[An away team made up of Colonel Jack O’Neill, Dr. Daniel Jackson, the android/AI Rommie, and Dr. Rodney McKay has been dispatched to investigate a seemingly derelict freighter. On board, they discover a service android named Maia who requests their assistance in ridding the ship of an intruder in exchange for her cooperation.]
You agree to help track down and deal with the intruder. Satisfied, Maia leads them off down a dimly lit corridor towards the bridge. They walk in silence, only the hiss of venting steam and the ringing of their boots on the metal grating.
Finally, McKay: “Y’know, there’s a Waldorf Astoria on my planet.”
“Does it also possess Dual Kessler-Vann X-440 fusion torches, cold-gas plus eight monopropellant cluster thrusters, and twin Mark-18 closed-cycle fission reactors?”asks Maia.
“Uh, no,”McKay reluctantly admits. “But it serves a pretty popular salad.”
Suddenly, something skitters overhead, mechanical and spider-quick. McKay flinches. “What the – “
“Where are we going?”asks O’Neill.
Indeed, the team is headed off course. Rommie points out that if they’re going to the bridge, they’re headed in the wrong direction. Maia agrees. Her neural link to the ship, she explains, has flagged a containment leak from the back-up reactor that’s flooded the compartment ahead. “I carry manufacturer-installed radiation shielding,”she informs them. “You do not, and the exposure could be lethal.” So she’s routing them the long way around.
She walks on a few steps, stops, and looks back. “Coming?”she asks.
What do you do?
A) Push straight through.
B) Follow her detour.
C) Hold, and send Rommie to confirm he leak.
CHOOSE!
Previously On…
You and 19 others have been stranded in an amalgam universe of myriad SF realities. All 19 are sci-fi’s Best of the Best. And then there’s you, uniquely qualified given your encyclopedic knowledge garnered from your world where these characters, their technologies, and their stories are fiction, beloved TV shows you have watched time and again. Together, all 20 of you have set off on the Enterprise-D, tasked with finding a way home.
For your first mission, you’ve decided to investigate a seemingly derelict freighter broadcasting an emergency beacon. An away team and puddle jumper have been dispatched to the ghost ship, anomalous energy pulses making beaming and communications a challenge.
After parking and cloaking the puddle jumper in the freighter’s hangar, the team crosses the airless bay into the ship proper. There, they make the decision to check out the waning energy signature of a containment field en route to the bridge. But they immediately encounter a utility unit that advances on them menacingly. Rommie connects to it and relays a shut down command that causes the robot to collapse.
Further along, they encounter a sealed door and Rommie informs them that the compartment beyond is exposed to space. She suggests locking down their current section and then unsealing the door since it’s the most direct route to the bridge – and that ebbing containment field. They do so. The door slides open to reveal an immense hull breach complicating their progress. Rommie leaps over the chasm and secures a tether to the other side, allowing the rest of the team to pull themselves over. But when they attempt to open the door to the next section, they hit an impasse. The door remains locked and will not respond to their commands.
O’Neill blows the lock with C4, allowing them entry into the adjoining compartment where they discover an android in a containment field, completing its regenerative cycle. When the android awakens, it informs them it is the caretaker of this freighter, the Waldorf Astoria, and warns them off pillaging its contents. Daniel assures the android, Maia, that they harbor no ill intent and ask for her assistance in accessing the bridge and restoring ship’s systems. But Maia remains suspicious. She requests a peer-to-peer interface with Rommie to confirm that your presence on the freighter is, in fact, benign. Rommie agrees, satisfying Maia’s request. Maia explains that her memory stores and parts of the ship were damaged after the freighter encountered an atemporal force during FTL transit. She offers to help the team access the ship’s systems in exchange for their assistance in tracking down and eradicating a mysterious entity that has boarded the freighter.
***
Norman Spinrad
One of the most provocative authors of the New Wave.
The Iron Dream (1972): This alternate history satires skewers the allure of authoritarianism in heroic pulp fiction. Set in an alternate world where Adolf Hitler abandons politics, emigrates to America, and becomes a science fiction writer.
Bug Jack Barron (1969): This near-future stream-of-consciousness novel sees a talk show host unearth a conspiracy involving political corruption and immortality treatments. Nominated for a Hugo Award.
The Void Captain’s Tale (1983): A starship’s Void Pilot convinces her Captain to risk it all on a transcendent “blind jump” through interstellar space in this inventive and erotic space opera.
“Carcinoma Angels” (1967): A wealthy businessman uses psychic self-analysis to enter his own bloodstream and do battle against the malignant cells killing him in this surrealistic short Story.
Naomi Mitchison
Who published more than 100 books over her eight-decade career, spanning everything from historical episodes to children’s fantasy.
Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962): A communications specialist on an interstellar exploration team narrates her experiences of first contact in a seminal SF novel exploring linguistics, time dilation, alien biology, and motherhood. S
olution Three (1975): A new generation born on a ruin, overpopulated Earth begins to question a social system built around cloning and the suppression of heterosexuality.
Not by Bread Alone (1983): The discovery of a genetic-engineering technique that dramatically increases crop yields and makes food freely available worldwide carries consequences no one anticipated in this ecological morality tale.
We Have Been Warned (1935): A near-future political novel imagining authoritarian suppression, sexual politics, and the erosion of individual freedom.
Suzy McKee Charnas
Best known for her four-volume Holdfast Chronicles, and her radically naturalistic take on vampires in The Vampire Tapestry.
Walk to the End of the World (1974): The first book in the Holdfast Chronicles is set in a brutal post-apocalyptic society where women are enslaved under a patriarchal regime that blames them for civilization’s collapse.
Motherlines (1978): The second book in the Holdfast Chronicles sees a woman who has escaped from the Holdfast encounter the Riding Women, a free all-female society whose unusual reproductive biology lets them continue without men.
The Conqueror’s Child (1999): In the final book of the Holdfast Chronicles, the descendants of the women who escaped escaped the Holdfast confront what to do with surviving men, and whether a new society can break free from the cycles of oppression.
Listening to Brahms (1988): Nominated for both the Nebula for Best Novelette, this haunting story finds the last survivors of a devastated Earth revived by aliens who worship human culture.
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