"2549 Ganymede (23.17.46.11) * Episode 15"

iodoorclubmunich (49)in #life • 7 years ago (edited)

Source: THE ENGINEERS

TRIADS' TRAGEDY

The three girls living and loving together were the offspring of 8 generations of Muslim mechanics and engineers: all three were educated as gardeners and participated in the responsibility of the hydroponic gardens.

Due to the nature of their work, they could work both one and two years before going back to cold sleep.

They had met and joined triad while on Charon. Apart from work, there was basically nothing else to do than lovemaking, sleeping or eating, and the food was not that good.

Ines, the daughter of the gardener Mustafa was the one who liked a good flirt, then Kenzie – whose father had family tree back to Casablanca before the riots.

The third of them, Annette, had great-great and so on from Nairobi. Annette was usually the more serious of them, always ready with a quick and logical remark when the others became too whimsical.

They were into their 5th awake period, so the ship was now halfway on the planned trajectory. In their previous period, Ines had given them their first offspring, a girl.

Despite Ines’ wish, the little girl was put in deep freeze with her, and now wakens together with the triad, just as Annette had demanded.

The gardeners as a group had been informed that the destination had two planets with widely different conditions, so they bred plants in two different environments as well For Alpha, with a controlled environment and a lower gravity, they had chosen the cultivated plants – both the more decorative flowers and the ones for food production that gave the best yield.

For Beta, that seemingly had a much better climate for food production they had chosen to cultivate the more practical kind of plants and changed them somewhat to handle the 1.3 gravity (always compared to Earth).

Working with plants is always a hands-on job. It takes generations of cultivation to bring forward the exact variable one is looking for.

Even though gardening methods had increased in efficiency over the many, many millennia since the first woman planted some wheat and corn seeds, gardening is still a job for people with near unlimited patience.

This triad worked on the cultivation of a new plant, a hybrid between sweet potato and carrot.

It would not be affected with the higher gravity, and the result would be higher in nutrition value.
It could be cooked and mashed, sliced as a salad, baked or fried.

The frustration lied in the mystery that the end result had a much lower percentage of beta carotene than what they were looking for: An increase. The debate had been going through the better half of two awakenings now.

While the girls were in deep sleep, the robots tended the cultivated plants and developed the variables as instructed.

Going through the development for each one of them, a painstakingly job, Annette could not find where the error was.

Even though this was a side-project – they had many more important tasks to work through when awake – the frustration was thick as porridge. It didn’t take much to ignite a quarrel about any insignificant detail.

In the bedroom Ines was giving milk to her daughter, her daughter resting on her arm in the bed.

“Why are you still breastfeeding her, she is soon two years old?” It was Annette.

“Because we both like it, and we feel close together,” she answered.

“It is not natural!”

“Says who?”

“Says all the books”, Annette retorted as she brought up some titles on their common display.

“Really?” Ines answered and listed up an equal amount of titles that defended her view.

“Kenzie!” they shouted.

She came out of the shower spray cabinet: “Yes?”

“How long is it natural for a mother to breastfeed her child?” Annette asked her.

“’Natural’? That was a loaded way of asking this question!” Ines was slowly getting angry.

Kenzie answered them both, slowly and quietly – “in my opinion it must be up to the mother”.

It ended the quarrel, but the morning was totally wasted. Kenzie quickly finished her breakfast routines and went to the hydroponic park to do a detailed checkup, a project that would take her several days to complete.

Better that, than to listen to the bickering.

Ines too left the common areas rather early, she had laboratory work for the Alpha plants, and that laboratory was placed further out from the center tube, to naturally simulate the gravity on the planet.

On the way, she dropped off her daughter at the nursery.

For the Beta plants they were for the most dependent upon the computer simulations, and from time to time they would send trays of saplings over to the mechanics’ wheel-shaped ship.

Again, Annette went through the results for the experiment over the 50-year period.

She called up the nutrient details for the whole period and placed them all on the wall, and closed up on the trend for each one of them – who was getting better readings, who was losing value?

Oda gave her access to more wet-ware. Even so, it took more than three hours before she almost had to give up in frustration – there simply was no correlation.

Oda’s voice in her head: “What if I lent you some Sherlock’s?

Most of them are in storage anyway. I have given them an update; it would be nice to test how good they have become.”

Just afterwards, ten Sherlock’s and their bee swarm came to her lab.

The leader of them said “what reference book have you used?

It is not listed in the project presentation.” She gave them the titles, all of them were to be found in the Academy library and the Sherlock’s didn’t spend many microseconds.

“Your saplings are grown in a nutrition solution. However, these roots must be grown in soil – the roots don’t like direct lab light. Elementary, Annette.”

With that they all left her.

She got the wet-ware to do a simulation on all the saplings being grown in soil over the 50 year period, to see if there was any significant difference.

It was: For each generation, the nutrition value increased, including the beta carotene. Annette was very pleased.

Ines was not so pleased. Her laboratory now looked more like a jungle – with chrysanthemums big as umbrellas, tomatoes the size of a handball, elephant grass taller than bamboo and an endless variety of smaller plants and flowers climbing all the way to the ceiling – 10 meters up.

The problem lay in choosing which ones to cultivate further and which ones to leave behind.

In the meantime, Kenzie was in quite another jungle.

Taking the central Tube, she was now at the rear, where the more sturdy plants and a few trees grew.

The thought was to establish a large group of saplings that could grow into trees to protect the edible plants.

The ozone layer on Beta was fairly thin, so they had cultivated trees that gave long shadow, and tested them close to the engines.

After her little “happy dance”, Annette sat down again to go through the project details and to find why it was decided to use the nutrition liquid – she could not recall making that decision herself.

She soon found it: It was in the experiment parameters, naturally!

They had not been made as joint affair, instead it was Ines who had written them, and she and Kenzie had approved.

And for this she had been frustrated two Awake periods! Just because of Ines’ sloppiness and her trusting her!
It made her crazy. She called up on Ines and showed her the findings.

“Annette, calm down! This was just the standard template – I simply changed the request for the final result to calculate how many generations were needed.

Besides, you and Kenzie were supposed to do the QC on my presumptions!”

“Ines, this is not over,” Annette said, now in a calmer voice.

Meanwhile, in the rear of the ship, Kenzie was slowly working her way forward in the jungle, going in a spiral track.

From time to time she dropped to the inner growth, checking for changes in the plants. So far, all was normal.

She came to the dark and damp midsection where the fungus grew, both on the rim and on the inner part.

The only light here, were the rows of LED directed directly on the fungus.

She plucked some of the “funny” ones she had helped develop over the years, and stuffed in her outer pockets.

It was getting late, and she informed the others she was going to sleep in the park.

In the middle of the jungle they had established a small park, with benches and tables.

She ate some of the mushrooms and laid down for a relaxed sleep.

The alarm came from the nursery- Ines had now shown up to fetch her daughter.

One of the still awake Sherlock’s released his bees to do a search on the areas the girl had last been seen.

It was not for long before they found her, stabbed multiple times with a gardeners’ tool, and probably bled to death.

A sniffer was called for and a 3D image was made, including all the smell around the body and the nearest area.

The system automatically tried to get hold of both Annette and Kenzi, but as neither of them answered, a similar search was performed.

They were both found where they were expected to be, but in very bad shape: They both had multiple wounds from a sharp article, a knife or scissors.

Oda made a decision –as she focused on running the ships she decided to release the latest update for all the Sherlock’s, the version 10.

Now, they could work totally independent from any human interference. In addition she had given them free will.

The large group of Sherlock’s got together as one. The One started to think.

Images of timeline started to glow, of events to come, of decisions to make – and then focused on the mystery at hand.

The other thoughts continued though in the background, and some stored for future analysis.

Center Tube leads from the living quarters – and also the control center, the nursery and other common areas – all the way to the rear and to the gate to the engine rooms.

The 20 kilometer is traversed end to end in less than three minutes with no traffic.

That day, less than 20 people had used the Tube in either direction.

Their analysis found that Ines died at around lunchtime, a very quiet period.

Kenzie must have been stabbed at around midnight – and Annette shortly after.

Midnight was also a quiet period. The sniffer found some female human smell in the Tube from that period, but no human waste.

All three girls were dressed in the standard gardeners’ clothing, green-grey one-body with lots of pockets for collection of samples and tools.

On Kenzi they found hallisogenic mushrooms, quote common among the crew.

There was no residue under either’s fingers apart from natural soil and plant waste.

They checked the brain pattern for the last communications with the ship’s systems.

Not surprisingly, the last communication from Kenzie was the iris and voice recordings for her plant check-ups that day, then her message to the two that she would sleep in the park, unanswered.

Records showed that she had slept in the park on earlier expeditions too, so no surprise there.

Ines stopped transmitting findings at lunchtime, without any alarm that she was attacked. None of her tools had any blood on them, and the frustrated sniffer could not identify any other human in particular from the myriad of smells in this compact jungle of flowers and other plants.

Annette’s recordings were obviously surprisingly clear as she half the time was surrounded by the collective group of Sherlock’s and in neuro-contact with Oda.

In addition to the direct contact: Her lamentations before and after the findings, especially her outburst to Ines.

It was time for a new gathering; this time they asked Oda to join them.

“I/we have concluded, Oda.” The noun amused her, but she refrained from a comment.

“Tell us your findings then, Sherlock.”

“I/we find it of outmost interest that the temperature in Annettes laboratory was adjusted drastic for a period of time.”

“How do you conclude that?”

“Elementary, Oda. A number of the youngest saplings meant for the temperate zone had obviously been exposed for a temperature they were no meant for, a very low one.”

“I see where you are going – a body at low temperature will look as if it had been stabbed later than the reality.”

“That is correct.”

“Did not Kenzi report from the hydroponics all day?”

“Not when she was having lunch.”

“Well, that is only natural.”

“Also, we believe her to be outside Annette’s laboratory when she sent the last message – and that both of the other girls was unable to answer.”

“And how do you conclude that?”

“There was a manual change on the outside temperature control. Annette never uses that one. The change was set just minutes before the message.”

“I'we also found that the mushroom was eating almost 15 minutes after she sent the message, and that makes no sense as she said in the message that she was already in the park.”

Annette came out of coma a few days later and confirmed the stabbing of her.

Oda had no prison or any legal system; she simply ordered the girl frozen and Ines’ daughter frozen as well, thinking this was a matter better suited for the future colony to handle when the time came.