Fell Asleep, Missed The Party

Madsen leaned forward in the freezer, rubbed her eyes, then kept them squeezed shut for a moment. Planting her hands onto the sides of the pod, she vigorously shook her head and scrunched her nose. She felt the force of gravity on her body, pulling everything down. Christ. Everything aches. I was expecting a zero-gee thaw; pretty sure I saw the Orbital on the itinerary. Whatever, must’ve misread it.

She thought that maybe the weird guy would go away by the time she opened her eyes. Nope. Still there. Standing in front of her freezer was a knight. As in the ‘shining armour’ kind. Madsen’s had her fair share of freezer and/or substance-affiliated hallucinations in the past, sure. But she had a feeling this was pretty real.

For a while, she stared at him with a straight face. All of sudden, she couldn’t help it any longer and her mouth stretched into a grin as she huffed. The smile softened as she shook her head. “Jesus Christ…” she whispered, still smiling.

Madsen clumsily stumbled out of the freezer, bracing herself against the side of the pod with her right hand. The disorientation would pass once the rest of her body decided to fully wake up. “Looks…nice. You 3D printed all of that?” Madsen asked, pointing at the armour.

The eyeholes, or whatever they’re called, on the helmet were completely black. The guy just stared at her, breathing heavily out of his mouth.

“Nice,” she said as she staggered over to the locker by the side of her pod and pulled it open.

Inside the locker was a pile of clothes; a sports bra, J.A.C. tank top, briefs, socks, flight jumpsuit, and Madsen’s lucky pair of red high-top b-ball shoes. Everything was fastened in place with straps to make sure it didn’t get loose and float around when the ship was in orbit. She unclasped the buckles and started getting dressed as she looked back over at her company.

He still didn’t say anything. He kept staring at Madsen as she almost fell over a couple times while she hopped into her briefs. This is a little weird. Eh. Whatever.

Before long, Madsen zipped her bright blue flight suit all the way up and fastened the velcro collar around her neck. She plonked on her shoes and flexed her toes inside of them. As she rolled up her sleeves, she said, “Is that you, Vuong? Could you maybe just do your job for a second seeing as I’m still half frozen?”

Finally the knight moved. He tilted his head, like he didn’t know what she was talking about.

Madsen shook her head and rolled her eyes with a smirk. “Okay, fuck you.”

She turned to the crypod that was adjacent to hers. Staten just has to see this. He’s always carrying on about how we should all care more about Earth history. Here it is in the flesh, staring at me and mouth-breathing like a creep. The control panel was deactivated. She tapped it a few times. Nothing happened, it stayed a black screen. Madsen leaned over the pod, pulled her right sleeve back down, and wiped the condensation from the transparent lid. Madsen slowly pulled back, her eyes pinned on what was beneath. Her brow tensed and her lips parted as a rickety breath trailed out.

There was a corpse inside the cryopod. S-Staten…? It was crystalline, enveloped in ice. Decay had settled in. Staten’s face, frozen in a distant stare, was gaunt and his body was reduced to skin and bone. Not at all the thick-set mountain of muscle that he should be. Madsen swallowed. She glanced up at the readout on the top of the freezer. In bold red letters, it displayed the message:

'CODE 227B CRITICAL SYSTEMS FAILURE. SUBJECT VITAL SIGNS- DECEASED,'

When Madsen peered around at the rest of the pods, her heart thrashed against her ribcage, trying to bust out. They all said the same thing. Every single pod. Except for hers.

Swallowing, Madsen slowly turned back to the knight. He was staring into one of the freezers, making faint sounds of shock and confusion. The astronaut's mouth twitched and pulled itself into an angry sneer. "W-What the fuck did you do?"

The Knight stumbled away from the freezer. He was shaking.

Madsen paced towards him and repeated, "Answer me you son of a bitch. Twenty nine people are fucking dead!"

His hands trembled. "I-I simply shook thee from thy slumber... I knew not the fate of thy fellows."

The woman flared her nostrils. "What the fuck's wrong with you?" She started pacing the room, thoughts racing through her head like lasers.

She muttered to herself, "A two twenty-seven B… That's a stasis break…"

Madsen clamped both of her hands onto the manual emergency release lever fixed to the side of Staten's freezer. She wrenched on it with everything she had. Her biceps pulsed, tensed, and hardened, but the thing didn't budge. She snarled as she relented.

Temperature regulation must be shot. Ice shouldn’t be able to seize the mechanism like that.

It settled within her mind, and her chest was overcome with tingling. They were awake. Totally aware of everything. Trapped. T-They starved to death.

Madsen clutched the sides of her head. “Christ…Jesus fucking Christ.”

How could this happen? What the hell was Control doing? The crew monitor suite should've notified them as soon as the first hardware failure happened. Protocol would be to send a response team right away, well before anyone was even close to dying. What the fuck is going on?

“I…I am sorry,” murmured the knight. “To lose brothers in arms…i-it is never easy.”

She couldn't handle it anymore. People were dead. Twenty-nine people were dead. Lots of them were her friends. Staten, Vuong, Abboud, Chan, Osei, Morgan…they all slowly wasted away, sealed inside a compartment no bigger than a coffin. And here this guy was, talking like he was Macbeth and dressed like a tin can. Madsen lost it.

She bore down on him, snatching his helmet and violently prying it from his head. With an enraged scream, she pegged the thing at the wall, filling the room with an ear-shattering ‘bang’.

The knight stumbled backwards, his motions dripping with fear. Madsen snatched the padded hood that sat on his head and slammed it onto the floor. It was only after that she looked at his face. And when she did, she felt the feeling drain from her fingers and the jittering in her torso grow more intense.

The knight…he wasn’t human. It had two eyes, a nose, lips, ears, and facial expressions, but none of these things looked even remotely lifelike. Its eyes glowed like a pair of depth-perceiving optic nodes, the nose looked more like a thin intake vent in the middle of its face, and the ears almost looked like flat microphone arrays on the sides of its head. Its ‘skin’ was deep red and had a semi-rigidity to it.

He was a robotics platform.

What the fuck…? W-What the fuck? She'd never seen anything like it before. It was humanoid. It blinked. She could see its body expanding and compressing with every breath it took. Its face was capable of expression. Its lip was quivering in fear.

Madsen whispered, "What the hell are you?"

"I-I…do not know," he replied, voice wavering.

It was clear from the inflection and fluctuations that his voice wasn't synthesised by A.I. There were always tells, whether it was awkward sentence phrasing, lack of contextual emotion, or mispronunciations. So far, it hadn't done any of that. All of its movements were also incredibly inefficient. They were shaky and imprecise. In other words, they were human. Madsen figuted that it was some kind of cutting-edge telepresence machine. Somewhere in the world, there was a guy using VR equipment to control this rig via motion control and running a mic to speak using his own voice. Hell, she’d operated an ASPECT class telepresence platform before to repair geo-manipulation equipment on Concord F while she was on a ship in orbit. It just…looked like a million years ahead of that clunky ASPECT model.

"Listen…I am not dealing with your shit right now, okay?" Madsen paced over to one of the computer terminals on the wall and swiped away frantically on it. I'm gonna find you and I'm gonna kill your connection. Fucking lunatic.

When she arrived at the wireless networks menu…she realised that for one reason or another, there was a comms dead zone surrounding them. There were absolutely no data transmissions of any kind leaving or reaching the ship. No radio waves, no wi-fi, no wireless networks. Meaning that there just couldn’t be a human sending commands to that thing. It had to be autonomous. Acting entirely on its own. No. That's not possible. We're not there yet.

Madsen looked back over to the machine. It didn't matter what she thought. It was there. It was right there whether she could believe it or not.

“F-Forgive my bluntness, but thou…t-thou art unsafe here,” said the knight. “We must go.”

She watched his mouth as he spoke. The clarity of its speech, the way the words vibrated through the air, and how its lips moved… It all indicated that it was actually producing these sounds for real. There wasn’t just a speaker in its mouth. Its throat vibrated and it shaped those vibrations into different sounds using its tongue and its mouth. Just like a human did. Madsen could hear it struggling to breathe.

It continued, “Doth thou understand? A horde of…d-demonists seeks to exploit thee. Worse still, clans of sorcerers wish thee dead.” Only then did Madsen connect the dots. The way it stammered, the way it struggled to stand. There was also some kind of fluid dripping from its side. It was damaged.

She didn’t bother talking to it as she stalked across the room. What was the point? It was a machine. A really impressive one, but it wasn’t alive. Everything it said to her was just fluff. The response of a neural network trained to replicate human speech by repeating things that it had been told, or combining phrases to produce something it thought was appropriate. Any piece of software that could speak was essentially a sophisticated chatbot or voice-controlled assistant from the 21st century.

Madsen approached an access panel on the wall, squeezed the two release buttons, and watched the panel flip open. Inside was a bright orange tool case. On the face of the kit was a decal reading ‘EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE KIT’. With the case in hand, she marched back over to the knight.

When she reached for the area under its armpit that was stained with the black substance, it anxiously took a step away and raised its hand to keep Madsen back. She exhaled a shallow breath of disbelief. Instead of pressing forward, she set the maintenance kit onto the floor, unfastened its clasps, and threw the lid open. She reached inside and pulled out a large tablet computer, a DIAG-R console.

After she held the power button, it completed startup after a second or two and wirelessly scanned the area for any self-diagnostic suite tags. Madsen glanced at the ship’s terminal display, which was still on the wireless networks menu. Her shoulders relaxed when the DIAG-R’s signal showed up on the screen. Good. It's working.

The DIAG-R only picked up one tag. The label was a string of random letters, symbols, and numbers that was so long that it scrolled off the side of the console’s display. Crinkling her nose, Madsen tapped on it. The knight gasped, his eyes frantically shooting about. “W-What…what is happening? I feel…strange.”

Madsen was connected to his onboard diagnostics suite…and her DIAG-R sputtered for a moment. This thing was state-of-the-art hardware constructed with the most efficient processing technology available. They didn’t lag. When the subsystems list loaded, Madsen suddenly understood why it had a hard time. Accompanied by an incredibly fuzzy auto-generated diagram of the machine’s insides was a gigantic list of items. There were thousands of individual systems inside this thing. None of them were correctly labelled, instead they were all just random strings of characters. For fuck’s sake. Label your shit, people.

One of the subsystems was flashing red. When Madsen selected it, the diagram changed. Everything disappeared save for a series of lines that ran along the length of the body and along each limb. At the centre of this root-like system was a cylindrical device. Madsen weakly shook her head. It was an E-Gel plant. It wasn’t the power source Madsen would’ve chosen for a robotics platform…but the high-output and synthetic nature of it made sense. What didn’t make sense was why it was being pumped around the machine like blood. It didn’t have to be like that. She re-labelled this layer ‘E-Gel delivery pathways’.

That was what was leaking out of it. According to the readouts on Madsen’s console, the leak reduced the maximum power output by a significant amount. It wasn’t enough to keep powering the entire platform. If it kept losing E-Gel, the plant would slowly fall behind. It would cause a cascade failure of every onboard system.

She was beginning to think that she had to talk to it. “Take off your suit,” Madsen said with a monotonous drone.

The knight’s throat visibly pulsed…like it was swallowing. “W-Why?”

Madsen thinned her lips and sighed heavily. “You’re about to crash. If you don’t let me take a look at the damage, you’ll shut down.”

The knight’s face warped. “...I am d-dying?”

Rolling her eyes and smacking her lips as she struggled to find the will to give into the machine’s weird talk, Madsen said, “Yeah. Sure.”

It took a few seconds, but the knight winced as it undid his belt and dropped it onto the ground. It wore what Madsen could only describe as a dress over its armour; it lifted this white garment over its head, folded it neatly, placed it on the floor, then moved onto the lengths of armour on his arms. First it had to untie a knot of laces that fixed the pieces in place, then it unbuckled a few straps along them. Madsen couldn’t help but tilt her head in confusion as it struggled. Once those arm pieces were pulled off, it loosened the straps that held its chest armour shut. It dropped the thing onto the ground. Madsen could tell by the sound as well as how it looked that it was actual steel…it wasn’t just polymer that was painted to look like metal. Then, it slipped out of the weird shirt made of interlocking metal rings. The chain armour fell onto the ground with a surprising amount of weight.

Underneath the suit of armour, he wore this filthy shirt. It had laces dangling from the shoulders, probably what was tied to the armour that covered his arms to keep them from falling down. The steel protecting its legs was fixed to this garment with laces as well. It was covered in dirt, E-Gel…and it stunk. Like sweat. It unlaced the shirt and pulled his arms out. Its body was even weirder than its face. Madsen watched as its chest rapidly inflated and deflated with every shallow breath it took. It had to have had some kind of softbody-type artificial mulcature underneath its ‘skin’.

Madsen scrolled through the list of subsystems on the DIAG-R, seeing nothing but gibberish…until she saw ‘IPT-FF221BSSD’. She froze. That was the serial number for a high-density solid state drive manufactured by Insight Processing Technologies. Tapping on the SSD, the display changed and showed a command history that was scrolling down so fast that Madsen couldn’t even read it. Regardless, she sighed in relief, finally seeing something that she completely recognised. Since the DIAG-R was designed to be just a way to assess issues for them to be fixed later on with more specialised equipment, there were only three actions Madsen could take. They were listed beneath a short description of the subsystem:

INPT-FF221BSSD

TYPE- Data storage drive

CAPACITY- 237,774,384TB/600,000,000TB

-Subsystem appears to be critical in platform operation. Termination or memory formatting may cause severe malfunction-

Device actions

[FORMAT MEMORY]

[FORCE HIBERNATE]

[FORCE TERMINATE]

Without saying anything, Madsen tapped ‘FORCE HIBERNATE’.

The knight stopped moving. Its breathing stopped. Its optics went dim. It stood there like a statue. Madsen ran a hand down her face. He shut up. Thank God.

Madsen made her way around the cryo deck and conducted visual inspections of each freezer. She had to make sure. The displays could’ve been malfunctioning. Staten could’ve been the only one who didn’t make it. It was clear after just a few checks that wasn’t the case. After she saw her twenty-ninth dead crewmate, Madsen dropped herself onto the floor and sat there for a moment. Her eyes went hazy as she stared into nothingness. Whatever happened, it made her the sole survivor of the J.A.C. Hera XII flight. A crew of talented contractors from a host of different companies, all with specialisations that made them the best at what they did, died and no one was here to figure out how.

She knew John Vuong since college. He was studying to become a test pilot while Madsen was chasing an engineering degree. Vuong made it into the J.A.C. as a flight commander, Madsen scored a job at Anvil Heavy Fabrication. Imagine their faces when they were allocated to the same intersystem flight five years after graduating and saying goodbye. It'd been around four years since and they lost count of how many missions they flew together. This time though, she really wasn't going to see him again.

So what the actual fuck do I do now?

She found herself, once again, looking at the robot. It was exactly where she left it, with all software functions suspended. Madsen recognised the tech that was inside of it. The applications were bizarre to say the least, but one thing was for sure; someone made it. It seemed to really want her to follow it somewhere. Was that her best bet at finding other people?

She lost track of time. Maybe she sat there for half-an-hour, maybe more. When she finally got up, she unzipped a pocket on her jumpsuit and pulled on a pair of work gloves. Then she got close to the knight, pressing against the damage on his armpit.

It stopped leaking E-Gel for the time being since Madsen put it into hibernation. Its skin was soft to the touch; it was spongy like human flesh. She could even see some scars on his chest that had healed over. Self-healing polymer membrane. Not exactly groundbreaking, but can't say I've ever seen it used like this before. Hold on…is that fucking synth-meat?

Basically all animal produce that people ate was entirely synthetic; grown in a lab somewhere to maintain animal populations. Madsen never ate a real steak in her life, not that she wanted to, to be completely honest. It tasted great, but killing another animal to harvest its meat went out of vogue somewhere down the line. So synth-meat is all well and good…but this robot was essentially a skeletal frame with an outer layer made out of fake meat. If she wanted to, Madsen could eat it. I guess we're just skeletons wearing meat suits too. I can't wait to find out which company threw this guy together so I can ask them what the fuck they were thinking.

Then, because she had heaps of maturity flowing through her veins, her eyes drifted down to the robot’s groin. There was a…bulge in its pants. Madsen snorted like an amused child.

She locked her eyes onto the knight’s face and thinned her lips mischievously. She poked the bulge with a single finger. Madsen assumed that it was just a bump on its frame designed to make it look male when it had clothes on. Like a Ken doll. But her ‘initial tactile assessment’ suggested that it…ahem…was entirely anatomically correct. Her smirk vanished and her brow had tensed in the face of this scientific question. Just to make sure, Madsen pulled the brim of the pants away from the body and peered down.

“Dude, what the fuck?” she hissed to herself, abruptly reeling back. The worst part was, she’d seen something similar before. Vuong took Madsen to the shady part of Touchstone City on Bosnia Prime after her very first service job on Bosnia's ODIN-2 orbital telescope. Yeah, that night, a fresh-out-of-training and naive Madsen found out that sex robots were a thing and she suddenly wanted to burn her mechanical engineering degree.

In an effort to wipe the sight of an artificial penis from her mind, Madsen pushed herself back to the matter at hand; the E-Gel leakage. The entry point was pretty gnarly. It looked like he was stabbed multiple times. There were other articles on the DIAG-R that were flashing red, so Madsen had to assume that there was damage to internal hardware as well. It was harder to guess what they were just from the crummy auto-generated diagrams…so she was going to have to open it up and have a look.

She looked all over the knight's body. There weren't any access panels…no way to actually get at the internals without essentially dissecting it. That was something that shouldn't have bothered her at all. But it was shaped like a person. It pretty much felt like a person and if she made sense of the the DIAG-R scans properly, it probably worked a lot like a person too. Madsen retrieved a scalpel and surgical mask from a nearby medkit. She fixed the mask to her face as she grabbed the knight's shoulder and moved the scalpel towards his chest.

"Really wish I did more biology."

She plunged the scalpel into the knight's flesh.