Saving proxima, p.20
Saving Proxima, page 20
“Go on, Roy. Open it!” she urged.
“Okay, okay.” Roy tugged on the ribbon and released it from the box and then opened it. Inside was a small data-cube projector. By his continued fumbling, she could tell Roy was having trouble finding the switch to turn it on.
“For God’s sake, Roy, press the button on the bottom and then set it down,” she said.
Roy found the switch and turned the device on. Then there was an audible ding and a voice asked, “Please approve database access.”
“Access to what?” Roy asked.
“Oh, it needs permissions to look at your imagery and videos you have on file,” Cindy explained.
“Okay. Nigel?”
“Yes, auld boy?” The Scottish accented AI’s voice filled the room. Cindy almost laughed.
“Handshake with this thing,” Roy told the AI.
“Done.”
PROCESSING DATA. PLEASE STAND BY. appeared in solid three-dimensional letters above the cube. Then suddenly a three-dimensional image of Samaritan Ro Burbank appeared in front of them above the cube looking back at them. Roy peered through the hologram for a moment silently and Cindy could see in his eyes that he was going to break down again. So, she quickly got his attention by explaining what the device did.
“It’s not just a single image, Roy. Zhao, Bob, and I created a rendering program that will take data from each video you get and update the image in real-time, assuming you give the program permission to intercept your mail, and you will have a day-to-day live growing image render of your daughter. You’ll be able to see how she grows from video to video this way.”
“I uh, well, thanks,” Roy said sheepishly, doing his best to hold back the tears.
“You’re welcome.”
CHAPTER 31
December 1, 2090 (Earth timeline)
March 13, 2090 (Ship timeline)
approximately 6 light-months from Earth
3.64 light-years from Proxima
Captain Crosby was taking his turn at being awake. To pass the day he was at the desk in his ready room, checking the cryo tubes and sleep requests for all the crew on board. Roy, the unplanned crew member, had no specific requests other than wanting to be awake to view any messages from home. Doctor Kopylova had ordered that he be awakened every month for the first eight months since they’d found him in order to do concussion protocols and reassessments on him. Roy was currently in cryo and wouldn’t need to be awakened for a few more weeks. Crosby looked at the data piling up in his personal folder and could see that there must be many videos of his family being stored there. Roy would have a lot of “letters from home” to go through once he woke up.
As Crosby checked Enrico Vulpetti’s status, he noticed Vulpetti’s personal request to be awakened at the halfway point of the voyage. When Enrico had first made the request, Crosby denied it. There was no health reason for the denial—cryosleep was extremely safe and there had never been a case of adverse effects from either going into or being awakened from it. Flight rules said that no one was allowed to be awake and alone on the ship. In fact, the requirement was for either no one to be awake or a minimum of three people at any given time and at least two of them had to be members of the flight crew. Then Crosby told him why he wanted to wake up and the next thing he knew, seven others, including both Roca and Zhao, wanted to join him for his three-day, mid-flight awakening. Crosby was yet undecided. Since he, Roca, and Zhao would be the last to enter cryosleep, he still had time to decide. Vulpetti’s status was one hundred percent normal for someone in cryosleep, as had been all the rest.
“Captain Crosby, please come to the flight deck.” The announcement came over the intercom from a voice that Crosby knew to be Ming Zhao’s. Zhao was a meticulous pilot and engineer, and unbeatable at Scrabble. For a nonnative English speaker, Zhao’s vocabulary was amazing. He attributed it to being a nonnative speaker. He had to learn English as a second language, and, being an engineer, he took an engineer’s approach to doing so—memorizing a vast number of vocabulary words before he ever began to learn the mechanics of the actual language and sentence construction. Scrabble was the game of choice on many deep-space trips and just about everyone in the business took part. Until playing Zhao, Crosby considered himself to be a rather good Scrabble player, but he’d met his match.
The flight deck was two levels up, and Crosby quickly ascended the ladders to answer the call. The ship designers hadn’t installed a lift because they knew that the crew would need the exercise and that going up and down ladders provided sensory stimulation that would otherwise become lacking on the long voyage. Every little bit of stimulation helped. Besides, elevators could break down and that would be just one more thing to worry about. Ladders were pretty stable as far as maintenance was concerned.
Zhao looked grim as he turned to address Crosby upon his arrival. “Captain, the latest telemetry update from Earth just arrived and they’re telling us we’re off course.”
“How bad? Hell, that message is six months old by now!” Crosby had been worried about this very problem. He knew that even a small deviation in their trajectory this early in the mission would lead to missing the planetary rendezvous by a large margin. It could be a serious problem. And even though they’d never figured out what Ray Gaines had been trying to do to the PINS, or why, it was pretty clear that the asshole hadn’t wanted them to make it to Proxima for whatever reason. Crosby also knew that the engineers, scientists, and flight crew had worked diligently to build a back work-around navigation fix so they wouldn’t be in this very predicament. Apparently, the work-around wasn’t working around whatever problem Gaines had created for them.
Instead of answering, Zhao handed him his datapad containing a string of numbers. It showed what their predicted location should be versus their actual location. For the first few months, they were aligned as best anybody could tell. The “should be” were exactly the same as the “actual,” but sometime within the last year the numbers began to diverge, and the rate of divergence was increasing.
“Shit. Unless we fix the problem, we’ll miss the Proxima Centauri star system altogether,” Crosby said.
“I checked the PINS and it says we aren’t off course. According to our onboard navigation system, we are exactly where we should be,” said Zhao.
“Of course it did.” Crosby frowned and shook his head left and right with a sigh. “Wake the CHENG and Burbank up.”
By this time, Roca entered the room and was listening from near the top of the ladder.
“Bob, I’m glad you’re here. Can you double-check the PINS to make sure it’s working properly?” asked Crosby. “And I want you to double-check the backup stand-alone system for errors.”
“I haven’t received any alerts or any other indication of a problem, but I’ll check,” Roca replied, moving toward the ladder as he spoke. Roca was definitely an action-oriented person. Crosby had worked with Roca before and personally recruited him for the one-way trip to Proxima Centauri. It hadn’t taken much convincing. Roca, like himself, really didn’t have any family to speak of. Wives and kids weren’t usually compatible with the career of deep-space pilots and engineers. Too much time away from home port didn’t make for good relationships. He thought about poor Burbank and his situation. Family wouldn’t be a benefit to the deep-space traveler.
“Do we have any other options for astronavigation?” asked Crosby.
“No good ones. Radio tracking from Earth and the other antennas in the inner solar system aren’t a lot of help to us now since we are traveling a significant fraction of c and we’re so dang far from home. From our radio signals they can easily tell how far away we are and our speed. With multiple antennas they can even triangulate and give us a pretty good location fix. But that will get less accurate the farther out we go and then it will get even more complicated by the time-of-flight delay in getting updates. Hell, we’re already to the point that this update is so old it doesn’t do us a lot of good. Traveling at pushing forty percent of c now will allow us to go a long way in the wrong direction in between updates,” Zhao replied. “And once we have reached full speed at about eight five percent lightspeed, who knows how difficult it’s going to become to stay on track.”
“But with enough updates, we could make it work?” Crosby thought rhetorically. He knew that was not going to work.
“Uh, maybe, Captain . . . but, umm . . . ”
“That was sarcasm, Zhao. I know that isn’t going to work.”
“I see. Well, Captain, any fix we can do really depends upon how far off course we are between each update. And it’s a problem I wouldn’t want to leave solely up to the AI,” said Zhao. “We might want to rethink all of us going to sleep at the same time.”
Crosby had thought of that. If they were to go that route, then someone, or three someones, had to remain awake to oversee the constant course corrections. From personal experience and the psych briefings, he knew that was a recipe for disaster. He would mark this option as the last resort.
“Any other ideas?” Crosby asked. “We’re pushing that year in space. While most of us have had a month-long nap here and there, I don’t want to take chances on somebody going nuts on us. We need a plan B.”
“I have none that I can think of right now.”
“Let’s see what the CHENG and Roy can come up with. We’d better go wake them up. Might as well get Lin and Patel too.”
* * *
Three hours later, Captain Crosby, Ming Zhao, Bob Roca, Xi Lin, Pankish Patel, the CHENG, and Roy Burbank were gathered around a table in the mess hall. The captain had decided to let the XO stay in cryosleep. The scientists who had been awakened when they had found Roy had long since gone back to cryo. The captain had decided there was no need for any of them to be awake if they couldn’t find a problem to fix. And Dr. Kopylova wanted Roy in cryo as much as possible with the fear that he might be a suicide risk. They had already gone back to the standard three-person awake rotations and were almost to the point of deciding it was safe for everyone to go into cryo until they reached designated wake points of the trip.
“The PINS appears to be functioning correctly. I checked each of the imaging telescopes—they’re all tracking the pulsars as they should. The onboard data processor is working at its rated capacity and there aren’t any error codes coming through. I reran the calibration code and reset the system. Nothing changed. As far as I can tell, the PINS is working just fine,” Roca said, completing his update. “And the backup system is doing just what we set it up to do. Both systems are independently in agreement with each other. We’re on course according to them.
“If you extrapolate the two-line-element data backward from where we currently are to where we would have been six months, three days, four hours, nine minutes, and seventeen seconds, and counting, ago and then re-extrapolate that forward, we can see the difference in the trajectories.” Bob Roca spun a three-dimensional map in front of them and overlayed their current trajectory in blue versus the correct trajectory in green on it. The two curves were for the most part straightening out and would look like straight lines before long, but, unfortunately for them, their current blue line was veering away from the required green line. “We’re significantly off here. If we don’t correct it, we’ll miss Proxima.”
“Looking through the telescopes at Proxima, the bow still appears to be pointed right at it,” Crosby noted. “But we’re too far away to just point and shoot. Interstellar navigation is a lot trickier than going to the Moon, Mars, or even the outer solar system.”
“I say we make corrections,” Roca said.
“The problem is that whatever we do now, Earth will not know it for months to come. Folks, we are reaching that point where we are mostly on our own,” Lin added. The tech was tapping away at some virtual icons in midair that only he could see before he looked up. “We need our own true nav system that doesn’t use any of the PINS equipment. Maybe we could print or rig from spares or dismantle one of the science telescopes and try to build a point-and-shoot system.”
“That would get really complex, Lin.” Burbank rocked slowly back and forth in his chair. “The stars are all crazy shifted in spectrum right now. The pattern recognition software alone to filter the stars to the spectra we know is extremely calculation intense. Also, if we slightly overcorrect and the point star goes out of view, then what type of control algorithm is going to steer you back to it?”
“Well, we can’t sit on our hands and just do nothing!” Patel blurted out. Clearly, he was starting to get nervous about the likelihood they were all going to be stranded in deep space. “You might not care if we all die out here, but I don’t want to be lost in space until we freeze to death, suffocate, or starve!”
“Stow that shit away!” Crosby almost shouted at the crew tech. “Another outburst like that, Mr. Patel, and you’ll be confined to cryo for the duration.”
“No, Captain, it’s alright.” Burbank held up a hand. “I can understand what some of you might think about me . . . ”
“Roy, you don’t owe anybody an explanation,” Cindy Mastrano told him and then glared at Patel like she was a lioness about to pounce on a gazelle.
“No, no, it’s okay,” Roy continued. “I don’t want to be here. My life, the one I had, is over. I understand that now. But I’m still alive. For a bit I thought maybe I didn’t care if I lived or died. But, no, I don’t want to die. And I don’t want to be stuck in deep space to that end.”
“Any ideas then, Roy?” Captain Crosby asked him.
“Not yet.”
“Well, I’ve entered the trajectory correction maneuver most likely to keep us on target based on the data from back home, our best current estimations of our whereabouts, and the best bet on where Proxima is from non-PINS camera observations and extrapolations. My hopes are that this maneuver should put us mostly back on course. I’ll engage it with your permission, Captain. This should reset everything and, with the PINS being reset, maybe the problem will be solved,” said Zhao.
“Very well, I guess the prudent thing to do is wait for the next update from both systems tomorrow and see if the problem is fixed. The thing that worries me is that we couldn’t find any issues with the PINS that had to be fixed. It looked like it was working correctly before and after the reset. Which means that nothing has really changed,” Crosby said.
“At least we have a lifeline home. Being out here with a shaky nav system makes me think of all the ships lost at sea and never found, like the Waratah. She was a steamship that operated between Europe and Australia. In 1909, she was on her second voyage going from Durban to Cape Town, South Africa, when she disappeared with two hundred eleven people aboard. No trace of her was ever found,” Roca told them.
“I don’t know that that story was very uplifting, Bob.” Cindy scowled at him. “It’s true that if we become lost out here, no one will ever find us. But we’re a long way away from being lost, so please hold on to your ‘lost forever at sea’ stories. Are you a history buff, Chief?”
“Only nautical history. If you ever want to know about the life of Sir Charles Wager, First Lord of the Admiralty in 1733, then just let me know.”
“Maybe if we have to pass the time waiting on daily navigation updates,” Captain Crosby interrupted. “Listen, there’s no trying to make light of this situation. We’re in it deep out here, folks. We will either trek forward or make an all-stop, figure out how to abort, and return home. As it stands for now, we’re moving forward.”
CHAPTER 32
December 20, 2090 (Earth timeline)
March 13, 2090 (Ship timeline)
approximately 6 light-months from Earth
3.64 light-years from Proxima
“Damn. Still off course,” Crosby grunted. Twenty-three hours had passed since they reset the PINS and performed their first trajectory correction maneuver and now Crosby knew there would have to be another. The same group was gathered again in the mess hall, which was, to no one’s surprise, the most likely location aboard ship to congregate. Even in deep space, breaking bread together was still among the most social of activities for humans. They had just finished their lunch when the latest navigation status data was calculated. Good food even helps to assuage bad news.
“The correction we made yesterday should put us back on course at least for the next six months or so. The problem is that we are going faster and faster and the errors grow more quickly. We really need a better way because I’m not excited about going to cryo with an unproven nav computer steering our way,” said Roca, moving toward his datapad. He could control most ship systems from his datapad. The entire Samaritan network was accessible if you had the proper codes and hardware. Roca had set up a routine to take the new navigation data and feed it directly into the AI for the appropriate course correction.
“Did we have any clues as to what’s wrong with the PINS?” asked Zhao. “I mean, Roy, Cindy, there has to be some way to find out what Gaines did to it.”
“I still say we build a completely new system,” Lin added.
“No way to really test anything out here other than just do it for real and keep correcting everything. We’ve run our input data through the PINS, through the backup system, and even through the system simulator and it appears to be working fine. The problem appears to be local. The fact that the data going into the PINS is good rules out any problems with the pulsar telescopes. The issue has to be in the PINS hardware itself or its programming,” said Burbank.
“I say we reload the PINS software one more time. I can delete the current load and replace it with the code we know works back home that Roy brought us. Maybe something is wrong with the software we’re running,” Cindy Mastrano said. “If that doesn’t work, Lin, you might be right about building a new system of some sort.”
“I’ll keep thinking on a new nav concept with tech that is in our inventory or can be printed,” Patel offered in agreement with Lin.
