Noriama: Chapter 15

Sighouri liked nicknames.

Normal names were universal. She was Sighouri to everyone, and always would be. But to her grandmother, she had been Noyoner moni. To her niece, she had been Sig. At the academy, she had been Bandar, thanks to her limber limbs and loud laughter. To her longest-term lovers she had been Ya amar, Jaanu, and Shona, respectively, and for two months on the ISS she had been Bullet.

The CHR-3 was Churji to her, and the Croatoan was the Śabādhāra. Everyone saw different things when they looked at the world, and to hang every viewpoint, every facet of a gem under a single name was unwise at best. Dangerous at worst.

Kristiana called them ‘colonists,’ but they could just as easily be pioneers, explorers, Noriamians, Proximans…

Sughouri was about to be an archeologist, or an SAR Engineer, or a surveyor, or a migrant, or an ex-pat.

As the time of her descent drew closer, she felt her spirits lift higher and higher. There was something soothing about action. In the army they had a motto: “make the choice, then make it correct.” You could sit around talking all day, and none of it would ever matter if you didn’t get off your squishy ass and made a difference.

Experience had taught her well. Of all the problems she had ever encountered in space, she had almost never been shocked. Once you started working on a problem, it usually ended up easier or simpler than you had feared. It was easy to imagine gremlins and unforeseen variables that the universe hadn’t even bothered with. Often times, a loose nut or a broken valve was more than enough.

“I see,” Victoria had answered when Sughouri finished explaining. “Does that mean you feel stress when there aren’t clear paths forward? Or if a problem is more complicated than it first appears?”

“Not really,” Sughouri shifted on the medical bed. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with bull-sessions, I just don’t like wasting time when there’s something to be done. Talking theory and musing over problems is fine when there isn’t a broken machine right in front of you. That’s all I mean.”

“So,” Victoria pulled a pensive face, “if you’re on Noriama and there’s a broken machine right in front of you, and you want to fix it, but we decide up here to wait and talk about it, would that cause you stress?”

“Only if we didn’t get anywhere,” Sughouri shrugged. “And even then, I’d only be irritated, not insubordinate, if that’s the question you’re really getting at.”

Victoria smiled. “Just trying to find out the best way for this long-distance dynamic to work effectively and efficiently. Knowing how to communicate well is vital to the success and safety of this mission.”

There was a pause, and then: “So give it to me straight, doc. What’s the verdict?”

“You look perfectly fit. Anything bothering you at all? Unfamiliar aches or pains?”

“My left ankle itches,” Sughouri shifted her thigh. “Could you scratch it for me?”

“Very funny. Seriously, are you feeling any phantom pain?”

“Not for years now. It hurt something fierce for quite a while, though. Can I say, I’m a little surprised you agreed to send me down. I would have guessed you’d call it an unnecessary risk to life and half-limb.”

“Oh, it’s definitely a risk, but in my medical opinion it’s also very necessary. Sending a team of drones and robots to Noriama is the safer and more efficient option, but hardly the wisest; the physical and psychological strain on the team would be very real.”

“Seeing as I’d be gnawing my arms to match my legs if I wasn’t going down, I can’t argue.” Sughouri paused to grab for her shirt and slipped it over her head. “So you used to be a surgeon, and then you became a psychiatrist. Kind of a big shift, isn’t it?”

Victoria shrugged. “Yes, well, there’s not a lot of call for a surgeon who can’t use their hands properly.”

“What happened to your hands?”

Victoria rubbed her hands together. “What happened to your legs?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend.”

“It’s fine.”

“Privacy wasn’t a virtue where I grew up. I imagine the Southern Americas is different.”

“Very. We care about our privacy very much. The echoes of Perrocampo.” Her smile was shy. “Some wounds last for generations.”

“How does that work, with you being a psychiatrist? I thought they were all about sharing?”

“I’m a trauma therapist,” Victoria’s hands continued to rub themselves. “That’s different.”

“How so?”

Victoria heaved a sigh. “Medical science is advanced because we can see effects and measure results. If a knife cuts the body, we can see how the blood flows, examine how it heals, and do any number of things to aid the body in repairing itself. For all our romance about it, the human body is very much like a machine. On the other side of the spectrum is the mind; For all the research we’ve done on the human brain, there is still a great deal we don’t know. Sure, we can psychologically evaluate behavior and construct very basic predictions, but humans keep evolving; our societies influence how we are nurtured, and in turn this provides different viewpoints and structures for our psyche to use. We can’t conclusively predict how certain therapies will affect different people. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve gotten much better at it, but when it comes to mental health and therapy, it’s still more of an art than an exact science.”

“Okay,” Sughouri nodded, “so trauma therapy is an art?”

“No, trauma therapy is an exception. We’ve become very good at diagnosing and repairing mental trauma; almost as good as physical trauma. The fact is, our brains are physical organs. The mind defends itself when it’s hurt, and predictably so. Our current understanding of trauma straddles the line between the science of medicine and the art of therapy.”

“Ah,” Sughouri nodded. “So privacy is more important in trauma therapy than regular therapy?”

“No, just different metrics. Feeling safe is paramount to the healing process, both physically and mentally. A violation of privacy breeds mistrust. Forcing or even enticing someone to share if they don’t want to can be a trauma in itself. It would be like cutting into someone if they don’t need surgery. Current methods of psychiatry are based entirely on the patient sharing only what they are comfortable sharing. Anything else is malpractice. With traumatic events, its more important to guide the patient through the trauma, which can sometimes be at odds with their natural desire to remain private and protect themselves. Just like how we don’t ask people to sign consent forms before pulling them out of wreckage or doing emergency surgery to repair damaged organs.”

There was a pause. Then: “Okay, but wasn’t privacy considered detrimental to this mission? You said so when we talked about the CELSS.”

“Well, secrets and privacy are two different things. This is officially a military mission, and you know about ’need to know’ as a metric, right? Same deal applies here. You have a duty to convey all information that could be pertinent to our responsibilities. Apart from that…”

“I trust you.” Sughouri blinked. “You know something, I’ve worked in the military with people for years before I trusted them. This team, it took less than a month. How did that happen?”

“Psychological conditioning. It was needed for the mission, and frankly, they did more than they had to. We have a common cause, are in close proximity with each other, and have a dangerous external situation that requires cooperation for survival. That’s all it takes, really. Now, before I give you the green light, I need to brief you on a couple of those dangers. The more you know about the stresses you’re going to be under down there, the better.”

According to Victoria’s final report, there was no medical reason to keep Sughouri on the Croatoan. At the same time, there was a medical imperitive to keep Sughouri away from Proxima b. They had spent twenty-one years in space, with incredibly low levels of gravity. Even with the rigorous physical therapy, there were simply physical realities that would make operating at near-earth gravity medically dangerous.

Originally, the plan for sending one of the team to Proxima was for unforeseen emergencies, and required outfitting the space-elevator like a hospital room. Mission Central had expected that any excursion into Noriama would take only a few hours at most.

Sughouri had spent most of their journey to Proxima studying methods of improving or safely lengthening that duration. She studied medical journals and physical tolerances of the human body, and compared it to the mechanical methods Mission Central had put in place to keep someone alive on Proxima.

In the end, even Kristiana couldn’t find fault with her designs, and so the team decided Sughouri’s presence on Noriama was an acceptable risk. They had given the go-ahead, and the elevator was recalled to the station.

There was no telling how long she would live on Proxima b. Perhaps days, perhaps months. All she knew for sure was that she would be sleeping, eating, and living in the freight elevator for the foreseeable future. It would be her world, apart from the walls of the Croatoan and the rest of her team. She couldn’t live there and not give it a name, all her own.

In the end, she decided to simply call it the Hut. It conjured an image of a ramshackle shelter cobbled together from random bits and pieces and her own sweat.

Thankfully, she didn’t have to cobble too much. The top floor of the elevator had been designed to transfer up to thirty people at once for two days. Not comfortably, of course, but safely, and that meant there was plenty of room for her own personal modifications.

First and foremost was the CELSS. She would need food, water, and waste disposal while she was on Proxima, and relying on the Noriama’s life-support facilities was imprudent at best. Thankfully, Mission Central had planned for this, and so the Croatoan’s CELSS was, to an extent, modular.

But, the CELSS was its own ecosystem, and just because it was designed to be modular didn’t make it easy. Each of twelve separate containers, each as big as barrel, had to be connected to a multitude of sensors, thermostats, and monitors to ensure that everything was working perfectly. And that was after they had been /dis/connected from the Croatoan’s system.

It took a full day for Sughouri to finish, but when she did, there was her own personal restaurant-cross-toilet in the center of the Hut, next to the recharging station for Churji. She decided to call it the Cafeteria.

The rest of the empty space of the Hut would be filled with equipment and supplies that would allow her to maintain Churji, her environmental suit, and anything she found in Noriama that needed fixing.

A sizable amount of emergency supplies would come with her too, in case anything went wrong and she needed to survive for a week while they fixed unforeseen problems.

Even with all of this, there needed to be limits to Sughouri’s activity on the planet. She would only be allowed out into the Colony for a few hours every day. For at least eighteen hours, she would need to reside in a coffin-shaped medical chamber; a fully automated suite that would keep her body functioning even in unfamiliar gravity.

When not in the chamber, she would need to wear a thick metal arm-band that would keep real-time readings of her medical state while injecting medicines that would help keep her body-chemistry stable.

Almost all of her time spent on Noriama would be devoted to keeping herself alive for the few hours she would spend out and about. It was complicated, dangerous, and possibly not even worth the effort, but Sughouri didn’t mind. It was moving forward.

It had taken almost a week of work for Sughouri to outfit the Hut, but at last she had finished, the tests had all passed, and she was ready to descend to Noriama.

Her heart was beating fast as she floated through Noriama Station towards the elevator. She half-expected Victoria to call her over the comm and check in with her feelings. She must have realized how excited Sughouri was, and not bothered to ask a question she knew the answer to.

Once she was inside the elevator, with the airlock doors sealed behind her, she gripped the nearby handle with her thighs and waited.

Slowly, the atmospheric readings on her suit began to slide into the green. The pressure was equalized. “Okay,” she glanced at the cameras in the corners of the room as she pulled off her gloves. “I’m going to start stripping, so Victoria, Zuri, avert your gazes.”

“Not me?” Kristiana’s voice echoed from the speakers in the wall.

“Meh,” Sughouri scratched her scalp as the suit’s helmet came off. “You I can take or leave.”

It took several minutes for Sughouri to completely divest herself of her space-suit. Free from its rough fabric, Sughouri scratched herself all over before gathering the floating pieces of her suit and pushing herself towards an empty storage locker in the wall. “My suit is safely stowed in —” she closed the door, " — Storage locker B3. Just let me strap myself in and I’ll be all set in here." She guided herself down to one of the recessed crash-couches, pushed herself into place, and drew a belt across her stomach. It was one of the least comfortable beds she had ever been in. “There, whenever you’re ready.”

“We’re almost finished with the checks,” Kristiana answered. “In five or so.”

Two minutes later, Sughouri spoke again. “What are you folks going to be doing for the two days I’m traveling, eh?”

There was a pause before Kristiana’s voice responded. “Zuri’s not going to budge from her chair, is my guess. She’s getting closer to re-establishing a functioning system on Noriama, and getting us a real map. Victoria’s going to be monitoring your vitals, a bit more often than usual, just to make sure everything’s okay. She’s also working on putting together a collection of possible medical scenarios that the Colonists might have suffered based on what we know, and what we can expect to see for each one.”

“Sounds like fun. What about you?”

Kristiana blinked. “Oh, I’m…apart from familiarizing myself with how to handle Churji if I need to take over, I’ll…find something.”

“Well, if you ever need to talk,” Sughouri smiled, “I’ll be right here.”

“Remember, you can only stay in the crash-couches for eight hours. Then you’ll need to get into your chamber.”

“I know,” Sughouri huffed, “but if I’m going to spend all my time in that coffin, I want to stay out here for as much as I can.”

Breathing deeply, Sughouri closed her eyes to wait. She remained silent as the elevator finished its warm-up and began to descend towards the planet below. She didn’t say anything after eight hours had passed, and she moved from the couch to her coffin. She didn’t speak much for the whole next day, until the elevator at last reached the surface of Proxima b.

---

Zuri wanted to pace.

No, that wasn’t quite right. She didn’t want to pace at all, but she knew that if she were back on earth, she would be pacing. It wasn’t the waiting — you couldn’t be an effective programmer without a strong sense of patience. It was simply something to do to pass the time; a way of getting exercise when most of your life was devoted to sitting at a desk.

But she wasn’t pacing. She didn’t want to pace. Right now, her arms and legs felt leaden. Her mind was full of lightning, but her body just wanted to sit still, so her limbs did not strike any vital systems or bump into a fellow astronaut. It was the conditioning. Or the pills. Maybe both.

It was two full weeks since they had activated the Noriama’s computer system. Her time was split between monitoring Churji as it explored Noriama with its drones, and doing everything she could to help Red extract even the smallest amount of useful data from the corrupted Noriama computer network.

“Decrypting the computer is harder than it sounds,” Zuri told Victoria, when she asked. “It’s like turning a chicken dinner back into an egg. It should be impossible — for a long time it was — but now we have adaptive AI and large advances in processor power. It’s possible. Not easy, fast, or reliable; but possible.”

Even that was being generous. She was practically inventing her own branch of computer science as she went. There were millions of possible encryption algorithms, among thousands of separate methods. She was running prepared files through each, and analyzing the resulting hash-data. She was selecting random blocks of corrupted data from Noriama, putting them through decryption algorithms, and comparing outputs. She was inventing entirely new processes for encryption, and working backwards to fit what she discovered to the database.

She didn’t even know if she was making progress. With every failure her doubts redoubled. Perhaps the damage was too great. Perhaps the colonists had rewired the computer system entirely. Perhaps she was wasting her time.

Then, faithful Red caught her attention. Like a gleeful puppy, a request for her attention blinked on the screen. Through Red’s processing, it had found a pattern that didn’t fit with the random noise of corruption and encryption.

Zuri opened the report. There, in a single and unassuming line at the bottom of her screen, she saw success.

datafile-NC334OOT-SS2341322.log - xx.xx.xxxx

A single file label. That was all it was; a title of some report or data-node that could be found in the system, pieced together, and given life once more. It was the first sign that they were on the right track. Redoubling her efforts, Zuri poured herself into her work, ignoring the transcribed conversations of her teammates that flashed onto her screen.

All she could see was a string of numbers and short phrases, none of which made much sense. Chording command after command on her keyer, she flew through the Croatoan’s database as a legion of Red’s algorithms scoured for connecting data.

After two more hours of searching, repairing, and studying the results of Red’s efforts, she had an answer, but not a complete answer. This was where computer science and the real world always fell into conflict. For all its real world application, data was just numbers. She needed more than just the computer’s say-so to be certain she was correct.

Thankfully, the Croatoan was connected to the Noriama Station computer, so it was but the work of a moment to access the stations observatory module, and begin adjusting its orientation.

The top of her screen flashed red. Kristiana: Zuri, what are you doing?

Zuri sighed to herself. She had never worked with Netters before. She knew all about them, as the Kinshasan media had developed a fetish for detailing, decrying, and exalting foreign cultures. Prime Minister Kabila had expressed concern, speaking out on occasion about how a truly patriotic press would celebrate and critique Kinshasa before foreign countries, but the media persisted, and Kinshasa — or more accurately, the Kabil regime — went un-noted.

Now, Zuri had a focus for her envy. Kristiana could directly interface to the Croatoan computer. She had spent years learning and practicing this ability. If Zuri had wanted to see what the station observatory was doing, she’d have to root through the message logs. All Kristiana had to do was think about it.

She had probably set up an alert, Zuri realized. There were safety alerts littered across the Croatoan computer, now that it was linked with the station. Anything unusual or untoward would have caught Kristiana’s attention.

Zuri chorded her answer and watched as her words followed Kristiana’s transcribed exclamation. Up in the crash-room, a digital voice was likely reading out her words as they did.

I’m accessing the station observatory telescope.

Victoria: Why? What’s going on?

Zuri sighed to herself. Kristiana could find out easily enough. She was probably sorting through Zuri’s work right now. I successfully decrypted a file, and I think its astronomy data. I’m using the station to create a report to see if they match.

A response from the elevator: Sughouri: You decrypted the database? That’s incredible!

Not the whole database. Just one file. But its a start. A moment later, she had her answer. Yes, I decrypted a piece of an astronomical log, spanning from a year and a half to two months before the Earth lost contact.

Zuri paused, and looked again. According to the data, the scope wasn’t moved during that time. Noriama Station was focusing on the exact same section of empty sky for sixteen earth months.

Victoria: Doing what?

The file is incomplete, but as far as I can tell, nothing. Just watching. Gathering data. Background radiation, luminosity readings, things like that.

Victoria: is that normal for a telescope, to be still for a year and a half?

Kristiana: Not unless it’s looking at something specific. Was it, Zuri?

No. The section of sky the telescope was focused on was completely empty.

There was a pause.

Sughouri: You think they might have detected something? Maybe a transmission of some sort, and they were looking for its origin? That’s an intriguing thought, isn’t it?

Aliens again. Zuri knew better than to pin her hopes on the astronomical idea that humankind would ever come into contact with alien life.

No, the team had no idea why the observatory hadn’t moved in the year and a half before the Earth lost contact, nor why it was collecting data on such a tiny slice of empty sky, but that was secondary to the euphoria she felt at having solved a puzzle.

She had found something. The solutions were there, as were answers to their questions. Maybe it would take decades to piece it all together, but she could brush away the dust and sand, and reassemble the bones of the past. Whatever their mission ended up being, it would not have been a Fool’s errand.

---

Sughouri winced as inertia pressed her hard into her coffin. It was nothing she hadn’t experienced many times before, but that didn’t make it comfortable. It wasn’t a real coffin, but Sughouri couldn’t think of it as anything else.

Twenty-one years of floating in space. It was a marvel of technology that her body wasn’t crushed.

Finally, the pressure relented. A series of loud bangs echoed through the room, and then silence.

“Descent complete,” Sughouri reported as the information flashed across her screen. “the elevator is at rest and locked in.”

“Okay, Sughouri, we need you to stay in your chamber for a few hours while we slowly adjust its parameters. I want you to tell me if you start feeling uncomfortable, okay?”

“Sure thing, doc,” Sughouri grunted. She was feeling uncomfortable already. It was like she was under water.

“Just breathe slowly and steadily,” Victoria’s voice was soothing. “You’re not drowning, you’re just at normal gravity.”

Sughouri barked a strangled laugh. “This is what Earth felt like, wasn’t it?”

It took two seconds for a reply, the time it took for the light-speed communication to travel up to the Croatoan and for the reply to come back again. “More or less,” Kristiana answered. “A bit heavier, actually.”

“You just need to get used to it, that’s all,” Victoria said. Your exercises should have minimized your loss of bone structure and muscle."

“Good thing I didn’t skip arm-day,” Sughouri tried to laugh, but it was too hard. It had come on slowly over the past two days. She had felt thick somehow. Heavy in a way she hadn’t felt before. Over the twenty-one years of low-gravity, she had started to forget what ‘weight’ actually was.

She understood mass well enough. She could feel inertia and density as fundamental properties of her body, but weight was something else entirely, now. It was foreign. An external climate force like wind or rain.

She decided to distract herself by flipping through the book she had started reading on the trip down. She squeezed the keyer at her side, and the words glowed on the screen in front of her face; the screen she would be staring at for hours every day as long as she was on the planet.

At long last, the chamber gave a whirring click.

“Sughouri,” Victoria’s voice spoke up. “I want to look at how your body’s reacting. Can you slowly and carefully try stepping out of your chamber?

“Sure,” Sughouri took another deep breath, “Opening the chamber now.”

She stepped out into the pressurized elevator. Leaning forward, she raised her hands and caught herself as she tipped out. It wasn’t as hard as she expected, but it certainly wasn’t easy. “Like moving through molasses.”

“Okay,” Victoria said. “Now first thing is to get you in your exo-suit. It’s right next to you, in the blue-lidded container.”

“I remember,” Sughouri said, pushing her arm to the bright square lid.

“Alright,” Victoria’s voice was calm and soothing, “but I’m still going to recite it all, because your heart is working overtime right now — harder than it has for a decade — to keep blood flowing to your brain. Even if you feel fine, you might forget a few small things.”

Sughouri didn’t answer, instead resting for a moment before pulling the folded exo-suit from the container. It was a one-piece, the fabric course and smelling faintly of plastic.

“Okay,” Sughouri grinned. “Time me.”

The suit was tight, squeezing her arms and chest. Hard metal bands ran up the back and down the arms, providing support to her weakened bones. Tiny tubes filled with water were regulated by a monitor on her chest that would help balance her, and give her muscles a little extra strength in the strange gravity.

“Well-done,” Victoria said. “Now I need you to put your right arm in the injector-sleeve.”

Sughouri was left-handed, so her right upper-arm was the perfect place to affix the machine that would help regulate her bodily fluids, and ensure her biochemistry was as stable as possible. She winced as the sleeve clamped down, and once more as the three small needles pierced her skin.

“Very good. Now, take a moment to rest. We’ll be putting on your legs next.”

“Kristiana,” Sughouri said as she leaned back, “Don’t wait for me, go ahead and start interrogating Churji.”

“She already is,” Victoria answered. “Don’t worry about Churji, we’ve got it under control.”

Of course they did. Sughouri was jealous. For days, the Wolf AI had been driving Churji through the colony, searching out hidden nooks and crannies and recording anything interesting it found. Now that the Hut was back on Noriama, it could reconnect with the relay and transmit its entire itinerary. There could be a treasure trove of interesting tidbits to sift through, and Sughouri wasn’t seeing any of it.

She resigned herself to actually being on Proxima b.

“How are you feeling?” Victoria’s voice piped up again.

“You’ve got my vitals up there, don’t you? These patches still transmitting?”

“Sure, they tell me your pulse is slightly high, your breathing is steady, and your temperature normal, but they don’t tell me how you feel.”

“I feel excited, doc!” Sughouri laughed. It was feeling easier already. “How else would I feel? Tomorrow I’m going to set foot on Earth’s first Exo-colony.”

When Victoria was satisfied she had rested enough, Sughouri crawled over to the thick leg-case.

Inside were what Sughouri thought of as her ‘casual’ legs. They were quick to strap on, easy to use, and simple to take off again. They weren’t tricked-out with the extensive computer chips and processor power that made her ‘ritzy’ legs as effective and balanced as flesh-and-blood legs, so she had to compensate more when she walked, but that didn’t matter for just taking a few steps around the elevator.

The rest of the day was spent making sure everything still worked properly in the Hut, from the Cafeteria to Sughouri’s coffin. She ran tests, measured tolerances, and double- and triple-checked everything. Churji returned to the Hut, and plugged itself in to recharge for a very busy tomorrow.

Her first night was plagued with nightmares.

The next day, she prepared to enter Noriama colony for the first time.

Mission Central had specially designed suits for each member of the team, to fit their different sizes and shapes. The top of Sughouri’s suit was the same as the others, complete with on-board computer, head-display, and several complex monitoring systems integrated throughout.

They had decided, for obvious reasons, to give Sughouri a different lower-body. They could have fitted both her and her prosthetic legs in the same suit as the rest of the team, but instead they created a simpler design, sealing in her thighs and giving her advanced prostheses that attached on the outside of her suit.

Apparently — according to one of the sergeants at her briefing — they had actually considered giving Sughouri a small motorized platform to wheel herself around on. A stupid idea on further reflection: Noriama had a bit more gravity than Earth, and had not been built with legless engineers in mind.

“Speaking of the first colony,” Sughouri said as she dressed, “Any thoughts about my first words?”

“What do you mean?” Kristiana asked.

“Well, they’ll be historic, won’t they? The first words said after stepping on the moon, onto Proxima…”

“They’re not our words,” Kristiana said. “The colonists got here first.”

“Sure, but they weren’t ever going home, were they?”

“This was their home,” Victoria interjected.

Sughouri thought for a moment. “Does that mean I’ll be the first Earthling on Proxima?”

Once she was fitted in her suit, Sughouri rocked back and forth on her mechanical legs, getting a feel for her new center of gravity.

Sughouri’s excitement gave way to impatience, as they slowly took Churji through each test, making sure everything was working perfectly. Before, when Sughouri had been driving the thick drone, she hadn’t been bothered. Now, when the tests were keeping her from stepping through the airlock, it was maddening.

When the tests were finished, Sughouri checked to make sure her tool-kit was well affixed to Churji’s back, and tapped the drone on the camera. “Okay, I’m good to go. You all set, up there?”

“All set,” came the reply through her helmet. “We’re cycling the airlock now.”

Sughouri smiled to herself. “You know, I can do things like that now, too.”

“Right,” Kristiana said. “Good to remember.”

A few minutes later, Sughouri’s heart was pounding in her ears as the airlock doors opened.

“Wow, it’s dark!” Sughouri said. A snort from over the com told her that at least Victoria appreciated her sense of occasion.

Churji went first, driving out into the dimly lit room. Sughouri watched as the drone moved forward, the light from its LEDs pushing the shadows about.

Sughouri swallowed. “I’m stepping out of the airlock.” She took a few steps forward.

“Sughouri,” Victoria’s voice piped up. “Do me a favor, will you? Can you take three deep breaths for me?” After the third, she spoke again. “That’s better. How are you feeling now?”

“Pretty much the same,” Sughouri began to follow the drone.

“I ask, because your pulse jumped quite a bit. Are you sure you don’t feel any different? Still excited?”

Sughouri thought for a moment before answering. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Its not fear or anxiety. I’m not anticipating. It feels neutral, like something good or bad could happen, and I have no idea which. It feels like I’m in a holding pattern, and I’m eager to get moving.”

“I know it’s frustrating,” Victoria’s voice was tinged with sympathy.

She probably did know. That was part of her annoying charm; she was fiery spirited woman, who somehow managed to convey complete and total understanding of you and everything you are going through. It probably had something to do with her job as a First-Responder. When she said she understood how you felt, you had to believe her; she had definitely felt similar, if not worse.

The walk through the long hallway connecting the colony to the elevator did little to ease Sughouri’s pulse. When they reached the locker room at the far end, Sughouri felt her first pangs of temptation.

“Yup,” she said, “I still really want to open all these lockers.”

But she didn’t. They had gone over the plan multiple times, and Sughouri knew it by heart. With Noriama’s operating on emergency power, wasting time was a dangerous proposition.

Instead, she followed Churji out into the colony proper. It looked lopsided to Sughouri, less the one missing drone.

“Here we are,” Sughouri said. “I suppose. I guess. Can’t quite tell. Can I please have some light?”

“Activating back-up lighting,” Kristiana answered. A heart-beat later the darkness of Noriama Colony faded into view. The walls, floor, and ceiling were pale gray, with a single blue stripe along each wall at chest height. She had seen it all before through Churji’s camera, but seeing it now with her own eyes was chilling.

Squeezing the keyer at her side, Sughouri turned on her own suit’s LEDs, aiding the emergency lighting with her own. She could have moved through the colony well enough without it, but this was not a time to squint at anything.

“Much better,” she said. “Everything looks…is this fog?”

There was a pause, longer than two seconds. Then Victoria answered. “No, there’s no fog, Sughouri.”

“You sure? I can’t see much further than a few meters before —” she stopped herself. “Right. It’s the eye thing you were talking about.”

“Right,” Victoria answered.

“Well,” Sughouri forced her voice into its usual cheerfulness, “I can still see well enough nearsighted, and it’s all completely bare. You’d think they’d put out a plant or two.”

“Where would they get the plant from?” Kristiana asked. “Hydroponics? They’d need every seed they brought. Never mind the watering.”

“Plastic doesn’t need water,” Sughouri said. “Besides, wouldn’t extra plant-life be a mitigatior for life-support? The more plants around, the less strain on CO2 recyclers.”

“Not at all,” Kristiana said. “It’s a massive headache getting everything to balance exactly right, especially with a growing human population. Any plant life in Noriama would need to be highly regulated.”

“Would it? More people get born, plant another tree. What’s hard about that?”

“What’s hard is you can’t just plant another tree in a closed system this tightly regulated,” Kristiana said. “Oxygen is a caustic element, capable of causing a lot of damage. Oxidization, erosion, rust, it’s highly flammable and causes dangerous chemical reactions with unstable elements, at high pressures it’s poison even to humans…too much oxygen is a real problem in closed spaces like this.”

“And too much carbon dioxide or not enough oxygen has its own problems,” Victoria finished. “People don’t realize how delicate our ecosystem on Earth really is. It can take decades for ecosystems to repair themselves after a catastrophe, if they are repaired at all. Its often much easier for the survivors to simply adapt. Creating a robust and self-correcting ecosystem on a different planet in an enclosed system as small as this colony is simply impossible. It needs to be tightly controlled.”

Sughouri kept walking. The hallways were still, and perfectly silent. The light was dim, and the shadows dark. Even only being able to see two meters ahead, She couldn’t see any dust, nor vestigial signs of life. The halls were clean and sterile, like the station above.

“I reiterate my suggestion for plastic,” Sughouri said. No, it wasn’t like the station. Noriama Station was empty, yes, but it had a clean unpackaged feel about it. In the Station, Sughouri felt like she was the first person to step inside a factory-fresh product. If she could have taken off her suit, she would have expected it to smell like a new car.

The colony did not have that feeling. Sughouri felt like she imagined Archeologists felt, stepping into sealed off tombs from centuries ago. There was history, here, all around her. Mysteries and the untold tales of humans long since dead; which was an unsettling feeling, considering there was no evidence that they were dead at all.

It was the colony, she realized with a start. No matter what had happened to the colonists, the colony was dead.