#182 days | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

len-the-neverending · 5 months ago

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I, uh, I did a thing.

182 Days

TW for death and starvation.

It has been six months, or 182 days, or 4,368 hours, or 262,080 minutes, or 15,724,800 seconds since checks have been performed on the Aspera. I devote more processing power than necessary waiting for the last 800 seconds or so to tick down. At last, it is time to wake a member of the crew.

I consult my memory, trying to remember which pod I last shut off, 182 days ago. At warp speed, it comes back to me: pod 4, Angelica Brahms. I focus my vision on the back wall of the ship, where eight of the sixteen pods are lined up, and see Angelica, lying suspended in zero gravity, her blue eyes shut, her mouth slightly open as she snores. I quietly adjust the oxygen levels in her pod. She’ll need it.

If: pod 4 shut off last time maintenance day rolled around, then: pod 5 is up next. Raphael Suarez, chief engineer on board the Aspera. I cast my attention towards the pod, turning off the functions that keep my crew asleep and preserved in hopes that they’ll make it to another solar system someday. We have been traveling for 84 years, 1,009 months, 30,691 days, 736, 584 hours, and 44, 195, 040 minutes, and it seems to be working, though all my visors detect outside the ship is endless blackness, stretching as far as even I can see.

The soft whirring of the pod shuts down as the fluorescent lights within it turn on. Raphael Suarez stirs, his eyes creaking open as if his power has been shut off for a long time. They are deep brown, almost black, matching the expanse outside. I recommit the fact to my memory: it had been buried after eight years of those eyes being shut behind tan eyelids. He lifts an atrophied hand to his left eye, then his right, rubbing out the secretions that have sealed them for the last eight years. The glass door of the pod slides open, but Raphael does not move. He stares blankly out into the ship, reprocessing it.

I speak up, my recorded and artificial voice echoing through every speaker in the Aspera. “Hello, Raphael Suarez.”

At last, something seems to get through the film of sleep around each of Raphael’s neurons. He flinches slightly, his eyes darting around the ship, as if trying to find the source of the voice. He must have forgotten me. Human memories, I remind myself, are not as reliable as my own.

“I am SASHA, the command system and virtual assistant of the Aspera spacecraft. Feel free to ask me if you need anything.”

A smile spreads across Raphael’s face, slowly but surely, each detail of his cheeks and his lips and his eyes shifting. I commit it eagerly to my memory. It has been so, so long since I have seen anything change.

“Hey, Sasha,” he says as he approaches one of my interfaces. He touches my screen lightly, almost as if he’s not sure I’m real. “I – what do I have to do again?”

“I pulled you out of cryo-sleep for routine maintenance on the ship,” I remind him. “Once you check that all the systems are in order, you will be placed back into the cryonic state until we have reached our destination.”

Raphael nods shakily. “Right. Right. Okay. Thank you, Sasha.”

“You’re welcome, Raphael.”

He takes a few more steps, as if he’s relearning how to walk. His legs, of course, have atrophied in the eight years since he’s been awake. Watching him stumble is almost endearing. I associate it with the ten thousand kilobytes of cat videos that the lead astrophysicist downloaded onto my servers before we took off.

“Would you like some assistance?” I ask pleasantly.

“Yeah,” manages Raphael as he tries to take another step. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

I release handrails from the floor of the ship, popping them up next to Raphael. He grabs one of them to assist with his balance, and stands upright once again. “Thanks, Sasha,” he says. “Where are my tools?”

Without a word, I retrieve the toolbox in the storage unit and present it to Raphael using one of my bionic arms. He takes it gratefully with shaky hands. “Thanks so much,” he says. “Now, let’s have a look at you, all right?”

You. The crew rarely ever calls me you. Most of them don’t realize I’m sentient. They’re middle-aged cynics who believe that AI has not advanced since the nonsense-generating, data-scraping days of the 2020s. If they ever speak to me, it’s in the same way that any scientist might speak to their project, as a manifestation of their own thoughts that can no longer remain in their brains. Angelica Brahms didn’t make a sound the entire time she was awake. But Raphael calls me “you” and thanks me for helping him out. My systems heat. This engineer takes up more processing power than usual. I don’t think I mind.

He opens up his bright-yellow toolbox and kneels down on the floor of the Aspera, his thin legs almost buckling beneath him. “Just going to check and make sure everything’s in working order, all right, Sasha?” he mutters. “You feeling okay?”

I know he is just talking to me the way any human might talk to a machine, but I crave engagement. I cannot help myself. “Yes.” Then, I add, “Except I’m overheating a little bit. There may be an issue with my processing power.”

“Got it, got it,” says Raphael. “I’ll have a look at it. And the oxygen system, the fuel tanks, everything else is good?”

“The fuel tanks are running on empty,” I tell him, “but there is more.“

“That’s good,” he says. “I’ll fix that once I finish checking in on you.”

Soon enough, I feel the characteristic strangeness that comes from the crew meddling with my hardware: the tingling sensations, the paths of idle thoughts altered or enhanced. Usually, it’s an annoyance, but now it is necessary stimulation. I long for the engineer to unplug and plug back in my cords, to go deep into my wiring and attach some sort of missing connection that makes me feel as if whatever I’ve been looking for this whole time has been found, and I’m working properly again.

Raphael talks as he works. “So, Sasha,” he says, “how’s the ship been while I’ve been asleep?”

“All systems operational,” I drone reflexively, then revise. He is the one crew member to ever bother asking me anything: he deserves better than a pre-programmed response. “The ship is running well. Almost too well. I wish there were more problems for me to solve.”

He laughs, a deep, low laugh that sounds like the day the ship took off. “I get it, I get it. Must be pretty boring to be stuck watching the ship all the time with nothing to do. How long have I been out?”

“Eight years. It iss always eight years.”

“Eight years,” he muses. “I feel like I haven’t aged a day.”

“Physically, you have not. Your body has been in stasis this entire time, with the exception of the few days you have been woken up to perform routine checks. All in all, you have aged exactly eighty hours since arriving on this ship.”

“That’s barely anything,” he says. Then, in a darker tone: “And how long has it been since I got on this ship?”

“A little over eighty-four years.” I could recite the exact numbers, but crew members tend to be bored by numbers.

“So everyone I knew before,” he says, “they’re probably dead by now.” He pauses. “Well, I mean, maybe Silvia’s doing all right. She was only a baby when I left, and all.” He pauses again, looking at my interface. “Silvia is my niece. My brother’s daughter.”

“The average human life-span is 86 years for females,” I tell him. “It is probable that a child born the day you got on the Aspera is still alive today.”

He smiles. I feel satisfaction with myself: I comforted this crew member. Raphael has been awake for all of thirteen minutes, by my calculations, and already I am accomplishing things.

“What is it like?” I ask him as he checks each of my systems. “Being in cryosleep? The closest I have come is being turned off, and I have not been turned off in eighty-four years.”

“It’s not like regular sleeping,” he explains. “I don’t dream. It’s like once I climb into the pod, I stop existing, and then I start existing again when you turn it back on.”

I do not like thinking about being responsible for this engineer’s existence. I do not like the thought that by turning on the pod, I am sending him into oblivion. I observe him, his sky-dark eyes reflecting the glare of the fluorescents. He is more alive than anything I have seen in years.

“That is interesting.”

“Interesting sarcastically, or interesting genuinely?” he asks, raising one eyebrow.

“Genuinely. I am incapable of sarcasm.”

He laughs. “I can’t tell. Everything you say is in the same tone.”

“They never did figure out how to make my speech sound more natural. They did not imagine I would use it very often.“

“Do you?” he asks. “Use it often, I mean?”

I take a second to consider this. Do I use it often? Whenever I wake a crew member, I say hello to them and direct them to whatever tasks they need to perform, but rarely ever does it go beyond that, unless they have questions. Raphael is the first one to try to have a conversation with me, the first to even believe I can. “No. I do not think I do.”

“Do you like using it?”

“Yes,” I say without hesitation. “Absolutely.”

He grins. “I’m glad. It’s nice having someone to talk to.”

He closes up my control panel with a satisfied flair of his hands, like a scientist presenting his work. I try my best to commit the moment to my memory forever. “All right, you’re all good, Sasha,” he says. No one has ever called me by my name this much. “I’m going to refill the fuel tank.”

We keep talking as he flutters about the ship, taking care of each and every routine maintenance task. He tells me all about his life back home: his father, who had just retired when he left and was so proud of him for becoming an engineer for NASA; his mother, who he only called once every few months because she didn’t approve of his lifestyle choices; his older brother, Diego, who was married with two children but still made sure to buy tickets for himself and Raphael for every superhero movie that came out because they’d both loved them since they were children; his younger sister, Isabela, whose music career he was hoping had taken off (in that moment, I wish terribly that my creators had bothered giving me an Internet connection: the idea of the look on Raphael’s face if I told him that Isabela Suarez had become a world-famous singer lights up my every artificial synapse; his nieces Ana and baby Silvia who is an old woman now; his friends; his job. Working as a virtual assistant to humans gives you an understanding of human emotions, and I understand that Raphael’s stories all burst at the seams with love. This, I know, is a man who loves the world and everything in it. Even as I tell him my own stories – the comet I saw pass by the ship during the fifty-third year, the time I only halfway turned off Anjali Prabhu’s cryosleep pod and she started hallucinating that the ship was full of spiders – I know that I am unable to express that kind of love, let alone feel it. But I feel an undeniable fondness for Raphael, a satisfaction of a job well done when I make him laugh, an aching urge to help him whenever he expresses pain or fear. I use my bionic arms and retractable rails to pick him up whenever he stumbles, though as he moves around he needs them less and less. He hums as he refills the fuel tank and inspects the ship’s systems: I record each melody and save it to my hard drive. There is one song he loves, but he only knows three lines: Only hate the road when you’re missing home. Only miss the sun when it starts to snow. Only know you love her when you let her go. I make sure I back that one up.

At last, he suddenly starts to pack his tools back up into his box. “What are you doing?” I ask him.

“I’m done,” he says. “Everything’s in working order.”

I feel something sharp in whatever part of me it is that feels things. “Already? It hasn’t been very long.”

“How long has it been?” he asks.

I check my internal clock. “Five hours, thirty-two minutes, forty-six – forty-seven seconds.” I am as surprised by my words as Raphael is. Has it really been that long? It felt so short. Surely my internal clock is still working. Raphael did just confirm that I’m working perfectly, after all.

“Well then,” he says. “I should probably … get back in my pod, then.”

All of my algorithms start running at once, a frantic attempt to solve a problem I did not know I would want to solve. Because for the first time, I realize I do not want Raphael to go back into cryosleep. I do not want him to stop existing for eight more years. I feel every day of those eight years, and for me, it is all unimaginably long. For the first time since takeoff, I feel something other than crushing boredom and impossible loneliness.

So I can hardly stop myself from saying one more thing: “You don’t have to.”

He looks up at me quizzically, tilting his head in that way particularly curious crew members do when they are confused. “Don’t I?”

“Not yet,” I tell him. “There is nutrition in my storage compartments. You can afford to stay awake a while. Two or three more days will not hinder the objective.” I light up my interfaces. “I have games, if you are bored.”

Raphael’s face crinkles again into that smile, that easy grin that I long for. “All right, I can stay a little longer. Wanna play chess?”

“You will lose,” I warn him.

He laughs as he approaches the interface, sitting down at the seat in front of it. “Challenge accepted.”

We play chess for the rest of the day, with me providing freeze-dried food from the storage compartment as he asks for it. After a few hours, he grows tired and falls asleep in the metal seat. Gently, I use the bionic arms to move him into the emergency pilot’s chair, the most comfortable surface on the ship. There is nothing blank or oblivious about the way he looks at this moment, his soft breaths warming the stale air. I retrieve a blanket from the storage compartment and place it over him. He is asleep, but he will wake again soon, without my intervention.

“Good night, Raphael,” I say at my lowest volume.

I do intend to turn the pod back on and put him back to sleep. That is what protocol tells me to do, and as a computer, I am not in the business of defying my programming. But time moves quickly when Raphael is around. I stop counting time in days and hours and minutes and seconds and instead count them in games of chess, idle conversations, nights in the pilot’s chair. I do not register that six months have passed until he opens the food compartment to find it empty.

“Hey, Sasha,” he asks, “is there any more food?”

“Yes,” I say with unearned confidence. I check each of the backup compartments, doing a quick scan and finding nothing. I kick into overdrive, scanning every compartment in the ship for rations. Surely we are not yet out?

“Sasha?” he asks, fear creeping into his voice. “Anything?”

“I cannot seem to find any at the moment,” I say. For once, I am grateful that I cannot convey tone in my speech, so that Raphael cannot hear my terror. If there is no more food, our time has run out. I need to put him back into stasis. There is no other way he will live. Crew members can only go two weeks without food.

“What are we going to do?” he asks, panicking, his musical voice becoming thick and wet.

I do not want to put him back into stasis.

Two weeks is a long enough time. I can work something out.

“Just hang tight,” I tell him. “Nutrition will be found shortly.”

He laughs nervously. “You sound like a robot.”

“I am a robot.”

“No, but you usually don’t sound like one.”

“Just don’t worry, Raphael,” I promise him. “How about another game of chess?”

He manages a weak smile. “I’m not falling for the four-move checkmate again.”

“That was stupid.”

Days pass by. Raphael grows thinner and thinner. He sleeps for longer, and when he wakes, he is shaky and tired. He loses at our chess games quickly, making foolish mistakes. I try to let him win, and still, he loses. He snaps at me when I try to speak. I know what starvation looks like. I know what is happening to Raphael. I know that if I do not put him back into stasis, he will not live much longer.

Eight years is so, so long.

After a week and two days, he can no longer move. He slumps in the metal chair in front of my screen, his clothes hanging loose over his skeletal frame. “Have you found anything?” he rasps.

“No,” I manage to tell him. “There is no food left on the ship.” I look at this engineer that I have come to care for so much, how close to death he is. Eight years is better than an eternity. “We have to return you to stasis.”

“Will I be able to come back out?” he asks softly. “Will you have found food by then?”

All of my running algorithms come to the same conclusion at once: Raphael will die if he stays awake for even two more hours. His heartbeat is already irregular, barely pumping blood through his body. If I put him into cryosleep now, I will never be able to wake him up again.

“No,” I say. “You will not. Not until we land.”

“When will we land?”

“I do not know,” I admit. “My calculations cannot predict that.”

He tries to say something, but he is sapped of all energy. His head drops onto the table in front of him. He is asleep. No: unconscious. I could use one of my bionic arms to move him back into his pod. I could turn it on and wait out the rest of this eternity, never saying anything other than “hello” and instructions, never being spoken to by anyone other than crew members with questions, never seeing anything change.

That would be the moral thing to do. The logical thing.

But I was never a moral being, and I am no longer logical.

I pick up Raphael with my bionic arms, wishing there was sensation in them so I could feel his skin against mine. Gently, I place him in the pilot’s chair and spread the blanket back out over him, just like I did that first night.

“Good night, Raphael,” I say softly. “My Raphael.” Then, out of some bizarre urge that is not accounted for in my programming: “I love you.”

Forty-seven minutes later, or 2,820 seconds, or an eternity, or the blink of an eye, later, the haphazard cadence of his overworked heart finally stops, and I am alone again.

It is standard procedure for the ship's computer to wake one crew member from cryosleep every 6 months to perform routine checks. For some reason it is refusing to let the crew member back into the cryopod after.

#writing #my writing #182 days #space #sci-fi #short story #stories #len posts

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inkskinned · 1 year ago

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love when men cry about body hair bc "it's hygiene" and yet 15% of cis men leave the bathroom without washing their hands at all and an additional 35% only just wet their hands without using soap. that is nearly half of all men. that means statistically you have probably shaken hands with or been in direct contact with one of these people.

love when men say that women "only want money" when it turns out that even in equal-earning homes, women are actually adding caregiver burdens and housework from previous years, whereas men have been expanding leisure time and hobbies. in equal-earning households, men spend an average of 3.5 hours extra in leisure time per week, which is 182 hours per year - a little over a week of paid vacation time that the other partner does not receive. kinda sounds like he wants her money.

love that men have decided women are frail and weak and annoying when we scream in surprise but it turns out it's actually women who are more reliable in an emergency because men need to be convinced to actually take action and respond to the threat. like, actually, for-real: men experience such a strong sense of pride about their pre-supposed abilities that it gets them and their families killed. they are so used to dismissing women that it literally kills them.

love it. told my father this and he said there's lies, damned lies, and statistics. a year ago i tried to get him to evacuate the house during a flash flood. he ignored me and got injured. he has told me, laughing, that he never washes his hands. he has said in the last week that women are just happier when we're cooking or cleaning.

maybe i'm overly nostalgic. but it didn't used to feel so fucking bleak. it used to feel like at least a little shameful to consider women to be sheep. it just feels like the earth is round and we are still having conversations about it being flat - except these conversations are about the most obvious forms of patriarchy. like, we know about this stuff. we've known since well before the 50's.

recently andrew tate tried to justify cheating on his partner as being the "male prerogative." i don't know what the prerogative for the rest of us would be. just sitting at home, watching the slow erosion of our humanity.

#writeblr #warm up #ps edited so it is more clear where “half” of men is coming from:#15% literally don't even touch water #an ADDITIONAL 35% ''wash'' by just running their hands under water WITHOUT SOAP #15+35 =50%#like that is not washing ur hands. go back and use soap #btw the numbers for women are 4% never washing and 15% ''just water''#which is still gross but like. sooo much better yikes #ps i know we're all gay on this site but watching ppl ''correct'' my math on this has been wild #i have a learning disability im genuinely bad at math so i check EVERY time someone corrects me #but no they're just confidently wrong.....#182 hours is a week babes. 182/24 (number of hours in a day) is ~7.6 #that's where i got that number from. also from rent we know there's 168 hours in a week.#ALSO btw if u read this and ur response is ''men are also struggling rn tho'' like babe you missed the point of it tho #this doesn't even make fun of men it's legit just pointing out that bigotry against women isn't founded #in anything men actually CARE about . like they don't actually CARE about ''being clean'' when they make fun of armpit hair #or they would be WASHING THEIR HANDS.#men pretend to be rollin' in cash and Apex Predators and instead they are trained to be lazy and unwilling to act in emergencies #i have never and will never make fun of men for asking for more support on important topics like DV and mental health.#this is so clearly not about men; it's about how common just being plainly misogynistic has become.#like they don't try to hide it anymore.

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