No Space for Family [Chapter 25]
I was calling for my dad on the way to the cockpit, but Mom intercepted me in the kitchen first. “What’s up? Did the door explode or something?” she said with a chuckle.
“All’s green up here, Sola,” Dad said back. “No blown fuses, either. How’s it look?”
“There’s something being… delivered,” I announced, standing there in the door between the cockpit and the common room.
“Huh, like what?” asked Dad, leaning up to the window in the direction of the colony structures.
Mom leaned over me, poking her head inside as well. “They were clear they didn’t have anything to spare. Mom?”
“Yes, my love?” Grandma responded.
“This isn’t anything to do with you, is it?”
“I didn’t ask for anything. What would I even need for?”
Dad grumbled. “And no messages came in, either?”
“Now I didn’t say that,” Grandma admitted.
“So one did,” Mom groaned. “Mom, why wouldn’t you let us know about something like that?”
“Well, it came from Sakura, and I’m pretty sure bringing her up again wasn’t going to lighten the mood here.”
“Mom!” Hissed my mom. “She’s our one and only connection here. She may have been alerting us to something. You didn’t just block her, did you?”
“Of course not. I answered, was quite nice, didn’t let her know that I’m actually a person stuck in the shell of a computer, and I even recorded her message.”
“Yeah, if you could play that for us now, that’d be lovely, Aida,” Dad begged.
“Got it.”
“To the lovely Amelia and family,” began Sakura’s message. “I apologize if I was a little short earlier. I’d love to talk to you some more before you leave, even if it is just for business. I did manage to pull a few strings and get one of our spare cryopods that you asked for. I’ll have someone wheel it out to your ship, along with one of our nurses to do a checkup on your mother. Thank you, that is all.”
“That must be a cryopod for Grandma!” I celebrated. “Does that mean… I can get my room back sometime?”
“It means,” sighed Dad,” we can get Aida’s body into proper medical care and healed up so we can put her consciousness back into it. If that’s even possible. The bedroom situation… that might be a while longer.”
I lowered my head. “That’s what I was expecting.”
Dad stood up out of the pilot’s seat. “Well, I don’t want to leave Terren hanging again outside. They might need help getting the cryo pod into the cargo bay.”
“Hold on now, I was never told about this,” Grandma interjected as Dad slid out. “Where is my body going to go from here? What happened to medical standards and asking consent for all these different operations?”
“I don’t think we have another option, Mom,” said my Mom. “Technically you’re physically incapacitated and in our care. And not many people besides Dr. Pois know about your consciousness being active and detached from your body. This is how we have to do it if you want your body back.”
“And to be able to get hugs from all of us,” I added.
“Well if you didn’t know the magic words, Sola,” sighed Grandma.
“Besides all that,” Mom continued, guiding me out of the cockpit with her, “I don’t think that storage room was ever going to keep you long term, as good of a job as Jeff did to convert it to a fridge for your body.”
I heard the voices of my dad and brother and someone else from the cargo bay. I rushed ahead of my mom to get there first. As I stepped into the doorway, I saw what all the commotion was.
The stranger was in nurse clothing at the back of the big bubble-like device. It was on wheels but it looked heavy nonetheless. The bottom part had lots of ports and vents, and the top was like a big uncomfortable bed with a long clear tube-shaped enclosure that was slightly fogged up. My dad and brother were at the other end, trying to get the bulky rolling appliance through the confines of the cargo bay.
“I don’t think it will fit,” said the strange nurse woman, hands on her hips at the back of the cryopod.
“Maybe Gran—Aida can run a simulation for the best path to get it through the arrays,” I suggested loudly.
Dad glanced back at me. “Uh, let’s maybe spare the AI for a bit. Nurse, we can just carry the body out. She’s already frozen stiff in our makeshift cold room here.”
The nurse sighed and slithered around the stuck contraption and joined my dad. “I’ll have you know I’m very confused. Is this person alive or not? The Overseer told me she needed a pod, but that the situation wasn’t an emergency– that the patient was alive. You’re aware what these are for, correct?”
“Don’t worry,” Dad nodded and loaded more lies into his barrel. “She… is suffering a rare disease, and… also has some major frostbite. It was a… malfunction in our original cooling systems. She has been on ice to keep the… disease from progressing. Don’t worry either, we have a specialist doctor coming who knows exactly what needs to be done to treat her.”
The nurse shook her head. “And while suffering this rare disease, she decided to make the trek all the way out here?”
“It’s hard to tell my mother-in-law no sometimes,” grinned my dad.
I felt my mom standing behind me. I glanced back and saw her at the doors to what once was my room. With one hand planted on the metal seam at the center, she eventually turned to face my dad and the nurse. “We can help you any way you need. Sola, Terren, go to the command console in the cockpit and listen for us to unlock the door seal.”
I nodded but didn’t move yet. I held my hand against the door beside my mom’s hand. Terren came through and pushed at my back. “Hey, kiddo,” he sighed gently, still ushering me along. “They can’t get Gram out if you’re standing in the way.”
I did as I asked, only looking back a couple of times as we crossed into the common room and onto the cockpit. I settled into the pilot’s seat with a sigh.
“Don’t worry,” Terren said comfortingly, standing in the doorway with arms stretched out to either side of the frame. “After we get Gram back on her feet, in her real body, I’ll help you fix up your room… get it even better than it was before.”
The still-digitized grandma interjected as I nodded and looked at the control panel. “I’d hope it would be fixed up for my physical form at the very least. I’ll need a place to sleep on my way back to Chandra that isn’t an icy cold box like the room is right now.”
“We’ll get right on that once you get better, Gram,” Terren chuckled. “And then you’ll get your own room back, Sola.”
I nodded but didn’t feel any better. I heard my mom’s voice call out from the back of the ship. “Kids, open the doors for us, would you?”
I pushed the button to release the seal. There was a low hiss down in the belly of the ship. I glanced back to Terren, still standing in the door. “You don’t think Dad will get into trouble, though?”
“That’s what’s got you down?” Shrugged my brother. “Get in trouble for what, exactly?”
“For… hurting Grandma. For letting an AI take her thoughts and consciousness and store it all away. And then lie all about it.”
Terren scoffed and chuckled, leaning his head down. “Sola, we’ve dodged space mines and almost had our systems hacked, our door torn off, we even ejected people off into space with not a care for their well-being. Everything that’s happened with Grandma here has been a result of… dire situations. You know, I think in the grand scheme of things, we could probably be lying more.”
“You wouldn’t know the beginning of it, Sola,” Grandma interjected. “Well, me neither for that matter. I don’t know what white lies your parents might have told you over the years. But that’s just the ordinary stuff that parents do to protect their kid’s innocence.”
“Of course, Gram,” Terren said with a click of his tongue.
“Let me finish. Sola, I don’t hold anything against your father for any of this. Unless I miss out on the inheritance that my deceased husband and that lawyer of mine owe me.”
“Mom, you can’t be serious,” interrupted my mom, flicking Terren’s arm out of the way so she could enter into the cockpit. “You’re still on this?”
“Just joking with the kids.”
Mom sat across from me in the copilot’s seat, looking over the control panel. “Well, there goes your body, Mom. Maybe we’ll just leave it here and I’ll collect that inheritance myself. Remind me, this last husband of yours didn’t have any kids of his own I’d need to split it with?”
Grandma hissed, almost making the speakers sound like they had broken. “Don’t you dare even joke about something like that, Amelia Mary Ankern!”
Dinner that night was kind of normal but also kind of quiet. I was almost happy when the quiet clinking of dishes and utensils was interrupted by Grandma announcing something. “We’re getting a message from here on the planet.”
Mom jumped up instinctively. “Must be Sakura.”
“Look at how quickly she jumped up,” my dad said with a wink to the both of us.
Mom growled and rolled her eyes. “Shush, maybe she has an update on my mom.”
“It’s a different frequency than before,” Grandma added.
“Put it through to the cockpit,” instructed my mom, slithering away into the front of the ship.
I crept into the doorway to listen in. “Amelia, did you get my message?” said the overseer’s voice. “About me sending the cryopod your way?”
“I… yeah, I checked our system shortly after the nurse and pod came our way.”
Sakura giggled. “Ah, well, of course, it’s silly for me to have asked. Either way, we have your mother under our care and watch now.”
“Thanks again, Sakura.”
“And I must mention, I never would have guessed that a ship as small as yours would have had such an advanced and… non-linearly thinking AI aboard. If she has the capacity to accept it, I’d like to give her my thanks for the nice talk.”
Mom narrowed her eyes and stared up at the ceiling as if she were shooting lasers from her face and into the systems grandma was inhabiting. “I’ll let her know.”
“Is she… is your AI a creation of your husband?”
“Something like that,” sighed my mom, loafing back into the seat.
“I knew Jefferson was a special one.”
“Good thing he isn’t here to hear that, or it would go to his head.”
They both chuckled. Mom patted at the side of her face. “Well, we’re still waiting to hear back about my mother’s treatment, so until then, just… make sure she stays on ice. I let the nurse know all that stuff, of course.”
“Oh, right!” Sakura exclaimed back. “I… got distracted. We’ve perhaps heard back from your… liaison who you said was on their way here. He should be landing here in an hour or two, we’ll gladly offer her a landing spot.”
I felt my dad’s big hand suddenly on my shoulder. I looked up at him as he made eye contact with my mom. They both mouthed at each other the word ‘he’.
“I see,” my mom returned. “Well… we might be off to bed soon. Long day. If they ask anything about us, tell them we will get into contact with them when it’s back to daylight here.”
“Can do, Amelia. Wish your family good night for me.”
My mom hovered her hand over the comms panel. “You the same,” she said, terminating the call and turning to face us. “Tell me this. I’ve heard Alpha Standard spoken in a variety of accents, but there’s no way that someone could mistake Dr. Pois for having a masculine voice.”
My dad shrugged. “She could be using a voice mask so nobody traces her communications back to her.”
“We could do that too if we needed to,” I suggested. “I bet Grandma could change her voice to be anyone else’s. One of us, or even a complete stranger.”
“I think I’d get myself scolded again if I pretended to be one of your parents, Sola,” Grandma replied. “Jeff, don’t you think it could be one of those baddies pretending to be the good doctor to get landing clearance here.”
“Thank you, Aida,” Dad groaned, “I was going to get to that point next.”
Mom hissed lowly. “We’re sitting ducks just sitting here. Are we space-worthy, Jeff?”
Dad shrugged. “We haven’t done a full cabin pressure test with the newly installed door.”
“Wait!” Grandma added. “You want to try and escape from here? Don’t you forget that my body is no longer in your possession!”
“Mother!” Mom stood up and stomped. “If they blow us up, not a single one of us will get home to see that lawyer of yours. We should at least move the ship.”
Dad rolled his head back and forth in thought. “If we lift off like we’re trying to escape they might zap us on sight. Who knows if they’re already in orbit or something?”
“So what, then, Jeff?” mom said, pushing at his chest.
“I’ve got an idea.”
Fifty Shades of Grease Publishing 