SSE
Copyright© 2013 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 2: The Proposition
Jake was busy sorting information when Dr. Rattray-Taylor’s voice came again. “Mr. Primare, Administrator Juanita Grace is here to talk to you.”
Jake would have blinked in surprise, had he eyes to blink. “It’s tomorrow already?”
“Yes, sir. Sir, Administrator Grace is the NASA Administrator. Administrator Grace, on the other end of this connection is Mr. Jacob Primare.”
“Mr. Primare, Dr. Rattray-Taylor tells me that you prefer formal titles, but in my case, I’m a grandmother of six little cherubs. Not one of them would dream of calling me ‘Administrator Grace.’ Mr. Primare, please call me Nita.”
“Yes, Nita, what can I do for you?”
“Mr. Primare, can I call you Jake?”
It was something he used in negotiations when he wasn’t sure of his ground. “I’d like to stay ‘Mr. Primare’ if you please.”
“As you wish, Mr. Primare.
“Are you familiar with the history of American space flight in the last half dozen years?”
“A catastrophe,” Jake told her. “President Bush ordered the Space Shuttle grounded after 2010. There was a strong move to save it when it became clear that we would not be able to supply the International Space Station. After the election of President Obama, amid the financial crisis at the end of the 21st Century’s first decade, a great many programs had to be cut. NASA’s budget was an easy target. The shuttle program was shut down, the follow-on project was cancelled, and eventually we sold the ISS to the European Union for fractions of a mil on the dollar.
“We couldn’t afford the Russian resupply flights, and eventually Russia tried to claim the ISS, but in the closing days of the Obama administration, he suddenly decided that he needed something positive in the face of seven plus years of uniformly bad news, and so he reasserted American control. We have flown two shuttle missions to resupply it, even though we’re using de-mothballed shuttles and we no longer have an ‘escape vehicle.’”
“I read about that ... what are we planning to do with a space station that we can’t afford and can’t support?”
“Mr. Primare, you can’t see me; have you ever seen a picture of me?”
“No, Nita, I never have.”
She chuckled. “I am vertically challenged, sir. As a result, I have grandiose plans and schemes. We’ve been sending up commercial supply rockets that aren’t shuttles — they are simple one-shot vehicles, although they are working on that. They are as reliable as the shuttle, or more so, as they cost less, and I can save shuttle missions for crew replacement and, if needed, crew rescue.
“We have begun to stockpile supplies in orbit for an ambitious mission.
“The Obama administration was grasping at straws, and not doing it very cleverly. They cancelled all sorts of NASA science projects, thinking they could spend the money on job creation or bailing out someone else. The fact was, that every project they cancelled added to unemployment while hamstringing US Space Policy.
“I was appointed by our new president to my position to change that ... and that’s my intention.
“We have an opportunity coming up in eighteen months, Mr. Primare. There is a planetary alignment that will last for eight weeks, that will allow a planetary probe launched during that window to visit Venus twice, then Mars, pass close to a few asteroids on the way out to Jupiter, loop around Europa, a moon of Jupiter that scientists want a close look at, then on to Saturn to visit Enceladus, the moon with the geysers and almost certainly a water ocean just a few hundred meters below the surface of the moon.
“We’ve been working on a computer artificial intelligence to run the probe. The mission will be two orders of magnitude larger than any other planetary mission to date and the thinking is that a more autonomous entity would be ideal for this mission.
“Except the AI projects keep producing nothing of any real significance; nothing that’s better than what we have today.
“Then you came along. Early on, one of the members of your medical team realized where the research involving you was headed and came up with an alternate plan. It wasn’t an easy sell, but we’ve come to agree with him that it’s feasible.
“We will hook you into all the computing power that you can handle. We will deploy you with our Phoenix probe, our Return to the Solar System mission due to launch in eighteen months.
“You would be the first human being to orbit Venus, Mars, some of the asteroids, Jupiter, Jupiter’s moons, Saturn, Saturn’s moons ... you will go down in the history books, Mr. Primare!”
If Jake still had salivary glands, he’d have been drooling. He’d always wanted to go into space; he had, in fact, a reservation on one of the commercial ventures to fly people into space, even for a brief time.
He was wryly amused; he’d suspected it before, but now he was sure. His emotional responses to events were definitely muted. Doctor Rattray-Taylor had said that he wasn’t being medicated. He’d taken that assurance at face value, but now he wasn’t so sure. Before the accident, if he’d received an offer like this, he’d have been bouncing up and down, eager for more details — and probably would already have said yes instantly.
Thinking about that and other things brought him up short. There was no doubt that they were monitoring, and certainly recording, all of his communications. His first thought had been to politely ask the woman to get Dr. Rattray-Taylor back, and he’d let her know his decision in due course.
“Nita, if you would. I need to think about this; I’m going to need some more details.”
“That’s fine, Mr. Primare, take a couple of days. The thought now is that we’d do the preliminary work on your interface to the rest of us — a visual feed and the computer hookup. Then, for the next twelve months or so, you’d study the mission parameters, and we’d prepare you the best we can. About a year from now, or a little more, you’d go to orbit, where the mission will be in the final stages of assembly, about twenty-five miles from the ISS. About two weeks later, you would board the probe and make interface adjustments and integrate into the vehicle. Then it’s off for a grand tour of the solar system!
“I’ll leave Richard Phillips here; he’s my liaison with the Phoenix mission engineering team. He’s fully conversant as to the mission design. You will, I assure you, Mr. Primare, be greatly impressed with what we’re going to assemble in orbit. The vehicle will be the most expensive device ever built.”
“Thank you, Nita. If Dr. Rattray-Taylor is there, I’d like to talk to him.”
“I’m here, Mr. Primare,” the familiar voice told him.
“You said I wasn’t being medicated. Yet my emotions are, I guess you’d call it odd. They are there, but muted.”
“Mr. Primare, you know the answer to this yourself. The brain is the conductor of the symphony of our lives. However, the rest of the body participates to one degree or another in that life. Hormones, Mr. Primare, are the medium that causes the physiological changes we are familiar with and that we call ‘emotions’.
“Take a simple thing: if you were to say, make an embarrassing gaffe. You can’t blush, sir. All of the hormones and nerve impulses that would normally be part of the emotional reaction simply aren’t there anymore. For what it’s worth, quadriplegics frequently experience the same thing. I haven’t mentioned it, but the fact is technically you have been castrated, and you no longer have the glands to be a functioning male.”
“Oh,” Jake said, stunned. Gosh, it was true! Out of sight, out of mind! “Crap!” he finished his thought.
The good doctor had the effrontery to laugh at him, and Jake was sad to realize that his anger was as muted as the rest of his emotions. He sighed, and Dr. Rattray-Taylor chuckled again.
“Mr. Primare, it is just one more thing you have to adapt to; better, don’t you think, to face it now than to wake up some night with the sudden realization that there will be no more wet dreams?”
“I guess whatever floats your boat, Doctor,” Jake said with only a pale shadow of the emotion he should be feeling.
“Well, consider the upside. No more dumps, no more pissing...”
“Doctor, what exactly can I expect for a lifespan like this?”
“We have no idea. Not a single idea. Obviously, there are the rather enormous medical risks of new medical technology. The team has spent years getting ready for this day, and months now checking everything — and then checking it ten more times.
“On the other hand, you’re functionally immune to a lot of forms of cancer. You’re safe from kidney and liver failure. No risk of kidney disease or gallstones. No risk of diabetes or thyroid disease. No prostate problems; no skin cancer. Men can get breast cancer, even if it isn’t as common as it occurs in women. That’s off the table now as well. It’s quite a long list of medical risks that have been taken off the table.
“The most common belief is that you could live as long as you normally would have, assuming you didn’t come down with one of the forms of cancer that you’re still at risk from, that would have ended things early.
“You’re Patient Zero, Mr. Primare. We’ll be learning from you as long as it’s possible.”
Evidently, the wages of sin truly were death; there was a lot of steel in the old aphorism.
“Doctor Rattray-Taylor, I have two requests of you, both relatively modest. First, you can start calling me ‘Jake’ if I can call you by your first name.”
“It’s Mike, Jake.”
“Good! And Mike, I have no idea of time in my current state. Unless I’m talking to you, I have no clear idea of the passage of time. Even in a conversation, I’m aware that there may be some longish pauses in my responses.”
“Never more than five or ten minutes.”
“Mike, it just feels like an instant to me. So, what I would like you to do is tell me the time and date every time we start a conversation, and if I take overlong to respond, to start a timer and give me an idea of how long I was actually thinking.”
“We can do that, Jake. It’s a good idea. I never thought of that; I’m sure no one on the team has either.”
“That said, I’m going to spend some time thinking about this.”
“There’s no particular rush, Jake. Take all the time you need.”
Jake pulled back and switched his thought processes to Armenian. Was that going to fool them for very long? He doubted it. If nothing else, there were too many modern words that had been added to the language that would tell them, at least generally, what he was thinking about. That too was something to consider ... could he develop a secure way of thinking that they couldn’t listen to?
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