Chapter 1 - Survivor
Day 1
Yeah, hi there, stranger reading this survivors log, whoever you are, however many hundreds of years in the future you are. Seriously, the black box in this thing will last forever.
So… there’s no other way to say this.
This is positively cata-fuckin-strophic.
I just finished reading the escape pod logs and what ever data it was able to pull from the Tongzhou before loss of signal occurred and what the fuck?
A failure like that? Unheard of. That is like ‘you got struck by an invisible asteroid’ levels of bad for the whole spacecraft to be lost.
Fuck.
Might as well get the basics down for you in case you're so far in the future you've forgotten the International Interstellar Exploration Missions (IIEM). Who. What. When. Where. Why. How. Simple.
Let’s start with where.
There are levels to this.
I know where I am, but not where I am, you know? I know the star over head is called Beta Canum Venaticorum. Most people call it Chara. I am 27.6 light years away from Earth right now. What I don't know is this planet, or where I am on it exactly. That was kind of why we came here. To explore this planet... from orbit. This is a little close for comfort.
OK. OK. How did we get here? It was called the Tongzhou, the 'same boat' because we're all in it together. The CNSA got the naming rights because it never would have been built without them. Mankind's first manned interstellar spacecraft. Pretty cool huh? Well, it's probably primitive and lame by your future standards, but in my time it was the single most expensive thing ever put into space, y'hear? And it was truly humanity's spacecraft. Every nation with a respectable space program contributed - right and proper international cooperation. What ever disaster caused its destruction must have been one in a billion, after all, it visited Proxima Centauri and Barnard's Star just fine...
What were we going to do here? Hopefully find some alien life more advanced than an amoeba and call it a day. They thought they found single celled life in Alpha Centauri, took a second trip to prove it was Earthly contamination.
Who am I? My job was to know everything about our quantum communications system, but even then, I’m just a wetware backup system to the ship's onboard software mixture of experts AI system. George West. Quantum Router Engineer Extraordinaire. I was never meant to leave the Tongzhou, and that was OK, perfectly happy to stay all cozy in the craft while the twelve man surface operations team did their business. The mission protocols dictate surface operations may only occur if the planet shows no indication of intelligent life. Whether I am a rule breaker right now remains to be seen.
Why do all of this? The International Interstellar Exploration Missions? Well, democracy, that's why. The people wanted to send humans among the stars, getting exploration fever, and eventually they voted in politicians who would grant their wish. The scientific community was just fine with the unmanned probes by the way. They were doing great without fur-less monkeys onboard adding complexities like life support and such.
It's 2056 and interstellar travel has only existed for a decade, but you don't need me to tell you about that. The future arrives at different rates for different technology sectors. The world today doesn't look that different to how it did two decades ago. Die casters are still bashing their heads over the end of Moore’s law, they just can’t make the transistors any smaller without quantum mechanics beating their ass, and half of them are looking for efficiency gains now instead. How much computation can you do with one watt of electricity? Quite a lot apparently. It was only really three advancements that got us here, and me here on Tongzhou specifically.
The first was a breakthrough development in medically induced comas, allowing us to be put to sleep for the journey here, saving physical and mental resources.
The second is quantum data routing technology. My specialty. Now you’d think a quantum entangled router would be awesome. No more lag in online video games? But you’d be wrong. Two things: The bandwidth is pathetic. Measured in Bits per second. Yeah I didn’t mistype there. Not kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes nor petabytes. Not even single sad bytes. Singular ones and zeroes per second. And the data error rate is stupid too. If they had the budget they would’ve sent five of them like on earlier missions. To the dismay of an entire generation of physicists, we have found that the higher you try to push the transmission rate, the noisier it becomes, it goes asymptotic, hits a kind of soft limit at around 50 Bits per second depending on how good your error checking algorithm is and that is with the top of the line hardware too. So, quantum routers, good for talking very slowly over very long distances and not much else. You guys probably have that all figured out now though.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
The third development, and don't freak out in case things changed in the interim, but the third is aliens. Yup. We stupid space monkeys didn't figure out faster than light travel on our own. What we did do was find derelict Alien artifacts, I guess is what you'd call them, in the asteroid belt. Big deal? Kinda. As best as we can tell, they are old and truly derelict. No sign of their creators. Not sure how they work either. Attempts to analyze one resulted in a sort of self destruction which put an end to such curiosities. Ancient aliens installed tamper resistance on their FTL devices, who would have thought? My guess is that there are no user serviceable parts inside. But you don't need to know how the car engine works to drive a car either! Sorry, bad analogy, you probably don't have internal combustion engines anymore. Anyways, as long as you know what pedals to push, you don’t even need a steering wheel. Drive in straight lines and when you want to change direction, stop the car, get out, and push it until you’re facing the direction you want to go. That is basically how it works.
So, big deal? They only found a few of them. The actual day to day impact on people's lives is zero. Exact number? Classified, but it was the CNSA who figured out which pedals do what, so to speak, and mankind's first travels to another star was done with an unmanned probe built as advanced as we could make it. It’s just economics, crew life support is an easy cost to save on. But eventually the public demanded, and a politician yielded and we got our first manned mission to... Mars! IIEM 0 was just to make sure everything was working correctly. Then it was Proxima Centauri in the Alpha Centauri system. Sorry guys, no blue cat people there, though if there had been, I’m team human all day baby. Eywa is a eldritch tree monster enslaving the cat people, and no, you won’t convince me other wise, because I’ll be long gone by the time you find this. That was International Interstellar Exploration Mission 1.
IIEM 2 was very original. Alpha Centauri again. Yes, the microbe they found the first time was proven to be Earth borne contamination on the instruments thanks to IIEM 2.
We got a little more ambitious next time out. By the time humanity was exploring the second closest star to Sol in IIEM 3, the public was starting to lose interest. They were still checking if what they found out there is a real single celled organism when we left. They don't want a repeat of the IIEM 2 controversy. If it is a real microbe they found, it will have lost a lot of the potential impact such a discovery would have, you know, with the whole FTL devices proving that there was life out there already, at least at some point in the past. You should know that the discovery really kicked world leaders into gear. Maybe they didn't want to be the ones at the helm running an embarrassing operation of fossil fuel burning and environmental havoc should extra terrestrial visitors arrive for a tour, or maybe alphabet soup agencies convinced them we need to step up our game collectively should we encounter not so friendly creatures. Either way, nuclear power has been "in" in a big way for eight years now. There was a big easing of international tensions too. Nation states sharing their homework under the specter of a potential existential threat.
With budget for one more mission, the Unified Earth Space Council (UESC), basically a joiner between NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, CNSA, and the ESA to better co-ordinate our best and brightest, selected the star Beta Canum Venaticorum for the last manned mission. That is the star I am orbiting now, on a planet that we didn't even know existed 12 months ago. It was observed by the Ultra Low Observatory Exo Planet satellite based telescope, which found it three years ago.
For twenty four months this planet was hiding in the glacier of data that astronomers hoard over like dragons. A machine learning algorithm analyzing the data lake found it, and the lucky SOB sitting at the desk when the push notification appeared got a PhD out of the ordeal. The data said this planet would be extremely Earth like. My own two eyes support this hypothesis. You wouldn’t believe how many pages the dissertation set aside to proving it wasn’t some error in the data. One page. Did I trick you? It was the previous work section, referring to the author's masters thesis: 'Proving the ULOEP telescope data is valid and not in error'. The planet's designation in the Dataset was FCK-Y0183 by the way.
Fuck you?
Until I have reason to say otherwise that shall be my name for you, rock that orbits Chara.
That is the story of IIEM 4 so far - the last IIEM for an entirely different reason now. I was onboard an aging Tongzhou craft as a crew member. We were supposed to show up here, look at the barren rocks for fourteen days then go home like everyone else did in IIEM missions of past, so the good old Tongzhou could be retired and the scientific community can go back to unmanned interstellar probes. Instead everything seems to have gone horrifically wrong.
I'm probably going to die here. Just not when Tongzhou did.
Alright. I’ve done my crying and shouting and bargaining. I have thoroughly cursed the void for generations to come. It's time to get to work.
I've completed a full inventory of the escape pod's contents and it's looking good. I'll cut the long and short of it. There is enough stuff here to survive for six months. Overkill. Just the way it should be. Why? Glad you asked.
Right now the UESC is probably freaking out over the complete loss of signal (LOS) from Tongzhou. But we have plans for that. There are plans for everything. For communication it is called the PACE plan. Part of my job description is being able to recite the PACE plan while asleep.
Primary means of communication: Tri-redundant quantum digital router. This bad boy can reach a bandwidth of up to 50 Bits per second under optimal conditions. Full duplex two way communication as God intended. I presume it burned up when Tongzhou went face first into the planet's atmosphere.
Alternate communication device: The 3 Qbit standby modem. Another quantum communication device, this one is much slower, less than a bit per second of transmission rate. And it gets better. The device is half duplex. Only one party can talk at a time, and other other must listen. Yet it is also much sturdier. The Tongzhou compartment it is stored in probably would have survived re-entry. Maybe I can go look for it some day.
At the Contingency stage we lose FTL communications but maintain excellent signal to noise ratio: The Baoding gravity wave transmitter and receiver unit. Sure it would take 27 and a half years to send a message one way, but at least we would understand each other. Good for sending last wills and testaments. Also presumably hot little fragments burnt to a high velocity crisp.
Lastly, the worst option for interstellar communications, at the emergency level, we have plain old radio communications. It sucks because you have to get your signal to noise ratio up, and stars love to shout all kinds of things in the electromagnetic spectrum. It's hard to get your voice heard out here. After the primary and alternate contingencies are discarded, the UESC won't want to wait nearly 28 years to learn our fates.
They’ll probably send an unmanned probe at great behest to checkout what happened. That may take just over a month. The probes already exist, its arrival is just a matter of travel time. I will need to be ready when it does. As long as I have still got my Universal Emergency Personal Locator Beacon (UEPLB ) by then I’ll be good. The device can talk to stuff out in space provided you have line of sight. Once comms are up we can go from there. A rescue effort could take longer still, but probe resupply will keep me alive and happy until the UESC decides what they want to do.
Let's take a closer look at what the mission planners decided I would need to survive on this planet:
Three 10 Watt solar panels. Redundancy to keep my electronics charged, including the ruggedized tablet I'm recording this journal on. Custom Operating System and it even has a basic Large Language Model within it for general questions. Why not send a little bit of everything in terms of knowledge? I know generative pre-trained transformer LLMs were all the rage about thirty years ago, but the cutting edge agents today are called Quasi Natural Intelligences, it's a good marketing term don't you think? They don't even say artificial anymore. They are actually pretty cool. You have to raise them like any new born child, sure it’s a lengthy process, but they just keep learning, and as long as you can keep the QNI aligned and friendly, the sky is the limit. Where things get strange is if you let a grown up QNI raise a new born QNI. At least that way you solve the QNI supply issue. The Tongzhou was actually governed by a mixture of QNIs, each specializing in a particular area, and together they could run the ship and complete the mission happily, all without human intervention. One may ask again why the public was so hell bent on sending people here instead.
Enough multivitamin tablets to last the rest of my life. Six months worth of MREs. A compass. Haha. There is a water purification kit + desalination straws. Hardened spacer heater blankets for shelter. I pitch my tent with the orange survival colored side facing down and the neutral green facing up. There's no one out there looking for me right now anyway.
The planners must have been thinking long term because I found rice plant seeds and freeze dried potatoes (10x). I think I will be saving those - ideally I won't need them.
Now get this, there is a compact AR-7 Henry Survival Rifle stowed away in here. I want to punch whichever pencil pusher decided this over literally any other firearm out there. And it's not because there is only half a rifle here - just the polymer rear butt-stock. That is how it looks to the untrained observer. I get at the rest of it by removing the butt-stock cap and accessing the internal storage compartment. Compact indeed. I insert the barrel into the receiver and tighten the receiver into the stock. I am now armed but don't feel particularly dangerous. They should’ve asked someone who knew what they were doing, this thing is junk. An after thought of a checkbox item on a checklist. They must have read "survival rifle" and thought that sounds good enough. The rifle is chambered in .22LR, a woefully under powered cartridge given my situation. A container with 100 rounds of (quality, thankfully) .22LR and 2 eight round magazines. The instructions say to check the zero so I set the provided paper target up at 50 meters and shoot a 5 round group, after adjusting the sights I shoot another 5 rounds. Now I have 90 rounds of ammunition.
I’m happy with the grouping that I’ve got here. It’s a shit group, but whatever, this rifle is good for killing rabbits and other small game, or by lucky head shot, the humble .22LR is known to be capable of taking down larger organisms... should it come to that.
It won't come to that.
They'll come looking for me, I know it.
I've also got wet weather clothing, clothing repair kit, a hatchet tool, water proof matches, paper, and pencils. A 90Wh battery bank. Oh, good. Cold weather clothing too. I'm not feeling that though currently. Maybe I landed near the equator? It's pretty warm. The clothing is actually good outdoors stuff.
All in all I have everything I need until I run out of food, but I'll have heard from the UESC by then.
The escape pod landed me on a beach. I guess that makes for an OK runway. I won't judge it too harshly, it kept me alive didn't it? I patrol along the length of the beach, listening to the eternal crashing of waves upon sand and rock. On the dry side there is plant life. Alien plant life. I don't feel super surprised that it looks Earth like. Everything we knew about this planet said that it was Earth like. Why shouldn't the plants be so? Though I don't dare go near them. I don't know anything about their make up. They could have nasty compounds. Or they could be completely benign. I just don't know, though my money is on our biology being so different that they won't interact at all. There is mountainous terrain further inland. When I feel braver I reckon I'll hike up there to get a better lay of the land.
I stop at some rocks raised up out of the water and stand on them for a while, looking out to the islands in the distance.
I am struck by how awesome my sister would think this is. She is a real outdoorsy person. Liable to disappear into the bush for a week at a time with nothing but her backpack and own two legs to keep her company. She and her ilk probably look at those islands and think it is time to build a raft and go exploring. Not me though. I have everything I need already. I plan to make my survival story as boring as possible. They might accuse me of being too reliant on the equipment and supplies I have. But I say that is so very human of me. It's in our nature to stand on the shoulders of our fore bearers. The fact that I can wait for rescue in relative comfort instead of suffering like Endurance did in Antarctica, eating their dogs, is a testament to how far we have come as a species, not a drawback.
I walk back to the escape pod, leaving a trail of foot prints in the sand.
It is getting dark now. I think the explorers of old may have gotten nervous for this part. Not me. The escape system has stowed my personal items into the escape pod, which is excellent, included among them are my PSQ-98 Goggles.
In the last ten years the military has been experimenting with trying to increase the lethality of individual soldiers while managing the incongruity that volume of fire is what tends to win the day. One of the outcomes of that program was the PSQ-98, portable night vision goggles with a thermal enhancement.
The star Chara dips below the horizon and I don the goggles. It may as well still be broad daylight. These things are awesome. I don't see any movement but I’m still keeping watch though, in case of nocturnal creatures. Hours pass and in the distance I hear creatures calling. Far from here. At least I know I am not alone now. If they are simple and animalistic I suspect I will have little to worry about, though I sling the survival rifle over my shoulder anyway while I maintain my watch. There is no need for a fire. Above me in the sky there is a terrific light show. Pieces of Tongzhou burning up while flying through the upper atmosphere. I am disappointed to see so much of it appears to be tracking down into the ocean behind the distant islands.
What an alien night sky this is. I wonder which star is Sol.
Day 2
I am not alone here. The weight of the realization hits me later than it should have. Well after I have woken up.
If the situation wasn't so messed up this would be a massive triumph, a discovery for the ages. Proof that there is life out there in the universe beyond single celled organisms and long derelict and extinct creatures that we know almost nothing about.
I wish John was here with his chemistry gear. There’s no way for my idiot self to known the chemical make up of these plants. I have to assume everything on this planet unsafe to eat because there’s no way our biology will play nice with each other. On the plus side that means any diseases here won’t know what to do with me… and any predators have no reason to eat me. Haha. If only I could explain that to them, if they’re out there.
Yeah, so I fell asleep during my self imposed perimeter watch last night. Not good. I have to do better. I would do better if I had someone here with me. I wonder where the other 24 escape pods touched down (with mine making 25).
I patrol the beach again, looking at the same distant islands and the same inland trees and hills.
There was a little development for concern this morning. I took a photo of the solar panels yesterday, so I know I am not hallucinating. I have been thinking about this for hours now.
Last night, something moved my solar panels.
Dragons in Space. I ultimately went with a different story for the magazine, but some ideas are just too good to say no to. A love letter to the early days of space exploration featuring dragons is just begging to be made. The title is obviously a homage to Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff, chronicling the story of NASA's first astronauts.
Here be Dragons.
I'm in love with the "Dude with a problem" genre of story, so consider this my humble attempt to contribute the genre. Hopefully my own ideas I'm bringing in will be interesting. I'm hoping to bring some of the beautiful imagery of New Zealand to life with my prose, with the environment George finds himself within.