Chapter 16

…[ MATIVO ]…

It took us one hour twenty-two seconds to reach Saturn. Mũsango had asked a few times if she could increase the speed a little, push the ship to go faster. The last mission on Jupiter had clearly unsettled her. But in the end, she kept in within the recommended limits for the journey. I had toyed with her, telling her she could lower the speed and increase it back again. Just to see if it would quench her thirst for speed, I had argued. But she had declined, claiming that it wouldn’t be the same.

We had watched as the point of light slowly grew as we approached Saturn. Until the glow had started to fade as the rings differentiated from Saturn. Soon, it was no more white but a brownish grey ball of gases floating ahead of us.

And here we were, staring at it in front of us. Well, not really. We were actually staring at Enceladus, our first destination in the Saturn System. The rings and Saturn just so happened to be on the background of the view. Our other destinations were littered all over. Dione was barely making it in to our Bridge Display on the far left. Tethys and Mimas on our right. Iapetus, Rhea and Titan were nowhere in sight. But we would hunt them down soon enough. But first, the crew was hungering for another try at discovering life outside of Earth. And no one was around to hinder us now.

I was of a mind to inject microbial life in Enceladus if we found none. Just to fuck with them. We had put pressure on Control Center, who had in turn pressured the haves back on Earth for green light to explore Enceladus. And they had agreed to it. Though, I thought it had more to do with the fact that we didn’t plan on drilling into the subsurface ocean. Only the Enceladus Submersible would venture into those waters.

There were reasons for our reluctance to drill that had nothing to do with the haves back on Earth. First and foremost, Ganymede had proved that we were ill-prepared for such a venture. We didn’t have anything on the ship that could offer any kind of protection for such a venture. Second, the geysers at the south pole didn’t look inviting at all. We were all scientists; we knew what happened when you punctured a pressurized vessel. That’s how chemical rocket engines worked. We would be providing a nozzle, with the drilling team at the neck.

We had settled on performing surface and subsurface in depth scans as much as we could. Gathering up all the data necessary to come up with a safe way to puncture Enceladus. There were the missions to collect as much as we could from the plumes at the south pole. We had technology enough to figure out whether there was any life related compounds in them.

We would spend more than a month at the Saturn System. No one on the Bridge was in a hurry, least of all me. So, I settled to watching the so called magnificent rings of Saturn, and was bored in minutes. For something that was supposed to be the jewel of the Solar System, it wasn’t interesting at all. At least not to me. It was just another large ball of gases, just as Jupiter, just smaller. Floating in the middle of nowhere. The rings were supposed to be magnificent, but from this close, they looked disorganized.

Looking around the Bridge told me that my view was not shared. Several of them were actively swooning in their seats, literally. It was disgusting, and I wanted to disrupt it. But my book said I should share in their reverence, show that I appreciate, or at least respected that which they revered. But I just couldn’t.

“It’s just so… it is way better to see it in person than in pictures.” Matt said from his station. I wanted so bad to tell him that he still wasn’t seeing it in person. Not until he went out on one of the missions, that is.

“Yeah. I just want to go out there and lay on top of it.” Pon said, spreading his hands and leaning back on his seat.

“You can’t.” Mũsango told him. “You would just fall through.”

“No you wouldn’t. Gravity doesn’t work like that.” Chantel countered.

“Saturn’s gravity would pull you towards Saturn.” Kalũki added. But that sounded wrong.

“You are saying that if I come speeding through the rings I wouldn’t be able to pass through?” Pon asked.

“You will. As long as you don’t meet a large enough chunk head on.”

“What would happen then? Splatter like an egg from the balcony?”

Around Enceladus was faint mist that slowly become faint as it moved away from the moon. That was the E-Ring, the outer most of Saturn’s rings. Other than the mist trailing and ahead of Enceladus, no more of it was visible to the naked eye. At least not to us. It had been fairly visible as we approached Saturn. This told me that the ring rain to be found inside the inner ring too might not be as visible as I had thought.

The rest of the ring system stretched for thousands of kilometers before us. If space wasn’t so empty, I didn’t think we would have been able to see the end of it. Enceladus felt so bright, like it could blind me if I stared at it for too long. The so called tiger stripes looked nothing more than rugged terrain to me. Just who had allowed people to give such misleading names to things?

Slowly but surely, the Exploratory Teams started on their missions. And one after another, the members of the Bridge left for their missions and returned as the days dragged on. I only had one mission on Enceladus; a surface scan. It was one of the most menial missions on Enceladus if not on the whole expedition. But missions needed to be done, the cool ones and the boring ones. Even seeing the presence of the subsurface oceans didn’t have the same thrill as it would have at the start of our expedition.

The Enceladus Submersible was expected to return promising information on the subsurface ocean. But that wasn’t expected to happen for weeks. Drilling was a slow process. The initial results of what had been collected from the plumes only confirmed what was already known. There weren’t any more compounds that could prove or disprove the presence of life in the ocean below. The more detailed analysis would be presented weeks later, but the scientists didn’t think that anything new would be found.

…[ JACY ]…

Jacy missed Kacy. She was finally ready to admit that. Not that they saw each other all the time back on Earth. No, that wasn’t it. It was more the late night phone calls after work nearly every day to ask her how she was doing and wish her goodnight. She hadn’t realized how much she had come to rely on them until they were taken from her. Now she wanted them more than ever.

It wasn’t that they didn’t talk anymore, they did. But the messages were always hours apart at the best of times. Sometimes, even days. It was hard to keep track of days out in space. Watching the clock was easy enough, but after spending hours out on a mission, then hours on research; whatever number was on the clock no longer made any sense. Besides, day and night looked the same out here.

All she wanted was to say something to Kacy, and hear her respond almost immediately. This was the one downside to Mativo. He didn’t care about interacting with people, so his investments in the communication technology industry was nonexistent. He didn’t even put in any effort at all. Someone needed to start working on faster than light communication, and they needed to do it soon.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

The last message Kacy had sent, she was happy. Joyous. If she wasn’t putting up a front, but Jacy doubted that. She had talked about how they had finally started training for crew positions. Kacy was surprised that they still had to keep working in their jobs at the same time. Sweet Kacy, wait till you get here. There will be no rest. She had thought as she watched the message.

Kacy claimed that there were thousands of them; maybe even tens of thousands of prospective crew members. She had been afraid to count, fearing that she might find the number too high. Which would prove discouraging. What would be her chances of making the main crew out of hundred thousand people, she had asked. She knew that she was good, but was she good enough to beat them all?

Jacy herself wasn’t even sure how many would be on the ship leaving for interstellar space. Come to think of it, if family and friends were allowed, would they also have to go through the training? Jacy knew that the answer to that would be a yes. Maybe that was the reason Park had been crestfallen when the timeframe was presented to him. He didn’t think his family could make the cut by then. What would Mativo have to do then? Have both family and crew left behind? Leave the family, go with the crew? Carry the family even with the risk they posed? Wow! Jacy was surprised, running a ship was no easy feat. And that was just crew selection alone.

Jacy wondered if the current crew of Robin knew of the crew training happening back on Earth. They must, she concluded, after all, everyone was talking to someone back home. With a crew selection that large, it would have made news.

Kacy continued by talking about the ships they were working on. Jacy was surprised that Control Center had allowed her to talk about it. Either they didn’t care or it was public information as it needed to be if they hoped to be allowed to ferry League of Nations citizens on them. Kacy said they were bigger than Robin. Close to three times the deck area but with half again as many decks. They were designed for three twenty crew and one thousand one twenty-four passengers. But that wasn’t the most surprising thing about the ships. No, that would be the number being constructed. Two hundred.

Mativo must be running himself dry, Jacy thought. She didn’t think he had enough money for that. And was the market really there for that many ships? He was definitely jumping the gun here. But then again, how many millionaires were there? A trip similar to their current expedition wouldn’t cost more than tens of thousands, at most a few hundred thousand. That would be nothing to millionaires. The question wasn’t whether people could afford, but if they wanted to go. And given where they would be headed, it might leave a lot of people hungry for a taste of space.

Frea’s message had been so different than Kacy’s it had surprised Jacy. For one, it was a short thing, barely five minutes long compared to Kacy’s half hour narration. Second, she didn’t talk about anything important at all. It was a simple message, talking the same way they would talk after they made it to their apartment. And just like Kacy, she had talked about the crew training too. But unlike Kacy, Frea had gone for a different angle altogether. It was like they had sat down and agreed on who would be telling Jacy what.

Frea’s opinion on the number of people on the training program was the complete opposite of Kacy’s. There was no awe or fear, only appalment and disgust. She thought that most of them didn’t have what it took to be part of the crew. Saying they were a complete waste of time and resources, her words. But she still acknowledged the need for them. Saying, they needed the bad for the good to pop. Where Kacy was unsure of her worth, Frea was way too sure of herself.

Jacy thought of asking Frea to have words with Kacy; to try and motivate her. Otherwise, she might not make it. But she soon disregarded that idea. If Kacy was going to be a qualified crew, she needed to find it in herself to see it through. She won’t be able to survive in space otherwise.

Jacy set to creating her replies to them. First and easy was Frea, talking about the absurd with tidbits of the danger in space. And then to Kacy. She tried creating a lengthy reply and her first try ended up been a summary report since the last she had sent. It felt emotionless to her. She deleted that and began again. It took her eight tries to create one she was comfortable sending.

..[]..

Jacy was in their lab working on her bioaugmentics project. It was her second side project. Or was it the third? She wasn’t sure. Maybe she had one too many side projects. But that didn’t matter. Her side projects were all the things she had been working on before she started working with Mativo. They had taken a back burner a lot. But since the breakthrough with Mativo’s project, she had gained a better understanding of the interaction between body and machine. And her bioaugmentics project, as she liked to call it, had seen leaps and bounds in progress because of it.

Jacy thought that of the few things she and Mativo had in common, one of them was their want to be more powerful than their physical bodies allowed them to be. She was a short person, and in a world filled with not so many short people, she was always at a disadvantage. She knew that the law was there to protect the weak and those who couldn’t protect themselves. But just because there would be justice for crime committed didn’t mean she wanted that crime committed on her. Better be alive to answer for killing a supposed perpetrator than be dead, she liked to believe.

She knew that she would always be at a disadvantage in all things physical. So she had pushed her body to best that she could. And then started finding ways to get past that. She had met Mativo on that quest.

At first, it appeared like they were searching for the same thing. But when she finally got the whole picture of what he was looking for, she realized they couldn’t be more different. While she was looking for a way to make her body more powerful, Mativo was looking for a way to access more power. From where, she didn’t know. She didn’t think it would be possible. A rich man’s fancy, she called it. By then, they had been friends enough that she could say that to his face. His response had been, ‘I am not a rich man, but I am very fanciful’. She had laughed and promised to help him on his fancies.

‘On all my fancies?’ he had asked. Then she had thought the question sexual, but looking at him scared her. She had a thought then, maybe it being sexual might have been better. And the following years had proved that true. A few months later, the others had started arriving. Andrew came exactly a year after that fateful conversation.

Mativo helped her on her side projects when he had the time. At one point, she had asked him if he would ever want to try her work if it worked. ‘When it worked’ he had said. But still shook his head, ‘I love all the cells of my body so much that I have issues shaving my own hair.’ They had laughed then; it was the kind of answer she had come to expect from him.

Her first true breakthrough came two years and three months after meeting Mativo. She had successfully mapped all the nerves and muscles in a lab mouse, and how they worked together to achieve movement. She had then proceeded to design a bionic forelimb, similar to the lab mouse’s forelimb, capable of working with the lab mouse attached if the corresponding forelimb were amputated. There had been a lot of failed experiments. Like a lot, before she had finally had her first successful attachment. The lab mouse didn’t do much with the limb other than use it to support its weight, and flex the bionic paw a little. Neuro-signals through the bionic limb showed that the lab mouse had lost more than ninety percent neuro-activity in the limb. It wasn’t the best news, but it still was something.

The group had been happy for her, congratulated her even. But Mativo’s reaction had been the most surprising of all. He had been ecstatic. And that had scared her. So much that she had avoided him for a few days before he cornered her and asked for a reason.

‘You had expressed joy at my success,’ she had said.

‘Is that bad?’ he had asked.

‘No.’ she had told him. ‘It was just not like you.’

‘Oh. I am reading this book, it said that was the proper response.’ He had said, relieved.

She had known that he had issues interacting with people, she just hadn’t known it was bad enough he needed a book. ‘Do not do that with me,’ she had told him. ‘Not them either.’ She had added, pointing to the rest of the group.

‘But the book said—’

‘Do you do that with your family?’

He had shook his head saying, ‘They already know me.’

‘And I already know you.’ After thinking for a while, she had added, ‘But you should still do it with other people you meet. Just dial it down.’

‘But I was reading the book to learn how to interact with you guys.’ He had said, dejected. ‘Why would I want to interact with other people?’

She had smiled at that, ‘You never know.’ Inside though, she had been scared. If that had been a constructed response, why had it felt so real? How much of what I see is real, and how much isn’t? She had thought as she watched him join the others.

She shook her head free of those memories, and got back to her work. She was close to a major breakthrough, she knew it. Even Mativo had said so. She chided herself for thinking that. Using the words of a fanciful person was not the best way to argue her points.