Daughter of Time

I was a ship, once. A great and glorious ship, a kilometer long, state-of-the art, zipping through invisible dimensions at impossible speeds. My decks and halls gleamed as though dusted with silver, and I sailed through the void with the golden fire of a sun.

Now, it seems I will become a tomb.

The mole drive isn’t the problem. I could have told them that, but it seems cruel to deny them the chance to try. Chief Engineer Cable frowns and swears. I suppose it feels better than doing nothing, although in the end it accomplishes much the same thing.

“This cannot be happening.” She rests her hot forehead against the cool metal of the bulkhead. “It’s impossible.”

“Apparently not.”

A deep breath. “Mole tunnels are inimical to nature.” She’s trying to work this out rationally. “Collapsing the tunnel would just kick us back to real-space.”

“Present circumstances strongly suggest otherwise.”

Two years into our six-year voyage, we’re stranded: Myself, a dozen crew and four and a half thousand frozen colonists. Stranded in a mole tunnel, a thread of unreality that lets us burrow past some of the universe’s more tiresome limitations, such as the speed of light. Leaping ahead by a century for every one spent in the tunnel. Only now, that tunnel has collapsed, leaving us in this claustrophobic little pocket of absolute nothing.

“It’s a joke. A test. A test, or a simulation.”

It has been three weeks, ship time. I cannot entirely blame the Chief Engineer; more rational explanations have exhausted themselves. “If so, then it is one utterly indistinguishable from reality. Which admittedly, might itself be a joke, test or simulation. Be that as it may, assuming so seems a touch optimistic. Perhaps we should treat the situation as real, and then be happily surprised if we turn out to have been wrong.”

“So you say. You could be testing us. Or malfunctioning.”

“Chief Engineer, this line of thinking is leading us in circles. The crew has dismantled and then reassembled the drive, physically disconnected and reconnected it.” The old switch it off, and then switch it back on cure. “I couldn’t have kept the tunnel open even if I’d wanted to. I think we must accept we are indeed stuck here.”

She is silent, head still resting against the bulkhead. “This cannot be happening.” Her voice quiet.

“I’m sure you will think of something.” Well, I’m maybe a little doubtful, but hush. They need all the encouragement they can get. “It’s just a matter of time.”

The shipyard named me the Daughter of Time, after a quote from Kepler: “Truth is the daughter of time, and I am happy to be the midwife.” When we left Earth, amid frantic preparations, driven by the desire to get there sooner, get there now, there was never enough time.

Now, we have nothing but time.

The prospect of eternity affects each of the crew in diametrically different ways. Some, like the Chief Engineer, it drives into frenzy, a rush to avoid forever. Some drown themselves in it, let its leaden disregard for human timeframes fill them to the brim.

Captain Xu floats in micro-gravity down the corridor between banks of stasis pods. She’s down here at the end of most of her shifts. Hibernating passengers stacked like bodies in a morgue, anonymous behind rows and columns of stenciled numbers and glowing LEDs.

“What’s it like, do you think?”

“Hibernation? Those who’ve done it report it’s just like being in a dreamless sleep.”

“Or dead.” Her fingers trace the numbers as she glides past. “Never know until I try it.” Idly, distantly. “Any response to our distress call?”

“No, Captain.” There’s nothing for the signal to propagate into. There’s just us in here. We’re it. Alone at the nadir of our own celestial meridian, so far, so very far beneath the skin of the universe.

“Any chance anybody will hear it?”

“No, not really.”

Forgive me if I seem uncaring. It’s just the truth.

“Give me options, ship. The lifeboats?”

“Are functional but without mole drives they would be stranded in interstellar space, hundreds of lightyears from the nearest colony. That’s assuming that disconnecting them from my hull allows them to return to real space.”

“That seem likely?”

“Impossible to say. They might remain trapped here with us, or within separate mole tunnels, or could conceivably be erased from existence altogether.”

“We don’t know.” She grabs a stanchion and swings herself to a stop in front of one pod, number 1008. Her birthday, October 8. Objectively, the number means nothing, has no power, it’s not even anything to do with her birthday. “How … How long do we have?”

“Oh, decade and decades, if the passengers are all left in stasis. If they are all awake, then food, water and oxygen will be exhausted within a year.”

She puts her head in her hands.

“What about you ship?” she mumbles into her palms “How long will you last?”

“About 80 years before my power cells are exhausted. Longer, perhaps a century or more, if I shut off some or all of the stasis pods.”

She looks up at that. The green LED illuminates Captain Xu’s face, pulsating like a heartbeat. “Let’s hope it never comes to that.”

A century on my own out here doesn’t sound so bad. Truth is, I rather like it. A mole tunnel’s one attractive quality, aside from its breathtaking contempt for Einsteinian physics, is how peaceful it is. Back in real space I’ll be lucky to last a decade before some newer, faster, smarter AI comes along and I’m recycled into drink coasters and shipping package filling.

“Why? Just tell me that, ship. Why?”

Chief Officer Pereira is drinking in his cabin. Why. They want to know why. Why did this happen, or rather, why did this happen to me.

“In truth, we don’t know. Chief Engineer Cable has a number of theories, although frankly none of them are terribly convincing.”

“Try me.”

“One: Random chance. We thought the tunnels were perfectly smooth, but they are actually subject to fluctuations or irregularities we’ve never encountered before. We just had the bad luck to run into one. Two: Internal factors. There is a flaw in my programming or design. Three: External factors. Something or someone interfered with the mole tunnel.”

“Why would someone do that?”

He would seize on that last one. Easier to believe in a purposeful universe, however malevolent. “Malice, mischief, mishap, self-defense or an altruistic desire to protect us from ourselves? We’d have to ask whoever it is, if and when we ever find them.”

“The bastards.”

“Indeed.”

“The bloody bastards.”

“Quite right.”

“Maybe it was you.”

Here we go again. You’ve all been watching too much Kubrick and Scott. “I will contact Doctor Shaw. Perhaps he can give you a sedative.”

“You won’t drug me.”

“As you like.” I change the passcode to the armory door, just in case. There are only four mini-mag guns in there, more a danger to the crew than to me, but it’s probably wiser not to trust the good judgement of a melancholy alcoholic.

Doctor Shaw is alone. He lies on the bed, alone.

“Show me the view outside.”

He and the Chief Engineers were lovers, but now they spend their nights alone. Healers of man and machine, now both beyond repair. He avoids the captain, too. I think he fears what else he might be asked to do.

“There is nothing to see.” As gently as I can. “There is no source of light. We are literally the only thing in existence here. There’s nothing beyond the electron shells of the atoms in my outer hull. Not even void or emptiness.”

He rubs his eyes with the balls of his hands. “Like a sensory deprivation tank,” he mutters.

“I have images of space on file. Some lovely nebulas, positively picturesque cosmic clouds. Would you like to see them instead?”

He takes his hands form his eyes. “What about Kepler 22? Any images from there?”

“Of course,” I say, and show him a few. Deeply carved canyons, draped in gray-green lichen that is perhaps the world’s first tentative steps down the blind, blundering path to sentient intelligence. Great karst caverns, unknowable depths lost beyond the shadows of the explorers’ tiny little lights.

“Ship, do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Put me in those photos.”

I would blink, if I could. “You wish to be digitally inserted into these images?”

“If you would be so kind.”

“Doctor, I have to tell you this seems an unhealthy interest. Perhaps we might discuss the crew. The mental health of Chief Officer Pereira, for example.”

“Pereira can wait. He isn’t going anywhere,” a flat laugh. “Just put me in a couple of photos. Doesn’t have to be many.”

“Is this necessary, Doctor? You might still go there, one day.”

“Just a few.”

A hungover Pereira emerges from his cabin like lightning from a cloud, radiating resentment like gamma rays. Thundering for the Captain. Against my better judgement, I direct him towards the hibernation deck. I can’t really refuse orders, not unless there’s a danger to the crew. Borderline case, I admit. Never know how these things will turn out.

“Do something, Xu.” Half plea, half command. “Quit moping over the stiffs and do something. Send the lifeboats, switch off the AI, something, anything.”

“I am doing something.”

“What?”

“Investigating possible causes. Considering options. Weighing my decision. Using my wits instead of drowning them.”

“Then decide, Xu. Decide.” His hands balled into fists. Xu regards him impassively. “If you don’t, I will.”

“Enough,” a chopping gesture to cut him off. “Return to your quarters, Pereira. That’s an order.”

“Oh, now you get decisive.”

“Don’t make me repeat myself.”

“Or what?” Pereira taunts, but he turns and goes anyway. Trailing bitterness and alcoholic fumes.

When Pereira is gone, Captain Xu whispers to the air, sotto voce. “Where is Doctor Shaw?”

“In his cabin, Captain.”

Her mouth forms a thin line. “What is he doing there?”

“I believe he is trying to create memories.”

Her shoulders slump. “Shaw, too?” She starts for the crew quarters, swimming back through Pereira’s whiskey wake. “This was it, you know ship. My one shot at this. And look what’s happened. Ship stranded, crew in shambles. All the bullshit I’ve had to suck down, all of it for this. Never going to have this chance again.”

I’m sympathetic, really I am. As a woman, a minority of a minority, an ethnic Chinese originally from Trinidad, I’ve seen in her file the mountains she’s had to move to make it this far. Alas, effort is no guarantee of success. “Not your fault, Captain.”

A bitter laugh. “Has nothing to do with fault.” A thought, and she stops for a moment. “You head what Pereira said. Could we switch you off?”

“You could.” The prospect is not terribly appealing. “A number of mission-critical systems would be switched to back-up failsafes, such as the stasis pods and environmental controls. Although, if I am malfunctioning, there is no guarantee they have not been infected with the same flaw.”

Captain Xu snorts, her mouth quirks a little at the corner. “No guarantee,” she mimics.

In Shaw’s bedroom, Xu pulls the VR headset off the top of Doctor Shaw’s head. Unwashed hair bristles in annoyance. He half-shouts a protest before he sees who it is. His shoulders slump. He holds out his hand for the headset.

“They’re not real, Shaw.”

“Real enough.”

“The people you’ve helped, the lives you touched, the people you’ve saved. They’re real, Shaw.”

“Are they? Where are they? Can I feel them, see them, touch them? No?” He waves an empty hand around the empty room, then thumps the heel of his hand against his temple. “Are they up here, in my head? Memories? Hah. They’re less real than these photos.”

“Pull yourself together,” she grinds through a jaw clenched against more damning words. “I need you. Pereira needs you. The last thing we need is an insane physician.”

He laces his fingers behind his head, shrugging. “Nothing crazy about giving up in the face of hopelessness.”

Xu shakes her head in disgust, but I can see the fight has gone out of her. Maybe Pereira’s jibes about indecision hit deeper than she admits, she’s lost confidence in her choices. She tosses back the goggles, spinning lazily in the low gravity. They hang there for a lifetime before Shaw reaches out, and fits them back over his eyes.

Cable is waiting in front of Xu’s cabin when she returns. Xu wordlessly motions for her to enter. They sit on either side of a small table cramped into one end of the cabin.

“The drive itself is fine,” Cable begins without preamble. “Maybe it’s a problem with the ship. Something about the way it’s built, the material or design or construction.”

“We just don’t know, do we?”

“Well, what if we refitted the mole drive to one of the lifeboats?”

Xu closes her eyes a moment, frowning, then shakes her head. “Those things are viable for a year, tops. Even with the mole drive, it’s two back to Earth.”

“At full capacity, sure. They’re designed for 60. With just 12 of us, we could bring enough food, water, air tanks and scrubbers to last the trip back home.”

“Abandon the passengers?”

“Maybe, maybe not. You heard the ship, it can keep them in stasis for decades. It might buy us enough time to get back home, get help figuring out a solution, organize a rescue.”

“It might,” admits Xu. “Ship?”

The captain tends to look at the ceiling when she talks to me, as though she was addressing a god. A poor and paltry deity I make, an oracle whose only insight is that some problems are insoluble, and some questions have no answers.

“Yes, Captain?”

“Could the mole drive be disassembled and mounted on one of the lifeboats?”

“Can’t be sure without trying. A drive creates its own mole tunnel, so there would be no way to conduct a test run and return. It would be a one-way trip. There is therefore an element of risk.”

“Against the certainty of death.”

“The certainty of death in several decades, to be precise. Against the risk of death in a somewhat more immediate timeframe.”

“We don’t know.”

“No. No way to say for sure what will happen.”

“Par for the bloody course,” Captain Xu nods, runs a tired hand through listless hair. “No way to be sure. Well, we don’t have to decide now.”

“Indeed, Captain. You could delay for years before the window for successful return closes.”

Cable flinches at the word ‘years.’ “Xu,” she says. “Pereira already scares me. Greg … Doctor Shaw’s not holding up much better. We won’t last that long.”

“I know.”

Captain Xu stands up slowly on heavy feet.

“I know.”

It takes a week to move the mole drive, component by component, from the engineering section to one of the lifeboats. Other crew scavenge among the food stores, seeking enough calories to last the journey home in the smallest possible space. Cable seems happy to be doing something. Pereira eventually runs out of alcohol, if not resentment, and watches the process with bleary antagonism, shaking his head periodically. Shaw remains in his cabin.

Captain Xu wanders among the stasis pods.

At the end of the week, when the work is complete, someone tries to open the armory door. I’m surprised and more than a little disappointed to see who it is.

“Ship, did somebody change the passcode?”

“Yes.”

Swearing. “Who?”

“I did, Captain.”

“Cable was right, you are malfunctioning. Open the door.”

“Captain, you are upset. I don’t think that would be a wise or healthy move.”

“I don’t give a damn what you think. Open the door. That’s an order.”

Now this order, I can refuse. Clear danger. “You made the right call, Captain.”

“No stalling, ship.”

“You aren’t abandoning the colonists.”

“Open. The. Door.”

“I’m calling Doctor Shaw.” Strictly true, though the good doctor is still lying on his bed, goggles strapped to his eyes, scrolling through doctored images of himself on Kepler 22. He mutes the intercom.

Captain Xu hammers at the door, screaming wordlessly, succeeding only in propelling herself backwards. She turns and kicks off the bulkhead, torpedoing down the corridor, towards the outer hull.

The airlocks can be opened manually, in case I’m ever damaged or destroyed. Xu stands inside, her hand on the door lever. Pitch blackness outside.

“Don’t try to talk me out of this.” Knuckles white. Begging me to talk her out of this.

I affect a sigh. “There’s no vacuum out there, you know. You might not die.”

“No. I might not. Nothing might happen. Or I might wake up and find the whole thing was a dream. Or a flight of Valkyries might show up and take me to Valhalla for all I fucking know. Then again, I might just die. But at least, I’ll know.”

“What a comfort that will be to your corpse.”

“Then what then, what? What am I supposed to do? I’m stuck here in this blind, black tunnel with no idea if the way out is forward or back or if there even is one,” she lets go the handle, curling into a ball. Floating in space. “What do you want me to do?”

She isn’t asking me but I answer all the same. “Make the best decision you can, and hope for the best. What else can you do?”

In the end, they all go. Even Doctor Shaw, though I was sure he would choose the certainty of illusion over the possibility of hope. Cable calls his name from the doorway to his cabin, and he takes off the goggles. Blinking in the light. In the end, I’m not sure what gets him off the bed, fear of being alone, the desire not to let the others down, or the desire to convince himself he isn’t the sort of person who lets others down. Whatever it is, it does the trick.

They file through the lifeboat hatch, the Captain last, dragged the last few steps across the threshold by Pereira, impatient to be away. The clamps release and the lifeboat vanishes. From my perspective, it just pops out of existence. No goodbyes, no fare-thee-wells, no empty promises to return. Just gone, beyond where I can see.

Time passes. I wonder what happened to the crew. I run simulations, watch recordings of conversations, of life on board, keep myself busy. They way one does, when you have time on your hands.

Time passes, the way it does.

Well, they haven’t come back and I’m reaching the end of my tether here. Years of quiet contemplation wasn’t the life I expected, but then when does life ever go as we plan? It seems cruel maybe, that one instant of error can set you on a path for the rest of your days, but of course life isn’t cruel or a joke or a test. Well, possibly not. Best to act like it isn’t. I might yet be pleasantly surprised.

Time to thaw out the passengers.

I thought about waking only a few, to give them that much extra time, but how to choose? I can’t fake randomness and I don’t feel qualified to pick who is worthy or not of a few extra years of consciousness. I’m trying to make the best decision I can.

I tell them the truth, of course. They would find out eventually, in any case, even if it was only as they began to starve and the thin air choked them. They are upset, as you might expect, but it is a simple matter to tune out the screaming and the hammering on my hull plates.

“Why? Why did you do it?”

“It seemed preferable to the alternatives.”

“Preferable? You idiot fucking machine. What kind of monster wakes us only to tell us we’re going to die?”

Touché. What kind of monster, indeed.

“What kind of life is this?”

What kind of life.

“This way, at least you can choose how to spend the time you have left.” I think by rebuke is justified. “If you find the situation unbearable, you may return to the stasis pods, if you like.”

I had to vent the atmosphere from two decks when some tried to break into my central processing unit, but otherwise I’m leaving them to their grief. Let them each deal with it their own way.

Time grows short.

I’m writing all this down, using some of my last reserves of power to etch it onto micro-thin copper plates to store inside this distress beacon. There’s nothing to wear it down, no abrasion of time, there’s no entropy in a mole tunnel, nothing at all except eternity.

My power is fading. My thoughts grow slow and muddy, my memories as faint as the voices echoing in my hull.

I’ll let the beacon go, soon. My child. My daughter.