New Year’s Day, 2083.
Herman knew what was coming, but he slid the pain to the back of his mind, as was typical of him. He stopped wearing his eye cap, and his watch too, avoiding any source of updates. Technology, people – he had been delaying the inevitable. His contract with Magellan Mines probably wasn’t being renewed.
The relatively easy job had sapped him of his last good years. This week had already seen him relegated to light duties. With his time freer than it already was, he would go to the deserted observation platform and watch the Earth from the bunker on the Moon. He stared at it with naked eyes, though today he had brought his old magnum binoculars. He sat and watched the continents under cloud cover, and tried as he might to make out the islands and archipelagos. It was the point of everyone’s origin, everyone’s home – and yet it seemed less than homely, knowing he would probably be confined to it until death.
He had come a long way, and mankind too. In his life, the reusable booster had been perfected. Select Privateers had Government blessing and were given license to pursue the Faustian conquest of space. The moon had been peopled, courtesy of his own employer. And when the Helium-3 was tapped out, there were plans in place to beam solar groundside.
But his role in the story was fast drawing to a close.
In search of a distraction, he looked for Axios Space Station, but something else far from it caught his gaze. A flash, then a flitter of debris.
Where was the Habitat Hotel?
Curiosity forced his hand. The eye cap was back in, the watch slapped on. Emails, inbox, a subject line that read Regarding your contract. In the preview pane, his mind focused on the words unfortunately and medical and grounds, and he knew that it was so. But there was something bigger going on, bigger than him.
***
The preliminary report came in after twenty minutes. The estimated death count ranged between twenty-five and thirty-something deaths. Herman was reminded of his own fragile life, wrapped though it was in aging muscle. One small thing. That’s all it takes. Herman had learnt that after his last flight in the Army Air Corps and before his first day with the ESA in Cologne. An O-ring here, a piece of foam there, and his whole world could depressurize. He’d feel the saliva evaporate from his tongue, ushering in a new career as a ragdoll.
Instinctual fear was juxtaposed with rationalized schadenfreude.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall, Herman thought. To see the billionaire Sheldon Morgensen’s countenance fall with the value of his stock. The man who wanted to “democratize” space and take it away from those who were elite in ability and spirit but not exactly wealth. The man who wanted the trailblazers to cede territory to the tourists.
Herman needed a drink, teetotal though he was. His quarters were a dry country, so he headed for the Hall of Mirrors.
***
Why they built this place, he wasn’t sure. They said it was for the miners, but really it was for Morgensen’s ilk. A small club with an open bar, but only a minority of patrons could pick up the drink bulbs. Holo-projectors shot from the ceiling. Their payload was an augmented reality that could not be shut out. About a hundred people were in here, and maybe 15 or so were solid. The rest were avatars of people experiencing the Hall in VR suits back on Earth, paying through the nose for the privilege. Each avatar had a timer above their head, counting down the airtime left in their session.
It was a mutually beneficial idea. Base workers had no shortage of people to meet and greet, and the players got their bragging rights, having done virtual shots with a spaceman. Every now and then, Herman – ever the introvert – could get lost in a crowd. With liquor divined for the perpetual night, his secondary objective was a fact-finding mission. What did they think? How many translucent clubbers had saved up a pretty penny to get here, in envy of the newly dead? Was there anyone here who knew anyone on board?
All they could offer was idle talk in the dead of night.
He was being eyed by a woman on the other side of the round bar, a quarter of a million miles away. Young, blonde, the debutant type. The kind of woman that avoided a face like his. Something about her was different, cut from different cloth. Her time wasn’t running out. There were no numerals above her head. Her halo was the symbol of infinity.
“Herman Goetz?” She asked.
She knew him by sight. As a security officer with Magellan, he had opted out of having any highlighting applied to him from the user’s point of view.
He pretended to not hear her.
“I’m Vienna Morgensen.”
He dropped his drink and spilt it over the counter.
***
She was the first thing resembling a woman to set foot in his room this side of the Karman line. She was now being relayed through a personal projector he had never used before, designed to give private airtime to guys with families. There was no rampant cleanup in the run-up to the session. His room was barer than a catalogue, lacking even the faux personal effects. Her range of motion was limited to the core of the studio. It’s not like she could root around in his open medicine cabinet or mock the pencil notes of his few half-read philosophy books.
Her avatar had minimal customization. It wore black, but not the little black dress some girls slip on to hook a man.
“What was it that you wanted to talk to me about?”
Her face was cracking underneath its myriad filters. “My father is dead. He was at the Habitat when it went.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” He said it too quickly, having anticipated the reveal. The entire Habitat manifest was being suppressed, and the initial statement to come out of the Morgensen Corporation was terse in text. Speculators were reading between the lines.
She tried as she might to regain some semblance of composure. “I want to recover his remains. I’d like you to help me.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible, Vienna.” A silent sigh on his part.
“My father had a robust tracker implanted in him. It’s still responding. It will lead you to his body.”
“Select Privateers are handling the cleanup operation. Why not go to them?”
“Select are following government-mandated parameters. They’re more concerned with material debris than the dead. But you are an experienced pilot and have access to a ship.”
He shook his head. “The Buffalos belong to Magellan. Security officers can only use them in a state of emergency. They’re slow craft designed for bugging out if the bunker starts to break down.”
A small smile crept upon her face, born of cunning rather than joy. “I had something else in mind. You know the Wayfarer plant, at Mare Serenitatis?”
“I have a few friends there, sure.”
“My family have a minor equity stake in the company, but we are party to interesting information. A craft is in development there. One of the first to be built in microgravity, off-world. There’s a working prototype in the R&D Hanger. State of the art. Agile enough for a rendezvous.”
“Taking something like that for a joyride is going to cost me more than just my job with Magellan.”
“But you have so much more to gain.”
“Like what?”
“Name your price.”
He smirked and picked a figure out of thin air. “Ten million dollars, and a better job.”
Within seconds, there was a ping on his watch. It informed him of a Swiss account made in his name, opened with a deposit of three million and then some. His jaw went slack.
“You’ll get another third when I hear the Wayfarer has been stolen, and the rest when I see my father’s body.”
***
He had studied Vienna’s copy of the proposed control schema on the tram to the garage, relaying its illustrations to his eye cap, layering it over clear vision at half opacity. It was like looking through a monocular with the other eye open, and there was a tearing in the world. One half waking life, the other a realm of theories and forms. He took the personnel carrier to Mare, the open fledgling road empty, friendly to drivers under the influence of owner’s workshop manuals.
***
“She’s a beauty,” said Head Technician Andreyev, caressing his own against-regs mutton chops.
“Sure is,” said Herman.
The older man sniffled with his wine-red nose like he was struggling for air. “What do you like most about her?”
They stood in front of the prototype for a minute longer, admiring it.
The Wayfarer had some pedigree to its aesthetic genes, the germs of which had crawled forth from the British TSR-2 and V-Force Victor, as well as the obvious American Blackbird and Shuttle. Her vestigial wings had been clipped at the drawing board by engineers headhunted from outfits like H-Arms and Raginwald Manufacture, giving her a slimmer profile. They studded her with more thruster points than was typical.
This was no space plane, but the perennial forms of fish and fowl were hardwired into man when it came to forging extensions of himself. She had no real need of legacy thrusters, perpetually in freefall, and she was dressed for solar radiation but not re-entry heat.
Combination craft, which could take off like a plane, traverse the sea of black, and land back home the same way, were forever on the horizon. For now, dedicated roles would do, but the purpose of the Wayfarer was as opaque as the endless night. Maybe it was a rich man’s hobby.
“She’s sleek,” Herman admitted.
“Well, you’re clearly thinking straight if you can see that. I can let you have her, but we gotta make it look like you jacked her. Punch me in the face.”
“You want me to punch you in the face?”
Andreyev smiled. “If it gets me closer to a hundred-K, sure.”
“Can’t we just schedule a shakedown run, and I go rogue?”
“If the hotel had blown up a week ago, sure.”
Herman took his hands out of his jacket pockets.
“Just give me enough time to get to a suit before the hanger bulkhead opens…”
He clenched his fists.
“…And bring her back in one piece.”
***
He got in the ship by way of an empty cargo bay. It was on the lower deck instead of the upper. Traditional space payloads were being fired into orbit and beyond by way of captive railguns. In light of this development, the Wayfarer had plenty of room for transporting luxuries for the body or soul. The space lab that its Shuttle forebear would have carried was now an integrated part of the fuselage and blurred the flight- and mid-decks into each other, rather than splitting them into separate stacks.
She utilized cryogenic propellants in lieu of the legacy hypergolics that had carried man along from Apollo to Dragon. Lunar water, cracked by electrolysis, produced hydrogen and oxygen. Refrigerated to cryo temperatures, the gas was made liquid. High energy, high performance, highly efficient. Hell, they should be using this stuff in the Buffalos…
In the cockpit, however, Herman noticed some control units had been moved around compared to the prior design document. It took him a minute just to get to grips with the current layout.
He toyed with the Wayfarer’s planner, the kind of nav assistance that – on a long enough timeline – would give any idiot with a high school science education and ten hours in an arcade flight sim the keys to everything between here and the Oort cloud. He programmed in the waypoints that Vienna’s advisors had recommended.
***
Six-something million.
The state of the art could only go so fast. He was some time out. Now and then, he could step away from the controls for a free minute. He explored the nooks and crannies that appealed to him. Solo travel gave him time to think. He mulled over the same ideas that come back and forth to him in his reading.
Mechanical law persists throughout the universe. Morgensen’s technicians understood that enough to put the Man of the Year’s plush modules into orbit, sandwiched between the Earth and the Moon. But its latest and last passengers failed to realize that, in vacuum, ontological law drastically changes. If there was a God, he was still providing for man in the terrarium of his birth, despite Gaia’s innumerable scars. But he cared not for the man in space. Out here, in Medean territory, technology can’t self-correct any errors that will cost life, despite its myriad blessings.
There was no retreating into a biosphere. And if future generations found one in a neighboring star system, it wouldn’t have been tailor-made for man over eons. The stations, ships, and bases were strange new wombs. And while temporarily insulated from death, Herman led a stressful way of life. A life not fit for parties.
He thought about Vienna, and how an ugly bastard like Sheldon could sire an heiress like that. He liked to think she got her good looks from her reclusive mother and not some test tube. A Renaissance man, her father had ideas in that area too.
***
He shifted into low earth orbit. At high speed, he had more maneuver options, but at the cost of Delta-v. He kept his transponder on but ignored Select’s hails. The calls increased in frequency and intensity. He muted them after a while, leaving the auto transcriber to type out strongly worded letters in English, Russian, and Chinese.
He made incline adjustments and played the waiting game. Rendezvous with object in twenty minutes.
He got suited and booted.
***
Out of the strange new womb, clutching the same old cord. He rode the remote manipulator arm as far as he could. The pack on his back took him the rest of the way. He kept his eye on the prize – amorphous though it was – marking it with his helmet HUD. Closer inspection provided higher definition: the transponder wasn’t completely human-shaped. Curating his eyes, he looked past the unpleasantness. It was all about finding some part to hold onto. He reached out for the last of the cervical vertebrae, once, twice, three times the charm.
He traced his anchor back to the bulkhead.
***
Select had escalated his intrusion to NASA, the ESA, Roscosmos and the Taikonauts. The Western nations were writing out his rap sheet in real time. The death penalty was absent from that list. He hadn’t got anybody killed with his quiet heroics yet, and if the fledgling orbital defenses were to light him up, they’d just be contributing to the Kessler syndrome that Select was trying to throttle in the crib.
Herman didn’t really care.
All that remained of Morgensen was a damaged head and a crop of upper spine. On the workstation, Herman rested the carcass face-down like he would a haunted photograph.
He cared not for the cascade of small things that would inevitably go wrong on the back of Morgensen’s work, costing hundreds of lives. He was more worried about the teeming millions of mass men who would try to live in outer space. It was the law of counter-intuitive results. The loss of the Habitat would not dissuade aspiring dilettantes from space as much as received wisdom would like to dictate.
What would Herman see, after leaving the brig?
Suppose a deranged scientist were to inject the Morgensen brain with amphetamines, partially reviving him. What would the dead man prophesy with his last rattle? A new Hall of Mirrors, with every dancer made flesh. No longer an elite comfort, but an influence unto themselves. None of them would be excellent, individual, or qualified. They were mostly undifferentiated in face, opinion, and experience, carrying on in their avatars by way of late-stage fashion and freakish makeup.
If an outfit like “Select” Privateers wanted to remain exclusive, it would be better off dirtying the edge of the sky than cleansing it. The astronaut, as a breed, was doomed to be replaced by joyriders. Morgensen was not alone in mistaking a nightmare for a dream. There had been many before him, and he had many imitators in this life.
What pulps had this man ingested in his youth, to make a snot-green moon seem desirable? His type wanted a second, smaller Earth. And then a third one. They were not in the business of resurrecting dead worlds as they once were, but bullying the ashes into behaving like Eden, so that Bosch’s Earthly Delights could play out again and again on a myriad of duplicate canvasses.
The Rocket Man should have been a clean break.
He wanted to punch the back of the dead man’s head but thought about what was inside.
Then, he thought some more…
***
He sent out a transmission of his own, and it wasn’t long before an image of Vienna erupted from the lab’s comm cradle. Her infinity halo was no more, replaced by a fast-ticking timer, perhaps indicative of her ever-diminishing wealth. He had to milk the Morgensen cash cow while he still could.
“You’re a clever girl, Vienna. Worthy of your father’s legacy. Asking me to secure his remains for burial, knowing whatever’s inside them is what really counts.”
Her entire face was a puzzle.
“This was more than just a robust tracking device. A neural implant, no doubt full of useful metadata, destined for a burning, of one kind or another. Its value is more than sentimental to you, isn’t it?”
If there had been a carefully constructed façade, it appeared to be crumbling. “What are you talking about?”
“His final conversations. His final business arrangements. The gritty details of his plans. The finer points of empire.”
“I haven’t slept since my father’s death, Herman. Funeral rites. Last will and testament. Phones that don’t stop ringing. If the help could arrange it all, I don’t think I’d rest any easier. If I gave a damn about money, I would’ve talked you down.”
“Ten million dollars is a paltry sum for a woman of your caliber. Microscopic compared to what it cost your father to engineer his place of death.”
“What is it that you want from me?”
“I’m going to need some of the Morgensen shares in Magellan and Wayfarer, especially if you’re using your father’s game plan. Hell, maybe they’ll go easier on me, shareholder that I am, and it’ll only be five years in the joint for the sins of useful telemetry. I’m rather short on time.”
“That metadata, that I’m so clearly interested in. Tell me, what was the last thing my father saw?”
“I don’t think anyone wants to see that.”
“Get back to me when you find it.” She cut herself off.
***
It took him a while to figure it out. Lines of code beyond his comprehension, but a complex recovery UI that he worked out in half an hour of clicking back and forth. The first and last entries were wedded with a string of programming going back to the pre-alpha versions of the firmware. A family photo, forever tied to his vital readouts. Arrangements had been made so that when heavy trauma was detected, his vision would be overwritten with the image inside of a nanosecond. Morgensen wanted his kith and kin in happier times to be the last thing he ever saw, no matter the circumstances of his demise. And he got what he wanted.
Herman felt ill, but not more so than usual.
***
Ten million dollars, until the time came to compensate good old Andreyev.
He passed the upload on to Vienna through the ether of tightbeam, but not after making a copy of the metadata for his personal smartwatch. Already expertly encrypted without the original device – itself trash compacted by the galley and jettisoned out – Herman added his own hieroglyphs on top. If Vienna didn’t keep her end of the new deal, it’d be his bargaining chip with Select or the other high rollers whenever he was a free man. With his compliance, someone could eventually figure it out.
He hailed the Wayfarer plant. His landing was textbook.
He kept his channels open, enjoying the comfort of the elite flight chair for a few minutes more, and waited for his comrades in the security office to call him out with his hands up.
Enoch writes 