Family dinner was a tradition. An incredibly weak, shallow one. Today's setting was a stone garden with cheerful (or revolting, if you're Axy) green and yellow foliage, an almost overwhelming amount of bird chirps, and a rustic wooden table you couldn't eat off of. Because everything is holographically projected. From three different locations in Illumount, Father, Mother, and Axy ate a variety of menu items together, dispensed on trays directly from the wallls. They could hear and see each other just fine, but the scent generators made all the food smell the same.
"They do, Dad, for the actual mining and stuff, but the surveys need - "
"Well, I don't think it's very responsible to leave your job you just started, not to MENTION leaving US. You know how much we had to spend on a license to have you? And how much your Incu-cell cost??" Mom interrupted.
"You didn't *have* to have me in an Incu-cell, Mom, you could have just had a natural bir-"
"Nobody has had, like, a fully biological birth in an eon, Axy. It's probably not even possible anymore. Thats WHY WE HAVE droids and.. pods and stuff to begin with." said Dad.
"That's just it, Dad! EVERYTHING is fake. This habitat is fake. This food is fake. You're not even here. IM fake. I'm just so sick of everybody pretending this is all normal!" Axy finally raised her voice.
Dad, ever the non-confrontationalist, just switched off and disappeared, leaving Mom with the emotional cleanup. She did not own a mop.
"Axy... you're NOT LISTENING. I'm telling you it's NOT FAIR to leave us for who knows how long on some... dangerous expedition that'll end up just picking... garbage up out of some asteroid hole somewhere anyway. You wanna do that? Just switch on your damn holofield and load up one of the programs your father and I worked HARD to bring to you. Eeeeeverybody else in Illumount gets along here JUST FINE, I don't see why you - "
"I'm NOT everyone else, Mom. I'm me. And I wanna go."
"Axy, you're not making sense! How long have you known this guy now? Two months? Think this through, what are Dad and I supposed to do when - "
"Don't pretend you need me, Mom. You know what today is?"
"I don't know and I don't care! What I'm trying to tell you is - "
"Today is the 1 year anniversary of the last time you came to visit in person."
(Despite trying, humans couldn't break out of their circadian rhythm as a whole, so 24 hour day/night cycles persisted, and on those days were based weeks (7 days), months (30 days), and years (360 days). )
Mom was a little shocked. They sat in silence for a moment.
Everybody lived in a separate living pods, fathoms apart from each other in this endless concrete and carbon fiber jungle of a habitat. It doesn't take more than an hour or so to get anywhere in Illumount with the fully automated transportation grid, but most people did not venture out. Work was at home, food came through your walls, and VR was.. well, as good as the real thing for 90% of anything you want to do. In this age, It's easier to leave a droid to mother your child for you. After all, maternity A.I. has parented millions of children, and learned from them all - nobody could make a better mother than a droid.
Except maybe a present one.
"I've asked all my questions, I trust him, and I'm going to take the job, Mom. And this is going to be my new chapter. And I'm not promising you I won't fail... but I'd love for you to be here when I come home if I do."
_______________
Over the next months, Axy and Era continued their correspondence. They speedtracked the legal process to allow her to leave system; she wrapped up her contract with her clients at the garden; he linked FreeBank accounts to cover her living expenses and travel costs to a shipping depot a few months journey out, where she would get picked up by the first ship she would serve on.
Illumount actually gave her sizable bonus for leaving, as there was a waiting list of more affluent people trying to move to Illumount from further out in the system. Twenty thousand Stedits (Stoic Credits at the common consumer exchange rate) would be enough for down payment and first 5 weeks rent on a base-level living pod.
_______________
The day finally came.
"Versette?" Axy asked into the void, after just having been awoken by her implant.
"Good morning sleepyhead. Why do you always wait 'till last minute to get up?" chuckled a woman's voice from the darkness.
The walls lit up, a glowing screen showing a yellow sunrise over a green and brown dessert plain. Stepping through the grass came a woman, with short brown hair, blue overalls, and what might pass for a straw hat if A.I. knew what straw was.
Axy's bed gently transformed into a comfortable seat as she rubbed her eyes. There was seldom need to yawn as her implants regulated oxygen precisely.
Versette was a solar-system wide artificial intelligence that spanned all of Stoic, developed to raise countless billions of children from birth to infancy. Having a traditionally female role, her creators assigned her that gender. She was a masterpiece, able to not only know a person to incredible depths, but to know so many on that level. She contained eons of lifespans she had interacted with over the centuries of parenting entire civilizations. Greed is a powerful motivator, and can very quickly twist such an influential A.I. to its creator's political agendas... but Versette was, at least to Axy, trustworthy and reliable.
"Are you going to be at Anaxon when I get there this evening?"
"It's already evening, love" she chucked. "Remember you opted for a sleep offset instead of spending more time there?
But yes, like I've told you 1,727 times before - no matter where you go in Stoic, I'll be there".
Versette's motherly smile was so comforting and tender and confidence-building.
"But you won't be there when I go to Nuric?"
"I can't follow you everywhere! You've got your own life to live right now."
"I know..."
"The rest of your crew is waiting for you. I predict you won't have a better chance to say good-bye between now and the time you board. Besides, this is your own adventure."
Versette knew full well there would be plenty of time to say good-bye on Anaxon, but she also knew human psychology... she knew how strong her bond was with Axy, and that what Axy needed now was closure. Far better to give her that sense of closer at the moment she left her pod, than it would be somewhere at the beginning of her next chapter.
"I'll miss you a lot."
_______________
Living pods were tiny one-room spaces. You spend most of your time sitting in your console with a spherical projection system all around you, where you lived and worked and played in virtual worlds all day. The chair transformed into a bed, a resistance exercise machine, an eating table, even a bathroom, all to save space. It was tall enough to stand up and stretch your legs in, but little else. Of course, there is never any inclement weather in a cylinder habitat, and the temperature is always a perfect 68 degrees, so walls were thin and soundproofed both ways by a sphere of noise-cancelling speakers embedded in the exterior wall.
While the virtual world with virtual faces was "home", it was nearly unlivable with the screens off. The constant simulations existed to counter claustrophobia and despair, and Axy always battled with this, being averse to the facades of technology. Stepping out and sliding that thin plastic door closed one last time felt like leaving a prison cell.
She walked down the tight, dimly lit catwalks to the nearest street, 5 stories above the lowest level. City AI knows where you are by your implant and predicts your route based on your conversations. No sooner had she reached the street's edge when a white egg-shaped pod zipped over and met her, door ajar and seat waiting. She wordlessly sat down, buckled in her ankles, torso, then arms, and was on her way to the habitat's official dock, at the very end cap of the cylinder.
Too many gray buildings and neon signs went by. Everything is close. Tracks were a little grease grimy, and a few dusty corners get missed by cleaning bots, but otherwise the cramped streets were clean. Sterile, unlived-in. Signs promoting new VR worlds and corporate honor nominees shouted specifically to her in her lonely pod as she rode by empty outdoor meeting places and closed doors. Sort of ironic how empty one of the most over-populated cities in the belt felt. There was no final grand view of her city, either - just a final elevator ascension to the highest altitude in the city - dead center - on the inside of the end cap.
Here, the rotation offers no centrifugal force to induce the feeling of gravity beneath the feet. Were it not for the safety harness and hand grips and walls around her, she would feel like she is in free-fall. She was, in fact, in free-fall around the star Stoic... all of Illumount is, as that is precisely what an orbit is!
The elevator indexed to its stop point, the side opened, and the seat she was strapped to slid on rails through a tunnel directly into the departure craft. Although she couldn't see it yet, she was officially outside the habitat for the first time in her life.
Alongside her were 40 or so other individuals, each on their own seat, lined up on tracks that ran up the outside a wide central shaft, closed in a cylindrical room of sorts not much bigger. This was the transfer vessel that would take passengers to a transportation depot where her official voyage would begin. It was quite disorienting, having no idea which way was "up", in zero-G.
While others boarded, the ship computer interfaced with her HUD. The arm implant-nested AI typically did a good job calling up information as it predicts you'll need it. There are also speaker implants in the outer ear canal, which give you audio from your HUD as well as auto-translation for conversations involving different languages.
An AI-generated face and voice appeared, tailored on the fly to Axy's cataloged personality, to explain basic safety and ship information.
In a brightly extroverted fashion, it said in a smiling and cheerful female voice, "Hi! I'm Turry, your in-flight host!"
...it wasn't very good at tailoring to introverted people like Axy.
"Today's trip to Anaxon Depot will be 3 hours. Please remain buckled at all times. If you need to use a lavatory, you can request it by clicking here" (You can look at a button in your HUD and select it by twitching a finger, raising an eyebrow, or whatever other physical command you've linked to it.)
An image flashed of a zero-G toilet with unholy probes and hoses designed to reduce the "hazards" of going to the bathroom in zero-G.
"I think I'll hold it, thanks..." Axy quipped under her breath.
Turry stopped her monologue momentarily to inject, "As a reminder, the flight is 3 hours, and any cleanup fees will be charged to your registered FreeBank account".
Axy glared, unamused. Turry droned on.
A few loud clunks could be heard, and a dull, steady rumble kicked on as the engines gently engaged. They had disembarked.
After a while of silence, once the acceleration normalized? the boredom kicked in. Most people on board were silent, watching some type of entertainment behind their eyes. Axy hated using her HUD for entertainment. But there was nothing else to look at besides a mint-green plastic wall just out of her reach that was obviously overdue for cleaning.
Eventually, she broke.
"Turry..." she sighed.
"Hi! I'm Turry, your in-flight- "
"Turry is there a way I can see outside?" Axy desperately interrupted.
Turry paused for a moment.
"Tuning you in to exterior live feed now!"
Turry was still WAY to chipper for Axy today.
Everything went dark. These eye pieces didn't show stars very well, but she could see a shape... half encapsulated by darkness, and half blindingly bright in the sun. A capsule-looking shape, long and cylindrical, a hardened rocky outer shell that rotated, with a counter-rotating inner cylinder, visible from two rings cut through the shielding. Within one of those rings was a window she could just barely make out the details of the city through. There was Illumount, seen from the outside for the first time, with her own two eyes!
Well, sort of.
But it was enough to finally spark that sense of awe, that hard-to-capture sense of realization she was OUTSIDE for the first time in her life. She stared into that window she had spent so many months craving to see OUT of. The endless lights, the cramped quarters, the stuffy streets... a sense of timid relief swept over her as the reality set in that she would never again have to confront that space until she wanted to.
Her thoughts went to her parents. Who knows how far apart they lived in that cylinder, but now for the first time they were ironically closer to each other than they were to her. She had a sense of pride about her own decision making process. Not devoid of a little self-doubt, but overall she felt like her own person for the first time.
She thought about the future. About the months and years of education that lay ahead of her. About the many varied career paths Era had explained to her... about the types of asteroids and moons she would be visiting, about the perils and dangers of starship travel. Her heart beat a little faster with excitement. Her HUD gently indicated she was getting a dopamine rush.
[Do you want to regulate this rush?]
[ ] YES [ ] NO
She paid it no mind. She smiled.
Finally, despite having arms and legs strapped to a chair in a coffin-size hall, finally... she was FREE!
