SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

When her hand was on the doorknob at the front of the shop, Foxx remembered his manners and pulled a crown from his pocket, offering it to her. She shook her head.

“Please,” protested Foxx. “For your troubles.”

“The messages are not troubles,” she said, pushing his hand away. “They are gifts.”

Then she walked out the door and disappeared into the crowds on Burlington Arcade.

Suddenly, from the studio, there was a shout and the sound of something breaking. A distraught George appeared, a bent brass rod and broken prism in his hand.

“I’m…I’m sorry, Mr. Foxx! I bumped the table when I was moving the books you signed. It must have fallen off!” He looked desperate. “Please, take it out of my wages!”

Foxx took the broken pieces of the camera lucida and stared at them for a moment. Then he patted George on the shoulder.

“A simple accident, George. Don’t upset yourself. This day is nearly over anyway. Why don’t you lock up and go home. I’d like to spend a little time alone.” Foxx eyed the stack of large, empty canvases in the corner of the studio. “Although perhaps, before you go, you can help me lift one of those onto an easel?”

“Of course, Mr. Foxx,” said George eagerly. “Anything you say, sir!”

When George had gone, Foxx set the pieces of the camera lucida on a shelf and began to open tubes of paint, one by one.

Originally published by Baen

At 18:27 input received.

Get me out. Let me breathe.

The carbon-steel hull lies a scant half-centimeter from my face, but I can’t dwell on that. It’s what started me into panic in the first place.

I crawled to my spot next to Matthew James in the back of Dad’s two-door classic Chevy, trying to keep my bare legs from burning on the peeling vinyl. Dad rolled down the window in an attempt to cool things off, but I resigned myself to sucking it up and breathing the soupy hot air. As the engine puttered to life and the radio blared "Summer in the City," I scowled at Mom and Dad’s delight in the ancient song. In the rear-view mirror Dad’s bushy eyebrows crinkled as he laughed.

He tossed back a hard candy. "Hang in there, Natasha."

In deep orbit around Alpha Centauri AB.4, encapsulated in a coffin-sized hunk of metal, I’m surrounded by nothingness—silence and cold and dark. The ship pings, announcing the return of the first Little Guy probe. Cool peppermint lingers on my phantom lips from the memory.

My robotic eyes open, but see only darkness. The metal shell around me clunks and there’s a mechanical whine as the beach ball-sized Little Guy docks with the ship and silence again while its data uploads. Please let the planet be habitable. I came all this way, give me something.

While I wait, I check with the comm-bots on the Beacon construction and try to ignore the itching. My skin is a synthetic polymer covered in forty-two thousand sensors that were overkill in training, but now, inside the capsule, they’re worse than useless. They pick up every tiny dust particle. My mind-construct interprets these as itches and somewhere during my malfunctions I’ve lost the ability to turn the sensors off.

My biggest complaint is the choking. I know I’m not actually choking. I’m not crazy. But it’s the same sensation, a tightening as if a hand grips my non-existent throat.

I think back, trying to figure where I went wrong. It makes no sense. Everything was normal before I shut down for the journey—months of training, psychological assessments, and self-diagnostics came back with flying colors. Upon arrival three days ago I awoke to panic and malfunctions. Sure, fifty-two years passed back home but it felt like a blink of an eye for me. I remember with perfect clarity the day they mapped my brain and uploaded me into the probe, how afterward I said goodbye to my old self, that human Natasha, and watched her go on her way.

The data from the Little Guy finishes uploading. This is it. I can’t get the files open fast enough.

The first several photos show a dense atmosphere of swirling browns. A few manipulations give me access to surface images of a gray crust filled with rocky gullies like the wrinkles of a massive elephant.

As the rest of the Little Guys return and fill me in on the data they’ve collected, the choking in my throat gets worse.

Alpha Centauri AB.4 is a lump of rock. Six thousand kilometers in radius, dense carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. No chance of sustaining life. In other words, Venus but warmer. All of this, my life’s work and traveling 4.3 light years to find the twin of our nearest neighbor.

The rain pattered against the windows as Grandma pulled chocolate chip cookies out of the oven and I watched from the kid-safe distance of the kitchen table. Grandma hummed absently and I took a deep, cookie-scented breath. Warmth filled me all the way to my toes. Just as my mouth started watering, shadows fall over the memory, swallowing Grandma and her kitchen, and I resist a tug pulling me into the darkness.

Vivid, perfect memory is one of the perks of upload technology, but with my malfunctions I can’t even get those right.

I jerk free of the shadows and end up on the road beside the airfield. This isn’t a memory I’d choose. When I was thirteen, not long after Sophia died, my parents took me all sorts of places trying to cheer me up. During one of those attempts we stopped at Luke Air Force Base. Mom, Dad, Matthew James, and I stood beside the chain-link fence with the Arizona sun beating down on us as it leached the sky a dull blue. The air smelled of rain without a cloud in sight. The necklace I wore that day feels too tight now and I want nothing more than to take it off, but the memory doesn’t work that way. Mom and Dad stood close to me, but all I could think about was the terrible inside-twisty feeling of everything being so wrong.

Sophia would never grow up and fly. She’d never even get to see a plane.

My eyes prickled as a jet engine roared, the ground beneath our feet rumbling. Matthew James, ten years old at the time, let out a whoop and jumped against the chain-link fence. "This is more like it!" he yelled. The rest of his words were swallowed by the roar of the plane.

A whoosh of adrenaline surged through me as the jet zoomed off—a child-like excitement I don’t remember having felt. Some of the pressure lifts from my chest.

Dad sighed and squeezed my shoulder. "We can take you someplace else if you’d rather?"

I don’t mind watching a few more, but I said, "Yes, please."

Matthew James scowled.

The files from Earth include forty-eight years of updates sent to me at the speed of light while I slept. In those files was the discovery of another rocky planet, AB.6—this one looking even less promising than AB.4, so they didn’t send me there right away.

It’s taken me two months at my reduced speeds, but AB.6 is within spitting distance. During that time I’ve been awake, malfunctioning, and staving off panic by reliving memories and avoiding shadows. I can watch my video library thousands of times per hour, but somehow memories take longer.

Once again the ship’s cameras fail to respond, so I’m blind as the ship settles into high orbit around the planet. Metal clunks within the capsule as the bay doors open to release the five Little Guys that will take pictures and run analysis of the planet below.

I reboot and run another self-diagnostic that tells me the same thing as the others:

Great. As if I didn’t know that before running the tests. The least it could do is give me an idea of where my processing went haywire.