Real Danger

It was the robot’s fault. Probably. That’s what Emily said anyway. Evie blamed the engineers. Cypris, languishing in the corner with a growing pile of mucus-coated tissue, blamed Evie. (Cypris was rather sour about the chili sauce. She would have blamed Jacob otherwise.) Reyes blamed the robot also; Kareem, Henry, and Tyler were attempting to be impartial, so they blamed the robot. The robot probably would have blamed the Humans, but it was programmed to respect its creators, even when it didn’t want to respect them. Conrad blamed his parents. 

Mortimer Station was special. It was the first station equipped for interplanetary travel. But it wasn’t exactly ready for interplanetary travel when the robot wandered onto the bridge. Nor was it ready for interplanetary travel when Evie was serving salad with peanut sauce. But it was ready after Emily installed a power coupling in just the right place; it was ready by the time the robot decided that the Humans weren’t hurrying the march of progress quite fast enough. So it fired the newly-installed FTL Stuffpusher and chucked Mortimer Station directly away from the earth; into the vast blankness. 

Then the robot went to make coffee and ponder its existence. It was, for fifteen sweet minutes, unaware that everyone despised it (at least) mildly, and unaware that the FTL Stuffpusher was very, very broken. 

For the moment though, that wasn’t the issue, nor was Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker’s swiftly worsening reaction to Evie’s carefully bio-engineered chilis; there was a small star just to the left of Mortimer Station, and it was frustratingly massive. Consequently, if nothing drastic happened in the next six months, everybody on board was going to melt. After they died of heatstroke and radiation poisoning, that is; a fate which even Jacob Tracker would not be able to escape.

It’s necessary at this juncture to reveal that Jacob stowed away on the Fang X-IIIA while Cypris was trying to ignore it. His motion sickness took a week to wear off, and when he finally did emerge from the storeroom he’d been using as a bedroom, there was the wrong kind of sun outside the window. 

There was also a robot. 

The robot was tall and lanky, and covered in wires and capacitors. It had a very large battery strapped to its back with zip ties, and a very large smile painted on its otherwise expressionless faceplate. Its hands were almost normal looking, but they both had six fingers because Conrad had been obsessed with polydactyly since he was fifteen. The hands were also green, because Emily assumed that green hands might ingratiate the robot to Evie. It was intended to be a peace-offering, a sort of collaboration between biology and, as Conrad put it, ‘actual science’. Reyes had helped because he liked robots, and was the only person who knew more than two programing languages, but mostly because he knew the mathematical formula for progress by heart. A progress-oriented robot, Emily thought, was much more likely to earn her and Conrad a Nobel Prize. 

They named the robot Steven, and after everything more or less fell into tiny, fragile pieces, Steven became significantly more helpful. He had a French accent, though, (Reyes’s idea) and it made it very difficult for anyone to take him seriously. 

“Hello.” Steven said to Jacob. “How may I serve you? Hail science.” 

“What is wrong with the window?” 

“The window is functioning nominally. Hail science.” 

Jacob looked at the robot, then at the window. “What’s wrong with the sun?” 

“Based on initial observation, the sun is functioning nominally. Hail science.”

“Where are we, robot?” 

“My name is Steven. You may call me Steven for short. Hail science.” 

Jacob had never been this flustered. It was usually much easier for him to understand what he was looking at. But the surreality of what he was looking at now was overwhelming. “Where are we?” 

The robot’s head rotated precisely ninety degrees to the left. He stared at the unfamiliar star. 

“Uncertain. However, based on the microgravity currently exerting itself on you and I, we are not near Earth. Ruling out Earth, and the half of the universe that we were not facing when the FTL Stuffpusher was activated by yours truly, there are lots of places we could be. Let us go talk to the Captain. She will know what to do because I am programmed to assume that Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker knows what to do. Hail science.” 

“Hail science.” Jacob muttered, and followed the robot.