It was cold outside. Bitterly cold, the kind of cold that you dragged indoors with you. I was shivering up and down, wishing that the base had some kind of bath so that I could soak myself in a tub of warm water and never leave it. No such luck, of course. Work beckoned.
A passing snowstorm had knocked out the power between shifts, meaning that all of the communications equipment had to be rebooted. That took twenty minutes on a good day, and someone – me – had to babysit the morass of machines as they spun up to make sure nothing was permanently broken. I wondered what the point was. Even the clown had been silent for months, relegated to the status of a well-executed prank in the back of my mind. All that was left were the automated messages from stations that still hadn’t updated to newer standards, probably at the insistence of old men who didn’t want to lose their jobs.
Yep, there I was, sitting in silence as forty-year-old boxes built to implement 250-year-old protocols whirred to life around me, having another one of my minor existential crises. I was just shy of twenty-four and not far out of college, an experience that was supposed to equip me with all the knowledge I’d need to work on creating the future. Instead, I was stuck working thirty hours a week inside a prefabricated concrete altar to the past, on top of some hill in the middle of dead frozen nowhere.
I pulled myself into the converted broom closet that passed for a break room, and brewed myself a cup of cheap instant coffee to while away the time until the machines came back. Reboots were the only time I ever drank coffee. I didn’t even really like the taste all that much, but I figured I needed to do something to keep my hands from subconsciously fidgeting with the switches. I’d learned my lesson after the first time I accidentally brought down the station. I got yelled at, of course – when someone eventually noticed, a couple of days after the fact.
Back in the machine room, the diagnostic displays had finally lit up. Hidden among the reams of mostly useless debugging information was an indication that the message queues were empty. So we hadn’t missed anything. I slumped over in the operator’s chair and thought about taking a nap.
I woke up to the sound of the internal line ringing, having not fully realized that I’d fallen asleep in the first place. I feebly reached for the control console and hunted for the “voice only” button with my outstretched fingers. Even if I had been in a presentable state, I was in no mood to look at someone else’s face.
“Oh, good, you’re still alive. I was worried you might have frozen to death,” said the disembodied voice of my boss. He topped his statement of concern with a loud guffaw, obviously pleased at his bad joke.
Had I been lucid enough to be sarcastic, I might have responded with something like “glad to know you care about me so much that you didn’t bother canceling my shift, bastard,” instead of just the “yeah, I’m fine” that I actually said.
“Nice to hear. How much longer are you supposed to be on duty?”
I looked at the clock. Two hours had gone by while I was under. I must have been more tired than I thought. “About three more hours.”
“Okay, that’s great. I need you for something. We’ve got a guy at Landry who says he’s been getting messages with forged origin headers.”
I bolted straight up in my chair. I’d never told my boss, or anyone else for that matter, about the clown transmissions, and he was too oblivious to check the logs. “Where from?”
“I don’t remember, exactly. I think he said the, uh… Talingen system? It’s obviously wrong. I mean, nobody lives way out there in deep space. Anyway, I thought you might be able to help work out what’s going on.”
My interstellar pen pal was back.