NO COMM SOURCES DETECTED
Awesome.
Minnie set it to rescan every 20 minutes and sat down on the skimmer platform. She searched through the flops of instructionals in her fone’s archive and came upon a relevant vid. Munching on a calorie bar, she watched this brilliant old bearded guy in Australia outline a process for using a ground-based PCU to communicate beyond local orbit. He even had an earlier model of the very unit sitting at Minnie’s feet, the critical components all essentially the same. But she appreciated something else about the vid.
Instead of using a fone, the man wore a head-mounted camera and had happened to record his vid on a sunny Australian day, forty-seven years ago. He had a bunch of tools and gear laid out on a table, and the table pushed up against a wall with a wide mirror. He intermittently looked up at himself in the mirror when addressing the viewer. Behind him was a window to a yard, and in that yard Minnie could see a pair of little girls playing. Sometimes, when he looked up, they were not visible outside, but most of the time they were there, aiming a hose or running through a sprinkler. The man’s mic picked up their giggles and shouts, and once or twice, to Minnie’s alarm, he appeared to be annoyed and considering whether to stop their play. To Minnie’s pleasure, he did not.
She’d participated in such antics when she was very small—before she’d become overly bookish, reclusive, and crazy—but she recalled fondly that freedom and unreserved joy.
Cold wind whistled over the skimmer platform and across Minnie’s exposed neck. A fresh whiff of mold and decay she was surprised to find herself enjoying.
She composed herself and skipped the vid back several minutes as she realized she’d missed everything the man had said about actually enhancing an emitter.
What time was it? She was cold and tired but didn’t want to go to sleep. It was dangerous to be out this late at night. She peered at the sweeping beam of green light shooting up in the sky and wondered if any Hynka would see it from afar. They’d certainly all seen the EV during reentry. Knowing now that the kidney-shaped valley in which they’d landed was not all that popular with the natives, it was amazing how quickly the horde had converged on the EV. Most likely the bad luck of dropping in while a hunting party happened to be passing through, combined with a blazing parachute. But what if someone spotted this beam from, say, 5K, how long would it take for it to run through the forest to her?
Minnie ran a therm scan of the valley, indeed spotting several wandering Hynka scattered about. They seemed to favor groups of 2-4. None appeared to be headed her way. A mental note to re-verify this fact in another 30 seconds.
Halfway through the vid, the PCU on the ground before her sounded an inspiring tone. She spun and dropped to her knees and read the blue strip of screen.
COMM SOURCE DETECTED
LINKING…
LINKING…
COMMS READY
“Yes!” Minnie blurted, then cupped her mouth and resurveyed the panorama. The closest she could see was a glob of indeterminate numbers about 8K away, just beyond Duck Rock Mountain.
Back to the PCU, she held her breath and opened the homepage. This was the first thing anyone connecting to the pod network saw. This was where anyone with half a brain would leave a message for others.
Default crap, albeit enlightening.
As she suspected, no Backup Habitat. Interesting that two pods were dead. Probably taken out by the station’s debris field. Minnie navigated the menu and initiated an unfiltered search, sorting by date to find recently uploaded code. She was certain that the pods would at the very least track changes. They had plenty of onboard storage and, even though no coder ever expected the system to be used this way, it would make no sense for existing code changes to be overwritten without something logging the actions.
There was indeed tracking, but the most recent code change was a firmware update dated three years ago. If this was truly the case, it meant that no one—not a single evacuee—had connected to the only available network that others on the surface or in orbit could access. The only place where anyone could leave a message. And like any perfectly dumb network, changes were instantly synced across all other nodes, so even if she checked every pod she’d see the same thing.
No one had left a message. Over 300 hours had passed since landing on Epsy.
No one had left a message because everyone was dead. Why was she surprised? She’d said all along that none but EV5 and 6 could have survived. Why would there be something new to find here?
Because denial said so. She’d performed a convincing show of certain pessimism, all the while holding out hope to find a surprise message—from Aether, of course—saying how they’d made it back to the BH, everyone was good and safe but worried about her and John, and Qin and Zisa were rigging up some kind of lander that would go down and pick them up so everyone could live happily ever after, though, sadly, in the BH’s more confined space. Right. She’d known the truth from the start: EVs launching away from the atmosphere would not be able to reestablish a proper trajectory, regardless of piloting skill. It was the equivalent of shooting a person into space with only a pressurized fire extinguisher in hand, and expecting them to make their way back. That was the stuff of lazy science fiction, not reality.
Fortunately, Minnie hadn’t wasted too much actual work time on this ridiculous fantasy. If she and John were to survive, those people must be banished from her head. All of them.
Minnie rolled her shoulders and moved on to accessing the pod’s homepage source file.
ROOT ACCESS REQUIRED
She tapped in the passcode and the file unlocked. The homepage reappeared in edit mode. As it had been for her, it would now be the cold, insentient purveyor of bad news to unknown others. Syncing across all the orbiting pods, it would forever remain—the last digital communication from one of the disaster’s only survivors. If another mission came to this place 50 years from now, they’d know that at least a few people surface evac’d. Maybe their remains could be returned to Earth, as if she gave a crap about that.
She appended the beginning of the homepage, pushing down the oddly cheerful welcome message and status links.
She wrote:
Post-station evac, EV6 landed Hynka country 39S112,95E908. Survivors Minerva Sotiras and John Li (level 8 injury post-landing). EV5 discovered today, sans sabotage suspect Ishtab Soleymani. EV6 planning to leave hostile territory for west coast 50N when able.
She read it over once and saved it, initiating a system reboot to force a network sync. A 10-minute countdown clock began—some sort of grace period.
Leaning forward onto her knees to disconnect the rig, Minnie paused, considered, a dry swallow, another safety scan of the landscape. She rolled back onto her rear and reopened the file.
Why? Not sure. She didn’t want to think about it—just do. Words—stream of consciousness, no hesitation, no edits—filled the screen before her.
Zisa: You are so quick, so brilliant, and with so much heart you almost make up for those of us who are more like robots than people. You live on another emotional plane. I suck for every time I tried to knock you down from way up there.