Caretaker IV in The Fiction

This was the writing sample that got me into the MFA program. God help us all.

Caretaker IV

I

Celia, I came out of cryosleep today. It was a lot uglier than I had been led to believe while in training. Everything hurts. My color vision was gone for the first few hours, but is slowly coming back. Not that there is much color to see here on ARC IV. Caretaker 3 was supposed to be here when I was brought out of suspended animation, but I haven’t seen him yet.

Update. The monitor system showed me the video. He ejected himself out of the airlock. We knew two years of loneliness could get to some people. But we had been so thoroughly screened. I have two years to find out if I have what it takes.

II
Dearest Celia. I had to eject a man today. The monitoring system said he was “non-viable.” What an ugly business. I disconnected the cryo chamber and sent him out of the air lock. Because a computer told me I had to. He will float in space until the cryo chamber falls into the gravitational pull of some planet or star. Until then he floats through space, frozen solid. He went to sleep three hundred years ago. Now he will never wake up. I feel like I murdered someone. I don’t feel well right now. I desperately miss you.

III
My love. I have had a lot of time to think today. It has been three months. I have almost finished cleaning up the mess Caretaker 3 left me. He stopped doing basic maintenance after about a thousand hours. Some of the filters on the O3 level were disgusting. There is still some minor electrical work to attend to on the O5 level. The more I think of it, the more I know we are really lucky, because some of these things could have turned dangerous. He hadn’t been replacing the Rubics Modules. If I hadn’t woke up this ship could have been seriously en extremis.

I found myself on the bridge. All of the panels are covered in plastic sheeting. It is still another three hundred years until the flight crew wakes up as we approach Ceti Alpha IV.
Four. Again with the four.

Sometime I wonder if three hundred years in cryo hibernation doesn’t leave you haunted by the ghost of who you would have been. That is an impossible question asked by an impossible ghost asked to someone who doesn’t exist anymore.

We are moving at high sub-light speed. The light in front of the ship shifts rapidly into red, until it isn’t visible. At least not to me. What is left is an incredible blackness. So black you can feel yourself falling, I miss you. I’ve said that enough. It doesn’t make it not true.

IV
Dearest Celia. The monitoring system found another non-viable today. I am becoming inured. That scares me. I go through the motions. Disconnect the umbilical. Take us to half gravity, shuffle the cryo chamber into the ejection airlock. And die a little bit. They never told us how much this would hurt. They told us we would be ejecting corpses. But they still have heart beats. The system runs their vital signs and blood work through some vast algorithm and decides if they live or die.

If you pepper it with enough questions the monitor system will eventually answer you. This whole interplanetary crapshoot is predicated on a series of “mid course adjustments.” The engines come on and adjust the trajectory. The mass of the ship has to be continuously modified. They didn’t tell us that in training. Not the part about killing people.

Taking into account time dilation, you have probably been dead for thirty thousand years. If earth even exists. I should have stayed, I should be with you as dust. Wherever we found ourselves, whatever happened in our lives couldn’t be worse than the hell in which I have found myself. We are our own worst enemy. Decisions. We make decisions, and we live with the consequences. That is so easy to say. I desperately miss you.

V
My love. It has been a month, or thirty days which in my mind equates to a month – since I have had to eject another non-viable. I hold my breath every time I bring up the status page on the monitor system. I am the wrong person for this job. I could have stayed with you on earth until our time ran out. Now I am stuck in the cycle of checking the monitor system for tasks. It doesn’t differentiate changing a filter from ejecting a “non-viable.” This bothers me greatly.

I miss. I miss everything about you. The feel of your lips on mine. The feel of your breath on my neck. The way you made me laugh, that sense of humor. The feel of your body close to mine. I just miss you.

VI
Celia. For the first time in three months the monitor rang up another non-viable. I went into the bay. Found the cryo chamber. The annunciator on the front was flashing yellow every few seconds. I made a big mistake. I opened the faceplate. It was a little girl, all of maybe four years old. I am starting to understand why 3 did what he did.

Again, I detached the umbilical. Dropped us to half gravity and shuffled the chamber to the ejection airlock. I sent her into eternity. And. I worry about my soul.

I so miss you. I wish you were here because you would know what to say. Anything to assuage this guilt I feel for doing my job. Calling it my job and doing it doesn’t seem to make it better.

VII
My love. It is now six months until I go back to hibernation. I will stay up until Caretaker 5 is awake and coherent. A kindness not afforded to me by Caretaker 3. The system monitor is flashing at me. I guess I have work to do.

VIII
I am beyond words. You are here on ARC IV. The system gave me a series of maintenance tasks. I now never eject without opening the face plate. And there you are. When did you change your mind? You were guaranteed a spot after I was accepted into training. You told me you would never leave earth, and yet there you are in chamber 3898. Your annunciator is flashing yellow. There is no way in hell you are going out that airlock. I will figure it out. I will fucking figure it out.

IX
My love. I spent three days in the schematics. I have sorted out what to do. I will move your chamber to one of the empty spots in stage 5, and splice your monitor connections into the container in the next spot. That is a young healthy man. The system won’t know that these erroneous “marginal to non-viable” readings are yours. I have two more months before I go back into sleep. Then another 300 years and we will be together again. I wish you had told me you had changed your mind.

I wonder what the planet smells like. Where we are going to live. Where are they are going to assign me. With my background in engineering and maintenance they could put me almost anywhere. I have so many questions. None of the final approach and settlement was covered in my training. But I am so gloriously happy that in my relative time I will see you in a couple of months. Sleep well, my love.

X
Dearest, it is working. Your annunciator is reading green. The only fly in the ointment seems to be that the monitor system is telling me I am one behind in non-viable ejections. We are coming up on another mid course correction and boost. I will figure this out.

XI
Problem solved. I picked another cryo container. I walked along the stage five sleepers with my eyes closed. Did a right face. Disconnected the umbilical, dropped to half gravity. And shot it out of the ejection airlock. I did not look. That was wrong on so many levels. But I can’t lose you again. I just can’t. For three centuries we have been careening through the galaxy, and I had thought I’d lost you forever. Only to find you were here all along.

XII
Celia. I have three weeks before going back into my cryo container. Any time I am not working I spend beside yours. I ponder our life on Ceti Alpha IV. Will we farm, or will I be put to work building things. You are a nurse, so it is silly to wonder what you will do initially. I imagine you will eventually end up teaching. What kind of civilization will we build? Will we have children? I have so many questions, in so many areas. If the monitor system hadn’t been keeping me busy with routine scheduled maintenance I might have gone mad in my pondering. But is not a foregone conclusion that I haven’t already.

XIII
Celia, we are down to five days. In two days the wake sequence will start for Caretaker 5. If his is similar to mine I expect he will be disoriented and confused. His color vision will be nonexistent. He will be as weak as a newborn kitten. I will give him a day to adjust, and then start the turnover process. The system monitor is running all green. I am leaving this guy a much better situation than 3 left to me. Assuming he doesn’t drop dead in the intervening time on the fifth day he will strap me in, set up the IV tubes. Wait until I going to sleep. Start the cryo process, and move my cryo chamber to the O-6 level. It will be a blink of the eye and we will be together on Ceti Alpha IV. Starting our new life.

I will check your cryo container the day before. Everything seems seamless at this point. You would never know about the splice unless you are looking for it. Caretakers 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. None of them would have a reason to suspect what I did. Or even have a reason to investigate. The monitor system is not going to report anything, mostly because there is nothing to report. Seamless.

XIV
Celia. Caretaker 5 came out of suspended animation in much better shape than I did. He was up and running after only twelve hours. I think he is 25, his name is Paul. His training seems to have stuck. I haven’t had to work too hard to get him up to speed about the systems. He is more familiar with the system monitor interface than I am. That is a good thing. I am leaving us in good hands.

XV
Six hours. Paul or Caretaker 5, connected me with the IV tubes and the container monitors, I am wired for sound. The master system monitor is counting down the hours by the minute. I try to not keep looking at the clock. Once I go to sleep it will be but an eye blink before we are together. We start our new lives on Ceti Alpha IV. I am so anxious.

XVI
Celia. It was worse the second time coming out of cryo sleep. Once I came up my body lost its ability to control temperature. I was running from absurdly high fever to marginal hypothermia and back again. I was so nauseated, dry heaving three hundred years of nothing. My joints still feel like they were filled with crushed glass. It is getting better, but it seems to be taking a long time.

The flight crew and the recovery crew have been up for a few weeks. We are in orbit above Ceti Alpha IV. I occasionally overhear them talking about the six intended seed sites. I am not completely sure they know who I am.

XVII
My love. They have started bringing the population out of cryo. It is a long, staged process. The first few drop ships have landed. From what I hear they finally picked one of the seed sites as the main disembark point. Three of the other seed points will remain as outposts. They named it “Council.” There is fresh water close. The atmosphere has a little more oxygen than that of earth, but still in the safe range. I suppose we should be careful about starting fires.

I don’t know your status. I am remaining circumspect. Tomorrow I will begin enquiring about my wife. Container 3898. Celia Ramirez.

XVIII
Ships security came looking for me after I enquired about you. They figured out pretty quickly that I was Caretaker 4. They also figured out that I had manipulated the sensor wiring to give you this chance. For some reason they think I killed Caretaker 3 and ejected him. I don’t know how they are coming to these conclusions. I never even met him. He was gone before I woke up. The system monitor showed me a loop of him entering the airlock and ejecting himself. Surely they must have seen that. I still don’t have the answer to whether they have woken you yet. I’m trying to be patient. Once this Caretaker 3 fiasco is sorted out we should be on a drop ship shortly after. Time for us to start our new life.

XIX
My dearest. I am under arrest for murder. Not for Caretaker 3, but rather the soul I ejected to save you. I shouldn’t have bothered. It wasn’t you. And the person I thought was you was ejected by Caretaker 8 after discovering my manipulation of the container wiring. He removed the splices, restored the wiring. The annunciator immediately started flashing red. The woman in the cryo container was non-viable for the better part of five centuries.

XX
Celia. There won’t be a trial. I have already been convicted. My punishment will be to be put back into cryo sleep on ARC IV. Where I will stay until the ship falls out of orbit and burns up in the atmosphere.
I will never see you again. I hope your life on earth was full of joy. And maybe once in a while you thought of me.

Goodbye my love.

Last updated June 08, 2019