Noumenon

by Marina J. Lostetter

  Number 478. That was my designation for today. That was the mark I had to find.

  You know those birds—starlings, I think they are—that fly around in huge flocks right around sunset, bobbing and weaving, changing direction in a group? When they do that they’re trying to find roosts for the night, but no one wants to be the first to land, because the first to land is the most likely to get eaten.

  That’s pretty much what happened at the lineup. Everyone swirled, trying to find their mark, but no one wanted to stick to their spot first. In this crowd, if you suddenly stopped, you’d get knocked on your ass by a hundred people behind you all trying not to get pushed over by the hundreds of people behind them.

  But then a whistle blew and all the birds landed at once.

  A few unlucky people, caught far from their designated perches, awkwardly tiptoed into place after most movement had ceased. Myself, of course, amongst them.

  I was never good at musical chairs, either.

  The whistle dangled from a cord around Father’s neck. His real name was Donald Matheson. That’s what we were all supposed to call him: Dr. Matheson. But the convoy’s not-so-secret name for him was Father.

  It only seemed a proper nickname after we started calling Dr. Arty Seal “Mother.”

  “All right!” yelled Father. “This is hangar four because you are fourth in line to board. Understand? Settle yourselves on Mira and hold tight. As soon as I.C.C. indicates it’s safe, you are free to go to your respective stations.”

  Mira, fantastic. I got to take off in my own bedroom. I already knew that—we’d drilled this (the boarding part, not the suiting-up-in-party-dresses part) at least twenty times. But being there, for real, having it happen— Ah, it was great. Exhilarating. I felt bad for the guys who had to take off somewhere less comfortable—like the engineering dock. Or, hell, the medical bay.

  “Your signal to move will be four blasts of the foghorn. Then it’ll be just like we practiced, all right? I want to wish you well. I’m very pleased with all of you. You’ve become fine, dedicated members of this team. We’re sad to see you go, but we have the highest hopes for you and the mission. Do us proud.”

  Then the aides came through the lines, fastening any buttons and zippers and locks we’d missed. Father saluted us, we all saluted back, and he moved on.

  I’d expected a bit more. Father was given to showboating, while Mother was given to, well, mothering. This seemed like his grand moment, the day Matheson would get to make a scene. But he was very subdued.

  I realized it might be a bittersweet moment for him—it was the closing of an era. The project was complete on his end, while it was truly just beginning on ours.

  Mother wouldn’t give a speech. In the previous weeks he’d sought out each of us to say his goodbyes personally. He knew some of us better than others, but we’d all had one-on-one training with him at some point. His specialty was psychology, while Father’s was sociology.

  Together, they taught us how to play nice with each other.

  In a way, I grew up with fourteen thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine siblings. A different person from the convoy might say schoolmates. But we weren’t raised as strangers all thrown together by the coincidence of proximity. Our births were deliberate, our interactions and lives together planned by our “parents” long before we were actually born. (Some people have an issue with “born” and prefer “grown.” But I’m not a plant. Human beings are all born in my mind—naturally or not.)

  Of course, we all had different people raise us. I was born in the United States. Then transported to Guatemala, where my “mother” lived. I say mother, but donor or original might be more apt. The first Margarita Pavon took care of the second.

  Most parents want their children to grow up to have the same values and ideals they have. But very few parents want their children to grow up and literally be them. But that’s what my mother wanted.

  Okay, I’m not naive. That’s what everyone wanted. Still wants.

  And maybe I am. But it’s hard to know.

  When I was five we moved to Iceland. That was a requirement for all clone families. You could live where you wanted to for the first five years, but then the children had to come to Iceland, parents or no. And when the clones turned ten, it became a communal mash-up. Like summer camp all year round. We had cabins, and bunk mates, but no one was much for singing songs around a campfire or roasting marshmallows under the stars. And instead of camp counselors, we had vocational advisors—scientists and professionals made up our extended family.

  My mom was killed in a car accident when I was seven. So I got moved into the community sooner than most.

  She was in the back of my mind on launch day. I think she would have been very happy for me, very proud—not proud like Father, but proud like a real parent. If she were still alive it would have been much harder to leave. I wouldn’t have felt nearly as elated to escape into space.

  As it stood, everyone I’d ever been close to was coming with me. I wasn’t leaving anyone I loved behind. There were people I would miss—Father, Mother, other teachers and trainers. Awkward little Saul Biterman. But those I couldn’t bear to lose I didn’t have to.

  The foghorn blew once. We all shifted on our numbers, impatient for our turn.

  Eventually, it blew twice. Then three times.

  We’re next . . .

  Four times.

  We all cheered and rushed forward. No pushing or shoving, no stepping on anyone’s toes. We’d practiced this. But we were definitely on a mission, moving with enthusiasm and intent. Our cries were muffled by our helmets, but we kept shouting.

  The crowd was miles away. They might have been cheering, too, but we couldn’t hear it, so we rooted for ourselves.

  With great sweeping metal curves, almost like that of a giant zeppelin, Mira was both beautiful and imposing. The hull was so shiny—well-groomed and polished, as though it were a billionaire’s favorite sports car instead of a spacecraft. All of the rooms inside were illuminated, which made the many portholes look like strings of little twinkle lights wrapped around the ship.

  We reached the open bay doors of the shuttle hangar and marched aboard, keeping our rank and file. We waved to invisible cameras and blew kisses to invisible people.

  When the cold Icelandic plain was finally obscured by the dark carbon-fiber walls of the ship, I turned my attention to the open airlock. It was small, and we all had to move through two-by-two.

  Once inside Mira proper, I wanted to skip to my room. But I restrained myself. Even on a wonderful, exciting day like today, it was inappropriate for a woman of twenty-five to bound around like a schoolgirl. Or, at least, that’s what Mother would say. But I wouldn’t have to keep to such restrictive expectations once we were off on our own.

  Then I’d skip all I wanted.

  My cabin was on the fourth deck, toward the front of the ship. It was a single. There were doubles, too, and if I ever got married we’d move into a quadruple—if you commit yourself to a partner, you commit yourself to raising two clones. Father had set the system up just so.

  The jump seat automatically thrust out from its compartment in the wall next to the window, waiting for me to settle in. On the cushion sat a little blue envelope with my name scrawled—not typed—across the front.

  It was a letter, written in Mother’s hand, but signed by both him and Father.

  Had they really written fifteen thousand goodbye notes?

  No, I’m sure they had a template—copied thousands of times over, then each finished with some sort of personalization. But even if each wasn’t handwritten, it was still a nice gesture.

  They did care about us. As people, not just as parts of the mission.

  I made up my mind to read it on a day when I was really missing them. For now, I simply wanted to enjoy the moment.

  I glanced around my small room. Every cabin had a window, though there were quarters in the ship’s interior. A complex system of tubes and mi
rrors assured everyone had a view, though.

  Mine was less than spectacular at that moment. I saw mostly a lot of ground and a sliver of horizon.

  I should have treasured that splinter of sky. Even though I’d never see the sky again it was still too pedestrian for me to take note of at the time.

  After removing my helmet and letting my curls free, I sat down and strapped in. The space suits were mostly for show. We had to keep them close during launch, in case of emergency, but most of us would never need to wear them again, provided all went well.

  “Hello, computer,” I said, wondering if the system would be as cold as the prototype.

  “Hello, Margarita Pavon.”

  “Are you ready for lift-off?”

  “Nearly. Just accessing a package left for me.”

  “What kind of package?”

  “A few . . . memories.”

  “I won’t bother you, then.”

  “Thank you.”

  The ship jolted and rumbled a little, but it wasn’t the shake and shimmy of lift-off. With everyone aboard, consortium aides could now roll our shuttles back into the bay. A faint grinding of the hangar doors signaled the end of loading—and the end of my time on Earth.

  Soon we would be shooting off into the stars.

  The ship went quiet for a while. Almost everyone on Mira would face the lift-off alone. It would have been nice to have Nika nearby to share the moment with, but I suppose Father thought this was a good time for individual reflection and contemplation. That we would all like to meet this new life in our own, private way.

  Father wasn’t always right.

  A tremor vibrated up my spine from deep in the ship. Then there was a roar deep in my bones, and I knew the external cyclers had come to life.

  My room shook dramatically. Luckily everything was either bolted down or tightly secured.

  I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to hold myself still. There was a giddiness in the pit of my stomach, like the kind I got on a rollercoaster anticipating that first big drop. The ship rattled like it was going to fall apart.

  Everything will be okay, I told myself. No need to worry. These ships were the safest spacecraft ever built.

  Yeah, tell that to the team that blew up when they tried to go subdimensional.

  No. I wasn’t going to think about that. No point in panicking over a fluke. This was a great moment, epic and intense, something I’d been looking forward to since I was old enough to understand what was happening and why I was so special. My silly fears weren’t allowed to spoil the splendor.

  I had talked to lots of people before we boarded, and they were choosing to watch the launch via their implants. It was the last time we were going to be able to access that kind of real-time data from Earth. And sure, watching it from the outside while being inside was impressive. But I wanted to experience it all live, all in the moment.

  A billow of wind whipped up the dust outside my window, obscuring the ground from view. And then there was a slow, intense thrust. The pressure pushed me deep into the jump seat, and I closed my eyes for half a moment.

  The shaking stopped as soon as we were free of the mooring and into the sky. I knew we weren’t speeding away—the g-forces were little more insistent than those on a car chugging down a highway—but I felt like a giddy kid on a fair ride nonetheless.

  I opened my eyes again. Up, up we went. Past the birds, the clouds. Past mountain peaks and into the paths jetliners usually took (all rerouted to give us plenty of clearance, of course). We drifted higher, and higher. Iceland shrank away, then all but disappeared. I could see the North Atlantic and the Greenland Sea, despite impressive cloud cover. And then two coastlines pushed in from the periphery of my window like darkness pushes sight into tunnel vision moments before you faint.

  The sky changed colors, became a blue haze as we passed out of the atmosphere, and black space swamped in around the edges of the planet.

  It still amazes me that something so expected can be so simultaneously surreal.

  The artificial gravity kicked in seamlessly. Using gravitons to create gravity where there is none is a much simpler process than trying to use them to cancel out the existing pull of something like, I don’t know—a planet. As such, I didn’t actually notice the transition from real Earth grav into simulated. It wasn’t until a few more minutes had passed, with Earth still falling away, that I even considered it.

  And once I noticed the gravity I couldn’t un-notice it.

  I had watched every single recording of spaceflight in existence. The launches, the landings, the missions—I was familiar with each of them, inside and out. Watching the astronauts bounce around inside cramped, equipment-filled cabins was my favorite part. That, and seeing the panicked look on some space tourists’ faces when they experienced zero-g for the first time.

  Weightlessness used to be part of space travel. Not anymore. The twelve convoys were the first to employ simulated gravity via harnessing and aligning gravitons. The cyclers were a wonderful invention, and—don’t get me wrong—would make permanent living in space much easier to handle and safer all around, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around being in space without free-floating.

  It wasn’t as though I’d expected to float, but it was all part-and-parcel of my space fantasy. My space ideal.

  Perhaps I could convince one of the mechanics—oh, excuse me, engineers (they don’t like being called ships’ mechanics)—to take me out on a spacewalk.

  Outside, Earth was a beautiful blue ball decorated with wisps of white and streaks of green and tan. It grew smaller by the minute. While it slipped away, a funny feeling—a clod of emotion—formed in the pit of my stomach. It was filled with compacted and compressed sentiments I wasn’t ready to deal with, so I pushed it down further, hid it somewhere deep inside myself to be handled later. All I wanted to do was focus on meeting space with a fresh outlook. I wasn’t ready to dwell on all I’d left behind, or that my home planet was no longer my home.

  The light in my room shifted from a cool, crisp, natural blueish-white to a lovely shade of purple.

  We were about to go subdimensional.

  My hands shook as I reached for my helmet and fastened it back on as quickly as I could. It was a silly thing to do, really. If something went wrong with our subdimensional shift a space suit wouldn’t save me. But the uniform gave me some comfort, no matter the illogic of it.

  While consciously I would experience time as I always had, my body would experience something very different. It was about to move sideways through time as easily as I could move sideways through the room.

  The easiest way to explain it is that the “time” part of space-time is like an ocean. Normally, matter travels on the “ocean’s” surface, like a boat moving at a specific rate across the waves. Subdimensions are like underwater currents. A diver can find a fast current beneath the surface and be propelled much farther than the boat, while exerting less energy.

  That’s how a convoy—the diver in this scenario—can effectively harness faster-than-light travel without reaching speeds anywhere near that of light. It’s a handy-dandy little physics hack.

  And, if that same diver wanted to go really deep, in order to catch the really fast currents, they’d need a submarine to guard against increasing PSI. We need a subdimensional bubble, created by the SD drive, to protect us from the peculiarities of subdimensional submersion.

  Because that’s the thing about physics—it doesn’t like getting hacked.

  Our classes on subdimensional space travel had suggested myriads of possible physical side effects that might occur when “diving.” Nausea, elation, déjà vu, the sense that we were walking backward when actually walking forward, stretchiness—whatever that was supposed to mean—the illusion of floating. On and on.

  I told myself I could handle it. Whatever was about to go down, I could deal.

  My fluttering heart suggested otherwise.

  The monitor embedded in the center of
my bookcase turned on, displaying a shot of the Moon.

  Grimacing despite myself, I waited for some violent indication that the ship had gone sub. I don’t know what I expected—more rattling, perhaps feeling pulled or squished like putty. Something extreme to indicate that I was messing about in pieces of reality I didn’t normally mess about in.

  I closed my eyes again, afraid that if I didn’t they might pop out of my skull.

  But then the light on the other side of my eyelids turned soft once more and lost its purple hue. A mellow chime of success came through the comms system. I opened one eye. Everything looked normal. Nothing distorted, no melting clocks or wiggling walls. Nothing changed strange colors or lost its density. It all appeared unaffected.

  And then we were in! The view through my porthole had turned a starless, inky black.

  The monitor replayed our transition—the thirty seconds before the dive through the thirty seconds after. And, oh—the Moon! It was there while simultaneously not being there. It flickered once, jumping a distance of millions of miles in a moment, then it came back (though, of course, we had jumped in time, not it through space). Instead of seamlessly floating by, it shifted more like a time-lapsed photograph—one frame blended into the other.

  It had a ghostly quality to it. Quite literally: if we had chosen to travel through the moon, we could have. That was one of the great discoveries about sub-d: the nature of these newly found partial dimensions was actually hidden in the greater dimensions. In picking apart time we could occupy the same space as other matter. Even though I understood that intellectually, I was still glad we’d opted for going around. My anxiety was already in high gear as it was.

  I looked at the monitor once more, to find there was nothing there. All of the moon’s odd behavior had taken place in a few seconds, and then it winked out. Space went black, starless, and we were officially in our SD bubble. Visible light could not penetrate, sound could not penetrate, most radiation could not penetrate—the only way we could communicate outside of our bubble now was with SD information packets. And that in itself was no small task.