by Tarah Benner
Who the hell is this guy?
“I’m Chao Ping, by the way.”
“Sergeant Jonah Wyatt,” I grumble.
“Whoa. Officer!” A shadow moves over Chao Ping’s face, and I gather that he’s trying to salute me. “Right on. You totally stoked for space or what?”
“Yeah,” I say, hoping to put a quick end to the conversation.
“This whole mission is über-historic. Total once-in-a-lifetime experience. We’re gonna go on space walks and experience zero gravity. Plus, it’s gotta be like a twenty-four-hour sex marathon up there.”
I turn my head to look at him, equal parts intrigued and disturbed.
“Think about it,” says Ping excitedly. “They recruited five thousand single, unattached adrenaline junkies in their twenties and thirties to go live in space for five years.”
“Not everyone’s in their twenties and thirties,” I say.
“Everyone except for the higher-ups. They want us all young and healthy so we don’t, like, drop dead in space or whatever.”
“You don’t say.”
Ping lowers his voice conspiratorially. “I heard they even made all the female crew members get this super intense birth control shot before they came. Don’t want ’em to get pregnant from all the crazy space sex.”
I see movement in my periphery and realize that Ping is thrusting his hips.
I shake my head and hold back a laugh. If anyone’s going to be having crazy space sex, my money says it’s not going to be Ping.
“You got your room assignment yet, dude? I mean sarge. No disrespect.”
The nickname falls like a badly timed joke. “Don’t call me that.”
“Sorry.” He leans over in his seat and taps a finger on my helmet. I try to jerk my head back, but it’s held in place by my headrest. I glare at Ping’s gloved finger and see a number and a letter blinking in the upper right-hand corner of my Optix.
“Dude! We’re in the same pod!” says Ping excitedly.
Fuck my life.
“What unit are you assigned to?”
“I haven’t checked yet.”
“Dude . . . Did you read any of the stuff they gave you?”
I ignore this and immediately begin scouring my enlistment papers just to make sure I’m not in Ping’s unit. Shit.
“What’s your specialty?”
“Close-quarters combat.”
“No way!” says Ping. “So you must be, like, a total ninja.”
I hold back a groan. It doesn’t look as though I’m going to be able to get rid of Ping.
“I’m what you call an ethical hacker. I used to make my money cashing in on bug bounties, but that racket —”
“You’re a hacker?”
“I only use my powers for good,” he says quickly.
“So you’re the one in charge of hacking Russia to find out if they’re going to shoot a missile at us?”
“Yeah.”
Now there’s a scary thought.
“I mean, it was either this or the NSA . . .” Ping opens his mouth to say something else, but before he can, a pre-recorded video pops up, and the hot blond lady is back.
“Welcome aboard the Impetus. I hope you’re enjoying your journey. Soon we’ll be docking on Elderon — your home away from home for the next five years.”
The woman walks down what looks like a futuristic airport hallway. I can tell she’s supposed to be on Elderon, but something about the background makes me think the video was filmed on a green screen.
“The exterior of the space station was constructed using materials interwoven with hydrogenated boron nitride nanotubes to shield the colony from radiation. To simulate the gravitational pull you would experience on Earth, giant solar-powered thrusters rotate the entire colony along its axis.”
As she speaks, a computerized graphic shows what looks like a giant three-layered donut rotating in outer space.
“The centripetal force simulates one G, though the colony’s rotation will be paused at scheduled intervals so repair bots can perform routine maintenance on the colony’s exterior.”
The three donut rings separate, and the woman reappears to point out different parts of the space station.
“The colony has three floors — the upper, middle, and lower decks — and is divided into six wings. Within each wing are three sectors containing offices, residential suites, and public spaces. There is also a microgravity chamber located on the middle deck for research and recreational purposes.”
The donut graphic splits apart into pie-like slices, revealing the stationary core at the center.
“Our crew has worked tirelessly to equip Elderon with all the amenities you would expect from a luxury resort. Please refer to your Optix map to locate the dining hall, fitness center, infirmary, tech center, and hospitality offices. And don’t forget to visit our spa and each of our themed recreational lounges.”
I roll my eyes. So far Elderon sounds a lot like Disneyland.
“For your security and convenience, each suite is equipped with a biometric lock. Your credentials will allow you to access funds in your commerce account. All transactions will be processed in US dollars. You may upgrade your ticket at any time during your stay. Business-class and first-class suites are subject to availability. Please see a hostess for details.”
I let out a snort of laughter. What rich asshole gets all the way to space and decides that he should have sprung for the first-class suite?
“Your cargo will be delivered by bot upon arrival, and you’ll see a variety of bots at work throughout the space station. Please be advised that all bots are the property of Maverick Enterprises, and tampering with a bot is punishable by law.”
I glance over at Ping, who looks as though he’s already thinking up ways to tamper with the bots.
“If you have any questions or concerns, please see me or one of your friendly Elderon hostesses for assistance. You’ll find our office in Sector E on the upper deck. Thank you, and enjoy your stay.”
The screen goes momentarily dark, and Ping’s face reappears in my feed.
“Damn! Aren’t you excited?”
“So excited,” I say, muting my Optix.
It’s going to be a long trip.
9
Maggie
A jolt of excitement flares through me as Elderon comes into view — three thick metal rings stacked one on top of the other, rotating on an axis. We’re still too far away to tell, but I imagine it must be whipping around at several hundred miles an hour to recreate the feeling of walking on Earth.
Space Barbie Vanessa reappears as we start to dock, warning us to keep our helmets on until the fasten-harness light turns yellow.
Tripp’s leg is jiggling restlessly beside mine, and every once in a while it brushes up against me. This guy is a live wire, but I can’t really blame him. None of us can wait to see the colony in person, and his company designed the thing.
Finally, the little light above our seats turns yellow, and I reach up to unseal my helmet. It releases with a snap like a plastic sandwich bag, and I yank it up over my head.
The air inside the shuttle is warm and stale. The heat and perspiration of five hundred bodies has mixed with the aroma of new carpet and upholstery.
I unbuckle my harness and stand up slowly. My butt is sweaty inside my suit, and my hair is stuck to the back of my neck. I unzip the outer suit and get a pang of embarrassment when I remember what I have on underneath.
Tripp peels off his suit and sits there in his underwear as he retrieves his jeans. Once he’s dressed, he runs a hand through his mess of curls, looking just as fresh as he did when he first climbed aboard. Meanwhile, I’m battling a bad case of spaceship hair with my underwear stuck to my ass.
“Well, it was nice to meet you, Maggie Barnes,” says Tripp. “Ping me if your suite isn’t to your liking . . . You can always come by mine if you feel like stretching out on a California king.”
My eyebrows shoot into my hairline, and
I don’t know whether to feel enraged or flattered. Tripp has this way of making me feel as though I just narrowly avoided being struck by a bus, and it’s messing with my verbal skills.
Before I can summon a witty comeback, he’s already strutting down the aisle toward the lift, and I’m staring dumbfounded in my stupid scratchy onesie.
Shaking my head, I stuff my feet back into my boots and approach the bottleneck of people lining up behind him. When it’s my turn, I crowd on with half a dozen others and flip on my Optix to grab footage of Elderon.
We disembark and line up by the jet bridge, and I feel a draft of cool air coming from the space station. I can hear the quiet hum of the air-filtration system overhead, and I get another full-body thrill.
I’m actually in space. I’m about to climb aboard the first-ever civilian colony, where I’ll be living for the next five years.
I power walk through the jet bridge toward the door at the end of the tunnel. The doors slide open, and I step into what looks like a mall from the future.
Elderon isn’t at all what I was expecting. It’s not some dark blue-lit cave with narrow tunnels branching off in every direction. It’s open and airy, lit by artsy asymmetrical light fixtures suspended from the ceiling. The walls are made from interlocking white hexagons backlit around the edges, and the floor is covered in white tile speckled with gold.
Little glass plaques positioned near every corner point me toward the restrooms, the mall, and the hospitality office on the upper deck. There’s an information desk to my right and a little waiting area with modern white chairs.
Space Barbie Vanessa’s tinny voice is echoing through a speaker somewhere above me, quickly followed by a translation in what sounds like Hindi. Voices speaking in French and German join the cacophony, and I stop in my tracks to take in my first glimpse of Elderon.
Passengers are pouring off the shuttle toward the escalators straight ahead. They seem to lead to the mall on the upper deck, but I turn down a hallway to my left to get a more complete tour of the colony.
Immediately I notice two tracks of dotted lines beneath my feet and hear a quiet beeping coming up behind me. I turn around just in time to see a delivery bot barreling behind me, using the dotted lines as a guide.
The bot flashes its lights at me, and I step out of the way to let it pass. It flies down the hallway and cuts hard to the right, zooming toward its preprogrammed destination at twenty miles an hour.
I step off the tracks to avoid another near collision and make my way toward the heart of the colony. Straight ahead is the fitness center, but I hop on another escalator and ride up to the upper deck.
I emerge into what must be the mall — a jumbled maze of shops on risers and bright flashing neon signs. Asymmetrical panels along the ceiling beam down to mimic skylights, and a dizzying spiral staircase winds up toward the ceiling. Shops branch off on their own little levels, and I spot a pharmacy, a coffee kiosk, and a frozen-yogurt stand.
Relieved to know that there’s coffee in space, I pull up my orientation packet to locate my pod number and room assignment. Apparently, each pod is like a neighborhood, and mine is in the coach sector.
I take my time on the way back down, getting plenty of footage for my column and trying to identify the smell of the place. It’s an odd mix of plastic, new carpet, and biologic cleaners.
Apparently, I have to go through Sector M to get to coach housing, which means I have to walk through the fitness center.
I hop off the escalator and instantly feel a prickle of intimidation. The place is a maze of shiny new ellipticals, treadmills, and weight machines.
I wind along the corridor in the direction of my pod, and the ceiling opens up to the most magnificent neighborhood I’ve ever seen in my life.
I’m standing in a sort of atrium that most closely resembles a beehive. Five levels of rooms arranged in a honeycomb configuration stretch up toward the ceiling, and a sprawling set of ramps leads to the upper suites.
When I reach my unit number, a tiny pinhole camera scans my face. The door unlocks, I push it open, and a light above my head flickers on.
I step into the room and let out a laugh. I’m standing in a hobbit hole that cannot possibly be my room.
The entire unit is roughly nine feet long and five feet wide, made smaller by the ceiling that slopes to a point. I’m standing on a tiny square platform eighteen inches wide, staring into a child-sized loft. A stack of shelves in front of me doubles as a ladder, and I can see through them to a bed smaller than a twin.
There is no pillow — just a raised bump in the mattress where my head will go. Folded at the foot of the bed is a peculiar-looking cloth bag with a zipper and a thin charcoal blanket that looks more medieval dungeon than space-station chic. A white paper gift bag with a blue ribbon is resting near the head bump, welcoming me to Elderon.
I grab the bag and empty its contents onto the mattress. There’s a package of melatonin tablets for sleep, a tiny bottle of the same “comfort tonic” they gave me for space sickness, a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels, and a supergreens granola bar.
I rip open the bag of pretzels, and the nutrition facts pop up on my Optix. I take a handful anyway, and my Optix pans over the tiny bed.
Another pop-up window appears, pointing to a handle just below the mattress. I reach down to give it a tug, and the entire bed — mattress and all — flips up toward the wall. The bed stows away neatly in the cubby, and a desk pops out with a little floating chair.
I pull the bed back down and shake my head. As a New Yorker, I’m used to small spaces, but this is ridiculous.
Dumbfounded, I hang my messenger bag on a hook by the door and flop down onto the bed. It doesn’t bounce like a normal mattress. It sinks down with the weight of my body and absorbs the impact like a forgiving cloud. It’s ridiculously comfortable.
I kick off my shoes, and one of them hits the opposite wall. A circular hunk of plastic splits open and rotates to reveal a porthole, and I get my first view from Elderon.
Darkness as far as the eye can see stretches out into the endless abyss. The stars are a silvery blur from the spinning space station, and Earth is a wispy blue blob. The motion of the space station combined with the glow of the stars gives my view a twinkling Christmas-light quality, and in this moment, I am struck speechless.
Never in a million years did I think that I would be lying in my space bed looking out at the world from three hundred miles away. It’s mesmerizing — unimaginable. This alone is worth the trip.
The blurred glimmers of light look like shooting stars, and it’s almost too much for my brain to process. My eyelids slowly begin to droop, and my body sinks deeper into the mattress.
My last thought before falling asleep is that Tripp Van de Graaf is unjustifiably smug. He might have a king-sized bed in space, but his views are the same as mine.
10
Jonah
My alarm blares me awake at oh five hundred sharp. It’s dark in the little cubbyhole they assigned me, and I can’t find my Optix to save my life. I grope around on the shelf above my bed, and my fingers finally make contact with the stupid thing.
I shut off my alarm and roll over. This place is definitely not what I was expecting.
In the army, my bed was always about as wide as my body and not nearly as long. In basic, it was a bunk bed in the barracks that I shared with twenty other guys. Later, it might have been a cot in some hellhole bunker if I was lucky. The army seemed to operate under the philosophy that the less comfortable the bed, the less time you’d want to spend in it.
This bed is a different story. It’s like sleeping on a goddamned cloud. I have a window that looks out into space, but if I stare too hard at the big blue blur that is Earth, I start to feel a little sick.
Rubbing my eyes, I get up and flip the bed into the wall so that I can access the cargo bins stowed under the floor panels. Both of my bins are only half full. One of them is lined with uniforms, socks, underwear, and a fe
w sets of civilian clothing. The other contains my hygiene kit, a set of electric clippers, a Benchmade knife, my watch, and a worn manila envelope.
I pick up the envelope and pull out the one photo I take everywhere I go: the one of me, my mom, and my brother at Will Rogers beach. It was taken when I was nine or ten years old, just before Ian enlisted. It’s the last photo that was taken before he was killed and the very last one of all three of us together.
I stick the photo in a crack above my headboard and grab a clean T-shirt from my bin. I get dressed, lace up my shoes, and head to the lavatory.
It’s early enough that I expect to be alone, but someone is already in the shower. He’s singing “Hotel California” very loud and off-key, and I try to ignore him as I splash cold water on my face.
The lavatory has six showers, four urinals, and a long row of sinks. Everything is coated in the same charcoal-gray tile, and I’m amazed that the shower stalls actually have doors.
I still have dark circles under my eyes and the start of a five o’clock shadow, but at least I managed to get a decent haircut before coming to Elderon. I stick my head under the faucet to swish some water around in my mouth just as the shower shuts off.
A cloud of steam wafts out from the shower, and a disturbingly familiar face appears behind me in the mirror.
It’s Ping.
When he sees me, a huge grin spreads across his face. “Heyya, sarge! Fancy meeting you here!”
“Morning, Ping,” I grumble, grabbing a towel from a rack by the sink to dry my face. “Put some clothes on.”
Ping grins and wraps a towel around his waist. “You off to get your swole on?”
“What?”
“You goin’ to the gym?”
“Uh . . . yeah.”
“Well, shit. You need a spotter? ’Cause I’m a real good spotter. Or maybe a sparring partner?” He feigns a few punches at my reflection in the mirror.
“I think I’m good,” I say, hoping he’ll take the hint and leave me alone.