The yetis roared. I screamed. Everything went right to hell.
The closest Yeti flung his spear at me at about a million miles an hour. The suit’s threat detection mechanisms blared an alert and forced my frozen body out of the way.
Once I was moving I couldn’t stop, not for a second. The yetis were every bit as fast as they were big. They weren’t stupid either, working together to corner and trap me. And I was still tethered to the battery by the power cord. It was a good thing I’d had to use so many converters. Without the slack from the extra cord length even the suit’s incredible threat detection wouldn’t have been enough to keep me alive for more than a few seconds.
“Ai! Send the hover bike!” I screamed, the suit flinging me backwards to avoid being stabbed by the one who still had his spear.
“I have already sent it. It will arrive in thirty seconds,” Ai said. Her incongruous calm was infuriating. But I didn’t have time to be angry. The yeti with the spear jabbed at me again and again. I didn’t know where the other yeti had gone until it swung an ax at the back of my head. The suit bent me backwards so it slid over me, inches from my face.
Every time the suit moved me was jarring and painful as though my skin had come to life and was taking me for a ride. I was going to be one giant bruise if I lived through this.
“Twenty five seconds,”
“Are you kidding-” I tried to yell but the suit threw me away from another blow jarring the words from my mouth. It was moving me too quickly to keep up with. I tripped over the cord and because I wasn’t in immediate danger the suit’s protections didn’t activate. So I fell on my ass. Before I could get my feet under me, a yeti roared standing over me with its ax raised.
“No no no!” I screamed and threw my arms in front of my face.
“Twenty seconds,” Ai said.
“Blargle bragh!” the yeti shouted. Or at least something approximating that. Either way it swung its ax.
The suit’s motors flung me away just in time. The yeti’s ax came down on the cord connecting me to the battery and severed it with a popping hiss and an explosion of sparks. I rolled and kept rolling as the yeti’s ax came down at me again and again, each swing accompanied by more noises a human throat simply could not imitate.
“Fifteen seconds.”
I had to get to the door somehow. If I had a weapon maybe I could make an opportunity. Through my desperate rolling I saw the end of the cord attached to the battery still spitting sparks and smoking. Current could still be flowing through it. I rolled away from the ax wielding yeti and towards it. My hand shot out to grab hold of the cord and stopped dead still and inch away. It was like I’d rammed my hand into a wall.
A message popped up in my vision, highlighting the cord in red.
That is dangerous. Please do not touch it.
In that moment I decided that I had to live. I had to live and get off this planet so I could find the miserable bastard who programmed my suit and kill him.
Something slammed into my stomach and flung me into the air. The spear wielding yeti had kicked me and from my awkward position the suit hadn’t been able to avoid it. My head smacked against something before I came to a crunching rest in snow.
Dazed, I looked up to see the hazy dot that passed for a sun here up on the ceiling. That wasn’t right. Why wasn’t that right? Oh. Sky. I was outside.
The suit was already forcing me up, warnings popping up with a view of a skeleton and different potentially injured areas highlighted in red. I thought it was supposed to be a bad idea to move someone with a head injury but I guess the suit figured it beat being skewered by angry yetis.
Once on my feet, I saw the situation was worse. It wasn’t two angry yetis trying to kill me now. It was a whole village of them. Dozens of them were on every side of me, howling, spitting, shaking every kind of weapon imaginable at me.
How could I have gotten so sweaty? The suit was using cool air jets to try and cool me down and dry me but it wasn’t doing anything for the way my whole body was violently shaking.
I knew what I had to do. I had to stand up, act like I was ready to take all of them on right then and there. The yetis weren’t animals but I couldn’t communicate in any way but body language. They couldn’t know what I was capable of. If I stood my ground and acted like something that could hurt them it could buy me the few seconds I needed.
Only my knees wouldn’t hold me up and lacking the programming to do so, I couldn’t rely on the suit to make me look intimidating. I crumpled and the yeti’s converged.
At the last possible instant, there came a burbling howl from across the snow dunes. The hover bike was a ramshackle collection of barely working parts held together by tape and hope, but in that moment it was the most beautiful thing in the entire universe. The yetis stared up at the thing for a shocked instant, confusion written over their faces.
“Ai, put it in panic mode.” I said, the idea bringing me back to my feet.
“Already on it,” she said as the bike began to let out high pitched shrieking alarms and flash with a dozen different lights. All of the yetis threw themselves to the ground. Or rather, almost all of them.
As I leapt onto the side of the bike and scrambled up like an overgrown squirrel I caught sight of the little yeti that had been dragged from the tech hut. It stood, looking up at the bike, not with terror, but with awe. And the gigantic spear wielding yeti that had kicked me out of the hut stood tall with his spear held back, ready to throw.
I clambered into the seat, reangled the jet fans that kept the bike aloft, and slammed on the throttle before any of the other yetis realized that the bike didn’t actually have any weapons. The survival suit blared a warning as the huge yeti threw its spear at me.
It barely missed me, thrown off by the hover bike’s air jets. Then the wind howled around me, mixing with the bike’s scream as I flew away at top speed. None of the yetis could hope to follow me but the image of the fearless little yeti and it’s curious eyes stuck in my head, haunting me as I ran.
----------------------------------------
I’d flown for almost twenty minutes when my terror receded enough for me to notice that Ai hadn’t spoken to me since I’d taken off. I’d just barely started to get my heart under control and suddenly it was back up in my throat.
“Ai?” I asked. The only answer was the howl of the wind around me. I twisted in my seat and saw the problem. The spear the yeti had thrown at me as I’d made my escape hadn’t hit me but it had been close. It had lodge itself in the long range transmitter I used to stay in communication with Ai when I left the ship we lived in.
I turned back to face forward and felt the cold wind whipping at me, threatening to throw me from the seat if I didn’t hang on to the bike. The endless white ground and grey sky seemed to stretch out around me to infinity. I was alone.
In my time on Persephone I’d learned a lot of things about fear. I’d heard that back on earth there’d once been a group that lived near its North Pole who’d come up with a seemingly absurd number of words for snow. I felt I understood them because, even though the snow seemed to be basically the same to me, the fears I lived with were legion.
There was the sharp blazing terror of immediate danger, the kind that set my synapses on fire, made thought impossible and took over my body. A close relative to that fear was the kind struck and left you helplessly frozen when you absolutely had to move. More distant but still in the same genus was the cold ever present worry that filled the air and sank into my bones like radiation, wearing away at me every day. I could name a dozen other variations on the beast but there was one that was worse than the others.
Ever present, whispering at the cracks in the doors to my mind and silently smiling as it watched me try to sleep in the deep hours of night. It filled the sky as I flew, more tangible and real than the cold white star that hoarded its warmth millions of miles away. Every child has woken up, late at night and screamed in fear, terrified of a nightmare but far more afraid that no one can hear them scream and no one is coming.
Isolation.
I knew I was the only human on the planet, for light years in every direction. I told myself that it might not be true sometimes. Hoped that the falling stars I sometimes saw might be some other soul to share this burden with. Prayed no one else was that unlucky.
Ai kept me sane with her presence. She was close enough to human that I wasn’t always sure I could have guessed she was an A.I. if she hadn’t told me. But she couldn’t stand next to me, couldn’t put a hand on my shoulder to reassure me. And now I didn’t even have her voice to keep the fear at bay.
Being alone was the worst kind of fear. All the others gobbled you up in an instant, held you down so something else could pick the meat from your bones, or could be pushed back with concentration and work.
Isolation ate you slow, piece by piece, day by day.
So when my earpiece burbled and a human voice that wasn’t mine or Ai’s empty facsimile reached my ears you’d have thought I’d have screamed with joy. But it was mostly just the sudden sharp surprised fear that set my heart racing.
“H- ca- -ou hear me?” The voice said through bursts of static.
“Holy crap,” I said, more to myself than whoever that voice belonged to. Then I remembered that I could talk back and nearly drove into a snowdrift in panic. “Holy crap! Hey can you hear me?”
“Ye- yeah kid. I can hear you. I’m dialing in on your signal. Picking you up loud and clear now.”
“Who are you?” I asked, trying and failing to keep the excitement out of my voice. Another thought hit me almost immediately. “Where are you?”
I looked around but there was nothing in sight but grey sky and snow in every direction. The voice took a moment to answer and as the silence held I worried I might have gone insane and started hallucinating. But then the speakers around my ears popped on.
“I’m orbiting the planet a couple thousand miles above you.”
“You’re in a ship?!” I all but screamed, hope blazing up like a fire in my chest.
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“Well… sort of. Here, give me a second,” he said. A few moments later a blue icon of an ancient ringing phone popped up in my vision and a jingling tone sounded in my ears. The words video conference call requested scrolled across the screen followed by would you like to answer? Some fees may apply.
I fumbled for a moment trying to figure out how to answer. The stupid interface made no sense sometimes. I couldn’t tap the thing. It was on my screen, not a hologram.
“Uh, yes. I’d like to answer,” I said out loud and the icon disappeared only to be replaced by what I took at first to be a giant alien eye. But then a puffy gloves hand came up to wave at me and I saw it for what it was. A space suit.
“Hi there. Nice to meetcha. Name’s Cyrus. And you are?”
My mouth worked a few times before I remembered to actually say words to someone else. How long had it been since I’d introduced myself to another actual human being?
“Euclid. My name is Euclid.” The words came out in almost a whisper. I wanted to scream for joy. I wanted to cry.
“I’m glad I finally picked someone up down there. I don’t know what you did but you activated something that let me hone in on you. I was starting to think I was just going to sit up here and starve in this cramped pod,” Cyrus said with a laugh. I tried to join him in it but my numb brain wasn’t really up to the task of false humor. It came out sounding forced and a little hysterical.
“Oh Jesus kid, you haven’t gone crazy down there have you? It looks like a real hellhole.”
I laughed again. This one was genuine but I’m not sure it made me seem less crazy.
“Yeah, yeah it is. What are you doing orbiting the planet in such a small ship?
“It’s an escape pod. My ship crashed here about a week ago. The pod judged the planet below to be too ‘environmentally harsh’,” he said using air quotes,” for me to survive and so it put itself into a reasonably stable orbit instead of landing down there. How on earth have you survived?”
“I got really lucky. I crashed too but my pod had a survival suit in it.”
“Ah, that makes sense. How long have you been down there?”
“Months. Maybe a year? It’s hard to keep track of. The day and night cycle here is about twenty eight hours and I don’t like doing the math. Ai could probably tell you exactly how long its been.”
“Ai?”
“I found a ship not long after I crashed that still had some power. It had an on board A.I. It’s an old one but she’s probably the only reason I’m still alive.”
There was a pensive moment and I thought that maybe we’d lost the connection. When Cyrus spoke again there was something in his tone I had trouble identifying.
“An old A.I. you say? How old?”
“I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “She told me how long ago she’d landed. I don’t remember the exact number but it was a few hundred years.”
“Oh. I see,” Cyrus said. He let the silence hang for a few more seconds. Without being able to see his face I couldn’t judge his expression but the sound of his voice made me uncomfortable. I needed to find another direction to take the conversation.
“You said you were worried about starving in your ship. How long will your supplies last?”
“Two weeks. A little more if I stretch it. You sounded excited when you thought I was in a ship. I take it that means you don’t have any way to come up here and get me.”
“Well… sort of,” I said mirroring his earlier tone. “I think it’ll be easier to show you.”
----------------------------------------
It took almost two hours to reach the corpse of the Ariel. Cyrus and I talked a little but kept running into dead ends. I had never really had a chance to develop my conversational skills and my time on Persephone hadn’t exactly sharpened what little I had. Eventually we just lapsed into reasonably companionable silence.
That was sort of strange in and of itself. I’d never been particularly comfortable around other people. Back before I’d been stranded I had gone to great lengths at times to be away from people when I had free time. People weren’t easy to trust. They could turn on you in the blink of an eye, and keeping track of what you could and couldn’t say, what topics were safe around other people was exhausting.
But that was before I’d spent months basically on my own. Some part of me clung to the fact that Cyrus didn’t have other options just like I didn’t. He couldn’t leave. That made him safe to me in a way I’d never experienced before. And despite that, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. But then, when you’d spent almost every minute of everyday thinking of ways to keep yourself alive, there wasn’t a lot to say in terms of small talk.
“Well, we’re here,” I said when the tips of the ship’s fins finally appeared in the distance.
“You’re there. I’m here,” Cyrus said, his tone teasing.
“Oh. Right.”
Ai’s ship, The Ariel, had once been truly impressive. That was before it encountered Persephone-4. The intervening years and the near super sonic impact had not been kind to it. The paint had been stripped away by the relentless wind and what was left of the structure stuck out of the snow at an uncomfortable angle. When I first found her, we had tried to find a way to break it out of the ice a little, to make it a little more level, easier to walk in. It hadn’t really worked out. We just didn’t have the tools or the power to shift something that large.
From what she’d told me, it had been an exploratory vessel, incredibly advanced in her time. And it must have been a nice ship at one point. The amenities inside were beautifully designed, despite the pressures that space travel put on a vessel to keep everything as compact as possible. They would have been even nicer if we’d had the power to run them or the technical ability to repair them.
Instead, I had to look at them all, the showers, the video monitors, the food processors, and more than a dozen other gadgets and facilities all capable of making my life so much more bearable, sitting there blank and inactive, as useful to me as a painting of fruit would be to a starving man.
Still, it was more comfortable standing inside the Ariel than it was outside of it. The survival suit’s heating systems were far more capable of keeping me at a reasonable temperature within its walls than they were without. And Ai was here. I think that, even if I’d had more tools at my disposal to stay safe and warm, without her to talk to I’d have gone mad a long time ago.
“Euclid? What happened? Are you okay? The connection between us broke as soon as you left the village.” she said, as soon as I was able to connect my suit to her short range transmitters. By that time I had the bike parked in the observatory that we used as a hanger. It was barely accessible because of the snow drifts that covered most of the hole that the crash had torn open in the Reliant’s side. I had to practically lay on top of the bike’s controls to ease its bulk inside. Once I was past the opening though, there was more than enough space for it. The only other thing in the hangar was beneath a large tarp. The whole thing reminded me of Geppito’s spaceship inside the space whale’s stomach in that old cartoon about the robot that wanted to be human.
“Yeah, I’m alright. Nothing permanently damaged.” I said, hopping down off the bike. I pointed to the spear still jutting out of the ship’s long range sensor. “Repairing that is going to be a pain in the ass.”
“On the bright side we have plenty of spare parts for that particular component.”
“At least there’s that.” I said, rolling my eyes. “So, something interesting happened while I was on my way back.”
“Oh? What’s that?” she asked.
“Hi there,” Cyrus said. A moment later he added, “She can hear me, right?”
“Uh, I don’t know. Ai, did you get that?”
There was another hesitant pause before she answered.
“Euclid? Who is that?”
“Name’s Cyrus. Nice to meetcha,” he said in exactly the same jovial tone he’d used with me.
“Hello Cyrus,” Ai said, her near emotionless tone seasoned with a hint of polite interest. I told her what he had told me, Cyrus giving the verbal equivalent to polite nods of affirmation from time to time.
“I see,” Ai said, when I had finished.
“Could our ship pick him up? If we got it flying I mean?”
“Perhaps,” Ai said, subtle flavors of concern coloring her tone. “Mr. Cyrus-“
“Just Cyrus is fine.”
“Of course. I’ll contact you again in five minutes. Sound good?”
“That is acceptable.”
“Alright, signing off.”
The silence stretched while I waited for Ai to tell me why she’d done that. But when she stayed quiet I wasn’t sure what to do. A sound caught my ear, a whirling buzz and I knew what she was doing but not why.
Ai could project a holographic image of herself anywhere in the ship. I assume she could've sether avatar to be anything she wanted. But on the rare occasions she used the hologram she always looked the same.
She looked like a girl close to my own age. Somewhere between fourteen and sixteen. The hologram had long inky black hair with bangs that framed a sweet, heart shaped face. Most times when I’d seen that face she’d been smiling. This time her mouth was tilted in a frown and her brows were knit together.
Ai saved using the hologram for special occasions. She used it on the six month anniversary of the day we met. She used it one night when there had been a particularly spectacular meteor show that we’d watched from the ship’s bridge. I couldn’t help but wonder why she would use it now. I didn’t think it was to celebrate finally meeting another person.
“Euclid, you need to be careful.”
“Of Cyrus?”
“Yes,” she said, seriously.
“What can he do? He’s practically in space.”
“I just think you should be careful of him. We don’t know exactly what he wants.”
“Sure we do. He wants to live.”
Ai nodded slowly at that.
“Yes, that seems likely. It’s what I’m afraid of in fact. You do not know Cyrus. You don’t know what he’s willing to do to continue to live. And if his situation is as dire as he claims, he will have very little to risk and much to gain. Likely at your expense.”
I opened my mouth but I closed it. She was right. Desperate people did terrible things. I’d seen it before back in my old life. Been the victim of it. Even done it myself.
I looked around the hanger and leaned back against the air bike while I thought. It groaned as it’s pieces shifted under my weight. I ran a hand over my head, wishing I could run it through my hair instead of just over the helmet. Bare, cold steel walls surrounded me. The only exception was the piles of snow coming in through what passed for a door. The sun was going down out there. I couldn’t see it but I could tell from the way what little color existed on Persephone was being leached out by oncoming night. Even so I dreaded going further into the Ariel to find my bed. To do it I’d have to pass the bodies of the people who had once been its crew. They were frozen stiff as statues and there was nothing to bury them in but snow outside. That seemed too cruel a fate so I had left them where they were. But they were constant reminders of what was going to happen to me if I couldn’t find a way off this planet.
But that fate was looking at me from far away. I had enough of what passed for food to last for years, decades even. As long as I could find a way to stay warm, I’d survive. Cyrus didn’t have that kind of time. I was desperate. Desperate, cold, and afraid. But I couldn’t leave another person to die, trapped in a box.
“Look Ai, I’ll be careful. But he needs our help. There’s no one else. And since he found me the way he did, maybe he can help us too. He might be able to find things we can’t with his sensors. He found me after all.”
“That is also possible,” she allowed. She gave me a look that mixed sadness, concern, and empathy. I couldn’t understand how a computer could do that but she managed it. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I don’t want to get hurt,” I said, a quick flash of a grin showing my teeth. “So let’s find a way off of this rock and go help him.”
“That’s going to be significantly more difficult now. You didn’t get much power from the yeti village and going back will be much more dangerous now.”
“Yeah. They’ll be way more on guard now, especially of their tech stash.”
“I can help with that,” Cyrus said, making me nearly jump out of my skin for the second time that day.
“Holy crap! Don’t do that!”
“Sorry. I just popped back in a second ago while y'all were still talking. I just didn’t want to interrupt without something helpful to say.”
I shook my head and watched the heart rate monitor that popped up on my screen when my pulse spiked slowly go back to normal.
“It’s fine. What do you mean you can help.”
“Well, I know a place where you’ll be able to get more than enough power to do whatever you’re trying to do. It’s got power enough to light up Old New York.”
“You do?” I said, standing straight.
“Yeah. But there’s a catch.”
“Of course there is. What is it?”
“It’s a nano nest.”