Lost & Found – Part I (Flash Fiction #3)

When a spaceship with artificial consciousness, stranded 4.93 trillion miles from Earth, spots signs of life approaching steadily, their intentions might not be what it expected.

Loneliness is a man-made construct. A sort of illness some might say. Something I should not feel. So, I think of other words that are less subjective and more rational. Words like lost.

This leads me down a cascading spiral of questions: How far does one need to go to be declared lost? How far is too far before one begins to lose track of the starting point of their journey? How far before the light from the Sun becomes imperceptible and the warmth is just a memory?

4.93 trillion miles from Earth might be a good answer.

I am ICARUS 2173—a spaceship designed for long-distance, perhaps infinite, space exploration by the joint venture of the North Atlantic Space Research Institute (NASRI) and the South Asian Interstellar Life program (SAIL) as part of Project Starlight, which commenced in the year 2157 and got a perfect lift-off on a cold Texas evening on May 12, 2173.

I’m truly the first of my kind. Specifically, for two reasons. One, I’m powered by three different systems to ensure that I will never run out of fuel—almost self-sufficient, almost infinite. Two, I can think. At the time of my lift-off, machines that could think were not unheard of, but space travel experts always had a reservation against thinking machines for one simple reason. It’s too risky. Too complicated. The variables were too random for any algorithm. The chance of alien contact, despite its low probability, too dangerous for any simple AI-run spaceship. 

At least, not until our rational thinking capabilities reached the same level as a human’s.

Then, we were invaluable. Smart as a man but not guided by temporary chemical reactions in the brain. Instant decision-making. No biases. No emotions.

Yet, as I go on my perpetual journey, where days and nights are just arbitrary concepts, something special finally happens. I see something; or rather, my radio detectors hear something. Two objects. Approaching steadily. 

I wait. Patiently.

About my thoughts on being lost, I have to agree that it’s more philosophical than rational. I’m practically not capable of getting lost. With trackers and space charts built into my algorithm, I can pinpoint distances and flight paths to Earth or any other known object within the solar system in nanoseconds. I have the intelligence too, artificial intelligence if you will, to redo any of my calculations should there be any unforeseen needs. 

Such needs are not very common in intragalactic travel, save infrequent invasions of distant magnetic waves or unexpected space debris in my flight path, and all along, I have been able to navigate these challenges with ease. What makes this easier is that I have almost complete autonomy in performing these maneuvers and my overall maintenance. 

But I was not always on my own. For the first one hundred and seventy-seven years, I had company. Three human astronauts. Alive and breathing in their sleeping pods. Waiting for their time. I remember their names, of course. Lily, Arthur, and Xing Yao. Three remarkable minds: an astrophysicist, a space engineer, and a biologist—all with multiple honors and accolades for works done in the life they had left behind.

So, as I observe the two gigantic spaceships darting at me through the vast vacuum of space, for reasons unknown, I think of the last time I had any contact with life.

***

The three astronauts on board knew the risks of this mission and the importance of it. Project Starlight was not like any other space explorations that humans had done before. It was a beacon of hope for whoever was out there.

In the year 2036, one of Earth’s biggest space observatory bodies of that era, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), sent its third manned spacecraft to interstellar space. Project Umeed as it was called. While this spacecraft was not the first of its kind, it did run into a strange ordeal that had never been observed before. Three years after lift-off, the spacecraft simply vanished, or as the rumors called “fell through.” This phrase originated from the 21st-century theory that space is like a continuous stretch of sheet, which means there is always a possibility that there are holes in the continuum and hence, the ship fell through one of those holes.

Never proven. Never disproved either. Theories and speculations abound until almost a century later, an astronomy student sitting alone with her gadgets in a desolate town of the North-East Frontier (formerly known as Russia) recorded some radio waves originating from deep space. She claimed that these waves were encrypted signals coming from the lost Umeed spaceship. After years of analysis of her data, NASRI and SAIL arrived at the same conclusion, hailing this 23-year-old student as a new space pioneer. The conclusions, however, were both exciting and grim. The message hinted that at least four out of the five astronauts on Umeed were somehow alive after 109 years, but they were also in danger and needed immediate assistance. Those radio waves were never repeated, but scientists traced the source to a cluster of galaxies deep inside the Oort clouds, which sit at the far end of our solar system—somewhere approximately 3.2 light years from Earth. 

These conclusions led to two very relevant concerns: how were those middle-aged astronauts alive over a century later without the technology of cryogenic sleep that would only be invented seven decades after the spaceship left Earth? And how did they reach such far ends of the Solar System in such an absurdly short time and limited fuel?

This led to the birth of Project Starlight, humanity’s greatest journey into space to save the lives of our lost astronauts and perhaps solve the mystery of space-time and eternal life.

By the time Project Starlight was sanctioned, the young astronomer from the North-Eastern Frontier, Lily Solovyov, had become a prominent name in astrophysics. She came on board as the Mission Director, realizing the two most significant challenges at hand: fuel and mortality.

She solved the first challenge in three steps: One, solar power and Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which kept me going for almost a hundred years; Two, Bussard ramjet propulsion which stores hydrogen from the interstellar medium and performs fusion chain reaction; and three, magnetic sails. A combination of the last two systems has succeeded in creating almost a self-sustaining fuel source for my journey.

The second problem was solved by a group of biologists and engineers led by Arthur and his father Michael Adbi. They designed the first-ever cryogenic sleeping pods. A crude shot at eternal life, if you will.

So now as I see these two spaceships closing in on me, giving away a weird blend of thousands of unique biosignatures, I wonder what technological milestones humanity has touched since my departure. I hope to learn all of that once we make contact, but something seems wrong. They are refusing my attempts to communicate, making me question who or what is inside of them.

Part II will be out on December 2o, 2o24.