Snapshot

The fight-or-flight mechanism is rooted deep in our prehistory, pieced together incrementally and accidentally by an unknowable number of genetic mutations across incomprehensible stretches of time. Even now, we’ve not successfully engineered our way out of the imperative to panic about dangerous things. If anything, and contrary to what the various ex-Sol tourist boards, travel companies, and haulage recruiters might tell you, spacefaring life has only widened the scope of threats that require an instinctual reaction to survive. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers glimpsing light flash across the teeth of a crouching homotherium latidens would have benefited from a sudden dumping of powerful stress hormones into their systems to help impel them to safety. A starship insurance claims adjuster who notices a crack spreading in an Iconoglass viewport can certainly be aided by the very same mechanism. It’s a response sharpened to an icy needle by evolution, and it works.

The problem comes when you feel that cold pinprick in unnecessary circumstances. If, like Thom, you happen to possess a brain that is somehow pathologically miswired, then behind the lows of your general mood is a constant tinnitus of anxiety. As Thom skids through his seemingly endless working days atop a skein of caffeine, nicotine, and amphetamines, pinballing from mortally dangerous recovery jobs to soul-evaporating administration tasks, this background whine can–without warning, and seemingly unconnected to a particular risk–spike into a shriek, blasting him over an invisible precipice into a full-blown panic attack.

Maybe the pulse of the call-waiting service interrupts a recovery call that, itself, was already the interruption of another call. Maybe another 2-star customer rating appears on his record for no reason he can think of. Maybe nothing like this happens, and a tiny glimmer of doubt about nothing triggers a cascade of exponentially apocalyptic thoughts. Whatever the reason, or non-reason, when Thom is locked into this trajectory, the same things happen: he feels his pulse accelerate until his heart becomes a cannonball vibrating in his ribcage until it threatens to burst out of his skinny chest. Muscles flooding with adrenaline and cortisol, stomach dropping, metabolism accelerating upward through the gears, Thom feels a hurricane of blood howling by his eardrums. Soon, he goes from breathing to hyperventilating, his tongue desiccating as he is hollowed out by the suspicion, the fear, the certainty, that he is going to die any second and there is absolutely nothing he can do to stop it.

Of course, he never does die. Instead, in an undignified and almost invariable climax, he throws up. Empty-stomached as he often is when he’s been too busy, anxious, or otherwise unpermitted to eat, there’s not much more to be squeezed from his board-stiff body than a foamy pool of digestive acid, phlegm, and green-yellow bile. Thom doesn’t know it yet, but this particular mess is destroying his teeth a little more every time it happens (and he certainly doesn’t have dental cover on his contract).

Maybe it’s a cruelty specific to panic attacks that, if this were a fight-or-flight situation, Thom would have done neither: he tends to end up on the floor with all the other trash, feeling misery and self-loathing flood him even alongside the false euphoria of the post-vomit endorphins. Why did this happen? What was he doing? How can he avoid it in future? All questions, of course, that do nothing but reinforce the anxiety that paints innocuous circumstances as those worthy of panic, setting him up for future such incidents in an endlessly tightening loop.

Eventually, after what feels like hours, he’ll grope for his thundering, skittering phone, drag himself back to his feet, spit out the last of the sick, wipe the tears from his yellowed eyes, and try to figure out how much time he has lost. Just because he was unable to participate in the universe for a few minutes does not mean that he hasn’t been receiving new jobs, new notifications, and new warnings.

Near-constant anhedonia would probably be more of an issue if Thom had more time to think about it. In that way, the continual stress of his job can provide some kind of superficial relief from the many flavours of despair engendered by his problems (while acknowledging, of course, that it causes many of them too).

Primitive antidepressants with a formulation dating back to the 20th Century can help, too — until he runs out, and can’t afford more. The amphetamines that keep him awake for colossal stretches of work also provide a teeth-grinding, hyper-focused kind of respite from the blankness.

However, when there is a lull — for instance, spending 13 hours kicking around the plains of the Reckitt-Benckiser vertshuttle terminal in the desert remains of Navasota, Texas, Earth — it can be hard not to spend time turning inward, and feeling the risk of dwelling upon the complete absence of happiness in his life.

In these situations, if Thom is brain-zapped from the discontinuation symptoms of hastily-stopped SSRIs, his vascometrics package prohibits the purchase of any more speed-laced coffee, and his shrivelled serotonin receptors still croak out for nourishment, he has to do something.

Eventually, the bass notes of enjoyment are among the few that can still resonate with his pleasure-deafened body. They are the endlessly-lucrative classics: Sugar. Salt. Fat.

Somewhere underneath the high-frequency, throat-scorching odour of dinitrogen tetroxide, it’s possible to be drawn by the cooking smells of a Jimmy Lumps stand. Jimmy Lumps are a popular way of mashing up whatever protein meals can be bought cheaply and in bulk and homogenising them into a product that hungry, bored, and/or depressed travellers can slide greasily down their throats while waiting for a vertshuttle. Gelatinous balls of anonymous protein and fat, flavoured heavily, whipped and shaped into aerated balls, deep-fried, and skewered by wood-effect plastic sticks, they’re cheap, they are grotesquely delicious, and they will dull certain aches for a few precious minutes.

One of the biggest drawbacks with the Jimmy Lumps served here is that Navasota is one of a patchwork of places — places not in any way limited to Earth — where the most common cooking fat to use is still sucrose polyester. Like Thom’s antidepressants, sucrose polyester is a 20th century invention– though, in this case, originally designed to prevent people getting fat, rather than to prevent them killing themselves. It can be used like any other kind of cooking oil, but it can’t be digested by the body, so it passes straight through without being absorbed. Unfortunately, many formulations of the substance have a habit of causing terrible stomach cramps and diarrhea, as well as leaching fat-soluble vitamins such as A, D, E and K. As a result, such snacks are usually sold bundled with a large dose of a cheap opioid-receptor agonist that stops the large intestine from turning into a high-velocity hot chocolate dispenser, the latter effect being one particularly undesirable when facing a stressful vertshuttle trip.

Sucrose polyester is actually synthesised from vegetable oils and sugars. The reason why merchants do not just cook with the raw vegetable oil alone is because, across several territories spread through the system, a venture capital company owns the exclusive processing rights to the only remaining viable strain of rapeseed oil–and has not attracted a price high enough yet to consider licensing them. The oil is still produced (where crops can still be grown), and it can be bought, but it can’t be used and resold. 

However, a loophole in the wording of the rights (which the VC company is engaged in a colossal battle to close) means that a few derivatives of the oils are still able to be sold. So a small market has sprung up in labs synthesising sucrose polyester out of vegetable oils. Oil manufacturers can sell oil, vendors can sell food, the VC company can’t stop them, and all it means is that packs of loperamide need be stacked up next to the napkins.

All of this is a moot point, of course, if the arid dustbowl where Thom is stranded whips up into a sudden gale that sprays the majority of the noxious treat across his face, his ears, and the company-branded jacket that he will have to pay to have cleaned.

REZQ do not invest heavily in training their employees. In fact, they do not invest in it at all. If a tool or onboard system has an instruction booklet, fine. If it’s in a language that their employee can read, even better. Beyond that, your average REZQ employee is left alone to figure out how to use the wide array of dangerous and unusual devices at their disposal (and, of course, which employees have to pay to hire).

PHOME Throwers. Hull saws. Stasis lances. Portable energy cells powered by volatile unprocessed Salient-compliant FTL fuel. Any one of these things could save a life, end one, or–horrifyingly likely–effect an unintended and unknowable outcome between those two results. Those kind of images drive nightmares that even a Somno implant cannot suppress.

You could consult your ship’s onboard AI — but their layered, psychotic palimpsest personalities, built out of systems emulating systems emulating systems, are not usually capable of understanding even basic queries. If you’re near enough a voidnet provider hub that you have bandwidth credit for, you can try and find tutorial videos–though this is expensive, reliant on coincidence, and not advisable under pressure. You could, perhaps, ask the client being rescued, but it depends whether or not they happen to have the power of speech at the time.

In Thom’s case, lacking any meaningful education before his time at REZQ, trial and error is usually the only plan. A few months’ patchy and irrelevant experience is usually the only thing to squeeze his scrawny shoulder and give him a vague clue what to do next. But some trials can end in errors that cannot be reversed or mitigated. Every trigger pulled, every button pushed, every port blindly filled with cables-that-look-sort-of-correct… each one adds to the accumulation of odds in a cosmically vast gamble with every life in the room, including, of course, his own.

[Note: I am shortly going to be selling a large print/poster based on the above image. If you’d like to be informed when that goes on sale, please stick your name on the mailing list].

Money is the only thing that matters. But nobody can really agree on what it even is any more. With almost every major company issuing its own proprietary currency in order to force artificial loyalty amongst its customers, the headaches associated with keeping track of money are more numerous and more intense than ever before. Want to know what your various currency units are worth? Sorry, but algorithmic High Frequency Trading (of both currencies and companies) makes prices so volatile that picking up a plastic cup of watery coffee from a grimy vending machine could cost five times what it did when you ordered it 30 seconds ago.  Want to use a competing currency to pay for a company’s services or products? Okay, but the additional fee for that conversion could land you in stupendous debt.

It’s all designed that way deliberately, of course.  Profits in currency exchange alone account for trillions of whatever unit you may care to select. And the harder it is for a customer to understand what their money is worth, the easier it is to extort them.

There are countless practical issues involved in this system, but one of the main everyday ones is the physicality and process of payment. With cash itself more or less a thing of the past outside the most marginal and embattled fringes of the galaxy, and barter strongly discouraged through strictly-enforced resale prohibition clauses on almost anything you can name, currency chips have taken hold as the de facto means of exchanging payment.  And, of course, every company currency requires its own proprietary token to store money/balances (sometimes more than one). While it’s not an identical technology, it’s broadly analogous to NFC/RFID as used in the 21st century for contactless payment. But you have to have the right one for the right purchase.

In some other pictures, you may have noticed the gun-like thing dangling from Thom’s belt. That’s not a gun (giving Thom an actual gun is a stupendously bad idea, for all kinds of obvious reasons) it’s just where he keeps all his currency chips. Biometrically keyed to his DNA and double-locked with paralinguistic intention-scanning (so that it can only open if he wants it to open), it’s his wallet, and thus the single most valuable thing he owns.

Accordingly, he keeps it close. And, when the need and the opportunity coincide, he audits his currency chips, to try and figure out some kind of idea of how he’s going to get through the next few days.

When you work on a deep space vessel of any kind, gravity is another commodity that you have to keep one weary, sore, sleep-deprived eye on.

When truly controllable artificial gravity was finally achieved, making obsolete the various giant spinning spacecraft that had to be used to keep career space travellers’ bones from disintegrating, it led to a massive shift in the way that starships were designed. They got bigger. Rooms started to be orientated much more like planetside rooms. A lot of clever-but-expensive specialised design decisions based around living in microgravity were cast aside, as cheaper off-the-shelf solutions that worked on Earth could be used instead.

The trouble is that non-spin gravity generators are extraordinarily fuel-hungry, based as they are on eliciting shaped, contingent, transient fields of ultra-high-density mass out of pure energy. The first waves of true artificial gravity technologies were implemented in an age where cheap energy was more abundant. But the safer high-energy-density fuels that used to power starships are getting harder to come by, as humanity ravenously devours the galaxy. So now, huge ships with colossal non-spin gravity systems both a) have to use dirtier, less efficient, more dangerous fuel sources and b) have to be more careful about how often they use those systems.

Usually, some kind of rationing is in place. Employees on a large private vessel will usually have a shared gravity allowance, resetting monthly (something that can get extremely fraught in a multi-person crew). Sure, you can purchase additional gravity credit — but it’s not cheap. Thankfully it does cut off when the allowance runs out, rather than simply racking up charges.

Anyway. Running out of gravity allowance is a pretty common occurrence for Thom. It happens at the most inconvenient moments.

[BTW if you are feeling suicidal here are some numbers to help you wherever you are in the world]

And when sleep does come, it does not guarantee peace. Maybe your wetware is booked in for Somno subconscious parallel processing. Maybe you’re woken moments after you drop off to deal with some crisis or another.

Or maybe you just have bad dreams.

It’s hardly surprising: while no place was ever truly meant for anyone, if there’s anywhere that nobody should be, it’s in a desolate former cargo vessel in deep space. A fatigued hull; degrading pipes leeching poison into the over-recycled water; cracked PHOME tanks; an ageing, leaky Salient reactor core; airlocks that open and shut without warning… everything safe feels so far away.

Often, in the face of these incomprehensible forces of nothingness and entropy, the sense of fragility is so overwhelming that it cannot be focused upon in waking life, for fear of utter paralysis. But it has to have somewhere to go. So it burrows down, deep into the subconscious, waiting for a chance to explicate itself–and when drugged, uneasy sleep comes, it bursts through the surface fully-formed. Glass shatters; bone cracks; lungs burn; blood boils.

There’s something to be said for the few moments of relief that come with waking. But they only last for as long as it takes to realise where you are, and that, while those images were just a nightmare, it may only be a matter of time before it comes true.

By a number of measures, Thom is discouraged from eating junkfood.

It’s not that the ship’s computer, nor REZQ themselves, have Thom’s health at heart. After all, it’s never tried to stop him sucking down amphetamine-laced instant coffee or eating “cereal” bars consisting primarily of petrochemical gum fillers. It’s more about short-term productivity, and micromanagement of organic resource to maximise that productivity. While consumption of SPEED COFFEE might cause a serious crash in a couple of days’ time, or lead to more serious health problems, there is the opportunity to monitor and mitigate that in advance–the ship’s computer might request cover from other vessels, or, more often, impose additional dietary and stimulant controls to smooth the comedown and keep a baseline of activity. If a longer-term replacement of an organic resource is needed–if the computer determines that they are at a high risk of imminent death–then all knowable measures can be undertaken to ensure that service is not disrupted for any longer than strictly necessary.

The trouble with unsanctioned carbohydrates, sugars, and other unmapped macro and micronutrients, is that (as far as the computer believes, at least) they cause spikes and craters in productivity that, while not impossible for the vascometrics system to measure and predict, do not build in much time to react. The sluggishness from carb consumption (whether real, imagined, or a side-effect of the relative contentedness from feeling sated) is not desirable when trying to get every useful working second out of an organic resource.

While vascometrics can provide a dizzying level of granularity to information about a body’s current state and function, and while this incredibly low-level surveillance can reveal a seemingly fractal level of detail, the more tightly these systems try to grasp a truth about the body, the more the fullness of that truth slips away. That is to say that, owing to inbuilt flaws in the system–forecasting models skewed by corrupt research, coding built upon a palimpsest of unexamined biases, the pressure to round off numbers and to flat-phase in favour of a desired/idealised efficiency profile–the accuracy of vascometric measurement and organic resource management is far from guaranteed.

This is a long-winded way of saying that sometimes, despite all potential consequences, Thom knows he can get away with eating algae chips and drinking fizzy fructose, even if the computer doesn’t. And if he has to hide in a particularly derelict part of the ship with poor sensor coverage to do it, then he will.

A lesser-known duty of REZQ employees is to scuttle spacecraft.

It may seem unthinkable that spacecraft–of which many these days are overgrown, hulking monsters, embodying tens of thousands of tons of raw materials– would just be vaporised by thermonuclear fire rather than salvaged and refitted. There are plenty of companies that do the latter: REZQ, for one, have a habit of procuring very thoroughly-used spacecraft for their purposes. The truth is that the salvage value of a ship varies according to the availability of certain raw materials at any one time (and thus their cost). With new colonies being founded or collapsing on an almost daily basis, something that was plentiful yesterday may be scarce today, and vice versa.

There have been building booms as certain colonies have upturned seemingly vast reserves of ores used ultimately for shipbuilding–and in these bubbles, as resources have flooded the market, there have been times when it has been cheaper to build a new ship than to refit an old one. But on balance it’s usually a steadier bet, costwise, to refit an old ship–which is why so many ships are complex patchworks of ancient, busted, retrofitted systems slapped on top of each other.

Regardless of the material circumstances, some companies destroy their ships as a matter of policy if they think they might be incapacitated for even a couple of days. This could just be to minimise insurance liability to the owners for any damage or injury a drifting ship or its dangerous cargo might cause later. Or there could be valuable items or information onboard which need to be destroyed to stop it falling, as salvage, into a competitor’s hands–giving them boost in a turbocharged economy where any tiny advantage can make the difference between galactic domination and bankruptcy, making the cost of a destroyed ship a lesser sacrifice than the alternative.

Here, after being given the codes, and forced to sign half a dozen different non-disclosure agreements regarding anything he might see onboard the ship, Thom has been instructed to arm and instigate the self-destruct charges on a large, incapacitated corporate research vessel. He doesn’t know what’s aboard, and really, he doesn’t want to know. An NDA is no protection against the use of exotic interrogation techniques by corporate espionage specialists, and he’d hate to go through that and then get sued into a Debtors’ Colony afterwards because he gave up something of value in violation of his NDA.

He doesn’t get to set the duration of the exit timer–the company doesn’t want there to be any chance that another company could reach the ship before it blows. Thom has to hope that the timing is such that the worst of the blast will be shielded by a moon in whose orbit the stricken vessel is trapped — but this won’t be much help if he can’t get off the ship and back to his own vessel, Angel Fish, getting the clumsy autopilot to push it around the other side of the moon before the timer hits zero.

The more-frequented deep space rest stops, and especially those run by the larger chains, have food courts. In a manner not unlike those seen in the 20th and 21st centuries, trashy franchised food stands sell salty, fatty, calorie-dense slabs of ground, unidentifiable mixed proteins–fried, glazed with chemically-spiked petrochemical dressings, and wrapped in indistinct expanded carbohydrate rusks.

A musty haze of grease hangs in the hot, overly-recycled air, and settles in a yellowish film on plastic bench tables glued to the slippery floor. You might be squashed between two other patrons, one of whom is vaping psychedelic drugs furiously while the other seems to size up his chances of snatching your food from you and gulping it down. Impatient cleaning robots try to get you out of the door while you’re still chewing to make room for the next customer.

It’s sweaty. It’s disgusting. But it’s food, kind of, and it’s a place to eat that makes a change from having to hide in one of the few awkward, uncomfortable corners of your own ship where (you think) your overbearing, fussy ship’s computer won’t be able to get a real-time lock on your vascometrics and discover that you’re eating macronutrient groups that are in variance with your mandated nutritional profile.

Even this meagre luxury is unavailable sometimes. Not all rest stops have any kind of seating area, so if you want to eat a Bugrito or an Algae Burger without taking it back into your ship’s computer’s vascometrics range, then you have to find somewhere else to perch. Often, that means squeezing yourself into the Assistants’ Suite—a little closet most rest stops have where Assistant Robots are left to charge, to upgrade their software, or to be diagnosed for any number of dangerous faults.

There’s no better way to learn than on the job. Make sure you’ve bought enough data to download the tutorial videos, though.

Though this scene does raise two good questions: 1) whatever happened to the Internet?  and 2) how can such a system possibly work in deep space, where starships routinely punch through spacetime to distances which would take any recognisable data signal many thousands of years to travel?

To address question 1: well, it’s still around… sort of. On Earth, for instance, it’s now pretty much one big shopping channel. It’s much more set to “receive” than “send”: individuals on the main networks don’t tend to put things out there; the Internet is the voice of companies. The closest most individuals will get to putting original content on the Internet is using their social media profiles (usually the ones provided by their employers)–but even then, they are limited to sharing and adding emotes to content that has been posted by the corporate accounts. They can’t put anything original there themselves (not even comments–thankfully). And, of course, ISPs pretty much run their own walled versions of the Internet, without much crosstalk between them (you can pay, but most people can’t really afford the out-of-plan charges of accessing content provided by another network).

Out in deep space, the Internet is even more limited. You’re stuck with whatever is on the nodes within line of sight and within range. If that’s a network that your ISP includes in its plan, then great. If it’s not, you either can’t access it at all, or you can only access the previews designed to sell you access at a considerable cost.

Which brings us to question 2. The basic problem of superluminal signal transmission being fundamentally impossible has been tackled by using wormholes. Erect a communications system around a tiny wormhole, and you can pass signals from one point in the galaxy to another instantly. You can then set up a more conventional line-of-sight network to relay the signal to starships, planets, and other recipients.

Early such wormholes were discovered–wormhole prospecting was once a huge industry for this reason, and a lot of the earlier colonial systems were set up around these natural nodes, and their ease of communcation made them highly desirable locations to settle businesses relying on fast and consistent communication. Somewhere along the line, though, someone figured out how to punch the holes artificially–which was bad news for those early colonies, as their USP suddenly became a whole lot less U.

Anyway, Thom was extraordinarily lucky to be near a network node that could serve up a video about hotwiring FTL drives (a mirror of content stolen from a now-defunct independent network for user-generated video)–but it wasn’t cheap.