Space Saver, part III

THE SPELLBINDING CONCLUSION! *wild applause....from myself, which I'll admit is weird*

Here are links to part I and part II.

In the hour and a half it would take to get to the space station, I was sure I’d get a chance to tell somebody. The rocket was set up in pods like a long green bean, so each astronaut had their own chair, screen, and window. I saw a few useful looking buttons on my armrest, and I was sure one of them would connect me to an astronaut that I could explain about the sticky sleeve. I mean, as of yet, nobody had told me exactly what I was supposed to do when I got to the space station to fix the problem. Surely I’d need to speak to someone eventually.

I didn’t get any further with that thought because the roaring of the rockets died down and at that moment, I looked out the window, and honestly, I choked up. Somehow, I thought I wouldn’t be that impressed at seeing earth. I mean, I’ve seen hi-res vids and been in IMAX theatres about space my whole life. But knowing that beautiful blue ball down there was my home, full of my people, full of life itself—it was unbelievable. People that I had decided I would treat rightly, even if it meant losing my newfound popularity. I looked around for an intercom button.

There was a little flicker on the right side of my helmet and a dark blue screen popped up in front of me. A happy gender-neutral astronaut animation waved at me.

“Welcome to the ISS! To avoid contamination and complications, we at the ISS will be giving you your step-by-step tutorial before you reach the station! If at any point you have questions or concerns, please press the green button on the right-hand side of your armrest!”

Ok, great. I definitely had a concern. I pressed the green button. That’s when I discovered that automation has reached even space. A menu popped up on the screen.

Welcome to the ISS Automated Instructional System!

Press A if you wish to repeat a chapter.

Press B if you have a disability and need special assistance

Press C if you have failed your test and need to retake it

Press D if you have other questions and concerns

I pressed D. The cheerful astronaut animation reappeared, waving at me. “This is a time-sensitive mission. We at the ISS prefer that you spend your transit time learning about what you need to do to keep our station healthy and safe! All questions and concerns will be addressed after the mission is completed!”

I stared at the screen. “Okay,” I said out loud, “this is ridiculous. People’s lives are in danger!”

“I’m sorry,” the astronaut replied, “I did not understand your voice command. If you wish to repeat the menu, please press E. If you want to return to your learning module, press F.”

“We make living, duplicating skin for our space exploration vehicles!” I shouted at the screen. “We have holographic computers! We can instantly communicate with even the Mars outpost! We are the most technologically advanced species in the existence of the universe! Let me speak to a real person!”

“I’m sorry, I did not understand your voice command. If you wish to repeat the menu, please press E. If you want to return to your learning module, press F.”

Faced with the inflexible smiling inevitability of a computer not programmed to handle weird real-life problems, I gave in and did the learning module. Surely I’d have time before we docked to speak to a real person.

They needed me to do a fairly simple procedure to fix the station, all of which was explained in detail. There was a significant problem in the schedule of events though. I watched the tutorial twice through and sat for several long moments with my hands folded in my lap, staring at the blank space in front of me. Unless I had misunderstood, and I didn’t think I had, I would have no chance to speak to anybody until after I had done what I’d been sent to do.

Now, I guess bureaucratic red tape can get in the way anywhere, but to entirely isolate me from human contact from blast off till after I’d done a major repair on an international space station seemed…fishy.

And then there were the details of what I needed to do. The new, unstable bioskin had grown a mass of scar tissue over the damaged port. All I had to do was pull out the damaged part and replace it with a new one, but to do that I would have to shove my whole arm into a fairly tight hole. My right arm. The one with the sticky place. I didn’t want to be paranoid but it really seemed like somebody had planned for me to contaminate the bioskin.

My mouth went dry. I would have liked to get up and pace but there wasn’t enough space. ‘Space.’ Heh-heh. There was actually a lot of that around….

(I apologize; that’s an example of the kind of random things that go through my head when I’m under a lot of stress….)

I needed to be calm. I wanted to talk to someone.…I twisted around in my seat. Could I see the other astronauts? No. It was a blank white wall behind me and in front of me. I was already tethered, already suited up. I looked around. Maybe I could sanitize the suit myself, wipe off what was stuck to my sleeve…There were no napkins, no wipes…

I jumped as my vision was blocked by the screen and the happy astronaut again. “Ten minutes till docking! Prepare to leave your capsule!” It blipped away and left me sweating. Ten minutes. What could I do? Was I just imagining all this? I rolled the fold of my sleeve up, and there they were, a host of tiny brown hairs littered along the inside of the cuff. My stomach dropped. This was real. Somebody was going to sabotage the space station and it would look like my fault. The hairs were so small; there was no way I could get them off, even if my hands hadn’t been in gloves. If I took my suit off, I had no way of telling them to wait; they’d open the airlock and I’d be dead in seconds. What if I refused to go out? What would happen then?

Ten minutes later, the door hissed, and then it opened. It landed with a soft thump on the surface of the bioskin, which thankfully had been engineered to a shimmery grey. (I saw the original prototypes of bioskin back when it started to be a thing and I didn’t think I could handle walking out on a hairy, skin-toned space station without puking.) I looked out on the vastness of space and felt my throat constrict. Not two yards from where I sat I could see the hole in the bioskin. If I went out and did my job, nobody would realize I’d known the suit was contaminated. They’d see me being heroic, and then if something awful happened, it would just be bad luck, and I’d still be a hero, not a coward.

I bit my lip and sat where I was.

A voice piped into my helmet startled me so much I nearly fell off my seat. “Rachel, it’s time to get out of the capsule, now, we’re all watching and counting on you!” It was Dill’s voice.

“I can’t go!” I shouted, desperate to be heard, to tell people that I wasn’t chickening out. “I’ve been contaminated! I could make the whole station even worse!”

It was immediately apparent that they couldn’t hear me. What imbecile had thought to put a receiver in my helmet but not an outbound speaker?

“Rachel, I see you’re a little frightened, but please calm down. All the men and women of the international space station are counting on you to rescue them. Don’t let us down! I know you can’t see us, but we’re all rooting for you!” His voice was all round and bouncy, I thought sourly. Like everything’s going fine, this is just a walk in the park. And I knew, somehow by the tone of his voice, that even though nobody could hear me, lots of people could hear him. He was talking to me in front of people.

Were they my people? Were my parents listening? Were the kids and teachers at SEA standing there? Was Astro standing beside him, listening to him tell them that I was panicking? Or Dr. Patrisky? I ground my teeth. But I stayed where I was. “I have been contaminated.” I said again, as clearly as possible. “I could make the station shut down if I go out!”

“Rachel, this is not the time to be a coward.” His voice was stern now and he was talking like he’d not heard a word I said. Who was he, anyway, this Dill, who had ignored my last attempt to tell somebody about the danger, who had grabbed my sleeve and touched the sticky place? Dill who had insisted that I get a haircut right before putting on my suit. Dill, trying to force me out onto the station’s surface where I’d almost definitely harm the people in the space station.

I could feel the disapproval. That beautiful blue earth just visible over the side of the space station, full of people looking up at me with disgust. Astro, Dr. Patrisky, my own family, disgusted by me. I wrapped my hands around the armrest, and I stayed where I was.

“You are wasting millions of dollars.” Dill’s voice was sharp, “This will lose you your scholarship. You will never go to space again.” His voice changed, more desperate pleading than reprimand. “Rachel, this is endangerment of life. You will be arrested if you do not complete your task. You’ll go on trial. Legal fees. Please, Rachel, just go out there.”

And then, worst of all, after a pause, another voice, younger, sounding hesitant, embarrassed. “Uh, hey, Rachel. Just wanted to remind you that’s my mom up there. We’re…counting on you.” I shut my eyes and said, again, “I am contaminated.”

I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I sat there and felt my entire life crumbling away from me.

I waited forty minutes before they gave up. Forty minutes of Dill’s voice in my ear, ranging from paternal no-nonsense orders to heroic calls to valor. The door shut. The shuttle moved. With a soft clunk, the shuttle docked on the space station.

The door opened. I shot to my feet. There were faces just outside the air lock; angry faces. The door opened and let me inside. I stumbled out, holding up my arm, shouting even though I didn’t think they could hear me yet. “I’m contaminated! Sabotage!”

It took them a while to listen but when they stopped being angry long enough to look at the hairs on my sleeve, the scowls started to fade into expressions of stunned horror.

All this time Dill had been calling the station from earth. The captain answered him only once, letting him know that they had me inside and were assessing the situation. He immediately cut her off and began trying to explain how it had recently come out that I was misfit and a poorly judged choice, possibly unstable—the captain left him squawking his outrage to the control room at large. As I stood, trembling from stress in the middle of the room, she began questioning me minutely about what had happened in the moments before the launch. As I answered, a crease began to appear on her forehead—anger, but not directed at me, I sensed.

“And there was no way possible for you to communicate with anybody about what was happening?” She asked, for what seemed like the fifth time.

“No,” I said. “I couldn’t talk to the astronauts or the station or anybody on earth. Apparently people could see me, but Dill never responded to anything I said. I figured he couldn’t hear me.”

In the background, Dill was saying something about needing to get a report to national authorities. The captain narrowed her eyes. “The audio transmission from your end was tested and proved to be in working order before the shuttle landed on earth, yet Dill,” she waved a hand back at the speaker as it yammered on, “claims he heard you say nothing whatever.”

“I was talking as clearly as I could.” I said. “If he didn’t hear me, he should at least have seen me saying something. Why didn’t he ask me to speak up, or tell me to keep trying?”

At that moment. Dill, in a lather of frustration at not being answered, shouted out this little gem into the control room for everyone to hear: “She should have just obeyed orders, instead of talking back, like she understood anything about the mission!”

The captain stiffened. They’d all been listening through the whole ordeal. Never once had he let slip that I was speaking, instead of just panicking.

That was the beginning of the end for Dill and he knew it the moment the words came out of his mouth. The intercom went silent. With a face like stone, the captain went to notify the authorities.

Weeks later, after the arrest and court trial, it was revealed that Dill had been indoctrinated by a Martian terrorist cell and had planned to destroy the ISS and weaken the connection between Earth and her Martian colonies. Then, when communications were down, the terrorists would stage a coup. When the dust settled, Dill would smuggle himself out to Mars and be all set for a high powered job in the new Martian government. It was a massive operation, and I’d stumbled into the middle of it, and destroyed it.

But that was later. On the station, I was given a meal while my suit was sanitized. And then, with the hearty approval of every astronaut, I went back out on the skin to do the job I’d come for. After I’d replaced the part that needed replacing and felt the soft shiver of mutating skin under my feet, I took a half second to look down at my home, starkly blue and breathtakingly beautiful against the immensity of space. Even if I the captain hadn’t listened to me, if Dill had his way, if I had been reviled the rest of my life—I wouldn’t have regretted it. Life itself is precious; precious enough that it’s worth preserving no matter what people think of me.