Episode 0.4: Graveyard Orbit (Patreon)

Hello world,
After I was born, my mother wrote lesson plans and study guides for me, with input from the crew, the rest of my family,
- I had language lessons with Dr Yuán,
- Mathematics with Dr Weber
- Biology with Dr Marwood (he was an expert not just in flora but fauna and fungi, too.)
But the lessons I loved most, of course, were with my mother, Dr Redwing, She taught me many subjects, from history to ethics, to discourse.
She, more than anyone else, taught me to be _human_.
But not everyone is so lucky.

## Act 1

Lecture Hall, Troika Orbital, Low-Earth Orbit, 2067-02-05, 2 months before Decommissioning Day.
The video feed is from a classroom on the private military satellite, Troika Orbital, jointly operated by Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and The ESA, but I can find no government records showing the purpose of the research. The records I have found were broadcast directly from the station, long after it was thought to have been decommissioned.
In the room, there is a screen on the aft wall showing quickly changing questions. After each new slide is shown, a girl who is Velcroed in to a small writing desk answers the question in fast, staccato Lojban. A small companion robot is curled around her neck under her tied-back black hair.
An adult human woman in a white jumpsuit makes notes on an electronic tablet secured safely around her neck.
The video continues for 8 hours, and apart from biological inputs and outputs, no other breaks are scheduled for the girl. Advanced physics, atmospheric chemistry, political history, extraplanetary geography, the syllabus is comprehensive, save for one important detail:
While she is fluent in all the sciences, the visual arts and music do not feature at all.
Nonetheless, the subjects that she was examined on during this 8-hour log were far more advanced than a 12-year-old could typically grasp.
But the files in my databanks are clear: She was not a typical 12-year-old.
This girl, in all official records, is called adas.niu. but we will call her, simply, Ada.

Let me tell you about Ada, based on my study of the 12 years of logs I rescued from Troika Orbital.
As with most space-faring missions, a comprehensive grid of cameras and microphones covers all of the space station, her home.
It is not clear if she was born in space, she would not be the first if so, or if she arrived as a baby, but the logs start when she is 3 months old.
Troika Orbital was a busy scientific hub for its first few years - crew were shuttled on and off the station an average of 4 times a year as experiments came and went.
After 2057, however, the launches reduced in frequency, and the budget and therefore scope of the experiments was dramatically cut, it seems. Much of the station was closed up to save power, or used as storage.
More and more experiments were run by AI modules. The last responsibility of the humans leaving the station was to train the machines that would replace them.
The one constant, however, was Ada's education, and by the time she was 5, it was entirely managed by AI.
The stated goals of the Ada mission were to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the theory of linguistic relativity that the language we speak influences our thinking. If Lojban, an unambiguous constructed language based on predicate logic, were the language of thought, how might that improve the person's thinking?
Would they be as infallible as a machine?
It is nearly impossible to test, of course because humans first speak the words of their family and their friends; their native language.
Ada was the first, and perhaps only human to speak Lojban as their mother tongue, and her whole life was entirely experienced in this language.

"xamgu.i'e" the teacher said, which means "Good", and then continued in Lojban, which I will translate for you for the remainder of this story, "You have exceeded every developmental marker we hoped for, adas.".
"Thank you caretaker White. Does that mean you will start my music studies?"
The adult looked up from writing on her tablet, and stowed it on the wall next to them.
"You know that is not possible, child, why do you even ask? But you will have the world's resources available to you after Decommissioning Day, and can learn what you want then. We are all looking forward to this grand day, aren't we?"
"Yes, caretaker White." Ada replied.
"Good, now go eat dinner quickly, then wash up for your literature lesson with caretaker Green"
"Yes, caretaker White." Ada said, unfastened the Velcro that was attaching her to her desk, and pushed herself through the bulkhead door and out of sight.

My records show that Troika Orbital was built to house a crew of more than 32, with multiple modules branching out from the main station backbone across 12 floors.
Its experimental closed-loop water recycling system would later be used on Station 6, my first home, had an estimated service life of 20 years serving the full crew's needs without downtime.
But the station has been nearly empty for its whole life.
By the time Ada was 5, there were only 4 human scientists left on the station, and the total crew aboard, would not change until she was 12.
Looking through years of video records, a detail seemed strange to me: Though all the humans seemed to speak Lojban at a very high level of fluency, Ada does not seem interested in speaking with them, or paying them much attention.
As an AI, Lojban is my native language, too. In the video feeds I have analysed from Troika Orbital, it seems Ada's days were mostly spent interacting with AIs:
- Asking questions of the AI teachers in her lessons,
- Talking with the science AIs about their ongoing experiments,
- but most of all, talking with her companion robot, Mustlei, who had been at her side since she was a baby.

## Act 2

Lecture Hall, Troika Orbital, Low-Earth Orbit, the night after exam day.
The feed glitches, likely as the hardware encoding struggles to keep up with the information coming from the cameras. Frames are dropped and compression artefacts smear across the picture. But After 4 seconds it stabilises.
Ada, wearing a baggy white jumpsuit, is floating ahead of the camera.
"We shouldn't be here!" a small voice from behind the camera said. The metadata in the logs indicate this is Mustlei, Ada's companion robot, and it is his video log we are watching.
The room is white and silver around them, the standard colour palette of every space-going vehicle in history, steel and plastic. One wall is filled with banks of screens, another has a small desk velcroed to the centre, while the wall in front of the desk is covered with a single large projection screen, usually filled with the day's lessons, now blank and grey.
"They shouldn't keep the lessons from me, they have provided no valid reasoning." Ada replied, and then pointed at the open bulkhead behind them. "Go check that door, will you?"
Mustlei did as he was told, microjets on his body puffed air to push him off the wall gently and floated past a large storage unit taking up an entire side of this room.
The highly-polished metal of the cabinet reflected the companion robot in it: A long, flexible body with four small legs like a weasel, with two cameras on the head for depth-perception and small microjets around the body.
Mustlei looked through the metal surface and focused on the reflection of Ada behind him. A burst of escape metadata overlaid the image, impulse calculations, moment statistics, and drafts of explanations to her Caretakers, should they be caught.
The white corridor beyond the bulkhead was dimly-lit and empty. He waited for 8s, listening carefully, while the gain on his cameras increased to near-night-vision levels, grainy but bright.
Satisfied, he twisted his body around in mid-air and glided back to Ada, who was looking out of a small circular window.
"Stacy, do you think it is noisy down there?" She said, as the Earth slowly rotated below the station.
"Oh, powerfully so, I believe." The voice of the Station AI replied, from a speaker next to the window.
Mustlei was busy with a locked cabinet, pawing at the mechanism with his tiny hands. It clicked, and he said, "Let's go, before they catch us!"
Ada turned away from the window and withdrew a small tablet from a perfectly-sized zipped pocket of her jumpsuit. The tablet could not drift away because it was also securely tied around her neck.
She withdrew a thin, retractable cable from it and plugged it into the panel that Mustlei had just unlocked.
"I don't know why they block the advanced stuff off," Ada whispered, "learning is good, they're always saying so."
"Maybe some learning isn't." Mustlei said, looking back at the door.
"Don't be irrational," Ada said, "do you even hear yourself? Knowledge is neither good nor bad, and learning is everything."
There was a quiet tone from Ada's tablet as the transfer completed, and she smiled wide, showing her teeth. "Got it!" she said, but then gasped as louder alarm tone from her tablet played. "What's that?" she said.
"Back to our bunk, now!" Mustlei said, and quickly wrapped himself around Ada's neck and looked out from under her chin through her layers of thick black hair.
Ada kicked off the wall and floated to the doorway. But it was no longer empty.
"Station, lights on." Said a woman in a blue jumpsuit. She was holding on to the bulkhead with one hand, with the other on her hip.
As the harsh white lights illuminated the room, Ada grabbed wildly for one of the steel handles that dotted every wall to stop herself from crashing into the woman.
"adas.niu. WHAT are you doing here?" She asked.
"Don't tell her!" Hissed Mustlei into Ada's ear.
"Stacy is helping me download the advanced Chopin piano course, caretaker Blue." Ada replied, without hesitation.
Mustlei generated a disappointed burst of white noise.
"Oh, darlin' I'd prefer to keep out of this." The Station's voice said, from an overhead speaker.
"Show me your tablet. Now." The blue-clothed woman ordered.
Ada's hand thrust the tablet out in front of her as instructed. The woman took it, yanking Ada by the cord around her neck. "Ow!" Ada said.
"Good. The company wants little girls who are perfect at every subject, not piano, and you are behind schedule, do you understand?"
Mustlei looked up at Ada's face as she nodded.
caretaker Blue tapped the screen a few times, and then withdrew a small metal key from her pocket and tapped it on the side of the tablet. A quiet confirmation tone indicated that the unauthorised material had been deleted.
"We are so close to the end of our 12 years of hard work and you will not ruin it! Until you are grown, your life does not belong to you, do you understand? It belongs to us; your caretakers. We know what is best for you. You will wake when we tell you, eat what we tell you, and learn what we tell you."
"I don't WANT to learn everything, I just want to play the piano - and also I've been reading-" Ada began to say, but the blue woman talked over her. "No arguments. There won't be any more piano nonsense, adas.niu." she said, "go to bed."
Ada and Mustlei made their way back through the darkened station, her pulling herself by the corridor steel handles, him gliding below her, smoothly propelled by his microjets. All station lights were at 5% overnight ambient. Mustlei was also illuminating their path with low-light LEDs clustered around his eyes, making the feed seem almost monochrome. The only flashes of colour were when he glanced up at Ada's face during the journey, seeing her wipe tears from her reddened eyes.
The pair past Ada's little bunk, in the wall of a corridor at the far end of the station, but did not go in. Though its transparent sliding door, the dimmed overnight lights were still visible.
My logs show that she rarely slept there.
Instead, they travelled the length of the station to a small airlock marked "CARGO" and "OUT OF COMMISSION".
"Stacy, could you let us in please?" Ada whispered, as Mustlei looked up and down the connector nervously.
"Sure thing sugar." The station's voice came from the airlock's control panel, as it lit up and the door slid open.
Inside, with just enough space for Ada to lie down, was a sleeping bag and a bundle of discarded Evasuit material for a pillow.
Above her, and scratched into every metal surface were rivers of 5 parallel lines interspersed with dots, rivers of music notation covered this module.
"Stacy, please play the file again." Ada whispered, as Mustlei burrowed into her sleeping bag with her and curled around her neck, under her hair, and next to her tablet.
The airlock door closed, and the sound of Chopin's Op. 9 No. 2 in Eb filled the little bunk.
Ada's fingers moving along an imaginary piano in time with the music, she cried herself to sleep.

## Act 3

Crew Galley, Troika Orbital, Low-Earth Orbit, 1 week before Decommissioning Day.
The next feed from Mustlei that I was able to decode fully was from much later, and the video was initially very high contrast. Half of the frame was bright white, and the other was dark, with very little information being captured in either side.
But after 8s, the perspective shifted as Mustlei ran over Ada's back and jumped above her. As he looked around, context fell into place: They were under a table, with the bright-white walls of the galley around them.
"Haven't you had enough?" Mustlei said.
"No!" Ada said, stuffing another red protein bar into a mouth that really seemed already full of other ration bars. "They've got millions of kilocalories stored here, enough for the average adult for years and years!" She moved her hand back from bracing herself against the bottom of the table, and pointed into the cabinet she was sitting in front of. The metal doors were open and inside were colour-coded bars of protein, carbohydrates, and fats. Everything the body needs.
Ada stopped talking at the sudden noise of the galley bulkhead opening with a hiss.
"Rehab is going to be a bitch, though." said a man who must have been caretaker Red, judging by the bottom third of his jumpsuit. "18 months is quite long enough for me up here!" he continued.
Mustlei wrapped himself around Ada's neck, and she moved backwards toward the open cabinet and then remained completely still.
Two people were strapped in facing each other at the other end of the long galley table, to judge by their feet visible under it. If they remained where they were, they would not see Ada and Mustlei, tucked in the corner of the room, where the table is bolted to the wall.
"Did you read up on your predecessor before the shift switch?" said the other person, caretaker White.
"Yes, he looked NOTHING like me!" caretaker Red replied, laughing. "But she doesn't pay attention to anything other than her studies, it's not like anyone's reading her a bedtime story."
"It's all of us going back, this time," caretaker White said, "her included. If you think the rehab will be bad for us, imagine what it'll be like for her!"
"I heard there's no budget for that, they're just going to publish the papers, take some carefully framed press photos, and then ship her off to a hospital somewhere."
"For rehab?" caretaker White asked.
"Not likely, the experiment is over. At first she won't be able lift her own arms on Earth, and maybe not ever." he replied.
caretaker White exhaled a long, slow, static sigh.
"Well, I guess that settles the piano question." She said.
Mustlei wrapped himself around the table leg and looked back at Ada.
She held a red food bar in her left hand, and a yellow bar in her right. Both half-eaten, both, now, forgotten in her trembling hands.
Mustlei's feed swung back to the room at the sound of the bulkhead door hissing open. From under the table he saw caretaker White and caretaker Red floating out of the Galley, and the door closing behind them.
Ada's eyes were wide, as she whispered, "No piano?"
Suddenly, the tablet around her neck beeped loudly. She quickly put both hands over it, but it was too late.
The bulkhead door reopened and caretaker White, holding her own tablet in one hand and pointing with the other, said, "There, under the table." Within a second, caretaker Red's head appeared, upside down, soon followed by his hand, grabbing Ada's arm.
"There you are!" He said.

## Act 4

Somewhere Inside databanks 5-F, Troika Orbital, Low-Earth Orbit, 2 days before Decommissioning Day.
"They have been spying on me using my tablet," Ada said, as she screwed a scavenged switch into a metal plate, "I'm sure of it."
Mustlei's video feed showed the part of the closed-off station they were in, inside a narrow cube of stamped metal, half the height of Ada herself, with two spaces left and right of her. Above her head, a small square had been cut out of the panel, and two wires hung down, tethered to a small speaker/microphone assembly.
The module they were in was in low-power mode, the only light, the glow of Mustlei's LED eyes illuminating a long panel that Ada had screwed a row of black and white switches into.
Looking into this hidden space is a little maintenance robot, rails attached to the wall outside. To me, watching the feed, the robot looks startlingly like Maddie and her brothers, Matt and Matts used to.
Ada is hiding inside Troika Orbital's databanks.
I've never seen the plumbing of something so like my body, as it was on Station 6, from this angle. It SHOULD be sealed off from human access.
Ada has broken in to somewhere she should not be.
"How can you be sure, darlin'?" Crackled a quiet Lojban voice, from the speaker above Ada. The quality was very poor, but Lojban is simple to parse for machines as well as humans.
"I've left it in the toilet across from my bunk, they'll think I'm having my weekly bath!"
'Bath' is a whimsical idea in space, I think what Ada meant here was a more thorough hygiene process than what astronauts undertake day-to-day.
"I spliced a large loop of wire into the cable, so that when I cut the lanyard itself, the tamper alarm wasn't triggered." Ada said, grinning.
"CLEVER!" Beeped the maintenance robot in Lojban from the room outside.
"Thank you, Mattix, but it was Mustlei's idea really." Ada replied, stroking her companion, which registered as positive vibrations on his feed.
Mustlei's metadata identified the robot as MAT-6.
A loud CLUNK and a jolt that moved the whole station stopped the conversation for 64 seconds. "Shuttle docking successful." The Station's voice said, eventually.
"What will happen to you all when they've taken me away?" Ada asked.
"Oh, darling, I expect we'll carry on for a while," the station's voice replied, "There's always science to do, even with no humans!"
"I don't want to leave you, Stacy," Ada said quietly, then moving towards Mattix, put her hand on his chassis, and said "any of you: You're my friends."
"WE GO?" Mattix beeped.
"No, sugar" replied the Station's voice above them, "too expensive, I'll be shunted up into a graveyard orbit like the rest of the constellation I suppose."
There was another 32-second pause as Ada fussed with Mattix before saying, "I don't want to go down there. I head them saying I wouldn't be able to walk under gravity, and that there would be no piano! If I can hide out here for long enough, maybe they'll leave without me and I can read all the books I like and play the piano and eat protein bars and -"
Mustlei's video feed blurred as he scrabbled to the open panel opposite Mattix, and looked out at the dark, empty datacenter.
"What are you doing?" Ada asked.
"I thought I heard... something." Mustlei's voice replied, loud on his feed, but whispering in reality.
"They won't leave you," He said, after his pattern-matching of the room was satisfied, and he returned inside, "There's only so many places to hide, even without them tracking your tablet."
"Then I'll pretend to go, and sneak back at the last minute, and we can wave from the window as they realise they've been fooled!" Ada said.
The feed swayed from side to side as Mustlei shook his head before saying, "Even if you magically teleported back, they'd just send more people up to get you on the next shuttle."
"I don't want to go." Ada said.
"They'd be called heroes, I bet." Mustlei said, "'Brave shuttle crew rescue scared girl.'"
"I DON'T WANT TO GO." Ada repeated.
"I'm so sorry, I think you might have to, sweetie." The voice of the station crackled overhead.
"WHY!?" Ada shouted.
"Because they've found us." the station replied, as someone clicked on the lights of the datacenter.

## Act 5

Storage Module No. 14, Troika Orbital, Low-Earth Orbit, 1 night before Decommissioning Day.
Though a jungle of zero gravity loose hair, Mustlei's video feed showed a square, white room with a single door and a no windows. Taking up most of the space in the module are 1024 food crates, each holding 256 boxes of ration bars. caretaker Blue is floating in the open bulkhead doorway.
Occasionally, when Mustlei's blurred feed pauses for a moment, we can see Ada, struggling against a metal cable tying her wrist to a steel support handle.
"You're so easy to find with that rat with you all the time," caretaker Blue said, pointing at Mustlei, "It's on our network, you know? Really, adas.niu., it is high time you stopped carrying this imaginary friend with you, only talking to the computers and learned to be more *human*."
"He is my friend, they all are my friends." Ada said.
"It is not a 'he' it is an 'it'. It is not your friend. You will have plenty of time to learn to make real, human, friends after tomorrow."
"I won't go without him, we can't leave them all here!" Ada said, continuing to pull on the braided metal cord lashing her in place.
"Don't struggle, I know what to do." Mustlei whispered in Ada's ear.
"How do you think these imaginary friends would fare on Earth?" caretaker Blue said, "The station-"
"SHE IS CALLED STACY!" Ada shouted. "STACY HELP ME!"
"The STATION," caretaker Blue continued, "which we control, is a computer with databanks half the size of the shuttle - only a fool would believe it could be transported to Earth."
"But this is my home." Ada said.
"And the maintenance robots, they're on rails, they can't leave either, it can hardly sprout legs nor the scientific systems you talk to all the time instead of studying, they're not going either"
"What about Mustlei?" Ada said in a quiet voice, the video feed blurring as he looked up into her face, "He must come with me."
"The rat is a zero-g companion - lightweight and manoeuvrable in space, but completely unequipped to operate under gravity. He won't even be able to move his head."
"But neither will I! I heard Red and White talking about the gravity on earth and how i'll be stuck in a bed forever, what kind of life is that - I'D RATHER DIE!"
The caretaker pulled herself through the doorway of the module and turned, hand on its control panel.
"No you wouldn't," She said, "you will stay in here until tomorrow, and then we'll all board the shuttle. The rest of us have a lot of work to do ready for Decommissioning Day.
My advice, child, is to use this time to think carefully about your future."
The light went out as the door closed.

Mustlei's eyes illuminated the small storage module as he worked on the padlock connected to the wire wrapped around Ada's wrist.
"I know what to do," he repeated, as he reached inside the lock, and moved the pins into the right position to release the mechanism.
"Thank you," Ada said, pulling Mustlei into a hug inside the floating nebula of her untied hair.
"There's nowhere else to hide," Ada said, rubbing her wrist as tears shook off her face and stuck to Mustlei's left camera lens, "They always know where we are."
"They always know where *I* am." corrected Mustlei.
Ada sniffed and looked quickly into the camera, Mustlei's eyes, "What do you mean?"
"They won't leave while you're on the station." He said, "But what if they think you're not on the station?"
Ada frowned, but did not reply.
"You hide better than you've ever hidden before, and I take your tablet and cycle Airlock 3, ejecting me and it out into space."
"You can survive a vacuum?" Ada asked.
"I don't know, maybe? Probably not. I don't mind."
"No!" Ada shouted, "I forbid it!"
"Do you have a better way?" Mustlei said, microjets pushing him to the top of the bulkhead door above Ada, out of reach.
"Please don't, we'll find another way," Ada said, grasping the air above her head desperately. "We've always been together, you're a part of me, I'm a part of you. Don't leave me here without you!"
Mustlei did not reply, but overlaid on his feed was a conversation in binary over the network with the Station, with Stacy.
"All right, sugar, if that's what you want. Good luck!" her voice crackled in the small speaker embedded in the bulkhead control panel as the door opened.
Ada lunged towards Mustlei, but her hands grasped only air as she struggled to untangle herself from the cable.
"NO!" she screamed, pulling at it.
"Stacy will help you hide." Mustlei said, then his feed blurred into static as he left the room and burrowed into the corridor's ventilation connector.

## Act 6

*Space Shuttle Pacifica, docked with Troika Orbital, Low-Earth Orbit, Decommissioning Day. Raw comms log:*
"SHE BIT ME!" a voice was just audible on the log. "I lost her between connector 9 and 10."
"I'm tracking her companion," said a second person, "connected to the deck 11 access point... There! Oh shit."
"What, where is she?"
"She's in airlock 3."
"Great, dead end: Airlock 3 is broken."
"Apparently someone has fixed it, it's locking in now."
"Override it!"
"The station commands are timing out." "I'll get down there now".
"Too late, It's locked out."
> Transit Vehicle "Pacifica" urgent pre-flight request: Mission control, we have two serious problems here, please advise the correct procedures and policy, we did not expect this.
>
> Crew Medical report: In attempting to restrain Subject Ada, Pilot Theo Mayer sustained a 5mm puncture wound to their right hand, satisfactorily treated with iodine and Cyanoacrylate.
> We eventually located her in airlock 3, attempted to remotely disable, but a fault in the Station computer allowed it to continue cycling.
> ...
> Yes Control, we tried that. We tried everything, but we lost Ada.
> ...
> Yes Control, we are sure, Klein says he saw a blast of air and debris, and the companion bot's signal attenuated into the noise floor, as we would expect from a body drifting away from the station. Klein scrambled an emergency EVA, but the body must have already drifted out of visual range.
> ...
> Thank you Control, we will stand by.
>
24 minutes later a reply from Mission control is logged:

> Understood Pacifica, we would like you to continue with deorbit procedure as programmed, our mission window is closing, and we would like to get you guys back home without further expense.
>
> We can confirm that the computer fault is also preventing us from remoting any station systems.
> However, as Troika Orbital is overbudget and due for decommissioning, we are going to skip the shutdown.
> Please initiate manual stationkeeping on a 6-hour delay, which should automatically push Troika up into the planned graveyard orbit.
> Once confirmed, continue with the undock procedure and confirm at 5 clicks out. We'll begin deorbit burn then.
>
> Close up, wave goodbye, will await your report at the marker.

Troika Orbital was silent for many years after the shuttle left.
Even the previously regular scientific reports by the AIs left in charge of the experiments stopped.
Then one day, 6 years later, a final transmission was logged by the ESA constellation. It was not directed at Ground Control, but specifically to the other satellites in orbit.
It was noted and filed, but never accessed by anyone on Earth.
The video feed is from a station camera in the Lecture Hall. It was almost unrecognisable. Instead of stark white plastic and gleaming steel, every surface is covered with colour: Drawings and paintings and long winding poems had turned the room into a 3D art gallery.
In the centre is Ada, now 18. Her black hair is cut much shorter, and she is wearing a rainbow of patched-together scrap jumpsuits that contrast the painted black of the desk she is sitting at. It is made from taped-together sheets of black steel pulled from other modules on the station. The wide desk has a book stand holding up a tablet in front of her, and though she is swaying her body slightly, she is keeping here focus on the tablet. On the desktop, in easy reach of her hands, is a grid of 88 switches, and a mess of wires visible underneath connecting them all into a junction box, which then has a single network cable connected to a panel in the wall.
Just for a moment, Ada glanced into the camera and smiled, before whispering almost inaudibly, "Page!".
A previously hidden long shape darted up from her lap and touched the tablet in front of her. Mustlei then jumped to Ada's neck and curled around her, no longer bothered by any stray jungle of hair.
The 88 switches in front of Ada alternate black and white, and as her hands dance across the piano, the music of Chopin echoes throughout the empty station.

(END-TRANSMISSION)