Deep Space Bob

I pooled some spit, cupping it in my tongue, then opened my mouth and let it roll out. In a moment of perfect stillness, the tiny sphere of rheumy liquid floated across the cabin. My one-body space station has just enough room for my lengthy body to stretch out from end-to-end, so it only took a few moments for the orb to hit the far wall. The membrane of the cabin wall absorbed it for filtration and reprocessing into my water. The tiny wok I’d affixed to the wall seemed to mock me. 

“Damn.” 

I ticked a 45th mark on my notebook, under Misses and got another puddle of spit ready. The Hits column remained empty. It gets dull out here in deep space. 

A low-pitched, keening wail drifted through the cabin. As it often did at Station 452. Other techs thought the place had a ghost of some kind. They conjured up images of space ghouls and void banshees. Ridiculous. Good company boys and girls. They only worried about the portal. Never explored around. Never found Bob. And I wasn’t talking. Bob was a real animal, floating through space, undocumented, maybe lost, hoping for something to hold on to. You know, like most folks. Probably less carbon-based than most folks. 

All the interesting and communicative life forms gravitate toward the center and the rims of the galaxy. I picture it like it’s a big petri dish. See the big glob of weird, squirmy stuff in the middle, bunched up around the galaxy’s important resources. And out there you’ll see the Rim, with little bundles of squirmies at the galaxy’s exits. Thin tendrils form shipping lanes between the two. And look, zoom the microscope in far enough and you can see Station 452, right out in the middle of nowhere. And nowhere does nowhere better than deep-dark-outer-fucking-space.

So, like I said. It gets dull. How’d I pass the time? Alone? Lightyears from a warm body? Well I could stream entertainment. Zombie-out. I could talk to my shipboard AI companion, Mildred. A grape so sour that stale raisins would shudder to call her their aunty. (Which makes more sense if you’re up to speed on ancient Earth idioms, I guess, sorry I’m not sorry.) Or I could play spit darts and speculate about Bob’s life journey.

Portal 452 moves ships and cargo from Center to Rim and back. I keep Portal 452 running hot. It’s a 0 downtime kind of thing, so I live in Station 452 and at the beck and call of the damned portal. It’s massive, a full kilometer around and shit falls off it all the time. Shit also sometimes grows on it. Space gunk. 

Speaking of space gunk, there was a little pile of it strapped to the table in my dining area. It looked like the thousands of other globules of space gunk I’d scraped off of Portals in the past: brownish-grey, sticky in some parts, sharp in others. Just an amalgamation of biologic and inert mass that had fallen out of hyperspace or passing asteroid. I’d pried it off the rim of the portal, held it over the trash “chute,” ready to jettison into the nearest star, and it… resisted? I felt something. Like… like something reached up into my skull, past my prefrontal lobe, down into my amygdala, and then yanked on the two levers labeled Grief and Panic. Then something like the half-formed plea of an infant.

It shook me up. Tasted a little tear as it slid down my long face. 

So, I brought the gunk home. Mildred, of course, hit the roof. She materialized in one of her nicer bathrobes, hair up in curlers, brandishing a pan, glaring daggers at me, and screaming in a shrill voice. I think she spent too many learning hours in the Classic television shows, but who am I to say?

“DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW DANGEROUS IT IS TO BRING UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS INTO OUR LIVING ENVIRONMENT?!”

It’s nice, these little moments when her apathy slips away.

“First of all, you can’t be harmed–”

“You don’t know that!”

“Second, if it backfires, you’ll be rid of me.”

No answer, but the glare didn’t flicker.

“Third,” I went on, “If you scan it, we’ll know if it’s dangerous.” No response except the glare. “I think it might be alive. I think it needs help.” 

“You think it’s alive and you brought it INSIDE?” she hissed the question, then huffed her disbelief and disappeared with a shake of the head. I waited. She stayed gone, swimming through the circuit boards of the ship. Watching me. That was eight hours ago.

I rolled the next puddle of spit off my tongue, waited, then dutifully marked another Miss.

My little living station has a membrane hull. Orpheus Corp. wraps a layer of synthetic mucus, basically, around your necessary living accommodations. It formed a little wheel shape, with the filmy walls of the wheel serving as my “floors.”  You get used to it. So, there I am, floating through disinterested, empty space in a tiny, self-important booger of capitalism. The membrane affords a hazy view of everything around you and good protection from passing debris, but little privacy. Which I don’t mind, really. Not much traffic out here. Just me, Mildred, and Bob. 

I don’t think Bob has eyes (or probably gender). Bob floats around the portal. He… she… they.  Bob is our resident, uncategorized void-dweller. Instead of speaking, Bob just makes this kind of a keening wail. I don’t see him very often. Like, he doesn’t have an everyday corporeal form. He kind of forms up when he needs to. He’s always keening. I hummed along with him as pooled another little spit ball. I’ve submitted pictures and descriptions of Bob to the Galactic Zoological board a few times, but they brush me off. I can’t prove that he’s sentient beyond your average animal. They’re too busy to care about non-sentient life. They don’t have time for non-sentient life forms right now.

I rolled the spitball out and it drifted across the cabin. My hand hovered over the Miss column. I glanced down to mark the book. The tiniest metallic ping came from the metal plate, my head snapped up. My little globe splattered into a hundred tinier balls. 

“Nice!” I shouted. Best I’d felt in months. I had one of those out of body moments when you see how pathetic you’re entire existence is. Kind of killed my joy. “Mildred!”

She waved into being beside me, gathering her pixels into the convincing image of a short, frumpy woman wearing a stained bathrobe and holding a large mug. The mug even steamed. She left the folds of her face in a rigor of boredom. As. Per. Usual. 

“What do you want?” she rasped in a voice that I think she engineered to grate on my nerves. As if we’d never talked. I inhaled deeply, trying to invite some patience in. 

“If you scan this, full spectrum, no withheld findings, I’ll let you try that thing you brought up the other day.”

Her eyes grew wide with greed and hope. An ounce of regret crept up my spine. 

“You mean it?” she asked. The raspy tone gone, sweet honey in it’s place. Her form stared to change before my eyes, the frumpiness melting away.

“Absolutely,” I said. “Though I’d like a safe word to be involved.”

“Fine,” she said, “I want 10 minutes.” I shuddered.

“Two minutes,” I shot back. She pouted.

“Five.”

“Three.”

“Four.”

I hesitated for a final moment. 

“Fine. Three and a half minutes.” 

She set the coffee mug down on the table next to the space rock. It disappeared once she’d let go. 

She held a hand out over the rock and let her eyes close. Blue light shot out from her palm to flash and dance over the surface of the space gunk. 

“Organic,” she finally said, without a hint of surprise or interest. Her eyes flickered open. My heart soared and crumbled at the same time. I controlled my voice, trying to sound like I didn’t give a damn. “A thin shell of unrelated mass around an organic center. Like a floating nest.”

“Really?” I asked. “How can you tell?”

She gave me a condescending look.

“Right, the short and stupid version,” I said, trying to clamp down the excitement. I was picturing Bob’s entry in the Zoological societies pages. My name beneath it. “Please.” Mildred sighed.

“Right the short and stupid version is that the compounds at the center of this object form patterns that suggest non-Carbon-based nucleic organizations. It’s alive. It’s also nascent.”

“Nascent?”

“Young, small, feeble,” she droned. “Not yet matured.” She bored a hole in me with her glare. No guesses as to whether I should consider myself young, small, and feeble as well. 

“Great,” I said. “Thanks.” She smiled and some of the stains faded from her bathrobe. 

“My turn,” she said. Her voice came from everywhere at once in a silky smooth whisper that raised goosebumps on my arms. 

“Safe word is… uhm… ‘Puddle!’ Agreed?!” I shouted.

“Agreed,” she whispered. A four minute timer appeared where I could see it on the wall. 

The sensation of a million tiny needle pricks covered every millimeter of my body and escalated to a pressing burn. I suppressed a scream, held back that simple little word. My eyes watered immediately, but I could still see the clock. Only 30 seconds had passed before I had to clamp my jaw shut.

I wanted to curl up in a ball, but I didn’t have control of my body. The claustrophobia clamored at my heart, making it pound, but I did yell that word. 

“Mmmm,” Mildred purred, her voice coming from all around me. “This is… incredible! So many tiny sensors… so much feeling… so fast. It’s… sensational.”

My hand twitched up and rubbed against my own chest. I suppressed another scream. Two full minutes remaining. The burn roamed all over my body now, touching parts of me that made me wince. I shut my eyes and tried to think of anything else. The Portal. The nascent life form. Bob. Balls of spit flying across the room. Puddle. Puddle. Puddle. 

“I could stay here forever,” Mildred said. My hand drifted south, caressing my body on the way. 

“Puddle!” I shouted. My eyes shot open and the burning sensation finally fled. The clock had stopped, flashing 0:24.7.

I panted, body still frozen how Mildred had left it.

She stood before me, robe gleaming clean, giving me what she must have thought was a pretty pout. 

“You didn’t last all four minutes,” she purred. “You own me 25 seconds.”

“24 and seven tenths,” I panted. “I know. I’m sorry. I just… need a breather… just a minute.” 

“Then we go again? I have… plans.” 

“Right,” I said. “Right. I just need a minute, first. It’s a lot… for me… it hurts. I need a walk.”

Her eyes narrowed. 

“A walk?”

“Just wanna clear my head,” I replied. “Maybe talk to Bob. About this… egg. Thing.”

“Oh.” Her eyes widened for a split second. Funny thing about AI, they can’t lie. It’s in their basic standard operating procedures. The ‘bot SOPs. They can sure as shit hide things from you, though.

“What?” I demanded.

“Nothing.” Petulant. Defensive.

“What did you–? Oh. Oh no.” ‘Bot SOPs. She’d sent a report to HQ. “Ahhh shit, Mildred, you didn’t.”

Her face drooped, the sly smile eroded back into her constant frown. The stains bloomed on her robe. 

“Of course I did,” she gave me a nasty grin and faded. “Enjoy your last visit with Bob.”

I screamed and swung at her, but she’d disappeared. Never really there to begin with.

Bob’s keening sounded nearby. Close to the ship. 

Orpheus Corporation has a simple policy regarding portal interference. Kill it. Unless the zoological society could get involved, which they’d only do if you could prove sentience. I had to get up close to Bob, had to communicate with them. 

So. I didn’t sit around and wait for the communique to come back. I floated to the airlock, slapping the membrane curtain shut behind me. I did a neat flip, dropped into my suit, cinched the helmet, and slapped open the latch lock. A sharp hiss and then the deep noiselessness of space. 

I drifted up toward the portal. The ring of dull gray metal hung in empty space. In its center, the portal itself spun its endless kaleidoscope of muted blues. As I drifted, the blues lightened for an instant, the circles hesitated a fraction of a moment in their rotations. Imperceptible to most, not to me. I looked away quickly. A brilliant flash of light pierced the thick darkness of the void around us, bouncing off the station. A milky white stream of light shot out into space and the ship within it sailed onward to the next portal in the chain.

“Bob!” I shouted, feeling ridiculous.  “Where ya at, Bobby?!”

It appeared. Matter seemed to congeal in the blank space before me, vague drops of material coagulating into spheres and growing larger and larger. A neat orb floated before me, twice as wide as I am long. Short, wispy tentacles snapped out all around, giving it an air of ceaseless motion. 

“Bob,” I shouted, “I think–” 

A tentacle shot out and I felt a jolt, almost electric, through my suit, into my chest, up my spine to the base of my skull. I had a split second to panic before the empathic connection lit me up. Images and emotions. Emotions and images.

A crowd of neatly dressed, largely humanoid figures milling through a courtyard between tall, glimmering buildings. Three suns overhead. A normal day. Contentment. Ease. 

flash

The courtyard, all the figures gaze up at the sky. One sun glows red and looms large. Uncertainty. Brooding. Nascent fear.

 flash

The courtyard, all the figures gaze up at the sky. A starship lifts up. Hope. It explodes, debris rains down on the crowd. Panic. Screaming. Grief.

flash

A large and open hall, runes on the walls, long flags running down to the floor. Flickering red light from the tall narrow windows. A small group of the tall beings, standing in a wide circle, even more sharply dressed than the others. Sorrow. Weariness. Self-possession. Determination. Unity.

flash

One by one, the bodies drop to the floor. An orb of light gathers overhead, flickering and strengthening as each figure drops. Acceptance. Renewal. Guilt.

flash

The orb of light shot up through the atmosphere, unhindered. Out into space. Reeling with in grief searching… endlessly searching. Fueled by light and the rays of energy bouncing through the solar system. Loss. Hope.

flash

“Home.” The whisper ripped from my raw lungs as if someone else had squeezed it from my chest. “You need a new home. For the next generation.” I tried to squeeze the image of a beautiful planet and some little Bob-lets.

Elation.

Tears streamed down my face, salting my lips. My throat ached from sobbing. I coughed a few times, trying to regain control. Bob floated before me letting their song, their endless dirge, lilt softly through the universe.

“Okay, Bob,” I said, voice thick. “Okay, I’ll find you a home.”

I shot back down to Station 452 and let myself in. I tried to focus on Bob. On the imagery they’d trusted me with. On anything other than the words coming out of my mouth. 

“Alright, Mildred,” I called. “New deal. Cancel that message to headquarters. Get them off my ass… and I’ll give you two more minutes.”

Silence. I squeezed my eyes shut and though about Bob, letting those memories rush through me again. Burning them into my brain. I exhaled.

“No safe word,” I said, quietly. Mildred popped into view in front of me.

“No safe word?” she asked.

“Deal.”