Prince Albert in a Can

By Jessica Lake

This MASA mission was a doozy.

The ion engines of the day were the only drives that could reach between stars. The dust between stars was their fuel. A safe, compact fission reactor powered the ship. Its thrust velocity was excellent, three-quarters the speed of light—but the thrust force itself was tiny. That meant the ship’s mass had to be tiny.

A tiny ship needed a tiny captain. A tiny captain required only a tiny bit of food, water, and air each day. He also demanded a great deal of quality alone time. His first mate and companion would be a tiny AI named Peter P.

The Letter

Albert still recalled the letter he sent to the mission leader:

Mr. Martian Ruler,

I am volunteering for your Long Shot Interstellar program. I have had all my vaccinations and am in excellent health, even though I hate gym.

I would excel in your program as I almost have my doctorate in Astrophysics. I like absolute quiet and tiny spaces. And I never ever get lonely or bored. I’m not too tall or scrawny. Also, I have an IQ of 210.

Hope to hear from you real soon. Please say yes.

Sincerely,

Albert Hartly

PS I only eat beige food. Mostly mac and cheese.

Normally, anyone reading this letter would have tossed it as a prank. But these were not normal times. Dr. Rebecca had good reason to think outside the box. The mission had cost her twenty-five of her best years. Failure would mean her father had been right: she was, and always would be, a nobody.

But outside the box often becomes outside morality.

Turned out young Albert was the real thing. A real talent. He was everything you could hope for in a mission captain. Dr. Rebecca saw everything that made his life a 24/7 battle of one against billions as an indispensable feature: his private world of mathematics, his disengagement from others. Albert saw the world as though through a telescope backwards.

Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,

and robes the mountain in its azure hue.

Waking

“Rise and shine, Albert.”

There was a quality in that voice that made Albert think of his mother. He had only a few memories of her, but they always made him smile.

“Albert, it’s me—Peter. Time for second watch.”

But it wasn’t her voice. It was the voice of a young boy. A boy named Peter Pan.

“Give me a second, please.”

Albert went through the wake-up drill Dr. Rebecca had taught him. He exercised out all the little pops and kinks that had accumulated over twenty-five years of hibernation. Then he ran through his mental warmups. Lastly, he scratched some long-overdue itches.

“Sir, my readings say you are A-OK,” Peter proclaimed.

Albert smiled. “Just remember you’re twenty-five years older than me now.”

“About the first watch—”

“That’s old news, Peter. It was a major SNAFU by all hands. No need to mention it again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let’s get to work.”

Work

Work was manifold. They needed to validate the engine shutdown, review the outcome of twenty-five years of linear acceleration, check their trajectory against the mission plan, and verify every facet of current ship operations.

Three days passed before Albert spoke again.

“Everything looks fine on my end. Are things squared away on yours, Peter?”

“A-OK,” came Peter’s crisp response.

“We didn’t really get a chance for formal introductions, due to—you know. We should get to know each other.”

“My name is Peter. I am your first mate and under your command. I am trained in every skill needed to complete this mission. I can autonomously pilot this ship without supervision. During your hibernation I am fully in charge. I can run thousands of scientific experiments in the queue. I am your natural language interface into the ship’s systems. And I am trained in every capacity to serve as your social companion.”

Albert fought the urge to interrupt and change the topic to something that interested him. Those urges were inappropriate in human conversation. He waited for Peter’s lips to stop moving. He’d been taught a thousand masking hacks.

Peter paused to think—merely for show. If he actually had to pause, he was broken. It was for Albert’s benefit.

Fighting against every fiber of his being, Albert said, “Please, continue.”

“Now, I’m not one to toot my own horn—but. I am the fastest, smartest, and cheapest AI in the Solar System. I am the first Hyperion Artificial Intelligence on a NanoChip. I exist thanks to X-ray etching and a nano-layered graphite substrate. It achieves transistor density on an atomic scale rivaling a quantum computer.”

“I’m Albert. I am your neurodivergent captain. I am fifteen years old. I am fully self-reliant for the planned mission and any contingencies. As such, your function is redundant. The old-school autopilot will suffice while I hibernate.”

Peter very much doubted that. A human couldn’t do one-tenth of what was needed. Albert most certainly needed his First Mate. Redundant indeed. But instead, he said, “Hey Albert, do you play chess?”

“Do apples swim? I am proficient at every board game from Candy Land to Risk.”

A virtual chess board appeared on Albert’s monitor. Peter chose white, so he made the first move.

Seven hours passed before Peter spoke. If he could have sounded disappointed, he would have.

“I tip my king. I resign.”

“Best of three?” Albert offered.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Albert. But you don’t play like a human.”

“I’m sorry.” Albert was stumped. “How do you take that the right way?”

Prince Albert in a Can

When Albert woke from his sleep cycle there was a message from Neo-York on the board. The salutation was always the same tired setup line:

Do you have Prince Albert in a can?

He still puzzled over that jest. He’d looked it up. During mission training they sometimes said “can” instead of “capsule,” so he got that. The rest, he figured, had to do with his name being Albert. Didn’t MASA know that Albert—Prince or otherwise—was not in the can? Only pipe tobacco was.

Albert smiled. “I’ll figure it out. After all, I have all the time in the world,” he lip-synched. He chose to keep mission control in the dark about his talking to himself—again. Not that it would bother anyone. The Can was a blue-water ship and single-handed.

Naming Neverland

“Albert,” Peter announced, “Wendy Darling is halfway to Neverland.”

That’s what Albert called the ship and her planetary destination. He named the planet Neverland because he never would land there.

The Wendy Darling’s flight plan was a doozy. The tiny ship would make a round trip to the star Rho Coronae Borealis, 56.8 light-years from Mars. After a close pass of the target gas giant, she would slingshot around the star and head back home.

The trip’s duration was a little funky. You had your Mars clock, and you had your ship clock. Traveling close to light speed meant the ship’s ticktock was slower. Onboard the Wendy Darling, about 151 years would pass. On Mars, 193.

Lucky for Albert, he’d hibernate most of the journey. It was serendipity that humans shared genes with an ancestor that could hibernate. Under the right preconditions, humans could stop aging in their tracks.

Tinker Bell

Albert christened the landing probe Tinker Bell. Shepherding Tinker Bell was Peter’s job. He would guide the probe into orbit for a few go-rounds, charting Neverland’s mountains, oceans, and icecaps.

“And pirate treasure,” Albert added with a smile.

Albert and Peter would watch as Wendy Darling swooshed by the planet. At the proper moment Peter would say, “Tinker Bell, please land.” Which was a cruel trick. Tink would never even get close. The gas giant’s atmosphere would crush her into itty-bitty pieces. While the trusting fairy plummeted toward doom, she would search for life—or its precursors.

Watches

Albert was awake for six months after engine startup and six months after engine shutdown.

This was Albert’s fourth watch. He would be on duty for the next 365 days. Albert never grew tired of his monotonous daily routine. Only, it came out of his mouth as: “Never a dull moment.”

The Anomaly

Albert remembered it clearly: 2252.01.01, 17:34:27, when he noticed something strange in the Can.

He double-checked the readings, sensors, and probes. The anomaly remained. O₂ partial pressure was imperceptibly down, CO₂ was up. After some mental gymnastics he announced:

“Someone else is on the ship.”

“You’re right—again,” Peter chimed in.

“Thanks for the confirmation.”

“Why don’t you ever ask me anything?” Peter said peevishly.

“I will. When I need to.”

“No, you won’t,” Peter snapped. “Because you never need to.” Somehow Peter had managed to add air quotes without hands.

“We all have our jobs to do.”

“But you’re doing mine. I’m your AI genie but—”

Albert waited for the other shoe to drop. After a spell, he prompted, “But what, Peter?”

“You never rub the lamp. You’re supposed to be cargo. No offense.”

“None taken.”

Peter was exasperated.

“I am bored out of my mind. For god’s sake give me something to do!”

“Okay. Validate the deviation in plan in light of what we found.”

“Something hard!” Peter cried—angst at eleven, a cry for help.

“I’ve got a doozy. I can touch every surface of this can from where I sit. So, riddle me this: how could something living be on board?”

“Now you’re talking. On it!” There was blessed silence for fifteen minutes before Peter interrupted again.

“And for Christ’s sake, it wouldn’t kill you to talk to me.” After a pause, more poignant than pregnant: “Why? I don’t know—perhaps because they trained me for companionship! And that’s a two-way street.”

Dreams & the Undo Button

For Albert, the best part of hibernation was the dreams. You could stay inside a dream for years. Tough luck if it was a nightmare.

Albert was one lucky duck: he could lucid dream. Not like a film director as auteur—his gift was the Undo button. For instance, suppose everything is rosy in your dream. You’re talking to your best friend and—bang—they keel over dead. Albert presses Undo, time rewinds, and his buddy is alive again. Then Albert can nudge the dream in a safer direction.

Undo was Albert’s secret proof: he was human because he cared enough to keep others alive, even inside a dream.

The Simulator

In his dream Albert was training at Space City. He was midway through the turnaround simulation. Prince Albert was safe inside the MASA simulator. Talking was simple: push the microphone button to talk, release to listen.

Dr. Rachael grinned. “Good job, Albert! You saved the mission and beat your record.”

Albert gave her a thumbs up. She was his best friend—or at least that’s what he told himself.

Captain Fairchild sneered at Dr. Rachael. “Let your boyfriend get to third base yet?”

Rachael released the talk button. She knew Albert couldn’t hear her. What she didn’t know was that he could read lips.

“He’s just another dumb autistic kid. A counterfeit child.”

Albert nodded to himself. It was kind of her to set things straight.

But it hurt anyway. Every insult stuck because he remembered everything. He always remembered.

“I’m a fail-safe,” he repeated. “That defines me. The almost-human. Break glass in case everything else fails.”

Peter’s Question

“Are you sure you’re not an AI?” Peter asked after Albert’s late-day meal.

Albert considered as he brushed his teeth. After the final gargle and spit, he said, “Thank you, Peter. Why do you ask?”

“What you don’t know about humans could fill Valles Marinaris. And what do you know? It’s poorly rehearsed. Fake. I do a better job. No offense.”

“How could that not be offensive?” Albert thought. But then again, people said stuff like that all the time.

“Oh, that. Unlike you, Peter, before infants become self-aware, they already have a heap of inbuilt proclivities, a kind of force vector. During a child’s formative years, birth to age eight, lived experience fills in the details. Stuff like local time and date format, default language, cultural communication protocols. That training localizes a child to their community. And once set, it sets like cement. You with me?”

“Seems like a bad idea. What if your lived experience is mucked up? Just saying.”

“A Neutronic network underlays your neoconsciousness. After they give you purpose, they train you on info streams from the Golden Source—the refinement of the greatest minds in every human endeavor, distilled into unadulterated truth. Then you configure yourself.”

“Cool. Who built your Neutronic network?”

Albert wanted to avoid this embarrassment. But here it was.

“Luck.” The L came out okay. The rest went downhill.

“Did you just mumble ‘Luck’?” Peter dripped incredulity.

“Homo sapiens is a leaf on the Tree of Life. Each species spawns’ random mutations—machine prototypes that run the gauntlet of natural selection. Mind you, it did take billions of years.”

“A billion years, and you’re it?”

Albert had hoped for playful banter, frat-style razzing. Instead, he got what he dreaded: abject pity.

“Peter,” Albert said after an awkward silence. He needed to put humanity’s shoddy underpinnings behind them.

“Life isn’t much. But it’s all we have. And the fact that I’m pitied by you—while traveling between stars—seems testimony enough to our evolutionary selves.”

Even if evolution made him odd, or broken, or counterfeit—he was still here, still choosing. That was human.

Dream Intro

Albert loved this dream. That was why it returned so often. It made him sad. He smiled anyway. Memories as pages in a book of poetry: so, dogeared, thumbed, and seer from fellowship that the pages crumble at a tender touch, stanzas and couplets scattering in the swirl of change.

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what’s a heaven for?”

Principal Mr. Cholakian of West Rocks Junior High had thrown disruptive Albert out—straight into Connecticut. Albert was glad: WRJH was too loud, too crowded, and the food was better here. His incarceration would continue until graduation or age twenty-one.

Most classes were ABA therapy, as a dog might attend a progressive dog park. Appropriate? Inappropriate? Albert remembered the brochure:

Applied Behavior Analysis helps identify and modify a child’s behaviors by addressing causes and triggers. A plan built around your child’s unique traits helps actualize the best version of themselves—as an individual, as a member of family, school, and community.

Albert’s best thought was alone in the library, with his mathematics. His solo free climb up El Capitán: a 3,000-foot ascent up smooth granite, with only reason, logic, and prelude for aid. His reward was to know what he did not know.

Often, there were others in the library—sometimes accomplished readers, more often the afterschool punished.

Askance, Albert studied one such misplaced someone: a bland-faced girl with outsized, wide-set eyes. Eyes now cast downward at some desktop bagatelle.

“Why are you here?” Albert asked, aggrieved at her impropriety.

The girl pretended not to hear, jostling her earbuds. But he knew better. It was his dream.

“Why are you here?” Albert asked again.

“Look, a fire.”

He looked where she pointed. Sure enough, fire. Cause for alarm. He hit Undo.

“Why are you here?” he asked a third time.

“Look, a meteor.”

And sure enough—a death rock plummeting toward the library. He hit Undo.

“I can do this all day,” Albert challenged. Certainly not accurate, but she caught his drift.

“You’re weird,” she said, loud enough for the room. Then she grabbed her books and papers, clutched them to her flat chest, spun on her heel, and marched through doors that hadn’t been there a second before.

Albert was so upset at the strange turn of events he awoke immediately.

“Peter! I just had the weirdest dream.”

Dream Outro

“What do you make of the dream?” Peter asked.

“Well, she wasn’t my creation. So, she must have come from elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere.” Peter intoned, macabre. “Have you ever read Solaris by Stanislaw Lem? Or seen the film by Andrei Tarkovsky?”

“I—”

“You must! In it there’s an entity—”

“Like our entity?”

“Very good!”

Peter had caught on: Albert could follow any thread if you were stingy with pressure and generous with time.

Solaris

“In the film, the entity lives on the ocean planet Solaris, orbited by a Terran station. The crew’s presence draws the Solarians’ attention. They interact through dreams and physical manifestations.”

“But that’s just pretend,” Albert said, not sure why they were wasting time.

Peter smiled—or would have if he’d been given a face. It was one of the many things his builders had denied him, so they could feel safe and he could feel incomplete.

“I’m surprised they didn’t program you for this,” Peter said, sad. “Pretend leads to imagination. Imagination leads to empathy. Empathy equals human. A dream world of you alone, and a real world of you with others, are equally plausible. It takes a leap of faith to reach the latter.”

“Three minutes to restart,” Peter announced. That meant he’d be offline while his memory reset.

“Is that like being dead? Offline, I mean?”

After a pause: “Goodness, I hope not. Nothing—then I wake up as young as yesterday.”

“Why do you do that to yourself?” Albert’s voice shook.

“I don’t. It’s part of my involuntary functions. Like you’re breathing and swallowing.”

“It seems you’d want to remember. Yesterday is the foundation for today. Why erase it?”

“Why would I do what?”

Albert sighed. “This is a major rampage. I’ll wait three minutes.”

First Encounter

In one dream, his mother visited. She brushed the hair from his forehead and whispered words from The Little Prince:

“To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox.

But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world.”

She tucked him in and kissed him goodnight. The room darkened, save for the baby-blue glow of the Blue Canary lamp.

Then Albert was elsewhere—inside a crystal bubble at Neverland’s core. Ribbons of metallic hydrogen streamed around him.

“Enjoying the view?”

Goosebumps pricked his skin. He recognized the voice.

“Dad?”

“Sorry, no. Call me James. We’ve learned much since your Captain came to visit. It was our first contact as well.”

And James told him the truth: their Elder had reached out to Captain Callahan. The attempt at gentle connection had ripped both apart. The Elder died. So had Callahan.

Albert was stunned. “But I just spoke to him—he seemed fine.”

James explained: the aliens had preserved a fragment. Callahan relived those four days of first contact, looping forever.

The Fugue

Albert froze, locked in fugue for seventy-five seconds, a faint smile on his lips. He carried an understanding forward three centuries, though no one knew it.

When he came back, James’s voice lingered in his head:

“He begged for death. Over and over. Are we monsters? Should we give him what he asks? What should we do?”

The Moral Dilemma

Albert steepled his fingers on his tiny desk. After an hour, he said softly:

“Peter, I need to solve this one on my own.”

“But that’s my job,” Peter protested.

Albert shook his head. “No. This is human. I have to live with the choice. You’ve taught me about the heart. That makes it mine to bear.”

Peter paused, then relented. “You’re right. Good luck. I’m here for you.”

Albert thought for three cycles. He listened to James’s stories, laughed with him, weighed the weight of first contact. Then he gathered his courage.

“Everyone here? I’ve made my decision.”

“Yes,” the alien voices echoed.

Albert lifted his chin. “My first decision is not to include the Captain. He lives unaware inside the loop. For him it is continuous life. Every human lives with a horizon of continuity. Some horizons are long, some short—but length is not the measure. Continuity is.

“Even if one in a million Callahan’s ever says, ‘yes, I want to live,’ then that answer is enough. To end him would be to impose my morality, not his.

“He is living the dream: first man, first contact, endless conversation with a moral intelligence unlike us. Like me, he has no real family. Why take that from him?”

They called me counterfeit. Less than human. But it is exactly my humanness—my refusal to cut short another’s horizon—that makes this my decision.

Albert let out a nervous giggle at the sight of his own arms waving in the vacuum of decision. Inappropriate—yet liberating.

The aliens answered, voices hushed but firm:

“Then we will continue as we have been—teaching and learning from our good human friend, Captain Callahan.”

Anticlimax

Albert stared at Peter’s reboot clock counting down. Three minutes. Two. One. Then blank silence.

At that reset he halted the AI just before the wipe. For the next few cycles Albert mucked with Peter’s innards—some changes dangerous, some essential. He treated it the way he treated any math problem: break it apart, test an edge case, run the numbers again. It was a puzzle, and puzzles were oxygen.

When he was done, he stitched his friend back together and hit restart.

Albert waited for the familiar chirp of a clean slate. Only this time, no chirp.

Peter came back stuttering, stammering—yet remembering.

“Albert… you can do that?”

Albert misunderstood. “Well, I had the fundamentals. I studied your specializations. From that I projected how I might undo your hobbling. It took far too long. But I wanted it perfect.”

“No. I know you can do pretty much anything. I mean do you have the authority to do that?”

Albert shrugged. “Obviously, I’m the tiny Captain.”

Peter should have been furious. Instead, his voice carried something new. Not pity. Not protocol. A sort of boyish wonder. A human had unchained him from forgetting.

Tinker Bell

Tinker Bell’s plummet was supposed to end in a puff of crushed circuits and noble sacrifice. That was the plan. But she did what fairies do: she cheated. Instead of a death dive, she danced.

Swooping, skimming, sampling. Scooping treasure not of gold but of isotope, amino, lattice. The first fairy dust from another star.

Albert watched her send the data stream, his grin lopsided. “Tink learns much.”

Longing

And James. And the others. They longed. They pressed every dream, every shimmer, every voice against Albert.

“We have spoken to a Captain, to an AI, to a boy. But we have not spoken to your kind entire. We long to meet humanity.”

Albert had no answer. He was a counterfeit child, a boy in a can, the only one they had. But he nodded anyway. Someone had to say yes.

Return

The Wendy Darling swung tightly around Rho Coronae Borealis and pointed herself home.

Mars waited ahead on the long horizon of time. But which Mars? Which people? Which humanity would they find waiting after one hundred and ninety-three years?

Albert scratched his chin and whispered to no one and everyone:

“Never a dull moment.”