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We Who Live in the Heart (Part 2 of 3)

By Kelly Robson

(…Continued from Part 2)

Ricci got into my notes. I don’t keep them locked down; anyone can access them. Free and open distribution of data is a primary force behind the success of the human species, after all. Don’t we all learn that in the crèche?

Making data available doesn’t guarantee anyone will look at it, and if they do, chances are they won’t understand it. Ricci tried. She didn’t just skim through, she really studied. Shift after shift, she played with the numbers and gamed my simulation models. Maybe she slept. Maybe not.

I figured Ricci would come looking for me if she got stumped, so I de-hermited, banged around in the rumpus room, put myself to work on random little maintenance tasks.

When Ricci found me, I was in the caudal stump dealing with the accumulated waste pellets. Yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like: half-kilogram plugs of dry solid waste covered in wax and transferred from the lavs by the hygiene bots. Liquid waste is easy. We vaporize it, shunt it into the gas exchange bladder, and flush it through gill-like permeable membranes. Solid waste, well, just like anyone we’d rather forget about it as long as possible. We rack the pellets until there’s about two hundred, then we jettison them.

Ricci pushed up her goggles and scrubbed knuckles over her red-rimmed eyes.

“Why don’t you automate this process like you do for liquids?” Ricci asked as she helped me position the rack over the valve.

“No room for non-essential equipment in the mass budget,” I said.

I dilated the interior shutter and the first pellet clicked through. A faint pink blush formed around the valve’s perimeter, only visible because I’d dialed up the contrast on my goggles to watch for signs of stress. A little hormone ointment took care of it — not too much or we’d get a band of inflexible scar tissue, and then I’d have to cut out the valve and move it to another location. That’s a long, tricky process and it’s not fun.

“There’s only two bands of tissue strong enough to support a valve.” I bent down and stroked the creamy striated tissue at my feet. “This is number two, and really, it barely holds. We have to treat it gently.”

“Why risk it, then? Take it out and just use the main valve.”

A sarcastic comment bubbled up — have you never heard of a safety exit? — but I gazed into her big brown eyes and it faded into the clouds.

“We need two valves in case of emergencies,” I mumbled.

Ricci and I watched the pellets plunge through the sky. When they hit the ice slush, the concussive wave kicked up a trail of vapor blooms, concentric rings lit with pinpoints of electricity, so far below each flash just a spark in a violet sea.

A flock of jellies fled from the concussion, flat shells strobing with reflected light, trains of ribbon-like tentacles flapping behind.

Ricci looked worried. “Did we hit any of them?”

I shook my head. “No, they can move fast.”

After we’d finished dumping waste, Ricci said, “Say, Doc, why don’t you show me the main valve again?”

I puffed up a little at that. I’m proud of the valves. Always tinkering, always innovating, always making them a little better. Without the valves, we wouldn’t be here.

Far forward, just before the peduncle isthmus, a wide band of filaments connects the petals to the bladder superstructure. The isthmus skin is thick with connective tissue, and provides enough structural integrity to support a valve big enough to accommodate a cargo pod.

“We pulled you in here.” I patted the collar of the shutter housing. “Whoever prepared the pod had put you in a pink bodybag. Don’t know why it was such a ridiculous color. When Vula saw it, she said, ‘It’s a girl!’.”

I laughed. Ricci winced.

“That joke makes sense, old style,” I explained.

“No, I get it. Birth metaphor. I’m not a crechie, Doc.”

“I know. We wouldn’t have picked you if you were.”

“Why did you pick me?”

I grumbled something. Truth is, when I ask our recruiter to find us a new hab-mate, the percentage of viable applications approaches zero. We look for a specific psychological profile. The two most important success factors are low self-censoring and high focus. People who say what they think are never going to ambush you with long-fermented resentments, and obsessive people don’t get bored. They know how to make their own fun.

Ricci tapped her fingernail on a shutter blade.

“Your notes aren’t complete, Doc.” She stared up at me, unblinking. No hint of a dimple. “Why are you hoarding information?”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. There’s nothing about reproduction.”

“That’s because I don’t know very much about it.”

“The other whale crews do. And they’re worried about it. You must know something, but you’re not sharing. Why?”

I glared at her. “I’m an amateur independent researcher. My methods aren’t rigorous. It would be wrong to share shaky theories.”

“The whale crews had a collective research agreement once. You wrote it.”

She fired the document at me with a flick of her finger. I slapped it down and flushed it from my buffer.

“That agreement expired. We didn’t renew.”

“That’s a lie. You dissolved it and left to find your own whale.”

I aimed my finger at the bridge of her goggles and jabbed the air. “Yes, I ran away. So did you.”

She smiled. “I left a network of habs with a quarter billion people who can all do just fine without me. You ran from a few hundred who need you.”

Running away is something I’m good at. I bounced out of there double-time. Ricci didn’t call after me. I wouldn’t have answered if she had.

---

The next time she talked to Jane, Ricci didn’t mention me. I guess I didn’t rate high enough on her list of problems. I didn’t really listen to the details as they chatted. I just liked having their voices in my head while I tinkered with my biosynthesis simulations.

Halfway through their session, Vula pinged me.

You can quit spying, she said. None of us are worried about Ricci anymore.

I agreed, and shut down the feed.

Ricci’s been asking about you, by the way, Vula added. Your history with the other whales.

Tell her everything.

You sure?

I’ve been spying on her for days. It’s only fair.

Better she heard the story from Vula than me. I still can’t talk about it without overheating, and they tell me I’m scary when I’m angry.

Down belowground the air is thick with rules written and unwritten, the slowly decaying husks of thirty thousand years of human history dragged behind us from Earth, and the most important of these is cooperation for mutual benefit. Humans being human, that’s only possible in conditions of resource abundance — not just actual numerical abundance, but more importantly, the perception of abundance. When humans are confident there’s enough to go around, life is easy and we all get along, right?

Ha.

Cooperation makes life possible, but never easy. Humans are hard to wrangle. Tell them to do one thing and they’ll do the opposite more often than not. One thing we all agree on is that everyone wants a better life. Only problem is, nobody can agree what that means.

So we have an array of habs offering a wide variety of socio-cultural options. If you don’t like what your hab offers, you can leave and find one that does. If there isn’t one, you can try to find others who want the same things as you and start your own. Often, just knowing options are available keeps people happy.

Not everyone, though.

Down belowground, I simply hated knowing my every breath was counted, every kilojoule measured, every moment of service consumption or contribution accounted for in the transparent economy, every move modeled by human capital managers and adjusted by resource optimization analysts. I got obsessed with the numbers in my debt dashboard; even though it was well into the black all I wanted to do was drive it up as high and as fast as I could, so nobody would ever be able to say I hadn’t done my part.

Most people never think about their debt. They drop a veil over the dash and live long, happy, ignorant lives, never caring about their billable rate and never knowing whether or not they syphoned off the efforts of others. But for some of us, that debt counter becomes an obsession.

An obsession and ultimately an albatross, chained around our necks.

I dreamed about an independent habitat with abundant space and unlimited horizons. And I wasn’t the only one. When we looked, there it was, floating around the atmosphere.

Was it dangerous? Sure. But a few firms provide services to risk takers and they’re always eager for new clients. The crews that shuttle ice climbers to the poles delivered us to the skin of a very large whale. I made the first cut myself.

Solving the problems of life was exhilarating – air, food, water, warmth. We were explorers, just like the mountain climbers of old, ascending the highest peaks wearing nothing but animal hides. Like the first humans. Revolutionary.

Our success attracted others, and our population grew. We colonized new whales and once we got settled, our problems became more mundane. I have a little patience for administrative details, but the burden soon became agonizing. Unending meetings to chew over our collective agreements, measuring and accounting and debits and credits and assigning value to everyone’s time. This was exactly what we’d escaped. Little more than one year in the clouds, and we were reinventing all the old problems from scratch.

Nobody needs that.

I stood right in the middle of the rumpus room inside the creature I’d cut into with my own hands and gave an impassioned speech about the nature of freedom and independence, and reminded them all of the reasons we’d left. If they wanted their value micro-accounted, they could go right back down belowground.

I thought it was a good speech, but apparently not. When it came to a vote, I was the only one blocking consensus.

I believe — hand-to-heart — if they’d only listened to me and did what I said everything would have been fine and everyone would have been happy. But some people can never really be happy unless they’re making other people miserable. They claimed I was trying to use my seniority, skills, and experience as a lever to exert political force. I’d become a menace. And when they told me I had to submit to psychological management, I left.

Turned out we’d brought the albatross along with us, after all.

---

When Jane pinged me a few days later, I was doing the same thing as millions down belowground – watching a newly-arrived arts delegation process down the beanstalk and marveling at their dramatic clothing and prosthetics.

I pinged her back right away.  Even though I knew she would probably needle me about my past, I didn’t hesitate. I missed having Ricci and Jane in my head, and life was a bit lonely without them. Also, I was eager to meet her. I wasn’t the only one; the whole crew was burning with curiosity about Ricci’s pretty friend.

When Jane’s fake melted into reality, she was dressed in a shiny black party gown. Long dark hair pouffed over her shoulders, held off her face with little spider clips that gathered the locks into tufts. Her chair was a spider model too, with eight delicate ruby and onyx legs that cradled her torso.

“Hi, Doc,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you, finally. I’m a friend of Ricci’s. I think you know that, though.”

A friend. Not a therapist, peer counselor, or emotional health consultant. That was odd. And then it dawned on me: Jane had been donating her time ever since Ricci joined us. She probably wanted to formalize her contract, start racking up the billable hours.

When I glanced through her metadata, my heart began to hammer. Jane’s rate was sky high.

“We can’t float your rate,” I blurted. “Not now. Maybe eventually. But we’d have to find another revenue stream.”

Jane’s head jerked back and her gaze narrowed.

“That’s not why I pinged you,” she said. “I don’t care about staying billable – I never did. All I want to do is help people.”

I released a silent sigh of relief. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to say hi and ask how Ricci’s getting along.”

“Ricci’s fine. Nothing to worry about.” I always get gruff around beautiful women.

She brightened. “She’s fitting in with you all?”

“Yeah. One of the crew. She’s great. I love her.” I bit my lip and quickly added, “I mean we all like her. Even Vula, and she’s picky.”

I blushed. Badly. Jane noticed, and a gentle smile touched the corners of her mouth. But she was a kind soul and changed the subject.

“I’ve been wondering something, Doc. Do you mind if I ask a personal question?”

I scrubbed my hands over my face in embarrassment and nodded.

She wheeled her chair a bit closer and tilted toward me. “Do you know what gave you the idea to move to the surface? I mean originally, before you’d ever started looking into the possibility.”

“Have you read Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage?” I asked. “You must have.”

“No.” She looked confused, like I was changing the subject.

“You should. Here.”

I tossed her a multi-bookmark compilation. Back down belowground, I’d given them out like candy at a crèche party. She could puzzle through the diction of the ancient original or read it in any number of translations, listen to a variety of audio versions and dramatic readings, or watch any of the hundreds of entertainment docs it had inspired. I’d seen them all.

“This is really old. Why did you think I’d know it?” She flipped to the summary. “Oh, I see. One of the characters is named is Jane.”

“Read it. It explains everything.”

“I will. But maybe you could tell me what to look for?” Her smile made me forget all about my embarrassment.

“It’s about what humans need to be happy. Sure, we evolved to live in complex interdependent social groups, but before that, we were nomads, pursuing resource opportunities in an open, sparsely populated landscape. That means for some people, solitude and independence are primary values.”

She nodded, and I could see she was trying hard to understand.

“Down belowground, when I was figuring all this out, I tried working with a therapist. When I told him this, he said, ‘We also evolved to suffer and die from violence, disease, and famine. Do you miss that, too?’”

Jane laughed. “I hope you fired him. So one book inspired all this?”

“It’s not just a book. It’s a way of life. The freedom to explore wide open spaces, to come together with like-minded others and form loose knit communities based on mutual aid, and to know that every morning you’ll wake up looking at an endless horizon.”

“These horizons aren’t big enough?” She waved at the surrounding virtual space, a default grid with dappled patterns, as if a directional light source were shining through gently fluttering leaves.

“For some, maybe. For me, pretending isn’t enough.”

“I’ll read it. It sounds very…” She pursed her lips, looking for the right word. “Romantic.”

I started to blush again, so I made an excuse and dropped the connection before I made a fool of myself. Then I drifted down to the rumpus room and stripped off my goggles and breather.

“Whoa,” Bouche said. “Doc, what’s wrong?”

Eleanora turned from the extruder to look at me, then fumbled her caffeine bulb and squirted liquid across her cheek.

“Wow.” She wiped the liquid up with her sleeve. “I’ve never seen you look dreamy before. What happened?”

I’m in love, I thought.

“Jane pinged me,” I said instead.

Bouche called the whole crew. They came at a run. Even Vula.

In a small hab, any crumb of gossip can become legendary. I made them beg for the story, then drew it out as long as I could.

“Can you ask her to ping me?” Eddy asked Ricci when I was done.

“I would chat with her for more than a couple minutes, unlike Doc,” said Treasure.

Chara grinned lasciviously. “Can I lurk?”

The whole crew in one room, awake and actually talking to each other was something Ricci hadn’t seen before, much less all of us howling with laughter and gossiping about her friend. She looked profoundly unsettled. Vula bounced over to the extruder, filled a bulb with her favorite social lubricant, and tossed it to Ricci.

“Tell us everything about Jane,” Chara said. Treasure waggled her tongue.

“It’s not like that.” Ricci frowned. “She’s a friend.”

“Good,” they chorused, and collapsed back onto the netting, giggling.

“I’ve been meaning to ask — why do you use that hand-held thing to talk to her, anyway?” Chara said. “I’ve never even seen one of those before.”

Ricci shook her head.

“Come on, Ricci. There’s no privacy here,” Vula said. “You know that. Don’t go stiff on us.”

Ricci joined us in the netting before answering. When she picked a spot beside me, my pulse fluttered in my throat.

“Jane’s a peer counselor.” She squeezed a sip from the bulb and grimaced at the taste. “The hand-held screen is one of her strategies. Having it around reminds me to keep working on my goals.”

“Why do you need peer counseling?” asked Chara.

“Because I…” Ricci looked from face to face, big brown eyes serious. Everyone quieted down. “I was unhappy. Listen, I’ve been talking with some people from the other whale crews. They’ve been having problems for a while now, and it’s getting worse.”

She fired a stack of bookmarks into the middle of the room. Everyone began riffling through them, except me.

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“Don’t you want to know what’s going on, Doc?” asked Chara.

I folded my arms and scowled in the general direction of the extruder.

“No,” I said flatly. “I don’t give a shit about them.”

“Well, you better,” Vula said. “Because if it’s happening to them, it could happen to us. Look.”

She fired a feed from a remote sensing drone into the middle of the room. A group of whales had gathered a hundred meters above a slushy depression between a pair of high ridges. They weren’t feeding, just drifting around aimlessly, dangerously close to each other. When they got close to each other, they unfurled their petals and brushed them along each other’s skin.

As we watched, two whales collided. Their bladders bubbled out like a crechie’s squeeze toy until it looked like they would burst. Seeing the two massive creatures collide like that was so upsetting, I actually reached into the feed and tried to push them apart. Embarrassing.

“Come on Doc, tell us what’s happening,” said Vula.

“I don’t know.” I tucked my hands into my armpits as if I was cold.

“We should go help,” said Eddy. “At least we could assist with the evac if they need to bail.”

I shook my head. “It could be dangerous.”

Everyone laughed at that. People who aren’t comfortable with risk don’t roam the atmosphere.

“It might be a disease,” I added, “We should stay as far away as we can. We don’t want to catch it.”

Treasure pulled a face at me. “You’re getting old.”

I grabbed my breather and goggles and bounded toward the hatch.

“Come on Doc, take a guess,” Ricci said.

“More observation would be required before I’d be comfortable advancing a theory,” I said stiffly. “I can only offer conjecture.”

“Go ahead, conjecture away,” said Vula.

I took a moment to collect myself, and then turned and addressed the crew with professorial gravity.

“It’s possible the other crews haven’t been maintaining the interventions that ensure their whales don’t move into reproductive maturity.”

“You’re saying the whales are horny?” said Bouche.

“They look horny,” said Treasure.

“They’re fascinated with each other,” said Vula.

Vula had put her finger on exactly the thing that was bothering me. Whales don’t congregate. They don’t interact socially. They certainly don’t mate.

“I’d guess the applicable pseudoneural tissue has regenerated, perhaps incompletely, and their behavior is confused.”

Ricci gestured at the feed, where three whales collided, dragging their petals across each other’s bulging skin. “This isn’t going to happen to us?”

“No, I said. “Definitely not. Don’t worry. Unlike the others, I’ve been keeping on top of the situation.”

“But how can you be sure?” And then realization dawned over Ricci’s face. “You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?”

“Not exactly.”

She launched herself from the netting and bounced toward me. “Why didn’t you share the information? Keeping it secret is just cruel.”

I backed toward the hatch. “It’s not my responsibility to save the others from their stupid mistakes.”

“We need to tell them how to fix it. Maybe they can save themselves.”

“Tell them whatever you want.” I excavated my private notes from lockdown, and fired them into the middle of the room. “I think their best option would be to abandon their whales and find new ones.”

“That would take months,” Vula said. “Nineteen whales. More than two hundred people.”

“Then they should start now.” I turned to leave.

“Wait.” Ricci looked around at the crew. “We have to go help. Right?”

I gripped the edge of the hatch. The electrostatic membrane licked at my fingertips.

“Yeah, I want to go,” Bouche said. “I’d be surprised if you didn’t, Doc.”

“I want to go,” said Treasure.

“Me too,” Chara chimed in. Eddy and Eleanora both nodded.

Vula pulled down her goggles and launched herself out of the netting. “Whales fucking? What are we waiting for? I’ll start fabbing some media drones.”

With all seven of them eager for adventure, our quiet, comfortable little world didn’t stand a chance.

---

We’re not the only humans on the surface. Not quite. Near the south pole a gang of religious hermits live in a deep ice cave, making alcohol the old way using yeast-based fermentation. It’s no better than the extruded version, but some of the habs take pity on them so the hermits can fund their power and feedstock.

Every so often one of the hermits gives up and calls for evac. When that happens, the bored crew of a cargo ship zips down to rescue them. Those same ships bring us supplies and new crew. They also shuttle adventurers and researchers around the planet, but mostly they sit idle, tethered halfway up the beanstalk.

The ships are beautiful — sleek, fast, and elegant. As for us, when we need to change our position, it’s not quite so efficient. Or fast.

When Ricci found me in the rumpus room, I’d already fabbed my gloves and face mask, and I was watching the last few centimetres of a thick pair of protective coveralls chug through the output.

“I told the other crews you’d be happy to take a look at the regenerated tissue and recommend a solution, but they refused,” she said. “They don’t like you, do they?”

I yanked the coveralls out of the extruder.

“No, and I don’t like them either.” I stalked to the hatch.

“Can I tag along, Doc?” she asked.

“You’re lucky I don’t pack you into a bodybag and tag you for evac.”

“I’m really sorry, Doc. I should have asked you before offering your help. When I get an idea in my head, tend to just run with it.”

She was all smiles and dimples, with her goggles on her forehead pushing her hair up in spikes and her breather swinging around her neck. A person who looks like that can get away with anything.

“This is your idea,” I said. “Only fair you get your hands dirty.”

I fabbed her a set of protective clothing and we helped each other suit up. We took a quick detour to slather appetite suppressant gel on the appropriate hormonal bundle, and then waddled up the long dorsal sinus, arms out for balance. The sinus walls clicked and the long cavity bent around us, but soon the appetite suppressant took hold and we were nearly stationary, dozing gently in the clouds.

On either side towered the main float bladders — clear multi-chambered organs rippling with rainbows across their honeycomb-patterned surfaces. Feeder organs pulsed between the bladder walls. The feeders are dark pink at the base, but the color fades as they branch into sprawling networks of tubules reaching through the skin, grasping hydrogen and channeling it into the bladders.

At the head of the dorsal sinus, a tall, slot-shaped orifice provides access to the neuronal cavity. I shrugged my equipment bag off my shoulder, showed Ricci how to secure her face mask over her breather, and climbed in.

With the masks on, to talk we had to ping each other. I was still a bit angry so no chit-chat, business only. I handed her the laser scalpel.

Cut right here. I sliced the blade of my gloved hand vertically down the milky surface of the protective tissue. See these scars? I pointed at the gray metallic stripes on either side of the imaginary line I’d drawn. Stay away from them. Just cut straight in between.

Ricci backed away a few steps. I don’t think I’m qualified to do this.

You’ve been qualified to draw a line since you were a crechie. When she began to protest again, I cut her off. This was your idea, remember?

Her hands shook, but the line was straight enough. The pouch deflated, draping over the skeleton of the carbon fiber struts I’d installed way back in the beginning. I pulled Ricci inside and closed the incision behind us with squirts of temporary adhesive. The wound wept drops of fluid that rapidly boiled off, leaving a sticky pink sap-like crust across the iridescent interior surface.

Is this the whale’s brain? Ricci asked.

I ignored the question. Ricci knew it was the brain – she’d been studying my notes, after all. She was just trying to smooth my feathers by giving me a chance to show my expertise.

Not every brain looks like a brain. Yours and mine look like they should be floating in the primordial ocean depths — that’s where we came from, after all. The organ in front of us came from the clouds — a tower of spun glass floss threaded through and through with wispy, feather-like strands that branched and re-branched into iridescent fractals. My mobility control leads were made of copper nanofiber embedded in color-coded silicon filaments: red, green, blue, yellow, purple, orange, and black — a ragged, dull rainbow piercing the delicate depths of an alien brain.

Ricci repeated her question.

Don’t ask dumb questions, Ricci.

She put her hands up in a gesture of surrender and backed away. Not far — no room inside the pouch to shuffle back more than one step.

The best I can say is it’s brain-like. I snapped the leads into my fist-sized control interface. The neurons are neuron-like. Is it the whole brain? Is the entire seat of cognition here? I can’t tell because there’s not much cognition to measure. Maybe more than a bacterium, but far less than an insect.

How do you measure cognition? Ricci asked.

Controlled experiments, but how do you run experiments on animals this large? All I can tell you is that most people who study these creatures lose interest fast. But here’s a better measure: After more than ten years, a whale has never surprised me.

Before today, you mean.

Maneuvering takes a little practice. We use a thumb-operated clicker to fire tiny electrical impulses through the leads and achieve a vague form of directional control. Yes, it’s a basic system. We could replace it with something more elegant but it operates even if we lose power. The control it provides isn’t exactly roll, pitch, and yaw, but it’s effective enough. The margin for error is large. There’s not much to hit.

Navigation is easy, too. Satellites ping our position a thousand times a second and the data can be accessed in several different navigational aids, all available in our dashboards.

But though it’s all fairly easy, it’s not quick. My anger didn’t last long. Not in such close quarters, especially just a few hours after realizing I was in love with her. It was hardly a romantic scene, both of us swathed head-to-toe in protective clothing, passing a navigation controller back and forth as we waggled slowly toward our destination.

In between bouts of navigation, I began telling Ricci everything I knew about the organ in front of us: A brain dump about brains, inside a brain. Ha.

She was interested; I was flattered by her interest. Age-old story. I treated her to all my theories, prejudices, and opinions, not just about regenerating pseudoneuronal tissue and my methods for culling it, but the entire scientific research apparatus down belowground, the social dynamics of hab I grew up in, and the philosophical underpinnings of the research exploration proposal we used to float our first forays out here.

Thank goodness Ricci was wearing a mask. She was probably yawning so wide I could have checked her tonsils.

Here. I handed her the control box. You drive the rest of the way.

We were aiming for the equator, where the strong, steady winds have carved a smooth canyon bisecting the ice right down to the planet’s iron core. When we need to travel a long distance, riding that wind is the fastest route.

Ricci clicked a directional adjustment, and our heading swung a few degrees back toward the equator.

What does the whale perceive when we do this? Ricci waggled the thumb of her glove above the joystick. When it changes direction, are we luring it or scaring it away?

Served me right for telling her not to ask simple questions.

I don’t really know, I admitted.

Maybe it makes them think other whales are around. What if they want to be together, just like people, but before now they didn’t know how. Maybe you’ve been teaching them.

My eyebrows climbed. I’d never considered how we might be influencing whale behavior, aside from the changes we make for our own benefit.

That’s an interesting theory, Ricci. Definitely worth looking into.

Wouldn’t it be terrible to be always alone?

I’d always considered myself a loner. But in that moment, I honestly couldn’t remember why.

(Continued in Part 3…)

---

Host Commentary

By Alasdair Stuart

I talked last time about Robson’s ability to balance big ideas and intimate realisations and I think that’s central to this second act. Most obviously, it’s there in the literal collisions that lie at the heart of this act. The crew colliding with the outside world, feelings colliding with pragmatism, safety colliding with adventure. Celibacy, societal and biological, chosen and enforced, colliding with libido. Massive cool space whales colliding with each other. 

Two lines really sparkled for me. The first is this:

‘Obsessive people don’t get bored. They know how to make their own fun.’

There’s that collision once again, this time between personal choice and cultural expectation. I also love how Robson approaches representation in this story, the same way it’s approached in life. Not everyone moves the same way, is the same size, the same build, has the same level of neurodivergency. People are just people, but in a tight space like this, people are more themselves than anywhere else. Robson finds the drama there, and the contrast between the careful assembly of a crew and the offhand modification of the whales is a neatly handled piece of gently sinister worldbuilding. This isn’t quite as brave or nice a world as it thinks it is, and the ‘safety’ of the crew’s routine being burst speaks to that even before the whales do.

The other line is this:

‘…So nobody would ever be able to say I haven’t done my part.’

As a former talented child with a complicated parental relationship and a Catholic work ethic, this one hits me square in the guilt centres. The drive to be useful is great. Being useful at the expense of being happy is not. Realising when you’re doing that is almost impossible and doing it changes your life, instantly, for the better. Doesn’t make it easier though and that being one of the arcs of this story is why I love it.

One last thing; Riders of the Purple Sage is a real book! Published in 1912 it’s regarded as one of the seminal western texts and follows three characters as they struggle with persecution from the local town, run by a Mormon elder. I love how Robson uses it here both to emphasize the universality of personal choice and exploration as personal definition, and to show how goals like ‘live free’ are actually destinations disguised as goals.  It’s also out of copyright so if you’re interested, we’ll drop a link to the text via Project Gutenberg in the show notes.

What a great story. Come back next week for the final part.

Onto the subject of subscribing and support:  Escape Pod has long survived on donations alone, and even though there’s ads now, subscribing through our Patreon remains the best way to ensure we can keep bringing you one story, told well. And, if you subscribe at the $7 tier, you can get rid of the ads again! So if you’d like to support what we and the rest of Escape Artists do, please join our Patreon at patreon.com/EAPodcasts through your browser, to avoid paying the app store fees. Prefer another method? There are details for supporting us via Twitch, Amazon Prime, Ko-Fi and PayPal on EscapeArtists.net, or you can reach out directly by email at donations@escapeartists.net with any questions and someone will get back to you.

The legal bit: Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. That means you can share it, and please do!, but you cannot sell it and you cannot change it; if you want specifics, check creativecommons.org. Our music is by Daikaiju.

Oh and one last thing, Columbo style. Escape Pod is proud to say that we have partnered with Sleepphones headphones to provide a special Escape Pod branded set of headphones. 

SleepPhones® headphones are soft headphones that you can wear while you sleep. They’re comfortable, slim and essentially ‘headphones in a headband’. So you put it on, unplug and surround yourself in an ultimate sound experience – without disturbing, or being disturbed by, the person next to you. SleepPhones® headphones were designed by a family doctor and provide wearable comfort that’s literally music to your ears and they’re available with both standard 3.5mm audio jacks and Bluetooth.

They’re easy to clean, comfortable and now you can get them with our logo on the headband! And you can get a 10% discount off your order of the Escape Pod branded sleep phones if you use the coupon code EscapePOD (all one word.)

Follow the link in our shownotes to Sleepphones and remember the code ESCAPEPOD to get 10% off!

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Daikaijiu.

We’ll see you next week. Before then, we’re sending you off into the week with another quote from Starfleet Academy. It just seems to vibe with this story.

‘“Say what you will about this present time, but it has one advantage over every other—it’s ours.”’

We’ll see you next time, folks. Until then, have fun.