NaN, Our Lady of Omissions, opened her eyes onto the black of her coffin, and lifted herself up. And cracked her head against the lid, which was minus one for the all-a-dream-after-all. The dark, the silence, the feeling of floating, the inability to move, all that was the stuff of contented reverie to her; “fine and private” she mumbled hopefully at the stars that flared in her head. But the pain was not, nor the stale air, nor the cracked sound of her own voice in a tight space, and surely not the feeling of something grating inside her left arm. She reached up with her right, and just eight inches above her head was the lid, metal and solid and cold, grave cold, death cold.

She tried to kick, down or up, but her legs were heavy. Not dream heavy, but wrapped in something, layers of something, smothering but icy, and slowly, firmly pulsing, and that’s when she lost it, flailed and screamed, more a squeal from her shriveled throat; she just went away for a bit, then, to a simpler, more accustomed darkness.
But the cold was insistent, and the throb in her head, and a flashing green, that wasn’t from the smack into the coffin; it was a display mounted in the lid above her face:
[Door—Open? RIGHT-Yes LEFT-Cancel]
With helpful icons illustrating the concept of left and right, but nothing clarifying “open,” or indeed what exactly would open. Idiots, she thought, while the lizard brain went back to flailing, because there was something on the lid above her right hand, an LED and a nub, a switch, and she slammed it right, yes yes yes open let me out, right through a series of warning screens which belatedly scrolled onto the display:
[Pressure Differential—Continue? RIGHT-Yes LEFT-Cancel]
[Life Support Active—Disengage? RIGHT-Yes LEFT-Cancel]
[External Locks Active—Disengage? RIGHT-Yes LEFT-Cancel]
A downward whirring, and the clunk of latches disengaging down the length of the coffin, and then the hiss of air, the exact volume and tone of her earlier shriek.
“Idiots!” she said out loud, and fumbled the switch left, just once this time, and waited for the display to update, as her ears popped.
[Open—Abort? RIGHT-Yes LEFT-Cancel]
Once, just once, to the right, and the hiss stopped. The display offered:
[Open—Resume? RIGHT-Yes LEFT-Cancel]
“Cancel” just redisplayed the same prompt, but the switch pushed down as well, and up, and that gave her a menu, and options to restart the life support systems, and reactivate the locks; she chose “yes” to both, lay there, and caught her breath, which had, she suspected, been depleted more by panic than actual decompression.

“So then, factcheck,” she said to the display. “I’m in a box. A box designed by cube-dwelling monkeys. It’s cold, it’s dark, my intestines are trying to switch places with my lungs, and there’s no air outside. Where does that put me?”
The display said [Main Menu], but it was bzzz, sorry, thanks for playing, “space” is the answer we’re looking for, even if that’s
“Totally whacked,” she croaked,
who had just dozed off, what felt like a few minutes ago, on her couch in Reno, which might be vacant and vacuous, but was firmly, relentlessly Earth-bound.

Inventory, then. One coffin, previously mentioned. One self, NaN, Our Lady of Omissions, likewise. Panties, one pair, in a bunch, or so it felt, under some kind of heavy, stiff . . . she tried to shift her legs again, which were wedged a bit askew, one foot not fully into what felt like an attached boot, and then she had to shut her eyes and breath against the claustrophobic panic that bubbled up again, along with her damn floating guts.
“Heavy, stiff overalls,” she continued. “Whatcha bet, spacesuit?” The dim light from the display didn’t illuminate anything beyond itself, so she probed about with her free hand, and it felt spacesuit-ish enough, tubes and straps and rigid panels. A bit gritty, outside and in, and a full size too big, and something suspiciously like duct tape; not at all the shiny tech on the tube ads, but that was reassuring, in a way: more real, less likely that she was stark raving, which was otherwise Occam’s opinion on the situation.

The suit was not exactly on right, either, which was the reason her legs were so tangled; the left side was unzipped and pushed down to her waist, something achy cold against that breast no matter how she shifted, and her left arm pinned, straps, it felt like, and tubes running up from somewhere below and into sockets in her arm. Well, the sockets weren’t actually mounted into the skin; no alien neurotap tech, which might have confirmed the stark raving theory. The sockets were mounted on needles, and the needles were taped down, their tips somewhere deep in her forearm, which was plus one for nausea, minus one for crazy: an IV, drugs, keeping her under, keeping her fed, maybe, which brought up questions like “when” and “how long.” Better, she thought, to stick to the inventory for now.

But that was as far as she could reach; no way to bend and follow the IV tubes toward her feet, past the tangle of suit around her waist, and nothing else but smooth, frigid surfaces, excepting the switch by her hand and the small display panel over her head.
In front of my head, she corrected herself; over my head
“Is where I am,” she said out loud,
but she, if she wedged her elbow up between her cheek and the display, she could reach past her ear and touch something chill and sharp: metal, but not the end of the coffin. A curving rim, and a rubbery lining, and some sort of latch that rattled on the side, and that was just like the shiny spacesuits on the tube ads.
So, then, time for summary, and never mind that word “time” and the associated questions, she could deal with that when she had more data (but I’m skinny, those are my ribs making icy ridges against my arm, and how long would that have taken?) more solid data to work with. No, the issue here and now was:
“Do I, NaN, Our Lady of Omissions, lie here like a good little stiff where someone stuck me, or do I pull this helmet on and get out of this damn box?”
Not a Number, she thought, and reached up for the helmet.

It had taken her a while before she was ready to risk the coffin switch again. It had taken her a while just to get the tubes disconnected from her arm; in the end, she had unscrewed them from the sockets, one dribbling something cold and slimy onto her hip, and decided to leave the needles where they were, in hopes of finding better light, or a first aid kit, or a flying doctor. Likewise for the strap around her chest, angled like a bandolier, stretchy and embedded with sensors; she’d disconnected the attached cable and tucked it next to the tubes.
And then she had wiggled into the left side of the suit, and spent the good part of half an hour trying to get the zipper up and the overlying seals pressed down, everything made that much harder by fits of convulsive shivering. There had followed a few minutes of raging frustration trying to get a grip on the slick rim of the helmet; eventually she shoved with her legs and slid herself up into it. Fortunately, the helmet latches had been designed for clumsy gloves; even more fortunately, the suit powered up automatically when the latches were engaged.

Nothing for it, then, but to flick the coffin joystick down to the emergency menu, and right, right, right, the hiss barely audible through the helmet, and the display flew back and around; she could just catch it flashing
[OPENING]
as it tilted out of view, a desperate grab after the lid, and then she was tumbling out into deep space. Deep space was dark and cold and about eight feet high; she pinballed off two walls and headfirst into the side of the coffin, slamming the same spot on her head against the helmet visor.
“Airbags,” she muttered; she was keeping a list, and some designer’s ass was gonna smolder as soon as she got messaging access. She was wedged head-first against the coffin, feet dangling into the void, such as it was. She bumped through the suit menu with her chin, found
[Lighting/External/Helmet]
The headlights picked out the coffin, plastic crates in a web of webbing, a far wall. She pushed herself loose, hit three walls this time but missed the coffin; difficulty four and a half, she thought, and she was not going to hurl, which proved true, but only because her stomach was empty.
The other direction: more crates, more webbing, more walls, and double doors at the end. Deep space looked a whole lot like a shipping container.
She wormed her way through to the end with the doors. There was an emergency release marked in yellow stripes, but it was wedged, or maybe it was just that she was dazedskinnyweak (how long?). She crawled back to the coffin, looking for a lever,
“Find a crowbar, I’m using it on you first,” she said to the coffin display,
The coffin was deep, and full of gizmos, all miniaturized and delicate and firmly attached. Strapped to the outside, however, was a bag, and in the bag was a shielded electronics pouch, and in that was
“A(i)da!” she cried, or croaked.

Her baby, and alive alive o; she came up in war-mode, and NaN let her spin because you never know, but “no networks found.”
“S’okay, A, we’re in space,” NaN explained, though A(i)da couldn’t hear her with the vacuum and all, gotta fix that, but first make sure that she was inviolate. “Driven snow” A(i)da assured, via her screen, NaN’s own code, burned onto a PLD hidden under a blob of solder. But someone had made a pass at her, and had been clueful enough to block the camera while doing so. The logs showed the attempt as 2042.10.14, which was tomorrow-that-was, and that brought up the issue of today-that-is, but with A(i)da there, NaN was fearless, mostly, and anyway too late, she’d looked. It was okayokayokay; she drifted for a bit, but it wasn’t really a surprise, given the skinny ribs and all. 2043.03.10. Five months, not even, she could handle that, and anyway, it was done, and she was out, and about to be more out.
The bag also contained some cables, a pen, postums, a mug, a dirty spoon, all quite familiar: someone (who?) had dumped the entire contents of her desk-cum-table. No crowbar; she was definitely keeping one next to the mug from now on.

With A(i)da tucked into a pocket on her hip, NaN shimmied back to the door. The spoon just bent, first try. But her brain was getting straighter; she looped some webbing through the handle and wedged her feet and pulled, and felt the clunk as the latch gave way. Feet wedged the other way, and the webbing clipped to her waist in case deep space was deeper this time, she pushed the door open.
And space was vast, maybe fifty feet “down” past the container edge to a wall, and a bit less up and side to side; the far end lost in shadow, and all filled with shipping containers clamped to each other, and to a grid of steel supports. She let herself drift to the end of her leash, spun slowly; in the other direction, maybe forty feet and a wall, this one with features: panels and cables and doors: a huge hatch, and a pair of smaller ones, and another at the top, and that one with a dim green light over it.

“This way to the egress,” she said to A(i)da, despite the vacuum. She tugged on the webbing and spun slowly; the hold was too big, she was thinking, way too big for some corporate suborbital or LEO shuttle. She pulled herself back into the container, got the bag, threw in a couple of lengths of webbing, and then out again, and down the length of the container via a series of handy handholds; some decent designing, at last. The gap between the end of the container and the door was forty-fifty feet, and at an angle. She held onto the handles, and tucked her legs under her; no way to look up and adjust her aim,
“Helmet camera,” she added to the list,

and let go, a bit of a roll, but her stomach was reconciled to the floating now, and she rotated far enough to see the door coming at her fast, just time to get an arm out and snag the surrounding grid; she hit hard but took it on her knees and hip this time, not the head.
The green side did not say “Exit” after all, but “Bridge” worked for her. There was a keypad and display, dark and dead. No doorbell, so she pounded with a gloved fist, her feeble, skinny fist (five months!), then grabbed hold of a handle and kicked until her feet throbbed, gasped out a sob, and saw the sign above the handle, that read “Airlock Manual Override.” Some government safety bureau had screwed up and accidentally got it right, down to the helpful arrows that said “pull out, rotate up,” and the door swung in. More handles, more arrows, and then there was hissing and clanking and a long airy sigh (that was her) and the inner door opened.
The bridge was empty, no one home, and she suspected no one just out for a walk, soon to return and find their porridge gone and their bed full. No bed, for that matter, or sign of porridge; just an all-business control room, twenty by fifteen by ten or so, with lockers along one wall and consoles along another, and a narrow strip of window blocked on the outside by a metal shutter. At least there was air, if she could trust the suit indicators. The suit was pretty ripe, or she was, so she risked it, popped the latches, ready to slam them back. But the process was hiss-free, and the cabin air coldly metallic but breathable.
The consoles were blank and unresponsive, all but a display that demanded
[Insert key]
alongside a thumbslot. NaN guessed that leaving the ship entirely unlocked wasn’t in the regs . . . but why was she guessing? She fumbled the pocket open.
“A(i)da, A(i)da babe, howzit?”
“NaN, it’s all good,” the tablet replied, in her low, sweet voice. NaN’s voice, to be sure; the stock personas had been tragically lame, and anyway NaN didn’t use anything stock. “All good” meant just that, a full system check; A(i)da’s makers claimed she was vacuum-proof-radiation-proof-water-proof-down-to-thirty-meters, but marketdroids were inveterate liars, no matter how perfect the product.
“Whatcha know about low energy transports?”
“Context?”
“Spaceship. Unmanned. Big.”
“Low energy transfers: trajectories between stable orbits requiring minimal delta-v, utilizing weak stability boundaries, often at Lagrange points. Within the solar system, colloquially, the Interplanetary Transport Network. In short, a cheap but slow way to travel between planets and/or moons. More?”
“What about real ships? You know, active?”
“Active low energy transport routes in order of tons of cargo carried, Earth Transfer Orbit to—”
“Wait, what about passenger routes?”
“Negatory, there are no active passenger routes using low energy transfers; while efficient, the trajectories are much slower than Hohmann transfers. Life support costs and passenger comfort outweigh fuel savings.”
“The hell. You were saying?”
“In order of tons of cargo carried, Earth Transfer Orbit to Lunar TO, Earth TO to Earth-Luna L1, Earth TO to Mars TO, Earth-Luna L1 to Earth TO, Earth TO to Sol-Earth L2, Europa TO to Ganymede—”
“Whoa, stick to those from Earth. And narrow it down to routes that take more than five months.”
“All the active routes take more than five months. Again: a cheap but slow way to travel. More?”
NaN had drifted up and over; she pushed off the ceiling and wrapped her legs around one of the console chairs, blinked up at the lack of view.
“Ah, okay, look, do you have a schedule of departures from Earth for, um, the two weeks after October 14, 2042?”
“Yes, there were seven ships that match the parameters ‘spaceship,’ ‘unmanned,’ departure from Earth Transfer Orbit, low energy transfers, October 15 to October 28, 2042. Clarify ‘big.’“
“Oh, uh, maybe eighty by eighty feet wide, and, whoof, a hundred feet long? That’s the hold, and the bridge here, no idea about the engines and crap.”
“Four of the scheduled departures were to the Earth-Luna L1 transport hub, shuttling light manufactured goods and pharmaceuticals, size well under the given parameters, adjusted for your customary margin of error.”
“That’s why I have you, babe.”
“The other three departures fit all parameters: October 15, Earth to Luna; October 19, Earth to Sol-Earth L2; October 22, Earth to Mars.

“How long? I mean, what are the arrival dates?”
“Tata-CASC Flight L287A, Luna via L5, inserts Lunar Transfer Orbit on May 10, 2043, transfer to Low Lunar Orbit on May 12. ESA Ex92-NASA Gen20 inserts Sol-Earth L2 halo orbit on September 29, 2043. MarsCon E15 inserts Mars Capture Orbit February 15, 2044.”
NaN was frantically scanning for some sort of corporate logo, business card, pinup calendar, whatever. The console was sullenly blank, so she went through the cabinets; a toolkit, made in China, that was no help; two emergency one-size-fits-all space suits, less stinky than hers, but far more flimsy, duct tape aside; a dozen bottles of air for the same, which could be useful; four packets snacks-ready-to-eat, and four liters of water, half a liter of which disappeared in a few painful gulps. Under the food packets was a pen, which she grabbed at, and subsequently chased around the cabin: “Courtesy Orbital Savings and Loan.” She flicked it at the useless window tink and rotated in slow, thoughtful circles.
Windows.

“A(i)da, if we could see the stars, could you, you know, triangulate our position, figure out where we’re headed?”
“Unlikely. My camera has insufficient resolution to measure stellar parallax.”
“Ah, bugger me.”
“No can do. However, a visual survey would be able to distinguish between the Lunar trajectory and the other options.”
NaN grabbed the seat back.
“A(i)da, my dear, how’d you like to go for a walk?”

The airlocks on either side of the hold’s main hatch had manual overrides, but they required a few extra steps; gotta keep the average newbies from accidentally launching themselves, she guessed. And not like she herself was a noob—five months flight time, after all, if unconcious, but hey, muscle memory etc. etc.—but she went back and got some more webbing, and rigged two separate lines to tie points in the airlock, and tugged on them as hard as she could, before opening the outer door. She was breathing fast and shallow, blood thumpathumpa in her ears; so much for the silence of space. Then the door slid sideways out of her headlights and it was dark; her eyes scrambled to adjust. There was a haze, air, maybe, escaping and condensing, but it didn’t move with her headlights. It was stars, the Milky Way, she guessed; she really didn’t go out much at night, or in the day, for that matter. Out was where she was going now, though, like it or not, hand over hand along the edge of the door.
“A(i)da,” she whispered, “you seeing this?”
The tablet was strapped to her forehead with duct tape from the toolkit; the only way NaN could think to give her a view and yet be able to talk.
“Somewhat,” A(i)da answered wryly; “Wryly” was one of the first behaviors NaN had added to her persona profile. NaN bobbed her head down.
“Better?”
“Still somewhat. We’ll have to move clear of the ship.”
“Shoulda just tossed you out on a leash.”
“My inability to maneuver would make a complete survey difficult.”
“Yeah yeah, always with the same excuse. Like it’s easy for me.”
But it was. She just had to let go.
“Okay, on three. One. Two.”
“Three,” said A(i)da, and then they were drifting. The front of the ship was a squarish hole cut into a million zillion stars. Her heart jumped as an angry red spot slid into view, but it was just some sort of running light on the ship’s nose. She reached the end of the line, one of them, and begin to spin toward the ship, and then the other line went taut and she started a slow, complex swing, out past the black edge of the hold. Her heart was still revving, but it was a bit quieter in the helmet, as she’d postponed the breathing for a bit. Maybe too long; her vision suddenly dimmed along the right side, but A(i)da caught her worried grunt.
“Visor polarization. We’re drifting into sunlight.”
And there was the ship, stretching away, and the sun, all blindingly brilliant despite the visor, and as she continued to spin, that’s all there was: ship, sun, stars, and one small spinning dot with a suddenly full bladder and a computer taped to her head.

NaN gasped in a thick lungful of air, and said “Earth, maybe behind. . . ?”
“Negatory. Earth is in view, approximate apparent magnitude minus two point five, currently about twenty degrees upper left of center of your field of view.”
There was nothing there but stars, teeny little stars, and maybe one brighter than the rest.
“Well. Frig. Me. Raw.”
“No can do,” said A(i)da.

New list: least favorite places ever. First and only entry: right where she was, back in the coffin. It was cramped, dark, smelly; but then again, so was her studio in Reno. What it also shared with her apartment was air, and food and water, even if the latter were courtesy a needle and a pump. Getting back in had not been easy; she’d taken the long way back through the hold, checking the other storage containers, which were barcoded and tagged, but no handy packing slips, no logos for, say, frozen pizza or Blind Rage Cola (beverage of choice for Our Lady of Omissions). And then she’d spent longer investigating the coffin. It was much larger on the outside, with a control console that was more complete, if no better designed, than the one inside the lid. BengaTek RETAIn. “Rescue Emergency Transport Autonomous Internetworked” A(i)da expanded; NaN thought “lame,” but kept her mouth shut, since A(i)da shared some of that acronym. There were red lights, and a backlog of alerts: “Sensors disconnected,” “Intravenous supplies disconnected,” “Oxygen usage below nominal range.” But before that, a series of warnings from the brainstate maintenance subsystem: “Intravenous pump two failure,” “Sedative flow 0%,” “ALERT: Patient exiting coma state.”
“And I’m gonna, any minute now,” NaN said to A(i)da.

But the nutrition subsystem was online, and the oxygen/pressure, both showing around 80 percent supply, whatever that worked out to, and while the bridge had air, it wasn’t exactly overstocked with food and water. What she needed, even more than those essentials, was a place to sit and think, and now that she knew what it was, the coffin was actually pretty close to her ideal environment: dark and distant and sealed from distracting contact, excepting A(i)da, of course. A(i)da agreed, but then again, she usually did; no thinking out of her carbon composite box for A(i)da, particularly not out here, way off the Net, and working off of what snapshots she had downloaded and stored that last night on Earth, five months back.

A(i)da, unfortunately, had no better information on what had happened than did NaN. Her camera had gone dark, across the spectrum, at 02:40:15 2042.10.14, and she’d lost connectivity at the same time; popped straight into the shielded pouch, most likely. A few hours later, a cable was plugged into her STB port and the not-entirely-lame but ineffective crack attempted; there were a few blurred frames of fingertips. And after that, the only useful data was from her accelerometer, which suggested that they’d been shipped into orbit the following morning, and banged about randomly for the following week. That was enough to rule out the Moon flight, but the fact that they were in the middle of nowhere had already done that. A(i)da didn’t have enough info on the L2 and Mars trajectories to narrow it down further. She’d recorded audio, anything significantly over the noise floor, but it was useless, just low-frequency rumble and her own slipping about inside the pouch.

“Well, they’re not noobs or kiddies or monkeys,” NaN said, meaning the soon to be dead and desecrated bodies who’d kidnapped her. “They knew how to handle you, figured out how to get us into orbit, stuck us in here; I mean, there are serious inspections for customs and security and export fees; heard enough about that at the Damn Convention.”
The Damn Convention had been NaN’s one public appearance as her cyberself. Like Irene Adler for Sherlock Holmes, it required no further qualification, and cast a dark and dubious shadow across the personal mythology of Our Lady of Omissions.

She’d hit a export fees database a few years back, actually, Chinese and thus to some degree government, which was rare for her; she stuck to corporations as a rule, but this one had been tracking end-users versus media purchases, and that seemed like personal information to her, and what she did with personal information in databases was Omitted it. Substituted with similar but fictitious data, when possible, to further gum up the works, or just the repeated word “omitted,” and always tagged somewhere with the local encoding of “NaN.” Our Lady was an epithet from the boards, which she liked well enough to adopt, but only between A(i)da and herself: never encourage the fanboys.

A government would have the resources for this sort of thing, but why the subterfuge when they could arrest her or just disappear her? Mind you, she was damn well good and disappeared; who knows, maybe she was headed to some sort of space gulag at L2, or a labor camp on Mars, which was pretty much all there was on Mars, from some points of view. But governments had military ships, and colonist transports, and anyway, this setup was too competent, and too cost effective, for any of the governments she’d crossed bits with.
Corporations, now, there were plenty of corporations who would gladly pay well to see Our L. of O. well and gone. More than she could list (though A(i)da could). It still didn’t really add up, though; the usual corporate approach would be to break her, body and soul, in the civil court system. Or just break her body and leave it in a ditch, hell, on her couch; it’s not like anyone could link her meat self to NaN and her corporate conquests. So why the hassle of shipping her away? And why, apart from terminal idiocy, would they stuff A(i)da into a pouch instead of exposing her to some serious supercomputing; not that they were going to crack her, not with NaN’s mods, not for a long, long—
NaN sat up and
“Ow!”
smacked her head again. “A(i)da, any idea what kind of protection that console has? The ship’s controls, I mean.”
“Negatory. My data on spacecraft in general is just wiki-level.”
“Yeah, but, I’ll bet that lock’s nothing specially space-y, just software, some kind of general corporate-level access control. I mean, it’s not online, so what’s the attack analysis? Space pirates at the Lagrange points? I doubt it. Crew, workers, maybe someone with a hankering and an orbital shuttle. All they need to stop are nuisance attacks, worse case a couple of weeks of cracking. We might . . .” She rubbed the bump on her head and winced. “We might have months.”
“Insufficient data. You’re the expert,” said A(i)da.
“Damn straight, babe, damn straight,” said NaN.

* * *