Category: micro short stories

It is at once both soft and yet insistent. Peeling my face up from my beds mattress I realize it is the chime of my intercom with a message notification. I can also now feel a slight buzzing from my wrist biometric unit. Head lifted from the bed, I roll to my left, feeling the fatigue of my last rotation through the ship as a Half-Three crew member, or the more popular terminology ghost crew. Laying now on my back, I pull each leg individually up to my chest and stretch out my hips, ankles and knees. Six four hour shifts per twenty four hour day for sixteen days straight is what is known as a hell week to all new ghost crew. It’s an unofficial officially sanctioned introduction to the dynamics aboard the Dirty Starling, and just about any other vessel with more than a thousand crew members across the solar system, and beyond. The fugue like state we enter in order to access much of the ship wide systems knowledge is both a blessing and a curse. I’m a generalist, so I can do a little of everything, but I don’t remember much more than snippets of any given shift. I float into and out of rooms, departments and situations to place a finger in the dam, and fill a warm spot on shift until someone else can take over full time. It’s not all glamour or suicide missions into the heart of a broken down reactor core. Sometimes I just sit in a seat and keep a space warm while I twiddle my thumbs. I’m just an average guy, you know, run of the mill. Part of becoming a Half-Three is being able to meld into the crowd and be inconspicuous.  I’m a six foot tall, one hundred and eighty five pound guy. Just some guy. My eyes don’t twinkle, I don’t have a dazzling smile, my voice isn’t rich velvety smoothness. Just a guy, who passes through the ship to fill gaps. That’s my life, passing through and filling gaps. And that life is currently beeping at me to read an urgent message.

Ref code ultima_00094763    At 06:00 report to sigint terminal forty seven, followed by cargo bay 003471 for the remaining five shifts. Access to restricted materials handling area will require a full body scan before and after. End.

So much for getting a minimum of forty eight hours off between rotations on duty. But that’s why they pay us the big bucks I guess. I can’t spend it if I have no down time, or family, or friends, or hobbies or much of a life – at all.

I pull a fresh beige ghost crew uniform out of my closet, feeling the pressure rings snap tight over the various points of my body. These suits are a godsend incase of a serious injury or loss of cabin pressure aboard a space fairing vessel like the Dirty Starling. Each pressure point acts like a tourniquet when needed during a traumatic injury. The crew uniform coveralls are linked to your biometrics and will clamp down at the two points closest to a puncture or wound. Saved countless lives that way. Also nanotech safety helmets cover your head in the merest fraction of a second if vaccum is ever detected. From the spec sheets we reviewed at the Mars technical institute you could live inside the suit without any external supplies for close to a week. A terrible, horrible no good week, but you’d live to tell the tale – apparently. Great stuff, these crew uniform coveralls.

After dressing in my room I trigger the reply notification from my orders and a glowing blip appears on my wrist. The navigational application will lead me to the signals intelligence terminal I need over in the science department decks. The nav app could successfully lead you through Daedalus’ labyrinth to any broom closet you needed to find the whole world over. It’s a technological marvel. From the status report I have about two hours of walking to do unless I can flag down a side by side crew transport, or a weapons hauler willing to let me hang off the back. The main passages on the Dirty Starling are large, but not as wide as the thoroughfare aboard the Tourus. The Tourus is a space station floating geosynchronously in the dark shadow of the moon. It’s where everyone starts their love affair with space as a human at least. The process to get up there is – let’s say… unpleasant. But a necessary evil if you will. I interned in the machine shop there for four years before being pulled scholastically for the Mars Technical Institute Half-Three program. I spent another five years there doing as many subjects as I could manage until under going the required brain surgeries and subconscious training regimen.

After day dreaming my way through the bulk of walking around the vessel I find the appropriate SIGINT terminal bay in complete disarray. Wires are hanging out of the walls and panels, sparks are shooting across the cavernous room, the lighting is flickering when it stay on long enough to show itself. Along the back wall is a massive row of floor to ceiling windows with technical drawing over laid on them. Star charts and conversion tables are displayed there as well. Down the hall a warning klaxon can just barely be heard. They impossibly loud boom of the klaxons is unmistakable. I had never realized they could go off separately in different parts of the vessel. I assumed it was an all or nothing ship wide alarm. Hmm.

I step into the space beside terminal 47 and search for the standard ship board time, I make a note of it on my uniforms left sleeve. It’s here I will make a series of three dashes to mark off my shifts for the next twenty four hours. Marking the start time let’s me know what time of day it is when you get deep in the weeds of a long rotation. It’s a lot of mental gymnastics if I’m tasked with doing anything time sensitive.

A commotion is breaking out in the centre of the room. A tall man in a burgundy uniform is arguing with a disheveled maintenance technician dressed in a red uniform, she looks tired and irritated. The burgundy dressed man is attempting to harang the technician about the mess and disruption because his superior is on the way down and the upgrades haven’t been completed yet. Apparently this is the usual state of the room, and it’s a software issue which the maintenance woman regards as not her problem. She’s trying real hard not to scream that she only does hardware and you need a programmer to fix the UI issues. With a puff of exasperated breath the red uniformed technician brushes her hair out of her face and marches out of the door. Immediately she splits in two at the waist and dumps buckets of blood onto the floor and wall in the hallway. A deafening silence fills the room as SIGINT techs all stare in awed shock.

Before they can compose themselves an orange jump suited woman steps across the rooms threshold and over the remains of the bisected tech. “Well what the fuck is going on down here Jones? Are my signal upgrades ready yet or what? Who the fuck is painted over my walls down here Jones!” The short angry woman in orange coveralls is red faced and has sharp features. A serious short hair cut closely cropped to her well shaped head. Jones, the burgundy wearing director of the SIGINT terminal bay is sputtering and distraught. “I have no idea why she’s” “….AWOOGA…AWOOGA…AWOOGA… CONTAINMENT BREACH ON DECK 19. ALL HANDS TO MUSTER STATION ONE… REPEAT CONTAINMENT BREACH ON DECK 19. ALL HANDS TO MUSTER STATION ONE. REMAIN AT YOUR WORK STATION…DO NOT GO INTO THE HALLS…AWOOGA…AWOOGA…AWOOGA…” and just a suddenly as the klaxon kicked on, it shuts off and the red flashing lights go back to soft blue. “Jones! Why the fuck are we getting a station wide alert a full seven minutes after it was dispatched?”. “I told you before ma’am, the signal attenuation out this way is awful, the signal repeaters miss half of the signal and fail. We’ve got thousands of miles of cables and fiber optics to reach us here and for some reason we can’t diagnose without tracing every inch of the line or inspecting every single junction panel between here and the bridge. It’s a logistical nightmare, sir. Ma’am, sir.” “Jones, do you mean to tell me that we can look and talk to the furthest reaches of known space outside the ship, but can’t figure out how to get a warning directly from the admiral on the bridge in a timely manner?” “Uh… yes sur – ma’am sir. We built the external system ourselves, and the internal system we just oversee after the fact – sir.” “Yes, well as long as our project gets results we can put in another requisition for the alarm system to come in via our departments wrist comms instead.” With a sharp turn of her head the orange uniformed woman turns to look at me, her hawkish eyes a piercing grey. “You there, Mark is it. I know you were to go to materials handling next, I rode in on your personnel transport, but I’m going to commandeer you for a few extra shift blocks to man a couple of terminals at once while we clean up what remains of my best maintenance technician. Christ all mighty Mark, she walked right into the on coming path of a loose particle from our Hadron Collider. Burned straight through her. I’m going to have to write to Josephines parents”.

I don’t really know if the orange jumpsuit meant to get that familiar with me, but looks like I’m here for a bit, so best to settle in.

Part Two: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

Dirty Starling, we have your crew corners ready to go, in it you’ll find your uniforms and a detailed docket for your next twenty four hours. So I understand you’ve signed on as part of our Half-Three crew contingent. You guys are nuts, but I hear you rake in the dough though!” The stout woman gesticulates wildly as she talks animatedly at me, not seeing the puzzled look on my dour face. “Did you just say crew corners? Don’t you mean my quarters?” I weakly interject mid sentence. “Huh? Oh, right, you’re not from around here. It’s sort of a colloquialism to these larger ships and kind of a dig at folks on your work detail. Your ghost like work mates hate the term quarter, since that’s the standard shift on these ships, four six hour shifts for every twenty four hours. But you guys work six four hour shifts per day, and coined it corners, because, well… you guys work anywhere and everywhere three out of every four hours and just kind of crash in corners, under chairs or tables, in bundles of coiled rope or what have you, then miraculously turn up at your next shift – to do it all over again. It sounds ghastly, but that’s why you lot get paid those big bucks right!” She hasn’t stopped pointing at things or taken more than half a breath the entire time we’ve been walking. “This is you. Set yourself up, read your crew details thoroughly and get some sleep. I don’t imagine I’ll see you again for quite some time Mark, so be well”. A wide arc of a wave passes within millimeters of my nose, and with a crisp twist, she loping down the hallway of the crew corners.

Standing in the grim grey hallway, my bisected metal door grinds open as I touch my palm to it. Biometric readers are every where on board this massive ship. No need to try to remember any codes, it’s all linked to my DNA/RNA and several other key markers I’m not aware of. A dim orange light is the only illumination inside the wide but narrow room. Spacious by Navy standards on earth, pretty big for a single individual in space. About four meters long, two meters wide. The door and open pathway along one wall, a closet sized bathroom/’shower’ outlet type cubicle on one end, a raised bed with desk underneath, with cupboards over top, and a full length closet on the opposite end. Clean, cozy and entirely unadorned with ornamentation. The lone object in the room is my crew information packet with my first six work details, and a voucher for my first meal aboard the vessel. Upon closer inspection the room is plastered with various warnings and guidelines for the optimal use of my crew uniform while on board. Lots of black, yellow, red and white labels. Very ominous and kind of foreboding. Nothing I haven’t seen before back at the Mars technical institute where I trained to be a ship board generalist. I can do just about anything in a modest, read mediocre fashion. Just enough to keep the cogs grinding along for a three hour session, until the real deals make their way to your location.

A loud chime signals the standard crew change, and I grab my voucher and head off to the mess hall to eat, and nose around the ship while still in a coherent state of mind. Along the way I pass several hundred people bustling from one thing to another. Each dressed in colour coded uniforms talking in jargon heavy bursts. No one looks up from their desks, bunks or conversations. The crew corner portion has a real college dorm vibe, with people talking through open doors, sprawling in the halls or hanging around in small cliques. I continue to walk on until I can smell the mixture of food, b.o and mild disinfectants and sanitizers.

The mess hall is enormous, with a massive bank of windows that look out over the bulk of the aft section of the vessel. Lots of curving grey domes, and twinkling blue lights. The neon lights glow in reflection on the concrete like glass. I walk under a huge set of hoods which contain some high pressure vents. In the centre of the room is a massive semi circle of vending machines, buttons, slots and glass drawers. Not quite replicators, but close enough to be science fiction. I slide my voucher into an available slot and choose a sixteen ounce prime rib, garlic mashed potatoes, grilled asparagus and a thick rich brown gravy, along with a Heineken branded pilsner. Turning to my right to see my name appear on a glass drawer I pull out my steaming hot plate and head to an empty table. As I step over the back of my seat I hear a soft voice say “Beige uniform eh? You a Half-Three then huh? That’s a nice dinner you got there. I always thought you guys were a myth, but here we are.” A large androgynous person in blue medical uniform half waves at me sheepishly. “Um, well yes. I transferred in today. Will rotate in at 03:00.” My answer is short, concise and as non committal as I can make it while I smell real food mere centimeters from my face. I plunk down onto the seat, it whistles under the newly acquired weight. A soft pfft as air escapes from the foam padded seat cushion. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your meal, I just haven’t seen many of you guys around. I did my residency on earth and I marvel at your ability to work six four hour shift blocks per day while you are on rotation. It both scares and amazes me!” A plump cherubic face peers out from under longish dark black hair, with a off kilter toothy smile. “Don’t be too impressed, they pushed some sort of synaptic device into my head at the technical institute on Mars so that we can function under high stress for brief periods of time, many times per day. It also allows us to ‘learn’ a great deal of surface level instructions on hundreds of jobs. I can even, in the most dire of circumstances work as a medic or a nurse during a level one, two or three medical procedure in any standard zero g operating room. But I’d warn against that, just between you and me. I’m a puker. Involuntary, I assure you. But detrimental to the sanctity of any given surgical endeavor.” I flash the briefest of warm smiles. “I’m Mark. Nice to meet you…?” I wave a fork lazily in the med tech’s direction. “Oh, uh it’s Alex. I’m Alex. Nice to meet you Mark, the fully fledged Half-Three! Man oh man, nobody’s going to believe that I met you!” Alex is flushed pink in the cheeks. “What do you mean? I’m sitting right here, out in the open, with you. The whole ship can see us with their own eyes. The cameras can all see us”. A befuddled look is crawling it’s way across my face, slowly. I am losing my good will and social cheer rapidly. “Uh dude no. You guys have biometrics that allow you every where and anywhere, and can seemingly travel at will across the ship. No cameras or software can track you lot at all. Hence the nickname ghosts”. Alex thinks better of sitting down at the table and backs away quickly. “That’s why you guys don’t have any photo ID, you don’t show up on camera!” And like that Alex is gone, melted into the crowd in the mess hall as I tuck into my prime rib.

Sixteen days later a well worn yellow side by side drops me off at my crew corners door. All that can be seen as the mono tracked vehicle passes is a pile of filthy clothes and dirty brown hair piled up in the vehicle bed. With the pull of a lever the bed tilts up and the limp body slides out the back like an animal still birth. With great effort I stagger to my feet and I place my palm against the cool metal triggering the bisected doors to split apart. I fall face first into bed and the whole world fades to black.

Part One: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.