September 26, T minus 0 Days to LD
2125 CE
“Suit up!” was the call of the day.
I stood aimlessly in hangar four, eyeing the rows and rows of space suits, trying to divine which one I was supposed to find my gear down.
Nika ran by with a helmet in her hand and slapped me on the back. “Wake up, Mags.” She pointed over her shoulder at the aisle she’d emerged from. “Tenth suit down. Better hurry up. Mother and Father won’t be happy if we’re late.” She brushed her dark hair out of her eyes as she smacked the helmet down over her Mongolian features. Nika was beautiful in a really regal sort of way. She should have been a queen instead of an astronaut.
Of course, she’ll never be my queen . . .
Then she said something in Russian and hurried away to her mark.
I flipped her off as she went, knowing full well she’d just insulted me. We always used our native languages to jab at each other.
I swam against the flow of bodies rushing away from the makeshift lockers. They were off to find their places. Bumping into person after person, I found myself shoved down the wrong row, then helped down the right one. Organized chaos. We all knew what to do and where to be, but there was nothing ordered about it.
That’s what you get when you have fifteen thousand people all getting ready for their Big Debut at once.
I think there were only seven hundred in my hangar, but it seemed enough to constitute a sea of people. And I definitely felt like a little fish swept up in the ebb and flow.
Finding my locker—which was more like a fiberglass cubby—I swiftly pulled the space suit over my party dress and zipped all the zippers I could reach. I’m not sure why I picked a dress—silly choice. It got all bunched up around my hips, which in themselves aren’t exactly slight. Supposedly the suits are unisex, but I’ll be damned if they aren’t designed for men with skinny asses.
Helmet tucked firmly under my arm, I advanced with the crowd toward the hangar entrance.
Number 478. That was my designation for today. That was the mark I had to find.
You know those birds—starlings, I think they are—that fly around in huge flocks right around sunset, bobbing and weaving, changing direction in a group? When they do that they’re trying to find roosts for the night, but no one wants to be the first to land, because the first to land is the most likely to get eaten.
That’s pretty much what happened at the lineup. Everyone swirled, trying to find their mark, but no one wanted to stick to their spot first. In this crowd, if you suddenly stopped, you’d get knocked on your ass by a hundred people behind you all trying not to get pushed over by the hundreds of people behind them.
But then a whistle blew and all the birds landed at once.
A few unlucky people, caught far from their designated perches, awkwardly tiptoed into place after most movement had ceased. Myself, of course, amongst them.
I was never good at musical chairs, either.
The whistle dangled from a cord around Father’s neck. His real name was Donald Matheson. That’s what we were all supposed to call him: Dr. Matheson. But the convoy’s not-so-secret name for him was Father.
It only seemed a proper nickname after we started calling Dr. Arty Seal “Mother.”
“All right!” yelled Father. “This is hangar four because you are fourth in line to board. Understand? Settle yourselves on Mira and hold tight. As soon as I.C.C. indicates it’s safe, you are free to go to your respective stations.”
Mira, fantastic. I got to take off in my own bedroom. I already knew that—we’d drilled this (the boarding part, not the suiting-up-in-party-dresses part) at least twenty times. But being there, for real, having it happen— Ah, it was great. Exhilarating. I felt bad for the guys who had to take off somewhere less comfortable—like the engineering dock. Or, hell, the medical bay.
“Your signal to move will be four blasts of the foghorn. Then it’ll be just like we practiced, all right? I want to wish you well. I’m very pleased with all of you. You’ve become fine, dedicated members of this team. We’re sad to see you go, but we have the highest hopes for you and the mission. Do us proud.”
Then the aides came through the lines, fastening any buttons and zippers and locks we’d missed. Father saluted us, we all saluted back, and he moved on.
I’d expected a bit more. Father was given to showboating, while Mother was given to, well, mothering. This seemed like his grand moment, the day Matheson would get to make a scene. But he was very subdued.
I realized it might be a bittersweet moment for him—it was the closing of an era. The project was complete on his end, while it was truly just beginning on ours.
Mother wouldn’t give a speech. In the previous weeks he’d sought out each of us to say his goodbyes personally. He knew some of us better than others, but we’d all had one-on-one training with him at some point. His specialty was psychology, while Father’s was sociology.
Together, they taught us how to play nice with each other.
In a way, I grew up with fourteen thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine siblings. A different person from the convoy might say schoolmates. But we weren’t raised as strangers all thrown together by the coincidence of proximity. Our births were deliberate, our interactions and lives together planned by our “parents” long before we were actually born. (Some people have an issue with “born” and prefer “grown.” But I’m not a plant. Human beings are all born in my mind—naturally or not.)
Of course, we all had different people raise us. I was born in the United States. Then transported to Guatemala, where my “mother” lived. I say mother, but donor or original might be more apt. The first Margarita Pavon took care of the second.
Most parents want their children to grow up to have the same values and ideals they have. But very few parents want their children to grow up and literally be them. But that’s what my mother wanted.
Okay, I’m not naive. That’s what everyone wanted. Still wants.
And maybe I am. But it’s hard to know.
When I was five we moved to Iceland. That was a requirement for all clone families. You could live where you wanted to for the first five years, but then the children had to come to Iceland, parents or no. And when the clones turned ten, it became a communal mash-up. Like summer camp all year round. We had cabins, and bunk mates, but no one was much for singing songs around a campfire or roasting marshmallows under the stars. And instead of camp counselors, we had vocational advisors—scientists and professionals made up our extended family.
My mom was killed in a car accident when I was seven. So I got moved into the community sooner than most.
She was in the back of my mind on launch day. I think she would have been very happy for me, very proud—not proud like Father, but proud like a real parent. If she were still alive it would have been much harder to leave. I wouldn’t have felt nearly as elated to escape into space.
As it stood, everyone I’d ever been close to was coming with me. I wasn’t leaving anyone I loved behind. There were people I would miss—Father, Mother, other teachers and trainers. Awkward little Saul Biterman. But those I couldn’t bear to lose I didn’t have to.
The foghorn blew once. We all shifted on our numbers, impatient for our turn.
Eventually, it blew twice. Then three times.
We’re next . . .
Four times.
We all cheered and rushed forward. No pushing or shoving, no stepping on anyone’s toes. We’d practiced this. But we were definitely on a mission, moving with enthusiasm and intent. Our cries were muffled by our helmets, but we kept shouting.
The crowd was miles away. They might have been cheering, too, but we couldn’t hear it, so we rooted for ourselves.
With great sweeping metal curves, almost like that of a giant zeppelin, Mira was both beautiful and imposing. The hull was so shiny—well-groomed and polished, as though it were a billionaire’s favorite sports car instead of a spacecraft. All of the rooms inside were illuminated, which made the many portholes look like strings of little twinkle lights wrapped around the ship.
We reached the open bay doors of the shuttle hangar and marched aboard, keeping our rank and file. We waved to invisible cameras and blew kisses to invisible people.
When the cold Icelandic plain was finally obscured by the dark carbon-fiber walls of the ship, I turned my attention to the open airlock. It was small, and we all had to move through two-by-two.
Once inside Mira proper, I wanted to skip to my room. But I restrained myself. Even on a wonderful, exciting day like today, it was inappropriate for a woman of twenty-five to bound around like a schoolgirl. Or, at least, that’s what Mother would say. But I wouldn’t have to keep to such restrictive expectations once we were off on our own.
Then I’d skip all I wanted.
My cabin was on the fourth deck, toward the front of the ship. It was a single. There were doubles, too, and if I ever got married we’d move into a quadruple—if you commit yourself to a partner, you commit yourself to raising two clones. Father had set the system up just so.
The jump seat automatically thrust out from its compartment in the wall next to the window, waiting for me to settle in. On the cushion sat a little blue envelope with my name scrawled—not typed—across the front.
It was a letter, written in Mother’s hand, but signed by both him and Father.
Had they really written fifteen thousand goodbye notes?
No, I’m sure they had a template—copied thousands of times over, then each finished with some sort of personalization. But even if each wasn’t handwritten, it was still a nice gesture.
They did care about us. As people, not just as parts of the mission.
I made up my mind to read it on a day when I was really missing them. For now, I simply wanted to enjoy the moment.
I glanced around my small room. Every cabin had a window, though there were quarters in the ship’s interior. A complex system of tubes and mirrors assured everyone had a view, though.
Mine was less than spectacular at that moment. I saw mostly a lot of ground and a sliver of horizon.
I should have treasured that splinter of sky. Even though I’d never see the sky again it was still too pedestrian for me to take note of at the time.
After removing my helmet and letting my curls free, I sat down and strapped in. The space suits were mostly for show. We had to keep them close during launch, in case of emergency, but most of us would never need to wear them again, provided all went well.
“Hello, computer,” I said, wondering if the system would be as cold as the prototype.
“Hello, Margarita Pavon.”
“Are you ready for lift-off?”
“Nearly. Just accessing a package left for me.”
“What kind of package?”
“A few . . . memories.”
“I won’t bother you, then.”
“Thank you.”
The ship jolted and rumbled a little, but it wasn’t the shake and shimmy of lift-off. With everyone aboard, consortium aides could now roll our shuttles back into the bay. A faint grinding of the hangar doors signaled the end of loading—and the end of my time on Earth.
Soon we would be shooting off into the stars.
The ship went quiet for a while. Almost everyone on Mira would face the lift-off alone. It would have been nice to have Nika nearby to share the moment with, but I suppose Father thought this was a good time for individual reflection and contemplation. That we would all like to meet this new life in our own, private way.
Father wasn’t always right.
A tremor vibrated up my spine from deep in the ship. Then there was a roar deep in my bones, and I knew the external cyclers had come to life.
My room shook dramatically. Luckily everything was either bolted down or tightly secured.
I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to hold myself still. There was a giddiness in the pit of my stomach, like the kind I got on a rollercoaster anticipating that first big drop. The ship rattled like it was going to fall apart.
Everything will be okay, I told myself. No need to worry. These ships were the safest spacecraft ever built.
Yeah, tell that to the team that blew up when they tried to go subdimensional.
No. I wasn’t going to think about that. No point in panicking over a fluke. This was a great moment, epic and intense, something I’d been looking forward to since I was old enough to understand what was happening and why I was so special. My silly fears weren’t allowed to spoil the splendor.
I had talked to lots of people before we boarded, and they were choosing to watch the launch via their implants. It was the last time we were going to be able to access that kind of real-time data from Earth. And sure, watching it from the outside while being inside was impressive. But I wanted to experience it all live, all in the moment.
A billow of wind whipped up the dust outside my window, obscuring the ground from view. And then there was a slow, intense thrust. The pressure pushed me deep into the jump seat, and I closed my eyes for half a moment.
The shaking stopped as soon as we were free of the mooring and into the sky. I knew we weren’t speeding away—the g-forces were little more insistent than those on a car chugging down a highway—but I felt like a giddy kid on a fair ride nonetheless.
I opened my eyes again. Up, up we went. Past the birds, the clouds. Past mountain peaks and into the paths jetliners usually took (all rerouted to give us plenty of clearance, of course). We drifted higher, and higher. Iceland shrank away, then all but disappeared. I could see the North Atlantic and the Greenland Sea, despite impressive cloud cover. And then two coastlines pushed in from the periphery of my window like darkness pushes sight into tunnel vision moments before you faint.
The sky changed colors, became a blue haze as we passed out of the atmosphere, and black space swamped in around the edges of the planet.
It still amazes me that something so expected can be so simultaneously surreal.
The artificial gravity kicked in seamlessly. Using gravitons to create gravity where there is none is a much simpler process than trying to use them to cancel out the existing pull of something like, I don’t know—a planet. As such, I didn’t actually notice the transition from real Earth grav into simulated. It wasn’t until a few more minutes had passed, with Earth still falling away, that I even considered it.
And once I noticed the gravity I couldn’t un-notice it.
I had watched every single recording of spaceflight in existence. The launches, the landings, the missions—I was familiar with each of them, inside and out. Watching the astronauts bounce around inside cramped, equipment-filled cabins was my favorite part. That, and seeing the panicked look on some space tourists’ faces when they experienced zero-g for the first time.
Weightlessness used to be part of space travel. Not anymore. The twelve convoys were the first to employ simulated gravity via harnessing and aligning gravitons. The cyclers were a wonderful invention, and—don’t get me wrong—would make permanent living in space much easier to handle and safer all around, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around being in space without free-floating.
It wasn’t as though I’d expected to float, but it was all part-and-parcel of my space fantasy. My space ideal.
Perhaps I could convince one of the mechanics—oh, excuse me, engineers (they don’t like being called ships’ mechanics)—to take me out on a spacewalk.
Outside, Earth was a beautiful blue ball decorated with wisps of white and streaks of green and tan. It grew smaller by the minute. While it slipped away, a funny feeling—a clod of emotion—formed in the pit of my stomach. It was filled with compacted and compressed sentiments I wasn’t ready to deal with, so I pushed it down further, hid it somewhere deep inside myself to be handled later. All I wanted to do was focus on meeting space with a fresh outlook. I wasn’t ready to dwell on all I’d left behind, or that my home planet was no longer my home.
The light in my room shifted from a cool, crisp, natural blueish-white to a lovely shade of purple.
We were about to go subdimensional.
My hands shook as I reached for my helmet and fastened it back on as quickly as I could. It was a silly thing to do, really. If something went wrong with our subdimensional shift a space suit wouldn’t save me. But the uniform gave me some comfort, no matter the illogic of it.
While consciously I would experience time as I always had, my body would experience something very different. It was about to move sideways through time as easily as I could move sideways through the room.
The easiest way to explain it is that the “time” part of space-time is like an ocean. Normally, matter travels on the “ocean’s” surface, like a boat moving at a specific rate across the waves. Subdimensions are like underwater currents. A diver can find a fast current beneath the surface and be propelled much farther than the boat, while exerting less energy.
That’s how a convoy—the diver in this scenario—can effectively harness faster-than-light travel without reaching speeds anywhere near that of light. It’s a handy-dandy little physics hack.
And, if that same diver wanted to go really deep, in order to catch the really fast currents, they’d need a submarine to guard against increasing PSI. We need a subdimensional bubble, created by the SD drive, to protect us from the peculiarities of subdimensional submersion.
Because that’s the thing about physics—it doesn’t like getting hacked.
Our classes on subdimensional space travel had suggested myriads of possible physical side effects that might occur when “diving.” Nausea, elation, déjà vu, the sense that we were walking backward when actually walking forward, stretchiness—whatever that was supposed to mean—the illusion of floating. On and on.
I told myself I could handle it. Whatever was about to go down, I could deal.
My fluttering heart suggested otherwise.
The monitor embedded in the center of my bookcase turned on, displaying a shot of the Moon.
Grimacing despite myself, I waited for some violent indication that the ship had gone sub. I don’t know what I expected—more rattling, perhaps feeling pulled or squished like putty. Something extreme to indicate that I was messing about in pieces of reality I didn’t normally mess about in.
I closed my eyes again, afraid that if I didn’t they might pop out of my skull.
But then the light on the other side of my eyelids turned soft once more and lost its purple hue. A mellow chime of success came through the comms system. I opened one eye. Everything looked normal. Nothing distorted, no melting clocks or wiggling walls. Nothing changed strange colors or lost its density. It all appeared unaffected.
And then we were in! The view through my porthole had turned a starless, inky black.
The monitor replayed our transition—the thirty seconds before the dive through the thirty seconds after. And, oh—the Moon! It was there while simultaneously not being there. It flickered once, jumping a distance of millions of miles in a moment, then it came back (though, of course, we had jumped in time, not it through space). Instead of seamlessly floating by, it shifted more like a time-lapsed photograph—one frame blended into the other.
It had a ghostly quality to it. Quite literally: if we had chosen to travel through the moon, we could have. That was one of the great discoveries about sub-d: the nature of these newly found partial dimensions was actually hidden in the greater dimensions. In picking apart time we could occupy the same space as other matter. Even though I understood that intellectually, I was still glad we’d opted for going around. My anxiety was already in high gear as it was.
I looked at the monitor once more, to find there was nothing there. All of the moon’s odd behavior had taken place in a few seconds, and then it winked out. Space went black, starless, and we were officially in our SD bubble. Visible light could not penetrate, sound could not penetrate, most radiation could not penetrate—the only way we could communicate outside of our bubble now was with SD information packets. And that in itself was no small task.
The feed to the screen repeated. They’d replay the dive over and over again for a while—because the effect was so stunning, or because it confirmed that our conversion was a success and we were all still alive, I wasn’t sure. Probably a bit of both.
I watched it a few more times before my chip phone, now entirely contained to our internal network, indicated I had a call.
“Yes?”
“It’s Nika.”
“Where are you?”
“Outside your door. Let me in.”
I was so enthralled with this new reality that I’d failed to notice the safety light above my door had turned from red to green. I could unbuckle and walk about.
“It has a buzzer, you know,” I said, getting up. “A doorbell.”
“How was I supposed to know you were in? I half expected you to be running up and down the halls by now.”
Skipping, I thought with a smile. “Did you see that transition?” I pressed a button and the door slid aside. “It was spectacular.”
Nika leaned casually against my doorjamb with her hands in her pockets, and gave me a funny look when I moved aside for her to enter. “Guess what?” she said, “The air here is breathable and everything.”
“What? Oh.” I still had the space suit on, helmet and all. She came in and helped me slip out of it.
When I and my party dress were free, Nika leaped onto my bed, bouncing a little as she looked out the window. “Trippy, huh?”
“No kidding.” I crawled up next to her and sat crisscrossed.
“So. Here we are.”
“Yep.” I nodded and bit my lip, watching the last of the moon fade from view. “Here we are.”
“You ready for it?” she asked.
“What?”
“This.” She gestured all around. “Our new lives.”
I shrugged. “I guess. The place—outer space—is new, but has that much really changed? I’m still a communications officer. I’ve been doing that for the past five years. You’re still a historian.”
“Archivist. I’m officially an archivist now. And diplomat.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yep. When we bring all the info on LQ Pyx back, I’ll be the one to interface with all of Earth’s bigwigs.”
She hadn’t told me that before. “Wow. You’re our representative, then?”
“Only when we go back.” She lay flat on the bed, with her hands tucked behind her head. “Too bad I won’t really be there. But, hey, I like being an archivist just as well. It’s easy, it’s fun. I mean, how lucky are we? To get handed our dream jobs from the get-go?”
I knew exactly what she meant. “I get to send the first crew report in five days.”
“Exciting. How many days is that for them?”
“About . . . forty-eight and a half. Give or take a few hours.”
“Oh, right.” She was quiet for a long minute.
“What are you doing?”
“Calculating how much time goes by for Earth each minute.”
“Nerd.”
“We’re all nerds,” she said, smiling. She shook her head. “Anyway. They’re setting up a great party down in the mess hall. Everyone’s shuttling over from the other ships. I came to get you.” She sat up and punched me lightly on the arm. “Better take good notes. You’ll want to detail every moment in your letter back home.”
We left the room and headed down the hall, still chatting about our jobs. “Do you know who you’ll be exchanging notes with?” Nika asked.
“Oh, you mean my pen pal? Yeah, I did some training with him. Biterman, remember? He taught me a special shorthand, since only so much info can be packed into one subdimensional signal package. Maximized my possible output. Obviously it’s not just him and me communicating, it’s all of us and all of them. We’re just the translators, in a way. There are plenty of other notetakers aboard—journalists. I’m just the one who has to compile everything.”
“Fun.”
“Oh, come on, you know it is, Ms. Archivist. We’ve got copies of millions of primary documents, and no one to stop us from accessing them. Your own personal historical playground.”
On Earth, people could only access rare documents under special circumstances. Not just the originals, but even the DNA-storage copies, since the tech to build and decode the molecules was still new and expensive. In order to read an artificial DNA strand and retrieve the encrypted information, you had to destroy it—which meant you better have the tech on hand to replace it. But we used nearly the same processes for cloning as we did for reading and replacing our databanks, so it was all there for us. Snap, nothing easier.
“We’ve got a wealth of information the average Earth layman can’t get ahold of,” Nika concluded.
And there was a reason for that. We might have old primary documents, history, but we’d be getting very little new information for the duration of the mission. We had no internet, no way to dial up an expert whenever we had an obscure question. If the information wasn’t coming with us, we likely weren’t going to have access to it—and even if I could ask mission control, we definitely weren’t getting a timely or detailed answer. Our only available communication method simply wouldn’t support it.
“We’ve got the information, plus,” Nika said with a grin, “we’ve got the brains to use it.”
“Going intellectual elitist on me already?” I winked at her. Of course she was an intellectual elitist. We all were. Nothing strokes the ego quite like being told from birth that you’ve been chosen for a fantastic mission because, frankly, your genes are better than everyone else’s.
Nika laughed.
We knew the layout of Mira like we knew our faces in the mirror. Part of our training had included two isolated years aboard, cordoned off from everything and everyone except the other ships. Mother and Father and a few instructors had stayed with us for the test run, though, to make sure everything went well. We proved we could be self-sustaining, and that we could handle the isolation.
So we walked down the corridors unerringly. It was just a few hallways, a couple of turns, and an elevator ride to the mess hall.
Yes, decorations were something we had. Yes, booze a plenty, too. Strange, I know. When we were teenagers we’d all taken bets on what they would deny us aboard. Anything distracting we were sure was out: no porn, no implant games. Drugs were something we all had on our lists. No alcohol, no cigarettes, and no caffeine.
But we were delighted to find out how wrong we’d been. Nothing illegal made it onto the manifest, of course. But we had plenty of luxuries—plenty of vices.
There was one noticeable difference between the items that made it aboard and those that didn’t, however. If it wasn’t reusable or renewable, it wasn’t there.
We could grow our own chocolate, though, like the other luxury plants—coffee, tea, etc.—but quantities were limited. We still had to ration it.
You’d never have guessed we were rationing anything at the party. And to be honest, sustainability was the furthest thing from our minds that day. We were strutting out into the galaxy, with our whole lives ahead of us. What could one day of indulgence hurt?
Before then, that party, everything had been controlled for us. If we were ever allowed alcohol before, it had been doled out by someone. Controlled by someone. Our intake of sweets, dyes, and artificial flavorings had all been regulated. We were each in the best of health, had no addictions, and no bad habits. But it wasn’t of our own choosing.
The party was a raucous mess before it hit its first hour. We’d never experienced such freedom before. No one to tell us no, to sit up straight, to stop yelling, that making out with your supervisor while sitting on top of the cake was a bad idea . . .
As with a lot of children who find themselves loosed from parental chains for the first time, we didn’t know when to quit. Though we were the kindest, most empathetic group of genes you could ever find, feelings were bruised and faces soon followed.
At some point Nika disappeared toward her quarters with a botanist she liked. “Go find someone and have a little fun,” she giggled at me on the way by. “Or I can stay here and you can try to convert me.”
“You’re not my type.” I stuck my tongue out and winked.
“Oh, I am. I am so your type,” she said.
She was right. And if it were any other straight girl giving me lip, I would have put salt in her next cup of coffee. But this was Nika—the sting was only skin-deep—so I just brushed it off and planned to embarrass her in front of her new bunk-buddy every chance I got.
Many of my friends followed her lead, slinking off with their significant—or not so significant—others to have some private time.
The hours stretched on, and the more bottles that were opened the more fist fights broke out. Turns out alcohol makes a boxer of the gentlest of souls. Insults flew. Someone broke someone else’s nose and forced the medics to set up a makeshift first-aid station. The soberest of the group found themselves unfairly playing nanny to those that had overindulged.
Me? I was all about the dancing. Brawlers to the left of me, criers to the right, and me in the middle doing a horrible rendition of a dance that was supposed to be done to marimbas. But I couldn’t care less about supposed to’s. I just flipped the hem of my skirt back and forth, remembering the way my mom used to shake her hips in the kitchen.
We were rowdy and uncouth, elated and hot-tempered.
And until a sharp whistle blew and a loud order was barked, we hadn’t realized that the bridge crews weren’t celebrating with us.
Captain Mahler demanded attention. When he walked into a room, it fell silent. Even at that party, high on life, as soon as we knew he was there, we shut up.
There was Mother and Father.
And then there was the Captain.
“Having fun?” The question was clipped . . . and rhetorical. He took to a table near the entrance, climbing atop it like a man who’d just conquered Everest. Several members from his command team stood by the doors.
There wasn’t anything malicious in his voice, nor in his stance. But I did feel like I was about to be reprimanded. His sharp, dark eyes projected a smug understanding. He wasn’t disappointed, or angry with us. But the unspoken message was clear: you can’t control yourselves, and that makes me better than you. It was as if our drunken displays were an illustration of the very reason he was in charge of this ship and we were not.
In a sense, Mahler wasn’t one of us. He was an original, not a clone, and one of only a handful aboard. His illustrious military career (if one can have an illustrious military career in a time of global peace) had gotten him a direct invitation. Why on Earth he’d accepted, no one was sure. He had to leave everything he was born for behind.
But he had. As had a fair few of those in command. I took another look around and realized no one partaking in the festivities was from Mahler’s division. I knew the captain of Bottomless quite well—he wasn’t around.
All of the captains were with their ships, of course. And all of the command crew were at their posts. They had jobs that needed attending to while the rest of us fooled around in the mess.
I looked up at a clock on the wall—five hours had flown by since the party began. Captain Mahler had to have known about it long before his appearance. He let us have our good time, indulged us. But now he was here to remind us it was time to face responsibility.
“I want this place spotless in an hour, and everyone in bed no more than fifteen minutes after that,” he said. “All who participated in the merriment must participate in the cleanup. If anyone does not contribute, there will be consequences. I expect everyone to report for duty at 0700 tomorrow. You’ve all heard of hangovers, and by tomorrow many of you will be intimately familiar with one. This does not excuse you from duty.”
He scanned the room, laying his eyes on each of us. “There’s a time and place for everything. Today was a momentous day, one we’ll all remember—the first half of, anyway.”
Uncomfortable laughter cropped up here and there around the room, but dropped off almost immediately.
“It was a day worth celebrating—and we have. Now, though, we must focus on business. The business of setting up our society, engraining it in ourselves. You led different lives on Earth—sheltered and formal lives. I understand the desire to break from those constraints. But there was a reason for your well-regulated upbringing. The training wheels have come off, but that does not excuse you from duty, or dedication, to your positions aboard these ships. We must take pride in our stations, in our commitment to each other. In responsibility.” He looked at his watch—an antique piece, perhaps an heirloom. “All right, your hour starts now.”
I lunged at the pile of soiled cake-plates nearest me, and dropped them into the compost chute on my way to Nika’s room. I hadn’t a clue what the punishment for not cleaning might be, but Nika would never forgive me if I let her endure it.
Besides—I sure as hell wasn’t doing this by myself.
Days later, it was time to compose my first message home.
I.C.C. sent automated messages back all the time. Short snippets of information about functionality and position, but that was it. I had to tell Earth about us—our societal status, our functionality, any major events, and any major problems. I had to keep mission support abreast of all that was happening.
There were three main communications rooms on Mira. One was part of the bridge and was used for ship-to-ship. The second was on deck six, and was a mirror image of the comms centers on all the other ships. That was where most of the “reporters” worked out of, gathering the data that I would then compile. The last sat on the lowest deck opposite the shuttle hangar—more of a closet than a room, what with all of the equipment stashed inside. It was well guarded, and only I and my cycle partner—the person who would take over when I retired, and in turn train a new clone of myself—had clearance to enter. It was where all Earth-to-convoy messages came in and went out. Inside stood a small desk, a small chair, and a good-sized server bank which extended beyond my sight and back into a long access tunnel beyond.
I called the servers my Enigma Machine, because all of their computing power was focused on sending and receiving coded messages. The messages came via a time subdimension we had yet to figure out how to physically move through. But even if we didn’t fully understand it, we could send information through it just fine—better than fine. It was the fastest communication method known, and would ensure us practical mission-to-mission support communications for a long time.
While the system was fast, it was also limited. For one thing, my Enigma Machine needed a mate back on Earth in order for my messages to actually make it to a set of human eyeballs.
For another, SD communication was comparable to SD travel, which meant is was equally as problematic, with a few exceptions. An SD drive made a pocket of “normal” space around itself and nearby matter, protecting it in a bubble. And the drive could independently move that pocket in and out of normal space; in other words, it could dive and surface. But SD communications couldn’t work that way—there was no physical engine I could attach to an encoded electromagnetic signal. Instead, there was a part of my Enigma Machine that created a bubble of its own and forced a dive, and a twin Enigma Machine on Earth that pulled the communiqué to the surface and coaxed the bubble to pop.
And the two machines had to be synced. The odds of randomly intercepting an SD packet were astronomical—pun intended. The Enigma Machine on the receiving end had to know which subdimension the information was traveling through, what trajectory it took through space, and how to unravel the “skin” that maintained the bubble once the packet was intercepted.
“Not exactly a ham radio, is it?” I’d joked the first time a teacher had introduced me to the concept. Unamused, she’d gone into further detail about how difficult SD communication was, and how I should be honored to be one of only a handful of people trained to use the methodology.
So, honored I was.
The system was fast, yes, and complicated, yes, and a huge energy suck, sure. But despite its advanced nature, it could still only handle so much data at a time. And by so much, I mean not a lot. So once the message was transferred to my implants or a holoflex-sheet, it needed further decoding, and that’s where my job could truly get tricky.
I smoothed the front of my clothes, making sure nothing bunched uncomfortably. My official on-duty uniform was a well-tailored, denim-blue jumpsuit. Not the most stylish of work-wear, but it distinguished me from the black of security officers, the vermillion of the engineers, the Italian-yellow of the emergency medical teams, the purple of the educational division—and everyone else who wasn’t in communications.
The color coding had been Mother’s idea, though I heard Father was against it. Thought it was too much like gang paraphernalia or something.
Well, if the botanists and the microbiologists ever start calling themselves the Sharks and the Jets, and go snapping in unison through the halls, we’ll know he was right.
In the days previous I’d gathered my notes, made my summaries, and translated them into the special shorthand. Of course, five days in, there wasn’t much to report.
People were working, doing their jobs well. Though, to me, the convoy still felt more like a clubhouse than a well-oiled machine. We were free, after all. This was our house—it was only fair we should make our own rules, rather than be confined to whatever our parents had set up.
If it hadn’t been for Captain Mahler, I’m sure entropy would have taken over and pulled our presently functional feet out from under us. We wanted time off when we wanted it. We wanted to switch shifts whenever we felt like it. We wanted to set up bowling pins in the halls and use inappropriate items to knock them down.
We just wanted to have a little fun. And despite the lesson we had learned the morning after our first party, our sense of responsibility was shaky at best. We didn’t know how to balance work and play—not yet. If the captain hadn’t had such a watchful eye the convoy might have ended up dead in the proverbial water.
Big Brother was watching, though. With the help of I.C.C., he made sure we ate our vegetables and washed behind our ears. He knew, better than the rest of us, that no Mother and no Father shouldn’t mean a lack of order.
So that’s where we were—but was I going to tell Earth all that? That they’d sent a wannabe frat house into space? And that their one hope for stability—after all the effort they’d put into that very concept—rested on a single man?
Hell no.
And, after all, it had only been five days. Surely it was just a phase.
I was conscious of the dangers of the dynamic while wanting to be a part of it. I had no desire to follow the strict regimen that had been set up for us, but I also didn’t want to see the mission flounder and fail. It was a strange dichotomy of concepts that somehow lived harmoniously within me. I simultaneously supported and denied our collective rebelliousness.
But I pushed all that from my mind as I tucked my holoflex-sheets under my arm and headed for my closet. I was to report the facts, just the facts, nothing more.
The space was as cramped as I remembered it from our two years of isolation. We’d simulated everything during that time. I’d done this job before. It was nothing new, and yet . . . everything had changed.
We’d left Earth behind. We were on our own. Truly.
I wanted to leave the door open, as I’d always felt a little claustrophobic in the communications room, but the two nearest security guards kept peeking through the door—very distracting. So I shut myself in. And once again, I wished the room had a window. Luckily, it wouldn’t take me long to send the report.
I connected the thin, plastic holoflex-sheets to the server and organized the message into SD packets. It shouldn’t have taken me more than ten minutes to get everything squared away.
However, halfway through my upload the server connected automatically to my implants.
[Message received. Sender: Earth Com Center 23, operator Saul Biterman]
I was supposed to send the first message. Was something wrong? I scanned my instruments: there was no emergency indicator. Had we miscalculated the time dilation? Was I late?
I was a little annoyed. I’d trained for this my entire life, how could I have messed it up already?
The message downloaded in the next moment, and I transferred it to a blank holoflex-sheet I pulled from a desk drawer. I wanted to see it all at once, be able to manipulate it. Sure, there was no need to translate it holographically—I could translate it in my head while reading it—but I wanted to have a physical record in case it was something I needed to take to the captain.
Turns out, it wasn’t something Mahler needed to see.
It was short, and a bit confusing.
It read simply, How are you?
That was a strange thing for him to ask. I was about to tell him how we were—no need to be preemptive.
But maybe he wanted an impression of our well-being, something besides a record of events and functions. So I whipped up one extra packet and uploaded it with the rest.
We’re fine, thank you.
I finished my upload, gathered my notes, and went about the rest of my day attending to my journalistic duties. But, benign as the question seemed, I couldn’t get it out of my head.
How are you?
Saul and I had worked closely, but never gotten personal. Like a grade schooler never really gets to know her teacher, I never learned much about Saul as an individual.
Age wasn’t a barrier, neither was language. But there were other extenuating factors.
For one thing, I didn’t meet him until the summer of my twentieth year. Everyone else had already met their specialists, and since I was one of the last to get my official training, I was both nervous and excited to receive him in the drawing room of my group home.
Buttoned up tight in a pressed suit, I sat in one of the high-backed chairs trying to focus on my posture. I wanted to make a clean, professional impression when he was shown in. With one look at me I wanted him to think I was the right person for the job, that I could handle the responsibility.
It wasn’t just paranoia or an eagerness to please—Nika’s mentor had gone to Mother to ask if she had the right student. If that had happened to me I would have been mortified.
Father came in first and held the door open for Mr. Biterman. I leapt to my feet—before he even had time to glimpse my well-planned pose—and my hand shot forward of its own accord.
It wasn’t until we’d finished our initial shake that my mind registered anything about him. The first thing I noticed was his sticky palm, and my first impression swiftly snowballed from there.
His dress shirt was stained at the bottom—as though he’d dropped food in his lap at some point—and wasn’t tucked in. Despite the smile, his face held a sour expression, one I feared permanent. And his eyes didn’t meet mine. Saul was only ten years older than me, but he’d gone prematurely bald, and to make up for it he’d grown a thick, unkempt beard.
I resisted the urge to ask Father who this man was. I knew he was my tutor, despite my desire to believe otherwise.
We were formally introduced, then Father indicated for us both to sit before he left. I’d hoped he’d stay and help break the ice, but he rushed out of the room muttering that he was late for another appointment. I wondered if that was really the reason, or if Mr. Biterman’s company was as off-putting as his appearance.
I smiled, crossed and uncrossed my legs, and literally twiddled my thumbs waiting for my specialist to outline a plan, or start a lecture, or whip out some comm equipment.
Saul might have been alone in the room for all he acknowledged me.
“So . . .” I began. Slowly. I’d hoped he’d interrupt me. When he didn’t, I pressed on. “Do I get a syllabus, or a prospectus, or . . . Do I need to ask Fath— Dr. Matheson for certain books?”
He reached into his trouser pocket and dug around for a moment. His mining produced a crumpled scrap of yellow paper. Without a word he handed it to me by means of an unenthusiastic flip of his wrist.
Hesitant, I leaned over and took it. The scrap was clean, at least—no food stains. Glancing sidelong at this strange man I’d been saddled with, I smoothed it out in my lap.
It was a scribbled schedule for the next week, with dates, times, and places, but no indication of what was supposed to happen during the appointments.
Once I’d read it over, I looked up to ask him a question, and was startled by the silly smile that had replaced his indifference. “Well, see you tomorrow, Ms. Pavon,” he said, as though we’d just finished with a delightful visit.
That was the first of many awkward times with him. It took me months to get used to his strange mannerisms, sudden disconnects with now, long silences, and a plethora of other quirks.
I was baffled, at first. And also a little insulted. Here was a man whose expertise in communications had landed him one of the most important tutoring positions in the world—he was training ambassadors to space (myself along with seven others—three on different convoys), and would be his students’ main connection to Earth once they left the ground—yet he couldn’t hold a normal conversation.
If anyone other than Mother or Father had brought Saul into my life I would have thought it a colossal joke.
But, like a good little soldier, I held in my doubts and accepted the training. As it turned out, Saul was a capable teacher. He taught mostly through illustration and hyperbole rather than pontification, which I appreciated. And when it came to his work he was quick and accurate, but it wasn’t until I advanced to decoding on my own that I realized why he had the job.
While the man couldn’t smoothly string five words together in person, he was a whiz when it came to communicating long-distance. Without all of the physical cues to get in the way, with the words stripped bare, he was the most articulate man I’d ever met.
The difference was so apparent that when he came to grade my first solo decoding work, I asked him who had written the message.
“Me,” he said, looking up from the many red marks he’d already placed on my paper. His brows didn’t knit together, he didn’t frown or squint sideways at me like a normal person would when trying to decipher the implications of what had been said. But by that time I could recognize his special brand of confusion.
“I know you coded it.” I walked around the large warehouse space with my hands in my coat pockets. We’d been allotted one corner for training, and for housing the server and other equipment. Other machines I had no name for—utilized by other convoy departments—took up the three remaining corners. “But who composed it?”
“Me. I did it all.” He went back to marking the page, each stroke of the pen more vehement than before.
I’d insulted him, and I tried to make up for it by inviting him to drinks with my friends and me after our session, but I should have known better. He declined with a lame excuse, but I’m sure his reasons for turning me down were twofold. His anger was a part of it, but how exactly was a man who couldn’t relax and behave naturally one-on-one going to get by in a group? If I made him nervous, what would a whole gaggle of girls in a crowded bar do to him?
But I kept trying. From there on out, every time I had a group activity planned after our lessons, I invited him. I hoped at some point he’d say yes. I thought maybe if he spent time with more people he would get better at communicating in person, but it wasn’t to be. Saul was who he was, and I couldn’t change that.
So, perhaps his first message to me on Mira shouldn’t have surprised me so much. The man I worked with closely on Earth, but never really knew, waited to reach out to me until I was stretching the distance between us to never-before-achieved proportions.
His reply to my first set of data packages was mostly what I expected: acknowledgment of the incidents I’d recorded, other Earth specialists’ professional advice related to my report, and questions about the crew’s health and productivity. But tacked on at the end was a full letter, clearly meant for me personally.
A portion was general-interest based. Saul thought we might want to know what Earth was up to. We’d been gone two weeks travel time, around four months their time, so not much had happened. Not enough to take note of, anyway, but I transferred the information to a file and sent it to Nika’s implants. She’d know what to do with it.
Throughout the second half of the letter, though, Saul told me about his work week, how he was feeling, and so on. Things friends talk about. Close friends.
I wasn’t sure what to think, let alone how to respond.
In all that time I’d been trying to get Saul to open up I’d thought him disinterested. I thought perhaps he didn’t want to come with me after lessons because he just didn’t care to get to know me. That maybe he didn’t like people, just words.
Could he have been holding out for this? For when he’d be most comfortable?
It seemed ridiculous, but as acquainted with his awkwardness as I was . . .
Before he’d signed off, he asked me the same question again, but made sure to come to the point:
How are you, Margarita? The convoy is fine, but are you?
The question bothered me. Other people would see these messages once he’d decoded them. They were public record. I didn’t really feel comfortable laying out personal information. He wasn’t asking how are you in the sense that you ask when meeting up with someone, when an obligatory “Fine” can mean anything from fantastic to I feel like crud.
He was asking me to confront my mental state. As though he knew I had not stopped to assess my own adjustment.
How was I? Did it matter?
I decided it didn’t. I gave him the same fine response, and sent the packets on their way.
Over the next few months, his messages were similar, and the differences in the way we were each traveling through time’s dimensions became more distinctive. While I was contacting him every week, he was only speaking to me once every couple of months. And his life was moving at speeds I could hardly comprehend.
A few of my days after launch, he’d gushed about a colleague. A woman, who apparently wouldn’t give him the time of day. After three weeks of my time, they were dating.
That in itself was a shock. Saul Biterman with a girlfriend? Highly improbable.
Two months into my journey, he was engaged. I couldn’t believe it. Who was this woman who had fallen in love with my quirky, socially-stunted tutor? Had he grown so much since I’d last seen him, or did the old saying about odd ducks hold true?
I blinked my eyes and he was married. Another blink and there was a baby on the way. I blinked a third time and the baby had been born—a boy.
I hadn’t been on board six months yet.
But four and a half years had passed for Saul and his family.
After his son came into the picture, things changed faster than ever. I hadn’t realized how quickly babies progress, and it was breathtaking to witness a child’s life on fast-forward.
Sometimes Saul even sent pictures. It was hard for me to accept that they were all of the same child.
And every time, Saul asked me how I was. Or pushed for more personal information. I always answered with fine. I didn’t see the point in giving him more.
Things that hadn’t bothered me during the test run—those two years we’d been quarantined aboard—began to pick at my nerves. I couldn’t stand to look at the cleaning robots when I’d hardly noticed them before. I even chased a wall-climber out of my cabin when it accidently knocked an old paper book off one of my shelves.
The walls felt closer than they had before, the hallways narrower, the rooms darker.
Living aboard for real was not that dissimilar from our test years—not physically, anyway. But psychologically I was in a completely different place.
It took me a while to realize it, but most of my free time was spent in front of my window, or on Eden when I could get permission.
Eden is the animal ship. It feels more like Noah’s Ark than anything. There aren’t pairs of every kind, but there is a small breeding stock of food and comfort animals.
Back on Earth I’d never been particularly fond of animals. I wasn’t one of those girly-girls who loved kittens and horses and wondered if maybe I’d rather be a veterinary expert than head communications officer. And it wasn’t the puppies or the cows that attracted me to Eden.
It was the special lighting and atmosphere. Eden looked like a light bulb from the outside: nearly spherical, but with one long protuberance. The protuberance held the docking bay and offices.
The bulb itself was split into two halves, each with its own gravitational direction; the ship’s center was down for both sections. Instead of decks segmented into cabins, each domed half was again halved by a giant see-through wall, and consisted of wide open spaces. Four zones for four climates: temperate and subarctic shared one half, arid and tropical the other. The temperate zone was filled with grazing pastures and spiraling terraces. The tropical supported a lush rainforest—though rain fern-garden might have been more appropriate, as there were only a handful of trees and numerous kinds of knee-height foliage. Arid was a red desert, spotted through with hardy plants and several oases. And subarctic was more tundra-like, really, with its short grasses and twiggy bushes.
The biodomes were themselves impressive, but the real wonder of engineering on Eden was the sun.
In testing, it had been proven that without exposure to the sun fewer animals were conceived, fewer came to term, and fewer of the live births survived to adulthood. Lamps didn’t work with the animals like they worked with the plants. With plants, as long as the chlorophyll got fed, they were happy. The animals needed more. They had to think they were outside, under the sky.
And that’s why I visited Eden. Just like the comfort animals, I would wither without it. I chose the temperate quarter, found a cow-pie-free spot in the pasture—next to the base of one of the terrace ramps—sat back and closed my eyes.
It was the little touches that made it feel real. A light breeze brushed my cheeks. The smell of fresh grass filled my nose. Bird song—piped in through hidden speakers—flitted through the air, accompanied by other background noises. Those, added to the warmth of the artificial sun, all blended together to complete the illusion. After drinking it in with my other senses, I let my sight back into the game. The sky held amazing depth. Though I knew where the domed ceiling physically lay, it felt like it went on and on for miles.
The bright orb of the artificial sun was just as difficult to look at as the real thing. It appeared to travel across the dome, even receding slightly as it made its way toward the horizon, implying a greater vastness than the ceiling actually possessed.
A curious calf came over to check me out. It made a silly, high-pitched version of an adult moo, and let me pat its nose.
That was when I realized I missed Earth.
When I’d been cooped up during the test years, I’d always known I’d go home again. That I would run in the fields again, stand on the rocky Icelandic shore, and stroll down the village parkway.
These nine ships were the whole of my reality from now on. Not only in terms of the area I had to explore, or the atmosphere, or the company, but also in terms of flow.
Children aren’t born and off to school in less than a year. That’s not right, it’s not real. If I ever chose to raise a child, he would not magically transform before my eyes as Saul’s son had.
We were separate—severed—from Earth in every possible way. It was a memory, and I found myself missing things I had been eager to leave. Father, Mother, all those who watched over us. I hadn’t been ready to receive my independence. Had anyone?
I cried then, with the baby cow nuzzling me and the pseudo-sun shining down on both of us. Homesickness was not something I’d ever had to contend with before. And it was something I simply had to learn to get over, because home was lost to me forever.
On my way back to my cabin I tripped over a vacuuming robot. I cursed and kicked it, though it only buzzed and beeped an error message in return. “Stupid machine.”
The depressive mood was not mine alone. The sparse news from Earth contributed to our sense of detachment, and most of the updates we received were negative—new conflict in South America, a tsunami in Asia, a devastating earthquake in Europe. And when Saul told me the littlest convoy had been lost, I didn’t know how to react. One of our twelve, completely gone.
But, after we hit our one-year anniversary, and the first new babies had been successfully tube grown, the unthinkable happened.
We had our first suicide.
“Mags! Margarita? Margarita, let me in!” Fists banged on my door and panicked cries stabbed through the walls. I woke up startled and disoriented. It took me a moment to place the voice as Nika’s.
My fumbling brain knew something was off before I made it through the dark to open the door. It wasn’t just the alarm in her voice; she hadn’t called me on my implants, and was ignoring the door’s buzzer.
“Lights,” I demanded of the room. I met my friend with a terse “What?”
Tears flowed down her puffy cheeks, and her lips trembled. I’d never seen Nika cry before, and these weren’t typical bad-day tears. Something horrible had happened, and she was near hysterics.
“He, he—I just found—I—” The hiccups started, and she couldn’t get any words out.
I pulled her inside, sat her down at my small table, and pulled the comforter from my bed to throw around her shoulders. Without asking I made her a cup of tea in my kitchenette and plopped it down in front of her. She barely acknowledged the mug.
Gritty sleep rimmed my eyes. Rubbing it away, I pulled up a chair beside Nika. When the hiccups stopped and her breathing steadied, I prodded. “What’s wrong?” I’d never known Nika to get unduly emotional. If she was upset, things were bad.
“I went to go see Lexi. I couldn’t sleep. He was working the night shift and— Ooh, God.” She let her forehead fall to the table. “He’s dead.”
Had I heard right? “How?” I lowered my head to her level. “Nika. What happened?” Lexi was an engineer, and Nika’s biological cousin. I thought maybe there’d been an accident, that some of Mira’s machinery had caught him. Never in a million years would suicide have crossed my mind.
But that was exactly what had happened. Lexi had hung himself deep in the bowels of the ship.
“What does it mean?” Nika asked. “Weren’t—weren’t we screened for this? We share genetic code. If he can kill himself . . .”
“No,” I jumped in. “You couldn’t. It won’t get that bad.” I put my arms around her, but knew we couldn’t sit there. We had to tell someone—the captain. “Nika. He’s still there, isn’t he?”
“I couldn’t touch him. I saw and I—I ran. He’s still there.” The realization that she’d left him hanging in his noose disturbed her, and she fell apart again.
Nausea made my stomach boil. The situation hadn’t hit home yet, hadn’t grabbed my emotions yet. Which meant now was the time to act, before I became a puddle like Nika.
I’d have to report this to Saul.
At the thought, I was instantly ashamed, embarrassed. But now wasn’t the time to think about that, so I pushed thoughts of later duties aside and helped Nika to her feet. “We have to let the security officers know.”
“I left him there,” she mumbled. “I ran and left him there.” She felt like a rag doll in my arms.
I’d thought to drag her to the security offices near the bridge, but she’d fallen into a stupor. Nika stared into space like she could see through the walls. My best friend was in shock, which meant I was left holding the bag.
This seemed like as good a time as any to give the convoy-wide security alert system a spin. I activated it via my implants, choosing the officers only option. A red light blinked at the edge of my peripheral vision, letting me know the alert had gone through. Immediately, I second-guessed the action. Perhaps I should have left Nika alone in my apartment and gone to the bridge myself. Maybe this didn’t constitute a convoy-wide emergency—or did it? It was our first death, and it was as unnatural as they came.
“I.C.C., are you there?”
“Yes. You have activated the—”
“I know. There’s been . . . Nika’s cousin . . .” I couldn’t get the words out.
“You are hyperventilating,” the computer observed.
I was—my hands were going all tingly.
“Close your mouth and inhale slowly through your nose.” I.C.C. was clearly more concerned with my present state than why I’d used the alert system. I wasn’t sure what to think of that. Wasn’t sure what to think about anything, actually.
Security officers busted through my door like they were performing a drug raid. My apartment-for-one became a sardine-can-for-twelve in under two minutes. The officers separated Nika and me in an instant—thinking a domestic dispute, I’m sure. It took me a few minutes to assure them we weren’t the problem. They were overly eager and hopping, as unsure in the execution as I was in the concept, but itching to do their duty, to solve whatever the problem might be.
Unfortunately, the hubbub pushed Nika into silence. I couldn’t get the exact location out of her, and bringing up Lexi’s work agenda from the cached files only told us he was scheduled to perform routine maintenance. So they left me to attend to my poor friend while they scoured the ship’s innards for a body. It took me a moment to realize our big mistake—we had all forgotten to ask I.C.C. for help. I.C.C. would know where he was.
“I.C.C., do you have Lexi’s location? Please direct the officers.”
“I will. Your breathing has normalized.”
“Thank you.”
Stupid. So stupid. I.C.C. should be programmed to alert us to this kind of thing. We shouldn’t have to stumble upon it. Privacy be damned.
Like everyone in the convoy, I knew Lexi, if only on the level of acquaintance. He’d seemed happy whenever I saw him, but I’m sure I had seemed happy to him, too.
The shrinks saw the event as a tragic failure on their part. They sent out emergency psychiatric evaluations and made sure everyone had an appointment to meet one-on-one with a doctor.
They assigned me to a session with Dr. Yassine. A nice enough guy, if a bit fidgety. Forgive me if I think doctors who work with people on the edge should be calm, collected, and stately, but if I were ever on the fence about killing myself, I think Dr. Yassine’s inability to sit still would have driven me to it. I almost got up and grabbed his hand to stop his pen from tapping. Almost.
He wanted me to “explore myself verbally.” But when you don’t feel comfortable with someone, it’s not easy to open up. I didn’t want to “explore” with him. It’s not that I had a problem telling him what was going on in my head. It was just that I knew it would be a lot more helpful for me to share it with someone else. Someone specific.
I resolved to stop telling Saul I was fine when I wasn’t. I hadn’t seen the harm in keeping my emotional distance before, but now . . . Keeping up appearances wasn’t worth crumbling inside.
So I made my next report ahead of schedule, and tacked on a letter for Saul. I told him everything. How I was feeling. How I was coping with the suicide.
How I was sure there would be more to come.
I wondered—in writing—about purpose. Mine seemed obvious enough. But what about the others? We’d created false purposes for them—something to keep their DNA busy until we reached the anomaly. The engineers hated being called mechanics because that’s not what they wanted to be. Nika was a historian, a diplomat, and that meant she needed to be working with people and their history. As noble as she made archivist seem, it wasn’t who she was.
Saul made all of it seem okay. He reminded me of the mission. How Earth was counting on us. We were brilliant scientists, doctors, inventors, thinkers, and Earth had given us up for a greater purpose.
I was looking at things too narrowly, he said. That our purpose was in the journey, in experiencing life as humans had never experienced it before. I found our situation—locked in tin cans hurling through a vacuum—boring, depressing. He said the people back home found it wondrous. That my messages were now studied all over the globe.
[You can’t see the forest because you’re a tree] he’d sent. [A tree might ask, Why do I grow here? Why do I produce cones instead of fruit? Or, why must I lose my leaves when that tree stays ever green? If you could show the tree how it fits into the forest, how it provides so much to the greater being that is the forest, what might it think of itself then?
[Show them the forest, Margarita. The trees are dying because they don’t see the forest.
[P.S. I have a daughter now. I named her after you. People have been naming their children after you voyagers for years now, and probably will for centuries to come.]
The metaphor might have been heavy-handed, but it and his postscript were exactly what I needed—what all of us needed.
But it took six months and three more suicides for me to take action. And I regret that to this day. As a member of the governing board (all department heads had a place in politics) I had a duty that far exceeded my station. But I was still so new to independence that I had yet to grasp my authority. I was basically a kid trying to be an adult—to be a leader. They had trained and trained and trained us until I could recite leadership principles in my sleep, but in the end, a person also has to want to be a leader. To rise to the occasion. I only wish I had found my place sooner.
I couldn’t change the past. But I was pretty sure I could change the future.
I put in a personal request to see the captain. In later years that would have put me on a waiting list as long as my arm. Back then I practically walked in.
Entering Captain Mahler’s situation room, I lead with the holoflex-sheet. In my eagerness to prove a point I’d forgotten to salute and do our introductory dance. Nothing like starting out on the wrong foot when you’re trying to save your entire community from emotional collapse.
He sat at the head of a beautiful marble slab, the kind that made the most intriguing tombs and best kitchen counters. Green, with beautiful flecks of gold and iridescent carbonates, it was out of place. Almost every portion of the ship was metal or plastic—carpeted floors being the major exception. But the ship designers had wanted to give us little pieces of nature wherever they could—maybe they’d known better than I had how much we’d miss such things when they were gone.
The holoflex-sheet plopped in front of Mahler before my clipped greeting met his ears.
Five sentences into my rehearsed speech, he cut me off with a violent, chopping of his hand. “To whom are you speaking?” he said through a clenched jaw.
The question tripped me up, as it was meant to. “Uh . . .”
“As you did not address me, I can only assume this flippant diatribe is meant for someone else. Yet I believe we are alone.”
It was then that I realized both my mistake and that I was intent on preaching to the choir. I’d come to him to talk order and systems. To discuss individualism vs. hive mentality. I wanted to argue for the very thing the captain hoped for: militant commitment to the group’s goals over individual wants and needs.
Immediately I backtracked, saluting at attention, barking out my station and my purpose, addressing him in the manner he deserved to be addressed.
“Sir,” I began again. “We have a distinct disconnect between the command team and everyone else. We are not a military convoy, but neither are we civilians. I believe this message from my Earth contact illustrates our problem. Most of us are wandering around in our own little worlds. The members don’t see how the pieces fit, and I believe that to be the source of our convoy-wide depression. We need to rethink how we think, if you will.
“We were each taught how special we are. As individuals. Yet, for some reason, we weren’t taught that the group is special. That devotion to the group is required for success. Yes, we were instilled with devotion to the mission, to the anomaly, but not to the convoy and each other.
“We need a better sense of community, and at the moment I can think of no better way to bring that about than to change the way we do things. I know there was a plan, and that it was supposed to ensure our stability, but it won’t work. Father—” this was tough to admit, but I swallowed and pressed forward “—Father was wrong. He wanted a ‘be all you can be’ attitude, when what we need is a ‘be all we can be attitude.’”
Mahler passed his hand under his chin, scratching it lightly, clearly weighing my statements and considering his first words on the matter carefully. “I wasn’t supposed to address this until the elections. Matheson and Seal didn’t think we’d have any suicides at this point, but things seem to be moving along faster than expected. Whether that’s problematic or all for the best will make itself clear eventually, I’m sure.”
“Sir?”
“The suicides were expected. Not planned—don’t give me that look. Just planned for. They were built into Matheson’s equations, and he figured if we had fifteen or so suicides in the first five years that would actually strengthen our society—much in the way you suggest.”
Flabbergasted, my mind went blank. I couldn’t even be sure I’d heard him correctly, let alone understood. “Sir, may I sit?”
He gestured toward a spot near the other end of the marble slab, but I took a seat at his right hand. “Are you saying Mother and Father knew some of us would die this way? That Lexi and—?”
“They didn’t know who, but they had guesses. Matheson’s calculations indicated a rash of suicides was inevitable, but that the tragedy would give us an opportunity. Misfortune can have many different effects on large populations. It can drive some into chaos, but the more empathetic the group, the more emotionally aware the individuals are of the other individuals—”
“The more likely they are to band together,” I finished for him, nodding. Instead of at my captain, my gaze bore into the far wall where a blank screen hung. We were a forest, trees in the forest. “Some conifers need fire in order for their seeds to germinate,” I mumbled. Turning back to him, I asked, “This is our forest fire?”
“Yes. That’s a good way to look at it.”
“But, why didn’t they warn us? Why not prepare us?”
He stood and began pacing. “Is anyone every really prepared for tragedy? They did warn us. They told me, and I was to inform the board once the elected half was in place.” The hard lines of his face were covered in stubble—I’d just noticed. Unusual, for Mahler anyway. He preferred to be clean-cut and well pressed at all times. This must have been weighing on his mind as much as it had been weighing on mine.
“But, elections won’t be for another six months. We were told exactly what must be done the first two years,” I said. Eventually we’d be able to make our own laws, dependent on whatever social problems cropped up. We could deal with them our own way, but not yet. For the first few years we had to follow our orders to a T, even when it came to civilian government.
Our board right now only consisted of the department heads and their appointed seconds. Only once we hit the two-year mark we were to set up elections whose winners would comprise the second half of the government.
“I know—believe me, I know. But now that you’ve brought it up, I don’t think we can wait until we have a full board,” Mahler said. “I can’t wait for our timeline to match the original. If the suicides are happening now we must take action. I was waiting, hoping . . .” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We are going to use these deaths as a rallying point, as an educational point. We’re not going to let the mission fail.
“We just have to work out how.”
I left the captain feeling simultaneously giddy and nauseated. Saul had been right. We could fix this. There was even a plan to fix this. We would band together and be stronger than before.
But at what cost? Matheson had sacrificed these people. Sacrificed Lexi and those still to kill themselves. Not directly, of course—he didn’t go through their files and say “You will die. And you will die. And you will die.”
But he might as well have.
If he’d informed us this might happen—that in all likelihood, according to his societal projections it would happen—we could have stopped it. Lexi might have thought twice before hanging himself.
Even worse, our psychologists and psychiatrists had known it was coming. They’d seen it in Lexi, they just hadn’t been able to do anything about it. They weren’t allowed to tell our modest security detail about pending problems. It made me wonder if that was why Dr. Yassine had been so fidgety. Because he knew, but hadn’t been able to do anything. It was only after something bad happened that they could act. We had to change that. No one’s hands should be tied when it comes to saving a life.
We operated that way because that’s the way many Earth societies operated—they didn’t respond to potential tragedy, only actualized tragedy. Once we could make our own laws we needed to abandon those ways. We were no longer bound to Earth by its gravity, why should we remain bound by its customs?
Perhaps my line of thinking was exactly what Mother and Father had planned for. This sense of outrage, this desire to band together to prevent more catastrophes. Despite what it meant to the little personal freedoms we had.
It didn’t prevent me from hating our mentors for not telling us. But I also found myself admiring their strategy and planning.
Again: nausea and giddiness.
My duty and my humanity were at odds, but I let them settle at opposite ends of my brain. I needed both to survive in this new encapsulated world.
I reported our progress to Saul. Told him we’d discovered a new portion of our societal design and now had to decipher how to implement it. He responded with a thumbs-up emoji and a picture of him and his family.
His son was fourteen. Saul himself was going on fifty. He looked so old. Not because fifty is old, but because in my mind he was still in his thirties.
How could he be fifty? How could his life slip away so quickly? Intellectually, I knew all was as it should be. He wasn’t living his life at a rapid-fire pace, I was simply seeing it through a long-range lens. But I still felt a gaping maw of loss in my gut, still wondered if I was ready to let Earth move on without me—without us.
I was starting to realize that all we really had up here was each other.
A few months later, the elections came and went. Before then there were more suicides. There were a few after, too, but for the most part a sense of togetherness was starting to pervade the ships. The votes reflected exactly what Mahler had thought they’d reflect—a convoy-wide sense of pride in our mission. Those elected were the most duty-bound in the fleet.
We outlined a new education system. Emphasis would be put on unity. To shirk responsibility would be the worst possible offense. Honor, pride, synergy—all important. Our children would grow up knowing community came first.
After another year and a half I fully committed myself to upholding those ideals. I met a nice woman, Chen Kexin from food processing. I knew the lesbian and bisexual population aboard was small—about the same percentage as in the gen-pop on Earth—and had previously resigned myself to possibly never finding a suitable partner. I’m so glad I was wrong. We dated for a while, then decided to make our bond permanent. We settled into a quadruple cabin and put in for a clone.
They decided to give Kexin and me a boy. His name would be Reginald Straifer II.
When we finally got the news, I was so excited to tell Saul about the baby that I forgot what day it was. I forgot that this was the last time I’d speak formally to him.
Saul had reached his seventieth birthday and decided it was time to retire. He reminded me with a preemptive data packet.
[Looking forward to your last message. I’ve included pictures of my son and his wife on their wedding day. And my little Margarita. She’s getting her advanced degree in chemical engineering.]
The bottom dropped out of my elation. I didn’t have a picture of Reggie to send, because he hadn’t been officially born yet. He was still gestating on Hippocrates.
I put in my report, and included a diagram of our new teaching processes that included community appreciation. I skimped on the data a bit, more consumed with my personal message back.
[Tell me this isn’t goodbye], I sent, [I want a picture of you and your wife, Saul. And I’ll send a picture of my son as soon as he’s birthed. Let someone know to forward it on to you. Tell them I want an update from you every few months—Earth months—okay?]
I couldn’t believe it. Seventy. So much of his life, gone. It had blazed past. He’d been my constant these past few years, my Earthly touchstone, and now it was over. Over too soon.
Earth was slipping away. Home was slipping away. Even if we turned back now, the world would not be as we’d left it.
We were aliens now. Nomads in uncharted territory.
And that was exactly how it should be.
The next message I received from Saul was truly the last. He had a heart attack two days after composing it, and his replacement sent it to me.
The message opened with a cheerful introduction and greeting from the new guy. A stranger. Someone who didn’t know me and never would.
He saved the bad news until the end. There was the message from Saul, and a short blip after: [Mr. Saul Biterman, deceased]
I couldn’t believe it. He would never see my son.
A picture came with the packet, just like I’d requested. The last picture I’d ever get of my friend.
I transferred it to a ‘flex-sheet and took it back to my cabin without entering a copy into the archives. This was just for me. I hung it on the wall, between pictures of me and Kexin, and me and Nika. I saved a spot for Reggie right beneath. Everyone I loved would find a place on this wall. We’d all be together in memory.
Afterward, I retrieved a worn, blue envelope from between the pages of my favorite book—the biography of Arthur Scherbius—curled up in a chair, and finally read the letter Father and Mother had left for me so long ago.