169: INDEFINITE

The next day is full of preparation. The first thing we do is set up a meeting between our ground crew, a handful of Hylarans (Hive, Celti, Elenna, Max and Dr Kim, chosen for their existing proximity to us and expertise in relevant fields), and the shipboard crew via radio.

“So the plan, as I understand it,” Captian Kae Jin says over the radio, “is to take advantage of modern technology to rebuild the Courageous to be able to last in space indefinitely. We need to redesign systems to make anything disposable as recyclable as possible, reallocate enough space and energy to be able to grow enough food to feed the crew, and set things ups so that anything disposable can be resupplies by harvesting asteroids. And outfit the ship to be capable of harvesting from asteroids.”

“That’s pretty much it,” I say. “Elenna, what’s the composition of the meteorites you guys get down here?”

“Primarily iron and titanium. We don’t know if there’s water, since that would burn up long before it reaches the ground. Little to no radioactives.”

“A lot of iron and titanium up here is a good start,” Captain Kae Jin says. “We can build a lot with that, and it allows us to test harvesting and manufacturing systems before leaving the area, as well as get stuff built up here without having to launch a whole lot of dense metal from the planet. But you all see the problem with this harvesting plan, right?”

There’s a lot of problems with the project, but one completely inescapable one related to the harvesting. “You can’t harvest asteroids at near-light speeds,” I say. “Doing this would mean stopping and starting on the journey, from star to star. If we’re really lucky, you might be able to get everything set up in this star system and make a straight run, but much more likely, this is going to be a slow, slow journey. Much slower in Earth or Hylaran time, and much, much slower in ship time, because you lose the benefit of time dilation.”

“Generations will live and die on this ship,” Captain Kae Jin agrees. “My crew are willing to do that. But the chronostatic colonists simply cannot stay in chronostasis for that long.”

I nod, although Kae Jin of course can’t see me. They’ll live and die on the ship, too. They’ll have to be revived on the journey, not at the destination.

“And more time is more resource consumption, more wear to the equipment, more time that we need these systems to keep going, more food we need to produce, more resource harvesting that we need to do. If we’re doing this, we can’t rely on an irreplaceable consumable resource at all. Everything needs to be harvestable from space or growable from things that are. Carbon, metals, and ice are abundant out here, but…”

“Nitrogen,” I say. “Helium should be harvestable, but…” Nitrogen is relatively abundant in space… in planetary atmospheres. Outside of those gravity wells? Much harder to come across. “Nitrogen’s a serious limiting factor down here, too.” Limited nitrogen aboard the Courageous isn’t necessarily a critical problem. It does mean using means of manufacturing that don’t use nitrogen, or at least don’t turn any of it into unrecoverable waste, but its main use for us is biological, and the biological systems aboard the Courageous should be as close to closed systems as we can get. If you’ve got your 70% air saturation and you’ve got your living soil, you don’t need more nitrogen except for in emergencies; it moves in a cycle. Depending on how much they modify the ship, the Courageous should already have enough nitrogen stored to do that.

The problem is airlocks. No airlock is one hundred per cent efficient. You lose a little air, a little water, every time the airlock cycles. There’s also the issue of hull leaks, and of nitrogen-consuming accidents. A problem on the short jaunt from Earth to Hylara? No; just bring spare air. A problem in a ship travelling through space indefinitely? Absolutely.

They won’t need much nitrogen. But they’ll need a source of it.

“That’s a late-stage problem,” the Friend says, leaning against an unused control panel in the radio tower and adjusting a bandage on its arm. (It had woken up that morning with deep scratches on its face and arms, but hadn’t wanted to go back under medical observation, so we’d helped it dress the wounds, grabbed breakfast and come here.) “We can’t launch without solving it, but there are so many other problems that need solving before it’s even a factor.”

“Definitely,” Captain Kae Jin says. “I just want to be sure that we all understand the magnitude of what we’re trying to do here. Earth was able to take a lot of shortcuts with the Courageous, because it was a single trip vessel that could carry its own supplies. We can’t take those shortcuts. If there’s anything here not renewable or replaceable, we run the very real risk of condemning our descendants to die in space. The immediate concern, of course, is getting this thing worthy for space travel at all.”

“You need Hylara’s metal manufacturing tech and a working AI,” Tal says. “Have you guys had any luck putting Amy back together? I’m not getting anywhere with the parts you’ve sent me.”

“I’m afraid not,” Asteria says. “It does look like Cory ate up significant parts of kes own programming to replace it bit by bit with what it was offloading to brains. Absolutely stupid experiment. I wish the people who came up with this were still alive and on board so I could shake some sense into them. Tal and my stopgaps are working for what they were designed to do, but…”

“You’ll want a working, coordinated AI for a long journey,” Tal says. “There are too many systems to trust to human oversight and individual programs.” Ke turns to the Hylarans in the room. “Mama piloted your ship, right?”

Hive nods.

“A small ship with no living crew is much, much less complicated than the Courageous,” Captain Klees points out. “But some kind of AI pilot is better than nothing. Mama might be able to be trained to use all the relevant Courageous systems. It was smart enough to raise children.”

“And it got them here with no human oversight, which is much better than anything our AI could manage,” I add.

Elenna nods. “We can transmit that program after this meeting. It’ll take…” ke checks some instruments… “probably about sixty four hours to transmit at maximum transmission rates. And we’d need to make the copy first. I don’t know how long that takes.”

“Double the transmission time for error checking,” Tal says. “It’s be best to just prearrange and block out a few days where we’re out of contact just for the transmission.”

“We’re somewhat off the equator here, too,” Sam says from the ship. “We’re not stationary above you, and with the weather patterns, we have to expect interruptions over a period of time that long. Best to triple the time, to be sure.”

“Let’s arrange as much as we can to prepare for a long period out of contact, then,” Captain Klees says. “It’s a good thing we’re not in a hurry. My main question right now is, is any sort of material transfer from Hylara to space viable? Building modern tech from the resources aboard the Courageous is its own chain of building better machines to build better machines. If there’s some way to re-aim the Hypati launcher to get things into orbit, we could send up some printers…”

Denish speaks over the radio. “We would need to make small craft up here, to get the package. Unless you want to just throw it into the side of the ship, which as an engineer I can tell you, is bad idea. We need to make ships to harvest materials anyway, but to make one before getting modern manufacturing equipment to pick up the modern manufacturing equipment is much harder.”

“Like when you lose your login details so your company sends your login details to your account for you,” Tal says. “And you have to hack to get them anyway.”

“I’ll ask about the launcher,” Celti says. “Even if they have to make one harvesting craft with their primitive technology, it’s probably easier to do that than to catch up to modern tech without us sending them anything. But the Hypati launcher doesn’t do gentle. Whatever we send you will have to be something that can be packed up to withstand the dangers of rapid acceleration. Or at least be something you can repair up there.”

Yeah, that’s a point. And it’s going to make my immediate plans more complicated. I should check how viable they are anyway.

After the meeting, I try to get Dr Kim alone for a quick chat. This is remarkably easy to do, since it turns out she wants to see me, too. We lag behind everyone else leaving the building and she hands me a small bag.

“Your things,” she says, “that you had when you collapsed.”

Ah. I’d almost forgotten about that. I tuck the bag into my belt. “Can we talk?”

“Of course. I can’t help noticing that the Leadership hasn’t shown up to yell at me about medical experiments.”

“It seemed an unnecessary complication. Unless you’re going to make me regret it. Your immortality experiments…”

“Volunteers. And going decently, by the way.”

“I don’t particularly care. I want to ask you about brain surgery.”

Dr Kim sighs. “I know your Friend is having a difficult time adjusting to a more healed brain, but I’m not going to mutilate it again just because – ”

“Not what I was going to ask. I want to know how you did it. I’m not a brain expert, but I can’t figure out how you’d even reverse a Lyson procedure.”

“We don’t know how successful the reversal was, yet. There’s marked improvement, but we don’t know if there’ll be a full recovery.”

“Nevertheless. The surgery did something. And, frankly, that sounds absurd to me. I simply don’t see how putting new brain tissue where the damaged brain tissue was can possibly restore lost functions like that. It’s a brain, it can’t possibly be a case of just sticking fresh tissue in the right spot granting function. There’s no way it works like that. Or does it? Explain it to me.”

“It’s very complicated.”

“Exactly. You don’t know how it works either, do you? You claimed my optic nerve was too damaged for you to work with, which I assume was a lie so I’d agree to the artificial eye you needed for your experiment, but everything else you’ve done is, frankly, remarkable. The range of tests and scans you can run by pushing a few buttons is unbelievable. You took a crash course in surgery for a few days and then grew and grafted a new foot to Captain Klees’ leg with no complications. Tinera’s hand must have been even harder. And the Friend’s brain is, frankly, ridiculous. So quickly? On barely any training?”

Dr Kim shrugs. She seems baffled by my amazement. “Is this going somewhere?”

“Yeah. Just how good are your medical robots? How much has autodoc technology improved since we left Earth? Because, correct me if I’m wrong, but if one doctor can do all this with minimal training and no noticeable errors, I’m guessing that it’s your machines working miracles.”

“Is basic surgery a miracle?”

“Don’t give me that. You know how much more advanced your tech is than ours, or you wouldn’t have lied to me about my eye.”

“That doesn’t mean our tech is miraculous, it means that yours is bad. But if you have a health complaint that you think we can solve, drop by and I’ll – ”

“Not me.” I point up to the station above us. “Captain Kae Jin. Do you hear how out of breath she always is on the radio? That means they haven’t fixed her lungs, and given how much her whole crew care about her, that must mean that they can’t. That’s a big risk with post-chronostasis organ failure; stress on the body increases the odds of further problems, so not fixing failing organs is a risk, but the trauma of serious surgery is also a risk. And I’m looking at my crewmates walking around with new functional limbs so soon after surgery and I have to wonder – is your surgery as traumatic as ours? Do you think that your machines could safely replace Kae Jin’s lungs?”

“I don’t know, Aspen. I don’t know anything about the effects of chronostasis that wasn’t in your medical records.”

“Your machines would, or Mama would. This colony was built expecting to receive people from chronostasis. You have the knowledge somewhere.”

“I’ll find out.”

“Thank you.”

I make my way back to our dome, glancing up at the clouds above like I expect to be able to see the Courageous through them. The chances of the Hypati launcher being able to launch something as delicate as surgery robots is very, very low. Maybe they can be packaged up in some way that resists that kind of acceleration, but I doubt it. So if Hylaran medicine can help her, then she has a very difficult choice to make.

Twenty years, that crew served together on that ship, and then more after we revived them. They’ve made no secret of the fact that that tube is more of a home to them than any planet can ever be, and Captain Kae Jin’s life’s mission was to safeguard those colonists and see them awake, a duty that should have ended here at Hylara but thanks to this new plan will extend back out into the stars. If the Hylarans can heal her and the Courageous can’t, then she has a hard choice ahead of her – a life here, abandoning her mission and her home and very likely her crew, or a much, much shorter one up there.

And it’s hard to feel too sorry for her, because at least some people get a fucking choice. The Hypati launcher’s acceleration is too much for delicate machinery and it’s absolutely too much for delicate humans. We might be able to send some equipment up to the ship, if we’re careful and lucky, but we have no way of sending ourselves. The trip down to Hylara is one way, same as it always was.

And the people we were supposed to prepare for and call down after us, we’re sending away. Away to try again, somewhere else. Leaving us stranded down here. Ha, look at me, all self-pitying and using terms like ‘stranded’. I need to keep my head in the game. Everyone’s agreed that the best thing to do is send down a small number of colonists, enough to lend their experience and knowledge with new equipment and procedures to the Hylarans but not enough to completely overwhelm and drown their culture, and as a sociologist, my skills are going to be critically important in ways that they never would have been if we’d been the first to land. My real life’s work begins when that ship leaves orbit again. This isn’t going to be any sort of end, it’s going to be the beginning.

So why doesn’t it feel like it?