2017 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide

by Maggie Allen

  Chen turned to face her tail. “Look, M-23, I don’t need an escort. I’ll get back to our condo before 18:00 to finish the form.”

  “I will let your mother know.”

  “Do whatever you want,” Chen grumbled as she turned away.

  When M-23 was out of sight, Chen took off at a run following the yellow light, though she hardly needed it. Chen could find her way to the recycling center from anywhere in the station by the age of five. It was her favorite place to hang out with the best company to keep.

  She came to the section center, where gravity was lowest, and whooped as her short legs took long, uninhibited leaps. The next door opened at her approach, and she grabbed the side railing, slingshotting herself through the entry with a hard left. Her feet bounced against the right wall as she corrected herself, continuing her lengthy bounds towards the recycling center.

  Gravity returned to its normal levels, slowing Chen down. No matter, she thought with a grin as she caught sight of the green logo ahead. Chen’s stomach lurched as something caught her by the back of her shirt.

  “Whoa there! Where you headed in such a hurry?” The familiar man’s voice put her at ease.

  She smiled up at him saying, “Robert, I was just stopping by for an evening chat.”

  He eyed her, one brow pointed and the other pulled down, the look he always had when she imitated his accent. Robert hadn’t been on the Xiao-ping long, only a few years. He transferred from a neighboring station called the Queen Margaret.

  “Oh, just by for a chat, are you? I think you’re avoiding some paperwork, young lady.”

  Chen groaned, “Ugh, great. Not you, too.”

  “Don’t worry,” he winked as the door to the recycling facility opened, “I’m on your side.”

  They stepped into the very personalized, almost apartment-like station center where Robert spent most of his time. Plans and sketches were strewn about the shabby office. Chen loved it. There was so much thought, dedication, and hope in the room.

  “I don’t know why I have to be in the first wave. It’s not like I’m anything special,” she humphed as she plopped down in his chair, arms crossed.

  Robert raised a brow. “Being the daughter of the cultural ambassador is unimportant?”

  “And completely boring. Imagine spending all your days in a classroom learning nothing but history and language. I know twelve different dialects from my home country,” she air-quoted the word. Chen found nothing about the country known as China to be home. Xiao-ping raised her and made her who she was. China would hold nothing for her.

  “That’s an honor I would be happy to accept.”

  Chen laughed, “Yeah, right! Try living it sometime.”

  “You are a well-educated young lady—”

  “But I don’t care about all that! They should have picked someone who cared!”

  Robert placed his hand on Chen’s shoulder with a gentle smile, “You were chosen to harbor a wealth of knowledge for an entire race; whether you like it or not doesn’t matter. You do care, deep down, because you know how important you are.”

  The words filled her with warmth. Chen always walked in her mother’s shadow, rarely receiving recognition for her hard work, her dedication. “Thanks, Robert, but you know that’s just not true. My mother will probably live forever, and I won’t be needed.”

  “Hmm, sounds like someone’s wishful thinking.”

  “If only.” Chen’s heart sank and she looked away.

  She heard Robert moving about, and then he tapped her shoulder. When she turned, there sat an adorable plush bunny in his hands.

  “For me?” She reached for it, and he recoiled with a stern gaze.

  “This is something special. If you truly do not want to go to Earth, I will give it to you.”

  She groped at his hands. “Of course I don’t want to go! What’s in it?”

  He extended it toward her again, opening his fingers very slowly. “It will force the colonization ship to turn around and come back to port.”

  “Give it!” She jumped and strained as he pulled away, but she couldn’t reach it.

  Robert held one finger to his mouth and shushed her. “You have to be careful with it, and you have to learn how to work it.”

  “I promise to pay attention to everything you say.”

  A smile spread across his face, and he finally released it to her. Chen turned it over and over in her hands. It looked like an ordinary stuffed toy.

  “How does it work?”

  He took it and flipped it on its back. There was a tiny switch nestled in the fake fur. “You push this up, and then place the bunny next to a computer. Once you do that, I can turn the ship around.”

  Chen thought for a moment. “Will someone notice it? Will you get in trouble?”

  He grinned, “Of course not.”

  “Well great, I’ll do it.”

  The bunny was placed in her grasp once more.

  “Want to try some of my new fruit juice recipe?” He opened a small compartment next to his desk and retrieved a jar of green liquid.

  Chen, being used to seeing strange colored liquid in jars around Robert’s office, thought nothing of it and accepted happily. She was three gulps in before she realized it was awful, like rotten cabbage when the pickled vegetables had gone wrong. She managed one last swallow before placing the glass aside and smiling a grin that felt much more like a grimace.

  “You hate it,” he said matter-of-factly, with a flat tone.

  She shook her head. “No, it’s great.” A burp fought its way up her throat and escaped with a foul flavor that made Chen cringe.

  Robert laughed. “That’s okay, I knew it was terrible.”

  “Then why did you offer it to me?” Chen punched his shoulder.

  “I just,” he broke into tears of jubilation, “I just wanted to see the look on your face.” He could barely contain himself, and Chen raged, jabbing him repeatedly with the bottle.

  “All right, all right,” he wound down to chuckles, “you need to head home and finish filling out the form. It’s almost 18:00.”

  “You mean I still need to get on the landing craft?”

  He shrugged. “How else would the bunny get to the ship’s computer?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Run along now. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.”

  Chen took off with a wave, elated to be freed from her duties as the cultural ambassador’s daughter. She would stay on Xiao-ping, study astronomy, biology, and computer science like Robert. She would be able to do whatever she wanted and wouldn’t have to spend any more of her days on Qin Shi Huang, Dong Zhongshu, or the Dalai Lama.

  Home was just around the corner for her when she slowed to a steady, disheartened trudge. Chen didn’t want her mother thinking she’d suddenly changed her mind about going to Earth and therefore getting suspicious.

  “Aiya! Chen, why are you so late?” Shuzhen chastised her as she came tromping in.

  Chen shrugged, ensuring the bunny was hidden deep in her pocket. “Mama, it’s fine. It’s not 18:00 yet, we can still finish the document.”

  “But you were going to help me with dinner, and now we have to eat rations.”

  Chen groaned, “They’re not rations, Mother, it’s just regular space station food.”

  “Why do you hold no respect for your history? You should be eating the food of your ancestors every night, remembering every taste, considering every scent. Memorizing the texture of it in your mouth. You are the only link to what we once were, and your knowledge will be taught in the future schools of Earth.”

  Chen’s eyes bulged as her eyebrows arched towards the ceiling, “Don’t be so dramatic, Mama. They have vids, they have books, and essays, and poems of all kinds. They don’t need me.”

  Shuzhen stood akimbo, blocking the way to the kitchen. “Who will remember the accents of our dialects? Who will remember the color of the sky over the Forbidden City? Who will remember the size of the Terracotta Army?�
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  “I will.” Chen sighed in feigned defeat. It didn’t matter that she had to get on the colony ship the next morning, it would be turning right back around within minutes of their departure.

  Shuzhen nodded, “And I will.” She led Chen to the computer desk. “Place your thumb on the reader and finish the last four questions, then come to the kitchen to help me with the dumplings.”

  Chen did as she was told, and dinner went without an argument. Afterwards, her mother forced Chen into a culturally befitting dress for the gathering in A-12. She and her mother shook hands, said words of encouragement in Mandarin, Wu, Gan, Hakka, or Yue, and bowed respectfully. Chen found it all so superficial.

  The slideshow went on for an hour, which was forty-five minutes longer than Chen thought it should have gone for. They showed the terraforming stations and their living quarters, described the risks of contamination in certain areas, which they’d be far away from, and the repopulation efforts they would go through. The Xiao-ping station was responsible for several different breeds of fish, a few thousand strains of bacteria, two of the salvageable species of primate, and of course, pandas.

  It was sad how few of the species were saved after the global downfall. Chen felt the leaders should have spent more time collecting the billions of creatures and plants from Earth, rather than all the efforts they spent in making comfortable arrangements in space. Visions of toxic rain, smog-strangled air, and piles of garbage surrounding the rainforests came to her. How horrible it must have been to be left behind those three hundred years ago.

  “Chen, come here,” Shuzhen called to her in Yue. Chen barely contained a gesture of displeasure as she approached the older man, Wu-Bō, who still considered himself to be Cantonese though his father, and his father’s father, were both born on Xiao-ping.

  He smiled warmly, apparently blind to Chen’s apathy. “Hello, Miss Li. Are you excited for tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, it’s going to be great. I’m ready to have more room to move around,” she lied. Chen didn’t mind the cramped living quarters and the narrow hallways when there was the vastness of space right outside her window.

  Wu-Bō bowed curtly as he turned away, and Chen’s mother eyed her with a stern glare.

  Shuzhen uttered in common speak, “You do not use slang around your elders. Show more respect than that.”

  “I’m sorry, Mǔqīn,” a hint of acidity entered Chen’s voice as she used the proper word for mother.

  She spent the remainder of the evening circulating through the crowd, shaking more hands, giving more words of encouragement in Yue, Mandarin, Hakka, and the other dialects. All the while Chen thought about the plush bunny stuffed in her backpack. She would be off and back before the morning was done tomorrow. Or at least that’s what Chen hoped.

  They piled through the door at an astonishing 23:53, and they needed to be up by 06:30 the next day for departure preparation. Chen yawned as she waded through the towers of “culturally relevant” books.

  “Goodnight, Mama,” she sighed, yanking the tight flats from her feet.

  The other side of the room was quiet, but Chen hardly noticed the lack of response from her mother as she drifted into a comfortable and easy sleep…

  Only to be woken what seemed like minutes later at 06:30. A metal clanking rang out as a robot rapped at the door, and Chen shot awake.

  “It is time for you to prepare your things, Miss Li.” The robot spoke in Cantonese, Shuzhen’s preferred dialect. Chen stared as her mother walked from the restroom, picked her bag up at the door, and turned to look back.

  “Are you coming or not?” Shuzhen said in a very challenging tone.

  Not! Chen wanted to say. Leaving was the last thing on her mind, but she knew if she didn’t come quietly, her mother would force her to come, kicking and screaming. Chen would rather cooperate and end up coming back in moments without ever being implicated.

  “Yes, Mama. I need a moment to get dressed.” She took her bag to the restroom and dug through to ensure her plush bunny was still there. A sigh of relief escaped her when she found it. She changed quickly and put her long, jet-black hair in a tight bun. Bright green eyes reflected back at her from the mirror, and she searched them, trying to find her happiness. It was in there, hidden behind the weight of an entire culture. Soon it would be set free.

  “Hurry!” Shuzhen’s voice was on the other side of the door, and Chen clamped her hand around the bunny, not wanting her secret found. She gave one last glance in the mirror, faked a smile, and turned away.

  The walk to the boarding station was crowded, much more so than Chen would have guessed. So this is what five thousand people looks like, she marveled as she stepped onto a bulkhead to get a better view. Every face in the crowd was known to her, either by name or position on Xiao-ping. How strange it must have been, just three hundred years ago, for someone to not know the people who grew their food or cleaned their water.

  Thousands of bracelets cracked to life at the same time. “Wave one participants, we will begin boarding shortly. Obviously for wave two we will have some foresight and batch people into boarding classes!” Everyone chuckled, though they were hot, tired, and sick of standing.

  “If you would please be sure to have your non-essential luggage passed off to a robot for handling and storage before you get to the entrance, this will go a lot faster. We will send them through the halls to collect your things. Thank you for your patience and cooperation.”

  Shuzhen sighed, “I can’t believe this. Hundreds of years to plan and they can’t even get us into the ship in a timely manner.”

  “It’s not so bad. We’ve only been here a half hour.”

  “Yes, but it’s taking so long. I feel like we’ll never get to the ship,” she groaned. Chen was surprised; her mother was rarely so vocal about her displeasure.

  “Why are you so upset, Mama? It’s not like we’re in a hurry.”

  Shuzhen looked at her with a strange expression. “That’s easy for you to say,” she paused, and her face went blank.

  Chen felt anger building in the pit of her stomach. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m sorry, Qīn'ài de. It doesn’t mean anything, I’m irritated this morning.”

  The use of such an endearing nickname soothed Chen’s frustration. If only her mother showed that much compassion when Chen complained about being a cultural leader, perhaps she wouldn’t have felt cornered into doing what she still planned to do. Though, if the disembarkation was as disorganized as the boarding, Chen thought she might want to hide and not even get on in the first place.

  Their line finally moved, then stopped, and moved. For another hour it went on like that until they reached the front.

  “We’re so sorry about this,” the young man said in Mandarin.

  Shuzhen very politely matched his language. “It’s no problem at all,” and she broke off to fan herself.

  “Place your finger here.” He held the tablet out to Chen, and she complied. The screen scanned her print, and her profile appeared.

  Name: Chen Li

  Ethnic Origin: Chinese

  Age: 13 years, 4 months

  Station: 29, Xiao-ping

  Occupation: Cultural Ambassador

  Next to the readout was an image of her face. Chen didn’t like the picture; the woman taking it hadn’t told her to smile and so her face was stoic, plain.

  “Please, come aboard.” The young man bowed.

  Shuzhen bowed. “Thank you very much.”

  Chen headed towards the cool air leaking from the open passageway ahead until she was yanked back. She glared up at her mother, who glared just as sternly back.

  With realization, Chen bowed lowly to the man and said, “Thank you very much.”

  Shuzhen released her, and Chen hiked her backpack on her shoulders, ensuring it was secure. She hoped the bunny was okay and her escape plan would go off without a hitch.

  They found their place amid the tightly cramped seats, a
nd Chen felt a wave of panic as she realized she might not be able to get away from her mother to plant the bunny. She dug around in her bag as they took their places, and she stuffed the salvation machine into her pocket. There had to be a restroom somewhere…

  “Mama, I need to go to the restroom.”

  Shuzhen tutted, “You were in there before we left; you can’t possibly have to go.”

  “It’s been two hours since then, and I have to go,” Chen whined.

  “It will only take us an hour and a half to touch down, you can wait that long.”

  “Mama, I really can’t!” She raised her voice and the people sitting around them turned their heads. Chen was embarrassing her mother, and the others did not want to stare.

  Shuzhen was silent, her eyes following the gazes of her people. Without looking at Chen, her mother spoke, “M-102 is just behind us. Ask it.”

  “I’m sorry, Mǔqīn,” she mumbled as she trudged away. And she was. She knew how important Earth was to her mother.

  For a fleeting second, she considered not going through with her plan. Then Robert came to mind. She might never get a chance to see him again if she went to Earth. Friends were not a commodity on Xiao-ping, and Chen valued Robert above all the rest. There were only forty-two other children her age on the landing craft, and none of them had been her friends.

  “Excuse me,” she said, regaining her composure.

  M-102 turned to her, its plastic mouth lighting as it spoke, “Miss Li, you need to take your seat, we will be departing in moments.”

  Chen’s eyes drifted downward to the black marks on M-102’s chest, clearly labeling it as ‘Lou Kim’. She tutted at the sight of the graffiti, wondering which punk had marked up the poor robot.

  “I need the restroom,” she said with feigned urgency, hoping the robot would not see through her facade.

  It turned its head from side to side. “There are no restrooms in this craft. Please return to your seat.”

  Chen nodded, and as she turned back to her mother, she thought of a solution. She made a left through the alley of people, pretending as though the robot had given her directions. With a nervous smile, she approached the cockpit on that level. The door creaked as she pried it open.