Teacup and Cross

convene, prepare, merge-run

System said.

disperse, convene, prepare

It was caught in a tight, backwalking loop, or I don’t know what. It blipped over, like an oblong wheel, rolling -this clown car. And all of us along for the ride.

“Have you tried the hard reset?”

The ha-?

Without answering, he reached across me, pulled down the yellow bar sharply, locking.

Lights shut off. The telltales -glow of logics, functioning- winked out. Audio-alert wound down, cut abruptly.

It was pitch for a sec till these biolume panels shaved on, gradually brightened, flung a bluegreen sheen over everything.

System down, my mind turned over. For just a moment, we were in logistical freefall, accelerating blindly. Locked in a box.

I swear he counted mississippis.

Then yanked everything back. Whirring up from nothing. It hit me, then: even venting had gone down.

You goddam son-of-a

One gloved finger hushed me.

System emitted the status chime. It sounded … better? When a pixel winked I spoke, in command tone:

System: Diagnostic.

The screen came up, flicking through directories, too fast, really, for the eye to see. I think that’s just showing off.

It pinged:

bad sectors

System said.

repair protocol

Produced a status bar, counting down minutes and trillions of bites.

“Bar crawl,” he said, popping open a compartment. A tall cylinder fell into his gloved hands -frosting instantly over. This he uncapped, squirting amber fluid directly into his mouth, from about a foot away, in that effortless manner of the quarter G people.

“Want some?”

I opened my mouth -closed my eyes, tho I needn’t’ve. From a good meter, he gimme a shot direct to the kisser and not a drop spilt. It was an uncanny skill to one of my ilk -groundwalker that I am to this day.

An I hadn’t choked a bit on the rough stuff, going down, there’d have been no spray.

He wiped it away, recapped the canister, packed it back in its cold compartment.

“What’s the doctor’s prognosis?”

I ran through the functions, one by one.

It looked green.

Looks green.

“Gree-“

Ship shuddered, kind of ripple effect, peristaltic -subsystems cascading, in closed-bracket order, into low-use and out. Rebooting in cycles -disconnect, retry. Audio-alert resumed, pulsing, where it had left off.

Console pinged, I flipped it over. Read:

receive, compose, re-run

System said.

reverse, receive, compose

It was happening again. His “hard reset” had brought us back to this catastrophic crash. An impasse.

Do it again. He said, gesturing. To the yellow bar. I stared at him in possible shock. He reached across me. I nabbed his gloved hand.

That won’t- I tried to explain.

Failure occurs in some logic deeply embedded… To find the thread to which it’s threaded we’d have to-

“Have to what?”

Take System offl-

And I stopped. Our lives, the lives of we two in the hub -and the others, our corpsicle crew, awaiting our arrival at the TRAPPIST star, a thawing gestation, new set of planets to play with- all of this rested in ongoing operation of System. Even in doses, it must go on.

I let go his glove, reached my hand for the handle; the yellow bar -sharply down. While he counted, silently, lips moving.

Restart collapsed its field of cognition. We entered the cloud of unknowing. Then System, on reboot, ran Ptolematics, benchmarking our two salient quasars: Teacup and Cross. It neatly inflected our vector before glitching like crazy, the backwalking loop.

We had eighteen months ahead of this, rebooting every few, over and over, in shifts. I could see now, the two of us, sleepless and sleeping by turns, turning on and off the System keeps us living, keeps us on course, going, to our deep destination. One slip, a second lost, might mean disaster, a shooting past -fast, faster.

And I kind of despaired, then, or I kind of let it in.

I’ll take the first watch.

He hovered a while, then, grunting, left. He’d be back soon enough, go through this, each of us nursing sick System, hobbling, to our new home.