(Sorry I’m late on this one.)
Tech Support
“Life Support, failing,” said the too calm robotic voice. There was no blaring alarm, no flashing red lights. It was just that voice, saying over and over for hours. It spoke over a tone of bland hold music.
Her crew was buried deep in the wiring, trying to find what was going wrong, but they couldn’t find anything. Kiki sniffed the air. Nothing wrong with it, excluding the feel of air that had been recycled for months. It smelled of stale farts.
She looked out the window at the grungy little world below. Eighty thousand tons of terraforming equipment and medicine, desperately needed on the planet below. Two years traveling the stars to fail now. Typical.
“How are we?” she shouted down into the wires.
Her crew answered with a series of grunts and complaints. They were all still alive, at least. “Have you gotten through to them?”
“Still on hold,” Kiki said. She held up the com and let the music drift down the holes. They groaned some more. She put away the com with a grim sense of schadenfreude.
“Have the computers told you anything?” The question came from Dern, chief mechanic. Today was a waking nightmare for him.
Kiki looked over the computers, considering each screen. Every single one of them was nominal. They didn’t think anything was wrong. Landing systems were all green. Fuel was fine. Hull integrity, everything.
“Life Support, failing.”
“I know. I know,” she said. Apart from that, and the hold music, everything was fine. The tension of living under the alarm was too much. She expected for everything to go dark any second. For there to be a bang and then nothing.
They had tested the air. Nitrogen, oxygen. One atmosphere. Everything was fine. They had hunted down the sensors and cleaned them. Fine. Commanding the computer to relax and worry about it later resulted in the message being repeated twice as fast.
“Hello, Strawberry Systems, tech support for your ships. This is Tmothy speaking, how can I help?”
Kiki dove on the com and held it up. She quickly explained the problem, trying to remain calm. It was the first outside voice they had heard in two years. Timothy didn’t speak, but listened respectfully.
When she finished, he took a deep, long-suffering sigh. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
