rowyn

Loop Zero, Day Four

An automated system kicked in!

I can't believe it.

It redirects climate control from the cargo compartment to the passenger compartment when the temperature in the passenger compartment drops below 15C or above 30 C. So we're back at 22 C in here. It's still getting hotter in the cargo compartment, but it's not like a few degrees either way makes much difference when it's over 200 C in the cargo compartment.

I know it's too hot for drones in there, but sent a drone into the cargo compartment as a test anyway. Its chip fried after 3 minutes, which is better than I'd hoped for. I'm not sure what I can do with a drone that's useful in 3 minutes, though. If I could wire a manufacturing printer in the cargo compartment to a computer system in the passenger compartment, I could get it running again: it's only the computer chip that's damaged, so far. I could absolutely do that in person, in an hour or two. Doing it with drones in 3-minute-shifts, though: ugh. Haven't tried. I don't know if the extra shielding I made three days ago is helping, just not enough, or if it's useless. Or making the problem worse, somehow? But the walls are hotter than the room so I'm sure the excess heat is coming from outside the compartment. I'll run out of materials after a while, though.

I haven't wanted to wake anyone else because I can't put them back into stasis, but I went into the stasis compartment to see if I even could. I can't. All the stasis pods are locked and active, and only the ship's computer or the automated safety system can override the lock on a stasis pod. The automated safety system hasn't triggered because the stasis pods are all operating normally, and I can't get into the ship's computer.

Spent the rest of today trying to figure out user credentials. I found a dozen user names in the rec system's logs and tried password recovery with one of them. The password recovery said it went to the individual's tablet. Which isn't on the ship as far as I know, but at least I have some valid user names? Now I just need the right password for one. Opened all the cabinets and checked under and behind things, going through any items I found, in case anyone had written down their password somewhere. No luck.

I'm exhausted. I need to sleep so I can think again but my mind is churning so I can't sleep. When I was a sick little kid, Pop sometimes let me play with his pocket watch. It didn't run; he just carried it as an affectation. He said, "A clock that doesn't run on its own is the best kind of clock, because then you can make it be any time you want." So I'd do things like set it to 8 o'clock and say, "it's breakfast time!" and Pop would make waffles in mid-afternoon for me. Set it to "play time" during the middle of lessons. That sort of thing. Pop would reclaim it eventually so I couldn't always 'control time'.

When I graduated college, he gave it to me to keep. "Now that you're grown, I think you're responsible enough to manage your own time," he said.

So I'm setting it to bed time now, and telling my brain it's time to sleep.

Loop Zero, Day Five

Over 300 C in the cargo compartment today. I doubt a drone will even last a minute now. If I don't fix this soon, the terraforming and manufacturing equipment alike will be beyond repair by the time we arrive. Even if we arrive soon, which -- who knows when we'll arrive?

I brought a toolbox from a cabinet into the stasis room. I opened up a side panel on Kexin's pod to access the interior electronics. Then I put on rubber gloves and snipped a wire. Nothing happened, so I kept snipping. On the fourth wire, an alarm blared. The unit's display read: "Error 2340: Failure in cryostasis maintenance sector 8. Failsafes engaged. Reviving HU KEXIN. Revival sequence complete in 01:23:00."

The timer incremented down.

Kexin is the team leader so he's as good a person as any to wake up. The flight is uncrewed. It's not like we have an expert on ship maintenance. But maybe Kexin will have login credentials the ship recognizes?

When Kexin's pod opened, I went back to the stasis room. The timer was still counting down; it took another minute to finish. Kexin took a minute after that to wake up. "Hey Robin," he said. He sat up, blinking muzzily. "Where's the welcome wagon?"

"We're not there yet." I briefed him on the situation. He rubbed at one ear, listening until I wound down.

"We can try my credentials, sure." He shook his head and rubbed his ears again, then stepped out of the pod and walked with me to the ship's console. "So you broke my pod. That's why I'm awake."

"Right -- sorry, I haven't been able to figure out the heat problem on my own --"

"No, no, that's fine. Good thinking. But why are you awake?"

I stopped.

Kexin sat at the console, and half-twisted around to look at me. "Robin?"

"I don't know." I rubbed my head, rumpling my hair. "I remember getting into the stasis pod on Earth. And I remember being awake on Sunbeam, five days ago. And thinking I ought to check the terraforming equipment. But...I don't remember waking up. I don't remember getting out of the pod. I don't know why I'm awake--"

I must have sounded as panicky as I felt, because Kexin held up one hand to forestall me. "Okay, take it easy. Must be a stasis side effect. Your brain took a while to come back online fully and wasn't forming memories when you got out of the pod. Something like that. We can check the logs for your pod once we get into the ship's computer. Maybe it was even a problem with your stasis pod and the failsafe kicked in to wake you before any real damage was done."

"Right. Yeah." I didn't remember hearing about memory issues being a stasis side effect, but it sounded plausible.

Except...I couldn't remember wondering why I was awake, either. At any point in the last five days. Why hadn't I thought about that? Why hadn't I thought, at any point before now, 'Isn't it weird that I don't remember coming out of stasis?'

Kexin tried his thumbprint and then user credentials at the console, but they didn't work any more than mine had. "You said the rec computer would let you use it?"

"Yeah, but it doesn't know anything."

Kexin shook his head, rubbing an ear again before he stood. "Let's try it anyway."

"Are you all right?" I asked. "Is something wrong with your ear?"

"Eh, mostly. My hearing's a little weird. Probably just from the emergency wake-up. I'm sure it'll clear up."

In the rec room, Kexin dug through its logs, deciphering time stamps and entries. There'd been almost no activity for this trip, since everyone was in stasis the whole time. The last log entry before I started poking at the rec computer was from the previous trip. But Kexin remembered how long Sunbeam had been in port between our trip and the previous: seventeen days. "They had to fit and prep her for an interstellar voyage because her last few trips were in-system hops. That means this entry was about 17 days before we launched. And today's ship-date is 2144-315: 723 days after it. So 706 ship-days in transit so far. I don't remember how long we were supposed to be traveling in ship-days. But the rec computer ought to be able to figure it out." The computer didn't have anything as straightforward as a time-and-distance calculator for space travel. We tried a few different approaches before Kexin found a space colonization game in the library that boasted of realistic ship designs and speeds. We poked at it for a while and eventually got it to tell us how many ship-days a voyage from Earth to Corsair-V would take a ship of Sunbeam's class: 813 at customary speeds.

Kexin got the game to display the course on a star map, labelled in both ship-time and distance. 706 ship-days was physically much closer than you'd expect: we should be in the Corsair system now, and braking in anticipation of reaching Corsair-V.

Seeing the map made me smile. "Finally, we know where we are. More or less. I suppose if there's a problem with the drives we might be either farther or closer, depending what went wrong."

"Yeah." Kexin stifled a yawn. "And none of this gets us any closer to figuring out what's wrong with the cargo compartment. But the temps have been rising linearly, not exponentially. And anything that'd melt at 300 C already melted at 200 C. I was wondering if we're close enough that we might as well wake everyone. But with over three months to go, I'm reluctant to jump straight to that. Let's get some sleep. Maybe inspiration will strike overnight."

Loop Zero, Day Six

Partway through the sleep shift, I had a nightmare of alarms blaring. The main computer announced that ship integrity had failed and instructed all conscious individuals to evacuate the escape pods. It was hot, too hot, as I ran through past the stasis room towards the nearest escape pod. The stasis room airlock had sealed. The stasis pods launched, each its own sort of escape pod. But instead of launching into the blackness of space, a fiery inferno boiled outside the ship. While I stared in horror, metal and ceramic shrieked and twisted around me. A heat so intense it didn't even feel like heat anymore washed over me, like the shockwave of an explosion.

On Fediverse, there's a "SoloRPG Book Club" that started back in April or May. I participated briefly while Lut was in the hospital, playing maybe half of "Princess with a Cursed Sword". The game didn't interest me enough to finish or to write about the experience of playing it. Which is not surprising, given the timing (Lut was in the hospital when I started playing it), and not really a reflection on the game.

I skipped the next few games, for several reasons:

I'm still playing Apothecaria and do not desperately need a new soloRPG to immerse myself in
The games selected didn't especially appeal to me.
Grief makes everything harder, even things that ought to be fun, and especially things that take energy/effort
I've bought a few game bundles on itch.io, with the result that I already own hundreds if not thousands of solo RPGs. I don't really want an excuse to get MORE solo RPGs. I want an excuse to play some of the solo RPGs I already owned.

So during the nominations period for the latest game, I looked over the solo RPGs I already owned until I found one that looked interesting, and then nominated it.

I was traveling on the day the poll was posted and didn't even realize it had already gone up. On 9/15, I searched the hashtag for it, and discovered it was over already. But Lo/oper, the game I'd nominated, had won! \o/

This is the first three days of my journal for the game. I’ll post the next few days soon, probably tomorrow. I do not guarantee that I will play this journaling game to completion: we'll see.

Loop Zero, Day One

I started today using my table to check over the cargo. Our ship, Mote of Dust Caught in a Sunbeam, is bringing modern terraforming equipment to Corsair-V. It'll solve the colony's agricultural problem and alleviate their dependence on imported food. Lance and I are the mechanical experts: it's our job to make sure everything works and to fix it on-site if it doesn't. The terraforming equipment itself takes up less space than all the machines for printing replacement parts for it. Almost everything can be rebuilt if we have to. The power cores and the computer chips are the only parts we can't manufacture, so we've got multiple spares for all of those.

I couldn't think of anything that might go wrong in transit, but verifying is my job and there isn't much else to do on ship, so I did it anyway. Nothing would be worse than getting to Corsair-V empty-handed.

And it was a good thing I checked! The cargo area was running too hot. Hot enough that the chips would've been damaged if I hadn't done anything. There was a shielding problem in the cargo bay.

I had drones move the chips and power cores into the passenger compartment, where the climate control systems are more aggressive. There's plenty of space in here for parts as small as those. I set up the printers to make additional shielding but the rest of the equipment should be fine -- they're not gonna fry.

Loop Zero, Day Two

Sunbeam doesn't have a crew. We're on an interstellar mission, and me and my team are supposed to be in stasis until arrival. We're basically cargo, like the terraforming and manufacturing equipment. But Sunbeam can be used for in-system hops between planets: journeys of days instead of years, where there's no need for stasis. That's why it has a passenger compartment and not just stasis pods. There's a rec lounge, a mess, and sleep bunks.

Even though we're supposed to spend the whole trip in stasis, the mess has freeze-dried and other preserved goods to feed all of us for years, plus plenty of water and other drinks. Just in case something goes wrong with the stasis. Good thing for me, or I'd be awfully hungry and thirsty by now. The ship doesn't have the equipment to put someone back in stasis once they wake up.

I'm worried about the cargo bay. It's still getting hotter in there. If it gets much worse, it won't be safe even for drones. Also, I moved the spare chips and the chips from the terraforming machines into the passenger compartment, but I completely spaced that the manufacturing printers also have integral chips. Those are fried now. ARGH.

The passenger compartment doesn't have enough room for me to move all of the equipment in here. I thought yesterday that it'd be fine and yes--other than the computers built into the printers--they'll be fine if the range stays under any reasonable level. 300 Celsius? Not a problem.

But it's over 100 C in there today.

Why is it so hot? I thought it was a shielding problem with heat leaking in from the fusion drives, but more shielding isn't helping. I looked up the specs and the cargo bay is supposed to run colder than the passenger compartment. The passenger compartment's additional climate control is mostly to keep it warm in here.

I asked the ship's main computer why the cargo bay was overheating, but it didn't respond. I must not have the right access for it.

Loop Zero, Day Three

Today, it's too warm in the passenger compartment, too. Not dangerously hot. Yet. But uncomfortably hot.

It doesn't make sense. We're in the interstellar void, right? Getting rid of heat should be easy. Out here, the shielding is supposed to protect the ship from radiation, not heat. The heat shielding is only for re-entry. We can't possibly be undergoing re-entry; re-entry lasts minutes, not days.

Wasted today trying to get the ship's computer to answer any question about anything. It doesn't respond to voice at all. Weirdly, my tablet isn't responding to voice, either. I hadn't noticed because I prefer using the touch or keyboard interfaces for it anyway. But I didn't know where the ship's physical interface was because I was supposed to be in stasis for this trip so why would I need to know?

There's a computer in the rec room but I can only get it to run recreational programs. It won't even tell me where we are. I feel like "my relative location in the universe" didn't need to be restricted information but here we are. Maybe the ship's computer won't talk to it, either.

I went through every cabinet in the bunk room and discovered that one cabinet folds out into a chair. The one next to it unfolds into a computer console. It said "fingerprint not recognized, please enter user login credentials". My user credentials with Interstellar Home Inc. don't work. I'm so tired. I don't want to die out here.

I can't think like that. I'm not gonna die out here. When I was a kid, I had leukemia. I remember being in the hospital, again and again. Each time thinking, "This is it. I won't survive this." And Dad at my bedside, telling jokes and promising me it'd all be okay.

And it was okay. Leukemia couldn't kill me. An overengineered, thoroughly-tested spaceship stuffed with tried-and-true technology sure won't. Some automated system I don't even know about will kick in and fix this. Or I'll figure it out. I'll be fine. We'll all be fine.