Helios 1.5

The bridge found its quietest hour at lunchtime, when the small section of crew directly under the Captain went to the mess to eat together. She knew it never would have been done this way in prior decades, and she had heard as much when she first instituted the change, from the elders who were wary that any alteration in the schedule or the form of life aboard the Helios might set the whole ship in a tailspin. It was easy enough, though, to get her crew to make the shift, and what started as a tentative assent to a superior’s order was soon an eager exodus to sustenance and relief.

For Alice, too, it was a respite. At every second, she was Captain. When John was alive, they joked about catching an asteroid for a holiday. Maybe they’d get lucky and find a green planet sooner than the Helios’ mission plan suggested. Now, the reality was as it ever was--an hour in an empty room was the most that Alice could hope for.

The lights on the dashboard flashed lowly, playing across the console. Resting her eye on them, allowing their pulse to ease her gaze out of focus, Alice removed herself from her surroundings. She drew herself away from its meaning, like a soul pulling itself from a body.

Here was her chair, from which she surveyed the operations of her crew. Here was the phone where she took notices from officers in engineering and the civil sections, and the doorway through which the same faces of her crew came, and greeted her, every morning. She took herself away from them, and allowed this thing to grow in her--this feeling that she was nothing. It was the kind of feeling that could swell up and engulf her in an instant. Her mind had made space for it. It knew that nothingness, and to connect to it was a relief. It was the only thing that could allay the terror of standing at the prow of the same metal wreck upon which she had been born, which faithfully, though perhaps mysteriously, propelled them through space.

Alice looked in the eyes of every crew member and confidently assigned them their work, modifying it here and there as circumstances required. She recited prescriptions from the manuals that she was given to study. But in this space, in this hour, when Alice was not Alice, but some substance without cognition, she had the sense that she was in her purest form. Because Alice, like the rest of the crew, did not know precisely how the Helios worked. She could not even imagine it’s movement through space, save for the cartoon of its hull (which she had seen countless times in the manuals, which she studied in her years of control) skating through the void.

She was the Captain, but she might as well not have been anybody at all. The Helios was on autopilot. It was a self-regulated machine.

---

Now her appointment card, the unassuming slip of paper that had delivered Alice her title, placed in a modest frame that had been obtained from somewhere in the ship some years after she had received her orders, stood proudly on the wall of her quarters.

Alice could recall perfectly the moment she received it. She remembered the messenger like a ghost, only a shadow, coming towards her, placing the paper in her outstretched hand. It might as well have been a hot coal. It fell to the floor, but the words continued to burn into her. Asset Requisition for: Captain. Above it was her name.

No one had noticed at first. Some had met their assignment day with more eagerness than others. Their eyes paced over the dull typeface, and some spoke the words gently, as the children do in pre-control training. Some beside Alice felt themselves being propelled towards a sense of purpose, however mundane.

Alice stood. She did so unconsciously, not having decided on it, but feeling instinctively the need to exit the place where she was. The eyes of her cohort were now upon her and she felt them, and beyond, she felt the cage of herself.

It was John who asked. She remembered. He asked what was wrong and she could barely speak, but the words came out in a breath.

“I don’t want it.”

She saw his eyes narrow for an instant and thought it must have been in judgment. Control training had made him strong, like it was supposed to make the rest of them--like it was supposed to have made her. But she couldn’t do this. She would’ve rather set the card on fire, or walked herself out of an exhaust port.

Someone picked up the card. They read silently, then aloud, as if the sound of the words could make them more believable. In a second, the room was aflame with speculation, and Alice herself had been forgotten. She recalled now, two decades later, that this was the first time that the fledgling feeling of emptiness had come up to enfold her in its wings. Everything seemed to be happening at a distance, and she sensed it like echoes of something that had happened before, the voices of people around her, their movements, the excited thronging that belongs to humanity, whether earthbound or in the isolation of space. No idea they were phasing out the Captain, one said. Their commentary was plentiful and Alice might have felt injured by it if she had really been there.

Like a swell of the ocean that Alice would never know, the tide of people moved out, leaving Alice and her requisition card. Even the card was meant to imbue the event with some meaning. Paper was a rare commodity and printing a wasteful thing. It might as well have been a golden ring, binding each young adult to the Helios for the rest of their lives.

Alice wondered who had bestowed the honor upon her. She considered the word “honor” lightly. She thought it better suited as a curse or a joke. It must be a mistake--Alice was sure of it. But the words still lifted themselves to her eyes, their long dark lines the bars of a cage she was never to escape.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and was jolted to. She entered the present through some immaterial fiber. It was John behind her. He had come back in, or had never left, and Alice had not noticed. He was in front of her now and looked at her steadily.

“You can’t be afraid.” He said.

The anger came up in her face. She wanted to strike the man, who was a stranger to her, and who now could not imagine the terror of the future that her card promised. She believed that was the case--she felt now the sudden and horrible finger of fate pressing down upon her, an anonymous speck of life, now a shepherd, destined to drive the flock on through the indifference of space to their imagined home.

Did she really always see it in such a way? In that moment, was she capable of such a full and articulated upwelling of feeling? Perhaps it was only the bitterness of years that had colored her memory of the requisition event so profoundly. Alice considered what she was made of. She understood biology and had some ideas about the chemistry of the brain. She took the same mood regulators that everyone onboard took.

She considered that the next great event was, though subtler, the most devastating. It happened that she was called up to a meeting with the Captain. His quarters were the same as her quarters now, though he had been living in them alone for several years. Alice was aware of the fact that the man, once married, had lost his wife some years ago, and now had to himself a room which, though uniformly modest as all the other rooms on the ship, was notably larger and configured in a pleasing and private way.

Alice had not been escorted to his room. She received orders by the fieldscreen and simply went. The news of her appointment, though recent, had already suffused the ship, and it’s effect manifested a broad spectrum of manners in the population of the ship. Alice’s mood in the weeks after her appointment was summarily low, but she did entertain herself on occasion with the thought that some poor fool on the ship--perhaps, and most likely, some of her cohort-- envied her. Undoubtedly, she had wrested this unwanted thing from the hands of another, more eager candidate without either of them knowing. As she passed others in the halls, she stole glances and measured the expressions of each. Who might it be? Which person had she, unhappily, saved from this coveted fate?

The Captain’s door was ajar. It was not so strange to Alice. He expected her. She knocked at the door gently, and at the Captain’s voice, entered.

“Well, come in.”

Her eyes found his face in the dark room. The overhead lights had been closed and only the recessed wall lights had been left open to relieve the space of its darkness. As she looked at him, she imagined he must have chosen his position for effect. The lights formed a glow behind him and slightly to his right, darkening most of his features and bringing only the sharp crescent of his profile into focus. He turned to her, his mouth lifted in a configuration that Alice could hardly read, but was sure it was anything but a smile.

“Come in, come in.” He urged. “Close the door. And sit.”

Alice did as she was told. Once done, she turned and took a place in a chair across from him. Though his bed occupied the center of the room and much of the space between them, she did not think to take the liberty of sitting on it.

“So, you’re taking my job.” He said, and paused before heaving a breath of stale laughter.

Alice shifted, opening and closing her hands together on her lap.

“Yes, sir. It appears so.” Her voice felt small in the room. At these words, his face lifted further, as if to smile more sincerely, deeply. It seemed to Alice more of a grimace.

“Well, well. It’s you. You know, I didn’t know who it would be. You would think that the Consortium would want the input of the Captain. The leader of the ship--” He cut himself off. The Captain stood and went to the desk behind him, opening the top drawer roughly. He drew out a piece of paper, and Alice recognized it as an appointment card, though it was much different from her own.

“You know what this is.” He said, waving it gently in the air. “I remember the day. And you will, too. I imagine they all did, and will…”

He had drawn it down in front of him, and was looking at the card. To Alice’s relief, the foul smile had dropped from his face and, for the first time, she had a meager stirring of sympathetic feeling for the man in front of her. Then, he held his card up to her and, in a single swift movement, tore it in half.

The aftermath of Alice’s appointment had done much to mute her expressions. It was expected by some, if not many, that she should be pleased with the news. So here, as she had done before the others, and now before this stranger, she closed her shock inside her body. As the Captain stood before her and performed this action, both simple and extreme, she subdued her feelings, drew her lips and eyelids steady. She read her feelings and his like words on a fieldscreen.

“I’ll tell you what.” He said, still holding the two halves of the cards in his hands. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll tell you what it took me five years to learn. Five damned years, because he died, he died on me and I had to--”

The Captain stopped himself again. He looked up to Alice, his face now wearing an expression that was earnest and plain. This was not about her, she realized. She was merely the medium upon which the Captain was now working on himself.

“The ship,” he began, his tone sombre, as if talking about someone recently deceased. “The ship is on autopilot. You’ll be its Captain in name only. But,” he hesitated, casting an arm out, as if to indicate the whole of the ship, “they can never know.”