My name is Douglas Hourbeck and I could use a drink.
We have been at this job for nine months now. Earth Standard months, 270 days. The computer gives us an estimated four weeks before the data is complete, another three weeks home, and a week detox, quarantine, and debriefing. By the time I stand planetside and watch a sunclipse, I will have been weightless for nearly a year's time.
My job is mostly mathematical. We are a survey team, charting out the cosmic radiation, the gravitational forces, and the likelihood of particles careening through this particular area of the solar system. The corporation funding my team hopes to build a modified Dyson Shell to generate star maps and to test their designs for faster than light drives. All I know is this job is paying me enough that I can take a sabbatical next year and get in some mountain climbing.
James Cardnal is the secondary pilot, he bunks above Janet Davies when they aren't sharing warmth and swapping spit. Nothing's secret on a tin can like this. After a weekend of binge drinking and liver pills James and Janet had found each other compatible enough for a year in space, and I only asked that they not throw us all off course bumping ugly in the cockpit.
Janet could fly in a pinch but I hired her for her skill on freewalks. Mountain climbing requires a certain sense of invulnerability and a willingness to look honestly at one's physical and psychological limits, then to work within those limits. Walking untethered in space pushes well beyond my psychological limit, quite honestly. I can do it, but if I'm out there more than a few minutes I get.. well.. jittery.
Janet has her own strength, she is able to embrace the void with excitement, while I feel only fear. It is for her skill in extra-vehicle activity that I hired her, but it is for her nerve and her audacity that I respect her.
James went to flight school with me, we've only three months difference between us in age. Twenty years ago he got me a job running cargo from the elevator platform out to the freestation this side of the belt. We'd get plenty of time off, usually spending it in the islands around the elevator base. Long nights, drinking sake and eating smoked fish, flirting with the other subcontractors and the locals through language barriers with subvocal translators.
Before I died the first time, I was more certain of my career choice. Now, looking out at the same unchanging nothingness I've been staring at for months, I start to wonder if I'd made a mistake along the way. Certainly I had the ship, but it was nearly all I had; or rather, it was all the company had, and I was the company's owner. There were the offices in Micronesia, but since Caitlin shattered the front door on her way out for good, they'd been slowly filling with dust, two forgotten room chairs, a desk. A flatscreen still on perhaps, with the glitching streaks of frozen light on the upper right of the screen sending gliders of digital static across the screensaver images.
I admit, I am nostalgic now for those two cubes of commercial property I still own, on land purchased on loans yet to be paid away. Measuring the exact influences on this section of space with the most sophisticated quantum hardware on or off world was costing Mogan Global more money than I've ever seen, and I buy rocketship fuel. After I get back, I'll have enough to pay off those loans a hundred times over.
Now I'm awake, writing. Nothing to do when you maintain a data retrieval unit. There's displays, read-outs, real-time models.. but you can only stare at this stuff so long before one's brain shuts down and the displays stop conveying information. James is asleep and Janet is playing chess against a board. I have plenty of time to decide before we begin to head back. I can do anything, but what do I want to do? That's the real issue.
This ship isn't as crowded as my previous entry implied in tone. We have eight hundred square feet of gravitationally irrelevant living area outside of the ship's control area. There are tension-based exercise mounts, a few immersive gaming consoles, and a water cycling system so powerful we could spend the entire eleven months showering without ever running out of hot water.
Everything is built forward of the backscatter shielding, and the living area is designed to maintain life support even amid particle showers or a direct asteroid hit. Short of a comet headfirst into the cockpit, there is very little chance of a hull breach. Unintentional hull breach, at least. Since my first death I've become somewhat obsessive about dying. I think I've thought of every way it could happen here, within this vessel.
Our food comes via a solid block of carbon, restructured to order via a nanofax preset with our dietary needs, dispensing a nutritious sludge with a uniform orangish-grey hue. James has an elaborate set-up that provides psilocybe in surprisingly strong strains, and we've spent several days tripping in immersive games rather than tending to the tedious data streams. There's still some rum stashed in Janet's things she thinks I don't know about. What she doesn't know is I've still got two quarts of gin last I checked. Sadly, my stack of THC patches have nearly run out. If this weren't such a lucrative job, I'd have set back to earth two days ago.
You can choke down sludge and slap on patches for only so long before you forget what a tomato tastes like, or how the crystals and hairs on a freshly budding rasta smell. Space travel turns you into an epicurean. You appreciate fragrance, you understand flacour, colour, and notice inflection, tone, and intent much more clearly. You even learn to admire gravity, to worship it, for it is the only thing keeping you back on earth, with flavour, with colour, with scent and experience and city. Gravity alone maintains the conditions of life.
And I am here, distant, alone. Above this primary point to which I have been assigned. Janet is asleep. James is under headphones and goggles. He may be asleep. Perhaps he has developed a sense of responsibility and is monitoring data levels, waiting for the meter at the bottom of the display to finally register complete, so we can return to earth's gravity well. Perhaps he is neck deep in virtual pussy. From here there's no way to tell.