(3) Tatyana

>"This one....'Tatyana' " A portly man had said to a timid line-manager as they passed the immobile robot during a factory inspection, the machine standing motionless in a line with fifty more of near-identical build. "Have it packaged and ready to ship out before I leave."
>One of the many perks of his position, the large man had thought to himself as he left the building, was how many people below him were unwilling to ever say 'no'. A free mechanical nanny was a small price to pay in order to keep the Commandant of the Union's spaceflight development happy.
>The robotic nanny, a recent development made after studying western designs, had been shipped by train to the home of the Commandant, a short thick man of advanced years yet retaining sharp predator's eyes.
>Her first memory had been of her initial boot-up, a nearly two minute process, in the elder man's home attended-to by a round woman and two curious children. The home, if you could call it that then, was dark and cluttered, and Tatyana noted the years of obvious neglect before anything else.
>The youngsters had been bashful at first, but at Tatyana's first smile and offer of a hug they'd nearly tackled her to the rug, their parents warmly looking on from a distance. Before the inevitable housekeeping began, she'd cherished this warm moment and would play the memory back to herself fondly on darker days.
>The household needed quite a bit of care, the Commandant's wife was nearly as elderly as himself, and the two had been blessed late in their lives by a pair of orphans adopted to give their home a renewed sense of life.
>Tatyana relished the opportunity, nearly breaking herself in her first week to catch up on years worth of neglect and disrepair around the house. It satisfied her greatly to see a decrepit pile of laundry washed and neatly folded, or a disused and dusty closet brought back to original function again.
>It had taken a month, but the determined robot had turned the dank and dismal hovel back into a warm and inviting home, and it made her proud to have contributed to her master's lives. One evening after tucking the boys into bed, she'd descended the stairs, discovering her masters huddled around the tiny television at the heart of the room.
>She moved forward and stopped just behind the couch, looking between them curiously at the black and white screen. A news broadcaster was telling them about an American achievement, one in her master's field. As she watched, she learned more, as had often been the case when he brought his work home with him, explaining to her various facets of the program in venting tirades she nonetheless found fascinating.
>According to the US media, one of their 'nandroids' had been shot off on a missile, and had orbited once before performing what they were calling a 'high-speed landing'. "Sounds like she bit the dust hard" Tatyana said with a tinge of smugness owning to her programming. American-anything performed shoddily, this was merely another confirmation of her built-in bias.
>"SHH!" The Commandant shushed her, listening intently to the small television even after the news piece had concluded. Finally he shook his bald head. "They cheated." he said flatly, then sprang up with force. "THEY FUCKING CHEATED!"
>Tatyana winced as the furious man kicked over the coffee table, sending newspapers and magazines flying. "It's not goddamned fair!" Fuming, the elder man caught his breath for a few moments, clearly overexerted. His wife dutifully stood with him, trying to soothe him with a "dear" and light back rub.
>The Commandant shook her off, grabbed his coat off the standing rack and walked out the front door, giving it a slam behind him without another word. Tatyana and the Commandant's wife stood silent for a long moment, neither knowing what to say.
>Eventually, the plump woman put on a forced smile and cleared her throat loudly. "Tatyana dear, would you give me a hand with the coffee table?"

>The master of the house had been gone for several weeks without word, which was not uncommon as his work often took him many hours away by train. Always though, he would call at least once to let them know he was coming home, so when he walked through the doorway without warning one evening three sets of eyes and one pair of lenses stared at the Commandant as he stood in the entrance.
>"Dear, where-" the elder woman's voice was cut off, the Commandant didn't even look at her. "Tatyana. You have a job to perform." He said this tersely, hands clasped behind his back in a stance that said 'official party business'.
>Rising from the block tower she'd been erecting with the twins on the living-room floor, she stood at attention and matched his official stance. "What would you have me do, sir?" She asked, ready for instruction. His demeanor unnerved her though, at home he was not like this, but she hid her apprehension from her family.
>The Commandant breathed in deeply and sighed, not deviating his gaze from Tatyana. "The Agency requires a mechanical pilot to perform an extremely important flight. I have opted you specifically." he said gruffly, fixing her with a gaze that told her this was non-negotiable. She was confused, but didn't show it. Why her? She knew only the basics of her master's work, and that was merely a happy accident.
>One of the twin boys clung at her leg, looking back at their half-built block tower. "No!" the child whined at first, then huffed angrily. "When are you gonna be back?" His brother sat by the short block tower looking at Tatyana, obviously concerned as well but letting the bolder of the two ask the question.
>Tatyana glanced from her young charges back to her master expectantly. The man fixed her with a dark gaze, and imperceptibly shook his head. Feeling the steel cable of her spinal support shiver involuntarily, Tatyana went cold. She'd always known that she was essentially expendable, all of her mechanical comrades had the self-sacrifice impulse hardwired into them. Still, now at the moment she called upon it, the programmed imperative was only somewhat motivating. She composed herself and smiled back at the twins.
>"Just as soon as I'm able, you just keep building. And no fighting, da?" The boys looked at her worriedly, unsure of why the statement felt off to them, but then the boy holding her leg released her and nodded. "Okay, see you later Tatyana!"

>Tatyana rode a train several hours with her master, remaining silent for nearly all of the trip as he'd initially dodged any questions she'd asked about her assignment. The silence bothered her, as soon as she'd seen the expression on the Commandant's face in the living room she'd givenin to the notion that this job was in all possibility her last, and she at least wanted details of what might be coming.
>They'd finally arrived at an imposing station, soaring columns holding back the roof over the train platform from gravity's endless pull. She'd walked with him silently, then was picked up by car and rode in equal silence over several more hours to a complex hidden away deep in the desert.
>"Is this the Cosmodrome?" Tatyana finally broke the unbearable silence in the backseat of the car as they approached the launch complex, her voice low and reverent. "Da." came the single-word response from the Commandant, his eyes focused somewhere far beyond the view out the window. She'd heard him speak of the place before, but seeing it up close made her stare up at the imposing structures around her in a sort of awe, nearly tripping as she followed her master.
>Inside she'd walked quickly with the Commandant past many curious faces all the way to a cramped meeting room buried in the complex. She breathed in, and her olfactory sensors detected stale coffee, cigar smoke, alcohol, and black mold. She remained silent about the latter, clearly whatever she was here for was far more important than tidying up this dismal excuse for a meeting room.
>After she'd taken a seat nearest the Commandant at a dirty round table, a succession of old men and young, grim and determined, had entered in small groups and taken their seats around the table.
>When at last the seats were filled, Tatyana's master stood before them to speak, all eyes focusing on him dutifully. "They think they've beaten us," he began, folding his arms behind his back. He didn't have to specify, the successful first orbit by the American robot had been the bane of their working lives since it happened. What optimism there had been ran dry after their first disastrous attempt to surpass the Americans just days later with a doomed human pilot, but none were permitted to speak of it.
>Tatyana shifted in her seat, uncomfortable and feeling out of place. Why she wasn't tucking the boys in and reading them a bedtime story to send them off to sleep right now? What 'important flight' could they need her for?
>"The Americans think they're on top now, that they've got the best machines" the old man continued. He was pacing around the room, agitating all who waited on his word. Several men from the last such meeting were not present, and would not be again.
>"Just because they send a robot up, this means they've suddenly won?" His voice rose. "Orbit is NOTHING! We should be looking FURTHER, pushing new boundaries!" The old man's patriotism took on a frantic edge. Nobody pointed out their failure to even achieve that supposedly-inconsequential goal.
>"We should shoot for the Moon itself, land there and show the capitalist pigs what TRUE engineering is capable of!" his voice reached a crescendo, and despite the speech ringing hollow nobody dared to object. Tatyana sat in shock. This was what she was here to do? They needed to to upstage that silly ginger robot? She narrowed her focus. 'If that overpriced child's toy can do it, then I know I certainly can'

>So it was that the Soviet moon-shot program began, running before they could walk. Tatyana was put through endurance tests in a centrifuge, spending hours at high-G to gather data on how long she could remain operational under the intense acceleration. She was fitted with weight-calibrated pool-floats and tossed into a swimming pool, the buoyancy roughly equaling the moon's lower gravity as she bounced around the bottom of the long pool for hours, growing accustomed to the unnatural slowness it gave to her movements.
>Lander training had been the hardest to simulate, they had no test vehicle assembled and so the agency had accepted simply putting her through her paces on a large simulator, which she ran through dozens of times without really feeling she'd had a grasp of it. Without any feedback on her internal accelerometers, with her gyroscopes telling her she was still on the ground, an additional dimension of controlling the vehicle was lost. Tatyana's mastery of the simulated landing did not reassure her that she had learned much.
>Not long into training, she was fetched midway through a flight-exam by a soldier and led to the central control area, an array of squat beige computers and several large projector screens in a wide darkened room.
>Projected on one of them was the face of an American-style nandroid wearing a blue jumpsuit seated on a couch, beside her a desk with a suited man sitting behind it. The image was paused on the smiling image of the nandroid, and remained so until men stopped entering the small room.
>The video played, and the audio rang out in English through the high-ceiling room. "Well Johnny, What I really want to do, and I think I can do it, is land on the moon!"
>The video cut out, and faces around the room were conferring with one another. The Commandant stood before them and waited half a minute for his men to digest this directed threat from the Americans. "We must move even quicker now, no breaks. Sleep in shifts of two hours, eat at your stations while solving problems, do your calculating while you shit." at the skeptical looks of the men he stiffened and raised his voice.
>"If they've got that machine on television to say that now, then they MUST be closer than we thought!" Finally shouting, he waved his hands to shoo them out of the room. "Get moving, NOW! Not a moment to waste!"

>The day had come quickly, it had been well over a month since the West had paraded success in their faces, and now was the day they'd finally even the score in this space race.
>Tatyana gave a groan as the belts hooked her hard into the lander's seat. The mission profile had horrified her when she'd first heard it, but she had restrained herself from thoughtlessly objecting, as if an outburst now might snatch away this chance at a place in the history of her homeland. She imagined herself shoveling a latrine in Siberia instead while some other robot flew away on her rocket, and shuddered.
>The flight had been planned to be as direct as was able, straight for the moon regardless of their inexperience. After launch, she'd stage to a full-burn course for the moon and skip trying to orbit entirely, after all the yankee robot had already gone and taken the glamour out of it so why waste the fuel?
>After coasting to the moon, Tatyana's mission was to slow down and land, it didn't matter where so long as she came to a stop on the surface. "Once there," the Commandant had said boomingly when first explaining it to her. "You will plant our flag, and radio home your glorious success! You will be a national hero!"
>Tatyana remained unfazed, a bad feeling having sat with her since seeing the still under-construction tiny lander. "And then, sir?" she'd asked in an even voice. The elder man put a hand on her shoulder and looked at her sullenly. "Sometimes, we are asked to make sacrifices, Tatyana." And there it was, she thought, nodding without a word as any doubt about her fate fell away.
>No consolation about her greater part in human affairs mattered to her after that, she simply didn't know and didn't care. She was given her task, and she would perform it. "That presumptive, shoddy pile of junk " Tatyana said out loud to herself on the launchpad, preoccupied as she checked over the final figures on her lander's console. She resented the American nandroid, her stupid smiling face everywhere she looked. She'd already orbited before them, then that carrot-topped glitch had the nerve to try preempting them to the moon too?

>She shook her head inside her glass helmet, marveling at the naivety of her American rival. "We'll just see who can really 'do it'." Tatyana had muttered under her breath aggressively during the pre-flight checks. The image of the red-headed outmode had been plastered across newspapers for weeks, and every time Tatyana had seen the image she'd grown more outraged by her. What gave this obsolete scrap the right to upstage an entire nation of people? To try doing it twice? She burned with indignation.
>"Sixty seconds TRIUMPH" The control room addressed her by her lander's given name. "Da, standing by for launch" she answered automatically. She'd drilled the launch sequence enough times that she felt she could perform this part during the unconscious bliss of recharge.
>"Ten seconds, nine, eight..." Tatyana let the lids close over her optics. This would be the last time she'd be on the Earth. She had no illusion now that she'd be coming back, despite the Commandant's insistence that a retrieval mission proposal would be submitted to the annual budget meeting in a few months.
>Distracting herself from her resigned fate, she tapped at her breast pocket, where a folded list of her duties post-launch rested securely. "Duty" she said resolutely to herself as the voice over the radio ticked down to zero.
>The launch was the most frightening thing Tatyana had ever experienced, every internal sensor meant to help her navigate the world was screaming out at her that everything was wrong. An internal prompt tried to reboot her apparently thinking she was malfunctioning, and she had to turn off the automatic protocol mentally. She shut her eyes tight and whined quietly as the G-forces increased. The solid N2 rocked pierced the top of the heavens and didn't stop burning even as two stages dropped from it in succession.
>The entire time, Tatyana kept her optics closed, unsure of what to expect as she was held back in her seat by the acceleration. When the violent noise and shudder of the third stage shut off with the final "BANG" of separation, Tatyana held her breath. Was that it? Was it done?
>"TRIUMPH respond." The voice over the radio sounded farther away than anything she had heard before, and Tatyana was forced to gaze out the window back at the source of the transmission. It seemed so small from up here, she thought, then hurriedly replied.
>"TRIUMPH lander responding, 80 hours from landing, all figures nominal." She read back the optimal report to the ground staff. Over the radio she heard cheering, and a muffled version of the national anthem being played for ground control. She sighed and let herself stare out the porthole again, longer this time. It really was beautiful, da?
>During the coast Tatyana thought a long time about what stresses the mysterious forces of geopolitics had imposed on her happy household, about her master's dour face every night that he came home after some failure or missed milestone, about being away from her boys now. Shaking her head, she decided these kinds of thoughts were above her station in life, that they were best left to the humans whom they impacted the most.
>After many hours of boredom, Tatyana had a sudden idea, and pulled a printed manual on landing procedures from the compartment above her head. She didn't need the directions really, and thankfully the binder had been left with several blank pages for keeping additional notes.
>In her life back home, she'd had hours of downtime between the twins heading off to school and returning, finding little to do once the house had been put in order. She'd absentmindedly picked up doodling one day after drawing a succession of silly faces on the brown paper lunch-bags of her two young charges. It hadn't been difficult for her, and she'd found transitioning from basic smiley faces to more detailed reproductions relatively easy.
>Pulling a spare page from the binder, Tatyana stared out the window for a long moment, taking in the sight and committing it to memory. Slowly at first, then with a fierce determination, she filled in every detail she was able to reproduce, working with an increasing determination. At last the sketch of her homeworld was finished, and she held it out against the window to compare the images.
>"Artistic glory!" She said out loud to herself with exaggerated bravado that mimicked her often-grandiose master, then laughed at herself loudly. It felt good to laugh. 20 hours remained before her landing.


>"Slowdown-burn complete, landing in two minutes." She read off the figures from her lander's console, unable to keep from peeking glimpses at the side window while she should have been focused on the computer. The grey lunar landscape rose up beneath her tiny craft. "One minute" she read off, nodding slowly to herself. Yes, she had this, and that chintzy American 'bot would be forgotten in history's dustbin. At least she could do that much, she thought to herself, at least it will count for something.
>As the bare-bones lander neared the surface, Tatyana checked her dials again and realized with a start that she'd picked up significant horizontal momentum without noticing. The ground rushed up at her and she could see her sideways motion now. In a flash of momentary blind panic she jerked the control stick hard to try compensating. The lander turned sharply, tumbling end over end several times as the engine continued to burn. The horizontal drift increased even as the overall speed slowed.
>"NYET!" she shouted as the vehicle spun, and turned off the flow of fuel to the engine. It cut out at once, and the lander twirled towards the ground soundlessly. "RCS, where are you, AH!" Tatyana searched the console and hurriedly activated a switch, only to hear all reaction thrusters fire simultaneously, venting her limited mono-propellant fuel in all directions. "Nyet, NYET!"
>The lander had been slowed nearly enough for a landing, and even with the sideways-tumble and lack of thrust wasn't going a significant speed. Two legs of the lander touched first, buckling with a sickening metallic groan and stopping the spin as the lander gouged its way a few yards across the landscape, kicking up plumes of dust.
>"Please, please, please" Tatyana was chanting to herself, preservation-programming running rapidfire in her mind as the vehicle shook around her. Looking forward through the viewport, her core suddenly felt chilled. She could measure her momentum internally, calculate the distance to the crater ahead, and knew at once where her wounded craft was headed.
>TRIUMPH lurched over the rim of the crater with Tatyana hanging on for dear life inside, turning as it fell towards the shadowed crater floor. It made one full revolution before striking the ground on the damaged legs, and one of the fuel tanks crumpled as it impacted hard and came to a rest, sitting with two legs poking out above the ground and the other two broken to bits. Tatyana stayed still a full minute before daring to move. The lander's internal battery was leaking power, dropping charge faster than she was consuming it. With reluctance, she unplugged and switched to her backpack's battery.
>"Is what it is" She said to herself grimly, and bitterly began to calculate her remaining internal battery life. With some strain against the distorted metal, the hatch opened and she had an unobstructed view of the shadowed crater from inside. "Egh" she made a disgusted sound, seeing nothing but black from within the darkness. At the height of her vision she could see the rim, lit with sunlight, but it seemed so far away to her now. Switching on her suit's sewn-in flashlight, she grimly began looking around her wrecked lander to assess her situation.
>The transmitter, she discovered, was smashed apart on impact, and the antenna broken off at the base. She carefully unscrewed the component from the dying lander and tried to repair it, but it was no use. Her knowledge of electronics wasn't insubstantial and she thought she might have been able to get it working again, but the few tools she'd been sent with were primitive and limited, nothing that could help her regain communication with the Earth.
>She tried for another hour to eek out some miracle from the transmitter anyway, but only frustrated herself to near-madness. After what seemed like a lifetime she stood up sharply and balled her fists, screaming incoherently upwards to nothing but herself. She felt shaken by her outburst, but there had been no real release of her hopeless frustration.
>Feeling suddenly very small and very foolish, she sat back down, and leaned her back against the underside of the upturned lander. She'd known that this was supposed to be a one-way trip, and she'd been able to make some peace with that, but being unable even to tell her master that she'd made it? That she was alive but dying on the moon, that he'd finally beaten his bitter rival with his own children's nanny?
>It made her laugh and sob in unison, the sheer nonsense of her situation. A low buzz sounded from the suit's heater, and suddenly she felt very tired. Looking inwards at her internal battery, she saw she had about 15% of her store of power remaining, the suit itself having mere minutes left to run the heater.
>She frowned, and closed her eyes. She thought back to seeing the American nandroid grinning on the television of her cozy household, thought of the boys playing with their blocks and toy trucks on the living room floor, thought of the pantry she'd so neatly organized for the Mrs. not so long ago, and the fireplace the family had gathered around once she'd brought it back to life. She played back the memory of meeting the children for herself once, then stopped it after feeling a sharp pang of sudden grief from the replay.
>Groaning pitifully, she banged her head back against the glass in anguish. She wanted to go home, she missed her family, she hadn't ever wanted any of this! And it was all that American robot's fault. Tatyana ground her synthetic teeth. SHE had been the reason her master had been so rushed to match the Americans! She bristled, and pounded the ground once with the rockhammer she still held. "IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT! DAMN YOU, DAMN YOU WORTHLESS THING!" again Tatyana raged at the darkness madly, needing any sort of release she could get from her emotional overload. Her suit heater turned off.
>She breathed heavily, her weak CPU taxed to limit by the weight of her experience. She looked up over the rim of the crater again, now at the Earth above it, hanging in the blackness forever out of her reach. She laughed again, sobbed once more, then went quiet. With a final internal look at her quickly dying power, she initiated a self-shutdown to preserve what little energy she had left.
>"Who knows" she thought to herself wryly as first her body shut down, then her external senses. "That recovery mission could still come one day, da?"


EPILOGUE

>"TRIUMPH this is mission control, respond." The call had been put out every five minutes on the lander's private channel for over two hours after the scheduled landing before the broadcasts ceased, no answer ever coming back. The Commandant had watched sullenly until the effort was abandoned, then silently stood and left to shut himself away in his office. He was angry yes, but tired, oh so tired, and it dulled the edge of his frustration.
>Two failures in a row, he thought, first the woman who'd burned up in that desperate hail-Mary attempt to surpass the American robot, now his own family maid had been lost in his attempt to preempt the rival agency to the moon. The first failure was not publicly-known, the agency and State had both denied it at first, then settled on explaining the launch away as a mere sounding rocket, though rumors had still persisted.
>This failure too would have to be covered up, were it all to go public he was sure he'd find himself stationed in Siberia permanently, or very briefly stationed against a wall blindfolded. He struggled alone for a few minutes before mentally rewinding and taking the problem from the top. The Americans knew there had been a launch, there was no covering that up, and they were likely going to know that something had hit the moon.
>"That's it" he said to himself with a nod, taking a cigar from his desk drawer and cutting the tip. Pulling a heavy zippo lighter from his coat-pocket, he lit it and puffed thoughtfully. "We hit the moon FIRST." It was a hollow victory he thought, picturing his family maid in her crimson flight suit. "That's all anyone needs to know". The Commandant picked up his phone and had his line connected with the editor at Pravda to issue a statement.