Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 81

by E. Lily Yu

  There’s James Dennett, a twenty-nine-year-old physicist who is tall and strapping and blonde and southern. His Texas drawl could fill an auditorium (let alone a tiny elevator pod), and his chin is so cleft that can’t shave all the way inside it so that a little tuft of beard hair pokes out no matter what he tries. Though thorough research has turned up no evidence of a history in sport, my quivering ego projects onto Dennett an undeserved air of linebacker stupidity (along with an imagined history of questionably consensual encounters with innocent college girls). He is, I am ethically obliged to point out, impeccably polite and friendly, which is honestly part of the problem; Dennett looks like he could run for President, and lose votes for not seeming real enough. He has a PhD from Cornell, significant work experience, and has almost two million dollars in debt.

  Next is Anna Petrovic, a thirty-one-year-old engineer whose family emigrated from Hungary when she was fifteen. She’s impeccably pretty, but so slim and gangly that with her hair pulled back she looks like some stick-figure impression of a woman. She wears thick but form-fitting clothes that go with her Eastern European backstory and has that peculiarly Slavic sort of social remove, quiet without being demure, unassuming without forsaking confidence. Her job on-station will be to keep the equipment performance within acceptable limits, run the installation’s many daily calibration routines. “It’s mind-numbing,” she told me early in the first day of our climb. “After three days in the simulator, I wanted to absolutely kill myself. The thought of doing it for three months . . . ” I ask whether the recruiting psychologists know of her problems with the work, which gets a laugh, as if to say, “Does a dancer tell the judges about her eating disorders?” Her post-doctoral degree has given her a net worth of negative $450,000.

  Last, and most akin to myself, is a short but muscle-rounded twenty-eight-year-old named Kingsley Pan. A half-Asian mathematician from Brooklyn, Pan has a tongue as sharp as it is quick. He is constantly making passes at Petrovic, though the references are just oblique enough that she can ignore them without losing face. Our first meeting was in the loading bay, just a few hours before stepping into the pod, when he asked me if I wanted to get into any sort of mutually beneficial porn sharing arrangement. I did not, but mostly just because I doubted our tastes would line up well. If the rejection fazed him at all, he hid it. “From what I hear,” he said, leaning close, “it can get to be an absolute fuck-fest up there. We’re talking about young, frustrated over-achievers who were selected for fitness, and who don’t exactly have much experience being idle. Trap them in a boring tin can for months at a time . . . ” Pan shook his head and we turned together to eye Dennett and Petrovic like two cackling old maids. “I give it two weeks,” he said quietly, “before they’re on each other.” I never got any financial information out of King, but I suspect that any debt-shame that did exist came from having too little, not too much.

  Pan is the only one who seeks me out to comment after our sudden vertical halt. “That’s not supposed to happen,” he tells me. “The lifts have an external power source. We can’t be out of juice. I didn’t hear any kind of mechanical failure.” Pan’s mind has a scab-picking quality with which I can identify, so after several minutes of silence, I turn to him and skip straight to the million dollar question.

  “Why are you here?”

  I’ve gambled three months of my life on the idea that the ultimate answer to that question will reveal something about modern American nature. What will it reveal, precisely? The writers of yesteryear wouldn’t have dreamed of coming here without at least a hopeful guess in mind, but I have somehow convinced myself that predictions of that sort would be poor journalistic form.

  Truth be told, the question is stupid in its essence, like asking a grieving family what they’re feeling. After all, I joined the mission for the exact same reasons they did: I’m young, intelligent, talented, and ambitious—but that’s all. I have not, thus far, developed into a Mozart-like savant, nor have I been able to chemically induce any of the revelatory neuroses of the Hunter Thompsons of the world. When my editor asked me if I would serve three months in space (plus the one-week ascent), it seemed like a way to show my enthusiasm for the job. For my scientist co-passengers, the transaction is even more straight-forward: $70,000 US for a quarter-year’s work, and access to what is still an undeniably bitchin resume bullet point.

  Pan mentions these things in his answer to my question, but then says something I’m not expecting. “These missions, they’re like a sleep-away camp for scientists,” he says. “It’s an escape, the foreign travel adventure of a neurotic careerist.” He talks like a writer, the bastard, but he’s right. After a pod-average eleven years of post-secondary education (excluding my curve-depressing statistics of course), the extreme change of scenery must be welcome. To those living with the PTSD anxiety of chronic unemployment, the monkish live-for-work lifestyle of the stations is enticing. Though it’s hard to get an exact number from some of the more secretive corps, it’s estimated that at any given moment the sky is workplace to as many as 150 people like my old-young companions.

  Work like this is increasingly becoming a rite of passage for the new class of mega-proles, people with the social credentials of a CEO, and the income of a cocktail waitress. They live like the upper class because they’re already successful, and the world just needs some time to notice. The cognitive dissonance that emerges when the world remains oblivious could drive just about anyone to drastic action.

  My companions are sufferers of late-onset adulthood, and I would shun them gladly if I weren’t a premiere member of the infected. In the bloody aftermath of the coming class war, my body will be stuffed and displayed in a museum, a statistical outlier they’ll use to scare young parents into using math tutors and regular corporal punishment. Quite naturally, I assume any war involving my generation will end in a loss for our side.

  This elevator will drop us at the second gate it passes, from which Pod 5A will spend a further forty hours climbing a lateral ribbon to Brahe Station. Brahe is one of the geo-synch setups, co-leased by four medical and pure-science research corps. It was one of the very first research stations built, which means both that it is shockingly small, and that it’s played host to more than a dozen historically significant experiments.

  My companions will see none of the glory of those early days, however. They have no following in the industry, no co-author credits in popular papers, no side-careers in molecular genetics. These are physical scientists, and I am a writer, and we are for the first time in human history of totally equal social utility. Work pool inflation has rendered us all fit for little more than cargo shipment. Dennett has a PhD in the study of the very the fabric of the cosmos, and will administer the experimental procedures of the land-lubbing professors who financed the trip from the surface. He will not know what hypotheses he is working to falsify, nor the results of his experiments; double bind? Try totally blind. The company is excluding him, this broad-shouldered charmer with a genius-level IQ, as thoroughly as it possibly can.

  “It’s monkey-work,” Pan explains. “They need us up there in case anything goes wrong. But nothing ever goes wrong.” He says this with a shrug, hanging thirty kilometers up in a broken elevator. He continues, oblivious. “They tried sending real researchers up to go do their own shitty experiments, but they only ever went up once. Three months in a tin can the size of a Bronx apartment is more than enough for most people.”

  “So if they aren’t sending the same people twice, anyway . . . ”

  “Why not send any old doctor off the street?”

  “You don’t seem to think the companies put much value on their workers.” In journalism this is called the “declarative interrogative” and it’s used by hacks, and by people who are slowly beginning to realize that they need to start getting some quotes, and how.

  Pan does not disappoint. “Us? We’re just fuel. Only difference is they bring our ashes back at the end.” Oh brother. I record this quot
e with gusto, but at the same time gripe internally; I’d love to be making seventy grand on this trip.

  It’s been half an hour since the stall, and the experts are retiring to their respective sleeping tubes. The implication is that I should do the same. We still haven’t heard a peep from command, and have I mentioned that we are thirty kilometers above ground? Pan slips into his tube and, I swear to God, claims he’s going to get some sleep. I grunt an assent, because we’re both real men and I feel exactly the same way he does. When he’s gone, and I’m alone in the common area, I slide down the wall to sit, feeling all the empty space just a few feet below me.

  My own question echoes back at me, then: Why are you here?

  It’s been almost two hours since our ascent came to its awkward, stuttering stop, and I can no longer contain the expansive pressure of the situation. It’s just myself and Anna Petrovic in the common room, and the words escape me like steam from a kettle (with all the manly timbre that implies). “Why aren’t you all more worried?” Their calm has been rubbing off on me so far, but even a passing how-screwed-are-we analysis returns some truly distressing integers. Petrovic looks at me oddly.

  “Didn’t you go through basic?”

  I did do the station’s basic training regime, though little had stuck. It had become apparent early in the first day that, being a writer, very little was expected of me (good call). From that point on I slacked shamelessly. It’s a rather annoying recapitulation of the pattern that brought me here in the first place. “Care to fill me in?” is all I say to her.

  “They’ll establish contact within three hours, or as soon as they have something to report.”

  “They won’t just call to check up on us?”

  She looks at me, incredulous. “Check up on what? If something was happening, what could they possibly do to help?”

  I’m really not sure what to say to that.

  “The lifts behind us will catch up eventually. If that doesn’t help, then we’ll have to jump.”

  I stare for a second, and before I can scream that last word back at her, Dennett approaches. “I still say it’s war,” he says handsomely. It’s meant to be playful, but it shakes me. How have I failed to consider the possibility that our journey has halted because of a war down below? It wouldn’t take much to disrupt the fine movements of the sea platform that anchors the graphene ribbon on which we hang.

  “The Chinese have little kamikaze satellites built to take out the counterweight,” Dennett claims.

  This sounds absurd to me, but Petrovic nods. “That’s true,” she says, approaching, “but this isn’t war. If it was, we’d be seeing mushroom clouds on the surface.” She glances, blasé, out the window that is the pod’s single nod to the humanity of its cargo. Petrovic tells me that if one jumps up on a bulkhead and uses the pod’s diminished gravity to hand-plant on a lighting strut, that it is possible to look with a steep enough angle to glimpse where the ribbon disappears into clear, blue ocean. If true, this proves the absence of a storm at sea.

  I decide that this needs first-hand verification (“For the Readers!”) but in trying to emulate her style of European body-knotting I succeed only in bruising my shin in an embarrassing ricochet off the ceiling. My resignation to the sexual indifference of Anna Petrovic comes even easier than my resignation to take her meteorological report on faith.

  I’m rubbing my shin rather like a clumsy child. “It could still be war, though . . . ”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much,” Dennett says, sympathetic to my civvie panic response. “It’s probably just a mechanical failure.” Just a mechanical . . . I stare at him for a moment, then nod and return to my sleeping tube, my slab.

  Command is supposed to check in within three hours of any mechanical failure. After twenty, we come to an agreement: either the comm is broken, or they just don’t care enough to bring us into the loop. Anna (two days in a crate have forced a first-name relationship) says that her gymnastic maneuvers let her see the next climber approaching behind us, inching its way up the line. “So it’s just our car, not the whole line. This one won’t have help, though,” she says. “It was already climbing when we broke down.”

  “The one after that?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  The thinking is now that the company will send a mechanic up on the next available lifter, a specialist in a space suit who will make the rather heart-stopping climb from lifter to lifter.

  “They could still fill us in,” I say, sulky.

  James (Dennett) nods vigorously. Nobody defends the logic behind the company’s policies any longer, I’ve noted. James, in particular, has developed a tic in which he will examine the comm several times per hour. He walks to it and pokes a few buttons with his left middle finger, which produces a series of incomprehensible beeps and boops that can’t possibly be telling him anything helpful. His report is the same every time. “It works,” he claims to know. “They’re just not talking.”

  Kingsley (“call me King”) Pan has been growing steadily quieter since the three-hour deadline passed without incident. He stirs now and speaks for the first time in an hour. “We’ll know for sure if there’s no mechanic on the next lift.”

  That possibility settles in to the atmosphere, gets recycled through the air scrubbers and spit back out to be inhaled all over again. Every conversation is now defined by what it is not about. Our talks are not about the man who may or may not be coming up to help us. They’re not about the possibility that we might be forced to jump nearly from orbit. I discuss literature with Anna (she likes depressing old Soviets), and James tells me about his childhood (chess club and track team). Kingsley increasingly keeps to his tube, even taking his dinner privately.

  I sleep for a few hours, and when I emerge it’s just James in the common area. He looks solitary and pensive, but I’ve been hoping for some time alone with him so I approach immediately. “Thinking about the lift?”

  “I’m thinking about jumping.”

  “Imagining it? Or considering?”

  He doesn’t answer right away. “I bought a house, two years ago. A house. I never thought I’d achieve all my goals before thirty, and still end up considering bankruptcy.” He looks at me. With just a day’s neglect, his big jaw has grown an impressively scratchy-looking coat of stubble, making him look wilder and less put-together than usual. “I can’t jump. And if I do, I’ll just have to sign right back up.”

  “Right.”

  “Why don’t you jump? There’s money in it for you?”

  “A good story. So, money down the line.”

  James snorts at this. “You came here to get a lesson, then. We’re here because we already learned it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s never any money down the line.” He gets to his feet and walks away, so I take it that we’re done.

  Kingsley jumps first. I’m awakened by a commotion outside my sleeping tube, now three days in the pod. The rescue lifter is supposed to arrive in a few hours. In the common area, Anna and James are speaking animatedly to Kingsley, who is decked head to toe in what looks like a dark red wet-suit stretched over a small internal metal frame. He’s securing a final glove, using a ratcheting system I have on my ski boots. He seems almost catatonic, eyes cast downward, totally unresponsive. He just ratchets on the glove.

  “You’re leaving, King?” I say as I approach, using his preferred moniker (to my knowledge the first time anybody has). He looks up.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why now?”

  “We’ve been here for multiple days. They still haven’t contacted us. Even if there is a guy on the lift, who cares?”

  “He’ll fix us and we can move on,” Anna says.

  “So? You’ll still be going up for a company that didn’t contact you for two days while you hung in a broken pillbox a hundred miles up!” thirty kilometers, I silently correct him. “What do you think will happen if something happens up there? It’s an old station—maybe they’ll de
cide it’s cheaper just to call the whole thing off, leave you up there forever.”

  “Oh, come on,” Anna says.

  Kingsley stands up. “This is the best thing that could have happened.” Stooping, he picks up the helmet and lowers it over his head, locks it in place with a firm sideways jerk that makes it look like he’s breaking his own neck (anatomically and professionally). Without a word of goodbye to any of us, he pulls up a marked floor panel and twists open the submarine hatch below, climbing down into a small pressure chamber. It takes a bit of squeezing to get down with the enormous bulge on his back, parachutes big enough to be useful in ultra-thin atmosphere. We all watch silently as he closes the lid behind him, no hint of hesitation. His slow confidence is unnerving to those staying behind. There’s a squeak of heavy metal as Pan locks the door behind him, then the faint whoosh of air as the chamber depressurizes, then the thud of the outer door opening fully.

  “Wait three seconds, pull upper chute,” Anna says quietly. “Fall three minutes, detach and pull lower chute.”

  “That’s what they said in training?” I ask.

  She nods. “From anywhere in the stratosphere. The first chute, the big one, keeps you from breaking the sound barrier as you fall through the thin part.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  James walks to the circular table at the center of the room and picks up his reader.

  “What are you doing?” Anna asks him.

  “Seeing if they have the specs on our parachutes.” His mouth twists up bitterly. “I’m checking their math.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to jump,” I say.

  He says nothing, keeps his head down.