Happy 23rd/24th/25th birthday! [delete as applicable]
You did answer some of the questions I was wondering about, thank you. That made talking to you with this long delay a bit less frustrating.
I have one other question for you – what do you look like? In my head I keep picturing you like Jayden Ness from Loch & Ness. The way you described yourself sounded a bit like him, and he was studying to be a doctor too before he joined the supernatural police. (Plus Jayden is a selkie, so he turns into a seal, your favourite animal!)
Also, I have to admit that I’m not the physics genius you’ve been told. Ever since my parents died, I’ve been finding it really hard to do any calculations at all. Every time I try, my brain just seizes up.
It sounds like maybe you felt the same way, when you stopped studying medicine. Did you quit because the pressure made it hard for you to focus? How did you fix that when you joined NASA? I’ve tried everything, and nothing works. I’d love some tips.
R
DAYS UNTIL THE ETERNITY ARRIVES:
319
Today the computer alerts me that the annual maintenance tasks for the ship are overdue.
Dad and I used to do them together. He would make it into a game, asking me to hand him tools as if I was his assistant. We would do the more simple things first, like recalibrating the thermal management system to the correct temperature for the life support, and cleaning the filters of the thrust boosters. When I got bored and went off to play, he’d do the difficult jobs.
We used to carry our lunches with us and take long breaks to eat them, even though it would have taken all of five minutes to go back to the kitchen – the ship isn’t very large. But Dad said that was missing the point of a good old-fashioned picnic. We would sit on the floor in the corridor and eat sandwiches, sipping lukewarm tea from a Thermos flask.
Once, my mother came across us while we were eating our picnic. By the time I was about nine, she tended to keep to herself. I hadn’t seen her in weeks. I remember she just looked at us. I could tell she had absolutely no idea what we were doing, or why – even though she’d been the one to teach me about the importance of maintaining the ship in the first place, back when we created our model of The Infinity. When she saw us sitting there, she just turned and walked away. Dad stopped talking mid-sentence. I touched his arm, but he looked at me like he’d forgotten what we were doing there too.
That memory hurts. We’d already lost her, and I didn’t even know it.
When I find myself staring into space, I shake myself and go back to reading through the computer’s instructions for the first task. I need to replace a circuit board which is running on lowered efficiency in the sun room.
I use the 3D printer to make a new board, and open up the back panel of the UV light. Using a small screwdriver, I swap the old board for the new.
A memory I didn’t know I had appears in my mind: following my mother around while she changed a circuit board in a door lock. I must have only been four. I remember tugging on her overalls, begging her to play with me. I remember her grabbing my arms and pulling me away from an open panel.
“Don’t touch the wires, Romy,” she said. “They’ll shock you.”
It’s an old memory, so faint that only the physical act of replacing wires manages to bring it to the forefront of my mind. Forcing myself to think of something else instead, I start writing a new fic in my head.
I imagine a story where Jayden works in a bookshop. He’d probably wear a Fair Isle sweater vest and those sexy, thick-rimmed glasses that clever characters always seem to wear. He’d lounge lazily across the counter as he made book recommendations to customers. Everyone who’d come into the bookshop would leave slightly stunned, with the beginnings of a crush. He wouldn’t even notice because he’d be too busy pining after the cute girl who would go to the bookshop to buy a romance novel every single Wednesday lunchtime. Jayden would probably change his shifts to make sure he was there when she came in. Once, when she didn’t turn up, he panicked and asked all the other customers whether they knew if she was OK.
I move from one job to the next, replacing air filters, cleaning solar panels and telescope lenses, lubricating joints in the boiler and the water recycling unit, then checking the pressure of the liquid oxygen tanks. I don’t find any major problems. The ship has been working for years without anything going wrong.
I ignore the voice in the back of my head that never leaves, telling me nothing has gone wrong yet. When it does, it will be up to me to notice it. NASA used to monitor the system data, which is regularly transmitted back to Earth, but now the war has started there’s no one analysing the data except me.
My final task is to remove static from the ship by cleaning up the charged particles of dust that cover each surface. The air filtration automatically picks up most of the dust, but there’s always places where it clings determinedly. If the dust built up, the static could cause a fire, so I have to check everywhere myself, just to be safe.
I wander around with a duster, getting into all the nooks and crevices of the floors and walls. When I reach the gene bank, I check that the panel on the door is green, which means that everything is fine with the terrible cryopreserved human spawn inside.
The room contains one thousand cryogenically frozen human embryos, eggs and sperm samples, taken from loads of different countries on Earth before the ship launched. It was supposed to be a secondary source of DNA, to guarantee genetic diversity on Earth II. Now that the astronauts are gone, the embryos will be the only way that we can establish a colony on Earth II. Without the samples, this whole journey would be pointless.
The embryos will stay in long-term cryogenic storage until the ship gets nearer to Earth II. Then I’ll have to set up an enormous artificial womb in the labs. It will incubate a few of the embryos until they are fully grown babies.
There was supposed to be a whole community of astronauts to adopt the children. Instead I’m going to be responsible for raising an entire generation, to make sure that there are people to work on Earth II and make it liveable. It has a hospitable atmosphere – oxygen, water, nitrogen … all of the essentials – but we’ll still need to build housing and set up agriculture. There’ll be a lot to do.
I could start off an embryo now and bring up the first baby, if I wanted to. Maybe I would have, if J hadn’t been sent to save me. Luckily, The Infinity will have joined up with The Eternity long before we need to start caring for children.
With any luck, J knows how to burp a baby. I’m not exactly qualified. I can barely even look after myself.