12/17/23: Solar Petal
Ship Charter:
Name: The Solar Petal
Make and Model: Evergreen, Modified Camelot XLE 2115
Mode: Subspace Puddle-Jump
Class: Freight
Cargo: Manufacturing supplies for Illysian-Enamel warfront
Crew: 905
Destination: Luhman 16A
Length of Journey: 482 days
Departure Date: 02/13/2132
It first started during a walk to the engine room. Almost the entirety of the Solar Petal’s interior was covered in ultra-high-resolution screens, and the ship had projected a forest onto the corridor I was walking down.
A canopy of vibrant green rustled above me and filtered sunlight onto my face. I felt a gentle breeze across my skin, and a moment later the leaves swayed in the same wind. There was a distant call of songbirds to my right, as they jumped from branch to branch. I could even smell fresh pine.
And then the thought suddenly occurred to me that all of this was fake, and that I was in a tube of metal hurtling through space, separated from vacuum death by nothing but a few inches of titanium.
You are a speck of life surrounded by nothingness, my brain told me. You do not belong here.
But then the illusion snapped back into place, like a magic eye picture fixing itself in my mind’s eye. The intrusive thought disappeared.
I frowned. That had never happened before.
That evening, Julia and I got into a fight.
The object-level issue was that I had left my pants on the floor in the middle of the room, and she had tripped on them while coming out of the bathroom.
“All I’m saying is that it would be nice if you put your clothes in the hamper.”
She gestured with both hands at the hamper in the corner of the room. “See? Hamper. Clothes go in the hamper.”
“Sure. Fine.”
She threw up her hands.
“I don’t even want to have this discussion. This is such a stupid, stereotypical thing for me to even mention or say, that I feel like a stereotype for even saying it. I don’t want to be that type of woman, okay? The type of woman who says, ‘I don’t want to clean up after you,’ - because neither of us wants that, and it kills me to even think those words, because it makes me feel like a parody of myself, and so just - ”
“I forgot, alright? I’ll do it next time.”
And then, before I even realized the words were leaving my mouth: “And besides, there are plenty of things that you do that bother me. And I let them go, because they’re small things, and sometimes you just have to let them go.”
Her eyes gleamed.
“Oh really. I do plenty of things that bother you, eh?”
We fought, which was happening more frequently recently, and made up by the end of the evening, as we always did. The subtext, of course, was that if this was a problem now here on the ship, then it would be a problem on Luhman, which didn’t bode well for the future of our relationship. I hated the idea of a single mistake - pants on the ground - being some kind of symbol of long-term incompatibility. I liked Julia - loved her, really - and I hated the idea of this being no more than a ship romance, of our experience together on the Solar Petal being one of expiration dating.
Even despite that, unconsciously, my mind imagined a life without Julia, filtering through a list of all the single women who were onboard the Solar Petal. It was a short list, as people tended to pair off quickly at the beginning of a long voyage much like Julia and I had - but Sarah in Informatics was pretty, and she laughed at my jokes, and let’s say Julia and I broke up - amiably of course - well, I could wait a reasonable amount of time before making a move, and -
I stopped myself before the daydream could get any further.
It happened again later the next week, when I was at the mess hall. It was my birthday, and so I had splurged on a bowl of rehydrated noodles with real vegetables from the ship’s greenhouse. I walked over to the edge of the room, and sat down at one of the benches, which overlooked a view of the Cliffs of Dover. There was a rumble from the waves crashing upon the rocks below me, and the ship had gone so far as to mix in the smell of sea salt into the wind.
And then - something about one of the seagulls in the air above me drew my eye. I paused, mid-bite.
That’s not a real bird, my brain told me. That’s just a simulation of a bird on the wall. You’re in a box with four walls, breathing recycled air.
I looked around, and suddenly the illusion of the Cliffs of Dover was broken. The boundaries of the mess hall were immediately obvious. I had the sudden, irrational thought that the supply of air in the room was limited, that I needed to start rationing my breaths because otherwise I would run out -
And then the feeling was gone. The walls disappeared and the illusion of distance snapped back. The sea stretched forever into the horizon.
I finished my noodles, watching as the seagull flew lazily across the water.
“I think there’s something wrong with me,” I told Julia later that night.
I always felt guilty talking to her about my feelings. She was the crew’s physician, which included psychiatrist duties, and I didn’t want to come off like one of her patients. But she had told me early on in our relationship that she needed me to open up; and so now whenever I noticed an instinct to squash a feeling, I let it out instead.
“What do you mean?” she said, grabbing a bag of wine from the fridge.
I described what had happened on the way to the engine room and in the mess hall.
“I don’t think it’s you,” she said, unscrewing the cap and pouring us both our second glass for the night. “You’re the second person to say that to me this week.”
“Oh. Really?” I said.
“I can’t say who it was. Patient confidentiality and all that. But they described something similar - the feeling that the wall’s AR simulations were off; and then a sensation of the walls closing in,” she said.
“I’m a little relieved it’s not just me,” I said. “Although come to think of it, I’ve been feeling antsy for weeks.”
“No. It’s not just you. But we can deal with it tomorrow. For now, I have something for you,” she said, then pulled out a box, putting it next to the two glasses of wine she had poured out for us.
I opened it.
“Fresh blueberries?” I said, a little in disbelief. “What did you have to trade to get these?”
“Happy Birthday,” she said.
I stared at the blueberries. They were a hefty splurge, and I knew she was already over her budget for the second month in a row. It was irresponsible.
“Thanks,” I said, swallowing the words that almost slipped out of my mouth. “These look really good.”
“What, you don’t like them?” she said, noticing the look on my face.
“No, they’re great!” I said. This seemed to appease her, and the rest of the night was a good one, though the sense of deep annoyance stayed with me, like a wound I couldn’t lick clean.
I used my lunch break to visit the software engineers. They were a quiet bunch, usually keeping to their own workrooms on starboard side.
“Hey Jean. You have a moment?” I said, popping my head in.
The room was an absolute mess. There were caffeine-bags everywhere, and the ship’s cleaning bots had obviously given up on clearing them.
“On a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being your personal entertainment device being broken, and 10 being the imminent destruction of the Solar Petal in the manner of Titanic from tales of yore, what would you rate the importance of your issue?”
“Um. A 4?” I said.
“I’m sorry, but I cannot help you at this moment,” said Jean, turning her attention back to her screen.
“But it’s an 8 on the interesting scale?” I said hopefully.
Jean stared at me for a moment, as if deciding if I were a fly worth swatting. I briefly felt resentful. I knew of course that the software engineers were higher on the totem pole than I was, and that their time was more valuable. But it perhaps didn’t need to be laid out so bluntly.
“Very well. You have two minutes.”
“I think there’s something wrong with the ship’s augmented reality projections,” I said. “They’ve always been entirely life-like for me. But recently there have been moments where they haven’t felt quite right. And there’s at least one other person who’s noticed the same thing.”
Jean raised an eyebrow.
“Not quite right?” she asked.
“A bird that doesn’t feel like a bird. A forest that doesn’t feel like a forest. I don’t know. It makes me feel… claustrophobic.”
She arched her eyebrow, and turned her attention back towards her keyboard.
“Come back when you have a third person who’s affected,” she said.
“It’s a real thing, I swear. I’m not just imagining it,” I said.
She waved me away.
There were two bars on the Solar Petal. The Cosmic was where you went for a party and for bad karaoke, while the Cottage was where you went for a chill beer after work.
I was at the Cottage when the fight broke out.
I heard the sound of broken glass, and by the time I turned my head, one of the men at the counter was already reeling. Blood trickled from the side of his head, and it took me a moment to recognize that it was Tom, one of the plumbers.
“What the fuck, Greg?” the bartender yelled.
Greg pointed a finger at Tom.
“You take that back,” he said, voice tense. “You take that back right now.”
“I didn’t say nuthin,” Tom muttered. He tried to get up from his seat, failed, tried again, and succeeded the second time.
I thought about getting involved, but by this point two of the others had already grabbed Greg and were restraining him.
“You. Take Tom to the Med Bay,” said the bartender, pointing at me. “Logan, call Julia and tell her to meet them at the Med Bay. Tell her it’s a head trauma case.”
Greg was struggling against the two other men, but they were keeping him pinned down against the bar. The ship had apparated a wheelchair out of nowhere, and I sat Tom down on it. The chair began wheeling out of the Cottage, and I followed.
“Tom, you feeling okay?” I asked, looking him over. Someone had handed him a wad of bar napkins, and he was pressing it against his forehead, the blood seeping through to his fingers.
“Worse than it looks,” he said. Our corridor was through a field of wheat; I could see the wind rippling across it like waves. The only thing that broke the illusion were bright arrows the ship had illuminated along the ground, directing us towards the Med Bay.
“What happened?”
“Greg’s been making mistakes at work. So I tried to tell him that,” Tom said. The bleeding seemed like it had stopped, or at least had slowed down.
“Mistakes?”
“I caught a valve that wasn’t fully shut off, by Section 3A. To be honest, he’s been slacking off for a while now. So I told him that. He didn’t take it too well.”
We had been in transit for a year now, and fights aboard the Solar Petal were unheard of. But this was the third fight in as many weeks. But people didn’t start throwing punches just because of negative feedback. I felt like there was some other side to the story, or that Tom was hiding something from me, and I briefly had to suppress the urge to shake him.
“I’m surprised,” I said, as we arrived at the Med Bay. “I thought you and Greg got along.”
Tom shrugged.
“You stay on a ship long enough, and you get a little on edge. You can’t get along with everyone forever.”
Julia and I went on a date every fourth night. It was something we’d decided when we first starting seeing each other aboard the Solar Petal. Sometimes we went to the gym and played pickleball, other times we made dinner together or borrowed a board game from the rec room. But most often, we went to one of the viewing rooms that could be reserved for private use; the domed ceiling was able to display anything you requested.
“Did you hear about the fight earlier today?” I said. We were sitting on a picnic blanket, looking out at the lights of San Francisco glimmering before us. It was a perfect recreation of Bernal Hill, and the ship had gone so far as to pipe in the sound of cicadas chirping in the background. I had accidentally double-booked the room, and so there was another couple, sitting on the other side of the “hill,” just far enough away that we couldn’t hear their voices.
“Of course,” Julia said. “I treated the head lac, after all.”
“And?”
“And I’m not going to comment on it. I don’t want to talk about work right now.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
Julia took a sip of her wine. I was a little distracted. Were there cicadas in San Francisco? I couldn’t remember. Somehow, that little detail bothered me.
“I wanted to talk about something,” she said.
“Oh?”
“We’re only a few months away from arriving at Luhman.”
“I’m aware,” I said with a laugh. “I can’t wait to get off this ship. I feel like everyone is counting down the days.”
“Right, me along with everyone else. I just wanted us to be on the same page once we arrive. You know… about us.”
There was a long, drawn out silence between us. I didn’t want to be having this conversation right now. It had been a stressful day and I had been looking forward to getting boozed up with Julia and talking about nothing at all. I was heavily aware that Julia was out of my league, and that there would have been no way the two of us would have wound up together back on Earth, or even in a bigger ship in which the dating pool was larger. I had just thought that maybe there was a chance -
A voice from the other side of the hill broke the silence.
“Hello?” a woman shouted. “Can anyone else come and help? Help!”
I scrambled to my feet, relieved to not have to continue our line of conversation. Something caught my eye in the distance; one of the buildings in the simulation of downtown San Francisco looked distorted, like a painting or an imitation of a painting. It broke the illusion; for a moment I felt like the sky above me was closing in, that it was going to squash me into the ground like an ant underneath a finger. I blinked, and the sensation disappeared.
The viewing room had been configured so that the ground actually resembled a hill, and Julia was already making her way to the other couple. I followed.
“Ship Command: lights on please,” I said. The dome around us instantly changed, the nighttime scene of San Francisco shifting to high-noon in less than a second.
There was a man huddled with his arms over his head, and Julia was asking him questions.
“He’s never had a panic attack like this before,” the woman said. “He just started saying he couldn’t breathe, out of nowhere. This isn’t like him.”
“We need to get off this ship,” the man was muttering. “We need to get off this ship, we’re all going to die, we’re all going to suffocate, we have to find a way to get off this ship, let me out of here, let me out of her - “
I stared at the dome around us. A perfect recreation of day-time San Francisco stared back at me; the illusion of distance was back, and the horizon stretched out before me into infinity.
“Okay, the problem is now officially an 8 out of 10,” I said to Jean. “Maybe a 9 out of 10.”
“Your scale suffers from inflation. And I’m busy right now,” she said without looking up. Kevin, one of the other software engineers, began eating a bag of chips, and the sound of crunching began filling the room.
“Kevin, what about you?” I said, turning to him.
“Sorry man,” he said with a drawl. “I’m way behind.”
“What about you. Uh. Lauren?” I pointed at the last software engineer in the room, someone I didn’t recognize. She raised an eyebrow.
“Marissa,” she said.
“Marissa. Can I borrow half an hour of your time?” I said. And then quickly, before she could turn me down: “I’ll trade you thirty blueberries for it. Fresh. Picked yesterday.”
“Done,” she said. “No take-backs.”
“You didn’t mention you had blueberries,” Jean said, peeved. I ignored her. I had rehearsed a short speech on the way over.
“I don’t know if you’ve felt it, but the ship has been on edge. This is a seasoned crew, but three fights have broken out in three weeks. There was a walkout in Supply Bay last week. The error rate in every department has skyrocketed. And there was a fourfold increase in the dispensing of anxiolytics by the ship’s auto-pharmacy just this past month.”
“So? You think this is related to the AR system?”
“Do you know the original purpose of the AR system? I didn’t, until I did some reading into it. It was to keep the crew sound-of-mind. There are some folks who do just fine in space - the early cosmonauts, the ones who were handpicked, the ones who were made of “the right stuff” - they could last in space for years. But once spaceflight became commercialized, common folk like you and me started boarding. And evolutionarily, our minds are not meant to handle either the vastness of space or the claustrophobia of living in a metal shoebox. The early commercial spaceflights were put on pause after an incident - you ever hear about the Latvian twins?”
“Sure - one of them stabbed the other, because he kept spoiling the end of every book the other was reading.”
“Exactly. Space madness, they called it. And so that’s when they came up with the AR systems. If you build an AR system into every interior surface of the ship and crank up the verisimilitude to something indistinguishable from reality, then all you need to do is throw up some scenes from home - preferably nature-themed - and everyone’s lizard brain is happy.”
Out of some unconscious herd instinct, all four of us in the room glanced up at the walls around us. The ship had thrown up a replica of Central Park in Old New York. It was early noon, the sun burning away the rolling fog.
“After decades of space travel, we’ve taken the AR system for granted - we don’t even notice it’s there half the time. We don’t think about space madness in the same way that 21st century sailors didn’t think about scurvy. That is, until something goes wrong, and people start breaking.”
“Alright,” Marissa said with a sigh. “You have my attention.”
“I do?”
“Come back in an hour. Bring the blueberries.”
“I figured out the problem,” Marissa said. She very carefully put a single blueberry in her mouth, and then paused, eyes closed.
“And?”
She smacked her lips, and then pushed the bowl of blueberries away from her.
“How much of generative AI theory are you familiar with?” she asked. “From a hallucination standpoint, that is.”
“Assume that I’m an idiot and know nothing,” I said.
“Well, after the Catastrophe in the late 21st century, true AI’s were banned. They still exist, supposedly, quarantined on some server farm on a moon somewhere, on standby in case we ever face some existential threat for which we need overwhelming firepower. Not even the war with the Illysians is enough to make us break the glass. But it turns out that any non-sentient AI will always have some degree of hallucinations.”
“That’s why we have hallucination-checking AI’s though,” I said. “To make sure that our navigational software doesn’t hallucinate false coordinates and send us to the wrong quadrant.”
“True. But the hallucination-checking AI’s also have hallucinations of their own. And the AI’s who check the hallucination-checking AI’s for hallucinations, also have hallucinations of their own.”
“Turtles all the way down.”
“That’s right. People have tried daisy-chaining the AI’s, so that they form a self-checking circle. But it turns out that as soon as you do that, the chain flywheels into a sentient, true AI. Which we can’t have, because again, they’re banned by international agreement and no one wants a repeat of the Catastrophe.”
“Basically, we’re stuck with software with hallucinations, because as a society we decided we can’t have nice things..”
“Bingo. Which is why people like me still have a job. You might wonder what me and the rest of the software crew are up to everyday? We’re basically manually checking the hallucination-checker-checker-checker-checker for hallucinations. The Solar Petal has five layers of software, and we look over the shoulder of the one at the very top. The buck stops with us.”
“And you missed something, so the problem cascaded all the way down to the base layer responsible for the AR simulations?”
“Well no, actually. The real answer is simpler. It was sabotage.”
An hour later, I was in an all-hands meeting with the entire software crew, the entire leadership staff including the Captain, and the head of every Department.
“What do you mean, sabotage?” the Captain said. She was leaning against the railing, looking distinctly unhappy.
“Someone inserted into the Solar Petal’s base layer a one-line command. It was designed to activate exactly a year into our passage, and subtly begin mutating the ship’s AR capabilities. The error propagated up through each one of the ship’s layers.”
“And… you just didn’t catch this?”
“There are more lines of code in the Solar Petal’s base layer than grains of sand on a beach. The ones that are monitored with vigilance are the essentials; life support, navigation, engines, so on and so forth. No one expects a malicious actor to go after a quality-of-life luxury item such as the AR system.”
“Except that it’s not a luxury item, isn’t it?”
“No. I think we can all say with reasonable confidence that the last two months onboard the ship have felt uniquely terrible for reasons we couldn’t quite put our finger on. And the reason is that for most of this time, the AR images being presented to us were causing us existential dread on a subconscious level. Every simulation was just uncanny-valley enough that a part of our lizard brain knew something was deeply wrong about the entire world around us, while our conscious brains refused to register it. It broke down social cohesion; when everyone is thirty percent more paranoid, prone to rage, anxious, and depressed, then the ship breaks down. Hence the supply bay walk-outs, the heavy drinking, the bar-fights, the panic attacks, the errors in the engine crew - “
“We get it,” someone from the Engine Deck.
“Relationships too,” Steve from Logistics said. “I’ve had to re-room twenty-five couples who have broken up in just the past month.”
“Sure, that too. And it would have gotten worse. Humans aren’t meant to be locked in a tin can and thrown into deep space. We’ve forgotten that the only reason spaceflight has been possible on a mass scale has been because we could convince our subconscious - for a majority of the time at least - that we’re somewhere else.”
“You still haven’t answered why you didn’t pick up on the bad actor,” the captain said, arms folded.
“To be honest, the only reason it wasn’t picked up as malicious code is because in a way, it isn’t. The AR system creates a visual profile for every human aboard the ship; because an artificial image that is verisimilitudinous for you may lie within the uncanny valley for me. Every screen on this ship is lenticular; it tracks our eye movements, and presents a different image to each of us. And for every image, it creates 32 versions of every frame in parallel, and then selects the version it thinks will be least likely to be rejected by the viewer. All that single line of code did was make the system pick the best version of a frame for someone else.”
“That makes no sense. When we’re back on earth, we all look at the same image and process it the - “
“If I have to be here, we’ll be here for another hour, and we’ll be fighting over whether my demonstration image of a dress is blue-black or white-gold,” Marissa said. “And no one wants that. Anyways. It also increased the hallucination rate of the AR system by 0.0001%, a rate low-enough that it wouldn’t be picked up by the layer above it. The only reason we caught it is because we have an unusually high proportion of crew members who have a lower threshold at which their conscious minds register the uncanny valley. And so now that we know the problem, I can fix it.”
“All the other ships carrying supplies to the warfront. They’re probably sabotaged too,” I said. “If I were an Ilyssian saboteur, I would have inserted it onto multiple ships simultaneously.”
“The Celeste was reported drifting in space by Axial 9 Asteroid Field, just before we left port,” Jean said. “They said her provisions and engines were intact, but the crew and lifeboat were missing - “
“There’s no use speculating. We can’t communicate until we’re out of Subspace,” the captain said. “And we’re not due to arrive at Luhman for another seventy days. The other ships are on their own. Marissa, you’ve fixed it?”
“Already done,” she said.
And with that, I looked around us, trying to find the walls of the room and finding none. The ship had thrown up a view of a vast savannah, a sea of tawny grass broken up by acacia trees dotting the landscape. If I squinted, I could even see a herd of what looked like gazelles at a watering hole. Marissa was still talking, explaining something technical about the specifics of lenticular displays, but I had tuned out.
I tried to look for giveaways, or dead pixels, or visual artifacts, but of course there were none. I looked for stuttering frames or lag, but the ship ran the simulations at an absurdly high frame-rate, enough to look almost hyperreal in smoothness.
I caught Julia’s eye from across the room. She gave me a wistful smile, then rolled her eyes at Marissa who was still speaking in jargon, and I rolled my eyes back at her, and then she rolled her eyes back at me, and we continued this way for some time until both of us were shaking just barely perceptibly from held-in laughter. And maybe it was my imagination, or the simulated savannah breeze blowing in from the grass around us, or the smell of baked dust that the ship was piping in, or the way Julia’s eyes crinkled around the edges when I knew she was laughing at her own little internal joke, but for a moment I felt like everything was right in the world.
We’re all going to be fine, I thought to myself, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I believed it.
Author’s Notes:
Antarctica scientist allegedly stabs colleague for spoiling the endings of books.
The Mary Celeste was a brigantine that was discovered adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean off the Azores Islands on December 4, 1872. She was in a disheveled but seaworthy condition under partial sal with her lifeboat and crew missing.
Spooky!