punched me lightly on the arm. “Better take good notes. You’ll want to detail every moment in your letter back home.”
We left the room and headed down the hall, still chatting about our jobs. “Do you know who you’ll be exchanging notes with?” Nika asked.
“Oh, you mean my pen pal? Yeah, I did some training with him. Biterman, remember? He taught me a special shorthand, since only so much info can be packed into one subdimensional signal package. Maximized my possible output. Obviously it’s not just him and me communicating, it’s all of us and all of them. We’re just the translators, in a way. There are plenty of other notetakers aboard—journalists. I’m just the one who has to compile everything.”
“Fun.”
“Oh, come on, you know it is, Ms. Archivist. We’ve got copies of millions of primary documents, and no one to stop us from accessing them. Your own personal historical playground.”
On Earth, people could only access rare documents under special circumstances. Not just the originals, but even the DNA-storage copies, since the tech to build and decode the molecules was still new and expensive. In order to read an artificial DNA strand and retrieve the encrypted information, you had to destroy it—which meant you better have the tech on hand to replace it. But we used nearly the same processes for cloning as we did for reading and replacing our databanks, so it was all there for us. Snap, nothing easier.
“We’ve got a wealth of information the average Earth layman can’t get ahold of,” Nika concluded.
And there was a reason for that. We might have old primary documents, history, but we’d be getting very little new information for the duration of the mission. We had no internet, no way to dial up an expert whenever we had an obscure question. If the information wasn’t coming with us, we likely weren’t going to have access to it—and even if I could ask mission control, we definitely weren’t getting a timely or detailed answer. Our only available communication method simply wouldn’t support it.
“We’ve got the information, plus,” Nika said with a grin, “we’ve got the brains to use it.”
“Going intellectual elitist on me already?” I winked at her. Of course she was an intellectual elitist. We all were. Nothing strokes the ego quite like being told from birth that you’ve been chosen for a fantastic mission because, frankly, your genes are better than everyone else’s.
Nika laughed.
We knew the layout of Mira like we knew our faces in the mirror. Part of our training had included two isolated years aboard, cordoned off from everything and everyone except the other ships. Mother and Father and a few instructors had stayed with us for the test run, though, to make sure everything went well. We proved we could be self-sustaining, and that we could handle the isolation.
So we walked down the corridors unerringly. It was just a few hallways, a couple of turns, and an elevator ride to the mess hall.
Yes, decorations were something we had. Yes, booze a plenty, too. Strange, I know. When we were teenagers we’d all taken bets on what they would deny us aboard. Anything distracting we were sure was out: no porn, no implant games. Drugs were something we all had on our lists. No alcohol, no cigarettes, and no caffeine.
But we were delighted to find out how wrong we’d been. Nothing illegal made it onto the manifest, of course. But we had plenty of luxuries—plenty of vices.
There was one noticeable difference between the items that made it aboard and those that didn’t, however. If it wasn’t reusable or renewable, it wasn’t there.
We could grow our own chocolate, though, like the other luxury plants—coffee, tea, etc.—but quantities were limited. We still had to ration it.
You’d never have guessed we were rationing anything at the party. And to be honest, sustainability was the furthest thing from our minds that day. We were strutting out into the galaxy, with our whole lives ahead of us. What could one day of indulgence hurt?
Before then, that party, everything had been controlled for us. If we were ever allowed alcohol before, it had been doled out by someone. Controlled by someone. Our intake of sweets, dyes, and artificial flavorings had all been regulated. We were each in the best of health, had no addictions, and no bad habits. But it wasn’t of our own choosing.
The party was a raucous mess before it hit its first hour. We’d never experienced such freedom before. No one to tell us no, to sit up straight, to stop yelling, that making out with your supervisor while sitting on top of the cake was a bad idea …
As with a lot of children who find themselves loosed from parental chains for the first time, we didn’t know when to quit. Though we were the kindest, most empathetic group of genes you could ever find, feelings were bruised and faces soon followed.
At some point Nika disappeared toward her quarters with a botanist she liked. “Go find someone and have a little fun,” she giggled at me on the way by. “Or I can stay here and you can try to convert me.”
“You’re not my type.” I stuck my tongue out and winked.
“Oh, I am. I am so your type,” she said.
She was right. And if it were any other straight girl giving me lip, I would have put salt in her next cup of coffee. But this was Nika—the sting was only skin-deep—so I just brushed it off and planned to embarrass her in front of her new bunk-buddy every chance I got.
Many of my friends followed her lead, slinking off with their significant—or not so significant—others to have some private time.
The hours stretched on, and the more bottles that were opened the more fist fights broke out. Turns out alcohol makes a boxer of the gentlest of souls. Insults flew. Someone broke someone else’s nose and forced the medics to set up a makeshift first-aid station. The soberest of the group found themselves unfairly playing nanny to those that had overindulged.
Me? I was all about the dancing. Brawlers to the left of me, criers to the right, and me in the middle doing a horrible rendition of a dance that was supposed to be done to marimbas. But I couldn’t care less about supposed to’s. I just flipped the hem of my skirt back and forth, remembering the way my mom used to shake her hips in the kitchen.
We were rowdy and uncouth, elated and hot-tempered.
And until a sharp whistle blew and a loud order was barked, we hadn’t realized that the bridge crews weren’t celebrating with us.
Captain Mahler demanded attention. When he walked into a room, it fell silent. Even at that party, high on life, as soon as we knew he was there, we shut up.
There was Mother and Father.
And then there was the Captain.
“Having fun?” The question was clipped … and rhetorical. He took to a table near the entrance, climbing atop it like a man who’d just conquered Everest. Several members from his command team stood by the doors.
There wasn’t anything malicious in his voice, nor in his stance. But I did feel like I was about to be reprimanded. His sharp, dark eyes projected a smug understanding. He wasn’t disappointed, or angry with us. But the unspoken message was clear: you can’t control yourselves, and that makes me better than you. It was as if our drunken displays were an illustration of the very reason he was in charge of this ship and we were not.
In a sense, Mahler wasn’t one of us. He was an original, not a clone, and one of only a handful aboard. His illustrious military career (if one can have an illustrious military career in a time of global peace) had gotten him a direct invitation. Why on Earth he’d accepted, no one was sure. He had to leave everything he was born for behind.
But he had. As had a fair few of those in command. I took another look around and realized no one partaking in the festivities was from Mahler’s division. I knew the captain of Bottomless quite well—he wasn’t around.
All