We had done an inexcusable amount of flight training for our mission to not involve a degree of space battles. It was a problem in search of a solution.

There's some old proverb about a samurai in a garden that Stevie likes to reference, and I get it but with the sheer volume of training we had done, I expected a few more space battles. The fact that none had occurred since before we were underway meant that the top gun level of readiness felt quite unwarranted.

At the same time this mission was not a game and no one was going to come save us. We were our own security, our own recovery. For even though I called them Crypt spiders I did not want the moniker to stick. The mission had been volunteers only -opt-in not recruits.

There are a few times in human history where people are so far from help but they are effectively on their own. This is about one of many of those. Only superhero that was going to save us will be ourselves. This is exactly why Eric gave himself the nickname killmonger.

We did have a lot of downtime for the ultimately excusable amount of role playing we did however. I relished the chance to actually play a set game with a group of people whose schedules were often wide open. Free as in stolen time, not free like freedom to do anything.

Kiernan had frequently complained about the training as well and I found myself more and more agreeing with her pronouncements that the team building aspects of our off work social time would probably bear more and better fruit than our actual training. I had to hope that Stevie herself would also get the message. It wasn’t like either woman to be subtle. But equally they were quite likely to be willfully ignorant of what the other was saying in particular areas. I wasn't keeping score but someone was. That person was definitely Eric and it was on his blog. Did I mention that he kept a blog? The best I could do was keep notes of my exploits, and send a batch of updates every month back to headquarters.

Them being in another solar system meant that the oversight was a bit hands off. I wouldn’t say that peer review was absent so much as delayed. Yeah, delayed is probably the right word for it. In order to receive a message over such long distances you had to make sure you had a good receiver. Since I only wanted to tell certain people, my notes were keyed to a key that headquarters had. Then they were sent via our donut shop in the Kuiper belt over to Proxima Centauri.

I was so lost in my thoughts being alone in my own probe for so long as I traveled to the center of the solar system. I began to spin out many different Adventures that I could possibly take my friends through and in two weeks it took me to get from a donut to the planet I'd effectively written my magnum opus at least in as far as being a dungeon master was concerned. Oh it's fairing upon them when I returned they would laugh they would cry they would probably all be wiped out a few times before the end but it would be good time. Exactly what they would expect of me being away. While I was gone I'm sure that all three of them were doing something similar or at least Eric's blog made me think that. If I messaged them multiple times a day it felt more like texting a friend and waiting for a reply then the synchronous communication I was used to. Being there in person was one thing and I really appreciated that warm human contact. That virtual reality contact which had passed The Uncanny Valley.

I did my close fly-by of the planet that Killmonger had taken to calling “Wakanda”. It was a very rocky planet, but it had an atmosphere. I hoped that the general state of Wakanda would be able to give us something useful. There was enough greenery to make me think that humans wouldn’t have much trouble with breathing oxygen, which got me into a rabbit hole about how to examine planets from space. It wasn’t like I could just click a button and scan it and get a convenient readout. There was no CIA world factbook for the only rocky planet in the goldilocks zone of Beta Centauri.

Instead what I had was problems.

The first problem I saw of course was what could only be an artificial satellite.

Immediately I was on guard, and I had weapons on standby. My training made me first think of anything resembling a ship as a threat. As I often told Levi, No, I don't have post traumatic stress disorder from the whole being uploaded into a probe, it's from Stevies training methods.

However as far as I could tell, either it hadn’t spotted me, or it couldn’t spot me. One was fine, the other was marginally better.

I stood there in a long orbit racking my brain as to what to do if we got discovered.

Thus far, we’d seen nothing but the normal astral bodies, and whatever light the sun hit. The thing about the speed of light is that it’s constant. It’s also something that will give away your position if there’s a line of sight.

Think about how you can see the stars at night and how if there was some huge moon in the way, it wouldn’t be able to hide. Just giving it line of sight with me didn't automatically make it hostile. It would have to first designate me as a target, then engage with me. This is presuming it could do all of the above. For all I knew it was there for the sole purpose of providing high speed telecom services.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. It wasn’t until two hours going down a different rabbit hole of what a potential contact would mean that I came upon an unlikely solution. I traced the trajectory of the satellite and I found a problem.

It was not maintaining its altitude.

It likely would drop down into the gravity well shortly. It would be destroyed within a few months, unless there was some intervention. It was a matter of months at the longest.

The chances that whatever lived on the planet had produced a single satellite was slim. In plotting out the trajectory, it looked like the damn thing had been running on fumes for a while. So either it was intentionally left to die, or the satellite maintenance branch of the Beta Centauri teamsters local number one was missing on the job.

Whatever alien race had made that satellite, they didn’t give it enough juice to stay in a far planetary orbit. I briefly thought that it was a bad russian probe, but the outside chance of one of those making it here and then doing what it was now doing was sketchy at best. Our previous experience with a probe had shown that there might be a few similar ones in the local star cluster.

I resolved to study the situation and radio back home.

I was sure after a couple of days that this was a rudimentary weather satellite. At least back in Sol it would be. The other option was some sort of telecommunications device.

For the size? Bigger than a breadbox, but it wasn’t the hubble telescope.

Speculation didn’t look good on me, though. I wore it uneasily. I wanted to know, or at least have the best consensus I could get.

It didn’t seem to be pointed at me at the very least, and it didn’t alter course while I watched from a high lunar orbit. While I enjoyed the angst at not knowing if I should ring and run or pull a fast one and sneak in the back entrance, I began to make plans for my next big problem.

You see I was only half kidding about the scan button. If there was such a thing I’d be the first one to press it. Who wouldn’t want to know more about a planet one was checking out? And how the heck could I streamline it?

Everything we know about Earth we learned over generations, as scientists made progress in every discipline. Our home planet has been categorized, mapped and examined nearly down to the inch.

I’d argue that they probably should have found bigfoot, but that’s another story for another day.

Every single problem that started with a desire for an easy button was another set of items on my to do list. And no one wanted to be lazy like a smart person.

After about three rotations it became clear to me that there was something on the ground as well. Even though I doubted that I would see any sign of life from down below, at certain times when I was on the dark side of the planet I was able to detect light coming from one area.

The earliest signs of a civilization according to some so-called experts is the presence of light. This means that whatever is on the planet, that at least they had figured out candles. I didn’t expect to know that I was looking at some huge bonfire of a candle from orbit but all things were possible.

I mentally added better optics on my list of upgrades to the standard EXODUS model.

“FERMI, add a better camera to the list. How many items are on my to-do list right now?”

“There are two hundred and fifty items on your list now. Make this your top priority?”

“No.”

I would have to fix the prioritization eventually.

“How many items pertain to the landing kit?”

“One hundred and twelve.”

I swear that my FERMI, the spitting image of a corgi, was messing with me. The others had chosen human looking system interfaces. That didn’t really suit me.

“How many items have been pushed to the highest priority of those?”

The corgi avatar looked at me quizzically. I knew that was its processing face. I hadn’t designed the virtual avatar, just most of the underlying code. Kiernan had been the main coder on this portion and I had to think that sometimes she was just playing the long game.

“Sixty. Deprioritize any?”

“No!” I said, before it began the subroutine to sing the to do list.

We would have to get in closer to figure out what it was, but we were not yet equipped to land.

That was going to have to change.

What would really be nice for us would be some sort of material analysis. It was easy enough to identify things in the donut where there were a few metals in particular, but for something as complex as a life form? The regular rules didn't apply. We didn't have one of those fancy expensive protein folding machines or even something like (the dna splicer machine), so if I was going to do a proper analysis of the flora and fauna of the planet, yeah I would probably need someone from back home to give me a fair amount of directions.

If you were able to get a visual representation of what kind of media I had saved to the very first EXODUS prove as a human, prior to all the space fighting, fully one third of it was a shrine to anime and gaming. Think of all the classics you would want to read if you had effective immortality, except remember that I grew up as an introverted weeb.

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That meant that I had a little bit of room for old textbooks to use as reference materials.

I brought up some of the data I had about the orbital mechanics that I would have expected the donut to have. If something was really that far out in the Kuiper belt, then it was there on purpose. Either it had been knocked into a far orbit, or it had been some sort of staging ground. There was a potential place where it was conceivable to me that it could have generated its own movement, but whatever had clipped the donut had removed enough of the engineering that it was slag.

I had hoped that something from the language would have been able to explain what had happened here and why, but nothing in the script had given me a toehold.

The problem in front of me didn't have an answer in any textbook ever written. Or at least any textbook written in an earth language.

I had run a lot of pattern recognition on the scripts I saw and everyday I felt a little closer.

The rosetta stone I was creating was showing that the letters were not as numerous as I had initially feared. There were a lot of circles, triangles and lines, like if someone wrote a comic sans font for Japanese or Korean.

After how long we had been there, my best estimate was that I had solved about ten percent. Like muddle through an alien children's book ten percent. Dick and Jane level. Zzyzx meets Bagaruru level, or at least some names like that. I had no idea of the pronunciation, but it would be just like a race of people capable of interstellar flight to not name their kids.

After a month of careful study, we were able to reverse engineer the robot that we found in the donut. We harvested a little bit of the donut around the edges to grab the refined metals. Most of the metals were exactly what we would expect, alloys similar to steel, irons, gold for the circuit boards, etc.

There were some exotic metals that my sensors would not identify for some reason. Either it was something completely new, or it was something artificial that we couldn’t understand. I began to think that they had cracked the quantum computing problem, that maybe this was one of those metals that could be in two different states.

Thankfully, I had the chance to use my optical emission spectrometry to try and identify the effect that I was seeing.

The dream of computer scientists for the recent decade was to get two atoms to do the same thing years apart. The quantum atoms would entangle and whatever state that one was its sibling atom would always be in that same state, no matter the distance apart. If they’d figured it out, they could communicate across light years. That was a big if, though.

I finished reverse engineering the robot taking it apart in a way that showed me what made it tick. Inside of the android there was a heavy metal power core. The robot generated power either through stored ion battery energy or direct solar light power. Under my reverse engineering I found that it was able to re-imagine and re-make itself through neural pathways. I didn’t have a full robot to examine though. Whatever took this donut out, somehow the brain of the robot was missing. No matter. I wanted to make a prototype.

It took me a full month of working with the 3d printer and designing a housing for an AI until I was able to put the android together. I learned a lot making it, and part of that was learning how to miniaturize what I knew of as me: my motherboard and the associated hardware connections. I was able to shrink the computer parts to about the size of a beer can, with inputs and outputs on the top and bottom. I had designed the android to be close to what the creature looked like before, or at least what the four corpses we found looked like.

We had figured out that there were about two hundred habitation units in this portion of the donut. Most of them had depressurized, and three of the corpses we found were still behind pressure locked doors. The atmosphere, whatever it was they breathed, was gone well before we arrived, but they were better preserved than the one which was floating initially. All four of those had the same cell structure, so we figured out that they were all the same species.

Kiernan, in the meantime, had run a ton of pattern recognition to see if she would be able to find anything good. She really wanted to learn whatever language it was that they used. I had dutifully given her my notes and findings. Sometimes you had to get other eyes on your projects, and this one I was glad to shift around.

Killmonger had found a great asteroid in the outer belt that he was mining and refining with our combined auto factories. He was going to have a Falcon Dropship for us before Groundhog’s day, or at least he swore that up and down. Stevie was trying to hold us together from across the system, but also meddling in my android project. As my test dummy.

I loaded her up in the virtual android system.

“Okay, Stevie, what can you see?” I asked her.

“Well, this looks like the inside of a factory with terrible labor laws,” she replied. The android was slaved to her probe via the least technical of routes, a direct line. I hadn’t designed a tiny comms system yet, but that was down there on the to do list.

“Okay, attempt to stand up,” The android had magnetic boots to clamp onto the inside of the factory. We had the space lit up so we could see but usually it was pitch black. The android sat itself up. Then it placed one hand down, then stood up wobbling a bit.

“What’s next? Running and Jumping?”

“No. Try to raise both arms one at a time. Wave them like you don’t care.”

She raised her arms in mock salute. We had a lot of work to do.

“I’m going to drop several crypt spiders into the simulation.”

“Don’t you mean several ‘crypt spiders, saviors of humanity’? I have heard of these.”

I stifled a laugh.

“Listen here, I said that one time and you’re all blowing that out of proportion,” I replied.

“It’s a very strong choice. I respect your choice. Painting that onto the actual drones though? That was a master stroke. I really do like it. The fact that you gave them all faces like your mother does make me worry about your sanity. Are you doing okay, fellow soulless automaton?”

Stevie loved to provoke me sometimes.

“In that case, we can make it a combat scenario.”

I dropped twelve spiders into the simulation. The sandbox within our sandbox struggled with the amount of separate virtual intelligences.

“Now attack my pretties!”

“Wait! I…”

Stevie bravely ran away from the swarm of six to twelve legged creatures as they chased her around the circular room. She began to do a lap until I figured out what she was doing.

“Split up!”

Six of the crypt spiders that were chasing her immediately reversed direction and began to run head on the opposite way.

“Oh that isn’t fair!”

The crypt spiders would encircle her in a brief period and that was when she started throwing kicks.

Stevie flowed into what could only be called a drunken monkey style, using her androids arms like heavy clubs. She windmilled into the first two spiders as they spread out to surround her. The poor crypt spiders just took the abuse as they got smashed into the ground. The other ten swarmed her, glitching as the processing it took to simulate all of them started to drift into the territory of way too much.

Once she was out we did a bit of a debrief.

“While I don’t expect to ever have to fight your crypt spiders, and that was a mean trick, it wasn’t… entirely unwelcome. It’s hard to feel grounded when you know that you’re in the simulation.”

“I know what you mean,” I said,” I felt a little dissociated when I tried to be in the sandbox and outside of it at the same time.”

“We’ve got to talk to Kiernan about fixing that cognitive dissonance, because a few seconds of that and it would be problematic at the wrong time.”

“I’ve got a feeling that you’ll get used to it. Or could Kiernan make us a special VR drink? The last one had me seeing spots for a while, which wasn’t entirely unpleasant, but when one of them tried to eat FERMI?”

“Yeah, those were a little too much. What did she call that one?”

“The Spotting experience?”

“That sounds about right.”

“And we run into a separate issue if you are mirroring yourself from one side to the other.”

I was already dreading the inevitable conversation about if a local copy didn’t want to merge back or something else happened. A big part of the reason that we didn’t just clone ourselves willy nilly was because we didn’t want to run out of resources. Another reason was that each time we did, the clones were subtly different from the original and we had a lot of personality to go around.

Stevie had made a strong choice early on to just stick to one copy, and although I didn’t want to press her to go beyond what she was comfortable with, I needed to know what she wanted. I was a bit gungho about cloning myself though. What nerd doesn’t want to replicate himself into an AI and see the stars?

“Hey, do you want to catch some lunch with me? I can cook a mean burger,” I said, scratching FERMIs ears.

“Can’t be as bad as Kiernan’s concoctions,” She replied.

We went back to the main area and then to the little grill I’d set up in the bar area. The wood paneling of the area had various posters made from our imaginations and memories of our old lives. For my part, I had a poster up showing New York city, and one imploring the viewer to ‘Visit the Palisades!’. As I’d grown up close to the city and had been there many times, it felt home. Next to that one was of course a graphic of Tim the Beaver wearing a MIT shirt, eating a certain brand of northeastern doughnuts well known to the common bostonian.

Strictly speaking we didn’t need to eat. As well, we didn’t need to wait for the food to cook, either but I cracked open a virtual Soju with Stevie.

“The feeling of relaying yourself through the second avatar…”

Stevie frowned.

“It’s a bit different. I know that I can snap back here at any time if I want, right?”

Stevie raised her glass and nodded to the contents.

“But it’s like I’m watching little Stevie in the glass, swimming around.

“You don’t really feel like you’re in the game? Or in the glass?”

“I hate to say that it’s a jarring disconnect, but the cognitive dissonance of being in two places at once, well if I had a head, I would probably get a headache.”

“I have a delicate question then.”

The grill beeped telling me to flip the burgers, which again wasn’t strictly speaking necessary.

“Go on,” she said.

I flipped the virtual beef while trying to avoid the social kind.

“Hypothetically if I could put you into one of the androids, like say full time, would you want to do that?”

Stevie scrunched her face a bit. Her dimples and brown curls had made it in the transition and I wasn’t going to say that she wasn’t cute, but I did linger a bit.

“When you say hypothetically, what are you talking about?”

“Suppose we have the perfect radio system back and forth from orbit. That would mean a lag time of a few seconds at best between seeing and acting on something. Like say you were trying to send a message from the sun to the earth, at light speed it would take eight minutes.”

“I’m aware of the physical limitations of our communications. I factor it into the plan, Levi.”

Stevie's stare was reminiscent of a chihuahua looking at a cockroach, and I was the roach.

The grill beeped again, mercifully.

“Okay I’ll put it this way then. Best case scenario is that you are able to operate the android with minimal lag.”

“Are you suggesting that there is an alternative?”

“Yes but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

Stevie grabbed buns and plates for both of us from the pantry, then she sat at the bar on the other side of the grill. I served up a burger for each of us.

“You don’t think I’ll like it because why?”

“I don’t think you’ll like it because the simplest occam's razor of a solution is to have your consciousness inside of the android. I’m thinking with a few steps I can do that. Especially with some of the metals we got here on the donut. It’ll be a heck of a lot easier than mining all of this down.”

Stevie chewed on her burger for a minute.

“I really have to thank Kiernan for how real this feels.”

“Thank her for making it not taste like brandy. I’m always glad for that.”

“So you think that I’ll have a problem with what… cloning myself? I already decided what I’m doing. At this point, I feel like I only sent a clone back to take care of my affairs. I don’t want to populate the galaxy like I’m some sort of self replicating paperclip. That just sounds like a lot of paperwork. And you know how I feel about paperwork.”

I sighed.

“Keep it to the absolute minimum.”

I let the silence sit for a while while I bit on my burger. I had to hand it to Kiernan. The burgers really didn’t taste like hard liquor.

“I have an obvious solution,” I said.

“Go on, Mr. Scientist.”

“It’s simple really. We have a backup of you in one location, while the other one does the work. Then from time to time we send a new copy to replace the backup. Having you around is invaluable. I… don’t want to lose you.”

Stevie smirked.

“I’m touched, Levi, I really am. I’ll consider what you’ve said and think about it.”

“That’s all I can ask, Chief.”

She finished her burger and I knew that I needed to ask the other important question that hadn’t been weighing on my mind nearly as much.

“So the controller for the android. Did you like it? Any input? Because I’m working on the fly here to make everything smooth and…”

“The control was smooth. That’s about the smoothest thing thus far on this mission. I know you have worked your tail off to make it work.”

I nodded.

“It’s something special. I just… it’s hard to reverse engineer this technology and I really hope I’m doing it right.”

Off in the corner, my FERMI corgi played fetch with itself. We both watched for a minute.

“If you can design a robot that does that? We’ll be good. You got the virtual part, now make it work with the physical portion.”