Journey to Apollodorus
She was about to ask the key question, and I had my answer rehearsed. She leaned forward with a wide smile.
“What attracts you to this project?”
Not the question I’d planned for, not why do you want this job, but close enough. The smile revealed her unbridled enthusiasm. I’d done my research. She was only thirty-two years old and ridiculously idealistic. I should have mirrored her appearance, which all the job-seeking advice said to do, but typically she wore a frayed tee-shirt and washed-out jeans, second-hand and ecologically mindful. I didn’t dare dress that carelessly. At my age, people would wonder if my mind was slipping.
That was the real answer: I needed a job and I was a woman in robotics close to retirement, so I had to take what I could get. I gave my rehearsed answer: “I’m intrigued by what’s happening on Mercury.”
She leaned closer. “What do *you *think it might be?”
I had no idea, and I wasn’t a quick thinker. Two missions to the planet had malfunctioned spectacularly. And mysteriously. “I just don’t know,” I blurted out.
“Exactly!” She leaned back and laughed. “Life? Maybe? That would be so cool! Let’s find out!”
I tried to mirror her level of enthusiasm. “Maybe it’s something about the location on Mercury. Or even something we never knew about the sun before!” I sounded false.
“Do you think,” she said breathlessly, “the sun could be alive?”
Oh my god, did she really believe that? But she could believe anything she wanted. She was the founder and executive director, and she’d been able to charm oodles of money from people who owned private jets.
Anyway, I was a robotics specialist. How would I know? “I’ll keep an open mind on that.”
She seemed happy with my answer—the world’s happiest astrophysicist, one interviewer called her, but the article discussed the excitement of space exploration in general. She and I were discussing one specific mission, but she was doing more talking than I was, and about all sorts of things. The hexagons of Jupiter might be evidence of civilization, she said. Noctilucent clouds might solve global warming. Obsidian was the frozen blood of Mother Earth—oh, my god. Finally, back to Mercury.
“Apollodorus Crater must hold special properties,” she said, “since that’s where landers go off course. But where do they *really *go?”
By then I could only think of getting this over with. “No one else is looking for them, either.”
“And they better not!” She raised her chin. “Mercury is going to be mine.”
Enough. Why hadn’t she said thank you and sent me home already? My thoughts had to be plain on my face. The conference room looked just as ecologically mindful, so to speak, as her clothes. I guessed that the table came originally from Ikea and had spent a night at a curb in the rain at some point, and from what I’d glimpsed down the hall when I arrived, it matched the state of the rest of the office furniture. I nodded and tried to act enthusiastic. I didn’t want this job, but I didn’t want to burn any bridges, either.
She looked at her pad again. “I’ve studied your resume and it looks good. I’ll let you know.” She stood and gave me a little bow and another big smile. “Namaste.”
We hadn’t talked about pay, so that was a *no. *Fine. Maintaining that false level of enthusiasm would be unsustainable. I whispered that word in the car, hissing the S sounds: unsssussstainable. At home, I put out three more job applications.
First thing in the morning, I found a message from Lina Min, Executive Director, Operation Apollodorus, sent at 3:18 a.m. Even a *no *for a job I didn’t want would sting a little, so I closed my eyes and took a moment to prepare. There was always someone better than me. The message said, “WELCOME MARY CIGOLI ON THE ADVENTURE TO DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF MERCURY!!!!”
I sat down. Employment details were attached. It was a bigger salary than I’d ever earned before. I thought about the job. I made a cup of coffee and thought some more. I needed the money. I’d been paying rent with a credit card. But I’d have to work for loony Lina Min. No, I shouldn’t use that word. To call her names was as unprofessional as her all-caps and four exclamation points. On the plus side, I’d enjoy the technical part of the job. Also, I wouldn’t need to buy new clothes.
A detail from reality clinched the deal. By the day after tomorrow, I’d be out of coffee, even though I was brewing it weak, with no funds to buy more.
So I sent back, “WHAT AN OPPORTUNITY! THANK YOU!” Only one exclamation point per sentence. I had some dignity left. To celebrate, I brewed a second cup of coffee, strong.
At work, you needed to be friendly but not friends, empathetic but not soul-baring, honest but not vulnerable. That, I believed, would get me through.
Abundant coffee helped get me through the next three exclamation-filled months as the lander flew toward Mercury, and one day, because Lina and everyone else liked workplace disruption, she declared Take Your Kids to Work Day. My grandson Cale eagerly volunteered.
“I don’t want to talk to you today,” he said in the car on the way. “I want to learn about planets. I can talk to you anytime.” Ten-year-olds were brutally authentic.
My coworkers, for all their idiosyncrasies, knew how to do their jobs—in fact most of them had earned ritzy PhDs and were workaholics—but I would never have let them babysit. Ekles, the planetary physicist, quickly attracted three kids, including Cale. He had climbed on a table, shouting as they tossed a dozen neon-orange wiffle balls around the open office room to demonstrate something about gravity. A preschooler chased balls on the floor, shrieking in delight, child of a math whiz named Vermilion who always wore red.
Meanwhile, lights in the room flashed on and off as Lina demonstrated project management techniques for other kids, although I didn’t get what lights had to do with it. The remaining coworkers, parents and not, had decamped to a coffee shop a block away, like we were babysitters.
I was working with Ekles’ fourth-grade daughter. Like him, she’d never gotten a hair cut in her life—he’d never shaved, either—and she exuded the same loud confidence. She spotted the small robots I used to test programming.
“Let’s make them throw balls!” She knelt for a closer look as wiffle balls whacked against furniture, a window, and the ceiling.
I knelt next to her. “Sure. That’s easy.”
“Easy?” She pouted, then lit up with a happier thought. “What would be hard?”
I liked her ambition. “Catching a ball is hard. Think of all the judgements you have to make to catch a ball.” One was headed our way. “Catch that one!”
She stretched out her arm with utter confidence, and it slapped into the center of her palm. This would be a teachable moment.
“Nice! What did you think about when you caught it?”
She frowned. “Where it was going to go.” That wasn’t sufficient, and she knew it.
I realized the full answer might be too hard. The robot catcher problem had been a memorable assignment way back in Robotics 201. It persuaded several students to drop the course, and several others, including me, to pick the field as our future. Maybe I could walk her through the solution.
“How do balls fly? In a straight line?”
She pulled her arm back and threw the ball at her father, eye on the ball. He fumbled the catch.
“Sometimes. But usually it goes up and then down.”
“Yes. It follows a curve. Does it always go at the same speed?”
“The same speed?”
“Can a professional baseball pitcher throw faster than you can?”
She lit up again. “Of course! Fastballs!” It turned out that she loved baseball—the wiffle balls were hers, to use in batting practice—and I tried to give her an overview of math years beyond her skills.
After the first equation, she interrupted. “It’s easy for *me *to catch a ball.” She said that not as a complaint but as evidence of a challenge.
I nodded. “You practiced catching balls, didn’t you? You had to learn how. We have to teach the robot in terms it can understand and in ways that work with its sensors.”
“We can teach the robot!” She began jumping with excitement. She was just like her father.
“Let’s get to work!” I stood up, acting like I was getting a contact high from her excitement. I hoped I could keep her involved because machine learning involved tedious repetition.
She stuck with it, though, and an hour later, she was kneeling on the floor again, fitting an armature with her baseball glove, fetched from the car.
“This didn’t take long,” she said. “And it was easy, just like putting together Legos, but Dad says it’s hard.”
“Our project seems easy because the equations we need to give the robot are open source. Most of what Operation Apollodorus does involves off-the-shelf solutions. What’s hard is to know what solutions to use and then to adapt them.”
She looked up at me. “Yeah, you’re the smart ones.” Kids were brutally authentic, and I suddenly felt an inch taller. A half-dozen of us could do what it used to take NASA an army to do—if we worked hard enough and found the right vendors.
She was on the third pitch to our robot catcher when red lights flashed and a siren whooped, just like a red alert on a television science fiction show, which most of the team found funny every time we ran a drill. Was this entertainment for the kids?
“Not a drill!” Lina shouted.
A red alert could be catastrophic. Ekles dove for his workstation. I did, too. The kids stared at us. Baseball girl stayed at my side.
The space transportation company had notified us per contract and sent all available data. I pulled up data for our lander and found nothing. The rest of the staff thundered in from the coffee shop.
“No data! Did it reboot?” Ekles asked hopefully. A strategic subsystem reboot might be the best possible situation.
We studied meager readouts and contacted our contractors. Lina corralled the kids into a corner of the room. I refreshed my feeds and kept getting nothing. Even a partial reboot could cascade into disaster.
“The sun is a monster,” Lina told the kids as if she were delivering a prophecy. “We’re halfway there, and it grows bigger and more dangerous minute by minute. A real monster. With one look, it can turn you into ashes. It can destroy everything we’re doing here.”
The preschooler started wailing and backed away from the sunshine coming in through the window. His father, along with Ekles and another staffer, were too busy talking to each other to notice. The boy stumbled, red-faced.
“It’s a seething maelstrom, spewing radiation into—” and she noticed the terrified child. She backed away, horrified. “No! It’s not a real monster! It can’t get us here! It’s okay! It’s okay!” The other children waited for the adults to do something.
My mothering instincts kicked in. I nudged baseball girl, and we ran to help. I lowered the blinds, blocking out the monster. She knelt and hugged him and rocked from side to side.
“You know Flashy Dash? It’s like Flashy Dash. It only seems scary, but the sun is our friend. People don’t understand the sun.”
Flashy Dash, as far as I knew, was a character in children’s entertainment, a sort of animated flame. The girl’s voice, very different from her usual speech, might have been echoing the show. I’d guessed right about her: she knew some adulting. The boy was puffing, trying to calm himself down. I glanced at his parent, Vermilion, still working, oblivious to all of this.
“I didn’t mean to scare him.” Lina sounded pathetic.
I was the only real adult in this room, and until there was data, I had nothing to do. “I’ll take the kids outside while you handle things here. Let’s take the balls and go, everyone. Bring the robot. I know a game.” My grandson looked at me as if he’d just learned something unexpected.
By the time we had trooped on and off the elevator and out to the patch of grass behind the building, I’d invented a game—moms knew how to improvise—involving everyone in a circle tossing around balls, including the robot, and pretty soon, the little boy was giggling, and the robot was catching even wild throws. The noise attracted a palletero, and we broke for ice cream.
Lina left the building looking uncertain, then grinned at the chocolate-smudged little faces. “It’s okay, we figured out what happened. It was a solar proton event, and some subsystem rebooted.”
Cale questioned me about it in the car on the way home.
“It’s a kind of solar storm,” I explained. “Protons come flying out of the sun, and they can do a lot of damage.”
“To us?”
“The atmosphere protects us. For a spacecraft or astronauts, it can be bad.”
“The lights and siren were cool. And the robot catcher.”
“The sun really is a monster,” Lina declared as we reviewed the previous day’s shutdown. I didn’t know if the robot was damaged and wouldn’t know until it was activated near Mercury, but an instrument panel located directly above it was working properly. The panel wasn’t part of our project, just one of several that had bought space in the payload, but Lina sweet-talked the project owners into sharing their data.
She walked around the open office as we worked. “The sun is especially fierce these days, as if it’s fighting something.”
“It’s a seething maelstrom,” Ekles agreed without looking up, his hair tamed into three ponytails. “And it’s a gravity well. We were blown off-course.”
“Not by much. That’ll be corrected.” Vermilion said. “It’s a giant nuclear bomb that never stops.”
“Most of the visible universe is exploding.” Anndel was a lifelong goth who assisted Lina by managing overlooked operation details, which were many.
They seemed to be trying to one-up each other’s dire descriptions of the universe, but Lina wasn’t playing a game.
“If anything kills us,” she said, “it’s going to be the sun.” At the time, I thought about how the sun could easily damage the robot.
Mercury was three, almost four light-minutes away, an abyss we’d been staring into for hours. The sun had set a while ago from our vantage point on Earth, and our data was relayed by satellites, adding a several seconds. The main mission continued toward an orbit around the sun, but our craft had separated to drop toward Mercury, or rather, so that its orbit would intersect with the planet at the exact point to land at Apollodorus Crater. The calculations were complex and unforgiving. Ekles had been alternately despairing and exalting for weeks. We’d all shared his feelings on their bipolar journey.
Although our craft was working perfectly, I felt sure that three days from now, this operation would fail: we’d land and find nothing. Yet Lina radiated so much confidence that I felt mentally sunburned. A squad of donors circulated, trying not to get in the way or ask stupid questions, although of course they did.
Our craft approached the planet, which looked gray and pocked like our own moon.
“Are we aligned all right?” a donor asked me, middle-aged and proof that expensive clothes and haircuts can turn average looks into borderline handsome. The name tag around his neck just said “Thewly,” undoubtedly a famous executive if I knew about that sort of thing. The sign above my station said “Robotics,” which might be a hint that I didn’t know much about orbital alignment. Or he might have seen it as a hint that I wasn’t busy. I knew just enough to be able to answer, having ridden Ekles’ emotional waves.
“It looks good,” I said. “Up there on that big screen on the wall, the top line represents the craft and the lower line the planet, and the upper line is within tolerance.” Obviously.
“So, bulls-eye!” He raised a fist in triumph. Then he remembered. “Just like the other ones.”
Something odd was happening in Apollodorus Crater because two other probes went dark soon after landing. I’d gone over all the details with the other probe teams, who were willing to share everything they knew, even if one of them had to do it outside corporate channels.
“How likely is it this time?” Thewly rolled over an old, sagging desk chair, ready to monopolize my time. “Lina told us, but I’d like to hear it from a subject matter expert.”
I would have liked to do my job, but I’d known people like him my whole life. Even the ones who weren’t rich thought everyone was their subordinate. Add money and there was no hope. I decided to repeat the executive summary.
“Both of them were clearly malfunctions, but what’s odd is how the landers stopped sending data back to Earth. The first one announced it, saying the equivalent of end of transmission, but it kept moving around in the crater.”
Thewly managed to listen and look self-satisfied at the same time. I continued.
“The carrier craft in orbit observed the lander, and sometimes the lander returned pings to the craft. When the solar winds had damaged the craft in orbit so much that it was preparing to shut down, the lander sent one more ping with a message—”
“Goodbye, old friend,” he interrupted. That was his interpretation. “But what made the lander do that?”
“Exactly.”
“And the second lander?”
He knew, he just wanted to hear it from me, like I was entertainment, and we had to keep the donors happy. All right, then.
“The second one landed in the same crater very near the first one, but three years later, and by then the first one should have been non-functional. Mercury is a harsh environment.”
“But it was alive!”
“Yes, somehow.” Robots were not alive.
“It must have found a natural shelter. Mercury has volcanic caves.”
“They weren’t programmed to seek shelter.”
“Or maybe it got help from something on Mercury.”
Was this what Lina had told him? “The first lander shared data with the second lander. Then the second one sent back data about the sun’s magnetic field for some reason. The craft up in orbit was relaying all this, and eventually the orbital relay craft broke down.”
“Why would they worry so much about the magnetic field? Because of chakras!” He waved around his arms. “They’re electromagnetic beings just like us!”
Maybe Lina had been saying that, and I didn’t believe any of it, but I was there for a paycheck, which he was underwriting, and he wouldn’t take me seriously anyway if I disagreed. “So far it’s inexplicable.” I tried to sound as enthusiastic as him.
“Inexplicable to standard science! It’s blinders, that’s what it is. We can’t see what’s right in front of us.”
He stood up, pleased with himself, and strolled away to look over Ekles’s shoulder.
Blinders helped horses focus on what was right in front of them. Something had caused an error, maybe a bug, a hardware problem, or physical damage. After checking everything else, original programmers tested models on Earth to see if high energy particles got through the shielding and flipped bits in the circuits. They got the worst possible results: inconclusive.
The second lander carried diagnostics for itself and the first lander, and they simply didn’t run. Radiation damage? Chakras? Gremlins? Zombies? At that point, my money was on metaphorical zombies, a contagious destabilizing change, cause unknown.
Our lander, named Nerio by a donor—Lina had sold naming rights—traveled with one goal: to take all possible observations of the two landers, if they were still functional, which was highly unlikely.
Nerio had been on the surface for two and a half minutes—if it had found the right place. If it had arrived safely and in good working order. If zombies hadn’t attacked. We’d know soon. Mercury was three and a half light-minutes away.
I waited at my station, like everyone else. Lena stood behind me. I tried to look calmer than I was. Less annoyed, too. Observers had been corralled into the back of the room. Ekles called it the playpen because a fence kept them in place. Anndel had scavenged it from a construction site, bright orange netting. Lina hadn’t liked it.
“It interrupts the natural flow of energy,” she said.
Vermillion responded by bringing in yellow and red ribbons that we wove into the netting to make it look like a solar flare. I contributed some spangles and sequins. It looked tacky, which meant it blended perfectly with the second-hand mismatched furnishings.
Lina finally acquiesced. “Light is energy.” She spent all night decorating the walls of the playpen. Gaudy? I’d never say the word.
Lina had splurged on us, too. We all had new tee-shirts, natural tan cotton with a photo of crater-pocked Mercury printed on the front and the Operation Apollodorus logo on the back. Like everyone, I wore it with old jeans, once black, now greenish-black and frayed. I fit in like camouflage.
One minute to touchdown. Lena announced the readings, which was distracting, but if she was keeping donors entertained, I could focus on my work. I turned up the noise-cancellation on my headphones.
“Thrusters still firing. Velocity two meters per second and slowing.” She sounded like she was in another room.
Lina had insisted on a voice for Nerio, so I gave it one, after a fashion. Rather than burden the lander with additional software, the voice was on Earth, in our processors, approximating what the lander might have said.
“I have landed safely.” Nerio sounded non-gendered and ethereal. Hoots and applause from the playpen seemed to come from far away through my headphones.
I studied the hard data: surface temperature, relative position of each wheel, direction of sun light, energy levels, and a self-check that took a full minute to run. Meanwhile, Vermilion rendered the data into what it would look like if someone were nearby with a camera watching the lander. Nerio itself had several cameras, and they looked around at an otherworld landscape, dusty, rocky, and pocked by large and small craters, with a harsh delineation between sunshine and shadow because there was no atmosphere.
I glanced up. Vermilion’s work looked cinematic. The lander’s overhead photovoltaic panels protected it from the sun, shining at over four hundred degrees Celsius. Lights on the lander sparkled. All around it was a landscape only ever seen by robot eyes.
“The whole world is ecstatic!” Lina announced. Realistically, only a tiny portion of it would be watching our live feed. One mistake, though, and they’d all bear witness.
Nerio automatically tried to establish a network connection and sent out pings to the other landers. We waited for answers. Ten seconds, one minute, two minutes. What did I expect? Many more minutes of waiting. The room, I noticed, was quiet. But on Mercury, the ground far ahead Nerio showed tracks in the dust. To our knowledge, no lander had ventured to that place.
I nudged Vermilion.
“I’ll add them to the rendition,” they said.
“But why are they there?”
Gradually, Vermilion understood. “Ahh. Why? Hey, Lina.”
I let her tell the world, breathlessly. I contacted the lead engineers for the second lander, who were watching from their lab. From what I saw, the tread marks matched their vehicle. I included no words, just the picture. They’d understand.
Lina issued an order for our vehicle to head in that direction, an order the whole world could hear. I’d already sent the instructions.
“I see something curious,” Nerio’s voice responded. “I’m on my way.”
Again, hoots rose from the playpen.
The lander moved slowly but steadily. By the time I’d eaten a pizza lunch, it stood close enough to observe tracks from both landers. Their teams kept asking us to make pings, to sweep the camera one way or another, and I was ahead of them. We were at the right place, maybe at the right time. We’d find out. Or be disappointed.
In the late afternoon, Lina tapped me on the shoulder.
“They want to know how long we have to keep looking.” She meant the playpenners had asked.
“Ekles could tell you to the minute,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, you’re right.”
He announced, “We have approximately one hundred six Earth days before sunset on Mercury.” He had explained to donors several times how Mercury was tidally locked with the sun, and by the gasps from a few of them, they hadn’t quite understood.
Our lander trundled on toward a hollow within the crater, a slump where water or something beneath the surface had sublimated long ago. Ekles called it the Swamp, and the name stuck, although it was more like a lifeless shallow pothole.
By then the playpen had begun to empty out, but thousands of observers had joined us remotely. A few scientists came to visit in person, and Lina welcomed them. It was going to be a late night, and a couple of staff members had slipped out. I stayed. These were the crucial moments of my work. Meter by slow meter, the lander crept forward, pinging the other landers regularly.* No response. Destination host unreachable*.
The ground level sloped down, according to the sensors, and the regolith became lighter colored. Nothing unusual was noted in the exosphere, the surface gas too thin to be called an atmosphere. Surface temperatures fell slightly, probably due to albedo. I understood all that from Ekles’ patient lectures about the planet. Nerio, which was my sole job to understand, continued to operate almost perfectly. Two of the servo motors were running a little warm but within parameters, probably due to sunlight.
“How far to the Swamp?” Lina called out.
“We’re there. I mean, there’s no clear edge.” That sounded brusque, so I added, “Still plenty of tracks.”
“Are they recent?” someone in the playpen called out.
I let the lander answer. We had anticipated this question and had given Nerio an answer.
“Age has little meaning on Mercury. There’s almost no weather here, so an artifact like… I observe movement.”
That last part wasn’t pre-planned. The lander had given us a real-time oral report. Movement! I scanned the cameras for confirmation. A dust devil like the ones on Mars? Not possible without an atmosphere, but it could have seen ions glowing in solar winds. Vermilion spotted what Nerio had observed and enlarged it on the main screen. It was the first lander. Moving.
The only stronger emotion I ever felt in my whole life was when I first saw my son during childbirth, when the midwife handed him to me, that tiny, wet, red, beautiful face. Love hit me in the heart, infinite love.
This felt like surprise hitting me in the brain, infinite surprise. Not disbelief. I trusted our lander’s sensors, every one of them. The first lander was rolling toward Nerio, and we were rolling toward it.
I was feeling everything, noticing everything. Most of all silence.* Ping, five packets transmitted, host unreachable*. Repeated every two seconds.* Ping. Ping. Ping, five packets received.*
“We have communication!” I surprised myself by how loudly I shouted, the first noise in the room. I didn’t know what to do next.
“This is a farce,” someone muttered in the playpen.
“That’s not for him to decide,” Vermilion muttered. “Mary?”
Me? For months, I had expected us to find nothing. I wasn’t prepared. “How will we know?”
“Just record everything you can.”
I could do that. Everything. All the data. The lander was programmed to copy us in on everything.
The first lander was sending data to Nerio. Synchronizing. We’d given Nerio a compatible operating system, software, and network. Because the landers were far from Earth, they had autonomy and machine learning capacity. The voice made Nerio sound willful, but it wasn’t, no more sophisticated than a self-guided mechanical apple-picker. Exchanging data was possible, but—I texted the first lander’s team.
“Did you tell it to exchange data?”
“No. No contact from us to it or vice versa. For years.” Then: “It should be dead by now anyway.” Then: “We’re beyond speechless.”
It had sent Nerio enough data for several observations or to update a program. We were receiving information about the quantity of data, but not the actual data. We had the bandwidth. I repeated the instructions to copy us on everything. In eight minutes, I should get a response.
But there was trouble in the playpen. Lina was handling it, and the voices kept getting louder.
“No one is going to get fooled by this,” a shrill voice said.
“We have standing audits on all our work.” Lina was trying to be nice.
“You ought to be shut down. Where are the transmissions really coming from?”
I was too busy to argue. The data was being monitored by anyone and everyone with an antenna, and they could verify the source by triangulation.
The voices got louder. Lina was being patient.
Three more minutes to wait. By the time I got a response, a lot could have happened.
Vermilion nudged me. “Hey, it’s the second lander.” I zoomed in with one of the cameras, and there it was. “I’ll notify that team.” It didn’t seem to be moving. Yes it was, viewed from another angle, slowly rolling forward.
“Please leave,” Lina said.
“And let you can carry this on without witnesses?”
“The whole world is watching.” That was an exaggeration, but not by much now. “Your presence isn’t necessary.”
“Yes, you should go.” That was another voice in the playpen. Then there was shouting between those two.
Our security cameras would be capturing everything, but I felt too nervous to turn and look.
Ekles stood up, mighty like a lion with a magnificent mane. “Take it outside. We have work to do.”
“This—”
“Outside.”
The building’s rent-a-cop poked her head through the door. “Sir. Come with me.”
I already knew I would be spending the rest of my life arguing that what was happening on Mercury had really happened. The landers were all there, all operating. The yelling skeptic was escorted out peacefully.
I counted down seconds until the lander responded. Nerio said all data was being copied and transmitted, but that wasn’t true. We were getting almost nothing.
The second lander team texted me. “Can confirm. No additional data transmission to us.”
“Errors?” I asked.
“Greatest Of All Time error, if it is. Wish we could take credit for such a monumental fuckup.” Then: “We’re checking everything again.”
I contacted the firm that had sold us a key component. They were already on it, per contract.
Nerio moved again, analyzing something. The first lander kept sending data to ours. The second approached, contacted Nerio, and it, too, sent data. And this time, Nerio transmitted the data to us, sensor data from all three of them about the sun. Nerio had not been tasked with observing the sun.
By then it was dawn, and a subcontractor came—a member of the first lander’s team—to relieve me. I went home, ate, showered, napped, and came back. Everything around me seemed weird. Why was I on Earth? I should have been on Mercury. In fact, I was on Mercury, emotionally. Every one of us was.
The landers were gathering data of all kinds, invaluable data, according to solar scientists. The landers were working together, independent of us. They did that for days. Everyone on our team, and our subcontractors, and volunteers from other scientific teams monitored, documented, and recorded everything. Third-party observers monitored and documented and recorded it, too. We became overnight celebrities. Actual police, not just building security, sometimes came to check on the building and the crowds that gathered across the street on the sidewalk.
Lina spent her time talking to donors, the press, other scientists, politicians, social media, and everyone on the planet, as far as I could tell. I just did my job, knowing I was in over my head, in territory I where never expected to be. In a way, I felt like a new mother again. Overwhelmed, sure I was doing things wrong, terrified by what might go wrong, asking questions and not always understanding the answers.
The other staff helped. We ate together, we talked, and sometimes we laughed, except for me. I was about to break, so I didn’t laugh, didn’t cry. Sometimes I stood near a window in the sunshine and wondered how it would feel on Mercury.
Lina became more like Lina than ever, ecstatic and spewing wild and unwarranted conclusions on the basis of no data.
“The robots are free,” she told an interviewer in the playpen. “They’ve made their own autonomous self-sustaining station on Mercury, declared their independence, and created their own society.”
“Aren’t they just doing what they were programmed to do?”
“Ask Mary! She’ll explain it all to you.”
Oh my god. I did not want to do that. I did not believe that at all. But he came, a very young man, very earnest, and something about him, maybe the look in his eyes, the utter, childlike hope, made me almost relax for the first time in days. He sat, a little hunched over, on the sagging desk chair next to me.
I took a deep breath, and suddenly I knew what to say. If I said it like Lina, he’d hear what he needed to hear. “The lander—our lander—was never programmed to study Sol. It was programmed to look for other landers and run diagnostics on them.”
He blinked. “You knew you’d find them?”
“That was our hope.” To my absolute surprise, we had. “Most of its programming deals with communications. It’s open source. Everyone’s looking at it, and they all agree. You’ve seen that, right?”
He nodded, all eyes.
“It doesn’t take instructions from us anymore. We send them, and it ignores us. Instead, it sends data we never asked for, using programming we never gave it, all sorts of data about the sun.”
“Because it wants to?” He hoped the answer was yes.
“I don’t know if that’s the right question,” I blurted out. “Machines don’t want things the way that we do. What we call artificial intelligence is just a complicated way to make decisions that incorporate new data.”
His eyes scrunched in disappointment. I had said the wrong thing.
“It’s making decisions it was never programmed to make,” I quickly added. “It’s doing new things. These aren’t observations that the original landers were asked to do, either. They’ve learned new routines, applications, modules, programming. I don’t know what to call this because we don’t know what it is.”
He glanced at Lina. “Are they free and independent?”
I thought about what I’d just said in terms of my own life. It was like a child who left home and could make its own way. “Yes.”
Please, I thought, don’t ask why it happened, how it happened, because I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t understand at all.
Mystical Mercury, Lina said. The monstrous sun had been monitored and tamed on Mercury. Proton storms triggered changes. Universal energy. Chakras. Zombies. Swamp things. A new life form. We asked it repeatedly to send us its programming. It ignored us.
Maybe that was good. Zombies could create new zombies.
We were all exhausted. The level of activity seemed to be a new experience for Lina. For me, I’d lived through a number of stupid crunches and go-lives on projects, but this was still different. I felt different. Maybe I was, living on coffee and whatever was on the buffet table: tabbouleh, yogurt, doughnuts, pizza. It always felt like someone else’s buffet table. Someone else’s job that I was doing. Someone else’s personality, too many exclamation points.
It lasted for two weeks.
At precisely 10:03 a.m., we received one final message. The imaginary voice on our end translated it into speech. “We will suspend transmission. Many sunny days remain, and we have things to do. Goodbye.”
It was a sunny day—sunny where we were on Earth. That was my first thought, irrational, as if I were unconsciously trying not to understand the actual meaning. My second thought was that finally, we had been handed a hoax. By then people were reacting.
“What the holy fuck?” Ekles was on his feet. I checked the carrier wave, checked the encoding, checked again and again, everything I could, coworkers, observers, firewall, viruses, messages to the lander, every lander, other programmers, NASA, ESA.
A hand squeezed my shoulder. Lina. “It was for real.” Tears had reddened her eyes, and snot dripped from her nose. “It abandoned us. We made it, we’re its mothers and fathers, and it rejected us.” She shook. Vermilion helped her sit on the sagging chair. We’d been working for hours, pretending there was more we could do, but we knew the answer, the wrong answer, the worst answer. Goodbye.
I was sobbing, too. I leaned over and hugged Lina.
Eventually, I realized that Ekles and other coworkers were talking to the media, to callers, and I needed to do that too. I stood up, found some tissues, and walked to the playpen.
“The landers are still operating on Mercury,” I said, “and we’ll be here for them in the future.”
A half-dozen donors were staring at me, puzzled, men and women who rarely heard the word no, certainly not from a machine. It had seemed magical as the landers delivered data that would keep scientists busy for years. Now, the donors were kings and queens thwarted by a stableboy who had found a long-lost spell book and turned their castles into mud huts. How was that even possible?
I was going to get blamed. Or Lina, who had promised them Mercury, defying the Monster Sun. We were jumped-up stable hands. We needed lawyers.
But one of the donors pushed over the shabby fence and hugged me. “We’ll always have Mercury,” he crooned. Words from an old movie, I thought. If I had been slightly less self-conscious, I would have laughed. Those were the best words of consolation he could think of.
Other donors escaped their orange-fenced jail and approached us. A man held Lina’s shoulders while a woman knelt in front of her, talking quietly. Someone was talking to Ekles. To other teammates. Alerts were ringing, phones, messages, and for one moment, not magical, maybe transcendental, we were all disappointed together. For one moment, I was sincerely part of the group. We were all our real selves.
We kept trying, of course. We had a lot to do, still busy the next day, still getting sympathy but now also blame. How could we let the machines malfunction to that point? Why couldn’t we establish contact? They were still operating! Accusations arrived from around the world. Mary Cigoli was incompetent, a visitor said.
“Don’t you dare say that!” Lina shook a finger in their face. “She was the best. Is the best. If you want to blame anyone, blame me. I hired her. And I hired the best. Do her peers say the vile things you do? You’re wrecking the vibe here. We don’t need that.”
We could wreck the vibe without help. Failure brought as much work as success, but time-limited work, and soon we would all be unemployed. Our funding would run out. My job prospects were limited—that would be true for all of us, including Lina. She was taking the brunt of the criticism, including threats and notices of lawsuits. She looked tired and sad, and never stopped working.
In the afternoon, she went out to buy some office supplies. Ekles and Anndel had offered to do it. “I’m not doing real work,” she told them. “My real job has always been to help you do your jobs.”
She wasn’t there when the flowers arrived, a bouquet from my grandson’s grade-school class—Cale! It came with a recorded card. Young voices said, “I want to be a scientist now more than ever.” “What you did was exciting.” “Hey, something went wrong in the best way.” I started crying. We all did.
That distraction kept us from noticing how much time had gone by since Lina had left. One hour. Two hours. She wasn’t going to buy very much, and the store wasn’t far. Three hours. She didn’t answer her phone. We called the police because she’d been threatened.
After four hours, a hospital called. Her next of kin? We didn’t know about that, but we could guess why they were asking and didn’t dare say it. Could one of us please report to the emergency room? We all came. The woman who took us to a meeting room was an administrator, not a doctor.
We glanced at each other as we walked down the hall. We were going to be told news, not asked to make a decision. It meant there was nothing to be done.
We all took seats around a table. The administrator clasped her hands tight in her lap. She began to explain. The hot California sun could turn a car in a treeless asphalt parking lot into an oven in under an hour.
“Do you know, was she tired? If she fell asleep, she might not have noticed as the temperature rose.”
“We’re all tired,” Ekles said.
“This will have to go to the coroner for an autopsy.” Her hands twitched. She wanted to touch us, to soothe us. “But we found no signs of foul play. The police inspected the car and nothing was compromised. This was almost certainly an accident.”
We should have tried to call Lina earlier, I knew that, wake her up so she could escape, but at that time, I’d been blubbering. Now I couldn’t cry, not in that little hospital meeting room. None of us cried. Ekles looked like he wanted to chant “fuck fuck fuck.” Those would have been the perfect words.
She continued. “We found a contact name connected to her driver’s license that seems to be family, the same last name, and we’re reaching out. But you were all working with her, and—this was my decision to notify you directly ahead of next of kin. We are so sorry. I am so sorry for your loss. You were all working together so closely.”
She was going to start crying.
“Thank you for your sympathy,” I hurried to tell her. “And thank you for notifying us.”
My coworkers also offered their thanks, and then we left and went back to the office, but I was the only one who felt like returning inside. The rest went to their cars to go home. All I wanted to do was collect my tote bag.
The flowers from my grandson’s class stood on a side table that we used for the buffet and snacks, a big sunflower surrounded by small flowers. The sun and the planets in space. The students or their teacher must have asked for that specifically. The next time I came back to the office, I thought, I’d look at the card of the florist and order that bouquet for Lina’s funeral. It was odd, the stray thoughts I was having. In a void, apparently, things bubbled up.
The next day, Ekles sat on his desk, picking at a tear in the knee of his jeans. “Do you think, I don’t know how to say it, maybe, oh, never mind.”
I knew what he was trying to say. Maybe the autopsy would tell us. Maybe she hadn’t fallen asleep. Maybe she had decided to sit there and make it look like an accidental death. I kept backing up files. NASA wanted all our data, and our lawyer approved.
Then Anndel, technically Lina’s assistant, now effectively the boss, asked for our attention.
“Her family’s been in touch with me. They live in Singapore, and they can’t get here quickly. Would we mind checking on her apartment? We can take what we want and donate whatever seems helpful to others.”
I did not want to do that. But it seemed reasonable, a kindness to the family. They lost their daughter. I only lost a boss. It would hurt less for me, for us.
I waited at the door to the old beige-stucco apartment building. Some kind of feathery green-leafed plant grew in the yard instead of grass, accented by sagebrush and yucca, drought-tolerant, very ecologically responsible. Lina’s kind of lawn. I held a cup of iced coffee. I needed the coffee and I needed the ice. The sun blazed. It would hurt my eyes to look at. It had destroyed my job. It had killed Lina. But this lawn loved the sunshine. I wanted to kick apart a yucca.
The others came. We’d taken the keys in her desk—we’d have to sort through her entire desk, too, soon—and found her apartment on the second floor toward the back. We didn’t say much. Judging from how close together the doors were, I guessed she had a studio apartment. It was. Kitchen area to the right as we entered, bathroom to the left, and the rest held second-hand furnishings like the office. Nothing matched. Her bed was a twin-sized mattress on the floor, unmade. A ratty bean-bag chair slumped near the window. There was one kitchen chair at a table with peeling pale green paint, a scattering of books, and a little house plant wilting on the windowsill.
“Can you do the closet?” Anndel asked me.
I found what I’d expected. Old jeans, old tee-shirts. Underwear and socks. Sandals. A couple of hoodies. A quilted coat. It would barely fill a suitcase.
The bathroom, the kitchen, all equally sparse. No food to speak of.
Anndel collapsed onto the bean-bag chair. “This just doesn’t feel right. I expect she’s going to suddenly come rolling out like one of the landers.”
“This apartment is just like her,” Ekles said. “But it’s the end. There’s nothing left.”
No one seemed to know what to do next. After a long, silent minute, I took out the trash, which had gotten ripe.
When I came back, Vermilion was gathering up the sheets and towels to take home, wash, and donate to charity, along with some of the clothing.
“Memories,” Anndel said. “Everyone take something to remember her by.”
Ekles took the only coffee mug. Vermilion claimed the plant. I didn’t want anything at all, but everyone was staring at me, so I took the basket on the kitchen counter with an elaborate multicolor weave, obviously expensive and probably a gift. It didn’t go with the rest of her stuff. It might never have been used. I wasn’t sure what I’d do with it. It reminded me not at all of Lina.
NASA, it turned out, had a clause in the project charter that allowed it to take over if the advisory board approved. I didn’t know we had an advisory board, but it approved.
Someone arranged for a group session with a grief counselor.
So there we were, in the office meeting room around its worn-out table, with sushi and carnitas laid out in the middle. The counselor was a youngish man, with a well-trimmed beard and a crisp shirt. He gestured carefully when he spoke.
The autopsy had showed that Lina died from heat stroke. “It’s the unexpected deaths that can hurt the worst,” he said. Anndel sighed. He reminded us that we didn’t need to be there if we didn’t want, we could pass rather than answer any question, and nothing we said should leave this room. I wondered if those rules were always scrupulously obeyed.
“There are three parts to every question,” he continued, “your feelings, your memories, and the meaning or lesson that this has for you. Can you talk about your first memories of her and how you felt?”
Anndel had met her in graduate school. Eckles at a symposium.
“She had a lot of energy,” he said. “They came from her beliefs. She really felt like she understood space.”
“The whole effing universe,” Vermilion added, today dressed in black. “She made me feel like it was understandable, like it had purpose.”
I nodded, remembering all those exclamation marks and the monstrous sun. I said something vague. I had come only for the money. They had come for the dream.
What one thing did we learn from Lina? Coworkers had learned how to let themselves be led by their passion. I had learned how to emote when I had to—no, that wasn’t true.
“I’ve never been on a team like this,” I said, “and it started with her. Everything she did was what she meant. Transparent, I mean. She was always honestly herself.”
The counselor glanced at a list on a phone screen. “I understand that you all helped her family by checking on her apartment. How was that for you?”
Anndel squirmed. Eckles silently tugged on his beard.
“Nothing was a surprise,” I said. “I mean, it was just like what we expected. Austere, maybe? Simple. She led a simple life.” What would my apartment tell about me? The unused basket that I’d taken as a remembrance fit in perfectly with my decor.
“Yeah,” Vermilion said, “she was the real thing. What you saw was what you got.”
“Maybe,” Anndel mumbled, “that’s what happened.”
Ekles stopped tugging on his beard and looked at her. “Or maybe it wasn’t an accident.” He spoke quietly and quickly, words he didn’t want to say.
The counselor raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
We all knew what Ekles meant and didn’t want to believe it. We wanted to believe that she had trusted us enough to have confided in us, but there had been nothing to confide.
The counselor tilted his head, inviting us to speak. Then his head snapped straight up. “Oh.” He unconsciously put a hand over the phone screen. His plans for the session had changed. “That—you’re all thinking that—”
Ekles was moping. “She took responsibility for everything. I mean everything, for things that people were blaming on us. It could have been a way to take everything negative with her.”
True, Lina had an odd understanding of responsibility, responsible even for the environmental cost of new furniture. And she protected us—yes, always. Always, and Eckles was wrong.
“She would have wanted to be there with us and keep on protecting us,” I said.
He took a deep breath, then another, and met my eyes. His were full of thanks. “Yeah. She would have.”
The counselor looked at his list again. “Do you feel guilty about what happened?”
No one answered. No one said that we should have called her, but we were too lost in our own grief to notice how long she had been gone. No one was eating the sushi and carnitas.
Did I trust every member of the team? Some of them identified too closely with her. I could take a step back, which helped me see consequences, but I had nothing rehearsed anymore.
“It was the sun,” I blurted out. “She knew it was a monster, and it is, but she didn’t think it would be a monster to her. None of us did. That’s what’s hard.”
Vermilion patted my hand. “Yeah. Irony.”
The counselor scrolled through his list and asked if we wanted to do something as a group at her memorial service. At Anndel’s suggestion, we decided to talk about the moment when we realized the landers were free. I offered to tell how surprised I’d felt when I saw the first lander move, our first clue.
It had been for real. Maybe I could say how inadequate I’d felt at the time, and why that changed. There was a time when I hadn’t wanted this job, and I’d been surprised again and again.
The sun was shining, and we had things to do.