Deanna jolted upright in her darkened bedroom with a gasp, her blue eyes wide as she clutched the white bed sheets to her chest. The alarms of her nightmare merged with the alarm ringing in her ears, and for a moment she couldn’t separate the two. She looked around the room, befuddled with both sleep and panic. It took a moment for her brain to register the Farm-wide emergency klaxon. But was it real, or just a drill?
When the extra-terrestrial colony had been established, everyone, no matter their age, had been given an Emergency Duty Station for any Farm drill or crisis that happened. Deanna’s parents, Elizabeth and Amory, had been assigned to EDS #2, the Science section’s chemistry labs. Deanna, being fifteen years old, had ended up being assigned not with her parents, but to EDS #12. That was the unit responsible for securing the Dining Hall and the Kitchen—two areas important for the overall well-being of the colonists, if not as technologically important to the colony’s scientific infrastructure.
Deanna shoved her short blonde hair out of her eyes as she struggled up out of the twisted-up sheets of the bed and punched her window’s computer screen on. It lit up to show a calm, pre-dawn picture of mist drifting across early spring grass, which was at odds with the electronic wails of the corridor’s siren. The clock in the lower right corner said it was only 5:31 am.
Spaceflot! This can’t be just a drill, then—it’s too early! she thought as she looked at the little blinking numbers.
All of a sudden, through the door of her tiny bedroom she heard the running feet of her parents. They called out to her to get moving as they dashed out of the family cubicle into the main hallway towards their assignments. That galvanized her almost as much as the sirens did. Deanna hopped onto the carpeted floor and ran to her bureau by the window screen’s dim light. She wrenched its plastic drawers open and pulled out the first thing that came to hand, a green-and-brown jumpsuit. She yanked it onto her body as fast as she could slither out of her pajamas, tossing the purple rayon material that she’d worn to sleep in onto the floor and stuffing her feet into the sturdy rubber shoes that were always beside her closet. She bolted out her bedroom door before the clock reached 5:34 am.
Deanna made it to the colony’s Dining Hall in a record three and a half minutes later, according to the chronometer imprinted on her jumpsuit’s cuff. Her rubber soles squeaked on the grey and white linoleum tiled floor as she barreled into the cavernous room. The black metal tables and benches of the room eerily reflected the red emergency lights in the ceiling, which also glinted off the glass southern wall, its windows, and its outside access door. Deanna, as she rounded a table, was horrified to be able to see the tilled fields in the growing light beyond the clear wall. The defensive shields hadn’t been lowered! She ran to the control box in the corner where the transparent wall and the plascrete wall met up. Worryingly, in the background almost over and above the siren’s racket, were abnormal sounds of banging coming from the Kitchen.
What are the others doing in there? The windows are supposed to be the first thing to be taken care of in an emergency! she thought in concern and annoyance. She slapped at the controls that would lower the protective metal.
“Come on, come on!” she said to the reinforced wall, repeatedly smacking one fist into the palm of her other hand in impatience as the metal moved too ponderously downward for her liking.
As the shield neared the top of the glass door that led to the outside, Deanna caught a flash of red and brown movement bolting towards her across the grass. She blinked—that was Rebecca! What was her best friend doing out there, when she should be in here helping with the emergency? Realizing that Rebecca would never make it before the metal closed off the door, Deanna slammed her hands down on the control panel and accidentally hit the ‘stop’ and ‘reverse’ touch-pads at the same time. The mechanism faltered, groaning and shuddering as it tried to obey both commands. The teen swore as her friend reached the entrance and tried to pry it open, but the shield had already passed below the top of the outward swinging door.
“Hang on, Rebecca!” Deanna cried to her through the glass, and she banged one hand down on just the reverse pad this time.
The metal wall resolved its difficulties and started going up, freeing the entrance. The brown-haired girl slipped inside, and Deanna mashed the ‘down’ pad again.
“Thanks!” gasped Rebecca as she doubled over breathing hard, her hair falling down over her face.
The shield-wall thunked into its groove in the floor behind them.
“What the hell were you doing out there?” Deanna practically shouted at her.
“I couldn’t sleep, so I’d gone for an early morning walk to look at the wheat fields and watch the sun rise! How was I supposed to know there’d be an emergency?” Rebecca half-shouted back. She took a big breath and straightened up, tucking her long hair behind her ears. “Do—do we know what’s going on yet? What’s happening in the kitchen?”
Rebecca’s questions jolted Deanna. There was still too much noise coming from the kitchen, and Deanna hadn’t seen anybody else yet from their EDS station. Just then several screams, followed by an explosion and a loud whooshing hiss, caused both teens to jump.
“I dunno, but we’re going to find out! Come on!” Deanna said, grabbing for Rebecca’s hand to yank her along behind.
Hand-in-hand the two girls ran to the opposite side of the dining hall to open the door that led into the food prep area. Both coughed as they got an unexpected faceful of smoke when it swung open. Remembering their fire training, they crouched down and covered their mouths and noses with the crook of their arms as they peered in. Inside the huge, stainless steel industrial kitchen, the food preparation area had exploded in chaos. Twisted blackened hunks of metal that once were parts of stoves lay scattered about, water gushed out of broken pipes, food dispensers spewed ingredients all over the counters and floors, and one oven still partially attached to the wall had flames spouting out of it. A loud electronic sound came out of the speakers in the kitchen that sounded eerily like laughter.
“What’s happening?! Has the computer gone mad?” Deanna shouted over the commotion, hoping someone could answer.
Across the room, the AI that normally assisted the colonists in making meals rotated its computerized camera/screen combination to face them. It was shorting out badly, sparks flying from the casing, and the jagged horizontal glitches in the screen made the usually calm and soothing androgynous face look twisted and demonic. The computer chef screeched incomprehensibly at the teens crouched in the doorway.
“Deanna! Rebecca!” Manny, one of the sub-cooks, pulled himself awkwardly along a counter top towards the two girls. “We received a new cooking program beamed from Earth last night, and we uploaded it to the kitchen mainframe this morning,” he gasped out, his leg bent at an unnatural angle and his pant leg wet with blood. “It was supposed to up the proficiency of the AI, but instead ….”
Rebecca shrieked, and Deanna looked over in time to see her friend duck out of the way of a wildly swinging, fiery gas line. Deanna ducked, too, but Manny wasn’t as fast. It hit him in the face and knocked him unconscious to the floor. The AI laughed an electronically demented laugh.
“The new program must have scrambled its brain! Now what do we do?” Rebecca yelled frantically to Deanna.
The two teens saw that the line which had missed hitting them was only one of many fuel lines that were knocking food, cooking utensils and pots and pans off every available surface, all orchestrated by the now madly cackling kitchen computer. To make it even worse, little gouts of flame at each hose tip spread fire as they came in contact with pooling flammable substances. It was a wonder the fires hadn’t ignited inside the free-flying fuel lines yet. Amidst the wreckage, the girls saw several people on the ground writhing in pain, the jumpsuits melted from their bodies in places along with the flesh underneath, exposing horribly reddened and bubbled skin.
“Chemical burns!” shouted Rebecca over the noise.
Deanna pointed sharply to the right side of the room. “That must be from the stove banks—the mixed gas mains have exploded! We gotta grab people and get them out into the dining … oh, god, no—the shields are down! Quick, Rebecca! Go raise the perma-steel wall so we can open the windows and door to get fresh air in here before we are gassed to death!” yelled Deanna.
The kitchen computer screamed in denial when Rebecca grabbed Manny up from where he’d fallen. She struggled only a little to half-drag him out of the kitchen and lay him on the floor just outside the door. Behind her, Deanna helped a stout woman from Stores named Sveda to her feet and out to the nearest dining room bench while managing to avoid yet another flailing line. As Rebecca left them all at a run and wove a path between the tables to do as Deanna had said, Deanna took a deep breath and held it as she dived back into the kitchen.
“S-stop! T-turn it all off b-before you do anything else!” gasped a bloodied woman half-lying not far away on the floor.
It was Bethe, the head of Deanna’s emergency group and the person whose orders she was supposed to follow. Bethe choked, pointed weakly in the direction of the other end of the kitchen, and then slumped all the way to the floor, unconscious.
“You will not, Human!” screamed the computer, just self-aware enough to perceive the threat to itself.
Grimacing but still holding her breath, Deanna dodged her way across the kitchen floor, steering clear of the thrashing lines and fires now being aimed at her and praying for no more explosions to happen while people were still in the area. She avoided the messes of nameless food substances on the floor, but as she jumped a large spreading milk puddle, a hose smacked her on the top of her head from behind. Deanna saw stars and fell to all fours on landing, a bleeding lump already rising in her hair.
The AI cackled in triumph.
Deanna nearly gasped with the pain, but she managed to remember to keep hold of her breath as she scrambled to her feet. She darted looks around her as she dodged three more hoses intent on doing her more bodily harm, searching for the kitchen shut-off switch. She saw with relief that the red plastic emergency panel, which controlled all electricity to the kitchen, was on the wall not far away. Deanna flung herself at it.
“Noooooo!” the computer screamed as it sent all its flexible hoses after her, but its own glitching, having grown worse even since Deanna had entered the kitchen, kept the computer from accurately aiming any at her.
Deanna pounded out the emergency override sequence on the touch-pad, but nothing happened. She felt a growing need to breathe and looked at it frantically to figure out why it wasn’t working. She then saw the small lit symbol on the screen which indicated that the pad was locked. She slammed the opposite symbol to unlock it and punched the code in again. The AI wailed inarticulately at her, all the hoses in the kitchen going even madder than they had been before, but this time Deanna was successful. The electricity powered down instantly.
In the sudden near-darkness of the kitchen, the waving tentacle-like lines all around her fell limply like harpooned octopi, the flames dying in their hoses as the gases slowed to a stop. Even the blazing stove went out.
Deanna, in need of air, forgot herself and sighed in relief. She choked on the fouled air that she took in and realized her mistake as everything went dark.
Machine clicks and whirrs filled an otherwise empty central control room with soft sounds. A section on one of the many burnished metal panels glowed to life and shot two different beams of light at two separate receptors on the wall across the room. Hidden wall panels slid aside as two life-like ambulatory robots dressed in white lab coats exited from the compartments. They left the room with a measured tread and headed down the metal corridor towards Testing Lab Two. Opening the door, they crossed the white, sterile environment to where Colonist 836-143, otherwise known as Deanna when awake, lay asleep on the gurney that the androids had brought her in on from her suspended animation pod a couple of hours ago. The lifelike robots removed the white sheet that had been covering the teen for warmth and went to work releasing her from the leads that connected her brain to the Emergency Preparedness Routine’s virtual environment simulator.
“Return Colonist 836-143 to her pod. Begin sanitization procedure for Testing Lab Two. Ready Colonist 836-144 for Testing Lab Three,” was the monotone transmission they received in their earpieces when they were finished freeing her.
The androids beeped, acknowledging the command, and wheeled the still sleeping Deanna out, pausing only long enough to activate the sensor that would start the room’s sterilization process. The robots took her down the corridors of the hushed starship towards the cold storage bays, passing other sleeping colonists on other gurneys being wheeled by androids to their various destinations. The deep space vessel Trans-dimensional Mage was still some years out from its destination of Kepler-438b in the constellation of Lyra, but it was the duty of the colony ship’s central AI to make sure that every one of the colonists, who were all making the trip via cold sleep, had the best chance of survival upon arrival. And that meant testing and re-testing by virtual reality the crisis knowledge and reactions of the people who were going to make the far away Earth-like planet, the first one ever discovered by humans way back in January of 2015, their new home.
The androids stopped Deanna’s gurney in front of her suspended animation unit and carefully lifted her back inside, rearranging her limbs so she would lie in the most comfortable position on the water-foam padding. She was then re-connected to her pod’s myriad lifelines and monitors, with everything being tested to assure they were in perfect working order after the final lead was in place. Lastly, she was re-connected by her special brain port to the control panel and the built-in teaching unit of the pod before the transparent lid was closed. Once the life-extending cold mist was registered to be seeping properly into the suspended animation unit once more, the androids left to carry out the rest of their orders.
The ship’s central AI, upon receiving the update that the subject assessed in Testing Lab Two was now re-situated in her pod, noted the test results in the appropriate file: Colonist 836-143—Failed Kitchen EPR test 3/6/2305; did not wait until clear of poisonous vapors, known to be present, to breathe. Next scheduled test: 3/6/2306.
As the androids’ footfalls faded away down the corridor, inside her pod an unknowing Deanna grimaced slightly as she dreamed about sitting down at her personal computer to log in to another boring lecture about Kitchen safety procedures.
Susan Bianculli wears the titles “Mother” and “Wife” most proudly. Another is “Author” for her The Mist Gate Crossings series, as well as several short stories in several other anthologies besides this one. To learn about the other things she’s had published, check out: susanbianculli.wix.com/home