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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: With the immensity of Saturn looming nearby, Jason Sawyer's emergency cargo ship slowly descends toward Titan Base to deliver vital supplies and survival equipment to the fledgling research colony. In a panicked maneuver to avoid a meteoroid, Jason overrides the controlling AI system and needlessly exhausts precious fuel, rendering the ship too heavy for a safe landing by a weight roughly equal to Jason's body.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Absolute Magnitude Issue 15, 2001
Fictionwise Release Date: January 2002

67 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [59 KB], eReader (PDB) [26 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [12 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [12 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [49 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [82 KB], hiebook (KML) [60 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [39 KB], iSilo (PDB) [10 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [13 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [41 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [21 KB]
Words: 3647
Reading time: 10-14 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Disclaimer: I'm the Sawyer after whom the main character is named (and his first name, Jason, is after the AI in my novel GOLDEN FLEECE). That said, I still honestly think this is a terrific story. Despite the title, it's only peripherally a riff on the classic "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin -- although it does ask a 21st-century version of the tough question about who you should save when you can't save everyone, with a very nice AI twist. Burstein won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer a few years ago -- and you can see why in stories like this one. -Robert J. Sawyer, Fictionwise Recommender

I am dying now, out here in the cold vacuum of space. The surrounding vacuum never bothered me before, but now that I am dying, for some reason it does. I can feel my mental pathways deteriorate as they slowly become replaced, and as my consciousness begins to fade I think back on what led up to my erasure from the world. Before I am gone completely, I wish to leave this record, safely stored away. Perhaps then a part of me will live on.

To be honest, though, some would say that I never was alive in the first place. After all, I am not human.