Noumenon. Marina Lostetter J.

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СКАЧАТЬ I thought with a smile. “Did you see that transition?” I pressed a button and the door slid aside. “It was spectacular.”

      Nika leaned casually against my doorjamb with her hands in her pockets, and gave me a funny look when I moved aside for her to enter. “Guess what?” she said, “The air here is breathable and everything.”

      “What? Oh.” I still had the space suit on, helmet and all. She came in and helped me slip out of it.

      When I and my party dress were free, Nika leaped onto my bed, bouncing a little as she looked out the window. “Trippy, huh?”

      “No kidding.” I crawled up next to her and sat crisscrossed.

      “So. Here we are.”

      “Yep.” I nodded and bit my lip, watching the last of the moon fade from view. “Here we are.”

      “You ready for it?” she asked.

      “What?”

      “This.” She gestured all around. “Our new lives.”

      I shrugged. “I guess. The place—outer space—is new, but has that much really changed? I’m still a communications officer. I’ve been doing that for the past five years. You’re still a historian.”

      “Archivist. I’m officially an archivist now. And diplomat.”

      “Oh yeah?”

      “Yep. When we bring all the info on LQ Pyx back, I’ll be the one to interface with all of Earth’s bigwigs.”

      She hadn’t told me that before. “Wow. You’re our representative, then?”

      “Only when we go back.” She lay flat on the bed, with her hands tucked behind her head. “Too bad I won’t really be there. But, hey, I like being an archivist just as well. It’s easy, it’s fun. I mean, how lucky are we? To get handed our dream jobs from the get-go?”

      I knew exactly what she meant. “I get to send the first crew report in five days.”

      “Exciting. How many days is that for them?”

      “About … forty-eight and a half. Give or take a few hours.”

      “Oh, right.” She was quiet for a long minute.

      “What are you doing?”

      “Calculating how much time goes by for Earth each minute.”

      “Nerd.”

      “We’re all nerds,” she said, smiling. She shook her head. “Anyway. They’re setting up a great party down in the mess hall. Everyone’s shuttling over from the other ships. I came to get you.” She sat up and 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.

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