The station – known to space shippers as MD-14 – was only a speck against the organonitrogen haze of Titan, which loomed in the timeless dark like something from a dream.
On approach MD-14 in his company transport, United Parcel Service Universal courier Clynton Karl - 'Clynt' - disengaged gravity drive as a nearly invisible solar sail retracted into a chamber on his vehicle’s chassis. The current could carry him in now, he thought.
Clynt could hear the hum of the ship’s nuclear-powered orbital maneuvering engines coming online. He double-checked his instruments, and pressed a colored button on his control panel’s translucent surface.
“Sync,” he said to nobody in particular.
The button changed hue, shifting from red to green. The courier opened a compartment and took out a bottle of pills. He fiddled with the cap, which released with a satisfying ‘popping’ sound.
Clynt took a tiny pill from the bottle and laid it on his tongue. As he put the bottle back in the compartment, he was humming a tune. Clynt was in a good mood.
He peered at the approaching station through the transport’s view panel. This will probably be the last time I come out this far, he thought. I can’t imagine why I would ever visit this place again.
The operations hub of MD-14 was at the center of a giant spiral, which became visible as the transport got closer. From that spinning hub, an enormous fuselage extended, encircling the station’s core almost like the shell of a snail.
Decades-old technology installed at the station still used kinetic generators to create a stable gravity field, which meant that any ship intending to dock with MD-14 was bound to encounter turbulence on approach.
NAV would have alerted him, but Clynt had disengaged the cues before leaving the inner system, as he had done for years. It would be a bumpy ride to the airlock, but having the ship’s AI talk him through it just added to his anxiety.
The precaution hardly mattered, and he threw-up just the same.
***
It will be good to try something new, Clynt thought as his transport docked at the operations hub airlock. Change is good. Movement is life.
The airlock slid open. There was the hiss of cylinders contracting and a rush of oxygen into the portal between station and ship.
Clynt made his way past the decontamination lights repeating his mantras and boarded an elevator that ferried him to Logistics. The department was supervised by a former astronaut named Lennon.
Lennon’s subordinates – the crew of two dozen skilled and semi-skilled labourers, bots and technicians that worked MD-14’s warehouse – referred to him alternately as ‘boss’ and cap’n’, although he was neither.
Clynt had been told by other couriers that, in fact, Lennon was smart. Not scientist-smart, but organized and methodical, with enough pull that he had been put in charge of Logistics at MD-14 shortly after it was commissioned.
That was 28 years ago (by Earth’s calendar) and Lennon was still running things.
On the few trips he had taken out to MD-14, Clynt had never asked Lennon’s first name, and Lennon hadn’t volunteered to tell him.
Clynt resolved to find out during this visit. He was trying to take a more active interest in other people, anyways; to be more attentive overall. That included people he may never see again.
He stepped off the elevator and surveyed Logistics, which was a large, brightly lit, rectangular compartment with a long smooth workstation near the wall, opposite the elevator doors.
A large observational plexus at the front of the compartment opened onto the station’s hull, putting perspectives of Titan’s blurry visage and the deep dark of space in full view.
The compartment’s workstation blended seamlessly with the station’s architecture, and at the far end of the desk a man stood pressing buttons of light on a holographic interface.
“Lennon!” Clynt exclaimed as the other man looked past the luminescent symbols on his interface to where the courier was standing.
“Hey! It’s Clynton, right? Nice to see you,” Lennon said, gently. He was an old man, with a warm voice and an engaging demeanor. “It’s been a while. What you been up to?”
"Clynt," he replied with a warm smile. Yet something was amiss. Lennon's questioning belied a situation, and Clynt - a career courier- could sense it.
For one thing – where was his package? Normally, it would have already cleared and been sitting at the workstation waiting for him to arrive.
Clynt reengaged. “Ah, this, that, and some of the other; you know how it is, Lennon. Ummm…there’s a package for me?” he said, gesturing towards the empty workstation.“Dispatch told me it’s hot, and it needs to be at O.L.A. by nineteen-hundred hours – today. Not to be rude, man,” he added as an afterthought, “but I have to keep moving.”
“Ah, sorry,” Lennon said cautiously, “but it looks like your package is missing…” His words hung in the oxygenated air of the artificial environment like an object in space.
Clynt eyed the station supervisor. “What do mean, ‘the package is missing’?”
“I mean, it’s not there; not where it’s supposed to be,” Lennon said, his pleasant demeanor now tempered with enough distress that Clynt knew that he had already been trying to find the shipment from the moment the courier’s transport had docked.
Well, at least it bugs him, Clynt thought peevishly. That should be motivation to locate the piece faster, at least.
Lennon touched his earpiece. “Warehouse! Jensen, you there? Hey. There’s supposed to be some product in bin 723c, but the system can’t find it. I sent the item number to your console. Check the ARM on that track, too; I think it’s malfunctioning. There were bad parts installed during the last maintenance cycle; we gotta swap ‘em out, but not now. Chop, chop. Double time – I need that piece!” Lennon ordered.
There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then a whining sound, like the air being slowly let out of a balloon.
“No, it can’t wait, Jensen,” Lennon answered back sternly. “Get your ass over to section two. Take Weasel with you. If I don’t hear from you inside five minutes, I’m docking you a day’s rations. What is wrong with you? You sound more stoned than usual. Out!”
“That bot is fucked!” Lennon said, exasperated. Then switching quickly from irritation to mildness, he continued. “This sort of thing usually never happens – especially with expedited shipments. It should be sorted out soon. Want some coffee?” Lennon moved to a console and took a container from a concealed drawer.
“Coffee,” he said plainly, and an aperture opened in the console. He funneled a handful of beans into the aperture.
“Prepare: two cups,” he said. The aperture closed and a motor behind the wall started running.
“Fresh beans, delivered from Earth a few days ago,” Lennon said idly, gesturing towards the wall. “We grow our own here, too; did you know that, over in the greenhouse?”
Clynt nodded, but he wasn't listening. He was preoccupied with the location of his missing package.
“Still, nothing beats a cup of Terra’s finest. You can really appreciate it out here” Lennon continued, as the rich, earthy scent of freshly ground java wafted into the room from a vent in the top of the console.
“Put on the Weather Network, will you?” Clynt asked, pointing at the large monitor on the wall opposite from where he stood.
Lennon complied, and a static video feed of the station’s landing array was replaced with blue, red, white and gold icons of the long-running source in planetary and exoplanetary weather reporting.
Clynt saw from the dizzying barrage of symbols that conditions on the North American west coast were anticipated to be favorable when he was scheduled to deliver the lost package, in about twelve hours. No planned geo-engineering in the area, no climate mods, nothing for a month, at least.
It would be nice to visit the beach, now he would have the time, Clynt thought.
He’d always had a fantasy about learning to surf on the California coast, like people in old songs. There wasn’t much coast left in California, mind you, but maybe one day, if the timing was right.
But with Clynt, it had always been ‘one day’. Now he had no excuse to put off the things he really wanted to do, he thought.
Clynt surveyed conditions at Weather Network locations on Mars and Jupiter Station, checking for signs that he might be delayed during his route. If that was the case, he’d have to wave dispatch to let them know that deliveries to the inner system would arrive later than scheduled.
But everything looked good for the commute; no serious solar winds; no gravity traps or orbital anomalies along his flight path. He turned from the view screen and looked towards the immense observation plexus at the front of the module.
He had decided. He was going to get a surfboard when he got back to Earth.
***
“I can’t believe they want to put that shit in your head,” Lennon said as they made their way through the station towards the warehousing module. The two men sipped their coffee as they passed through one bulkhead of the station after another.
“It’s fucked-up, alright,” Clynt replied. “Union is pissed. Reps said there’s no way senior members will undergo any sort of…upgrade,” he scoffed. “I support ‘em, too. The last thing I’d want is UPSU crawling around in my brain, updating manifests, giving directions, monitoring my vitals. But it’s all part of that Extraterrestrial Transit Standardization program. All the initiatives implemented since Commerce and Governance ratified that deal ten years ago.”
“Yeah, ‘The Great Reconciliation’. I saw that ceremony in person, you know,” Lennon said nonchalantly. “Seems like yesterday. Who would of thought that peace on Earth would mean one day you couriers would be upgraded with, what, braintech? What are they calling it?”
“O-P-U-S, or ‘Online Personalized User Service’; couriers just call it, ‘Oh piss!’” Clynt snorted. “No surgery required. All you do is take a pill. Pill got nanos in it and they know right where to go to link couriers up to the UPSU network. Totally painless, that’s what bosses say,” he said, gesturing dramatically, “but then the orders start to come in.”
“Ugh!” Lennon voiced disdain at the prospect. “It’s like they got a hold of all your parts.” Then, more thoughtfully, he continued. “But I suppose if the drivers don’t get in line, they’ll just get a bot to make the deliveries, eh? There been any more talk about that? Automating the fleet? I remember the bosses mind-fucked the union negotiators during the last round of contract talks.”
Clynt smiled. “Well, you know, a bot’s taking over my run; guy’s got my one-hundred-percent support. Goes by the handle ‘Vin-E’. Has a great personality, this guy; I guess the designers integrated retro-memes in his neural profile – he thinks he’s been alive for two centuries! He tells great stories – even has ‘body mode’ – which is new for UPSU. But that’s old hat to you, right?”
“Yeah, Jensen, Christ,” Lennon muttered. “You’ve met him, right? I know you usually only get out this way a few times a year. I don’t remember if you’ve been to the warehouse.”
“No, actually, I haven’t, at least not since that whole module was replaced, what, six years ago?” Clynt replied.
“Seven. Jensen was part of that whole replacement program. Commerce admin used him to replace six full-time guys. Attrition,” Lennon said, pausing momentarily to manually open the airlock between two large station modules. Broken door, Clynt thought.
“He’s good, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes I think the designers gave him a little too much autonomy,” Lennon continued. “His personality, for example…running intersubjective character routines so he identifies with oppressed people throughout history? Sharing in their struggle? It’s ridiculous! He isn’t oppressed; he’s a fucking machine. It’s his job to serve me! But you’ll see for yourself. We’re here.”
***
The warehouse was a single large module situated at the bottom of MD-14. It was easily the largest enclosed area of the station, and had been designed specifically to store components and technology of all shapes and sizes.
Tracks ran throughout the compartment, horizontally and vertically, and the door where Lennon and Clynt had entered was actually a narrow bridge leading over the warehouse floor, about thirty meters below. Clynt paused to take it in. The warehouse was much larger than he had expected.
There were many aisles, with bunks of palletized inventory and skids stacked atop one another. Clynt watched as large, coiled metal limbs on magnetic casters moved along the tracks, extending periodically into the spaces to scan codes on the items stored in the bins there.
“Corporate needed to expand the warehouse when trans-Neptune flights started. Now we’ve got as much stock stored here as any of the original twelve stations. The ARMtech is a little out-of-date,” Lennon said, motioning towards the metallic limbs moving on the tracks, “but they’re usually able to locate missing freight.”
Eventually, the two men reached the central platform and Lennon entered a code into a terminal. The platform buckled momentarily, and began descending towards the warehouse floor. Every ten meters, there was another bridge connecting the platform to the station, identical to the one Lennon and Clynt had used to enter.
“You can access all the lower decks, including RecDeck, from down here, so most of the crew stays in this part of the station. There’s no restriction on their movement, mind you. Once security is cleared at docking, station personnel can go pretty much anywhere, except Command and Engineering, of course,” Lennon told Clynt as they descended.
“Activity in those sections is automated, for the most part. There are only a few crewmembers onboard who understand operation protocols, and only one of them has the know-how to interface with the docking and orbital orientation systems. I guess you could say she’s in charge, but down here,” Lennon said, motioning towards the aisles that surrounded them, “I’m king.”
“Isn’t that a little concerning?” Clynt asked. “I mean, what if something happens to that one person?”
“Nothing,” Lennon replied absently. “The machines take over. They can run everything on the station without us even being here; not well, but they can run things. Remember – bots were out here before we were.”
The platform slowed as it approached the warehouse floor. The bridge where they entered was now high above as Lennon and Clynt stepped off the platform and moved towards one of the aisles. A long conveyor belt blocked their way, but the two men ducked underneath the mechanism and continued on their way. Suddenly a voice shouted from their blindside, “Ai! Ai! Ai! Safety first! Safety first!”
It was a strange voice; human, and yet not. It wasn’t a man’s or a woman’s voice; it wasn’t even a child’s voice. The pair turned to face the approaching figure, who had been joined by a second individual, this one smaller and leaner, and of less imposing stature.
Jensen and Weasel tended to the minutia of the warehouse so Lennon could handle administrative responsibilities. They were bots tasked with simple yet vital duties like tracking, storing and shipping products, cycle counts, and locating missing items.
Their operation was synchronized, whether embodied or disembodied, though both bots preferred the data-stream that proceeded from the techno-chemistry of their body modes, which allowed them to experience, among other things, the joy of eating.
“Wha’ we talk about, Cap’n? Yous got to be careful; dees machines finish ye, if ye don’t follow the standard rule,” Jensen said to Lennon, as Clynt got his first look at the android.
Like his voice, Jensen’s body mode was hard to describe. He was sturdy, but with mods to his design that made it easier for him to balance while climbing ladders and moving product.
Clynt observed that Jensen’s visual interface wasn’t a screen, like on Vin-E, the bot driver that was taking over his UPSU route. Instead, Jensen’s face was a perpetually refreshing hologram, an ever-shifting mask of opaque light.
What Clynt didn’t know – what most of the crew working on the station didn’t know – was that Jensen was a refurbished intelligencer bot built during wars in the previous century. His form of military AI, though nearly obsolete everywhere else, was still utilized on stations like MD-14.
The hologram visage which had attracted Clynt’s attention was designed for espionage, and allowed Jensen to assume nearly limitless identities. But now it was a reminder – an occasionally unsettling one – of the eccentric nature of the android’s heuristic processing.
Jensen was one of a kind, which was why he wasn’t decommissioned with other AI units at the end of the war. Like some of his kin, Jensen suffered from an android-specific form of post-traumatic stress disorder, which had afflicted a small number of specialized autonomous bots of his generation.
In a spirit of compassion for the suffering of a unique and sentient consciousness – as well as the furtherance of scientific study – a military court had spared Jensen’s life after the war, provided him with treatment, and put him to work on the space stations orbiting the planets of the inner systems.
By the time he became part of Lennon’s operation, Jensen was a highly skilled warehouse worker. But he struggled with problems of identity and with his existential state as a member of an android diaspora. Both issues were also exacerbated by his wartime traumas.
He could be inflexible with the rules, just as he’d demonstrated by safety-checking Clynt and Lennon, yet he was loyal to the crew with whom he found himself stationed. Combined with his expertise and eidetic memory, Jensen was a valued presence on MD-14, even if he was difficult at times.
“I got to say, man.” Lennon said slowly, shaking his head disapprovingly. “I have a lot of family that would be offended to hear you speaking the way you are right now. You know how it sounds, right?”
Jensen was speaking in unusual patois, a blurry phonetic blend of African-American dialects, which matched his exaggerated hologram visage. Easy to see how that could be offensive, Clynt thought, eying the android cautiously.
The thought had just passed from Clynt’s conscious awareness when Jensen’s face began to shimmer, and with an unusual ‘gulping’ sound, the face of unshaven, nearly toothless black man was replaced by the seeming of a round-faced woman, whose placid demeanor did little to quell Lennon’s irritation. Clynt shuffled his feet.
“Wǒ hěn bàoqiàn. Wǒ bù míngbái,” Jensen uttered in his androgynous, electric-sounding voice.
“Speak English, for Christ’s sake!” Lennon commanded, sensing that he was rapidly losing control of the situation. “I need your help with something, guy. We can play later!”
“Cèsuǒ zài nǎlǐ?” Jensen said mischievously, winking at Weasel, who had been observing the proceedings with amusement. The smaller bot snorted with laughter.
Lennon breathed deeply and looked in Clynt’s direction. Clynt shrugged, smiling awkwardly, and Lennon realized in that instant how unprofessional the exchange must have seemed to the courier. He decided to take another approach with the androids.
“J, it’s one thing to keep me waiting, but it’s another thing to hold-up a courier – especially one with a waybill for hot product,” Lennon said. “I mean, it would be shitty if you guys got investigated by internal affairs, and shitty if you were transferred to another station for such flagrant insubordination, but causing trouble for a private carrier? C’mon! You’re going to bring heat down on all of us!”
Jensen’s face shimmered, and almost instantly the visage of the Asian woman was replaced with that of a bald man, with a visible overbite, who spoke with the slow drawl of cowboy in caricature.
“Well there, sheriff, you do have a point,” Jensen said, nodding at Weasel. The smaller bot handed Lennon a flat tablet he was holding, and began to address the station chief in a quirky, electro-musical voice.
“If you’ll observe your screen, sir, an ARM was sent to investigate the product that was misplaced. Records indicated that, prior to its arrival at MD-14, it had been the subject of classified testing at mobile trans-Neptunian laboratories operating outside regulatory jurisdictions.”
“Yes, I know that much,” Lennon said. “But we ship a lot of classified technology through UPSU. That doesn’t tell me what happened to the product. Get to it.”
“As you can see, the cam on the ARM showed nothing in the bin where the product was supposed to be.” Clynt looked over Lennon’s shoulder at the tablet’s screen and could see an empty space that was marked 723c.
That’s not good, Clynt thought. “Wouldn’t the product itself have been tagged by the system when it arrived?” he said aloud. “Can’t we track it that way?’
“No, we only use bin numbers for products that fall into certain categories. Military tech, scientific equipment, exoplanetary resource samples don’t get tagged in case hackers or mercs grab the numbers from our system. Makes it easier for them to target certain couriers…hey!” Lennon exclaimed suddenly, “What’s that there?”
The ARM cam zoomed in, and Lennon squinted. “Is that…paper?” Indeed, it appeared to be a crumpled piece of paper, although Clynt was uncertain as to why this particular detail had gotten Lennon’s attention.
“There’s only one person on this station who still uses paper. Come on, Clynt,” Lennon said brusquely as he handed Weasel the tablet, and turned to walk towards the platform he and Clynt used to descend to the warehouse floor. “I know where your piece is.”
“Ah!” Clynt exclaimed. “Where is it then?” he asked as the platform clamps released, and the two men began rising above the rows of identical bunks
“Yippee yi yo kayah! Git along, little doggies,” Jensen said as he and Weasel returned to the warehouse aisle where they had been working. “Don’t fence me in!”
***
Lennon had apologized for the missing piece, and Clynt – because he was trying to be more attentive to people he encountered – had accepted his apology.
The two men travelled from MD-14’s depths to the adjoining command, navigation and research modules, which involved retracing their initial journey from Logistics to the Warehouse, but then going another way into the station’s architecture.
By the time they reached their destination, Clynt was fairly certain he would have to contact dispatch, and let them know he would be late.
Oh, they won’t be happy, Clynt thought. But aloud he said, “So this is where it is?”
“We should have come here first,” Lennon said, addressing Clynt’s query with a sideways acknowledgement. “I should have known she’d want to have a look”.
The door retracted and the two men stepped into the module which served as a hub for research, command and navigation functions. It was a large space, illuminated by low ambient light except for the glittering console that was position in the center of the module.
Clynt could see two large bay windows at either ends of the space. One window opened on to what seemed to be a luscious green garden, although it was difficult to make out if it was just a projection from where Clynt was standing.
The other window was filled with an illuminated liquid – water, probably, Clynt thought – and for a moment, he swore he saw a silhouette darting about in the murky blue.
“Kate! Where are you! You got my tech!” Lennon called out.
From beyond the room’s large central console, there was a bustle, and suddenly a voice replied, “I left you a note!”
The pair walked towards the sound. “The courier’s here – we’re keeping him waiting. Give me the piece so he can be on his way.”
“I’m so sorry,” a woman said, emerging from a compartment on the far side of the central console. As she approached, Clynt could see she was slight, with sparkling intelligent eyes that were so large they made her face seem tiny by comparison. Around her neck hung a pair of spectacles, and she was dressed in the standard coverall uniform worn by personnel on stations throughout the solar system, only this one was patched with the MD-14 insignia.
“Are you in a rush?” she asked, flashing a concerned look in Clynt’s direction. “I didn’t mean to hold you up.”
“Clynt, this is Doctor Kathleen - Kate - Wong,” Lennon said by way of introduction. “Not only is the Doctor brilliant and beautiful, but she’s my other half, the night to my day, the yin to my yang – you catch my drift,” he said, and it occurred to Clynt that the two were in love.
“Hello, Clynt,” the Doctor said in a cheerful voice. “I don’t mean to have the piece for so long but I wanted to inspect it before it went to Earth.”
“Hello, Doctor. Good to meet you. No, no, don’t worry...,” Clynt replied pleasantly, before trailing off.
Having already determined that he would have to contact dispatch about the delay acquiring the piece, Clynt had relaxed.
This was his final run, after all, he had reasoned. He’d transited the inner system corridor – the Chute – more times in his career than he could count. He knew the route like the back of his hand, so what could go wrong? The piece would be an hour or two late, still well within the window of his delivery time.
Besides, in all the years he had delivered and retrieved freight from these space stations, no one had ever given him a tour of their inner workings. For Clynt, the experience had been akin to a revelation.
“What’s with the water tank and…is that a garden?” Clynt reengaged. “Are those just holograms or are they real?”
“Well, yes, they’re real,” the Doctor said nonchalantly. “Lots of benefits to having a garden out here. This one actually covers a half-dozen modules and exits on RecDeck. It helps regulate the atmosphere on the station, circulate and purify oxygen. Some of the plants have natural medicinal value. And we grow fresh eatables – apples, oranges, tomatoes, lettuce, carrot, coffee, cocoa, bananas…”
“…weed,” Lennon said, smirking.
“Hemp,” the Doctor said resolutely. “I grow hemp. The psychoactive substances in the plant have been removed. I use it to make paper. And rope. I’m old-fashioned that way.”
“The bots grow their own,” Lennon said. “And they keep the psychoactive.”
“Well, that’s your business, Len,” the Doctor replied flatly. “I’ve always said not to mix mechanics and marijuana. But you’re more tolerant than me, I suppose. Plus, we’re orbiting one of Saturn’s moons. Where else are you going to score your stuff?”
“Hey! Not on the job, not like the bots; they’re high all the time,” Lennon said, in a sanctimonious tone.
“If I worked for you, I‘d want to be, too,” the Doctor giggled, with just enough faux sincerity that Clynt knew she was both joking and speaking truth at the same time.
“The water tank is where the station’s navigation and docking requests are processed by Larry, Terry and Hank – our ‘deep space dolphins’, as I call them.”
“Dolphins? Come on? Out here?” Clynt said, with genuine shock.
“For real,” the Doctor replied. “You been schooled in faunal linguistics, right?”
“Uh, yeah?” Clynt replied tentatively. He really couldn’t remember if he had been.
“So you know that when artificial intelligence emerged in the middle of the last century, one of the unintended consequences was the creation of a decryption process that could discern human meaning in animal communication – and vice versa; an interspecies translator that facilitated what was, really, an encounter with a truly alien consciousness, but the consciousness was on Earth, not on another planet,” the Doctor said, matter-of-factly, but her eyes were bright. She drew a breath and continued.
“Suddenly, real, meaningful contact with higher primates, ravens, whales and, yes, even dolphins became possible. Lots of digital records didn’t survive the war, and existence of the technology is suppressed as you get closer to Earth – too much legality. But out here, information flows pretty freely. It has to.”
“But…why?” Clynt said, gesturing towards the sleek shadows darting about behind the bay window.
“They wanted to come. They’re patched into station orientation, docking and navigation,” Lennon said. “Terry brought in your ship this morning. The translation tech the Doctor described is dissolved in the water they swim in. That tank runs the circumference of this whole place – hundreds of square kilometers. After builder bots finished the station, the dolphins were the first to actually spend any time here. As it turns out, their natural ability to communicate with sonar, coupled with pressure-adaptive physiologies makes them more suited for space travel than we are, provided they’ve got water to swim in, of course.”
Clynt was fairly stupefied. He’d never considered the possibility that anything other than a human or machine intelligence could play a part of the station’s operation. “Can I talk to them?”
The Doctor shook her head. “No, it’s not like that. You need training. There’s a whole orientation process. And the training is specialized for each initiate. So, no.”
Clynt was still pondering the implications of what he had been told when Lennon asked after the missing shipment.
“What is it? The piece, I mean,” he said to the Doctor. “And where is it? You know you shouldn’t be unpacking classified tech. I gotta get it back into its case and processed.”
“You don’t know what this is? Of course, you don’t know what this is? Why would you know what this is? Come!” the Doctor said enthusiastically, walking towards the compartment where she had been prior to Clynt and Lennon’s arrival.
The two men followed. “Well, I know it was being tested on the frontier, which means it’s experimental, whatever it is,” Lennon said.
“Yes, but this isn’t your average, top-secret military spec; this is something…different,” she said. The purified air hung heavy with expectation.
She led Lennon and Clynt into a smaller room off the main chamber. “My lab,” the Doctor said, and pointed towards a small shining device that was suspended mid-air in a status beam. “And that is the tech you seek.”
“Finally! Lennon said, moving in on the piece, and looking for the control to disengage the beam. “So, what’s it for? The suspense is killing me,” he said, grinning at the Doctor.
She smiled back at him, and took a beat before replying, “It’s a device that lets the user see ghosts.”
There was a pause as Lennon and Clynt looked at each other. “You are fucking with me now,” Lennon said. The Doctor shrugged.
“I know it sounds weird; I thought somebody was playing a joke, too. But it’s true,” she said. “It’s called a ‘Necrospectrometer’.”
There was silence for a moment. The Doctor and Lennon stared at each other incredulously. Clynt was hypnotized by the device, which appeared to be nearly translucent, and glowing from within. Circuits glistened, and in that momentary quiet, he was reminded of being schooled.
Perhaps it was because the Doctor had brought it up earlier. Clynt had never imagined that MD-14 would be such an unusual place. It made him wonder what went on at all the other space stations along his route. But it was clear to him, beyond any doubt, that he would have a story to tell about his last day on the job.
“I mean, don’t worry, it doesn’t detect anything out here,” the Doctor said, breaking the silence. “Out here, it’s too…cold for it to operate properly. Not like it would on Earth, where numiniod activity would be greater. That’s why they test out here; much easier to contain.”
“Numiniods!” Clynt exclaimed triumphantly. “I remember those. They’re metaparticles, right? Numinoids are…tachyons,” he continued, beginning to strain. “They travel faster than the speed of light? Am I remembering correctly?”
“Yes,” the Doctor and Lennon said simultaneously, and then smiled at one another. The Doctor continued. “There are a few particle models in use. But this technology is built around the premise that the universe was originally a field of energy comprised of numiniods. The numiniods decayed into the common particles everybody’s heard of, photons, electrons, gravitons. And just as those particles act on matter, numiniods – a primal cosmic quality, more than gravity, light or even time – act on our awareness of matter, shaping our sense perceptions and unifying consciousness in the same way illuminating a room with photons shows its occupant the objects within that room, without revealing their relationships to each other.”
“I understand,” Clynt nodded, comically.
“I’m probably not doing a very good job of explaining myself,” the Doctor said.
“It’s best not to think about it,” Lennon chipped in.
“Anyways,” the Doctor said, rolling her eyes, “scientists in the last century needed to reconcile faster-than-light quantum activity – like entanglement and superposition – and the solution to the problem turned out to be this Numiniod Field – the n-field.”
“Yes, yes, we know the rest, Kate,” Lennon said, abruptly shifting the conversation. “Clynt has to go and I’ve got to clear this piece before he can. Let’s pack it up, and get this man on his way.”
“All right, just one other thing,” the Doctor said, bemused. “Len, will you roll the glass over to me? I want to show you both something.” She pointed at a framed window-like object mounted on a cart with casters that was sitting by the entrance to the lab. Lennon pushed the object towards the Doctor and one the casters creaked. “Put some oil on that,” he muttered.
“Nobody on any other station has one of these; I built it myself,” the Doctor said proudly, to no one in particular “There are only a few available to researchers these days; most were warehoused a generation ago. It took me three years to make this one, but I’d wanted to make one since I was a kid.”
“What is it?” Clynt asked. Lennon shook his head, and shuffled idly away from the parked object he’d retrieved.
“It’s a Quantum Lens. It lets me observe quantum phenomenon from a semi-inert, quasi-dimensional platform using this spatiotemporal location as a referent node,” the Doctor muttered and positioned the screen in front of the strange piece of tech. “Check this out!” she said and switched on the screen.
The lights in the lab adjusted to the spectacle displayed in the lens, which was sudden alive with illuminated currents. Rivulets of energy organized into barely discernable patterns and disintegrated, coursing across the screen, like electric ribbons tied and untied, over and over again.
“What is it we’re seeing here, Doc?” Lennon said.
“We’re inside of it!” the Doctor said, held in rapture by the display on the screen.
“What do you mean, ‘inside of it’?” Clynt interjected. “Inside that tech? Like it’s magnified?”
“No, I mean actually inside of it, as in the larger portion of the tech exists in an adjacent dimensional space that can only be accessed from here in the lab, by using this…device to quantify the n-field. That’s what I wanted you to see. That we’re actually inside of this tech, right now!”
“Holy shit…” Lennon said. Clynt was speechless. He’d never heard of technology like this. What had the Doctor called it? Necrospectrometer? What use could it possibly have? Could it really be used to see ghosts? And most importantly, he thought, ghosts actually exist? That was news to him. I would be news all over the solar system, if it was true.
Suddenly, in the corner of the lens, one luminous pattern took on a unique orientation, and appeared to respond to the three observers in the lab. It traversed the depth implied by its appearance on the screen and forced itself against the Quantum Lens, with a crackle of electricity. The observers were shocked, and Clynt quickly looked behind the screen to reassure himself that what he was seeing wasn’t occurring in the lab. Or was it? He was so confused…
Lennon disconnected power to the lens abruptly. “What the fuck, Kate! What the hell was that?”
“I…I don’t know,” the Doctor said, still in a state of shock, “the lens has never acted like that before. The device wasn’t supposed to detect anything so far from Earth. That’s why they tested it out here!”
“That doesn’t even make any sense!” Lennon said, irritability. “I’m taking the tech now.” He disengaged the suspension beam and placed the item in its case.
“Fine. I’ve seen enough anyways. The piece is headed to a trade show on Earth, for its official launch. I’m sure a demonstration from professionals will be far more telling than my display,” the Doctor said.
“I enjoyed it,” Clynt replied, and the Doctor smiled warmly. “I’ve never seen anything like this on a space station. And I’ve been to them all!”
***
Once the two men had returned to the Logistics compartment, it didn’t take long for Lennon to have the tech packaged and prepared for transport. While he worked, Clynt contacted UPSU dispatch to let them know the shipment would be delayed for several hours.
To his surprise, his supervisor didn’t mind, and actually recommended that he take the time needed to get the piece back to its destination. “After all,” his supervisor said, “this is your final run. Be a shame to miss it, is all I’m saying, just because you were in a hurry to get back home.”
Lennon notified the Doctor that Clynt would be departing imminently, and Clynt knew that somewhere in the station, three dolphins in a tank were orienting MD-14 to optimize his ship’s journey out of the Saturnine system.
“That about does it,” Lennon said, passing the case containing the tech to Clynt. “It’s been good getting to know you a little better. We don’t see many new faces out here – Jensen’s holographic mug, notwithstanding – so it’s nice when we do.”
The two men shook hands. “You took a pill before you docked, right,” Lennon asked. “Don’t want your bones turning to jelly or for you to catch some kind of exo-infection. I’ve got some in my stash, if you need one.”
“You know what? I will take one,” Clynt said, agreeably. “I dosed just before I arrived, but then I puked.” The comment caused Lennon to raise his eyebrow.
“It’s been like that for me since I started these outer planet runs. It’s nothing serious; I’ve come to expect it when I enter a new ‘sphere of influence’, gravitationally speaking. This station, for example, it approximates Terran gravity, but it’s not quite the same. I’m sensitive; it’s like an allergy,” Clynt explained.
“Well then, Mr. Sensitive, I guess it is good you’re retiring,” Lennon said, smiling and passing Clynt the pill, which the courier downed with a gulp. “I’ll let Terry know you’re ready to go. Thanks again for your patience with the missing piece. Take it easy, Clynt,”
“I’ll take it whatever way I can get it, man,” Clynt smiled widely and walked towards the airlock, beyond which his vessel was docked.
“Hey, man!” Lennon called after the courier. “If you ever want to visit again, just have UPSU contact me. They'll give you clearance. Just tell them my first name.”
“Your first name?” Clynt paused and peered back at the man, remembering suddenly that he was going to pose this query. He replied, “Isn’t it ‘Lennon’?”
“I’m glad you asked,” the station supervisor said, grinning. “The family name is ‘Lennon’. But my first name is ‘John’.”
