#space isolation

Even if they know I’m alive (and they might’ve figured it out by now, with their constellation of monitoring satellites), there’s nothing they can do. It took the Argonaute seventeen months to spiral up from Earth to Jupiter, and that was under fusion power. The ESA haven’t built another engine yet—even if they had, I wouldn’t survive another year and a half. The emergency resupply drone is powered by nothing but gravity, swinging around Jupiter in an eccentric, Ganymede-resonant orbit, and it doesn’t have nearly enough fuel to change that. It could be weeks, maybe even months before it gets back here. Not even the nanites are that good. My only hope is the prefabricated base camp here on Ganymede, the one that the drones set up before we even left home. It’s still waiting for us—for me, at least.

The problem is, according to the tracking display on my helmet visor’s heads-up display, I’m still 2,460 miles away from it. Ganymede’s gravity is only a fraction of Earth’s, so I’m much faster here than I ever would’ve been back home, but it’s still not enough. At this rate, I won’t reach the camp for another two weeks.

I can’t stop thinking about it. About what the machines are going to take next.

It’s not all bad, though. I’m left-handed. The nanites knew that, I think. At least someone’s looking out for me.

*~*

The great thing about being stranded on Ganymede with no hope of rescue is the view. Jupiter’s about fifteen times bigger than the full moon in the sky. Not big enough to fill the horizon, like on an old sci-fi paperback cover, but enough to pick out detail; cloud bands, transiting inner moons, the livid, boiling scars of storms fighting their inexorable way across the Jovian atmosphere. It’s so much more beautiful in person than anyone could’ve imagined.

When the Argonaute first swung into Jupiter-space, still decelerating, I was terrified of it. Our orbital insertion manoeuvre called for us to pass barely two thousand miles above the cloud tops. At that distance, the king of the planets would fill half the windows: a wall of reds and whites and pinks subsuming our vision. We were heading towards it pointed backwards to slow ourselves down; I couldn’t escape the fear that we were simply expensively-packaged food, a tasty treat wrapped up in hydrogen fuel and carbon composites for Jupiter to eat. You couldn’t even see it unless you accessed the rear hull cameras. I wouldn’t even know the moment Jupiter got us for good.

As we passed perijove, everyone else gathered in the atrium, drinking and cheering our successful approach. I was sat hunched in the windowless cubicle of my quarters’ toilet, vomiting profusely into the bowl.

Not that I can throw up anything now. My stomach is empty, a clenched muscle throbbing uselessly in my abdomen. I still get hunger pangs, though. With any luck, the nanites will get to that next.

Every time I hit the ground, a flurry of ice crystals bursts up and ahead of me. As the suit steps forward and into them, they crash and scatter on my visor, like stars collecting on the windscreen of the universe.

There’s still 2,047 miles to go. *~*

Turns out I was wrong. My legs are next.

I remember an old video from Earth. Whether it was historical footage or cinematic re-enactment, I can’t remember. There were thousands of men, huddled in trenches, slicked with mud and sweat and blood. They were firing guns across a barren, pitted landscape. Looked a bit like Ganymede, actually, but more dirt than ice.

One man—I assume some kind of medic—had to cut another man’s foot off with a rusty hacksaw. The video wasn’t shy about it either; you got the blood trickling out of him, the crust of pus breaking where some original wound had been, the gradual slowing of the blade as it had to cut through bone rather than flesh.

I hope it was a re-enactment. Surely nobody would’ve filmed that then and there.

The suit’s way of amputation is much less graphic, of course. I get an alert about lowering energy levels on my visor, blink a swift continue, and steel jaws comply by instantly severing my right leg from the rest of the suit. It was a lot cleaner and more bloodless than what that poor soldier had to go through.

Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, though.

I think I blacked out, honestly—or whited out. It was a flare of pain, so insensible and insane that the scream I let out seemed to go on for hours. When I come to, the Ganymedean landscape ahead looks much the same as ever. The decreasing number on my HUD is the only sign that we’re still ploughing on, that the servos are still sending me on my half-skipping, half-slipping odyssey across the desolate, airless plains. Phantom pains rake talons up my body. I blink my way into the suit’s medical diagnostics menu and administer a hit of meth for the pain, as well as a healthy dose of sedatives.

The leg should buy me a couple more days. Until then, I just want to sleep.

*~*

Even in the drug-addled womb of self-sedated slumber, I still dream. I see Commander Rothke’s face, the European Consortium’s flag rich blue against the white of his chestplate. How his eyebrows arch with desperation as he helps me scramble into the suit. Red strobe lights throw the spartan metal of the Argonaute’s airlock into sharp relief. Radiation alarms blare shrilly down the corridors. We’re on a collision course—always were, always will be, every time I close my eyes.

Mallory’s already dead.  Her body floats listlessly in the airlock behind us, her half-crushed head trailing globules of blood like Hansel and Gretel’s goriest breadcrumb trail. Her thermal coverall—usually stained with dried coolant and splotches of gritty MRE sauce—is spattered with a shotgun blast of her own viscera. I have no idea where the others are.

Rothke’s almost tender as he spins me into the escape pod and seals the hatch. Through the glass, his lips move, casting his last words in silent pantomime. I never figured out what they were, and my dream of them is no different.

Nadia... Nadia, his voice burbles in my ear, shuddering with an eerie vibrato. Nadia... godspeed...godspeed Nadia godspeed... godNadia speed Nadia speed god Nadia...

Then the separation motors fire, and I’m falling.

*~*

We still have over a thousand miles to go when the suit chimes an alert in my ear, accompanied by a string of scrolling text. The suit and I are skirting the edge of a crater lip; to my right, an ice-slope stretches miles up and away, cutting off the horizon.

WARNING: present level of exertion unsustainable, the notificationreads. Servomotors unable to continue absorbing shock of surface contact at current speed. Reduction to half of current speed required.

I watch as my arrival ETA doubles again, wiping away my progress in an instant. Another thirteen days of travel to go. I blink open the medical diagnostics tab and get the nanites digesting my remaining leg to slap me with two more shots of amphetamines. Might as well go out on a high. After a few minutes the ice begins to twinkle, technicolour kaleidoscopes sliding beneath my feet, and I can feel the skin of my face prickling. The distant searchlight of the Sun flashes like the universe’s biggest disco ball. Someone’s giggling—it takes me a minute to realise that the whispery drugged-up laughter is coming from me. I feel as if I’m seeing my own body from a hundred metres underwater.

The suit repeats its warning again. I’m so tired. If I concentrate, I can almost feel the nanites in my severed skin. They spew forth from the lining of the suit, burrowing into the remains of my leg, breaking bone and weaving my flesh into a lattice of its component molecules. Iron, oxygen, carbon, calcium. Nutrient fluid mainlined straight into my bloodstream, keeping me going. And going. And going.

How much more of myself do I have left to eat?

I imagine the servomotors pumping, the metal pistons telescoping against the flapping, empty legs of the suit, driving me again and again away from the ice. Rothke’s face, shimmering, twisted, translucent.

Godspeed, Nadia.

I open my mouth as another alert tries to cut me off.

WARNING: energy levels lowering. Further biomass required for life-support functionality. Continue?

Howling at the visor, I blink a confirmation back. That way, when the jaws snap shut on my left arm, I’m already screaming.

*~*

I’m asleep again when the nanites come for my mind. I’m not dreaming. I’m not even aware that I’m conscious until a voice probes into the formless void between exhaustion and REM sleep. It’s speaking English with a deep, unbroken baritone. It’s uncannily similar—almost identical—to the voice of Rothke.

WARNING: Brain-function interface required. All available external sources exhausted: biomass engine reclamation procedure must target vital organs. Brain function will be sustained by nanite-emulated processes.

Cracks of the real world leak into the dream-void; the dull ache of my phantom limbs, the dogged gasping of my breath, the incongruously bright orange notification on my visor. The voice repeats its message again, this time in French. I interrupt it mid-sentence.

“I didn’t...know...you could talk...” I mumble aloud.

“La procédure de récupération de la biomasse,” the suit says. Or it could be the nanites. I have no way of telling them apart anymore. “Doit viser les organes vitaux.”

The drowsiness of sleep and drugs tug at me like cobwebs. Overhead, the stars slide past Jupiter in perfect, unbroken lines. Softly, diagnostic warnings chime in my ears. What’s left of my body is dangerously close to an overdose: deep below the metal carapace of my suit, methamphetamines burn their razor-trails through the last of my veins. My blood beats rhythmic tattoos into the backs of my eyes, and I can’t feel my lips.

“No,” I rasp, shaking my head in my helmet. “I can’t let you.”

“Les fonctions cérébrales—”

“No—”

“Seront maintenues par des—”

“No!”

“Processus émulés par des nanites. S'il vous plaît. S'il vous plaît,” the machine surgeons beg in Rothke’s voice. “Please. S'il vous plaît.”

I would become them. They would become me—or at least try to. Either I let my body burn itself apart, or let the machines digest what little is left to give me a chance at reaching the base camp. I want to be sick, but there’s nothing in my stomach, not even the acrid tang of bile licking its way up my throat. Somehow, I can feel my chest contracting and expanding against the thermal inner layers of the suit, rising and falling as my lungs struggle to breathe air that I’ve inhaled and exhaled a million times over. The faint metallic tang of my water supply is tinged with separated and re-separated molecules of my own waste. Every fibre of my body pulses with the power of a stomach that is not mine, devouring what’s left of me.

“WARNING—”

“Stop! Stop it!” I scream, balling phantom fists in the suit’s empty gloves. “Get out of my fucking head, damn it, let me—let me—”

“—required. All available external sources exhausted—”

I slam my head back in frustration. Instantly, the memory foam layer behind my head catches the movement and softens it,the nanites unwilling to let my human anger throw off the delicate balance of the servomotors.

569.2 miles remaining, reads the counter on my HUD. Ahead of me is nothing but ice, caves of it, mountains of it, crevasses of it. There’s still another week of walking to go.

I blink the sequence of commands that will allow the nanites access to my brainstem.