In the airlock, the act of closing a helmet is self-care. In the void beyond or the bubble of life behind, perhaps less so. A moment of self-care is important to maintain morale in dark and airless times.
The AI can’t scrape dust off its outer sensors and lenses. The bot that could do that would cost 10% more than just having a human awake. It’s comforting to get up and tether to the outside, float across the silver surface, and have a simple and menial task to accomplish. I love a task with a distinct beginning and an end.
In between walks, the task is more amorphous—wait until you’re needed. I’ll watch for anomalies on the sensors, wait for the next opportunity to be helpful, and watch the stars slink past.
We’ve covered a million miles in my 48 hour shift. I drew a double, another 48 after this, and then back to sleep until my next shift, probably another month from now.
I heard on the first ships, the AI would make games for the staff who were awake. That turned out to be more expensive than the budget would support, so they provided a deck of playing cards. Cards turned out to be impractical without expensive gravity, so we have a paperback copy of a book. The joke has always been that they bought the books in bulk, but it’s not much of a joke. The one for this flight is a mystery about some kind of cowboy who comes into town for a bank-robbing contest that’s interrupted by a murder and he solves an unrelated mystery about the ingredients of a pie. It’s got a human author’s name on it, but I imagine it was “AI-assisted” or similar.
Mostly, now I’ve finished the book twice, I just sit and look out the porthole. The less I move, the less oxygen and water I use. When we’re near a star, my shifts have been energy neutral. Out here where we are now, we’re running a little deficit.
The green light flashes and my first shift ticks over to my second. The timer starts over at zero. If I were being relieved, I would start waking up somebody else. Maybe Jonathan, who usually gets next after me since Georgia didn’t wake up last time.
I think we’re down to about half-staff now. That isn’t much of a shock. The company warned, not everybody makes it on these long-haul missions. i would guess we’re probably six months out from landfall, and that we’ve been going for about eight or nine so far.
Even though I don’t get to wake anybody up, shift change comes with a treat. The dispenser dings and I drift over to put my bowl under the spigot. The paste is warm and brown and welcome after a lonely shift and a walk in the void. It is grounding in this untethered life among the stars to eat something brought from home, even if it is a warm paste of calculated nutrients concocted by the A.I. for optimal digestion.
With the new shift underway, I begin the novel again. When I finish, I’ll take my first walk to clean. And, in just forty-eight short hours, I’ll wake somebody up and we’ll talk, if just for a moment. I’ll report on my shift. I’ll let them know if I see anything coming up. We may even hope together, just for a moment, about the landfall.
I can hardly wait.
| Ruth Gibbs | Reading |
| Ben Gibbs | &c. |