Eat This
"I stare out into space for long intervals. I used to try and pick out stars and comets and such using the star maps I thought I would love to have along. Now, I just stare. The small flickers of light barely move across the sky, but I see it. My constellations play slow motion movies of romance, war, and comedy. From this wide sky, I have chosen new constellations and my own characters. I don’t need them to be moving quickly; I have a lot of time to explore the nuances of their lives as they play out across the dark curtain of space. Recently, I realized that I knew more about the color of stars than I ever thought I would. There are reds and blues that are subtle but there; my eyes have slowly adjusted to not seeing any green outside the windows. There is green however. Its just inside the ship.
"When I was little, pretty well all of my class heard the stories of astronauts drinking their own pee, of course after purification by several methods and then distillation. I remember thinking, how odd that we on earth just let all that water go to waste. Much later in high school chemistry class I learned about the structure of water. During that class, my mind decided to conflate this memory of drinking pee with the water cycle of rain, rivers, oceans, and evaporation. It was perfectly acceptable to talk about the cycling of water in grand, clean terms. Evaporation from the “clean” ocean, rain falling from the “clean” sky, rivers flowing from “clean” ground water and ice bergs, and the ocean filling with “clean” river water. What a joke. Why is it acceptable for the world to reuse water but so abhorrent and funny for humans to do so? We use water after consuming it, but in general we don’t break it up, it just leaves the body in various forms like breath, sweat, and pee. Humans have been around for a while, and it is very unlikely that all the water molecules we intake are freshly born molecules. It is possible that all those “clean” glasses of water that I drank obediently as a child were at some point in time other people pee. I kept this thought conflagration to myself though (as I kept pretty much all my thoughts. Now I see what a good thing it was that I had this little “discovery” early on. But it still wasn’t enough to prepare me for life on a sun catcher.
"The green inside the ship doesn’t come from anything like clothing or paints (I weep to think that I didn’t bring any paints, nobody up here would care that I can’t paint well). In fact the green comes from the mold on the windows. It waxes and wanes like a season. Long ago, the prep crew told me how long this cycle is/would be, but I have forgotten and don’t really care. “Get rid of the mold, ewww,” is probably your first thought. Early on in my time up here I hadn’t let everything’s function settle into my thoughts and I did absent mindedly end up wiping off a small section of my window mold (it generally grows just on windows and a few other glass items) so I could see the stars better. It was probably 3 months later that I noticed that was a bad thing to have done. My food supply was a little bit smaller for a couple of days (being on strict rations makes you notice these small variations). You see, even the carbon dioxide I breathe out has to be recycled into something that I can eat again, carbon and all the other elements turn out to be quite precious out in space by yourself. When the mold gets to a certain length and opacity I use my “mower” to clean all but the thinnest of films off the windows and dump the “clippings” into my supplementary food synthesizer."
Kopper had gone through a battery of tests to determine if she was eligible to be a sun catcher crew. This involved mental and physical probing, which was done with little dignity. Sun Catcher Camp or SUCC (pronounced SUCK) was virtually unknown outside the Energy Agency for the Arts. In circles it was known in, people made good usage of the acronym, so much so that by the end of the program it was almost universally spelled SUCK rather than the proper SUCC. People didn’t volunteer for the program, they were chosen; this is true for all involved–crew, designers, flight control, prep team, doctors, everyone. Some people wanted to volunteer but knew that if they did then his or her name would be immediately struck off the list. This created some problems with the program, but Kopper didn’t know about any of this when she was shipped off to N 66̊ 33.920 W 136̊ 18.294 and didn’t find out until she returned from her tour on board the sun catcher she was assigned after camp, The Hemisquilla californiensis.
Shivering in the cold, Kopper stared at the low building, half covered by snow. She felt her arms wrapping around her torso and wondered why she did that when it didn’t seem to help. Nobody seemed to be paying attention to her and this also made her curious. Finally, someone conducted her inside the building, gave her some warm clothes, a pile of tablets, a room, and no useful information. On one of the tablets was her schedule for the next several days and she would’ve run off after viewing it, except she was sure that would mean even worse things than the schedule. The one thing she did learn before the next morning was that she was alone.
There were all the other people there, but she was the only person training to be the crew of a sun catcher. Although the energy needs of the Arts was great, they managed to maintain the stream of energy by sending up a sun catcher about every five years, so there was only a need to train one person at a time. In fact, the base has just been unpacked from mothballs not a week earlier and everyone was ignoring her because they had more vital things to do such as get the heat permanently turned on. Although her first day was tiring she was allowed a small space of time to wonder at why she only saw Arts and why everyone was going without helmets outside. This wonderment quickly passed.
The first tests were done quickly since they were to determine her inherent qualities, not her ability to learn what they asked of her. Psychologists asked her weird questions about what she thought about when alone and what tasks she dreaded doing at home. Physicians ran her through hoops and over walls until she was tired, and then asked her to type pages out of the dictionary. Apparently she passed, since her tablet schedule continued to show the next days and weeks schedules; though she never heard any encouragement or advice from anyone. In fact, the people seemed to almost pointedly avoid talking to her. Later, as she stared out the window ecrusted with her mold, she understood why that was; at the time however, she spent a few minutes before sleep each night trying to decide if it was worth crying over. Fortunately, she never did cry since that would have washed her out of the program.
After the tests, the training and organization began. It took two years to get her and the ship into the shape to enter space. The most humiliating thing to her was when they shaved her hair off, everywhere. She was permitted a human to comfort her as well as a cry once this was over. Her hair was then taken for analysis. Unknown to her, she had been on a special diet for the last two years and this shaving was part of the final preparation. In space she would have little need for hair and the nutrients it took to grow it were needed to feed back into her body. So these samples of hair were taken, analyzed, and small trimming bots were constructed along with another synthesizer. While in space, she never grew any hair longer than 3-mm and became accustomed to the spider-like bots that roamed her body at regular intervals to maintain this short cropping. The purpose of the hair cropping had been made known to her, but this was early in the training and so she had forgotten about it. Three days later she was launched into space, aboard the ‘Squilla (as she liked to call her); thirty years later she could barely remember the name of a comb when her hair was long enough to require one.
"When I was little, pretty well all of my class heard the stories of astronauts drinking their own pee, of course after purification by several methods and then distillation. I remember thinking, how odd that we on earth just let all that water go to waste. Much later in high school chemistry class I learned about the structure of water. During that class, my mind decided to conflate this memory of drinking pee with the water cycle of rain, rivers, oceans, and evaporation. It was perfectly acceptable to talk about the cycling of water in grand, clean terms. Evaporation from the “clean” ocean, rain falling from the “clean” sky, rivers flowing from “clean” ground water and ice bergs, and the ocean filling with “clean” river water. What a joke. Why is it acceptable for the world to reuse water but so abhorrent and funny for humans to do so? We use water after consuming it, but in general we don’t break it up, it just leaves the body in various forms like breath, sweat, and pee. Humans have been around for a while, and it is very unlikely that all the water molecules we intake are freshly born molecules. It is possible that all those “clean” glasses of water that I drank obediently as a child were at some point in time other people pee. I kept this thought conflagration to myself though (as I kept pretty much all my thoughts. Now I see what a good thing it was that I had this little “discovery” early on. But it still wasn’t enough to prepare me for life on a sun catcher.
"The green inside the ship doesn’t come from anything like clothing or paints (I weep to think that I didn’t bring any paints, nobody up here would care that I can’t paint well). In fact the green comes from the mold on the windows. It waxes and wanes like a season. Long ago, the prep crew told me how long this cycle is/would be, but I have forgotten and don’t really care. “Get rid of the mold, ewww,” is probably your first thought. Early on in my time up here I hadn’t let everything’s function settle into my thoughts and I did absent mindedly end up wiping off a small section of my window mold (it generally grows just on windows and a few other glass items) so I could see the stars better. It was probably 3 months later that I noticed that was a bad thing to have done. My food supply was a little bit smaller for a couple of days (being on strict rations makes you notice these small variations). You see, even the carbon dioxide I breathe out has to be recycled into something that I can eat again, carbon and all the other elements turn out to be quite precious out in space by yourself. When the mold gets to a certain length and opacity I use my “mower” to clean all but the thinnest of films off the windows and dump the “clippings” into my supplementary food synthesizer."
Kopper had gone through a battery of tests to determine if she was eligible to be a sun catcher crew. This involved mental and physical probing, which was done with little dignity. Sun Catcher Camp or SUCC (pronounced SUCK) was virtually unknown outside the Energy Agency for the Arts. In circles it was known in, people made good usage of the acronym, so much so that by the end of the program it was almost universally spelled SUCK rather than the proper SUCC. People didn’t volunteer for the program, they were chosen; this is true for all involved–crew, designers, flight control, prep team, doctors, everyone. Some people wanted to volunteer but knew that if they did then his or her name would be immediately struck off the list. This created some problems with the program, but Kopper didn’t know about any of this when she was shipped off to N 66̊ 33.920 W 136̊ 18.294 and didn’t find out until she returned from her tour on board the sun catcher she was assigned after camp, The Hemisquilla californiensis.
Shivering in the cold, Kopper stared at the low building, half covered by snow. She felt her arms wrapping around her torso and wondered why she did that when it didn’t seem to help. Nobody seemed to be paying attention to her and this also made her curious. Finally, someone conducted her inside the building, gave her some warm clothes, a pile of tablets, a room, and no useful information. On one of the tablets was her schedule for the next several days and she would’ve run off after viewing it, except she was sure that would mean even worse things than the schedule. The one thing she did learn before the next morning was that she was alone.
There were all the other people there, but she was the only person training to be the crew of a sun catcher. Although the energy needs of the Arts was great, they managed to maintain the stream of energy by sending up a sun catcher about every five years, so there was only a need to train one person at a time. In fact, the base has just been unpacked from mothballs not a week earlier and everyone was ignoring her because they had more vital things to do such as get the heat permanently turned on. Although her first day was tiring she was allowed a small space of time to wonder at why she only saw Arts and why everyone was going without helmets outside. This wonderment quickly passed.
The first tests were done quickly since they were to determine her inherent qualities, not her ability to learn what they asked of her. Psychologists asked her weird questions about what she thought about when alone and what tasks she dreaded doing at home. Physicians ran her through hoops and over walls until she was tired, and then asked her to type pages out of the dictionary. Apparently she passed, since her tablet schedule continued to show the next days and weeks schedules; though she never heard any encouragement or advice from anyone. In fact, the people seemed to almost pointedly avoid talking to her. Later, as she stared out the window ecrusted with her mold, she understood why that was; at the time however, she spent a few minutes before sleep each night trying to decide if it was worth crying over. Fortunately, she never did cry since that would have washed her out of the program.
After the tests, the training and organization began. It took two years to get her and the ship into the shape to enter space. The most humiliating thing to her was when they shaved her hair off, everywhere. She was permitted a human to comfort her as well as a cry once this was over. Her hair was then taken for analysis. Unknown to her, she had been on a special diet for the last two years and this shaving was part of the final preparation. In space she would have little need for hair and the nutrients it took to grow it were needed to feed back into her body. So these samples of hair were taken, analyzed, and small trimming bots were constructed along with another synthesizer. While in space, she never grew any hair longer than 3-mm and became accustomed to the spider-like bots that roamed her body at regular intervals to maintain this short cropping. The purpose of the hair cropping had been made known to her, but this was early in the training and so she had forgotten about it. Three days later she was launched into space, aboard the ‘Squilla (as she liked to call her); thirty years later she could barely remember the name of a comb when her hair was long enough to require one.
posted by Unknown at 9:16 PM
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