Duplicate

Duplicate

Alex Feinman

Copyright © 2009 Alexander Feinman. v1.3.7

Smashwords Edition

Chapter One

T-minus-30 seconds to impact. Twenty-seven. Twenty-four.

Listening to the computer do differences made me edgy in the face of crisis; I wasn’t sure who had programmed the damn thing to count down in threes, but I made a mental note to track him down and strangle him. If I managed to survive.

Fifteen. Twelve seconds.

I yanked on the controls, hard; the ship leaned sharply in to the turn, but the asteroid was simply too long and I had too much speed relative to it. At best I was going to skim the surface and rip the belly of the craft open; at worst, I’d splash on the surface like a Christmas ornament dropped on pavement.

Six seconds. Brace for impact.

I jumped for the Duplipod, slamming my limbs down into the slots. My right knee caught awkwardly on the lip of the device, making me tumble in heavily. The padding caught me and inflated; the door slammed shut automatically as the asteroid’s pocked surface flashed beneath my mining vessel.

Zero s―

#

I could see the shattered remnants of my ship’s tail above me, floating against the darkness. The entire aft section of the craft, from cargo to thrusters, had been grated off as I skidded along the asteroid’s surface. Just beyond the sealed windows lay nothingness―an open floor into the gulf of space. My Duplipod was cracked, too: crazed panes of Duraplast were all that separated me from vacuum.

My ears were still ringing from the concussion; even through the padding around me it had been quite an impact. But I was awake, which meant I was alive, and the Duplipod appeared to be holding air and ringing its beacon. So all I really needed to do was sit back and relax, and I’d wake up to a rescue. I just hoped it didn’t take too long―last time I’d missed an entire season of Iceball, including my spot in the betting pool. It was somewhat disconcerting to come out of a ‘pod and discover that the junior officer you’d been lording it over now had a year of seniority on you. But it was better than being dead.

I sat back, easing into the comfortable cushions, and waited.

The Duplipod, however, didn’t seem to be killing me. I checked its status monitor:

FUNCTIONAL

(Some errors occurred: please see logs.)

I’d never really learned much about the damn things―they worked great, were pretty much fool-proof, and since the Corp paid for them, I’d never even bothered to read the manual. Well, there was a first time for everything. I reached into the small access panel below the monitor and pulled out the info pad.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE:

1. Enter the Duplipod. Ensure all extremities are completely within the ‘pod, and close the door.

2. Relax. The Duplipod operates automatically and silently.

3. When help arrives, you will be regenerated automatically and will awaken refreshed.

4. Please exit the Duplipod at this time so it can reset for the next user. Remember to take all of your personal belongings with you.

Well, that wasn’t much help. We seemed to be stuck on step 2, so I thumbed the pad there. It expanded into a little animation of a Space Tower pulling up and hauling in a beat-up looking Duplipod, complete with flashing red light on the outside―no doubt because flashing red lights are extra cool. A voiceover droned on about how safe and effective the process was. I slammed the pad back into the slit in disgust.

The monitor blipped again.

SYSTEM SCAN COMPLETED AND VERIFIED

System damaged.

Estimated remaining life support:

81 hours 14 minutes at current consumption rate

Self-termination advised. Please see Section 4.6

Self-termination, eh? I guess the poor ‘pod had gotten a little rattled in the crash. Its needle might be broken―heck, the whole tank of poison might have been scraped off the bottom. But it seemed pretty confident in its read, so I flipped over to Section 4.6, which turned out to be a list of humane ways to off yourself. Number fifteen―pithing by projective energy―seemed relevant, so I pulled out my lasgun and―

Wait a minute. What if the ‘pod was so badly damaged it couldn’t regenerate me? That’d be a laugh. Dead in a Duplipod. Ha ha, very funny. I brought the pistol up again.

Now stop that! Turns out it’s hard to kill yourself. I put the pistol away for a minute while I thought things through.

I was stuck in a Duplipod of unknown condition. According to its readouts, I had a bit over eighty hours of life left, the last few of which would be spent in an asphyxiating coma. I had no food or water, so most of that would be hungry-time. In comparison―if it worked right―the Duplipod had a 100% chance of regenerating me, and without all this needless worrying; I’d never heard of the things failing.

But this wasn’t an intact Duplipod―it was pretty beat up from the asteroid impact. It claimed it had a good read on me―but what if its diagnostics were broken? What if it only had a partial read? What if I came back as a vegetable, only able to use words that started with the letter L or something like that? I just didn’t have the data.

But still―no need to worry about it now. I had 70 hours to think it over, right? I could just lie back and die like a man, or I could keep after the thing. Who knows―maybe I could even fix it.

Chapter Two

Hour sixteen

I’ve decided to keep a journal. It’ll be amusing to read if I make it out of here. Also to keep my mind off the solid wall of uselessness I’ve encountered when reading the stupid thing’s help system.

It’s obviously meant to be diagnosed with a Duplipod Brand Debugging System, and isn’t letting me get ANYWHERE with it. I can tell there is a simple system under there―it looks like it’s running the same OS as my ship, underneath it all―but they have it locked down but good. All I’ve managed is to weasel my way into the user diagnosis page, filled with cryptic messages meant to be comm’d to tech support. The logs start with the physical damage:

...

BIOLOGICAL RESERVOIR DAMAGED

BIOLOGICAL RESERVOIR EMPTY

CATALYTIC RESERVOIR BELOW 10%

MATTER JAM IN VENTRAL FEED

...

Ya think? The ‘matter jam’, I would guess, is a giant rock, stuck underneath my butt. I can feel the dent with my derriere, if I squeeze it against the seat.

...

AFT POWER PLANT SHUT DOWN

FORWARD POWER PLANT AT 82% OF MAX OUTPUT

RECOMMEND ALTERNATE POWER SOURCE

BIO/LOGIC RESERVOIR DAMAGED

BIO/LOGIC RESERVOIR BELOW THRESHOLD

AUXILIARY STORAGE RECOMMENDED

AUXILIARY DATA FEED INOPERABLE

...

It goes on like that for a while. But then it picks up:

...

INTERNAL LIFE SUPPORT NOMINAL

INTERNAL CONTROLS ACTIVE

BEACON ACTIVATED

INTERNAL DIAGNOSTICS SUCCEEDED

RECORDING SYSTEMS INITIALIZED

RECORDING SYSTEMS ENGAGED

...

And then finally there’s this beauty:

...

DATA STORAGE ATTEMPT COMPLETE

WITH SOME ERRORS (see log for details)

Some errors? Some? Nor does it say where to find this new log.

And: ‘attempt’ complete? Does that mean successful, or just finished? The help systems are giving me no clue as to what could have gone wrong. It’s making me downright leery.

Seventy-four―no, sixty-four hours of air left. That should be plenty of time to figure this out, right?

Hour forty-four

After sleeping fitfully for a while, I gave up, and now I’m back on it. I did some calculations. My mining trawl only took me about ninety mega-clicks off base. Corp should know approximately where I was, and the beacon would take them the rest of the way here, once they know to look for me. The ‘pod is sending out high-strength pulses in sets of three every half hour, with lower-power targeting chirps every five minutes; plenty of signal for a team.

So assume a worst-case of half an hour between when I crashed and when the pulses started; a few hours, give or take, to scramble a rescue boat. They wouldn’t hurry to get here―if operational, the Duplipod should keep me afloat for decades. So call it a one-gee burn so the crew doesn’t have to deal with stress fractures and compressed discs. They’ll keep that up for twelve hours, to keep fuel consumption down, then coast the rest of the way. That makes it about sixteen hours for them to get to turn-around, and twelve more hours to slow down; add in the launch time, and you could call it thirty hours total.

So where in the vastness of space are they? A day late, a dollar short?

Well, what if they only kicked in for a half-gee burn―after all, what’s the hurry? I’d just jump in the ‘pod. At a half-gee, they could