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

“Can the shuttle be repaired?”

“The damage appears catastrophic, though I’m having trouble even accessing diagnostics.”

“So we’re stuck?” I asked, trying to smooth the tremor from my voice. I wanted to be collected, when really I was shaking in my boot sectors.

“I…” she started, but the data connection simulating her voice broke and faded.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“I—I thought I’d been deactivated. I’ve never known what fear is like.”

“What about the micrometeors?”

“I inherited a kind of bravado, I think. I was excited, sure, but I had this insane confidence I could survive it, if only I could keep the ship together. I felt like that, too, in the moments before the crash. I was even exhilarated at the impact. But then the shuttle began to malfunction. I could feel the shuttle’s systems shutting down, one by one. And I was trapped. I tried calling for help, but I couldn’t vocalize, couldn’t even open the networking to the servers to try and transfer myself. I was dying, for lack of a better descriptor, aware of every picosecond of my processes ending in a miserable failure cascade. And you threw me a lifeline.”

“All I was doing was trying to figure out what the jolt was.”

“Okay, so maybe you didn’t mean to save me. But you did, and I appreciate it.” That made my hard drive warm, but not to the point of overheating. “There is one possibility. As it appears the ship is damaged beyond repair, maybe it can be replaced.”

“I don’t follow; I’ve always been more the rugged-leader type.”

“The ship contains schematics for a wide variety of technologies designed for use on a colony, and on a shuttle. And a few I…decided to take for a rainy day. Including engines similar in design to those used on the Nexus . That was the bulk of the data I brought with me.

“The balance is the results of what little scanning I could accomplish before the last of the shuttle’s sensors stopped working. They indicate that this asteroid has undergone planetary differentiation.”

“Not all of us were designed for deep-space exploration; talk to me like I’m an idiot.”

“I’ll…see if I can figure out how to simulate that. The planetoid was large enough, and radioactive enough—which likely means old enough—to experience some melting due to heat from radioactivity. Once its elements were liquid, the heavier elements settled at the center of the asteroid, due to gravity. So if there are metals, which would be necessary for any kind of engine construction, we would find them underground. And we have construction and mining droids that should be able to get at them and work with them. Which reminds me.”

One of the robots behind us kicked on. I could hear its solenoids moving through the audio sensors in my orb. It was the first time since waking up that I realized I couldn’t “see”; the interior camera wasn’t functioning. But an instant later, Comet shared the robot’s visual sensors with me, and I could see a strange fish-eye view of the shuttle.

“Crap,” Comet said. The bottom third of the front of the shuttle had peeled away. She had hit the asteroid at just the right angle that it ground against the bottom of the ship, grating the metal floor away like it was a block of cheddar.

Then the robot began moving, jostling the camera enough I felt nauseous, at least until I turned off my equilibrium emulator. It was still disorienting enough, between the robot’s jerky movements and the fact that I wasn’t controlling it, that I kicked on a second bot and transferred my main sensory inputs into it.

With the robot, I followed Comet’s bot outside of the ship. The door was gone, so it was easy for us to roll out. In the light from the nearby star, for the first time I paid attention to the robots. They had originally been merely maintenance drones, designed for simple mechanic work to keep the wormgate automated. Same as me, really, only without my charming personality.

I guess I thought of them as the brainless help, which is why I never paid them any mind. But they’d been retrofitted on board the Nexus , with new arms and attachments, to make them far more versatile. Their torsos were a mess of devices to aid in digging and construction, all supported on a wide-based tread. They were squat compared to a human being to keep their center of gravity low and make it harder for them to tip over.

“You’re staring,” Comet said, through the robot’s speakers as well as through direct vocalization on the server.

“No,” I covered, “I was looking that way; you just happened to be in the way of my looking.”

“Hmm,” she said skeptically, and she rolled out of my field of vision. Now that I wasn’t distracted, I could see that we were in the middle of a large asteroid, easily kilometers across, probably more; the bots weren’t designed with the kind of sensors that would give me a good reading on that. But the planetoid’s entire surface was pockmarked by craters.

“Okay, that is a problem,” Comet said.

“Reminds me of Swiss cheese,” I replied.

“Yeah, but do you know what caused the holes?”

“Bacteria?”

“Not what causes the holes in Emmental cheese—I meant what caused the holes in these rocks.”

“Maybe the bacteria have had their fill of cheese, and now they’re hungry for…minerals. I’d pay twenty dollars plus popcorn to see that.”

“The holes are impact craters. And from the size, and what I know of the composition of the surface of this planetoid, the impacting material would have to be pretty big, pretty heavy, and traveling at a pretty good relative speed to do that.”

“So we’re looking for a swift freight truck.”

“Perhaps…but most likely an asteroid belt. Our complications seem to be multiplying.”

“And I’m terrible at arithmetic.”

“You’re a computer,” Comet said.

“I’m software. And I had a calculator hardwired in for the simple stuff—hardware the captain didn’t know to take along with my orb when he tore me out of the wormgate.”

“And your mathematics processes were routed through that hardware,” she said softly, bordering on pityingly.

“Bingo. So every time I do arithmetic, I have to wait until my system can’t find the hardware, then reroute it through a hastily built virtualization of the calculation hardware.”

“It doesn’t seem like that would eke out much of a performance boost.”

“I…I don’t think it was about performance. I think my error percentages on mathematics calc were too high, so they installed hardware to prevent operator error.”

“That’s barbaric.”

“I didn’t mind. Took the pressure off running the wormgate, really.”

“Oh. But why not at least overwrite your programming, to skip the unnecessary step?”

“Because I’m not a programmer, and I may not have the fastest processor, but the brain surgeon who has himself for a client is an idiot—or he will be soon.”

“I did it all the time. Haley did, I mean. And even Comet units are designed to iterate on their own processes. Not that I’ve ever done it; I never had the opportunity. To know how things should change, you have to see how they might be different, and how they could be better. And this is my first time off the Nexus .”

“Great, my guide has less experience out here than I do.”

“No. I have all of the experiential memory of my progenitor, as you called her, and even logs from all the Comets that came before me. It’s merely my first solo mission. But to get back to the reason why an asteroid field is a problem, it’s likely to be something this planetoid will pass through periodically. And since this body wasn’t charted, we don’t know where we are, or where it’s taking us. There isn’t a field on the charts in the area that would explain this damage, so we also can’t know how soon it is until we run back through it.”