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The wicked ice.
There was only endless ice, on this barren planet far away from Earth. It had no name yet, just a label, and researchers were supposedly sent to planets like these to prove themselves.
I could not bear to call it home.
The ice was not visible from the surface—a light powdered snow covered every inch of ice, which I had found in the early days to also contain trace minerals. This flat sheet of white glared, fought, with hostility at the brilliant star above, so ever far away. Days stretched end over end here, and although the cabin lights and shades were set to the Earth-cycle, this planet's day-cycle was horrifically long, rotating absurdly slowly. It became routine for me to put day-correcting vision glasses on at the planet’s night, when I was set to the Earth-cycle day. And so this almost mesmerising contradiction was set: where it would be day and night at the same time.
Small outcroppings occasionally pieced the ice like beaching whales, huge slates of dark rock slanted out from the sheet, covered in the white powder. They were spaced across three patches on the planet's surface, interspaced irregularly, and it became a personal thought process of mine to theorize what had caused them to emerge. Without the correct seismic and geology equipment, I could only guess, but below the thousands of feet of ice I imagined giants pounding with spears, slamming the ice upwards, in a wicked attempt to break free. I knew no giants existed—there were no organic chemicals underneath the surface, I’d learned that after a few years—and that likely it had been an effect of the planet's formation or possibly some geologic movement.
But. Still I imagined those giants, banging, slamming, screaming to be let out of their prison of ice. I wish I could somehow let them know there was a human on their roof.
Before I’d arrived, the mechobots from the I-RISE Group had tunneled into one of the larger stone outcroppings and installed my cabin, a fusion generator and compact fuel cells, and an underground ice-garage for my ship. The ice they dug out from the construction had been set aside in the knee deep snow, and had barely moved over the years. Decades? Decades.
My cabin was nice, appropriate. Thick insulated walls, smooth white paneled ceilings (and specific colored floors per room), expansive glass windows, multiple science labs and electronics rooms, and comfortable furniture, were representative of all Remotely Transmitted Research stations, but especially the RT12 stations. As a researcher who went alone, mine had been outkitted with extra robotic help. Little mover bots and the big crate bot, the cabin computer and the automatic HiHVAC system, and my fitness hand-gauntlet. A decade ago, for my mid-term supply drop, I ordered a small robotic bird companion, on a whim, and it had arrived, tweeting out beautiful.. noises, and sat at my shoulder. I pet it occasionally, as I sat in the snow on the top of my outcropping of stone, looking out at the light blue horizon, as white dunes formed from light wind.
My favourite machine was the meal-prep machine.
A fully automated meal-prep machine, with integrated mixers and knives and pots and knives and fluid-dispensing nozzle things, for salad dressing. I would watch it every once and a while, mesmerized, as I ordered the ingredients from the supply crates and it arrived through vacuum tubes, where they are chopped, prepped, sautéed, fried, cooked, roasted, and dressed. The machine whirred with such a light noise, as vegetables were poured into a pot for soup, or a rack of deep-stored tuna was fried along a conveyor belt. When I was in the mood for it, watching it could be the most mesmerising dance of synchronous beauty that was displayed for me.
I got a larger ship too, for transport. Sometimes I sat alone on the ship.
It was a nice ship. The large cargo bay and expansion module meant it could store the astronomy equipment I’d been sent here with. I also got better food crates, and better equipment, overall. I had heard of cramped stations with bunkbeds and smells and that all sounded horrible to me then, and nightmarishly rigid to me now. The ship was cold of course, without power, and when I sat in my cockpit in my light-suit and raised the seat and opened the garage door; I could see out through the metal frame into the open expanse of ice and snow, and spot the nearest distant stone cropping. It was pleasant to sit there when I didn’t feel, and be a bit more warm.
There had been video modules of course, that told me about deep inner breathing, relaxation, mediation, the manifestation of imprinting humanity on robots, journaling, the list goes on and on. In my first few months, there had been so much to explore and do that I forgot about the modules. With little actual research to complete, I could set my robots to assembly work and be free. I loved going outside in my burgundy heavy-suit, and trudge through the snow, walking and only seeing my footprints, staring into the horizon; turning around and seeing my lone station lights and antennas poke out on the outcropping of rock. I would watch scant clouds race across the sheet of white landscape, sitting inside on my orange cushioned couch, sipping a hot coffee. I turned on the cabin’s low power mode for a week, charged up the ship, and blasted it across the landscape, spotting the regions of stone outcroppings from above. I marvelled at all the white snow and ice, snow and ice for the entire surface, see the fullness and emptiness of it all, and see the malevolent sun up above.
Later, years later, I would watch those video modules, and do the exercises for months—there was a time where I did them for years, but eventually I always stopped. Either it would be when my Earth-night lined up with the planet’s night for a long period of time, or during the planet's rare winter, or when the generator had to be kept running at irregular hours, or in gaps between large research projects. But I don’t think any of the module creators had ever been here, exactly, or anywhere similar: on this wicked expanse of night and ice, in the dead of it all, impossible distances away and gone from any of my kind.
Uploading and downloading video was possible, especially with my research antennas, but it was tedious and not the primary purpose and so eventually I stopped. I would order the original transmitting system at the nearest server center to transliterate videos into words, written words for me to read. I could get more information that way, and essentially consume the same quality of information. They put some geostationary satellites in, after two decades, which helped with the connection, but I downloaded everything as text anyways. It was better for the data and super-computer time to be routed through those satellites, rather than my personal texts. I had all the movies, films, documentaries, to work through until the end of time, the unquantiseable quantity of enjoyable media that humanity had produced already, and I didn’t really need any more.
Fifteen years ago, I got into the habit of using keybinds on any computer instead of voice commands. Surprisingly, I found it more efficient. Seeing words on the screen or a direct result of my action was more satisfying than using the built-in voice commands. I went on a maniac hunt, converting any piece of technology to be interactable with a keyboard. The robots got sophisticated hand gestures that to me felt similar to typing, the meal-prep machine got a spring loaded keyboard in a drawer, and the shoulder bird got a series of scratches that triggered its basic commands. I rarely heard my own voice anymore, but for the burp, sneeze, cough, or yawn. I always watched downloaded films with subtitles, and increased the video playback speed from two times speed, to two and a half, to three times regular speed. By then, captions got a bit too large, so I decreased their on-screen size. My monitor screen was big enough.
Two years away from leaving, the day-count down timer turned on. I had completed the research, what I had been sent out to do, and more. According to my text newsletters, I had become well known in the astronomy societies, the talk of the town, so to speak. A year and a half before leaving, I made a final discovery that my reviewers praised, and I was already set for talks and conferences and meetings and interviews and speeches and papers and press talks. People, friends, had written to me, congratulating me on my accomplishments. A year before leaving, I began to pack some equipment, and the dread grew in my throat. One of my robots broke moving a small crate, and I laid in bed for a day. Dread was unfamiliar, it was not of the place of snow and ice, here was constant, and dread was highly irregular. Seven months before leaving, and it was a month until two others would arrive to help me disassemble the station. I was being praised as one of the longest staying researchers at a remote planetary station. With little research to do, I laid in bed. I stood, or stood somewhat, looking out my cabin window. The meal-prep machine prepped things quickly, preferably. An uncontrollable mental countdown timer of the other’s arrival time began, and rang incessantly at each second in my head, counting down further and further, and further, and it was a break that didn’t need to happen, a break in this land of ice and snow.
01:20:41 MST.
14th Earth January. Year 16,751 CE.
Decommissioner Chris Saamer (Mental Recording).
‘Computer, is the mental journal recording enabled?’ Yes. Again, Chris, you do not need to manually enable it.
‘Well, three stations ago it didn’t record, and the Precept got pretty annoyed. So I’ll manually check.
‘Okay, 1:21 MST, January 14th Earth time, and the year is 16,740. God, I can’t believe mental recording is the way we do this, especially after today. My eye insert has a video of today’s visit to the station, correct?’ Yes.
‘Good. So, today, right. It’s just Albine and I on the crew now, we split from the others two stations ago. Our lander arrives down on this planet, uhh’ AG4-5E2 in the T6 Sector ‘Yeah, that. As reported, the planet is covered in a several foot high snow layer. The planet had a research station installed due to its proximity to three interesting stellar systems, and was the only planet nearby that did not have irregular gravitational effects or abnormalities for humans. It’s an RT12 research station in a slab of rock, and when we approached we could tell that it and its antennas had been fairly well maintained, and all transmitters, equipment, et cetera was beeping nominally at a distance. We’d been briefed that this was a well-known researcher in the astronomy community, but he’d been alone for forty something years. So we kept him updated on each of our arrival and landing events, and the airlock was triggered open for us to use.
‘By the garage, which slopped down and into the ice and rock outcropping, there was a broken mechobot, it was a M5 A-series. We’d gotten in our heavy-suits because they integrated better with older equipment and just in case something was broken. The airlock reported it was operational with 90% health, which is excellent. My suit also received a more in-depth station report, Computer, can you save that to the same file as the recording?’ Yes, done.
‘The researcher was inside the station, looking out of his window on his couch. When we entered the main living space, he stayed there, staring out at our lander. It's about the same size as his, but engine technology has primarily switched with dual-ion lately, and our engines are huge compared to his ship’s. There was a white canvas of nothing from the cabin to our lander, except for the pinpricks of our footsteps. Albine didn’t land too close, maintaining the Rast Antenna landing protocol.
‘“Hello?” I said, speaking to the researcher. He turned to look at me. He looked like the photos we had of him, with his gene therapy’s that I looked up, that wasn’t surprising, but there was a whiteness to his eyes. Like the white ice had been imprinted permanently on him.
‘He nodded, and grabbed a keyboard that had been neatly placed next to two cups of coffee. He’d been drinking coffee when we arrived. He took the keyboard in his hands, and gave me a wireless electronics plug, a wired cable for the keyboard, and three different remote module cards, the ones that you know, you can stick in any device and it’ll link it to something else.
‘“What do you want me to do with these?” I asked, as Albine looked around the room. He gestured with his hands holding onto the keyboard and the electronics again, but his head followed Albine around the room. She had a knack for picking up cues, station clues, or cues about any object, that’s what makes her a good pilot. She pointed out later that she noticed the bot in the room had a hand-gesture extension for it installed, and the meal-prep machine had a keyboard in a spring-loaded drawer.
‘I wasn’t wearing any suit or gauntlet, and my watch didn’t accept remote cards, so I told him, “Sorry, I can’t plug that into anything. Are you okay? You can speak to us, you received the notification but we’re here to help you.” Sometimes, researchers could be nervous upon greeting others. I’d never had to deal with a lone researcher before, though.
‘He walked over to his monitor screen and plugged in one of the cards, opening a blank window. His hand literally blurred for a thousandths of a second, and text appeared on the screen.
‘COMMAND: Confirm your identity.
‘REQUEST: Details of your ship and sailing number for security confirmation.
‘I chuckled, but quieted when I realised Albine’s frown. She’d figured out before me that he’d been isolated for so long, this is the only way he communicated to robots.
‘“We’re not robots,” she said, “We’re here to help you and the station.” We tried not to use the words take down or deconstruct, as people grew attached to their stations after so long. He gestured again, waving the cards and cables, pointing at the screen with his typed commands.
‘“We see the screen. We aren’t commanded by anything, we’re humans, like you.” He nodded at that, understanding. “Our sailing number is 4433.0991.3219, but I don’t know if that would help you.” He nodded again. “Can you speak to us?”
He walked to the robot in the room, and plugged a card into it. On the monitor, he typed “SAY: ‘We see the screen. We aren’t commanded by anything, we’re humans like you”, and pointed, first at the robot, then the screen, then us, then the robot again before he submitted the say command.
‘There was this horrible screeching sound as the bot’s mouth tried to move. It hadn’t been maintained at all. He looked surprised, and shook slightly, I guess he knew of the command but hadn’t used it on the bot before. He jerked back as Albine gently brought his chin up so his eyes met hers. “Hey,” she said, hand on his shoulder, “It’s okay. How are you feeling?” He shrugged his shoulders and nodded his head ambivalently, and tried to give Albine the remote cards.
‘“Hey, Rilo, can you speak to us?” He turned to me, with frustrated eyes. His eyes were white, right Computer?” Yes, they were slightly whiter than the average eye. ‘I really saw that when he just stared straight at me. He opened his mouth to speak.
‘This fast, garbled, guttural sound came out. His teeth weren’t in the best condition, and his tongue moved abnormally. I think his throat didn’t contract properly either, from an external perspective. He paused, coughed, and tried again. But that horrible, strained guttural sound emerged again, and he stopped. He pushed past Albine, and took a glass of water. He tried again, for a few minutes, and maybe there was a difference in tone, but all he could sound out were these horrible guttural sounds. Albine and I took a step back. He massaged, clawed, pressed in on his throat, and started shaking, almost crying without tears, but all that came out was this horrible, gut wrenching, almost sad, garbled mess of sound.
‘His eyes danced wildly, skirting around in their sockets. His hands flung, slamming and dancing down on the keyboard, a terminal appeared, remote commands and overrides firing, and before I finished, “Wait, we’re here to help, take it slow, we want to help—” he ran across the room, Albine leaped to intercept him but missed. I felt a light pressure shift and knew what he was doing. I raced after him, and saw the metal airlock door lock shut down the paneled hallway, and I pounded against the metal barrier.
‘Leaning my face against the airlock window, I saw him leap out of the cabin and into the infinite plane of ice and snow.’
Inspired by The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury and Interstellar by Christopher Nolan.