Proxima - Chapter 2

Elara's secret mission

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Their living quarters took up the entirety of level three. On either side of a narrow hallway, ladders led to the crew’s private sleeping quarters, alternating between ascending and descending below the walkway. Elara’s was the third cabin on the left. She climbed her ladder and entered through the trap door.

Their cabins were small but designed to feel cozy. The lighting was warmer than the rest of the ship, and the walls were a dark gray instead of stark white. Each room had a twin-sized bed in the corner next to an alcove in the wall for shelves. Across from the bed was a wardrobe built into the wall, which held all of Elara’s uniforms, work clothes, and a standard-issue set of pajamas.

Elara crossed the room, opened the storage under her bed, and took out the bin where her personal items were stored during stasis. She rummaged through her items. A stuffed elephant that had seen far better days, photos of her friends and family, a well-loved Duke University School of Medicine sweatshirt; all carefully chosen to fit her backstory.

She changed out of her stasis suit into her Duke sweatshirt and sweatpants before sitting down on her bunk and initiating a self-scan. Elara was one of the first of her kind, and the first to undergo prolonged stasis. She didn’t know what effect it would have on her synthetic and biological systems.

Elara was partially organic - it was the only way to make her passable as a human. Her skin and hair were self-regenerating, grown from the stem cells of some long-deceased donor. She had a functioning gastrointestinal tract that sustained her biological components.

Her similarities to humans ended there. There was a reason she was designated as the voyage’s physician. If she had any other role on the ship, the medical tests the mission required would be impossible to fake.

She had no heart, only a small implant that mimicked a heartbeat.

She had no bones; instead, her body was supported by a metal alloy structure, surrounded by synthetic electroactive polymers instead of muscle.

She had no lungs. All the oxygen she needed for respiration was obtained in other ways. Still, her chest would rise and fall at a normal respiration rate for her activity level.

Her brain was an incredibly advanced biological computer, part machine, part organic brain tissue. It allowed her to experience some basic sensations and human emotions, though she had no idea if she experienced them the way humans did. Her brain also gave her creators control over her perceptions and actions if necessary and provided a direct means of contacting her and uploading information to her mainframe.

All of her synthetic components were powered by a small battery, which was charged by the organic matter she consumed in a process she didn’t have the clearance to access. Her entire existence was a closely guarded secret; her body the culmination of over a century of research and hundreds of billions of dollars. She probably cost more than the entire ship.

Even Elara was amazed at the intricacy and detail of her construction. When she was first created, she would stare at her body for hours, watching her hands mimic the tendons moving beneath her skin. Most of the time, she couldn’t even tell the difference between herself and humans. Her eyes were the only thing that gave it away. She couldn’t describe it, but every time she looked into her in a mirror, she knew something was missing. She had a hard time making eye contact with the crew because she was worried that one day they might notice, too.

She didn’t know the details of her mission. All she was told before departing was that it was an intelligence operation, and she would be given more information on a need-to-know basis as it became important to the mission. She may never need to know.

Scan complete. All systems operating within normal limits.

She blinked, pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth to open the retinal display in her eye, and began preparing a report to send to Apex during the data transmission. Once the display turned on, she used hand motions to navigate it. These were subtle but visible to anyone watching closely, so it was important that she used her retinal display only in private.

“Systems are fully operational after stasis. Adverse reactions include tachycardia, dizziness, blurred vision, and nausea.” Elara wrote. Her synthetic parts could be shut down, but without nutrition, her organic components would atrophy like any human, so she did still need to undergo stasis for the journey; she just needed the drugs at different doses. She finished the report and attached the data from the system scan. She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth again to close the screen.

It had been barely over an hour since the crew awoke from stasis. She knew the rest of the crew would be resting or watching their personal messages, so she turned her attention to the port screen in the wall.

Apex had created the ship’s computing system with a backdoor for Elara's access. It was their ship, but this mission was in collaboration with the United States government, which was unaware of Elara’s existence. If Elara wanted to, she could access her messages herself and project them onto her retinal display, but her handler stressed the importance of acting human to maintain her cover, even in private. So instead, she grabbed the small port that was fitted into the wall, navigated to her personal messages, and projected them onto the large screen in her wall to watch.

They all had almost five years’ worth of messages from their friends and family detailing daily life, from the mundane to world news. Elara had fewer messages than the rest of the crew, but enough to avoid arousing suspicion.

The background story she was given was tragic but all too common.

Embedding memories, even in a droid, was a complex process. It was more than just downloading objective facts or data. For a memory to be believable, you had to feel it. Apex still had not perfected this technology, so most of this childhood was a blur to her. Instead, her creators focused on enhancing only a few key memories, most of them not particularly pleasant.

The chief medical officer, Elara, was from Washington, D.C. Although it had fared much better than most other major cities in the United States, the past century had not been kind to the nation’s capital.

D.C. wasn’t near the coast, but the river that marked the southern border, the Potomac, connected directly to the Chesapeake Bay. In the past century, the Potomac’s water level had risen over four feet. Low-lying areas like the Federal Triangle were vulnerable to increased tidal flooding. For a while, the federal government funneled funds into seawalls and other infrastructure, trying to protect the city. But no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t stop flooding from the nearly constant storms.

The combination of increased flooding and rising temperatures created the perfect environment for mosquitoes. West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne illnesses were becoming increasingly common and increasingly deadly. Some of the nicer buildings and neighborhoods began constructing transparent domes around themselves to protect them and their land from flooding and to give inhabitants a place to spend time outside without worrying about the weather or mosquitoes. For the location and the amenities, apartment complexes charged a steep premium. Rising rent prices pushed poorer inhabitants out of Northwest and Southeast Washington and into the low-lying Southwest.

That was where Elara was from. As a child, she lived in a building that was formerly a small luxury apartment complex. As flooding became increasingly common, tenants abandoned the area for higher ground, and the building fell into disrepair.

Growing up, her shoes were always damp. She thought everyone’s shoes were.

The first apartment she lived in was on the building's first floor. She didn’t remember much from this childhood except for the discolored lines on the wall, which marked the heights of previous floods, and her dad’s wet, rattling cough.

The highest mark on the wall was from her mom’s birthday when Elara was in second grade. It was August. The summer heat was stifling, even indoors. That day she had felt a pressure in the air, and she knew a storm was coming.

They were always prepared for a flash flood. Elara’s parents never let her put anything on the ground. She couldn’t set her backpack down on the floor, or keep her shoes next to the door. Almost all of their furniture was metal, partly because wooden furniture was expensive, but mostly to minimize damage to their belongings. When it started to rain, her family had a system. Her mom turned off the electricity and gas mains, and her dad put sandbags in front of the door and all the windows.

That was usually enough. But on this day, the water kept coming. Soon, it reached her ankles, then her knees. The wind and rain made it too dangerous to venture outside to seek shelter elsewhere.

That night, they slept on the kitchen table to stay out of the water. Elara still remembered the cold metal pressed against her back, and her dad’s deep, hacking cough from his chronic respiratory infection. As she lay there, she tried not to imagine the room continuing to fill with water until they all drowned. Once the floodwaters subsided, the stench of sewage from the overwhelmed sewer system stayed for weeks, festering in the summer heat.

Her dad died not long after that storm. It was because of her dad that Elara became a doctor. She went to medical school at Duke University and completed her residency at George Washington University in D.C.

The years she worked in D.C. took a toll on her. Even as a doctor, there was only so much she could do to help her patients when they didn’t even have a safe place to sleep. After practicing for another four years, she couldn’t do it anymore. She would have quit medicine altogether if another attending hadn’t recommended she look into aerospace medicine, a growing field. She decided to complete a fellowship in aerospace medicine and fell in love with it. She might not be helping people in the way she expected, but her work could one day help people live and work in space, which was incredible.

Elara wasn’t sure if these memories were real, and stolen or gifted by someone else, or if they were fabricated, but she supposed it didn’t matter either way. What mattered was that they were believable, and they made it plausible that Elara would sign up for a 12-year round trip.

Twelve years was a long time. The crew was compensated handsomely for over a decade of their life, but they had little use for money off the planet. Most of them gave their earnings to their family.

Since joining the mission, Elara’s story was that her family had been able to move to higher ground. Now, every time she saw her parents in their new home, where they could have wooden furniture and keep their shoes on the ground, she was supposed to smile. When the image of her two handlers posing as her parents appeared on the screen, she did smile. They were the first people she had ever met, and they raised her, so in a way they were her parents.

She hit ‘play’.