She immediately did a full diagnostics shutdown so she wouldn’t contaminate the rest of the ship. She tried to isolate the problem, to repair herself as she lay in the hall, eyes glazed over and unseeing.
9
Saved
He stumbled, threw out his hands and for a brief moment thought he was back at the survey stake and any second now some woman would be calling him a dirty hippy.
This place was somewhere different, not sunny and warm but icy cold and the air was hard to breathe. It was thin, tasted dirty, stale and greasy. A voice came from somewhere in a language he didn’t understand. A female voice that was calm. It sounded like Siri from his phone but her words had too many consonants and strange sounds. Jessie gasped and his eyes darted. The voice sounded insistent but he had no idea what it was saying and he started looking for a door, he had to get out of the oxygen deprived room. He was starting to panic and it was getting hard to think, the cold was subzero and what little air he could suck in hurt his lungs. Lights started flashing along one wall, caught his attention and he saw what they illuminated. There was a long row of bulky coveralls hanging that looked like something out of a video game. A space battle video game. He ran for them and cold numbed fingers fumbled with the latches and fasteners as he shed his jacket and struggled to climb into one. His analytical mind took everything in and calmed his seventeen-year-old boy brain that was nearly panicking in confusion and fear. It guided his freezing fingers, scanned the controls, deduced how they worked and quickly had air flowing through the helmet. The gauntlets had too many fingers, the suit was too big and the helmet was enormous but he could breathe. The Siri voice kept speaking and to his untrained ear it sounded like she was asking a question. The same question over and over again but in different languages each time.
“I don’t understand.” He said. “I know English, maybe a little Spanish, but I don’t know Chinese or Russian or whatever it is you’re speaking.”
The voice stopped talking and there was a long pause as he played with the controls and figured out how to get the heat cranked up.
When it started up again, it spoke slowly and with bad pronunciation but it was English and he understood most of it.
“Keep saying.” It said. “I learn language.”
Jessie did, rambling on and talking to himself as he looked around the room and kept fiddling with the controls on the suit. Her sentences and pronunciation became better with each passing moment and when he understood everything she repeated back to him, he started asking questions.
“Who are you?” he asked as his fingers and toes started to thaw out. “Where am I?”
Her name sounded like gobbledygook and when she told him some long coordinates of letters and numbers that was supposed to tell him where he was, he realized she was a computer program. No living creature spoke like that.
He walked around the room, holding the middle of the suit up with the clumsy gloves so he wouldn’t trip over himself. The boots were about ten sizes too big. The room looked to be made of metal and plastic with familiar yet different cabinets and doors and closet areas.
“Are we on a space ship?” he asked the voice coming through the speakers in his helmet.
“Yes.” it answered then continued speaking but saying things he didn’t fully understand.
“Where is everybody?” he asked, wondering where the welcoming committee was. Or the executioners.
“You are the only living entity onboard.” The voice said.
It told him there was enough backup power to support life for some time measurement he couldn’t figure out. He didn’t know if she meant minutes, hours, days or weeks. It couldn’t translate words that didn’t have an English equivalent and it didn’t have an understanding of earth time. There was a foreign numbers readout on a heads-up display in the corner of his helmet that was changing every few minutes. It was either counting up or down but he guessed it was a timer telling him how much oxygen or battery power was left in the suit. It was a long number so he figured he had a long time.
She sent constant queries to the rest of her laying in the corridor but it was unresponsive and motionless. She couldn’t determine anything about its condition and it appeared to have ceased functioning. She sent a few cells into it to read what was happening but they instantly went silent. There wasn’t much of her left if the human shaped part had been damaged beyond repair by the timestream. Barely enough to fill a cup.
As part of her analyzed the problem, another kept manufacturing air and checked the viability of getting another solar collector up and running again. For thousands of years, there had been no need. There was no life on board.
Jessie clown walked around the room and examined all the strange but vaguely familiar equipment. Everything was different than anything he’d ever seen, the shapes seemed a little too big or there were extra indents for an extra finger but most were identifiable. The room had an assortment of space suits and blank screens on control boards. The cabinets were made of the same sleek steel or plastic that everything else was but they only held neatly folded clothes. All the same but in varying sizes. He was in some kind of storage room.
He was warm again. Struggling around in the cumbersome suit was making him break out in a sweat.
“The
