Sensory Depravation Chamber

“There are few aesthetic things up here. First off almost all color is gone. I am left with the dull gray of metal and worn plastic. The pictures I initially hung up have faded with the sun. Apparently even though the ship is heavily shielded, the leakage is significant enough to mean that I signed a disclaimer about my future ability to reproduce. I signed a vast quantity of documents and read few, but I did manage to garner a few words of that particular document. This doesn’t bother me much since I figured with me being who I am, the probability of finding love was remote at best. Besides, I had already decided this mission was the best thing that could happen to my life and so there went thirty years. When I return (I guess if, but I am still trying to be hopeful) I will be in my late forties and who would want to marry me anyways. I will have spent almost all of my life alone and will have no career or skills.

“But back to aesthetics, or the lack there of, rather. Nothing about this ship was designed in beauty. There are many pieces of machinery and metal that have fondly remember seeing pictures of or using at home, which makes it even more disappointing to look around and see that the bare metal and plastics of this place engage no creative portion of my brain. Quite a few, actually I think all the stories I read or watched about people who were stranded by themselves on space ships (for various reasons but none of those reasons were the situation I am now in) had the character painting. I brought nothing at all useful in creating a painting. Not even food pastes or something like that.

“Speaking of food, that is another aesthetically lacking area. I remember being able to smell my food and enjoying its color and taste (I wonder how long I will be able to remember these things). My food here has none of those things. In fact I don’t think there is anything to smell anymore except myself. Not that I smell terrible, I do bath in a way. Although I guess I could smell terrible and I wouldn’t know it since I would be used to it. Bathing is a procedure that is nothing like the wonderful showers of earth. The small amount of water is warm, but it is hardly worth using the word bath. The small basin and sponge do the last work of the bathing procedure and this part is probably more for moral upkeep than actual bathing. First in the procedure is allowing the collector bots to scrap any salt I have sweated or any oils that my skin is secreting in any type of excess. The hair trimming bots then do their work, followed by sonicating bots that remove dead skin and other things that they deem me not to need on the surface of my body. My water finishes things up, but it is unsatisfactory water since it contains no soap (waste of chemicals in the engineering crews opinion I guess) and therefor I don’t smell the ‘clean’ smell that I remember associating with showers and baths on earth.

“Back to the ‘food.’ Sustenance is a better description of the stuff I eat. Essentially every meal is the same. ‘Peas’ are a vaguely greenish color round objects in high number that contain nutrients typically found in fruit and vegetables and look mostly like gravel and taste like mulch. ‘Potatoes’ are supposed to be like mashed potatoes, but are closer to a mixture of white glue and rubber cement in texture and taste, but tend more toward the rubber cement in color; they provide my carbohydrates. Although I don’t remember ever eating either glue, I did notice the taste was similar to the smell the first year out here. ‘Gravy’ is a runny brownish substance that contains my allotment of fat and is similar to motor oil. My protein is supplied by a round thin circle of wet cardboard. That is breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Except occasionally a piece of ‘fruit’ will supplement my diet. This is a collection of things that I only need occasional and take a while to synthesize and collect. The shape changes from a strawberry to a slice of apple or a few grapes, but it doesn’t help anything since it always tastes like styrofoam infused with plain gelatin and has a vaguely red but horrible gray color. I guess someone thought that the similarity to real food would do something other than make me dread having to eat. Personally, they should have stuck with squares of highly condensed matter that I could ingest as quickly as possible.

“Being alone in space has prompted me to think of things that I was never asked to think about before. One of my main thoughts has become concerned with God. I have decided there is one and so I talk with her (although the small amount I have read traditionally ascribes God to being male I prefer thinking of a female). This lack of aesthetics and the general silence reminds me of the few bits of information I read of the Catholic church, which existed before we broke into three nations of unity and apparently greatly influenced the formation of the Blesseds’ Nation. I figure that if I was living this type of life on earth I would be living in a nunnery. Apparently, communities of women would live together taking vows to do such things as live to help others, pray frequently, live in poverty, be celibate, and occasionally in silence.

“My silence, the horrible food, the lack of a partner, no interaction with people, and my service to my people back on earth leads me to think of this flotilla of sun catchers as a convent of some sort. None of us can see or talk with one another, but we are all ‘called’ to serve others in this condition. It is buoying to think that there may be other sun catcher crews out there thinking of the same things I am. Other times it is depressing thinking that maybe I am the only one out here who is thinking of these things. I desperately want a community that is tangible in some manner. I don’t care if I can’t talk to them, maybe just let me see them. What if the people on earth lied and I am the only one up here right now?

“Most of the time, my community is me thinking. I know there must be a God. If there is one then I know she would be able to do anything. If she can do anything then I know she can be here with me right now. The real question that I frequently find myself avoiding and probing in a minor internal conflict is why doesn’t God make my life better, since she can do anything. It would be nice to have her appear just once. Or maybe have my food taste good just once, just one bite. Perhaps have the color restored to my pictures and prayer flag while I slept once. Even a glimpse of another ship at this point would be a sign from God to me at this point in time.”

For some reason no other diaries from other sun catcher pilots have survived so we cannot say if she was the only one with thoughts such as this about the food, the colors, and God. Perhaps part of the reason that no other diaries survived is because they did record thoughts about God. The Arts were fairly stringent in requiring that any belief in God be kept strictly to oneself so the dairies of returning crews that mentioned God would have been destroyed. Not censored, destroyed.

We do know that the only crew to act on such a belief once he or she had returned to earth was Koppper. But perhaps that was due more to the circumstances on earth rather than others not having any belief. Her dairies contain multiple essays, most very well thought out, on God. Among the things that she was able to obtain from earth was a copy of the Bible and the Koran. Her inability to communicate on the internet was not restricted to downloading and viewing certain pre-determined bits of information. Much of this information that was not specific news was books. The list was reasonably large and so someone had been able to slip in both ancient works under the archeological classification without any other government official objecting. Fortunately none of the sun catcher crews downloaded this material in the first few years they were in space. During those years their downloads were monitored carefully, but after that crews were pretty well ignored since it was figured that if anything like a suicide attack or something weird like that would have already happened.

Kopper apparently re-read these documents several times while in her ‘Squilla since she was able to quote passages spontaneously upon her return to earth. Which resulting in some interesting events, but we’ll get to those soon enough. Kopper had grown up learning that life was dedicated to helping others for no other reason than that made a good society. Her parents are never recorded as being religious, but may have been but again any records dealing with such things would have been destroyed by the Arts. Kopper never mentions her parents talking about such matters, but she doesn’t talk about exactly what foods she missed so much either. She may have been told to never, ever talk of such things and since they were dead she didn’t want to tarnish their reputations. She was very careful about her portrayal of her parents, she desperately wanted people to think well of them in all matters it seems.

None of the events that Kopper requested as a sign took place. It turns out that by the time she wrote this passage, she was the only sun catcher in orbit around the sun. A recall notice had been posted on a public news site that the sun catcher crews were allowed access to. For some reason it never occurred to anyone to try and contact the crews directly. This may be because the people that issued the recall were not in any way knowledgeable about the sun catcher program and because they may not have known direct communication was possible. Remember that it was essentially never done, most sun catcher crews never received a single communication from earth or sent one, so the station where it was done was quite small and only taken care of minimally. So while there was little chance of her seeing another sun catcher while the others were in orbit, there was no chance about three years after the recall was issued.

Her craving for communication is opposed by the fact that she seems to have never accessed anything from earth after her download of the religious books. The sequestering in some sense was self-imposed since most of the other crews accessed information from earth very little, they still showed some attention to a few news sites about once a year, on average. Perhaps they sought the pictures and sounds that came with the stories rather than the stories themselves since almost certainly all the others were starved for colors as much as Kopper, but whatever reasons they had, all the others were able to receive the recall.

The station that received the power modules from Koppers ship functioned, almost miraculously, for the entire time from the recall to Kopper’s return on its own. Although the people that issued the recall no longer expected to receive the power that the sun catchers provided, they decided to use any power that did come as long as it did without their interference or upkeep, so Kopper’s power was not wasted. But it never occurred to them that there was actually still someone up in a sun catcher. They thought that one or more of the ships was functioning on its own since the crew died before the recall was issued.