A Daydream of Tondra
“BIOMETRIC SCANS INDICATE YOU ARE NERVOUS, LADY ADDISON.”
“I certainly wouldn’t dare to gainsay that assessment, PAM,” Addison replied as properly as her frayed nerves allowed. Nervous was an understatement. She wanted to jump out of the station’s airlock rather than face what was awaiting her just down the corridor.
She swallowed tersely and glanced out the tiny porthole window, where the bow of the Earth curved gently away like a great blue willow plate, haloed by a thin ribbon of ozone airglow. It seemed terribly fragile when viewed from within the cramped confines of Station 7. Such a stark contrast to the endless black infinity it floated upon. She wondered if Tondra would present nearly as pretty a view.
Addison shook her head and turned back to PAM. “You’re certain it won’t hurt? I’m afraid I must admit to being a bit of a coward when it comes to pain.”
“AFFIRMATIVE, LADY ADDISON. THE SEGATO PROCEDURE NEUTRALIZES NERVE ENDINGS IMMEDIATELY PRIOR TO PERMINERALIZATION, MAKING THE EXPERIENCE OF PAIN IMPOSSIBLE. TEST SUBJECTS HAVE, HOWEVER, REPORTED FEELING COLDNESS AND NUMBNESS. SELF-REPORTED EMOTIONAL SENSATIONS INCLUDE AWE, EXCITEMENT, FEAR, AND SURPRISE.”
Addison ignored the robot. She continued to talk, quickly, flightily, more to assure herself than to communicate with PAM. “I can handle fear, you know. Fear, grief, anxiety, dread… these never really bothered me much, because they’re all inside. They’re only as real as I let them be, in my head. But pain? Pain is visceral. It comes from outside. When you’re scared, it’s only your body trying to protect itself. But pain is something inflicted, something with the singular intention to hurt you. Am I stating myself clearly, PAM?”
“TRANSPARENTLY,” the robot replied. Addison whirled to face it, a smile fluttering across her pale face. The Probabilistic Artificial Mind wasn’t actually conscious- no machine could ever be conscious- but sometimes its programmed sense of humor was good enough to fool her into thinking it might be. The hardbody it was installed in looked like the forsaken lovechild of a KitchenAid and a couple of trashcans, but it did what it was supposed to. The visor-like display slit on its head flashed a pair of friendly green 8-bit eyes at her. One of them winked, and Addison laughed.
“Thank you, PAM. I needed that. Really, thank you.” Addison said. She exhaled heavily, trying to flush out her trepidation on a shuddering breath. “Is everything ready, then?”
The robot’s body remained motionless, but its visor screen lit up with a wavy green line as it answered. The line oscillated up and down, matching the robot’s cadence. “THE LITHOSLEEP BAY IS FULLY PREPARED, AND ONLY AWAITS YOUR ENTRY, MY LADY.”
Lady Addison rose up to her full height of five feet nine inches and leaned back in a deep, relaxing stretch. Then she smoothed down her sky blue leotard- comfortwear in the cramped confines of the space station- and exhaled pertly. “Well, don’t let’s prolong the agony then. Lead on, PAM.”
The robot turned, and with a herky-jerky gait led Lady Addison out of her private stateroom down the long, whitewashed corridor that terminated at the Lithosleep Bay. It was like any other corridor on any space station ever built- a sanitized white so glaring one’s eyes needed a moment to adjust to it, with pipes running along the ceiling and anonymous button panels mounted to the walls. The only thing distinguishing it from any of a hundred such halls was where it led.
As they walked, PAM began asking a litany of questions regarding Addison’s preferences for lithosleep. They’d been over it before but she but she was glad PAM was running through the list again. Less likely for it to screw up, if it checked its work.
“DO YOU HAVE ANY MISSIVES TO DELIVER BEFORE THE PROCEDURE?”
“No,” Addison started. Then she smiled mischievously, biting her lip. She wheeled round on her heel to face PAM. “Actually, yes. Tell my brother that he’d be better off marrying a smelly Holstein than that hussy from Utah.”
A little red light appeared on the top of PAM’s cookie mixer head, which rapidly sprouted into a little antenna. “AFFIRMATIVE. PREPARING TO TRANSMIT MISSIVE.”
“PAM, wait!” Addison blurted, “I didn’t mean it!”
“DO YOU WISH TO CANCEL TRANSMISSION?”
“Yes, yes I wish to cancel transmission,” she said quickly. She scraped her hand back through her long chestnut hair. “You really think I would wish to send something so hurtful as that for my last missive?”
“I AM ONLY A MACHINE, AND SO I CANNOT THINK.”
Addison shook her head in wry bemusement. PAM always did exactly what you asked it to do, and no more and no less. Jokes always fell flat with it, because it wasn’t intellectually capable of taking one. It was just a machine, after all. A damn clever machine, but a machine nonetheless.
“Well, don’t send it anyhow.”
“AFFIRMATIVE. CANCELING TRANSMISSION.” The little antenna resleeved itself in PAM’s head and the machine stood stock still for a moment, so all Addison could hear was the whirring of its servos. “DO YOU WISH TO STAND OR RECLINE?”
Addison thought about that. One of the perks of being the Lady of the House- while everyone else’s lithosleep pod was set directly into the hull horizontally, hers was in the dead center of the room and she had the option of having hers stand up vertically. It didn’t matter much either way- she’d be knocked out for the duration. The only reason to stand would be to assert status, but everyone else was already unconscious, so there wasn’t anyone to lord over. Besides, lording wasn’t much in Addison’s nature to begin with. Her brother and sister would probably have chosen to stand, if their roles had been reversed, if that little ploy with the Speaker had gone differently…
But more than the pointlessness of peacocking to a mausoleum, Addison feared that she might panic when the procedure began, when the cold ray started creeping up her ankles. Panic, and then she’d fall over and shatter into a million pieces. The End. Just the idea of it sent a chill walking up the ladder of her spine.
“Recline. Just like taking a nap, you know? I’ll simply lie back and think of Alleghan…”
“AFFIRMATIVE. THINK OF ALLEGHAN,” PAM parroted. “DO YOU WISH FOR ENTERTAINMENT?”
Addison stiffened. Why would PAM ask her that, knowing she was to be unconscious for the duration of the journey? Had the system hallucinated? PAM units were known to do that sometimes, the inner machinations of their algorithms wandering wildly off-script. That’s why one always, always, always had to check the machine’s work. They could never be trusted to just run things by themselves. “That would seem rather irrelevant, don’t you think?”
“I AM ONLY A MACHINE AND-”
“- and so you cannot think,” Addison finished, holding up her hand. “Yes, I know. You needn’t say it again. No, I don’t need any entertainment in lithosleep.”
“AFFIRMATIVE. NO ENTERTAINMENT.”
PAM stopped in front of a porcelain white bulkhead door and held up a hand that looked to be wearing a pair of purple, rubberized oven gloves. The first joint of its index finger flipped up, revealing a copper-and-plastic connector nub which the robot proceeded to stick into a receptor port in the wall panel. The bulkhead door hissed open, and Addison found herself staring into the Lithosleep Bay.
It was the biggest room on the ship. More of a vault, in fact- a circular chamber whose walls were stacked high with hibernation pods recessed into the station’s hull, excepting the open one situated on a little plinth in the middle of the room. That was the one Addison would be entering shortly. The lights were respectfully dim, though none of the occupants would have known or cared if they were as searingly white as the rest of the ship’s. They had all been turned to stone.
Discovered accidentally, the Segato Procedure had immediately been hailed as the solution to the main problem plaguing the concept of interstellar travel- namely, how to get anyone to another star system alive. Space was terribly, inconceivably vast, and the transit times were far beyond the scope of human imagining. If the Earth was a period at the end of a sentence in a book at the Library of Congress, then Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, would be perched atop Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Tondra, the world Addison was being sent to govern, would be halfway to the Moon.
Writers and scientists alike had dreamed of workarounds to the problem for centuries, none of them practical. Generation ships were patently inhumane, consigning whole generations to live and die in the cramped confines of a starship in the hope that their distant grandchildren might one day make landfall on a virgin world. Faster than light travel remained total fantasy, though the advent of the first relativistic drives had carried the vision of a bridge between the stars somewhat within reach. This brought Tondra to within two hundred years of travel time, as opposed to a thousand, but even with the most radical life extension technologies, no one born on Earth would ever see Tondra.
Cryogenics seemed promising at first, but while useful for preserving embryos and seed banks, it had proven fruitless when it came to mature individuals. The cold always won, piercing the heart and lungs and tissues with a thousand needles of ice. It was therefore only an unanticipated breakthrough at Segato Laboratories that made manned interstellar missions a practical reality. Forget deep freeze- Segato’s procedure used direct molecular carbonate bombardment and pressure recrystallization to metamorphosize the living flesh of a human subject into pure, white marble. No need to keep the organs and tissues alive when they were reduced to inanimate stone. The process was reversible via another mechanism already pioneered at Segato, laser crystal foliation, by which the whole body could be quite instantly restored back to flesh and blood via carbon cancellation.
The mind, as always, was a mystery, and though no one could describe the mechanism by which it occurred, it was known that the Segato Procedure could be applied to either render the recipient unconscious, or leave them fully aware of their petrified state. The technology had a plethora of benefits for scientific research, but also in more practical realities. Malignant tumors whose surgical removal might endanger the life of a patient could be simply chiseled away. Most dramatically, prisons had been abolished, with convicts simply being turned to stone for the duration of their sentences, giving them a good long time to think about their actions. And, more pertinently to Lady Addison, it made interstellar flight possible. A body changed to marble did not age or freeze or decay.
So there they were, four hundred people, all members of Lady Addison’s household, the servants and guards and waitstaff and their families, all being sent along with her to the little colony on Tondra, resting peacefully in their lithosleep pods. She couldn’t see into any of them, but the occupants were each marked coffinlike by a ceramic nameplate. At the bottommost level of the chamber were a series of smaller recesses, where pets of the crew had been stowed away, cats and dogs and parrots and a ferret that belonged to one of the maids. They, too, enjoyed the sleep of stone, and when they were all awakened after what would seem to be only a moment, it would be on a new world.
Addison paused, thinking again about what PAM had asked her. Do you wish for entertainment? It was a question that only made sense if PAM thought she was supposed to be conscious for the trip. Sometimes people did that, for short jaunts to the Moon or Mars; a baker’s dozen of odd self-help Eastern meditation philosophies had sprouted up among those who wished to try short spells of conscious lithosleep for themselves. Crazy people, Addison thought- what sort of lunatic would want to be stuck in total rigid immobility for any length of time? But all interstellar crews were supposed to be unconscious for the duration of the voyage. Otherwise… otherwise they would be trapped in a waking hell for years, centuries on end, totally unable to move, trapped in their own stone skins. Just the idea of it made Addison’s flesh crawl, as if she were staring down over the edge of a cliff. Did PAM somehow mess up the parameters?
She turned to the robot. “PAM, all other members of my household are in unconscious lithosleep, correct?”
“CORRECT, LADY ADDISON.” PAM replied. The robot was now walking jerkily over to the control desk, where it would sit and enmesh itself with the ship’s primary interface, to apply the Segato Procedure to her directly.
“Confidence level in that statement?” she asked, peering uncertainly into the open pod. Its lid was a sheet of semi-transparent green glass, hinged open vertically from the top, perhaps to evade the impression of a casket. But in this very evasion, the comparison was to be made. Addison leaned into the pod and touched the squishy green gel-foam that would keep her stone body safe for the duration of the journey from any jostling the ship might undergo due to the gravitational effects of the outer planets, or micrometeoric impacts.
“ABOVE SIX SIGMA THRESHOLD. THAT IS, NINETY-NINE POINT NINE NINE NINE NINE NINE NINE NINE NINE…”
“Okay, PAM, you can stop now,” Addison replied. Some days she wanted to curse Gödel and his incompleteness theorems- no machine could ever be 100% sure of anything, and PAM wasn’t programmed for rounding. She rose back up and blew an unruly brown wisp of hair out of her eyes. “And I am to be unconscious as well, correct?”
“NEGATIVE, LADY ADDISON. PARAMETERS WERE ALTERED TO CONSCIOUS LITHOSLEEP.”
Addison felt the floor dropping out from under her. She pulled her hand away from the gel-foam bed like it were a hot stove. Then her fear hitched upon a sudden burst of shrill laughter, and she caught herself. She reached up and raked back a sheaf of her hair, gently tugging at a lock of it to soothe herself from her nervous outrage. Presently, she shook her head and cleared her throat. “No, PAM, no. No, no, no. Reset that parameter to default- unconscious lithosleep, if you please.”
“AFFIRMATIVE. RESETTING PARAMETERS TO UNCONSCIOUS LITHOSLEEP.”
“Confirm reset,” Addison ordered. She looked back at the yawning pod. There was no way she was climbing into that thing without absolute assurance that she wouldn’t be snared in her own skin.
“RESET CONFIRMED. LADY ADDISON WILL BE PLACED IN UNCONSCIOUS LITHOSLEEP.”
Addison looked over to where PAM sat immobile at the control desk. The endearing green line on its visor had gone out- it wasn’t “in” the hardbody anymore, it was distributed through every terminal in the station. She pursed her lips. PAM’s errors had always mostly been restricted to minor annoyances- mayonnaise instead of ketchup on her fries, or accidentally altering the shower pressure to a drizzle. This, though, this was a far more serious mistake, and now she didn’t know if she could trust PAM at all. Maybe it would be better to call for a technician to take a look at it. Maybe she could delay their departure, just for that. But then her siblings might get suspicious. The Speaker might get suspicious. Things had happened before to ships that outstayed their welcome in orbit…
She gazed back into the open pod and bit her lip, weighing her options. “PAM, run full diagnostic and confirm to Six Sigma that lithosleep parameters are set to unconscious.”
“AFFIRMATIVE. RUNNING FULL DIAGNOSTIC.”
Addison leaned back against the control terminal and waited. PAM’s visor lit up with a green loading bar- more for her own benefit rather than any system requirement, she knew- and it ticked slowly upward to completion. She wished she’d brought something to read, but then what would have been the point? So she daydreamed about Tondra, that little world of which she’d heard much but knew very little. The sky there was supposed to be periwinkle, owing to its mother star’s wavelength. Like an eternal evening. That’s how it got its name, Tondra. It meant nap, in a long-extinct language called Bengali. A world forever on the precipice of a long, evening nap…
“DIAGNOSTIC COMPLETE.”
PAM’s voice startled Addison from her reverie. She wasn’t sure how long it had been- twenty minutes, maybe? There was a lot of code to diagnose.
“Results?”
“LITHOSLEEP PARAMETERS SET TO UNCONSCIOUS. SIX SIGMA CONFIDENCE ACHIEVED.”
Addison breathed out a deep sigh of relief. She felt like a thing of air, as frenetic as a leaf tossed about in a stiff wind. God that was close. Too close. She wondered when and how the parameters had been altered. It must have been a hallucination by PAM, since the machine was positive- well, as positive as it could be- that all members of her household were, indeed, unconscious. Or, a dread thought whispered from the back of her mind, perhaps PAM was hacked?
She tried to push the thought from her mind as she started to ready herself to enter the lithosleep pod, finally confident she wasn’t really stepping into her grave. It didn’t matter now, anyhow, whether PAM had been hacked or not. The parameters had been reset, and when she awoke an eyeblink later she would be in the orbit of Tondra, forever beyond the reach of any of her old enemies. Nevertheless, she wondered. It might have been one of any number of lovers she’d snubbed after her father moved the family to the capital in Denver. Or might it have been one of her own waitstaff, irate at being exiled off-world with her? Of course, the most parsimonious explanation was that it was one of her petulant siblings, trying to get in one last jab before she was sent off to Tondra, safely away from their own claims to the Senatorship and, perhaps, the Speakership itself.
That, really, was the point of sending her away. Ever since the Missileers Revolt, six generations ago, the firstborn children of Senators inherited their parents’ offices, while all their siblings were sent off-world to govern their own colonies among the stars, so they would not cause mischief on Earth. Addison was the third of three children, so while Gawain, the eldest, was heir to the Senatorship of Alleghan, and Giselle, the second eldest, was Mayoress of Cydonia, she was being sent off to serve as Governess of Tondra, a rocky world one-hundred and fifty nine light years from Earth. It wasn’t supposed to be that way- she’d been wooing the Speaker’s son, had been maneuvering to be allowed to remain on Earth, til her jealous sister got wind of it…
Addison slipped out of her leotard and shivered slightly as she folded it and placed it on the desk in front of PAM. The robot would take it back to her stateroom later, after she was stone. Or maybe not, maybe it would sit right there on that desk for the next two centuries. It didn’t matter. The room was rapidly cooling, the ship’s life support systems already switching over to a reduced operational status since technically there wouldn’t be any lifeforms aboard for a long time to come.
Addison tried not to think about that as she slid as comfortably as she could into the pod, leaning back with a nervous sigh and letting her body sink into the gel-foam. The gel-pillow was raised up slightly, indeed the whole bed was tilted at a slight obtuse angle, so Addison could view the transformation as it swept up the lithesome length of her body. She shuffled herself into the most comfortable position she could find and folded her hands over her bare belly like she were a princess under a spell.
“ARE YOU ARE READY FOR THE PROCEDURE?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Addison chuffed. She stared up at the pipes running along the ceiling and readjusted herself slightly. Finally she felt snug. “Just gotta lie back and think of Alleghan…”
“AFFIRMATIVE. THINK OF ALLEGHAN. INITIATING SEGATO PROCEDURE.”
Addison drew in a deep breath and stared straight up to where a port had opened in the ceiling, lowering down a wand-shaped fixture on a pantograph arm that halted just a few inches above her naked body. It slew down towards her feet and glew bright blue as it started up. Then the ray began to bathe her in its ion light.
PAM was right. It didn’t hurt, thank God. It actually tickled a bit, as the ray walked steadily up the length of her legs. The carbonate spray felt more like a cold mist than anything that was actively altering the chemical composition of her body, and it was only when she tried to wiggle her toes in protest of the tickling sensation that she realized she could no longer move them.
“BIOMETRIC SCANS INDICATE YOU ARE NERVOUS, LADY ADDISON.”
“I am,” she said, a clipped chuff of laughter hanging on to the edge of her reply. “I am very, very nervous.”
“THERE IS NO NEED TO BE NERVOUS, MY LADY,” PAM consoled her. “ALL PARAMETERS ARE IN ORDER. PROCEDURE IS GOING EXACTLY ACCORDING TO YOUR PREFERENCES.”
Addison didn’t bother replying to that. Her actual preference would have been to stay on Earth, but that wasn’t an option. So she craned her head up ever so slightly to watch the transformation progress. Nearly at her crotch now… she gasped as the sheet of mist swept over her mound, and thanked the stars that everyone else in the room was already deep in lithosleep so they couldn’t laugh later at her odd, sluttish arousal from the sensation. PAM didn’t take any notice of it, and the Segato Ray simply proceeded at its slow, steady pace up her belly, crystallizing her skin and everything beneath into solid stone as it went.
Solid. She thought about that. Her legs were completely solid pillars of rock now. She tried to move them, as if to test the efficacy of what was happening before her eyes, but she couldn’t. Her hips were already locked rigidly into place and she squirmed just a bit uncomfortably as the tide of white marble swept toward her breasts. Her arms were stone below the wrist, too heavy to even attempt moving, as though her hands had been changed to cannonballs.
“LADY ADDISON, PLEASE CEASE MOVEMENT, AS IT INCREASES RISK OF FRACTURE DEVELOPMENT.”
It was the sternest she’d ever heard PAM, and for good reason. A fracture might not hurt now, if it were small enough, but when she was restored it would be excruciating. And if it were large enough… well, amputation at best, death at worst. The ship’s medical bay was good, but not “stitch together a cleaved torso” good. Addison quickly slumped back down in the gel-bed and shifted her shoulders ever so slightly to approximate the perfectly comfortable position she’d been in before her imprudent stunt. Stupid, stupid. This isn’t a game, you know, she scolded herself.
She looked away from the misty ray right before it crested the swell of her breasts, the sensation once more making her inhale sharply. She bit her lip and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, that her breeding wasn’t really so lowly as that.
She was aware of her heart pulsing more sluggishly as it slowly changed to stone. By the time it stopped pumping for good the ray would have already passed over her head. As the ion beam began sweeping up her neck, she retreated to wry introspection. Tondra means nap… that’s all this is. Just a long, long nap. So enjoy the view it while it lasts. You are now experiencing the first-person perspective of the Venus de Milo…
The cold tingle crept its way up Addison’s chin and swelled over her cheeks. In her last moment, she considered closing her eyes to truly complete the illusion of falling asleep, but curiosity compelled her to keep them open even as the ionic ray passed directly over her. She wasn’t sure what she expected- a solid curtain of anesthetic black falling over her, to be washed away an instant later by the light of a new sun?
It didn’t happen that way.
Instead, Addison simply continued staring unblinkingly, her gaze affixed upon the ceiling.
Oh God! her mind screamed, I’m still awake!
Raw, acid panic washed over Addison from head to toe, rocketing right back down the course the Segato Ray had just taken. She writhed futilely within herself, trying desperately to sit back up, to move, to squirm, to draw a breath- anything to let PAM know she was still awake. But she couldn’t. All of her muscles had been turned into sculpted swells of stone. The only thing she could do was stare straight up and watch the Segato Ray draw itself back into the ceiling.
No, no no no. This isn’t happening! This isn’t real! PAM! PAM help!
PAM didn’t answer her silent pleas. There was nothing to respond to. Consciousness wasn’t measurable. It did not exist in neurons and brain waves- these were just the interface it made itself known by. And now Addison didn’t have any neurons or brain waves. They’d all been turned to stone. But her mind remained, perfectly intact, imprisoned in solid marble.
“PROCEDURE COMPLETE,” PAM said to no one. “PREPARING SHIP FOR ALCUBIERRE JUMP.”
God, God, please PAM, for God’s sake help me! Please don’t leave me like this! This can’t be real. This isn’t happening. I don’t want to be a statue!
She knew even as she thought it that she didn’t have a choice. The pod’s lid closed over top of her, leaving her staring up at the semi-transparent jade green cover, and then the pod hissed as all air was flushed out to prevent bacterial growth. The lights in the Lithosleep Bay went out completely, and the only source of light remaining was the life support indicator within her pod which continued blinking with the steady, reassuring rhythm of a cricket. Every ten seconds it flashed, giving Addison a brief, peripheral view of her own petrified body lying perfectly motionless in the gel-foam. She wanted to cry, to scream, to howl her fear and panic at PAM and beg the machine to release her, to make even a peep, but her lips were sealed in stone.
Lie back and think of Alleghan. That’s what you said.
The realization dropped like an anchor down to the blackest pit of her stone stomach.
PAM always did exactly what you asked it to. No more, and no less.
There would be no pain. Of that she was sure. Nothing, not a single thing would physically harm her during the ship’s voyage. Her stone body was perfectly safe in its coffin. Fear, grief, anxiety, dread… these had never troubled her much, because they were all in her head. And now, what was in her head was the only company she had, would ever have for decades to come.
The green life support light’s regular blinking was starting to become irksome, and as she was tormented by its incessant flashing, Addison realized that there were demons of pain lurking within her as well, those gnashing beasts of the id, and she realized too that she was about to receive a long, long crash course in the agonies of boredom and despair.
No, no, please, please God no!
Addison thought this to herself over and over again as the ship’s rockets fired and it began its centuries-long voyage across the stars.