S Morden - One Way

Frank watched the black and gray picture on the screen. “Just hope none of us gets sick. We can always radio home, get a doctor to talk to us. And when the NASA guys are here, they’ll have a medic with them, right? Someone to look after them on the journey: they don’t get frozen like we did.”

“There was one guy I read about once. Russian. He was the camp doctor in a base at the South Pole, and he got appendicitis.” Dee made a slicing motion on his abdomen. “He had to operate on himself. No anesthetic. He had people hold up mirrors so he could see inside himself and do it that way. That’s just extreme.”

“That’s the kind of thing I could have imagined Alice doing. She was a tough old lady. Still don’t know why she did it.” Frank reached across Dee and dabbed at the cameras. “Why did we install one in the workshop? There’s no risk of a fire in there.”

“It was in the specifications. One for every hab section, upper and lower floor.”

“So you can tell from here where everyone is, just not who everyone is.” Frank looked for the ghosts. Zero was in the greenhouse. There was him and Dee in Control. Declan was in the yard.

“I guess so. But we’re just piggybacking the fire-detection software. None of this was designed for us.”

“And there are still no cameras outside at all?”

“No.” Dee frowned. “Why would there be?”

“I don’t know. I’m just used to being watched, and I thought I was.”

“If you’d have asked sooner, I would have told you sooner.”

“Zero knows?”

“Sure. Told him when I put the cameras in the greenhouse. He said I was working for the Man, and I explained that they weren’t watching him, just looking out for fires.”

“Well, don’t I feel the idiot now?” Frank leaned back and looked around. Control didn’t have much hardware, but it did have redundancy. It was one of the few places that had more than what it strictly needed. All the cameras, all the other environmental sensors, fed into a series of black boxes. The radio traffic was logged there, and one station was set aside for video messages, with a camera facing the chair, and a mic and headset combo still in a cellophane pocket on the desk.

There were screens, too, flat ones that were of a new generation to what he remembered from life outside: as thin as a sheet of plastic, just stuck into a frame like a picture. They consumed power, so were currently dead. Dee sat at the only one that was active.

“So what can you do from here?”

“Do? Pretty much everything. I’ve got read-outs from all the habs: those get logged and transmitted. I’ve got read-outs from us—”

“Hold up. You’ve got access to our medical implants?”

Dee tapped through the menus on the screen.

“So this is Zero. This is Declan. This is me. And this, this is you.”

Frank placed his hand on his chest as he watched the lines cross the screen. His heart rate. His breathing rate. His body temperature. His blood pressure and something called pO 2.

“How does it collect this stuff?”

“Wireless. Same way the tablets work.”

“I mean if we’re in our suits.”

“Gets picked up by the suit and broadcast back here.”

“Well, damn.” Then a thought. “Does Brack have one?”

“If he does, it’s not on this system. It’s just the four of us. For now.” Dee tapped a couple more keys. Marcy: no signal. Alice: no signal. Zeus: no signal. He clicked off that screen. “So this is the electrics—this is what Declan looks at for most of the day. Red is higher power consumption, blue is less. The greenhouse takes most, but when we go and heat up food in the kitchen, that goes reddish too, or when we need to turn the satellite dish or recharge the buggies. You know. Total consumption is here, and what we make goes in here. Batteries are on a separate screen. Then we’ve got the same for water and air.”

“But you can’t start and stop things from here.”

“Sure you can. All the automatic systems. You can reset them, change the levels, turn stuff on and off. It’s not difficult, but I mean, why would you want to? I leave all that shit well alone. All I’m doing is bundling up the daily reports and transmitting them to Earth. I keep them all for a rolling seven days in case the files get corrupted and I have to resend, but that’s all we can hold. Then I overwrite them with the day eight data. I’ve written a script to do all that automatically. It’s no big deal.”

“So you don’t actually need to be here.”

Dee blew out his cheeks. “If something went wrong, you’d need me. Otherwise, I guess not. I just come in here to goof off. Don’t tell Brack. Don’t tell anyone.”

“So what do you do all day?”

Dee returned the screen to the top of the menu tree, so that the XO logo was staring out at them. “I just… read. Manuals. Tech stuff. Geological reports. Maps. I like that kind of stuff.” He pressed his hands together and looked down at the floor.

“It’s OK. It’s fine.” Frank risked tapping his fist against Dee’s shoulder. “You can keep doing that. I’m not in charge of you, or anything.”

“I just want to be useful to the NASA guys when they get here. Knowing things that they might not about the base, about the local area, that’s going to be good, right? They’ll need someone to carry their kit and lend them a hand. I want them to think… good thoughts about me. Include me. Come to rely on me. You know.”

Frank knew. “I get that. I know this is going to be a stupid question, but do you need a password to access any of this stuff?”

“Why would you need that? It’s not like we’re vulnerable to hackers, or unauthorized users. We’re all authorized. Everybody who comes to the base is.”

“I don’t know: I just thought that maybe Brack—”

“Brack always calls home from the ship. It gets routed through the main dish for ease, but it doesn’t pass through this computer.” Dee tapped some keys. “This is the uplink log for the last seven days. It’s just automatically generated reports, like I said.”

“Declan told me he was going to ask you to hack XO’s responses to Brack. I’m kind of hoping you didn’t, because I think that’d be a very bad idea.”

“He hasn’t. Why would he do that?”

Frank ignored the question. “If he does, turn him down.”

“They’re encrypted.” Dee shrugged. “I can’t crack them.”

“You tried already?”

“I was just seeing if I could. They’re working off of some public-private key thing, so I can get the message block, I just can’t tell what the text says. Brack will have the key in the ship, and, well, whatever: I’ll just tell Declan what I’ve told you.”

“And there’s no way you could crack the code?”

“No,” said Dee. “This is a key of twenty or so random characters that work in an algorithm to scramble the data. I could write a script to try every possible combination, and I’d be old a hundred times over before it got even close to working. Unless I have the key, it’s not going to happen. Just forget about it.”

“Forgotten,” said Frank, holding his hands up. “Thanks for showing me around. I feel like I learned something.”

“No problem.”

Frank turned to leave.

“Why did Zeus die?” asked Dee.

Frank stopped. “I don’t know yet,” he lied. Mostly lied, at least. Why he died was different from how he died. “If someone comes by and asks you to do something you’re not comfortable with, or throws questions at you, or just does something you don’t expect, you could let me know.”

Dee looked down at the screen, then back up. “Frank, what’s going on?”

“I haven’t worked it out yet. But stay frosty, OK?” Frank went back to the crew quarters to push the button. He ended up sitting there for longer than he needed to, thinking about things. Water reclamation was below the yard, and was little more than a machine that exposed their waste to vacuum and caught the water as it boiled off. The dry solids were sterilized, turned into bricks, and handed straight over to Zero. All of that had been Zeus’s job.