Space Funding Crisis 1: Persister
By Casey Hattrey
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Cover Image adapted from:
VST images the Lagoon Nebula by ESO/VPHAS+ team
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VST_images_the_Lagoon_Nebula.jpg
Engraved Printing Plate by Edinburgh City of Print
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Engraved_printing_plate.jpg
Prologue
Look. It is space. Dumbly hanging between burning stars and winding around the gigantic asteroids in front of you, tablet-black and silent.
Time passes. Listen. You can’t hear anything – it is space.
Only you are here to see the tumbling rocks, moving in silent unison past a moonless planet. Only you can study their rugged surfaces, cosmic rayed and meteored.
Watch now, as six of the massive objects change direction and begin heading towards the hub of the Central Academic Funding Council Administration. They do this in almost a threatening way, but without revealing exactly what their intentions are, almost as if they were foreshadowing some great, solemn event.
From where you are, you can read the names of the Bloggeration spaceships – for that is what they blatantly are – scrawled in gigantic letters across the bows. The Correlation Machine, the Psychohistorian, the Zero p-value, the Desperanto, the Peer-to-peer Review and What about the Residuals?
Are the occupants sleeping? Dreaming? This is what you must assume. In fact, many of them are in the middle of a beer pong tournament. But you cannot see or hear this. Your eyes only see some dark, maleficent force suddenly decide to become part of a sinister plot. Possibly at a later stage.
Hush, the ships pass now. They are going into the darkness of the darkness forever. You, and you alone, are scanning the communication frequencies.
Maybe someone else will notice you.
Chapter 1
Blood. A tannic taste. Then the sensation of bubbles slipping past skin. Extreme heat, jangling bones. Being very aware of your hands. Falling. A deafening thud from your heart. Pins and needles, then a sharp pain in the gut. Suddenly, anger, bitterness, doubt and a deep sense of loss. Then the realisation that some of these emotions are just things that you are seeing. With your eyes. You have eyes that you use to see things. What are you seeing? A blue liquid is draining away, exposing your eyes to a cold light which makes them stream with tears. A small metallic chamber, barely large enough to hold you standing up, with corrugated sides and raw sensor nodes.
“Chryochamber”, thought Arianne.
Then a vague realisation of something grasping at her attention. A holo screen, with some writing. Blinking the fluid from her eyes, Arianne managed to read a handful of letters:
EJECT
Arianne’s stomach knotted up, as if it was somehow deeply involved in the cognitive processes of word recognition. Another blink and the screen was clearer.
Central Academic Funding Council Administration
Karen Arianne: Application for grant writing stipend for postgraduate funding submission.
Decision: REJECT
Then she really was falling. The hood of the chryochamber levered open and Arianne was spooned out onto a soft mat. She skidded on her knees as the last of the chryofluid leaked out of the chamber. She began coughing, and decided to just keel over on her back. What was going on?
Best to just stare at something for a while, thought Arianne. The room was dark and sterile. Look at that nice shiny tube running along the ceiling. A nice, simple shape.
Lightning flashed inside the tube, and then a blindingly bright, cold light exploded from it.
“Morning!”
The light was talking to her. Maybe she was dead. She’d been rejected from something, maybe death was the consequence. Were you supposed to stay away from the light or run towards it?
“Woah, it’s been a while since we uncorked a nudie.”
No wait, the sound was coming from a person. Arianne levered herself up on her elbows. There was a woman in large black overalls looking at her cheerfully. A door closed behind her.
“Where am I?” croaked Arianne.
“You’re all right, it’s just a bit of post-cryo disorientation. A triggering condition brought you out.”
The woman walked over to a swivel screen on the wall.
“Ah, your decision came in. Tough luck, lass. Still, at least it was a relatively quick decision.”
It all came back to Arianne like a high-intensity drama series download beamed into her e-brain. The hard graft and late nights of writing her thesis. The relief of finishing it. The constant weight lifting from her shoulders, slowly replaced by an empty vacuum and an uncertainty about the future. Then the realisation that life outside academia didn’t really have any space for her. Professor Golden had suggested storage in chryosleep while she waited for a decision on her application for the next tiny step towards being a researcher. She couldn’t afford rent and food anyway, lots of early career researchers did it. That damn application had taken longer to put together than most of her thesis chapters.
Arianne accepted a towel from the lady in overalls and wiped some silky goo from her face.
“How long was I asleep?”
“Let’s see”
The woman dabbed at the screen.
“One hundred and fifty three years”
Arianne’s stomach desperately tried to parse the sentence.
“WHAT!”
“I know, quite quick for a low level application like yours.”
“ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THREE YEARS?”
“Yeah”, shrugged the lady “they probably got you on a technicality.”
How the hell did this happen? She was counting on being out for ten months, tops. Arianne suddenly felt very cold. The lady jacked into the console and appeared to be downloading.
“Ah, that must have been it - your reassuring word frequency distribution isn’t anywhere near standard. And you weren’t really aligning your covert metaphors with the assessment panel’s biases. And here’s a typo. Oh dear, first time, was it?”
The lady turned to see Arianne’s pale face pulled back in astonishment.
“ONE HUNDRED AND … wait, a TYPO?” She’d checked that damn application 17 times. The lady laughed.
“Yeah. It’s a risky tactic, but it didn’t work this time. Learned it in Advanced Psychological Tactics for Funding Applications, did you?”
“What?”
“Or maybe Funding Applications 701? Dr. Waits always tries to slip some extra stuff in at the end”.
“Er …” Since when had there been 7 grades of funding application class?
“Well, did you take ANY courses?”
The arcane format of the academic achievement section of her application leapt into Arianne’s mind.
“Linguistics 101, 201, Diachronic linguistics, Cultural Evolution, Linguistic Relativity, Linguistic Special Relativity, Interstellar Linguistics, Foundations of Biology, Philosophy of Biology, Agent Based Modelling, Quantitative Statistics, Experimental Design and Funding Applications 101”
The lady gave Arianne a quizzical look.
“You did twelve pure research courses and only one funding application course?”
“Um …”
“No wonder they thought you weren’t serious about being a researcher.”
The lady was poking the screen again.
“Oh no, hang about … a ha. Sorry, love, I didn’t realise. There have bee
n quite a few changes since you went under. The IFF changed and funding rounds got pushed back. Biggest restructuring of the funding system since SPIN II, really. Your application was in the system, but not in the right format. It got pushed into a backlog.”
Arianne’s head was spinning.
“Hmm, yes, bet you weren’t really expecting a wait this long, really?”
The screen flickered and the lady tapped at it.
“Oo, wait, there’s a message here.”
Maybe some acknowledgement of the mistake? Maybe the decision had been overturned?
“Want me to read it for you?”
Arianne nodded weakly and the lady’s implant light flickered beneath her earlobe.
“Oh, my.”
Arianne sat up slightly straighter.
“This is a summons to the Central Academic Funding Council Administration.”
Arianne blinked.
“This explains the early decision. They want you to go to the main hub station, immediately. That’s pretty serious, ducky, what did you do?”
The main hub station? Rumour had it that you needed a level 18 REF just to be allowed on the orbital sections of the CAFCA headquarters. Arianne shook her head, sending beads of goo flying.
“Why am I being summoned?”
“It says here that you’re being summoned to an inquiry into the murder of Professor Alice Golden.”
Arianne felt herself fall back onto the damp mat. She stared at the bright tube on the ceiling, which blinked once, as if it was also having a tough morning.
The lady shrugged.
“Perhaps it was the typo.”
Persister: Space Funding Crisis I Page 1