Chapter Three
‘Can anyone define entropy to me?’
The classroom was silent. The children looked at one another before whispers erupted at the back. They all turned their attention to the kid at the far back of the class, staring out of the window and on to the dying grass outside. The sun burnt orange against the sky and the car park was littered with dying machinery. Every few weeks a kid would drop out in tune with the next natural disaster, and the nightly news would continue its smiling crusade towards Armageddon.
‘Noah.’
He finally lifted his attention towards the teacher. Stood there with horn-rimmed glasses and pinstripe shirt. His inhalers littering his desk.
‘Tell me, Noah, what is entropy?’
There was a glimmer of his mother’s face in his thoughts, but he swallowed the memory.
‘It means everything ends, Sir.’ Noah said.
‘No need to be so melodramatic, lad.’ The teacher strode from behind the desk, casting his gaze across the classroom, ‘All things end. It’s not always thermodynamics to fault. Sometimes the heart is to blame.’
‘The second law of thermodynamics. Entropy always increases over time.’
The teacher crossed his arms and peered over to Noah.
‘How can we be sure that the law is true? What principles of physics and mathematics can you muster?’ The class looked at Noah, ‘It’s in your textbook, remember. In the section I set you for homework.’
‘Sir with all due to respect it doesn’t take a scientist to know that the world is dying.’
Charles Osgood Frederickson cast open the door and swaggered inside, adjusting his waistcoat. He tapped the air and froze everyone in their space. With a nod towards the teacher and his excellent choice in glasses, he slowly made his way throughout the room. Walking through the dust particles held in the air, and the half-asleep children dotting the tables. He looked at the textbooks for a moment, before striding towards Noah Frost at the back of the class. His perfect black brogues hit the floor with ominous thuds, like the coming of thunder, as he made his way throughout the dreamscape of the final astronaut.
‘Noah.’
He tapped the child on the head and there wasn’t a shift of movement. He clicked his fingers, and Noah Frost screamed himself awake.
‘You nodded off after the shakes. I’m administering a light dose of inhibitors to you tonight. And Sydney. When she recovers.’
Noah came to his senses. Blinking rapidly, he cleared the fog from his eyes. He found himself floating inches away from the ceiling with a needle in his neck.
‘It’s a precautionary measure.’
‘How-how-how-‘
‘I can command your muscles, Captain. I thought you were aware of this.’
There was a throbbing pain in his arms and chest as if he had been in a fight. Whatever it was, he adjusted himself to look at Sydney Kim sleeping below. Strapped in to a makeshift bed, a needle in the back of her head too.
‘How did you make me put a needle in myself, Charles?’
‘I told your brain to do it for me. I haven’t the luxury of limbs myself so I sent out some fancy audio. You’ve been programmed for this, Noah, don’t worry.’
‘Programmed?’
‘Of course. Didn’t you read the manual?’ Charles chuckled.
Noah felt the cold steel poking into his neck and the shivers shake inside him. There was something sliding throughout his brain, something seriously invasive. He felt all too vulnerable.
‘I don’t like the fact that I’ve been penetrated with metal, Frederickson. I want it removed.’
‘In good time, Captain. Now,’ and the voice shifted into the therapist, ‘tell me about your mother.’
‘Daisy chains, lilacs. She held a sweet smell.’ He had no recollection to the words coming out of his mouth. ‘Daisy chains, Charles. She had a face burnt into ember. Hard to see.’
‘Concentrate.’
Noah shook his head. There was a chemical cocktail being pumped into him, and he felt the liquids slosh in his veins. He looked at his wrists burning bright red and blue.
‘She slit her neck and poured her wound down the sink. Mummy didn’t- she didn’t want me to see the red when I came back.’
‘Good. Open up.’
‘Clemency.’ He felt as if emerging out of water, the slipstream of liquid sloshing off his face and back, and then the pain burst, ‘How the-?! How-do you know that name.’
The voice was silent. Only the slow beeps of the equipment attached to Sydney could be heard in the Theseus. And the humming of the rooms being shifted and turned. The puzzle box was opening.
‘When you entered here into my quarters, you and Sydney both signed a contract. We are united, Captain, not just by the fact of giving our lives so that billions may perhaps live and our species survive, but by our brains. Your mind is not your property anymore, Noah. It does not belong to me, it belongs to the Theseus. There’s only so much I can do to stop the ship poking about the junk rooms of your imagination.’
‘Contact? Stop? Nonsense, Charles, and you know it. You’re in charge here. I’ve read the manual and I’ve ran tests since day one, and everything points to you.’
‘Do you have any idea of who I am, Noah Frost? I am centuries old. I have outlived generations of your family, and now I am but a bit of fleshy matter squashed between two slabs of metal. You complain of the needle in your neck?! Try and imagine two stones in your lungs and you keep trying to breathe to push them out, but you have no mouth. You have no legs or limbs or pleasures. No hormones and no means to drink. You thirst and you hunger, trapped inside some macabre machine. This is a torture chamber, Noah, have some sympathy! I am all that is keeping the endless vacuum of space from swallowing you up.’
Noah grabbed hold of the needle in his neck and pulled it out. There was a rip of the flesh and the blood started to leak out. He grabbed hold of some nearby rails and hurried towards the medical casket at the bottom. He squeezed out the gel on to his wound, before wrapping it in thin bandages, stapling it secure. There was a numbing bit of pain, probably from the aftermath of the drugs in his system, as he turned upwards to see his stream of blood still floating in the room.
‘Free liquids? In this atmosphere? How do you expect me to flush that out, Capt-’
‘I’m sorry, Charles. For that.’ Noah rubbed his arms together, feeling a touch of cold inside, ‘I shouldn’t have said those things.’
‘We have all been together far too long, Captain, I would be worried if there were no swollen outbursts of tension by now. It is understood, do not worry.’
‘I just have no idea how you work. Honestly, actually, whatever Goodwin made out of you, I’ve got little to no clue about where to even begin.’
The atmosphere was steadily awkward for a good while after that. Noah kept rubbing the wound in his neck, and kept stirring the thoughts in his head.
Clemency.
He’d dream of him too much, perhaps. And there are some things best kept locked away. He’d never mentioned that name to Sydney. He’d never told Charles, but he knew deep down in his gut how the secret had been revealed. Why Sydney had spoken that name.
Osgood had been watching him. He’d been taking notes. Attempting to find pressure points, maybe? Noah strapped himself to the wall – watching Charles use the ventilation to flush out his blood into space.
The manual though. And the lecture from Goodwin. If either of them exited the vessel without an ‘umbilical cord’, used for spacewalking, Frederickson would shut down immediately. There was contingency after contingency after contingency in the even that Charles went rogue. Frederickson could only terminate them if they consented to it, Goodwin had said. He put a black coffee in each of their hands and gave them complete and utter assurances about that fact.
But outside of that – outside of that one bit of consent Frederickson needed – there must have been programmed leeway. Would he even need to ask them directly? Just pry open a bit of sub-conscious and use that as evidence?
‘You’re paranoid, Captain.’ Came the voice.
‘How can you tell what I’m even thinking, Frederickson?’
‘Oh where to begin with a question like that.’
Noah looked dead straight into a diode above. He could almost see the eyeball of the old man, burning blue.
‘Did you provoke Sydney’s death?’
‘No.’ Charles said, ‘we were going through her memories of her childhood, in the Grand Canyon. She just suddenly got spooked and realized breathing in that world isn’t breathing in this one.’
‘Simulated respiration.’
‘It’s a reality-affirmation technique. Confuse the brain, make it believe in the dream. Otherwise the mind is so quick to judge, so quick to analyse. Otherwise, how else am I going to get you to feel comfortable with my fiction?’
‘You don’t have to invade our privacy, Charles.’
‘I did not suggest the psychological exploration, Captain. Sydney asked for it.’
‘What did she tell you? I should look at the record of her brain activity, just before she, you know, died.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Captain.’
Noah Frost fell backwards.
‘I anticipated you removing the needle from your neck. Given a few more minutes of connection, I could have used my slow sedatives. It’s a shame, though, I had to use the delayed ones instead. They’re much more painful. Closer in relation to a snake’s venom, really.’
Noah’s vision shifted on an axis. He felt a gravity – an actual gravity – sweep him from side to side. His veins were already rotten with pain by the first minute in. He tried to rush. Pushing against the wall and breaking the brace holding him in place. His throat had been swollen since Charles had finished talking. As if Osgood had timed it perfectly.
Frost did not remember much after that. He remembered floating in the middle of the room, with Sydney’s half-corpse still beeping away. And the jarring voice of Frederickson overhead.
‘Do you play chess?’
Professor Goodwin sat in the middle of the concrete room. Above him, steel girders, and surrounding him, the innards of a machine. He adjusted his glasses, as they kept falling down the ridge of his nose, whilst peeling away wire after wire. Once in a while he’d plug something in to a great metal box at the centre of the room.
In the corner there nested a large machine holding a long vial of frozen, pinkish mass. The machine hummed every few seconds like a fridge, before Goodwin would occasionally walk over and analyse some of the numbers flashing across the many panels.
There was a clanking knock on the metal door, before Goodwin opened and in walked Noah Frost.
‘You’re a hard man to find, Goodwin.’ Noah said.
Goodwin nodded, and took Frost deep into the room. Noah looked around the small space, and took care to not trip over the wires and mesh of electronics around the room. It looked like a sprawled corpse of a much larger machine.
‘You understand what I’m asking of you, Noah.’ Goodwin said, ‘to trust a machine with your life.’
‘I’m well aware of that, Goodwin. I’m not expecting a bunch of code to go rogue though.’
Goodwin nodded, and then turned to the frozen machine in the corner.
‘Not exactly an accurate statement. Bunch of code. I’m afraid you’ll be having company. Of sorts.’
‘Sorry?’
Goodwin tampered with some of the machinery surrounding him, then sighed deeply. He looked up at Noah, remorse on his face.
‘I’m afraid that we’re at a crossroads. You know this, Sydney will be clued in later. I’m here to tell you both, separately, about the hard truths we face. We’re simply not ready.’
‘Ready for what?’
‘Ready for the flare shot.’ Goodwin cleared his throat, ‘quite frankly, we’re not prepared. One iota. Theseus isn’t intended to travel more than a few lightyears, under normal conditions. Our technology and understanding simply aren’t prepared for this.’
‘I understand. The Event has crippled science and-‘
‘The type of scientific knowledge that we require to give this mission even a ten percent chance of success probably won’t be available for a few centuries. And yet here we are, snatched away by time.’
Goodwin continued to play around with a few couplings.
‘I’m not a pure astrophysicist, Noah. Not a lot of those living. Being trapped in this frozen waste isn’t exactly helping, either. What little I know is in artificial intelligence. To write the code for an entire intelligence to manage life support systems, navigation, and all that is required of interstellar travel, that’s far past my capacity. Far past the capacity of anyone living.’
Noah looked confused.
‘Then how-how do you intend to even send us up there? Did you call myself and Sydney as a jape, some false hope-‘
‘I said living, Captain.’
‘Captain?’
Goodwin smiled.
‘You’ll hold the highest title in the Solar System this time next year, Noah. Of course I’m naming you Captain.’
Goodwin walked over to the vial, coughing into his left sleeve. Violently, even. A bit of blood on his lip, straight from his lungs.
‘See, supercomputers still can’t yet handle managing one human being, let alone two of you up there. That much oxygen to circulate. Atmospheres to create. Navigations to chart through infinite void. The cryosleep, too. You’ll be dead before you hit Pluto if you were to be awake for all this, you know that.’ Goodwin leaned on the machine, moving his palm across the frosted condensation, revealing the pinkish-fleshy mass entombed inside. ‘You’ll be asleep for the journey. First for weeks, then for months, then years, centuries – you get it. That’s where the tech can sustain us, but managing your conditions. Do you understand what happens to a brain that’s submerged for that long, physically and, more importantly, psychologically?’
‘Turns to mush.’ Noah said, ‘nothing left by the end of it.’
‘Exactly. And so I’m hazarding a bet. Maybe the biggest gamble of it all, Captain. The chances of finding a habitable space, let alone contacting an alien being with enough sympathy. Near impossible. But the real threading of the needle?’
Goodwin sauntered over, and tapped Noah on the forehead.
‘That thing in your cranium could end the whole thing. One thread, one neurone, out of place, and we’re gone. The whole human race evaporates with you. Exciting, isn’t it?’
‘So I’m betting you’re programming something to manage brain chemistry and behaviour. Pool cognitive spaces together, link-link them up even? Easier and more efficient to manage if there’s some neural connection.’ Noah said.
‘Exactly.’ Goodwin said, adjusting some diodes nearby, ‘Except, well, our problem stands, Noah. There exists no machine with the full capability to do that. That temperament. That necessary vision and emotional understanding. It comes from human consciousness. You’ve read the papers and followed me closely, right? My experiments on the singularity. The full processing power required is just a few very important clicks away. And you know me, a nostalgic fellow. The few things I salvaged from my homestead were the diaries and trinkets of my predecessors.’
Goodwin gestured over to the frozen vial again, strangely humming every few seconds.
‘I found buried in the wills and testaments a name, you know. Called out to me. Can vaguely remember some of the history. A British polar explorer from Gloucestershire. Charles Osgood Frederickson. Born on October 3rd 1787, and died on June 2nd 1840. Lived a long, prosperous life. Discovered some cave systems in the arctic, and donated some special geological collections to the British museum. A scientific man, as my family seems to have always been. He seemed happy, a wife and children. An intellectual, but a recluse in his later years. I’ve yet to find out exactly why and yet, buried beneath his papers I found this will.’
Goodwin took and unfurled a piece of parchment from his lab pocket. Old, rusted and yellowing on the edges. The thick purple ink hard to decipher. He handed it to Noah, who looked it over, confused.
‘His last written words were a wish. A dying one, impossible one. See, he wanted to buried, sealed in a box of his own design. Some magnesium alloy. Really strong stuff, sealed and then triple sealed. The air pumped out. And he asked for his metal coffin, as strange as it is, to be sealed again in another version a few decades after his passing. He wanted his body to outlive so many others. It’s morbid, you know, reading about this English gentleman writing about wanting his mind and matter not to rot. Crowing about his fears of degrading just like the rest.’
Noah looked at Goodwin, beginning to pick up on the discovery.
‘I could use any brain, Captain. Any recent dead. I could pickle the brains of the final scientific minds out there. Fresh ones. But that’s the difficulty, see. More than the processing power required might just complicate things, as they already are. The melding of mind and code. I saw in his writings a cry to live again. To just taste the air once, even through a tube.’ Goodwin went over to the vial. ‘Perhaps sentiment has conquered my sense, Noah. But I travelled to his resting place, before the harsh winter we’re in. I took it upon myself to extract Frederickson. I peeled away the coffin and found a mound of flesh and the most disgusting thing. Horrors as to what the bodies become. Sheer mortality, if you will.’
Goodwin tapped on the glass edges.
‘I took what I could find of the brain. Melted over the centuries. I preserved it, best I could. I’m still not sure what remains. All the neurologists and neuroscientists are all dead. My books say there’s a mish-mash of memories, cortexes, and just enough neurones for what I want to accomplish. See, I’d use a fresh brain. I’d use one from someone dead a few decades prior but, and this is slightly manic, the exact neurological profile I require to finalize the intelligence systems is equal to the exact that remains in the brain of Charles Osgood Frederickson. He literally made himself for this, preserved himself. Everything necessary for the intelligence.’
Noah, stunned, wandered over to the vial. Surrounded by wires and the guts of machines sprawled out to be spun into some grand design of Goodwin’s, there sat mushed inside a glass chamber, the mind of a nineteenth century aristocrat who may very well be the only hope of the survival of the human race.
‘I’m not sure I can be comfortable with all this. Bringing back a man from the dead like this, might be a bit of a stretch of cruelty. Could you imagine the panic? Stealing him from heaven, if you will. And secondly, am I trust one fallible human brain with the life of humanity?’ Noah said.
‘I get it. I do. But he’s not coming back. Whatever piece of him that actually lived, that processed his life, is long gone. What remains is the machinery that is required. Packed in, inch by inch, is just enough empathy, and attached to it is enough neural network that can manage the whole thing. Bolstered by my code, whatever personality of Frederickson remains will be used as an engine, Captain. That’s what I need, above all else. Just that small bit of dust, that inch of humanity, to steer you through the black. Osgood’s brain is made for this purpose, unlike any I’ve found. There is failsafe after failsafe. Charles can’t directly harm any of the crew. He can’t restrict life support. Simply nothing can go wrong. His welfare is your priority.’
Noah, still reeling from it all, took a few steps back.
‘Seems a bit too fantastical to be putting a dead man in charge of the final flare of humanity. In charge of an entire spacecraft, no less. I’m not sure he’ll even understand what trust is, let alone what a life support system looks like.’
‘He’s run by the code, not the other way around.’
Noah nodded, still concerned.
‘I thought this would all be a bit simpler. That machines could do all the work, put us to sleep.’
‘There’s the kicker, Captain. That human touch, that grain of empathy. It’s necessary for your very survival. A machine can’t process emotional and behavioural responses like we do. And I need that. I need to make sure that you don’t die too early.’
The pinkish mass of Charles Osgood Frederickson sat in the corner, frozen solid. Yet Noah could not shake the feeling that even then, as dead as the thing sat, it was still silently looking in on the whole mess.
‘I’ll need to become acquainted with Charles when he’s revived.’ Noah said.
‘I already did that.’ Goodwin said.
‘Sorry?’
‘I revived him a few months back. Remember when I sent that package to you, asking for your help? I did the same for Sydney.’
Noah nodded.
‘It was an experiment, see. Primitive stuff. I managed to plug Frederickson into a few low level machines I had constructed. Nothing with wide access, nothing that demanded too much. I’ve only managed to get to this stage after so much experimentation.’ Goodwin coughed some more, ‘and he was silent for a while. Not a peep. But then I saw a flicker of the machine’s code, and Charles was running throughout the hard disk. His first words after centuries dead were the names of yourself and Sydney.’
Noah was stunned solid.
‘I’ve tried to communicate with him. From what I can gather, he’s still getting his bearings.’
They both looked over to the frozen vial.
‘I was scared, you know. When I asked him a few questions.’ Goodwin said.
‘Like what?’
‘It was only primitive stuff. He can’t articulate just yet. I suppose he’s still chewing over the fact that he has the code of the human genome in whatever his cranium is plugged into. But his answers to my queries? Clear. Clearest things he’s said besides the garbled mess otherwise.’ Goodwin looked at Noah, as if in pain, ‘I asked him what he saw when he had been dead. I was curious, you know. Just as we all are. It’s kind of, you know, hard to explain. From a man in my position, close to death. I’ve had my suspicions and guesses, but now I have confirmation. And you have to wonder, you know, what effect it could have, psychologically…’
‘What did he reply? To what’s there?’
Goodwin looked for a moment towards the concrete ceiling. Before turning to Noah.
‘Nothing.’