Ballerina Justice and the Bro-bots of Peace

De-El led Jerry through a dozen corridors, into the bowels of the station. There were layers of dust and grime on the walls and floors, though Jerry was hard pressed to determine where it had all come from, on a sealed station floating in the vacuum of space. It was true that whatever life spent time on the station had a tendency to…

And before we can even get going, we are thrust into a lesson about the nature of the space station, how it operates, who visits it, and what sort of problems arise from a station like this flying through space. In particular, our lesson focuses on the nature of dust and grime, and some particularly resilient forms of bacterial life. As usual, we are burdened by the assumption that the integrity of this lesson is in doubt, and go to great lengths to justify what comes down to a little dust and dirt. In the interest of keeping things moving along, we will take it for granted that a station as unsophisticated as this galactic rest stop gets a little dirty sometimes, and try to keep things moving.

They soon arrived at a door marked CRYOGENIC CHAMBERS, underneath which sign was another, stating the rates for various lengths of stay along with the associated fine print. Jerry and De-El entered without knocking.

The air in the room had a stale feeling to it that, if possible, was even more pronounced than in the rest of the station. Inside the room, there were three rows of chambers that looked something like glass coffins, each with an information label near the foot. All were clear, as if no condensation had been allowed to gather during the freezing process, and most appeared to be empty. De-El walked down the second row and stopped about two-thirds of the way down. “Here he is.”

Jerry walked over to join him.

The man lying in the chamber looked grizzled. He had a full beard and long hair growing wildly, a pockmarked face, overly long nails, and a scar above his left eye. Of course the hair and nails were the result of the long sleep, but there was still something about him that gave Jerry pause. It was impossible to tell if he looked dangerous with his eyes closed, but Jerry immediately assumed he was and prepared himself for the worst. “Do we need to find a manager or technician or somebody?” Jerry asked.

“You’re looking at him, son,” De-El replied. “In the off-season, I’m pretty much everybody. What’s the phrase? Chief cook and bottle washer.” He knelt down at the foot of the chamber, below the label, and punched in some numbers. There was a clicking sound, followed by a slow hiss, and the glass chamber began to fog up.

“What about security? Is this guy dangerous?”

“Dangerous enough...if you’re on his bad side.” Jerry didn’t look appeased, but De-El gave a little laugh. “It’s alright. I don’t think we have to worry.”

De-El opened up the chamber and waited. For several minutes, nothing at all happened. Jerry had never seen someone come out of cryo, and was starting to wonder just how long it would take. He was committed to quietly waiting there with De-El, partially because asking how long it would take wouldn’t actually change anything for him, and partially because he was embarrassed for not knowing. After about ten minutes though, Jerry decided he was being ridiculous, and had finally decided to ask De-El, when the Captain saved him the trouble by opening his eyes. De-El was the first to speak.

“Good morning, Captain. Sleep well?”

The Captain stretched his mouth a bit, and took some time to gather his wits. Coming out cryo was a bit like getting out of bed on the weekend. You know you don’t have any sleep left in you, but it feels harder than ever to get up, as if the fog that surrounded you had actual weight, holding you down. “I feel like a hundred bucksh,” he said, a little slur forcing itself upon his still half-frozen mouth.

“That’s the spirit,” De-El replied. “Just lie there for a few minutes while the atrophy compensators finish their cycle. You’ll be yourself in no time.”

“Whatever you shay, bossh, just sho long as you tell me you’ve got a good shtiff drink on the way. What a headache.” The Captain closed his eyes again for a few moments, and then opened them. He was starting to feel the warmth flow though his body, and his mind was starting to wake up. “So the sheason’s started?”

“Not exactly, Captain.”

“What do you mean...not exactly?” There was a vague threat in his voice, already, even while still half-frozen.

“By not, Captain, I mean that we are still in the off-season, and the three of us are the only beings on the station capable of waking actions. By exactly, I mean that although your question was strictly related to the current time period, I assumed your first concern continues to be your primary goal, rather than the secondary one you hoped would help you achieve it. As your primary goal was to find a navigator and, if I may quote you directly, “get the hell off this floating cemetery”, I concluded that were I to find a navigator for you before the season began, you would be pleased to wake up prematurely.”

“You’re a crazy robot, De-El. Never a word when a lecture will do.”

“You know me better than I know myself, Captain.”

The Captain turned and lifted his head as much as he could to look Jerry over.

“I take it this is the navigator?”

Jerry looked at De-El for guidance, and De-El took the hint. “This is Dr. Jerry Strohman. He’s not a professional navigator, but he’s got the math to get you where you can find one.”

“How much do you want?” The Captain said to Jerry.

Jerry looked to De-El again. “He would like to get as close to Earth as possible. I’ll pay for his keep.”

“Does he speak?”

This time De-El looked to Jerry, who took the hint in turn. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to help you. Like you, I’m stuck here against my will and could use a little help getting out of here.”

“Like me? What the hell do you know about me?” The Captain struggled against his restraints but got nowhere. “De-El get me outta this thing.”

De-El pressed a few more buttons and the Captain became unrestrained. Even with the atrophy compensators, however, moving was still a struggle. He could barely sit up, and De-El and Jerry put a hand on either side to help him.

Jerry spoke with deference. “I don’t mean to compare myself to you, Captain. That’s not what I meant. I am only looking to make my way to Earth and am grateful for any opportunity to make some headway.”

“Alright, forget it. I’m always a little cranky when I come out of cryo. The Captain put out his hand and Jerry shook it. “Ok, you’re stranded here and want a ride to Earth. But people don’t just get stranded, at least not people smart enough to run navigation machines. And De-El doesn’t help just anybody. So what else? What aren’t you telling me?”

De-El jumped in. “Captain, let’s go to the diner for a cup of coffee and get you warmed up. We’ll give you the whole story there.” He motioned to Jerry who as a result noticed a hover chair in the corner, and went to bring it back. They loaded the Captain in the chair, and made their way back to the diner.

Along the way to the diner, we learn that the Captain is formally known as Captain Bernard Etchcovitz, although everybody calls him Captain. He runs a shady sort of import/export business, and has a pretty good record of avoiding the law when he needs to. He had stopped by this station for fuel and minor maintenance when his navigator got spotted by an off duty police robot thing, and the navigator, who had a long history of run-ins with the law, had come out shooting. The robot shot back and the Captain, though loyal to a fault, took his cue from his dead shipmate and went into hiding with the help of his old friend De-El.

Now the Captain was interested in only three things: making back what he lost when his cargo got seized, getting as far away from this station as possible, and most importantly, laying low.

The Captain had just finished his second bowl of Kelly root soup as Jerry wound down his story. He looked at Jerry incredulously.

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight, Doctor.” He said “doctor” with such disdain it was impossible to mistake his attitude toward the educated class. Like so many self-made men, he had an inherent distrust of what he thought of as intellectual elites. He had lived most of his life believing that their know-it-all attitude was ultimately responsible for the rise of the robots and subsequent oppression of the human race. Doctor was not a word he said lightly. “You used that big brain of yours to help those garbage creeps take over the galaxy, until they finally broke you and sent you to the colonies, where you’ve been wallowing in self-pity for over a decade. And now what? They set up a trap for you and you’re trying to walk into it?”

“A trap?”

“Of course. What else could it be? This guy who you say betrayed you suddenly calls you with just the sort of information you would be expecting, and cuts out before you can fully question him?”

“It can’t be,” Jerry said. “It doesn’t make any sense. I was already rotting half a galaxy away. Why even bother?”

“You tell me, Doctor. You’re the one with the brains. Besides, I want to head away from Earth, not toward it, and the last thing I need is a bunch of Tru-bots on my tail. So unless you’ve got something more compelling…”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Captain. I really don’t think this is a trap, but I’d be a fool to think it wasn’t possible. I admit you’ve got the first part pretty much dead on. Whether or not the garbage creeps, as you call them, took over the galaxy was never my concern. Maybe it should have been. I don’t know. At the time I was just interested in the science, and trying to please my wife by holding down a steady job. I didn’t know if they were hurting our race or not, and to be honest, I didn’t care. All I knew was that they seemed more interested in making money than anything else, and although I found it distasteful, I hadn’t yet moved on to morally repugnant.”

Jerry took a deep breath and tried to gather his thoughts. “So yeah, I guess I helped them do business, and I definitely screwed up in my work. And yes, they broke me, and yes, I gave up in the colonies, leaving them alone to destroy the universe. I figured somebody else could stop them. I figured that sometime in the next 200 years, before this turned into an irreversible crisis, someone else would fix it. And I gave up.”

Jerry took a sip of coffee while De-El and the Captain waited for him to continue. “And maybe we still do have 200 years. To be honest, I’m not sure what the full implications of this hole are. But I believe Elbert, Captain, and the evidence he showed scares me. Even at the outside risk that this is somehow a trap, I’ve got to know for sure.

“I may be going into the nest, as you call it, but I don’t see any other way. Maybe the future of the universe hangs in the balance. Maybe not. Maybe this will bring down RTI. Maybe not. I wish I could offer you more, Captain, but it’s all I’ve got.”

The Captain slammed his fists on the table. “I’ve spent a lifetime dodging the unstoppables, Doctor. And you say maybe you made a mistake? Like you cheated on your taxes, or fell off the wagon? I lost my entire family in the last war.”

“Huh?”

Jerry just looked vacantly at the Captain. Suddenly, he had know idea what they were talking about. They appeared to be in some sort of stare down, but over what, Jerry was completely unaware. He grasped at the first straw he could see. “I know I helped make these creeps a lot of money, money that bought them a lot of power. But RTI isn’t fighting a war. They’re just garbage men. At worst they’re environmentally irresponsible.”

“Enviro what?”

The tension in the diner was now nearly unbearable, as if any moment the Captain would draw his weapon and end Jerry’s adventure then and there.

“These guys are the biggest arms suppliers in the galaxy. They single handedly drove our people to the brink of extinction.”

“What are you talking about?”

De-El and the Captain looked at each other. Clearly Jerry was more than a step behind them. It gave the Captain no small satisfaction that this doctor, educated and book smart as he was, remained ignorant of one of the most important discoveries of the last decade. And as the doctor went from enemy to stupid before his eyes, the Captain’s anger subsided into vague suspicion.

De-El helped Jerry out. “He’s talking about the unstoppables, Jerry.”

“Well what do I have to do with the unstoppables? I’ve never even seen one.”

The Captain and De-El looked at each other again. Maybe this guy was as stupid as he looked. The Captain turned to Jerry and said, “Do you know how they work?”

“What? The unstoppables? Well…to be honest, I don’t know much about them. I think they are more or less energy inverters. They run on some sort of top secret fuel source and, from what I’ve heard, scramble whatever matter they come into contact with on an atomic level. In the process, whatever life they focus on is destroyed.”

“Destroyed is putting it mildly, Doctor. When a human gets shot with an unstoppable, he deflates like a popped balloon. His skin melts into his body, and what’s inside leaks out in fifty directions at once. His head crushes until it disappears, and the only thing left to identify him is the scream that seems to echo on forever. They are gruesome disgusting weapons, and they cannot be wielded except by those who have no soul. And even if a human could wield one, it wouldn’t matter because they only work on organic life. It’s a one-way game.”

Jerry absorbed as he stared back at the Captain. He had known about as much about the destructive force of those weapons as most, but he was still baffled as to what they had to do with RTI. When no one spoke, he finally said what he was thinking. “What does this have to do with me?”

“It has everything to do with you, Doctor. There is only one reason Robo-trash exists, and it isn’t to clean up your backyard. Those dumps, as they call them are done solely for the purpose of gathering fuel for the unstoppables.”

“But how do they…” Jerry shut off mid-sentence as the epiphany spread throughout his whole being. He was suddenly filled with a dreadful sickness that welled up from his stomach and threatened to suck any bit of life still left in him. Why had it never occurred to him before?

Here, ostensibly though Our hero’s thoughts, we learn the nature of the trash business and the ways in which it can be used for evil ends. Apparently our next-door neighbor, referred to at various points in the book as the other-verse, the Sedgewick Universe, or more prosaically, the other universe, operates on an entirely different set of physical laws than our own. By sending matter from our universe into the other, one sets up an incompatibility that leads to the release of massive amounts of energy, as this matter attempts to adjust itself to life in its new home. If that energy can be harnessed in the form of fuel, it can be used for weapons.

Although we have been led to believe that our hero is a highly intelligent scientist prone to think outside the box and notice things no one else does, we are now asked to believe that he spent years doing science for a company with the capacity to create such huge releases of energy, without ever considering how that energy might be exploited. This notion seems not only unlikely, but incongruous with our hero’s character. The best we can do under the circumstances, however, is to assume that, like so many scientists, he became so distracted by his own projects that he completely failed to see anything that did not directly relate to them — an absent minded professor focused solely on his work to the exclusion of everything else around him. We might even go so far as to call this “Ball’s Complaint”, which should make us feel a little better about the whole thing.

In any case, our hero now considers his lack of insight and wrestles with his soul. He convinces himself the Captain is right, that the unstoppable weapons that have held down his fellow man since the end of the last war were only made possible by harnessing the energy created during the garbage dumps, and curses himself for helping the robots, however unwittingly, enslave the human race.

As you can imagine, the torturing of our hero’s soul goes on for some time, by the end of which we are reconciled to the fact that he does indeed suffer from Ball’s Complaint, rather than the combination of stupidity and negligence we had previously feared. His soul searching complete, he comes back to life.

“Of course. How could I have been so stupid?” Jerry turned to De-El and the Captain with new purpose. “How did you find out?”

De-El and the Captain exchanged looks, and De-El signaled for the Captain to speak. “De-El here used to work on a scowl. He saw it all first hand, long before the news went public.”

“Public? You mean everybody knows?”

“Well, maybe public isn’t the right word. The robots call most of us conspiracy theorists, and treat us like a crazy fringe element, but...”

Jerry turned to De-El. “But you’ve seen it happen.”

“Yes, Jerry. I have. They have a gravitational sensor that doubles as a sort of energy conversion tool tied into a storage system that they call the fuel storage overflow capacitator. Are you following me so far?”

“Don’t look at me. I don’t even know what language you’re speaking,” the Captain said, lightheartedly.

Jerry, however, seemed to be following just fine, and said, “I must admit, I always thought those overflow capacitators were a bit overkill, but I wasn’t really in the ship building business.”

“Well, they’re not used for overflow fuel. At least not the fuel used on those ships. While the sensors are running, the energy is flowing right into those units for transport.”

“I should have guessed what they were up to,” Jerry said, “If only I’d been paying attention. It all makes so much sense now. So many things, actually. I’ve never felt so stupid in my life.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Kid. It’s not like you could have done anything about it even if you had known. There just would have been some other scientist doing their dirty work, like there was after you left.”

“Maybe I could have sabotaged them.”

“Sabotage?” the Captain asked, his ears pricking up.

“Well...it’s pretty complicated...but let me put it like this. The rips are controlled with a balanced formula that I think could be changed to backfire and dwindle, instead of lead to the chain reaction that rips the holes....”

“Go on.”

“I was just thinking...the ships all connect to central brain. If I could get at the brain, maybe I could break down the system.”

“Could? As in still could?”

“Maybe. If I could track down the codes to get me into the central brain. If I could do that, their ability to rip might be gone forever. And if they can’t rip, their energy source would be gone. Once their reserves run out, of course.”

De-El and the Captain looked at each other. Jerry had lain down the gauntlet. Help me to do my business, and maybe I can help with yours. Don’t, and you’re back where you started, but with a two-week suspension before you can go back into hibernation.

De-El took the lead. “I’ve got a good feeling about him, Captain. She wouldn’t let me protect him if he wasn’t important. I know She doesn’t mean much to you, but you know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

The Captain did what he always did in situations like this. He made a quick decision, to which he would then commit to the bitter end. It was the single most important trait in any captain, and he had it in spades. “Chart a course to A.C. Way. I can pick up another Nav there and you can get a lift to Earth. I’ll hold off the Tru-bots if they come after us along the way, or we’ll go down together. Once we get to A.C. Way, though, you’re on your own.” He stuck out his hand.

“You won’t regret it, Captain,” Jerry said as he shook the Captain’s hand.

“I already do, Doctor,” the Captain replied. “I already do.”

And with that bit of overly melodramatic dialog, we jump ahead to their destination, the mysterious A.C. Way, where we join up with a field trip of sixth graders, many of whom have left their solar system for the first time.