3230 words (12 minute read)

Settling

Morning came too soon for the hundreds of new immigrants orbiting Earth. For many, the night was a strange combination of the night before a prison break and Christmas Eve.

Emly and Yaro tried to sleep, but eventually came down and settled on the banister of their wide, old-fashioned back porch, gazing out in wonder for hours at their apparently moonlit yard. The mother and daughter occasionally remarked on their surprise at the health of the grass or the size of the young trees, but mostly sat quietly as the starry sky above gradually filled with color.

Through the open bay doors, a chime woke Emly just as she had started to doze off, leaned against a rustic wooden support beam. Yaro had moved into the living room and was sound asleep on a sleek white sofa. Without waking her daughter, Emly crossed the living room and turned off the alarm. Dizzy with the endorphins released after such a brief respite, she set the coffee and changed, checked for messages in the small, prism-like portal on the kitchen counter, and did everything she could to delay waking Yaro. When she could wait no longer, she set a mug full of hot, sweet coffee and an intricately draped, blue felt dress on the table beside her.

“Time to get up, little flower,” Emly whispered.

Yaro responded with a groan, and attempted to dig herself into the couch cushions.

"Come on, now, don’t you want to get breakfast?"

The teen wiggled deeper into the cushions, her face now wedged completely into the thin crevice between the sofa’s arm and back.

"If you’re not dressed in the next 10 minutes, all your classmates will get to see you with dirty hair and yesterday’s clothes."

Slowly, reluctantly, Yaro oozed out of her resting place and dragged her coffee and dress upstairs to her new room. Light poured in through a full wall of one-way windows. When she stepped up onto a colorful, glowing, stage-like platform near the wall, a section dimmed and an outline of her body appeared before her, with details about her weight, body composition, age, and other health statistics displayed in big, blue type. At the top, "VANITY 2.1" appeared in a flat, blue banner.

A cheerful, female voice instructed her to undress at a deafening volume. Yarrow jumped and covered her ears.

"Volume down!" she shouted. A slider appeared on the glass in front of her, and she waved a hand to adjust it to a more reasonable level. After she undressed, a list of options appeared on the screen: Hygiene, Appearance, Health, and Entertain.

"Hygiene," she said, and watched as a new list appeared. She chose "Morning: Standard" from a long list of presets. A warm tone sounded, and a ring of a dozen or so small jets raised out of the floor around her. A fan above her drew cool, fragrant mist up from them, swirling it around her. When the air was clear, a weak static charge tickled her nose. The fan reversed and a gust blew every molecule of the cleaning detergent off of her. Only a slight, powdery feel under her fingernails and between her toes remained.

After toying with the different appearance presets, she settled on a nearly bare face and the short, straight, triangular shingles of colorful hair she had been sporting for the past few months. She dressed, piled the bangles back onto her wrists, and clipped on her collar. As she hurried down the stairs, she set them all to glow yellow and white.

When Yaro came down, Emly was occupying herself at the portal, ordering furniture, kitchen herbs, learning about the quarters, checking the day’s itinerary. She barely noticed when Yaro set the empty mug on the counter in front of her.

"Oh, ready?" Emly emerged from the trance of the device and looked expectantly to her daughter.

Yaro nodded, still hazy. The two stepped onto the street, sparsely populated with sleepy residents and bright-eyed vendors, and made their way to the main hall.

When Yaro and Emly stepped out of the capsule into the station, they were surprised by how busy it was. Every one of the shiny metal plates had groups of passengers waiting for a new vessel, and dozens of people waiting for their turn behind them. Fifteen distinct, soft voices called out for passengers to step up as each group boarded, filling the once-silent hall with sound. Where smooth, grey walls existed the day before, shops and food stalls now buzzed with activity. Strange and wonderful smells, sounds, and vibrant displays greeted them at every turn.

The pair hurried down the corridor to the dozens of wide doors, now propped open, leading to the main hall. It, too, had transformed overnight. Vibrant, interactive kiosks dotted the open area, and hundreds of spartan foam chairs were lined up in neat rows, facing a small stage on the far end of the hall. A food and beverage station was pushed up against a wall, its dispenser speckled with the bland, peppery-smelling nutritive paste that was the staple in the poorest Quarters.

"Thank you, Reza..." Emly said under her breath as she and Yaro approached the station. They both gingerly poured themselves a thin, watery liquid posing as coffee before wandering to one of the kiosks nearby.

A screen beckoned Emly to place her hand, palm down, on a glowing white circle below. When she did, the screen changed to a warm golden-yellow and a number appeared.

"1AuBrandtE...to CA27..." she mumbled to herself. Just like in the receiving area the day before, a gold path lit up the floor, winding its way around kiosks and straight down to the first row of a stand of chairs. Emly stood, bewildered, until the kiosk softly urged her to follow the indicator to her seat. She stepped away and gestured for Yaro to scan herself in.

"RA46..?" Yaro read, throwing a quizzical look to her mother. A soft green path lead far to the right, in the front row of another section. She hesitantly stepped toward her mother, causing the path to re-align itself as she moved off its grid.

"There must be some kind of mix up. I’ll call Reza."

While Emly contacted their escort, Yaro watched as other new residents began to file in and follow their example. Groups scanned in, and slowly the seats began filling up. Children and teens took the group of chairs to the far right side of the stage. Adults began to take their seats in the middle. In a smaller section on the left side of the stage, a mixed bag of old and young began lazily making their way to their own seats like they had done it a thousand times before.

"Looks like you get to sit with your fellow students." Emly confirmed to Yaro. Yaro shrugged and followed the light to a surprisingly comfortable seat next to a well-dressed girl her age.

After the residents finally settled in, the lights slowly dimmed until the only light in the room came from the stage, and Garden door and kiosks behind them. An attractive, middle-aged woman with a sleek, steely bob and a simple, black uniform took the stage and greeted the crowd warmly with a formal wave and straight, white smile.

"Welcome to your new home." she said, her voice amplified throughout the hall.

"Before we get started, I’d like to introduce myself and a few special people to all of you," she nodded toward the group on the left side of the stage. "I’m Interim Governor Candys Marshall, of Quarter 2, formerly of Whitehall, New England," a smattering of applause paused the Governor’s introductions, and she graciously nodded to the crowd.

"I’m so pleased to welcome you all to this marvel of technology and global co-operation. We are all so happy to welcome you to our communities and to mankind’s greatest endeavor. I was elected by the Congress, as were the three other Governors and our Interim Residential Representative, to look after the day-to-day executive functions here while we finish building and populating the Century 1 Exodus Mass-Migration Vessel.

"But I’m not here to give you a civics lesson. Today, we will spend a few hours meeting our neighbors and getting to know the purpose of this great journey we are all embarking on together."

The governor went on to introduce a short film depicting an optimistic, non-panic-inducing version of the catastrophic events leading to such an expensive, dangerous, and ambitious exodus. A friendly, matter-of-fact voice belonging to one of the more respected actors of the day, Oen Lee-Felix, reminded the crowd of the last century’s climate disasters and extinctions. He recounted the wars that tore apart what was once a massive, sprawling empire that spanned most of the west into a dozen smaller countries and ungovernable autonomous regions, before moving on to the not so gradual total consumption of Earth’s resources.

He told the enraptured crowd how food and water became more scarce, panic set in, and governments struggled to maintain order. Despite shrinking resources, populations were still booming. Expeditions to Mars had failed to yield cost-effective, self sufficient colonies, and Kuiper Belt bodies proved too small and barren to support significant numbers, even with heavy supplementation. With a perfectly habitable planet just under a hundred years’ journey away, the increasingly desperate world leaders began to see value in spreading out further.

The great minds behind what was until then simply a thought experiment took every technological development and policy from the 100 Year Starship Symposiums of the last 150 years and worked feverishly to put them into practice. A feasible if risky plan was put together, and the world’s major economies retooled and poured every available resource into building the ship. A lottery program would choose the lucky 18,000 interstellar immigrants from billions of applicants who managed to scrape together the sizeable application fee.

The scale of the ship was unprecedented. More than 8 miles long, and nearly as wide, it contained everything necessary for a population of 25,000. It was a modular design, able to break apart in minutes if necessary. There were four residential quarters, each a separate module with it’s own propulsion, life support systems, and nuclear generator. A manufacturing sector and medical center comprised a second module, forming a bridge between the residences and the Garden Ship, a one mile sphere designed to serve as a park, fairgrounds, and main agricultural center. Nearly every food and fiber crop would come out of this single vessel. A carrier full of mining and exploratory ships and probes connected the Garden to the military Command Ship. As the film detailed each new section, the crowd gasped and buzzed. When it ended, the governor was smiling and slowly shaking her head in a theatrical kind of awe.

"Isn’t that something?" she asked the crowd. "This, as the man said, is your new home. Every necessity, every comfort, can be grown, built, devised in our little mobile world. The happiness and health of every last citizen here is the absolute highest priority."

After taking questions from the audience, she introduced a group of American dancers to kick off the cultural portion of the orientation. They shook, flung, and contorted their bodies to the pulsing beat. The music shifted from infrasound through ultrasound and everything in between, which delighted the younger, augmented ears in the audience and mostly irritated or missed entirely the less sensitive, natural ears of the older crowd.

When the dance concluded, the audience was released to browse the informational kiosks and tables full of international delicacies. Some new concoctions adorned a table dedicated to the budding immigrant culture aboard the ship. The majority of them centered around the fruits of the fungus used to grow the mycelial walls, floors, and other materials. They were not very flavorful nor nutritious, but their texture and adaptability made them a perfect blank canvas in lean times and an excellent supplement to the nutritive paste.

The poorer early immigrants, most of whom helped to build and maintain the residential quarters, had been perfecting the manipulation of this fungus since they first moved into Quarter 4 ten years ago. By selecting specific strains and adjusting the growing conditions, they could make different types of fruit and materials. The seeding and curing processes could make anything from a lacy, fine fabric to a cement-like brick in nearly any color.

This curiosity was on display in the form of rugs, crafts, and clothing draped over mannequins, as well as a small model room containing vases, bowls, furniture, and decorations made of the mycelium and fruits. Emly was disgusted by what to her resembled a rotting, flooded basement, but Yaro was fascinated. She stood in awe, inspecting a wall speckled with a bloom of bold, red, trumpet-like mushrooms. They appeared soft and delicate, like paper, but were hard as unglazed porcelain to the touch. They reminded her of a flush of poppies in one of the ashy, burnt fields back on Earth after a wildfire.

"Can I get some of these in my room?" she asked her mother, eyes wide and brighter than they had any right to be after so little sleep.

"Oh, I don’t know Yaro. You have such beautiful wood walls at home, and I’m not sure these are really safe."

"It says here they’re totally safe, hypo-allergenic, and even edible - sort of." Yaro rebutted, pointing to an informational tablet on the wall.

"I’ll think about it." Emly said skeptically.

The governor approached the two, smiling a warm, politician’s smile. She was dressed conservatively, in a pair of fitted black pants and a high-collared black shawl that obscured her chest. Beneath this, she was coated in a faintly shimmering, black film that pulled in her waist and flattened her stomach. She extended an uncovered hand, which Emly graciously pressed with her own.

"Welcome, Ms Brandt. We’re all so glad to have you and your daughter here. How did you find your new home?"

"Oh, it’s excellent. Exactly as I hoped. I can’t believe the yard."

"That was a shock to me, too when I first got here. Are you getting settled?"

"I think we’re getting there," Emly said. "After a good night’s sleep I’m sure we’ll think of a few hundred things we need."

"Oh yes, I think I spent a good fifty thousand credits in my first few week. What do you think of the new place, Yaro?"

Yaro looked up from the vase she was inspecting and stared vacantly at the governor.

After a beat, she answered, "It’s cool."

The governor’s relaxed face spread into a smile again as she turned back to Emly.

"Kids just love that mushroom stuff. I think it’s a little odd, myself, but it’s certainly useful. Cheap and easy to make, and pretty much fixes itself. I prefer to keep it under wood, though."

Emly nodded in agreement. "I know it’s everywhere, it doesn’t bother me as much when it’s just a smooth floor or something, but when they actually let it make the mushrooms it just...I don’t know. Supposedly it’s safe?"

The small talk continued, ranging over the coming elections, the weather controls, the best places to shop and eat, to the schools offered to the children and teens on the ship. Yaro moved on from the model room and was sampling the cuisines when a girl, a little younger than she, approached. She was painted from head to toe in the same shimmering grey film as the woman in immigration, but with only the pads of her fingers, nostrils, eyes, and mouth exposed. Her hair was closely cropped and covered with a sheer plastic hood. A furry, burgundy shawl coiled around her shoulders. She wore no shoes, only rubbery, stick-on soles, her toes bound loosely in the film.

"Hey, I’m Csalia. Are you Emly Brandt’s kid?" she asked abruptly, the smooth, hairless ridges of her brows raised expectantly.

"Yeah, I’m Yaro," she responded, unable to conceal her shock at the girl’s almost alien appearance.

"That’s cool, my mom’s running for president," Csalia bragged.

Yaro allowed a faint smile to break across her lips. "Is she really strict? Mine won’t let me do anything. How much stuff did you get to keep?"

"Everything!" Csalia said. "We moved up here right after it was built and got to take whatever we wanted."

"Wow, really? We only got to bring like, three bags."

"The worst. I have a bunch of stuff I don’t even really use, you can go through it sometime if you want," Csalia said with a shrug.

Yaro agreed and asked, "So, what’s with the paint stuff? What is that?"

"This still isn’t big on Earth yet?" Csalia asked, incredulous. She smugly continued, "It’s called ultes. It’s kind of like paint-on clothes? It’s so comfy. It’s this or a burqa according to my mom."

"How do you...put it on?" Yaro asked.

"My vanity has a setting for it. Do you have one?"

"Yeah...I haven’t really messed with it much yet, just showered."

"Oh, it’s so cool you have to try it," Csalia lowered her voice, looked around, and continued, "It’s like being naked, but no one freaks out. It comes in all kinds of colors, you just pick one and it sprays it on you."

"Does it have to cover my face and stuff?" Yaro asked skeptically, remembering the bare face and neck of the grey woman.

"No, that’s just a religious thing. My mom wants me to stay modest. No man can see ’an inch of my skin until my wedding day,’" Csalia said, parroting her mother’s mannerisms. "I have to fight her just to let me skip makeup sometimes because it ’shows too much skin.’"

"Crazy, my mom would never let me wear something that tight. I’d probably still have to wear a dress over it."

Csalia laughed. "Yeah, I’m definitely not complaining. This is way better than clothes. People get used to it after a while, your mom will probably be wearing one soon."

"I doubt it," Yaro stated. "She still plays a guitar. She’s so old. She said the walls in that room look like a moldy basement."

Csalia laughed harshly and rolled her eyes, "Mine was like that too, but they come around eventually. They’re totally allowed at school, though, so you can just wear a dress until she can’t see you and shove it in your bag when the coast is clear."

Csalia and Yaro continued chattering away like teenagers do, with Csalia filling Yaro in on the nuances of "MMVe" social life and school. By the end of the day, the two were inseparable and making plans for their off days.

As the crowds began thinning, Emly broke away from the last few fans that had gathered around the Governor and herself. She pried her daughter away from her new, more worldly friend, and they made their way through the halls and streets, to the house that was already beginning to feel remarkably like home.