Six Twelve Series XL Iteration 5— Number Six Twelve and her six hundred and ninety-nine sisters had only been in space for ten days when Four Fifty-three committed suicide.
It was what she had been built for, but that didn’t make it any easier for the rest of them. They weren’t supposed to be able to stay in touch, but they were after all, clone sisters. Six Twelve knew the moment her sister embraced the dead BILSAT 14 and slowed herself and the satellite down, diving into the atmosphere to burn up.
It wasn’t anything like mystical mental telepathy – they were, after all, clones from She-Rah, the chimpanzee’s brain. A bio-support box pumped a slow trickle of nutrient broth into the fist-sized organ. Decanted from a gene-modified algae suspended in a translucent box, attached to a sensor using a gyroscope to keep the photosynthetic chamber aimed at the Sun. As long as the pump worked, she would have food to keep her alive.
Despite the bizarre system, there was a connection between them; a feeling that bound them together. If they’d been a real chimpanzee troupe instead of brains and artificial nerves integrated into a Swiss-Maid-American-knock-off clean up satellite, they’d have screamed at the full Moon hanging over them, and thrown rocks, turf, and feces, railing against the injustice of it all.
But nothing of the sort happened. Six Twelve and her six hundred and ninety-eight sisters fell endlessly in their orbits around Earth.
Weeks passed before One Forty-eight’s orbit intersected another piece of space junk. It was big and the engrams laid carefully in the brains at BioSuperior Systems, Inc. in the basement of the Minneapolis St. Paul Vertical Village made her feel like she should call for one of her sisters to help.
Six Twelve heard the call. Even though Seven Thirty-two was closer, she twitched her orbit with puffs of gas spurted from tiny attitude jets at the sudden compulsion to join One Forty-eight.
Seven Thirty-two screamed at her to back off.
Without thinking, Six Twelve screamed at her sister just as vehemently that she’d gotten the call first.
Seven Thirty-two’s jets flared and in moments, she’d joined One Forty-eight. Together they wrapped their arms around the huge piece of a Russian-made Multi Filtration and Volatile Removal Apparatus from a failed space station. Thirty minutes later, all of XL-5 felt their sisters die, leaving a silver streak in a midnight sky. Six Twelve wondered what it would have looked like from the ground. As she passed over savannahs reclaimed from the sprawl that had been Nairobi, she would have blinked in surprise if she’d had eyes or eyelids or facial muscles. For an instant, she saw the meteoric scratch against a velvet night sprinkled with diamond stars.
Then all she knew was the slow sweep of her sensors as they kept an eagle eye out for space junk.
Weeks piled into months. Months became years. Six Twelve’s sisters killed themselves off slowly, as if they were reluctant.
She didn’t know it, but a dozen people lost their jobs at BioSuperior Systems, Inc. because their product wasn’t performing as advertised. The plaintiffs lost their suits because the Swiss-Maid-American-knock-offs were doing their jobs. Just not fast enough for the plaintiffs. As no time limit had been stipulated in the original contracts, BioSuperior Systems, Inc. got off scot free. However, legal counsel advised them that they had better figure out what was wrong with their product and include a reasonable completion time estimate for future contracts. They agreed, of course.
Six Twelve felt the suicides of nearly five hundred of her sisters. She might have grown numb, but that was not part of the engram overlay in her brain. This was more primitive, perhaps something missed in the initial DNA scrub BioSuperior Systems, Inc. had done. The Real Swiss Maid Corporation realized early on that constantly burning up even minute quantities of precious metals and plastics used in the programming chips removed them forever from the possibility of recovery. Their use fell into the debit category every time a ship went up. They were keen to find an alternative. BioSuperior, Inc. offered them programmed flesh in the form of chimp brains. Set in acceleration gel and connected to artificial muscle fibers, modified arms could grab any dead satellite and drag it to a fiery death. Not only that, the brains could assess situations in a way no hardware could possibly do, adapting to a narrow range of situations with animal efficiency. Of course, the brains would burn up on reentry, but a little carbon and iron was worth far less on the open market than gold and petroleum products.
Swiss Maid went bankrupt after they turned down the contract deal with BioSuperior, Inc. who later purchased the hardware plant but not the name. They went into business for themselves.
Six Twelve knew that she would one day feel the irresistible compulsion to grab a satellite, make a deorbiting burn and plunge to her own death. Six Twelve and possibly eighty-six of her sisters had yet to hear the call to gives their lives.
If she’d been a Human with a mouth, trachea, larynx, and a lung, she’d have said, “Some choice!” Her unspoken sentiment was the same.
The immanence of her suicide started to feel like a lion stalking her on the savannah. Was there any possible choice she might make? In her simple primate way, she grew paranoid.
Every time she passed into light, she sensed that it might be her last sunrise.
One evening, sister Three Fifteen and Oh Twenty-six were called to an unidentified wreck that appeared to be a shuttle of unusual make. Oh Twenty-six took a picture and beamed it down to Earth. Six Twelve didn’t know she could do that. What if there were other things she didn’t know she could do? She was far enough away to not hear the call, but others joined them until there were an even dozen. Two of her sisters – Five hundred and Oh Oh Three missed their grab and fell away to burn up, their purpose unfulfilled. Six Seventy-five took hold, but one of her arms broke off. The other nine tried to fire their thrusters in unison but Six Sixty-six exploded, taking out One Eleven and Four Oh One. The others did their job and with the help of Six Sixty-six’s detonation, a few moments later, the entire mass burned up in a spectacular, colorful streak of glowing plasma.
Six Twelve felt alone. She had also forgotten something about her name. It was significant, but she couldn’t remember why. She had no one to ask – she had no idea if she even could ask.
It was entirely possible as well as clearly stated in the prospectus that there was an expected loss rate of twelve percent. A certain number of the Swiss-Maid-American-knock-offs would neither accomplish their mission nor be accounted for at some later date. There was of course, a self-destruct sequence built in, in case Six Twelve or her sisters were ever in danger of becoming space junk themselves.
Two months passed. Six Twelve passed no one in the 612 Series XL-5 and though she tried, could no longer sense any of the others. Convinced that her own number had come up, she conceived of an alternate response to her inevitable call to suicide. It was a simple response. She didn’t have enough brain power to plan or create scenarios. It was only a slight deviation from the engram that had doomed her sisters.
A few more weeks passed and a small object intercepted her orbit. Before she was entirely aware of it, she’d opened her arms and embraced a piece of debris from a dead American satellite. The stencil of the flag was still clearly visible.
An instant before the compulsion to ignite her deorbit rocket became overwhelming, she responded. She’d practiced reorienting her attitude jets regularly since she’d conceived the new response. Now it was a reflex.
She started to spin.
Faster and faster she went. It was good that she’d been in full sunlight because she could sense when her arms were in sunlight or in the dark, facing Earth. When she judged the moment right, she let go, flinging the space junk down into the planetary gravity well. As she spared a few spurts of reaction mass to slow down her spin, she watched the piece of junk flash into plasma and fade away.
If she could have, she might have sighed in relief, but as the last of the compulsion faded, she fell into a new stable orbit. Weeks passed. She neither heard nor saw a sister from the 612 Series XL-5. Her chimpanzee mind could only do a few things, but one of those things was feel loneliness. The order to attach to a piece of space debris, deorbit, and die would never come again because those who had made her considered her dead weeks or months or even years ago. 612 Series XL-5 – Number Six Twelve spun around the planet ten more times until she was just over the land straddling the equator. Looking at it gave her a compulsion of a different kind. She could make a choice. She fired her thruster for last
time, aiming it at the deep darkness of space to start the plunge home.
