The wind changes and Shell smells food from the kitchen prepared for the ground staff and their families. Passengers and crew like Shell are already eating space food, like they’ve already left Earth.
Around her are the living areas of the quarantine house. High-rises of glass and steel forming a rectangle around the courtyard. One thousand passengers waiting to board various space shuttles that will ferry them to the starship Ragtime.
Shell, just out of training, along for the ride or experience, committed to ten years in space in Dreamstate, arrival and delivery of passengers to the colony Bloodroot, then ten further years on the ride back. She’ll be mid-forties when she returns. Might as well be a passenger because the AI pilots and captains the ship. She is the first mate, a wholly ceremonial position which has never been needed in the history of interstellar spaceflight. She has overlearned everything to do with the Ragtime and the flight. At some predetermined point, it will allow her to take the con, for experience and with the AI metaphorically watching over her shoulder.
She turns to her own building and leaves the courtyard. She feels no eyes on her but knows there must be people at the windows.
The quarantine house is comfortable, not opulent like that of most of the passengers. The Ragtime is already parked in orbit according to the Artificial who showed Shell to her quarters. Inaccurate: It was built in orbit, so not really parked. It’s in the dry dock.
Shell spends her quarantine reading and lifting – not her usual keep-fit choice, but space demineralises bone and lifting helps. She usually prefers running and swimming.
The reading material is uninspiring, half of it being specs for the Ragtime. It’s boring because she won’t need to know any of it. The AI flies the ship, and nothing ever goes wrong because AIs have never failed in flight. Once a simulated launch failed, but that was a software glitch. Current AI is hard-coded in the ships’ Pentagrams. MaxGalactix makes the Pentagrams, and they don’t make mistakes.
If she’s lucky, it’ll be two weeks of quarantine, frenetic activity, then ten years of sleep.
Shell works her worry beads. She has been in space, orbited, spent three months on a space station, spent countless simulation hours in a pod in Alaska, trained for interstellar, overtrained.
“It’s a legal requirement,” her boss had said. The private company had snatched her right out from under NASA’s nose six months to the end of her training. Shell still feels bad about it. She misses a lot of good people.
“A spaceflight-rated human has to go with every trip, but you won’t have to do anything, Michelle. We cover two bases: the legal, and you clocking space years. After this, you can pretty much write your own career ticket.”
“If that’s so,” said Shell, “why isn’t anyone else sitting where I’m sitting? Someone with seniority?”
“Seniority.” Her boss had nodded. “Listen, Michelle, you have to get out of that NASA mindset. We don’t use seniority or any of those outdated concepts.”
Shell raised an eyebrow.
“All right, your father has a little to do with it.”
Of course he did. Haldene Campion, legendary astronaut, immortal because instead of dying like all the other old-timers, he went missing. Legally declared dead, but everybody knows that’s just paperwork. A shadow Shell can never get away from, although she is not sure she wants to. A part of her feels he is still alive somewhere in an eddy of an Einstein-Rosen bridge. She once read that dying in a black hole would leave all of someone’s information intact and trapped. Theoretically, if the information could escape the black hole the person could be reconstructed. Shell often wondered, what if the person were still alive in some undefinable way? Would they be in pain and self-aware for eternity? Would they miss their loved ones?
The TV feed plays The Murders in the Rue Morgue, with George C. Scott streamed to her IFC. The film is dated and not very good, but it keeps Shell’s mind engaged for a while. Next is some demon-possession B movie, a cheap Exorcist knock-off that Shell can’t stand.
Each day lab techs come in for more blood and a saliva swab. It isn’t onerous – a spit and a pin prick.
On day ten, the Ragtime calls her.
“Hello?”
“Mission Specialist Michelle Campion?”
“Yes.”
“Hi. It’s the Ragtime calling. I’m going to be your pilot and the ship controller. I wanted to have at least one conversation before you boarded.”
“Oh, thank you. Most people call me ‘Shell’。”