Post by downwithquinn on Nov 22, 2013 13:48:18 GMT -6
A great thing about my job is that I get to write for a living, or to help others with their writing. A less great thing about my job is that, sometimes, I have to write what they pay me to instead of what I want to write. 
Some days even writing in your free time just feels like work! But I really liked the world and the characters I was creating here, so I hope I get more time to work on this.
It wasn't running away—not really. There was, after all, very little running involved and, had Mira been pressed, she would have pointed out that leaving nothing behind but the dirt and gravity could hardly be counted as having run away from anything, either. On Earth, there had been very little for her to leave, and the few ties to the planet she had had—her job in a call-center; her parents who were young enough to still be fit and independent; her friends who were all starting equally boring lives and careers in opposite corners of the continent—had seemed especially fragile when forced to bear the full weight of the ennui Mira felt crushing down on her every morning.
One of her academy classmates had been the one to tell her about Algebar. They need workers, he’d said. They were gagging for them up there. There was nothing on the whole damn dwarf planet but a couple of bases filled with families from the UESRP and their research equipment. But even scientific research colonies, when the scientists who worked there were bringing families and living on the planet for anywhere from five to fifteen years at a time, had certain societal needs that had to be met. There were children being born whose first breaths were of alien air and who needed teachers to learn from and nannies to look after them while their parents went to work. There was a constant need for replacement janitorial and general maintenance staff that, along with the secretarial pool, had a rather high turnover rate. There were literally hundreds of possible blue-collar jobs available across five small city-sized settlements, most of which you only needed either basic experience or some sort of training certificate for which to qualify. Rumor was they’d pay you well, too. Government wages and benefits were nothing to sneer at, even for low-level jobs, and your lodging and transportation would be provided by the UESRP. Plus, considering there wasn't exactly a plethora of things on which to spend money frivolously in space…
She’d thought it was too good to be true. After all, if the rewards were that stupendous and the requirements that easy to meet, why wasn’t every bored twenty-something living life in a cubicle clamoring to go soak in the light of an alien sun?
She remembered the look her friend had given her. It was the look of affectionate pity her parents occasionally gave the small dog they’d adopted after Mira’s departure from home after it ran into a screen door or barked at the strange dog on the other side of the mirror. A look that said he liked her a lot, but found her kind of dim.
Mira’d had nothing to run away from on Earth; except, perhaps, for the promise of more nothing. So when she woke up after four and a half years to see Alpha Centauri B cresting Algebar’s horizon, hundreds of millions of miles away from anything familiar, she could not bring herself to mourn the distance.
They took a shuttle down to the planet. There were actually multiple shuttles ferrying back and forth from Algebar to the dreadnought that had carried Mira and the others all the way to another galaxy, delivering supplies and fuel to the larger ship and then returning to the settlements with new passengers in tow. Mira, too bleary-eyed and sluggish from six months of stasis, barely noticed as UESRP crewmen checked her vitals, weighed her, and then passed her from their hands to someone else’s. At some point, someone had draped an ID card with a QR code around her neck, and it was this that they seemed to scan at every point to which she was herded before passing her to another orderly for more tests and questioning.
Finally, a middle-aged man in a hunter green jumpsuit pushed her down into a chair and had her strap herself in.
“Got another civ for the N.A. settlement,” he called to a similarly-dressed woman sitting in a swivel chair. The woman looked down at an electronic screen in her hands.
“I think she’s the last one. Cargo loaded?” She asked.
“Loaded to weight capacity.”
“Good,” the woman said, “Then we won’t waste fuel.” She signed something on the screen and then its lights turned off. “Everyone in your seats for preflight check.”
As the shuttle disengaged, Mira turned as best she could in her seat to see out the front window. From her vantage point only the edge of the yellowish planet was visible, but minute after minute it steadily began to encompass the entirety of the shuttle’s view. Slowly they were spiraling closer and closer to the planet.
Continents became visible, masses of land pocketed with large, interconnected pools of what, she assumed, was water—that was, after all, why the UESRP had begun colonizing the dwarf planet in the first place. The presence of water meant the possibility of the presence of life; if not indigenous life, then at least life from Earth that could attempt to thrive elsewhere in the universe.
The turbulence began on entry, marring their view of the planet with what Mira thought must surely be an exorbitant amount of heat waves. There might, she thought in a panic, even be flames. But none of the UESRP astronauts seemed perturbed. She gripped the arms of her seat tightly, but did not dare to close her eyes—as scared as she was, she did not want to miss one second of her arrival to a foreign planet.
The rocking started softly. It wasn't anything more nail-biting than your basic airplane turbulence as the shuttle approached the atmosphere barrier, but as they continued to hurtle towards the planet the shuttle began shaking. Mira felt her head knock back against the cushioned bar that worked as a headrest and the ache burst behind her eyes. Soon everything not bolted down securely was rattling in its restraints—including the passengers.
Mira strained to see the world outside the window but all she could see was flashes of color; the bluish-purple of the oceans and sky and the occasional yellow splash of land. Her eyeballs felt like they were about to rattle out of her skull. She could feel herself getting sick.
It was worse than any roller coaster ride she’d ever gone on as a kid. As the view outside the window tinted red with the flames of reentry, she gave up. Screw it, she thought. Seeing wasn't worth it. She couldn't see a damn thing and she was quickly becoming convinced that she was actually going to die. This wasn't a controlled flight down to the planet, they were falling and there was no way that this could possibly be safe.
She kept her eyes squeezed shut for almost twenty minutes until, finally, the rattling came to a crescendo and the shuttle landed with a soft thud. But instead of dying, the plane just kept shaking. Mira opened one brown eye and was relieved to see the scenery still rushing by—horizontally now, and much, much closer. She opened the other and watched the flat yellow landscape of her new home slowly come into focus.
The settlement was large—larger than she would have expected. An entire small city existed beneath several white metallic glass hemispheres. The hemispheres ranged from the size of a large farmhouse to something that looked to Mira like it could hold multiple football stadiums, and their parking lots. Each of the hemispheres was connected by one or more covered tunnels made of the same material. It was much more bizarre than it had looked on the UESRP website.
A large hangar door opened in the nearest structure, and the shuttle rolled inside before coming to a stop. The hangar closed behind them.
“Alright,” called one of the aeronauts. “Seatbelts off, IDs in front where we can scan them. Walk carefully—air’s breathable but not quite Earth normal and most of you have been popsicles for the last four years. There will be a representative from your new division on the tarmac to help acclimate you.” With a smug expression, she pulled a switch and the door of the shuttle popped open. “Welcome to Algebar.”
Mira could barely stand as she exited the shuttle. Though the craft itself was still and the ground was too-- as still as the ground of a foreign planet that was a third of the size and spun with half the velocity of Earth normal could be-- her legs didn't seem convinced. Halfway across the tarmac, she tripped.
"Woah there." A middle-aged Hispanic woman, hair pulled severely back into a braid, caught Mira's arm. The woman seemed to hold her stiffly. She gripped Mira's elbow and pushed it in to her side, forcing Mira upright.
"Sorry," Mira gasped. "I'm-- sorry. Dizzy."
The woman reached forward and examined the ID card around Mira's neck. "Faulkner, Mira, age twenty one? Well, twenty five now. Assignment N.A. lab code 34 Sigma?"
Mira looked down to check her own card, but the woman forced her head up again. Though several inches shorter than Mira herself, she nevertheless seemed undaunted by the prospect of shoving the taller girl around. Mira expected this would have been the case even if she magically regained the ability to stand upright.
"Don't look down, you'll throw off your equilibrium. Here, follow the light." Expression severe, she reached into her pocket-- a lab coat, was she one of the scientists Mira was meant to work with?-- and pulled out a small pen-shaped object. The woman clicked the pen and a bright light shone into Mira's eyes. She blinked immediately.
"Well your reactions are normal. Good. I hate the civs with freezer burn. Four years in a deep freezer? No way to travel, not once you've seen what it can do to your organs, ey." The light flickered off and she pocketed the item.
Mira couldn't help asking. "My-- so are my organs okay?"
The woman laughed, short and sharp. "That is what they have me here to check, yeah? Doctor Morena Cruz. It's nice to meet you. Try not to throw up on me on the way to the lab."
"I'll do my best," Mira said. The doctor smirked.
"Good, good-- you'll need to be able to follow orders up here." The hand on Mira's elbow slipped in, closer to her body, until she was arm and arm with the good doctor. "Lean on me if you need to, okay? Gravity's a lot less than Earth normal. Now once I'm sure you're all thawed out, I'll have to put you on a weight training regimen so you can rebuild muscle mass. That and time should help with the tripping."
Dr. Cruz helped her the rest of the way down the tarmac and through another set of hissing doors. Mira tried to remember back to the month of training she'd been given before she'd started on this journey. They left the large glass hangar dome and passed through a short tube, at the end of which was another sliding, hissing door just like the first, and like the hangar door had been, only much smaller.
"They're air-locks, right?" She asked Morena.
"Yes," the doctor answered. "Glad you can remember. Sometimes civs get brain fog when they're coming out of stasis. You're adjusting pretty well."
"You mean, I could have been adjusting worse?" Morena just laughed again. This did nothing to comfort Mira at all. She wobbled on her feet again, and the doctor pushed her back to standing. Mira decided she didn't want to know what 'worse' entailed.
"Look, this isn't Star Trek," Dr. Cruz said. "We can't just beam you up over multitudes of lightyears in the blink of an eye. Technology may have made great advances in sending real-time data streams back to good old civilization, but people? What, you want your atoms scrambled?" The doctor opened the next door, leading them into another one of the large glass hemispheres. "We don't get to skip time. We travel at the same pace as everything else in this universe. Only thing I disagree with is the ice house they ship us in. But I guess the pilots and other space-cases don't want us proles tripping over every wire on board. Well, I'm dirt-side for a ten year sentence, so deep freeze won't be a concern of mine for a good long time."
Some days even writing in your free time just feels like work! But I really liked the world and the characters I was creating here, so I hope I get more time to work on this.It wasn't running away—not really. There was, after all, very little running involved and, had Mira been pressed, she would have pointed out that leaving nothing behind but the dirt and gravity could hardly be counted as having run away from anything, either. On Earth, there had been very little for her to leave, and the few ties to the planet she had had—her job in a call-center; her parents who were young enough to still be fit and independent; her friends who were all starting equally boring lives and careers in opposite corners of the continent—had seemed especially fragile when forced to bear the full weight of the ennui Mira felt crushing down on her every morning.
One of her academy classmates had been the one to tell her about Algebar. They need workers, he’d said. They were gagging for them up there. There was nothing on the whole damn dwarf planet but a couple of bases filled with families from the UESRP and their research equipment. But even scientific research colonies, when the scientists who worked there were bringing families and living on the planet for anywhere from five to fifteen years at a time, had certain societal needs that had to be met. There were children being born whose first breaths were of alien air and who needed teachers to learn from and nannies to look after them while their parents went to work. There was a constant need for replacement janitorial and general maintenance staff that, along with the secretarial pool, had a rather high turnover rate. There were literally hundreds of possible blue-collar jobs available across five small city-sized settlements, most of which you only needed either basic experience or some sort of training certificate for which to qualify. Rumor was they’d pay you well, too. Government wages and benefits were nothing to sneer at, even for low-level jobs, and your lodging and transportation would be provided by the UESRP. Plus, considering there wasn't exactly a plethora of things on which to spend money frivolously in space…
She’d thought it was too good to be true. After all, if the rewards were that stupendous and the requirements that easy to meet, why wasn’t every bored twenty-something living life in a cubicle clamoring to go soak in the light of an alien sun?
She remembered the look her friend had given her. It was the look of affectionate pity her parents occasionally gave the small dog they’d adopted after Mira’s departure from home after it ran into a screen door or barked at the strange dog on the other side of the mirror. A look that said he liked her a lot, but found her kind of dim.
Mira’d had nothing to run away from on Earth; except, perhaps, for the promise of more nothing. So when she woke up after four and a half years to see Alpha Centauri B cresting Algebar’s horizon, hundreds of millions of miles away from anything familiar, she could not bring herself to mourn the distance.
They took a shuttle down to the planet. There were actually multiple shuttles ferrying back and forth from Algebar to the dreadnought that had carried Mira and the others all the way to another galaxy, delivering supplies and fuel to the larger ship and then returning to the settlements with new passengers in tow. Mira, too bleary-eyed and sluggish from six months of stasis, barely noticed as UESRP crewmen checked her vitals, weighed her, and then passed her from their hands to someone else’s. At some point, someone had draped an ID card with a QR code around her neck, and it was this that they seemed to scan at every point to which she was herded before passing her to another orderly for more tests and questioning.
Finally, a middle-aged man in a hunter green jumpsuit pushed her down into a chair and had her strap herself in.
“Got another civ for the N.A. settlement,” he called to a similarly-dressed woman sitting in a swivel chair. The woman looked down at an electronic screen in her hands.
“I think she’s the last one. Cargo loaded?” She asked.
“Loaded to weight capacity.”
“Good,” the woman said, “Then we won’t waste fuel.” She signed something on the screen and then its lights turned off. “Everyone in your seats for preflight check.”
As the shuttle disengaged, Mira turned as best she could in her seat to see out the front window. From her vantage point only the edge of the yellowish planet was visible, but minute after minute it steadily began to encompass the entirety of the shuttle’s view. Slowly they were spiraling closer and closer to the planet.
Continents became visible, masses of land pocketed with large, interconnected pools of what, she assumed, was water—that was, after all, why the UESRP had begun colonizing the dwarf planet in the first place. The presence of water meant the possibility of the presence of life; if not indigenous life, then at least life from Earth that could attempt to thrive elsewhere in the universe.
The turbulence began on entry, marring their view of the planet with what Mira thought must surely be an exorbitant amount of heat waves. There might, she thought in a panic, even be flames. But none of the UESRP astronauts seemed perturbed. She gripped the arms of her seat tightly, but did not dare to close her eyes—as scared as she was, she did not want to miss one second of her arrival to a foreign planet.
The rocking started softly. It wasn't anything more nail-biting than your basic airplane turbulence as the shuttle approached the atmosphere barrier, but as they continued to hurtle towards the planet the shuttle began shaking. Mira felt her head knock back against the cushioned bar that worked as a headrest and the ache burst behind her eyes. Soon everything not bolted down securely was rattling in its restraints—including the passengers.
Mira strained to see the world outside the window but all she could see was flashes of color; the bluish-purple of the oceans and sky and the occasional yellow splash of land. Her eyeballs felt like they were about to rattle out of her skull. She could feel herself getting sick.
It was worse than any roller coaster ride she’d ever gone on as a kid. As the view outside the window tinted red with the flames of reentry, she gave up. Screw it, she thought. Seeing wasn't worth it. She couldn't see a damn thing and she was quickly becoming convinced that she was actually going to die. This wasn't a controlled flight down to the planet, they were falling and there was no way that this could possibly be safe.
She kept her eyes squeezed shut for almost twenty minutes until, finally, the rattling came to a crescendo and the shuttle landed with a soft thud. But instead of dying, the plane just kept shaking. Mira opened one brown eye and was relieved to see the scenery still rushing by—horizontally now, and much, much closer. She opened the other and watched the flat yellow landscape of her new home slowly come into focus.
The settlement was large—larger than she would have expected. An entire small city existed beneath several white metallic glass hemispheres. The hemispheres ranged from the size of a large farmhouse to something that looked to Mira like it could hold multiple football stadiums, and their parking lots. Each of the hemispheres was connected by one or more covered tunnels made of the same material. It was much more bizarre than it had looked on the UESRP website.
A large hangar door opened in the nearest structure, and the shuttle rolled inside before coming to a stop. The hangar closed behind them.
“Alright,” called one of the aeronauts. “Seatbelts off, IDs in front where we can scan them. Walk carefully—air’s breathable but not quite Earth normal and most of you have been popsicles for the last four years. There will be a representative from your new division on the tarmac to help acclimate you.” With a smug expression, she pulled a switch and the door of the shuttle popped open. “Welcome to Algebar.”
Mira could barely stand as she exited the shuttle. Though the craft itself was still and the ground was too-- as still as the ground of a foreign planet that was a third of the size and spun with half the velocity of Earth normal could be-- her legs didn't seem convinced. Halfway across the tarmac, she tripped.
"Woah there." A middle-aged Hispanic woman, hair pulled severely back into a braid, caught Mira's arm. The woman seemed to hold her stiffly. She gripped Mira's elbow and pushed it in to her side, forcing Mira upright.
"Sorry," Mira gasped. "I'm-- sorry. Dizzy."
The woman reached forward and examined the ID card around Mira's neck. "Faulkner, Mira, age twenty one? Well, twenty five now. Assignment N.A. lab code 34 Sigma?"
Mira looked down to check her own card, but the woman forced her head up again. Though several inches shorter than Mira herself, she nevertheless seemed undaunted by the prospect of shoving the taller girl around. Mira expected this would have been the case even if she magically regained the ability to stand upright.
"Don't look down, you'll throw off your equilibrium. Here, follow the light." Expression severe, she reached into her pocket-- a lab coat, was she one of the scientists Mira was meant to work with?-- and pulled out a small pen-shaped object. The woman clicked the pen and a bright light shone into Mira's eyes. She blinked immediately.
"Well your reactions are normal. Good. I hate the civs with freezer burn. Four years in a deep freezer? No way to travel, not once you've seen what it can do to your organs, ey." The light flickered off and she pocketed the item.
Mira couldn't help asking. "My-- so are my organs okay?"
The woman laughed, short and sharp. "That is what they have me here to check, yeah? Doctor Morena Cruz. It's nice to meet you. Try not to throw up on me on the way to the lab."
"I'll do my best," Mira said. The doctor smirked.
"Good, good-- you'll need to be able to follow orders up here." The hand on Mira's elbow slipped in, closer to her body, until she was arm and arm with the good doctor. "Lean on me if you need to, okay? Gravity's a lot less than Earth normal. Now once I'm sure you're all thawed out, I'll have to put you on a weight training regimen so you can rebuild muscle mass. That and time should help with the tripping."
Dr. Cruz helped her the rest of the way down the tarmac and through another set of hissing doors. Mira tried to remember back to the month of training she'd been given before she'd started on this journey. They left the large glass hangar dome and passed through a short tube, at the end of which was another sliding, hissing door just like the first, and like the hangar door had been, only much smaller.
"They're air-locks, right?" She asked Morena.
"Yes," the doctor answered. "Glad you can remember. Sometimes civs get brain fog when they're coming out of stasis. You're adjusting pretty well."
"You mean, I could have been adjusting worse?" Morena just laughed again. This did nothing to comfort Mira at all. She wobbled on her feet again, and the doctor pushed her back to standing. Mira decided she didn't want to know what 'worse' entailed.
"Look, this isn't Star Trek," Dr. Cruz said. "We can't just beam you up over multitudes of lightyears in the blink of an eye. Technology may have made great advances in sending real-time data streams back to good old civilization, but people? What, you want your atoms scrambled?" The doctor opened the next door, leading them into another one of the large glass hemispheres. "We don't get to skip time. We travel at the same pace as everything else in this universe. Only thing I disagree with is the ice house they ship us in. But I guess the pilots and other space-cases don't want us proles tripping over every wire on board. Well, I'm dirt-side for a ten year sentence, so deep freeze won't be a concern of mine for a good long time."