Mission Unknown

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. This would be unfortunate for Turing, but thankfully, he didn’t know as much yet. Or if he did know, he didn’t seem to care. He was delightfully unaware of his future existential predicament, and for the moment was preoccupied with a speck of dust on the floor that was disrupting the symmetry on the rug beneath his feet.

The soft hum of the spaceship rang in the background before a small “ding” interrupted his thoughts. Tea.

Turing interrupted his own reverie to make his way over to the kettle. The rug and its many offenses against geometry would have to wait. Angles may be beautiful, and worth righting, but there are few things more glorious than a freshly brewed cup of Earl Grey.

The humans had done a fair enough job of replicating it, but the humanoid couldn’t help but think that something was missing. He suspected it must be the pollutants, or rather lack thereof, in the water on board. On paper, mixing hydrogen and oxygen sounded like a great way to make water. And it absolutely was. But if you only ever learned what water tasted like on Earth, sometimes you just wanted a taste of home. Even if that meant toxic waste. I mean, we’re not talking “Love Canal” levels, but a bit of herbicide is sort of like a sprinkle of salt on a meal. It’s a flavor enhancer, not a carcinogen. For Turning, anyway. And this is precisely why he was the perfect specimen for the job. He could mix in a spoonful of cyanide into his tea if it took his fancy, and could still calculate pi to 1,000,000 digits the next morning, recalling the pleasant taste of almonds alongside the drink.

His culinary tastes may be finicky, but his constitution was strong. Not subject to the same mortal woes that had befallen his previous brethren, Turing had the perfect mix of man and machine that held promise for the future.

Turing grasped the spoon that lay beside the kettle, turning it clockwise precisely seven times inside his cup before returning it back to the reflective surface from whence it came.

This was one of his only complaints about his new home. Everything was stark white. Not egg shell, not cream, nor bone nor powder, but stark white like the walls of early 1900s asylum. It would take everything in his power, he thought, to not resign himself to his own madness at the absence of color. Trained on a database rich in sound, light, color, history, and all things imaginable, it was hard to accept an existence that was so utterly sterile. But he would have to manage.

He didn't think it would be too difficult. His internal clock dutifully kept the time, reminding him there were only 3,542 days until the mission was complete.

Not unlike a prisoner left to live their days in a cell barely large enough to house a single bed and a toilet, Turing found himself comforted by the ritual of counting the days crudely into whatever surface he could salvage for his mental acrobatics.

After supping his mediocre cup of Early Grey, he would find a pen and scrawl another line next to the previous ones, lining them up neatly in a row as a reminder of his remaining days utnil the mission was complete. The trouble was, despite his best efforts, he could not quite recall the mission's purpose. And it remained to be seen if he ever would.