LITMIR.BIZ

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posts. They had jobs that needed attending to while the rest of us fooled around in the mess.

      I looked up at a clock on the wall—five hours had flown by since the party began. Captain Mahler had to have known about it long before his appearance. He let us have our good time, indulged us. But now he was here to remind us it was time to face responsibility.

      “I want this place spotless in an hour, and everyone in bed no more than fifteen minutes after that,” he said. “All who participated in the merriment must participate in the cleanup. If anyone does not contribute, there will be consequences. I expect everyone to report for duty at 0700 tomorrow. You’ve all heard of hangovers, and by tomorrow many of you will be intimately familiar with one. This does not excuse you from duty.”

      He scanned the room, laying his eyes on each of us. “There’s a time and place for everything. Today was a momentous day, one we’ll all remember—the first half of, anyway.”

      Uncomfortable laughter cropped up here and there around the room, but dropped off almost immediately.

      “It was a day worth celebrating—and we have. Now, though, we must focus on business. The business of setting up our society, engraining it in ourselves. You led different lives on Earth—sheltered and formal lives. I understand the desire to break from those constraints. But there was a reason for your well-regulated upbringing. The training wheels have come off, but that does not excuse you from duty, or dedication, to your positions aboard these ships. We must take pride in our stations, in our commitment to each other. In responsibility.” He looked at his watch—an antique piece, perhaps an heirloom. “All right, your hour starts now.”

      I lunged at the pile of soiled cake-plates nearest me, and dropped them into the compost chute on my way to Nika’s room. I hadn’t a clue what the punishment for not cleaning might be, but Nika would never forgive me if I let her endure it.

      Besides—I sure as hell wasn’t doing this by myself.

      Days later, it was time to compose my first message home.

      I.C.C. sent automated messages back all the time. Short snippets of information about functionality and position, but that was it. I had to tell Earth about us—our societal status, our functionality, any major events, and any major problems. I had to keep mission support abreast of all that was happening.

      There were three main communications rooms on Mira. One was part of the bridge and was used for ship-to-ship. The second was on deck six, and was a mirror image of the comms centers on all the other ships. That was where most of the “reporters” worked out of, gathering the data that I would then compile. The last sat on the lowest deck opposite the shuttle hangar—more of a closet than a room, what with all of the equipment stashed inside. It was well guarded, and only I and my cycle partner—the person who would take over when I retired, and in turn train a new clone of myself—had clearance to enter. It was where all Earth-to-convoy messages came in and went out. Inside stood a small desk, a small chair, and a good-sized server bank which extended beyond my sight and back into a long access tunnel beyond.

      I called the servers my Enigma Machine, because all of their computing power was focused on sending and receiving coded messages. The messages came via a time subdimension we had yet to figure out how to physically move through. But even if we didn’t fully understand it, we could send information through it just fine—better than fine. It was the fastest communication method known, and would ensure us practical mission-to-mission support communications for a long time.

      While the system was fast, it was also limited. For one thing, my Enigma Machine needed a mate back on Earth in order for my messages to actually make it to a set of human eyeballs.

      For another, SD communication was comparable to SD travel, which meant is was equally as problematic, with a few exceptions. An SD drive made a pocket of “normal” space around itself and nearby matter, protecting it in a bubble. And the drive could independently move that pocket in and out of normal space; in other words, it could dive and surface. But SD communications couldn’t work that way—there was no physical engine I could attach to an encoded electromagnetic signal. Instead, there was a part of my Enigma Machine that created a bubble of its own and forced a dive, and a twin Enigma Machine on Earth that pulled the communiqué to the surface and coaxed the bubble to pop.

      And the two machines had to be synced. The odds of randomly intercepting an SD packet were astronomical—pun intended. The Enigma Machine on the receiving end had to know which subdimension the information was traveling through, what trajectory it took through space, and how to unravel the “skin” that maintained the bubble once the packet was intercepted.

      “Not exactly a ham radio, is it?” I’d joked the first time a teacher had introduced me to the concept. Unamused, she’d gone into further detail about how difficult SD communication was, and how I should be honored to be one of only a handful of people trained to use the methodology.

      So, honored I was.

      The system was fast, yes, and complicated, yes, and a huge energy suck, sure. But despite its advanced nature, it could still only handle so much data at a time. And by so much, I mean not a lot. So once the message was transferred to my implants or a holoflex-sheet, it needed further decoding, and that’s where my job could truly get tricky.

      I smoothed the front of my clothes, making sure nothing bunched uncomfortably. My official on-duty uniform was a well-tailored, denim-blue jumpsuit. Not the most stylish of work-wear, but it distinguished me from the black of security officers, the vermillion of the engineers, the Italian-yellow of the emergency medical teams, the purple of the educational division—and everyone else who wasn’t in communications.

      The color coding had been Mother’s idea, though I heard Father was against it. Thought it was too much like gang paraphernalia or something.

      Well, if the botanists and the microbiologists ever start calling themselves the Sharks and the Jets, and go snapping in unison through the halls, we’ll know he was right.

      In the days previous I’d gathered my notes, made my summaries, and translated them into the special shorthand. Of course, five days in, there wasn’t much to report.

      People were working, doing their jobs well. Though, to me, the convoy still felt more like a clubhouse than a well-oiled machine. We were free, after all. This was our house—it was only fair we should make our own rules, rather than be confined to whatever our parents had set up.

      If it hadn’t been for Captain Mahler, I’m sure entropy would have taken over and pulled our presently functional feet out from under us. We wanted time off when we wanted it. We wanted to switch shifts whenever we felt like it. We wanted to set up bowling pins in the halls and use inappropriate items to knock them down.

      We just wanted to have a little fun. And despite the lesson we had learned the morning after our first party, our sense of responsibility was shaky at best. We didn’t know how to balance work and play—not yet. If the captain hadn’t had such a watchful eye the convoy might have ended up dead in the proverbial water.

      Big Brother was watching, though. With the help of I.C.C., he made sure we ate our vegetables and washed behind our ears. He knew, better than the rest of us, that no Mother and no Father shouldn’t mean a lack of order.

      So that’s where we were—but was I going to tell Earth all that? That they’d sent a wannabe frat house into space? And that their one hope for stability—after all the effort they’d put into that very concept—rested on a single man?

      Hell no.

      And, after all, it had only been five days. Surely it was just a phase.

      I was conscious of the dangers of the dynamic while wanting to be a part of it. I had no desire to follow the strict regimen that had been set up for us, but I also didn’t want to see the mission flounder and fail. It was a strange dichotomy of concepts that somehow lived harmoniously within me. I simultaneously supported and denied our collective rebelliousness.

      But

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