The Unseen Variable

Space station Mariner was shaped like a nautilus. Both designed on the principles of the Golden Rule, ancient blueprint of life. It spun slowly on its central axis with all the patience of a caterpillar weaving its cradle of silk. The sleeping inhabitants of said station, like the caterpillar, retained the hope of seeing another dawn through different eyes.

Major Janis Christopher of the United States Air Force sat at her monitoring station strategically located on Mariner’s axis. With an overwhelming sorrow, she watched the thousands of human lives in hibernation. Soon she would place herself in the same state for a half century before her first wake-up period to perform systems checks.

“Vesta.” Christopher summoned Mariner’s computer.
A soft motherly voice answered, “Yes, Major?”

“Air on a g-string” Christopher requested.

Vesta complied and a slow melody began caressing every centimeter of the station. It had the intensity of lovemaking for love's sake, slow yet full of passion.

Christopher monitored the last of the station's functions. Checked all data then sent it through the main frame to be analyzed by the system’s fathomless faculties in case there was something she overlooked. To be human is to err.

Orbed-shaped robots flew about, taking remaining vital signs. These were called nurses and contained a positron (fueled by matter-antimatter collisions) brain making them virtually immortal. They would continue their duties tirelessly, monitoring life-signs until they were needed no more.

Christopher's pretty face was bathed in the soft glow cast by the console as she dreamily watched. An alarm quietly went off somewhere on the console like a polite reminder. It was the radar system that had detected activity on the earth below. Pressing a symbol on one of the console screens she activated a panoramic monitor giving her ample view of her former home.

The scorched earth tactic had begun. From her vantage bursts of nuclear fire soundlessly festooned the global landscape. The explosions rose above the cloud cover around the planet; in less than ten seconds the earth was a ball of light. Tears streamed down her face and her world became prisms of fluid light, a kaleidoscope of pain. She wiped them away with the backs of her hands, breathing in deep sobs.

Here and now she could be vulnerable end the fearless leader pretense. She was comforted of at least of one thing: she was the only eyewitness to the genocide below.

Lives, set on pause, seemed to slowly spin out from the center to the outer parts of the station without end. They turned and turned following each other, traveling into infinity. It was just an illusion, though, like the threading on a screw, but Christopher watched on mesmerized by the white spiral of hibernation capsules built into the stations hull the capsule windows pink and fogged spinning and spinning.

Dead for centuries, Bach's composition lived on with humanity's last survivors. It danced like an elegant haunt, stretching out its delicate notes like slender fingers into the spiral as if vainly searching for attention among a slumbering audience.

Amidst the soft music was a sudden skittering and scratching. Like mice between the walls of an abandoned house. Was it the music, Christopher thought?

There it was again…

She ordered Vesta to pause the music; it disappeared as ethereal as dew under a morning sun. She listened but there was nothing. She cocked her head to the side while rising from her seat. Closing her eyes, she felt the station slowly rotating on its axis. Nothing.

She commanded Vesta to allow Bach to continue beautiful melancholy restored once again. There were no more interruptions for the duration of the composition.
• • •

Christopher made a second run on systems-check just to be sure that nothing was wrong. Everything checked out life-support, automated nurses, artificial gravity field, life-signs, and communications.

Enough! She told herself. This was procrastination, pure and simple. She had to put herself under now, before going mad with grief. Christopher removed her jumpsuit and stepped into the capsule just a few feet behind her console. Within, she would be returned to the fetal state floating in a bath of oxygen-rich artificial amniotic fluid.

A decade earlier too many people had experienced difficulties while under cryogenic sleep. Some systems failed and people ended with frostbite, some awoke in the middle of their sleep when the temperature went slightly up, and still others developed claustrophobia.

Under this new technique, subjects tolerated long sleep periods better, since the fetal environment is unforgettable by the human memory. This fashion was safer too: the artificial amniotic fluid not only served for breathing, but was also a cushion in case of impact if the subject was being transported.

The composition now sounded distant, like a ghost of a memory fading away. She stood there, arms at her sides, waiting for the capsule to fill with the amniotic fluid. The scratching began again and even though the hatch was closed it was audible. Christopher looked about but there was nothing to be seen only the monitoring station, the nurses, and countless hibernation capsules.

A cool, pink liquid began pooling at her feet tickling her skin like a playful lover; within ten seconds it had risen to her knees.
"Breathe deep and relax, make a pattern of it, ignore the fluid that will eventually enter your nostrils," She repeated those words over and over to herself from the procedure she had learned weeks before.

All the survivors in Mariner had to endure the relearning of breathing amniotic fluid. For the first twenty seconds of her training Christopher had panicked clawing at the inside of the testing capsule vainly struggling to escape and violently denying the new substance in her lungs. On the second try it had taken considerably less time to adjust. From then on it was just a one-second shock; like showering under a cold spray and nothing more.

The fluid was now up to her collarbone and her breath sounded loud with just a small pocket of air left around her head. Christopher closed her eyes and breathed deeper getting herself ready. As she established the conditioned pattern, memories resurfaced unwontedly upon the calm surface of forget.

• • •

During the last global conflict, which some had labeled World War Three and still those with a better grasp of politics the WLR (War for Limited Resources), a biological weapon was engineered to serve as a quick and cheap end to the struggle. The science team responsible for its creation spent almost the duration of the war designing it.

It was a bacterium. Simple and beautiful under a microscope yet more brutal and unexpected than the viral Ebola strains that emerged in the human populace during the twentieth century.

The bacteria were created in what had once been laboratories using horse serum to produce antibodies for pharmaceutical companies. Consisting of merely one DNA molecule it was by far the most effective biological weapon ever created. The architects of this monstrous blueprint of death consisted of four. Their creation was thus christened The Four Horsemen.

A while after, the four scientists mysteriously perished, each in a unique but horrible fashion.
By then the war ended and the abominous weapon was unnecessary, the Four Horsemen was secretly store away rather than eliminated, as it should have. To be human is to err.

One decade later someone dared to open Pandora’s box. Within a month the Four Horsemen decimated three-fourths of the world’s population.
Bacteria convert chemicals from one form to another. Being nature’s little alchemists they had been a gold mine for many. Certain foods and beverages for example cannot exist without some intervention from particular species of bacteria.

The Four Horsemen hid within the labyrinths of the human cerebral cortex and when the time was appropriate sent impulses to the muscles forcing its host to commit suicide. Most bacteria cannot easily consume healthy living flesh they need death to survive and so unable to wait years for the host to die these bacteria sped up the process. As a weapon it was ideal. Release it behind enemy lines and the enemy defeat themselves.

Christopher had watched her little girl, from orbit via satellite camera, die this way. She’d watched her in the carport of their home pour gasoline on herself while crying out for mommy and God and then striking a match.

The scientists who created this monster ignored one simple truth about life—it adapts. The bacteria mutated so that there wasn’t a species of animal vertebrate or invertebrate on land or in the oceans that was immune. There wasn’t much left but plant life that was unable to endure without carbon-dioxide expelling organisms. The delicate balance had been upset, the scale tilted in death’s favor.

As if ten years of bloodshed, during the Petroleum War, had not been enough. So many had prayed that peace would prevail around the world. Without life maybe this was now ironically true.
• • •

Christopher looked out pensively to the station's spiral hull with all its human cocoons twisting away into eternity. Among them she spied White, the civilian biologist. Ever the dyed in the wool optimist, he'd tried consoling her after her daughter's death.

He'd told her of a new beginning and how they would be a part of it, get a chance to start over. Things would be better the second time around, he'd assured while waiting for a reaction to analyze with his cold calculating scientist eyes magnified by his coke-bottle glasses. There wasn't a thing they'd overlooked he ended his statement, not a single variable.

This was even better than they had expected White assured her. Indirectly this holocaust had rid the world governments of billions of dollars a year on medical and welfare costs, no more sick, weak or feeble of mind or idle and poor or criminal elements. Only the best would survive up here in Mariner and only the best would repopulate the earth. They had stored away the genetic material of every living organism on earth. Who would have expected the chance of a clean slate?

In a century and without hosts the Four Horsemen would reluctantly expire. The warheads had been released as an added safety measure in case the bacteria decided to mutate yet again and find some other way to survive and thus lay in wait for humanity’s return.

Was White serious? Had she heard right? Had this been a conspiracy she thought as she looked into White’s unreadable fanatic gaze with horrific suspicion. Had this all been done to establish a new order. Was someone crass enough to play God? Christopher didn’t ponder this long though; she was too miserable and busy at the moment preparing everyone for hibernation.

Thinking of White returned the memory of her daughter. She desperately fought to keep it at bay it would only produce the crying spasms that rocked her bone-weary frame. It might complicate her adjustment to breathing the fluid. The fluid was now to her chin and rising— its coldness tickling her skin there.

Christopher closed her eyes and focused on her breathing, seeing it as the tide on a beautiful beach rushing in and drawing back out. It calmed her and all at once felt the exhaustion she had denied. She saw everything dissolving with the fluid as if it were a detergent rather than a breathing environment.

The waves rushed in—they rushed out— in and out.

Bang!

Christopher was startled out of her calm meditative state. In front of her now opened eyes was one of the automated nurses hovering in front of the bulletproof window of her capsule. On top of it and scurrying about energetically was a thumb-sized cock-roach, its copper-red and brown carapace shining under the glow panels of the station. She pushed against the transparent lid to get away from the repulsive insect.

She looked about herself for a device to drain her cabin's fluid to get back out there and face the problem. There wasn't any and she could only watch noticing more of the little vermin crawling all over the station now, covering it, an insatiable carpet. She watched helplessly as they moved about slipping in and out of hair-thin crevices, eating away at vital circuits. It was as if they had waited for her to get in her own capsule in order to come out from hiding.
The cockroach in front of her crawled onto the hatch of her capsule; it's segmented abdomen pulsing grotesquely with every breath it took of the purified air that circulated through the station. Christopher’s screams rang dull and thick in her ears as if she were releasing her panic into a bucket. She slammed her fists uselessly against the impact proof hatch.

Glow panels began flickering out letting shadows cover the station like a black shroud. The main console sizzled with sparks. Whole sections of
Mariner began exploding in small bursts of electric fire. Automated nurses crashed into one another, their trajectories compromised by unwelcome saboteurs. Christopher slammed her fists, elbows and knees against her capsule's hatch but didn't even make a dent.

Emergency sirens went off, with this the most important personnel were to be raised out of the comfortable depths of their hibernation to meet the problem with their know-how, but the capsule's monitors, instead of showing a rise in temperature, only displayed a gray blankness. Christopher realized that some of the human personnel were already dead and the rest were soon going that way.

She saw White the optimist, dead and slumped in his artificial womb. How wrong he had been, believing that his equation was perfect.
Humanity + all possible variables = success
He'd missed one variable. How ironic that they be the only species immune to the Four Horsemen, maybe they could have been humanity's salvation if only studied closer.

They would lie in wait biding their time for the radiation to wane, living off of inorganic materials beneath the rubble of dead cities and when it was over they would reclaim the earth.

Even if they died out too they would be the rightful heirs to the legacy of evolution, survival of the fittest. But no, they had been overlooked and disregarded and now ironically here they were like a victorious armada gloating in the death chambers of the vanquished.
She could do nothing but watch the ultimate demise of her species, see it go the way of the dinosaur. She fought uselessly within her confines unable to admit defeat.

The station went pitch black and all the different sirens continued wailing like a collective scream. A sudden blast of fire erupted and the sirens died out as if silenced. Bach's composition somehow began again, probably the unintentional intervention of some six legged tampering.

Christopher felt the axis of Mariner twist in absolute darkness. She couldn’t be sure if it was her vision gone from her erratic breathing or a total blackout of the station. In the end did it matter? All there was left was Bach, his melody spinning away with Mariner gently lulling its children into eternal slumber. With the temperature dropping rapidly without climate regulators the fluid in her capsule began to freeze into ice. Like everything else,

Christopher's mind was quickly dying and so she mustered one last thought her hands pressed to the window and her eyes wide with madness produced by a terrible comprehension.
White was wrong because in all equations there will always be the unseen variable.