Kell didn’t have a phobia about spiders, but having a million of the hairy little buggers in the ship with her was just plain creepy. A spider scuttling along the floor or up in its web minding its own business was just fine, but they gave her the heeby-geebies if they got on her skin. The other crew teased her about being arachnid-girl but it wasn’t like she had a choice of assignment. You took the gig you were given or you starved, that was life out in the Edge. It wasn’t like the spiders were roaming loose. They were all in their special transport habitats, hatching, breeding, dying their little spider lives as the Taka Tori thrummed across the great vastness of space. Any normal person would have nightmares about waking up covered in them, wouldn’t they? Kell certainly did.
“Cancel alarm,” she said, and swung her legs out of the cot, checking the chronometer strip on the wall. ‘0600 hours, Day 65.’ She padded into the tiny, adjoining bathroom and ran some water in the sink to splash the lingering memory of the dream out of her eyes. The mirror above the wash basin showed a pleasant face of a youngwoman with mussed up brown hair, and grey green eyes.
The elevator took Kell up to M-deck, where she clambered into the little electric cart and zipped off down toward her first mandatory check. Vast acres of floor space on this deck alone, all filled with serried rank upon row of habitat bins containing 200,000 species of insect, including 1,700 varieties of spider. And this was just one of seventeen decks in Cargo Module Five. The Taka Tori was a standard F-Class star freighter designed for efficiency and survivability out of the great Mitsubishi yards orbiting Periphony. Three kilometres stem to stern, with space-fold engines fore and aft, a long narrow central spine housing all the fully automated nav and engineering, surrounded by the rotating cradle to carry the eight cargo modules. In turn, each cargo module was a basic cylinder, over 2000 metres long and seventy in diameter, lying parallel to the spine the way that nine pencils could be held parallel in one’s fist. The cradle rotated about the spine to create spin gravity in the modules. The eight huge cargo modules were completely independent and isolated from each other and the spine, designed to be dropped off or attached in high orbit. Kell’s entire world for two years consisted of the strange dichotomy of the vastness of Module 5, and the confinement of not being permitted to step foot into any other portion of the ship.
Her tablet showed today’s instructions from Frank, calculated to the second decimal place to fully occupy the next seven hours. Firstly there were quality tests to be conducted on the fresh water feeds, then checks on the CO2 lines for the fire suppression system to finish off from yesterday. ‘Deep and abiding joy.’ Kell stifled a yawn and rolled a kink out of her neck, reaching into the cart to retrieve the first box of sample tubes. She sprayed disinfectant on the tube and the tap-point in the water line to the live-cargo bin, and then drew off ten mils. She labelled the tube and dropped it into the collection crate.
“One down, 9787 to go.”
With B shift complete, Kell headed back to her Crew Amenity Pod, or CAP, clamped to the deck at one end of Q-deck by the loading dock. Apart from the notion of a status of upper and lower decks, there was no difference between A-deck and Q-deck, they were all just levels in a giant warehouse crammed full of stuff. The CAP was on the lowest level, Q, because that was furthest from the point of rotation about the ship and had the best gravity. The CAP was a standard unit, a grey dinged up self contained pod, the minimum specified under labour laws. A sleeping space, a shower-laundry and rec-room cum galley, bio-recycler, and stowage. It included independent, emergency life support that may or may not have been serviced in the past fifty years and whose power supply and filtration would, at best, last six months. Still it was home for two years. Better than sleeping on the streets unemployed, or running the risk of being sent to Penal for nicking platinum out of fuel cells just to get enough creds to buy some water to drink.
Kell had a tepid shower, in and out within the prescribed two minutes before the water cut off, pulled on a fresh pair of coveralls and padded into her kitchen. She plonked a coffee mug in the slot and directed the dispenser. “Tea, chamomile,” she said.
The recreation space was about four metres by three. A couch, a chair, (‘What in case I have a visitor?’) and an entertainment console with its own screen and vid-logger. She looked across the small rec-space to the grid of eight displays mounted on the far wall. Two rows of four, one screen for each of the crew in their modules, with her own display, number five in the bank, showing ship data, comms, and any messages from Mother. This one fact about the Taka was a blessing to Kell. It hid her secret. Everywhere she went in life she dreaded having to reveal that she suffered prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, and often simply could not distinguish one person’s face from another. People to her were like a flock of sheep, all mostly indistinguishable one from the other. Sure, ethnicity, skin colour, height and body size all helped distinguish people if she tied names to traits but an innate ability that most people took for granted was not a feature of Kell’s brain. Whenever she had to admit her impairment, people always assumed it was caused by a learning difficulty, vision impairment or memory loss. And then finished by saying, ‘Surely you can remember my face though, right?’
No, it was a specific problem in the cognitive ability of pattern matching, caused by a tiny thickening of the right fusiform gyrus in her brain at birth. Most people have a near photographic memory of faces without trying. It is a long developed genetic trait and the little olive-sized lump of brain tissue just above and behind the ears, the fusiform face area, is instinctively trained from birth, which is why people are better at recognising individuals of their own race. The human brain doesn’t do that for other objects. Show people a moon-rock and then ask them pick that rock out of a line up of similar rocks. No way. Humans are born programmed to recognise faces, two eyes above a nose above a mouth in an infinite variation but which is instantly memorable.
But not the two percent of the population like Kell, who had to use clever tricks to attach memory cues to people to tell one apart from another. When people got a slightly different haircut it really threw her.
The Taka was perfect in this one respect. Every other person lived in their little spot in the bank of monitors and only their spot. It was like having acquaintances that lived in different cities, and you always knew who was calling from where regardless of whether you could recognise them or not. So to Kell, each of the other crew members was secretly labelled by name and module number.
It was mandatory to check in at least once every 72 hours or the Company would dock your pay, so Kell checked to see who was on line. Hondo4 in Module 4 and Flynn7 in Module 7, but no Ashi8 in Eight. As she watched, screen two flickered into life and Zenkaya2’s brilliant smile beamed out.
‘God that girl is always so cheerful,’ Kell thought, smiling in spite of herself. The African’s personality was infectious. It was weird that humanity had fled and shunned Earth, founded new civilisations out in the stars, and refused to even countenance the term ‘colonies’, yet racial pride to ancestry flourished so strongly. African, Chinese, Japanese, Islander, North American, Texan, Chilean, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, Arian, the need to identify with one’s genetic roots was as strong as it was varied.
Kell took a sip of tea, grimacing. She wasn’t truly sure what chamomile was supposed to taste like, but was fairly certain that it wasn’t supposed to be dirt and disappointment. Still it contained artificial sleepiness that was good at the end of a B shift.
“Join group chat,” she commanded.
Hondo4 looked up from whatever he was tinkering with at his small galley table. “Ah how goes it bug-girl? How are all your little crawly friends today?”
“I don’t know yet,” Kell replied, “I have only just logged on to see how you are.”
“Oh she’s sharp today Hondo,” said Zenkaya2.
Hondo4 was older than Kell, in his late forties. A big powerful man with ebony skin and a smooth smile. “Right you are sister, too clever for this old man.”
Zen2 said, “Ignore Hondo, who is no brother of mine. His ancestors come from Zimbabwe, and my blood is pure Hutu, well mostly pure Hutu anyway. How was your day in paradise, girl?”
“Oh you know, another day another credit. Only 675 to go.”
“Ah, it is not the journey, it is the pay cheque at the end that counts.”
Flynn7, down on screen seven, finished heating up a meal in his dispensary and joined the conversation, bowl in hand. “Hondo is just jealous because he has to live in the morgue for two years.”
“Ah what is this?” Hondo4 said.
“You started it.”
“It is not me who is jealous, you skinny white stick. While you baby sit seeds and tractors, I look after the passengers.”
“Passengers. Don’t make me laugh. It is a fine line as to whether someone in chem-sleep is a passenger or freight. The marketing brochures and indemnity contracts might say ‘passenger’. The bill of loading refers to cargo.”
Hondo4 just laughed. “Well I am just fine up here looking after all the meat sacks, thank you for asking.”
Kell only had access to know what was contained in Module 5, so her knowledge of what was in the other modules came from conversation amongst the crew, including that Module Four housed a second-wave of 1500 settlers headed out to Neu Hessen. The Company thought it good policy to impress upon its employees the importance of their job and the value of the cargo they looked after. It transpired, apparently, that simpler life forms, like insects and arachnids, did not do well in chemical hibernation for long haul space transit. In fact, nothing alive was unaffected by hibernation and if you were rich enough to pay for FTL transit in coma, you needed to be rich enough for some re-gen tank time. Two years of ‘chem-sleep’ added about ten years ageing to the average heathy human being. The universal axiom that nothing came for free held true, and while hibernation stopped you dying of boredom, it actually decreased your lifespan. You had to counter its effects with a week in the tank, and those with the credits happily traded skipping being awake for years in transit, for a few days floating in the goop high on stims. But there were people who were employed in long haul space travel who actually enjoyed it. There were people who enjoyed the solitude, then there were those who thought they would until one day they just decided to step out the airlock. ‘Taking a last walk’, or ‘stepping out’ as it was usually referred to.
And why send 200,000 insect species to a new colony in the first place? Terra-forming on planets habitable by humans is not a simple thing. If there is no life, then it is probably marginal to begin with. Surface habitation, the true goal of anything beyond a mining strip-and-take operation, required atmosphere and biosphere generation taking generations of dedication. A biosphere to support agriculture and complex life requires a complete food web, including insects. Without insects a planet will drown in its own excrement in a generation. Spiders and all the other creepy crawlies are a necessary part of the great circle of life. If a planet already has a biome, compatible with humans, it is usually still deadly in so many ways. Viruses and bacteria completely unknown to the human immune system, parasites that kill you in a hundred novel and terrifying ways. Apex predators had no knowledge or fear of puny humans. ‘Gardenisation’ was one approach, and amounted to exterminating all life and starting with a clean slate from a pallet of selected fauna and flora most useful and least harmful to colonists.
Kell, like all the crew of the Taka, had voluntarily signed on for the two year trip, and likely enough for a return one or onward leg to somewhere else. This was her first long haul cargo job and she planned to keep doing it for the next ten to fifteen years at least. It sucked, it was lonely and boring, and it was moderate pay at best. But over time it earned a chance to Company sponsorship for citizenship, and that provided the right to university, housing, permanent employment and, most importantly, medical. With medical benefits she could access regeneration. She would have to work the prime of her life but then she could regen to whatever she wanted, probably age twenty nine, and keep regen’ing whenever she wanted for the next 200 years. And by the time 200 years was up, doctors would have worked out a way to make it 500 years. In a galaxy of 400 billion people, half of whom were scraping by with barely enough food to survive for a miserable fifty year lifespan, she was determined to become part of the small percentage who could afford to live extended lives of comfort.