Chapter 6

Chapter Six

She stood in the middle of the lab in her blue dress and sock feet, looking around her. She could rest for a few more days, but she was afraid that would make it even harder to get started, and the work needed to be done. Best to make a start right away, even if it were a small one. She could always rest when she needed to. There was no one to report to, no one to question her if she took a nap in the middle of the day. There, I found one good thing about this situation, she told herself.

Let’s think about this logically. The first thing to do is to take inventory, to see what I have, and what works. That will probably take a few days on its own. Then I can start work on the designs, see what I have that could fit into them. Redesigning the best wing suits ever made, from scratch, that should only take, oh, a couple dozen years, if I make good time.

She began dissasembling the pile of electronics, identifying them when possible and writing that information on a strip of tape to mark it as catalogued. She couldn’t log in to her accounts on her tablet, but she had access to the computer system in the base, and used it to help identify some of the more mysterious parts.

The first few parts she identified were less than useless, just old filters and bits of wiring that no longer worked and had been taken out during the base’s first occupation. She might find some usable lengths of wire, but no more.

After a few hours’ work, her back began to ache, and Anita sat back. The pile of labeled parts had grown slightly, but most of it was still in the original pile, and that one didn’t seem to have shrunk at all. Slow down, Anita told herself. Breathe. You don’t have to build a suit in one day. You’re safe, almost no one knows you’re here, and you can take your time to do this right. There are other jobs to do, go focus on one of those.

Moving into the kitchen, she tallied up all of her food stocks on the tablet, making estimates about how long everything might last. Out of habit, she tapped the button to search for recipes. “Searching for network...” the tablet displayed, and Anita quickly cancelled the order, horrified. Connecting to a single network outside the base computer system, even for a second, would show the location of her tablet to anyone who might be tracking it. She contemplated opening it up and trying to disable the network connection entirely, but decided against it. The tablet was too valuable an asset, best not to mess with it. Just be more careful, she told herself.

The computer system in the base had no recipes of any kind stored on it, nothing that was not strictly relevant to the operation of the base back when it had been in use. Before hydroponics and other food production methods had made their way to Titan, back when residencies were measured in weeks rather than months or years.

She noted a few ideas for basic meals, and calculated her long her supplies would last at different rates of usage. Best to play it safe for the first few weeks, until she got a better idea of how often the team would be able to resupply and how much they might be able to bring. The produce should be used first, followed by the fruit and the eggs. The meat and cheese would last the longest.

Speaking of meals, she was hungry, Anita noticed. She checked the time. Midway through the day. Breakfast had been hours ago. Might as well get something started as long as she was in here, before getting back to work on the suits. No open heat sources, of course. Too dangerous. But there was a heating system similar to what kitchens in Kerguelen used, and she had some idea of how to use that. Eggs, beaten, went into an envelope with greens, seasoning, a little dried meat crumbled up as well. Not exactly a world-class omelette but it would be hot and fresh, at any rate. The envelope was sealed and put into the cooker, which slowly came up to temperature.

While she was waiting for her meal to cook, Anita sat down at the small table and looked at her tablet again. She’d wiped all the suit data from it, though very little had been on there to begin with. Most of it was sent from the tablet to the network at Kerguelen and stored there, and all of that was gone. But the programs she’d used to design and record were still there. She opened up the program she used to sketch out new engineering ideas she had, and started a new file. First the outlines of the suit and wing juncture, she could remember those fairly well. Then, the basic outlines of the suit, since they fit close to the body.

The timer on the cooker dinged, and Anita gingerly removed the hot envelope, which steamed in the cold air. The environment of the base was kept warm enough to live in without a suit, but cold by human standards, to lessen the heat signature. Meters of sand piled onto the top and sides of the base would also help mask the signature: every little bit helped.

Anita cut the envelope open and began to eat the egg meal with a fork. She closed her eyes, savoring the first hot meal she’d had in a week. The taste was nothing to write home about, but the feeling of warmth was enough to make it seem luxurious, the way the steam filled her mouth and nose, lightly scented with eggs and herbs. The way it heated her throat as she swallowed, and spread the warmth to her stomach and limbs as she ate.

Too soon, the meal was over. Anita immediately considered cooking another, but restrained herself. No, can’t go through supplies too quickly. Besides, you’ll make yourself sick if you overeat. Back to work. Get your mind off the food, and just enjoy the warmth as long as you can.

The design on the tablet looked like the suit she had created, but there was not enough detail. Anita looked at it for a long time before she realized what was wrong. When she first designed the suit, she hadn’t started with what it looked like. She had started with what it needed, with the core circuits and components. She saved the first file and opened a new one.

It was so small, just a sketch of a chip that formed the basis of the link between the suit and the wings. It was frustrating to be forced back to the very beginning, to do all of her hard work over again. But if she had to do that, she was at least going to do it right. Doing things the wrong way around would only waste time that none of them might have to spare.

When she pulled back from the tablet again, the chip was taking shape. She remembered more about it than she was afraid she would. It would take the better part of the week to reconstruct it from memory, but it was still there, in her head, if she was willing to work hard enough to find it again.

She worked a few more hours, then put the tablet away when she felt her work beginning to suffer. Something every engineer learns at some point, she mused, as she cleared the table. Either you learn when to stop or you learn how to recover from burnout. And the former is much easier. Most of the time. Except when the problem is really interesting.

Dinner was a packet of dried soup, reconstituted and heated with greens and a vitamin supplement. It would be a long time before she would be willing to depart from hot meals, Anita knew. It felt like home, it made sore muscles hurt less, and it drove away the persistent chill for a few minutes. Not every meal could be hot, given her limited pantry, but she would be fine with hot food for the next few days.

After dinner, Anita looked at the time. Here, under the surface of the moon, in a base with no windows and only one door, time seemed to run at a different pace. There was no schedule to keep but the one she set, and Anita had been in enough field situations to realize the danger it posed. Human beings liked schedules, they had evolved around seasons and harvests and planting times. She had seen too many young scouts and scientists, unfettered by imposed schedules, work themselves too hard or become unmoored from their work, unable to see when they needed to rest. She had experienced the same thing herself in college, but had learned how to keep a schedule for herself even when no one else set one. Time to put that knowledge to use.

One small wall of the kitchen had a surface for writing; she assumed it was because human wisdom had prevailed over technology, and the original residents of the base had left messages for each other in the kitchen. She squinted at the surface. Yes, a few messages were still legible. “Please stop putting empty packages back in the refrigerator. Experiments do not belong on the kitchen table. Weather too poor for my work today, I’ll prep dinner.” These messages were decades old, preserved in the still atmosphere of the base, but they could have been written yesterday. Anita herself had left and received similar messages from her own colleagues. There was something comforting about that.

She started her own list at the top: daily tasks. Work on suit design. Identify usable parts from scraps. Cook. Exercise. Rest. She could add to the list later, those were the big daily ones. Next: to do. The things that would need to be done, but not on a regular basis. Find a way to program the computers to alert her tablet if anything out of the ordinary happened outside. Create a database of recipes so she wouldn’t have to create meals from scratch every day. She could add to it later.

The lower third of the surface would be her schedule. She divided it into sixteen sections, with the ones during Titan’s nights shaded dark at the top. It was a rough calendar that would drift a little, since Titan’s day cycle wasn’t fully 16 days, but it would do. She could adjust as needed. The regularity was the important part. She blocked out parts of each day for the daily tasks, then assigned one of the “to do” tasks to a few days during the week. The schedule would take effect tomorrow. For now, rest. Nada had programmed the computer system to monitor outside data and sound an alarm if anything happened, but Anita still felt uneasy about sleeping for a whole night. Soon she would have an alarm set to ring to her tablet, but for now, the main alarm would have to do. She crawled into bed, and was asleep in moments.

Nine hours later, her alarm beeped, and Anita got up. The first full day on her own. The day that could set the tone for this entire period of her life, however long it might be. Thinking about the future made her feel sick, and Anita pushed the thoughts away. Focus on today. Focus on the schedule. What needs to be done?

First, a bath. Not with water, the base was far too small for that kind of system. A air blower cleared her body of the fine dust particles that tended to accumulate, and the main cleaning was done with a reusable cloth and a chemical mixture created for the purpose. Into clothes for the day, drop the dirty clothes into the cleaning system. Remember to add laundry to the schedule. Into the kitchen area to fix breakfast. Eggs again. Beginning to feel more awake after eating, Anita looked at the schedule for the day. In the morning, she was looking at ways to make the computer alarm link to her tablet, and then working on the suit designs. The afternoon was divided between exercise, rest, and sorting electronic components. After dinner was more design and a little more exercise. She had rested enough; her strong field muscles would begin to weaken if she went much longer without some serious workouts.

She settled into the bank of computers and pulled up the alarm systems. Nada had gotten everything back online and told her that syncing her tablet would be easy, as long as she made sure that nothing was connecting to an outside network. The main computers had their transmitters removed, but the tablet could still connect to a satellite, if she told it to. It didn’t take long to sync the tablet; with a quick glance, she could now see everything the computers saw, and any alarms would sound through the tablet as well as the main systems. Good.

Next, design time. She sat back down at the table and began work where she had left off the day before. It was still slow going, but she concentrated on the problem at hand. Just work the next problem. Don’t think about the big picture right now. One circuit, then another. Run a quick simulation. Fix the problem. Keep going.

Her task alarm beeped, startling her out of her concentration. Two hours had passed, and it was time for a meal. Anita shook her head to clear the tunnel vision. She fixed a quick meal and watched the simulation run on her designs a few more times while eating, then pulled up a video of birds in flight to remember the tweaks she had made to the wing design most recently.

After clearing away the meal, Anita studied the base for the best way to exercise. There must have been some equipment here at one point, but it must have been taken when the base was abandoned. New computers would have made it pointless to move the old ones, but exercise equipment didn’t go out of use so quickly. She would have to improvise. She slipped on the rubber-soled shoes that went inside her flight suit to give her better traction, then began sprinting around the small loop of the base. It felt odd, like being a small child playing “the ground is lava” again, but she could feel her muscles loosening up.

On her third loop, she noticed a bar set a meter or so below the ceiling and out from the wall at least a half-meter. Chin ups, she thought. Of course they’d leave the bar here. Why bother removing a simple metal pole? After her tenth loop through the base, she stopped at the bar and grabbed it, pulling herself up. It hurt a good bit, her muscles having not been used much the last week or so. Again. Again.

She arranged a spare blanket on the floor to serve as a mat, and went through her usual regimen of crunches, stretches, and yoga positions, until she felt her body begin to tire. Not as good as I used to be, she thought, but I’ll get there. The exercise had warmed her considerably, but the chill began to seep in as soon as she stopped. She set an alarm and crawled under the blankets on her bed for a nap.

She woke from a dream, stifling a shout. She couldn’t remember what the dream had been about, only that she had been running from something. Gee, I wonder what could have possibly inspired that dream? I guess my brain’s going to be processing this for a while. I’ll have to remember to book a therapist when life returns to sanity.

The pile of outdated electronics awaited, still as large as the day before. She settled in and began sorting it again, labelling anything that might prove useful. Good wiring into one pile, circuits in another, reclaimable metal in a third.

The hours ticked by, and when she finally straightened up at the sound of her dinner alarm, her hands and back felt tight again. Soup for dinner while studying more design elements that might help her work with the suits. She continued making adjustments to the design that was growing ever so slowly on her tablet.

The last hour, Anita spent stretching and running through her favorite yoga routines. She had a selection of handpicked movements that were suited well to small spaces, and she was careful to move gently while her body reacclimated to movement. Then it was time for bed, after setting the alarms for the next day.

And so this is the shape of things to come, Anita thought, as she lay in the bed staring at the ceiling of the old base. I’m going to be a good little hamster in my cage, running on my wheel, drinking from my water bottle, and stuffing my cheeks with food. Until I absolutely lose my mind.