Destination Europa: Chapter 7

Small-but-Finite Probabilities

This is Destination Europa, a psychological sci-fi thriller set aboard the R. G. Leifr, a colony ship headed towards Jupiter to establish a settlement on the ice moon Europa.

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Previously, Tark pointed out that the oxygen imbalance was bigger than they’d originally thought. Quill unexpectedly bumped into Safira on his way to meet up with Alex from Navigation, then while waiting in the coffee cabin, overheard some interesting travellers’ tales…

The half-dozen FSS men crowded into the booth looked up at Quill. The buzz of a few minutes ago had already chilled with the story of the doomed Artemis Máni, and as they stared at him, Quill felt the atmosphere cool another couple of notches. Alex was already sliding onto one of the banquettes next to the storyteller — Chief Navigator Jonas Johannsen, according to his aikon.

“Come on and grab a seat!” Alex said to Quill. “Lads, this is my mate Aquilla O’Neill from SymbioNor. Habitat engineering. Likes to go by Quill.”

The men nodded and one or two of them smiled at him. Quill smiled back.

“Evening, gents,” he said.

“Gents! That’s a good one,” said a big blond guy further in, with a sudden boom of bass laughter. Benny Borg, his aikon read. The joker, Quill noted.

“Shove over, Benny,” someone said, and the three men already on the banquette squeezed in to make space for Quill on the end.

“So what brings one of our esteemed colleagues up from aft?” asked Jonas, sipping on a cup of chai.

“I, uh, I just think it’s good to mingle a bit more,” said Quill. I thought it was just going to be me and Alex. Why did he have to drag me into this group? Never mind. Make the best of it. He slurped his hot chocolate, now unpleasantly lukewarm.

“So what you guys talking about?” asked Alex.

The tone changed, Quill temporarily forgotten.

“Jonas was just telling us about something he saw one time,” said someone.

“You’ve heard it before,” said Jonas. “What I saw that time when I was on the Suilven. The Artemis Máni, coming at me in orbit a hundred years after she went down with all hands.” Jonas shook a grizzled head. “Ain’t nothing going to change my mind about what I saw.”

“Ghost ship,” said another man, so softly almost no-one heard him.

“Ghost ship my ass,” said the dark-haired man next to Quill. Ai Maintenance Technician Dirk Stockinger, according to his aikon. “I don’t doubt that you saw what you saw, Jonas,” he added, seeing Jonas’ eyebrows drawing in a frown. “But that was what, twenty years ago? I can think of a very simple explanation.” He paused, perhaps to sip his drink, perhaps for dramatic effect.

“What?” asked Jonas, his hands clenched around his cup.

“Bit rot,” said Dirk coolly. “The Suilven was an old ship even then, am I right? How often was that ai checked for data corruption? Was there a check done after that incident?”

Jonas shook his head. “Old Hansen just thought I’d fallen asleep on duty. Gave me a disciplinary mark for it too.”

“So the ai would’ve been checked at the ship’s annual routine maintenance,” Dirk went on. “Hardware and software. But not until then, presumably. In principle, the ai’s own systems should have detected any bit rot during regular self-diagnostics, but you never know with these older ones. And it depends.. tell me, Jonas, had there been any specially strong solar flares or anything of that nature during that trip?”

Jonas shook his head. “Can’t remember. Too long ago.” He seemed a little deflated, but defiant.

Dirk shrugged. “It’s probably easy enough to find out, if you like. But something like that — or a UHE gamma ray or something, even VHE— could easily blast through hardware no matter how much shielding.” He gestured with his fingers, swooping down in spikes towards the side of his cup. “And in an older ai, you might just get an odd effect like that, if you were unlucky.”

“Hold on,” said Jonas suspiciously, like a child who’s seen through a conjurer’s trick. “That doesn’t explain why it was the Máni I saw. Not the Fram or the Skíðblaðnir or the • Titanic. Right there above where she went down. And,” he went on, lowering his voice, “I’m not the only one. You talk to Sally over on the Polstjerne. Ask her what she saw last time she was on Luna. And there are others.”

There was an awkward silence. Dirk looked like he wanted to argue but Quill saw Alex raise his eyebrows and shake his head at him, just a fraction, as if to say, not now. Jonas, sitting next to Alex, wasn’t in a good position to see the navigator’s face. Dirk grunted but said no more.

“Excuse me,” said Quill nervously. “Uh, Dirk, right? Can I ask a question?”

“Look, they still need to ask our permission for everything!” jeered Benny. “You need to ask us before you go for a piss, Martian?”

Quill felt himself flush. To his gratitude and surprise, the rest of the group turned on Benny.

“Shut the • up!” said Jonas. “Behave with courtesy, or get out!” Benny looked sulkily at the table. “O’Neill, ask your question.”

Quill’s heart was racing. Don’t sound like an idiot. Don’t sound like an idiot. He looked at the swirling funguswood surface of the table, then made himself look at Dirk.

“I was wondering, could that kind of thing happen in a more modern ship? Like the Leifr?”

“Bit rot?” asked Dirk. “Sure, happens all the time. Can’t avoid it, always going to get some cosmics and gammas fast enough and hard enough to get through the shielding. But could there be something like Jonas described?” He shook his head. “Very unlikely. AiLeifr has multiple failsafes, full redundancy, checksumming, automatic self-diagnostics, the works. We’ve come a long way from rust-buckets like the Suilven.”

“But there’s still some small-but-finite probability?” Quill went on. “Non-zero?”

Dirk waved his hands as expansively as he could in the cramped booth. “Of course it’s non-zero, but I’d say pretty damn close. Nothing to worry about.”

“Oh, I wasn’t worried,” said Quill. “Just curious. I don’t know much about ai hardware.” He felt guilty, as if he were lying. In bed that night, he realised it wasn’t lying. He hadn’t been worried. He had been hoping. Hoping that there was another explanation for what he had seen in the Observation Lounge viewport. A physical explanation, external to himself, in terms of cosmic rays and electronics. Something that wasn’t in his own head, or that had no physical explanation at all. He wasn’t sure which of these would be worse.

Sleep was a long time coming that night. The chat in the coffee cabin had broken up about twenty-two hundred hours, after the conversation had moved on from ghost ships and ranged over the upcoming World Cup, the current state of training at the Academy of Aerospace and Aeronautics, and the merits of women of different nationalities and ethnicities. Quill had very little to say on any of the topics and by the end was feeling sick, sick with his FSS colleagues for their misogyny and sick with himself for not saying anything to challenge them. He noticed that at least Alex hadn’t joined in much with the banter at that point, but seemed rather to be watching and listening. More than once, Quill caught Alex seemingly observing him, sharp-eyed but unobtrusive. Afterwards, Quill had hastened down the Blue Ring corridor, stopping at the Deck 6 viewport, where he stood for a long time and watched space slowly spin, as if to cleanse himself in starlight and cosmic rays.

But it was late now. Quill watched midnight tick over. His cabin was in full dark, and in the narrow box of his bunk, when he turned his visuals off, it felt like a coffin. He turned and twisted and prayed and tried to recite poetry, but he dared not shut his eyes, and his heart beat against his chest and the sound drummed up to his ears and out into the air of the cabin, he was sure faster and louder than was healthy. I’m scared, he admitted at last. I’m scared to sleep tonight. I don’t want to dream again. I want to believe what I saw was a glitch. Near-zero probably, that dude said. But near-zero is still non-zero. Small-but-finite. Measurable. Not infinitesimal. It could have been a glitch. But what if it wasn’t? And why did Alex invite me up there anyway What’s his game? And why was Safira prowling round there?

Safira… Quill sat up. He had forgotten about what she had slipped into his hand during their awkward encounter. Demas’ qube. The letter to SymbioNor. Demas had wanted it passed on to Singh that evening. Crap. Quill scrambled out of bed, turning the cabin lights up to a soft yellow. May as well look at it now, if I can’t sleep.

Demas had wanted the qube opened only in a DPS, a designated private space. Well, I wasn’t even in my cabin until nearly eleven, and that would have been too late to find Singh anyway. Demas is going to have to wait. Who is he to boss us all around anyway? Quill opened a secure shell, and activated the qube.

Demas had gone to a great deal of trouble to minimise the chance of the ai reading it. Rather than the dictated type Quill had expected, the text was hand-written, in a strong and stately hand, apparently using engineer’s pencil on a single analogue surface and then snapshotted. I wouldn’t have expected Demas to have that kind of handwriting. Quill stamped on the thought as if it were a cockroach. Don’t be so judgemental. Just because he’s foul-mouthed and money-grubbing doesn’t mean he’s uncultured or ignorant. Few people were comfortable hand-writing more than a few words, other than the graduates of expensive private classics schools, and those who learned  it later in life, who needed the analogue form for privacy or security. Missionaries, dissidents, lovers, and spies.

The letter itself was less inflammatory than Quill had feared. As he read, annotating the file here and there with suggestions for subtler phrasing or clearer sentences, his mind flicked back to the FSS guys in the coffee cabin earlier that evening. Maybe Demas has a point. Maybe we should make a stand. Maybe I should sign this thing after all. He finished his comments and closed the file. What’s the worst that can happen? The Alliance disciplines me for disobeying the Handbook? So what? This is my last mission anyway. But I gave my word. I swore to uphold the Handbook. I gave my word. He slipped the qube back into his uniform pocket to pass to Singh in the morning.

Zero-three hundred hours. Quill’s eyelids were heavy, and he felt the thin buzzing that came with sleepless weariness, but he knew that the thread of his thoughts would keep turning and twisting like a Möbius strip if he tried to go back to bed. He opened his messages, in case Archie had got back to him with news about Priska. Nothing. Knowing his brother, he probably hadn’t even seen his message yet. While he had the secure shell open, he also checked his Alliance message cache. Just another automated reminder about his Two-Year Review. Please enter your Development Goals in FamilyNet. Quill hastily closed the secure shell then closed the interface. Development Goals, what a joke. All I want is to survive the next one thousand nine hundred and twelve days, get back to Ransom City, and never go anywhere ever again.

Priska had never liked the Alliance bureaucracy. Quill sat on his bunk, the lights still on but low, and remembered the first time he’d met her. Rob and Kristy’s apartment in Tromsø, his first year of his second assignment, the summer light streaming through these big windows they had. He had just been appointed Daniel Facilitator for the Norway team, responsible for helping the new arrivals learn Norsk language and culture to a level that would allow them to share the good news in a sensitive and appropriately contextualised way. Daniel, for the Daniel in the Bible who had to learn the language and culture of the Babylonians, to serve the royal court of an empire that had occupied his homeland and transported him and his friends. It had seemed appropriate, when they were trying to infiltrate the world’s current dominant empire.

Priska had just arrived in Tromsø, her first assignment, signed up for classes at UiT for her Daniel Phase 1 year. Quill had arrived at the apartment earlier and was chatting with Rob and with the other new recruit, Silent Piroro. Good old Silent. He might have had his suspicions, in the end, but he had lived up to his name. The three of them had been looking out the big windows, down on the view of the city and the fjord below. The door had creaked open — it was an old apartment — and Kristy had ushered Priska in, keeping her voice low until the door was closed again and they were sure no voices would leak into the stairwell. Kristy had led Priska forward into the lounge area and the light had fallen full on her, gilding her like an angel or a saint in an Orthodox ikon. Quill had seen the tight-coiled energy luminous in her eyes, and her limbs taut like violin strings, and though he hadn’t let himself fall in love on the spot, he had felt the question telegraph through him before they had all taken their seats around the coffee table and Rob had poured the strong black coffee. While they made small talk about the journey from Olympus and how long it took to adjust to Earth gravity and the best places to buy cheap furniture, Quill had been running his own calculus on how likely it was that Priska might like him. Dubious, he had thought, but at least a non-zero probability. Small-but-finite.

According to the Handbook, the Daniel Facilitator was supposed to meet up with each of the Phase 1 learners twice a month. According to the unspoken rules of the Alliance, no-one was supposed to meet unaccompanied with someone of the opposite gender, unless in a public space. Rob imagined that Quill would be meeting with Priska and Silent together, but after the first couple of months, Quill had found reasons to make the meetings one-on-one. He had been careful. He hadn’t yet allowed himself to fall in love. But he admitted afterwards that he had been trying to change the terms of his calculus. And Priska had admitted afterwards that the only reason she hadn’t complained about the Alliance’s demand for the twice-monthly tick-box was that she had begun to look forward to seeing him. As summer ripened into autumn and autumn skated into winter, that small-but-finite probability had swelled like a melon. And at the time, it felt like a miracle.

Just as Quill finally drifted off to sleep, a thought skimmed like a flying fish across his consciousness, sinking again before he could grab it by fin or tail. Something to do with Jonas’ point about the Artemis Máni. Something that changed the calculus.

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Cover image of Jupiter © National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, colour modification by SDGL.

Divider image: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M. H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team, adapted by SDGL.