Year 0 Felicity

Posted on Tue Dec 21st, 2021 @ 5:45am by Lieutenant JG Alia Fitzgerald

1,939 words; about a 10 minute read

Alia sat on top of the subspace receiver while dutifully entering data being fed to her by her eldest sister, Eleanor. She was careful not to let her swinging legs bump the equipment, not because it was particularly fragile, but because Eleanor objected to the thumping during her observations.
The older woman called out one last reading, “Segment 227, up to 137.2 and rising.” She removed her face from the scanner, sighed and brushed back raven curls from her face where they had fallen. Black hair instead of red, brown eyes instead of blue, but other than that she was nearly indistinguishable from the teenager helping her. Had any of their other three sisters been there, the story would be similar, which made sense as they were clones of the same person.
“All done?” Alia asked carefully. Eleanor had been tense lately, even irritable, which was noteworthy coming from the normally unflappable woman.
“For now, for now. Why do *I* always end up doing the astrophysics work?”
“You’re the oldest, sis. Tell you what, though, I’ll switch with you and you can take over washing the dishes every night, deal?”
Eleanor laughed, though she didn’t want to. “Don’t tempt me, youngster, I might take you up on it. You’ll have your turn in forty-odd years.”
“So is there something wrong… up there?” The last time something had gone wrong ‘up there’, a supernova had destroyed the starship that brought the original researchers to this planet. To make matters worse, it had made the subspace receiver into little more than an oddly-shaped and not very comfortable chair.
She sighed again, “That’s just it, I don’t know. Radiation levels are jumping in some sectors, going down in others but the average is the same.”
“But not going up here, right? I mean, our shields…” her voice trailed off, not willing to speak aloud the consequences. Her unsaid words echoed through the room, however.
“Not for right now, hon. Even if it increases, we can find some way to boost the protection, at least in the short term.” She gave the girl a quick hug, “You go on and help with dinner and let me think for a bit.”
After the girl had gone, she sat staring at her faint reflection in the viewscreen. Eleanor was the only one of her sisters that remembered Dr. Fitzgerald. Unlike the clones who had radiation resistance built into their genes, their progenitor had only a hasty ‘patch job’ to protect her. Though the researcher seemed optimistic, despite the illnesses that would eventually claim her life, there was always a burden, a weight behind her eyes as she struggled to keep her progeny alive.
Eleanor saw that same weight in her own eyes and hoped she was strong enough to bear it as well.


The sisters always met together at least once a day and no one was excluded, no matter the age. Long experience with their odd lifestyle had taught them decades ago that it was as essential to their well-being as food, air, and radiation shielding. Eleanor, as the eldest, sat at the head of the table. To her left were Patty and Reena who were the only chronological (as well as genetic) twins. To her right were Zenna and Alia, the youngest two. Arrayed around the room were pictures of their sisters who had passed on along with one for Dr. Fitzgerald. Because all the sisters had the same face, the pictures were mostly of them with their favorite clothing or doing something they particularly enjoyed. The only ones that were significantly different were the children too young to have grown into their adult faces.
Eleanor put down her water glass, her usual sign the meeting had started, “I’ll go last today since mine’s going to take longer… Patty?”
Patty cleared her throat. “The replicators are still limping along but we’re 93% self-sufficient with grown foodstuffs, so we are limiting replicator use to just the bare necessities. The modified quadrotriticale I’m working on could push us past 97% with some tweaking, though.”
Reena knew exactly when to jump in. “Shielding is holding steady and we might be able to extended it by a few meters with a .03% reduction in efficiency.” She held up her hand, “I know, that’s not acceptable but the hurons’ hides I’ve been investigating show a remarkable resistance and then can be cleaned of radiological byproducts nearly indefinitely. With those, we might even mount an expedition to find a deeper cave system with better natural shielding. Call it anywhere within a week’s travel safely.” They grew quiet with this report since the last attempt to find better lodgings had taken the lives of three people. “At the very least, we can line our most crucial rooms with the hides.”
Eleanor nodded, “Zenna?”
“Everything’s working pretty much like it should. I managed to salvage some of the stuff from the junk room and rigged up a fourth screen and more storage so we shouldn’t have any energy problems for awhile. Been gettin’ some weirdness from the receiver so it might be going belly-up. I’ll have to strip it down and run a few ‘nostics on it.”
Eleanor shook her head, “No, leave it; you might be busy elsewhere.”
Alia waited a second and then took this a sign she should give her report. While all of them had an abiding interest in biology, genetics and the tricks used to keep them all alive, it always fell on the youngest to pull the sum of their research together and to work hard on the medical side of their lives. With no access to offworld colleagues to bounce ideas off of, their only sure source of innovation was each new generation of sisters seeing it all for the first time. “I still haven’t found a virus that can hack our genetics and everyone shows clean from mutagenic radiation damage. There still aren’t any critters that like our taste but the screens I put up will keep them from coming in to sample us anyway. No dangerous native bacteria have been found, but I have some antibiotics on hand just in case some mutate.” She looked down at her notes. “Nobody shows any sign of telomere degradation or irrational apoptosis.” Alia sat down feeling pleased with her results.
“Thank you.” Eleanor put her hands on the table. “There’s a situation that I’m not qualified to interpret and so I need everyone’s input. The stellar core from The Supernova seems to be growing unstable. As far as I can tell, it’s starting to increase its rotation and precession. Instead of just filling the region uniformly with radiation, jets have formed that have ten times the usual strength… and I think it’s going to get worse.”
Zenna frowned, “How sure are you ‘bout these readings? It’s been stable enough for eighty years.”
“As sure as I can be with the instruments and tools we have.”
Reena said, “We can take a hit or two like that, especially if we retract our shields to a small area during the worst of it.”
Patty protested, “But that means abandoning the fields! It wouldn’t take much to kill them all or spawn inedible mutations.”
Alia sat quietly while her elders talked. It was too heated for a discussion but too polite for an argument. After awhile, she finally spoke up, “Isn’t this a good thing?”
Suddenly, all eyes were on her. “How do you mean, short stack?” This was Zenna’s pet name for her despite the fact that they were, now, exactly the same size.
“These super-focused radiation beams are bad, yes, but doesn’t that mean everywhere else will have less radiation? Maybe we can do something new during those times?”
Reena said slowly, “That’s… an interesting idea. Can the arrival of the beams be timed precisely?”
Eleanor shook her head, “Not with the computer and data we have here. The problem is that it’s too close to us. Before it stabilizes to a nice, well-behaved pulsar, it might sweep over this planet a few dozen times just out of blind chance.”
Zenna jumped up, “Oh! Oh oh oh!” The words tumbled out of her mouth almost as fast as she could form her thoughts. “Alia’s exactly right! Between radiation peaks, there should be dead zones where we can use the minima.”
“For what?” Eleanor asked quietly, speaking for all of them.
“The receiver! We might be able to punch a signal to the nearest starbase when the subspace interference clears up. It can be set up to go out automatically as soon as it senses a good spot.”
Reena nodded, “The receiver could be modified to accept an overloaded signal with our extra energy capacity. It’d only work once like that and that would burn out most of its circuits.”
Patty asked, “What are the odds the beam will miss us entirely?”
Eleanor shook her head. “I don’t have the data. But in a way, it doesn’t matter. It’ll either hit us… or it won’t. If it doesn’t, we can probably recover somehow. But if it does…”
“Then we really have no choice, right? If we must gamble, let us gamble on survival.”
Eleanor nodded, “A vote then?”
The vote was five-zero in the end, as it had to be.
Captain Jacobs, commander of the U.S.S. Excursion, hailed his away team. “Got a report for me, Lieutenant?”
Lieutenant Smith’s voice was hard to make out through the interference. “The radiation levels are off the scale, Captain. The planet obviously took several dozen direct hits from the pulsar but even just the background radiation here is toxic enough. The ecosystem has survived, somehow, and seems to be recovering.”
“Any signs of survivors?”
“I can’t make out any life signs though the crap.” Smith paused, “Pardon the language, Captain. There are some structures ahead that look like they could date back to the lost expedition. They’ve been heavily modified, however. I can only assume there were survivors… at least at one time.”
“How is the team doing? Those suits weren’t designed for environments this harsh.”
“We’ll be good for another hour or so. Huh, that’s interesting.” Static overwhelmed his voice for a few seconds. “There’s a smaller area inside the compound that’s been coated with… animal hides? Interesting, though, they seems to be excellent radiation shields. Each layer is cutting the background radiation by a good bit.”
Smith squeezed between the huron hides and saw the radiation levels drop the closer he go to the core of the structure. The final door shimmered with an energy shield of some sort which he deactivated after taking another tricorder reading to make sure it was safe. Inside he found empty food containers, discarded water bottles, and a rattling wheezy noise he recognized as a life support system on its last legs. In the middle of the room there was a pile of hides, the same as the ones outside. Two ensigns carefully pulled them back revealing five nearly identical women, semi-comatose from lack of oxygen.
Eleanor roused herself and looked at the mirrored helmet of her rescuer but saw her mother behind the faceplate instead. The older woman was smiling and the weight seemed to be gone at last. “I guess I was strong enough after all,” she whispered. Then she closed her eyes and rested at last.

 

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