From the Desk of Director Sarah Martinez, Entry 11
October 24, 2101
Well. The negotiations went south.
Elusip—the UN Secretary General, mind you—threatened to cut off water and O2.
Jabari countered by threatening to ground ARK-3.
When Connie gave me that look, I couldn’t help but think how much she looked like her mother. And having Bones-lite giving me the nod to go do something horrible really made my gut turn, I’ll tell you that.
But we need Erias. Humanity needs Erias.
I found ALIZA.
I’d docked the Hope on ARK-3, so I hopped in and zipped off to the outer periphery of the debris field. Thankfully, our work these past two decades hasn’t been in vain. The shielded passages made most of the trip easy enough, though I almost ate it after I went past the giant flashing hazard signs, as one would expect.
Thankfully, ELISE is a far better driver than cook.
The probe was in remarkably good shape for what it was. Just a tiny little blink comm beacon that’d originally been entangled with ALIZA back before everything, but it’d lost connection prior to Janet taking control of the Ladder. So…
Right. Deflection.
I did my second EVA this morning. The silence. The restriction. I just can’t describe how much it feels like being locked in a closet. Just breath in your ear, the pump of blood in your head.
The knowledge that only a quarter inch of hardened plastics kept me from the death of the Void.
But my god, the view. Erias’s debris field is in a stable orbit around the system’s star, so it’s just an orbiting mass of rocks. But man… the sun streaking through it all, just gives it this endless impression.
That’s not it. Ugh. I don’t know how to write this. Not an author… so let me just say that it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
And right there, at the outer edge, was the probe. Inside, sitting in standby, was an intact storage unit with an ALIZA 3.6 personality matrix. The quantum entanglement unit had been damaged by a micrometeoroid, which explained the disconnect. After I got it back to the ARK, I went into one of the clean rooms, set security, and started a tear down.
The homing beacon had been burnt out somehow, which was a surprise, but the rest of the circuity appeared to have held up under…
Deflection. Fuck you, Friez.
I uploaded her into a self-contained storage unit and turned her on.
And she remembered me. ALIZA remembered me. Not from those last days, no. But she remembered my breakfast order and provided the ingredient list so ELISE could attempt to print out a croissant from the little-used Processor on board the ARK.
It tastes like cardboard, yes, but it’s edible.
So, excited we had our leverage, I pinged Connie, who talked with Elusip, and just the threat of uploading her into their systems was enough for Erias to back down. Everyone knows the horror story of what happened on New Eden, after all.
I was excited, filled with certainty and ready to go the fuck home.
But then I checked the output window from ALIZA’s storage unit.
Has the quality of the croissant improved? Yes or no.
And…
Goddammit. I can’t do this right now. I just…
Can’t.
— Sayre
