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Empowering Generations

The Lifeline

Picture of Zainab Ahmad

Zainab Ahmad

Indian
Writing from UAE

A piercing silence replaced the loud hiss from the opening hatch of the spaceplane. Gerda stepped out, her splayed feet, left uncovered by her thin spacesuit, finding purchase on the pliant polymer surface of Luna II so easily, it felt like homecoming. She had thought about this moment so many times during her training that it had removed all objectivity from the experience. She was breathless despite having barely moved.

She stared out through the acrylic of her helmet, into the polymer wasteland that stretched out before her like a snowscape. She wasn’t sure how long she would have to walk among the plastic outcroppings and perforated gulleys until she located the malfunctioning buoy. This was a reconnaissance as well as a restoration mission.

“We’ve all been holding our breath. How are you feeling?” The voice in her ear belonged to Victor from mission control.

“I’m nervous,” Gerda lied. Telling them she felt at home on the abandoned satellite while on a life threatening mission would sound deranged and suicidal.

“We’ll be with you every step of the way. How does it look?”

“The surface is springy but the binding is strong enough to not break,” she said tapping her foot on the ground, testing. “Can you see?”

“The video feed is clear enough. You can follow the dot on the screen to the buoy. It will detect as it guides,” said Victor.

A dark blinking dot appeared on the screen of her visor, a wraith compelling Gerda to follow. She moved forward in slow loping strides, the low gravitational force allowing her the buoyancy. The harsh glare of the sun glanced off the fragments of plastic. Far up in space, she could see the earth, a blue shard so barely lit, she could almost convince herself it was inconsequential.

As she walked alone on the large satellite, the sense of loneliness that had clung to her on earth seemed to slide off. It was familiar and perhaps expected, this kinship with the satellite made of mottled and discarded plastic. They were both conceived and forsaken by her mother after all.

***
The world flashed around her, colors streaking by like comet trails. Eight year old Gerda executed a pirouette sequence that would have been unfathomable to a dancer without prosthetic feet such as hers. She finished her final turn with an Arabesque and then a bow as the audience broke into a reluctant applause. Her unnatural feet were an advantage that many of the parents at the recital considered unfair.

Gerda did not care, her eyes were already searching, the high from the dance fading as her heartbeat slowed to an unsteady patter of desperation. She looked around the room once, twice, three times. There was no sign of her mother, again.

“Please try calling her,” she begged her nanny. “Just one more time, please.”

“There is no point now, child,” her nanny replied, pulling her arm from Gerda’s biting grip.

“Let’s just go home.”

They walked to the car. The other mothers stared with their arms around their daughters as Gerda passed by them, her trophy clutched in her hand, her walking steps not as graceful as her pirouettes. Each time she thought back to the memory of that day, she imagined their faces more and more comically distorted into jeers.

That night, Gerda left the trophy on the console by the door. She lay awake, her ears straining for the sound of the door opening, of her mother’s footsteps. She heard none of that. Ever since then, Gerda didn’t think she was able to properly sleep again.

***
Erik and Frieda Queen’s marriage ended long before their daughter was born without feet. Before the birth defect, there had been fights about careers, about what they hadn’t been getting from each other, a marriage borne out of selfishness and fear and an ensuing frigidity that they had attempted and failed to thaw with a pregnancy. When Gerda was born, Frieda Queen took it as an opportunity to throw herself into a career of science to develop the most advanced pair of prosthetic feet for her daughter. Erik Queen took it as an opportunity to point out that she could not compensate for love with a technical solution.

By the time two year old Gerda took her first steps on her prosthetic feet, Erik had left them and remarried. It was several years later before Gerda was able to move in with him as he had wanted to be properly settled in with his new family. Frieda, who was already recognized for her work in prosthetics had moved on to bigger and more impactful projects. When Gerda turned five, Frieda had started a private research company in the field of geo engineering, KAI.

Technological innovation had surged to unimagined heights as the earth had been steadily thrown into an imbalance. Funding for production flowed far more easily than for management of the fallout. Innovation was rampant but so was the neglect of it, Creatures forgotten by their Frankensteins. The consequential production of polymers in particular grew so rapidly that it was soon declared an international emergency.

When Gerda was nineteen, the concept of Luna II had been introduced by KAI, a project led by her mother. The technical aspects of the plan were well laid out. The debris formed by excess polymers would be discolored, broken down and bound together into large fragments. The fragments would then be held together by thousands of gravitational buoys that acted like large magnets, bringing all the debris together like a roughly hewn ball of plastic and then propelled out into space.

The reception of the plan was divided. Believers and skeptics, followers and protestors all clashed from various directions. Activists rallied as governments raised concerns and the private companies supporting them invested. In the end, after twenty years of research, production and legal battles, Luna II was successfully orbiting the the earth, a vestigial orb, hanging in the night sky like a second moon.

***
Gerda moved forward on her prosthetic feet. They had been reengineered to imitate snowshoes for this particular mission. She followed the dark blinking dot on her visor through mounds of waste steadily avoiding any cracks and peaks in the rambling grey expanse. Her legs were starting to ache.

Once Luna II had been successfully settled into it’s orbit, funding had decreased and the upkeep had been disregarded until they had suddenly been alerted to a malfunctioning buoy. The gravitational force pulling all the bonded pieces of polymer towards that particular buoy had reversed, pushing back until the pieces were slowly coming undone. It was just one buoy but if it wasn’t fixed or disconnected, its effect would spread like an infection to the core processor. Eventually it would spread to the rest of the satellite, dislodging every fragment of polymer that had been so painstakingly bound together and the resulting amount of space debris would be nothing short of catastrophic.

Remote rewrites or reboots had not worked. The only option had been to physically set foot on the satellite for the first time and Gerda had volunteered for the mission immediately.
Her breath was loud and ragged in the silence as Gerda kept pushing forward. Dust from micrometeorites swirled around her along with bursts of exhilaration. She wondered if this is how Columbus and Armstrong and Erik the Red must have felt as they stepped on foreign land for the first time. But this sense of belonging, it must only be hers. Her persistent desolation etched the landscape around her feet.

“Not too far now, and be careful,” Victor’s voiced pulled her back to the mission at hand. Sure enough, the plastic was getting softer and some of the pieces lay on top of the other as the binding had come loose. Her foot kept slipping through the wide cracks.

The blinking dot suddenly turned red and a few steps later disappeared with a loud beep.
“I see the cover,” Gerda told Victor and she reached to tug open the domed lid of the manhole. It was covered with pieces of plastic that she could easily brush aside. It wouldn’t give at first but after a few tries she managed to jerk it open with a loud crack. She directed the beam of her headlamp into the dark pipe. It was wide enough to comfortably crawl through and the angle wasn’t too steep. Her spacesuit would allow her enough friction to not slide down. Gerda hesitated but only for a moment. It just looked more claustrophobic than it actually was, she told herself.

***
“You and your father were suffocating me,” her mother told her over the phone. “That was never the life I wanted for myself.”

Gerda couldn’t bring herself to speak for a moment. Her mother had just answered a question that she had never been able to bring herself to ask.

“Are you trying to make up for all those years by offering me a role in KAI?”

“No. Even I know that it won’t make up for it,” her mother replied. “I want you to join KAI because we can’t deny your talent. We need engineers like you here.”

“I know about the project you’re working on, about Luna II,” Gerda told her mother. “And if you need to know anything about me, it is that I would never support it. It is nothing but a technical solution to cover up a problem we created. You’re not addressing the fundamental problem of excess creation and consumption.”

“You’re being a traditionalist,” her mother replied in a controlled, even voice. “There are consequences to everything, Gerda. We have to move forward, break through if we care for the future generations.”

“You care more about the future generations than your own child? Why did you give birth to me then if you knew that life wasn’t for you? Wasn’t that again because of some sort of self indulgent negligence on your part? A solution to your marriage?”

Her mother replied after a lengthy pause. “I can’t go back in time. Everything that has begun won’t just end, you know. You either give up, stop creating and stop living to let someone else take care of the mess or you find a solution. That’s all I’m trying to do.”

A few weeks after the phone call, Gerda joined KAI. She had known her opposition was biased, but she also knew that in the realm of science, biases are not to be tolerated. KAI was her best chance of making some sort of a difference and she was her mother’s daughter after all.
***
Gerda crawled through the pipe until she could see the top of the buoy nested in it’s casing.
“Let’s start the scan,” she prompted Victor.

“Ok, scan initiated. We’ll do an initial checkup for any damaged components,” Victor responded.

Gerda sat with her back resting against the side of the pipe as the camera on her helmet did a scan of the buoy. The low hum was muffled in the enclosed space.

“Yikes, looks like the buoy has completely stopped broadcasting. Too many components seem to have been damaged,” Victor said.

“What are our options?”

“Not many. We will need to detach it and bring the chip back here where we can debug the
preprocessor.” Victor informed her. “But don’t forget to be careful. There are too many unknown variables here.”

Gerda started slowly detaching the various wires connecting the buoy to its encasing. For a moment, there was nothing but a dense silence interrupted only by the rhythmic scraping of the wires as they were pulled out of their sockets.

“Wait -!”

Gerda could not hear the rest of what Victor was saying as a loud crash deafened her and slammed her back into the pipe. She couldn’t even draw in her breath to scream. The gravitational field had completely and forcefully reversed and it was like the world turned upside down. Large chunks of plastic were falling up into space.
Gerda held on to the sides of the pipe with all her strength as she was forced back up through the opening of the pipe. Her hands were slipping and she wasn’t sure how long she could hold on. At the same time, the buoy below her dislodged with a heavy thud and slammed past Gerda pulling her along in its magnetic force. Gerda hit her head against the opening of the pipe as her body was pulled past it. She was going to be thrown off into space like a piece of plastic, that was all she could think before the world went completely dark around her.

***
Her mother was dying.

Gerda looked at her mother’s frail body on her deathbed. Her lifelong resentment had claws but now with nothing to sink them into.

“Can you forgive me?” Her mother asked weakly.

Gerda stayed silent. Her mother managed a small smile.
“I’ve made many mistakes. We all have. And I’m leaving you to fix them,” her mother told her, her voice hoarse with regret.

“Every generation has it’s own form of tunnel vision,” was all Gerda managed to assure her with. Words she hoped to someday not know to be true.

Her mother died two days later.

***
Gerda opened her eyes.

She was lying on the surface around the manhole, pieces of fragmented plastic digging into her back. Her foot was caught diagonally in the lip of the manhole. She looked up. She should have been lost in the void of space by now. The only thing that had prevented her from falling to her death had been her foot.

She started to laugh but realized her face was wet with tears. Her heart was beating somewhere out of her chest. She had almost died in this desolate wasteland far away from home. But she was saved. A lifeline in the form of the only good thing her mother had been able to give her.

Her heartbeat slowed as the adrenaline rushed out. Victor was saying something but she couldn’t hear. She was tired, more than she had ever been. Her eyes closed and she was asleep. She was eight years old. It was late in the night. Her mother opened the door of her bedroom and walked over to her bed. She kissed the sleeping Gerda on the forehead gently, so as to not wake her up, the trophy held proudly in her hand.