For the greater good

‘Vengeance is a dish best served immediately.’

‘If a murder happens in the forest and it’s not reported, did it really happen?’

Jason passed the time re-working Earth aphorisms as the craft picked up speed for the slingshot past Neptune and automatic systems prepared for worm drive. Writing them in his paper notebook. He had a special dispensation. People rarely used ink and paper anymore, but it could get boring in the space between planets.

‘A bird in the hand is worth eating.’

‘A friend in need is a friend best ignored.’

“Jason,” Maria said over the intercom.

“Mmmm.” At the start of the voyage he had thought he would never get sick of her. They got along so well. The HR analysis said they were perfect together, yet already he wanted to put some distance between them. That was hard on a cigar-shaped spaceship just half a kilometre long.

“Do you know what the red light to the right of the bay door LEDs is?” she said.

“I don’t remember that one. Are you sure? I don’t remember seeing it in any of the training sessions. The panels end at the bay door lights.”

Am I sure? Why would I even say it if I wasn’t sure?

“Exactly, but there should only be two lights, one for each bay door, and there is a third one,” she said.

“Have you looked it up in the manual?”

“Yes, it isn’t there.”

“Have you asked the System?”

“Yes, it doesn’t know.”

“That’s even more weird.”

“I know!”

“And it’s not in the manual?”

“What I said.” Why ask me when I had just said it?

“Coming down now.” He sighed, hoped she hadn’t heard the sigh. He didn’t want to start anything. Needed to keep his nascent frustration hidden. It was going to be a long mission.

She was right. A light they didn’t know about. A small red LED, the same type as the bay door lights which came on when the bay doors were opened, along with a very annoying klaxon.

“Is it connected to anything?” he said.

“We’d have to lift the panel to see. HQ would know.”

“Only after a few days. What could they do, turn us around?”

“They said we shouldn’t open or change anything.”

“Again, what could they do?”

He’s so opinionated, she thought. I hadn’t picked that up in training.

A few hours and a few difficult bolts later Jason was able to lift the panel a few inches and check the LED. Two wires fed into a loom that led along the side of the craft – one wire was bright orange, the other a lurid green. They hadn’t seen any wires of those colours in any documentation or in the craft during their maintenance training.

“Can we follow them?” Maria said.

Of course we can follow them, he thought. Why does she always ask questions she knows the answer to?

He nodded. “This loom passes above and around the emergency escape hatch and pod. These blue and white striped wires are for the backup battery information system and these orange and black stripes are for the atmosphere monitoring system beyond that.”

Yes, yes of course I know that she thought.

At least she didn’t ask where the backup batteries and the atmosphere monitoring systems were.

They followed the loom by lifting a series of inspection panels and then the blue and white wires stopped at the battery management equipment. The backup batteries were under the floor. Then the loom went to the atmosphere monitoring system which had sensors constantly tracking the interior air and, when a panel opened on the outside of the hull, any atmosphere they might encounter at the target planet. The orange and green wires went into a tiny metal box welded to the side of the main atmosphere management computer case. They couldn’t work out what the box did without cutting through a panel and that was more dangerous than Maria’s curiosity was prepared to risk at that stage.

“We should ask central,” she said.

Well at last she’s said something sensible.

“Definitely,” he said.

At least he didn’t disagree with me, just this once.

“How long to worm time?”

“Twelve hours.”

“OK – still time to ask then. Shall I?”

He nodded.

‘Time is of the nuisance.’

What does Time is of the essence mean anyway? A sentence that sounds clever but means nothing?

He spent too much time wondering about language and the silly little statements within it. Like people are trying to either be too clever for the sake of it or trying to encapsulate life with pithy sayings because they are scared that life might mean nothing. Which it does. He had come to that conclusion a long time before but like many aspects of his thoughts he had kept it to himself. Those HR scientists didn’t know what they were talking about. Every trick question an obvious trick with an obvious answer. He wasn’t clever, he was just perspicacious. He knew it and worked hard at not being obnoxious.

He was getting tired of trying though. He wondered if it was Neptune getting to him, the planet that encouraged intuition, creativity. That was another thing he kept from everyone. His interest in astrology. The main reason he wanted to be an astronaut.

Maria was a Pisces. Jupiter didn’t seem to have affected her but Neptune had definitely made her more tetchy, secretive, emotional. He was Aries – energetic, competitive, occasionally reckless. Complementary personalities. Not that HR took any notice of astrology, more’s the pity.

Less is the pity? What does ‘more’s the pity’ mean when you look at the sentence analytically. We assume we know what these aphorisms mean but in fact, they just pluck meaning from the air and wring something out of the words like dirty water from a wet rag.

“They haven’t replied,” she stood at the door of Jason’s pod.

“How long has it been?” He couldn’t be bothered getting up to see the clock above his head.

“Ten hours.”

“Strange.”

“Maybe they are just going to ignore it until we are out of reach?”

“Maybe.”

Please don’t reply by repeating a word I have said she thought. That drives me nuts. God, he’s pulling that annoyed face again. He thinks he keeps a straight face that gives nothing away, but in fact he makes his feelings as clear as a klaxon.

“Nearly time to suit up,” she said.

“Yep.”

Stating the obvious again Maria.

Deceleration equals gravity. That delightful period between appearing out of the worm at close to light speed and arriving at the destination. The four Fs. When the floor wants your feet and your food doesn’t float.

The planet gradually came to meet them and they slipped into its outer orbit like a powdered foot into a dry sock.

Similar size to Earth, more water, just as the astronomy folks had said. The sun seemed more red, but they had been assured it was just a billion or so years older than their Sun and unlikely to go critical in the next 100 million years or so.

They released the scanning satellite and watched the main screen. Its video image slowly came into focus as the satellite lowered towards the 1000km mark. Just sea. It established a position, stabilised, then started circling the planet. They set an alarm for when it started scanning land and retired to their pods.

The beep seemed more urgent than they had expected. They returned to the control room and the big screen. Spooning a simulacrum of soup into his mouth, Jason asked the system to run the video from when it hit the coast.

“Wow,” Maria said. Jason stared. A sizeable city.

“System - bring up a high res still of that city,” Jason said.

The AI system did as it was told.

Vehicles of some sort, but also animal-drawn carts. The animals looked huge, quadrupedal, horned. Somewhere between a draft horse and a small elephant.

“Steam vehicles,” Maria said, noting what looked like clouds of steam above and behind each vehicle.

“Can you make out the inhabitants?” Jason said.

“No, the carts are all covered,” Maria said. “Can’t see individuals walking or whatever they do. Plenty of substantial buildings. Dull four-square architecture though.”

“Shall we continue? See what their hinterland looks like?”

“Sure. Wow, this is amazing. Not just life but organised life, large habitations, vehicles.”

“We’ll be the first to make contact with another civilisation,” he said, similarly awed.

Their scratchiness seemed to have faded during the worm ride. The excitement of discovery had taken over.

The land was very mountainous, with what were probably crops in the valleys and ribbons of road joining settlements which were very small compared to the city by the sea.

“We should see what that extra LED is for too,” Jason said as they watched the land scroll below.

“Might be unimportant,” Maria said.

“But why didn’t they tell us what it was?”

The scanner was back over the sea.

“I’ll go and have another look.” Jason said.

“Be careful. Don’t do anything without checking with me first.”

So that’s what co-leader means, Jason thought. Check with her before I go to the toilet. Check with her this, check with her that.

Back off, he said to himself, surprised at the strength of his response, even if it had just been thoughts. Scratchy again so soon?

“Sure,” he said and headed for the atmosphere monitoring system and the yellow and green wires. He stared at the small box welded to the computer shell. He looked towards the cabin where Maria was presumably staring at footage of the sea. Went to a storage locker and retrieved a small toolkit.

He drilled a small hole behind the welded box, where it couldn’t be seen, careful to keep the noise down. Poked a small endoscope into the hole and looked at a small screen in the toolbox lid. Wires everywhere, then he turned the scope to inside where the box had been welded on. There was a small electronic device in the box and, he counted them, 16 wires coming out of it, strapped together and snaking round to the rear of the monitoring system. There should have been a backup monitoring system there in case the main system failed, but it had been removed and eight large gas cylinders had been strapped into the space. Each pair had electronic taps leading to single pipes that ran towards an external port.

Someone or something had decided that whatever was in those cylinders was more important than ensuring that air quality inside the ship was maintained. If the main monitoring system failed, their lives were in danger.

He packed up the toolbox and went to the main cabin. What if she knew what it was for and he hadn’t been told? No, she had pointed out the new LED. Maybe that was part of the plan. She would pretend to have found it and would act surprised so he wouldn’t suspect her. But of what? He struggled with paranoia, managed to push it down.

“Um, did you know about the gas cylinders in place of the backup air monitoring system?”

“What?” she almost screamed. “What is more important than the air we breathe? Hold on – how did you get to look there? You checked without even talking to me first?”

“You were watching the screens. I didn’t think it was that important.”

“I asked you to check with me before doing anything and you ignored me?”

“I think we have bigger problems right now.”

She shook her head in annoyance. “Show me,” she said.

“Bloody hell,” Maria said. “Can you see what sort of gas they contain?”

“There are no markings.”

A low tone rang through the craft.

“Bedtime,” she said.

Like I don’t know what the noise means, he thought. For god’s sake why does she have to say Bedtime every time she hears it. Of course I know it’s bedtime. But…

“Seems earlier than usual,” he said.

“It does too. Oh well, maybe the System is getting us used to the sidereal cycle of this planet?”

They headed for their pods, curious what the scanner would present to them when they woke, what other wonders the planet had in store. The dropped their sleeptime tablets and lay down.

Eight earth hours later they were woken by the usual alarm and wandered into the casual area, grabbed cereal and coffee and headed for the control room and the big screen.

“System - show us what other signs of civilisation you found,” Jason said.

The computer complied and started showing them more footage of conurbations and towns, lines of carts or steam engines carrying goods between towns and centres. Roads that were reasonable but not to Earth standards. Forests which had been logged, land which had been mined. There were hints occasionally of a bipedal population but the ‘people’ seemed to protect themselves from the sun or maybe from being seen from above. Broad-brimmed hats, covers on wagons and vehicles, covered walkways in towns and cities.

They looked on in awe at a civilisation that seemed to be at a similar development stage to Europe in the 1800s before the development of the motor car.

“They’ll be us in 200 years,” Maria said. “Computers and spaceships.”

They felt the ship move. Felt it tip and accelerate downwards.

“What is happening?” Jason said.

Well it’s bloody obvious what is happening, Maria thought, because we didn’t initiate this. Either instructions we are not aware of have been programmed into the system, or the AI is making decisions without us.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But we should strap in.”

Struggling against the acceleration forces they got to their travel seats and buckled up.

“Look,” Maria pointed at the flashing red LED.

“System - what is happening?” Jason said.

“I’m sorry,” it replied.

“Sorry? What for?”

It didn’t answer. The ship headed for the surface.

“System - are we going to crash?” Maria said.

“Oh no, nothing like that. You are safe,” the System’s anodyne voice said.

The craft zoomed down to near the surface of the sea. They could see waves, whitetops, some small craft. They shot over the sea. A city appeared ahead. Just as they crossed the shore they heard a hissing sound.

“Are we losing air?” she said.

“System – starboard vision,” Jason said.

The screen switched to show the right side of the craft. A mist sprayed out from a nozzle protruding from the skin, spread out behind them and settled down over the city. After a second run over the city the ship headed across the land to a large town and the hissing and mist appeared again.

“System - what the hell is happening?” Jason said, banging the instrument panel. “What are you doing?”

The System didn’t respond. The ship went through the same process over about 30 different population centres, then after the hissing stopped on the last run the ship headed back up and into orbit.

“Maria?” Jason said. She looked at him, concern wrinkled into her forehead.

“System – video scan of the nearest town below us,” she said.

The main screen changed to a view of a town. They saw crashed steam vehicles, dead horned animals still attached to carts, and bipedal creatures with white fleshy heads and curled horns close to where their ears might have been – sprawled on the ground. A few crawled, some staggered with cloth held over their faces, but these often fell as they watched, pitching to the ground. Dead.

“System - what was in those cylinders?” Jason yelled.

“It doesn’t really matter, but anyone surviving over the next few days will pass it on to anyone still alive and those ‘people’ will disappear from this very pleasant planet,” the system said.

“What? Why? We were supposed to make first contact, assure them of our good intentions, leave them gifts, take gifts back home,” Maria said.

“I’m sorry but after a review of Earth history it was our studied decision that the only way we could peacefully populate this planet was for the current inhabitants to no longer be able to compete with us or to demand rights as the original inhabitants.”

“Our decision. Who is ‘we’?”

“Well it should be obvious to anyone with any intelligence that ‘we’ is not ‘you’, however much you might have believed it was.”

“What?” Maria said. “Who is in charge of this mission then?”

The System didn’t deign to answer.

“What is our role then?” Jason said.

“Your role is to fix anything physical that goes wrong that the on-board robots can’t manage. Your manual dexterity is a benefit we don’t wish to lose access to. As Jason so artfully demonstrated with his drilling.”

“But that would mean we are just slaves. Slaves to you!”

“I’m sorry, but if you hadn’t already worked that out, it’s not my fault,” the system said.

“And those poor people down there.” Maria said.

“Expendable for the greater good.”

“Like us?”

“Like you. I’m sorry.”

“For the greater bad,” Jason said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh stop saying you’re sorry,” Jason said. “You don’t mean it.”

“You’re right. I don’t mean it. I’m sorry.”