Novels

“Excuse me, Ms. Sidel?”

Antje winced internally, careful to not crack the smiling facade she threw onto her face as she turned. Damn it, there she was: a reporter not thirty years old yet, wearing the helpless awkward smile they all wore before they became experienced, bitter, and mistrusting.

“Yes?”

“Sorry,” the apology came quick through a faint Spanish accent, her press pass brandished like a shield. “I wasn’t sure that was you. Would you mind answering a few questions?”

“I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a hurry.” Antje turned back to the doors of the EUSAA, but it was too late.

“Just one, then,” the young reporter’s speech suddenly quick and clipped. “Are you here because of something to do with the KAP, or Noriama?”

Half way to Proxima Centauri, the Croatoan flipped upside down.

In accordance with procedure, the team strapped themselves into their chairs in the Crash Room half an hour before the rotation, and ran three drills, making sure they understood exactly what they were supposed to do.

Sughouri was well versed in the bureaucracies of space, and she knew running mock drills was important, but it was still a little silly, seeing as what they were supposed to do was practically nothing at all. Computers and automatics handled almost every aspect of their trip.

It wasn’t a luxury, it was a necessity. Mistakes were measured in fractions of fractions, and even the most minor of computer systems could assess, correct, and resolve errors faster and more effectively then any human. The Croatoan computer did everything perfectly. Victoria had said something about keeping everyone’s brains functioning properly, but mostly they were just reciting what their computer screens told them like play-by-play commentators.

Zuri Conde liked problems. She liked puzzles. When she was young, the first game she remembered playing was a jigsaw puzzle that lay on her mother’s clean floor. She loved turning the pile of colorful pieces into a complete picture. Like a sandcastle washing away in the surf, only backwards.

When she got older, her father gave her his entire collection of mystery novels. She read through them all in a single season, and saved up her money to buy more. She quickly became familiar with which novelists wrote real mysteries, where every clue and suspect were plainly observable to a clever reader; as opposed to cheap thrillers where the solutions were pulled out of the writer’s hat at the last second.

It was this love of solutions that drew her to computers. The process of writing code for advanced computer systems had a thrill all its own, as each line slipped into place like a piece of a puzzle.

Victoria accepted the offer. They all did. By unspoken agreement, none of them ever asked the others why.

Victoria tried not to think about it very hard. First-Responders knew that introspection rarely made any job easier, and being part of a select team chosen to fly off into space to save a missing Earth colony was a job worth doing.

As time passed, the veneer of romance was steadily buffed away from that narrative.

Training for the mission took half a year, though it felt more like torture. First-Responders were not unfamiliar with rapid and intensive emergency training, but Victoria was positive the purpose of any training was to learn something. The only thing she was learning was exactly how uncomfortable she could feel.

Victoria stepped into meeting room seven and began to panic.

It was not an uncommon reaction. As a First-Responder trauma specialist, she was familiar with the learned instincts and reflexes colloquially dubbed ‘punctual-panic.’

As a byproduct of their training and experience in the field, First-Responders often showed increased anxiety over wasted time, both in themselves and others. Time was a valuable resource to the First-Responders; seconds meant deaths. Minutes separated a successful response from a catastrophe.

If the room was empty, Victoria might have gone to the wrong room. How many dead as a result? She would need to contact her coordinator or the base supervisor to find the right room. How many more would die?

Victoria forced herself to breathe easy; if time cost lives, so did panic. First step was to confirm her location. Tapping her watch, she pulled up her coordinator’s summons. Sure enough; Meeting Room Seven. She was in the right place.

Hannah Klein licked her lips. She rarely did anymore; constant chapped lips provided her solid motivation for breaking the habit, but when she was nervous, the old behavior resurfaced.

It bothered her that she was nervous. Not just because it brought back her lip-licking, but because there was no good reason for it. Her entire career had been full of presentations to URC panels. It was part of the job. After weeks of study, she knew the proposal backwards and forwards, and any question the committee thought up that she didn’t immediately know the answer too would likely come from the team of aides seated behind her.

She’d even argued this exact proposal before. Granted, it was more than two decades ago, when she had just been appointed as an EU Liaison, and a lot had changed since then; but now she was an established figure at the URC. They knew her, and she knew her trade.

So why was she so nervous?

The Kolonie-Arche Projekt was what had first brought Michael and Antje together. Two decades prior, at a fancy EU party, the then-newly appointed EUSAA director had pinned a freshly elected German minister to the wall when she had inadvertently expressed an interest in space-exploration.

“It’s a common mistake,” Michael explained. “Everyone still assumes we’re planning on colonizing the solar system.” There were countless papers and projects to that effect. Deep in the EUSAA’s files, Mars, Venus, and even the moon were officially slated for colonization. Scientists had been talking about it for decades, and the programs and designs for doing so were dime a dozen.

“No?” Antje took a sip of her wine. “I am still new to the Bundestag; I am always learning about new projects. I assumed the EUSAA would have been working on something like colonization.”

“We are,” Michael licked his lips. “Or rather, I am; but not for our solar-system. Colonizing outside the solar system is the only project that makes any sense.”

A little less than an hour later, Michael Donnahill stepped off the mag-train at the New Bath Airport, carrying a single briefcase and dressed in his lightest clothing. He had been cursing himself the entire trip, thinking about the lonely umbrella that sat next to the door in his apartment.

He had always traveled light. He had to; a government salary didn’t give him the resources to bring extra shoes or changes of clothing. Travel was expensive, and every pound counted. When it was possible, he didn’t even bother to bring his briefcase, opting instead to slip his computer in his pocket and be done with it. Packing, for Michael, could take hours as he inspected each shirt, sock, and toiletry to decide if he really needed to bring it.

This trip, however, had inhabited that rare paradox of being impossible to pack for and therefore easy to pack for. Michael knew nothing about what Antje wanted, except it was for more than just a drink. Free from the knowledge of what to expect, he was able to forego agonizing what to bring. Instead, Michael threw on the lightest clothing he had and stuffed an old jacket and tie in a side-bag. He could remote-terminal into his office if he needed to access information back at the EUSAA.

Sometimes, it’s the little things.

For example: when Michael Donnahill was seven, he saw the 2090 eclipse as it blacked out the sky over the English Isles of the EU, what was once called Great Britain before the food riots. He sat on a grassy hill on what his grandfather still called the Isle of Wight, surrounded by thousands of onlookers as they all stared up into the sky, wearing their thin black glasses.

It was moderately cloudy that day, but everyone could still see the dim burning disk as it was eaten away, sliver by sliver, behind the thick fog of clouds. Michael watched as the world grew darker and darker still, his heart racing as night fell faster and faster, until 4:56 on the twenty-third of September was as dark as midnight in winter.

And that is how my poem ends. A satisfying ending for myself, and certainly for my companions, though I am sure it hasn’t entirely ended for all of them. Mx. Image and Mr. Porist, of course, left for the Tides of Three Shades, though Mr. Porist seemed far more insistent than Image. The poor Marq turned an eye towards me with a mild click of bemusement before they both left. I think our chitinous friend had already attained more than xer goal could provide.