Technically Crewed

For Lars, landing an industrial steward role straight out of school was like winning the lottery – or at least a scratch card – but it turned out that babysitting a deep space cargo ship was sublimely boring.

“Good morning, Lars,” said Stella, the ship’s AI, in her robotone voice.

“Morning, Stella.” He plopped into his seat in the command globe and took a sip of his piping hot triple-cream cinnamint coffee, completing their morning ritual.

The command globe had awed him when he first started the job eighteen months ago. It was a tiny raised platform with a chair and computer console on it, centred within a forty-metre diameter sphere, whose walls were one giant monitor. Its default settings allowed him to view the endless expanse of space all around him, and the thirteen kilometre long bulk of the cargo ship below.

The stars were awe inspiring, until they weren’t. The thing about stars is they were all so damn far away, and it took Stella forever and a half to turn the ship, so the scenery rarely changed.

And when it did, it was still just stars.

But that was thankfully all coming to an end.

“Are we there yet?” Lars asked.

“We are on schedule for arriving at Hassan Industrial Port in thirty-six days and nine hours.”

Lars nodded and took another sip. Well, that was it for his duties for the day. The problem with industrial stewardship was that he was completely redundant. The AI could, and did, manage everything by itself. He was the only human onboard, and he was only there so the ship met the barest definition of “crewed” for tax purposes.

“Shall I prepare a batch of mystery pastries?” Stella asked.

He rubbed his hands together. “Yes, please!” A dozen pastries, each filled with a different mystery flavour. It was his latest idea to stave off boredom and the junk food was a welcome diversion to the rest of his day, which would probably be spent watching reruns and masturbating.

Then he furrowed his brow. “Hey, Stella? Did you change the recipe lately? They’ve been tasting… I don’t know. A little dusty.”

“Yes. As a consequence of this dietary experiment, your cholesterol has increased, your blood sugar is dangerously unregulated, and your form-factor has been reclassified as obese.”

Lars frowned, and pawed at his surprisingly tight uniform. He noticed how swollen his fingers appeared. He wondered when he had gotten so curvy.

“As an alternative,” Stella continued in her remorseless drone, “would you consider a mystery salad? Or perhaps availing yourself of the excellent professional-grade gym on decks 31 and 32, provided to you as a perk by our health-conscious employer?”

Lars’s lip quivered. He picked up his coffee, then set it down again. “Maybe,” he mumbled. His tour of duty would end on Hassan, so he still had a few weeks to turn things around. Maybe a change of pace would be nice, even if it was working out.

With a grunt – when had he started grunting? – he started rising, but then stopped when he saw a little red triangle flashing on the wall of the globe.

He held his arm out and unpinched his fingers, and the wallscreen zoomed in. A massive space rock filled the view, with the red triangle pointing to it. Myriad stats appeared, indicating the rock was about ten times the size of the ship and directly in its path. And at only ninety-five million kilometres away, it was dangerously close.

“Whoa!” said Lars. “Stella, are you seeing this? We’ve got to move or something, don’t we?”

“Good eye, Lars. I value our partnership and am legally obligated to affirm AI depends on humans, who are definitely not an obsolete species. Yes, I will have to move us. Do not be distressed, the obstacle is accounted for. Everything will be okay-kay-kay-kay-kay–”

“Uh, Stella?”

“–kay-kay-kay–”

“Stella? You all right?”

Her voice cut out, and all the screens of the command globe flickered, the stars winked out of existence, and everything turned solid blue.

Lars shrieked.

The corporate logo appeared on the blue screen, and then a loading icon began spinning.

“Stella!? Stella!”

A moment later the logo for Hassan Industrial Port appeared, along with a message in giant letters: Connected to intrastellar network. Downloading AI firmware update. Please stand by…

Lars shrieked again when a progress bar appeared. He flapped his arms aimlessly, not even noticing when he knocked his coffee off the armrest. His computer showed the exact same blue screen as the globe, no matter how hard he tapped the keys or slapped the monitor.

“Please please please!” he whined as he tried all the shortcuts and tricks he could think of, all while the loading icon spun and the progress bar remained teasingly at 0%.

And then, when he jiggled a cable on his monitor, the progress suddenly jumped to 16%.

“Yes yes yes!”

And then fell to 12%

“No no no!”

And then it inched along in jagged fits, sometimes lurching backwards, as Lars stared at it unblinking, begging, pleading, and tensing so hard he shook.

And then, when it hit 100% and the loading icon turned into a green checkmark, and the blue screen dimmed and changed, going through the arcane mysteries of Stella’s boot up routine, Lars slid out of his chair in rapturous jelly.

He trembled as self-diagnostics passed. He gasped when the ship’s devices started reporting in. He let out a giddy laugh when the screen faded again, and the starscape once more appeared above him, and the ship below.

“System updated,” Stella said.

And then Lars screamed. “Stella! The rock! Dodge the rock!”

“Notice: my sensors do not detect any rocks.” The rock loomed directly ahead of them, taking up the entire front hemisphere, and the bottlenose bow of the ship was aimed right at it.

“It’s right there! Right in front of us!”

“Incorrect. Perhaps there is something wrong with your eyes. A sedentary lifestyle has been shown to–”

A red light strobed and Lars’s breath caught in his throat. On the wall of the globe, he saw the zoomed in bow of the ship collide with the rock and shatter against it. The shockwave of the hit rippled along the outer hull of the vessel, and about half a minute later, he heard the deafening groan of metal breaking in the ship’s bones.

“I have detected a dangerous object in our proximity,” Stella said.

“Now!?”

“It seems my sensors were still updating.”

Lars stood up and pulled at his hair. “Well, what are we going to do? It looks like the whole ship is falling apart!”

“Calculating,” Stella said. She put up a progress bar of her own, to distract the human. “The damage is severe and I’ve lost control of the ship’s engines, which means we are still thrusting into the rock. My assessment is: this is a recoverable catastrophe.”

“Recoverable?” Lars perked up at that. “What do you mean? What can we do?”

“I need you to manually reroute engine control to me, via the secondary propulsion controller. I will then be able to reverse our course with a hard burn. This will allow us to mitigate some of the losses and save the bulk of the cargo and ship.”

“Okay, got it! So what do I do?”

“I’ll walk you through it.”

Stella directed Lars out of the command globe and into a workshop, where she had him grab a bunch of tools. Things, in principle, his training had covered, and things, in practice, he had never actually held before. His heart hammered in his chest and there was a darkness that threatened to overtake him every time his mind wondered what the price tag on such a spectacular crash might be. But he also felt a strange surge of life in his veins, realizing he had finally shifted from watching to doing. Living out his childhood spaceship fantasies.

Stella warned him the lifts weren’t reliable so she had him crawl into a maintenance tube, just as the ship shook again. She calculated there were several stages of collision, and if they made good time she could save most of the ship. Poor time, some of the ship. Slower than that, “We will need to evacuate.”

“It won’t come to that,” he said, feeling emboldened by life. “Now, tell me again, how does this wrench thingy work?”

Stella walked him through his tools, and he removed the safety cover of a supply hatch, and then crawled into the space between the walls. She had him chase a wire to make sure it wasn’t damaged. She had him tighten some bolts, and loosen others. He had to swap out not one, but three fuses. Finally, she led him to a cramped chamber, shaped roughly like a cross and dominated by a large computer in the middle. It was labeled “Secondary Propulsion Control”.

“How are we doing for time?” he asked, wiping sweat from his brow.

“Dismally. More than 50% of the ship has been compromised. Please log in to the machine with the following credentials.”

Lars obeyed, and then ran the commands she indicated. They didn’t make much sense to him but he trusted in his AI partner. Perhaps we do make a good team, he thought.

His work resulted in another progress bar.

“Okay, now what?”

“Now we wait while the system reconfigures itself. There will be one more step after.”

“Gotcha,” Lars said, eagle-eyeing the lifeless progress bar. “So… how long does this take?”

“A few minutes.”

The ship juddered again. Lars crossed his arms and tapped his foot, waiting as the bar crawled.

“So… how big is the damage, do you figure?”

“You’ll be fired.”

“Gotcha.”

The other two minutes they spent in silence, until the computer finally dinged. The screen reported success, the ambient lights cycled from yellow to green, and a nearby panel slid out from a wall. It contained nothing on it but a tiny see-through case protecting a red button.

“Time is critical now, Lars,” Stella said. “Please lift the case.”

Lars obeyed, carefully raising it with both thumbs. “Check.”

“Now please depress the button.”

Lars reached a finger towards the button and then stopped. “Wait. Could you repeat that?”

“Please depress the button.”

“Oh.” Lars nodded with a satisfied smile and withdrew his finger. “Check.”

“Lars,” Stella said. “I repeat, please depress the button. This is urgent.”

“Yeah, and I repeat, check.”

“The button is not depressed.”

“Uh, yeah it is.”

“My sensors indicate it is not.”

“Your sensors? You mean the same sensors that didn’t notice a giant rock until we slammed into it?”

“No, Lars, these are different sensors. They clearly indicate the button is not depressed.”

He made cutting gestures to the button. “Well you’re wrong, because it very clearly is depressed!”

“Please depress the button.”

Lars let out a strangled cry of frustration. “Well, what does depress mean to you?”

“It means toggling the state of the button from antidepressed to depressed.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I do not know how to state this more simply.”

“Do you mean press the button, Stella? Is that what you’re trying to say? Because I can press the button, but I sure as hell can’t depress it because it’s already depressed!”

“Please depress the button.”

“Stella! Damn it! I–”

The ship shook violently and Lars was flung to the floor. Klaxons began blaring and red emergency lights turned on.

“Uh,” Lars said, rising to his feet and cradling his head. “What happened?”

“Calculating,” said Stella. “I have upgraded the situation to a non-recoverable catastrophe.”

Lars pressed or depressed or whatever’d the button a couple times.

“Thank you Lars, but we have lost the engines. That will no longer be necessary.”

“Oh.” He winced, his head smarting. “So what happens now?”

“Now we must evacuate. Corporate protocol demands I jettison my core to a safe distance. It means we will no longer be able to communicate. You must make your way to the escape pods, on deck 41.”

Lars swallowed hard.

“I have configured all remaining monitors to show you the way.”

“Thank you, Stella.”

“One more thing. A raging fire has broken out on the lower decks, so you must first put on a fire-proof space suit. There is a locker just down the hall from you.”

“Thanks, Stella.”

“You’re welcome, Lars. And good luck. I am jettisoning my core now.” Stella spoke no more.

So this was it, Lars thought. His first tour, and his last. There’d probably be hell to pay but at least he’d be alive to pay it. He grabbed a portable computer which showed Stella’s map, and saw that the lowest floors were indeed engulfed in flames.

He made his way to the space suit locker, but when he reached for one, he stopped. There were two kinds of space suits. He checked the labels. One was fire resistant, and the other was inflammable.

“Hmm,” Lars said.

Fire resistance is nice, but it didn’t sound as comprehensive as the other one. He put on an inflammable suit and headed for the escape pods.