Adam's Rings by Matthew D. White

Author:Matthew D. White [White, Matthew D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-01T22:00:00+00:00

The Long-Expected Party

“What do you think he meant by all of that?” Adam asked Erin on the following day’s discussion.

“Just don’t do what you did to me, that’s all,” Erin replied. “If what the director said is accurate, your guys will be in the middle of a bunch of moving parts, and that’d be a layer of complexity they shouldn’t need to deal with.”

Adam nodded. “That makes sense.”

“Of course, it does,” Erin said with a quick smirk. “I’m steaming full ahead over here and can deal with a morality crisis in my own way. I’ve got time to think and no critical flight operations to speak of. Nothing I do would be derailed by a pipe to the knee like that.”

Adam sighed, not wanting to affect the doctor’s work any further. “Do you think your training gave you the fortitude to deal with death here in space?”

Erin’s face grew twisted at the thought, as if she had indeed been doing a full routine of internal gymnastics to make sense of it all. “It’s a little creepy, I’ll give you that, but I’m a product of the system, not a creator of it. From my memory, I had five undergrad classmates die in car wrecks. Another took his own life in the middle of the Ph. D program due to stress, and we lost two in the desert when their test vehicle broke up mid-flight. Granted, none of that actually happened to the people that I knew, but there were others who suffered the same fates. If not, how were the memories originally programmed?” She paused, thinking.

“In my case, I’ve got good authority to assume those events were elements of my conditioning, to make me realize my value and to ensure I’d be able to handle the trauma of living out here. It’s only a degree away from being sent up to test an experimental spacecraft with a less than one-hundred-percent chance of mission success. It’s a risk to all involved; we accept it and we live with it.”

Adam shrugged. “True.”

“Life’s never been fair, and anyone telling you so is full of it,” Erin said. “If you wanted to live in safety, you’d have never left your hometown and you’d spend your days stocking shelves at the grocery store, staring out the window at every chance to ponder the limitless opportunities you let pass by. Freedom means nothing without risk, sweetheart. You’re not going to kid either one of us that you’d have taken that road,” she added with a laugh. “It’s dangerous work keeping humanity viable, isn’t it? Just think, from what we do here, we’ll be set to launch the first manned mission beyond the solar system. From your work, we’ll know how to keep astronauts viable, and from mine, we’ll know where to send them.”

“You’re making this sound pretty rosy.”

“You’ve got to dream big,” Erin said. “By the time you check out, you’ll have a twenty-foot marble statue christened in the Aviation Hall of Fame, Wright-Yeager-Glenn-Armstrong-Montgomery.” She stopped and tilted her head.

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