Nigel Thompson - Pheia

When Dr. Ford had administered the injections it had taken only seconds and Kate had simply looked away. “OK, then. Let’s play doctor.”

She pulled back the syringe a few inches and plunged it into herself, then pushed down on the plunger. When it was empty she paused a second before realizing it had to come out again. Yanking it out she dropped it on the counter, then put her hand over the entry point and applied some pressure. She looked around the room and saw the small first aid box on the wall. Keeping her hand on her butt she walked over and opened it, looking for bandaids.

Kate pulled her hand away and tried to look at where she had injected herself but couldn’t see. She wiped her hand over the area and looked at it. No blood. She shut the first aid box door and latched it closed.

For the next hour, Kate tried to make a plan to get back to the surface. The essence of the plan was simple: program the hab at a fixed rate of ascent and wait. Easy. She already knew how to set up the ascent rate. But what rate to set. The hab was currently in about 4,500 feet of water and Kate knew she needed to ascend slowly enough to allow her body to outgas the hydrogen and helium that had been forced into her tissues by the huge pressure she was under.

Failure to go up slowly enough could cause bubbles to form and cause the bends. She knew too that hydrogen and helium were absorbed way less than nitrogen and this is why they were breathing the hydreliox mix. What she had no idea about was exactly how much she might have absorbed or at what rate it was safe to get rid of it by going up.

The original mission plan called for three weeks to get back to the surface, but that was after being on the bottom for several days and Kate thought it likely included a big safety margin.

There was no way she could deal with being in here by herself for three weeks. Half of that, maybe. But half the time seemed like it might be pushing things too hard. She settled on 15 days. From where she was now that meant an ascent rate of 300 feet per day. That sounded like a nice round number.

At the control console, Kate entered the ascent rate and her finger hovered over the Execute button. “What am I not thinking of?”

Kate scanned the displays again. Most of it seemed reasonable. She laughed. “Oh, right, like you know.”

She tapped the Execute button and heard the drive motors spin up. The hab shifted slightly and the image of the wall outside the portal started to move. She was going up.

Kate stood at the portal in the ops room looking out at the wall. The control systems on the hab were keeping it about 30 feet from the wall. Easily close enough to see details on the wall when the flood lights were on. The hab was rising at 300 feet per day which sounded like a lot but that was only twelve and a half feet every hour and Kate could see 30 or 40 feet of wall from the portal. It was agonizing to watch the incredibly slow movement of the wall, but it was somehow compelling. It was the only indication that the hab was rising at all.

Inside the ops room, the only evidence that the hab was in motion was the sound of the drive motors which mostly emitted a constant faint whine but which occasionally changed speed briefly to adjust the attitude or lateral position of the hab. It was boring.

But what bothered Kate more than having nothing to do was being alone. She didn’t generally mind being alone. She had regularly been backpacking on her own in the wilderness. She found it very peaceful and used it as a stress reduction exercise. When she hiked alone, there was no need to be responsible for anyone else. No need to keep up with a group or slow down so the group could keep up with her. Being alone just cut all that out. If she wanted to go faster, she went faster. If she had had enough, she could turn around and come back with no need to discuss it with everyone else. And if she wanted to sit down in the grass and count the flowers, she could do that too.

But sitting on the floor of the ops room wasn’t quite the same. Apart from very small changes on the control display panels, everything looked exactly the same, all the time. She had even tuned out the occasional beeps from the control system as it made a change to the attitude of the hab.

Kate was lonely. She could almost feel the pressure of the enormous column of water above her holding her down. Keeping her away from the people on the surface.

To keep herself busy she had rearranged all the food and other items they had brought in to the ops room once more. She had laid out a few towels on the floor as a mat and tried sleeping on it. It might work if she was really tired but it was impossible to sleep. Her head had too many things swimming around in it. She had spent over an hour just looking through all the menu options on all the control panel displays. This had turned out to be a lot less helpful than she had first thought it might. There were a lot of systems that kept the hab operating but the designers of the Pheia had sensibly automated almost everything, and there was very little Kate felt the need to look at in detail. As long as it kept running and the hab kept ascending, at some point she would reach the surface, and the people on the surface barge could pick her up. Then it would be over.

At the present rate of ascent that was 14 or 15 days away. She just had to keep it together for that long. There were a few practical issues she had to resolve. Food wasn’t a problem. She had a good collection of freeze-dried foods and a kettle to heat water with. It was really just like backpacking, and she had decided early on to avoid the teriyaki chicken. The last time she had eaten that on a trip had not been fun. And that reminded her of the big issue, where to poop?

The one head in the facility was in the crew quarters at the top of the other cylinder. If she wanted to use the bathroom, it involved a dive to the other side and back again. It hadn’t become a problem yet. She was eating so little, there hadn’t been any need but she knew that at some point it would be, and knowing her luck it would be one of those emergency events where you get the feeling that you need to go about fifteen seconds before you really, really need to go.

Kate had wondered about using the opening by the ladder that led down to the moon pool. She felt OK using it to pee into and had tried it once to be sure keeping her feet on the deck and one hand on the side of the ladder. Not too elegant but she’d hit the water and not the deck. Score one to her.

But she thought about floaters and sinkers a lot when she thought about pooping in the same hole. If they sank, that would be OK. And most poop sank didn’t it? She tried to remember a time when she might have had floating poop, but really, who looked? There was some medical fact about floating poop that she thought she remembered, but whatever it was it didn’t matter much right now. All she cared about was that poop might float and the thought of being stuck in the ops room beside a couple of floaters wasn’t appealing. And what if she had to do a dive to the other side for some reason? She was getting into the water with her own poo. No way.

“OK, enough about the poos,” she thought. “This is borderline obsessive.”

And so Kate settled into an uneasy routine of eating dried food once or twice a day supplemented with a can of peaches or some other thing she found in the food pile. Not all that exotic perhaps but manageable. She looked at all the monitor screens every hour or two and spent a lot of time watching the wall crawl by outside the portal as the hab slowly ascended.

At least she didn’t need to scratch the days on the wall. The computer systems had plenty of date and time indications as well as the more depressing information about depth and distance from the wall.