162: CANDLE

Hey guys.

Can’t believe I missed soap making. If I’m not out in time to see a Hylaran cuddle their first tiny animal, I’m killing someone. You guys had better be taking video footage of all of this. Also, has anyone gotten those embroiderers some wool yet? Do we have wool? Cotton? Linen?

Thanks for the soap, Tal. I liked it so much I used it all up right away. Everything goes through a sterilisation process before it gets to me, but it’s safe for food so I’m not surprised the soap made it too. I’m not sure exactly what the process is, but Dr Kim says it involves CO2, some kind of radiation treatment, and also an electrostatic field. You know, like the shield on the Courageous?

Quarantine is boring. On the plus side, I have learned so much about modern metal refining processes and improvements in power generation systems.

-------------

“How are you feeling, Aspen?”

I sigh. “Fine, Mama. Just writing to my friends.”

“Adin and Tal?”

“Yeah. I’d love to write to Tinera and the Friend, too.”

“Oh Aspen, you know that your doctor has restricted contact with them for their safety.”

“I don’t see how a letter could possibly compromise their safety.”

“I don’t make the rules, I’m afraid. But they very much want to talk to you, too.”

We’ve had this conversation before. We’ve had it enough that Mama’s started repeating exact phrases, which is rare, given how sophisticated an AI it is. I glance at the TV, which is currently off, and think about the input ports that would be my key to freedom if only we could get electronics through that little box.

Can they get the data to me some other way? Not likely. I can’t carry it through the door with me if I can’t get my hands on it outside this room, and there’s no way for them to leave it in the scanning room for me. Even if there was, there’s nowhere on this outfit that provides a good place to conceal anything. Tuck it into the belt but under the robe, perhaps? Risky. And pointless to muse on, if they can’t get it into my hands in the first place.

My eyes drift away from the TV to the little chip reader on the wall. And several things occur to me at once.

The first is that the ID chip in my arm has data on it. It’s not just a flag for the Courageousto find my location and pull data from its own banks; the chip itself carries data. I know this because I have to use the reader to update the data on the chip when I first woke up and the AI told me I was the captain. The lights and soforth wouldn’t work for me until the chip data had been updated. Furthermore, Mama can read my name and rank off the chip itself, and she has no contact with the Courageous.

The second is that that chip reader is, well, a chip reader. And a chip writer. I can put my forearm to it and it can read and write data to and from my ID chip. On the Courageous, some of that data was available to the computer even away from the readers (it could always flag our locations and knew if the chip was detecting life signs); I’ve seen no evidence that Mama has those particular systems, nor would she need them, since so far as I can make out the readers are only to efficiently grab the ID and basic data from the colonists when they land (the Hylarans certainly don’t seem to use ID chips). But she can read such data through the reader. Again, I’ve used it, and she picked up my name and rank from my chip.

And the third thing that occurs to me, the thing I can’t believe I never really considered before, is that the chip in my arm does indeed work. With Mama. With the Courageoussystems. It works perfectly well and it always has.

Even though I’ve dunked that arm through the Courageous’ electrostatic shielding more times than I can remember.

I glance at the chip reader. I glance at the sterilising box in the wall. I bite my lip to hide a smile from no one (or possibly from Mama) as I get back to writing.

---------------------

This place has chip readers, like the Courageous. They work, too. Ridiculous, right? The Hylarans don’t use chips and the ship was never intended to arrive with live crew on it, so why even have the readers? My theory is that they were for when we arrived; all the colonists have ID chips even though we were supposed to spend the whole journey asleep, so I guess it’s for efficient tracking and registration of five thousand confused strangers. I know they work the same as the Courageous’readers, because Mama can read my name and rank from mine. So I guess I’m the only registered arrival from the javelin. Lucky me.

The mech fighting show was boring, Tal? I’ve never heard you call a mech fighting show ‘boring’ before. I remember when you and Sunset spend a whole day dressed in painted plastic boxes and suchlike chasing each other around the ship making robot noises.

Say hi to ship for me!

Aspen

------------------------

Dr Kim takes the letter, and I try not to look nervous, or excited, or, well, like someone hatching a risky escape plan on limited information. If we can get the door open, I need to get out of here and to allies, preferably without violence, and I don’t actually know how many people are involved in Dr Kim’s experiment here. Not a large group, or she wouldn’t have to work in secret, but there might be guards. There might be doors I can’t unlock. I might get lost on the ship and Mama might refuse to help. I might trigger some emergency protocol and set off alarms that throw the whole settlement into a panic, and I might get lost on the ship and run into the children being raised here, and Dr Kim might insist I have something contagiousand turn the colony against me as a danger to the children and… well, that could go badly. But, stay or escape, things are going to come to a head eventually. The crew, on the ground and in orbit, aren’t going to have infinite patience about half the ground crew being locked away for suspicious reasons, especially since Tinera and the Friend are apparently no-contact; the pressure must already be mounting, because otherwise Dr Kim wouldn’t be letting the crew talk to me. A lot of people are making big moves that I don’t understand, and something’s going to collapse and it could very well do so violently. I owe it to everyone to do my best to be in a position where I can help it collapse with as little damage as possible.

It’s a pity Tal isn’t a DIVR. Ke would’ve volunteered for this experiment without hesitation.

Captain Klees and Tal don’t write back the next day. Or the day after. By the third day, I suspect that Dr Kim might be suspicious enough of our correspondence to risk escalating things and she just hasn’t delivered the letter; but, no, when she drops by with my lunch, she also carries a letter and a small… something. Something waxy.

“We’ve gotten some very good data from the eye,” she says, grinning with the excitement of a scientist whose experiment is actually yielding useful results against all expectation. “I think we should give it a few more days and then kill off the synnerves and try something else.”

Hell if I want to lose half my sight again after putting all this work into regaining it, but I don’t bother to protest. I try to look bored as I take the things from the box, sit down to lunch, and read my letter. This one’s in Captain Klees’ handwriting.

-----------------

Aspen,

After the soap thing, Hive really, really wanted to try making beeswax candles, but we don’t have bees yet and it seemed like making them from local beeswax would be a better First Beeswax Candle milestone than dropping some from the ship. So instead, we were able to render some fat from the biotanks and try making candles with that. Here’s one of our first tries. They’ll be way better when we can actually use beeswax. Or real animal fat, but growing animals of that size down here is so far in the future it doesn’t yet bear thinking about.

Oh man I forgot about Tal and Sunset’s mech warrior thing. I wish you hadn’t mentioned it because now Tal’s trying to explain mech warrior media to Elenna, who is just not getting it, so Tal’s requested that Xanthe send a bunch of it down from the ship and there’s even odds that they’ll make me watch it with them. I’ve told Tal that I don’t think the Hylarans have the cultural context to get what ke gets out of the genre but ke insists that ‘people fighting inside huge robots is awesome in any culture’. Ke spent over thirty minutes trying to explain what a mech suit was to Elenna so seeing the shows is either going to make it make more sense or less sense to the locals I guess.

I’m guessing you probably don’t have fire in there to actually burn this candle, but we can burn other badly home made candles together once you’re out. Everyone misses you.

Adin

------------------

I finish lunch. I finish it slowly. I try to savour it, although it’s hard to really savour the bricks of nutrients and calories that Antarctica provides the colony. Maybe the colonists have better food from the ship by now, or at least slightly more varied food now that the biotanks are apparently active. Either way, I’m not getting it in here.

My hands tremble at the thought. Out there, there might be better food. There will be better food, in the future. Out there is open skies and sandy slopes dotted with green dandelions and people experiencing for the very first time all kinds of simple pleasures that I have always, my whole life, taken for granted. Our there, somewhere, is a gold gather-ring that didn’t make it into this room with me. Out there, on the planet and above it, are some of my people, waiting on me, trying to figure out how to save the rest of my people.

Outside this ship. Just on the other side of a few locked doors.

My whole body is shaking by the time I finish my lunch and I put all my attention to keeping it under control, because if Mama notices then she’ll worry about my health and if I can’t convince her that I’m fine then she’ll call the doctor and the absolute last thing I need is for Dr Kim to show up, worried that the experiment has done something to my nervous or endocrine systems, and want to spend days taking extensive tests while I do my best to avoid looking suspicious.I finish lunch and I head into the bathroom on legs that I will to move steadily and I take the little candle with me and I close the door against the prying eye of Mama, I’m pretty sure, but I can never be certain.

Still, Mama didn’t tell Dr Kim about the last thing that Tal smuggled me; it’s still under the sink where I stashed it. So even if it can see me, it clearly isn’t inclined to tell Dr Kim about it.

Last time. This time might shock it, if it can see me. This time I’m going to have to take more dramatic action to make things work.

I bite into the candle, chunk by chunk, spitting the wax into the basin, until I get into the very middle and find a tiny pouch in there and inside that pouch, an oh-so-familiar little chip. I spill it into my hand and stare at it, hardly believing what I’m seeing. Everything I need to do to fix everything for everyone relies on this next step, getting out of this ship.

This had better work.