“Great. So. Proceed. How can I be of service to the greater Prime good? Let’s kick these quarters to the curb. Give me jargon, or the idiot’s guide version, whatever works. I’ll take notes. Old school–style.” She waves a pen in the air. She is being the Good Astronaut Daughter now. She is clever at this, knows what tone to take, is aware of how she is landing.
“Keep up the communication with your mom,” Luke says. “This is the time when she needs to hear from you the most, when skipping an email or video would have the greatest impact. You might imagine that your mom won’t be interested in little things, but those little things are going to help give her a sense of connection to you that’s really important right now.”
“Hold on.” Mireille pretends to be writing. “Let me get all this down. Now, I’m supposed to be super happy and content in all of these messages.” She looks up. “Is that right?”
“For the messages, honestly, yes.” Luke is pretty sure it’s okay to offer this advice. He’ll need to review it, though. He wants Mireille to be the best possible version of herself so as not to stress out Helen and he’s physically attracted to her and he is combining these things by getting a crush on the version of Mireille that exists only in his head.
“Maybe it’s helpful to think of the letters as a kind of job, or a volunteer service,” he says. “But what I wanted to say is that it’s natural for you to experience a kind of three-quarter effect of your own. The effort to stay positive and encouraging can make you feel resentful. It’s a long haul, and—”
“Oh, don’t worry about me,” Mireille says. “I know how to do this. Hey, I got a message from Madoka Tanaka. She’s going to be in LA for work. We’re having lunch. Maybe we can exchange happy family member tips. Thirty Ways to Love Your Astronaut.”
Luke wishes there was a way to contain Mireille, manage her perfectly, just for the next eight and a half months.
“I really do understand,” she says, leaning forward into the screen. “We all do.”
? ? ?
AFTER MIREILLE SIGNS OFF Luke swipes the entirety of this conversation from his screen. Manage Mireille? He needs to manage himself.
His shift starts in thirty minutes.
Luke had to hand it to Prime. For twenty-four hours after the crew had shut themselves in the Lav there had been a lot of Prime-style shrieking. “Let’s not call this a crisis, but it’s definitely a challenging teaching moment and we should all really use this as an opportunity to get very creative in our solution streaming.” And then, they’d taken it on the chin. “That the crew finds this a necessity is probably the most revealing information we’ve had so far, and let’s be grateful for the challenge in examining that.”
“Only observe” is Ransom’s new refrain.
They are not allowed to have theories.
Ransom also keeps reminding the team that when they Gofer, the crew will have a great deal more privacy and the Obbers will have to get used to working with incomplete data.
But Prime didn’t want the crew to have more privacy, certainly not now.
Luke pictures the crew, and all the careful little preparations Prime has made for increasing astronaut enjoyment of life on Red Dawn. New exercise regimens with virtual landscapes. Special meals with complicated and time-consuming recipes. Concerts or events just for the crew uploaded daily. Specialized instruction, more training, more tests. A routine designed to help the crew navigate a daily existence that was both monotonous and restrictive and also bound at every second by an extreme peril which demanded, at the very least, total recall of massive amounts of information, lightning-quick reactions, and pretty much zero margin for error.
Maybe they should be surprised that the crew had shut themselves in the Lav for only twenty-three minutes. If it was Luke, he might never have come out.
YOSHI
This is a tuba concerto by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams,” Yoshi says. “Long Kwan is the soloist, in a live performance with the Hong Kong Baptist University Symphony Orchestra.”
Prime uploads a music performance every morning. When they Gofer, this will be part of a worldwide music participation program: Music in Space! Right now, someone in Prime is making selections. Yesterday they had a Sufi song. Sufis twirled in ecstasy when they danced, or perhaps the ecstasy of being a Sufi caused them to twirl. There wasn’t much room in Red Dawn for twirling, or for ecstasy either. Helen had bounced around in her chair a little.
They must all continue to be very normal, very nominal. They are doing, Yoshi thinks, a good job. They are acting as if Sergei had not introduced a note of paranoia. No, it was more an orchestra of paranoia. Helen is doing the best job. Perhaps she is not concerned. Yoshi wants to talk to her, very badly.
They are in a sort of trap. To ask Helen to join him in the Lav without Sergei for a soundless confabulation would be a clear indication—to Sergei and to Prime—that there is an issue of some significance. Prime already knows—probably—that there is an issue of some significance. They might have deliberately fabricated the issue to test their responses. Double blinds within double blinds were structurally possible.
There is also a world where Sergei is perfectly fine, and a private discussion is unnecessary.
Yoshi pretends to listen to the music, but there is not enough tuba in the world to sort this out.
They have plenty of time now; this exacerbates the problem. Red Dawn is a kind of incubator, and so they must be very cautious about what they allow to grow. You need words—banalities are best—to neutralize the danger. There isn’t enough space for words in Red Dawn either. Not these words.
They’ve all been trained to recognize the symptoms of paranoia. They are in perfect conditions for its occurrence, more at risk for it than almost anything else.