Lam kept me sane. I never learned his first name, if he remembered it, he kept that particular secret to himself. But when I was first decanted and spilled out of the tube I was grown in, sputtering and naked, his voice was the first familiar thing I heard.
“Take it easy there, man. Breathe. Remember to breathe.”
I took big gulps of air, and then hacked a cough that wretched my whole body, like something was trying to push its way out my esophagus. I threw up something wet and vile onto the cold floor.
Cold. That was the first thing I felt. A cold floor. I shivered, and reached for my face. Clawing at whatever was stopping up my eyes from seeing.
“Easy. Easy. They’re bandaged up for a reason.” Lam’s voice again, I could hear it properly this time. He sounded young, my age maybe. An accent that didn’t quite place. But in it was something else, a bit of the listless resignation, that lilt that marked him out as someone in my generation. It put me at ease, if only a little bit. I could feel the gauze fabric, holding tight to my face.
“What happened to my eyes?”
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Years later, I was grateful that he didn’t tell me the truth, not right away. I probably would’ve just laid down and died right there, if I even understood what had happened to me. I was that particular kind of furious and terrified, all at once.
Better to find out later, once I understood that I wasn’t alone. That it wasn’t what had been done to me, it was what was done to us.
Years later, I could look back and laugh, at the sheer existential horror of it all. When I wasn’t covered in some gelatinous goop, kneeling in my own vomit and who-knows-what-else. So I did, I laughed.
I could tell it caught Lam off-guard, my strange, barking laugh. We were standing on a balcony above the presidium. Pointless extravagance, since we couldn’t see the view, but it was nice enough to hear the crowds cheering and the distant music playing far below. Feel what felt like real wind across our skin, ruffling the collars of our uniforms.
I heard Lam shift a bit, startled. I imagined his face, a bit quizzical, looking at me like I’d finally lost it. But that was just my own conjecture. What I heard instead was his quiet wheeze, the noise he made when he’d decided not to worry about something. Instead, he clapped his hand to my shoulder and thankfully let it linger there.
We heard the anxious tap-tap-tap of a cane on the floor, a particular rhythm that marked out Hamad and his nervous energy. He’d always been fidgety, even before being decanted according to him, and he never seemed to quite trust that he’d gotten a fix on anyone or anything in his immediate vicinity. A particular paranoia, a desire to double- and triple-check that was probably more asset then liability to a Navigator.
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“Harper? Lam?” He asked, still tap-tap-tapping on his way out the balcony. He shuddered a bit at the sudden wind.
“Here, Hamad.” I answered, tapping my own cane against the rail of the balcony, “Lam’s at you’re 3-o-clock.” Usually it was Lam that gave out precise directions to assuage Hamad’s frayed nerves.
Lam’s hand left my shoulder as Hamad tapped over to the railing, shuddering again, “Bloody high. Can’t even see it, but I know it’s bloody high.”
“Did you get your assignment yet, Hamad?” Lam asked, his tone a bit distracted.
“Valence, a battlecruiser out of Outtenhampt. Going to be a riot moving all that brass,” there was a note of pride, battlecruisers were heavy ships, nearly ship-of-the-line, assigned to competent (or very well-connected) captains and the best of our Navigator class. I wasn’t quite sure it was a reward, the responsibility for guiding 10,000 souls across the aether, though Hamad was likely the best cut out for it. “You lot?”
“Nobilis,” Lam replied, earning a soft whistle from Hamad. It was only a cruiser, but it was one of the newest in all the corp fleets. All the latest bells and whistles, advanced batteries of railguns and the fastest jump drives. “Harper got the Eschaton.”
I grunted in annoyance as I marked Lam’s teasing tone. Eschaton had been top-of-the-line. Nearly fifty years ago. Now it was a junker, a glorified parade float, cargo-pusher or diplomatic run-about when someone wanted to make a point in some photo-op. A jump drive made before the latest in safety innovations, which gave rise to the rumor was that it had splatted it’s last Navigator somewhere in the middle of an asteroid. All fixed now, of course. It was (probably) fine.
Hamad hissed, “Bad luck, mate. Well. You’re lucky ‘nuff. Maybe you’ll splat into something nice!” Jokes about dying horribly were common enough before we’d been decanted. Now, they took on a sort of comforting familiarity. I grinned a bit.
“...I’ve got some fresh prints on the stellar array, and you got my notes on cartographic interpolation, yeah?” Hamad’s tone was conciliatory. He’d been the type to let you copy his homework, or even try to teach you a bit, if you had the patience for his tangents.
“I’ll be alright. Mostly pushing cargo tonnage. And it’s a skeleton crew besides. Aim small, miss small.”
I heard Lam wheeze in, likely to try and get Hamad to shove off, but we all heard a long, low blare before he got the chance. Assembly call. It was time to report in to the rest of our lives.
Life at the Navigator Collegia hadn’t been easy by any stretch, but there’d been upsides. A sense of camaraderie, we were all in the same boat, whether we liked it or not. The proctors were apathetic at best, looking down on us the way you’d look at a wrench or a screwdriver that would occasionally refuse to do what it was meant to We’d trade hushed stories about what the world was like before we decanted, when we were sure the proctors couldn’t overhear. Hamad told us about London, about the smell of tikki marsala the way his mom used to cook it, the sights of horrible architecture blighted skyscrapers next to stonework centuries old. Lam spoke about California, the waves, the surf, the weed, the long, looping sidewalks and lines and lines of identical stucco houses. There was a sadder story we didn’t talk about, but each could infer from the parts we left out. How Hamad’s parent’s must have felt when the realized how he’d never be a doctor, or an engineer, an architect. How Lam’s sister grew up without an older brother surfing next to her.
We rode the elevator down in silence. Lam’s hand wrapped around mine. As Hamad started to sniffle, I reached out to him, feeling his shoulder before pulling him into a hug. But then the elevator chimed, and we each had to let go.