My pod juddered. A robotic arm carried it from the wall of the stasis carriage to the ladder transit that crossed the center of the once-revolving tube. The radiation sheath split and slid away. My glass canopy cracked open. High-oxygen gel burst from my pressurized nutrient bath. I awoke, for the first time, coughed on gel and gasped for breath. All around I heard the klaxon of the fire alarm.
“Hull breach in stasis carriage four,” Lore announced over the intercom. She was the ship’s main computer and had a patient, maternal manner. She spoke in the voice of a middle-aged woman. “Chamber depressurization imminent.”
“Lore, what’s happening?” I asked in my small, breathless voice. With wide eyes unprepared for darkness I pressed myself out from my pod. Gravity had been disabled. All around me was the interior of the carriage chamber, lined with thousands of stasis pods, but the walls once lit were dark.
“Meteorite impact on the hull of carriage chamber four,” Lore answered. “Damage: Extensive. Advise immediate evacuation.”
“What’s the status of the pods?” I asked and gripped the edge of my pod. I pulled myself through globs of drifting gel to the ladder transit.
There was no answer from Lore.
“Lore!” I shouted, coughed on gel. “What’s the status of the stasis pods?!”
“All stasis pods are offline.”
My body trembled. Minutes ago, I had been in Ark World, and although my memories were just flags, I knew I had been there for a very long time. All that time I had hoped that everyone else was okay. That while I played alone, the stasis procedure had been carried out correctly.
“Emergency atmosphere shield is failing,” Lore informed me. “Estimate explosive decompression in three minutes. Please evacuate the carriage.”
“What happened to the stasis pods?”
“Please evacuate the carriage,” she repeated.
I glared up into the dark, searched for the birds-eye-view that Lore surely watched from, but all I saw was darkness and the impressions of inert pods.
“Katherine,” she said. It was a name I hadn’t heard in a long time. “If you remain there, the human race will be extinct.”
It was as bad as I feared. I imagined for a moment—wondered if Lore could lie—and tried to remember what had happened on Departure Day. The faces from that time, the smiles and anticipation of the crew, were crowded by flags. How long had I played Ark World? The nearest habitable star was only a few light years away. The Ark couldn’t sustain relativistic speeds and relied on slow-accelerating ion engines for navigation, so we anticipated a trans-stellar journey of a thousand years. That’s why the game, the stasis pods, and the procedures we so carefully programmed were important.
I struggled on and climbed the transit ladder. I heard the klaxon of the fire alarm the whole way, but it didn’t matter. Hull decompression would extinguish any fire in the carriage chamber. Did that even matter? I wondered. Did it even matter if the fire spread across the Ark and burned the whole ship from the inside out? Lore said I was the only human left. I believed her.
When the bulkhead was sealed behind my back and I was safely in the curving airlock hall between the carriage chamber and the rest of the Ark, I took a deep breath. I held my sides and cried in the weightless space.
“Stasis carriage four is effectively destroyed,” Lore said through the airlock intercom. “Ark status remains nominal. Overall operational capacity is above 80%.”
“Who cares!” I screamed at the ceiling and coughed again, badly. My body hadn’t acclimated from reanimation.
“You’re alive, Katherine,” she said to me. “My objective can still be completed.”
I smiled through my tears. I felt manic, I was going to lose my mind. To bring up such a ridiculous thing at a time like that; split hairs with me, like it made any difference. I curled into a trembling ball and tried to remember what happened, but all I could think of were flags.
The brain only had so much space for what humans called ‘memories.’ To enhance our ability to remember long term, over spans of a thousand years or more, we—the Arkitects—wrote a program for storing just the most necessary information in our flesh. Flags felt like foggy memories to us, but their electronic signature meant a memory was there. When we were placed in a stasis pod for connection to Ark World, the process of imagining and uploading our neural patterns would account for the flags. We took advantage of Lore’s astounding storage capacity to extend our brains, and when connected to Ark World we would have full access to all the details of every flag—every memory—of our entire lives. That my mind was so full of flags and little else was a bad sign. It meant the ‘unnecessary’ memories had been off-loaded to Lore, but that would only happen if I had been under stasis for an exceptional amount of time.
I floated there for a while, alternated between sobs and silence while I spun my thoughts around. The procedure for stasis sleep was controlled by Lore. Apart from myself, the other arkitects would have understood all or part of the program. Whether it failed on Departure Day or was tampered with later, it could only have been them. Lore had certain limitations on her behavior that prevented her from harming humans. As I looked through clear glass at the twinkling dark of space, eyes red with tears, I realized there was one other with mainframe control.
“Where is Ghost?” I asked the ceiling.
“Ghost is in Ark World,” Lore answered.
I gasped. My lips parted. I wanted to hold my head and laugh, thrash my arm into the wall, or beat on the door. Ark World was still operating with no stasis pods active. I squeezed my hands into small fists.
“How many neural patterns are in Ark World?”
“9,999.”
Everyone was still in the system.
