reinitiation, but food would outlast water. So dehydration, Minnie determined, was how anyone stuck on an EV would die. That is, if they didn’t take other measures first, such as shutting down environmental.

This was how she preferred to think of Aether going: by choice. Not the slow, agonizing churn of dehydration. No, no going, period. No goddamn going for Aether.

Eventually, Minnie moved on to a thorough dissection of EV design and evac procedures.

Why had the pod systems been programmed based upon optimal station orientation and coordinates in the first place? Pods should be designed to assume worst-case scenario: station chaos. In what fantasy world did evacs take place under optimal conditions?

EVs should have full propulsion and guidance systems programmed with specific coordinates based upon layers of redundant sources: GPS, magnetic field, land feature recognition, and above all, direct, on-the-spot user input. She knew why they didn’t. They were built and coded 35 years ago based directly upon the even-older pods used in local system research. They’d never once received an upgrade and no one on the station ever gave them half a damned thought—Minnie included. And if anyone had, obviously, pod enhancement would forever remained buried beneath an ever-growing mountain of higher priorities.