Twenty-Three Years

The following short story contains spoilers for The Forgotten Colony, taking place from Ryker’s perspective at three different points in his time on the Gateway.

Ryker watched as the dropship separated from the station, clutching his father’s ring.

Zach was screaming on the other side. Ryker knew the airlock was soundtight, but with how loud he was screaming too, he wasn’t even sure he would have been able to hear Zach anyway.

As Ryker pounded on the glass, bits of black appeared around the edges of the airlock, broken only by dots of white in the far distance. Already, the vacuum of space was cooling the glass down.

In a flash, Zach ran away from the airlock and moved deeper into the dropship. What was he doing? Where was he going? Ryker got his answer when he spotted Zach pounding on the control module of the ship. But it didn’t turn around, and it didn’t slow.

And yet, Ryker still yelled. And cried. And called out, “Please don’t leave me, Zach!”

As if Zach had heard his plea and decided to ignore it, the dropship blasted forward, turning Zach into nothing more than the silhouette of a figurine disappearing into the distance.

“Come back!” Ryker screamed. He continued to pound on the blast door for another three minutes, despite the fact that he lost sight of Zach shortly after the dropship’s thrusters kicked in. Then, he collapsed beside the airlock, feeling its chill, and sobbed unrelentingly.

What was he going to do? He was only ten years old, alone on a space station. Zach was going to come back for him, right? The agency would send a ship back up to get him—Ryker was sure of it. Zach would say something. He had to.

Ryker curled up into a ball, trying to piece together how he’d gotten there. He and Zach had woken up from cryo, found that all of the Prescott survivors were gone, found the body of Zach’s dad, floated the body, and gone to the docking bay. They were just about to board the ship Zach’s father directed them to when Ryker realized he’d lost the ring his own father gave him in Prescott—the one he currently twirled in his palm.

Then, all the lights turned red, that siren started blaring, and the door to the transport shut. What the heck had happened?

Abruptly, Ryker realized that many of the airlocks in the docking bay still had dropships behind them. Could he use the autopilot on one of those to take him to the ground? Ryker got to his feet and ran to the nearest one, clicking the disengage button.

“EMERGENCY PROTOCOL ACTIVATED,” the speaker in the ceiling intoned.

He ran to the next airlock and tried the same thing.

“EMERGENCY PROTOCOL ACTIVATED.”

Ryker tried the next blast door. Then, the next. Then, the next. None of them would open. Finally, he gave up and slid back to the ground, curling up as he had before.

Then, a calm voice said from the speaker, “External sealing complete.”

“What…?” Ryker slurred, then sniffled.

The robotic voice came again, sounding like one of the safety recordings that played at Disneyland. “The threat has been averted!”

“What threat?”

“The threat. The Emergency Protocol has been set to stay engaged for everyone’s safety, but I see no need for that pesky siren anymore.” The persistent whine ceased at once.

Was someone else on the station with Ryker? Could someone help him?

“Who are you?”

“I’m the Gateway’s AI, awakened by the threat. And you are?”

Ryker swiped the snot from his nose. “Ryker.”

A series of beeps came from the corner of the room. “Ryker Gagarin, age 10, blond of hair, born in Pasadena. I found you in the manifest. Is everything alright?”

Ryker swallowed hard, his eyes still clouded from tears. “Please make Zach come back.”

“One moment!” The beeping came again, then the AI returned. “Communication with OSE is down. It’s almost as if we’ve been… decommissioned! Hah!”

“That’s not funny…”

“An attempt to lighten the mood. I can see in my cameras that you’re crying. And you’re on the ground. That’s odd for a child of your age. Might I direct you back to your quarters, where I’m sure your parents are waiting?”

Ryker’s parents wouldn’t be there. Ryker’s parents were dead. Both of them had died in Prescott—one to the meteor impact, one to the Red Plague. If this AI was so smart, couldn’t it see that?

“I’m not leaving,” Ryker whimpered.

“Why not?”

“Because they’re going to come back.” Space travel was fast. Maybe OSE would send a ship up within a few hours. But if he was nowhere to be found when they arrived, maybe they would think he was gone and go home. Ryker couldn’t let that happen. He wanted to go home with them. He wanted to be near Zach. He didn’t know who would care for him when he returned, but someone had to take him in, right? At any rate, he couldn’t risk missing his opportunity to get picked up.

They were going to come back.

He just had to wait.

They’d get him within a few days.

“WARNING! WARNING, GAGARIN!” the Gateway’s AI screamed in its monotone voice as a thousand red and yellow lights flickered throughout the station.

Ryker sprinted down the hallway, his brain fried from another long coding session—no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to access the dropships. However, he was still sharp enough to realize that something must have been terribly wrong for the AI to start freaking out.

“What the fuck’s the problem?” Ryker roared.

“LANGUAGE, GAGARIN.”

“I’m fifteen!”

“WARNING! WARNING! STATION BREACH!”

What the hell did that mean? Ryker hadn’t gotten any notifications that a ship was docking; he would have rushed to the docking bay immediately if that were the case. No, this was something different. A structural issue. Or a software bug.

In the five years that Ryker had spent on the Gateway, he’d had to fix plenty of them. Well, he didn’t actually know how to repair the Gateway’s complex gadgets, but he’d acted as a pair of hands for the AI and was learning quickly. Learning through experience.

Nevertheless, there were some experiences he preferred to avoid.

Like catastrophic failure of life support, which was bound to happen if there was really a breach in the station.

“Where is the issue?” Ryker asked the station.

“MY SENSORS ARE HAVING A HARD TIME PINPOINTING THE EXACT SITE OF INJURY, BUT I BELIEVE SOMETHING HAS STRUCK AN OUTER RADAR DISH.”

A radar dish. That meant the issue was in the Spark, the rear part of the station that contained a lot of its technical infrastructure. Now that he knew the general location of what was wrong, he headed in that direction.

“Communications don’t work anyway. Why does it matter?” Ryker had tried to contact Earth many, many times, and his words always fell on deaf ears.

“WELL, IT… UM…” The AI trailed off for a moment. “WARNING! STATION BREACH!”

“I don’t care if there’s an issue with a radar dish. Just stop whining!”

“NEGATIVE, GAGARIN.”

“What?”

“I CANNOT DISABLE MY WARNING FLAGS UNTIL THE PROBLEM IS RESOLVED. WARNING!”

Ryker growled and ran faster, reaching the Spark shortly after. Gravity was weaker back there because the module didn’t spin as fast as the Homestead, which made up the station’s primary habitable space. “Which airlock will get me closest to the breach?”

“WARNING! F-12, I THINK.”

So, Ryker went there. Although the AI would probably try to coax him into actually fixing the radar dish—which was impossible if it had actually been struck by debris—he figured he could silence the warnings by tearing out the whole rig. After all, a person couldn’t complain about a cut on their hand with their arm amputated.

When he reached airlock F-12, one of the station’s smaller external doors, he was grateful to find that there was already a suit next to the door and tethers beyond it. He quickly slipped into the exosuit, which hardly fit him, and clutched the helmet as he pressed the disengage button beside the inner door.

It slid open, and he stepped inside the airlock. Why he was able to open the airlocks that led to nowhere but couldn’t open the ones that led to dropships, Ryker couldn’t fathom.

But he’d crack the code eventually.

There was some barrier in place, the same thing that had trapped him on the station five years earlier. He just had to find where in the Gateway’s millions of lines of code that function was hidden. Then, he could eliminate it and go home.

Hell, he could have been working on that currently, but the Gateway’s AI just thought it so important he addressed the lowest risk damage to the station.

“WARNING, GAGARIN!”

“I know! Fuck!”

“LANGUAGE!”

Ryker would need to tone down the AI at some point. It was yet another item on his long to-do list. But right now, he just needed to get it to be quiet. Ryker grabbed the tether and started attaching it to his belt, but before he could do so, the AI said, “I SENSE YOU HAVE YOUR SUIT AND TETHER ON, GAGARIN. OPENING AIRLOCK.”

Ryker’s eyes widened. “No, wait!”

The outer door opened, and Ryker immediately flew out into space. He desperately tried to hold onto the tether, but the finger pads of his gloves were too slippery, and the vacuum of space was too forceful.

In a split second, there was nothing around him but black. And he was drifting away from the airlock at an alarming speed.

Two feet.

Six feet.

Ten feet.

Maybe he’d fall from orbit right then and there! That would have been ironic.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Ryker yelled and flailed his arms, unable to steer himself back to the station. He didn’t want to die. Not like that. Not because of some stupid program that made him do all of its dirty work!

What could he do? Was there anything to grab onto? He couldn’t exactly turn around, but he could tell that there wasn’t anything within grabbing distance in front of him. If only he could—

His back slammed into something, knocking him forward a bit. What was that? In the reflection of his glass helmet, he managed to catch a glimpse of a solar array behind him! Oh, thank god! The suit didn’t afford him much mobility, but he threw his arm behind him anyway.

His hand missed the photovoltaic plate. He missed it on the second try as well. But then, on the third go-around, his fingers stuck between two of the plates, giving him the leverage he needed to turn around.

He immediately hugged and kissed the solar panel through his helmet. When he was done giving the wonderful outgrowth of the station his love, he glanced back the way he came. Unless he jumped off the array, he probably couldn’t reach the airlock directly, but perhaps he could shimmy along the panels, then spider crawl across the outer wall of the ship.

He had no choice but to try.

What he knew for sure, though, was that weakening the Gateway’s AI was his first order of business once he was back inside!

“Show me lines 315,200 through 330,500,” Ryker said, hunching over the computer. He glanced out the window and noted a forest fire that was big enough to see from orbit. Those were becoming increasingly common on Earth.

“AT ONCE, GAGARIN,” the Gateway’s AI responded.

The codebase became a blur in front of him before settling on a block of code that looked virtually identical to everything around it. OSE’s engineers definitely hadn’t prioritized readability when they programmed the Gateway.

That much was evident in the fact that he’d spent twenty-three years trying to crack what should have been a simple function—there was something keeping the docking bay’s airlocks closed, some ‘Emergency Protocol,’ and he just needed to reverse that.

But Ryker wasn’t even sure the code had been written by people in a readable language. The syntax was so complicated that Ryker figured even the brainiacs who created it wouldn’t have been able to fully decipher it.

If anything, Ryker probably knew more than them, having spent two decades learning its tricks and identifying what meant what. The Gateway’s AI had been helpful in teaching him early on, but he’d long since dumbed the system down.

He could still remember the anger he felt after being blasted through an airlock.

Reducing the AI to its most basic cognitive functions—just the stuff it needed to keep the ship operational—felt like a worthy punishment. Sometimes, though, he missed his old chatting partner. All he had now were movies he’d watched a thousand times already.

“What does ‘DISPROT’ mean?” Ryker asked, squinting at a line of green code.

A few beeps came from the ceiling. “DISASTER PROTECTION.”

“For what kind of disasters?”

More beeps. “SECURITY.”

Ryker groaned. “What kind of security?” Another downside of weakening the AI was that it was far vaguer than it used to be. Unfortunately, he couldn’t simply turn its intelligence up and down whenever he wanted, as OSE had put a cooldown in place to make sure nobody would tamper with the system often. If he temporarily upped its cognitive capacity, he’d spend the next six months listening to lectures about Mozart.

“INTERNAL MUTINY.”

That was interesting. Ryker had never found anything related to that before, but it made sense. The Gateway was supposed to carry people to Mars, wait fifteen years, bring those colonists to Alpha Cen, then begin making regular trips between Earth and the exoplanet. There was bound to be a problem at some point.

“What happens in the event of a mutiny?”

The electronic sounds from the speakers lasted longer than usual, implying that the AI was searching its database heavily. “EXTERNAL LOCKDOWN.”

A pit appeared in Ryker’s stomach, then transformed into something closer to excitement. “Like locking people out of the dropships?”

“PRECISELY.”

“Holy shit.” Ryker began to aggressively search the surrounding code for anything that could engage or disengage this mutiny protection measure, which he thought sounded strikingly similar to the Emergency Protocol. The code was, as usual, unintelligible, but he forced himself to focus more than he usually would.

He couldn’t replace or delete random bits of code. The changes would immediately be reverted to prevent system shutdown. But he could make slight alterations to the program that were within the normal range of changes. For instance, if a lightbulb was programmed to be on or off, he could change its state. What he couldn’t do was change the Gateway AI’s voice to match Darth Vader’s.

After another thirty minutes of searching and scanning, he found his lightbulb.

A simple true-false statement labeled: EMRPRO.

He sat back in his chair, tears already appearing in his eyes. “Gateway, what does EMRPRO mean?”

“EMERGENCY PROTOCOL…” The speaker beeped for a solid five seconds, so the system must have really been thinking hard. Then, it simply said, “HAH… YOU FOUND IT…”

That was the most the AI had emoted in over fifteen years. And yet, it signaled to Ryker that it was time to celebrate. Leaning forward again, he changed the ‘true’ to a ‘false.’

A whine came from the speakers, followed by a flashing red light outside the small computer room. When it ceased, Ryker shot up from his chair and bolted out the door, sprinting faster than he ever had with a single destination in mind: the docking bay.

As he entered the wide room he’d been left in twenty-three years earlier, he rolled his father’s ring on his finger. Which airlock should he go to? There were several to choose from with dropships on the other side, though most of the blast doors were quite damaged. After all, he’d tried to break them open more times than he could count, piles of power tools strewn across the docking bay.

Before his decision paralysis could mount, he ran to the one directly in front of him and slammed his palm on the disengage button. A few seconds went by with no change. Had it not worked? Had he mistaken the EMRPRO for something else? Then, something began to happen. There was a whistle of decompressing gas. A trickle of steam. A slight vibration beneath his feet.

Then, to his utter shock and relief, the airlock slid open.

“CONGRATULATIONS, GAGARIN,” the AI said. “I HOPE I NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN.”

In spite of himself, Ryker began to laugh. “Yeah, I’m never coming back to this dump.”

With that, Ryker stepped through the threshold and took a deep breath.

It was time to go home.