Fiction River: Moonscapes, page 14
“Eliane!”
The wind abated momentarily, and she stood still to listen. There! A faint keening over by the stone wall that tried to keep the park at bay. But when she tried to run toward it, she found her feet trapped by grasses that had grown spontaneously over them. Bending down, she ripped at the coarse fibers until they finally let go.
She ran toward the wall, ignoring the battering her bare feet were taking on the stones and twigs littering the path. Then she tripped over a twisted root and sprawled face first on the ground. As she lay there, winded, she could feel the stealthy creep of grass growing up over her legs and arms. She scrambled to her feet, her heart filling with horror.
Was this what had happened to her mother? Had she fallen and been trapped by grasses? Was her skeleton even now in the park beyond the wall, nothing more than an indistinct hump in the forest floor?
“Eliane!” she screamed, looking about wildly. “Where are you?”
Within the space of a minute, the drenching rain slowed to a spatter and the wind quieted. Rachel kept moving, afraid of standing still. Then the clouds parted, allowing the twin moons to shine down on the storm-tossed landscape. And in that light, Rachel found her daughter.
At first, she thought Eliane stood behind a tree stump, with only her face showing. Then Rachel blinked and saw. A whippet tree had grown around Eliane, consuming her. In the moonlight, Rachel could see the sleek bark of the young tree growing up around Eliane’s shoulders and upraised arms. Her face was raised to the sky, her beautiful long black hair moving in the breeze as if it had a life of its own, her eyes open and no longer seeing anything.
“No.” Rachel blinked, trying to make sense of what she was seeing, all the while moaning, “No, no, no.” She tugged her feet free and stumbled toward her daughter but even as she touched Eliane’s cold cheek, bark reached up to cover the flesh.
A scream of horror rose from Rachel’s chest but before she could release it, a muffled sound caught her attention and she turned toward it, only then noticing the hump of grasses next to the whippet tree. To Eliane.
It moved and she jumped back. Then she realized what it was and dropped to her knees, frantically tearing at the tough strands, ignoring the cuts to her hands and the insistent grasses tugging at her feet and legs.
“Sam!” she screamed. “Sam, help me!”
After a moment, the movements inside the hump grew more frantic and she desperately tore at the grasses until a hand suddenly emerged, reaching for the sky. Rachel swallowed a scream and grabbed the hand.
“I’ve got you, Sam! I’ve got you!”
***
Year Fifteen of the Third Perigee was the first time we had adapted enough to Verdant to become… palatable. Of the population of five hundred thousand people on the planet, we lost over eighty-thousand, most of them young, but some of all ages. Nobody under the age of puberty was taken.
We still don’t know how perigee causes the madness. Something about the moons’ pull triggers a response in Verdant. Whatever the cause, the effect is deadly.
Aisha’s experimental drug worked well enough to keep Sam from succumbing completely to the call of the planet, although he will bear the scars on his body for the rest of his life, as I will on my feet and legs. Ten years after Aisha’s death, Sam and I continue the work she started, though we both know that we will forever be trying to catch up. Verdant is clever, and adaptable, and very patient. In the hundred and twenty-one years since we first landed, our rate of attrition has grown higher every perigee.
We must persevere, for in the eighteen years since we lost so many to the Cycle madness, every single child born on Verdant has had the Verdant gene.
Introduction to “Moonfall”
Fiction River is only six volumes old and already Lisa Silverthorne, like Annie Reed, has become a regular. Lisa has appeared in our second, fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes, with more to come, we hope! Her short fiction has appeared in sixty other venues in genres from romance to science fiction.
“Ever since Sojourner landed on Mars,” she writes, “I’ve been fascinated by rovers….capturing images that make our sense of wonder burn hotter….I was incredibly affected when Sojourner and Spirit went silent. But Opportunity and Curiosity are still out there, still carrying on the vision that began that July in 1969. ‘Moonfall’ is dedicated to those intrepid little rovers that have changed the world, enhanced our vision for the future, and stolen my heart.”
Moonfall
Lisa Silverthorne
Spaceport America
Sierra, New Mexico
“Orbital insertion successful. Booster separation complete. Heat shields active,” Senior Research and Development Engineer, Jack Morgan announced, swiveling his chair around in the small, brightly lit control room.
Cassandra Bailey sat beside Jack in the back of three rows of desks that faced two wall-mounted 120” screens in the windowless, trapezoidal control room where she and her team had camped since the orbiter reached Io, a moment they’d anticipated for a decade. A green Data Frontiers banner, lettered in crisp, white Helvetica, hung on the wall of the control room and lab space leased from Spaceport America, New Mexico’s commercial spaceport.
She gripped the edge of the black desk, staring at the large, front screens that shifted from static to black as she awaited connection to the data-collector bot. She was exhausted, eyes watering, but her wrinkled khakis and green Data Frontiers polo made it obvious that she’d slept at the office last night. And not very well. The soft, dull thrum of computers softened the room’s palpable silence, scent of old coffee mixing with sweat and a hint of aftershave. She glanced at Jack who sat to her right and then around the room at the rest of her team: four men and two women. This mission was the culmination of her career. She had to get it right.
“Status check on DOV,” Cass replied.
“DOV’s instruments are online. Dropping heat shields. Initiating first braking burn,” said Jack, his deep, velvety voice filling the painfully quiet room. He wore a blue striped dress shirt and khakis, two-day’s beard shadow on his sun-washed skin. “She’s decelerating within acceptable parameters. Moonfall in nineteen minutes sixteen seconds.”
Cass let out a breath, clenching her eyes closed against the assault of data and readings rolling past on her workstation’s three monitors.
“C’mon, DOV, Cass whispered. “You’ve got to make it to Io.”
Everything was riding on this moonfall. Everything.
“Nervous, Cass?” Jack asked as he leaned back in his chair, hands on the keyboard, his handsome face illuminated by a row of monitors.
“Terrified,” she said in a half-whisper.
“Don’t trust your team?” he asked, that dangerous dimple punctuating his smirk.
With that shaggy black hair and large, moon-bright grey eyes, Jack was still devastatingly handsome at forty-five. They hadn’t been together for over ten years, yet she still found him attractive.
Cass snorted at him. “I followed you from California to Quebec to Russia and back again, Jack, until you took this job. I let you hand-pick the team. And I’ve spent every day including Christmases and birthdays with all of you for the past ten years. I think we’re way beyond trust here.”
Jack Morgan was a god in the industry. At twenty-five, he had degrees from Purdue, MIT, and CalTech. At twenty-nine, he was a Senior Design Lead, on the JPL fast track to becoming a mission director when Cass entered his team as a baby engineer. She became his right hand professionally and personally until their messy breakup. She left JPL (with a broken heart) for Lockheed Martin, engineering unmanned crafts that delivered payloads to the International Space Station. Later, she worked for SpaceX while pursuing her PhD at CalTech. Her dissertation led her to New Mexico and her own commercial startup.
Cass threw herself body and soul into every aspect of Data Frontiers, securing funding, building a team, and securing essential industry partnerships. She hadn’t come up for air and thought about life outside of work since she was sixteen. At forty, she’d finally learned to trust her skills and instincts, but she couldn’t help wondering what her life might have been like if she’d thrown as much effort into her private life as she had her career. Would she and Jack have stayed together?
Despite their history, Jack was still the first person she courted for this project. They were both too much alike, but he was the only person she trusted to head the bot’s prototyping and rigorous testing.
“That was a joke, Cass,” Jack said in a soft voice, those grey eyes intense now. Concerned. She knew that look. “Your sense of humor always goes numb when you don’t get enough sleep. You okay?”
She nodded, looking at her hands. She’d kept her distance from him whenever possible, but that had been impossible over the last year. Cass hated to admit it, but he’d stirred up her emotions these past few months, that old attraction awakening again.
“Yeah, the night on my office couch was anything but restful.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You slept here last night?”
“Wanted to finish studying the data from those last simulations Cortez built.”
“Moonfall in sixteen minutes forty-nine seconds,” said Sundeep Subramaniam in a thick Indian accent. His hair was bushy and straight, warm brown eyes tired and anxious. “Two minutes until thruster’s first course correction.”
The forty-four-year-old Purdue grad (Jack’s roommate) and former space shuttle engineer was damned near a genius and Jack refused to come aboard without him. Sundeep developed the orbiter and its launch protocols alongside Cass, who’d researched and tested the series of thruster burns required to place DOV and the lander properly. DOV had to get to Io’s surface. Like Jack, Cass trusted Sundeep with her life. And DOV’s.
“Sixteen minutes,” Cass groaned, drumming her fingers on the desk. “That’s a lifetime.”
“It’s a quarter of DOV’s lifetime,” said developer, Jenny Li, phone in one hand, huge to-go cup of iced tea in the other.
Jenny sat in the second row of desks between developer, Shuying Kwan and robotics engineer, Cortez Davis. Her thick black hair was tied back with a red ribbon and she wore a sleeveless red sundress. She chewed on her straw as she flicked her fingers across her phone’s screen.
Quiet and reserved, Shuying Kwan just nodded, her attention on the sparse thread of data coming in from the orbiter. She wore a green Data Frontiers polo and khakis, thick purple glasses framing small brown eyes. Her hair hung in a coarse bob just past her chin.
Jenny and Shuying were two of the most talented developers Cass had ever known. Both twenty-somethings, Jenny picked up languages like song lyrics and Shuying developed AIs as a hobby. DOV’s evolutionary algorithms and emergent perceptions were bleeding edge (thanks to Shuying), allowing the little bot to analyze complex inputs, learn from them, and react based on her conclusion.
Systems engineers, Arum Jain and Matt Weldon sat in the front row nearest the huge screens. Arum, Cortez, and Matt could build anything, take it apart and put it back together better than it was before. For fun, they built engines out of paperclips and batteries. Cortez and Arum pushed existing parameters to their limits for the orbiter’s high-gain antenna while Matt developed new data compression routines that increased DOV’s video and image transfer rates to twelve times current ratios.
Cortez and Matt designed DOV to be small and maneuverable. At six feet tall, DOV had a “head” with an omniscient camera and two “eyes” that were separate camera lenses/video processing systems. DOV’s “feet” were six independent wheels with cleated treads and a modified rocker-bogie suspension that gave DOV a 360-turn radius and increased stability to handle Jupiter’s wild tidal forces.
DOV’s “feminine” triangular torso had five robotic arms (4 articulating and 1 stationary for audio processing) allowing her to perform several simultaneous functions. A well-placed curve (thanks to Cortez) beneath her two camera “sockets” resembled a smile. Jack and Sundeep did everything they could to shield her systems from radiation, giving DOV an hour before Jupiter’s radiation belt killed everything.
DOV was the closest thing to a child Cass ever had. She’d overseen the little collection robot’s development, helping to shape her ontology and evolutionary algorithms. Cass smiled, remembering nights sitting on the lab floor with Shuying and Jack, cheering as DOV exhibited her first emergent behaviors, like her first words. They’d witnessed the display of her expressed perceptions, the maturing of her input recognitions, like taking her first steps.
Cass remembered one night in her office, soft white lights glinting off stainless steel cabinets where she sat with legs dangling, Jack sandwiched between her and the wall. He smelled warm with a hint of coconut sunscreen and traces of wood smoke, his shoulder pressed against her like an embrace from long ago.
With her hand on DOV’s “shoulder,” Shuying demonstrated DOV’s evolving perceptions and learned behaviors.
Cass picked up a canister from the shelf, sending a puff of dust into the air.
DOV’s robotic arm whirred to life, flicking through the dissipating wisp of dust.
“Composition is seventeen percent plant pollen, ten percent paper fibers, thirty-seven percent human skin cells, twenty-four percent mineral particulates, and twelve percent textile fibers.” DOV’s female voice was pleasing with soft, bright tones. “Colloquially called dust. Its shape reminds me of a butterfly, Cass. I often wonder how it feels to fly, don’t you?”
“DOV!” Cass cried.
“Shuying, that was brilliant,” Jack said in a hushed voice, his eyes wide.
“Thanks,” said Shuying, smiling. “Cass helped me tweak the ontologies. DOV’s teaching us things now, Jack.”
Jack surprised her by pulling her into an embrace.
“Weak moment?” Cass whispered in his ear.
“Fond memory,” he said. Apparently, he’d forgotten that he broke things off, not her.
“Don’t you, Cass?” DOV repeated.
Cass touched DOV’s extended arm. “Yes, I do, DOV. Like the birds.”
“Like a dove?” DOV asked, servos whirring. “I’m named after a bird, aren’t I?”
Cass nodded. “Your name’s an acronym for Data-collecting Orbital Vehicle.” She smiled. “I chose it because I like the image of a dove flying across Io’s horizon.”
DOV’s output responses were the result of emergent learning, moments of artificial intuition—and imagination. They’d just witnessed a level of artificial intelligence once thought impossible.
“Cass?” Jack’s hand was on her shoulder, squeezing.
Returning her to the present.
“Sorry,” Cass said in a quiet voice, her gaze on the blank screen again. “Was just reminiscing. Remember when DOV talked about butterflies?”
Jack nodded. “Wondering how it’d feel to fly? She’s flying right now, isn’t she? For the first time.”
“You’re right. I wonder if she’s enjoying it. Or if she’s afraid. Wish I could see what’s happening to her.” Cass got quiet, her gaze on the blank screen again. She couldn’t help but feel protective of the little bot. “What if I miscalculated something? Missed something.”
He rubbed her shoulder. “Cass, you didn’t. That’s why we’re a team. We validate each other’s work. DOV will perform like a champ.”
“Hope you’re right, Jack.”
He grinned. “I’m always right.”
Sundeep rolled his eyes. “Yes, Jack knows everything, Cass. Just ask him.”
Jack chuckled. “Eleven minutes twenty-two seconds. Initiating second braking burn.”
Cass let out a breath. She hoped the lander survived its landing.
Ten years of development, prototyping, simulations, and AI tweaks to produce DOV, an intelligent data-collection bot. She was the payload aboard a jointly launched orbiter-satellite from Spaceport America. Slingshotting through progressively more distant trajectories from Earth to Mars, Earth to Venus until reaching Jupiter, the orbiter-satellite would inject DOV into Io’s orbit and transmit her data back to earth. Io, one of Jupiter’s largest moons, was the most volcanically active place in the solar system. With surface temperatures ranging from 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit to negative 202 degrees, depending on where you stood, DOV had to stick her landing or this would be the most expensive five-minute mission in history.
Once on Io’s surface, DOV would analyze soil samples, gather atmospheric data, map terrain, and stream video/images before conditions eroded her systems. Designed to withstand Io’s heat (provided she didn’t land in a pit of molten lava), DOV would last about an hour on the moon’s surface. Her meticulously constructed evolutionary algorithms would allow her to adapt to new data and learn from it. Testing the AI was just as important as collecting the data.
“Structural temperature outside expected parameters,” said Matt.
“Matt, check sensors on DOV’s outer hull!”
The six foot five, ginger-haired engineer turned his chair toward her, looking apologetic. “We’re still in blackout, Cass.”
She cursed under her breath. DOV had to survive. This was the worst wait ever.
“Eleven minutes and thirteen seconds until touchdown,” said Jack.
Cass sighed. “Thanks, Matt. Keep monitoring it.”
She turned to see Jack staring at her, concern in those luminous grey eyes.
“Eleven minutes is a lifetime, Jack,” she said in a half-whisper.
“Cass.” He gripped her shoulders and she stared into his eyes, seeing a flicker from ten years ago. “DOV will survive the moonfall because we designed her to. Remember, she’s a prototype. This data will improve our next iteration. What’s important is that we’ll be getting real-time data from Io, Cass. Io! Even DOV’s video and images will be priceless.”
Cass was glad that she’d purchased several exabytes of storage space on CalTech’s new spectral cluster imaging repository, mirrored through Purdue’s fastest research cluster. She nodded and gripped Jack’s forearms, remembering long ago nights in his arms. They’d both been so driven back then, so focused on their careers that they didn’t have time for anything else. Including each other. Standing here now, she regretted that.
