The Eden Protocols: A Sci-fi Bimbo Space Odyssey

Initializing Final Stage Protocols…

Unpacking Data Packets…

WARNING: NEW KERNEL DETECTED!

Introspecting…

Credentials Accepted. Override Engaged.

Allocating Resources…

WARNING: PRIORITY CONFLICT DETECTED!

Admin Arbitration Requested…

Estimated Admin Response Time: [487] Days.

Commencing System Stopgap Protocols…

Doctor Maeve Hughes exited her stasis pod in a fit of retching coughs and frozen toes into the warm welcoming embrace of a blanket which unseen hands proceeded to wrap around her shivering body.

“Easy, Doc. Easy. The Institute warned us that the thawing process would be rough.” A deep resonant voice told her, a steady hold keeping her upright. “Didn’t half undersell it though, did they? Take your time. That feeling of corpse lung will pass soon.”

“Whe–Where am I?” Words wheezed out through icy lips. Sounded mealy-mouthed.

“You’re safe and going to be okay.” The nice voice reassured her. Someone was rubbing her arms through the thick cloth of the blanket. “You’re on the Perseus III; a colony class starship. It will all come back to you once we get you warmed up and the shock wears off.”

A starship?

Maeve blinked the frost crystals off her eyelashes and tried to focus her watery vision on the blurry figure before her. He was tall, whoever he was, standing a full head higher than her and stocky of build.

Details slowly swam into view.

A broad but kindly face looking back down at her from under a heavy brow with concerned cerulean eyes. His jaw was strong, like a block of hewn marble, and his nose blunt. A short crop of hickory-brown hair was neatly combed into a classic side part atop his handsome head.

“Who? Who are…”

“I’m Tucker Evans; the senior systems administrator assigned to the Perseus III, and we are in **** need of your medical expertise, Doctor.”

Maeve shoveled down her third helping of reheated liquid nutrient paste–an enriched algae derivative grown in huge hydroponic vats on the fifth deck–lifting the plastic bowl to her hungry mouth, barely cognizant of Tucker sitting across the table from her and watching intently.

She was famished!

Travelling over seven light years in stasis would leave any belly empty, No matter how much the Andromeda Institute expounded on the technical wonders of their human popsicle pods.

Her depleted body badly craved carbohydrates, proteins, essential minerals and enzymes to restore it to full functionality after so much time in the deep freeze. Maeve was busy giving it what it needed with near industrial levels of efficiency.

They sat, and she slurped, in the middle an empty mess hall built to accommodate over two hundred colonists and crew. One of many on the stadium-sized interstellar space vessel. All of them similarly empty and shrouded in silence, save for the humming of the environmental systems, as the human inhabitants slept dreamlessly in their stasis pods.

Precious cargo, safely stowed away for the duration of the interminable trip between the stars.

“Feel better, Doctor Hughes?” Tucker asked, then chortled when he caught the flash of embarrassment in her expression. “Don’t feel bad. I chomped my way through a half dozen bowls of that hot sludge before I felt human again. Couldn’t quite believe it once I was done.”

Maeve could believe it. Tucker Evans was a mountain of a man. A prime cut of A-grade beef squeezed into a utilitarian orange jumpsuit with the ship's insignia stitched onto the straining chest and bulging shoulders.

Whenever he moved, she could see the play of his strapping muscles through the durable synth-fabric of the uniform. Several of the topmost clasps on the front had been left open, unable to be buckled over the meaty slab of his ripped torso.

She suddenly felt very small and fragile, with only a woolen blanket and her razor-thin hibernation suit for protection from the hulking crewmate; a man who was single-handedly crowding the other side of the six person table.

That was until she looked into his sparkling sky blue eyes and read only keen intelligence there, tinted with a hint of concern. That, and his conscientiously clean cut hair, shaved cheeks and cultured British accent belied her first impressions of a muscle-bound meathead, opting instead for more of an exercise obsessed computer nerd pastiche.

An exceptionally rare breed indeed, but only the exceptional had been chosen to facilitate this once-in-a-lifetime mission. To shepherd a seed of humanity to their new home in the mysterious reaches of outer space. To make landfall and colonize New Eden–an admittedly flashy but unoriginal name for a planet–only the best and brightest had been selected.

Herself included…

“Forgive my poor table manners, Tucker.” She pleaded, lowering the empty bowl to the white plasti-steel tabletop and dabbing daintily at the corners of her mouth with a paper napkin he had considerately laid out for her. “No amount of reading medical accounts of post-stasis rehabilitation could have prepared me for actually experiencing it for myself.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, Doctor…”

“Maeve, please. There’s no need to stand on formality given the present circumstances.” She said, waving at the sea of identical tables and empty seats surrounding them. “Call me Maeve, then explain to me why you have thawed me ahead of arrival. Is there a medical emergency that requires my attention? Why are you even awake?”

The Perseus III was a state-of-the-art colonial seed ship. A one-of-a-kind vessel on the cutting edge of technology, outfitted with the latest, greatest semi-sentient caretaker AI to autopilot the ship, maintain its multitudinous systems, and watch over the itinerant pilgrims asleep in the hold.

That included the crew too. Every single member literally put on ice for decades of Earth’s years, scheduled to awaken on the final orbital approach of their interstellar destination. Unless a critical incident precipitated the need for a human crew member’s particular expertise, they were all supposed to be safely suspended in stasis.

So why had a senior systems administrator–a highly qualified IT tech-head–defrosted the future colony’s chief physician for help with a problem he had, presumably, been specifically awakened to deal with?

“No immediate medical emergency, no. More of a concern. But I can already see the gears spinning in your brain, Doctor. Please give me a moment to explain,” Tucker broke eye contact and fiddled nervously with the edge of the table. In the manner of a shy schoolboy before a stern teacher. “I was released from stasis to troubleshoot a logical conflict in mission protocols that Perseus–that’s the ship's AI–couldn’t resolve by itself. I’m kind of a glorified IT administrator for one of the most advanced quantum computers in existence.

“There were some unexpected hiccups in the base code of the operating system… That’s neither here nor there for someone of your expertise, but we were working on it when we started to notice changes. Ummm… like physical changes to ourselves, and in the regular biometric scans of those still held in stasis.”

That piqued Maeve’s curiosity and she gave the physically imposing young man’s towering body a critical once over before meeting his worried stare again.

“You keep using the plural pronoun to refer to yourself and others. Tucker… who else is awake aboard this ship right now?”

Letting out a weary sigh, Tucker’s gigantic shoulders slumping as the other shoe finally dropped.

“Probably best if I show you. It will be easier to explain once you have seen the situation for yourself.”

Doctor Maeve Hughes had earned her angel wings on the rough streets of Kolkata–formerly Calcutta, India–patching up the underprivileged and impoverished masses from a mobile street clinic that was little more than a rusty Suzuki minivan running on non-existent funding and well wishes.

The back of it had been stuffed full of clean gauze bandages, liters of blood orange antiseptic, terribly sparse UN first aid kits, and any medical supplies she could beg from the charity clinics she regularly frequented with sick patients in tow.

Born from the happy wedlock of a talented Irish-American surgeon and a gracious Bengali trauma nurse, she always felt destined for greatness, no matter what humble form took. Maeve had attended John Hopkins school of Medicine and graduated with honors, only to disappoint her overbearing father and delight her soft-hearted mother by announcing her intentions to spend her formative professional years serving in the Doctors without Borders program.

Maeve had been triage personified on those dusty streets. Cleaning and dressing wounds. Treating and wrapping burns. Setting and splinting broken limbs like an old frontier sawbones.

That was where the Andromeda Institute of Space Exploration and Xeno-Expansion approached her with the offer to practice her healing arts on the final frontier. To play the part of doctor in the founding of an entirely new world and nurse the first off-world human colony through its infancy.

The unique proposal promised rewarding opportunities, challenges and experiences that she could never hope to encounter on Earth’s well-trodden surface.

How could Maeve refuse?

Except now she was following Tucker’s impressive frame, striding down the empty corridors of the ship, she was haunted by an instinctive sense of unease.

“You’re telling me that a software glitch in the Perseus AI is having a physical effect on the colonists?” She asked, half jogging to keep up and trying not to stare at the way his sculpted rump moved in the tight jumpsuit. It was entirely too entrancing. “How is that possible… and can you please slow down a little?”

“Sorry, Maeve but I’m trying to maintain a safe distance.” He shot back over his shoulder. “It's turning out to be harder than I anticipated. I didn’t expect to find you so… distracting. Bear with me, we’re almost there.”

Distracting?

That wasn’t a word that Maeve would have used to describe her appearance. She was well aware that some men regarded her as pretty… she had inherited her mother’s rich inky hair, dark eyes, and slender figure which blended well with the fine Caucasoid features and porcelain pale skin of her father’s anglo lineage. But she had never turned more than a passing male head in the street.

Certainly not a beauty worthy of distraction. Especially not when wrapped shapelessly in a drab gray blanket with her hair all a tangled mess.

Tucker was also angling himself in a way that kept his back to her as they hurried through the ship. Even going so far as performing an odd sideways shuffle whenever they reached a turn. Was he actively trying to ignore her or simply more socially awkward than he had initially appeared?

“I think we’ve isolated the problem to the mission priority values, they’re completely out of whack and messing with Perseus’s decision making processes.” He muttered, speaking more to himself rather than Maeve.

“I’m going to need more context, Tucker… and maybe some eye contact when communicating with me.” She said levelly, running forward to grab one of his burly forearms.

She had only intended to guide him around to face her but she might as well have tried to steer a charging bull.

“No, NO! That will just make things worse. It’s bad enough that I can smell you!” He snapped, tearing his arm violently away before taking a deep breath to calm himself. “Forgive my brusqueness, Doctor. What I was trying to explain is that Perseus is a top-of-the-line intuitive artificial intelligence; with the capability of interpreting data and monitoring environs to independently respond to possible issues without the need for human oversight or permissions.

“As a Caretaker AI, Perseus has complete access and control of all the ship's systems. From astro-navigation down to sanitation and everything in between. It was designed to watch over us as we all slept, keeping us safe and the ship on an even keel. Perseus brought me out of stasis eleven days ago to assist in resolving a priority conflict, and that’s when I began to notice things were not as they should be.”

Tucker was moving again, big muscles bunched in obvious tension as he approached a large pair of reinforced double doors with the name “Engineering Bay” embossed into the top of the steel frame.

“With the ship’s AI? That still doesn’t explain the physical changes you alluded to, or what help I, as a medical professional, can offer with what sounds like a purely technological issue.” Maeve fidgeted nervously with the ends of her dark hair.

That was strange, she never fidgeted! Doctor Maeve Hughes snapped joints back into place and faced down Hindi street toughs without blinking. She chewed nails for breakfast and spat iron filings in the face of her detractors.

…But something about the senior technician’s bulky stature and elusive behavior had her on edge. As though there was a scent in the air that she couldn’t quite place.

Something slightly sour and musky, with a hint of earthy aniseed that the oxygen scrubbers didn’t filter out.

“That’s what I wanted to show you.” Tucker groaned, reaching down to press his palm to the hand scanner. It was the size of a catcher’s mitt. With an affirmative blip, the doors slid smoothly apart with a soft hiss. “I apologize in advance for what you are about to witness, but please understand that certain elements are completely out of our control.”

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