Come In Number Seven, Your Time Is Up!

The cries of gulls circling overhead punctuated the sound of the gently rolling waves. A fresh summer breeze stroked Galen’s face as he lay in the sun’s radiant warmth. With his eyes closed, he reached out with his left arm and was met with the warm body of his best friend and wife, Elena. The laughter of his two children, Jonathan and Jacqueline, splashing and playing together in the lapping waters added to the aural tapestry. Galen inhaled the salty sea air and took a moment to reflect: though perhaps not quite the life he had imagined as a child, he knew that he wouldn’t change a thing - this was a beautiful moment in a perfectly simple life. He lazily opened an eyelid to see his children peering curiously into a rock pool. “Daddy!” His daughter cried. “I’ve found a crab!”

“Okay, Jacqueline, I’ll be right over” Galen called as he eased himself up from his sandy seat. He leant over to kiss Elena, who responded with a smile exuding a brilliant, glowing warmth, and hopped across the craggy beach to his two waiting children. “What have you got there?” he asked in a childlike, inquiring tone.

“Daddy, it’s gone, it’s buried itself into the sand!” Jacqueline cried despondently. “Never mind kid, let’s go and find another” Galen assured his daughter encouragingly. “But Daddy, I-”

“Come in number seven, your time is up!”

Before William H. Galen, methane extraction assistant engineer, knew what was happening, he was back in familiar sterile surroundings, the sound of gently heaving waves rudely replaced with the steady hum of machinery.

“Wake up Walter Mitty! Come on man, time to face up to the real world! Your meals’s ready.”

Melancholy hit Galen like a 50 ton maxi-transport. Time to face up to the real world indeed! What real world? What kind of life was this? But the come-down was all too familiar. It was 562 days since the crew had arrived at Huygensbase I, and Galen’s feelings of homesickness had not diminished - he was missing the life he left behind him more than ever. But returning to Earth wasn’t on the cards - this was now home sweet home. Galen blinked in the harsh white lighting and began to disconnect himself, wire by wire, from the imposing console wedged into the corner of the cramped room. He took a deep breath of the filtered, sanitised, sterile air that surrounded him, clambered down from the bed of the Everly system, and made his way to the base’s eating quarters.

***

Galen slid his genetically-modified potatoes around his plate, like lost pigeons trapped in a cage, and made no genuine attempt to attach the food to his fork. His glazed expression caught the eye of a colleague.

“Listen, Galen. You gotta stop this” Hutchinson said with a concerned, yet somewhat distanced manner. “I’m beginning to get worried now - you’re getting worse”

“I know” mumbled Galen. “But I keep wishing that-”

“Stop wishing!” She interrupted him before he had time to even gather his thoughts and prepare the rest of his sentence. “I know it’s hard, but this is what you chose. And anyway, we’re all in this together. Sure, I miss home too.”

“You just don’t get it” Galen grumbled with dismissive tones.

“Get over it! The Everly system’s supposed to help us, relieve our boredom, let us become - I don’t know, a rock star, an actor, you know - let us live the dream; give us variety in our same-old, same-old lives; remind us of home every now and then. It’s not supposed to be a substitute for life. And anyway, remember, we’re pioneers! You know, we’re making history!”

She was right. No Earthling had ever settled a permanent colony so far from home. Huygensbase I was only a billion miles from Earth.

In time it was hoped that Huygensbase would become humanity’s third off-world city. Following permanent settlements on the Moon and Mars, Titan, largest moon of Saturn, was selected as the perfect spot for humanity’s next big adventure; a suitable outpost for research and expeditions concerning Saturn and beyond to the outer reaches of the solar system. Thirty colonists, sixteen of them couples, had fledged Mother Earth’s nest to forge their own destiny in the stars. Like a city, division of labour was reflected in the chosen settlers - robotics engineers, computer scientists, and extraterrestrial agriculturists among others had their parts to play. At present, Huygensbase was nothing more than a prison in space - cramped, claustrophobic and dehumanising. Zheng-Greyland, the agency behind the Cronos programme, had an expectation that colonists were to start families following completion of the first stage of settlement - that was scheduled to be at least another two years away. Autonomous excavators and load-lifters were working 24/7 (to use archaic Earth parlance - every day here lasted nearly sixteen of Earth’s), digging gargantuan foundations that scarred Titan’s surface with the ultimate aim of expanding the sprawl of the colony. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither would Huygensbase become anything remotely resembling a village for the foreseeable future.

Galen had jumped at the chance to become a “pioneer”. Put simply, he was bored of his perfect life. He was a member of a “nuclear” family as they used to call it - wife, two kids, steady job too - executive team leader at Hypacorp neoplastics, subregion six. Galen wanted more. He wanted the thrill of something new and the satisfaction of leaving a legacy behind him to secure his place in the history books. As a child he had always had these far-fetched dreams to be “somebody” - to be the man who found a cure for cancer, or to sail the stars where no human had been before. He knew he wasn’t supposed to join the billions of others, living a prefabricated, cookie-cutter life. When he first saw the advertisement, beamed directly into his dreams via his sleep health tracker (how else would easzzzy make their vast profits?) he heeded the call: “Join the off-world revolution! Apply for a new home in Titan’s pioneer colony.” It was a permanent prospect; a one-way ticket to a new life. It was all in the contract. Once the shuttle left the launch pad the Rubicon was crossed; no company would be prepared to send a craft two billion miles on a return journey for the sake of timewasters. Without a second glance, Galen had cruelly turned his back on his family. He couldn’t help but jump at the chance to start a new life among the stars. He had walked out of their lives to the selection camp one sunny morning without a single thought for his wife and children. Through all his selfish pride and hubris he had left his wife without a husband, and his children fatherless. To them, he may as well have died.

Regret came later. Methane extraction that would provide the heartbeat of the base’s generators seemed fun to begin with - the first time Galen stood above the plain of a methane delta, anything to do with Earth suddenly seemed so... bland. But soon the lack of simple pleasures and the things he took for granted began to creep into his mind. The warming sun, now a faint spot in the hazy orange sky. The feeling of a gentle breeze that would never reach his skin suffocated beneath a spacesuit. The freedom to go wherever, whenever. Birdsong, restaurants, a swim in the sea, an evening walk, the laugh of his children - all substituted for loneliness, isolation, boredom, claustrophobia, and a feeling that he had made a terrible, terrible mistake. He sometimes reflected on his own thoughtlessness, but it was more out of self-pity than selflessness. Now it was time for a second chance. When Galen entered the simulations, he was interacting with mere facsimiles of his family, reconstructed algorithmically from his memories. They were expertly controlled by artificial intelligence to always be loving, never questioning, always subservient and always doing exactly what Galen wanted them to do. Galen knew that they didn’t really love him back - but what did it matter? It felt real enough to him. His actual family were still on earth and his children inevitably on their way to adulthood.

Would it make any real difference if they were dead or alive? Other settlers received messages from their loved ones (any direct conversation was of course impossible due to the time delay) , but Galen had burned all his bridges and had no genuine links to his past life. All Galen could do now was to instead live a new perfect life, a life he wished he had, a life he did have until he callously discarded it. Through the Everly system he could right his wrongs and be a better husband and father. His new wife would never be angry at what he had done.

***

Reality? Fantasy? Did it make any difference which was which by now? Another day supervising mining operations, another day eating GM food, another day sick of “real life”. Screw it! Why live in a gilded cage? Another day. Another dream. Galen had found himself teaching Jonathan to ride his bicycle. He’d lived it in the simulation several times already, but that didn’t matter. At the moment, this was his reality and the one thing that mattered. But of course, the bond between father and son was fake. The pleasure was all his and only his - the inner warmth he felt, betrayed by the tears in his eyes as his pseudo-son pedalled unsupported and alone was not shared. And yet - his family felt so real. Through misty eyes he turned to look at Elena. She was jumping up and down with excitement, and through her dancing blonde hair Galen noticed her eyes suddenly lock with his. This was real - surely the woman he left on Earth was the impostor... soon Galen found himself and his wife waiting to see one of her favourite sights - sunset. A menagerie of colour filled the evening sky and liquid birdsong was carried away in the gentle breeze. As the sun’s red- orange disc pierced the distant horizon, Elena let out a sigh.

Galen turned and whispered facile words into his wife’s electronic ear: “I love you”. He waited for the expected response - the machine had learned that he liked reciprocal affirmation; he needed to feel valued in a world where nothing seemed to matter. No response. He repeated the stock phrase in an almost perfunctory manner. Nothing. Turning his head, he noticed Elena’s gaze was fixed into a blank stare. She looked like a corpse. Suddenly the warm feeling of embrace was gone. Not just the embrace; he couldn’t feel anything at all. He looked up at the recipient of his numb caress, but it no longer had a face, and then not even a body - just a cloudy silhouette vaguely resembling a human. Shadows disappeared, textures became crude, and everything instantly appeared flat and dimensionless. Without quite remembering when or how, like a dream, Galen realised there was nothing.

The cold and clinical display of the Everly system announced the foreboding words: CRITICAL SYSTEM FAILURE. POWER LOSS.

 It was an unexpected coronal mass ejection that had taken out the power for half an earth- day on Huygensbase. Luckily, the backup generators had fired up almost immediately to ensure that the crew had a steady supply of oxygen and fresh water. Unluckily for Galen, consciousness alteration had come at a cost - electronic modification of brain state and electromagnetic pulses from the sun didn’t mix well. Galen was of course dead in nearly an instant -the crew were merciful enough to be thankful when they discovered that. But Galen didn’t know he was dead yet - time was laughing sadistically at the poor little human fooled by its illusory nature. No sight. No sound. No feeling. Just the sensation that time was infinite. All the time in the world - and nothing to do in it.

Like a drowning man would die just for a gulp of air, Galen needed to go home - home to Huygensbase! To his bunk in his room, to see his colleagues again, to eat genetically modified potatoes again, to breathe the pure, filtered fresh air again! “Can anybody hear me? Is anybody there? Is anybody at all? Where am I? Am I?” And he needed to hear the words that would never come:

“come in number seven, your time is up!”