Dear God, if this goes right, I’ll turn myself into Schrodinger’s Cat. I give it a 75% probability of occurrence. Damn, I just calculated that, didn’t I. Focus, Gary, focus.
Floating in zero-gravity while writing with pen and paper was much harder than he’d thought it would be. Anxious nerves made his writing hand shake, and he felt sorry for the poor soul that would receive his letter and have to decipher the frantic scribbles. Time was short, and Gary decided to avoid any long exposition about the asteroid. He didn’t know anything for certain anyway, and there was no immediate cause for alarm, or so he hoped.
Hope. It seemed such a convenience when not needed. The plan would be nothing but a failure without hope. This was their one advantage.
Quickly, he wrote:
And finally, to the Transient, X^G 5FXL^ inbound at LX6^0AZ.
Pass! The Black Golf Ball is coming back to you! Go get it!
We don’t fear the darkness. Instead, we pursue it, and find no end to the depths of light.
My love to all,
Gary Buckle, Cognitive Detective, March 15, 2045
Gary folded the letter and added it to a short stack of papers, and slid them into a manila envelope. He looked across the EVAC chamber to a wall of wire-frame lockers, considering all the ways that the plan could go wrong. They all ended with him dying in the vacuum of space.
He connected the last of the custom wiring to the wrist-mounted bank of buttons on the EVAC suit. While his movements were calm, beads of sweat formed at the roots of his orange hair and rolled down his pink face. His heart pounded.
“Just breathe,” he whispered.The stale recycled air of the EVAC cabin never smelled so alive.Nervously, he glanced over to the upper corner of the room to reassure himself that the security camera was fully disabled. With the optical lens shattered, the battered camera tumbled freely in the air. Flayed wires floated like the exploded innards of a bird. Nothing could see him, but he was worried that something still could. This was the paranoia of behavior modification, and he still felt it despite the sabotage of the ship’s software command network.
With the external switch on the suit connected, Gary closed the shielded cage of the locker. He pushed himself across the utility chamber to a makeshift red torpedo of weld-bonded gas tanks. Removing the folded manila envelope from inside his jacket, he held it closer for inspection.
“Here’s hoping that people still remember how to use you.”
Gary opened a small door on the side of the torpedo and slipped the envelope into an interior chamber. With a press of a button, the torpedo retracted into a shielded cage.
This was the last of the small steps leading to the precipice. The hurried details of the preparation kept him from imagining the reality of this moment, or the growing fear that chilled his spine.
No time for that now, he tried to convince himself, as he pushed up the access tunnel toward the command center. Along the way, he grabbed the shattered camera and attempted to crush it in his hands. Failing that, he dropped it into the waste disposal. Goodbye-Archeai… for now.
The command center was a mess. Gary hated to see such a fine machine stripped and cannibalized to its bare and exposed wires. The remains of seven security cameras, the gouged electronic eyes of Maxwell’s Demon, floated in the middle of the cabin. At least the thing had no more eyes.
Gary pulled along the guide rails to a hastily constructed wall of recycled paneling and squeezed through a concealed entrance. Behind the wall, Thuja and Rico were busy sliding circular pieces of the Sizzler together. Coiled tubes and banks of large capacitors lined the aluminum frame that held the Sizzler intact. With concentric conductive rings of copper wires, the machine looked the part of a cyberpunk cyclotron.
Gary maneuvered his body toward the end of a curved bench and swung his legs below the table that anchored the machine. The improvised wall paneling made for tight quarters, but the concealed space provided enough room for the engineers to complete their plans.
“I’m kosher. How’s the Sizzler?” Gary asked.
Thuja and Rico feverishly tightened the final bolts in place. Once finished, they looked at each other, then at Gary, unsmiling, their eyes betraying fear.
Gary smiled, “It’s not a funeral, ya’ll, it’s just sabotage.”
Rico winced at yet another Beastie Boys reference.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Gary?” Thuja asked with tears welling in her eyes. A bubble of water twisted from her face as she slowly shook her head. The tear floated in a perfect sphere, and Gary could see the lost piece of Thuja’s heart rippling at the center.
“This is the only way, and it’ll work. I promise.”
Rico whispered, “If you’re done, we’re done. Go time.”
Gary glanced at the primer on the side of the machine and pushed aside the sudden nervous surge that shot through his body like electricity. There was no turning back now. Time to jump into the abyss.
He looked at Thuja and Rico and warned, “Remember, get out, get back in. Don’t leave this thing unoccupied for too long. We all saw that movie.”
Rico answered in monotone, “Affirmative, Commander.”
Gary grabbed the crank and spun it. The Sizzler sputtered, then roared to life. The spinning rings whipped the air like the beaters of a rabid pastry mixer. The engineers took deep breaths, and then Thuja and Rico pulled the wall of paneling down. The engineers escaped to the EVAC chamber as the Sizzler began to scream.
Gary, the last to enter the EVAC chamber, pivoted to shut the portal door. With the door latched, he turned and pushed off toward his EVAC locker where Thuja and Rico were waiting. Through the reinforced ceiling, they heard the Sizzler rise to a shrill, ear-aching pitch. Suddenly, the machine popped.
The interior lighting of the EVAC chamber shut off, casting the engineers into utter darkness. Gary groped the locker door and found the latch. Opening the locker, he reached in and grabbed the flashlight. A beam of light illuminated the tight metal box that protected his equipment, and Gary extracted the spacesuit. He quickly pulled the spacesuit over his body and snapped the helmet into place, while Thuja and Rico activated their flashlights. Gary initiated life support, and the guide lights on the suit illuminated the chamber.
“Thank you, Mr. Faraday,” Gary said over his helmet comm. “Moving to secure the Red Pill.”
He pushed his bulkier body over to the hand crank for the storage tube and began manually extracting the red torpedo from its shielded cover. It was not long before Rico and Thuja, fully suited for the spacewalk, were by his side, and they quickly maneuvered the Red Pill toward the EVAC gate.
Thuja took her position behind the red torpedo and gripped it firmly with two welded handrails. Rico took his position at the front while Gary floated to the crank that opened the EVAC gate. He grasped the handle with his padded gloves and called out into his helmet intercom:
“Copy go when ready!”
Rico and Thuja each shouted, “Go!”
Gary tilted his head up toward the ceiling of the EVAC chamber to imagine the dead control center above it.
“HAL 9000 you are not,” he snarled, and he spun the EVAC gate open. Puffs of vaporized gas rolled around the perimeter of the round door as the atmosphere of the utility chamber escaped into space.
With the door fully open, the engineers were greeted by a dense backdrop of stars. Rico and Thuja guided the Red Pill through the round gate to the spherical exterior of the Harvestman 5. Gary was hot on their tail.
Outside of the massive curved sphere of the space miner, Thuja pushed the Red Pill away while Rico and Gary descended. The two men steered with pressurized gas jets along the smooth, round surface of the ship until they were under the open gate of the drone garage. They slowly rose into the garage and took positions around two of four cranks that held a truck-sized remote mining drone to the docking carriage.
Gary quipped, “Almost free of this cranky ship.”
He spun the cranks with Rico to release the Tikkler from its anchors, and as the final docking clamps were released, Rico called out, “I got it from here Gary, go!”
Using the gas-thrusters on his suit, Gary maneuvered around the rotund space miner to the retracted claws of the Harvestman’s portside articulated arms. Between four tips of the massive claws, Gary could see a small black circle.
The Xenoskin, as Pierce described it, was a perfect circular hole about the size of a golf ball. The guide lights from the suit illuminated the articulated claws, but the black orb reflected no light. The words of the Inspector haunted his mind. Was he really looking at the skeleton of an extraterrestrial?
“Okay gang, I have it in sight. Status check.”
Thuja reported first, “NAV confirmed. Standing by.”
Rico added, “The Tikkler is on its way. I’m leaving the garage now.”
“Ten-Four,” Gary confirmed. “Beginning extraction.”
Gary reached for the black golf ball and clasped it between a padded thumb and forefinger. He could sense a top, bottom, and sides. However, when he touched it, the battery icon on his HUD visor dropped significantly.
“Gary, looks like the Harvestman is powering back up,” Rico urged, “You might want to hurry.”
Glancing back at the Harvestman 5, Gary could see the external flood lamps turning on. The lamps slowly rotated, searching for activity.
“Rico, get inside asap and execute backup Epsilon.”
“On it,” Rico replied.
“I’m losing power, so this has to be fast!” Gary shouted. He took the black sphere into his clenched fist but was surprised at how massive it felt. The Xenoskin had the weight of a large rock, only compressed to the size of a golf ball. With the black sphere firmly in his grasp, Gary reoriented himself toward the red torpedo where he could see Thuja making her final preparations.
“Thuja, get inside!” Gary ordered.
Rico warned, “The mainframe is back online.”
Thuja started floating toward him. “Gary, I can get that for you.”
“No!” Gary exclaimed. “Thuja, I’m ordering you to get inside now! I got this!”
He saw Thuja stop, slowly turn, and accelerate toward the massive, mechanical arachnoid of the much beloved Harvestman 5.
He was going to miss that creepy spider ship. Gary accelerated toward the red torpedo, but the mass of the black sphere in his left glove resisted the force. The muscles in his arm were only a fleshy tendon between the mass of the xenosphere, and the thrusters on his suit. His arm and back muscles strained to keep the two on a common trajectory.
Below the docking garage, the Tikkler slowly approached the torpedo. The polished titanium plating of the leggy mining drone caught the starlight, appearing like a white wolf-spider against the black of space.
“We’re on track for Epsilon. Rico, are you on the hyperlinks yet?”
“Negative,” Rico replied, “but close.”
With the main battery nearly drained, Gary flicked a custom switch on his left wrist that engaged a backup battery unit. A second battery icon appeared but quickly started to fade. Gary sighed.
“This is an unfortunate string of unintended consequences…”
He flicked a second switch on his custom wrist and fired the charging cable out the back of his suit. The extended cable yanked at his back, and the black sphere ripped from his glove. The sphere disappeared against the empty backdrop of space.
“No no no no no no!” Gary yelled.
Thuja called out over the intercom, “What’s wrong?”
Gary took his right thumb off the thruster controls and let inertia carry him through a surge of panic.
“Look at me and eyeball the charging cable. Make sure it’s not rebounding my way.”
“Copy.”
His HUD was in the green. Battery two was nominal, and battery one was now charging. Gary stared into the darkness, hoping to find something, anything, that indicated where the xenosphere went. He would stay here for the rest of his short life trying to find that thing if he had to.
“Gary, the cable is oscillating, but not recoiling.”
“Thank you,” Gary replied. He could feel the subtle shifting pressure on his back that would make him oscillate too. His short life would be even shorter than he previously thought.
Thuja repeated, “What’s going on Gary?”
His eyes pierced the black of space to absorb the shimmering light of countless stars. With any luck, the xenosphere might pass in front of one of them.
“Just a little jazz.”
“That didn’t sound like jazz.”
There were so many stars, and his eyes couldn’t possibly see all of them at once. Struck with an idea, he opened the front panel of his suit and toggled a switch to expel gas.
“A little improvisation — you know, a little jazz.”
He slid his thumb over to the thruster controls and put his suit into slowly spinning roll. He activated the front panel lights, and a swirling but faint cloud of gas illuminated the space around him.
“Gary, you’ve got problems,” said Rico. “What’s going on?”
“No problem, just a little fluid problem solving. Tell ya about it if it works.”
Through the visor of his helmet, Gary watched the shifting interplay of stars and gas. If he had to die today, he wouldn’t have had a better view. With each rotation, the charging cable wiggled and wrapped around him like the serpentine body of a thin space-worm. This too would have negative consequences, and so Gary reached for the front control panel and detached the cable. The cable suddenly writhed like a decapitated snake, and bent around an object that Gary could hardly see. An arc of the cable had attached itself to a tiny black sphere floating in the fog.
Bingo. Lock down the spin with the goal back in sight. Gary accelerated toward the xenosphere, reclaiming it in his grasp. The battery indicators of his HUD began to flash yellow.
Gary muttered, “Back to square one, on the River Styx in a sinking raft.”
He steered his suit and the xenosphere into a position alongside the Red Pill. “Rico, prime the hyperlinks,” Gary ordered.
“Hyperlinks are already online,” Rico reported. “We’re too late.”
Gary grabbed the red torpedo and opened a panel in the side fuselage.
“No, we’re not,” he assured Rico, “If it’s looking for me, then let it find me.”
He released his grip on the black sphere and pushed it into a machined hole inside the panel. Then he hit a switch on the side of the tank, closed the panel, and propelled himself away toward the oncoming Tikkler. The concealed engines at the rear of the torpedo ignited, and the Red Pill slipped away toward the bright light of the Sun. Fingers crossed, this would be a hole-in-one at Earth’s sixth Langrangian point.
Gary then turned and accelerated toward the oncoming Tikkler. As the mining drone passed, he grabbed at a utility rail and seized it. The sudden change of acceleration slung him around to a platform that rose perpendicular to the drone’s shielded top. He braced himself against the inevitable collision and grabbed at a second rail with his free hand. After slamming into the top of the Tikkler, he planted his boots on the rising platform and steadied his grip. With a quick, calculated motion, Gary latched a carabiner from the Tikkler to the utility belt on his suit. Now secure in his position, he opened a control panel and wrapped a glove around an inset throttle. He pushed the throttle forward, and the sternside engines pushed the Tikkler toward Mars.
“That’s checkmate, my friends. How’s the view over there?” Gary asked, watching the Harvestman 5 seem to shrink at the base of his feet. It looked like nothing more than the Harvestman spiders that he’d feared as a child, but it felt like the death of a close friend.
With a somber voice, Rico responded, “We’re good here, Gary.”
“I hope to see you soon, Gary,” Thuja was crying.
“Don’t worry about me. Mind your duties to each other and I’ll see you soon enough.” Gary pulled himself up the top of the Tikkler to the cockpit port. “Rico, get ready on my hyperlink.”
He opened the cockpit door and slipped into the pilot chair. With one hand, he attached a utility cable from the interior control panel to his space suit. The life-support icons blinked green and his batteries began recharging.
Deep breaths, racing heart, but slowing. Breathe. No matter what happens to me, we just won.
The Tikkler was no five-star resort, but Gary considered that he would rather be inside than outside. He desperately wanted to remove the helmet, but he didn’t want to take the chance of sudden decompression. No, for once, he actually outsmarted that damned thing, and landed in the pocket safe and sound. There was just one more thing that he had to do.
“Activate Hyperlink.”
The Hyperlink Icon appeared in Gary’s heads-up display. Gary shouted into his headset.
“Activate Codex C-DEC-one-three-seven. Alright, you blue bastard, I know you’re listening. Did I get your attention yet? It’s your move.”
Continue to the next Chapter: The Apocalypse of Gary Buckle
The Paradigm Convergence 