Noriama: Chapter 17
Kristiana’s head was throbbing.
“Hamēstagān is a place referenced in the Dādestān ī Dēnīg, a ninth-century Persian religious text,” she recited. “It had been written by Zoroastrian high priest, and it’s composed entirely of ninety-two questions followed by the priest’s answers. Hamēstagān is a place where dead souls are sent to wait. It’s a neutral place for those whose good and evil deeds are in perfect balance, to wait for the day of judgment.”
“Okay, but what does it mean?” Sughouri said over the com. “‘Gone to Hamēstagān.’ Is this their way of saying they knew they were dying?”
“That’s one possibility,” Kristiana admitted. She didn’t like how excited Sughouri was getting. If she started to panic or lost control, there was nothing any of them could do. “We don’t have all the information yet, so it’s counterproductive to start guessing wildly.”
“It’s not wild,” Sughouri huffed. “It’s right there, on the wall of a flipping kitchen: Gone. To. Hamēstagān. Look, I’m all for restraint when it comes to making guesses, but it’s not like they’re speaking in code, here.”
“They might be,” Zuri interrupted. “It’s not like a Zoroastrian purgatory is something everyone just has on their lips. If they really meant limbo, why didn’t they say ’limbo?’ We had to look the word up, so they probably had to look it up. If they didn’t, that suggests it was probably a colloquial name for another section, or they might have had code names for certain situations. Hamēstagān could be what they called the Security Lockdown.”
“Which we still haven’t found,” Victoria grumbled.
“I’m more concerned about the placement,” Kristiana rubbed her forehead. The pain was growing stronger. She would need to take a pill soon. “This is the first sign of the colonists we’ve seen, and we’ve explored a good thirty percent of the colony. Why paint a message here? This intersection isn’t near any vital colony systems. If Wolf hadn’t been looking down every corridor, we might have never even seen it. If they had something to say, why not put the message right outside the elevator airlock, where we were sure to find it?”
“Even simpler question,” Sughouri asked, “why paint a message at all? They could have left a much larger and more detailed message in the computer’s database, if they wanted to tell us what happened.”
“Perhaps not,” Victoria spoke up, her voice quiet. “Remember, the computer was wiped. They might have done that for a good reason, and leaving a message behind might not have fit with their beliefs.”
Kristiana breathed through the pain. “Beliefs?”
Victoria rubbed her hands together. “I’ve been thinking ever since Zuri mentioned the Three Generation rule. You said that entropy would eventually weaken the laws and procedures that kept Noriama alive. They must have encountered this before catastrophe, right? The first time someone shirked a duty, if it didn’t kill them all, they would have been forced to deal with the possibility. So, what would inoculate the colonists against this entropy?
“You have a theory, I take it?”
“The message…Limbo has become a secular word; a neutral state of suspension. They didn’t say limbo, they said Hamēstagān. A religious reference. Religion is ideal at indoctrinating behaviors and rituals into a population, and could at least work against the entropic inclinations of the colonists for another generation or two, at least long enough to give them a chance at building better safeguards.”
“Okay, so what does that have to do with the computer?”
“I can guess,” Kristiana gripped the bridge of her nose with her fingers. “You think they deified the computer system?”
“Maybe even the colony itself,” Victoria nodded. “It makes perfect sense. Repairs and maintenance are offerings. Filed reports are prayers. And in return, the powerful colony who knows and sees all provides and protects you from death. It may not have been as blunt as that, but they could have easily cultivated similar behavior patterns.”
“So then they, what, killed their god?” Sughouri’s incredulity was clear in her tone. “Wiped the hard drive and shut everything down as an act of deicide?”
“It’s a regular pattern in religious systems,” Victoria said. “Early religions deify natural catastrophes. Volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes…these are the actions of angry gods. When societies gain more control over their environment, wrathful and vindictive gods are traded for more benevolent, if capricious deities. Noriama’s computer could have been seen as commanding and brutal, and growing resentment might have lead to a schism, or even a religious war.”
“And so they scrawl their religious manifesto on a kitchen wall?”
Kristiana took a deep breath. The pain was starting to ebb. Maybe she could avoid the pill for a while longer. “I think that’s a pretty outlandish theory, but even if you’re right, it doesn’t answer the more pertinent question. If they’re ‘gone,’ where did they go to? Where is their Hamēstagān?”
“Easy and obvious answer?” Zuri shrugged. “The freighter. If they decided, for whatever reason, to make the journey back to Earth in the freighter, that’s almost a century of travel. However they manage to make the trip, that’s a pretty strong parallel to limbo.”
Sughouri’s protest was quick: “I still don’t buy it. There’s no evidence they’re in the freighter, and strong evidence they’re not, and I haven’t seen any reason for them to leave. There’s no obvious damage or structural failures, no signs of conflict or societal breakdown, no…”
“No bodies.”
Kristiana’s head began to throb again at Victoria’s quiet answer. She massaged her temples. “So we have a missing lockdown section, a misplaced Hydroponic section with no plants, an encrypted computer database, a device of unknown purpose attached to the colony’s reactor, and now a mysterious message with no clear motivation or meaning.”
For a moment no one spoke.
Kristiana took a short breath. “Our job is to collect information, not solve puzzles. Sughouri, keep heading back to the hut and lie down when you get there. Victoria, keep her healthy. Zuri, let Wolf keep searching, and get back to decrypting the Noriama Database.”
Before anyone could offer any dissent, Kristiana unbuckled herself from her seat. Launching herself towards the ship’s ladder, she pushed herself down towards her sleeping unit.
When she reached the attached locker, she opened the small compartment in the bottom and pulled out the small bottle she had left there for weeks.
The pain was agonizing.
It was absurd. She knew it was absurd. The thoughts calling her absurd had swamped her mind back on Earth, and now she didn’t know if they were her own thoughts or simply thought-shaped holes that had to be filled by something.
It was chemicals. Nothing more, nothing less. Her brain was a chemical making machine, and it needed supplements. It was no different–no different — than the pieces of gold and silicon in her brain right now.
But somehow, when the time came, she couldn’t put the pill in her mouth.
Why did it worry her, the idea of being dependent? She relied on food and water to function, she needed to sleep, how was this tiny pill any different?
Sometimes her excuse was training. She was getting better at managing the pain, and eventually she wouldn’t need medication at all. Sometimes she said it was pride, that she didn’t want to be hooked on medication for the rest of her life.
Sometimes she didn’t bother to think up a reason. She simply didn’t want to take the pills. That was reason enough.
But it hurt. It still hurt. It would always hurt until she took the pills.
She took a deep breath, and let it out again.
No. She was stronger than her pain. She was more than her pain. She didn’t need pills to function, she didn’t need bromides to live. She had made her choice years ago, and the pain had become as much a part of that choice as anything.
The sound of hands on metal tore Kristiana from her thoughts. Shoving the pills back into the cabinet, she turned to see Zuri descending the ladder head-first. Catching herself, she turned around until they were oriented the same.
“Can I ask you something?” she asked after slipping her leg around a ladder-rung to free her hands. “Do you ever regret it?” She pointed at her forehead.
How often had Kristiana asked herself that same question? Inevitably, the answer came back to her, but in her darkest hours, the moments before the pain became impossible to bear, she wondered if those were really her thoughts, or the thoughts of the thousands of Netters whose minds she had shared.
Now, cut off from those minds, she had only herself to ask.
“I don’t think so,” she admitted. “Honestly, I don’t always know. Most of the time I don’t even think about it. It’s just a part of me.”
Zuri nodded. “I feel the same way.”
Kristiana almost asked, but stopped herself. She had wondered, ever since first meeting Zuri, why she still signed, why the rest of the team had to learn to sign along with their speech. Artificial ear-drums weren’t terribly rare.
To know that Zuri felt the same was somehow soothing.
Victoria woke up and climbed out of her sleeping chamber. Time had passed, though she wasn’t certain how much until she glanced at the mission clock. She dressed herself and floated to the ladder, climbing down to the exercise room for her morning routine.
Once she was finished, she climbed to the galley for her breakfast. It was the same meal as always. She didn’t mind the monotony.
As she chewed, she looked around at the Croatoan’s metallic walls, their pale sheen nothing more than background noise. Was it the conditioning? She almost wanted to feel claustrophobic, to feel a desperate need to leave, even acknowledging the billion miles of space beyond the thin wall.
Halfway through her meal, she heard shouting from the crash-room.
She felt her heart sink. That was her responsibility. Her crewmates. Now there was an ‘agitated social interaction’ in her future. She would need to record the team’s vitals, schedule a time to engage in a conversation with each person involved to discuss exactly what happened, who said what, why, and how it made them feel. She would need to fill out a report and send it to Earth. It was her job.
She was in the middle of her breakfast meal. Medical orders were for each teammember to have an uninterrupted period of eating. Eating too fast could cause physical discomfort, and so once you sat down to eat, you were supposed to stay seated.
When Victoria finished, she unstrapped herself from ehr chair and pushed her way up towards the crash-room. As she approached, she could better hear Kristiana’s grumbling.
“Damn it all,” she grumbled. “What kind of an AI pitches a fit?”
There was a pause. Zuri was signing, no doubt.
“Well, it’s what we have. Once Wolf is there, have it — Victoria, good to see you up and about. Going to be a busy day today, it looks like.”
“What?” Victoria looked at Zuri, her brow furrowed as she squeezed at her keyer.
“Take a look at your screen.”
Victoria moved to her chair and had just started to strap herself down when she saw what was playing on her monitor. “So many?”
“Zuri thinks something got Wolf confused,” Kristiana muttered. “The drones have flagged twenty-seven separate abnormalities, and we have to look at all of them.”
A far cry above the four or five that usually awaited their attention. Victoria finished seating herself before calling up her daily report.
She recorded the team’s vitals, prepared the next weeks duty roster, signed off on the team’s medical status, wrote a report on all social incidents that had happened during the previous week, and throughout it all she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was wasting her time.
On a practical level, of course she was. Keeping her mind active had been more important than efficiency, so the majority of duties which could have been automated had instead been made manual. This was to keep her mind fresh and effective.
But why?
The empty hallways.
Why was Victoria even there?
She couldn’t remember when she had decided the colonists were all dead. The team had decided long before they had even docked with the Station. Their conversations had slowly transitioned from the wild musings, where no possibility was too absurd, to the stoic and sad acceptance that there was little reason to believe that anyone was alive on Noriama, and what tragedy had done them in.
She was here for two reasons only: to keep her teammates healthy, and to study the dead. Did they die from malnutrition? Disease? Radiation? Her purpose was to discover how over five hundred colonists had died.
What was perhaps most galling to her was the uncertainty. With bodies, she could have done autopsies and analyzed her findings into a coherent story. But there was no coherent story here: Each new thing they found was a fragment of a clue. A strange device attached to the main reactor; there was no telling what it did. Hydroponic labs without plants. The floor-plan changed without clear reason. A black box that had been damaged on purpose.
No bodies. No corpses. No colonists.
“I didn’t know you were so eager to find them,” Sughouri had said to her, once, after she expressed her frustration. “Don’t worry, you gristly little bone-saw, they’re probably all nicely stacked away in some storage room. We’ll find them soon enough.”
Sughouri’s pitch-black humor hadn’t gone over well. She had seen enough catastrophes to know even the simplest things painted a vivid picture.
The past seven days had been the same. Sughouri could only spend two, maybe three hours safely outside her chamber in the airlock, before needing to return and rest for another twenty. Eventually, her body would re-acclimate to the steady pressure of gravity. She would be able to last for four or five hours for every fifteen spent resting. Eventually, she would be able to spend a whole waking day outside of the chamber, only needing to sleep in it to keep her body functioning.
But it would take a long time before that happened. In the meantime, she was striking out into the colony and putting human eyes on the things that Wolf was registering as abnormal.
Twenty-seven abnormalities. Did any of them matter to Victoria?
Victoria spent the time before Sughouri woke solving complex math puzzles. It was something to do.
After a quarter hour, Sughouri’s vitals began to shift. She was almost finished with her time in the chamber.
Kristiana switched on the coms. “Good morning, Sughouri. Are you ready for a walk?”
“Just about,” Sughouri muttered. “Let me get my coffee.”
She wasn’t sounding good. Both her psyche and her body were under immense pressure. Her usually jovial tone was sliding deeper and deeper into a placid malaise. Where once she would delight in sharing her opinions, she had become reserved during her walks through Noriama.
It had only been two and a half weeks since she had dropped. It didn’t bode well for her health for much longer.
“Twenty-seven?” Sughouri was amazed at the number when Kristiana explained. “Yeah, that sounds like something’s wrong. What does Wolf’s cognitive report say?”
“Visual abnormalities,” Zuri answered. “Nothing abnormal from the sensors, but the camera saw something unexpected.”
“Ghosts, maybe?” Sughouri snorted. As she was pulling on her helmet, she paused to speak into the com, “Here’s a thought. Corridor E5 is between flag two and three, right? How about I take a turn down E2 first? It won’t add much time to my route.”
Kristiana’s eyes shot open and looked across the crash-room to Victoria. “Why?” she asked.
“Because blank boring hallways is a crap view for a walk. Why not take a bit of a peek around now? We might find another message, dropped on the floor like a bit of trash.”
Victoria bit her lip. They should talk about it. They should talk privately and discuss how once more Sughouri was trying to adjust the plan, the same stunt she had pulled with the EVA up in space. The message had galvanized Sughouri. Her irritation at the colonists’ confusing message was matched only by her relief at finding a message at all.
She took a deep breath. This wasn’t reckless or foolish, it was sensible. If she was going to be walking for hours anyway, might as well walk somewhere that she had the chance of seeing something helpful. And she was asking, rather than acting on her own.
Nevertheless, she filed the red-flag away in her memory, in case it was important later.
“Okay,” Kristiana said at last. “But be careful.”
“Yes ma’am,” Sughouri said.
The walk was held in silence. Victoria couldn’t disagree with Sughouri’s assessment: the halls of Noriama were boring.
Hey, not to change the subject, but I was studying the map of our sensor-net, and some of these live sensors in Section J look a little off, yeah?”
“Just the one I can see,” Zuri answered. “A centimeter or two.”
“But everything else has been centimeter accurate,” Sughouri pushed. “I’m wondering, why is that one off?”
“Do you want to check it out?”
“I think I do,” Sughouri admitted.
“Any objections?” Kristiana asked. “Okay, we’ll add it to your itinerary. For now, head to the flag at…Junction E7.”
Sughouri felt a chill run down her back as she turned down the corridor. Noriama was becoming familiar, and that was a terrifying feeling to have four and a quarter light years away from Earth.
The sound of her metal legs beat out the heart-beat of her life on the metal floor of Noriama.
It was hypnotic. The long gray hallways of Noriama faded into the back of her mind as she kept her steady pace, a stride that was not too tiring or strenuous on her body. She needed to keep her strength during the long expeditions into the colony; the worst thing that could happen would be succumbing to exhaustion and collapsing outside the Hut.
But losing herself to the rhythm of her machine-feet was dangerous too. If she stumbled and fell, if she missed something important, if she got lost…
No, she couldn’t get lost. She was only walking where the sensors were repaired and active. If she turned down a wrong hallway, the Croatoan would know immediately.
Well, within two seconds.
She paused to take a breath.
During the past two weeks, Churji and Sughouri had spent hours out of every day searching the colony for the missing Security Lockdown section. Repairing the available sensor nodes hadn’t been the complete solution they had hoped for: once connected and activated, the sensors provided a spotty map of the colony, but more than half of the sensors had not re-activated. Even basic equipment throughout the colony needed to be turned on by hand before it would connect to the main system, which meant that even with Lemon running the central computer system, they were depressingly uninformed.
“Sughouri? Are you alright?”
“Just fine,” Sughouri answered Victoria as she started walking again. “Just catching my breath. Anything interesting going on up there?”
Kristiana’s voice was cold. “Churji found the plants.”
Sughouri’s heart jumped. “The plants? You mean from Hydroponics?”
“I don’t know where else they could have come from.”
“Did they find all of them?”
“I don’t know how to answer that without knowing how many there are. There’s bamboo, mostly, but I can see other kinds. Some roots. They’re in Sector G4, in a pile on the floor.”
Sughouri blinked. “The floor? Why are they there? Where in Sector G4?”
“Outside the incinerator room.”
Sughouri could picture it perfectly. A pile of dried plants, chopped up into easily tossable stacks, piled on the floor like a funeral pyre. Next to the pile, the open incinerator, its mouth gaping wide and dark, aching to be activated and spew red hot light into the pale room.
“Why?” she asked.
“I’m getting awfully tired of that question.”
Sughouri couldn’t respond to that. It was a feeling she shared. “Okay, I’m less than a minute away. Anyone want to take bets on whether this is going to point us to our missing SLS?”
“No bet,” Zuri said, “there’s no guarantee that they built the SLS. They might have rejected a dedicated security section altogether, deciding it was a waste of materials and effort.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Kristiana answered. “Law and order are vital for the survival of any closed system. If they didn’t have a security sector, the colony would have collapsed within months.”
“Not necessarily,” Victoria said. “A centralized peacekeeping force is not requisite for cohesive societies.”
“Well, the SLS has nothing to do with peacekeeping,” Sughouri interrupted. “It was a secure location during emergencies. I can’t see how anyone would think that was unneces —”
Sughouri stopped dead in her tracks. In front of her, blackish brown in her LEDs, a puddle-shaped smear covered the metal floor.
“Guys,” Sughouri said, “what’s this?”
“Is that…is that paint?” Kristiana asked two seconds later.
Sughouri bent down to the ground and ran her gloved hand against the edge of the stain. It was long, broad, and spread out like a fan. A streak peeled away from the main body of the stain, pointing the direction in which something had been dragged through it. “It’s not paint,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s not paint.”
“It’s blood.” Victoria said.
Blood.
“Are you certain?” Kristiana asked.
“I’ve seen bloodstains on metal before.”
“I’m collecting a sample now,” Sughouri said, reaching for her belt and pulling out a small flat scraper from her personal kit. Pressing against the metal, she rubbed the scraper against the colony floor. Flakes of the substance pried off the metal, and were then brushed into a small sample vial.
“It looks like something was dragged down the hallway,” Zuri’s words scrolled across Sughouri’s helmet. “To your left, Sughouri.”
“Yeah,” Sughouri replaced her tool and slipped the sample bag back into her kit. “Yeah, let’s take a look.”
“Hold up,” Kristiana predictably interrupted. “We can send Wolf to look. The drones have flagged a lot of alerts for us to get through. It would be better to keep moving to the next flag and see what it is.”
Sughouri crawled to the wall and began the laborious process of standing up. When she was upright again, she spoke as clearly as she could. “This is the first real proof of life that we have. No, the first proof of death. For all we’ve seen, this smear of blood is the only real evidence that people ever lived here. Real people. Flesh-and-blood people. Not robots, not some Potemkin village mock-up.”
“I understand,” Kristiana said. “I do. But Wolf can look down a hallway as well as you can. It asked for your help with these flags.”
Sughouri took a breath. “Your advice is noted. With all do respect, I am seeing this through.”
“I agree,” Victoria said. Sughouri wanted to be grateful, but she couldn’t help but think Victoria was just trying to keep it from feeling like everyone was ganging up on her. It felt like pity.
She walked in silence, only speaking when she reached the door.
According to the map, it was the door to a lounge. Part cafeteria, part meeting hall, part rec-room, it was one of the several rooms devoted to keeping each section socially cohesive.
“The door’s locked,” Sughouri said, poking at the keypad beside it. “Zuri, can you get Lemon to open it up for me?”
It took longer than two seconds for a reply. “It’s not connected to the computer system,” Zuri said. “Lemon doesn’t even recognize there’s a door there.”
“Of course not.” This colony was grinding her chest. “If it’s not connected, that’s one thing, but why didn’t Wolf recognize a flipping door? It’s a door. It’s a door, Zuri. What kind of training did you give that damn AI?”
“Can you open the door, Sughouri?”
Sughouri bit her tongue. She couldn’t tell if Victoria was trying to cut Sughouri off before she let her frustration run away with her, or if she was just eager to finally find her precious corpses.
She inspected the door. A simple keypad was at its side. “Yeah, piece of cake. Give me a few minutes and I’ll be inside.”
It didn’t take long. Once she had decompiled the key-lock, she passed the key through and stepped back.
The door didn’t open.
She tried again. Was the door trying to open? She drew closer to the door and tried cycling the key through the lock once more. Laying her hand on the door, she could feel it strain.
“I’ve disconnected the lock,” she said, “it should be free to open, but it feels like there’s something still holding it shut. I could try cutting through the door entirely, if we think that’s…no, wait…”
She leaned forward to stare closely at the seal. “Well, shit.”
“Talk to us,” Kristiana was irritated, Sughouri could tell. “What’s going on down there?”
Sughouri cycled the key again, and pushed at the door as it tried to open. Through the sliver of a crack, she saw a small flash of black metal. “There’s a high-grade security seal on this door. Looks like it’s been installed from the inside. Now check me on this, someone. This is not a seal that it makes sense having on a lounge.”
“You’re right,” Kristiana answered. “Can you open it?”
“Maybe?” Sughouri looked closer. “It’d certainly be simpler to cut the door off. Might not be quicker, though…”
“Could this be it?” Victoria asked. “Did they put the SLS here, instead of off Section D?”
“And do without a lounge?” Sughouri shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere that made that trade. Besides, they were supposed to put the SLS at least a kilometer away from the rest of the colony, right? For safety?”
“They may have decided it was safer to have it nearby. Quicker to get everyone behind a safe door. I’ve got a more unpleasant question,” Sughouri said. “That blood stain back there; do we think someone was attacked and then dragged here?”
“Lets not assume attacked,” Kristiana said. “They could have fallen. It could have been an accident.”
“Then why dragged?” Zuri asked. “If they needed to be dragged, then they were too wounded to have been moved until a medical team checked them out. Was there some sort of quarantine in effect? A curfew? A riot?”
“Violators of quarantines and curfews don’t have to be attacked,” Victoria said. “If it had been a riot, there would have been more signs of violence. Let’s concentrate on getting inside. We might find some answers in there.”
“I don’t share your optimism,” Sughouri muttered. “Thing is, and here I’m starting to think some unpleasant thoughts, the SLS was designed to survive a complete collapse of the colony. It needs to have its own power-generator, which means it doesn’t have to be connected to Noriama’s smart-grid. Only, unless they did some major redesigning of the colony plan, there is no way the whole SLS could fit behind this door. Which means there’s something else behind it, and I don’t know what that is.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Kristiana said. “Let’s see if you can open the door before we decide if you should.”
“I can,” Sughouri said. “If I use Churji’s cutting torch, I might be able to cut a hole above the lock and thread a connector though. That’s going to be the most straightforward method.”
“How long will that take?”
Sughouri sighed. “A couple hours on Earth. Here? When I have to jog back to bed every forty minutes? A day or two. And it still might not work, depending on how standard this seal is.”
There was a pause, but it was short. Everyone knew there was only one answer.
“I’ll tell Wolf to head your way,” Zuri said. “It’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Zuri rubbed her eyes. Was she tired? She barely knew anymore.
She needed to focus.
Just because she was a computer genius didn’t mean she was perfect. Even now, Zuri was constantly learning new things; she had to, or else be left behind by those who learned more. Computer languages spread and branched the same as spoken languages, but faster and with purpose, rather than natural evolution. It was that purposefulness that caused the problem; there were over five hundred programming languages now, all with different uses, different pros and cons, all created by programmers in their basements and cubicles to fit their needs just a bit more perfectly.
Focus.
Zuri shook her head, rubbing her temples. She was fluent in over fifty separate computer languages, well-versed in over a hundred, and it hadn’t come easy. She had chosen her languages carefully, making sure she had at least one from each branch of computer language, from the ancient and venerable C-languages, to the new and flashy Jupi and its numbered variations, to the tricky but powerful S-MAL, and everything in between.
What was really important to her was learning how to learn languages. The inner workings of computers were all the same. Once she understood the underlying logic, the deluge of languages became dialects. Some with major differences, of course, but with time, effort, and not a little guess-work, she could figure out any computer language well enough to be proficient.
Focus.
The screen in front of her pinged, and a new array of digits and letters met Zuri’s eyes. They were all starting to blur together, mixing in her mind the same way they had been mixed in the Noriama’s database.
Zuri hated metaphors, especially when dealing with computers. They trapped you into lazy thinking. History was littered with the pieces of broken toys people had gotten metaphorical about. The Titanic was unsinkable, the Blockchain was unhackable, Artificial Intelligence was unemotional…
Tear away the metaphor, and you could see with clear eyes what people were actually thinking, and usually what they were thinking was ‘I don’t know how, so no one knows."
Focus!
Zuri wasn’t going to get trapped with lazy thinking. She even had an advantage that most innovators didn’t have; she knew that what she was doing was possible. Red was sorting through the database at a steady pace. It was a slow process — doubly so because of Red’s other job — but it was functional. The biggest stumbling block was translating the data into something usable. It was the proverbial sorting through shredded paper, trying to tape together old documents. Only there was half a centuries worth, and it was comprehensive.
Noriama’s computer had recorded everything, because everything was vital. Mean temperatures in every room, rate of air-flow through separate ventilation systems, terminal access times and locations for every colonist, and what they were accessing…minute details that were only useful once the entire picture was made whole once more.
What was all the more tantalizing was when she found something personal. Noriama’s database was full of private data as well as public, and Zuri periodically stumbled across something disturbingly human.
The colonists were people, she knew that, but she had never considered the fact that men, women, and children had actually lived on the planet below them.
This knowledge, this sudden recognition of two hundred ghosts floating through the airless tomb beneath them…it made it hard to focus.
She should have ignored the diary entry, but the Colonists were missing, and the only message they had left was a half-legible scrawl on the wall. Why? What were they trying to say? What were they thinking at the time when everything that happened…happened?
It was all right there. No, not all, but something. A single colonists thoughts laid down in ones and zeroes, ready for the reading. Zuri could read it now, and maybe learn about the people long since gone.
Dear Diary
It’s worse than prison. I’ve never been to prison, but I’ve read books written by people who’ve lived their whole lives in jail, and this is nothing like what they describe.
They talk about hope, about peace, about finding a connection to all humanity, in spite of everything in the system that was created to take their humanity away. They find something deep and simple and at their core that gives them a hand-hold. Something to hold onto and never let go. A humanity.
We have duties as citizens, as humans, as the seed of the future. That’s what the Commodore always calls it, the “seed of the future.” When we changed to a biweekly schedule, it was planting a seed of the future. When we improved our water reclamation efficiency, it was a seed of the future. When Marcelle dropped his complaint against the security detail, he planted a seed of the future.
Sometimes it feels like all we’re doing is planting seeds.
We left Earth so many years ago, but I can’t help but feel like Earth is still more real than Noriama. I have memories of wind and oceans and smells of dirt and grass without the taint of metal and plastic.
It’s like exile. Or worse, because even an exile can dream of the world they left behind. They can hear news, or have some connection to the people they no longer see. No, this is worse than exile, because Earth is the cradle of humanity. Earth is where humanity is.
I don’t want to be inhuman, but I am no longer an Earthling. I cannot be human anymore. What is humanity compared to that?"
Zuri closed her eyes and let her head sink into her hands. She needed to give up for the night. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t bring herself to think right now. Sughouri had said she was almost through the seal, they would probably break into the lounge early tomorrow. She needed rest.
She told Red to get back to its regular encrypting duties, and left her station for her sleeping quarters.