AUGUST 2506 AD
Jed threw out his arm to grab the sides of the hatch. The void terrified him now the sentence had been passed. He loved being out in space, all the more so on his own as the modern equivalent of a prospector, but being ejected from the Midnight Collision like this sent stomach acid refluxing up into his throat. It could’ve been worse. The last convicted felon was thrown out without a spacesuit.
His gloved fingers could feel the edge of the hatch, but servomechanisms within the suit forced him to relinquish his grasp. Screaming, he was ejected.
JED PONDERED ON THE hundred-percent certainty he would die, then reflected on the ninety-percent probability it would happen in the next six hours. The first figure helped him decide to take stupid risks, but the second obligated him to focus on the asteroid in front.
He risked twisting around to look at the huge blue ship that had spewed him out in this asteroid belt. The off-Earth court had found him guilty of stealing Asteroid 253b, but had given him the choice of thirty years hard labour on the Moon, or to go out in style. He chose the latter because he had a plan.
“Jed, it’s advisable for you to cease gyrating. I have to re-coordinate the target continuously. You’re making me nervous.”
“Like I give a damn about your nerves. Hey, you don’t have any, you’re a spacesuit.”
“I have sensors with an electronic brain. Therefore, I have nerves. It is imperative to reach the asteroid in one piece.” The suit used a velvet masculine voice, but that had been Jed’s choice. He could have chosen the alluring voice of his mistress, but he worried that it might upset him if he and the suit argued too much.
“My life’s as good as over. Assuming we reach the asteroid before my oxygen runs out, what’s the chances of finding my supply cache?”
“I have insufficient information to compute the details. Jed, this is the same asteroid they convicted you of planning to steal?”
“Yes. I intended to move it deeper into the Belt to work on it undetected.” He kept back the juiciest detail.
“The Company have a tagging policy for their asteroids, they would have known as soon as you started…”
“They’ve only tagged half their rocks, and tags often malfunction. I was unlucky. Do you think the judgment was too harsh?”
“Jed, that asteroid is worth forty million credits.”
“But it’s not as if I took a life. Suit, can a rock be worth more than a life?”
“I don’t have a judgment chip. The Company has rated the rock higher than your life, but you could have taken the lunar penal colony option.”
This experience of conversing with a sentient spacesuit freaked him. It nattered like a person. Jed looked at his sleeve. The white surface carried marks and grime; used goods.
“There’s a chance of my freedom–opportunities. Though I accept I’ll probably die in the next few hours.”
“Some would say you deserved that judgment.”
Jed swore he detected sarcasm, unlikely. Unless… “Suit, which model are you?”
“You shouldn’t ask.”
“No. They’ve fitted me up with a throwaway prototype? I assumed you carried the Intel-Nagasaki sentient chip.”
“Why should you object? I’m smarter than previous models, and you’re going to die anyway. Jed, you are fidgeting again.”
“They’ll have planted a transponder.”
“Do you want me to disable it?”
“Eject it.”
Jed watched a shiny chip spin away into the void.
“Thanks, Suit.”
“Don’t mention it. You’ve a survival plan you don’t want the Company to discover?”
“What do you think? Speaking of thinking, can you be quiet? I’ve some deep contemplation coming up.”
IT WAS HARD WORK arguing with his spacesuit: he was used to subservient suits with less intelligence. For Jed, the most useful feature was that they could stay awake if the wearer needed a nap.
His weariness amalgamated with the wonder of the starry vision of which he couldn’t tire. The blue ship blocked stars and produced some of its own in neat lines, the longest a kilometre of dots leading up to the illuminated name: Midnight Collision. Jed was right in the middle of the main asteroid belt and yet he could see only one rock. The other million were scattered so far apart you’d have to navigate carefully to find them.
A disc the size of the Moon from Earth appeared from behind Midnight Collision. Jupiter moving fast. Damn. The ship had left him to his fate. At least he wouldn’t be forgotten; the first man to be convicted of stealing an asteroid. The newscasts of his chosen death by marooning would not have reached Earth, yet but when they did, he’d become famous–for the wrong reason.
He’d like to stick two fingers up at the departing ship, but the suit would object at his waste of energy. Apart from the abomination of his suit, Jed was truly alone. His stomach threatened misbehaviour but it was more like indigestion. He wondered if the suit would detect dyspepsia and administer antacid without saying anything.
Alone, with maybe only hours of life remaining, but what a place to end it. He couldn’t tire of watching the lethal yet beautiful blackness between the startlingly clear Milky Way. Ah, he realised the moving of the Midnight Collision would expose him to direct sunlight. The bastards. Of course his suit was not only a pressure suit but one appropriate for EVA work. Even so, direct exposure to the hard solar radiation would eventually get through. And it meant his visor would darken so his visibility of the stars and that dark asteroid would suffer.
He turned again to search out his destination. Over twenty kilometres at its widest, it had only been discovered two years before. RTZeno computers automatically paid the mineral rights fee so Asteroid 253b belonged to them for fifty years. Jed, hated that–one-man-prospector chancers had few opportunities to make it big with rare finds on small rocks, so he had to take a first-rights option on subleasing new finds in his zone. It stank. If he found any rich minerals or a substantial water-ice deposit, he had to inform RTZeno, who had the rights to buy his option back. Consequently, to finance both his family and mistress back on Earth, he had little choice but to hive off the richer chunks of asteroids and send them a few kilometres away for him to ‘discover’ later and submit his own claim. Now he was to pay the awful penalty.
He studied the asteroid that had attracted him a year ago, enough to borrow up to his teeth to equip a Life Support System, and a small nuclear fusion and solar cell power unit. Most asteroids were worth very little, but he whooped when his forward-looking portable Mass-Spectrometer discovered Asteroid 253b. The dark blue-black pitted rock, the shape of a giant clenched fist—how appropriate—possessed something unique, but unidentifiable. The intelligent chip on the MS gave up on a best guess. Initially, an object in a narrow gully looked like a violet crystalline amorphous lump the size of a beach ball. Close up he could see arrays of darker and lighter crystals within, and what might have been lettering. Artificial yet un-Earthlike. He’d found an alien artefact? If so, it would have been the first. Hence the risks he took to procure it.
“I didn’t know about the artefact.”
“Suit, you shouldn’t be listening. Hey, can you read my thoughts?”
“That’s restricted information, Jed, but I am able to detect the relevant perturbations in your electromagnetic field to detect key words. I am programmed to pick up on possible alien artefacts.”
“There haven’t been any.”
“Until now. Jed, why didn’t you remove the artefact?”
Jed couldn’t decide whether he relished the notion of his thoughts being archived for posterity as the human who found the aliens.
“The crystal is stuck in the rock. I could’ve cut it out but apart from damaging it, and risk to me if it detonated, I wanted to be in a less exposed place.”
“I don’t blame you,” the suit said, making Jed note the suit’s increasing humanlike speech style. It must be learning from him. “Jed, the Company has robotic sniffers wandering the Belt. They’d notice unusual activity like hot sparks emanating from one of their rocks. What is puzzling is why they didn’t find the artefact first.”
Jed smiled. “So the brightest spacesuit in the galaxy can’t work that out?”
“I wouldn’t know who the brightest sentient suit is. My successor has been upgraded to sentient plus.”
“Does that mean you’re a reject?”
“Of course; otherwise the Company wouldn’t assign me to an end of line human.”
“I suppose not. Thanks.” If only Jed could glare at him and scratch at an itch at the back of his neck.
The suit continued, “You haven’t said why you think the Company sniffers didn’t detect the artefact.”
“They probably drift around and merely log the thousands of unidentifiable readings. I had to crawl around on that rock before I zoomed in on the unidentifiable readings and locate the artefact.”
Jed looked around as they closed in to within two hours of landing on the asteroid. The suit would use its hydrazine jets to make a soft landing.
Ten years previously he’d performed his first space walk from a Company training station, his mind couldn’t cope with the apparent infinity of his surroundings. His guts revolted and, in spite of space-sickness prophylactics, he threw up. With imminent danger of drowning in his own vomit he was pulled to safety and that could’ve been the end of his zero-gravity career, such as it was. Stronger medication and willpower saw him through the course, only for his maverick tendencies to result in his expulsion from the cadet industrial academy. He should have known better than to attempt joining the fifty-million-miles-high club with the director’s wife, and organising a black market in valuable iridium nodules.
His eyes watered as he fought back tears of remembrance touched with regret. All humans had to die and far too soon. His demise could be when his portable Life Support System gave out in less than two hours, or in several months if his suit helped him operate the LSS on the asteroid. He had few allusions of a longer life. He’d installed some turbo-ion drive motors to move the asteroid, but was prematurely nabbed.
“Why did you think you’d get away with stealing a Company asteroid, Jed?”
“You keep interrupting my thinking time, Suit. I’m surprised you don’t have access to the court records, but I’d a franchise to work the rock and that’s what I was doing. No problem.”
“But you were going to hide it. How did you argue your way out of that?”
“I failed, didn’t I? My defence was that I hadn’t committed a crime in the contemporary business sense. I was merely availing myself of a potential but unproven asset. The Company would have accrued their expected loot, and I mine.”
“That would’ve involved lying about what you found. Your franchise only allowed you your prospected inventory.”
“Since when has following a business nose been a criminal offence? Ah, you’re going to say always, aren’t you? One rule for the galactic moguls and another for us self-employed. Do you have an ethics chip built into your CPU, Suit?”
While the suit stayed silent, Jed sniffed at a metallic odour in his air supply.
“Suit, is there a malfunction in my air-supply? It’s like the ozone when a motor sparks.”
“Apologies, Jed. The air supply is running low and I should have been compensating for residual odours. There, that should be better.”
“Suit, you’ve given me a strawberry dessert to breathe in. For fuck’s sake. I’m a man on his last gasp; I don’t want to smell like an ice-cream factory to the end.”
“Apologies again, Jed. What flavour would you prefer?”
“For crying out loud, the odour in a spacesuit is supposed to be like Cicero said should be the best scent for a woman–none at all.”
“Plautus, not Cicero, and I assumed you were a man.”
Jed ignored the jibe even though he was tempted to debate whether the suit’s rationality chip could engage in irony. Maybe the designers decided that loner rock-hoppers like him were less likely to open their helmets in one of their inevitable suicidal phases if their suit had a sense of humor. His sense of smell found the neutral odour he normally experienced, but now guilt gnawed at him for making such a fuss. It must have been terminal stress.
He’d wasted precious stargazing moments over his olfactory obsession, but his air supply could’ve been contaminated. He’d always queried oddities. It was what made his wife an ex-wife, and his mistress, Quatra, a soon-to-be ex-mistress, and not just because of their imminent widowhood.
“Apologies for breaking in on your reminiscences but I’m about to retrojet to make a gentle landing.”
Jed, changed view from the Milky Way to a crater on the asteroid. It looked too far away; an optical illusion. He switched on the head-up display to show where he’d cached his LSS. Voice-commanding the scale he found the triangle graphic at two kilometres away from the expected landing site.
“Suit, we are undershooting.”
“I don’t believe so.”
“My LSS is way over—oh, you’re heading for the artefact, first? No, Suit. I’m going to need air and power.”
“You have air for at least thirty minutes, and your power has been solar recharging as we flew here.”
Jed’s anger and anxiety heated his face, but cooler air washed him as the suit compensated. It simultaneously cared for and antagonised him. Jed realised the suit had another agenda, and then presumed the suit, in reading his electro-encephalitic output, would’ve known he realised that.
“Okay, I know what you’re doing.”
“I’m delivering you to the asteroid.”
“Yes, that was no doubt the Company’s orders, but I thought we had a bonding going on here and you wanted to help me.”
“Of course I do, Jed. There’s no conflict.”
Jed wondered if the suit could lie. He realised there was no protection rule—forget Asimov’s Laws of Robotics—do as the Company ordered was the only rule.
“You kept a backup chip didn’t you? You are telling the Company about the artefact.”
“Not so, Jed. There is no backup chip for the transponder, which you told me to eject.”
“Did you recover it when I was daydreaming? I get it, you have comms chips besides the transponder.”
“Jed, I have not communicated to the Company about the artefact.”
“You want to check it out for yourself, first?”
“That and they are in receipt of our conversations via comms irrespective of the transponder or what I specifically tell them.”
“Oh marvellous. Why didn’t you turn it all off?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Damn. I’d rather this find be kept between us until I work out a way to use it as a bargaining ploy. And I can’t concentrate on anything until I know there are a few weeks of life support available.”
“It won’t take long to assess the artefact.”
“Suit, you’re not listening. We are going to assemble the LSS first.”
Jed waited, but the suit didn’t respond. They continued their trajectory, unchanged. He wondered if he could override the suit’s master control. He, and probably the suit’s builders, hadn’t anticipated a conflict between suit and wearer. Most of the commands available to him were voice-activated, but in the event of a throat infection or similar disability, he could press two buttons on the front of his chest pack. The left pressed once followed by the other demisted his visor. Two on the left pressed by one on the right cut off the hydrazine jets. Just pressing once on either button alone switched to emergency air. He failed to remember any other sequence. In the bizarre situation he found himself in, could he have trusted the suit? No. One combination would’ve disabled the suit’s intelligence mode, but would he have really wanted to do that?
Jed’s scalp prickled as he’d become aware of the corollary of his previous thought: maybe the suit could disable the intelligence mode of the wearer. He had to find out what he and suit were capable of sooner or later.
“Suit, what do you think of me?”
“I do not know what I think of you.”
“I assume you prefer me to be functioning normally?”
“It is less trouble for me to organise the success of the mission if you are normal.”
“That’s not quite what I meant, but it’ll do. I will not function normally, Suit, if you don’t let me reach the LSS before faffing around with the artefact.”
The suit didn’t respond. Jed was beginning to realise that when they approached some critical point, the suit didn’t engage in conversation so much as respond to direct questioning. It was as if the suit had become autistic. It’d changed its conversation mode from friendly chat to matter-of-fact. But then it did have many optimising probability calculations to do, and not all about the trajectory and landing coordinates. It’d altered its attitude, like a friend who’d discovered something unpleasant.
Jed needed to show the suit that he was serious, and so pressed one of the buttons; a fresh blast of air met his face.
“Jed, did you do that accidentally? I have switched your air back to the main tank. It has sufficient air, as I’ve informed you.”
“I’m getting very worried, Suit. When humans get frantic about their survival, they are prone to panic and do silly things.”
“I have noticed this. Are you going to do anything else unexpectedly?”
“I might. It isn’t something planned.” He lied but was banking on the suit’s presumed inbuilt lie detector not to notice.
“You are not being honest, Jed.”
Damn. Jed attempted to wriggle, both metaphorically and physically, to turn himself towards his LSS store. “Suit, I mean it. I’m not going to help you with the artefact. I’ve locked it, you know. You’ll waste a lot of time trying to access it without damaging either it or yourself—us.”
Another silence, but Jed had the feeling that the suit was thinking this over. It wasn’t entirely a bluff. He’d password-protected a camouflaged covering to the artefact’s niche. That meant the suit would know he’d done that and it was already figuring the password. Jed knew he had to not think of the password. To not think of something was damned hard, so he thought of alternatives. Pink elephants, pink elephants, pink elephants, pink elephants. It’d drive the suit mad, hah. Pink elephants, pink elephants. He needed to add more senses. Pink elephants smelling of peppermint, pink elephants smelling of peppermint, pink elephants covered in fur smelling of peppermint, pink elephants covered in long fur smelling of peppermint…
“I can filter out your distractions, Jed.”
“Wet fur?”
“Although my sensors have data enabling me to detect tactile differences, and odours, they mean little to me compared to how a human experiences them.”
“You might be bluffing. Hey, we’re about to land. Aren’t we too fast? We’ll bounce straight back off.”
“All under control. Fifteen seconds to land. Reminder to you to relax your muscles.”
Against his natural instincts to brace himself, Jed tried to let his arms and legs hang loose as small hydrazine jets slowed him to a gentle landing near the artefact location. Jed immediately pressed both buttons three times. He’d recalled the de-activation of the sentient chip a while back but managed to distract himself and thus the suit.
He aimed himself at the LSS location and started to lope. He remembered that he didn’t need to worry about leaping off into space. With a twenty kilometres diameter, he’d have to have the turbo assistance of an active suit to reach escape velocity.
Another anxious kilometre. Would he have enough gasps? Worry was a side effect of breathing. The Company must know of his cache, and might have splattered it, but they probably thought it would help him survive long enough only to be of help to them. In spite of the cleverness of Artificial Intelligence, the quirkiness of humans often brought solutions via serendipity and by being sodding awkward.
He reached the pile of rubble that protected his LSS against the remote chance a meteorite would smash into it.
He threw aside boulders, found a porta-case, and after throwing a small lever, pressed a button that started an auto-assembly routine. Besides construction, ice within the asteroid had to be extracted for water.
SATISFIED HE’D BE WARM and with food concentrates, water and air for months, his only life-limiting factor was going mad with boredom. He was used to being on his own for weeks at a time. He enjoyed the solitude; listening to The Tonal Oceans, but that was when he’d had a spacecraft, even if it was a starcoffin, as his drinking buddies called it, and they were right except that he wished he had it now. Although certain they’d hire a rescue ship, he needed to be far from the Company’s reach before attempting to radio them.
He had no means of playing music in a static spacesuit or in the rock hole he was expanding. He had a tiny chamber in which he could unsuit and sleep. His escape plan meant he’d need to make the hole into accommodation, but only for a few weeks. It would take him that long to build it without the power functions on the suit. Not only that, its sentient nature had the fancy additions needed to make life bearable; like his music; possibly conversation. He knew it meant the suit would insist on investigating the artefact before the semi-permanent accommodation was ready, but at least the LSS was running, so Jed was prepared to compromise.
Moments before he switched the sentient chip back on, Jed reflected on whether the suit would be mad at him, but for fuck’s sake—it was only a spacesuit.
“Hello Suit.”
“Let me catch up, Jed,” said the unemotional voice, clearly not bothered that Jed had de-activated it for hours. “I can help with enhancements here. You haven’t optimised the LSS efficiency routines. For example, the power-receptors can make gains from reflected light off Jupiter when the sun is below the asteroid’s horizon.”
“Go for it… please.”
The suit had Jed stand close enough to the short-range radio input and spurted in the code for implementing programming changes.
“May we go to the artefact now?” the suit asked.
“Why not? I need to take some tools and provisions.”
“You may not need the tools. Is there a shelter for you?”
“Kinda, a portable bubble tent, if it’s intact. Why, are you expecting us to be there long? Hey, it’s a pity you can’t get there without me.”
“I could.”
“What? How?”
“If you were not in the suit, I could occupy your space with air and then operate the turbomechs and jets. Surely you knew this?”
“I suppose I could have worked it out. Hey, Suit, you won’t go out on any walks by yourself when I’m asleep in the LSS chamber will you?”
“Not without good reason.”
As they moved off, Jed made a mental note to stay in the spacesuit even when in the LSS chamber and the artefact bubble. He assumed he could go to sleep with the sentient module turned off, but the whole point of having it was for the suit to be permanently on guard. He had to assume the Company wanted him alive for when the Suit hit a mental block. They were in symbiosis.
He hoped for the passing by of an asteroid miner. Then he could transmit a narrow beam SOS, hopefully unnoticed by the Company. He’d set a proximity alarm.
He could deactivate the sentient chip, but could he trust it? It might have reprogrammed its own controls by now. A pain, but until he could trust the suit his survival depended on it.
Jed realised the suit had made a throwaway remark—you may not need them—the tools. How would the suit know what was needed?
His introspections robbed him of enjoying the view. Jupiter loomed up, colored like a kid’s lollipop. The blue hues of the asteroid glinted from light bouncing off minerals. He’d have made a comfortable legal income from this rock if he’d not let his own avarice and intrigue rule his head. Maybe he still could if he was real lucky. Jed looked ahead at their shadowed destination a kilometre away. He blinked as he became convinced he saw a small red light.
“Suit, the light. Give me an enhanced zoom.”
“You might not like it.”
The suit had obviously identified the light, which meant it was the Company. They’d found the artefact either by guessing there was something special here for him to endgame here, or the suit had told them. The enhanced image showed a small shuttle, probably robotic. It must have come from the Midnight Collision.
“Suit, you told them.”
“It was obligatory. My apologies.”
“I thought you wanted to check it out first. Oh, they’ve heard everything we’ve said, and felt the urge to see for themselves.”
“Something like that. But, Jed, it could be good for you.”
“I know what you’re thinking; they’ll be so pleased with me for finding the artefact that I’ll be pardoned.”
“No. But they might let you help investigate it.”
“What you mean is, that they need a human idiot to risk his life using intuition you robots don’t possess. After they’ve whisked it away I can die a contented man.”
Jed found himself alone with the suit and a robotic surveyor, of limited speech but excellent at drilling, fixing and analysis. At the locked entrance, Jed laughed. He’d placed a digital lock on an improvised hatch to the artefact niche, but any hammer would have dispatched it. Of course they hadn’t because it might have been booby-trapped. A risk they would have had to take if Jed had been deceased, but now they’d brought him along like a good little boy.
“Suit, did you work out the password?”
“How could I? All you kept repeating was pink elephants. Ah.”
“Now you see why humans are used by the Company?” Jed chuckled as he punched in the two words.
He stooped to enter but the suit forced him to stand back and wait as the robotic surveyor shuffled by. A few minutes later the robot emerged, climbed into the shuttle and the vehicle silently took off.
“What’s going on?” Jed said. He was hoping that when the shuttle left, he’d been on it—reprieved.
“Don’t you know?” His suit sounded weary.
“You’re not telling me the artefact has gone?”
“It’s not an artefact, Jed. It’s a malformed crystalline growth.”
“No.” Jed, with tears welling, crawled in through the hatch. The cave, no bigger than a large car, loomed its gloom onto him. He knew the sides and roof had head-sized nodules protruding, threatening.
“Suit, illuminate this grotto before you become dented.”
White light shone from the suit’s belt, shoes and helmet, but it was mostly absorbed by the blackness except for the back wall. A niche glowed lilac shades. Approaching, Jed groaned as he saw that the helmet-sized violet crystalline lump— his prize—was in pieces. The neat lines of smaller crystals, he’d assumed were connected by optic fibre, were scattered.
“Look, Suit, I’ve never seen natural crystal growth like this. That damned moron has damaged the array. Can’t you see? Hey, examine that red shard. There’s writing, numbers or something…”
“It’s difficult to be certain, Jed. That surveyor robot would have had data on all known geological phenomenon.”
“Yes, but suppose this was an alien computer constructed to look like a natural growth. Again that’s why humans should… Just a moment. The Company have deliberately destroyed it. Did they think it was a beacon of some sort, activated when I found it? They’re afraid a mighty fleet of outer space monsters will usurp their business?”
“It might not be so simple.”
“What the heck does that mean, Suit? There were others? And the Company doesn’t want Earth to know. Suppose the aliens come to find out what’s happening to their beacons?”
“Jed, do you know how old that crystal structure is?”
“That’s what you’re doing; analysing dateable isotopes in the remaining array. Oh no, have I been exposed to uranium?”
“Not seriously; you’re in a spacesuit. How old?”
“You’re going to say a million years, and that’s why the Company isn’t worried about aliens appearing, but Earth regulators might dent the Company’s operations if they knew.”
“Five point three million, and your assessment is accurate.”
“Bugger.”
WITH A MOOD DARKER than a black hole, Jed desperately sought ways to extricate himself from his castaway fate.
“Suit, can we use the turbo-ion motors to steer this rock to Earth?”
“Would you prefer Wagner this afternoon, Jed?”
Oh no, the Suit was employing distraction because there’s no solution. Naw, the deception by the Company has unhinged it. Damn, he might configure the motors to move this rock but would his psychotic suit let him?”
“Jed, I believe I’ve translated those ancient alien markings. Apologies it’s taken so long.”
“Not much use now, but what did they say?”
“Entrance. Which means…”
Jed smiled, hardly able to talk. “The crystal lump was just the door mechanism. This asteroid is a spaceship! Hah, this news will blow the Company away when we get home.”