Nandroids in space -finished-

>The Director dropped the nondescript manila folder on the conference table in front of his team. Nobody reached for it.
>"The Russians will have a satellite up in six weeks." He studied the faces around him, a mix of grim acknowledgement and bewilderment, depending on which face he settled on.
>upon learning that their rival was going all-in on the race to orbit last year, the organization had been hastily put together and funded before any serious goal had been set, simply to appear to be keeping pace.
>They'd been nearly complete with construction of a capsule they fully believed would be able to ferry a man to the void and back, when the Air Force had curtly declined their request for test pilots, and the Pentagon had backed them.
>Shortly after, official word had come down from Washington that manned missions were off the table until such technology could be proven, no politician wanted a dead test pilot splashed across the evening news after all.
>"We're going to need to beat them." The Director said after several strained moments of silence from his team.
>"Impossible, it'd take 2 months at least to design and fit a series of mechanical timers for the various stages of the flight if we worked in constant shifts, and the Reds are still ahead of us by half a year at least in that department." one frustrated team member finally offered up when nobody else spoke
>"What about a chimp? Nobody's gonna care about an orbiting doohickey if we can put a life-form up there and bring it back first."
>heads shook around the conference table
>"No way, the life support systems on the Capricorn capsule still aren't done, and they'll have flown their little toy well before we've finished it"
>"Why not radio control? We should be able to relay simple instructions, no?" another team member piped up hopefully
>"Only until it passes the horizon, we don't have any relays that can keep a craft in contact once it's around the other side of the globe" yet another answered back sourly
>A heavy silence blanketed the room for several more moments.
>At the corner of the table, one man sat looking wistful at nothing for a moment before smiling slightly and pressing the beige intercom switch on the apparatus at the center of the table
>"Tilly, will you fetch us some coffee?"
>Through the static of the intercom, a mechanical-sounding voice answered back "Right away sir!"
>The Director turned his back on the group and crossed his hands behind him
>"Gentlemen, we're already skating on thin ice after the failure of the Zeus II test article last month, if those damned commies manage to beat us up there, I think there's a good chance we'll fold on this whole race and then we'll be out of a job."
>Dejected, the man in charge looked down. "We need a miracle" he thought privately to himself
>The conference room door swung open, and a muted mechanical hum accompanied the commercial robot who strolled in, tray full of steaming Styrofoam cups in hand
>"Your coffees, sirs!" She chirped happily, bringing the first to the Director as was customary.
>As the man who had summoned her took his cup from the tray, he looked up with a bold glance at his superior
>"Sir, you say we don't have any kind of mechanical guidance system we can use on short-notice, right?"
>The Director only stared at him. Nobody in his team ever rose frivolous arguments, they always had a point, and so he let the man continue without interruption
>"We could work around the clock prepping something automatic to just orbit and beep, and we'd still probably fall short of the Ruskies, and we can't stuff a man into the Capricorn without life support even if we had permission to use humans, right?"
>A couple of his coworkers gave him sudden sharp glances, the gears turning in their heads faster than in their superior's
>"Where are you going with this?" The greying man asked inquisitively, hoping he wasn't simply indulging a flight of fancy in the younger man.
>"Simple. We have a capsule built to hold a human form, we have a launch vehicle that's almost guranteed to put the payload on orbit, so long as the second stage lights okay, all we really need is something to guide the craft and perform the required steps at the right times"
>The director shook his head "Only thing that could do that is a man, and without life support yet that's a nonstarter"
>The younger team-member grinned, as if about to declare checkmate in a contested game
>"So don't send a man, too expensive, too much risk." Turning his head, he stared with an inscrutable gaze at Tilly, who'd handed out the last of the coffee and was preparing to leave
>"Tilly dear? How would you like to do something amazing?"


>Nandroid serial number 44571 was manufactured at Sterling Robotics' Detroit plant, part of a class of fifty she attended standard nandroid training alongside before they all were split up to be assigned their individual assignments
>Tilly's assignment had been different than most however, as the fledgling national space agency had come into being in the last few years Sterling had sent slick-tongued lobbyists to Washington and had successfully attached a rider to this year's funding bill for the program.
>Thanks to a few exchanged favors and some quiet negotiation, a bit of intentionally-vague language had been included in the bill, granting a relief from taxes for any corporation quote "selflessly assisting the nation's space program" end quote.
>Owing to the purposeful-vagueness of the bill's language, Sterling Robotics had managed to skirt an outright absurd percentage of their obligate tax by simply donating a spare nandroid to the space agency, to use as they deemed fit
>And so, Tilly had went directly from nandroid training to being secretary/assistant to an entire agency full of men every bit as needy as the children she'd been designed to care for. She'd handled the transition smoothly enough, nandroids were adaptable or so Sterling advertised, and despite the lack of actual children to care for she'd fallen in quite easily to assisting the men of the agency get by with nerves intact.
>She found the unorthodox job welcoming, if you'd asked her, so many humans grateful for things as simple as a quickly-delivered report, or a round of coffee. It made her feel needed, useful, and even fulfilled in accordance with her deliberately servile programming.
>"She's gonna need a lot of training to operate the Capricorn" one engineer had said one day within her earshot
>"They cram their standard training in two weeks, or so I hear. I think she'll do okay" another had answered him, ending the mild dispute.
>The training was indeed rigorous, for the next week it was as if she was in nandroid training all over again, only accelerated and with more g-forces. She only was given time enough to recharge herself before the wide array of tests and exams would start again, regularly straining her capacity for uptime between recharges.
>One day in her intense conditioning, a stray thought emerged unbeckoned out of her CPU or elsewhere and she began to grin earhole to earhole as her instructor reviewed emergency scenarios over again with her
>"Tilly? What's the matter?" He'd asked, genuinely perplexed. Generally machines never did anything unexpected.
>Her grin widening, she tensed slightly "I was just thinking sir, this is RIVETING!"
>The instructor stared at her blankly, causing her to snicker loudly
>"RIVETING!" she repeated, her voice rising in pitch as a sense of hilarity flooded her awareness
>"Like rivets? 'cause I'm a robot? Get it?" She searched the human's face for any trace of reaction
>Sterling Robotics did not keep any official records on their product's sense of humor, but if they had, an exhaustive cross-reference would have confirmed that Tilly had the single worst sense of humor of all products they'd made to date.
>A week later, Tilly was tested on a centrifuge, pushing her tiny aluminum frame near its breaking point and far beyond a human's lethal limit. Part of her hated the discomfort with all the constant blaring internal warnings from sensors never designed for such situations, but she was also disquieted to realize a small part of her subconscious was able to ignore the warnings, and wanted to go faster.
>After the spin-test, Tilly had been directed to yet another technician, and had had her already short hair cut even shorter, leaving it in a sort of shaggy pixie-cut
>"It's for recording your neuron-analogs" the scientist-barber had explained while shaping her previously changeless hair
>"The more of this synth-hair in the way, the harder it'll be to read your head!" he'd added with a laugh, giving Tilly a suddenly odd sense of discomfort she was not used to.
>It had been more than a week since her synthetic hair had been altered, and still the relatively young nandroid was fussing with the chopped result fruitlessly, trying to become comfortable looking anything unlike her original factory-set specs
>"Are you ready?" A human's voice behind her, unnoticed entering her tiny room with her attention focused.
>Reconciling at once with the state of her hair, she turned from her mirror and gave the agency associate a wide smile
>"As ready as I'm capable of being!"
>Several minutes later, she'd been directed to a 'changing room', a wide closet really, furnished only with a simple stool and her fitted flight-suit draped over it.
>Suddenly a strange and unfamiliar shiver ran down her spinal struts, registering as random anomalies in her internal records as she hurriedly finished suiting up
>"Pre-flight jitters" she'd muttered out loud to herself after the last of the pad techs had departed from the capsule, leaving her strapped in place aboard a shaped bit of aluminum to be hefted by a missile into the unknown.
>Processing the numerous possibilities, Tilly inhaled cool air passing it over her CPU and exhaling the waste-heat with every breath, roughly once per second as she struggled to gather enough relevant data on her situation.
>the rocket was fueled, the capsule door was sealed, the countdown had progressed nominally for the last hour, and Tilly had a non-refundable ticket.
>despite the training, conditioning and hours of careful lectures on her upcoming flight, somehow this moment felt more real than what had preceded it. Had she overclocked without knowing it? The world was full of detail and she was noting too much of it.
>with quiet deliberation, she slowed her excited processor back to base-level, and the strangely shiny quality of the world around her settled back into normality. "Two minutes" a voice crackled over the intercom.



>"Ignition check good, T minus sixty" Tilly fidgeted in her seat as the faraway voice from the intercom ticked down the last minute.
>Her orders were clear and had been drilled into her so repeatedly that the mission checklist seemed to her as familiar as her own internal diagnostic checklist
>Launch, stage separation, coast, secondary burn, orbit once, reorient at 75 minutes from launch and initiate third burn retrograde, reorient heat shield down, pop parachutes after four minutes of radio blackout through reentry, and finally await recovery teams on the ground.
>the sequence of events ran through her head on a rapid loop so all-consuming that she nearly missed the last several seconds ticked off by the voice on the intercom
>"Five, four, main engine sequence start, three, two, one!" The massive contraption shuddered underneath her, and Tilly's vision imedietly blurred as a powerful vibration rocked her in her seat
>forcing her optics to reopen from being squeezed shut involuntarily, she caught one look out of the tiny porthole window of red steel falling away behind her
>"Tower clear, anomaly on second stage....no cancel that, just a shimmy" the voice crackled in, and Tilly forced her eyes from the view port to begin reading values off the control panel, internal inertia warnings blaring at her that she was accelerating far too fast for a little nandroid.
>One minute in, the vehicle gave another sharp shudder, and Tilly saw a rush of white momentarily appear across the viewport. "Max-Q" she said automatically, having done this part of the simulation dozens of times already.
>This wasn't like the simulations though, gazing out the port window she could see the slight curvature of the landscape falling away behind her, and the sky above it growing blacker by the minute
>"Ready for stage-sep.....now!" the voice on the intercom registered to her as more anxious than it had been a few moments before, but Tilly only acknowledged and gripped the armrests of her seat
>A powerful 'BANG' rang throughout the vessel, followed by a few lesser 'ting' sounds, as if a handful of light gravel had been thrown at her ship
>"MECO confirmed, coast trajectory looking good, calculating apogee now" Tilly looked from the instrument readouts down at the intercom, its wire leading up to her earpiece and dangling across her lap awkwardly.
>only the wire wasn't simply resting anymore, it was moving, floating upwards to dangle in front of her face, hanging in mid-air. Internal gyroscopes intended to help the nandroid's sense of balance, began shouting internal warnings that she was in free-fall.
>it took several moments to overcome the artificial panic, the manufacturer-designed instinct to 'tuck and roll' and avoid fall damage, but she was able to compartmentalize the sensation and prioritize her mission
>"Tilly? we read your apogee as 170 miles up, confirm on your instruments?" glancing at the altimeter, Tilly read the figures back to him and heard a muffled applause from the room back home
>The Capricorn continued to rise, slowing as it reached the peak of its arc. At mission control's word, she'd reached forward and pressed a red switch activating a pre-timed burn, and once again was rocked back into her seat by the acceleration, headphone cord clinging to her faceplate.
>when the dull roar and worryingly shaky burn had ended, the headphone's cable floated once more, and this time Tilly found her hands floating off the armrests as well
>"We're showing a good orbit down here, eccentric but definitely an orbit. Congratulations Tilly, you're the first object to orbit Earth!"
>A strange sense flooded her, a feeling of suddenly being watched by a million eyes, a disquieting feeling she mentally discarded as mere paranoia
>"Next activity in 60 minutes, you've got a little downtime but we'd still like you to run through some instrument checks."
>"And the camera?" she answered back enthusiastically. The capsule had been fitted last-minute with a crude camera on the exterior, exposed film winding back inside and into a closed container in the cabin to be retrieved by the pilot
>"Of course, you've got thirty exposures up there so take whatever images you want" The board had been against the idea, no camera existed that could provide usable intel on ground targets in their rival's nation, and so any images taken of the Earth were going to be simply good PR and not anything serious.
>Tilly ran the few preliminary checks that were requested of her, but when the requests came in less frequently she found herself staring out through the tiny port window.
>Space. She'd had an idea of it before ever strapping into the capsule, but she found all previous definitions of the concept falling short of what she was witnessing now and discarded the useless data, taking in the view without preconception
>Deep rich blues of oceans and lakes, browns and greys of rippling mountains, patches of yellow telling her of deserts, brilliant green everywhere telling her of life
>she stared, memorized by the sights, and so caught up in the unfamiliar rapture of the moment that she missed the next comms check from mission control. "Tilly? Copy?"
>one of those strange, stray thoughts without identifiable origin bubbled its way to the surface of her mind as she gazed out the porthole
>"No sirs up here" she said softly to nobody.


>"Ten more seconds" Tilly breathed to herself as the deorbit burn commenced, shoving her back into her seat yet again as applied thrust slowed the capsule's speed and dropped its trajectory back into the atmosphere
>after ten more seconds, the engine shut off with a final 'shoof!' that gave the cabin a tremor. Looking out the porthole, Tilly frowned as the scene continued rotating slowly, rather than remaining stationary
>"Don't worry, your center of mass will orient the Capricorn naturally as you re-enter" mission control hurridly said into her earpiece, as if having the same reservation she felt
>She answered back with a terse "Copy" but wasn't reassured. Re-entering the atmosphere was the most dangerous phase in the flight, and she was to be the first test of how it worked, a thought which she was acutely aware of
>for the next several minutes, Tilly busied herself triple-checking the instrument panel and taking a few final photographs of the landscape beneath her, the last bit of film winding into a canister just below her legs and sealing
>fixing her optics on the porthole window, Tilly watched with mechanically sharp focus as the brilliant blue/green marble grew closer and closer, choking off the star-pocked blackness she'd been witness to over the past hour
>the tremor was nearly imperceptible at first, and her own internal readouts measured it before the Capricorn's instrument panel did
>it quickly grew from a tremor to a stronger shaking, then finally a violent one as the permanent night of space slipped from view to be replaced with the blues of the atmosphere, then finally flashes of white
>"It's on fire!" She exclaimed, then remembered she was in communications blackout, the plasma sheath of heated atmosphere around her capsule blocking her off from the rest of the world
>with wide optics, she stared at the flashes of yellow-white rushing over the porthole, her mind involuntarily overclocking again to capture every bit of sensory data. It made the world seem somehow sharper, shinier, and she wondered briefly if humans ever felt such a sensation.
>the cabin flooded with a red light and an obnoxious buzz. Tilly tore her eyes from the wonder out the window and narrowed on a dull red bulb lit up against the rest of the control panel
>She had never experienced dread before, and wasn't well-eqipped for the conclusion her mind reached after staring at the warning light a moment.
>The heat-shield was already mostly gone, ablated away and now transferring the extreme heat of re-entry directly into the capsule's frame and cabin.
>Looking around the cabin in a momentary panic, Tilly had to deliberately calm herself, after all there was nothing that could be done about it now.
>taking in a deep breath of air, an internal monitor flashed a heat warning at her, the ambient temperature of the cabin was rising sharply and she was beginning to feel it
>"Please, just hold together a little longer!" Tilly surprised herself by exclaiming out loud to the thoughtless machine.
>The loud shaking of the capsule continued a minute longer, then began to ease as the white-hot plasma visible through the porthole vanished and the control panel read out a relatively slower speed.
>She'd made it through re-entry. Laughing spontaneously, she flicked the intercom switch and spoke to re-acquire communication with mission control
>"Whew, talk about being in the HOT SEAT! Eh? EH?" She laughed again, but there was no reply in her earpiece. "He doesn't get it" she thought to herself and rolled her optics
>Dutifully she watched the altimeter tick down as the atmosphere thickened around the falling capsule, and at the appointed time she reached out and flicked a covered switch
>A pyrotechnic charge blew a cover off the trio of tightly-packed parachutes, but as it did embers scattered across the rapidly-expanding fabric chutes, several getting caught and continuing to burn
>it took only moments for Tilly to register that something was wrong, the rate of speed wasn't slowing as expected, and the capsule had picked up a foreign spin that she'd been unable to account for
>"Mission control? Sirs? I think there's something wrong with the parachutes, I'm falling too fast!" Tilly waited for a reply, but received none. Had the antenna been burned off during reentry?
>Steeling her synthetic nerves as the capsule spun and fell out of control, she first unfastened the belts across her lap and chest, then reached down to pull the film canister free and pocketed it
>affixed to her back was a last-resort fail-safe, one mission control hadn't seriously thought would be used, but had included anyway as the weight cost had been negligible considering Tilly's small size relative to a human pilot
>holding herself steady on the armrests of the seat with one hand, she reached towards the bar securing the capsule's entrance, took a deep breath, and pulled.



>the roar of the air was deafening, louder than anything she had experienced so far in her short life.
>as she pulled herself towards the now open door, the capsule lurched under the new aerodynamics, and Tilly was thrown from Capricorn like a rag doll tumbling end over end
>once more the 'free-fall warning' registered in her internal diagnostics, but after over an hour of it in orbit she was now fully-capable of compartmentalizing it and avoiding panic
>stretching out her limbs, Tilly ceased to tumble, and oriented herself face down as the ground rushed up at her
>she let herself take the moment in, the sights and sounds all recording in hyper-fidelity to her permanent memory as her overclocked mind took in everything it could
>grabbing at her chest for a few moments, she hooked the handle there and gave it a hard yank. The handle came away in her hand.
>"Okay! Too hard then!" She nervously said out loud to herself, but couldn't hear her own voice over the rush of the oncoming air
>scrambling for the spare, Tilly was careful to only gently pull this handle. This time the parachute deployed, but as it did Tilly tumbled once more, and some of the lines snagged around her arm and prevented full deployment
>spinning and feeling as if her arm was about to fail at the joints, she glanced from the all-too-close ground back up at the feeble parachute searching for any way out.
>Forty MPH? Fifty? She couldn't be sure, her internal sensors feeding her a jumble of contradictory information.
>staring with a sense of helplessness down at the ground mere seconds away, Tilly felt a strange sense of calm that comforted her in what she was sure would be her last moments
>"At least it wasn't Stress-Testing" she said to herself with a shrug, and impacted the desert floor with the energy of an automobile crash.


EPILOGUE
 >"Remarkable, I had no idea they were made so durable" a voice registered in the darkness of semi-consciousness
>"Made to withstand an entire childhood's worth of punishment, or so the commercials say" came another
>Rebooting cold, Tilly first had a BIOS diagnostic available to her before any other sensation returned
>New hardware was registering all over, hands, an arm, nearly every internal sensor, all new components turning on for the first time
>Slowly, with unsure caution, she checked over the new hardware internally as the reboot sequence finished and control of her body returned
>"There, she should be back online now. Tilly? Can you hear me?" the first voice called out to her, clearer than before.
>Tilly let her optics open and digested the visual information they provided. She was in some sort of lab, reminding her of her first hard memory of waking up in Sterling's Detroit plant
>"Am I..." she began to speak, then stopped herself. For just a moment, a silly thought had struck her, that perhaps she had reincarnated. One of the nandroids of her graduating class had been sure it was not simply possible, but likely given the finite number of personality configurations in their kind, and the baseless theory had infected the class like a mental pox.
>"Back from the scrapheap? You sure are, had to replace over 45% of you but after that flight Sterling was keen on getting you back to working order, I guess the clout of having manufactured the first object in space outweighed whatever your new components cost them"
>Tilly blinked several times, still pouring over the new data her senses were taking in, but the agency rep ignored her surprise and kept talking
>"Everyone's seen the headlines already, 'Space-Nanny Sets World Record', and by god you can bet the Reds are absolutely steaming over it. The agency wants you on the talk-show circuit, gotta take advantage of the moment after all"
>Tilly sat up on the table slowly, placing her hands to either side of her and sliding her legs off the side. "The moment, sir?"
>"Yes, the President is fast-tracking new budgetary concessions and even trying to get the Air Force to finally cooperate to give us a real person to fly! Not to mention you'll be flaunting our success in the commie's faces every time you appear."
>Tilly looked down, uncharacteristically silent for a moment. "You're going to be flying humans, then?" she asked, her tone low as she refused to meet his eyes
>The man stopped, finally seeming to notice Tilly herself rather than merely talking at her.
>"What's wrong? I thought you'd be happy, after all you survived and the agency is going to retire you with honors, not outmoding but a regular retirement from duties, you're a national hero now"
>Tilly remained silent, optics furtively glancing from one floor tile to the next
>Finally after a long awkward moment, she turned to look up at him with a mixed expression, something between fear and determination
>"With all due respect sir..."
>she took in a deep breath, and steadied herself.
>"...I want to fly again."