The Space Explorer
by Corwyn Green
(1997)
(Dedicated to Kilgore Trout, the character in Kurt Vonnegut's novels)
Billy's world was the multi-generation spacecraft Space Explorer.
Naturally, he thought in terms relevant to his world. He measured distance in floors and rooms, not kilometers or miles. He thought a lightyear was a measure of time slightly longer than the archaic terrestrial year, so when he asked "How many lightyears from here to there?" he wasn't asking "How far?" but "When will we get there?".
"There" was actually Andromeda, but only computers really understood that.
The humans in Billy's world weren't like the humans that had stayed on Earth, so many lightyears ago. Only people who loved space, science, and exploration came to live in the Space Explorer. They abandoned all Earthly comforts to spend the rest of their lives in the sterility of space, knowing that their descendants who finally arrived on another planet would not even remember them. But they did not feel like martyrs, they felt privileged.
From them, the people in Billy's world inherited love of space, science and exploration. They studied everything. Technology progressed faster than it ever had on Earth. The invention of new technologies and the genetic engineering of new biologies became so common that they weren't considered science--a necessary investment in the future, but art--something that didn't really need to be done but was done anyway. Like the painters and writers of Earth, most inventors in Billy's world weren't paid for their art. Poor and rich alike spent as much money as they needed for their electronic or genetic constructs, paying for them as if it were an addiction.
Although he burned with curiosity as much as anyone else, Billy never saw why people had to make more of the same unneeded things. He didn't care about atoms and the occasional anomalous star. He wanted to explore his world in a more literal sense.
Unfortunately for Billy's parents, there were many empty, uninhabited corridors in the Space Explorer.
Billy's parents told him that the empty corridors were just like the one he lived in, only the farther away from home they were the "heavier" they became. They said the corridors were there for future generations, to accommodate the ship's growing population. The population had been slowly shrinking for some time now--hence the empty corridors--but only the computers knew that. They were only programmed to report life-threatening things like fires, power-outages and plague.
For the first few lightyears of Billy's life, his belief that the empty corridors were just like the one he lived in kept him away from them: he hadn't yet finished exploring the one he lived in. But then, just the floors' emptiness and "heaviness" became irresistible and he bothered his parents into letting him explore.
"He's just interested in the gravity," his father had said.
"So let him go to the lighter floors," his mother replied.
"You know he pukes in the lighter floors. Maybe the heaviness will do him good."
"He might get hurt."
"If he wants to go heavy, we should encourage him: we'll need more like him when we get There."
"What if an accident happens? Are you going down there, or do I?" was the mother's concern.
"We could send the robot with him. If anything's wrong, the robot would fix it," the father assured her.
The robot was the latest kind of housekeeper robot: it's primary function was to be child-proof, actual housekeeping was secondary. The theory was that a robot couldn't housekeep in a home with children if it could be hurt by large toys, deliberate vandalism, or--as every child born was a technical genius--by being reprogrammed. In theory, this indestructible robot could also serve as a nanny, cleaning up after a child or nagging the child into cleaning up after himself, whichever the adults wanted it to do.
In theory, theories work. In reality, Billy thought the robot was a new large toy and treated it as such, re-wiring it and trying out his second language, Programming-Binary, on it. P-B was a spoken language consisting of "oh"'s indicating zeros, "wa"'s indicating ones, and words (usually swear words) that stood for pre-set strings of "oh"'s and "wa"'s. All machines "spoke" P.B., and so did all children. Children communicated with the mechanical world that surrounded and sustained them using P.B., the same language with which they talked to household appliances. The older generation didn't even know P.B. existed.
Sometimes, as a result of Billy's experiments, the robot stopped functioning. When that happened, Billy did the house-work himself while his older friends taught him more about his robot with phrases like "You dumb toddler, if you jig the Kri-led 6 wire for a P2 grid you get an Irving loop in a pseudo-k linking. Geez! You owe me the whole floor, the whole sunshiny and windswept floor, for fixing your mistakes. Look, you'd need a Tri-peck wire for this job. But if you were smart, you'd just forget the re-wiring and settle for a smaller adjustment. If you flip switches 4 and 7 in the skyder box, you get a Serven T, which is close to the 47 to 32 alteration you want. The switches are clearly numbered, but I doubt that means much to you, toddler: you're probably too young to count."
Besides learning about his robot, Billy learned words like "sunshiny" and "windswept", which children thought were swears because their parents never adequately explained them.
From the time that they got the robot to the time they sent Billy to school, his parents permitted him to do anything that the robot permitted him to do, having programmed it to take care of Billy as they would have.
Although Billy's robot bore the same brand name and serial number on it's smooth, corner-less surface, it's insides could have made Billy a candidate for the artist-of-the-lightyear award: Billy had re-wired and re-programmed it to worship him, which was the first time an emotion had been successfully induced in a machine. It also did it's housekeeping work in half the time it used to.
Billy, guided by the instinctive cleverness children are born with, still argued with his parents about the limitations they thought they had set.
"How far are you planning to go?" they asked.
"Three floors heavier."
"Two. Three is too heavy for you."
"Three."
"Two."
"How do you know how heavy they are? You never leave this floor," Billy told his parents.
"We're your parents. We know. If the robot tells me you've been three floors down, you'll regret it."
Billy, who didn't like to lie unnecessarily, would agree with a mono-syllable: the robot wouldn't tell his parents anything.
When he was five lightyears old, he played a game to make the "heaviness" of the empty floors more tolerable. He pretended each floor was a monster trying to pull him down. The monsters were "defeated" when he grew strong enough to jump despite the floor's heaviness. He grew out of that game quickly, but by then he found that he actually liked the heaviness.
But Billy couldn't relate to other people as well as he did with his parents, robot, and empty floors.
His travels to "heavy" floors made him to grow stronger than his peers, who lived lives of contemplation and/or self-indulgence on the lighter floors. He noticed this, so when he comparing them to himself, he found them lacking. He was yet a lightyear away from being sent to school, but he had developed some very sophisticated feelings of contempt for his peers, parents, and people in general. His contempt mis-lead him to believe that he wasn't just stronger, but also smarter--an generally better--than everyone else. He wasn't, but there was no way he could find that out. If people didn't understand him, he thought his reasoning was beyond their comprehension. If he didn't understand other people, he assumed that they lacked the oratory skills to make themselves clear. When people disagreed with him, he thought they were fools.
One thing could be said in Billy's favor: he never used his strength, or his robot, to push anyone around. Billy let people choose: if they wanted his leadership, it was fine with him, if not, he figured it's their loss.
In the stories Billy had read, good leaders guided people into doing what the people wanted done, while bad leaders bullied people into doing what the leader wanted but the people didn't. Billy thought he was a great leader: he'd give anyone anything they wanted. Actually, this didn't make him a leader but a politician, but he never realized this so he never entered politics.
Adventure? He'd show any non-adult floors and rooms where no one else of his generation had ever seen before. Wealth? He'd give them any machinery he had no use for himself. Wonder? He'd take them to the Vertical Hole, through which one could see floors and floors down, one past the other. Because the Space Explorer was built as a series of concentric circles joined by randomly placed elevators which, for structural and psychological reasons, never linked more than two floors, the Vertical Hole was a sight that was remembered for a lifetime. Fright? More than anything else, he loved to bring someone to a strange room full of ancient and unidentifiable objects. There, lit by a phosphorescent fungus he'd stolen from the food farm, he'd tell stories of his own invention about "the day the World forgot how to talk P.B." and "Evil Melvin's very-evil Electricity-Sucking Robot and how it made a world-wide power outage out of many little power outages". Because of the fiction that the original settlers of the Space Explorer chose to bring from Earth, stories were traditionally set in the future and based on a "what if?". So Billy's stories, which conformed to all traditions, were considered strictly horror.
And yet, people never wanted Billy's leadership for long. If Billy had thought to ask someone why s/he didn't come with him, he would have discovered that all people wanted one thing that he didn't give: respect. But instead of asking someone, Billy decided that people didn't come exploring with him because they were soul-dead or cowards or both.
Billy was eight lightyears old when he was sent to school. He didn't really take his robot with him: his robot was just stayed with him as it always did. There was no one to make fun of him for bringing the robot because the only time school children had social contact with each other was on the way to and from school, and Billy didn't plan on talking to any of the "inferiors".
He had already convinced his parents to let him go four floors heavier. As a coming-of-age present, they now permitted their "dear schoolboy" to go one more "heavier". Billy acted appropriately happy.
The Earth-born psychologists who had devised Space Explorer's school curriculum had been afraid that race-memories and genetic codes could make a child fall in love--tragically--with Earth. Yet they also considered that without Earth history and Earth culture, the people on the ship might create a society that made Aztec sacrifices seem humane. So, grudgingly, carefully, the psychiatrists included Earth in the curriculum, but they kept facts about Earth as dry and boring as they could.
Billy's curriculum didn't even resemble the one the psychologists had devised. Since he already knew how to read and count (older children taught those skills to younger children, along with P.B. and electrical engineering), school was meant to teach billy about history, literature, biology and advanced calculus. Space Explorer's children needed reading, math, and electrical engineering to program robots, so they learned these subjects for the same reason--and in the same way--that they learned to talk. Billy's teachers didn't even think of telling him that "a is for apple", since he could spell "airmositoric configuration" as easily as he could induce one in a robot. On the other hand, Billy thought that "apple" was a candy flavor named after the guy who invented it.
Yet, there had been no need to change the way Earth was taught. What little Billy found out about Earth lead him to believe that Earth was a more primitive version--an older model--of his own world. Where his world was made of many floors with different heaviness, Earth had one wide floor with only one "heaviness". Instead of going in one direction like Space Explorer, Earth went in circle around the same star. He thought "the sky's the limit" meant that Earthers, unlike Space Explorers, were limited by their world's bad engineering. He couldn't understand why he needed to learn about bad engineering. The whole truth about solar systems and planets wasn't taught until sixth grade.
Billy would have been fascinated by the idea of a rock that spun in space simply because it could not stop. He would have marveled that intelligent life would sprout on such a rock for no reason. If someone had told Billy about dinosaurs, he would have asked his teachers endless questions, finally finding answers by inventing stories about people living side by side with dinosaurs. But dinosaurs weren't brought up until second grade.
What Billy learned lead him to the conclusion that Earthers named their world "Earth" because they felt it was dirt: cheep, unrefined material. He though that his world's name was derived from the fact that it never stayed in the same space. Billy had yet to learned about relativity, so he couldn't know that there was no such thing as "same space" and that travel was only measured in relation to other objects. But relativity--another potentially interesting subject--was only introduced at the end of first grade.
And so, instead of thinking about his lessons, Billy formulated escape plans.
One day he realized that the punishment for getting caught escaping would be shorter and/or less unpleasant than starring at a boring computer screen for six hours. And that's only if he tried and failed.
So Billy reacted to his situation in the only way his life had prepared him to. He created a computer program that adequately simulated an average student which answered to his name. His teacher--which also a computer program--would never know he was gone. Billy thought about programs teaching programs, and wondered if it was possible to replace all the humans with computer programs in this way. Given a chance, he would have tried to do this, but he never had that chance. Just as the thought came to him, he encountered the elevator going "heavier". He casually told his robot "Override-by-my-sunshine: erase places 52 waohohwaohwaohwa 543892 63 24 87 52 07 01 07 ohohwaohwaohohohwawawaohwaohohwa last place. End-override," and stepped into the elevator.
Since each elevator connected only two floors, he had to get off on each floor and walk to the next elevator, sometimes walking a long way to bypass broken ones. He killed the time by telling the robot about his theories. The robot remembered Billy's theories but could not respond.
Originally, it had been somewhat of a nag. Billy was very young at the time, so his reprogramming tended to be crude and drastic, so to get rid of the robots' nagging, he programmed it to think everything it was supposed to say out loud. He permitted it to speak only when asked a question.
Billy would much rather tell the robot about his theories than ask if they were right.
What he told his robot most often was that the "heaviness" of floors increased and decreased like a wave. That meant that if he went far enough, the floors would get "light" again. He didn't know how far he had to go to get to hid hypothetical "light" floor, but he intended to find out.
His theory was not unfounded: when he went in the direction of lighter floors, he came to a floor with no heaviness at all. It was a very strange floor, running perpendicular to normal floors, in the same direction as the Vertical Hole. And it wasn't endless, as Billy thought the other floors were. It had only two doors, one on each end. Past the strange weightless floor, the floors got heavier again and ran in the right direction. Billy thought about this, and decided that people had taken a section of a regular floor and stood it on it's end--vertically--in order to bypass the weightless part of the world quicker.
Every time Billy told his robot about his wave-heaviness theory, the robot thought about the ship's rotation and the centripetal force which was actually responsible for the "heaviness". The robot hoped that Billy would some day walk in one direction long enough to come back to where he started. The robot knew that Billy would either deduce the source of "heaviness" by himself, or become curious enough to ask about it. This hope was the second emotion a robot has ever felt.
But although there was a distinct difference between floors, the rooms on one floor seemed copies of each other, which in effect kept Billy seeking out new floors instead of exploring a single floor long enough to go around it.
By this time, Billy had completely forgotten that his parents once said that the heavier floors were there to accommodate the ship's growing population. He never realized that what he saw conflicted with what his parents had told him.
The farther he went, the more decrepit the floors became, the older and cruder the relics he found were. He concluded that people originated on the heavier floors, and moved, over generations, to the more comfortable lighter ones.
He was partially correct: the original settlers of the Space Explorer lived evenly spaced throughout the ship, occupying one of every four rooms. There were enough people, back then, to do that. Over time they migrated to where they were more comfortable, leaving the "heavier" floors to the maintenance robots.
At first, Billy was curious about the robots he found in the "heavy" floors and often asked them what they were doing.
"Applying chemicals that prevent rusting," was said one reply.
"But the wall has completely rusted away," Billy pointed out.
"That is why anti-rusting chemicals must be applied as soon as possible."
Billy tried a different tactic. "But your brush is completely dry: there are no chemicals on it." he didn't bother adding that the brush was missing all it's bristles as well.
"That's because I used all the chemicals up."
"Then go get more chemicals."
"I will, as soon as I prevent this wall from rusting. Preventing its rusting is Top Priority. If it rusts away, the structure of the ship will weaken and the ship will disintegrate. As soon as I do this, I'll do my other chores."
And the further he went, the stranger the robots became.
After a while Billy stopped talking to the native robots. He answered his own questions regarding them with "Because they got windy sun in their circuits" or simpler "Because those dumb things suck". He saw no reason to talk to robots that did not understand logic when he had his own modern, enhanced, and worshipful machine. He soon stopped thinking of the native robots as machines capable of conversation.
Finally, he arrived on the New Unexplored Floor. First, he tested the heaviness. He knelt then got up again. Then he picked something up and let it drop. "Hey! This floor isn't any heavier than the last one!" he proclaimed.
The robot disagreed silently.
Billy looked around. To his right, two malformed robots were busy constructing a green-eyed horror. Billy saw that he could not go around them without disturbing them, so he turned left. There, he soon saw something even more astounding.
"Running rivers! It's a door! There's a door in the floor! Robot, we found it! Remember the floor with no heaviness, the one that starts in the ceiling of the lightest floor? No... I know you remember it. This must be the door to the heaviest floor! If probably runs vertically, and after it the floors get light again."
The door had bright red an yellow stripes on it that reminded Billy of the candy-canes the ship made every Christmas. At first the stripes distracted him from the writing, but then he noticed that there was a word on the door: "airlock".
"Wow, what an idea!" Billy exclaimed. "Painting words! I always thought there ware only two ways of writing: typing and dictating. Why hasn't anyone ever thought of using paint to write words? When I get back and write words all over the walls and floors. I won't tell them I found it though, I'll tell them I made it up!"
Billy wanted to do to the ship's corridors what cavemen had done to their caves so many lightyears ago. If Billy had turned around and done this, he would have been considered an artistic genius. But he never got to do this because he never turned around.
"What a strange word," Billy continued. "and it's on a floor-door, too. That's evan stranger. And lock up air? That's silly. You could lock a person up, or a thing, but air? You could lock doors, and the word is on the door, so maybe it refers to the kind of lock that's on this door. This door is locked with an air lock, whatever that is."
The robot remained silent, just as Billy had programmed it to.
Billy easily opened the door with the candy-colored stripes and the strange word, only to find another door right beneath it. He could not open that door. He tried to order it to open with P.B., but gave it up when he saw how many defensive programs were set against him. He sat there, idly opening and closing the upper door, thinking about forcing the thing open, when he noticed that the dust on the lower door had been wiped clean.
"Hey, I know what an airlock is," Billy declared. "It means that the second door only opens when the first one is closed. It's a trick lock--the word tells people who are in on the secret what the door is, but no one else would know how to open it. But I think I got it figured out. I'll go in. You wait up here, and open the top door two minutes from now. If I'm wrong, I just wait between the doors for two minutes. If I'm right, I get to explore whatever's on the other side!"
Those were the last words that young Billy spoke within the Space Explorer, or in fact, anywhere.
Billy's robot waited two minutes and opened the door, as it had been instructed, even though it knew Billy would not be there. There was enough of the original housekeeping robot left in Billy's robot for it to turn around and go back to his parents.
It never got back to human civilization. It traveled only a few floors in the lighter direction when a spider-like machine, the like of which no human eyes have seen, approached. It had watched Billy and his robot pass it by several times now, waiting to find the robot. "Hachi! Hachi Hu! A riu tandraka siu?" it asked.
"Can you restate the question?" Billy's robot replied.
"Blow-hu." it said and proceeded to dissect Billy's robot.
And so, the Space Explorer's population shrunk again--by one human and one robot. The population was already so small that Billy's disappearance affected every heart in the ship, not just those belonging to people who knew him.
But they got over it, and went on living--went on loving space, science, and exploration as strongly as they ever did.
The Space Explorer sped onward...
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