Wolf 1061

I opened my eyes. I struggled to wipe the blear off. My blood pressure was only slowly coming up. With all the alarming realization that the narcotic sleep was over, I tried to see. I blinked. Green. Lots of green. Bubbles of green suspended in dark blue solution. Slow migration like clouds. Algae! Growth reactors! I could see now the rows of large sheets of algae floating in blue growth solution to soak up the generated light while they slowly floated through the system. Above, the sky window was still open to let in the last rays of the sun. It would close when we left the solar system and the loss of light through the window would exceed the light coming in. Slowly and reassuringly, the green luminescent algae blobs floated through the sheets. It was like watching clouds on the Earth sky, fluffy things that constantly shifted shapes to trick the imagination into seeing giant battles unfold as magical animals cuddle.

Most importantly, I checked my back pocket for that most important T-shaped tube. With eager hands, I pulled myself along the sheet in front of me to the corner near the ground. A white plastic tube connected the sheet to a little pump. I clamped the hose off, unscrewed the tube, and inserted my T-shaped tube in between. Then I let the algae continue to flow. I opened the tap on my T-shaped tube to let a little bit of algae out. It had sedimented and thickened. The crew would get the algae processed into bars. I had to settle for getting the wet stuff. I needed water intake anyway.

It's not so much that it is particularly disgusting. It's more that it simply doesn't taste like food at all. It's like sucking on the leg of a wooden desk. You can leave it on your tongue indefinitely, but you don't want to suck it down. My empty stomach helped. Probably three days had passed since I entered an induced coma for my brain to survive on minimal oxygen while we accelerated at high velocity. The acceleration was gone, as my body was floating freely.

A railing ran the length of the room, I pulled myself along to the exit. Right through the exit, I could see the hold of the ship. Well, I couldn't see the hold. I saw a wall of containers stacked and tied against each other. I saw a very small sliver. There was a corridor along the side of the stack. I followed it. Pulling myself along was pretty tedious. I tried a more acrobatic method. I pushed myself forward with my feet, rolled midair to land on the opposite side of the wall to push myself again forward, and repeated that jump from side to side.

What did it feel like? The stillness that was full of sound. I couldn't hear much because there was no hissing and no generators. However, as I listened into the silence, it seemed like I could hear into the far distance to pick up amorphous sounds right below my capability of hearing. There was no dust piled up because there was no gravity. Yet the air felt stale and dusty, like the oxygen molecules had slowly aged and grown a beard. The light sources were minimal, right above where the human eye can see more than only grayscale. In my stomach, I felt the freedom of being a teenager with the parents being out, and the terrible doom that I might be wrong, very wrong. I knew that there would be one security officer on board, but he was unlikely to leave the habitable crew quarters. They kept a guy in case something went wrong on the fully automated ship.

The first day, I spent wandering about the stacks. I found that some container slots were left empty to create tunnels to reach deeper. You could tell that you were getting deeper because everything was more scratched up and banged up. Screws and bolts occasionally floated in the air. I had heard about the dangers of wandering too deeply away from the habitable crew quarters. The years-long journeys through space allowed highly toxic mold to develop. A single inhale could be enough to kill one. I kind of didn't believe it until I saw the first sign of life.

A particularly bright light - pretty much earth daylight strength - happened in the cove of an empty container slot. The wall around it was covered with green algae. I could see the strings of algae like a beard on an old man. The wall was covered with the tapestry of it. There was a beauty in the radiance. When I got closer, I could see a moth batting its wings as it was sucking moisture out of the algae tapestry. Flying animals were uniquely adapted to living in zero gravity. At first, it seemed like merely a gray moth, but as I looked closer, I caught the reflection of the light. Dark blue circles covered the wings, almost in the shape of a human skull. I touched the algae, it felt soft and wet like a sponge. It must be filtering water out of the air.

I fell asleep somewhere nearby. I simply got tired. Without any indication of time, I didn't know where the day started and ended. I simply knew that I had closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I must have slept for the length of a night. I was in a completely different place. My butt was pressed against a wall panel with lots of small holes. I kind of put together that the slow circulation of air through the ship swept me for hours, slowly through hallways until I ended up at the intake duct for the air system. I should have brought a velcro strap to fix myself in place when I went to sleep. But getting on the ship required getting every ounce of weight off. All I brought with me were my sneakers, jeans, a t-shirt, and the T-shaped tube.

It took me most of the day to find my way back to the algae reactor. I pretty much went in the direction of where things were cleaner and newer. I hit the side of the ship pretty easily, but then finding the algae reactor was more difficult. I stumbled upon a room that was covered with green light. When I reached my hand in, I could feel a slight warm crispness from the light and smelled ozone. The green light seemed to be a scattered, low-power laser that vaporized any small fragments like dust and mold in the air. This must have been the crew quarters. I was cautious. I mustn't be caught. Still, I stole a curious look. It seemed like a blend of a kitchen and a medical station. There were many drawers and cupboards. There were working surfaces. Everything was neatly packed away. I stayed outside the green illumination of the air but craned my neck for cameras. Every corner of the room had a small camera with those black domes so that you can't tell what the camera is looking at.

I quickly left before I could be discovered. The algae reactor wasn't too far away, which made logical sense to keep the modules together. I was hungry enough to get the algae down pretty easily. This time, I floated up to the sky window and remained there to glance outside. The sun was still so blindingly bright that I had to block it with my hand. I tried to look for planet earth, knowing that I would only see the dark backside of it, which would be indistinguishable from the blackness of space. I got a sense of the immensity of space, but it was mainly in my imagination because a lot of what I saw was the reflection of the very bright grow lights. I imagined that what I was looking at was my home star system that I would never get back to in my lifetime. I felt a sort of longing for the familiarity, but I also knew that I wasn't wanted there as a young woman.

Stories of a rebellious colony on Wolf 1061 had drawn me. The mysterious rumors spoke of a society of merit, where anyone could achieve anything if one was smart and hardworking enough. A place where being a woman is not something to be laughed at but celebrated, a community of goddesses supporting each other. You wouldn't get ridiculed for stating your horoscope sign with your name. And when you had your period, you would get hugs and warm tea from strangers. The language was supposed to be spoken as a song, and if you couldn't sing, people couldn't hear you.

A woman, named Mariam, was supposed to be the first elected leader. She had been a regular space engineer, typing away at her keyboard when a friend had given her the forbidden book of Aramon. The book of Aramon wasn't a book with pages written by an author in the conventional way. It was a book with an AI. The AI would write for the reader the truest desires of the reader. And once one was exposed to one's truest desires, one couldn't help but pursue the with all one's heart. A motivated person is a very dangerous person. As long as one doesn't know what one wants, one lives a life of slumber that opens one to the manipulations of others, which was why it was imperative for the powers of our world to ban the book. Copies only exist on the fringes of settled space.

I had to come to terms with a rather disgusting subject. I needed to pee. Not having access to a space toilet, I went to the deeper recess of the cargo hold where I had found the algae tapestry. I pulled my jeans down. What do you do? Do you keep your legs straight and pee forward? Or do you squat and pee down? I figured that the whole thing could turn into a wet debacle. So I pulled my jeans and panties entirely off. With my legs spread wide, I started peeing. The dark yellow urine shot straight forward in a line. It floated three or four yards forward. Then the surface tension started pulling the tip of the stream back toward the center. The tip started balling up into a bubbly sphere. It vaguely looked like a ball and chain that was hanging off my coochie. I was terrified that the whole thing would come ricocheting back at me and I'd be covered in my own pee. I pushed the pee out harder to jettison the whole thing away, or at least make the approaching bubble work harder to float upstream. When I was done, a wobbling sphere, the size of a soccer ball, dangerously loomed and moved through the space. Dear god! I'll be making hundreds of these until we arrive.

The vision of hallways covered with pee balls terrified me. I figured that I'd need to find more remote parts of the cargo hold. As I ventured deeper, I found broken lights. I found cargo containers that had aged through centuries on intergalactic voyages. All the spooky stories of bedtime stories for children about what hid lurking in the depth of cargo holds came up in my mind. There was the story of princess Nariba, who was caught by a cannibal tribe. There was the story of Padam, the astronaut, who was infected by space fungus and turned into a tentacle monster. When I got older, I read the book "Rebel City." It was about a group of teenagers, who lived a life of party in the ship hold until they arrived at the destination and were arrested. The book was a strange mix of joy and painful awakening. Ship holds captured the imagination of many people because they were so giant and lumbered for decades through space. It was a mystery of what happened in them. Although, for the most part, they were probably simply empty. Still I couldn't shake the trepidation of wandering deeper, especially when I had to sometimes continue blindly when multiple lights in a row were broken. Feeling hand-over-hand to what's ahead without a hint of seeing anything was scary.

At first, I didn't even notice the high-pitched shrieks. The pulse of the shrieks was so reassuring and soft that it calmed me. Then as I re-appeared out of the darkness, I saw three little, black balls in the corner of an empty container slot. The little balls were pointy like shoulders, no fangs! They were tiny little bats quivering and shaking. I could barely see them because they were in the shadow of the light. It made sense that there would be predators that was feasting on the moths that were living off the tapestry algae. Bats often carried diseases. These little things were dangerous.

I decided that this was the edge of how deeply I should venture into the hold. I left them a nice gift and pooped. A benefit of zero gravity and surface tension is that even soft poop likes to stick together, but I still rubbed my asshole on the corner of a container. It was so disgusting. I shivered to the bones! I looked at the float I had made. I shouldn't come back here. I left as fast as I could.

Somewhere on the way back, I must have gotten tired and closed my eyes for a moment. Because all I remember as opening my eyes and finding myself in a foreign place with my butt against an air panel with holes, slowly sucking air out of the room. Without any indication of time, I couldn't tell the difference between a microsecond nap and a full night of sleep. The steel of the containers was a pretty good indication of how deeply I was in the hold. The steel at the top was shiny and new. The deeper I got the more oddly the metal was worn by decades of space travel.

As I found my way to the surface of the cargo hold, the white ambient light turned to a light blue hue. I knew why this happened, but I was startled by its psychological impact. Safety regulations required the light blue ambient lighting as an indicator that the ship was outside of any reasonable communication range. We were in deep space now. There was no way to summon help from anywhere. Anyone on board needed to be extra careful and prepared to be fully self-sufficient. The sky window over the algae reactors likely closed. I wouldn't be able to look outside anymore, even if I saw mostly the reflection of the inside. The sense of being trapped for years in this box panicked me. Being alone! Having nothing to do! Utter isolation!

I got anxious. My breathing got fast. I knew that I couldn't do anything but relax. The dice had been irrevocably cast, but I couldn't relax. Tears started running down my cheeks. I wanted to feel the way I feel when a human face smiles at me. I wanted to gush like I do when I have something exciting to tell a friend. I wanted to listen to someone's sorrows to feel my heart grow large as the ocean. Most of what scared me was how uncontrollably those emotions were that ran through me. I cried out to hear the heartbreaking sigh echo back to me and tell me that my feelings were real.

"Focus!" I told myself. "Get some food in you. Go for a workout. Everything will look better!"

I passed the crew quarter, staring for a moment at the drawers, wondering which one contained anti-anxiety meds. I kept going. I got myself some algae goop. The sky ceiling was indeed closed. I tried to go for a run. It was actually fun. I was leaping like a hound forward, bouncing from opposite wall to opposite wall. I worked up a good sweat. I realized that I was getting my clothes wet. So I tied my jeans with my t-shirt around a handlebar. I felt so powerful leaping. Without gravity to slow me, I generated quite some speed. The sweat lathered me. I felt good. All the workout endorphins were doing their thing.

As good as I felt, when I slowly returned to my left-behind clothes, I realized that I couldn't keep this up for weeks, let alone years. My mental eye kept being drawn to the crew quarters. There was a human in there. My mind kept trying to insinuate that maybe it was a friendly and good human. However, the rule said that most security guards who could give up civilization for years were rather brutish. They were almost always men with a violence fetish. Who else would be swayed by big bucks? The employment requirements were pretty minimal. Companies mostly only put a human on the trip at all because of union rules. Shipping companies would have been happy to send deliveries unmanned and add a clause to the shipping contract: "Not responsible for nothing."

But what if, actually, the ship cop was this quaint old lady, who simply loved to have lots of undistributed time to read books?

I must have been tired from the run. I was suddenly somewhere different, with my butt stuck to an air uptake panel with lots of holes. Closing the eyes for only a second was tricky in this environment without any indication of the passage of time. I was right around the zone where the algae started. I figured that I might as well go a little deeper into the cargo hold to pee. I pushed myself through the darkness of three broken lights. When the light emerged again, I saw a ball of liquid hover in the air. Instant memories of my first pee soccer ball came back. And I realized that those pee balls wouldn't be stagnant but would move around with the current of the air system.

The ball had strange dots on them. I carefully hovered closer, looping my foot around a handlebar to be able to pull myself back. There were probably a hundred little beetles moving on the surface of the pee ball. Their black shells had purple and red reflections. Their feet indented the liquid surface as if they were water walkers. The ecosystem in the ship hold was quite evolved. They were so tiny and compact. They shimmered so clean. They were slowly sucking on my pee. The amount of pure hydration must have been like a feast to them. One of them disconnected. Huge wings unfolded, and it flew away with amazing swiftness. There was such beauty to them. They were shiny and the purple-red so vibrant as if they were little jewels.

I ventured deeper today. I wanted to leave my bodily refuse farther away from where I lived. The creepy feeling of going so deep in the hold made my nerves crawl. I felt trigger sensitive. I worried about invisible mold filling my lungs. Invisible dangers are the scariest of them all. You don't know if they are coming at you. You can't fight back. The image of pee balls everywhere drove me to face my fears. There was a stretch of five lights knocked out. It took me minutes to work my way through the darkness, scared every time I reached forward to what I might touch. Getting lost in the darkness seemed absolutely terrifying.

Yet there I was rewarded for my braveness. A chalk drawing was on a container. A happy family on a picnic in the green grass under a blue sky was drawn with basic figure drawing skills of circles for hats. Cheery! I found chalk sticks wrapped in a piece of paper jammed into the side of a container box. I got the chalk out. I drew my best friend Jennifer riding on a chestnut brown horse with a flying mane. I drew my mom's puppy Simpson, a yellow spaniel. A sense of comfort came over me as I brought what I loved back on earth to life here in space. Of course, I also drew my niece Alberta playing with frogs in the pond. She was surely going to become a biologist when she grew up. Happiness overcame me.

I definitely didn't want to pee here. So I had to venture deeper into the cargo hold. I think that I got a bit careless from the fun of painting. I seized up the pitch-black darkness in front of me and dove into it, completely assuming that it would be empty like every other time. Yet when I was at least, three knocked-out lights deep, I felt something wet and soft against the middle joint of my right index finger as I reached forward to grab the railing. I froze instantly out of complete terror. The soft wet spot was perhaps the size of a dime. It kept softly bumping into my index finger. The bumps crawled over the back of my hand, rhythmically stubbing my skin and cautiously pulling back each time it touched me. Perhaps, as cautious as I felt about the thing, the thing was cautious about me, exploring me.

When the little bumps reached my wrist, I felt a new contact starting at my index finger. It was something furry and very warm, extremely soft. At this point, I was pretty sure that it wasn't human. No human would have spent so much time so cautiously exploring me. It was some kind of animal. I had heard freak rumors of wolfs and bears in cargo holds, but those were wild conspiracy theories. Then I felt what exactly felt like a cat head butting my hand. I turned my hand around to pet the head, but when I reached for the head blindly, the cat meowed and I could hear it pounce against the wall hard. I went after it. I chased her. When I reached light again, I saw way at the end of the corridor before a turn that the cat was jumping wall to wall like me, but she had far outpaced me. I had scared my new friend away. I named her "Paloma," should I ever meet her again.