An Android Awoke (on Moon!) Chapter Seven

Episode Seven – Stow Away

Previously in the series: Selina lands in her hometown on Moon but before she gets home, she sees LEX. LEX gains entry to a spaceship in the Bohr City spaceport and is spotted by Selina. 

The year 1420 ACE would go down in history as the first time a machine showed emotion. Those who are involved in creating history generally do have a premonition that they are part of something that is (or will be) critical in human history. But in this story of how machines became human, Selina and LEX-42 did not have any idea what their future held, at least at that time.

1420 ACE translates to 3440 CE. The “Common Era” ended with COVID-19. 2021 was retroactively renumbered Year 1 After Covid Era, and humanity embarked upon Earth v2.0 – living greener, being more eco-conscious, and acting kinder unto one another. To avoid messing up digital systems with excessive dots and zeroes, people shortened the syllables of Earth v2.0 and started calling our planet Eartoo – a sign of the times after touch technology had pervaded humanity. The lingua franca was a rich soup, in which portmanteaus and syllabic abbreviations floated and evolved, especially due to the stark rise of a Marvelous pop-culture phenomenon.

Just as Shakespeare had persisted in popularity – in various forms of art, unconstrained by copyrights – so had Marvel’s Combined Universe. The explosion in ways and methods of creative expression had necessitated the updated name. One of the earliest installments has portrayed an artificial intelligence as evil – rather, as the villain of a story – but LEX did not know that. He climbed upwards inside the spaceship standing upright on the launchpad. He had a vague idea that he would be able to gain access to the cargo holds, and act ahead from there.

Snaking his way up the ship, he reached the midsection cargo hold modules, which were full of instrument panels and stowed sundries, and started scanning the modules visually, one by one.

Inside the port, Selina was unable to prove to the launchpad staff that there was someone out there. Their sensors showed zero heat signatures of life forms crossing the signal field around the launchpad. Undeterred, she headed back to the air cushion lift tube and started floating up to her ship’s flight deck. About halfway up the minute-long ride, she caught a glint of reflected sunlight coming off one of the duct panels. She knew what she had seen from the train station. That silver person had been hopping around her ship, and that made her a little more anxious.

Was someone trying to sabotage her because she was looking into whatever it was that was going on with Neer on Mars? She settled into her flight deck and began a full diagnostic scan.

LEX-42, meanwhile, had almost reached the end of the cargo modules, and was beginning to feel something approaching humananaxiety when his mind was delighted to spot an android storage bay. He opened the housings around one of the android’s legs and quickly carried it out.

His arms told him that even though the android was a slightly different model, it weighed almost precisely the same as himself. He did not have the word “luck” in his vocabulary but he did begin to understand that concept, too. Sometimes when you needed something, some chances created by some random spiral of events independent of your control caused the right kind of chaos. He carried the android to one of the joints where the open support legs of the ship joined it and looked out and down to see if the coast was clear. Without any regret, he dropped the body out of the ship. In space, no one can hear the metal body of an android hit the tarmac of a lunar launchpad. Lex took the position of the newly ejected android and waited for the launch.

Several stages of the rocket above him, Selina was waiting for the critical systems check to finish. It was green across the board, so she initiated an auxiliary parameters check as well, just to ease her mind. Her mind’s eye knew she had seen a person around her ship, but the electronics did nothing to confirm her suspicion. She was disappointed, mainly because she knew the lunar ground crew would have quite a few jolly remarks ready for her when she returned through the spaceport. She used the minute-long, silent air cushion ride back into the terminal to brace herself mentally for their good-natured ribbing, emerging at the end with a smile. As expected, the sparse lunar crew took full advantage of her momentary lapse in reason. They had known her since she had taken her first steps into interplanetary space, and there were way more than just a few internal jox and anecdotes that they could refer to for the express purpose of making fun of her mischievous nature. Her prakjox were quite legendary.

“Look out the window, Sel, I think someone let the dogs out again!” one of them guffawed at her.

She roared with laughter at the memory. As a child, she had started earning extra pocket money by walking dogs in Bohr City. On one fateful day, something spooked them while she was in one of the areas near the spaceport, and they all bounded off the lunar surface in various directions.

Hilarious as it was, it was a major task to wait for the lighter dogs to return to the lunar surface, scattered over the better part of a square kilometer. She thanked the stars that none of them landed on sensitive equipment or suffered any physical damage – but the owners were furious!

Spaceflight had to be suspended while humans ventured out on the canine retrieval mission, because no droids had been trained – or indeed had the capability – to collect dogs in different stages of distress from the rocky, blistered surface of the moon. Some of them were in shallow craters, but the extra power provided by the Moon-developed exoskeletons of Mooninites allowed them to descend into the craters and throw the dogs to other rescuers. What a day!

That incident had set her on the path to fame, and the more she progressed in the spaceflight group, the more chances she got to pull people’s legs. When the quite sober event in which she was formally inducted into the lunar space squad was over, she emptied a full barrel of orange flavored electrolyte solution over the heads of her instructors, much to their bewilderment. Her ‘research’ into centuries-old celebrations of Earthers had yielded that little nugget of inspiration.

Touching Home Base

All of the lunar space squad (and most – if not all – of the earth space squad) was well aware of her penchant for kidding around even about serious stuff, but they also appreciated her cool head when it came to dealing with unexpected problems. Many people, Mooninite as well as Earther, believed that her parents had invested in genetic crisping before giving birth to her. She knew about those rumors and had asked her parents about it, but they insisted that she was all-natural Mooninite. They had fallen in love during one of her mother’s leisure trips to Moon, and stayed together ever since, dividing their time between Earth and Moon until she was born.

Since her birth, the family of three had settled permanently in Bohr City. Her father took care of logistics at one of the ore processing plants, while her mother taught children attending high school. Selina’s thoughts wandered while she laughed along with the ground crew about her supposed spotting of a person on the launchpad, and she decided to ignore her first instincts.

Perhaps she had seen a human-shaped droid doing routine maintenance and gotten worked up because of the paranoia surrounding Neer, she convinced herself. Back at the bubble station, she looked out again at her ship, now almost ready to go back into space. She made a call.

“Hi, Chief, how are ya! Yeah, I am going to the City to check in with Maw and Pa, it should not take more than a few hours. That all right? There is no serious situation scheduled for my flight, right? I wanted to get back to Earth soon, but now that I am here, I want to talk to them, too. Yes? You will handle E squad if they start getting fussy, won’t ya? Thanks so much, as always!”

It was good to be on good terms with your boss. It certainly did not hurt that the Moon squad chief was an old friend of her father’s as well. Sometimes, friendship trumps family when it comes to support. Selina had support from all quarters on Moon, but Earth was a tricky matter.

She bounced into the bubble at the train station with glee, joining a few familiar faces from the ground crew who had just finished getting her ship ready for the trip back to the heavier of the two heavenly bodies locked together in perpetual celestial motion. The trip was short and sweet.

Bohr City had very clear demarcations between hazardous and non-haz sections. She waved goodbye to the people getting off in the haz area – mainly to stow away equipment that did not belong in the residential non-haz area. The rest of them, about half a dozen Mooninites, disembarked cheerily in the non-haz and bid adieu. She headed towards her mother’s school. 

“Sel!” Parica was overjoyed to see her daughter in person, having only seen her on vid comms for over two years, since Selina had taken off from Moon to Earth after being certified as solo captain. Space exploration involved a lot of solo time, so people who could do it alone were given adoration as well as adulation from their fellow humans. Selina coped with it quite easily.

The entire class of children wanted to jive with Selina, so she put her wrist comms on broadcast and each and every child got a digital memory with her. While they chattered excitedly among themselves about the welcome intrusion, Sel and Parica embraced and vid commed her father.

“Hi Pa! Look who I’m with!” She turned her wrist and Parica saw her husband, Dalmour, clad from head to foot in an anti hazmat suit. He had answered the call assuming Selina would be back in space, given her ship’s short turnaround time, and he was elated to see both of them.

“Get back to Biggun you had to, did you not, young ‘un?” Biggun was Mooninite slang for Earth.

“Hey, the junk waiting to get refurbished can wait a little while longer, nobody’s losing pressure over them for an hour or two. I just wanted to see you folk bodily before heading back down.”

“Good to see you it always is, Sel! Time you have? Will you be there when I return?”

“How long will you take?”

Dalmour glanced at the head-up display in his face visor; there was quite a bit of work to be done. Even though ore processing was automatic, his team had to be on site to monitor and respond to any unpredictable events. After all, despite so much progress in science and technology, predicting the future was still out of humanity’s skill set at the moment. Foresight and predictions eluded the human mind. Perhaps it was an evolutionary block waiting to crumble, biologically speaking. Until that happy turn of genetic strands, humans had to guess.

“About half a sol.”

Selina did a quick assessment of how long she could stretch her favor with Moon squad chief. It might become too much if Earth squad started moaning about schedules & entry-exit windows.

“Pa, I’ll hug you when I get back. Here’s an extra one to Maw, you can take it off of her when you come home. I’ll vis you from the mid-way bio modules; you’ll like seeing how much Neer’s forest has grown even though he has not been around them. Oh that reminds me, is your friend still running our botany lab? I wanted to pick up something for Neer from his old hab module.”

Dalmour grinned. His daughter was so unlike her mother – a fast and furious talker, not suited to teaching little children like her mother. Perhaps that was why she had outpaced everyone in her class. Absorbing knowledge at a breakneck pace was Selina’s superpower, as the comics put it.

“Works there he does, young ‘un, want me to call ahead and let him know to expect you, should I?”

“Naah, that’s alright, I’ll be passing the lab on my way back, will be in and out of there in a flash.”

Ending the call, they decided to give the kids an early break – a decision met with sheer cheer.

Parica and Selina said their goodbyes and take cares and stay safes at the door of their home.

Selina had spent most of her life since her teens away from home, in various educational institutions that helped her attain the requirements and fulfill the prerequisites of space flight. She was understandably unattached to material possessions like childhood toys & such kitsch.

Parica knew better than to ask her to stay any longer to spend quality time with her daughter, but Selina had told her about Neer’s more than usually unusual behavior and Hielsa’s dilemma while they walked back from Parica’s school to their perspex-encased lunar residential complex.

Emotions were given their due importance, but in balance with the time it took to express them.

This was even truer for habitual spacefarers, since time & gravity were always in constant flow.

Selina turned around at the corner, waved, and blew her mother a kiss. Parica was waiting for her signature style of waving a last time before vanishing from line of sight but the kiss was new!

Selina walked on smiling ear to ear towards the lunar botanical garden where Neer had worked.