Three Minutes in the Dark

She has three more minutes before she’ll need to move to the next stage of the evacuation plan, and she’s never rehearsed for that plan.

That’s the plan that nobody talks about, because if you get to that part of the plan, you’re already looking at a full-scale desertion crisis, wherein a multi-billion dollar ship gets left out in the vast reaches of space while its crew makes their way in individual pods the size of coffins to stations that already under-staff and over-capacity at the very same time.

She has three minutes before that has to happen.

The power has gone out on a ship this size exactly three times. The other two times both resulted in desertion, and half the evacuating crew perished before they could make it to friendly stations, because that many pods jettisoning at once caused numerous crashes, and even after it happened the first time, and after a lengthy investigation, there was no solution for how to stop it from happening again other than a bunch of men standing in a room writing a press release about how rare power outages are in that section of space.

This is the third time this has happened, the third step of the plan hasn’t been rehearsed, she has three minutes to fix this, and three hundred crew members are already boarding individual pods, waiting to see if they can make it to safety without crashing into each other.

She takes notice of patterns. That’s her job. It’s why she’s here. All these ships are run by live coding now, most of which is done by prisoners on the nearest settlement, but that’s only if the communications system doesn’t go down, which is the first thing that goes down when the power goes out.

And the power is out.

She saw the blue crooked line like a wire go across the glass in her bedroom and three seconds later she was in darkness. If a surge great enough hits the ship, it can knock out even the emergency lighting. She grabbed the portable flashlight under her bed and only then noticed that the company had failed to put batteries in it, which meant that it was very likely none of the flashlights they supplied to staff had batteries in them.

Three interns were in charge of putting the emergency kits together for each residence on the ship, and two of them were still in high school when they started working for the company, so it’s understandable that mistakes were made, but now she was standing in the dark and there were three minutes to get to the third portal on the third deck and try to come up with a reboot code that would work around the current system since it would take weeks to get it back up online and they needed power now or the filters would stop working and they’d all suffocate to death if they didn’t evacuate.

Using the three-by-three square of light on the walkie talkie the interns packed into the kit (batteries not necessary), she managed to exit her room and make her way to the nearest stairwell, all the while hearing people tripping and then tripping over each other. Yelling. One person--probably Dana--cursing the company out for letting this happen again.

But they all chose to board the ship knowing it was a possibility. Knowing that Sage and Rosemary had to be deserted, and that Coriander was no different than them in design and structure. Something was said in a press release about the extra surge protection, but everybody knows the shocks that took out the first two ships could have powered New New York for seventeen years, so what chance did a ship with a few more wires on it have?

They sent them out because every ship got a little closer to the third moon and the third moon was believed to have water on it, and that was enough to lose billions of dollars over and over again, let alone loss of life.

She took the stairwell to the third deck, and ran three hundred feet into straight-on darkness until she could hold her walkie talkie up against a door and see the words “Portal Three” next to its lock. Her personal ID code was 111, and that got her into the room that was just big enough for her, with a computer powered by a separate source that would get her directly into the ship’s electrical grid.

On portals four and seven, there were would be three teams of three working on this as well, but they were released with each passing second, and she would be the last one permitted to stop trying and move onto the next phase, but that meant, unofficially, that she needed to either fix this or stay right where she was, because while these ships were technically captained by an AI hologram known as Anad, she would need to go down with the ship if she couldn’t do the one job she was hired to do, and that’s find a pattern that works.

She knows she should think about what’s back home, but there’s nothing back home. She was chosen as the result of having nothing in her life that would cause her to feel something in the event that she needed to sacrifice herself. Her parents were dead. She’d had no children. Only six percent of the population is allowed to marry, but there was a person she was interested in before she got the call letting her know that she’d been chosen to code on the Coriander.

The idea is that she shouldn’t be afraid of death, but it turns out you can be very afraid of death even if for no other reason than you don’t hate living. She’d spent the last three years of her life in an astronomical dorm careening toward a moon because a scientist on earth made something that was a little bit more credible than a prediction that humanity could be saved if we could just get there, because there are three blue spots that might be water.

She finds a pattern that could work, but the ship won’t accept it. The more advanced they make the technology, the more mysterious it is even to those paid to understand it. A set of numbers is chosen. They work or they don’t work. Coders are thought of as prophets for the new era. They sense something between the numbers. There’s something between a five and a six that isn’t present between an eight and a nine.

She tries to feel that presence, but the darkness holds her breath and makes her ask for every bit of it. It should be easier to concentrate without light, but instead, she feels weight. She feels tension. She feels everything but what number should come next.

Once she gets her fingers on the keyboard, she can try a dozen codes in ten seconds, but she has to remember which codes she tries, because they won’t appear on the screen in front of her. Either a blue light will stay on screen until she gets the power back, or the power will come back on, and she’ll know she found the right combination.

She has three minutes.

There’s heat coming from somewhere, but she doesn’t know where. She may be smelling smoke. Could be a hot wire or it could be that the entire deck is in flames. She wouldn’t know, because she’s not taking her eyes off the blue until the lights above her head start working.

She realizes that the blue surge she saw go past her window is the same color as the blue on the screen in front of her. How could it be the same color? Is there something to--

No, it doesn’t matter. That’s not a pattern worth noting.

Nor is the hologram that runs the ship and the man cursing out the company having names that--

How many ships were there?  Three.

There were three.

She has three minutes.

The interns forgot the batteries, but not to the walkie talkies.

Is the air quality compromised? How much--

They never taught her how to keep her own clock.

She can memorize every pattern she tries, but she has no idea how to process when--

The third minute.

The third minute lights up blue like a connection to an imploding star.

The third minute falls into water and electrocutes itself.

The third minute goes back to the first minute and between the first and the third the presence she can’t get a hold of pulses so strongly, she has to close her fists around what can’t be seen to steady herself before she tries to remember if there even is a third phase of evacuation, or if it’s a joke they tell at orientation, because gallows humor runs rampant amongst people preparing other people to get used to the idea of dying in the dark.

In the dark.

In the dark.

Three minutes.

In the dark.

Three minutes.

She only has.

The dark.

Three minutes.

She finds a pattern.

Above her, there’s a sizzle.

But is that light?

Is it possible it’s--

Light.