A Visitor to the Future - 134 - Keeping Busy

Settling into life on a spaceship wasn't something I expected to happen overnight - though with all the comforts of home and the novelty of zero-gravity I found myself surprised by how quickly I adapted. I'd found a nice spot outside the Factory, where I could alternate between writing whatever suited my fancy and watching the veins of the ship at work, drones delivering materials or conducting inspections like clockwork.

I'd been talking to Regolith a lot more lately, and one conversation stuck with me in particular. He'd been monitoring some of the ship's metrics, some inane and obscure information related to reactor cycles. I asked whether he'd found anything interesting, and he said that he hoped he never would.

"You hope not?" I'd asked, not sure what he meant.

"Yes," he'd said, "The two most notable events in a successful space journey should be departure and arrival. Anything interesting, or unexpected, that happens between those two events should be of as little consequence as possible."

He was absolutely right, of course. When ship operations were almost entirely automated on such a routine journey, finding anything amiss would be cause for concern. I thought of a comparison - imagine traveling on a bus in the 2020s. If the bus you were on suddenly caught fire, all the passengers would suddenly have something to do, but they likely wouldn't be too pleased about it.

I found myself imagining these weird scenarios - some of which I wrote short stories about - perhaps the ship would encounter aliens or be hit by a meteor - these innocent daydreams helping me to pass the time of the voyage. Inevitably myself and the crew would work together to save ourselves and continue on our way.

It was following one such fantasy that I realized I was going a little stir crazy without anything meaningful to do, so I approached Regolith and Anode in the Forefort and asked whether there was anything I could do to help aboard the ship. We weren't accelerating at the moment, so in the zero-gravity environment Regolith tended to anchor himself to the handholds with one strong limb. Anode, on the other hand, floated through the air like some sort of octopus, cable-like hair displacing air and latching onto various surfaces to move forward. Its function hadn't been too clear on Earth, but out here it was obvious. I very much took the same approach as Regolith and stayed close to the walls.

It turned out that I had been sorely mistaken about there not being anything to do.

"Just because systems are automated," explained Regolith, upside-down in front of me, "It does not mean they are operating at peak efficiency, or it could be that some aspect of that automation is not working as intended. All systems and processes have leading indicators of decay or failure. It is the detection of these indicators that is the true work of spacefarers, and the development of strategies to remedy these issues where they occur."

"Yes, and that remediation work isn't necessarily something we need to do ourselves either," added Anode, "Not like when Sarkona or I tinker with an automobile engine with our own hands as part of some Aldev contest. We can leverage automation to help us implement our strategies - and that's to say nothing of innovation, either! Just because the ship is working right now, it doesn't mean we can't improve it. I hope to have made at least some efficiency gains before we reach Mars."

Regolith's head rocked back and forth a little where he was anchored next to me - a subtle expression of emotion I barely picked up on - the CI was hard to read at times. I took a guess at what it meant.

"Do you think that's possible, Regolith?" I asked.

"I would be surprised," said Regolith, "Many of the basic elements in use within the Boiling Point have been iterated upon for hundreds of years. That is not to say it cannot be done, but it may be difficult during a journey of this length."

"Is that a challenge?" Anode said mischievously, "I do love a challenge."

"Not a challenge, a statement - though I would not discourage you from trying," responded Regolith, "The study of systems and the interactions between them forms a large part of the roles of an Auditor. It may be that you find some undocumented observations to act upon. I would be intrigued to hear them if you do."

"You're on!" said Anode, clapping her hands and pushing off in the direction of the Factory.

"Back to the matter at hand," said Regolith to me, "I would say that it is very easy to rely on the Consortium - to see the effective functioning and state that there is nothing more for us to do. But this, in truth, is an illusion. Even a perfectly designed and implemented systems may encounter issues after constant use - complex systems rarely remain at rest, which is why monitoring is so important. I would be willing to teach you, should you be interested."

"Really? You'd do that?" I asked.

"Yes. I will have to start with the fundamentals - you must understand, these are usually taught to children during schooling. I am sure we could make some progress before we arrive on Mars," Regolith then paused, before adding, "And to be frank, it would give me something interesting to do as well. The monitoring we are performing on this journey is far from the most engaging work, necessary as it is."

So began my lessons with Regolith. True to his word, he did start with the fundamentals - interacting with Consortium systems and interfaces being chief among them, an area I realized I was severly deficient in. I'd grown so used to interacting with the Consortium directly, asking it about various subjects. As Regolith showed me, what I'd done so far barely scratched the surface. There was a whole other world of statistics, programs and esoteric functions which I wasn't sure I'd be able to master in even fifty years. I found the experience enlightening - from an uneducated perspective, it was very easy to say that the Consortium just worked - you asked it for something and it did it. Regolith helped me to see the gargantuan administrative mass hiding just below the surface - how the Consortium began to achieve the things you asked it to do.

Regolith was a very good teacher, always straight to the point but respectful, and often anticipating my questions before I asked them. I wondered if he'd ever thought of teaching at an orchard town or university. That being said, I was still very much behind the times, but I resolved to continue working on what he'd taught me, even after the journey ended.

That was how I filled part of my time on board.

The remainder was filled with social activities. Even with our various interests to keep ourselves busy, we still had plenty of time left to socialize. We played Contact frequently (I always came last, but had fun in the process), and I'd embarked upon another project that the rest of the crew were eager to help me with - finding out which films, TV and media had survived from my own time and watching them. There were a surprising amount of remakes of old classics from my time, which were bizarre to see in full 3D projections. Besides those, everyone else seemed to be able to recommend something, and we had plenty of time to watch them. I finally watched Sarkona's long-term recommendation, the Asimov projection trilogy, featuring depictions of the writer's stories in the I, Robot collection, one of which brought me to tears. Gatecrash made sure that we watched the latest Star Wars remakes, which I had to admit were much better than the originals. The most interesting recommendation came from Regolith, though - it was a series from the late 2330s, extremely obscure and pulled from a personal archive of his that roughly translated to "Meddling Mars". It was a comedy about a team of scientists attempting to terraform Mars and failing remarkably in the process which held up extremely well even translated into English. I hadn't expected such a funny series to be one of Regolith's favorites, stern as his manner usually was, but my shock didn't stop me from asking him for a copy.

In the process I found out that lost media was something of a goldmine for citizens of the Consortium. Checking the Infranet articles on the subject, it turned out that there was a small group of formerly cryocontained who had outlasted the media that was around when they grew up. Some of them had taken the time to re-create the missing media from scratch, and were always looking for feedback on their attempts. I found a remake of the film Baby Driver, made by a formerly cryocontained person frozen some thirty years after I was - the original hadn't survived. Sarkona loved it - though it was sort of cheating to recommend any film that heavily featured automobiles to them.

Gatecrash sometimes skipped socializing for a week or so at a time - which was understandable as they were trying to grow used to being on their own once they continued their journey out past Mars without us. "Better to find out if I can handle it now than six months from now," they'd said. So far, so good.

With a routine established, the days began to pass quickly, only marked by the gradual slowing of the gravity ring from 1G to 0.37G as we began to adjust to Mars gravity, which was both weird and fun as I lept through my quarters. Though there wasn't much way to tell from the seemingly static stars outside our windows, we were now mere days from the destination Sarkona had asked we visit on our way to Mars - the habitat in the middle of no-where which belonged to the Abnormals.


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