183: LAUNCH

It’s movie night.

It’s a very special movie night. A half-day marathon of all of my favourites, one year since our return to the Courageous, and the three hundred strong population of the ship necessitate the use of a proper projector to make sure that everyone can see the movie. Dandelion sits next to me, a nervous tension in her shoulders; more nervous, I think, than me. We’re both experienced with using the radio implants now, and as the heroes of Dawn of the Dead raid the bear trap shop to protect their new base, I mentally tell her, ‘I hope they don’t overcharge the laser crystal this time.’

A smile touches her lips, but a sad one. ‘But that would deprive you and Tal of the chance to yell that one line you love so much.’

‘Yeah, it’s worth everyone dying for that,’ Tal says. ‘Yippee ki yay.’ Ke’s on my other side, manually keying kes messages into a little transmitter. A lack of an implant can’t keep Tal away from information; I think ke’s more fluent in the mental language we’re developing than either of us are.

I reach up to touch the port in the back of my skull. No hair impedes me; I’ve been getting depilation treatment for months and there’s not a hair on my body. Hair is a complication, where I’m going. It still feels strange to actually touch the port, the scar tissue having been carefully cut back to make room for the cable later. We keep watching.

And Stephen throws the overcharged laser gun into the mass of zombies to explode, and I leap to my feet and Tal leaps to kes feet and a good quarter of the residents of the Courageous leap to their feet and yell as one, “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!”

And soon, the movie’s over.

And soon, Movie Night is over.

A lot of my friends leave the cobbled-together movie theatre with me, a good forty or so people. They drop off in small groups as I head for Chronostasis Ring 2.

“I’ve been reading up about aspen trees, you know,” Tal says conversationally, walking alongside me as if this is just an everyday casual stroll. “Did you know that there’s forests on Earth that are basically one big tree? Because what they do, right, is that aspens can make babies with shoots, like strawberries. And like strawberries, if you don’t separate ‘em, they can stay connected. So you can have massive forests of thousands of trees that are all really just one big tree, sharing resources and stuff. It’s like how a whole lot of mushrooms look like they’re different things, but they’re all just the fruiting bodies of the same big fungus. And other plants can grow in the aspen forest and animals can live in their branches and stuff without every knowing that the thousands of trees around them are really just one big organism.”

I nod. I know a lot about aspen trees. Most Arborean kids learn about their name – who wouldn’t?

We move through Greenhouse Ring 1, where I used to spend so much of my time. A bee lands on my hand, seems to realise I’m not a flower, and moves on. The remnants of my old sleeper nest still hang in a tree. In the centre of the ring sits a well-tended aspen sapling, doing its best to reach for the well-lit artificial sky above.

We move on.

Only Tal, Dandelion and Denish enter Chronostasis Ring 2 with me. My old chronostasis pod sits there, open, waiting, all of its equipment replaced and sparkling clean. I meet Denish’s eyes, and he sweeps me into a bone-popping hug.

“You will be safe,” he promises me. “I will keep you safe. I will make sure that everything is working perfectly, always.”

“Look after the ship,” I tell him.

“Of course! Is my job! And looking after you is looking after ship, yes?” After a long moment, he reluctantly lets me go.

I turn to Tal.

“Still jealous,” ke says.

I kiss kem. “You have to promise me one thing. It’s very important.”

“What is it?”

“Do not. Under any circumstances. Name me after the Allied Mastercomputer.”

Ke laughs. “I think I’m about done with Amys.”

“That’s all I can ask of you.”

“See you on the other side, Aspen. However long it takes.”

“We don’t have to do this today,” Dandelion tells me. “If you’re not ready, we can wait.”

“I’m not going to get more ready. I’m physically prepared. Training on the radio implant more is probably going to go faster in there than out. We’ve reached the point where waiting any longer is just stalling.”

“Yeah. Well. If there’s any problems, any at all, you radio us, and I’ll come and pull you out, alright?”

I nod. I won’t lie; having that option does make me feel a whole lot better about the whole thing. We have very little idea of what this experience will actually be like.

“I’m not scared,” I say. “I know you’ll look after me.”

“And I know you’ll look after the ship.” She pulls me into a hug, a specific hug with her right cheek against mine and her right inner wrist against the left side of my neck, a pose I automatically mirror. An Arborean hug. The last person who hugged me like this was my mother, when I left the Greaves cluster for the very last time. But Dandelion’s taller and lankier and has a lot more hair to tickle my face than my mother. This reminds me of being hugged by Shia.

She pulls away. “If you’re sure you want to do this today, we should get started.”

I disrobe, and Dandelion starts hooking up the various lines to my body. Everything’s in place and ready for this; everything’s been in place and ready for days. I lie in the chronostasis pod and my friends begin strapping the protective restraints around my body, leaving my arms for last.

“It was suggested,” Dandelion says, “that I give you a paralytic and numb your whole body, because this should accelerate your integration with the computer systems by minimising distractions. I’m not going to do that.”

“Would it accelerate integration?”

“Very likely, yes. But sensory deprivation is no joke. This ship won’t be ready to leave orbit for a long time anyway, and there’s no reason to put you at more risk, physically or psychologically, than we need to. To be clear, Aspen, you should be fine. I’ve had hundreds of patients with very limited mobility and very limited senses who did just fine, and you’ll also have radio communication with us and the computer. But we don’t have to take your body away from you, so I’m not; it’s much better, actually, if you are able to feel and adjust for any physical issues with the tubing or the restraints or whatever. If you want to be numbed later on, when you’re a bit more settled, we can do that; or we can not do that, whatever works best for you.”

“We’ll see how we go, I guess,” I say.

“We seem to do that a lot, these days.” She secures the oxygen mask over my face, taking special care to make sure the tubes sit right and everything is properly sealed. I have an emergency radio code that’ll automatically open the pod and release all restraints if anything goes catastrophically wrong, but it’s best to have no cause to use it. Denish hands me the cable to the cerebral stimulator, and I reach to the back of my skull and plug it in. Once it’s securely seated, they tie in my arms.

And then the lid of the pod is lowered, and I’m in the dark. In the dark, in this little pod, with nothing but the sound if my own heart and breathing. Alone, except…

‘Everything okay, Aspen?’ comes Dandelion through the radio implant.

‘It’s fine.’ Floating in the chronostasis pod reminds me of lying in my cluster’s fish pond, eyes squeezed shut, loose roots brushing against my limbs.

‘Remember you can talk to the computer,’ Tal says. ‘And use it to write text to other crewmates, if you want. They aren’t cool enough to have memorised your codes like me, but they can read.’

‘I know.’ To be honest, I wish they’d stop talking to me. I know, I know; they’re worried about me. But can’t they give me a few minutes alone to adjust?

They do, eventually, assure themselves that I’m not going to die on the spot, and I start using the radio to explore the computer. I have code patterns to tell the computer to start or stop accepting my broadcasts as input, allowing me to send or receive text to people, look through books, things like that – eventually, I should be able to do these things via the cable in the back of my head, but the new synnerves will take time to grow. This is an extremely tedious way of accessing computer files and an even more tedious way of reading books, decoding broadcasts letter by letter in my mind, which is probably why I haven’t practiced it nearly as much as I should. Whelp. Plenty of time to practice now.

I draft a letter for my friends on the planet, reporting the success of the cerebral attachment, although I’m sure the ship’s already told them. They deserve to hear it from me.

The chronostasis pod, over time, becomes more and more familiar and comfortable a place. I’m safe in here, and I don’t really need to worry about my body – not the human part of it, anyway. My awareness of other things grows, and the ship is… it’s like having a whole lot of unfamiliar automatic reflexes, and trying to keep your balance through unexpected jerks and thrusts. The computer systems mostly take care of themselves, but occasionally ping me for approval, and I have to learn how to talk to them and make sure they don’t interfere with each other. This means developing new senses.

At first, I have to ask the crew to manually check a lot of things like air pressure and power usage, but eventually, I learn to find things myself. I learn to trace the ID chips of my residents moving about, learn to detect movement on the internal cameras and eventually learnt o detect shapes, to map them to crew positions and to distinguish objects. I learn to listen to people, and to speak, although this is surprisingly difficult; I’m not sure what the synnerves are doing inside my skull, but they don’t seem to be using the perfectly good linguistic specialisation areas of my brain properly.

Ship systems are easier to track. I learn to feel the pulse of water and coolant through my pipes in the Tube, to detect the humidity of my various cavities, something that the automated systems are constantly readjusting because people keep leaving doors open between greenhouses and work areas, like they want their computers to rust out or something! Well, when that happens, I’m not the one who’ll have to strip all the hardware down to its base materials, clean and deoxidise stuff, and reprint and reassemble everything.

Population grows, and oxygen consumption grows with it. Food production grows, and oxygen consumption decreases with it. The ship is being fitted for deep space travel, so minimal if any use is being made of the local sun; the energy for my microbiome is provided primarily by me, my reactor. Energy from my reactor transmitted to plants and algae as light, converted to chemicals, transmitted to my residents as chemical energy. The chemicals being used to store that energy being primarily made from carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, in an endless cycle. The breakdown of inedible or indigestible carbon molecules, surprisingly, quickly becoming the rate limiting step; new chemical composting methods are introduced to turn straw and stalks and old leaf matter to carbon dioxide and water faster without the inherent complications of the fastest known method, fire.

Heat production, in such a system, isn’t a problem. Heat dispersal is. The coolant lines all need to be upgraded and the heat radiation ports moved to not conflict with the ports and walkways and robotic systems and solar sail arrays being built all over my hull. Some of the new additions are easier to feel and understand than others; some don’t have automated systems that check in with me specifically, so they’re just numb masses, like scar tissue. I have to ask the crew, or look through the cameras of the external maintenance robots, to understand what they are.

People and supplies are dropped onto the colony. Complex machinery is sent back up, trusting the AI pilots to handle it without a human aboard, increasing the acceleration that can be used on the Hypati launcher and decreasing the total fuel costs – if there’s an error and a shuttle doesn’t make it, well, that’s an unfortunate waste of resources, but not one worth including a human pilot to avoid. Humanity’s been shooting unmanned satellites into space for far longer than manned ones. I’m not worried.

My engines, all of my engines, are replaced with helium propellant systems, a chemical easily harvestable from space. They don’t need to be as powerful as the engines that took us here; we won’t be accelerating nearly as fast, or reaching a top speed nearly so close to c. The power of the rotational engines is important – if we suddenly lose or gain a lot of spin, I need to be able to correct that very quickly – but we can always just build and attach more such engines if the ones we have aren’t powerful enough.

Below me, the colony grows, settles, evolves. Inside me, the colony grows, settles, evolves. Until one day, the ship is declared launch ready.

Launch ready. They actually want to do it. The crew aren’t going to stay in orbit, they’re actually going to head out into deep space, to head for another liveable exoplanet.

“Are you guys sure about this?” I ask Captain Kae Jin, as the crew prepares for final launch.

“This was your plan, Aspen.”

“I know, but…”

“Hard to believe that it’s actually happening, right?” She coughs, raspily; her new lungs never quite sit perfectly comfortable in her body. As, somewhere on my hull, Denish and his fleet of trainee engineers lock down some random addition I still don’t understand, I sympathise. “I have to be jealous of young Adin on the planet below. Technically, he completed the mission we came her to do, actually going down and setting up the colony. I was the person selected for this mission at its outset and I’m gonna die in space and leave it to someone else.”

“If you’re having second thoughts – ”

“You know me better than that, Aspen! We’re not going to waste a perfectly good interstellar spaceship by moping around this planet until the end of time. Of course, if you’re having second thoughts, then – ”

“No. No, I’m ready.”

“Great.” She switches on the ship broadcast system. “All crew, complete your launch lockdown procedures and confirm successful lockdown. Prepare for launch.” She turns off the broadcast and turns to the computer tech next to her. “Long journey ahead of us, Tal.”

“Yep.”

“You’re the math guy. How long, do you think?”

Ke snorts. “I couldn’t begin to give you an estimate.”

I feel the lockdown confirmations come in, and alert the captain accordingly while I manually locate and check that every person aboard is safe and secure. Captain Kae Jin awaits all confirmations, then announces, “Crew of the Aspen Courageous. Today we step out once again into the universe. Destination: Trellin. Time to launch: fifteen seconds. Time to orbit: unknown. Thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine…”

There’s something great about our Javelin Program.

I mean, there are numerous problems with our Javelin Program. Retrofitting a single-use interstellar spaceship with permanent spacefaring capabilities, packing it full to the gills of untrained colonists and launching it at one of the nearest viable exoplanets comes with all kinds of physical, medical and engineering challenges. But the saving grace of the program that’s glaringly obvious to me comes down to three points:

1) The sorts of people you want to live in a close community on a long-term mission of adventure and exploration possess a very wide variety of skills, priorities and personality types.

2) The people likely to end up either lured into a Javelin Program or forced into it by dint of being incarcerated possess a very wide variety of skills, priorities and personality types.

3) In both cases, these groups are a general cross-section of humanity. The people pulled out of those chronostasis pods have conquered every challenge put before us so far, and will continue to do so. I don’t know what sort of society we’ll develop, or whether we’ll continue towards our current destination through future generations of crew, but I do know that I’m excited to find out.

“… three, two, one.”

I fire my main engine, and begin to chase the stars.