A Planet Too Far: Beyond the Stars, #1

by Nick Webb

  Hope 91 is mostly a lot of ladders. It’s speeding up enough that I weigh half what I used to, but Gertie says that to grow right, I have to exercise a lot. I guess that’s why they put all the ladders in. It makes me climb all the time, and makes me really tired.

  The bottom floor is the engine room. I’m not allowed to go in there. The second floor is storage. It’s where we keep all the food that I’ll eat for the next thirteen years. Well, it’s not food food. It’s more like “add water” food. It tastes ok, I guess. Sally the chef does a good job. Better than mom ever cooked. She was always working and never had time for me anyway. She was always working so hard on something, which she never even told me anything about. Maybe it’s best that she died and I left.

  Now I feel horrible for typing that.

  The third floor is where lots of machines are kept. Like the water recycler. And the air purifier. And all sorts of other stuff that Philae promised me he’d explain to me someday. He said that in a few years I’ll get to choose my profession. He says I need to become good at all the spaceship’s machines eventually, but that it would be best if I focused on one. I hope he doesn’t make me learn to be a toilet expert. That would suck. Literally. The toilet here is not like the one in our house. It really sucks the poo out of you. I don’t know why they just couldn’t give me a real toilet.

  The fourth floor is the kitchen. Sally the Chef’s arms hang down from the ceiling and prepare all the food. But she doesn’t clean. Really, people? You can design a robot that cooks me dinner, but that can’t clean up after itself? I keep asking Gertie if she’ll clean for me, but she just laughs and says I need to learn to clean up after myself. She says I have to be prepared for marriage. That’s when I know she’s just making fun of me. There’s no one but me on this ship. And I won’t get to Sephardia until I’m twenty-five. That’s way too old to get married. Even if there are any girls there.

  The fifth floor is my bedroom, and next to it is the game room where Max hangs out. He’s the fun robot. Always inventing games for me to play with him. Sometimes he makes me invent games too, which is really fun.

  The sixth floor is the school room. It’s where Gertie and Philae both teach me my lessons. That is the most boring room ever. Every day. Four hours of Gertie. Four hours of Philae. Sometimes I wish the builders had packed me a gun.

  The seventh floor is my favorite. It’s the observatory. It has the most windows on the whole ship. The roof has windows too, and there’s this loft I can climb up onto and lay on my back while I look up at the stars. It reminds me of laying in the back yard with mom in the summer, watching meteor showers. She always liked space stuff and astronomy, and we’d lay out there for hours. Sometimes she liked it so much that she’d even cry. I don’t know why.

  You can’t see anything through the window but stars. There are no planets or nebula or anything more interesting. Just stars and more stars.

  So that’s it, seven floors, three robots, an autopilot, Sally the Chef, and me. Alex White.

  Wow, that was a lot. Goodbye!

  Day 739

  Gertie thinks she’s my mom. Or at least that’s probably how they programmed her. Sometimes she tries to hug me, but it’s a little creepy. I let her anyway, because I don’t have the words to tell her why it makes me uncomfortable, so I just let her do it. And she mentioned me getting married again today, which creeped me out. I asked her not to say that again, but all she did was smile and said something about Willow getting to meet me someday. Then she changed the subject really fast. I asked her who Willow was, and she said I must have heard her say something else, and then she made me go up to bed, an hour early! Ugh, I’m getting so sick of Gertie. Luckily, Max played a new game with me at bedtime. I think he sensed I was annoyed at Gertie. But now he’s gone and I still had ten minutes before the lights turned out, so here I am.

  Day 741

  Today I tried to trick Gertie into telling me who Willow was. I lied and told her that Max and I talked about her last night before bed, and that he told me all about her. I thought she was going to cave and finally tell me, but instead she climbed up into the game room and punched Max in the back of the head. I think it was all worth it just to watch the two of them go at it. I think Gertie damaged one of Max’s servomotors because his left eye has trouble blinking now.

  Anyway, Gertie’s not talking. She just makes me do my chores and does my morning lessons like normal. Every time I asked about Willow she just ignored the question and kept right on teaching. Today was all on commas and periods and punctuation. Seriously. Am I really going to need punctuation as one of the first settlers on a new world? So unfair.

  Day 1010

  Wow, so it’s been awhile since I wrote. Like almost a year. I’m ten now, and the day after my birthday, all of the sudden Gertie starts blabbing about Willow! Like it was just part of her programming or something that she wasn’t supposed to talk about until after I’d turned ten or something. She’s a girl (duh!) who’s in another spaceship called Hope 92. Gertie said I could talk to her sometime this year, but that first I’d need to prepare. I asked her what I needed to prepare, and she kept on saying stupid things like, Oh, you need to be ready for her, or, all in good time, my sweet.

  I begged her to let me talk to her, but nothing worked. All Gertie did was continue with the morning lessons. Today it was … I can’t even remember. All I could think about was Willow. I think Gertie does the morning lessons because that’s when I’m most awake and least likely to fall asleep. Philae’s lessons are in the afternoon. That’s when I’m already tired. But his are so interesting that I can’t fall asleep. For robots, they’re pretty smart.

  Philae seemed pretty weird at first. He’s still a little weird. He gets so excited about whatever our lesson is for the day. Like today, he taught me about seeds and germination and planting strategies and stuff, and I got to put on the VR headset and he showed me how to do it. He doesn’t have to wear the headset since he’s a robot, but we were both there, digging in the dirt and watering the seeds. He fast forwarded the time, and I got to watch our crops grow up in less than a minute. Then I learned how to run a harvester and chop and process all the wheat and corn. The whole time he was bouncing up and down in the tractor’s seat next to me, telling me how combustion engines work, and just acting like Philae.

  Then I asked him about Willow, and he said he wouldn’t talk about her yet. Then he started talking about how learning how to grow all this food would help me feed my kids. That was weird.

  I asked Max if I could move my bed from my bedroom to the top of the loft in the observatory. I want to fall asleep watching the stars. Even though they just look like points of light and nothing else, well, it reminds me of mom. I miss her.

  He said no. Stupid robot.

  Day 1121

  It’s been almost four months since Gertie first told me about Willow, and still, FOUR MONTHS LATER, she hasn’t let me talk to her. Why are they making me wait so long? I’ve been sitting on this spaceship for over three years, and it seems like all I do is wait. That’s the purpose of my life: wait. I’m waiting eighteen years just to get to my new home. And every day, all I can do is wait for the interesting lessons with Philae. Or wait for Sally the Chef to finish making dinner. Or wait through all my lessons to be able to play games with Max. And now, I have to wait months and months to finally talk to the only human I’ll have gotten to talk to in years. I hate my life sometimes.

  I finally convinced Max and Philae that I should get to spend two nights a week sleeping up in the loft in the observatory. Since there’s three of us, we out-vote Gertie, who said that I couldn’t sleep outside my bedroom. She thinks I might roll around in my sleep and fall off the loft. But I won’t. I’m good with heights. I climb at least five hundred meters every day, since I go up and down those ladders over and over and over again.

  Max calls the two nights I spend up there in the loft my slumber party. I asked him what that was, and he was surprised I’d never had a
slumber party before when I was little. At least, I can’t remember if I did. Mom moved us around a lot after dad left when I was really young. I remember living in three separate houses before she finally died. She never even told me why dad left. She said he was in the military, but never said anything else. She seemed really sad about it.

  Anyway, I finally told Philae that I’d decided on a calling. I guess I should explain that. I’m supposed to choose a profession and a calling. The profession is some special skill that I’ll learn and be an expert at that will be super useful to the colony when I get there. Farming. Building and programming computers. Being a doctor. That kind of stuff. But my calling is what calls to me. It’s what I’m interested in doing and learning about that doesn’t exactly help the colony, but is something that I want to learn about and be good at. For fun.

  I chose astronomy. Well, actually I chose telescope building, but that’s so I can look through the windows in the observatory and actually see stuff instead of just stars.

  I get to start building my first telescope tomorrow. I’m so excited. I have a secret about the real reason I’m building the telescope, but I won’t say it here because you-know-who is probably reading this.

  Day 1128

  I finished my first telescope. I spent a few days reading on the computer to learn how. There are lots of different kinds. I didn’t know that before I started, so I chose the simplest one. Something called a refractor. It’s just two lenses at different ends of a tube. After reading about what size lenses I needed and how far apart they need to be, I went to the printer and gave it the designs. A few minutes later I had the lenses and the tube, but then I realized I had no way to connect the lenses to the tube. So Philae gave me some hull sealant. That’s the stuff they’ll use if there’s ever a hole in the wall of the spaceship from a micro-meteor. That’s the biggest fear the robots have, is us hitting a tiny tiny piece of dust. Since we’re moving at close to the speed of light, it’ll hurt us bad. But there’s no way to see one coming. Luckily, the robots say that deep interstellar space is super empty, and that we shouldn’t have to really worry until we get close to the star system we’re heading for. And right before landing on Sephardia will be most dangerous part of all.

  Anyway, I used the hull sealant and glued the lenses in the tube. I took it up to the observatory, rested it on the loft pointing out the side window, then laid down to look through it.

  AND IT WAS FUZZY! I was so mad. All that time I spent studying and printing and glueing, and it was fuzzy. I think I glued the lenses in at the wrong spot, or maybe I made the tube too short or too long.

  But I think I figured out a way around that. Tomorrow I’ll make a tube with two parts that slide against each other, so I can extend the tube or make it shorter. That way I won’t have to glue the lenses exactly in the right spot.

  Gertie has me doing stuff she calls “etiquette lessons.” Basically, how to talk to girls. She’s so weird. Aren’t girls people? I used to talk to people all the time. Why can’t I just talk to Willow?

  Day 1129

  I built the new tube. It works perfectly. Well, almost perfectly. I can slide the two parts of the tube in and out, and put them in just the right spot so the image is not too fuzzy. The thing is, it’s still a little fuzzy, but I think it’s from another problem. I read more about lenses, and I think it’s something called astigmatism. That’s when the lenses are crooked.

  Man, this astronomy business is hard. Maybe I’ll choose something else for my calling.

  Hmm… . But if I change, I won’t be able to do my thing I have planned. Gertie‌—‌stop reading my journal!

  Day 1209

  Over two months ago, I built that first telescope. It sucked. Now I’ve got a pretty decent one. It’s still a refractor, but the lenses are a little bigger. The tube is not adjustable. That’s because I figured out how to print out some lens holders that will clamp onto the tube. And I even printed out a tripod, and a clamp to hold the telescope on and move it around.

  The bad news is, my plan didn’t work. I tried to use it to find Hope 92. But I couldn’t find it. I spent every night for a whole month looking for it, out every window of the observatory. Looks like I’ll never get to talk to Willow, or see her or her spaceship. It’s so unfair. Just like when dad left. Just like mom dying. Just like being sent out in this stupid spaceship. I should have never said yes. Why did I say yes? I was only seven. They can’t just send seven-year-olds out into space, can they? Can they?

  But now everyone back on Earth that sent me is dead, because for them, I left almost three hundred years ago. Life is so unfair.

  I just want to talk to somebody. Gertie is annoying. Max is getting boring. Philae is the only interesting one, but I only get to talk to him for a few hours in the afternoon before he goes down to the engine room to take care of the ship. But he’s not human, he’s a droid. I mean, he has a human face, and he looks human. But it’s just not the same. Not the same, and not fair.

  I just want to talk to somebody.

  Day 1210

  I woke up today, and Gertie surprised me at breakfast.

  She said tomorrow I get to talk to Willow.

  I’m in bed now, but I can’t sleep, so I’m writing in my journal. And I can’t even concentrate to do that, so I’m going to read about telescopes. Goodnight.

  Day 1211

  I talked to her! Willow is a real person. She is ten years old. Like me. It is day 1213 for her, so she’s been in space for two days longer than me.

  I think that explains it. Since she launched two days before me, maybe it took us this long to catch up! That’s why Gertie didn’t let me talk to her, because we couldn’t. And that’s why I couldn’t see her spaceship in the telescope, because it was in front of us.

  Anyway, I got to talk to her for twenty whole minutes. It was the most amazing thing. We talked about everything. We compared our ships. We compared our robots. She has a mom robot, a fun robot, and a teacher robot, just like me. Her kitchen robot is like mine, except Willow calls him Jeeves. That made me laugh.

  We even had a few minutes where we didn’t say anything at all. But that was ok. It was just so nice to have someone real to talk to. So nice, that even that awkward silence was amazing. It was like I could hear her smile in the silence. I hope she could hear me smile.

  I think I could get used to this.

  I’m in bed already. I didn’t even have time to do telescope work today! How can I have time for telescopes when there’s a real person out here to talk to!

  Day 1225

  I’ve been talking to Willow for two weeks now. It’s like I’ve known her forever. We’re best friends, and we talk about everything. And I mean everything. We talk about our robots. We talk about what professions we think we’ll have. It’s still a few years before we need to decide, and I still have no idea what I want to do. Neither does she.

  But she has chosen her calling. Willow is an artist. She says her mediums are colored pencil, watercolor, and electroglass. I thought it was funny she said mediums instead of saying, I like colored pencils. I laughed at her. But then she laughed at me for wanting to build a Cassegrain, so we’re even.

  A Cassegrain is a type of telescope. It’s where light goes in one side, but instead of going through a lens, it hits a curved mirror at the other end. Then it bounces back and hits another smaller mirror at the first end. Then the light goes back to the second end and goes through a really small hole in the first mirror, where it comes out the tube and into a small lens in an eyepiece. I explained it all to Willow, and she’s really excited for me. It makes me happy to know she’s excited. It makes me want to see her art.

  Day 1250

  Gertie keeps on getting after me for talking to Willow so much, but I can’t help it. She and Philae tried to limit me to one hour per day, but me and Max outvoted them. Well, it’s a tie, but we made a new rule on the spaceship that ties go in favor of the way something is already done, and since I already talk to her a
bout two hours a day, that’s how long I get to keep talking to her for. I love democracy. That’s what Philae has been teaching me about. Democracy, monarchies, oligarchies, republics, theocracies, autocracies, military juntas, banana republics, it seems like it’s one of Philae’s favorite subjects. Except that every subject seems like Philae’s favorite subject. Good old Philae. He asked me what system I thought we lived in on the ship, and I said Alexocracy, since I’m the only human onboard, I’m in charge. He did that snorting thing where his chest bounces while he laughs.

  I asked Willow about her parents, about why they sent her up here to settle Sephardia without them. It was weird, Willow got all quiet and changed the subject. She’s never done that before. We talk about everything. We don’t keep secrets from each other. I’m worried I upset her, and then I realized what a stupid question it was, that maybe if I was sent up here because my mom was dead and my dad gone, maybe hers were dead too and I reminded her. Damn, I can be so stupid sometimes.

  I just wrote damn. I think I can swear here. Who’s going to stop me?

  Gertie, if you’re reading this, I swear I’ll figure out a way to deactivate you.

  Day 1252