Chapter Text
“Food allotment completed,” the NannyBot says.
“What? No, there’s still food left. Give me breakfast.”
“Food allotment completed,” the NannyBot says.
“Computer, give me breakfast,” I say again–for the third time this morning.
Still no movement from the arms, but I get a different response this time.
“Food allotment for Ryland Grace completed.”
Oh. I guess that makes sense. I’m still not sure how to access the NannyBot’s storage directly. Meant to look for it a long time ago, but I’ve been busy trying to save two planets and not die.
When we were getting ready to travel to Adrian, I found the ship’s supply inventory in the lab computer. It showed there was enough food on board to feed 3 astronauts for 90 days. That wasn’t too surprising. I think I was there for conversations about the length of time when the crew would be actively awake and working on the mission. I don’t remember all the details, but 90 days sounds about right.
I mean, now that I’m here it sounds bonkers to expect anyone to solve this problem in just 90 days, but at the time, it seemed reasonable. As reasonable as any of this mission, at least.
Looks like we’re at Day 91 now. I didn’t expect the computer to give me a hard time about eating food intended for my dead crewmates.
Ok, let’s try this:
“Computer, this is Olesya Ilyukhina. Give me breakfast.”
“Incorrect.”
Computer’s not buying that. Deep breath. Don’t panic. How sensitive is the voice recognition? Can I pass as Yao?
I give it a try.
“Incorrect,” the computer responds.
Darn it! Well, I’d intended to get into the NannyBot’s supply area at some point. Should have done it much sooner, I guess. Now I’m going to have to do it while hangry. UGH!
Before that, one more thing to try:
“Coffee?”
By some miracle, the computer serves up the usual pouch of coffee designed for zero g. Oh, thank God! I’m guessing I’ll run into the same problem with coffee soon, but not today. I probably skipped my coffee allotment a few times, while I was sleeping off my injuries or just too busy to think about it.
A short time later, caffeinated but not fed, I feel my way along the floor of the lab looking for anything that might be an opening. I figure since I found the access panel to the main supply room in the floor of the dormitory, the most likely place for human crew to access the NannyBot’s secret stash is the floor of the lab.
“You are okay, question?”
I startle at the sound of Rocky’s voice, bonking my shoulder against steel lab furniture. My left shoulder, mostly healed now from its burns, is still a bit tender, and it was a pretty forceful bonk. I’m momentarily speechless with pain.
I make a slow exhale as I push off the floor toward Rocky’s position on his side of the lab. I was so distracted by my task I didn't hear him come in from his tunnel.
“Yeah, I’m okay. Welcome back.” I rub my shoulder a bit. It doesn’t help. I’m hungry and anxious to get back to solving that problem, but the last thing I want to do is get cranky with my only friend within light years. “How did your…thing…? Wait, what were you working on?”
“Wanted to start checks I need for trip to Erid. Checks good so far. No repairs needed. Still many parts of ship to check.”
“Oh, yeah. I should probably do that, too.” The Taumeoba farms don’t really require my constant attention. I should do some things that I already know are necessary, like cleaning out the Hail Mary’s fuel tanks. And giving all the critical systems on the ship a check up before attempting another interstellar journey it was never designed to make wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.
Eh. It can wait. At the rate we’re going, it could be anywhere from a few weeks to a few months of waiting around for results before we get Taumeoba that can survive in Venus or Threeworld air.
“When is next Taumeoba experiment result, question?”
“We have about an hour until it’s time to check.”
The current round is Taumoeba-08.7 in Tank One and a conservative spacing of 0.01. We had a few good generations in a row while en route from Adrian, but progress has slowed down a bit since docking with the Blip-A. We even had to backtrack a bit when we were on Taumoeba-07.5, so we're back down to 0.01 increments.
Sometimes that’s how it goes. Scientific progress is rarely linear.
“What were you doing to floor, question?”
“I was trying to find the door to the robot’s supply area. Need to fix a problem with my computer.”
“Ah, bad. If was anything else, I could fix. What is problem, question?”
“My robot won’t give me food anymore. I know there’s food in there, but it’s food for my friends that died. I’m out of what was intended for me. I didn’t realize it would just stop giving me food when that happened. So now I have to figure out how to get into the robot’s storage area, which I’ve never done before. And I have to be careful not to damage the robot or move anything around that would mess with the robot’s functioning.”
“Of course you worried about food again.” I sense a little irritation in his voice.
“Hey, it's a fair thing to worry about. You would, too.”
“How long was human food intended to last, question?”
“It was supposed to be 90 days of real food for the mission, not counting the coma food for the trip.”
“Very short time to complete mission, even with three crew.”
“I agree. I guess we miscalculated that. Bringing more food for a longer mission might have been a good idea, but we had to make a cut off at some point to limit the mass of the ship and amount of fuel we’d need. We just didn’t know what we would find out here. 90 days seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Both humans and Eridians made mistakes in planning missions. Some very bad.”
“Agree. Did you take part in planning the mission from Erid?”
“Not in planning mission, but in building ship, yes. And decision to launch ship quickly without knowing many things about space, yes. Deadly radiation was result. Bad bad bad.”
“Bad,” I agree. “I was involved in the decision to put the crew in dangerous sleep for the trip here. It was intended to keep us from harming each other or ourselves. We knew it was dangerous but we didn’t realize how dangerous it was. But I don’t remember if I helped make the decision for the crew to have only 90 days of food.”
“How you not know that?”
“There are a lot of things I don’t remember well from before leaving Earth. Part of it is just how human memory works. But part of it is because…”
I hesitate. I’m not sure how much I want to disclose to Rocky about this. I think…yeah. I think I do want to tell him about the memory loss. I can skip over why.
“When I first woke up in Tau Ceti,” I say, “I had a condition humans call amnesia. It means loss of memories, usually due to injury or illness. You still remember things like language, skills, and knowledge, but what humans call biographical memories, memories of who you are and what has happened to you in the past, are gone. When I woke up from the coma, at first I didn’t know where I was or why I was here. I didn’t even know my own name. And since the rest of my crew had died, they couldn’t help me. I was very confused. The condition is usually temporary, and in my case, I started to have memories come back to me almost right away, but it’s taken a while for me to remember a lot of things, and I’m still not sure if there are memories I’m missing.”
Rocky takes some time to take this in.
“You had this condition when we first met, question?”
“Yes. I had remembered a lot by then, but many memories were still missing that came back to me later.”
“When was last time you had memory come back to you?”
“It’s been a few weeks. It was when we were on our way back from Adrian and doing the first tests that showed Taumoeba failing to survive in Venus and Threeworld air.”
Rocky thinks about this.
“I observed that,” Rocky says. “We were both sad sad sad about experiment failure. But then you changed. Louder, faster noises from organs. Not only sadness. I heard you say something strange that I not understand. Like you were speaking to someone else. You were remembering something, question?”
Wow. That makes me feel a little exposed. Rocky’s memory is too good. And his sense of hearing can apparently pick up on changes in my…breathing? Heart rate? Both? And what did I say out loud? Probably something mean I wanted to say to Stratt.
Well, I’m already in for a penny. I guess I can go in for a pound.
Or…not. Yeah, I really don’t want to tell Rocky what that was about. What can I say instead?
“Yeah, you’re right. It was an upsetting memory. I’m not sure what I said, but there’s someone who did something cruel to me that I remembered at that moment. I probably said something angry to or about them.”
“Someone did something what, question? I not know this word.”
“I’m sorry, Rocky, I can’t define it for you right now. I’m really hungry and I’m struggling to think straight. I need to solve my food problem.”
“Ah, sorry. Fragile human. Always need food. Do you want my help?”
“Actually…yeah! Can you tell me what you can hear in the space under the lab floor?”
Rocky answers more quickly than I expect.
“Yes, much machinery in there. I hear it moving often. When I build xenonite tunnels was difficult to find space through this level that would not interfere with machines.”
Wow. I should’ve thought to ask Rocky about this before.
“Can you sense where the access panel might be? The one that opens up so I can look at the machinery inside?”
I watch as Rocky listens carefully, rotating his carapace as he tries to get a better “look” at the lab’s floor.
“Under table there,” he says. “Is panel with different quality. Maybe opening.”
I use a leg of the table to help pull myself down and take a closer look. Sure enough, there’s an access panel just like the one to the supply room under the dormitory and about the same size, taking up most of the space under the table near the outer edge of the lab. And like that one, I expect it will be difficult to open without the computer’s help. So I make a guess about how to do that.
“Computer, open food supply,” I say.
“Food can be accessed in the dormitory.”
I let out an angry hiss.
“See what I mean? Computer is giving me a hard time.”
“Open panel with hands, question?”
“Can't. The supply room under the dorm is the same way. I could try to pry it open with some tools, but it would be better if I can figure out the right thing to say to get the computer to open it for me.”
“Dumb design,” Rocky says. “Thinking machine make problem worse.”
“Yes, sometimes computers do that,” I agree. “Ok, let’s think about this. That didn’t work because even though there’s food in there, it’s not the way the crew was meant to access it. So why have an access panel to the robot’s area at all? Why would a human need to access it?”
“Obvious,” Rocky says. “Repair.”
I nod. “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” I think for a moment. Okay, let’s try this:
“Computer, open robot repair panel.”
“Opening aperture to automated care and monitoring system.”
The panel unseals to reveal a crawlspace. It’s both narrower and shallower than the supply room under the dormitory. I get my head inside it to get a better look. It’s lighted–I assume the lights came on automatically when the panel opened. The side of the crawlspace that’s closer to the center of the ship is covered in sturdy metal mesh. Through the mesh I can see a relatively spacious area full of complicated machinery–the NannyBot’s guts.
“You see machinery, question?”
“Yeah, somewhat. It’s behind some mesh, a material made of metal that has some openings for light to get through. I can’t see through it very well.”
“I observe it before. Many robot arms inside like arms in nest room. Many boxes of materials. Machinery moves boxes in a cycle. Boxes open, robot arms access items. Use. Give things to you on other side.”
I notice something embedded in the mesh a little ways ahead–looks like a square control panel with a touch screen and a few manual controls. It’s just out of reach.
I don’t really want to go in. I mean, the crawlspace was clearly meant for a human to crawl in and do maintenance work, though I’m not sure why. There wouldn’t have been anyone awake to do it during the trip to Tau Ceti, and how likely is it that the robot would need repairs in the–scoffs!–90 days it was meant to serve the crew? Maybe it was meant to be used during the pre-flight checks before the mission launched.
The idea of crawling in that very narrow passageway doesn’t thrill me, but I’m also getting hungrier and I see no other way to solve the problem.
“All right. I see a control panel. I’m going in there so I can reach it.”
“Be careful.”
“Do my best.”
I use the edge of the opening to pull myself inside and crawl toward the control panel until I can touch the screen. It displays the words “Automated Care and Monitoring System” and offers several menu options: Advance Carousel, Reverse Carousel, Open Compartment, Close Compartment, and System.
From this and Rocky’s description, it sounds like the robot has a carousel that moves compartments of supplies in and out of various staging areas where robot arms work with them, preparing food or medical treatment to be served to the crew by the arms in the dormitory.
My stomach makes a gurgling complaint. I have to try something. I choose “Advance Carousel”.
The machinery whirrs to life and I can see movement through the mesh. But more than that, I can see that just a little further down the passageway, there is another opening in the mesh, like the one around the control panel, but larger. As the carousel moves, it brings a white boxy shape into view, perfectly framed by the opening. I think I see what to do next. I select “Open Compartment.” A hatchback-style lid opens, revealing an interior that is as intricate and varied as a fishing tackle box. I move down the passageway a bit to get a closer look at what's inside. It’s full of carefully arranged vials of medicine and packages of supplies like IV tubing and needles, all secured with little clamps so that nothing is at risk of floating away in zero g.
That’s interesting–but not what I’m looking for. I select “Close Compartment”. As the hatch seals back down, I notice that there’s writing on it, “Medical Supplies 05.” I select “Advance Carousel” a few times in a row, cycling past more boxes of medical supplies.
The fifth time I advance to the next box, the label reads, “Crew Rations, Days 01-30, DuBois,” and the compartment has a NASA logo on it. When I open it, the compartment is empty. “Crew Rations, Days 31-60, DuBois,” and “Crew Rations, Days 61-90, DuBois,” are empty as well.
My heart is beating a little too fast and I feel light-headed. Part of it is probably from the choice to drink coffee without any food. And part of it is the realization that I’ve already been eating a dead friend’s rations. It seems in the five days before launch (or maybe even before, if Stratt started quietly moving things into place right after the explosion), there was time to make some updates but not others. The jumpsuits were near the opening in the supply room. My coffee settings probably just required a few keystrokes on the main computer in the lab. Updating these were trivial tasks for the astronauts who prepared the ship for its long journey.
DuBois and the other crew would have selected their meals months in advance, probably from menus provided by their respective space agencies. Well, one American is as good as another, right? It didn’t even occur to me to wonder how the meals were selected until now. Maybe if the crew member I was replacing had been Russian or Chinese, I would have noticed a mismatch.
“Grace, you okay, question?”
Rocky probably noticed my organs getting loud and fast again.
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Another upsetting memory, question?”
“No. I mean, sort of. Something I saw down here reminded me of something, but it wasn’t a new memory. I’m fine. I think I’m getting close to what I’m looking for down here. Just give me a minute.”
The next 3 boxes are Ilyukhina’s rations, followed by 3 boxes for Commander Yao. Like the boxes for DuBois, they have their respective space agency logos. I open each one of them to confirm that they are full of food packages, as expected. Out of curiosity, I advance the next few boxes and get three boxes labeled Beverage Service, which are surprisingly still pretty well-stocked with coffee, tea, and a few other powdered drinks. We must have been allowed multiple servings a day. I’ve only been having one cup of coffee most days, and water the rest of the time. I’ll have to check the inventory on the lab computer to see how much coffee is left, as well as what other drinks are available.
Next is a box labeled Soiled Laundry. I decide not to open that one. At some point, I’ll have to come back to find what else is here, but I’m too hungry for any more exploration right now.
What should I do? I can grab food packages at random. Just crawl in here every few days or so and nick more food that the NannyBot won’t give me. But the NannyBot hasn’t just been handing me food. It also prepares the food, adding hydration and heating it to the temperature it deems appropriate for serving. I could use the equipment in the lab to prepare my meals, but it wouldn’t be easy. Is there a way to hack the system?
I have an idea. I grab several packages from a box of Yao’s rations and tuck them behind my back, anchoring them against the wall of the crawlspace so they won’t float away. I Reverse Carousel a few times and grab a few of Ilyukhina’s as well. Then, I reverse back to a box with DuBois’ name on it, and put all the packages I collected in it. I have no idea if this will work, but it’s the only thing I can think of to spare me from cooking meals in the sample furnace. I repeat this process a few times until the three boxes for DuBois look almost full.
Then, I undertake the unpleasant task of trying to back myself down the passageway and crawl back through the opening, taking care not to scrape the tender spot on my shoulder that I bonked earlier. It's like playing Operation, only the penalty for touching the wrong spot is pain rather than a buzzer.
Rocky is where he was when I left, observing from his side of the lab. Of course, from his point of view, I didn’t really go anywhere. He could observe what I was doing in the crawlspace just fine, though he may not have understood it.
“You bring food back with you, question?”
“No. I did something that I think will make the robot give me the food. I hope so, anyway. The robot adds water and heat to the food, and it would be unpleasant if I had to prepare the food myself.”
“Humans strange.”
“If you say so. I’m going to the dorm. With any luck, I’ll have breakfast soon.”
Rocky makes a sound of acknowledgement. He doesn’t follow me into the dorm. Eridian manners.
“Computer, breakfast.”
Nothing happens, but that’s not a bad sign. Sometimes it takes a minute for it to bring food out. The lack of a flat out refusal from the NannyBot is encouraging.
Moments later–SUCCESS! The NannyBot delivers a hot meal. It’s labeled Day 59, Meal 1. That means it’s breakfast. Nice! From Roscosmos or CNSA?
I open it up and sniff the steam coming off the meal, but I can’t tell much about it by the smell. I’ve been in zero g for a while now, which messes with my nasal passages. It tastes great, though. It’s egg wrapped in some kind of fried breading, filled with a sauce that is probably spicier than what I would normally eat. I think I had something like this on Stratt’s Vat, so it’s probably from CNSA. I finish the meal all too quickly.
—
That afternoon, Rocky and I are settled in the dorm for some down time. I’m playing Minesweeper while Rocky tinkers with something. I’m a little tired but in good spirits. I’m well-fed, and we’ve got Taumoeba-09.1, a big enough increase that I’m feeling confident about increasing the spacing again.
Out of the blue, Rocky asks, “What is meaning of new word from this morning?”
Oh, boy. Just like that, my good mood is gone. I consider playing dumb, pretending I can’t remember what word he means. But, no. I won’t do that to Rocky.
“Word was ‘cruel.’ It’s like…hang on.” I tap on my laptop until I’ve got our shared word list. It’s out of date, but I want to double check what words we have established to make sure I can define it adequately.
“Okay, so we have the meaning of the word ‘mean’ that describes behavior.”
“Yes, understand. That human word has different meanings. You are thinking of ‘mean,’ question?”
I check the laptop to confirm that the Eridian word he used is the correct sense of “mean.” It’s not a word that has come up many times in our conversations. “Yes, that’s it. Cruel is like mean, only stronger. More painful. It’s used when someone hurts another person either with intention to cause suffering or at least disregard for the suffering that they will cause.”
“Someone intended to hurt you, question?”
I pause. I wish I could think of a way to end this conversation without stepping on Rocky’s feelings. Against all odds, even with wildly different physiology, he has a similar palette of emotions as a human. If I shut down his questions, will he feel rejected? I choose my words carefully.
“Something happened to me right before I left Earth that was painful. I don’t think the person who did it intended to hurt me, but she was so focused on doing what she wanted to do that she didn’t care how much I suffered because of it. I’m still…” I breathe for a moment. Rocky waits.
“It’s still painful. Please, don’t ask me anything more about what happened.”
Rocky thinks about this for a moment. Then he says, “Understand. No more question. Can’t think of Eridian word for this that is stronger than ‘mean’, so will call this ‘mean mean mean.”
It’s not the first time we’ve found a word that was untranslatable. Repeating a similar word to make it stronger has been one of several strategies we have to deal with this.
I add “mean mean mean” to the database.