Eighty years was a long time to be asleep. Even with all of the modern advances in medicine, allowing people to slow down their metabolisms without losing too much bone or muscle mass, that long of a trip would take its toll. When Pate shut his eyes back on earth, he’d been a healthy eighty-three kilos. The next time he opened them, he found himself looking at his medical chart displayed on the screen in front of him, showing that he was now a meager sixty-one kilograms. Fortunately he was still in micro-gravity and would have another few months to bulk back up before reentry.

Waking up from a long sleep was a lot like waking up normally, except that he had to wait to be released from the mobility aid. While asleep, the aid fitted over his entire body. Made up of a stretchy, durable material and embedded with countless magnetic threads, electromagnetic impulses could be sent throughout the suit to alter its form. In practice, this meant that the mobility aid kept him limber, moving his body every day, mimicking natural motions like walking, bending, and whatever else the medical staff deemed appropriate. There were rumors that they would sometimes program in some fairly comedic motions but with no one around to witness any of it, Pate didn’t concern himself with such things.

Given how long he’d been asleep, Pate wasn’t surprised by the smell that greeted him once the mobility aid was removed. Still, he found himself holding his breath at times to minimize how much of his odor he’d have to smell. As soon as he was able to, Pate pushed gently off from the wall towards the cabinet that held the sanitation wipes. There were no showers or baths in space. Without gravity, the surface tension of the water was strong enough to turn most free-floating water into unruly globs. It took almost four full packs of the wipes before he stopped smelling himself so acutely. Next, he folded up the mobility aid and stuffed it into a vacuum seal bag. Once all of that was taken care of the air in the capsule began to freshen.

Prior to waking, his life support systems had removed his intravenous lines as well as waste collection tubes. He wasn’t particularly hungry at the moment but Pate knew he needed to begin the process of restarting his digestive tract. After not having eaten anything for so long, he’d need to take things slowly, drinking water at first and then gradually introducing more and more complex foods. There were also bacterium cultures he would need to eat. They were like small, jelly wafers that smelled not too dissimilar from how he’d smelled moments before. For better or worse, long sleeps tended to result in a loss of taste buds, making almost everything he ate bland. Some people regained their sense of taste after a while, others didn’t.

With no one else on board with him in the capsule, Pate considered skipping getting dressed. The single-piece jumpsuits were not uncomfortable in and of themselves and they did add a certain amount of additional insulation, but he had his reasons not to like them. In the end, Pate decided to get dressed. The capsule was a bit colder than he would have liked and since he had no way of adjusting the temperature inside the capsule, his only other option was to wear the jumpsuit.

“Good morning,” chimed the onboard Sysbot. “How was your sleep?”

“Fine, Sys,” Pate replied, “How were things while I slept?”.

“We encountered zero anomalies that fell outside of the expected deviations.”

Pate wished the engineers who’d designed the Sysbots had given them better communication algorithms. His cheap, old homebot could make better conversation than this thing.

“How long before we arrive?” Pate asked.

“We will arrive on Icarus V in seven hours.”

Pate shook his head. “It’s Icarus FIVE,” he told the Sysbot. “Not Icarus vee. Get it right.”

“The name on our charts indicate that you are incorrect,” the Sysbot said in its ever pleasant voice. “Icarus V, spelled I-C-A-R-U-S space V.”

“It’s a Roman Numeral,” Pate insisted. “Didn’t they program you to know that?”

“There are no references to roman numerals in my database,” Sysbot replied.

“Whatever,” Pate grumbled and let the subject drop.

“There is one mission update, received while en route, and four hundred sixty three personal messages,” Sysbot announced while Pate began strapping on the resistance bands that would help him rebuild his muscle mass.

“Four hundred and sixty three?” he asked, shocked that, even with how long he’d been gone, that he’d received so many messages.

“Yes,” Sysbot replied. “I see you did not apply any filters to your personal message log prior to departure. Would you like me to filter out any potential spam?”

“Right, yeah,” he said, remembering. He’d been in a bit of a rush to launch so a lot of little things like that had fallen through the cracks.

“You now have one mission update and two personal messages.”

Disappointment extinguished the excitement he’d felt moments before. “Alright, then,” he said, “let me have them.”

The wall display blinked, erasing his medical data and replacing it with two small files.

“They’re text?” He asked.

“Yes,” Sysbot replied. “Our relativistic speeds make the large audio and video data packets unreliable.”

It seemed the engineers had also failed to program the Sysbot to recognize rhetorical questions. He tapped on the first message, revealing just a single sentence.

Serves you right, you piece of ——-

The last word was edited, quite plainly, by the Sysbot. The program leads had explained very briefly that any and all communications would be monitored by the Sysbot since those communications would all be made public. There was no name attached to this message and the user ID was listed as tmpuser4973.

With his excitement dwindling even more, Pate flicked over to the second message. It was similarly brief albeit not quite to the extreme as the first one.

Just heard the news. Not sure what you’ll do out there but I hope you’re happy and that you can find something to put your skills towards. Love, Mom

Pate furrowed his brow. What was his mom talking about? She knew what he was going to be doing. He was going to chart Icarus V. The combination of nearly constant cloud cover and powerful magnetic fields made satellites a poor choice for getting a good detailed map of the land so he’d been sent instead. Upon landing he’d make sure the rovers had been correct in their initial assessments, send out the seedbots to begin planting their crops, and then set out to map as much of the planet as he could. A few years later, the settlement teams would arrive and they’d begin mining and doing whatever else they would be sent to do. There was enough planet to explore to keep Pate busy for the rest of his life, he figured.

It was the chance to be a modern day explorer that had won Pate over and convinced him to give up everything else. He’d always loved cartography, but in the modern world there simply wasn’t any need for it. On Earth, there were satellites for that sort of thing, but out here, on the new frontier, someone who could make a detailed map without all of that technology was invaluable.

“Have you finished reading your personal messages?” Sysbot asked, jolting Pate back into the present.

“Oh, yes. I’m done.”

“Are you ready for your mission update?”

“Send it on over,” Pate sighed.

The display blinked again and a partial image flickered into view. The face, what Pate could see of it, was that of Carlyle Sang, Pate’s mission director. The image jittered, revealing more of the face and playing a few seconds of garbled audio before the whole thing froze up.

“I don’t suppose there’s anything you can do to improve the playback?”

“I have spent the last twenty-one years, four months, twelve days, eight hours, and twenty three minutes striving to do repair the corrupted file.”

“I guess this is why they don’t send video,” Pate said with frustration. “Is there a transcript of the mission update?”

“Yes,” Sysbot replied.

The screen flickered and a plain text readout appeared. It, too, seemed to be corrupted since large patches of the text were jumbled.

“What is this?” Pate asked. “I thought text was supposed to work!”

“This was sent as part of the same data packet as the video and suffered similar corruption.”

Pate tried to read the mission update but it was such a mess that he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The only thing he knew for certain was that there were several bits that appeared to be apologizing to him and others where the words URGENT and CRITICAL showed up multiple times. Unfortunately, whatever it was that was so urgent or critical was impossible to decipher. And why would they need to be apologizing to him? Had something gone wrong on their end?

“Would you like to run through the pre-landing checklist?” Sysbot asked.

“Um, no, not until were closer to landing.”

“The pre-landing checklist will take several hours to complete.”

“I know,” Pate said, “but doing it now won’t do any good. We’ll have to run through it all again once we get closer to Icarus.”

“There is not enough time to run through it more than once,” Sysbot said.

“Yes there will,” Pate insisted. “We’ve got months before we land. How many did you say we have?”

“You are in error,” Sysbot said. “We will be arriving at Icarus V in seven hours.”

Pate froze. Sysbot had to be wrong. He was supposed to have months to rebuild his muscle mass and get his digestive track working again. However, a quick look out one of the small windows in the capsule did indeed reveal the looming orb of Icarus V.

“Why wasn’t I woken up sooner?” he asked.

“Mission parameters did not stipulate your animation until this time.”

“When we left Earth,” Pate said, trying hard not to get angry with the horrible excuse for artificial intelligence that was the Sysbot, “what were the mission parameters for when I should be woken up?”

“You were to be woken up seventy-two days prior to landfall.”

“And when did those parameters get changed?”

“Mission parameters were updated  twenty-one years, four months, twelve days, eight hours, and twenty three minutes ago.”

“All part of the same corrupted mission update?”

“Correct.”

“And you didn’t think that this change was possibly corrupted as well?”

“It was an update to the mission parameters,” Sysbot stated.

“Yes, but everything else in that update was corrupted!”

“I was able to restore a significant portion of the corrupted data in both the text file and the mission parameters update.”

Pate had to force himself to stop arguing with the Sysbot. It didn’t matter now what it had done or why it had done it. The simple fact of the matter was that he had mere hours to prepare when he was supposed to have months. There was no time to strengthen his body and he only hoped that he would be able to handle reentry and landing. If that all went well then he’d worry about walking. Fortunately, Icarus V only had two thirds the gravity of earth so at least he had that going for him.

With so little time to spare, Pate hurriedly began running through the checklist with the Sysbot. At the same time he began putting on his full space suit and stowing away the packs and things he’d previously been pulling out. All systems checked out and as Pate cinched his final seat belt into place the capsule began to vibrate as it reached the upper atmosphere of Icarus V.

It amazed Pate just how quickly seven hours could go by, but when there were retro-burns to fire and heat shields to move into position, time just flew by. As the air resistance mounted and buffeted the capsule more and more violently, Pate became acutely aware of just how much muscle mass he’d lost. What should have been a rough but manageable few minutes was turning into a real beating. It was all he could do to keep his arms and legs from flying about wildly and his head from smacking too hard against the back and sides of his seat. The only thing that saved him was the numerous straps holding him into his seat.

It was a relief when the first set of drag chutes were deployed and his velocity dropped to much more manageable speed. Even still Pate was struggling to blink back the spots in his vision.

“Your heart rate is erratic,” Sysbot said.

“Yeah, well,” Pate managed to say through clenched teeth, “Be grateful my heart’s still beating.”

Sysbot did not reply and for that Pate was thankful. He didn’t need any unhelpful observations about his heart rate when there was nothing either of them could do about it.

After what felt like an eternity, Pate felt the final retro-thrusters kick in for the last few hundred feet of their descent before finally touching down.

Pate took a few minutes to catch his breath and let his heart slow back down. His lip was bleeding and it felt like he might have some bruising here and there but overall he was surprised by how well he’d fared.

“Atmospheric readings,” said Sysbot, “show oxygen at twenty-three percent, nitrogen at seventy percent, argon at five percent, carbon dioxide at one percent, with trace amounts of water vapor, sulfur,  and other gasses.”

“That’s a bit off from what we were expecting,” Pate noted. “Oxygen was supposed to only be at twenty percent, and why is there so much argon? And did you say you’re detecting sulfur?”

“Sulfur is measuring at zero point two parts per million.”

“There shouldn’t be any,” Pate muttered to himself while he worked on unbuckling himself. His body felt incredibly heavy and clumsy as he moved. The weaker gravity did help, but it also made some things more complicated because they weren’t responding to gravity the same way he was used to back on Earth.

Finally free of his seat, Pate stumbled his way over to the airlock and shut the door behind himself. He waited in the closet sized airlock as the air was first pumped out and stored in the capsule, and then air from Icarus was pumped in. The precaution was a simple one, in case there were any air born contaminants on the planet. This way at least the air in the capsule would remain clean.

As soon as the airlock equalized, the exterior hatch unlocked and swung open. Pate blinked at the bright sunlight. It was either near sunrise or sunset. Pate would need to figure out his orientation to know for certain. However, the landscape that was spread out before him was not at all what he had been expecting. Instead of virgin fields of grass and saplings, there was a massive pit, dug out and mined, although there were no miners or machinery working there now. This mine was clearly old, long since stripped and abandoned.

The ground where his capsule had landed wasn’t a rocky outcropping like it was supposed to be, either. Instead, he was standing on a well built launchpad. There was evidence that it had been used several times, though how much time had passed between its last launch and Pate’s arrival he couldn’t tell. Not far from the launchpad stood a thin post, anchored into the ground, that held a metal plaque, the sort that historic monuments often had explaining whatever historical events had transpired there. Dreading more and more what he would read there, he strode over to it.

To his surprise, it began with a dedication to him.

In honor of the valiant explorer, Pate Winsly, who volunteered to be the first person to ever set foot upon Icarus V, but for whom it was not to be. His voyage, which would have had him sowing the first crops and mapping out the surrounding environs was made obsolete with the advent of more advanced drives, developed and launched a mere three years later, allowing others to surpass him on their way to Icarus V. The hope was that the planet would prove fruitful and be a thriving world by the time of Pate Winsly’s arrival, but alas, the mineral deposits were not as large as had been hoped. With decades still to go before Pate Winsly’s arrival it was determined that Icarus V would be abandoned. Updates were sent to Pate Winsly’s craft, explaining the situation and expressing our hopes in having a craft there in orbit around Icarus V to which he could dock and join us in whichever part of this new frontier that we have since made our way to.

Pate looked up at the sky. Were they there, somewhere above him in orbit? Had they seen him? It didn’t sound like they would be prepared to come down to the planet’s surface and pick him up, so what would they do? Could they leave and come back with yet another mission to retrieve him?

“I am releasing the seedbots now,” Sysbot chimed through the intercom.

Behind him, Pate heard the panels on the capsule slide away and the droning noise of the seedbots as they took flight. As he looked out over the massive pit mine, he couldn’t help but laugh when the seedbots began to drop their seeds into the pit, still relying off the old topographical scans the first rovers had sent back.

“Hey, Sysbot,” he said into his mic, “go ahead and recall the seedbots and activate the distress beacon.”

“I do not see why we should deviate from the mission parameters,” Sysbot replied although the seedbots did begin to turn back and return to the capsule.

“I know you don’t,” Pate sighed. “I know you don’t.”