The Turn

[theotherguy]

I wrote this little short story to get me back into writing. I might continue Lucid, but its looking more and more like its going to either end now or become a short novella.

The Turn

The world around me lurched with a deep, unnerving rumbling. I felt slightly giddy as my organs began to float upwards. At first I felt that I would vomit; but in time, the feeling began to fade. All the butterflies in my stomach blew away in the wind and left me hanging there in space, weightless.

This was supposed to be the greatest moment of my life, perhaps the greatest moment in everyone's lives, but at this very instant, I felt nothing. I felt no anticipation, no pride, no nostalgia or great feelings of patriotism or unity, just a staggering, monolithic emptiness--nirvana.

They told us that we were to be the greatest generation. We would pass that great invisible milestone in space and somehow we'd be marked forever: "Those kids of the Turn, the Way-facers, and the Shifters". I didn't know what they would call us in the future, but as for me, as for right now, I did not feel particularly special. I didn't even feel lucky--not even mildly so. It was simply happenstance, accident, that I'd be here at this monumental point in history to feel this weightlessness, this nothingness.

The wide-eyed, smiling faces around me didn't seem to share the same sentiment. Screams of glee and weightless tears of delight spat from every joyous head, creating a dissonant symphony of unfaltering pride. A collective cheer arose from the small crowd in my pod as gravity suddenly went away and we were all left floating, twirling in space.

Suddenly, I couldn't decide which way was up. I twisted in the air, my feet scraping from the rust-colored floor as I drifted slowly among those gleeful twenty-somethings celebrating the literal turning point of the entire operation. A spherical glob of alcohol from somebody's thrown drinking glass collided wetly on my face, leaving a wine-smelling, sticky residue burning in my eyes. They were all drinking, of course, and why not? This was like new-years, times a trillion. This was even better than the turning of the last century. Everybody had the right to get hammered--but not me. I had decided long ago that I would be sober when it happened, just to see what it was like through undistorted eyes, to remember it for what it truly was. Unfortunately, the Turn was a bit disappointing. Perhaps I should have been drinking, just so I could join in on the fun.

"Yeah!" a woman, intoxicated beyond belief, whinnied as she tumbled through the air, colliding with the brown, rusted metal ceiling. One whom I assumed to be her boyfriend followed her, smoking cigarette in hand, guffawing like an idiot. I knew that it wouldn't last long. The deceleration would begin soon. The world would be weightless for only a few more moments as the long-unused maneuvering thrusters applied a slight torque to turn it about laterally, facing us, for the first time in a little over five hundred years, back towards Earth. I could feel a slight lurch, even in the air, from the centripetal force of the vast, turning planet of a vessel. It seemed as though a slight breeze was pushing me back, shoving the little specks of alcohol on my face towards my ears. Tickling, sickly-sweet insects crept upon my face. Through the enormous windows surrounding our pod I could see the stars, the stars I had come to recognize and love, slowly moving from the rusty brown floor of the pod to the rusty brown ceiling. It was the first time I had ever seen the stars move. It was a more than slightly unnerving.

After a few minutes of giggling, mid-air somersaults, zero-gravity kisses, and a rocketing cork from a wine bottle, the stars stopped moving. The ship must have turned itself around in space, and was now facing back towards Earth. The walls let out a cheerless moan, their rusty rivets barely holding them together as the main engines, those massive furnaces on the other side of the world, crept back on.

And then, as soon as it had disappeared, gravity returned to my frame of reference. All at once, my organs weighed a billion tons. I felt like I was being pulled downward by an invisible hand. No, there was no confusion now about what was up and what was down. Down was definitely towards the rusty bulkhead six feet below me, which was now rushing up to meet me at an ever increasing speed.

I hit hard, my bones crushing against my kidneys, my shoulder blades practically slicing into my chest, my ears ringing, onto the hard metal floor. Simultaneously, a thousand shards of glass hit with me as the glasses and bottles of this grand display of gaiety shattered on an oxidized wall of metal. Wine spilled out onto the floor like blood, little specks of rubies and gold flying in grand ballistic arcs through the room as the patrons who had one hoarded them in their bellies collided face-first onto the ground, giggling.

It was over. This was it: the biggest event ever to come to pass. Every nervous aspiration, every patriotic promise, every lie every person had ever been told in the last hundred or so years came down to this, and this only: a bundle of flesh piled upon a rusty bulkhead, guffawing drunkenly, and a young man with burning kidneys lying on the floor, seeing stars. Though, more specifically, I was staring up at a flickering orange fluorescent light on the ceiling.

My excellent view of the light fixture was then suddenly replaced by the smiling, red, obviously drunk face of my friend and roommate, Rudy.

"That was awesome! Wasn't that awesome, Hal? You've got to tell me that was awesome." He grinned at me as if he had just shared the most hilarious joke in the world.

"Sure, it was awesome." I lied. No need to get existential here. This was Rudy, the fan of cheap laughs and cheaper women, the clown, the hopeless fool, the bearded connoisseur of all things boorish, my best friend.

"Dude -- you had to have seen me, right? I mean, you did see me do like twelve-pi radians there while simultaneously blowing smoke rings ?" His voice was expectant, though slurring. He reached out one massive, hairy arm to help me up, though he was staggering quite a bit himself.

"Yeah, I saw you man, it was cool," another lie.

Then he just shook his head, his eyes glazed over in the sort of 'I'm too cool to care about whatever the heck you're saying' look that he always has, and lost interest in my existence.

We talked for a little while. It was nothing but banter of course, the mindless fluff we always talk about, and watched as the few halfway sober people still around staggered and scraped their wasted friends off of the floor, and tottered back to their respective dorms in the pod. When it seemed that Rudy would either pass out or vomit all over me-- (two things which happened surprisingly often whenever he convinced me to hang out with him) -- we decided to head back to my dorm.

Things had not changed much on the ship since the Turn. Outside of the public pod from which we had come was the same dreary, wide, garishly decorated cavern of room that I had seen every day since birth. There were seven public pods per deck, and in the 'residecks' as they were called, there was a large public space in the center of each deck devoted simultaneously to the pursuits of commerce and industry, public meetings, sports, eating, recreation, and the growing of food. The enormous space before me was one such a public space, the floor covered in a patchwork of tiles, carpet, dirt, grass, and metal; the ceiling consisted of huge brown pieces of metal scaffolding. About a hundred meters above us, robotic welders were repairing a rusted piece of scaffolding. The entire deck was big enough to house a small town, and for all means and purposes, that was exactly what it was.

Sunlight, or at least what looked like sunlight, radiated out from a monolithic glass column in the center of the deck through which superheated plasma, redirected from the engines, flowed, emitting a warm, constant twighlight glow across the entire resideck. This glow supported thousands of plants, a forest of trees, and a few small fields of and wheat and barley, and vineyards of grapes spread throughout the deck.

About the entire radius of the cylindrical deck, crossed by walkways high in the air, were seventeen public pods, detachable glass structures in which people could go and find solace among the stars. The public pods were originally designed as landing craft and escape pods for the ship, but over the centuries they have taken on the purpose of supporting public gatherings and acting as general meeting spaces and places of business. There were officially fifty people assigned to each pod, and twenty five dorms, each the size of a small apartment, housed two pod-mates each. My pod, in particular, was assigned to fifty people all in their mid-twenties. We were destined to grow old in those pods, to move on every ten years or so to another one as people died and opened up space in some of the nicer senior pods.

Ah yes, the senior pods. Nothing was rusted there. They didn't have special rations. They didn't have curfew. But they were dying there. They were dying of radiation poisoning, incurable cancers, and other space-related maladies wrought from years and years of flying through space. It was a harsh trade off; but it was one we were all willing to make.

As Rudy and I shuffled down the side pod bay doors towards our dorm, I noticed a dozen or so people gathered near one of the many shops which dotted the resideck landscape. They appeared in a riotous mood. Some were younger, some older, but I saw no seniors or children. Their eyes glazed over, every face was turned towards a cube of glass on display just outside of the shop's windows. They cheered. Displayed with perfect clarity inside the translucent cube of glass was the visage of our old, wizened, charismatic Captain. The Captain beamed with energy, his smile radiating out from the display cube towards everyone in the small crowd gathered around the shop.

"This is a good day indeed!" The Captain boomed, his voice the coagulation of every politician in history, his manner counterfeit. "You, the greatest generation, the generation of the Turn, the Way-Facers, the Shifters, you have done well. You have remained faithful to the goal that our forefathers and mothers set out to accomplish those many centuries ago. My friends, just two-hundred and fifteen years ago, the Last Despot sat in this very seat and declared that the cause was dead! Just two-hundred and fifteen years ago, when the reassuring light of Mother Earth was blasted away by atom bombs, our forefathers and mothers made that fateful choice. You know the story, my friends..." Oh yes, we knew the story, we had only been brainwashed by it a billion times, "how the Last Despot and his followers decided to turn back towards Mother Earth, that dead shell of a world, and abandon our God-given quest to strive towards Eden! Do you remember, my people, how we wrought independence from that despot, and made this land no longer a society in chains, but free?"There was a roar from the crowd.

Here we were again. The Captain was going on about Independence Day again, how the original line of captains of the ship, bound by their original Earth-based rules and orders, had decided to turn back towards Earth when we lost the signal, our last remaining connection to reality, and how a small group of extremists had overthrown the captain, (called now 'the Last Despot'), and his crew in favor of a democratic government run by the crewmen themselves. It was embarrassing, really, to see this politician, whose only call to legitimate authority was by popularity contest, to be commenting on events which occurred centuries ago, as if they had happened yesterday. We had videos of the event, of course, but both the audio tapes from the last transmission from Earth and the exchange between the Last Despot and the First Captain were in an old dialect of English which none of us could understand.

"They made a fateful decision that day, two-hundred and fifteen years ago, to continue on towards Eden," he continued, "oh, there were dissenters, to be sure. Many wanted to turn back. Many did not see the glory in continuing. But now the dissenters are all gone, and the opportunity for abandoning our God-given goal has past. As of today, there is no turning back!" Another cheer, "As of today, we face that distant star which our forefathers and mothers called their home, and as we see it descend into oblivion, a new star, a new hope grows ever brighter!" Another cheer, and then, a chant, one I had heard echoing through the resideck at the turn of each new year, "E-den! E-den! E-den!" the crowd chanted drunkenly, as the politician sputtered on.

We walked past them. I wasn't in the mood to hear more garbage about 'the forefathers', and that mystical, distant land, which had been renamed from 'HU8578' to 'Eden' by the glorious First Captain himself on 'that fateful day' two hundred and fifteen years ago. We had known, known for decades now, that Eden was nothing but a barren desert of a world, having only one small sea and miles of nothing but low, inedible shrubbery. But it had oxygen. I suppose that once you've been travelling in a rusty hulk of a ship for a few centuries even such a sandy rock as HU8578 would seem like an Eden.

"Oh man, I don't feel so good Hal.." Rudy groaned, leaning on me,"How far to the dorm?"

I let out a sigh, "Just a few meters man, I know you can make it. Like I always say, one foot in front of the other, right?"

He stumbled, "One foot...oh man..." He stumbled against the wall, and I half-dragged, half-carried him to our dorm.

 

[theotherguy]

Latching the ellipsoid aluminum door behind me, I dropped Rudy down near his bed like a sack of potatoes. I would let him deal with his own drunkenness, whenever he woke up. I took off my shoes. They were plastic sandals, a popular fashion in those days, and tossed them against the cracking plaster wall. I lay down on my soil-colored bed and stared up towards the ceiling. I wasn't quite sure how I felt at the moment, but if I had to describe it in one word it would be this: 'cheated.'

I noticed a small cockroach crawling on the ceiling near the tiny LED light bulb, its hairy body casting hideously oversized shadows across the room. It was disgusting. Nobody knew how the little bastards had gotten onto the ship in the first place. Perhaps they had laid eggs in the original store of seed; perhaps they came in with a crewman?s possessions. Wherever they had come from, the cockroaches were to be found in every pod on every deck of the ship.

I sat up in the bed and fumbled around for something to swat the damn bug with, but couldn't find anything. My Link lay on the bedside table, tempting me to shove it in my ear and become lost in the bliss of the Net. It was a tiny glass pebble, no larger than a pea. It usually never left my ear, but I had taken it out today so that I could enjoy the zero-G experience of the Turn; but the turn had paled in comparisons to the experiences I had on the Net. I had friends on the Net, all of them artificial, of course, but they were a hell of a lot more friendly than the people in the real world.

I reached for it, but pulled my hand away. No, I wouldn't get on the Net tonight. I would spend the last hours of the day in the real world. Besides, I knew that once I put the Link in my ear, I'd be unable to take it out for at least a week.
I was tired. I looked up to see that the cockroach had scurried away, probably to some dark corner of the room. I had heard rumors that the roaches lived in the millions between decks, feasting on the decay of plants and human waste that settled there. I would not be surprised if that were the case.

Our dorm was as cobbled together as the rest of the ship. Two of walls were covered in fresh plaster, while the other two were interlaced with plastic panels and metal rivets. We couldn't afford to have the entire place remodeled, (Nobody could), and so we simply had to get each part replaced by a new one every few months. A piece of electronics here, a light bulb there, an appliance or a piece of furniture every now and then... Sometimes we had to replace entire sections of bulkhead which had rusted out after decades of neglect. I suspected that nearly everyone since this ship left Mother Earth has had to do the same thing. You simply can't build a ship and hope for it to last for hundreds of years, especially one this large and complex and you simply can't afford to repair and replace the entire thing if it's the only piece of matter within light years, so we recycled. Rust became soil became iron became steel became new parts for the ship. But of course, things were wasted. It was one of the major crises these days, the fact that we had lost half of our matter to out-gassing, irradiative decay, and other sources of waste in the past five hundred years. It was why things were so expensive these days.

I stood up, and hobbled over to a desk in the corner of the room. On the desk was a collection of gossamer plastic displays which had brightly colored lettering scrolling across them. The latest news, information about the ship, last night's ball game, the latest progress on the latest public work, everything was contained in these pages. I shoved them aside. Sitting at the bottom of the pile was a transparent film on which was projected the smiling face of my girlfriend.

I had taken the picture in the park, when we had gone last Saturday. She was holding a sugary treat on plastic stick, something they were selling in the park, and was just about to take a large bite of it when I snapped the photo. She looked beautiful in the picture, her red hair flowing in the breeze. The picture was animated, of course, and I could see her mouth begin to close around the little blue sugary delicacy on the stick. She was lovely.

I considered calling her, but decided against it. She was probably out partying with her friends. It was the night of the Turn, after all. I had asked her if she wanted to come with Rudy and me to the public pod to see it, but she had decided to go with her friend Josie, and perhaps a hundred others, to see the event first-hand on the bridge. I loved her, but at times I felt that she didn't care much for me. We'd only known each other for a few months, and already I was having thoughts of marriage.

Marriage! Marriage meant nothing in this hell of a place. I had heard on the Net that in the early days of the Journey, the crewmen on the ship had married and had children freely, both stupid ideas, but certainly more interesting than what went on nowadays.

Overpopulation had forced one of the Despots to decree that the number of people on the ship should be set at no greater or less than 10,500. This was one of the reasons that the First Captain had led the revolt. But after just twenty years of free sex after Independence Day, the Captain decreed that the population limit would still stand. That decree has remained in effect for over one hundred years now. Sure, a man could get married here, but he could have no consummation. Births were strictly controlled by the Captain and his men. It was something we all resented.

I turned her picture over, and glanced at the snoring body of Rudy. He probably would have liked it better if I had put him on the bed. Oh well. He was heavy and I didn't feel like lifting him. Instead, I made my way to the bathroom and splashed cool tap water over my face. In the mirror, I saw that the lesion had grown larger. I would have to see the doctor again. Radiation lesions were hardly life-threatening, but they were a constant nuisance. The last time I had one, it had given me melanoma. This time, the lesion was on my face, a tiny red gash above my right eyebrow. I frowned, poked at it a bit, felt it sting, shrugged, and headed back to bed. The lesion would have to wait until the morning.

After a few hours of simply lying there and thinking, I succumbed to temptation and shoved the link in my ear. I felt a wave of well-being flood over me as fantastic images and sounds flooded my brain, and I drifted to sleep, the cool buzz of information flooding my entire existence away.

 

[Saruke]

I think it's a very good story so far I'd just be wary about using first person it's a little tricky to pull off.

 

[Dan]

Your narrator comes of as a huge condescending prick. Maybe that's the intention. It reminds me of Holden Caulfield because of the many other similarities too. Some of the exposition is a little bit less than subtle, kind of defeating the purpose of first person.

 

[theotherguy]

Your narrator comes of as a huge condescending prick. Maybe that's the intention. It reminds me of Holden Caulfield because of the many other similarities too. Some of the exposition is a little bit less than subtle, kind of defeating the purpose of first person.

Not my intention. Narrator is supposed to represent how I would feel in that situation. I guess I'm a condescending prick.

I agree with the exposition. I suppose I got stuck in a rut trying to explain everything.

 

[JFry]

I liked it quite a bit. I've always thought something like this would be a great setting for a movie or book. I think if something like this were to ever happen depression would be a big issue for people. Your entire life would be nothing but a stepping stone for someone else's life. Somewhat noble, but rather sad as well. Many of the nice things we take for granted on earth like mountains, oceans, sunsets, might be first doubted and possibly even considered fairy tales as generations went on. Interesting stuff, and I don't think it's entirely unrealistic to think a scenario like this may happen at some point.

 

[Saruke]

wait.... "whinnied"???

....are you sure you want to use that particular word?

 

[Dan]

I imagined a really ugly horsey woman going yeeeehawhawhawhawhaw; I think that's what he's going for.

 

[theotherguy]

Another section:

The Launch

She was huge. That is all I can say about her. No other single word comes to mind. Big, maybe -- gigantic, certainly -- colossal, yes, but most of all, she was huge. From the surface of the Moon she had looked like a bright point of light in the sky, slightly larger than the stars around her, but dwarfed by the Earth and the Sun. But here, just a few hundred meters away, she filled the sky with her enormous girth.

"Holy hell, Jack, how big do you think she is?" I remarked, gazing up at the giant web of steel and carbon fiber covering this hulk of a ship.

"Well, I'd say she's maybe ten kilometers long, at least, maybe a two or three kilometers in width. However big she is, she's a monster, that's for sure." Jack was slowly shaking his head at the sight of the quickly approaching ship ahead of us.

He was right. She was a monster, a colossus.

"What I want to know," Barbra, our electronics specialist, announced, "is how much it cost. I mean this thing must have cost trillions to build." Her head, too, shook slowly from side to side.

"She's a ship, Barb," Jack corrected, "Call the ship her, not it."

"Whatever," she sighed, "I'm not a navy buff like you, Jack."

"And for the record, she took hundreds of trillions to build," he continued, "more than the GDP of Earth earned in a decade. Do you wonder what half of your income tax, half your parent's income tax, half the budget of every country went to for the past fifty years? This was it."

Of course, everybody knew about the ship. She was controversial. She had been in the news every election year, as every politician in every country promised to end the project -- but nobody ever did. We had considered that hunk of metal in space to be a sunk cost, a mere necessity. We were now riding a carbon nano-fiber space elevator up to that sunk cost, now simply a landscape of metal spires and gleaming carbon webbing above us.

"Huh," I gasped in awe, "I knew what I would be getting into when I signed up for this, but I hadn't prepared for this view..."

Nobody responded. We were all thinking the same thing as the elevator ascended the last quarter of a kilometer to the ship. Suddenly, we could hear the whirring of an electric motor through the metal cage of the elevator as we were spun around to face the surface of the moon. We were accelerating in the opposite direction now, slowing down to a stop before arriving at the ship.

"Now this view is even better!" Jack exclaimed, giddily, "I think I can see my house from here!"

I couldn't see my house, but I certainly saw the dim glow of electric lights on the surface of the moon, the glow of the lunar base below us, where we had spent the last few months preparing for the mission. As I craned my neck upwards, I could just barely see over the horizon of the Moon, where the Earth, a fragile blue marble, sat.

"You know," I began, "this may be the last time we see the Earth. Ever. Our children might not ever see Earth again. Neither will their children. Or their children's children, or --"

"Oh let it rest Jim." Barbara cut me off, "Don't think I haven't thought about that every day for the past few months. We all know what we're getting ourselves into. We've all been briefed. Besides, we'll get to see Mars in a few weeks."

"Do we really?" I sneered, "Do we really know what we're getting ourselves into? Have you ever spent more than a few weeks on a space craft? We're going to have to spend our entire lives on this ship. Our entire lives, Barbara ..." I trailed off, staring at the Earth. It was beautiful. Maybe HU8578 would be just as beautiful. It didn't matter; I would never be able to see it. I didn't want to think about it.

"It's alright, Jim..." Jack tried to console me, and probably himself too, "We've just got to focus on what's happening right now. Right now we're about to step into the greatest construction project in the history of mankind and run some diagnostics on the equipment. Jim, we're about to light the biggest candle in history, and it's going to keep burning for a thousand years."

"Scratch that." Barbara corrected, "We're going to shut the engines off when we get to Mars and then light them back up once we've picked up the remaining colonists. Then they're going to burn for a thousand years."

"Right," Jack snapped, annoyed that his little philosophical metaphor had been ruined.

Then, there was a sudden jerk, and we were weightless. It felt as though someone had cut the elevator cable, and we were free falling back towards the moon, but rather we were simply cruising at a slow, constant velocity through space. It was something I would never get used to. Newton; he was a brilliant man, but you would never realize just how brilliant he was until you've travelled at a constant velocity through space and felt the profound weightlessness.

At that moment, the gleaming metal jaws of a gargantuan crocodile snapped over us as one of the many radial bay doors of the ship closed behind us. I watched with misery as the pale blue light of the earth disappeared behind the bay door, leaving us in an infinite darkness which would not cease for the rest of our lives.

They showed us around the ship, then. We were gathered with the rest of the crew which was to man the bridge during launch, all fifty or so of us. Brilliant minds, we all were. I was surrounded by scientists, engineers, techies, and specialists from all over the world. The crewmen, all wearing sleek, white cotton uniforms, led us through the corridors of the ship. It was an awkward experience, the tour in zero gravity. We each had to move around by kicking off the walls of a glass tube about three meters in width, apparently designed for the sole purpose of getting people in the most leisurely and awkward fashion as possible from the docking bays of the ship to the bridge; a whole five kilometers, traveled less than two or three kilometers an hour, a whole flock of us kicking off the sides of the tube and grabbing on to metal hand-holds.

 

[theotherguy]

The tube passed through what one of the crewman called a residential deck, a cavern of town-sized proportions in which we would apparently spend the rest of our lives. It was lovely, really. Everything was either made of gleaming aluminum or freshly painted white steel. I witnessed a group of flying robots spray-painting the last bits of unpainted steel near the scaffolds of the ceiling. Of course the metal needed to be painted; you wouldn’t want the structure to rust, not in space.

I could see hundreds of other robots near the apparent bottom of the cavern, hastily laying down patches of grass and planting saplings, the oxygen producers of our closed eco-system. I knew very well what would be supplying those saplings with light. My personal specialty was the control of superheated plasma, the basic technology which would be used to circulate plasma around the ship and back towards the fusion-powered engines, and which would also provide the entire ship with warmth, light, and power.

After a while we passed through the residential deck, and then two more, before coming to the bridge section. It wasn’t just one large room, like the bridges of interplanetary cruisers. It was more like a collection of several offices around a central, circular atrium. A bulb of glass covered the roof above the circular area, through which we could see the stars, sterile and cold. The walls were of whitewashed steel and plastic. I had the odd feeling as I entered that room that I was falling towards space through the bulb, and that everyone was simply upside-down. The feeling quickly subsided, and the world righted. The floor was the floor and the ceiling was the glass bulb on the roof.

Once we were all gathered there, the crewmen and a man who called himself the captain came around and handed us plastic identification cards and a voucher for each of us to obtain a uniform after the ship had gotten into motion.

“I guess we’re part of the crew now,” Jack said, his lips pursed as he gazed at the plastic identification card. His picture was on it.

“Alright, is everyone here?” The captain asked timidly. He was a small man, shorter than I, and had a balding grey head. He wore a white uniform, just like everyone else, but had a small blue star on his hat identifying him as the captain.

“They’re all here,” one of the crewmen announced, “we gave out all of the identification cards.”

“Good,” the captain responded, stepping into action, “welcome to the Astra, ladies and gentlemen! You all know why you’ve been chosen for this mission, and I want you to recognize that you are the most skilled crewmen I could ever hope for. You’re the leaders of your fields, and you won’t only make good bridge hands, but good leaders of the community we will set up here on this ship.” He paused for a moment, a twinkle in his eye. The man had a Texas accent. “Each of you will be assigned to a station on the bridge, and to a dormitory in the highest residential deck. In a moment, a crewman will show each of you to your stations and go over the basics of the controls. Right now, I want you to put one of these Links in your ear,” he held out a collection of glass pebbles, which sparkled in his hand, and then closed his fingers so they wouldn’t float away. “They’ll be your basic communication devices for the remainder of this journey. We are close enough now that they will be able to connect to the Earth’s Net. Take some time after we’ve set off to contact your loved ones, because after that, the Links will only be able to connect with servers on the ship. I’m sure each of you knows the plan for today. We are to run a test of each major system on the ship, and then at two thirty today, we are to cut the elevator links and set the main engines burning. In about three weeks, we will arrive at Mars. After picking up as many colonists as we can, we will begin our journey. First we will pass near to the sun to fill our fuel tanks with hydrogen, and then we will leave the system completely. We will not pass any other planets after that until we reach HU8578, so make sure you all get a chance to use the toilet before we go.” There was a hum of nervous laughter.

The crewmen showed us to our stations. My station was a tiny cubicle at the far side of the bridge. The crewman leading me into my station was an Asian woman. Her black hair puffed and flowed like some frightening medusa in zero gravity. She handed me my Link, and I shoved it in my ear. I resisted the urge to immediately peruse the Net, and let the information trickle, rather than flow, into my brain. She showed me a cube of glass which was to be my display, and showed me the controls. I knew exactly how the thing worked already. I had been training for months, and I knew the commands like my native tongue.

I thanked the crewman, and steadied myself in front of the terminal. There was a chair bolted to the floor beneath me. It was useless in zero gravity, but I knew all too well what it would be for. I strapped myself into the chair, clicking the poly-fiber belts across my chest and waist, and let my hands rest on the smooth glass panel of my station. I knew that I didn’t have to touch it to make it do what I wanted.

I suddenly heard a voice inside my head, “prepare for launch in T-minus fifteen minutes.” It was the captain, speaking to the crew over the Link, “all stations begin test in T-minus two minutes.” I didn’t have much time.

I turned the console on by merely thinking, and numbers began scrolling across the glass panel on which my hands rested. The glass cube in front of me lit up, revealing a translucent, three dimensional display of the ship, with a golden line straight through the center highlighted in gold. She didn’t look so colossal here, as a mere cartoon floating in front of me. I knew that the golden line was the small part of the ship that I would control, the plasma exchange duct.

“T-minus sixty seconds,” the captain announced, “begin fusion reaction in chamber one.”

I heard a small blip in my head, and an affirmative, “Yes, captain,” before a golden flash erupted in the rear of the holographic display of the ship, signifying the start of the fusion reactor.

“T-minus forty seconds,” the voice in my head echoed, “begin plasma circulation.”

“Yes, captain,” I said aloud, exactly as I had trained, “beginning plasma circulation now.”

I stretched my fingers over the glass panel, thought the appropriate thought, and a red line began travelling over the golden wire in the center of the display of the ship, and eventually stretched over the length of the ship.

Over the next forty seconds, every other system in the ship was turned on, with the exception of the engines. The test was successful. Then, after a grueling thirteen minutes, the captain began the countdown, “cut the elevator lines and engage the engines in T-minus twenty seconds,” a pause, and the distant sound of pinging as the elevator lines, our last tether to civilization, were cut. “T-minus ten seconds …” The glow at the rear of the display of the ship increased in size, and became blue. “Nine,” I heard a groan throughout the entire ship for the next six seconds as if it were shaking in anticipation, “Three,” the glow grew brighter, “Two,” another voice chattered in, “Engage,” the captain again, “One.”

The kick from the engines was not what I expected. It wasn’t exactly a liftoff from Earth. It was more like the acceleration of an elevator. Suddenly, where I had been weightless and disoriented before, I was now absolutely sure of where down was. One G. That was all the acceleration this massive hulk of a vessel could muster, but it was all we would need.

“We are under way,” the captain announced, “good work, crew.”

I would never see Earth again.

 

[Dan]

Again, I really think you gotta focus on show not tell. It might as well be a wikipedia entry if you are just going to stick in the back story preceded by the words "I knew very well..."

I think for something that big, it would be pretty well known what the length is. It's the kind of thing news stations love to say. And what does "the man who called himself captain" mean. There's a doubt that he might be lying?

And from what I have seen of NASA launches, and what makes sense, is you don't start doing stuff at T-minus 30. Usually everything is ready hours before launch. You would definitely not wait until less than a minute to start up a fusion reactor.

 

[theotherguy]

Again, I really think you gotta focus on show not tell. It might as well be a wikipedia entry if you are just going to stick in the back story preceded by the words "I knew very well..."

I think for something that big, it would be pretty well known what the length is. It's the kind of thing news stations love to say. And what does "the man who called himself captain" mean. There's a doubt that he might be lying?

And from what I have seen of NASA launches, and what makes sense, is you don't start doing stuff at T-minus 30. Usually everything is ready hours before launch. You would definitely not wait until less than a minute to start up a fusion reactor.

1. This is why I should stick to realistic settings in modern day America.

2. a) I dunno, maybe it was top secret? Maybe I just wanted a plot device to give away the length
b) It means that the crew didn't know who the captain was before they got there. It's also a slight barb at the captain during the Turn and what he was saying about The First Captain and the Last Despot and all of that.

3. True, but that would have been boring. I'll hand wave it by saying that they didn't want to waste any of the hydrogen idling the fusion reactor.