by Nick Webb
“No. I will not go. You persuaded me last season to enter the strange forest village. I followed you then, but not this time.”
“And what ill followed? We entered the village, we saw it, and we left. The same shall be so again. We will enter the barrows, see, and leave. And if I recall, it was you who persuaded me to enter the village.”
“For the last time, no!” And she punched Elu hard in the gut before flying northward. Elu doubled over, and before he caught his breath he was alone. He pursued her, but soon lost her tracks in the quickly melting snow. Why was she so nervous? She seemed different somehow from when they explored as children, as if some burden weighed her down.
Further opportunities for exploring eluded him for some time, and he grew weary of the plodding monotony of the basin making. His back ached from hunching over the spinning wheel for so many long hours every day, and his spirit ached more at having to spend his vital youth in a trammel, a cage of boredom that leached his vigor.
Inevitably he decided to make his own opportunities to escape. At first he resorted to simple lying. The potter, though skilled at his craft, was hopelessly dull in all other matters and naively believed Elu when he claimed his mother was ill and required assistance at home, or when his father needed help skinning a wrobly. Soon, as one lie required another for company it became too much to manage, so Elu resorted to contriving sicknesses, something that played well to the natural fears of the potter.
On most occasions, Thora managed to escape the eyes of the innkeeper’s wife and steal away with Elu, but her partings were more inopportune and awkward, leading to uncomfortable situations in which the innkeeper and his wife both publicly scolded Thora for her insolence and laziness, and worse encounters that she only hinted at to Elu. She bristled at the treatment, but held her tongue, for someone with a mere child’s mask did not hold the rank necessary to question their treatment by an experienced tradesman.
Eventually, the inexorable pull of justice exposed Elu’s many deceptions. The innkeeper’s wife remarked at Thora’s frequent absences to the potter’s wife, and added that she believed the girl was still gallivanting about with the teacher’s son. The potter’s wife, ever the overbearingly loud gossip, passed her suspicions to her husband who confronted Elu’s father publicly in the street.
When Elu returned to his father’s house from his wanderings that day, the usually calm, affable man awaited him. As he walked through the door the teacher stood up, strode over to his son, the son that had brought such dishonor upon the house, and ripped the potter apprentice’s mask violently from his head, revealing a shocked, naked face.
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This short story is different. Like nothing I’ve written before. It’s basically just the journal of a kid that gets sent on a spaceship escaping a doomed Earth, alone but for the company of a few robots. It follows his adolescence and early adulthood as he discovers the truth about why he’s there, that he’s not alone, and that his destiny is far different than what he thought it was when he started his journal.
Hope 91
By Nick Webb
Day 715
My name is Alex White. I am nine years old, and I live on a spaceship called Hope 91.
Gertie told me I have to start keeping a journal, so here goes, I guess. She’s mostly ok, but sometimes annoying. I told her she can’t tell me what to do because she’s a droid. But she tuts and laughs, and makes me do the chores anyway. I hate it. But she’s all right.
Let’s see. I have to fill three whole pages, so I guess I should start typing. I’ve been on Hope 91 for almost two whole years now. But I just woke up a month ago. It’s very small. There’s just room enough for me, Gertie, Max, Philae, and the other droids but they don’t count because the rest of them only have one job, like the autopilot. I didn’t name him, because he doesn’t even talk. And Sally the chef. All she does is cook. But she doesn’t even have a head. Just a bunch of robot arms in the galley.
Gertie’s the nicest. Max is the funnest. And Philae is the weirdest. That’s good because otherwise I’d be REALLY bored.
You see, I used to live in Baltimore, but, well, mom died. I still miss her a lot, but Gertie’s been so nice to me. For a robot. Anyway, it’s good that I’m up here. They say that I’ll be one of the first people to live on Sephardia.
Who are they, you ask? They are everyone back on Earth. They are the ones who don’t get to live on Sephardia. And the funniest thing of all is, they are all DEAD. Ha ha, I know, that’s not funny. It’s not like they all died in a big volcano or something. They all died two hundred years ago. There’s new people living there now. People I’ll never know.
They explained it to me once. You see, I was asleep for two years. And while I was asleep they fired the engines so the ship could speed up REALLY fast. I had to be asleep or else it would hurt me, or something. And now I’m going so fast that I’m TIME TRAVELING!!!! THAT IS SO COOL!
Anyway, I should get to Sephardia in about sixteen more years. But I’ll have to sleep for two more whole years while we slow down. Eighteen years on a tiny spaceship. Yay. I can’t wait. Gertie also says that I’m too sarcastic.
Anyway, Gertie’s saying it’s time for cleanup, then dinner, then more lessons with Philae, then a game with Max, then bed. I guess brave space explorers still have to do their chores.
Until next time!
Day 730
Gertie kept telling me to write in this thing, but I kept putting it off. Now I don’t even know what to write about. I guess I’ll describe the ship. It’s called Hope 91. It’s not big. I remember living in Baltimore. We had this house that was so big, I had my own bathroom, and the kitchen was big enough for mom and me to both sit down in, and there was a living room, and room to walk around. And a yard I could play in.
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 whe
re 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 servo motors 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, 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 rig
ht 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.
