Madoka grabs PEPPER’s controller and powers down the robot before PEPPER can reply.
She knows how PEPPER would have answered that question. PEPPER would have reminded Madoka of all the humans who loved her, would have said that her main goal was making sure that Madoka was safe and healthy, and that PEPPER was so happy to be able to care for Madoka, and only after a third prompting of the question would PEPPER have answered, “I love you, Madoka!” while displaying a heart on her torso screen.
You do not want a robot to say “No, I don’t love you.” That is mean. But it is considered ethically complicated to program a robot to say “I love you” to a human. Most people don’t mind a robot saying they love them, personally, but do not want a robot loving other people, people that the human loves, perhaps not as well, or at least not as demonstrably, as the robot. Then there is the problem of reciprocity. It is remarkably easy to love a robot.
Madoka shakes her head and the edges of the wig whisper-whip her cheeks. She reminds herself of all the things PEPPER cannot do. PEPPER cannot walk into a shop in Sweden on a whim and buy a white-woman wig, and drink one glass of wine too many, and hate empty furniture and her own dull childhood. These are human privileges.
SERGEI
Primitus has its own solar storm tracker, and if it picks up some activity on the sun, like a coronal mass ejection possibly headed their way, a distinctive alarm will sound to warn the crew. This alarm is sounding now. Prime confirms the data and Mission Control would like them to take evasive action immediately.
There will always be a chance that they, or all the automated systems of their craft, will be obliterated by a solar flare on the way to Mars. For their daily radiation exposure their craft has a polyethylene/graphene hull (fortified with their own excrement); they have their Solox suits and the latest in pharmaceutical and nutraceutical protection. But there’s not much they can do about a solar flare, and no way to prepare for most versions of this catastrophe, in the same way that there are no protocols for what to do if a building is dropped on your head. What they can practice is the lucky chance of receiving a merely dangerous level of radiation. They can practice hiding. That is what they are doing now.
In the real mission, they will most likely have more time than the forty minutes Prime has given them to get in the tube. Solar forecasting is very good; they will have maybe an hour and a half of advance warning. No doubt Prime wants to see how quickly the crew can go from something like socializing and enjoying tea just before bedtime to completing evasive protocols and taking refuge.
Forty minutes later, his crew is inside the tube with all protocol tasks completed.
Now they must wait.
They could be in here for several hours, or for days, depending on what Prime has in mind. The tube runs from lower level to upper Hab and they can space themselves out on the interior ladder and get themselves into more restful positions. Sergei will suggest they do this soon. Just now they are more or less facing one another as they prepare their radiation monitors.
“This would be the last opportunity to send a message,” Sergei says. “If someone would like to record.”
He mentions this because there is a possibility that this sim is not for practicing hiding, but for practicing final moments.
“Final words could be important,” he says. “It would be bad to mess that up.”
Helen laughs in a strange way. Six months of pre-Eidolon training and almost four months now in Primitus and Sergei has never heard her make this sound.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice is strangled. “Every once in a while this happens.” She makes the noise again. “I get the giggles at inappropriate moments. It’s nothing.” Helen’s usual laughter is short and throaty: huh-huh-huh. The sound exiting through her nose now—she’s clamped her lips together—is like a cartoon villain’s laugh. mhmr-mhmr-mhmr. Her face is scarlet from an effort to repress this. Or perhaps embarrassment. No one else has these giggles.
Sergei has a solar flare of irritation for Helen. He has learned that it is better for him to give all the way in to an emotion for three seconds—exaggerate it even—rather than suppress it entirely. Hatred! He hates Helen!
There were too many tasks in those forty minutes to take time up with using the toilet, but unfortunately Sergei did need to eliminate. His generation was spoiled. They got to the space station in six hours, instead of the older flight profile, which had you in the Soyuz for two days with two other people, and where for anything more than urination you had to alert your companions, who could only politely turn their heads and stop up their noses. Something like this might have to be done in their current situation. Their emergency kit does have diapers.