26: Strange Friend

Strange friend, past, present, and to be;

Love deeplier, darklier understood;

Behold, I dream a dream of good,

And mingle all the world with thee.

-Tennyson

Endurance-

Given the go-ahead, Commander McCord had piloted Endurance three times around Mars, following the direction of the red planet's rotation. This gave his ship the same sort of speed assist that a whirling sling imparted to a rock. With Dr. Kim's help and computer guidance, Pete waited until they were perfectly oriented to ignite the main engines. A very short burn this time; five seconds.

All they needed was speed enough to break free on a trajectory that would put them in line with Kuiper. Until that critical rendezvous, it made no sense to squander fuel building up thrust that he'd just have to kill, later. In-flight hookups were hard enough without excess velocity.

Much of this, the mission commander plotted out on his own. Tracy (slightly drugged, but coherent) was available for consultation, but Houston proved extremely slow about responding with flight plan and figures. Then, for a bit, he lost comm entirely. Something to do with the giant Tracy Aerospace operating system, evidently.

Popping alertness tablets, McCord and Kim stayed at their posts all night, waiting for CAPCOM's trickling replies (which Pete likened to peanut butter flowing uphill in January). The others rested.

Back at the med lab, Dr. Bennett had chosen to hook up a sleep restraint and spend the night by her patients. Roger's prognosis continued to improve, while John was scheduled to be out of his harness and cast by the next day.

There was another aboard ship, as well, one without physical substance; able to move from machine to computer, or person to person. She did so now, taking over the doctor's sleeping form.

Organic housing slowed her perceptions but permitted an intensified range of biochemical responses. It also allowed for the sensation 'touch'.

She divested her temporary housing of its sleep restraint, next maneuvering the housing over to that of John Tracy (current status: offline). Contact… physical sensation… rebooted him.

Change of operational status in a computer could be determined by output rate, power use or screen color; in an organic being, by an unlidding of the eyes. This occurred.

John Tracy's head and facial muscles altered position. From the entity Doctor Linda Bennett's files, she seized the term 'double-take'.

"Hey," he greeted her, awaiting response before proceeding with rest of message. Her reply was prompt.

"John Tracy greeting protocol acknowledged and returned. John Tracy status check requested."

Another series of twitches, called 'smile' and 'shrug'. Analog entities seemed to communicate as much with movement and gesture as they did through exchange of coded data. Outside of a host form, she would have considered this wasteful.

"Undergoing repairs, Five. Yourself?" And then, perceiving the lack of specificity in his last query, "Five status check?"

"Self scan initiated. Scanning systems. Scan complete. Results returned: Five found to possess limited operating capacity at this time due to system restraints. Please enter next command or query."

She had interleaved the left fingers of her housing's body through John Tracy's, maintaining contact. He exerted a slight pressure by flexing certain muscles in that hand, which was still bandaged.

"Run status check on Linda Bennett and the baby, please, Five."

She complied.

"Organic entity Doctor Linda Bennett found to be experiencing fatigue and immune dysfunction associated with Tracy-Bennett subroutine. Tracy-Bennett subroutine is failing."

"Failing?" The harness restraints creaked and tautened, responding to John Tracy's sudden movement. Data appearing on his biological status screen indicated a surge of physical and chemical distress. "The baby is dying, you mean?"

"Traumatic physical failure of the Tracy-Bennett subroutine is imminent, John Tracy."

The pressure of his hand upon that of the Linda Bennett host form increased to the point that it risked waking the housing's main operating system. John Tracy spoke again, as Five adjusted Bennett's melatonin levels.

"Can you repair the… subroutine?"

Comprehensive scan and probability check.

"Repair is feasible, John Tracy, but the task is memory-intensive and will require defragmentation with temporary cessation of other functions."

He moved his head in an assenting manner. Within this form, Five noted data bits that were not evident through a mere scanner or mechanical lens; she tracked the play of light on angled and plane flesh surfaces, the varied reflections from narrowed blue eyes, the lowering pitch of a worried voice.

"Close all unnecessary programs and functions, Five. Stay with Junior until the repairs are completed, making periodic status reports where possible. …and thanks for the heads-up. The input, I mean. Wherever you came from, I'm sure as hell glad you're here."

Biochemical responses flooded the host form. They corresponded broadly to what an analog entity would have termed 'love'. Doctor Linda Bennett had not assigned that term, so Five made appropriate file edits. Correct terminology and data handling were indispensable to proper function.

This housing had physical access to John Tracy's. This housing was permitted to touch him. A brief interface followed; embrace, and slight contact of mouth called 'kiss'. Then Five began debugging the faltering subroutine.

Her operating capacity, limited in function though it was, had satisfied Five's creator. At that point in her short existence, the AI could conceive of no higher good.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Thunderbird 3, the cockpit-

All at once, the entire ship had gone dark, cold and silent. Even artificial gravity and life support failed. Scott Tracy had been trying to raise John on his wrist comm. He'd gotten a flicker of something, he thought… only to have the whole electronic house of cards fold in on him at once, without even time for an alarm light or klaxon.

"What the hell?" he muttered, automatically resetting his wrist comm for Virgil. No joy there, either. Everything was out.

Scott toggled a few switches on his instrument panel, startling once, when something seemed to brush against the inside of his skull. Thinking for some reason of TinTin, the dark haired pilot unstrapped from his seat and pushed himself up and around. Facing the open hatch, he shouted,

"Virge? You guys all right, back there?"

His younger brother called back, voice ringing hollow in the slowly cooling dark,

"Yeah. On our way up with the survival suits, Scott!"

Moments later they were there, the lot of them. TinTin and Fermat headed directly for comm and computer consoles, while the others finished suiting up and stood to their designated emergency posts.

"What's going on?" Virgil asked, looking waxy-pale in the glow of his own flashlight. "Trouble back home?"

"Don't know," Scott replied, lifting his arms so that Virgil could help him on with the padded survival suit. "I can't raise anybody there or on Mars. Everything's gone dark."

"Bloody right, it has," Gordon cut in from his post by the starboard escape hatch. Jerking a thumb at the window, he said, "Have a look at this, Scott."

Thunderbird 3 had slipped into the Earth's night side, which was missing something. Scott pushed away from the bulkhead, crossing the cabin to Gordon's window. With one hand locked to an overhead brace, he scowled through triple-paned glass and uttered a short, tuneless whistle.

Darkness. Gone was the usual pulsing spider web of shimmering light. Except for a few sparks here and there, the Earth's massive, overlapping cities appeared to have shut down.

"Fermat…?" Scott snapped, levering himself away from the window, and incidentally kicking Alan in the head; extra degrees of freedom sometimes led to unexpected injury.

"I… I'm on it, S- Scott," the boy responded, busily hooking his PDA to 3's main computer panel. "Sh- shouldn't take but a… moment. I'd s- say that… my dad s- succeeded in sh- shutting… down Braman."

"Has he got any kind of backup system?" Alan demanded, rubbing at a badly scraped forehead. Space boots hurt. His longish blond hair was standing up even without the gel, waving like a well-trained stadium crowd. At the moment, though, Alan was more subdued than his hair, and easily irritated.

Fermat shot his friend a reproving look, holding his glasses in place with a finger to the nose bridge.

"A- Alan," he said, "With m- my dad, there's always a… plan B."

And then, as if cued by his confident words, the cities below flowered like still-life fireworks. Thunderbird 3 lit up, too, shuddering to beeping, whirring, staticky life. Her renewed gravity resulted in yet another set of bruises, quite as grunt-and-curse painful as they were noisy.

"See…?" Fermat said to his companions, after they'd picked themselves up from the deck. "R- right back to… to normal."

Almost.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Tracy Island, earlier-

NASA's special access channel had switched to a bland 'cooking in space' documentary. Not a good sign.

Jeff Tracy picked up his cell phone and dialed NASA's director of operations. Moments earlier, Brains had headed downstairs to deal with some sort of 'computer parasite', leaving Jeff and Gennine alone with their worries.

'We've got to contact John,' Fermat had told them.

Meaning… what, exactly? That this computer glitch somehow threatened the Ares III crew, as well? And what was all this business about other universes, and 'Matt'?

Jeff Tracy needed answers, but instead all that he got was a busy signal… on a 30-line phone. Damn.

Jeff hung up, meaning to try Gene Porter's personal number. As flight director, Porter was at MCC, and had to know what was happening. Three digits into the call, he was startled by the sudden quick flicker of a portrait comm; Lady Penelope's.

The phone hovered uncertainly between desktop and ear before Jeff, with a swift shrug, snapped the thing off and set it down. Gennine stepped away, but the former astronaut was too busy to do more than pat her retreating arm.

In the meantime, the portrait in question had cleared to display a real-time image of Penny, alluring as ever in designer couture and gleaming jewels. Dressed all in dusky pink, her golden hair softly backlit by setting sun and cabin lights, she appeared to be seated in her private jet, the 'Princess'.

"Jeff, darling…" her ladyship purred, throaty and promising as a nightclub chanteuse, "How perfectly delightful to see you again. Do forgive a silly young thing her foibles and grant us a bit of a layover, won't you? There's a dear. I've had simply the beastliest…"

It was at this point that the comm cut off, leaving Jeff Tracy in the dark, in more ways than one.