Training back at the academy on Tourus station about thirty years ago this job used to be fun”. She mutters to herself aloud, while reaching for a fresh bulb of black coffee, sat on a little dispenser above her console. The heat from the instant bulb bringing feeling back into her clammy hands. Her remarks echoing off the empty banks of machines surrounding her station in the middle of the long cold room. Gilda, the air traffic controller on shift is hunched over a bank of displays watching a dizzying array of pale green blips jostle across several CRT tv screens all at arm’s length. It’s a slow moving dot matrix puzzle. Leaning away from the console, her feet firmly tucked into the padded stirrups underneath so that she won’t float out of position in the low gravity field she occupies, an audible crack emanates from her hunched spine. With a brief moan of relief Gilda leans back towards her console and the many thousands of cargo vessels she is responsible for keeping track of.
“I can’t believe that when I started I only had to follow three vessels! Three!” She barks in a hoarse laughter. The righteous indignation present in her commanding voice. Looking at the cavernous space around her console with a sweeping glance, like she used to do when it was full of other people. Back when she could catch another’s eye, and they could both enjoy one another’s plight within the Company. “Then the company decided it was too expensive to assign individual ships to a traffic controller as a parcel, they moved over to one controller one entire route.” Gilda loves to talk out loud, because there is nobody to hear her, so she has gotten pretty good at delivering her daily diatribe with gusto. With her best performative gestures she continues. “Now back then, routes might have had only ten or twelve ships flying the same path, just days apart. The work load for us got harder, for sure, but it was manageable” she pouts. Gilda loves to bemoan the state of her job now that much of what she was trained to do has become automated.
Her role was to know where every ship was under her care. That far flung planet in desperate need of parts or it will collapse, yeah they’d ping Gilda, and she’d know where on the route the vessel was within seconds. If they’d taken evasive maneuvers, she’d know and would log it, and all parties would be notified same day. But with the consolidation of traffic controllers, and the expansion of traffic she personally had to watch, that role got pushed onto automation. Now the Company has a separate system that gets pinged, and if the same vessel names comes up time and again, even if it’s for different reasons, as soon as one question about it gets answered the Company system deletes all tickets regarding further questions about said vessel. It’s great for throughout stats, but terrible if you have multiple things you needed to know, or communicate. But that’s Company life, right. Somebody gets a bonus for tickets logged, they just say that all queries were completed. One answer fits all folks!
It’s also the reason why all earth ships have these long ridiculous sounding names, so that no two get mixed up. Pretty hard to get two with the same name when the cargo vessels get called “Clarice with the sheeps” or “Edgar, Allen and Poe” or something truly weird like “The Pauly Shore Wheezing of the Juice“. Absolutely bizarre names. Very distinct monikers that meant when a ship got pinged for its whereabouts, or a status update, the answer that came back, promptly at that, was correct. It virtually eliminated transposed numbers or letters for ship names. Hard to believe but back in the day they used just VIN numbers to identity ships. Who cares if eights, A’s, and zeros or O’s look the same on these CRT tv screens. That was when we tried to be all covert about shipping and shit. Lots of folks died because of that. Like, a lot a lot. Planets sunk into civil wars because they were given information in error about a ship not even in their system. A truly terrible time to be alive. A whole colony gone to war killing themselves over scarce resources, just to have the usual ship show up ten days later and 95% of the colony dead, or dying. It was a mess. I’m sure some one still got their bonuses though, right.
But today with the longer names, that doesn’t happen. Instead we have air traffic controller burn out. We have corporate greed to thank for that Gilda mutters to the vast but empty room. It’s not entirely silent in the cavernous expanse she calls operations. It’s one of six spaces on this far flung station orbiting some random gas giant, about four hundred meters across, and six hundred deep. What used to be filled by three overlapping eight hour shifts worth of people, is now jammed up with server banks, cold blinking lights, squeaky exhaust fans, the trickle from water cooling towers, and row upon row of dials, switches and toggles. None of which Gilda knows how to service, or maintain. Now for shift three, it is just her. She’s paid to watch multiple screens full of slow moving pale green dots. Every few seconds those blips move just a hair. It’s her job to notice if one of those blips should wink out. That means death. Total annihilation of a vessel. Black box with virtually indestructible transponder gone up in flames. Unlikely, but it happens. If an engine gets punctured, or a seal breaks and the living, breathing, volatility of a dead star erupts from out of containment, it’s a sure fire way to eliminate an entire cargo vessel, the occupants, contents and engine contained within.
Now we humans like to think of engines as merely machinery with moving parts that can be switched on and off at will. But with the size and complexity of these cargo vessels traveling billions of miles round trip month after month, they are a little unwieldy. You don’t just shut down an entire ship. Once you light an engine and trap all that energy, it stays on until its ultimate heat death from machine failure, decades or possibly centuries after it was awoken. The rigmarole the Company has to go through in order to create a new vessel these days in non trivial. It’s akin to directing the energy from a dying star into a containment space no larger than a couples transport berth on Tourus station. The action it takes to bring a ship to life is positively cataclysmic. So more often than not Gilda, and the few others left that do her job on alternate shifts have only ever seen ships data wink out of existence. Not once have they ever seen a presumed dead ship turn back on. That is, until just now.
“What the fuck?” Gilda exclaims in shock. Her hands flying across her console. With a few button presses she hits record on the displays, and rolls back the counter for the clock, and loops it to repeat over and over again. A capture of just a few seconds of screen time. Gilda transfers the few moments of display data over to the Company archives for further investigation. An until now unheard of event, right there, bottom left corner of her display, a lone pale green blip, that was once empty space one second, is a new vibrant green dot. Blinking life where there was only emptiness a moment ago.
Inside the vast array of data banks a previously scrubbed name sets off all sorts of alarms. This data gets shunted immediately to a private data center while the previously heavily redacted name “The Dirty Starling” flashes urgently. All hell breaks loose.
GHOST OF THE DIRTY STARLING: REBIRTH. Part 1
**Stay tuned for more adventures in the interconnected space short stories universe of The Dirty Starling.**
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