Виктор Иванович Зуев "The Falling Bird"

The Falling Bird
Виктор Иванович Зуев

A short story about Earth in a distant of maybe not so distant future, space travel, omnipotent AI and the alien world. And, of course, about the eternal philosophical questions of life.

Виктор Зуев

The Falling Bird

Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum.

Renе Descartes

The administration responsible for finding promising new ways of discovering edible vegetation on distant planets that could prolong human life hastily assembled a covert division tasked with launching a spacecraft mission into the Canes Venatici constellation. Their reports suggested that that area contained a faintly visible planet on which the first cosmonauts to explore its surface discovered an undying moss-like plant which, when eat continuously, made one immortal.

The Center for Elementary Rationing and Productive Labor on New Exoplanets in the Solar System was located one level below, at the end of the hall behind the fire escape. Hardly anyone ever stopped by there, as all their methods for preparing and distributing material goods, produce and other items of value had long become obsolete due to new developments and rapidly changing priorities in era of explosive development in interplanetary travel, And also due to the fact that long-haul flights paid quite well. Yet none of the executives wanted to admit this, habitually employing a whole department of twenty five experienced senior female staffers consisting mainly of close and distant relatives of the top brass.

Their job was to calculate the requisite amount of food, extra clothing, everyday goods and money for colonists on the next newly discovered planet, referring to manuals approved many decades ago and doing their best to follow those to the letter. These manuals spelled out the number of bureaucrats, guards, supply agents, merchants, regular workers, agitators, and, above all, the leaders dedicated to their people. In order to provide for this core group of people required to sustain productive life on a new exoplanet, the Center would calculate the spaceship capacity needed to carry all the necessary supplies – food, air, water and other essential resources that would be required during the long interplanetary journey, right down to toilet paper.

The spacecraft, easily exceeding the speed of light, would biannually be shipped out to one of the explored planets orbiting the star Proxima Centauri, named Abba, which takes almost a whole year of travel time. Upon arrival, everyone on board would disembark and begin collecting the moss in the underground caves and deep hollows of that planet. Sparse reddish thin lichen-like build-ups grow on the rocks in the caves – one millimeter every ten years – and the workers dispatched to the planet would scrape them off, package and store on the spacecraft to be sent back to Earth. Harvesting of the lichen would continue until all of the ship’s storage modules specially designed to carry it under certain temperature and humidity conditions were completely full – usually this process would take up to a month and a half. After that, the surviving and homesick members of the crew (after undergoing a strict filtration) would return to Earth along with the valuable cargo.

The thing is that this lichen was needed on Earth as a reliable and tested medicine to prolong the lives of honored and notable people threefold. However, this method of extracting and delivering of the lichen to Earth was extremely expensive and took a long time, plus its existence on Abba was very scarce. And sometimes on the transit back home, the miners of that valuable cargo would eat some of it themselves to prolong their own lives, despite a strict law forbidding mere mortals from doing so under penalty of death. The first offenders had been dealt with precisely that way – upon returning to Earth they had been summarily executed by firing squad to set an example for others.

And these prohibition violators were caught quite easily: those who consumed several grams of that valuable lichen would develop a persistent and lingering garlicky breath, like all governing and elite citizens of Earth who partook in the ambrosia made from the lichen. The odor could be temporarily masked with strong aromatic substances or by eating plenty of fatty foods, but as soon as the unpleasant smell was no longer covered up by these methods, the garlicky breath would come back to the super-centenarians. And since this persistent smell was practically impossible to get rid of, people began to identify the elite super-centenarians by their distinctive stench. And not just that – by mandated laws for the people, the stink gradually began to be viewed as an aura of pomp and wealth. Naturally, regular Earth folk were not supposed to smell this way, so a whole series of regulations and decrees were passed prohibiting people from growing and eating garlic and its byproducts, so that their breath would not be confused of that of the governing elite.

As a result, workers and crews who had come back from the off-world lichen mining missions were easily probed during quarantine; anyone who was detected with the garlic breath was detained and executed. However, it was noticed later that within the prison cells where the ambrosia eaters had been kept, various insects (cockroaches, caterpillars, fleas) and other bloodsuckers would thrive for a long time even though the spaces were empty and had been disinfected multiple times after the criminals had been executed.

After pathologists had carefully investigated this strange phenomenon occurring in the prison cells where felons convicted for illegally consuming ambrosia were kept, the following was discovered: while condemned individuals were imprisoned and awaiting execution – which could go on for weeks – the insects living in the same space would actively inhale the air exhaled by the prisoners and thus prolonged their lives manifold, consequently developing an immunity to all toxins.

Earlier, scientists and political strategists had frequently noticed that after contact between the leaders and their electorate, the latter were imbued with extra energy having inhaled the garlicky exhaust from the mouths of the dignitaries, and could work for free for a while if fed simple peasant foods. And thus a question was raised: what was the point of executing the convicts right away if they could still be of use to the law-abiding populace of Earth?

The brass hats made the right call. They began placing convicts in specially built barracks with a powerful exhaust ventilation, and next to them compact health care centers were being built, equipped with the powerful system sucking in the garlicky air coming from those barracks; these became health resorts where the honored laborers working for the good of the motherland could enjoy rest and relaxation and so that worthy working classes could too taste – or rather, inhale – the elite garlic aroma in order to lessen the divide between the rich and the poor and, if possible, to prolong length of service of the able-bodied, rank-worshipping flock.

However, the surplus of the lichen brought from Abba kept depleting all the time. Whether because its reserves found in the planet’s hollows and caves were getting exhausted or theft of ambrosia had become more creative. At the same time, the number of the relatives of Earth’s elite kept growing exponentially due to increase in life expectancy and, accordingly, more numerous offspring. It became necessary to either cull the list of those worthy to receive ambrosia – something the public servants would resist with all their might, culminating in all-out brawls amongst one another – or to increase punitive measures against those caught embezzling the longevity elixir on the spacecrafts returning with the valuable cargo – that was extremely undesirable.

Over the last few years it was getting harder and harder, even for large material rewards, to recruit those willing to fly to space for two to three years to collect the lichen that leaders were dependent on to prolong their life. Rumors began to circulate among the people that after returning from space all surviving recruits were placed under quarantine in special barracks where they were half-starved and forced to strenuously expel the ambrosia-rich air (that they had accumulated from the planet’s atmosphere or from the moss they ate) until they were dying from exhaustion and starvation.

Yet, ambrosia stockpiles were quickly running out, and already less notable officials had to visit the health center to breathe in the therapeutic air exhaled by not only those condemned to death but also all quarantined miners – they were in short supply as well due to high mortality rates. The authorities had no choice but to add a regular fly spray into the air conditioning system in the visitors’ rooms to at least mask the fact that the garlic smell was no longer noticeable. Still, it seemed there was no solution to this insurmountable problem and the ambrosia shortage kept growing like a snowball rolling down a hillside, but a lucky strike saved the day.

The Earth’s brass hats were continuously dispatching spacecrafts with geologists and botanists on board for outer space reconnaissance missions in order to search for similar planets where the wonder lichen grew, but for a long time their efforts proved fruitless. Until finally, the explorers of the star Alpha Centauri were tipped off by the locals (those who had been marooned due to their status as a security risk) that the wonder-weed was plentiful on a remote planet, an easy-to-miss star called Asteroin in the binary star Cor Caroli (Heart of Charles) system within the Canes Venatici constellation. The star Asteroin had a lone planet slowly rotating around it, humbly named Hopus. The health-improving weed abundantly growing there not only could prolong life, but also would make a person eating it all the time flat out immortal. The test flight by the “pilgrims” (a name Earthlings had given to explorers travelling one-way off-world) to this planet helped discover this wonder-weed and test it on lab mice living on the pioneers’ starship. And the tests demonstrated that during the ten-year flight back to Earth, none of the mice had died and they thrived in good health on the ship to this day, while all the crew members died on the return journey from incurable diseases and poor quality nutrition. However, there was a downside: the travel time need to reach Asteroin and the lonely planet orbiting this star was three times longer than the average flight. Hence, both the fuel and resources (such as food, oxygen, and water) necessary to support the spacecraft and lives of the recruits onboard would be required threefold. But as a result the starship was overloaded above the maximum weight limit and could simply not get off the ground or was unable to decelerate when approaching the discovered planet, due to its monstrous mass and inertia. And who could guarantee that “the sprogs,” having learned about the miraculous power of the weed would even want to go back to Earth at all? It wasn’t unreasonable to have concerns that they all would stay there with the crew forever. The planet Hopus was even nicknamed “Hop” due to its inaccessible nature, taking cues from the old proverb – “Don’t say hop until you have hopped over.” The best scientific minds of Earth had been scratching their heads for a long time trying to come up with a solution to the problem until they came up with the following:

1. To accomplish this task, a supercomputer must be built. It should be able to autopilot the spacecraft and manage the people on board, be capable of anticipating all possible emergency scenarios that could arise during the flight, and making decisions to above all else ensure the wonder-weed is successfully harvested, packaged and shipped back to Earth.

2. The return home should be without the miners who must be left behind under any pretense, even resorting to euthanasia if necessary. This would increase the number of rooms for storing the product and cut the deadweight in half for the trip back to Earth.

3. The return flight must include the spacecraft pilot (who may not necessarily be the commander) and three cryogenic engineers who would ensure that the temperature conditions in the refrigerating modules and the vacated cabins are conducive to successfully preserving the precious wonder-weed.

For two years, the programmers and designers on Earth had been racking their brains over this problem and, finally, built a supercomputer superior to all previous versions by a thousand times. It was called GASSOS, an acronym for a long abstruse name for the super brain of the spaceship – the Global Automated Science-based Spaceship Operating System. But the developers themselves – and the spacemen later on – began calling it just GAS for short, and the computer answered to this nickname with pleasure, accepting it as its proper name.

When installed into the starship, GAS could perform each of the ship’s tasks on its own without any human assistance. It handled all of the starship’s vital systems, charted and set the optimal course mid-flight, toggled on and off the mechanisms necessary to maintain flight, arranged meals for the crew, calculated the minimal daily requirements for air and water, and the controlled the temperatures in the cabins. It could even entertain its passengers with various lectures, songs, stories, jokes, and just have heart-to-heart conversations with them. It knew everything: about the crew, the flight to Hopus, the ship’s functional capabilities, the Solar System and all the stars humanity had studied. GAS’ developers had accounted for everything and programmed it in such a way so that it only obeyed commands from the Center; when it is out of communication range, it should work according to its preprogrammed directives – its main goal was to deliver Hopus’ wonder-weed to Earth. Everything else for GAS was secondary and expendable to the task at hand. Of course, all possible contingencies over such a long journey cannot be foreseen, so the programmer implemented a machine learning function to GAS, functioning much like the human brain, so that it can decide on the optimal course of action in an emergency while following the principle “do no harm to yourself and the cargo.” To assist GAS on the ship the inventors built two androids capable to carry out simple jobs on command related to the servicing the machinery, serving the crew and system repairs if necessary.

While the problem of figuring out how to operate the ship during the long journey was solved, the developers still struggled to find a way to reduce the ship’s total weight to ensure the ship’s return to Earth while in accordance with the approved supplies requirements. The routine calculations for the necessary spaceship supplies were made by the experienced planners and logisticians who were located a floor below, and didn’t fit into the takeoff weight of the experimental long-haul journey. To make these calculations, a separate group of classified specialists was formed to assess the most extreme conditions the flight could undergo. Much like the staff from the old department, they worked in secret during the preparation activities of the classified department to prevent information from leaking to the people, as it often happens.

Thanks to the on-board artificial intelligence, it was decided to down the size of the crew to half, and as for the miners of the wonder-weed, all of them were to be left on the planet, possibly euthanizing them (if there is no other method) so they can’t prevent the last working shuttle from taking off into orbit, where the mother ship is to be waiting for them at all times. During the flight to Hopus, the computer is to put all passengers onboard into hibernation for four years, supplying their sleeping chambers with a special concentrated gas consisting of all necessary nutrients while they are asleep. Trial experiments on prisoners had shown satisfying results – eighty percent of the subjects had survived after an almost two-year sleep, and sixty five percent of the survivors were still capable of doing the necessary physical labor. All these measures allowed reduce the load by three quarters and additionally double the ship’s payload of the precious cargo.

It had been decided to assemble the interstellar ship piecemeal in lunar orbit and use shuttles to deliver the necessary resources to it – fuel, water, oxygen, and flight foods.

This measure would reduce the amount of fuel necessary for decelerating when returning to Earth and getting caught by its gravitational orbit.

Valentin Valentinovich, the head of the development team working on the flight conditions for the starship, became so overzealous that he offered additional radical measures to the executive management.

“I believe that we can halve the nutritional amount for those asleep, since a sleeping person needs less glucose and vitamins. And reduce food consumption twenty per cent taking into account the statistical mortality rate from induced sleep. Even the quantity of clothing can be cut in half, given that part of the expedition team will die, and the workers will be marooned after completing their job.”

“You, Valentin Valentinovich, are very prudent around here,” the chief-executive of the pre-flight commission responded, and addressing the commission members, continued, “that, in my opinion, you are the one who take the mantle of the ship’s director, and with your natural frugality directly supervise the hired workers on site so that they do not eat an extra slice of bread and do not have an extra sip of water or air. Am I right, colleagues?”

The members of the state commission remained silent for a short while, contemplating their chair’s suggestion, and began nodding their heads in agreement.

And Valentin Valentinovish, hearing such a fatal suggestion and becoming scared for his own life, turned pale, his forehead went clammy and his heart sank. He grasped for air for some time yet could not produce any sound, until finally, pulling himself together with a great effort, uttered, his lips trembling:

“My dear fellow executives! I am immeasurably glad about the honor granted to be your director in such a high-stakes journey, but I am completely untrained to direct interplanetary flights. I have no diploma and no experience in endeavors of this kind. Finally, I have a common-law wife on Earth and two little children, and I can’t abandon them to their fate.”

“Dear Sir, firstly, the chief executive and members of the state commission know better who is to be sent to this flight as a director. Secondly, during the flight everything will be managed by the on-board computer and you will have nothing to worry about; all that is needed it will do on its own. You will need to only control the computer’s course of actions and report everything to us. And when you exit the communication range, you will act according to the instructions given to you by the Mission Control Center. While you are away, we’ll look after your family and help them with anything they need.”

After the meeting, Valentin Valentinovich left the room, feeling his legs getting numb and a voice in his instantly turned dull head that said, “Run, immediately! But where?” Of all people he perfectly knew with a tracker implanted in his head he could only get so far. He would be caught regardless and sent to mine the weed, but this time as a laborer fated to be killed on the wild planet following his service. Nor was it possible to wriggle his way out of the decision declared by the high committee. “I must accept and fly there as director, and if I am lucky then I could eat my fill of this weed and come back immortal.”

And Valentin Valentinovich, taking time to grieve and shed a few tears, began to prepare for the interstellar trip. He negotiated for himself his own food, water and oxygen, his own personal quarters with his own air conditioner so that the terrible GAS could not accidentally put him to sleep, and altered the ship’s subroutines with the additional clause, “Whatever happens, GAS must bring him to Earth with the cargo.”

No matter how hard the developers tried to lessen the total number of the travelers, they were still coming up with fifty people at least – counting the crew, maintenance personnel, and the actual workers, while taking into account the demise of the part of the crew – up to forty percent – due to the prolonged sleep. Of all the crew, the ship’s director and the pilot were off limits for GAS, as well as three refrigerating engineers (to ensure extra control for the machinery and modules with the plant cargo, just in case). As for the others, GAS could dispose of them at any moment without compromising the weed storing prior to departure back to Earth. However, the director, mechanics and pilot was expendable only in the event that the cargo was endangered.

For two years the ship had been built in lunar orbit and equipped with everything that was needed – space shuttles were delivering these resources from Earth. And, finally, not long before the early winter, all of the supplies had been loaded and the final tests of the systems and the machinery had been finished. However, all of a sudden an unforeseen problem had occurred. The HR department for Space Expeditions found it impossible to accrue personnel for this fascinating flight, in spite of the double salary and quintupled reward upon returning to Earth.

It turns out that information about the flight had gotten leaked nonetheless; people began to talk about how it was a one-way trip and that those hired to work on the unknown planet would be abandoned there (or killed) after they gathered some invaluable weed for the Earth’s elites. So, knowing that the executive officials were lying to them, and the rumors were unlikely totally groundless, nobody volunteered to fly there, even with the promise of a big payout. As a result, the expedition’s executives decided to recruit former spacemen who were imprisoned in the special barracks for stealing the lichen and exhaling the state officials’ “property” they had illegally consumed.

Those who agreed to the mission had been promised, in addition to the big pay, that their sentence for their “horrible” crime would be revoked; many had to agree in order to avoid starving to death in the barracks. With a crew now assembled, the spaceship blasted off from its lunar orbit in the direction of the planet Hopus, without any unnecessary fanfare, one hour before the New Year, in order not to interfere with the planned reporting before the chiefs.

The huge starship, externally bearing the resemblance of a zeppelin, had been accelerating for four months, with great effort sped up to the velocity to break away from the Solar system’s gravity, and detached the first acceleration stage. Later on, it was picked up by a stream of the galactic aether which sucked it in like a speck of dust into its fast-flowing river of time, several times exceeding the speed of light. The giant ship merged into it just as a knife dropped into still water, and instantly disappeared into the endless space of the Universe, like a needle in the haystack.

The entire launch and interstellar flight was being vigilantly overseen by GAS; it was relentlessly and meticulously checking all of the parameters of the ship’s engines and systems’ operations, repeatedly calculating and re-calculating the variants of the burn rate of fuel necessary to slow down when approaching the intended destination, and was making adjustments to the possible maximum load for the return trip.

Trouble began on the ship right after blast-off, happening as early as the acceleration stage. The central air conditioning system on the ship started malfunctioning at once, and some cabins were cold and damp. Controlling the temperature and air humidity was impossible – this operation could only be done by GAS, which kept refusing to warm up the cold units on account of economy for the journey back. It was also supplying water to the lavatories for workers according to a strict schedule – for half hour in the morning and for two hours in the evening. And besides, the food for the personnel was meager in serving and tasted awful – no cook was hired for the flight to cut costs and resources, therefore GAS prepared the means using pre-stocked briquettes of frozen meat and fish as well as dried grain products. The uncomfortable accommodations and poor food quality created much hardship for the travelers. Given that the ship’s crew had been assembled at the last moment, it consisted of a ragtag group of individuals who were hard to manage. In addition to the recruits from the special barracks, there were twelve girls working as chambermaids, six guards for Valentin Valentinovich, and, finally, the crew of seven people.