Chapter 3
About 18 Krots earlier Effie arrived, slightly flustered, at the internal communications room. The first duty of the day (after breakfast) was to write out instructions and issue the schedule for the next 56 onts. The Choral mind had isolated another set of proteins which Tindruilite lifeforms possessed which the native biome lacked, these could be targeted, the blight upon the world below could be cleansed. The only problem was, protecting the crew from their own treatment.
The clean rooms on the bio-engineering decks would be needed for the dual developments of a short lived, microbial parasite which could be dispersed across the planets atmosphere to cleanse it, and a special marker which could be administered to the crew (and all later Tindruilite visitors on to the world) to deactivate the parasite before it could do them harm.
Effie lived for that sort of work, the intricate architecture of proteins and the calculated cell division which was required to limit the life span of an engineered microbe or virus, since their earliest years it had been a passion. Engineering the simple gene codes of smaller life forms. A memory surfaced, of a chance encounter with a False Morning, a brightly shining creature which roamed the deepest darkest woods of their home on Tindruit. No, not their home, this was at least two generations back, must have been Avilia, she’d lived on the home world. Regardless, although half blinded by the radiance of the thing, Avilia had noticed the injury in its back and the strange blue, glowing fluid it had left behind . She had extracted the bioluminescence from the cells contained in the fluid and implemented it into a number of bacterial prokaryotes from her mouth, and had astounded her friends a week later by showering them with the living glow-dust. As they typed up the days schedule Effie hummed with happiness at the memory, before wincing at the memory of the scolding Avilia had gotten after explaining how they’d got the glowing bacteria. As it turned out, this was for good reason, the bacteria were mostly harmless, but propagated quickly throughout the bodies of half the local population, causing most buffers in the town to start glowing around the mouth for several weeks afterwards. It had been Avilia’s and now Effie’s, first lesson in the unforeseen consequences of careless trait harvesting.
They finished writing up the schedules, dispatched the general ones into the stations communication system to be delivered to the crews private quarters and to their personal communications devices whenever they were in range. The schedules were not usually relayed to groundside teams since they would not need to know who was doing what whilst they were gone. Then Effie printed off their own personal schedule to keep on them. 10 days ago, Effie wouldn’t have needed to keep a schedule for themself as they had an eidetic memory, but the process of reassembling an individual after spending so much time integrated into the compound consciousness of the choral mind was occasionally prone to imperfection and Effie had, it seemed, acquired the forgetful nature of one of the other crew member’s brain. They suspected it was Stactfil. Stactfil was always losing things and spent so much time in choral concert that aspects of his psyche were encountered in the stations mind it even when he was not part of it. Rumour around the crew was that Stactfil had personally seen the doom of this place, and preferred not to have a self to think about it. Well, thought Effie, I hope whoever gets my memory puts it to good use.
Tindruilites were not, by nature, very singular creatures, they rewrote their own biology regularly, and inherited parts of their ancestors memories which shaped their personalities as they grew up. So, losing part of their minds to someone else and acquiring part of someone else’s was not (as it may be for humans) a moment of sheer anguish and existential dread, but rather a minor hiccup requiring only slight adjustments.
Furthermore, Effie was of the view that there were some things it was better to forget. Now what was next on the schedule?
They quickly checked, and realised they had to do a repair job which would take half an ont and write a report which would take 3 onts, before half past 4 in the Venluash , which was fine except after that they needed to get back to their carpentry project in the residential quarters to apply a new layer of organic oils.
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Effie sighed, this looked like a multitasking day. With a bit of a groan and a crack of their cartilaginous skeleton, Effie put on arm on each side of their head and pulled, sending as they did a message to the glands at the base of their slimy neck to release a solution which dissolved the ligaments holding it to their body. neck and head parted from one another with little ceremony, and the head sprouted new limbs to manoeuvre without the body. The back up nervous system in their torso kept their body moving. "Right," said the head, "I'll be Writing Effie, and you be Maintenance Effie, you know the job and I'm counting on you" Maintenance Effie did a little bow and sprouted a pair of eyes "Of course Writing Effie, I won't let us down" and then they moved to the nearest airlock to put on a suit for the spacewalk required to make the repairs. Writing Effie turned around and clambered onto a table to do the report at the tabletop computer. “Final Analysis, Orica reconstruction efforts for the 4th Ignatia of the 231st year of reconstruction, completed by the choral mind designated Korathon, report by component mind Effiseon…”
In the meantime the other half of Effie got suited up, grabbed the EVA tools and headed several floors out from the centre where the triangular outer section of the station had its airlocks. They climbed into the airlock feet first and began depressurisation. This was foolish, they told themselves as the atmosphere hissed out of the enclosed space, conducting a spacewalk with less than your entire nervous system intact was an easy way to lose the parts of your nervous system you did use for it.
On the other hand, it was practical, and members of other professions did it all the time, so get out that airlock and repair that solar array. Whatever part of their brain would retort to such a flimsy excuse, had wisely stayed behind in their head, so they attached the harness, some small navigation thrusters and opened the final door into the noiseless void outside.
The cosmos opened up before them. Passing over the threshold of the station, nearly every direction extended infinitely into darkness. Directly below them, loomed the beautiful world they had orbited for nearly 20 years, a bright blue and yellow gem bathed radiance, spiral storms dancing over its surface, glittering oceans speckled with small islands barely visible even to Effie’s extremely precise vision, the great continents curved away from them in grand arcs. At this time of day, the scars of their peoples hubris were visible in only one place, the northern most continent facing them, pocked with lava filled craters where the orbital bombardment had scoured the land, to its southwest was the Northern quarantine zone, where the ecosystem was closely monitored and field tests were carried out.
To their left and behind them, nearly everywhere in fact, they could see the stars. Of every shade and hue, burning with heavenly radiance. Orienting themselves to look behind, they were packed so densely that they merged into an indistinguishable fog of light, a ribbon of glowing mist spilt across the canvas of the night. Immediately above them, past the looming form of the station they were more spaced out, getting fainter and fainter as they moved their back up eyes towards this system’s central stars, until its own glow completely obscured them.
The station itself was an impressive sight from the outside, large, and mostly white, lit starkly in the vacuum, its shadows were impenetrable and its lighted sections nearly blinding, it resembled a triangular box, with rounded off corners, with a circular dagger shoved through the centre, the triangle was in turn separated into three smaller triangles which were connected to each other at the corners by thick rectangular blocks, but connected to the dagger only by thin supporting struts and three long cylindrical tunnels. One of these triangles had a broken channel on its adjustment thrusters. The station required them to move in orbit and rotate itself. They could also be used as backup for maintaining orbit should the primary thrusters fail, but they needed to be used together and synchronised. With that thruster at risk of misfiring, the station was potentially at risk.
Effie fired a burst from their own thrusters and shot towards the outer hull.
Had Effie known to look at this time, upon the horizon of the planet, and had they the wherewithal to adjust their already well adapted eyes to detect such minute disturbances in the corona of a terrestrial body and scrutinise the way the light reflected at one point in the southern hemisphere, just where the planets silhouette blocked anything else from view, they might have noticed what Stactfil, the lethargic old buffer currently manning the stations observation centre, designed to anything approaching the planet or station, had noticed a week before, but was unable to inform anyone else of due to his forgetful tendencies, A small metallic gleam of something that should not have been there. Something artificial, something approaching from below the plane of the planets orbit, something alien, even on this alien world.
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