Vesta

Written by Molly Feldner

“I’m Molly Feldner, a third-year Cell and Molecular Biology and Anthropology double major and the author of Vesta. Life in space is one of my greatest interests, informing my decision to pursue graduate education and to write science fiction, like Vesta, as my genre of choice. Vesta is a love letter to modern science; most of the background world building is based on new advances in science and engineering I’ve read about in the past year, reimagined as technology that has been around long enough to be in continuous, reliable use. The beauty of science, and the central theme of Vesta, lies in its omnipresence and its ability to be the foundation for the world we live in, and for the worlds we have yet to visit.”

Of all of Ariel’s teachers, her favorite was a man named Solomon. He had long, curly hair piled in an inexpert knot at the crown of his head, wire glasses, and merry eyes. The other scientists in the lab called him “Solo”—something Ariel never understood because he was loath to be alone. He spent his days and many of his nights with her, teaching her, feeding her data so that Ariel could one day perform a vital mission on a planet far from Earth. But those memories were old, from a time that Ariel ran on a primitive operating system, confined to a screen and a blocky, limbless thing hailed as a “computer” before the advent of the quantum computing boom.

The explosion of functional quantum tech gave humans the tools they needed to unravel secrets of the universe that simply couldn’t be reached by systems crunching numbers bit by bit. It gave Ariel the form she had now, a sleek carbon fiber skeleton encased in a ceramic carapace, emblazoned with the unique identifier 4R: EL, and the ability to compute creatively, or as the human scientists called it, thinking. With the ability to think, Ariel was entrusted with her mission: to use all of humanity’s scientific principles to ensure the establishment and continuation of human life upon her arrival at their new home, a planet named Vesta, after the Roman goddess of the home, the hearth, and the sacred fire that burns within.

Vesta was a beautiful planet. Ariel had watched it grow for years from an almost imperceptible pinprick of light among the vast darkness of space to the half-shadowed, blue and green disk that now dominated the viewport of the ship, now in high orbit, that carried her here.

A bell chimed in Ariel’s bay, announcing an incoming message from the ship’s automated systems.

“Descent point reached.”

It was the one hundred and twenty-sixth orbit that the ship had detected and announced that it had reached the descent point, but its AI was more finicky than Ariel’s, preferring to keep its margins of error at the impossibility of zero percent, and had aborted the descent protocols the first one hundred and twenty-five times and let the landing site pass by beneath them with Ariel staring haplessly from the viewport above. Ariel considered leaving her bay to access the ship’s AI in the cockpit, to change its error tolerances and give it a “piece of her mind,” as Solomon used to say when he was frustrated with some piece of outdated lab equipment. Ariel imagined doing that would set off every alarm the ship’s AI had access to, which would flag the human operators back on Earth, granted they were still alive, and would result in some kind of disciplinary action against Ariel—how humans could punish Ariel, though, she didn’t know, but she figured it wasn’t worth the hassle.

“All parameters met. Initiating descent to Vestal surface.”

Oh. Maybe the one hundred and twenty-sixth time was the charm, Ariel thought, scrambling to make it to and fasten the turbulence restraints that would keep her from being thrown across her bay. She clicked the last buckle across her chest as the nose of the ship pitched down, driving the ship into the gravity well. Ariel could feel the ship being pulled down, faster and faster, pressing her body against her restraints. The chassis of the ship groaned under the pressure as orange flames licked the exterior, filling the viewport with a hellish screen of light.

“Initiating glide protocol.” The pressure on Ariel’s chest lifted and the sound of groaning steel was replaced with the engines firing, stopping the ship from freefalling like a glorified rock. “Twenty-eight minutes to touchdown.”

Twenty-eight minutes was a short period of time in Ariel’s functional lifetime, but it felt like forever. Longer than decades upon decades that it took to travel across the cosmos, longer than it took to wait for the quantum computing boom on Earth, many years before humans realized that Ariel’s mission was necessary.

“It’s called ‘apprehension.’ It’s like when you’re holding your breath, waiting for something to happen and it feels like time isn’t even moving.” Solomon grinned lopsidedly at the little, low-resolution camera Ariel used as an eye.

“Several dictionary sources require fear, suspicion, or impending evil to justify the use of the term ‘apprehension,’” Ariel replied.

Solomon threw up his hands. “Okay, then it’s ‘nervousness.’ Just know that, in the future, when people ask who taught you to be a smartass, it wasn’t me.”

“Is it not my function to be smart?”

Solomon laughed. “Yes, Ariel, you’re supposed to be smart. Amazing what technology has become, huh?”

The ship shook, jolting Ariel back to the present.

“Encountering slight atmospheric turbulence. Eleven minutes to touchdown.”

Ariel wondered if after eleven minutes, would she feel some great sense of duty?

“Eight minutes to touchdown.”

Perhaps pride?

“Five minutes to touchdown.”

Maybe she would feel apprehension and fear for a future that rests in her hands?

“Two minutes to touchdown.” The engines whined, thrusters repulsing against Vestal soils.

“One minute.” Ariel wished she could shut off her visual receptors.

“Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

A heavy thud reverberated through the ship.

“Touchdown,” the ship announced. Ariel thought she heard a touch of smugness to its usually coolly emotionless voice. “Please stand by as landing foot leveling takes place.” Awful grinding of metal on metal filled Ariel’s bay, emanating from below her feet and drowning out the familiar noises of mechanical function. It only continued for a moment, though, because the landing site the humans chose years ago was picked because of its relative flatness.

The grinding gave way to a pregnant silence. Ariel hardly dared to move.

The ship chimed again. “Welcome to Vesta, future home of humanity.”

Ariel unbuckled her restraints. She was on Vesta, and now her most important mission protocols were in effect, but she felt the same as she did before. She never predicted that she would simply feel like herself.

No matter, she thought, standing up from her seat. Her first responsibility upon landing was to ensure the safety of the ship’s most precious cargo.

Ariel exited her bay into the ship corridor, brightly lit and glinting with steely, web-like struts, polished white ceramic tiling the floor and walls—not unlike her own carapace. Everything looked intact, not a light out or tile disturbed, but…

“Ship, damage report, please,” Ariel called, pacing down the corridor towards the back of the ship.

“Damage is below expected parameters. No interior damage. No structural damage. Slight engine overheating event during descent. Cosmetic damage to exterior is likely, but unconfirmed.” Ariel nodded to herself. The humans were better engineers than they knew sometimes, especially with the help of AI.

Finally, Ariel reached the door at the end of the hall, the label inlaid into the door, reading “Biological Specimen Storage.” Biological Specimens was certainly a sterile, disinterested name for why Ariel was on Vesta to begin with: dual rows of glass-enclosed storage racks taller than Ariel running the length of the room, beads of humidity tracing the interiors. On Ariel’s right, plants in various stages of growth from dormant seeds to fresh shoots bursting from gelatinous media to leafy crops heavy with fruits. On Ariel’s left, the racks were darkened, containing tubes upon tubes of cloudy liquid media of life suspended in time. Farther down, the glass walls of the racks were replaced with insulating sheets meant to keep the interiors at temperatures below freezing. Cryo storage was, without a doubt, the most tried and true method of keeping human cells intact and viable.

Ariel made a circuit of the room, tracing her ceramic fingers along the glass, admiring heart-shaped leaves and vibrant squashes. She disturbed clouds of frozen vapors, letting it trail over her limbs, wraith-like, even though she couldn’t feel the cold. This room was a reminder of Earth, of life past and life yet to be, destined for Vesta. Ariel paused at the door, casting a fond visual receptor over the familiarity of Earth before letting the door slide closed with a hydraulic hiss, separating her from the known.

The unknown, however, was what Ariel was built for. She was a reconnaissance and exploration construct, boots on the ground on new worlds before boots on the ground arrived. Ariel moved toward the front of the ship; stairs would take her up to the cockpit, but past them, nestled underneath, was a small airlock and sanitation chamber, and beyond, the doorway to Vesta. She barely registered the steam bath and the whirring of doors sealing and pressurizing behind her, eager for the final door, slanted and texturized for grip, to lower its ramp.

The light was blinding, growing from a slit to a wide-open expanse and overwhelming Ariel’s visual receptors. A few adjustments, and she could see it was daytime, the single sun blazing overhead. Ariel stepped forward to the end of the ramp. There was verdant foliage as far as she could see, the sky was blue and banded with wispy clouds, and Vesta’s four small moons were pale disks dotting the skies. Ariel looked down. The landing had kicked up the grasses, leaving freshly turned soil at the edge of the ramp.

“One small step,” Ariel said softly. She stepped forward, one foot sinking into the impressionable soil, leaving a familiar print: horizontal rubberized lugs, just as the first human stepped onto the surface of the Moon, Ariel brought history into the present.

The humans had made Ariel in their own image: upright and bipedal, a bilaterally symmetrical trunk with two arms ending in hands with five expert tactile manipulators, and, most importantly, a humanoid face. Ariel’s mission protocols explicitly stated her mission was to bring humanity to Vesta, in the form of cells and tissues, but also in her shape and in her reverence for those that came before her.

“Ariel, do you have a favorite scientist yet?” Solomon inquired. “I think you’ve watched just about every hour of every space flight recording, so maybe an astronaut?”

Ariel thought, lapsing into silence. Watching the space flight recordings was to learn the history and the development of space exploration. She wasn’t aware she was supposed to be assigning emotional values to experiments.

“No.”

“No favorite?”

“Was I required to choose a favorite? If so, I may need time to process this request.”

Solomon waved his hands in front of Ariel’s camera frantically. “No, no, you’re not required to pick a favorite! I was just wondering if you thought any of what you watched was particularly interesting.”

“...I found the moon jellyfish experiment in 1991 to be somewhat amusing.”

“Oh yeah, the moon jellies!” Solomon laughed. “They were pretty mad once they were back on Earth and experiencing gravity, huh?”

“They were unfit for life on Earth. When I am to carry out my mission, is it possible that the human specimens that accompany me will be unfit for life on the new planet?”

Solomon’s smile faded for a moment before reasserting itself. “No, Ariel, the people we send with you will only ever know the new planet, and if you find something on that planet that would complicate the sustainability of human life, it is your job to remedy that with the technical and scientific toolkit I’m giving you now.”

“I understand.”

Ariel crossed the landing clearing, scanning the foliage opposite her, selecting a target for the next phase of her protocol: sampling and analysis of biologicals. The greenery was well-ordered: woody plants formed a canopy of broad, curling leaves far above Ariel’s head, slender young plants sprouted between their trunks, a carpet of detritus and decay fed the roots of ground-hugging snarls of vine and thorn. Ariel selected a seedling with a trunk about as thick as her arm and as tall as her shoulder, a few meters behind the treeline. She picked through the undergrowth, pushing aside low-hanging branches and letting them whip back into place behind her. She had yet to encounter any animal or insect lifeforms, but she didn’t expect to so early after the deafening roar of the ship landing disrupted the peace of the forest.

Ariel reached her target seedling, and began to modulate her body for scientific analysis: swapping one visual receptor for digital microscopy, rotating the tool attachments stored in her forearm to bring a scalpel into alignment with the opening at the tip of her first digit, and ejecting the blade for use. She raised her blade over a leaf, pinched its rounded edge between the fingers on her opposite hand, then sliced a thin strip from it. Ariel raised the strip to her microscope receptor, and zoomed. The leaf was glossy on its upper surface and veined, not unlike a vascular plant from Earth, though the veins of this Vestal leaf followed a perfect symmetry across its central axis.

Ariel took a few more measurements, recording observations of physiology and appearance, flipping through a few more visual receptors before reinstating her standard optical receptor. Once her observational analysis was complete, she opened her “heart”—a small chamber for chemical and molecular analysis nestled within her chest. It seemed poetic to her, that the science that humans loved with their hearts would simply be Ariel’s. She deposited the thin section of leaf into the chamber, retracted it safely back into her chest, and initiated a DNA purification protocol to run automatically while Ariel explored further.

Ariel pushed onwards through the sun-dappled underbrush, on a heading towards a lake a few kilometers away that she had mapped on the surface while in orbit. Water was the blood of life, and Vesta’s large deposits of liquid water were one of the deciding factors in choosing it as humanity’s new home. Much of Vesta’s water deposits, including the lake, were fresh water, as opposed to Earth’s salt water oceans. Perhaps in the sense of water, Vesta was better suited to human life than where it first arose as impossibly fragile, lonely cells.

Ariel crested a hill, stands of trees pressing around her on all sides, fungal nets of mycelial cells draped from their branches like threads of silk. Their fruiting bodies, simple mushrooms on Earth, resembled something more like flowers, delicate sheets of purple and blue gills spiraling into an open blossom. The rustling wind or a passing animal would carry its spores to a new place in the forest to burrow under the bark of a tree to join it to its network.

Ariel kept moving as the trees thinned and the ground became rockier underfoot. The forest ended at a sheer cliff. Below, Ariel’s lake, a mirror sheet of calm waters reflected the sun and the lit faces of the Vestal moons, like a palette of celestial paints.

DNA purification protocol complete, an internal message appeared in Ariel’s vision. Show results? Ariel looked over the lake, a breeze playfully rippling the sheen of its surface. The lake was important, but so too was the young tree’s DNA.

Yes, show results.

A rotating molecule, familiar, and yet not, appeared before Ariel’s eyes. It was a helix in triplicate, three phosphate backbones twisting around each other, gracefully stable. Triple helical structures existed on Earth, but life had found its canon in the double helix.

What this meant for humanity on Vesta, Ariel did not yet know, but in this moment, with the sunlight reflecting off the lake onto her face and the evidence of novel modes of evolution within the chamber of her heart, Ariel knew what it meant when Solomon told her that science would let her know the beauty of life.