🦺 The Expanse

Welcome to the 26th edition of Safe For Work.

Today a story inspired by the details of realistic space engineering and the possibilities of happenings in galaxies beyond.

Mass. It’s just a number-- and a unit: “ninety kilograms”.

The number means a lot, or nothing at all, depending on what you’re trying to do with it. If you’re trying to use it for gravitation, it’s diddly-squat. I’ve never once gotten anything orbiting around me, and I never will. The force is there, it’s not zero, but it might as well be, and life is mostly made of might-as-well.

Life is made of bodies three times heavier than they ought to be, not that anyone ever explains it to you-- at least not at first-- and you can either stay in bed and die of starvation, or dehydration, really, or you can muster every last fiber of your muscles to peel yourself up and drag yourself across the room and down the hallway-- live or die, and you might as well live.

Inertia-- that’s where the number starts to mean something. Ninety kilograms-- that means that it takes, for instance, ninety Newtons of force for me to accelerate myself across a room at one meter-per-second per second-- ignoring other factors. It takes nine-hundred Newtons of force for the engines of this shuttle to accelerate the mass of my body at a rate of ten meters-per-second per second. Combining that with the masses of the twenty other people onboard with me, plus the mass of all our gear, plus the mass of the shuttle itself, in order to maintain that acceleration of ten meters-per-second per second, the engines have to produce…

…well, actually, I’ve got no idea how much force the engines have to produce to keep us all accelerating at a steady ten meters-per-second per second, but however much it is, they’re doing it-- no more and no less.

I get up from the sofa and walk across the cabin towards the viewport. My steps are loping and awkward-- my arms and legs move just fine, the way I’m used to, my mass hasn’t changed one bit… but every step sends me too far off the floor, and it takes too long for me to come floating back down again-- as though I’m somehow accidentally jumping along. I just don’t weigh enough.

This is what it feels like on Earth-- or so they tell me.

The rest of my squad-- the other twenty-- are also struggling to adjust. Michaelson keeps hitting his head on the ceiling. Che keeps trying to take his next step before his feet have made it all the way back down to the deck and he goes toppling-- over and over.

It won’t last. The first shuttle-ride away from the Facility is usually enough for people to get acclimated, re-comfortable in the body-- or so they tell me. And they tell me it’s a lot harder going the other way around-- from Earth onto the station. I can sort of imagine how that might be the case, now that I’m feeling it for the first time; what it’s like to be light. What it’s like on the planet, far away, where my bones and muscles and organs were designed to work. I imagine living like this, for an entire lifetime, and then waking up one morning completely crushed down into your bed. It’s a “might-as-well” when you’ve had an entire lifetime to get used to it. It must be hell itself if you haven’t.

I’m starting to understand, really, truly, now, what my life has been about. What I’ve been made for.

At the viewport, I see my home receding away, faster and faster-- it’ll just be a speck soon, lost in the black-- and despite every time I’ve had someone shouting spittle into my face about this or that, I catch myself shedding a tear-- and then another-- and then another, they aren’t stopping. They are falling down my face more slowly than any tear I’ve ever let myself drop, or failed to stop myself dropping, more slowly than any bead of sweat.

I steady myself against the frame of the viewport with one hand, and with the other I reach up to wipe away my tears-- or at least cover them up before someone else notices. Too late.

But-- “Your secret’s safe with me,” whispers the young woman in the beige uniform of the cabin-crew. She’s passing out water and protein-biscuits. “Happens every time. Doesn’t matter how tough any one of you guys is, you see that and…”

She shakes her head.

“Happens for me with Earth. I mean, it’s a beautiful thing, too, you’ll love it when you see it, I hope… but I think it’s more because it’s home than because it’s beautiful, you know? It’s more about what’s happening than what anything looks like. It’s your home, after all, right?-- it’s where you’ve lived your entire life-- where you were born, where you grew up-- where you made all your mistakes and corrected them-- where you fell in love and back out of it again, or where you learned to stick together… all of that, and then here you are… outside of it. Watching it vanish away from you.”

I nod into the glass, without a word. I can’t make myself look at her, not with my face like this. I can’t make myself look away from the Facility, either. It really isn’t anything all that special to look at-- nothing like a planet, or a moon, or even an asteroid. It’s really just a space-station-- and nearly all of that is just one big ring, rotating-- fast-- even from all the way out here, and getting farther and farther, I can see how fast it’s spinning-- and it’s almost dizzying.

The crew-member is right. I’ve spent my entire life on that ring. Every drill. Every failure-- and failure and failure and failure until finally, I could clear the vault-- finally, I could lift the weight-- finally, I could run the course fast enough-- finally, I could jump high enough-- finally, I could take my aim and hit the shot, every time-- all of that, on that ring, spinning there. Thirty meters-per-second per second of acceleration, centrifugal force, every second of every minute of every day of every year of my entire twenty-five years up until now on that ring, there, and now, here I am, outside of it. Outside.

Here I am, outside of my entire life, standing next to a woman whose forearm I could snap with just a squeeze of my hand. She’s not particularly thin or weak-looking. She’s just not from where I’m from. I could pick her up and hurl her across this cabin like I was trying to make a hoop.

“You know what I am, don’t you?” I ask her. It’s a stupid question. It’s a completely moronic question. She wouldn’t be here on this shuttle if she didn’t know what I am. If she didn’t know what I’m for. Nobody who doesn’t know it would ever be allowed onto any one of these shuttles-- and they certainly wouldn’t be allowed off again. Not alive. “I was born to kill people. Earth people,” I say, and what I don’t say is “People like you” because surely that isn’t true. Surely, it isn’t supposed to be people like her.

“Lots of people are born to do lots of different things,” she shrugs. “Maybe you were and maybe you weren’t. What I can tell so far, it looks like you were born to cry looking out the window of a shuttle.”

She hands me a bottle of water from her tray, and two protein-biscuits.

“Cheers,” she says, and she makes a little mock-toast before turning and shuffling off. Her feet stay comfortably on the floor. She doesn’t float too high. She moves perfectly-- naturally. She’s been moving like this her whole life, however long that’s been. Next to her, the lot of us look like a squad of complete buffoons. Next to us, she looks like a professional dancer.

I’ve never danced. I’ve seen it-- never done it. I’ve tried, but no luck; it doesn’t matter quite how strong you get, you just can’t dance in triple-gravity. Not in a way that looks any sort of good. And I kind of like that, actually. I think I’m going to miss that actually, knowing that I couldn’t dance if I tried.

I turn, too, and step away from the viewport. It’s a little better, now. A little easier. By the end of this shuttle-ride, I’ll be acclimated again, it’s easy-- or so they tell me. I’ll be able to move less like a buffoon by the end of this shuttle-ride. I’ll be able to fight. I’ll be able to operate on Earth, just the way I need to. Just the way I’m needed to.

But it won’t be home.

I let the tears stay where they are on my face, falling slowly.

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See you next week as we dive into submarine cable networks. Stay safe.