Day one

‘O Rose, thou art sick.’
…’though I try, I can’t quite see the relevance of Romantic poetry to my life here on Alpha 5…but we still have to do academic lesson two mornings a week… Our tutor says that these are designed to ensure that we are ‘rounded human beings’ rather than narrowly focussed specialists…although what a nursemaid would know about being a human being…!
The dude we’re studying today is William Blake, who wrote that line three hundred years ago. William was a sort of artist (he was an ‘engraver’, but I’m not exactly sure what that means…), who wrote poetry on the side… He believed his poetry was divinely inspired, he came up with a whole legion of mythical spirits, and thought he saw an Angel in a tree in some place called Peckham Rye, near London, when he was nine years old…
But some of his words do affect me, especially these ones,

‘Love seeketh only self to please
To bind another to its delight
Joys in another’s loss of ease
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite’
Nurse Vermillion eight told us today that Blake was very difficult to live with and had a fractious relationship with his wife…she said we could draw our own conclusions about the meaning of those lines…! My conclusion was that Blake knew himself very well, but wasn’t about to change for anyone…now who does that remind you of…?
As I thought at the time, my reports on the crusties in the ice, about their tools, ornaments, and what have you, were not believed… They weren’t quite as blunt as that,
“Are you sure of what you saw…? It’s very difficult to make out things clearly when they’re encased in ice…and the light was very poor…” and so on…
But there was no argument about the new species of crusty, or at least that it was a new species of crusty…again Six Gee and her cronies, both organic and AI, were sceptical about my assertion that I’d found a more ‘advanced’ species of pseudo-crustacean,
“That remains to be proved, Marta…” etc
But at least, as Sal predicted, we do have approval to go back in six weeks to look for more evidence…
One thing the Nurses were interested in was the apparently spontaneous failure of my interface to record anything more once I’d switched my torch on, down there in the crevasse…
Initially, Six Gee had been sceptical about that as well,
“Are you sure you didn’t just turn your cortical feed off, dear…?”
Behind that statement lay the suspicion that I’d fabricated the glitch to explain the lack of evidence for my claims…or at least that’s how I read it…not that I’m paranoid or anything…! Also, it was news to me that I could turn it off…! However, I had noticed that my interface clock was now out of sync with everybody else’s…further investigations revealed that my ’face stopped working completely for four and a half minutes…that failure came to light when they tried a diagnostic on it, mainly to shut me up…
Mission AI is intrigued by this anomaly, and plans to run further diagnostics to investigate…most of these can be done while I’m sleeping, and I shouldn’t even notice that they’re happening…but worryingly, Six Gee mentioned the possibility that surgery might be needed it to put it right…and they can’t even reset my clock…!
While I’m waiting to go back to the Barrier, I have to put up with Rai, Jorja and Han’s triumphalism…their latest achievement has been to solve the mystery of crusty to pod, (and crusty to crusty) communication…strictly speaking this mainly involved Han, who’d come up with the detectors that he and Rai had left at the pod grove…and it was his detectors that had made the discovery…and his insight that had identified the medium…
The secret turned out to be childishly simple…radio…! Specifically something called shortwave radio, meaning, paradoxically, radio waves much longer than those we broadcast now…at a much lower frequency…! What’s shortwave radio, I hear you ask…? Well, it’s something we no longer use…antique communication technology that was employed in the last century, and could reach ’round the world… In fact, it’s something the home planet seems to have forgotten about… Han explained it to us in the briefing he gave…apparently the radio waves bounce of something called the ‘Heaviside layer’ which is why they can reach around the planet…this was used on Earth before satellites to broadcast long distances… It seems that Alpha 5 has also got its own Heaviside layer, and the crusties and pods have been making use of it…for thousands, who knows, maybe millions of years…! We don’t know how these two very different lifeforms manage to generate radio waves, although certain crystalline structures found within the pods are being studied…and as for the larger question of how and why two different orders of pseudo-life would evolve the same communication strategy…? What we also haven’t worked out is the language, which seems to consist of long continuous tones containing apparently infinite variations on pitch and time, almost like a song… Priya says it’s like the songs of humpback whales, and she should know…! The ‘songs’ are interspersed with rapid-fire clicks that could almost be machine code…but they’re not in binary…!
One practical result of this discovery is that Mission AI has decided to print shortwave radio transceivers, which we can use on Mission when out of range of our ground station network…bouncing the signals off the atmosphere like Marconi and the other pioneers did two hundred years ago. I must also point out that that this method of communication will be as unreliable and as subject to atmospheric conditions as everything else on this crazy planet…

The feeling of being marginalised is worse than ever…I know I’m right but nobody cares…and my life is just passing me by… I try to talk to Jorge, Priya, and Sal about this, but they just tell me that I’m taking it too much to heart…that everybody contributes to the Mission…and it’s just Rai and Jorja’s turn, is all… What they really mean is,

‘Marta, the whole world doesn’t revolve around you, and it’s about time you realised this…’
I don’t know why I’m telling you all this…but this is the movie running through my head, right…! The stuff I don’t share, even with my ’face…coz they’ll be listening…
We have an important landmark coming up, me and my significant other…which means it’s already way past time… Have you guessed what it is, yet…? Comes ’round every Standard year about this time…normally it’s an excuse for a party, but I just don’t feel like celebrating, right now…and this one is different, because now we’re legal… Why Earth conventions should matter to us, I don’t know….. but sometime in the last few months we turned sixteen, by Earth chronology… Which means we’re grown up…we can make decisions about certain things…do certain things…experience certain things… But, whenever I start to turn the subject to certain things, you don’t want to know…! You act like I wasn’t about to say, what I nearly was about to say…! And you tell me that you love me…! But love isn’t just about words…empty promises to be true, ’til death us do part… It’s about actions, it’s about touching…feeling…doing your duty as a man, for chod’s sake…! Even if you are just a boy!
So why won’t you…?

Day two

We work to a twenty seven hour day on Alpha 5, unlike those blink and you’ll miss it twenty four hour days they have on Earth… Normally they don’t seem so long…
I decided to force the issue…to see if there’s any life down there…! To get him used to the idea… In any case I’m going to have to do all the work, when we finally get down to it… At first he’s just too shocked to say or do anything. He just lets it happen. Maybe he just never believed that it could… But Priya was right, bless her…!
And maybe we can go a bit further next time…
I’ve been working on my core samples that I brought back from the Barrier…the ice twenty metres down was about a hundred thousand years old according to my initial findings…which means that the crusties in the crevasse had a civilisation when us earthlings were running around in bearskins chasing woolly mammoths…! The ice cores down at the level where Priya’s arthropod was entombed are much older, more than a million years old at a rough estimate… The ice cap would have been much smaller then…but what were the (presumably non-sentient) crusties doing up there anyway…?
Priya was rather miffed that my discovery of another deep-frozen crusty, of a hitherto undescribed species, had stolen her thunder… ‘Her crusty’, although (as I keep pointing out) I found that one as well, seems to be of the same species as the ones ’round the Dome… She was able to take samples of what in Alphane pseudo-life passes for DNA, but unfortunately we lack any samples of current crusty ‘DNA’ to make a comparison… I suggested that we visit the crusty remains near the rock pool, and bag us a sample…we could then see if it’s possible to extract anything from that… Priya thinks this is good idea, we have a Mission out together soon where we can do this… Failing that, she’ll have to rely on comparisons with pseudo-DNA extracted from her pet arths…… Priya also was able to get samples from the ice-crusty’s gut…and surprise, surprise…it was carnivorous, and appeared to have fed on some kind of smaller arthropod, shortly before it died…
But I can’t escape the feeling that nobody cares what we find anyway…!
I meet my love again, later… This time he seems to be with the programme, almost eager…! It’s awkward because it’s no longer so spontaneous…we know we have to try, and hopefully succeed…! Getting into position is difficult and slightly embarrassing… Jorge’s legs are almost skeletal, no muscle tone at all…I fight a momentary feeling of disgust, and press on…It hurts when he enters me, and he comes very quickly…but, we’ve done it…! I suddenly feel a fierce exultation…once more we have been the first…blazing the trail for the others to follow… But, then the doubts set in…maybe, Rai and Jorja beat us there as well… I reassure myself that Mission AI would have been keeping an eye on them, and would surely have intervened…Jorja is far too young…
I’m not worried about getting pregnant as I know that the medical protocols in my interface will prevent me from conceiving…at least, they will until Mission AI wants me to…
We suddenly have nothing to say to each other…the enormity of what has happened is like a huge barrier between us… I dress, kiss him hurriedly goodbye…and rush back to my bunk… Abruptly, every cam is watching me…judging me…there is nowhere to hide…even my own eyes betray me, revealing my innermost secrets to those who watch…
I want to speak to Priya…to pour out my hopes, my fears…my embarrassment and my self-consciousness…but, even ’though it’s not late to disturb her…suddenly I can’t…it’s all too new…too personal… I try to sleep, but sleep won’t come…sorting through my library of entertainment…I find something suitable…a old romantic comedy sent from Earth…it stars someone called Jennifer Aniston…and is set in an old American city called New York… Even ’though New York disappeared under the waves fifty years ago…and the United States is no more…it’s comforting…her life, her problems, don’t seem anything like mine, as if anything could be…! But the fact she has a life, and problems…albeit, one that’s made up, is enough…
I am not alone…

Day three

We’ve just been told the news…out of the blue…Mission AI has decided to cancel the second Mission to the Barrier…no warning, no explanation…just another fait accompli…
I’d been about to confide in Priya when the news came through…suddenly, the time is no longer right… Priya ’faces Sal, who’s already heard…and we arrange to meet in the common room…
Sal is angry,
“They can’t do this…we’ve got work to do, important work…experiments that we haven’t finished…that mean we have to go back…!”
“Maybe we should talk to Nurse Gee…” Priya, as ever, is trying to be reasonable,
“Have you tried to talk to Six Gee lately, if your names not Rai, Jorja…or Han…!” snorts Sal…
I keep my mouth shut… I’m with Sal…I think that, for whatever arcane reason, they’ve made their mind up…and won’t be shifted or persuaded…but if we can’t work with them…maybe we can work ’round them…
Sal has to go…his Mission today, ironically with Rai, is due out in twenty minutes… Priya turns to me,
“You didn’t say much…! I thought you’d be outraged…!”
“Well, I am, really… But, I’ve got other things on my mind…”
Priya’s got that look,
“Come on, then…! Give…!”
And so I tell her…
I go and visit the twins, I nod to Nurse Amber, but don’t engage in conversation… Does she know…? She surely must…they’re all linked, all part of Mission AI… Amber shows no indication that anything has changed, but I turn my attention to the children, they at least will not judge…
I’m holding them both…one in each arm… Milla is gently tugging at a loose strand of my hair…Maddy is investigating my nose…this at least is safe, and normal…and mine…
Priya had been suitably amazed and curious…and sympathetic when I’d told her…but this does put a barrier between us…it’s somewhere that I’ve been and she hasn’t…and won’t for some time… I know her relationship with Sal is all very innocent…kissing and cuddling…and holding hands…even when they briefly shared a tent out on Mission…
I now feel very alone, because what I’m about to do I can’t share with any of the others…there’s just too much risk… I now know I can keep secrets from those who watch us… I stumbled on it almost by accident…although I think, I must have been looking for it…subconsciously, at least…
What I thought was a random, unexplainable event,out of my control,appears to be something I can control… As I said, I stumbled on it by accident…it was almost like tensing a muscle I didn’t know I had…and something shifted in my mind…A few seconds later, I tried again…and whatever was different shifted back…! Scarcely able to credit it, I checked my cortical feed…by chance I’d been using an old fashioned VDU, with Standard Dome time displayed in the corner…the feed sort of shimmered, and when it came back there was a fresh discrepancy…my time and Dome time were even more out of sync… Now Six Gee let slip that when my ’face malfunctioned the first time, there was no telemetry at all…which presumably means the tracking signal, which lets Mission AI know where we all are whenever we are in reach of a ground station, won’t work either…
So folks, I’m about to go off the radar…
I know I can’t try this again until I’m ready…the time discrepancy is very small, less than an elapsed minute…and I’m hoping that the Nurses just won’t notice…I’m already four and half minutes out, so I’m trusting they won’t pick up a few more seconds… So, when I’m ready what will I do with my new found freedom…? Well I know I can’t take a vehicle…that can be tracked, both via its locator signal and also visually from space… So wherever I want to go I’ll have to be able to reach on foot… I know it’s not going to be easy, I’ll have to invent an excuse to leave the Dome…or possibly just abscond when I’m on a routine Mission…once I switch my interface off they won’t be able to follow me…and I’m too small to be seen from space…but I’ll need a window of opportunity, a time period when I’m not missed…so I can get far enough away…
But where to go…? What to do…?
The Pole’s out of the question, even if I could steal a ’plane and disable the tracker…! But I have other ideas…I still want to try and communicate with a crusty, face to face…I’m convinced that they mean us no harm…but will I have the nerve to confront one…? Out in the open, with no protection…no rova to hide in…
For some reason I can’t get those other lines from William Blake out of my head…the ones about the sick rose, and ‘the invisible worm that flies in the night’… I worry that the worm has found my ‘bed of crimson joy’…whatever that means, and surely that can’t be good…!
I’m avoiding Jorge now…in fact, I’m avoiding everybody… I can’t shake the feeling that what I’m about to do, and what I’ve already done, are clearly written on my face…! I feel like I’m chipping each little scrap of time out of the vast cliff that is eternity…and every thought, word and deed is being wrenched unwillingly from my consciousness…
Jorge has ’faced me for the second time tonight…so has Priya…! I know I can’t ignore them forever…but I can’t talk right now…

Day three plus one hour