November 22nd, 2022

So, this is odd.

After last night’s awkwardness with Mark, I figured everyone would be sleeping it off and this would be a bit of a late day - for a farmer that meant an extra 15 minutes or so.

The thing is, I didn’t hear from him. I decided to have breakfast and if Mark still hadn’t called me, I’d call him. It’s weird, when I’m not expecting a call I could have happily gone days without talking to anyone. But when it’s expected and not coming, all I can think of is why not.

Breakfast’s a chocolate bar.

I was a chubby kid growing up. And when you really think about it, that wasn’t my fault. I mean when you’re under about 13 or 14 you’re just this ball of desire without any ability to self regulate or think critically about what you’re doing. That’s what parents are for. By the time I was almost done high school I’d ballooned up and was hearing about the “freshman 15”.

So I went on a diet. I sat down and looked at everything I’d eaten in the past week and started thinking about where the easy calories to cut were, and how I could keep full. Soda, potato chips, candy, and chocolate bars all got cut. Then instead of having pasta and carbs I replaced it with cooked vegetables. Sweet potatoes, lefty greens (fun fact, choy is the Chinese word for leafy greens: bak choy, yu choy, etc.), asparagus, carrots, etc.

I don’t want to get all preachy about this, but ultimately that’s what worked for me. The only reason I’m telling you this is because it has literally been a decade since I’ve had a chocolate bar and Jesus, Joseph, Mary and the little donkey, are they sweet. Like disgustingly sweet, like all I want to do is drink-water-and-floss sweet. I seriously think people must get desensitized to sweetness over time because I’m getting hit by full blast sugar overload here.

Breakfast done, I broke down and call.

“Morning Mark.” No answer. Five seconds goes by with no answer, five minutes, a half an hour goes by.

“Artemis I to mission control - copy.” No answer.

You may recall that NASA, repeatedly, told me not to touch any of the Orion’s controls. So, careful to touch nothing, I moved over to the commander’s chair just to have a look-see at what was happening.

Now I like to think of myself as a smart guy. NASA engineer, degree in aerospace engineering, but looking at that nice, functional, multi-purpose LCD display, I didn’t have the damnedest idea what it was saying. My “pre-flight safety briefing” covered tool kits and flotation devices, not the Orion’s actual controls (which was probably all on its own a six-month training course).

For the past six days NASA’s had me doing busy work that I couldn’t possibly mess up - not pushing buttons.

Mostly the console is full of buttons I don’t know. “FCM 1”, “FCM 2”, “FCM 3”, “FCM 4”. Whatever the hell “FCM” stands for, it needs a lot of buttons. There’s also, “LVLh”, “Preddt”, and “Por”.

The buttons I do know are either useless, “Cockpit Lights”, or “Strobe 1”. More practically though they are buttons that absolutely shouldn’t be pressed, “trj clr”, or “burn auth”.

The problem is, there have to be about a hundred different readings and displays on this LCD panel and after an hour of watching them, I don’t think a single one has changed. They should change, right?

Mental math time. Battery status 92.35%. So this is day 7. Just to keep the math easy let’s say 150 hours elapsed from 100% on the battery to 92.35% on the battery. That’s 7.65% in 150 hours, or 0.05% per hour, give or take. That means that battery % should be ticking down by 0.01% every fifteen minutes or so. I watch it. After twenty minutes it hasn’t changed.

Well, this is why people invented writing… Anyone have a pen?

Would you believe that the last page in the emergency procedures manual is actually a copyright page? Anyways, it’s scrap paper now. I record every number on the LCD panel, set a watch, and an hour later they are all, still, exactly the same.

That’s odd. Bad odd.

NASA’s also still not answering the radio. I check to make sure I’m not in the moon’s shadow - I look out the window and spot earth (that was easy). So why isn’t NASA answering the radio? Why isn’t the command console’s LCD display changing?

I expand my search. There are exactly thirteen LCD displays in the Orion that are tied to the main computer and I record every reading on everyone. I wait two hours, then circle back and check. Every number, on every display, is the same.

I think the computer's frozen.

***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and
I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).

Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

© 2022 Nathan H. Green