The Scraper: Part 2 - Death Becomes Him

Multiple pain signals shot into the anterior cingulate area of his brain whereupon they were immediately re-routed by the local chip that formed part of his Neural Net so that Sam did not register the signals as actual pain.

Instead he was faced with a damage report which had ghosted itself over his vision. This he knew was an OMC company upgrade that blocked any more than mild discomfort so as to prevent his body going into shock, for which he was suddenly very grateful for.

He could feel his I-secQ4 working overtime, talking to the other chips in his head and organising the repair routines his medichines needed to start healing his body.

He closed his eyes so he could better concentrate on the damage report cast over his visual cortex, the damaged parts of his body were represented as red and the fast disappearing undamaged parts as green.

Reams of information pertaining to the activity of his medichines were scrolling in front of his eyes too fast to read in real time. Without his company upgrades his own medichines would have already started to put his body into a Medically Controlled Death, but the upgrade meant that he could carry on functioning for long after the average human in the same situation.

Everything seemed in order inside his body insomuch as his medichines were doing their job. Outside though was a different matter, his suit had several holes and was spinning out of control, albeit still heading towards the rock below.

The biggest potential problem Sam faced was just how big a micrometeorite storm he was in, the bug hadn’t told him about any potential threats but that most likely meant that the threats were too small to detect.

The main asteroid belt was so thinly spread out that in the hundred and fifty years or so since space travel had began, many hundreds of unmanned and manned spacecraft had passed through the belt without incident.

But it was in the last thirty years or so that the bulk of these journeys had been made and incidents like this, probably caused by far off collisions between massive asteroids were becoming more commonplace.

What worried Sam more than anything was if he was hit again near or around a major organ, then upgrade or no upgrade his medichines might attempt an MCD anyway.

Usually this would be no problem as he could survive without a human doctor for long enough for help to arrive probably weeks later but if he was rendered immobile while he was in the middle of a micrometeorite storm he’d be a sitting duck, unable to move and at the mercy of flying debris.

Even worse, if Sam was hit on the head that could well destroy more of his brain than was retrievable and Real Death was an unwelcome outcome.

He should have been panicking but certain company drugballs within him had been activated by his medichines and he remained relatively calm, better able to assess his situation.

Sam accessed the bug’s computer via his Neural Net and saw that it was liaising with the asteroid’s AI; between them neither of them could pinpoint the source of the shower.

In some ways this was good as it meant that the shower wasn’t so big that it was inevitable he’d take more strikes, but bad in that he had no meaningful way of detecting Fast Moving Debris, and therefore avoiding further hits.

The bug had repositioned itself trying to use its collision laser to shoot down any detritus heading his way, extrapolating from the incoming trajectories of the micrometeorites that had hit him previously.

Sam signalled the bug trying to get it to come closer to him, thus bringing the lasers into a much more effective range; as they only had a five hundred metre reach. Also he planned on using the craft itself as cover.

Sam was horrified as the bug signalled back a company directive which prevented the bug from sacrificing itself to help him; apparently inanimate company property was more precious than any human personnel.

Sam shouldn’t have been surprised at this, aside from the brain, human parts were pretty easily cloned and grown. Whereas machine parts out here so far from any planetary resources were not readily available and took time to manufacture and transport.

Though this was a wonderfully efficient system that obviously worked well for the company, it didn’t really sit too well with him in his current predicament.

His suit was having problems repairing itself, as the temperature inside the suit dropped further company modified genes inside him caused all the cells in his body to release a modified organic anti-freeze.

This was technically the first steps of a Medically Controlled Death which began to worry him.

His medichines were frantically running programs, his neural net was working at full capacity and Kendal could now feel a dull ache all over his body, mixed with lances of fiery pain at the impact sites as his Neural Net turned to more important matters than keeping him from pain.

He was around eight hundred metres from the surface of the asteroid and was still travelling at around fifty metres per second.

If he landed at this speed his damaged suit might not fully protect him and the extra damage he would receive to his body would mean that his medichines would have no choice but to put him into MCD.

He sent a thought command to the suit willing the thrusters to work; they fired up and spun him round so that he re-orientated to feet first. The thrusters now pointing in the right direction weren’t working well enough to slow him down sufficiently; Kendal gritted his teeth in anticipation of a rough landing.

He was doing about eight metres per second when he hit the hard rock-metal surface of Kobas-9, his suit stiffened and he bounced up and forwards for a few metres before coming to a stop lying face down.

Sam checked his damage report; shattered femur, broken tibia, hairline fracture fibula. Spleen ruptured, punctured left lung at five percent capacity, broken collar bone, fractured scapula, four hairline fractures right humorous… he turned the report off.

He needed to get to the ViDoc within an hour or even his upgraded medichines would have trouble keeping him alive.

His main problem was that a large majority of the drugballs within his system were converting their mass to oxygen helping his one working lung to deliver enough air to his brain and thus avoiding asphyxia, this meant that they couldn’t do the their main job of keeping him physically and mentally stable.

There were no human inhabitants on the asteroid and few visitors, surface vehicles were seen as an unnecessary luxury by the company; Sam had no choice but to try and crawl to the entrance and get to the lift to take him to the medical bay.

Sam estimated that he could feel about thirty percent of the pain he should have been feeling, which was more than enough.

He managed to get onto his hands and knees and start to pull himself towards a large sloped entrance about fifty metres away, the near zero g made it easier but not by much.

About four metres ahead of him to his left a golf ball-sized crater accompanied with a six metre plume of metal dust lit by the shoulder light on his suit appeared as a micrometeorite - probably of a similar size to the one that first hit him - slammed into the asteroid.

Sam knew that if he stayed out here then Real Death was a fairly likely prospect, he carried on sending pointless override signals to his medichines to delay his Medically Controlled Death as he pulled himself along with his less damaged left arm, scraping over the jagged metallic surface of Kobas-9.

Placed at the centre of the main chamber inside Kobas-9 was the medical bay, within which sat the Virtual Doctor, which was the only machinery manufactured off site and was unarguably the most technologically advanced man-made object on or around Kobas-9 for a hundred million miles.

It was a class two quantum computing machine, evolved from class one standard; it not only had access to the medical records of any Offworld Mining Company personnel that were likely to come within a few hundred million miles of it, but also to the asteroid’s AI.

It observed through the external sensors on the surface that the human had crash landed on the surface some minutes previous. The sensors were not quite sensitive enough to detect the micrometeorites that were raining down around the human until they’d actually impacted.

But from extrapolating from their impact angles, the ViDoc worked out that the human had about a thirty percent chance of survival unaided. That figure fell to about two percent if just one of those meteors hit him on the head. The ViDoc sent a signal to one of the scouting robots to the entrance the human was heading for.

Whilst doing this the ViDoc accessed the human’s suit and ascertained the damage to it, even though the ViDoc couldn’t access the human’s I-secQ-chip from here, it knew from its vast knowledge of human anatomy that with the amount of damage to his suit the human’s medichines would have already begun the Medically Controlled Death sequence.

Cryptogee