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I steered my small craft to Docking Ring 4 of the orbiting station. The clamps engaged with a loud clang, causing the craft to shudder. A small bobble-headed figurine of an Earth canine, a souvenir from a salvage operation when I first started this job, nodded in annoyance with the carelessness of the docking operation.
“Ring 4, secured,” came a staticky voice from the com system.
“Ring 4, acknowledged,” I said, speaking into my helmet.
It had been a long trip this time. Given a lead on an old satellite that had been missing for almost a century, floating around a million kilometres off Jupiter’s aphelion, I had been the first to find it, derelict and dead. No other scavenger had found her, so I filled my cargo boxes with a ton of valuable parts and goods. Now back at Homestead orbiting Titan, I would be able to make some trades and get some much-needed repairs done to my ship.
I undid the safety restraint that kept me in place during the docking process and stood up, remembering to stay bent slightly, so as not to hit my helmet on the control panel above my seat. Once past the confines of the cockpit, I stood, stretched, and walked into the corridor that led to my cabin door, first having to pass by the airlock to the station and the door to my small personal toilet.
I took my helmet off; now that the ship had docked, I didn’t need it anymore. Linked wirelessly to the helm, the helmet helped me to navigate through the deep darkness of space this far out from Sol. I looked the helmet over as I held it in my hands. A second-hand unit, it had seen better days, its dark green paint faded and worn, with dents and scratches from where it had saved my skull more than once.
With my bare head exposed, I reached up with my left hand to the back of my scalp. I moved instinctively, as I had a hundred times before, and found the small connector and cable that stuck out of the base of my skull. After pulling the plug out from the back of my head, I stuffed the cable into the helmet, then returned to the little port in my skin and gave it a good scratch. Having the cable plugged in too long always gave me a rash around the connection point.
“If we keep scratching at it, we are going to bleed,” came the voice out of nowhere.
“I know, and you tell me the same thing every time I unplug,” I said out loud. I knew I didn’t need to say it out loud, but after a few months out in the deep dark by yourself, you started to talk back to the voice just so you could remember what you sounded like.
“And yet we keep doing it,” the voice answered back. Only I could hear this. All deep-space pilots had their own voice only they could hear; part of the AI built into the implants we had in our heads.
History books could tell you about how humans had begun to push out from Earth to the other planets in the Sol system, starting with stations around our home planet, then cities on the moon, next Elonton City on Mars and, after that, the giant stations built to orbit some of the Moons of other planets. Homestead was one of a few orbiting Titan, and not the newest or the nicest, either. But the docking fees were low, and if you watched your back, it wasn’t a terrible place to make deals and get paid.
Earth had been a tough place to live if you weren’t born with money, and like most deep-space pilots, I wasn’t. When I got tired of getting beat-up, threatened, and arrested, I decided to leave my home planet and try my luck out past the asteroid belt. But here’s the thing – in order to survive out here, you needed to be able to interface with a lot of systems in your vessel all at once, and that wasn’t something that was easily done by a regular human. So us pilots signed a waiver, went under the knife (I mean, I say knife, but it’s really a laser and it’s over and done with in about 20 minutes), and got these implants.
The AI in the implants plugged into shipboard systems, helped navigate the deep dark, let you know your ship’s status, and interfaced with your brain to make decisions before you consciously even knew that a decision needed to be made. Since it was embedded so intimately, it also knew everything about you and your body, which could get very annoying.
Like now.
“Our bladder is currently at fifty-seven-percent capacity. We suggest emptying it before going station-side,” the voice proposed. If I could have described what the voice sounded like, I would have said a middle-aged man who works as an accountant in a huge company that only has him listed as a number and treats him as one. He was the one with a receding hairline and a boring wardrobe, mostly beiges and browns. Not only that, but he was disappointed with every life choice he had ever made. I called him Merv.
I got Merv second-hand and on the cheap, when I decided to become a pilot and get the implant. It was impossible to remove an implant once it was inserted – unless, of course, the pilot was very much not using his brain anymore – that’s how I got Merv. They said Merv’s original pilot had flown a little close to Sol and had been hit by a burst of radiation in a freak storm. It would have explained some of Merv’s quirks, but he never talked about it; he just said that some of his data was corrupted and he couldn’t access the memories when I asked. Which sucked, because it meant he only had about 50% of the memory space he should have.
I set my battered helmet down on the bench next to the airlock door, took stupid Merv’s advice, and hit the head. It had become annoying how, after Merv pointed something out to me, I couldn’t help but notice it, and if I didn’t do anything about it, he’d just keep repeating it until I did.
After emptying my bladder and Merv telling me to fill it back up by getting something to drink because I was becoming dehydrated, I plugged myself into my ship’s memory banks to download newer information from Homestead. Like I said, Merv couldn’t fill his memory to his capacity, so I spent a lot of time deleting old info and downloading new stuff. In this case, I had to delete the navigation charts to the derelict satellite I had just salvaged and upload Homestead’s schematics, along with all the particulars I had on the local traders and past deals with them.
“We hope we are not going to go back to that dreadful Myles character,” Merv said as the new data transferred into his memory chips. “We have notes stating that he undercut us fifteen percent last time we dealt with him.”
“Yeah, I remember,” I said.
“Judging by our voice’s timbre and the fact that our heart rate went up by seven beats per minute, we are lying,” Merv quipped back. “We are bringing up a list of past interactions with him for us to review.” Suddenly, the vision out of my left eye had an overlay with a list of sales and rates between Myles and myself over the last few years.
I sighed. “Fine, Merv, I won’t go to Myles this time. I’ll go to Janice instead.”
Merv, as a standard pilot AI feature, could interact with several of my body parts, all on the left side. Part of the functionality included overlaying star charts and maps on my field of vision so I could easily pilot and not get lost in the deep dark. The AI could do other things like take control of the left arm and hand, allowing a pilot to concentrate on delicate work with their right arm while the left did something completely different. The first time it happened to me, I felt like I was being split in half during a tricky salvage job. Merv took over the left side of my body and worked the thrusters to keep the ship aligned and out of the way of the spinning craft, while I continued to carve it up with my craft’s multi-use appendages using my right. We performed it like a well-rehearsed ballet, my craft always in step with the salvage, moving and swirling gracefully with my AI dance partner as it moved about on a wild course through space – Baryshnikov in space. After this intricate routine, I knew that Merv would become an important part of my life.
I thought about the list of interactions being gone from my line of sight and Merv turned them off. I opened my shipboard safe and grabbed a handful of Earth and Mars credits while getting Merv to show me my online account balances. I locked the safe backup and became a little disappointed in the amount I had in my account: A recent upgrade to my ship’s cutting laser had just come out and took a big chunk of my hard-earned credits with it.
“Well, let’s hope we can get some good deals on what we hauled back this time,” I said.
“Perhaps we could find a female companion while on Homestead,” suggested Merv. “Our dopamine levels are thirteen-point-eight-percent lower than normal.”
“Right, cause the ladies always throw themselves at me when I’m station-side,” I snarked. I glanced towards the cockpit of the ship and saw my reflection in the window, ghostly against the backdrop of space. I wasn’t a terrible-looking guy, but I wasn’t going to be winning any beauty contests, either.
At least I had been born on Earth, so I didn’t have any of the birth defects found in Martians or ship-born babies. I had all the right number of ears and eyes and arms and legs. I was short to boot, which turned out to be a good thing, since the cockpits of a lot of ships were cramped, and if you were too tall, you’d end up working some maintenance job on an orbiter instead.
Like my height, my hair was short, buzzed down to my skin, which made plugging into the port easy, but meant I got a nasty case of helmet-scalp and looked like I had massive dandruff most of the time – either that, or I had just come in from being in a blizzard. My beard had grown to roughly the same length as my hair, which didn’t make for much of a change from my neck to the top of my head, seeing as how the helmet had the same effect on the skin on my face as my scalp.
My work suit, an old workhorse of a thing that had been patched and repaired more times than I care to admit, matched the green of my helmet, and I filled it out around the middle more than I should have. Sitting in a pilot's seat for long periods of time didn’t really allow for physical activity, and my waistline proved it. The suit was also starting to give off a smell, and if I didn’t get it washed while aboard Homestead, I was worried it would get up and start moving around on its own.
“If we would comply with the zero-G exercise routine and stop eating such unhealthy foods while on jobs, we could lose four-percent body fat in six months,” Merv snapped me out of my train of thought. “Our dopamine levels have just dropped another five percent.”
“Thanks, Merv,” I muttered.
Seeing as how I still had a connection with the shipboard systems including the communication channels, I got Merv talking to Homestead’s docking computer and it extended the docking ramp to my airlock. This was by far the most dangerous part of getting onto the orbiter. The cheapest bays were on the outside of the massive ship where you clamped onto a docking ring and had a ramp extend to your airlock. The most expensive bays were internal to the station, places where your craft was kept under the watchful eye of security, you could order your supplies to be delivered, and repairs could be done by certified mechanics. I couldn’t afford that.
The ramp was an enclosed hallway that pressurised once in place, a long, white square tube that snaked its way across the void of space as it expanded like a telescope. Constructed of the usual materials, once you were in it, any number of terrible accidents could happen to cause it to fail, and you’d be sucked out into the vacuum of space. Then your craft would be left for a scraper like me to take apart and sell off piece-by-piece.
I watched out a porthole as the ramp came closer and closer, little puffs of compressed air condensing in the freezing cold of space as it carefully navigated to the connectors on my airlock. I could see that it was off-target by a few centimetres, but after a last-ditch exhalation of air, the ramp successfully docked with my ship and I felt the vibrations of the automated bolts clamping on through the hull.
“There had been a two-percent chance of failure on the part of the docking computer,” Merv disclosed, “but a last-second correction reduced the margin to acceptable tolerances.” I loved it when he told me about how we almost died after something happened. It occurred a lot more than I liked.
