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Leia left Amable's office and tried to figure out what she should do next. It was impossible to rank in priority order any of the things she should be working on (language, answers to that endless list of questions), partly because she was too sleepy to think straight. After checking the time until lunch, she decided now would be a great time to take a nap as there was at least an hour until lunch and no one had tried to reach her.
When she was first on the ship, Esifwu showed her places to sleep that reminded Leia of capsules from a Japanese capsule motel, with several major improvements: you really could sit up comfortable in one, you could control the temperature, they were completely opaque, with no open window with a lousy mat screen to keep the light out and they were soundproofed. They were scattered unevenly around the ship. She had noticed that there weren't the same number of them in each place she had slept when she went back at another time. Even though they more like a coffin than her cell on the car-crash ship, she found them a comfortable place to sleep, except when she had nightmares.
She queried ship-mind for Radmer's location, and felt inordinately happy to learn he was in his room. She was tired, but not necessarily that tired. Ship-mind also included what he was doing, which involved four other people and looked better not to interrupt. That was a letdown, but she could still take a nap. She found a capsule relatively nearby. She set the alarm with enough time to use the facilities and go to lunch, then fell asleep while she was debating whether or not to leave Radmer a message. She had decided to leave him a message, and was working on what it would say, to let him know he could wake her up, but without sounding pathetically needy and clingy.
She was, therefore, a little disoriented when she was not woken up by the alarm, but by light streaming into the capsule from above and halfway down the long side, rather than from the end where she was accustomed to entering, which was also the only side typically accessible when the capsules were stacked. The capsules felt somewhat coffin-like anyway, and this exacerbated that feeling.
Looking up and around, she was even more confused to realize she was in Radmer's room. Her recollection was hazy from sleep, but she was relatively sure she hadn't gotten around to leaving him a message.
"Hello," he said hesitantly.
"You can move these things?" Leia asked.
Radmer looked at her blankly for a moment, and then reached in and set the screen in the capsule to display a technical description of the capsule, helpfully translated by ship-mind for Leia. These things were way more interesting than Leia had realized. They had full life-support and were used to stabilize people who were sick or injured and functioned as escape pods in the event of a disaster. Who knew? She wasn't sure if it was reassuring that she spent her sleeping hours in one of these, or a bad sign.
"We haven't run you through what to do if there's some kind of problem on Hazard, have we?" asked Radmer.
"No, you haven't. Add it to the list."
He laughed at that, made a further adjustment to the capsule, and she could turn and put her legs down and stand up, just like standing up from a bed. Radmer made some more adjustments and the capsule lifted silently off the floor, the door to the room opened, the capsule went out into the hallway and disappeared around the corner.
"Do you have to get to one of those if something happens?"
"Not necessarily. If you're in a room like this one, it's self-sufficient as well. But if you are in a corridor, or a large room like the dining room, it's a good idea to find a capsule."
Hazard didn't just look like it was assembled from a bunch of boxes. It was assembled from a bunch of boxes: a Lego ship, in a way.
Leia half-expected, half-hoped Radmer would pull her down onto a bed (which she was sad, but not surprised, to see was currently put away) for more sex. Instead, he kept looking at her with a worried, indecisive expression, as if he had something important to say and wasn't sure how to say it. Leia relaxed a little when it occurred to her that no sane person woke someone up from a nap to tell them so long. Whatever was on Radmer's mind, it wasn't that he wanted her gone from his room.
"I'm a little concerned," he started, "that maybe you aren't as happy about the way last night and this morning went as I am, or maybe it meant something different for you than it did for me."
Leia refrained from emitting the stereotypical and sexist comment that it's usually the woman who thinks sex means more than it does, but instead asked Radmer point blank, "I really enjoyed last night and this morning. But I have no idea what it meant for you. I'm trying to keep my expectations low, to avoid being disappointed, and to avoid making some cultural misstep. You weren't around much the first few weeks I was on Hazard and this is all happening very quickly."
Radmer countered, "You weren't easy to find, hiding out in Esifwu's room by day. Also, everyone was run ragged trying to process through all the survivors from car-crash kidnapping." He paused, then reluctantly admitted, "I was slow to express interest because we hadn't talked, couldn't talk, and I didn't know if I was reading too much into a little eye-contact, which can mean very different things to different people. Add to that the complete uncertainty about your background."
"What changed?" asked Leia.
Radmer asked in disbelief, "Were you paying attention when Dulak and everyone else was talking about me? About us?"
"Yes, I was paying attention, but I talked to Amable today and I'm now wondering if Dulak more or less ordered you to nail me so I'd have some kind of connection to someone because he's worried about my psychological health."
Radmer said, "That's pretty paranoid even for you. Dulak definitely wants you to connect with people, and he's quite upset with Esifwu for isolating you, although he does understand the circumstances are unusual and no one has ever handled this kind of situation well in the past." Leia thought she should at some point look up the other three people who've been first-contacted inadvertently and find out how things had gone for them. The way people referred to them sounded bad. Radmer continued: "And yes, sex is a great way to establish a strong connection quickly. But Dulak did not poll the table. He knew I was interested in you, and he had some confidence you returned my interest as much as you could, given how passive and pulled-into-a-shell you are right now. It's never comfortable being around Dulak when he's decided people on Hazard are being overly cautious and need to be prodded into taking action, but it is effective and he has extremely good results." Radmer then hedged, "but he isn't perfect, and I'm worried he pushed me and I pushed you and you are now running away. You totally ignored me and everyone else at breakfast. You had to be reminded repeatedly to eat your food. You left without saying anything to anyone, and went to talk to Amable, then curled up for a nap without even checking in. How much trouble am I in?" asked Radmer, heartache clearly visible on his face.
"No trouble at all!" insisted Leia. "I've been spending weeks glued to a screen except at the evening meal. Sometimes I even work while I'm exercising. That's all I did for days and days, and it's a lot like what my life was at home. I have a small social life, mostly with coworkers at lunch and sometimes over dinner. I don't have a significant other right now, well, NOW I do, you idiot, but not on Earth. I worry a lot about taking up too much of someone else's time, and right now, there's a lot going on that you have to do, and Esifwu has to do, and everyone else has to do, even though a lot of them wish they could be doing it on Upper Andal or Andal instead of constantly refiguring their plans to adjust to the new circumstances. Before I found a capsule to take a nap, I did check in, but you were busy in a meeting and I didn't want to interrupt. And I was behind on sleep because we had so much fun last night and didn't sleep in this morning and not just because of that meeting."
"What was the meeting with Amable about?"
"I'm tempted to tell you to go read the minutes in ship-mind, since that's what I always do and it's faster, but the short form is, I had some dumb questions and I thought she'd have answers. She did, but that led to more questions. As always."
Radmer pressed for details, so Leia tried to summarize. He heard her out, eyebrows raised and jaw open when she explained about her questions about the fossil record, primates on earth and questions about what she'd pulled out of ship-mind about the origins of humanity in space. He pulled up a screen and reviewed the people Amable had contacted to in the wake of that information, and confirmed to Leia that this was being taken very seriously, and furthermore, some extremely high-powered people were taking over the car-crash computer systems analysis, thereby eliminating the bottle-neck of Hazard's overworked crew.
At about that point, there was a chime, and Radmer blinked, swore, and opened the door. Dulak stepped in. "You two are late for lunch, so I brought you some." He distributed. Leia opened hers to find the items she ordered when she didn't have a specific interest in or craving for something else. Ah, the wonders of a complete record of everything you do; people can bring you food and it's the right food. Nice. Dulak let them get partway through their meals, and then asked, "What's going on?"
Radmer opened his mouth, but Leia beat him to it with, "Don't you know?"
"No, I do not. Radmer put up a privacy screen after he pulled your capsule in here. In my job, that's worrisome. You had a virtual privacy shield up at breakfast, you spent so much time buried in your screen and so little time paying attention to anyone else. I'm also worried about your conversation with Amable, because she was so surprised by what you said that she lost track of what her job is."
"Which is?" asked Leia.
"To help you adjust to your new life here on Hazard. Although some of that is your doing?"
"What do you mean by that?" asked Leia, incredulous. "It's hardly my fault I asked a simple question about -- "
"No, not the monkeys and the fossils. Look, it's going to take a long time to get used to the idea that you actually have seen other primates. But forget that for now. She all but patted you on the head and said, oh, isn't that cute that the youngster has such a powerful imagination. Yes, you are young by our standards. But nobody's making up shit like what you said at your age. She's lost track of the difference between a teenager and an adult-too-young-for-space."
"I've been meaning to ask -- "
"I'm starting to dread that phrase," commented Dulak, but indicated she should continue.
"Why keep people planetbound that long? Is there really that big a difference in perspective? Or is that just a way to make sure only people who've accepted longevity get to travel around and . . .do whatever people do once they can go from planet to planet?"
Dulak laughed. "There is that big a difference in perspective, which is why you keep catching people unawares, although you display that difference in perspective even more so than most people would at any age. Unmodified humans are, oh, there's no polite way to put this, unstable, paranoid and violent. The longevity process does a lot to mitigate that and once a person is past their hundredth or so year, even the worst of who's left have calmed down enough. Humans were given that technology because none of the other races had come up with a way to keep us from breeding insanely quickly or at least they weren't prepared to do what had to be done. It was bad enough that we were taking up a lot of space on planets other species would have had for their own use otherwise. The weapons the first few generations of escaped humanity developed and the uses they put them to were pretty awful. We were going to do to intelligent species across the galaxies what generally happens to top-predators when we colonize a planet. A lot of us were going to die in the process but not enough to reverse our growth and worst of all, the growth rate always increased among the humans involved in current conflict." Dulak shrugged. "So we keep everyone at home until they're old enough and modified enough to know better."
"But you're letting me run around."
"There's one of you. And we've left the topic I came here to discuss, which I'm starting to learn to expect around you. What's going on?"
Radmer gave Leia a quelling look this time and she subsided.
"She had her head in a screen at breakfast because she did not think she was needed or wanted at the breakfast meeting and she was trying to catch up on background."
"Which part?" asked Dulak.
"Universal Friends and Ubiquitous Humanity."
Radmer continued, "I was just trying to get her to eat her breakfast, but it seemed pointless, so I gave up and mingled. The next time I looked around, she was gone, but my morning was full. When I saw she'd gone to see Amable I figured it was out of my hands. Ship-mind told me she looked for me after seeing Amable but did not leave a message. I decided that she wasn't completely averse to seeing me again, so I pulled her in from her nap and started asking her exactly the same questions you are asking. Amable's answer on the protocol around having sex question combined with your brutal technique in getting us together left her wondering whether I was actually interested in her or not, or if she had been assigned to me, or I had been assigned to her, or something like that."
"Ha!" said Dulak, shaking his head.
Leia cut in, asking, "Is Amable going to get in trouble for saying that to me? She was worried."
Dulak tucked his chin down and gave her A Look. "You sound far too excited at the prospect of Amable being in trouble with me." When Leia cranked up her expectant look, Dulak sighed and said, "Yes, she is. Can we please get back on topic?"
Bemused, Radmer added, "Leia says I'm not in trouble, then we got distracted by the lost-home-of-humanity and that's where you came in. With lunch, thank you very much."
Dulak looked at Leia and said, "We were looking for your home, although it got put on hold briefly because we didn't have enough people to do the security audit and work on the data off car-crash-ship."
"I know."
"More people and more resources are being put towards finding your home now that you've made it extremely interesting to just about every human alive. How are you feeling about that?"
"Extremely conflicted," Leia replied.
"Because you know you'll be bring a huge amount of change to your planet when we get there?"
Leia laughed briefly. "No; if you can keep us from doing something really stupid that kills a lot of us and/or you, that'd actually be great. I don't want to leave him," she said, gesturing to Radmer, who looked surprised and pleased, before returning to his increasingly typical expression of lust and affection.
Dulak, for once, was at a loss to respond.
"You should really work on that impatience problem you've got," Leia added, with a malicious look on her face. Dulak had an unanswerable response to that. He collected the dishes and left the room.
After a strange, but not uncomfortable pause, Leia looked over at Radmer and said, "You haven't told me about your morning yet."
"I spent a lot of breakfast, when I wasn't poking at you to eat, making sure the security audit is done completely. We don't usually do security audits, because we just find a lot of problems that won't generally be a big problem, and will take a lot of time and resources to correct. We just don't look, because if you look and you don't fix it, it sends a bad message. A lot of bad messages."
"That's exactly the same at home."
Radmer nodded sharply and continued, "We've found a half dozen things that we would not ignore if we found them under any circumstances. Well, unless there were something else really pressing us for time. One is a Known Problem with a station designed by the people who did this one. Essentially, it has two locations from which everything can be run, controlled, observed. There's a point where all the connections from, well, everything, cross so they can go to both C&Cs. The people who designed and built this station often put in a three or n-way cross but only completed the connections to the two official comms. The remaining one or n potential connections are usually incomplete. Here, at least one of them continues, and we need to figure out where, and why, and make sure we don't have someone else doing stuff to the station that we don't know about. It's tempting to ignore it, because it clearly predates any current operation, but there's no reason why the current hypothetical threat couldn't exploit a pre-existing weakness. I'm arguing that this weakness might have been why Andal was targeted; most stations with this problem have been redesigned, or at least have a lot more security associated with the cross to make sure no one messes with it. I also find it suspicious that the security refit didn't do anything about this."
"But it isn't the only thing they didn't fix. There are pervasive bad choices on encryption and access security. There's inadequate shielding from any incoming physical object, whether that's a ship with an incompetent pilot or serious mechanical difficulties, a meteor or an attack. There are some devices on this station - on most stations - that are used to break up large incoming objects into pieces small enough for the shielding to handle. Most of those devices on this station failed very basic test sequences, not because they don't work at all, but because they are unreliable - they do exactly what they should do part of the time, and then fail on another test. And we haven't found a pattern yet to why it works or why it fails."
"When is your next meeting?" Leia asked.
"Not for several hours, maybe not until dinner. Do you have plans?"
"I had intended to go to the lunch meeting, but I think we may have missed it."
Radmer checked, and confirmed they had indeed missed it, and no one had cared enough to leave a message. Radmer, however, preempted her next suggestion on how to spend the next few minutes or possibly hours. "You," he said, pointing at her, "need to be drilled on emergency procedures. I'm also guessing that you have been faking your way through using nearly everything you've touched on this ship - you've just watched what other people do and done the same."
She nodded, slightly disappointed, but also relieved. It would be nice to actually understand how things worked. She could get into and out of a capsule, but had no idea it had other functionality, much less what it did. She could deploy and return the bed in Radmer's room, but still wasn't sure if she would spot beds in other locations. The same was true of nearly everything she'd seen on the ship. The plaques indicating available functions were tiny, visible only from some angles, and only rarely had labels with scripts. Their shape gave some indication of function, but Leia hadn't been able to figure out the code, nor had some come up with a way to query ship-mind about it.
So when Radmer started by doing one of those mysterious fiddly motions at what had appeared to be a smooth expanse of wall, she stopped him, and asked him to explain in detail how he knew where he could do that, and how to do that, and, for good measure, how to query ship-mind about similar so if she should have a question in the future, she could get information out of it. Radmer rubbed his forehead and looked slightly tired. "I can imagine what this must be like for you," said Radmer, "because I remember first learning all the interfaces on car-crash and completely-indecipherable and different-but-completely-incomprehensible-also ships and equipment. But I didn't have to live on those ships, and I expected everything to be different because none of them are human."
Then he dropped the larger discussion in favor of details. The plaques, she realized as he pointed several out, were best seen out of the corner of one's eye. If you looked straight at the wall, they weren't visible at all. But if you glanced just away from the wall, you could see them scattered around. He pulled her screen up and showed her the query that got her a legend for all the shapes, which was a ridiculously large number, and then showed her she could point her screen at a wall and ship-mind would list off all the available options and allow her to control them through it, rather than manipulate them directly. Speaking of universal remotes.
He then returned to what he had started with: the access for survival suits. "If this unit," he gestured around the room, "becomes separated from Hazard, protocol is to get into a suit. As long as we're part of Hazard, we have at least two levels of protection, generally a lot more if Hazard is functioning normally. You need to get an additional level of protection when the room is separated, which is your suit." He showed her on her screen the specs for the survival suit: length of time she could safely breathe in it, tolerances for variable gravity, protection from impact, radiation and stellar flares, etc.
Back on the screen, he showed her how emergency lighting would indicate the room's status (part of Hazard and Hazard normal; part of Hazard, but not all systems normal; detached). They went out into the hall, and he had her put her glasses on and overlaid on her vision what the hallway would look like under various emergency conditions. Her ear-piece reproduced for her a series of alarms.
"There will be a quiz, probably several." He showed her how to access some testing modules on her equipment so she could practice. He then demonstrated more emergency indicators that would point to the nearest available (as in, not already full) safer location which could be a refuge if Hazard lost structural integrity, whether a capsule, a room, etc.
Now that Leia had seen several examples of how this stuff worked, she could see the little plaques everywhere. It was a rare stretch of wall that went her height or length without something embedded in it. It reminded her of a very small guesthouse she'd helped a cousin refurbish one summer when she was in high school. He was going to use it as a backyard "office" although she'd thought of it more as a den in the animal sense: he'd run connections for everything the main house had - cable, phone, network, power, plumbing - to this 16 by 16 space. She was there to fetch and carry, hold drywall in place, paint. He hadn't thought through where the furniture was going to go very carefully, and no matter what he did, something was blocked because every single foot of wall had something on it, whether an outlet, a light switch, a phone jack, cat 5, Ethernet or whatever. And after she'd worked on that tiny building, every other building looked very different to her, as she saw every single functional piece of everything for months afterward. Including, typically, how things weren't square, weren't screwed tight, were painted sloppily or otherwise Not Done Right.
Leia was not to find out what the next part of the emergency demonstration would be, because Radmer got a call from Upper Andal. The political team wanted him on station ASAP to hammer out an agreement with station and planetary authorities. It seems they were concerned enough about the missile defense system problems that they were willing to discuss turning over the keys to the station in exchange for Hazard making everything work.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2012.
Created: July 9, 2012 Updated: July 9, 2012