Got to get one of the kids to their vaccination appointment this morning, and the other needs to be monitored all day to make sure they stay online for kindergarten class. Have out of home errands to run, so if I do write anything of note today it’ll be later on in the afternoon or evening. But here I’ll leave you with a picture of something!
“Let’s get Alex to tell us about their dinner date!” Chuckles the two mismatched orderlies dressed in midnight blue scrubs. Their lopsided grins are pulled tight with mirth. They both begin to wave excitedly trying to gain Alex’s attention in the hustle and bustle of the mess hall lunch rush. “Hey Al over here!, come over here and sit with us.” Bellows the larger of the two orderlies. His tanned olive skin and close cropped jet black hair stands out against the piercing grey eyes. “Come on Al, Giada wants to hear all about your dinner date with that special guy!”. A round of chuckles breaks out around the large table where a mass of other random orderlies are gathered on their break. Shuffling over towards the table, the six foot six nurse technician mumbles sheepishly. “It wasn’t a date, I just said I caught one having dinner here like a month ago. It – wasn’t – a – date. I just wanted to say hello, I’d always thought they were a myth”. Alex talks into their chest, chin pointed down, eyes hidden behind the long lank hair of their bangs. “Yeah, Alex here says they met a Half-Three, a full on ship board ghost crew member! Ha. Right!”. Barks the smaller of the two orderlies. A silver haired wisp of a man. He’s turning left and right in his seat looking up and down the table gesticulating and jittering with fits of laughter. “It wasn’t really much of anything. I saw Mark, the ghost take out this voucher I’d never seen before and sit down with a full on prime rib dinner, with garlic Onion and chive mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus on the side, layered in a thick rich brown gravy that had the slighted tinge of rainbow on top from natural oils. It smelled amazing”. Talking about the meal brings Alex’s voice into full volume over the laughs and giggles of the gathered crowd of orderlies. An older doctor a few seats down the table jolts at the mention of the gravy. “What are you talking about, oil slicks on gravy. That’s nonsense. Do you know how much it would cost to have real animal flesh kept on board. Ridiculous! Utter nonsense. you guys told me this would be a laugh, but now I’m just annoyed and irritated!” Throwing down her knife and fork, the doctor pulls her napkin from their lap, and throws it onto their plate with a flourish. “No – no! It’s true, I saw the voucher before he put it into the central dispenser. It was an eggshell blue voucher.” “That tells me nothing I don’t all ready know. They come in all kinds of colours. Don’t lie to me Alex. I can pull you from rotation and bust you down to cleaning bed pans for the next decade.” The older doctor is red in the face with a large purple vein pulsating on her temple. “I saw the priority symbol that was in iridescent violet ink!” Rasped Alex in retort. “What symbol? What are you talking about?” “On the right side of the voucher was a strange symbol I’d never seen before. It was all in outlines but hard to forgot. It almost looked alien.” The gathered crowd had fallen quiet once the older doctor’s attention became rapt. “An iridescent violet symbol. No way, listen I make close to the top pay grade onboard this ship. I’ve seen all kinds of meal vouchers, even those given to visiting dignitaries and the Orange Caste. That’s not a thing. You’re so full of shit Alex”. Exclaims the irate doctor in a huff. “I can draw it for you! it looks like this – a square with a circle and triangle inside it, that connects with the squares four walls. Down the center bisecting the circle is a line that extends out from the edge of the square by about a third of the squares size. An upside down U is centered over the line, and it terminates in a semi circle with like triangles encased in the bowl of the C. Here scan this image, and do a search on your wrist pad”. Handing over a slip of paper with the symbol on it, the doctor picks it up off of the table, and holds it to her wrist communicator. With a chirp and a beep it scans the image and begins to search. Within seconds a prompt to put in the doctors ‘Q Level’ security clearance appears, which she does with a sense of slight trepidation. A few moments pass and a single item returns. It is an image with a caption underneath. “Yeah that’s it, that’s it! Come on Dr. Jorek enlarge it, stream to the table top for everyone to see”. Yips the large nurse Alex in excitement. Pausing for a breath, Dr. Jorek toggles a switch on the top of her wrist communicator projecting the image upon the flat table top surface. The smooth white Formica like substrate works excellently as an impromptu view screen. Gasps are heard around the table. “Would you look at that!” “Sweet Jesus!” “Holy – fucking – shit!” “I told you guys!” sneers Alex in a triumphant tone. “That meal voucher was for a hundred thousand dollars. Your pal just had a single meal worth more than the average salary of ninety percent of our onboard crew. Jesus. There’s no way this guys only does maintenance or fills job gaps.” A few seconds later all the medical personnel at the table feel vibrations on their wrist communicators. A simultaneous notification has gone out to the localized group.
**PRIORITY MESSAGE** Ref Code Upsilon_#00791-002-4946 UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO INTERNAL IMAGE DATABASE – BREACH DETECTED – Please stay where you are a tactical team has been dispatched to your location with orders to subdue with prejudice. keep your hands flat on the table, fingers splayed open, and feet firmly planted on the ground.
The air inside the mess halls feels like it has been sucked out of the room. The large table is now sitting, stunned in total silence. The drop in ambient noise is so palpable that other tables in the huge mess hall are falling silent and are craning their necks to turn and stare. A muffled sound can be heard from outside the mess hall, it’s the sound of heavy boots hitting the floor grating in unison. The jingle of tactical gear can be heard as guns and rifles are drawn. The faces of the crowd as ashen. The lights in the room are cut.
Part Five: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.
Kids are back to online elearning for this week, so I can’t promise that I will add as many or any full installments to the ghost of the dirty starling this week. I did write close to five thousand words for it last week with four chapters and a side-note anecdotal addendum that goes into a little more detail about one aspect. I’m trying to flesh out how to tie several storylines together without ballooning into a 100,000 word novel. I want to be concise wherever possible and skip over anything repetitive or boring. I don’t mind exposition, but I’d rather leave more to the imagination to bridge gaps than write all of the inbetween events. They did start as micro shorts of about 400-500 words, so the few that get into 1,500 to 3,500 should be the exception rather than the norm. Guess I’ll break out the construction paper to build a road map to pull the strings together soon.
By Jones on the secure line. The encryption pattern this shift is Omega, sir.” Just as quickly as the intern appeared as a floating head at my office door she is gone, leaving only the baleful blue light shining in from the hall. The office is rather grand as far as black ops sites go out on the far reaches of human space. UB313 is located out in the grim darkness beyond Pluto, and as such doesn’t warrant much attention from The Companies associated with earth’s greater goings on. Decorated with framed photos guilded in gold, hand drawn ancient maps, technical drawings of stations and memorabilia stolen by the earth side insurgencies they help to fund and direct from afar. Corporate espionage and technological breakthroughs in R&D are the main focus in the bored out depths of UB313. They are as unscrupulous a bunch as you will ever find. They attract the vile, the scum and villainy like maggots to day old roadkill on a piping hot asphalt road in late July.
The walk from the grand office down the tight bare hewn rock walls of the hallway is a fair jaunt. The high grade low wattage blue leds strung up over the kilometers of dark grey black rock make everything here look the same. Signage is at a bare minimum here, due to the elicit nature of much of their work. Also – the torture element. Dr. Jang has a penchant for unnecessary surgery and has used it to mine for answers among those his insurgents have managed to capture and return to him alive enough to question. Lost in thought, but still counting off his turns and stairs along the route the taught, rigid doctor saunters into the bridge without knocking to stride over to the private channel comm’s terminal located in an alcove off of the side of the main bridge. A red blinking light flashes repeatedly beside a blood red hand held phone receiver. With a quick flick of the wrist Dr. Jang picks up the receiver and places it next to his ear. “Took you long enough – I have word from our network that somebody has triggered a sword initiative, rated at level orange. You know what that means good doctor. We need to locate and capture the target before the earth side corporation’s can get out there to find it. Dispatch a small team now, before we’ve even traced the signal. We have a nine week travel lead on The Company people. Use it and bring me that specimen!” – CLICK. The other end of the line has gone dead. The raspy voice of the one we call Jones was tight with excitement, also insistent on an urgent response. Well it isn’t beyond the good doctor to act rashly before having a fully developed plan. Slowly a menacing grin blooms across his taught features like an ink stain on wet paper. Turning quickly on his heels to glide across the room and out of the private alcove Dr. Jang leans over a smaller terminal to toggle the base wide PA system. “We have an Omega level sword initiative triggered – code level orange. I need an immediate dispatch of search teams ETA & THETA. Head to the Charon Pluto lagrange point 5 – add the offset in crew as additional fuel since your orbit will be unstable. Hang there until we can get you a more precise set of coordinates. Dr. Jang out.” Looking around the room at the shocked and excited faces of the bridge crew Jang knows it is going to be a busy and fretful couple of weeks while they work to pick up the requested target. “Sir?. We have some rough data going in on the teletype machine – looks a little disrupted though. It could have been corrupted passing one of the signal repeaters. But we can test for that against our back log of recieved communications- sir.” “Good, good. If you need me I’ll be back in my surgical bay. I have a few questions I need answers to. Please do have your interns buzz before they enter this time.” The look on the comm’s ensigns face drains of any appreciable colour. “Yes! Sir – yes, yes sir of course, sir.” A single bead of sweat dribbles down the side of his face even though the UB313 base would be considered rather chilly at the best of times.
Part Four: Ghost of the Dirty Starling..
If you ever write a micro-short story that begins to spiral outwards into a multi chapter series of interconnected tales, that feel like pin points of light on a black blanket that eventually lays out a beautiful mosaic like final image; keep track of all of your character names, occupations, gender (if required) Race (if not human) and the names of the places that they inhabit, the ships / stations / vessel names and their approximate locations as you go along. Up until recently I thought I had a good chunk of it down pat, but then I couldn’t recall if I had used yellow as a colour code before, and it turns out I was using it for HR / and personnel related things. So I have gone back through 75,000+ words of interconnected short stories to retrace the steps of all of my characters, their whereabouts, and the proper spelling of vessel names, and their classifications. Funny how a handful of non-fiction micro shorts of 500 words of less, became an increasingly large in scale, scope and size science-fiction world of short stories, circling a semi coherent central narrative – via the use of multiple points of view, and sometimes contradictory accounts from characters with their own axes to grind. Also, quick tidbit – if you create made up names for in world technology; write that shit down.
To anyone who has read any of my short fiction, thank you! I know it’s not terribly polished, as I tend to publish as I go along. When I have an idea I want it out of my head as fast as possible, and I’m not shy about editing several days or weeks later. But the gist of the story stays the same regardless of catching a spelling or grammatical error after the fact. Keep on grinding it out, and make yourselves feel better.
Says the man in the burgundy jumpsuit. Jones is his name, he’s the director for this particular terminal bay which is part of the signals intelligence division aboard the Dirty Starling. Now that the orange jump suited menace has commandeered my services for longer than my usual one four hour stint, he has chosen to acknowledge my presence.
Part of my role as a Half-Three or ship board Ghost crew member is to be able to swoop in to assume control of some small portion of the ships systems and keep it moving for at least three hours, until someone more qualified can take over. I’m meant to be inconspicuous, that’s why we’re all colour coded. No need to ask what you do or what your qualifications are, if that position needs a blue, or green or yellow or red or burgundy body in it, and you see one there, all is well. Otherwise if you see a beige outfit, you know you’ll get a modest output for the next couple of hours, and not to worry. I’m a permanent temp worker that can shift between the machine shop, science division, mess hall or surgical bays and just about everything in between. But much like a ghost, I drift from sector to sector covering off shifts, mishaps and personnel errors for brief periods, and move on. The only place I spend any real time in one spot is my room across the ship, and that’s usually only for forty eight hours after I rotate off duty. The mental state I enter is much like a trance and it takes a deep physical toll on me, so my first twenty four hours after shift are spent asleep, where my deeply embedded programing in my brain works overclocked in order to repair my body and get me ready to do it all over again. This trance leaves me with fairly large gaps in my memory – meeting people or learning top secret details usually lasts long enough in my memory to function for a short term task, and then gets dropped as I rest between shifts.
“we’re just going to get you to work over by the viewing port along the back of the room, you’ll see a partition back there, walk through that and man the bank of terminals there. They are much older machines, and you likely won’t see of hear from any of us during your stay here. Just keep the lights on so to speak! We’ve got the really exceptional equipment going on our end, you are just sweeping areas of little or no interest to our project. As per standard procedure, should you locate something note worthy – which you won’t – make a note of it and follow the appropriate protocols”. With that Jones turns on his heel and disappears into the tangle of people, wires and upgraded terminals in the open terminal bay.
I take one sweeping look at the cavernous terminal bay, with all of it’s loose wires and fancy equipment. The floor is a rough open grating, and there appears to be about a thousand miles of cabling and pipes running under foot. Lots of different colours. We’re real big on colour coding in space. It’s like looking at a coral reef under foot, except there are no fish to complement the static cables with flurishes of movement. The soft crunch and scrape of my boots I getting easier to hear the further across the room I get towards the view ports. The concrete glass used on research vessels the size of the Dirty Starling are a somewhat old invention, but given new life in space. Their only downside is that they echo like a mother fucker, so that’s most likely why Jones or his orange boss have draped print outs of star charts and conversion tables across the panes of what looks like crystal clear glass. Walking for several minutes, I can see the far wall where the partition should be. I don’t see anything from fifty paces. My wrist navigator isn’t blinking or beeping, so I’ll just need to feel this out unaided. There is no sign of anything over in the corner, so I walk up to the enormous star chart against the glass. I run my hands over all of the minute details. Oh, the map is textured – how lovely. It’s semi opaque with a light purple raised ink on it that shimmers in the dim light. The point I touch begins to glow. It is bioluminescent. No flickering, a solid violet in the now dim ambient light. Out of the corner of my eye I see an orange and red twinkle of light. Turning to look over my left shoulder I see it’s a reflection on the glass from what seems like a solid featureless wall. Taking a few cautious steps forward I notice that the partition as they call it is a cut out in the wall that is set back, so the wall looks unbroken, but there is a cubby tucked away inside. The closer I get the easier it is to hear the ticking and whirling of the analogue equipment. The eight meter long u shaped panel is covered on three sides with huge lead panels and a water tank with something gently sloshing around inside.
With my hands on the walls I stick my head tentatively inside the room. The walls are almost bare but have clip boards full of hand written notes. Lots of warning signs and labels pinned together on a cork board, and a bookcase full of technical manuals. A bell chimes over the loud speakers so I look down at my left wrist and mark off the shift change. A high pitch peel sounds from my wrist communicator, a new message has just come in.
Ref Code Omega_00000007 You have been assigned to Signals Intelligence Analog Panel Maintenance indefinitely. Continue six shift protocols in preparation for supplemental orders. ••TRIGGER Sword Initiative {Clementine} •• [Signals found emanating from ZULU Quadrant 03-06-09917] CAPTURE**
My pupils dilate until almost entirely black, my care free laissez-faire attitude melts away – an automaton like figure bends down low over the analog signals panel, it begins to press a series of buttons, flipping switches and turning dial knobs. The empty black light bulb at the center of the console slowly begins to glow a dim orange barely visible even in the near total darkness of the small secluded room.
Part Three: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.
Here’s an illustrative anecdote to get you on board with why we lay persons as a general rule don’t raise our voices or encourage the ire of the admiralty or Company ruling class dressed in bright neon orange. Broadcasting their toxicity like a beacon.
When I was coming up through the Tourus mechanical engineering program, there were always stories about people who had done something awful like make an Admiral look bad in front of colleagues or had become too familiar and offered an ill timed barb in public. These poor folks become pretty easy to spot once you know what you are looking for. Both at the Tourus school and further along at the Mars Technical Institute. What you want to find is someone well out of synch with the usual age bracket, who knows, from experience, what they are being taught before the professors and instructors open their mouths.
See the orange oligarchs are the type of sociopaths that will refer you back to remedial instruction should you ruin their day. This means a person whom has all ready completed their four years of education at the Tourus, did well enough to be chosen to go to the Mars Technical Institute and do four to six more years there, depending on your specialty or generality. Getting hired, traveling the weeks or months to your newly minted job and then working for however long it takes to upset an Orange mafia bastard and get sent back to day one to do it all over again. No skipping ahead, no breaks, no winks or nudges. Day one – again. Sometimes if you’ve fucked up enough you are granted a long enough stint back on earth where you lose your innate ability to function in zero g, and then have to start the initiation process like a gods be damned chump.
Only for your offended Orange bastard to check in on your progress and get you tested on all of your practical work at the expert level because you know what you’re doing – and this is after all, a punishment. These orange fucks keep excessively detailed files on their offense taken, in order to ruin your life repeatedly. All that so that once you get out of the Mars base of operations they can swoop in at the last possible second to redirect your life and have you assigned to some black site based beyond Pluto with zero amenities and no chance for advancement. Pure. Fucking. Evil.
That’s why you don’t mess with the orange crowd, either that or they’ll push you out of an airlock to starve to death over a lengthy float in total vaccum.
Addendum: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.
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.
Me listening to my daughters tell a combined imaginary tale about knights, dragons and monsters in a mystical land, and I was trying to transcribe this hectic, self referential logic nightmare of a tale as they spoke it out loud in tandem like a vomited stream of consciousness. It was such a vivid memory, I could feel the fluctuating story ideas, like they were there breathing at my finger tips. It made almost no sense as they told it, but in my dream I was able to sort of throw it on the table to smash apart, and then take a really wide angle lens to it and rebuild it into a coherent epic fantasy novel. The best part about it was taking the whole spoken tale and sort of doing this exploded view – like you get of an engine diagram format, but being able to draw elements together, or add parts and realign story beats so that it all made sense, and flowed together. It was a wildly exciting dream, and when I woke up I remembered absolutely none of the story, but only the rush of picking it apart and putting it back together to make some kind of sense. Which sounds tedious, but also like a performance in and of itself. I’d love to revisit that dream, and actually remember the story my girls told me. If you’ve ever spent time listening to kids under six tell you stories, you know how many gaps there can be, what sort of logical leaps you need to make, and how easy it is to lose the plot. Good times. I guess I had a dream about editing. Wow! – go me. in
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