One


 
TOBY WYATT MCGONIGAL AWOKE to biting cold and utter silence. When he opened his eyes he saw nothing, only a perfect black.
“Hello?” His voice was a rough croak, its sound so surprising to him that he coughed. He tried to put his hand to his mouth, but it moved only a few centimeters before striking some flat surface.
A lid, covering him where he lay.
A momentary panic took him, but as he banged his knees, hands, and forehead against the cold curved substance, he realized something else.
He was weightless.
With that realization, all his muscles relaxed; he let all the air out of his lungs in a whoosh, then laughed. Of course he was weightless. He wasn’t on Earth, buried alive in some coffin. He was in space. He was on his way to do something, for the family, for his brother, and if he was awake now that meant he’d reached his destination. Hibernation time was over.
That single moment of panic had worn him out, but hibernation was like that; he remembered the weakness from last time. It should pass in a few hours.
Gradually his fluttering pulse slowed, and when he felt more in control he groped until he found his glasses, which he’d stowed at his side when he’d gotten into his little ship’s cicada bed, weeks—or was it months, now?—ago.
He slid on the augmented reality glasses, wincing at the icy cold against his temples.
“Ship, give me a status report,” he said. Nothing happened. “A little light, at least?”
Maybe the glasses’ batteries had drained. Considering how long he’d been out, that was likely. It was stupid that he hadn’t thought of that, though; he relied on them as his interface to everything—ship, communications, and the all-important gameworld, Consensus, where he spent most of his time.
Who knew what Peter had gotten up to in Consensus while he was asleep? His brother would have had time to invent whole new civilizations, colonize new systems—who knew what? Knowing what had happened in the game while he was asleep was nearly as important to Toby as making sure he’d arrived at Rockette on time.
Everything was still black; the ship hadn’t replied. “Glasses, load Consensus,” Toby said. Maybe there was a communications problem; since Consensus was local to the glasses, it at least should boot up if they were online at all.
Weak flickers of light appeared at infinity, then resolved into words: POWER CRITICALLY LOW. Toby had never seen that message before, but it was obvious what it meant.
“Consensus … load me some personalities. Sol? Miranda? Can you hear me?”
There was no answer from any of them, and suddenly panic had him shaking the cicada bed’s exit handles. An alarm buzzed and finally there was light outside of the glasses; more glowing letters had appeared in the translucent material: VACUUM DETECTED. “Crap!” Something was wrong, the ship’s systems had failed, he was stuck here with no way out—
“Toby.” It was Miranda’s voice, coming through his glasses’ earpiece. “There’s an emergency suit under your mattress. Put it on and the bed will open.”
He felt around until he had the suit’s glove in his hand. He gave it a squeeze and the thing climbed over his body, its pieces snapping into place with reassuring precision.
When the helmet had built itself over his face, it signaled the bed, and with a sucking sound the canopy opened. Toby drifted off its surface and into a place he should know but which, as he looked around, had become frighteningly strange.
His headlamp showed him to be in a round room about thirteen meters in diameter. The place was full of jumbled shapes. Most were turning slowly in midair in zero gravity; all were covered with white, fuzzy hoarfrost.
The suit seemed to have power, so he ordered it to recharge his glasses. Then he said, “Miranda? Can you embody?”
“Yes,” she said, then a moment later, Sol added, “On my way, boss.”
Two headlamps snapped on off to his left, and moments later two space-suited figures were bumping their way through the debris, the cones of light flicking off now this, now that odd shape. The jumbled stuff was mostly butlers and grippies—bigger and smaller robots that could conspire with your glasses to pretend to be other people or walls or trees or furniture in a virtual world like Consensus. The little grippies could change their shape and texture and pretend to be anything you might pick up. Combined with the glasses’ visual and auditory illusions, they’d made this cramped little ship tolerable for Toby on the flight out. At least until he’d gone into hibernation.
“Ship?” he asked again; there was still no response. “What happened?” he asked the other two.
“We’ve lost main power,” said Sol Norton, his voice coming clearly through Toby’s glasses. “But I don’t know why, and I don’t know how long ago.”
“What does that mean? Did we miss Rockette?”
There was a long pause. “I’m not jumping to any conclusions,” said Sol curtly.
Rockette was the dormant comet their little ship had been headed to. It had just been discovered, and Dad suspected it might be in a very long orbit around the dwarf planet Sedna, which would make it a moon. In order to keep their family’s claim on Sedna, all the little world’s moons had to be claimed by a McGonigal. Because Dad was on his way to Earth to formalize the claim, Toby had been sent to rendezvous with Rockette. His job was to claim it and then turn around and return to Sedna.
It was a pretty big responsibility; he was only seventeen. He was getting used to doing stuff like this, though. Helping run his parents’ colony on Sedna was all-consuming, just as taking care of his traumatized brother, Peter, had been in the year leading up to their leaving Earth.
“We’re going down to the bot room,” continued Sol. “See what else we can get under manual control.”
“Thanks.” Toby wasn’t surprised that all the other ship’s systems might have failed but that his cicada bed had worked just fine. The hibernation beds—technology his parents had bought and perfected—were amazingly reliable. They were what had made it possible for the family to homestead here, with a couple dozen close friends and volunteers, far beyond the orbit of Pluto.
“Well, we can use some of this stuff,” said Miranda as she and Sol cast their helmet lamps into the bot room. She sounded optimistic and calm, as always. That was why he’d thought of her when he’d called on his Consensus allies; Miranda, like Sol, was always able to encourage Toby when things became difficult.
Toby bounced over to perch next to them at the hatch. “Why were we woken up? And what’s all this weird frost all over everything?”
“It’s air, Toby,” Miranda said. “Frozen air. Sol, do you see that?”
“Yeah.” Sol flipped through the hatch and kicked off through a constellation of motionless robots. These were mostly maintenance and repair bots that were supposed to be able to fix anything that went wrong with the ship. All were dark and lifeless.
He leaned close to the wall to...