Distant Frontiers - chapter 6
field log: 3NS200920
These past days have been eventful. The bleak dread of daily labour long gone. Everyone’s running around decks, and those that don’t either don’t have the vaguest idea what’s happened, or they’ve lost their will to live many cycles ago in the repetitiveness of their fruitless tasks. There’s a stir of purposefulness echoing along the corridors, clatter in the eating quarters now beats with intent to finish meals faster, up and down the corridors drums a beat of fast paced steps, all with the intent to prepare for the eventual encounter with our adversaries, to meet the new frontiers. And we’ve met new faces. Faces mostly from the upper brass, the most bored of us all. They’ve come from their lairs hidden somewhere on the spaceship, inquisitively looking around as if they’re seeing things never seen before, the marvels of government’s spaceship. Which probably isn’t too far from the truth in their cases. And we glance back at them as if they’re space monsters with whom we’ve made contact for the first time. Upcoming days, what could they bring, we’ve been wondering. Day after day I was gleaming with hope that some grand adventure would be waiting for us and it didn’t matter if finale turns out to be insignificant. What a fool I’ve been. But this wasn’t my individual desire but a collective plea to the gods of the future. The feelings of co-workers so obvious and clear, bright sparks in their eyes, ends of their lips curled up, exaggerated hand gestures. Come, come, sit with us, tell us how was your day, you’ve heard we’ve gained another so and so kilometres on them, have you heard the rumours that Jack and Jill are back together… How easily do expectations of ecstatic mind go hand in hand with clear nonsense?! A carnival, I think. I’ll have to look up in the database what a carnival was all about. A gathering of some sort? I remember reading something about it years ago.
Everyone’s become friendly and this allows me to write something else than dreadfully boring reports of a screw gone missing while the dentist’s chair was being repaired or that there was a spillage of some kind in the eating quarters and no one had bothered to clean it up until one of the subchiefs slipped and then it was found out that cleaning equipment had been missing for some time and the request for resupplying hadn’t been processed yet. Everything recorded neatly and regularly, as I’ve been taught. I had to ask bystanders on the details of the spillage incident. No one was too keen to give me a thorough description. No one had found it funny. What makes a person talkative? I was told that ingesting specific consumables can lead to that. Perhaps, if frontierers were caught and interrogated they might’ve a thing or two to say about that. They’re that kind of people if our manuals are correct, they’re the ones who frequent bars which offer those kinds of services.
And the reason for all this commotion? We’ve received information about a spaceship in a nearby sector. All we were told was that it wasn’t one of ours. But despite the news being as basic as it was it made us jump in the air. However, closer we got more it became clear that it was just a wreckage. Still, this didn’t make our excitation wane. It just shifted from the desire to spy a wild beast called a frontier company in its natural habitat to the examination of its carcase. As a result of our glorious endeavours to incorporate and convert members of frontier companies back into our midst, just another empty slogan, I was assigned to the unit boarding the wreckage. The scavenging crew. Fairly unusual. I’ve only heard of such practises, ordering a diarist to accompany a crew on their mission and file a report of what’s happened. During my specialization it was only presented to us as a theoretical possibility, a diarist’s just an unnumbered cog, a faceless witness to the might and splendour of the glorious federation. Your job isn’t to embellish its history, to fanfare its success, and mute its failures, or to make an everlasting written monument to its greatness for future generations to marvel and become inspired by, or to uplift spirits of its local subjects and to protect their zeal from the lust for freedom so cunningly constructed by separatists, or to … What else was there? My mind once so eager to learn anything new and remembering it well, all for the service to our government, now dulled by the uneventfulness of the assigned post, so I can’t even remember the basic stipulations of my position. I’ll forever wonder who gave the order for boarding and why. And I’ll be forever grateful for it. I could sense my life starting to flower again. Trapped in this black hole, a prison colder than ice, the void. I do miss my Earth days, I miss the Sun and the blue sky, scent of dirt when I was able to visit nature preservation districts. And now enclosed in this emptiness I value those experiences even more. It was good feeling alive.
Clearly, my role isn’t to reason why or even to make a reply, orders are orders, but so seldom have I considered that I’d have to die during my work. This image in my mind, always away from dangers the separatists pose to us, physical and mental, far away from distant frontiers, even though the void’s still the void if you’re near the Moon or near the belt, safe inside a government’s spaceship or a frontierer’s. To go beyond your daily life diving headfirst into activities unknown, activities never experienced before. That was the situation I was put in. Then it started to dawn on me, I had been living a comfortable life, no anxiousness, no fears, no material deprivation, just doing my assignments the best I could. I’d gladly take this instead of freedoms adhered to by the frontierers, my boredom instead of their exploration. If I weren’t ordered to accompany the crew, if I were free to make the decision, would I board the wreckage? If I were free, I wouldn’t do it willingly. I came to the realization that the excitation which results from imagination, and the excitation which results from actions are two completely different concepts. We all showed enthusiasm to daydream about what’d happen once we reach the spaceship/wreckage, but who amongst us would voluntarily depart the safe zone of our spaceship and enter the unknown of the void.
Be that as it may, I was told to meet with the boarding crew. For them boarding must be such a common event. They were the only ones on the whole spaceship not showing a slightest zeal, as if this was just another everyday mission. Without a doubt, I realized as soon as that thought had occurred in my mind. That’s precisely what their work is, their everyday boredom. And then, someone’d probably find writing these daily reports quite eventful. Oh, how soon they’d find themselves just rolling fingers across the keyboard or mutter something in the microphone. Just to get to the prescribed length and the approved error count. A master of words, a very insulting moniker, rather a master of don’t-have-anything-meaningful-to-do. But I can’t say a bad thing about them, they were really nice. No silly taunts targeting me, no ignorant shouting, no jeers and sneers, muscle flexing just to make clear who’s the boss there. As if I were just a piece of a gear they must carry with them. Perhaps I wasn’t their first. An outsider. More and more my time with them passed, but such a short period, more and more I was convinced that their assignment’s probably the only one that isn’t minutely prescribed in advance. Which part should’ve been prescribed in the first place? To remove a potentially non-existing container they couldn’t have found if they took the first exit on the right which now only leads into the void because the whole module has been blown away? Only they have the pleasure of meeting the outside world, the frontierers, albeit only as a faint whisper of events that might’ve occurred years ago and had just reached the sector we happened to be in at that time in a form of an abandoned spaceship or barely recognizable modules that were separated from the main frame, whether the cause was explosion or something else.
No one, to my knowledge, has any first-hand experience with the separatists, and from what I can infer from records, it’s been like that for decades. Military hasn’t had any contact with them and their everyday drills can’t be anything more than a show-off of the federal might and a way to fill up their work quotas, diplomacy forever engulfed in opaque fog of irrational plans how to persuade them to rejoin the federation, probably just trying to reach their quotas as well, commerce not interested in trading beyond colonies on the Mars, thinking about other quotas. Would there be anyone else whose sole purpose is to meet the frontierers one way or another? Unimaginable. It appears they’re just a sign, a symbol, and its meaning to keep us in the constant fear of losing what little we have if the federation falls. If our social system gets eroded by the freedoms they herald. How ridiculous! They shouldn’t even exist, in recent times they’re nowhere to be seen, no reports about them published or archived, a true spectre of the past. But still, these wreckages we come across seldomly or at least hear about them. Perhaps not theirs but just a lone part of another federal spaceship, or maybe one of the covert missions gone wrong, but what’s the reason to be covert in the first place? Or maybe, we’re very familiar with their existence, it’s just that all this thorough knowledge is kept hidden somewhere in vast and endless unnavigable archives, access to it known only to few, its details used by even fewer. Bizarre. Surely there’d be someone to spill out all these secrets, someone’d reveal it. So many questions questioned, so many answers unanswered. The scavenging crew. I didn’t ask them questions about the separatists. What were their empty black eyes telling me? Don’t ask me anything, I’m just doing my job, find my superior and ask her.
They didn’t seem to be bothered with me and they didn’t bother me. Their chief only said to not get in their way. I tried to oblige her. She didn’t look worn out as many others are, but it was clear from the first sight that she’d gone through some hardship. Her gaze was too deep, her words too precise. She had ink markings on the neck partly hidden by the collar. If the word database is correct, they were called tattoos many decades ago, not something you’d want to put on your body these days, much less having it on places for everyone to see. It pays off, the specialization course in the historic vocabulary I’ve taken during my studies. I wonder what they signify. They looked systemic, the little bit I could see, as if they were a type of rank or a grade. Naturally, I haven’t seen those anywhere else. They aren’t mentioned in any federal records and AI data miner couldn’t find anything meaningful from the description I had provided. I’ve sent inquiry to the central office but I’m doubtful I’ll get a response, any kind. They are probably too busy meeting quotas with some unimaginably boring and unproductive assignments. And their staff, how’s it possible they can do anything at all. Some of them were my colleagues when we were still an uneducated flock of barely mature adults. So many mysteries, how did they even get employed there, not to mention finish their studies. What’s brought the quality of our work so low? Or better, what’s still keeping it at this level? How fortunate are we to live in a world where everyone has a decent material standard as opposite to decades before the current federal government was formed? Maybe I should ask her directly about the markings when I get a chance which’ll certainly be never again. I don’t even know where the crew’s quarters are. The more I think about the marks, the more enigmatic the whole matter gets. How unlikely is it that a person with visible ink markings got to the position of a crew chief? Propensity for keeping everything levelled, everything as it is, not prohibiting innovations, change, diversity, but at the same time not promoting them. Don’t stick out and you’ll be alright. Could there be some clandestine organization working in our midst? Not with her showing markings visible to anyone. Unless it’s approved by the government? And to what end? There’s nothing covert going on here. No need for watchmen or watchers of watchmen. No one’s got anything to hide. If there’d be some benefit in telling a stranger all about yourself, your work, co-workers, where the main computer frame is, who has the access codes to important data, anything else there is, everyone would tell that gladly from the bottom of their hearts. Perhaps not a government organization then. Separatists infiltrators? We’re constantly being warned about them, among other things, but who takes these warnings seriously. Overambitious zealots, severely uneducated masses, children only few years old. Maybe some third party working inside the federal system but not related to the separatists or the government? The ink markings of the scavenging crew chief. So many things to say about them, so few things to know about them.
The wreckage had the standard docking. On the approach it looked that it was fully intact. To be honest, I couldn’t see much. It was my first time putting on an exoskeleton. I didn’t get a normal spacesuit the crew was wearing. I wonder why. Am I too valuable and must be enclosed in extra protective gear? Would I be too clumsy and would tear the normal spacesuit on some random object floating among us? It takes time to adapt. Once inside the exoskeleton I turned my head only to have my vision blocked by the side of the helmet. For a period, I could only see what was directly in front of me. Being strapped on my seat, I couldn’t move my body. I forgot I had to turn on the adaptive movement of the hamlet frame to synchronize it with the head motion. Only when they saw me struggling, gawking in a funny way out of the helmet, someone kindly told me what the problem was. You aren’t taught these skills in diarist courses.
I don’t know why I didn’t ask for help. Maybe I was too embarrassed. Later I found out it wouldn’t matter anyway. They couldn’t hear me even if I tried. The chief explained she had muted my outgoing sound for the everyone but herself. I didn’t complain. I didn’t want to be a burden. Even if I communicated with them, they probably wouldn’t go further than a polite small talk. On the approach they kept on going about events from their daily lives, who they are dating, strange experiences, new novels or comics. Then we docked on the wreckage and stopped its rotation. They prepared to board. Everyone checked each other’s gear, devices, and equipment they were taking with them and finally two robots. If I remember correctly, another term for them is a can, which was originally used for androids before the great purge, but it’s not supposed to be used in formal documents. I didn’t ask my professors about that. Some questions are better left unasked and the commitment with which they had instilled that into us over the years was too telling by itself. Finally, the chief gave instructions to every crew member. Then she came to me. She took time to see that my exoskeleton was set properly. In comparison, I got a feeling that she had been more attentive to robots than me. A lot more than a normal human would be. Which says something. It could also be said that I was at the bottom of her take care list. Before they continued into the wreckage, I asked her what her orders were. She didn’t answer right away. My impression was that she was hesitating, but she might’ve been preoccupied with something else. I was getting ready to persuade her by saying that I need the information for the official report but before I had a chance, she briefed me in a direct and frank manner. She said they are looking for a specific device, its real existence still only a rumour, that would allow the separatists to increase their interplanetary travel speed, enabling them to travel with ease even to the outer belt and back again, perhaps even further. She didn’t look to pleased and it’s not too hard to imagine why.
I don’t know much about space travel, but just the idea itself sounds too bizarre. Why’d you want to travel even further into the cold darkness, this empty void, where celestial bodies are even sparser? It’s more than obvious to anyone sane enough that nothing is there. This should be clear to see as your own nose. But they’re strange people. Or so we’re told. Why travelling that distance looking for something that doesn’t exist while every material item can be found on the Earth or any other decently supplied colony? How much do you have to persuade yourself that at the end of your journey there’s a place like no other, a place where you want to live? Baffling but intriguing, nonetheless. To be so committed, to be so sure of your success that you’re willing to die in the dreadful nothingness, nothing but blackness around you, and all that protects you from that, from the void is the metal hull of your spaceship, and once outside of it a flimsy spacesuit. What’s the compensation for your toil? To be independent? To be free? It never ceases to astonish me this physical world we and they live in. Dangers of this realm all too well known. But no. Is it ignorance, blindness rooted in their confidence that drives them deeper, further still? Ahh, I spend too much time meditating on issues I don’t understand. Far away from the simplicity of the void. On this side life, on that side death.
When they opened the hatch, I tried to get a clearer view of the interior even though I was on the tail with the chief just by my side. And what did I see? The void had spread into every room, every corner, every gap. As we moved deeper inside the chief told me to not move in front of her or to lag. She didn’t tell me what her reasons were, but I can come up with some feasible answers. To not be a hindrance, to have an accurate view of the mission, to not get lost. I asked her what our time window was and if they will search the whole wreckage. She gave me this empty look as if she was gazing through me at something far, far away, as if she wanted to be at that faraway place. She said they’ll do a thorough sweep, whether they find the device or not. And that was it. Perhaps there was something on her mind about the mission she wasn’t willing to share. Or maybe my desires were too transparent, and she didn’t want to crush my hopes. It’s true, I wasn’t interested in that imaginary device, but that was expected. It doesn’t have any particular value to me, its function, design, even the idea behind it is inconsequential. Although a remnant of frontier society, surely there’s much more to a social system than a piece of machinery. That’s what I was hoping for. To get a better insight into their lives. Would I be the first diarist to give even a modest report on basic traits of their world? Who knows? Piles and piles of digital data unsorted in archives, a chance that someone’s already done it, but search gives no results.
Her answer didn’t assure me my expectation would be met, nor did it help to calm my anxiousness. I’m not sure why I was anxious in the first place. Did I really expect to get myself in danger? I should’ve been worried of getting bored. Despite a considerable amount of excitement, and on my part egoistic desire to encounter something unusual, even though the boarding itself was extraordinary, I guess I’d become greedy and wanted more, but nothing happened. The scavenging crew extensively searched every room and compartment, opened every container, sent microbots into gaps of closed lockers. It soon became clear to me they weren’t looking only for a device but for any kind of information about the operator of the spaceship. Reconsidering, that was a surreal thing to do. Because there wasn’t even a hint of who had been operating the spaceship. Of course, it didn’t help that spaceship’s brains had been fried. Anything that would track the spaceship to its owners had been missing. Not that I know how to recognize a frontier spaceship or what to look for to distinguish it from ours. So, we dragged ourselves from here to there, looking around at empty spaces, and sometimes an object would drift into our view weightlessly, and then the crew would examine it. If it was a partly damaged light ball, they assessed the cause of the damage and if it was insignificant for their mission they’d just release it back into the void, if it was a spec of frozen blood, they’d put it in a capsule and give it to robots to carry it among other items of interest. And sometimes we’d stop and take a rest and after a while the chief got everyone up and we lumbered on some more.
It really took a toll on me, having big expectations turn into a big disappointment. I can only imagine how big the collective upset would have been if everyone had a chance to board the wreckage. Poor fools, as I had been. Deeper we got harder it became for me to continue. This maze of nothingness was draining life from me. Everything new coming in sight just a faded memory of a moment just passed. I tried to regain concentration, but it was so hard wandering through empty corridors, barren rooms, my view limited to wherever flashlights beams were pointing at. The crew did they work diligently I’d say, but their communication was limited to orders from the chief, and confirmations and reports from the crew of everything observed, as if they didn’t want to use even more energy talking about pointless topics.
At that point I got this idea in my head, the answer to the question why we don’t know more about the frontierers, why’s it all such a mystery. I speculated that if there have been other missions like this when scavenging crews boarded their wreckages, at least crew chiefs must’ve written reports. And why no one knows anything about reports or their content? Because it’s so dull and boring. As if we’ve been sparred dreariness, as if these reports would diminish our image of the frontier society, making them totally insignificant. No adversary, nothing to look for. Every day a repetitive cycle of yesterday.
So, what have the crew and my insignificance found? Empty spaces. Eternal silence. Endless void. Not a sign of the separatists or their device. Only a whisper of their plans, only a phantom of their skills. The mission was a precise reflection of who we are. Chasers of nothingness. I turned back once again when we were about to enter our shuttle. Was that only a dream, an imagination of my mind that seeks a desire but doesn’t know what the desire is? Something was there in that blackness I’d just moved through. Something which I couldn’t find. Something intangible. The idea.
It felt like I was the only one that considered the mission a failure. The crew looked unhinged by the whole event. Some had fallen asleep on our way back to the spaceship, others continued with the small talk. The chief asked me how I felt about it. I should’ve lied. A wonderful experience surpassing anything I’ve seen before! But I told her the truth, as expected from a diarist, showing my displeasure. There’s nothing in the void, any object you’ve found equally empty of its worth, mostly a waste of time. She nodded. For a moment I thought she was only being polite, not scolding me for being a spoiled brat. But then, her answer made a strange impression on me. Yes, she said, I agree, the mission was devoid of anything meaningful, in its operational sense it’s been a failure, we haven’t found the device or anything else substantial, be that information or a physical object or something third. But that’s the nature of our work, our life, our society, she continued, we roam empty spaces searching for things that don’t exist, no vision, no purpose. I was taken aghast. The mysterious scavenging crew chief. Not only did I hear her clearly, but her whole crew did as well, and not even one of them blinked or objected in any way.
I debated in my mind if I should include this in the present report. The extremely minute chance that a human will read it and take actions against her. As a diarist I have the obligation to report faithfully and in details everything happening on the spaceship I’m assigned to, but also the freedom to write in these reports whatever comes on my mind, to think freely. I’m certain this is unique only for few professions, my included. But to express directly during your work that our existence as a society is meaningless invites reprisals in one form or another. And the outcome wouldn’t be positive. Well, as a diarist I’m also not obliged to notify anyone about presumed offences like this. I’ll just leave it as it is and let others deal with it if they feel inclined to do so.
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type: diarist’s report
author: definitely human
length: too excessive, shorten reports
style: artistic, advise exactness
grammar: predominantly correct
relevance: mostly irrelevant, advise omitting redundant parts
reviewer: AI
code: LVS133310ZLC