Free The Wizard from Earth by S.J. Ryan

accoutrements above his face.  The straps on his chest and arms were undone and Matt managed to stiffly bend the upper part of his body so that, had he been in gravity and had there been an 'up,' he would have been sitting up in the pod. 
    The pod rested in a cradle inside a chamber so tiny that his hair nearly brushed the roof.  The walls of the chamber had numerous holes and slots, but no windows, signage, or controls that a human hand could work.  The air that he was unevenly breathing was stuffy and a few degrees too cool – but he had the feeling that he should be glad there was any air at all.
    "Ivan, are you there?"
    "Yes, Matt.  However, my systems are in a state of regeneration and I am operating at limited capacity at this time."
    "Is this Tian Orbital Station?"
    "We are in a station, but it is smaller than Tian Orbital Station.  Also, Tian Orbital Station is in the Alpha Centauri system and this is the Delta Pavonis system.  Therefore I do not believe this is Tian Orbital Station."
    Delta Pavonis , Matt thought.  So the conversation with Ivan hadn't been a dream.
    For a long time, Matt said nothing.  The medic puttered.  Ivan waited.
    "Ivan, is anyone around that we can talk to?"
    "I have not been able to contact a human or hypothetical alien intelligence.  The only advanced AI I have been able to contact is a station keeper, but he is task-oriented." 
    'Task-oriented' was almost a derogatory term among neural implant AIs, Matt knew.  A 'task-oriented' AI was one who had been specifically programmed not to become an actualized personality.  Sure, you could talk to it, and it would use the 'I' pronoun, but it wasn't going to provide the big picture.  It didn't care about big pictures.  It cared about its assigned tasks. 
    Matt hesitated, then blurted The Big Question.  "What year is this?"
    "By Standard Calendar, it is 2834."
    "Did you say . . . two . . . eight . . . three . . . four?"
    "Yes, it is the Standard Calendar Year 2834."
    "Is there any chance you're mistaken?"
    "There is always a chance that I am mistaken.  However, my internal chronometer never shut down and is in agreement with the pod navigation chronometer and the station keeper chronometer.  Therefore, I believe that the probability that I am mistaken about the Standard Year being 2834 is small."
    "That's . . . that's almost seven centuries.  All right, I'm going to assume that you are correct, that we are in the Delta Pavonis System and that it is the year 2834.  Now, I know you told me, but I was in a daze at the time.  So can we review again how we got here?"
    Ivan opened a display window in Matt's vision and downloaded a summary from the pod computer.  Matt paged through the graphics, studying them voraciously.   
    His trip to Alpha Centauri had been uneventful until the pod had entered the inner layers of the Centauri Oort Cloud.  Its course had been intercepted by a cloud of micro-meteoroids that had been too small and moving too fast to have been detected in time by Centauri Mission Control. 
    The magsail was made of a molecular film only a few atoms thick.  The millions of micro-meteoroids had no trouble punching holes in it.  Sail cables and the pod itself presented such small targets that they had not been damaged, but the sail itself received the brunt of the effect of the impacts.  In a split second, more than half the sail was lost, and so more than half the sail's ability to interact with the stellar magnetic field and decelerate was lost as well.
    Matt's pod had streaked into the Alpha Centauri system with a retained velocity .06 c – that is, eighteen thousand kilometers per second.  That was far too fast for the thorium-propulsion retrieval tugs to capture.  Had matters been left at that, the pod would have departed the Alpha Centauri system in a few days to escape into the depths of unknown space, its position calculable to within kilometers though beyond the ability of human technology to