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Some people would say it started when Tom’s tether suddenly snapped and she was flung out into the vast void of space. Others would say it was Hal taking a fire axe to A.R.C.H.E.R.’s mainframe that did it. Others still would insist that Amy knocking Hal into the common room table with enough force to crack his skull in two was the first nail in the coffin. It doesn’t really matter where you pin the start though, either way it ends the same; With Doctor Gladys O’Neil, standing alone in the common room of the ship, the only living person for so many miles the numbers stop to matter.
Gladys clutches her mug slightly closer and watches the steam rise up in curling shapes and dissipate underneath the flickering glow of the fluorescent lights. Eight years ago all five of the human crew members had stood together and toasted to a bright decade with one another. Their voices blending and mixing into a single cry of comradery that filled up the room. Gladys raises the cup to the ceiling.
“To a bright two years and eight months.” her voice crashes against the cool metal walls, utterly singular.
Gladys lets the silence settle deep into her bones before she knocks back the bitter burn of the instant coffee. She sets the mug down on the table and strides towards the door. She presses the button to open it manually. Opening the doors used to be A.R.C.H.E.R.’s job. Lots of things used to be A.R.C.H.E.R.’s job. Lots of things used to be Tom or Hal or Amy or Hera’s job. Now lots of things are just Gladys' job. She sighs as she begins to walk her rounds around the ship. The plants are watered. The data has no noticeable change from last cycle. A.R.C.H.E.R. is still an unrepairable mess of broken wires and torn metal. The bodies in the freezer are still very much dead. She strikes through another day on the wall calendar. Nine hundred seventy two more until she can go home.
She had come out here to monitor Meissa and make sure A.R.C.H.E.R. stayed running. At least that’s what she wrote down on the application form. She was so twisted up when it came time to depart that she couldn’t tell if the urge to vomit came from excitement or nerves. Hal had kept talking right up until he went under stasis, streams of stories and plans and jokes. He held Tom’s hand when she went under. Gladys leans back in her chair. Her door is open, more out of habit than genuine need. Hera would pop in sometimes when she had a moment spare. Gladys reaches over to the keyboard and begins typing, the clicking of the keys filling the empty room.
Most of the data A.R.C.H.E.R. once held was lost or corrupted when Hal took an axe to it. Most, but not all. The quality is fuzzy, a flickering desaturated image riddled with static. Gladys can still make herself out when she walks onto screen.
“Good morning A.R.C.H.E.R.!” Gladys still feels the twinge of embarrassment that runs through her at the sound of her own voice on recording, but it’s worth it for what comes next. It will always be worth it.
A faint hum, like the whir of a hundred fans spinning to life.
“Hello, Doctor O’Neil.” The first words he ever spoke, at least to her. Hello, Doctor O’Neil . Gladys has run through them enough times to know the shape of them completely. She imagains that if recordings and audio files could wear out from use they would be nothing but faded shreds by now.
“I’ll be your engineer for this trip, so I bet we’ll get to know each other real well!” Gladys says in tandem with her past self. The rooms of the ship are too small to create echos. Gladys manages on her own.
“I look forward to it. I’m sure you’ll do a splendid job.”
“Thank you Archie, I’ll sure as hell try!” Her fuzzy face looking up into A.R.C.H.E.R.’s camera is the final shot before the frame descends to static.
Gladys heaves another sigh. That moment has etched into every fold of her mind. She had come out here for A.R.C.H.E.R., really. He was the dream of every scientist that dealt with AIs. Well, maybe not every. But he was her dream. An AI that couldn’t just operate the ship, but be conversed with like you would any human. Artificial Research Communications Historical Record . A.R.C.H.E.R.. Gladys had read every lick of information about him that she could find. She knew as much as she could possibly know before she even met him. It was like a dream once it happened, one of those moments that you think about but know deep down won’t ever experience. This whole trip had been a dream, or it had felt like one anyways.
Gladys casts her eyes over to the photo looted from Amy’s room somewhere around five months ago. She would need it to write the report, she had reasoned. That would have been Hera’s job. She was the mission commander. It would have been Amy’s job next. It wasn’t meant to be Gladys’. None of this was meant to be Gladys’.
She picks up one of the photos. All five of them pressed shoulder to shoulder in the common room, smiling. The photo Gladys holds up a mirror, reflecting the camera as it takes the photo. “We can’t leave Archie out!” the long gone voice laughs. They were meant to take another once it was time to leave. Amy had gone so far as to write ‘ Before ’ in thick black letters at the top. The thought of taking a photo, of feeling the putridness of the empty air all around her, is nearly as unbearable as the thought of the unfulfilled promise. She’ll have to be the one to write ‘ After’, the different handwriting no more damning than the spidery signatures stamped in ink across her crew mates death certificates.
Gladys opens the document where she’s been writing the report.
On day 1,718, Dr. Watch’s tether failed well she was performing routine maintenance on the outside of the ship. Though several attempts were made, both by the crew in the ship and Dr. Watch herself, we were unable to rescue her or otherwise retether her to the ship. Dr. Watch ceased radio communication around two hours after the tether had failed, given the amount of oxygen she had, this is also likely her time of death. Attempts to retrieve the body failed.
Dr. Watch’s death caused great emotional distress to all of the crew, in particular Dr. Drury. Five days after Dr. Watch’s death, Dr. Drury appeared to have some manner of breakdown. He removed the fire axe from its case on the wall and used it to damage the ship’s on board AI system beyond repair. No human crew members were injured in this incident. All attempts to restart A.R.C.H.E.R. failed and the system has been offline since the incident.
The language is clinical. Both vile and prefect in its distance. Gladys wipes her eyes off on her sleeve. She needs to write this. She refuses to bring three families nothing but corpses and one not even that without a reason why. That’s what she’s doing, she’s making answers to the questions. Answers to be handed off to the public when the time comes. This is the version Gladys wants them to have, the version where death comes and goes in just a sentence. Twenty eight days can pass in the blink of an eye.
On day 1,746, twenty eight days after Dr. Watch’s death and twenty three days after A.R.C.H.E.R. was destroyed, Dr. Drury and Dr. March got into a verbal fight that escalated to a physical altercation. Dr. March pushed Dr. Drury and he collided with the metal table in the common room. Dr. Drury sustained a substantial head wound from making contact with the table’s corner. He was pronounced dead by mission commander Dr. Caddy an hour later. He never regained consciousness. Dr. March was extremely distressed by the incident and began to withdraw herself from group activities.
This is the version of the story the public will receive. The version that is leaves no room for doubt. Factual and stiff as a corpse. Gladys stands up and walks out her open door. She had become well acquainted with the Aurora ’s corridors long before she was the only one left to walk them. The nicks and scrapes that had formed over the years, the sound of the fluorescents buzzing, how footsteps would change slightly from one room to another. The Aurora was barely bigger than a large apartment. Cozy is what she would have called it before. Now as she stands in the room that once housed A.R.C.H.E.R.’s systems, suffocating feels like a more apt descriptor.
Hal had tried to fix A.R.C.H.E.R.. Gladys couldn’t count the hours she’d seen him bent over the wreck, tool bag laying open next to him.
“Come on Archie, come back. I said I’m sorry.” Hal’s ghost says, the creaking of the ship forming the phantom clinking of tools.
“I didn’t mean to Archie. God, I didn’t mean to.” Gladys pauses for just a moment more before she moves on to check the freezers. The rooms of the ship are too small to create echoes.
Gladys doesn’t believe in ghosts, she never has. As she gazes out at the three carefully aligned stretchers covered in white sheets, a part of her does wish she did. Her breath mists in the air as she exhales, a small wisping puff that vanishes as its heat drains away. The freezer is the only room that hadn’t seemed to have lost its heartbeat with A.R.C.H.E.R.. The hum of the fans whirs on untouched through the vastness of space. A fourth stretcher sits empty next to its cohorts, maybe beckoning, maybe just being. Gladys stays for just a moment longer in the freezer, letting the cold air soak into her. The heavy door slams behind her, plunging the Aurora back into its empty quiet.
Amy had become a ghost long before she died. It wasn’t like Tom or Hal, she didn’t go out with a bang. She dripped away like water from a leaky bucket. A string that frayed until it snapped.
When Amy died, she was laughing. High and bubbling and so completely unlike herself. The shards of the broken test tube were still held fast in her hands. Amy was smiling even as the red blooming from the gash on her thigh spilled hot and fast to the lab floor. Maybe that was the reason why she was smiling in the first place, it’s not like Gladys can ask her. The broken test tube was thrown out. The blood was wiped up. And Amy was gone.
Gladys hasn’t made any use of the lab since that incident. Hera hadn’t either. Work had stagnated once it was just the two of them anyways. The same unsaid weight barred down on them both. Floating through the air, suffocating any words that could be said before they left their mouths. They still talked to each other. Conversations meandering and empty until inevitably they would snag upon the void that filled up the Aurora ’s halls, the hush that would descend deafening.
Hera had withstood that void. That void had eaten Gladys from the inside out. She does wonder, as she wanders through the Aurora ’s corpse and back to her computer, how much longer her shambling bones can hold themselves together.
That void had gobbled up Tom. The monster in a bedtime story. Maybe it’s leering over Gladys shoulder even now. It clawed at Hal until he clawed at A.R.C.H.E.R.. It drowned Amy in the ruby red of guilt. It snuffed Hera out like a candle. That’s all there is, really; the void and the small fragile beacons built to cut through it. Gladys stares at her reflection in the black of her turned off computer screen. A ghost stares back.
It only takes Gladys powering on the computer for it to wink out of existence.
On day 1,902, 184 days after Dr. Drury’s death, Dr. March was involved in an accident in the ship’s lab. The test tube she was handling exploded due to improper mixing of chemicals. Dr. March received deep lacerations on her hands and legs, including her thigh. The glass punctured her femoral artery. Despite efforts made by both Dr. Caddy and I, Dr. March bled out as a result of her injuries.
Seeing as Dr. Caddy and I were now the only personnel on board, we made the choice to discontinue use of the lab. We attempted to send a transmission to mission control in order to request an early termination of the mission, but the analog equipment was too damaged. Dr. Caddy volunteered to do the out of ship repairs necessary. Well she was working on the ship I believe a piece of debris collided with the glass portion of her helmet and shattered it. When Dr. Caddy failed to maintain radio communication I went out myself to check on her. She was deceased by the time I arrived.
Hera looked almost peaceful in the soft glow of her discarded flashlight and the burning red of the station lights. The glass of her shattered helmet hung like a twinkling halo of stars in front of her face and for a moment, Gladys did wonder if she was looking at an angel. She didn’t wonder that when she had to drag Hera’s corpse through the airlock and to the freezer. She didn’t wonder that when she went to bed and woke up to an empty station. She didn’t wonder that as the days started to drip by. She didn’t wonder it, but maybe she did wish it.
Since then I have attempted no more repairs to the analog communications equipment. I have made the decision to spend the remaining days left in the mission on board the Aurora and continue functions as normally as possible. As of the writing of this report it is day 2,678. I am acting commander of the SS Aurora , Dr. Gladys O’ Neil, signing off.
And that’s the end. Curtains closed, turn out the lights. Tears splatter softly against the desk, dripping down Gladys’ face in wet streaks. She swears that in her choking sobs she hears another voice but- the rooms of the ship are too small to create echoes.