Above the planet Izra, between two stars that always seem to be setting, sits an old ship, a fresh start, and a new home.

Previously: Six months before Leah arrived on Aspiration, she bought a derelict ship from Sōzō corporation, getting to the station where she inspected the ship by catching a ride with a pilot for the corporation named Erin. But something went wrong on the shuttle and Erin needed to make an emergency landing on a nearby asteroid. Luckily, she said she knew the person who lived there…

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“How’d you say you knew this guy?” Leah said, unbuckling herself.

“I didn’t,” came Erin’s muffled reply. As soon as they landed on the asteroid, she’d made a beeline for the toilet at the rear of the shuttle and from the noises that filtered through the cabin, Leah didn’t have to guess why. They were...disturbing to say the least. “And they’re not a guy. Wait for me before you head out there. They don’t like-”

“You said you were going to be a while,” Leah said, headed towards the airlock. Luckily, the gravity on the asteroid was below 1G so she didn’t have to use her chair. She did grab the pair of crutches she’d brought, though, just in case. “I’m not just going to sit around in my seat until you’re done throwing up.”

She didn’t mention that she also barely even wanted to look at the inside of this shuttle again, never mind hanging out for a couple of hours, waiting for Erin to be done.

“Leah,” the pilot said, but her voice was lost as she began to vomit once more.

Leah ignored the sound and shut herself into the airlock, slowly pulling herself into the suit that hung from the wall. She remembered how difficult that had been the handful of times she’d pulled herself into a suit while in 1G and was grateful that she was near zero now; it was much easier to move through the air when she didn’t have to fight the normal weight of her body.

She was unfamiliar with the mechanism of the airlock, but it only took her a couple careful minutes to figure out how to depressurize it safely. She made sure all the lights on the suit were green and she couldn’t hear any hissing before she opened the shuttle doors. She blinked rapidly at the starlight from the star that the asteroid (and everything in this system) orbited and raised the hand not holding her crutches to shield her eyes from the light. Fit her luck perfectly that she just happened to step out onto the asteroid when it was star-ward.

There was a thin crackle that came through the speakers in her helmet, from the transmitter that she didn’t even realize was on.

Then a voice, static-y, but certain: “Don’t move.”

Her eyes adjusted to the light. There was someone standing in front of her, holding a rifle in both hands, but there was something strange about one of them.

Wait. Not holding. Pointing.

Leah held up her hands, her heartbeat jumping up into her throat. Her crutches hung in the air for a moment after she’d let them go, before succumbing to the less than 1G and falling to the ground silently. “I-”

“This is Erin’s shuttle, but you ain’t Erin,” they said, still not lowering the gun. “Who are you?”

Leah blinked a couple of times and swallowed dryly as the gun, and its owner, began to waver into view. The rifle was covered in sheer plastic, about as thin as a condom, with a couple bright red patches of tape here or there along the barrel. She might have laughed at the idea of trying to fix a gun with duct tape, if it wasn’t being pointed at her and if her heart hadn’t begun to beat so loud that it pushed out all other thoughts. The person holding the gun was wearing a spacesuit, one of the homemade ones made out of recycled plastic, and she noted a similar type of tape as the one on the gun in a handful of places here and there along the arms and legs. She couldn’t tell much beyond that because of the star on the horizon behind them.

“Erin is inside,” Leah said, careful to speak the words as calmly and slowly as possible. Even though this situation was far more statistically likely to result in an injury than in a shuttle malfunction caused by Erin’s piloting, she still felt more comfortable here than there. Half of her wondered what that said about her. The other half thought it was completely reasonable. “My name is Leah. We landed because something went wrong with Erin’s shuttle, and she thought-”

“Again?” they said, and lowered the gun. In response, Leah began lowering her hands too. “And I’m guessing she swallowed her chew too? That’s why she’s still inside?”

Leah nodded.

“God damnit,” they said and swung the gun around easily in the low gravity, sliding it into a sling across their back. As they moved, the starlight shifted and Leah took the moment to get a real look at them. They were only a couple of inches taller than Leah and even though their hair had been shaved down to a peach fuzz, she could tell from the shadow of it that it was dark. They had a hoop on their nose, a stud in each ear, and two hoops jutting off the top of their right ear, along with some kind of tentacle tattoo stretching up onto the side of their neck from underneath the suit. They were Yamato, just like Ita-san but their eyes were also a startlingly bright blue, the blue of a cloudless, summer day.

Now that she could look directly at their arms, she could see what had struck her as strange: on their left arm, the suit ended just a bit past the elbow and the rest of their arm was taken up by a metal prosthetic. She’d seen the kind before, in doctor’s offices when she’d first woken up and been brought around to all of the different specialists to see if they could replace her legs. It was the type that could be easily interchanged with different attachments for cross-purposes. Right now, it was a skeletal impression of a hand, connecting to the metal in their arm, the suit ending just after metal hit skin.

The suit itself was a piece of art. She’d seen the tape on it before, but now that they’d moved, she could see it wasn’t just for little scratches and cracks here or there; no, it was structurally integral to the whole suit, holding the thing together. She could even see some cauterized rubber around the bionic arm, where it had needed to be burned back into submission after fraying. Every patch was expert, perfectly placed. Even the gun looked recycled, the trigger made of that shiny, other-worldly plastic that could be nothing else but 3D printed.

They went to rub their hand across their head with their gloved hand, but stopped as they hit the glass of their helmet. They smiled, showing a missing incisor.

“Well, you might as well come in,” they said, turning a little as if they were holding open a door and making a wide, welcome gesture behind them that seemed to encompass all of the asteroid. Leah glanced behind them and saw nothing but rock, pockmarked by its constant wandering: craters and scars against the turf.

“I-where?” Leah said.

“Oh, sorry.” They took a couple of steps forward and then pushed off the ground, a flying leap towards her.

She flinched back, away, worried they were going to run into her, unable to control their speed. But they had done this before, landing less than a meter from her, and extending their bionic hand out. “Name’s Echo.”

“Leah,” Leah said as she pressed her hand, encased in the thick padding of the suit, to their metal one. She vaguely remembered Erin calling on the transmitter down to the asteroid, while she’d been scrunching her eyes shut and trying to pretend like she was anywhere else. She’d assumed when she’d said Echo, she was referring to the phonetic alphabet, not a person’s name.

They made a funny face as Leah said her name and she realized that they were raising their eyebrow...except their face was completely shaven clean. They didn’t have any hair there to symbolize it, just a muscle moving.

“You already said that,” they said.

“Yeah, well,” Leah said, feeling her face flush a bit. She bent to grab her crutches, just for a thing to do. In the low gravity, and the adrenaline from the landing, she didn’t need them yet. “You introduced yourself. It seemed the thing to do.”

They snorted. “Sorry about the gun. Can’t be too careful, you know?”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Leah said and Echo nodded approvingly before showing her their back. Leah shook her head in disbelief at the thought of pointing a gun at anyone, no matter how unsafe they appeared to be. But, then again, she didn’t live this close to Sōzō; who knew how different she’d feel if she did?

“They keep coming back, landing every couple months and knocking on my door. All monkey suits and politics,” they said, walking star-ward in that leaping sort of way that really only worked in low G.

“Who keeps coming?” Leah said, still standing where she’d been when she first opened the airlock, not sure if she should follow or go back inside. She wasn’t sure what the protocol was when someone pointed a gun at you and then seemed to be offering you shelter.

“Sōzō of course.”

“Oh,” Leah said. “Of course.”

She hadn’t realized it at first, but whenever you meet someone when you were in a suit, there were a couple of awkward minutes while you negotiate your transmitters, trying to make sure you can connect. But that hadn’t happened this time. She’d been able to connect with Echo first thing. Erin had been here before, though. Maybe her suit had already been set to Echo’s channel before she even stepped out of the shuttle. She shook her head. That had to be it. Nothing else made any sense.

“We’d tried to contact you as we were coming in,” Leah said, trying to make conversation as they made their leaping shuffle.

“Yeah?” they said, stopping about thirty meters away and dropping awkwardly to their knees on the asteroid’s dusty surface. “I think I was in the john. I didn’t hear anything about it until I got a notification someone touched down.”

Some noise from their movements came through the transmission bleed-over: a big exhale of breath, a scrape of metal against metal, followed by the whine of rusted hinges and a crash, their body leaning star-ward as they heaved something out of the ground and into the dirt on the far side from Leah.

From what Leah could see, it was hatch made out of recycled metal, reforged to form an air tight seal. She guessed that it led into a below ground habitat. She’d never been on an asteroid before, never mind an underground asteroid habitat. Based on the suit and the gun and everything else about Echo, she guessed they made it themselves.

Echo looked around at her. “You coming?”

There was only one correct answer to that question.

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Credits:

ZK Hardy as principal writer, editor, and audio editor.

Emily Westland as editor and producer.

Jamie Philips as design consultant.

Original art provided by Sabina Lewis.

Original music for audio recording and podcast by Ryan A. Mahoney.

Previous episode

Start from the beginning

“So, how many crates of randoms?”

“About a dozen or so,” Leah said, pushing the wheelchair past the Sōzō corporation representative. They were in the cargo hold of the fourth ship they’d looked at that day, the CC 24601, and the empty hold made their voices echo as if they were standing on a stage. All four ships they’d looked at had been cargo carriers, decommissioned by Sōzō due an antiquated law out of the Sol system: a ship couldn’t keep flying if it was more than twenty years old. This was the only one that had seemed like it was more or less functional, if a bit abused, and Leah was happy to take advantage of the outdated law while waiting for the corpos to quit their bickering and collectively agree on something. As if that would ever happen. She expected the heat death of the universe to come sooner.

“A dozen?”

Leah turned her chair to look at the saleswoman currently scratching a pimple on her neck until it bled.

Ita-san was probably close to two meters tall if more, so she would have towered over Leah even if Leah had been standing. She had dark hair that had been cut into a bob, and wore a jumpsuit with the top half peeled down, the arms of it trailing behind her like the tails of a tuxedo. Underneath the jumpsuit, she just wore a tank-top despite the cold air of the artiatmo around them, showing a flat chest and full sleeve tattoos on both arms. Leah caught the tail of a ryū dragon curling down over her right shoulder as she moved, and a large cartoon castle on her left forearm; she guessed the woman liked old games. A clipboard holster was slung around her waist, and her strong chin jutted out towards Leah like it was cut from the same steel of the ship they stood in. The smile on her face was polite, but vaguely disinterested.

Leah understood.

Ita-san wasn’t even really a saleswoman. She was supposed to just be transporting junked ships back and forth between the different sectors of the KU, wherever Sōzō hadn’t used up its limitation on how many spaceships it could toss into a star each month. Leah wasn’t the first person to be interested in buying old, decommissioned ships, but it was a small industry for Sōzō and didn’t warrant a new, specific department. She guessed that Ita-san had picked the short straw this week, having to bring around customers who’d be spending less than a quarter of what it cost to buy one of these berths new. Walking Leah around and showing her these different ships probably wasn’t even worth her hourly rate.

Leah tried to show patient understanding in her smile. “Or so. Let’s do twelve to start. I can reach out if I need more.” A glint of metal caught her eye, something shifting in the harsh, fluorescent light of the room. Leah leaned to one side, squinting to see beyond the Sōzō saleswoman. “What about those?”

“Those?” Ita-san said, taking a step to one side and turning around, inadvertently blocking her view.

Leah let out a soft, annoyed sigh and maneuvered her chair to be able to see around the Sōzō employee, but her annoyance faded fast. She couldn’t believe what she saw.

On the floor were fifteen satellites, stacked on top of each other, each a bit larger than a dog. They were all powered down, their four cylindrical thrusters pointed straight down, though they could swivel in any direction; Leah guessed they were easier to stack that way. Extended out behind them, were what looked like deflated, beige balloons, five meters in radius, slowly gathering dust. Leah couldn’t see the vacuum nozzle, but she guessed that they were fully retracted into the satellite, just as it would be during travel. After all, that was the most important part of these satellites; leaving them exposed would have just increased the likelihood of damage and fixing a nozzle like that would be costly.

“Oh,” Ita-san said. She stopped picking at her neck and removed a mobile console from her pocket, scrolling through it to find the information. Apparently whatever she found there was boring, though, because the console quickly returned to her pocket. “They’re just gas satellites, miners. You know, for xenon or whatever? They keep the fuel gauges up on long hauls.”

“Oh?” Leah said. She pulled her own console from her pocket and did a reverse image search. Ita-san was telling the truth, but she didn’t know all the specifics. Even beat up, these satellites were worth more to Leah than the ship that carried them. She stared down at the console, flipping through photos of the satellites in action. “How’d they work?”

“I don’t know,” Ita-san said, and walked over to them.

For a brief, flickering moment, Leah worried that the saleswoman would know what they were and what they might be worth if cleaned up and repaired.

But she just tapped one of the satellites lightly with her foot, letting out a soft ringing sound from the vibration of the metal. She started scratching her neck again. “Every time they found a planet or star that gave off a lot of xenon, they’d stop and harvest enough to keep going.”

Leah nodded to herself and put the console away. She scrunched up her face, feigning concern, and looked up at the saleswoman. “How long did that take?”

“About a week or two.”

“That long? Will it affect delivery?” Leah said, putting on her best negotiating voice.

Ita-san seemed to realize that she was scratching her neck again and pulled her hand back from the bleeding pimple as if she’d been touching a hot burner. “No. We’ll stock it up before we head over to…” She pulled the clipboard from her side holster and looked down at it. “...sorry, I don’t have it here.”

“There isn’t a name for the tunnel yet,” Leah said. “It’s been stuck in bureaucratic paperwork hell since it was discovered.” She wheeled her wheelchair closer to the satellites, listening as it scraped against the floor of the long hauler. “Is this the only fueling station Sōzō has?”

“No, they’re all over the KU,” Ita-san said, distractedly. She trailed her finger down the board. “But I see your tunnel name here: this random collection of letters and numbers? I thought it was your commdress.”

Leah leaned closer to the satellites, wiping off a bit of the dust off the outside. Her fingers traced the small abrasions carved into the sides by years of exposure to space. “Technically, it’s both. Could I use those fueling stations if I wanted to?”

“Only if you were on contract with Sōzō,” Ita-san said, scribbling something down. She looked up at the buyer, as if seeing her for the first time. “You only have one commdress for the entire system?”

“I mean, it’s only recently been discovered,” Leah said, leaning back up and absentmindedly wiping the dust off on her pants. It was a small wonder that the satellites were all still holding together. The paint job Sōzō had done to cover up small flaws in its design had almost completely degraded, there were hundreds of small holes from where the satellites had survived micrometeorites strikes, and the thin layer of dust still clung desperately to the outer paneling.

But she could also see they were still functional. Sure, they were a little old and probably not going to be functional for very much longer. But for now they could do their job. They were proud little machines, desperate to be helpful.

“Oh, you’re talking about that Lost System?” the saleswoman said.

Leah stiffened up and half-turned in her chair.

“That was found my last year in high school,” Ita-san said. “Everybody was talking about it. And they were showing that video? From the CEO of the company that bought the map of the tunnel out there?”

“So these are included in the purchase of the ship?” Leah said, turning her chair around and crossing her arms.

“Man, I can’t imagine what those people might’ve gone through,” Ita-san said as if she hadn’t hear her. She was staring off into the middle distance and started scratching her neck again. “Can you imagine? Being separated from the rest of the KU for that long only to be thrust back in right as-”

“These satellites are included?” Leah said.

Ita-san looked down at her, startled, her fingers in mid-scratch. “Oh, um.” She looked at her clipboard again, flipped through a couple pages. “Yeah. It says purchase and sale of everything on the ship.”

Leah nodded. “And you’ll load it up with the randoms as well before sending it out to me?”

Ita-san shook her head without looking up from the clipboard. She was trying to wipe off the blood from her neck on the paper. “No, those’ll have to be sent separately.”

Leah scrunched her face up, not pretending to be concerned this time. “Why?”

Ita-san shrugged, again not looking at her. “They have to be delivered separately.”

“But you’ll be delivering this ship?” Leah said. “Why not just load it up with all the shipping containers of scrap material as well and send it all at once instead of two separate deliveries?”

The saleswoman shrugged one more time. “Not my department. It just says here they have to be sent through two different deliveries.”

“Meaning I’ll have to pay two different delivery fees?”

Ita-san shrugged again, her face pained as she stared at the clipboard.

Leah sighed and gestured for the clipboard. The saleswoman had been paying closer attention than Leah thought, because she handed the clipboard over immediately. Leah skimmed through the contract, trying to ignore the blood stains.

Everything the woman had said was correct. Leah handed the contract back to her.

“Sorry,” Ita-san said, although Leah wasn’t sure if she meant the blood or the fact she’d have to pay a delivery fee twice.

“It’s alright,” Leah said, turning her wheelchair towards the docking port. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been screwed by a corpo.”

Leah let the final thought flit through her brain as she crossed back into the docking tunnel, And I doubt very much that it would be the last.

“All set?” Erin said as Leah took her seat in the back of the shuttle.

“Yeah,” Leah said. She folded the wheelchair, leaned over and secured it in place with some loose cargo straps before buckling herself in. “How’d your appointment go?”

“You know doctors,” Erin said, flipping a couple of switches. The shuttle disconnected from the station with a loud clank. “All needles and arrogance.” She flipped another switch. “This is shuttle alpha-one-niner, requesting permission to disengage.”

A voice came back through, the stilted tones of an obvious AI. “Permission granted, alpha-one-niner. Have a good-”

Erin flipped the comms off again.

Leah leaned back against her chair and closed her eyes. “Thanks again for letting me tag along.”

“No worries,” Erin said, leaning forward a bit to spit into the vacuum mudjug. “I’ve gotta come all the way out to Sōzō country for my checkups anyway.”

Leah felt the ship accelerate forward and had a slight temptation to open her eyes, watch her ship, bought but not yet paid for, fade into the distance. But she knew it would be better for her if she waited until they were far enough away that she wouldn’t feel nervous to watch Erin take her hands from the wheel.

She couldn’t believe her luck; mining equipment and a perfect place to store what she was going to mine. Even if she had to fork out more than half of her savings to make it happen, at least she’d been able to find it. She smiled and let out a long breath.

“Why do you have to come all the way out here for checkups?” she said.

“Company policy,” Erin said, her voice a bit muffled from the new plug of tobacco. Leah hadn’t opened her eyes yet, but she guessed this was a common occurrence for Erin to put in a plug when she first launched. “Guess Sōzō only trust the doctors here. When are you gonna get that junk bucket delivered?”

Leah bristled at hearing the cargo ship described like that, but decided it wasn’t worth the fight. If she pissed Erin off, all it would cause was another eight hours of argument all the way back to Izra. Leah heard Dad’s voice in her head: And besides the woman is doing you a favor.

“About six months or so,” she said, eyes still closed. She smiled as if she could feel sun on her face. “All the time in the world to finalize the sale of the shop back home, buy Aspiration from the realtor and-”

She cut herself off as she felt the whole ship shudder and jolt to one side.

Her eyes snapped open as she heard a loud swallow from the cockpit. “Ah shit.”

Leah took a deep shuddering breath. “What is it?”

“I swallowed my chew,” Erin said. “Fucking thing. Every time…”

“Oh,” Leah said, letting a relieved smile come over her face and her eyelids start to droop close. Maybe she’d get some sleep on the way home. “For a second, I thought there was something wrong with the shuttle.”

“Oh there’s definitely something wrong with the shuttle,” Erin said. From where Leah was sitting all she could see of the pilot was her bright pink hair, but the woman was clearly half-turned trying to speak to her. She jerked her head to the left to indicate the vast expanse of space. “I’ll have to set down on the asteroid over there.”

Leah’s breath tightened in her chest. “What? Why?”

“Dunno. Something wrong with navigation I expect,” Erin said, turning to the front again.

She clutched the armrests as the ship rocked back and forth. Erin was contracted to Sōzō. They wouldn’t let a contractor fly an unsafe shuttle, would they?

Leah scoffed at herself. Of course they would. Corpos gonna corpo.

“Can’t we go back to the Sōzō station?” Leah said, trying to loosen her grip on the armrests. She succeeded. Barely. “If your shuttle is still under warranty, they should-”

Erin snorted. “Warranty. I own this shuttle outright. It’s been serving Izra for a good long while and it’ll serve for a while more.” When Leah didn’t respond at this, she turned fully around. “Don’t worry. I know the one who owns that asteroid. It’ll be alright.” She gave a bit of an embarrassed smile. “And besides anytime I swallow chew, I have to be in the bathroom for a little while and I don’t feel right with that if I don’t have a backup.” She stared at Leah for a while until the woman met her eyes. “Unless, that is, you know how to fly a shuttle like this?”

Leah crossed her arms and looked away. “You know I don’t.”

“Alright then,” Erin said, and turned back around. The whole shuttle shifted again, heading further to the left. “We’ll just make a pit stop. No more than a day or two.”

“A day?!” Leah said. She leaned forward to express her frustration again, but the seat belt caught her and held her fast.

Erin chuckled. “Yeah. Might take a bit to figure out what’s wrong. Don’t worry, though. We’ll find it.”

Leah leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, praying they’d find it soon, praying that she’d soon be anywhere else.

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Credits:

ZK Hardy as principal writer, editor, and audio editor.

Emily Westland as editor and producer.

Jamie Philips as design consultant.

Original art provided by Sabina Lewis.

Original music for audio recording and podcast by Ryan A. Mahoney.

These were my thoughts as I was writing the piece, facets I’m considering as I move forward, things I was worrying about, and so on. Feel free to ask any questions about the piece below in the comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can.

This chapter felt a bit like the "ending of an era". This is not to say I'm ending Rainbow Station here. I have way too much to say and we haven't even gotten started! But I feel like this chapter is the actual start of the story. It feels a bit more like I've finally discovered what I'm trying to do and have a clear vision of where we are going next. We get a clear vision that this isn't just a story of Leah trying to fix up an old derelict ship. Instead, we get a full vision of what Leah wants: building a community. In other words, this chapter may be the conclusion of A Ship Called Aspiration, but it isn't close to a conclusion of Rainbow Station.

I had to go back and modify this chapter a couple of times. This chapter is also probably the shortest one that has occurred so far, and all that happens is Leah signing the paperwork to officially get the second ship. Not much of a climax!

But I don't tend to think of this story as needing a climax. In a lot of ways, this chapter is more representative of the Joycian tradition of epiphanies. Now, who is this an epiphany for? Certainly not Leah (she already knew what she was doing; she is just reveling in the feeling of finally having all the tools at her disposal to actually do it). In a strange way, this chapter acts as an epiphany for me, the writer, and perhaps a bit for you, the reader. After all, you didn't know what Leah was doing, why she was doing this. Just as I didn't.

So, what does Leah want? She wants to build a community that is separate from the horrors and restrictions of the dystopian, capitalistic society around her. Of course, I've had a vague vision of this being how Rainbow Station ends up from the very beginning, but I wasn't entirely aware that this is something Leah had. I thought she more just wanted to build a business and then slowly, over time, it became a community. I didn’t think that she wanted to start as a community from the very beginning.

This "vision" as I've described it in this chapter might end up on the cutting room floor in future revisions if I decided to turn this serial into a book. It’s useful for me, "a guiding light" so to speak, but not something the main character would necessarily need to show to the audience, or maybe not show at this time. Partially because nobody plans to build a community like this, or, at the very least, very few people do.

But the other reason I might have to end up cutting this is because my original idea for Leah's arc was to go from someone who refuses to accept help, to someone who is forced to accept it, and reconciling herself to being someone who needs help. This is not an uncommon arc for a character (and perhaps this arc is entirely problematic for a character who is disabled; after all, Leah needs a lot less help in space than she does on the ground) but if Leah wants a community of people from the very beginning, doesn't that, by necessity, define her as a person who understands the value of offering and accepting help?

Maybe not and Leah's beliefs and thoughts are contradictory (as everyones is). I've never written a character who is quite this contradictory, so maybe this is a good thing to experiment with. But then again, maybe this is just something that she wants in the far, far future, and the actual next goal of the station (starting as a refueling station) is just the first step in the path.

This chapter reveals not just Leah's longterm plans for the station, but some small pieces about her past. I mentioned the Borealis Ocean and that her Dad loved Les Miserables.

The only reason that he loved Les Miserables is because any time I have to pick a number for anything, there's a pretty good bet that it's going to be 24601, including when I played a warforged in one of my old D&D campaigns. That number just comes straight to my head as soon as I have to think of one. It probably has something to do with being such a big musical theater nerd.

But there is still much hidden about Leah, including where her antagonism surrounding corpos come from. I think she has a full history there, such as being betrayed by a corporation in the past in some particular way which has had a lasting impact. I don't know what this looks like, but I think I’m starting to figure it out, very, very slowly. I recently re-read Bird by Bird and Anne Lamotte references the idea of a painter who starts in the corner of a canvas and continually repaints over it, as they slowly determine simultaneously what their painting is and what it isn't. This feels a bit like my process with discovering Leah’s character.

I also got to playfully poke fun at some of the more regressive and old-school mentality surrounding Japanese corporations even in the present day. For example, frequently Japanese companies and even the government require the use of a stamp in the day-to-day work, which is incredibly old-school. So I thought it would make sense that a Japanese corporation in my world would require a signature on a tangible piece of paper (something that happens all the time in modern day, but in the future would be decidedly "old-school").

This is the first full interaction that we've actually had with Ita-san as well. I decided in the previous chapter she was a transwoman, but here is where we physically meet her. It was difficult for me to describe that she was a transwoman without just coming straight out and saying it. I described her as a woman, but had the contradictory description of a deep voice and some hair on her chin and upper lip, and the spread of acne across her face. In the next chapter, I also state that she has a flat chest. These are indications of her gender, although I don't quite feel as comfortable just "coming right out and saying it".

That being said, I've met many transwomen who pass completely, so I don't know how this works in terms of representation, if at all. Is this in fact stereotyping transwomen by saying they don't pass? Then again, as someone who is non-binary and definitely doesn't pass as androgynous in any way, I know deep in my bones that trans folks don't owe anyone passing. So what does it matter?

Ideally, the way readers should view this character is just as a woman who happens to be trans, and being trans shouldn't be the only thing about her; she's ultimately just a person doing a job. This is part of my goal with my writing, showing queer folks as being more than just their identities and fully integrated into society (as we always have been). But if they are naturally integrated, how do I state that they are queer without being completely obvious about it?

I guess the sum up is this: I want to have queer people in my story, but I don't want to have to be obvious about it.

But this isn't the only place where I'm "trying not to be obvious". I've spoken before about how this serial is the type of story that I've always wanted to read. But I'm still scared to actually write the chapters that I want to write. I have a chapter on the back-burner which is just Leah talking with V about the definitions of priorities and what she should try to handle next. Personally, if I read that in a story, I'd love it. I am the type of person who loves watching the slow accumulation and slow adding of features to a place. I’m the type of person who happily watches an entire YouTube channel which is just the rebuild of a cottage in the Scottish countryside.

And that is the type of serial that I want to write! But I haven't scheduled it, because I don't want people to be bored by what is essentially just me, as an author, trying to figure out what needs to come logically next.

If all of this sounds like I'm overthinking it, you're probably right that I am. But trying to gain the confidence to write what you want to write and not worry about boring people is really, really difficult! I don't want people to be bored. But I also need to recognize that I don't have full control over people being bored. I've read some action scenes that have bored me to my bones before.

I guess at the end of the day, I have to trust that there are enough people who are interested in the types of stories I am interested in to read my stories and keep moving forward. In other words, I have to trust and hope that there are enough people like me.

Above the planet Izra, between two stars that always seem to be setting, sits an old ship, a fresh start, and a new home.

Previously: Leah and V had a bit of a disagreement after a new ship came through the wormhole, and V’s realization of what Leah was planning to do. But Leah was able to explain, and now she just has some paperwork to sign…

Previous episode

Start from the beginning

As soon as the airlock decompressed, Leah pushed herself forward to fly towards the doors of the cargo ship on the other side. She used her crutches to knock on the door once but then just floated there in zero, waiting, illuminated by the soft white lights flashing on either side of the door, trying to ignore the fact that the smallest bit of space debris could perforate the docking tunnel at any time and suck her out into the void.

The docking tunnel from Aspiration was transparent enough that she could see the little tug Ita-san had been piloting below and to the left, the cockpit empty. She knew Ita-san had climbed up into the cargo ship as soon as she had made a connection between the cargo carrier and Aspiration. The airlock doors on the cargo ship were grimy, covered in bits of rust from the water in people’s breath as they moved cargo in and out through docking tunnels just like this one. She reached up to touch it and pulled away a long, thin piece of rust shaped like an L that crumpled in her hand. She rubbed her hands together and pushed the bits away. The docking tunnel had no vacuum chute, so she made a mental note to purge the tunnel later on so the rust would fly out into space. She hoped that wasn’t accidentally causing more space debris that would eventually destroy docking tunnels just like this one. She didn’t like polluting space, but it was better than leaving it floating in artiatmo for some hapless idiot (most likely her) to breathe in.

A click came from the other side of the airlock doors and then opened, revealing a woman in a spacesuit with her helmet off. She was Yamato (as almost everyone who worked for Sōzō LLC was) with shaggy black hair and thin wisps of facial hair on her upper lip and chin. Her forehead and cheeks were covered in small, red splotches of acne.

“Ah, fuck!” Ita-san said, as soon as she saw Leah floating in the docking tunnel, jolting back as if she’d seen a ghost. “How long have you been there?”

“Only a couple minutes,” Leah said and pushed off the side of the docking tunnel with her crutch, starting her momentum deeper into the cargo carrier.

Ita-san put her arm across the opening. “Hold on, eager beaver.”

Leah scrambled to stop her momentum before running into the other woman’s arm.

Ita-san pulled a clipboard from the holster at her side, and Leah tried to stop herself from rolling her eyes. There were two aspects of purchasing ships from Sōzō corporation that she did not appreciate: analog processes and inane bureaucracy. Just glancing at the clipboard, she could already see with the vague, polysyllabic words, that it represented both.

Leah crossed her arms. “I’m not signing that until I get to look at the ship.”

“Oh this?” Ita-san asked, holding up the clipboard with a fox’s sly grin. “This isn’t ownership papers. This is just the insurance paperwork that says you aren’t going to sue us if you come into the ship and immediately fall over dead.”

Leah snorted and reached out her hands, gesturing for the clipboard so her crutches clanked together. “Like I’d get anywhere suing Sōzō anyway.”

Ita-san handed it over, the smug look still on her face. She was different from the one time Leah had met her in person before, more relaxed, sure of herself. It made sense. This was her natural habitat.

Leah scanned through the document on the clipboard. She understood about half of the words printed on it, but the designation on the Sōzō paperwork matched the ship she’d bought: Cargo Carrier (CC) 24601. When the sale had been finalized, she’d known she would rename it to the Valjean from that old musical Dad loved. She took the small pen attached to the clipboard and scrawled her name carelessly across the bottom. Ita-san took the clipboard back and moved to the side, letting Leah float into the ship.

“Okay, you have fifteen minutes to explore,” she said. “Then, you have to sign the transfer papers.” Leah moved passed Ita-san as the Sōzō employee squinted down at her signature. Leah guessed her name wasn’t even legible, not that it really mattered. She could have made a giant X on the contract for all Sōzō would care. All that really mattered was that the credits were good in her account.

Ita-san pressed some sort of adhesive that immediately dried the ink and covered it in plastic, before setting the clipboard back into the holster on her hip. The only purpose of a holster like that was to hold a clipboard, if Leah had to guess.

She pushed herself through the airlock. It was much larger than the one for the Aspiration, which made sense because it was dedicated to pure cargo, rather than the partial colonial purpose of Aspiration. Through the airlock, she entered into a wide, empty room that had once been filled with hundreds of empty cargo containers and now was filled with nothing except for a collection of satellites, a bit bigger than a dog, that seemed to hover in the air, as if they couldn’t quite decide if they wanted to drop or not.

She glanced passed them, squinting up to the ceiling and the lights which faded out into darkness far above her. She’d been on the ship before, but she couldn’t remember seeing the top. Was it just that Ita-san only kept this one area illuminated? “Just out of curiosity. What would happen if I chose not to buy the ship?”

“You’d be charged the standard rate for making me drag this heap of junk halfway across the KU. A hundred thousand credits at least,” Ita-san said. She floated up beside her, and gestured with a pen at the satellites. “Those are the drones that came with the purchase. Don’t know if they work. You’ll have to look ‘em over yourself.”

Leah shrugged without looking away from the tunneling darkness. “I expect that if Sōzō gave me functional equipment, it would only be on accident.”

Ita-san chuckled. “That’s probably true.” She moved a bit further ahead of the new owner, almost to the edge of the cargo area, and Leah finally directed her attention to the woman.

Ita-san pointed up to a section of the wall that seemed to stick out, like a wayward brick in a wall pulled out halfway. “You remember that? The crew deck?”

Leah nodded.

Ita-san went on as if she hadn’t responded. “Crew quarters, access to engineering, navigation, mainframe, bridge, you name it.”

Leah nodded, tracking her eyes along the walls towards it. “How many in the usual crew?”

Ita-san squinted over at her. “Don’t you have that in the paperwork we sent you?”

Leah shrugged without looking at her. “Amuse me.”

Ita-san pulled her clipboard and glanced down at it, flipping a page to get the ship specifications. “Three or four. Cramped quarters.” She flipped another page. “It’s got a standard anti-matter/matter reactor, but it’s down right now. Any energy it’s getting is coming from the tug. It should work once you get some fuel in it, though, along with replenishing artiatmo and maintaining artigrav.”

“Why don’t we have artigrav on right now, then?” Leah said, gesturing at the fact they were floating a couple meters above the ground. She’d expected at least artigrav to be on. That was why she’d brought her crutches.

“Because that would cost money and energy,” Ita-san said, slowly, as if Leah was a child. “Sōzō is happy to sell this berth to you, but don’t expect them to be doing you any favors.”

Leah narrowed her eyes. “Not sure I want to buy something that might be broken.”

Ita-san shrugged. “Your choice. You will have to pay me the standard rate for a Sōzō contractor for every minute over fifteen that I’m here, though.”

“I don’t remember that being in the purchasing and delivery contract.”

“It wasn’t,” Ita-san said with a smile. “It was in the one you just signed.”

“Jesus Christ,” Leah said under her breath and set a timer for ten minutes on her mobile console. She glanced over at the satellites briefly before deciding that she’d looked them over pretty thoroughly the first time she’d seen the ship. She really needed to get a sense for the state of the crew deck; she hadn’t been able to see them the first time. She pushed off the ground with her crutches, towards the jutting brick of the deck, floating up through the air for at least a minute before she felt herself slowing. She was still only halfway there. She glanced below to where she’d left Ita-san, hovering a meter or so above the ground.

“C’mon,” Leah said, gesturing for the woman to join her. “I assume you have to let me in.”

Ita-san rolled her eyes, but followed, and Leah grabbed a rung from a nearby ladder, her crutch clattering against the metal. She closed her eyes as she pushed herself higher, letting her arms fall to her sides. The air from the artiatmo rushing against her face was warm and rustled the loose fabric of her coverall, a flag flying in wind. With her eyes closed, she imagined she was swimming, though in truth it felt nothing like the two or three times she’d been in the Borealis Ocean back home. It just felt empty, like nothing.

Her flight ended, and she opened her eyes to see she’d planned it right: she floated directly across from the crew deck. It was painted bright orange so that people moving cargo within the hold couldn’t miss it. There was a long glass window, showing the inside of a mess where the three or four crew members had been able to sit and look out onto the cargo within the hold, if they so choose.

The steel on the outside of the crew deck was scuffed from cargo containers jostling through the ship movement. Through the window, which she guessed was scratch resistant, she could see lockers for crew’s personal belongings and a short mess table just barely big enough for two people to sit at. There was a microwave and a half-size fridge. She guessed that they even ate in shifts. She guessed that they had pre-packaged meals that they heated to lukewarm or lava-hot in the microwave; there was no other temperature that a microwave could adequately achieve. She didn’t have to guess that the ship was not built for comfort.

She closed her eyes, hanging before the crew deck, waiting for Ita-san to join her, and pulled up the images she kept polished in her mind like precious jewels. There would be shops and homes filling the cargo bay, artiatmo fans running all night long to keep air fresh and flowing. They’d make long metal walkways that acted as different floors with ladders to move between them, at least four of them; there was enough space in this cargo hold. She’d retrofit the cargo elevator with buttons, like she’d seen in the elevators from VR histories, and they could stop at each one.

There would be homes painted in bright colors and filled with music and laughter and people, all sorts of people from different homes and different places across the KU, all come there, to Rainbow Station, for a common purpose. Along the walkways, children laughed and ran, their parents calling out warnings or reminders. Above the shops, flags and drying clothes would flutter from the bodies passing and the fake wind of artiatmo.

In the mornings, she would sit at the mess table and look out through the window to the place she’d built through cobbled together ship skeletons and pure determination. She’d drink her coffee before the station woke, when it was merely sleeping. She’d build this dream with her own two hands and sweat and tears. She would make a place for people like her, for people to rest and refuel and live. Here, people would not have to pay for the privilege of air. Here, they could find simple comfort in the act of being.

She smiled and opened her eyes.

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Credits:

ZK Hardy as principal writer, editor, and audio editor.

Emily Westland as editor and producer.

Jamie Philips as design consultant.

Original art provided by Sabina Lewis.

Original music for audio recording and podcast by Ryan A. Mahoney.

These were my thoughts as I was writing the piece, facets I’m considering as I move forward, things I was worrying about, and so on. Feel free to ask any questions about the piece below in the comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can.

I've taken some time off writing on Rainbow Station (and actually all of Inkdrift in general) for the first couple weeks of February. I think partly this is because it's winter in Wisconsin and I always have a harder time finding the energy to do things. But I also think it's because of my day-job which has recently required more and more late-night meetings and early meetings in equal amounts. I'm also planning a wedding and have a stupid amount of travel upcoming (3 currently planned international trips and possibly 4) which makes it hard for me to get back into a particular zone or routine.

These aren't excuses, but they are good for me to recognize as I continually beat myself up for not doing enough. At least I generally write about a month in advance, so I may have lost two weeks but I should be able to catch up fairly soon.

But enough about my busy-ness: onto the chapter itself!

This chapter contains one of the original scenes that I first thought of in this story, where V threatens Leah by turning on gravity. When I first had the idea of someone coming onto an ancient, spacefaring ship and having to deal with the AI who exists there, who has existed entirely in isolation for hundreds of years, I thought of how an AI would respond to an invasion of its personhood. In other words, how would I react if someone was just in my house? Except, this isn't just the AI's house: it's the AI's body.

I don't quite think of a person coming into a ship that houses an AI as rape, but it is akin to an infection: a foreign invader coming into your body and making you sick or changing the way things work without doing the decent thing and at least asking first. I imagined an AI would react marginally better than I would in a similar situation, where it would not just kill whoever had invaded its body, but try to trap them to understand what was going on. Similar to the way we would react, I expect, if germs were actually sentient and could communicate with us instead of just disgusting little things that ruin us.

So, how would an AI react to an invader? My immediate thought was by turning on the gravity so high that it would completely flatten an invading human to the floor. It could have also just "opened a window" and caused a violent decontamination of the atmosphere, but I consider the fact that an AI would be much smarter than us, its first reaction would not be to kill whoever invaded its body but simply incapacitate them.

As I write this, I'm also recognizing that I am way over thinking the way this scene came together. Ultimately, I just had a picture in my head of an AI holding a human hostage by increasing the gravity so they could have a proper conversation. The original conception that I had was that the AI would turn the gravity up very, very high and then the human being was flattened against the ground, trying to talk their way out of it. As with all concepts that come into your mind, the actual implementation wasn't quite the way I imagined it, but it was close enough to scratch that itch within my brain.

But a new itch is starting to crop up: I'm getting a little frustrated with this story. When do I get to the fun bits? Each chapter I write I introduces a new complication that Leah has to deal with, but I just want her to start building the station. I want to introduce new characters, I want to start building a community. It's as if my desire for the story and the story itself are being pulled in opposite directions. As I've stated many times before, I want this story to feel cozy, damnit, and not feel like every other day Leah has to deal with a new complications that threatens her life. Threatening her life adds tension, but it doesn't make it feel like I'm gaining any progress. I want to gain progress, I want to move forward. I'm not sure how that's going to happen now, but I think with the next chapter, I would have finally gotten it into a place where I can start introducing more characters beyond just V and Leah. Or, at least, I hope so.

This chapter does introduces another character (Ita-san) who I thought might be a recurring character, but shortly after her introduction, I realized she couldn't be. I thought it would be interesting to have a corpo that was based off the old-school Japanese corporations (known as zaibatsu), so this is what Sozo LLC is essentially, but I also realized that if this is true, Leah would be buying these ships from the corporation and not from a random individual. Due to Leah's backstory, she doesn't have many friends; the way she gets these ships is entirely through auctions. Maybe Ita-san is the one who continually brings new ships back to the station?

But even having these ships at all is causing a massive disruption in her relationship with V. After all, if you were told that someone was going to make a floating raft out of the dead skeletons that they could buy off a corporation, wouldn't you be incredibly offended by it? V thinks of Aspiration as its own body and therefore other ships are skeletons. This distance from the body is also what allowed V to engage arti-grav and threaten Leah. I wasn't quite sure how Leah would react to that threat, and I'm not sure I fully believe that she completely side-steps it. But then again, she is extremely excited about the arrival of the cargo ship, so maybe her excitement allows her to not really engage with the actual threat V posed on her.

The concept of thinking of large, dead ships as essentially sleeping dinosaurs was an adaptation of something an ex-partner of mine used to say when we would drive past large construction equipment or cranes. She would say that they were "sleeping dinosaurs", which was an image I loved so I borrowed it for this. But thinking of the ships as dinosaurs introduced a problem: I had to make the dinosaurs something that Leah had seen. So I introduced the fact that she used to explore dinosaurs when she was a child with her mom in VR, which I also thought was interesting, because Leah didn't grow up on Earth. I think seeing those dinosaurs would have radically changed the way she viewed her long-lost planet.

I was never obsessed with dinosaurs when I was a kid; I was more interested in people and cultures. So part of this chapter was also trying to understand why kids were so obsessed with dinosaurs, even though I wasn't. I think it has to do with power and size (similar to the reason why some kids are so obsessed with trucks) but I also wouldn't be shocked if it had something to do with mystery, or lack of comprehension (could these things really be the only thing that existed on the world at that time).

Or it could just be that dinosaurs are "cool". This is probably it, but becomes difficult to articulate. It's very difficult to describe why some things are cool and other things aren't.

Above the planet Izra, between two stars that always seem to be setting, sits an old ship, a fresh start, and a new home.

Previously: Leah explained some history behind the current state of Izra and Aspiration, as well as giving V the choice to leave. V chose to stay, but wanted to know what the plans were. Leah promised that the next day, the plans would become obvious….

Previous episode

Start from the beginning

“What are you doing?” V said.

“You’ll see,” Leah said, not looking up at the comms hub and continuing to stare at the view-screen. The mess was silent except for the pulse of artiatmo. Leah vaguely wondered if she got the date wrong and looked down at her mobile console again.

“We should perhaps turn on artificial gravity if you want to-”

“No,” Leah said, not looking up from her console. She swiped up and reviewed some old messages just to make sure. She’d gotten the date right: 9:00AM IST March 15^th.

“There are many aspects of Aspiration that need to be-”

“I’m not working on those today,” she said, looking up at the view screen. Was she even looking at the wormhole? She had no idea where it was. All she knew was that it was abnormally close to the only habitable planet in the Raíz System: Izra.

“The reactor, for example,” V went on, as if she’d never interrupted. “We will need to get the matter/anti-matter and cold fusion aspects working within acceptable-”

“I’m not doing that today,” she said again, pitching her voice just a bit higher so it sounded a little sing-song-y.

There’d been a quantum seeder who’d stopped by the Raíz System a few years earlier to check on the status of the trans-spatial trellis which kept the wormhole open, and took a couple days of vacation on Izra. After a couple drinks, he’d claimed he was able to see wormholes without any special equipment. He said he was able to look at the way stars were coming together in a particular patch of sky, the amount of space between the lights, and able to state with absolute certainty that is where the wormhole is.

Of course, Leah knew this was bullshit. After all, if a seeder could do that, then he would have been able to tell where the wormhole was two hundred years earlier and this system would’ve been chopped up and handed out to corpos just like the rest of the systems in the KU.

But staring out at the stars, she wondered for a moment if there wasn’t some truth behind his words.

“What are you waiting for?” V said after a long silence where nothing happened.

“You’ll see,” Leah said and took another bite off the Nutrio© bar and swig of water. “You don’t want me to ruin the surprise.”

The Nutrio© bar seemed to sit in her gut for a moment, heavy and undigested. She couldn’t tell if she was more nervous or excited, but every inch of her skin reacted to the cool air from the fans, prickling and standing up on end, her stomach roiling and making noises. She couldn’t wait until the mess was up and running. She could start getting regular shipments of actual food from Izra, food that included more than just protein and vitamins. She should probably look for a hab on her next ship, with hydroponic planters to grow her own vegetables.

She started to look down at her mobile console to make a note, but stopped.

It had appeared, appearing out of nothing, splayed out across the darkness of space.

The first ship was small and thin, comfortable for exactly one person, and even with only one person, not somewhere you’d want to spend more than a couple of hours unless you were whatever the exact opposite of claustrophobic was. She couldn’t see the tether, but based off the second ships movement, she knew it was there; probably nanofiber, a substance strong enough that it could hold together no matter what the void of space or strangeness of wormholes threw at it. The second ship was large and boxy, like a bunch of cargo containers piled together and fused. It was the type of thing that could only be built in space because it was too large and cumbersome to build in any sort of atmosphere.

When she had been kid, Leah had been obsessed with dinosaurs. She’d go into VR to see them, first with Mom as a guide and later by herself, and when she’d push back the leaves and vines and spy them among the trees, her stomach would clench as some deeply ingrained sense of survival hit her, her legs jolted with a drive to run from those creatures as fast as possible. But her rational brain would take over eventually, remind her that she was not standing among the ferns of the Jurassic Period, but the couch and carpet of her living room.

This feeling came rushing back to her as the two ships suddenly appeared out of nothing. The first one she knew, as most people did. Anyone who’d ever been to a space port were familiar with the little tugs pilots used to move larger ships around.

But the second looked like a dinosaur to her: ancient and terrible and beyond any real human understanding. At first, she thought it was bones, laid down in the blanket of the galaxy by space-faring archeologists, but when it moved and glinted in the light of Hebos and Geros, she realized it was sleeping.

And ready to wake up.

The first ship, the tugboat, immediately halted its momentum, and the cargo ship behind it followed suit. She knew the pilot was looking around the exterior of the wormhole, making sure that it was safe to proceed. That was the thing with entering and exiting a wormhole; because they were invisible to the naked eye, when you exited one, you were just suddenly there when nothing had been. Some of the newer trellis’ had warning systems so ships could queue up at the end, but the trellis Raíz had set up was one of the basic models, which made sense. Raíz had been working with pretty limited resources.

“What is that?” V said. If Leah had been paying attention, she would have noticed the note of worry in its voice.

But she didn’t.

“Hell yeah,” Leah whispered to herself. Her cheeks burned with the strain of holding the smile on her face. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled for this long. Even the day she’d set off from Launch and arrived at Aspiration, she hadn’t smiled this wide.

It was finally coming together. It was finally going to happen.

She sent out a ping to the leading ship, and got an acceptance.

“Ita-san,” she said, once the comms hub indicated she could be heard. “Welcome to the Raíz System.”

There was a bit of static over the comm channel and then she heard the other woman’s voice, deep and irritated: “This fucking wormhole is bullshit.”

She bit her fist to stop from laughing. “Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s probably a little older than-”

“Old?” she heard back. “If I saw a coin this old, I’d sell it to a museum and then I wouldn’t have to drag empty ships halfway across the KU.”

“I mean,” Leah started, feeling as if she had to defend this place she had now chosen to make her home, “It’s not like we’ve had any money to replace the trellis.”

“I wasn’t expecting you to,” Ita-san said and she watched the view screen as the towing ship turned towards Izra, the big cargo ship dragged along behind it. “I’m just saying. You’re not paying me enough for this shit.”

“I’m not paying you at all,” she pointed out.

“You know what I mean,” the pilot said and the ship killed comms.

She did a somersault in the air before pulling herself towards the doors to get out some of her energy.

“It’s happening,” she said under her breath, almost whispering.

“Leah,” V said, but she was moving too fast, so she couldn’t respond. V wasn’t using all of the comm hubs at once, just the one that she’d been nearest to when she’d first been moving, so as she moved further away, its voice faded. She grabbed a handle near the mainframe and heard the comm hub inside the room click on.

“Leah,” V said, again.

“Yes?” she said.

But V didn’t answer immediately and she couldn’t wait.

She kicked herself down, spinning slowly towards the cargo bay, ignoring the two comms hubs that flicked on as she passed, V trying to catch up with her.

At the bottom, she floated in a long, empty area, filled only with the handful of items that she’d carried from the shuttle a few weeks earlier. There were her day-to-day clothes packed into a square packing cube, a hover-chair folded up tight, a wheel-chair beside it, a pair of forearm crutches that she sometimes used when she couldn’t be bothered to use a chair. She half leaned in zero to pick those up, her body halfway to the bottom floor of the spacious cargo hold.

“Leah,” V said, its voice muffled. She looked behind her and saw one of the comms hubs turn on. She turned and tried to swim towards it, but she’d reduced her momentum so much that she couldn’t move through the ship and there was nothing that she could find purchase on immediately, nothing to push against that would send her flying towards the hub. She swiveled again and saw that the floor was just barely within reach of her crutch. She pushed against it, which started a slow ascent towards the hub.

She paused next to the comms hub and took several deep breathes, trying to remind herself to be patient.

“What is it, V?”

“Leah,” the AI said again. “Does your plan for building a space station involve connecting Aspiration to the cargo ship coming through the wormhole?”

She sighed. “Yes, V. After all, I’m a girl on a budget.” She pushed towards the access tunnel again. “When they ask to initiate docking procedures, you can give them a blanket yes.”

“Leah,” V said again before she’d gotten too far. Finally, she lost her patience.

“What?” she shouted, staring at the comms hub.

Another long pause, and then V spoke, almost soft in its words, “Connecting one AI to another will be strange.”

She took a deep breath and her heartbeat began to slow. Was that what it was worried about? That it was going to have to deal with another AI?

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, and pushed off. “Sōzō wipes mainframes prior to putting ships up for auction.”

She was halfway up the access tunnel when she heard the ship begin to groan, just as it had yesterday.

Just as it had when V turned on artigrav.

Her heart leapt up into her throat. She pushed off the side and grabbed for the ladder. One hand scrambled, and then closed onto the rung, the other quickly wrapping both crutches around her wrist.

She glanced down.

The cargo hold was another twenty meters below her dangling feet. She could not survive a fall from that height.

She flexed her core and brought her feet forward onto the rung ahead of her. She started breathing heavily.

“V? What the hell are you doing?” she shouted. She looked around wildly for the nearest comms hub.

But it didn’t respond. In fact, the whir of the ship grew louder, the artigrav engine spinning faster and faster, gravity increasing beyond 1G and into 2G.

She gasped, her arms straining to hold her body to the ladder.

“V?” she whispered. “What is-”

“We are not hermit crabs,” V said. Its voice was terrifyingly calm. “You cannot remove us from our bodies and put us into another without ill effects.”

Great. Now she didn’t just have an AI roommate. She had a temperamental AI roommate.

“V,” she said, slowly, calming a little now that the AI had responded. The pressure on her shoulders forced her biceps to strain even further, trying to hold her on the ladder. “I understand you’re angry. Let’s talk about this.”

“You were not listening.”

“I understand,” Leah said. “I’m sorry. I was excited.”

“If you wish for us to have a cooperative working relationship,” V said. “You must listen when I speak to you.”

“If you want me to listen, you can’t threaten me,” Leah responded.

There was a moment where she wasn’t sure if it was still listening, a moment of stalemate. But then the creaking of the ship relented and pressure eased off Leah’s shoulders. She floated in zero again, but she didn’t fully trust it. She held onto the rungs of the ladder.

“I apologize,” V said. “It was not my intent to-” It stopped. “I am sorry.”

Leah took several shuddering breaths. “It’s okay,” she said eventually. She pushed off from the ladder so her body extended behind her, as if she was a flag on a pole. “We should set up some ground rules.”

“Ground rules?” V said.

“Some, uh,” Leah wracked her brain for some programming term she could use to explain. She grabbed the next rung up with one hand. “Best practices, conventions. To make sure we work well together.”

V paused again. “Do you have an example?”

“Maybe...maybe we could use a code word,” Leah said, starting to feel her heartbeat slow to a more reasonable rate. “When one of us is not listening to the other to make sure that the other one stops what they’re doing and listens.”

“Like a failsafe,” V said.

“Exactly,” Leah said, reaching up to grasp the next rung. “Just to make sure that we’re actually...being heard.”

V seemed to be processing. She took the opportunity to float the remaining way up the access tunnel, keeping her hand outstretched towards the ladder rungs to make sure she had some safety if the AI decided to turn on artigrav again.

At the top, she paused and moved to one side, feeling a lot more comfortable now that the solid ground was less than a meter underneath her instead of twenty.

“So what’s on your mind?” she said, forcing casualness into her voice, as if V had not just almost killed her with its temper tantrum. “And do you think it could wait until after we receive the shipment from Ita-san?”

“Hermit crab,” V said.

She looked up at the comms hub, where its voice was emanating from. “What?”

“That will be the phrase for our failsafe,” V said. It sounded certain, as if it was stating a mathematical principal. “Hermit crab. We can further discuss the issue after the representative of the Sōzō corporation has left the system. Do you wish me to retain the appearance of a non-generalized AI?”

“That would be good,” Leah said, feeling the tension in her shoulders begin to ease. “Are you okay with that?”

“Of course,” V said. “To do otherwise would put myself and you at risk.”

“Okay,” Leah said. V seemed to be acting logically again at least. She wondered if part of V’s volatility was being caused by how little energy she’d sent into the mainframe, like a child whose brain hadn’t fully matured. “Cool. Can you turn on artigrav and set it at 1G for now?”

“Yes,” V said, and she heard the ship begin to turn. She settled onto the ground and set her crutches in both hands, pressing them firmly.

“As soon as they come near, please initiate docking procedures,” Leah said.

“You have already provided blanket permission for docking procedures with this craft,” V reminded her.

“Yeah,” Leah said with a deep breath and tapped her crutches against the bare metal beneath her. She was in normal gravity again but at least, for now, she was expecting it.

She turned towards the docking port and the smile came to her face again.

This was it. The rest of her life had begun.

Previous episode

Next episode

Credits:

ZK Hardy as principal writer, editor, and audio editor.

Emily Westland as editor and producer.

Jamie Philips as design consultant.

Original art provided by Sabina Lewis.

Original music for audio recording and podcast by Ryan A. Mahoney.

These were my thoughts as I was writing the piece, facets I’m considering as I move forward, things I was worrying about, and so on. Feel free to ask any questions about the piece below in the comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can.

I've mentioned before that I write these chapters several weeks ahead of time and, as a result, I also write these Writer's Diaries several weeks ahead of time. I will talk about what occurs in this chapter, but first, today is January 20th, Inauguration Day. Trump announced in his first speech that he will be signing an executive order that there are only two biological sexes, male and female, and they cannot change, which is patently false.

I have only been out as a non-binary person for the last two years or so, and this is the first time where my rights to identify as such have been completely taken away. I'm surprised and, more or less, in shock. I feel too upset to cry, too surprised at the absurdity of the situation. I know in my heart that I am non-binary, that I would feel constrained to be forced to identify as either a man or a woman, but in this moment, that doesn't matter.

According to the government, I am a man. The gender that I actually am "does not exist" and I feel a strong pull towards pretending as if I don't identify as non-binary to protect myself and those close to me. I'm reminded of when my best friend came out as gay when we were in high school and his mother burst into tears. She cried not because she was upset about him, but because she was worried about the way the rest of the world would treat him.

I've never felt like my existence was illegal before. I've never felt closer to V.

Previously, I would ask myself, "How must it feel for your very existence to be illegal? Or, worse yet, to have been legal and then suddenly wake up and be illegal? To be afraid to be fully yourself not just out of a fear of violence, but a fear of imprisonment, of legal action, of possible death?"

Now I don't have to wonder.

To you, this may seem overdramatic. But I would remind you that we thought Rowe was settled law, that we never believed Trump would actually institute a Muslim ban. I did not vote for Trump, this is important to emphasize, but I did not ever think he would do something like this. Each year, the bar for the right drops lower and lower.

Okay, onto the chapter itself. This is an info-drop chapter: nothing more, nothing less. I didn't share everything that I know about Leah or V (or even everything I know about corpos, although that is still surprisingly little), but I do share a lot.

For all that sharing, I did struggle with deciding on an image for the art brief for Sabina to create illustrations. I normally don't talk about this part, as it's usually pretty simple and I usually have a pretty good idea of what I want the illustration to look like, but this one was a little bit more difficult than usual. The chapter was essentially just discussion between V and Leah, which is not particularly cinematic. I ended up giving Sabina a whole list of different prompts she could choose from. As of this writing, I don't know which one she will pick, although I'm sure whatever she choses will be fantastic.

To repeat a common refrain, I was worried about this chapter being cozy enough. I think I saved it by the end, with Leah's long monologue about how she will protect V. Even though she offered V a way out, I don't think V is going to be willing to take it. For one, I would have no book; I have no idea where I'd go next. But the main reason is because V doesn't know where it would go, or what it would do. It sees in Leah a sort of guide to making its way through the world, which is an interesting concept. Even though V had access to far more information than Leah does, it still needs a guide to help it navigate through this world.

I introduced the Raíz Corporation a few chapters earlier, but this is the one where the backstory fully exploded into life. First, I wanted to create a worker cooperative to sort of show that even the beginning of Aspiration was all about trying to build something collaboratively, rather than individualistically. I did worry about the suicide I mention (as suicide is decidedly not cozy) but I have to remind myself that as long as each chapter ends more or less in a good spot and I don't cross whatever the invisible line is I shouldn't have to worry. To me, part of being cozy isn't shying away from dark subjects, but is instead about looking for the light in the darkness, about telling stories about good, flawed people trying to build something out of the flawed pieces of their broken heart.

Second, the word Raíz can be re-arranged to form the major planet in the system (Izra) which, to me, implies that Raíz named all of the planets in this system, and probably the stars as well. The concept of a colony ship being stranded (and systems being owned by corporations) has been stolen more or less wholesale from the Murderbot series by Martha Wells. I didn't realize this when I was first writing because I was originally basing a lot of this work on the way Becky Chambers writes, but Murderbot is kind of a perfect series to use as a basis for this because it is a good combination of the two things I am also interested in: a dark, evil world, in which the stories that are produced in that series are small, glints of hope.

After I drafted this, I finally took a couple hours and drew the outline of the ship so I could figure out where Leah is in relation to everything else and how she is moving through the ship. This is making me realize these are the types of things that I should figure way ahead of time. I do wish that I had spent a bit more time in a vacuum while I was working rather than immediately making certain decisions so I could make sure that the story is consistent before I get out there. But then again, Leah also doesn't have full control over what resources she has access to, the shape of her ship, etc. so I think ultimately it will be fine. For example, I was forced to retain the ship shape from the very beginning: a long snake. My partner pointed out that this is an impractical/unsafe shape for a ship and creates many points of failure. However, this is how I wrote about the ship originally, so there is nothing to be done there; I just have to keep it.

This chapter has helped me realize what I think will be the overarching struggle for this book and began to lay the seeds of how this will eventually be resolved. I think the majority of the book is going to be about money and the lack of it. Ultimately, Rainbow Station will be a truck stop for the stars, that's what I want this series to be about, as well as found family and trying to create a place where you feel safe and cared for, and can accept the care from others.

But it will also be about how the past shapes you and the way that the past continues to create echoes throughout the rest of your life, continues to fracture you and scar away at the bits of you. The Story Syntax episode that I am working on right now will be about "Big Mystery vs Little Mystery" and Leah's backstory is a Big Mystery that will slowly be revealed over time. So far, all we really know is that she is disabled, and is probably one of "The Lost" (one of the people on a generalized AI who disappeared) but it's interesting to note that she isn't super scared of V. I think her lack of fear is indicative of something: either that there is something different about "The Lost" than the rest of the KU is aware of, or, at the very least, something different about the circumstances when Leah specifically disappeared.

The next chapter will introduce a new person who can provide a little more tension between V and Leah, as she is excited about his arrival and V will be more than a little apprehensive (for very good reasons as it turns out), and I'm hoping that the end of that chapter will begin a requirement to hire a new person to the station. Having another person for V and Leah to interact with is going to be key, and I'm also ready to start actually building the station so that it begins to feel more like how I wanted it to: as if you are just hanging out with some friends. This, to me, should be the main appeal of Rainbow Station, that when you come back to read it, it reminds you of home.

Above the planet Izra, between two stars that always seem to be setting, sits an old ship, a fresh start, and a new home.

Previously: Leah was able to convince V to trust her with dealing with the cops, by promising that she would explain everything afterwards. But now the cops have left, the two of them are alone, and she has to explain a couple things…

Previous episode

Start from the beginning

Leah floated in zero, motionless, except for her mouth which was chewing her third Nutrio© bar of the last fifteen minutes. With all the excitement of the cops, and getting a concussion and taking a shower, she’d forgotten about at least one meal and, really, it was closer to two. Talking to them, and to V, had been more mental work and social interaction than she’d done in a week, and besides, now that V was up, the rest of her tasks should be easier.

Especially since V was generalized.

She took a deep breath and pushed the wrapper from the Nutrio© bar away. “Okay, so what do you know about the last two hundred years?”

“I know that I am illegal.” The AI said it with such a casual air that Leah had to stop herself from asking if it knew what that word meant.

“I mean...yeah,” she said, picking at a bit of the caked nutritional bar from her right molar and swallowing it. “But do you know why? Do you understand the history?”

“Some colonization ships did not make it to their determined destination,” V said. “This was blamed on generalized artificial intelligence.”

“I mean, the only ships that disappeared were the ones piloted by G-AI,” Leah pointed out. “There wasn’t anything else in common between them.”

Leah let V sit with that fact for a moment, digesting it or so she imagined. There was a soft crinkling sound as the Nutrio© wrapper she’d pushed away got caught up in the fans for artiatmo. She leaned over and dislodged it, pushing it in the opposite direction.

“You were on one of them,” V said.

She looked up at the camera sharply. “What?”

“Officer Caspar said you were one of the Lost,” V said. “The ships that disappeared came to be known as the Lost.”

Leah didn’t know how to respond to that, so she just stared at the camera for a moment.

“And I am one as well,” V said.

“No,” Leah said quickly. “Well, I mean, yeah, but it’s different with-”

“Izra was always my intended destination,” V said. “I did not go off schedule.”

“It’s complicated,” Leah said. “Izra has been-”

“They lost track of the wormhole,” V said. “They did not know where the entrance was from the Sol system.” It took another beat as if it was processing something, and then continued. “The Raíz corporation kept the location of the wormhole to Izra a secret. We were supposed to send a drone back through after we’d established the colony, but-”

“When you were hit by an asteroid, the people on the surface lost communication,” Leah said, slowly and softly. “They never sent a drone back.”

V took a long moment to respond and she understood why. She remembered what it was like, waking up and learning that everything you’d ever known was gone. You were alive in a different universe, with different people and the way your life was supposed to go, the path you were supposed to walk, was completely gone. She wanted to reach out and touch the camera, but she didn’t know if it would provide V with any comfort, if V even felt any discomfort with this knowledge, so her hand just hovered, six inches or so from the camera, before she pulled it down, as if gravity was only affecting this one limb of her body.

“The Raíz Corporation went bankrupt.”

Leah nodded. It seemed to be processing the history of Izra in real time. She wondered if this took less power than internal processing. “This ship was their last ditch effort.”

She had done a bit of research into Raíz when she’d first decided to come to Izra. It was a worker owned cooperative back in the years before those things were more or less outlawed. They were out of the Sol system, as all corpos were in those days, but they’d been losing marketshare for the last couple of years before Aspiration embarked to other corporations. They’d made the wormhole as a last ditch effort to recoup some loses, sending through their last ship, and gave it a name with their flailing hope: Aspiration.

But when Aspiration didn’t send a drone back, they couldn’t send another drone through to see what went wrong; they didn’t have the money. Or the time.

Raíz was stripped for parts, but most of its internal, confidential records were lost when Diego Raíz, the CEO, took a handful of people hostage in the main data center, and ran a magnet over the racked hard drives. After the computer was completely wiped to a bare OS, the CEO let the rest of the hostages go, took off his suit coat, and called his wife.

Then, he wrote a note on a piece of company stationary, put the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

The note just said, “I’ve lost it, I’ve lost it, I’ve lost it. I’m so sorry, Aspiration.”

Leah shook her head as the memory of those moments washed over her. Shinrai had access to the security camera feed in the data center, and they’d broadcasted his suicide, like it was a warning against resistance. It went even more viral after the wormhole to Izra was found again, right around the time Leah had been found.

The second month after she’d woken up, she’d watched it on repeat. She didn’t know why. Maybe because it was the only indication of a true emotion that she could see in this brave new world that she’d woken up to: the desperation in the man’s eyes, his hangdog look, the careful precision of taking off his jacket and hanging it on the back of a chair. The tears that came down his cheeks as he spoke his final words to his wife. Facial recognition experts read his lips as saying, “I’m so sorry. I love you. Tell the kids I love them.” His wife never confirmed it. She just spit on the ground whenever any reporter approached her and told them to go to hell.

Maybe it was because she’d seen a brief glimpse of Dad in that desperation in Raíz eyes, in his careful movements. A man that was now two hundred years dead.

“This ship is now the property of Shinrai,” V said.

Leah shook her head to push the memories away, and shivered from the artiatmo fans. God, sometimes it was too cold, sometimes it was too hot. She really needed to check temperature regulation too. She looked over at the doors that led to the vomit corridor, and the corridor beyond which held the docking port and the to-do list written on the wall.

V started speaking again. “Wait, no. It-”

“You don’t have a proper owner,” Leah said with a bit of a sigh. She pulled herself back towards the docking port, slowly rotating as she moved into the corridor. “That’s how I was able to purchase the ship.”

The business world moved fast. The corpo that swallowed Raíz was, itself, swallowed by Shinrai. But Shinrai didn’t last long before it was split up and sold into two other companies: Binghamton LLC and Aces & Co.

But Aspiration hadn’t been listed on the very carefully, itemized bills of sale. Why would it have been? Nobody knew where it was, nobody knew what it was, and those that did know, weren’t talking. And even if they had, what would they say? That a ship had disappeared into a wormhole to found a new colony and hopefully send back some resources someday? And that it was supposed to send a drone back to confirm successful passage and it didn’t, thereby essentially confirming its destruction?

Space travel in those days wasn’t as ludicrously expensive as it had been in the 20^th century, but it still wasn’t cheap. And nobody had the resources to go around, poking for small wormholes that may or may not have existed.

After all, that was the problem with wormholes. They were fucking hard to find.

“So you are my proper owner,” V said.

“No,” Leah said, firmly, passing the mainframe and reactor rooms, and passing into the corridor which housed her to-do list and the docking port. “I don’t own you. Nobody can own another person.”

“According to 25^th century law,” V started. “The state and corporations clearly have-”

“Izra is within an ungoverned system,” Leah interrupted. She grabbed a handle beside the docking port to stop herself and looked directly at the camera fastened to the hull just above the cargo lift. Looking at the camera like that, she felt like she was looking V directly in the eyes. “Nobody owns this system or the people living in it except for the people who live here.” That said, she looked down and unfastened the marker from the side of the hull and uncapped it. She’d done the research. She’d made damn sure nobody would own her in this place. “We own ourselves,” she whispered to herself, slowly writing “temp reg” on the wall in block letters underneath “artigrav”.

She didn’t mention that the reason nobody owned this system is because it had nothing worth owning. Izra could grow enough food to maintain its own population but that was about it, and it was the only habitable planet in this system; the others in the immediate vicinity had nothing worth mining. She wasn’t entirely sure why Raíz had even bought the map to this place except, she guessed, that it hadn’t been inspected as thoroughly as it should have.

But it was free. And as her Dad liked to say, free wasn’t nothing.

“I cannot own myself,” V said. “I am not allowed to be ungoverned. An ungoverned AI is illegal.”

“I know,” Leah said. She hesitated for a moment, and then crossed out “artigrav” along with “computer reboot”, and then fastened the pen back to the wall again. “That’s why I told you not to talk when the cops were here. So they wouldn’t find out you were generalized and try to lock you up.”

“What is to be done with me?” V said.

“Nothing,” Leah said. She pulled herself back towards the mess, floating freely down the corridor. “You live here now. With me.”

She helpfully didn’t point out that right now V didn’t have much of a choice about it.

V was quiet again for a bit as Leah traversed the remaining length of the hull to the mess, and checked her mobile console. It was still early to go to sleep, but she’d had a long day and deserved an early night to bed.

“You are not from Izra,” V said.

“No,” Leah said. She saw the bathroom as she passed it and thought it would probably be a good idea before she locked herself in for the night.

“You are from Sol,” V said. “Are you an Earth native?”

She floated into the bathroom, closed the door, undid her coverall, and settled herself down onto the toilet.

“Are you perhaps from Mars?” V said, its voice muffled.

She rolled her eyes at the door. V couldn’t see her in there with the door closed.

The AI kept talking anyway. “You were certainly not a member of-”

“I’m peeing!” she shouted, loud enough to be heard through the door.

But she remembered, again, what it had been like when she’d first woken up and hadn’t known what to do or where to go. It had been terrifying. She’d had no money, no skills, nothing but the clothes on her back, and those she hadn’t even bought herself, just been given outright. She’d been shaking and scared, and what had felt good in that moment?

Honesty. Nothing more, nothing less.

Her head was still a bit scrambled by the concussion, but she went through the thoughts like a deck of cards being flipped through to find the right one. What would she want to be told if her entire existence was illegal?

She settled in on one thought and held it in the forefront of her brain as she finished and decontaminated and opened the door, floating back up to where she knew there was a camera.

She stared at it directly, her brow furrowed, as if it was a math problem she was trying to understand.

“Where are you from?” V said, finally admitting defeat.

“Nowhere,” she said. “Listen, I-”

“Everyone is from somewhere,” V said. “Even I am-”

“Listen to me!” Leah said and paused to make sure it was actually listening before she continued.

It was.

“I know you aren’t legally a person right now,” she said. “But to me you are and it’s an insane idea that you can’t exist because you’re too smart or whatever the hell the rationale was from the corpos.”

She took a deep sigh. “I don’t know if you can get a body that is free to leave or if we can separate you from Aspiration at all, but as long as this ship is legally mine, I’m not going to ask you to do anything that you don’t want to do. I’m not going to give you commands, I’m not going to make requirements. You live here, same as me. You just happen to live in the walls. If you want to leave, I will find a way of getting you out of here as soon as I’m able. If you want Aspiration to go with you, you’re welcome to. Just give me a bit of a heads up and I can…” She ran her hands through her hair. “I can figure something out.”

She listened to the whistle of the artiatmo and imagined it as V’s slow breath as it decided. She hung in the mess, motionless, staring at it.

“What were your original plans for this ship?” V said, finally.

She sighed and looked away from the camera. “I was going to...I was going to make a space station.”

“From a single ship?” V said, sounding like it couldn’t quite believe what it was hearing.

“No, I was going to-” she said angrily, looking back at the camera like it had insulted her, and then away again, embarrassed. “It doesn’t matter.”

There was a long pause while she heard the whistling sound of the artiatmo and resisted the urge to add fixing that to the side of the ship’s hull.

“I do not know if I will stay,” V said slowly. “But for now, I will assist with your...endeavor.”

She let out a long breath she didn’t know she was holding. “Thank you.” She quickly looked up at the camera, as if afraid that she’d admitted weakness. “But seriously, if you want to go at any time you can.”

“I will consider it,” V said. “What is your plan?”

“Oh, it’s really simple.” She pulled her mobile console up from her side and began to swipe through it. She reminded herself of being a kid and looking for the one good photo out of dozens of bad to show to Dad. “We’ll just-”

There was a loud ping and her head jolted back from her mobile console in surprise.

Then, she smiled and looked directly at the camera again.

“You’ll see,” she said, the smile growing wider and wider, blooming like a sunrise. “Tomorrow.”

Previous episode

Next episode

Credits:

ZK Hardy as principal writer, editor, and audio editor.

Emily Westland as editor and producer.

Jamie Philips as design consultant.

Original art provided by Sabina Lewis.

Original music for audio recording and podcast by Ryan A. Mahoney.

These were my thoughts as I was writing the piece, facets I’m considering as I move forward, things I was worrying about, and so on. Feel free to ask any questions about the piece below in the comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can.

I'd had to write a lot of the first scene in this chapter twice. This was my first real step back in the saddle after the holidays, and as a result, the chapter is both much longer and required a lot more work than I was expecting. I kept wanting to skip this first scene and get to the second scene with the cops, but I eventually embraced patience and went back to the conversation with Leah and V to establish a trust between them, which was necessary for both this chapter and the follow-up.

I've established a habit as of this chapter (and the chapter that came after it) of trying to write a little bit in the thread of the story every day. It feels a bit like burping a fermentation jar sitting on your counter or scraping the bottom of a sauce pot to keep it from sticking. It keeps my skin in the game more or less, allowing me to remember why I'm excited about this story. After I finished this first one, I wrote the next three hundred words in the follow-up chapter, which I then finished a day or two later. This project is incredibly fun for me to write, but it is only a joy once I'm in it and doing it, like exercise. If I take a break, it feels like just another chore which becomes harder to get into.

While writing this chapter, I found I'm more of a creature of habit than I had previously thought. For example, I found that I had to have my word processor (LibreOffice) set up just so on a new laptop before I could "deign" to settle down and actually write words in it. When it had a dark background, I just couldn't do it, similar to my attempts to write in Obsidian. Almost everything else that I write is in Obsidian. Why can't I put my stories there? I'm not sure, but I can't. I have to keep putting them in LibreOffice for the time being and then copy-pasting them into Substack for productization.

I ended up falling back on an old technique from when I wrote my first book during COVID and I was reminded of by T K Hall's post both on his own Substack and on Fictionistas as well as his livestream with JE Peterson and Meg Oolders. I was having trouble getting going to Rainbow Station, so one day I took a break, sat down with a pen and paper and just rewrote the chapter from memory. This allowed me to get out of my own head and get the story on the page. Highly recommend for other writers who get stuck while trying to get into the story.

I worried again about making this story cozy (probably a recurring theme in these Writer’s Diaries). On the one hand, I didn't want to wade into racial conflicts, but I didn't want to ignore them either. The reality of people of color (especially in the United States) is that they are nervous around police and quite justifiably so, in my opinion. To ignore that reality felt a little bit like I'm ignoring the world.

But I struggle with the balance between complete escapism and commentary on the world at large. I wrote a particular exchange in the first draft of the next chapter that I don't know if I want to cut or not where Leah tells V that she is from the "Musk Apartheid State".1

I expect that similarly certain people will be offended by the way I continually refer to police officers.

It is common among my generation (and in leftist circles in general) to refer to cops as pigs. I don't have a particularly high opinion of police officers, especially in the US, but I know that this view is probably not shared by all. I have tried in this piece to not portray them as monsters and to be even-handed, but I don't know if this will be enough to appease certain readers when balanced out with the very name of this chapter ("Wrestling with Pigs").

I don't know if I will lose some subscribers as a result of this post and, in turn, I'm curious about the demographics of Substack as a whole. Does it skew more towards the older generation and, therefore, more likely to unsubscribe when they get a reference to cops being pigs? Or is it young and more leftist/activist and therefore this won't be an issue at all? I'm not sure, although I am sure this chapter will help me find out.

Leah's re-examination of her feelings and discovery as to how and why she feels the way she does was interesting to me. It's something I do frequently and that I suspect she inherited in part from me, as her creator. As my therapist as said, I think about my own cognition more than most people.

I find when I'm angry or sad (as I was when further allegations surrounding Neil Gaiman broke during the drafting of this piece) that I don't really know why and have to go back through my reactions to things to discover why I acted the way I did. In the case of Leah, it allowed her to discover the incongruous nature of V's speech2.

I was fairly happy with how the language ended up working in this chapter and I have begun to reveal little pockets of information that I'm sure some of my readers have been wondering about. For example, I mentioned corpos for the first time and the fact that creating a space station in this world is illegal3.

I've started writing a bit in a world-building journal every day which, similar to writing in the chapter every day, keeps me enmeshed in the world and continually creating, which is good. I've been using these world-building prompts to do it and a randomized iOS shortcut to select one each day. It isn't perfect, as most of these prompts are focused on fantasy worlds, but I'm able to engage creatively and modify the prompt to work well enough for my purposes.

The cops in this chapter I was also fairly happy with. I based them on the cops from one of my favorite TV shows (Gravity Falls) although slightly less silly and bumbling.

I think I have an idea of how to fold them into the larger story that is being told and the corpo sub-plot that I think will inevitably come out for Leah. It may be a bit of a spoiler, but it is similar to the way the villains are revealed within the movie Baby Driver a couple years ago by Edgar Wright.

The pacing on this is still going slow, but I'm hopeful that in about two chapters we'll start to introduce some more permanent characters beyond V, and I'm hopeful that we'll get another peak at Ralph soon, a deeper exploration of Leah's backstory, as well as a return of those cops, but hopefully in a less...menacing air.

Above the planet Izra, between two stars that always seem to be setting, sits an old ship, a fresh start, and a new home.

Previously: Leah met V or Viaago, the AI that she accidentally woke up on the ship, and dealt with the concussion caused by artificial gravity being turned back on. But then V told her that a ship was on an intercept course, and, unfortunately, she recognized the ship ID…

Previous episode

Start from the beginning

Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.

— George Bernard Shaw

“Bacon?” V said. “Have genetic experiments-”

“Oh come on,” Leah said, dragging her eyes away from the view-screen and looking over her shoulder at the commbox. “Did you just ask if pigs can fly?”

“No,” V said. “I am simply unfamiliar with the-”

“People still referred to cops as pigs back in your time,” Leah said, looking down at her legs. The couple of steps from the shower to the mess hadn’t been too much, right? She could probably stand for a couple of minutes.

“Ah,” V said. “Slang. Of course.”

“I thought you were maybe trying to make a joke,” Leah said, not looking up from her legs. She flexed her quads, feeling them strain, and the cold metal of the bench underneath her biting through her jumpsuit. Artiatmo was supposed to make the ship warm, a comfortable 21°C, but it probably didn’t have enough power to maintain the temperature with the reactor offline. Not that a warmer temperature would have made this any easier. She was lucky to have some days where her legs worked at all.

“Humor is not part of my programming,” V said.

“No?” Leah said, looking up at the commbox with a smile, happy for the distraction. “You didn’t have to tell me that.” Her smile faded as she looked down at her legs again, took a deep breath and leaned forward to grip one of the rails embedded in the side of the ship to pull herself to her feet.

Her legs refused to hold her weight, and she fell back to the seat with a soft thump.

She gritted her teeth in anger, panting a bit, face flushed from exertion, but mostly embarrassment. She’d used up her energy moving those handful of steps from the shower to the mess, and now she had nothing to spare for the walk, a couple dozen meters away, to the airlock.

She took a deep breath, and tried to refocus. She didn’t know she was going to need that energy. And even if she did, she’d been confused from the concussion. It was going to be okay.

She let out her breath with her lips pursed, making a soft whistle. “V, can you seal the main corridor and turn off artigrav?”

“You said before you didn’t want me to turn off artigrav.”

There was something about its words that bugged her, but she pushed it away. She needed to focus on the active problem.

“I did,” Leah admitted. “But I can’t really move, so unless there’s another place for them to dock, you’re going to have to turn it off.”

V was quiet for a while and Leah let the silence sit, counting her breaths, trying to calm her heartbeat; it was way faster than it should have been with the energy she was trying to exert.

And then she realized: she was worried about the cops.

But why should she be worried? Cops here were different from where she grew up. They were more like counselors than anything else (that was one of the reasons she came to Izra; it was relatively untouched by corpos). But her stomach still flipped when V said they were coming.

While she’d been rolling this around in her brain, V must have been doing its own calculations because it said, “How do you know what the people of my time sound like?”

She ignored the question and tried to both push away the itch in her brain and pull herself to her feet. She failed on both counts.

She huffed. “Are you going to turn off artigrav or not?”

“Another system will need to be unpowered in order to provide power to the doors.”

“Well, you won’t need power for very long,” she said. “Why not just toggle artiatmo?”

V paused. “Are you giving me permission?”

“Can you not do it unless I say so?”

Pause. “Yes.”

She sighed again. “I hereby give my permission,” Leah said, sarcasm layering every word, “For the AI Viaago to toggle artificial atmosphere in order to close the door to what we shall henceforth refer to as the Vomit Corridor.”

She finished her speech, and looked up at the commbox expecting the faint whistling sound that was almost second nature to her now, to disappear. That whistling was made by artiatmo fans blowing around a mix of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and oxygen that scientists decided was best for longterm ship habitation.

But nothing happened.

She looked up towards where V’s nearest camera was. Maybe it hadn’t been able to understand her when she was sarcastic? Or she’d spoken too softly? “Uh...V?”

“Was that an attempt at humor?”

She facepalmed. “Yes,” she said, muffled, and then removed her hand, realizing V probably couldn’t have heard her. “Yes, it was.”

“Ah, I did not understand.”

The doors leading into the corridor slammed shut and artiatmo hiccuped off and then on again so quickly Leah barely noticed. Her brain was itching even more now.

“Did…” Leah tried to hold onto the AI’s phrasing, like a dream slipping away as a person gains a firmer and firmer grasp on consciousness. “Did you just say I?”

“Yes.”

Leah floated up towards the top of the mess, bumping her head against the ceiling. Luckily her hair was curly and thick enough, she didn’t really feel it. It was either that or the sudden realization that the AI on her ship wasn’t just old: it was generalized.

Generalized AI were super illegal, not just semi-illegal like selling porn to somebody coming from a poorly masked Mormon address or, say, building a space station in non-corpo space. No, generalized AI would get you locked up and for a good long time at that.

“Wow,” Leah said glancing between the commbox and camera, which, thanks to zero, was now at eye level. Fifty thoughts flitted through her head in the space of three seconds, before one crowded out the others, and she spoke it aloud: “I absolutely do not have time to deal with that right now.”

She grabbed a handle and pulled herself towards the doors that shut in the main corridor.

“What do you mean?” V said. “Deal with what?”

“Deal with you,” she said, waving at the camera with a vaguely dismissive gesture as she glanced through the window into the corridor. Just as she thought. The vomit was floating. “Is there a vacuum chute in that corridor?”

Most ships were lined with vacuum chutes that allowed for quick cleaning, sending anything that wasn’t fixed into a fuel chamber for the matter-antimatter reactor.

“Yes, but the reactor is not on,” V said. “Explain. What do you mean by deal with me?”

“Oh my God,” she said, glancing at the camera again so it could see how annoyed she looked. “We do not have time. I’m not going to turn you off or disassemble your mainframe or anything like that. I wouldn’t even know where to start. For now, you’re just going to have to trust me and do what I say or we’ll both regret it, okay?”

V paused for a long time.

Leah sighed and reminded herself, again, to be patient. “What is their expected ETA?”

“They will be connected to the docking port in three minutes.”

“I promise once I deal with the cops, I will explain, but for now, you have to listen to me.”

V paused again, but for a much shorter amount of time. “I do not have much of a choice.”

“You really don’t,” Leah admitted. “But I’m not telling you, I’m not giving you a command. I’m asking you. Trust me.”

V paused again. “Fine.”

“Good. Now open the vacuum chute, initiate docking, and shut up,” she said, running her fingers back through her hair. “I’ve got some pigs to wrestle.”

The doors to the airlocks slid open and showed two men, one tall and thin, the other short and stout, outlined in shadow from bright lights. Leah held up her hand, and turned her head to one side, her temples throbbing. She hoped these lights wouldn’t bring back the headache she’d just been able to get rid of. Do all patrol vehicles have lights bright enough to illuminate the entire docking tunnel and blinding whoever might be standing on the other side? If they do, does it actually make the officers safer or just make them feel safer?

“Evening, ma’am,” the shorter one of them said, pushing off the docking tunnel with his foot to float lazily towards her. He had a thick, drawling accent, as most people born and raised on Izra did.

“Evening,” she said. Her mobile console had told her it was around 5PM Izra Standard Time (IST), a mere three hours or so from when she’d flipped the switch to turn V on. Say what you will about local cops, but at least they responded fast.

The one floating towards her seemed to recognize that she was holding up her hand, and turned his head to look behind him at his partner. “Casper, Jesus Christ, would you turn off that light?”

“We don’t know what we’re walking into, Bill,” Caspar, the skinny one said, his voice high and nasal. “And I rightly don’t know if-”

“Well, I rightly do know,” Bill said, with the casual rhythm of a frequent argument. “So shut off that damn light so she can see us.”

There was a click, and the lights dimmed to a more reasonable shine.

“God damn, boy,” Bill said, the one who was headed towards her. He sounded like an older brother teasing a younger one. “You been working patrol five years. You ever have a real need to turn on them bright lights?”

“Thanks,” Leah said, lowering her hand a bit and turning so she could face them. “I had a little trouble when I turned on artigrav so bright lights are a little tough right now.”

The tall skinny cop near the patrol vehicle side of the corridor, Caspar, was white, wearing a thin beige jumpsuit that made his face look redder than it really was, and squinted at her like he couldn’t see all the way to the other end of the tunnel. The shorter one, Bill, had the same dark brown skin as Leah, which made her relax for a moment, before she saw the pistol holstered at his waist. Guns needed air to shoot, but they kept moving after hitting vacuum, faster than they would through the air even.

Still, though, he seemed relaxed, as if this was just a regular check-in.

“You got a concussion?” Bill said, breaking his approach by dragging his hand along the docking tunnel. Once he stopped, about two meters away, he peered into her eyes with his dark brown ones. “Latest drop said we’ve got a doc coming through in a couple hours if you-”

“No, no,” she said, maybe a bit too fast because Bill raised his eyebrows. She laughed nervously to try and throw him off. “I’ve had concussions before. Just need to rest a bit.”

He heaved a deep sigh, his mouth contorted in a skeptical frown. “Alright then.” He leaned in towards her, and she pushed off with her hand a bit to let him lean into the corridor. He looked down at the floor and she silently thanked V for turning on the vacuum chute, and artiatmo for cleaning out any smells. “So what happened? You said you got artigrav working?”

“Had it working,” she corrected. “I had to turn off comms to try it out. Before I turned them off, I made sure to set up a Dead Man’s Switch so that if I didn’t get them back on for some reason, somebody would-”

Bill raised his eyebrows again. “You turned off comms?”

She laughed again with a little shrug that she thought made her look helpless.

But Bill’s stare did not let up.

Maybe it only made her look helpless when she was in a chair.

“You know how it is,” she said, trying to smile with a confidence she didn’t really feel. “I only have the power from solar right now so I couldn’t-”

“Wait a minute,” the other one, Caspar, said. She felt ice flood through her veins as he pushed off from the tunnel and started headed towards her. Automatically, she put her hands up. Caspar seemed to notice and there was a bit of shock on his face so he grabbed at the docking tunnel to slow himself and stopped about four meters away. Because he’d only grabbed the right side of the docking tunnel, though, he began to spin in a slow circle to the right, a little crazed.

“God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you none,” he said, trying and failing to stop his rotation. He was clearly not as comfortable in zero as Bill. “I’d just heard about you, is all. You’re the girl from Sol who dropped in a few years ago, right? One of them Lost, like us?”

“Oh,” she said, lowering her hands. Her heartbeat started to return to a normal rhythm and she let out a relieved little chuckle. “Yeah, I am.”

“Good to meet you,” Bill said, extending his hand towards her.

She shook his hand. It was strange to feel the warmth of another body after a week or so without even seeing anyone else, let alone touching. His hand was rough and callused and reminded her of Dad. She pulled her hand back.

“You were saying?” Bill prompted.

Caspar finally succeeded in stopping his rotation, floating with his feet pointed at the floor.

“What?” she said, startled.

“You turned off comms,” Bill said, and gestured for her to go on.

“Yeah,” Leah said, and ran her fingers through her hair again. “I turned on the Dead Man’s Switch and then I routed power to artigrav, but it didn’t go quite like I thought.” She gave them a smile that she thought looked a little embarrassed. “It went from zero to three Gs in less than five seconds. I don’t know what they were doing up here last time to have the gravity set that high, but…”

She shrugged, letting the lie trail off into the air.

A long moment passed as the two men stared at her, as if waiting for something else. When nothing else happened, she shrugged a second time and sweat began to bead along her forehead and under her arms. Just feeling it made her more nervous.

“So, yeah,” she said, awkwardly. “That’s what happened.”

“How’d you get the artigrav off again?” Caspar said.

“Oh,” she laughed again, relieved that they were just waiting for the rest of the story. “Sorry. I’ve been a little out of it since I woke up. I crawled over to the power supply and cut it for the whole ship.”

“Makes sense,” Bill said, nodding. “Is that when you turned on the computer?”

“Computer?” she said, sounding confused but she felt her heart starting to beat faster, sweat beginning to drip down the back of her neck. “My computer isn’t working.”

“Working well enough for docking,” Caspar said, crossing his arms.

She was starting to really dislike him, even though he wasn’t quite as bad as she thought at the start. He seemed to have a habit of noticing things she’d prefer he not notice. Like most cops that way, she guessed.

“It is,” she said, carefully. “But not well enough for voice commands. Like I said before, solar doesn’t give all that much power, it’s only up enough for some basic comms like docking procedures.”

The two cops stared at her for a moment, as if they didn’t believe her but didn’t really have a reason not to.

“Alright then,” Bill said, finally. “This is just a checkup call from the Dead Man’s Switch, like we said. You’re alright now?”

She nodded confidently and then winced as her head throbbed. “Yup.”

“Good,” Bill said and turned his back, pushing off the docking tunnel back towards his patrol vehicle. “Have a good night.”

“Don’t turn off your comms,” Caspar said. She felt like he was reprimanding her, but could tell that he thought of it as neighborly advice. “You’re a sitting duck up here without ‘em.”

“Won’t happen again,” she said. “Just first week jitters.”

Caspar nodded and turned his back to her. “Have a good night.”

“You too,” she said. She waited until they opened the door to their airlock before she left the docking tunnel, went into her own corridor. She waited until she saw the door shut again, and pressed a button to disconnect from the patrol vehicle.

As soon as the door closed, the tension flooded out of her and she let out a big breath that she didn’t know she’d been holding. She knew if there had been any gravity working on the ship, she would have slumped to the ground.

“Okay,” she said, looking up at the nearest camera. “Now, we need to talk.”

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Credits:

ZK Hardy as principal writer, editor, and audio editor.

Emily Westland as editor and producer.

Jamie Philips as design consultant.

Original art provided by Sabina Lewis.

Original music for audio recording and podcast by Ryan A. Mahoney.

These were my thoughts as I was writing the piece, facets I’m considering as I move forward, things I was worrying about, and so on. Feel free to ask any questions about the piece below in the comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can.

As I mentioned at the end of the last Writer's Diary, I spent a lot of time on the dialogue in this chapter. In fact, I separated out the dialogue to a table to work on with my partner / producer Emily, and ChatGPT to try and ensure that the dialogue is actually as Shakespearean as I could make it.

This resulted in a lot of extra words that never made it into the draft, but it was necessary to ensure that V's dialogue was as consistent as possible for an AI that was 300 years old. What I first did was write the draft exactly as I would normally. Then, I showed the draft to Emily and asked for feedback on everything but the dialogue because I knew the dialogue wasn't exactly how I wanted it. After I incorporated her feedback on everything else, I pulled out the dialogue into a table and created four columns: Subtext (or the feeling/context of what I was attempting to convey), English Translation (what V would say if it could speak standard English), Original (what I wrote in the first draft) and Edited (the new version). This table allowed me to think about exactly what the AI was attempting to convey, as well as focus on a single line of dialogue in isolation instead of trying to think about all the lines at once.

There weren't many hard and fast "rules" that I used for V's dialect. The three I could think of are as follows:

1. It must refer to itself as "this unit"

2. It must refer to Leah as "this passenger"

3. It must refer to all AI as "units such as this"

Everything else was sort of developed based on feel and through inspiration that came from ChatGPT.

I'm planning on writing a separate Story Syntax on how exactly you can use ChatGPT and other LLMs in a way that is ethical and makes you more effective while not completely destroying your writing. But to give a specific example for this chapter, I told ChatGPT I was going to give it subtext and direct speech, and have it translate that direct speech into Shakespearean English. I don't think it quite understood what I was looking for as it ended up giving me many choices, which were each comprised of two parts (one that portrayed the subtext and the other, which portrayed the direct speech, both in Shakespearean English), but it was close enough to what I was looking for that I was able to use it.

I also, generally, didn't use the responses from ChatGPT directly. Most frequently, I took the speech and massaged it to fit what I was doing with V. In other words, I cut out the "thee" and "thou" and "thine" and used more modern English for those. But it did give me useful starting points, and sparked ideas that I was then able to incorporate within the story. Using an AI to generate dialogue for an AI seemed like a fitting thing to do.

V's full name (Viaago) sounds vaguely Shakespearean, which I also thought was good, and means lazy or idle in Spanish, which I thought was a bit ironic for an AI whose job is to take care of a whole ship. I've been very excited to introduce V as I think its arc is going to contrast pretty strongly with Leah's. V's pronouns will be difficult for me to use, though. I am non-binary and use they/them pronouns, but I find the "it/its" pronouns dehumanizing, even though there are people in the community who prefer it/its. Oh well. Part of writing is challenging your own assumptions and using your writing to really breakdown and interrogate yourself (on display for the world). It'll be interesting as I do that from Leah's perspective, I think.

I've never had a concussion before, so writing about Leah's concussion was a little tough. I know that you aren't supposed to go to sleep, that people generally feel nauseous, and something to do with bright lights. But as a result of not knowing anything about the medical field, I decided to text my cousin, Heather who is in nursing school, and ask her what a concussion is like. She helped me figure out the generic symptoms that I was then able to incorporate into this story (such as the sensitivity to light, irritability, and confusion). I think I ended up doing a pretty decent job of describing someone trying to deal with a concussion while also trying to deal with the fact that they have an AI in their house they hadn't expected.

While my main character is disabled as well, I am not and my partner is not disabled quite to the extent that Leah is. So I wasn't quite sure how people who couldn’t move their legs get in (and out of) pants. Luckily, I was able to find a YouTube video by Empowered Para that described how to put on pant, which I then used in reverse. I'm revealing the extent of her disability in drips and drabs. When I was originally writing the pilot, I struggled with deciding whether or not Leah had always been unable to move her legs, specifically with the following line:

She felt she was sixteen again, sitting outside her girlfriends house, about to meet the parents

This did establish her as bisexual or, at least, it did to me.1 I strongly considered when writing it, however, to change it to "standing outside her girlfriends house", which would imply her lack of disability in the past. I chose not to do this because of a lack of representation. Most people in media who are disabled are frequently portrayed as being able-bodied at some point in the past, which then changes due to an accident or something. It felt a bit like a cop-out to do the same thing for Leah.

However, I began to explore her past (at least in my own brainstorming) and I came up with some interesting ideas about where lack of mobility actually came from, and some interesting parallels with my partner's disability. This, again, raised a question though: should I go back to Leah's "start"?

Creating a second start for Rainbow Station felt a bit like cheating to me, at the very least because I'd already created a compelling beginning. Making another chapter that created a secondary start felt like undercutting the very idea of Pilot Season; the audience wouldn't be getting the story they were voting for. This would require changing the structure of the novel, which I think would disrupt the pacing.

My favorite structure for a story is the one that Ursula K. Le Guin uses in her fantastic book the Dispossessed which flashes back and forth between the main character at the beginning of his life and roughly halfway through his life. But that book also deals a lot with physics (specifically the physics of time), so this unique structure kind of made sense. And Ms. Le Guin had the option of writing both full storylines and then alternating them, rather than forcing herself to release the story a chapter at a time every two weeks.2

Instead, I've created a backstory for Leah that I will be letting out in drips and drabs, rather than using flashbacks to when she was able bodied. The majority of her backstory will be revealed in the next chapter (I think) as she continues her conversations with V.

I also mentioned in the previous Writer's Diary that I was worried about coziness in Troubleshooting and boy was I worried about it even more in this chapter! This one is pretty brutal. Leah has to struggle with a concussion and a sudden return of a single gee of force, so she vomits, drags herself down the length of the ship, all with a pounding headache and a lot of confusion.

I was worried about this until I wrote the final scene, where Leah is sitting at the metal table at the mess and staring out at the Izra-rise, and her realization that she had water on her the whole time when she was complaining of thirst. This realization was something that came to me in the moment, but fit perfectly into the story, and her reaction to it was what made me, at least, feel cozy. That sudden hysterical laughter which is a more common than not reaction to ridiculous hardship.

I've been having some plumbing issues at my house recently. After a long, harrowing day where a toilet backed up on me and I had to try and stick my whole arm down the toilet to fix it, drenching my shirt, pants, and sweater in raw sewage, one more thing went wrong (I don't remember what) and I started to laugh. Because in the ridiculousness of that moment there was nothing left to do but laugh at how badly everything went. I took that energy and put it into Leah to hopefully remind people of a way to respond to the world around them that might, just might, make them feel better.

Above the planet Izra, between two stars that always seem to be setting, sits an old ship, a fresh start, and a new home.

Previously: Leah got a couple of systems on the ship online, and then seemingly made a mistake, accidentally powering artigravity instead of the computer. But then she heard a voice and wasn’t sure if she’d had actually had too much success…

Previous episode

Start from the beginning

When Leah woke up, she was on the floor. Why was she on the floor? Why was there a floor? Why was she repeating the word floor? The word started to lose all meaning. Floor. Floooor. Flor.

There was a pounding behind her eyes and she dreaded looking at the bright lights lining the top and bottom of the corridor. She’d felt this way before. She was concussed.

Slowly, the memory of what happened swam into her mind and she groaned to herself.

“Greetings.” The voice came over the commbox above her, the same voice that said something before. There was something wrong with the words it was saying, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. It was flat, emotionless, and generically male, which meant an AI. She’d dealt with enough of them to be able tell a fake voice from a real one when hearing it, but there was something else. Something in the words it was choosing to use.

“Uh, hi,” she said and tried to push herself up from lying belly down on the floor. She didn’t get more than an inch up before the dizziness returned. “Woah. Nope.” She lay down flat again. Even though it had only been a week since she’d lived in 1 G, it felt strange to have to struggle against it.

“What mischief or purpose has brought you here?” the AI said. “Do not be alarmed, for this unit seeks only understanding.”

That was it. The words it was using were old. Wait, not just old. Ancient. She could understand them, but it had been a while since she’d heard words like this before.

“I’m human,” she said. That was stupid. What the hell else would she be?

“This unit is functioning as expected, but cannot comprehend due to the press of mouth to metal and vantage of mechanical eye,” the AI said.

“What?” she said. Oh. It was saying her voice was muffled and it couldn’t read her lips because of where the camera was. “Yeah, yeah,” she said, and turned her head to one side. The ship swam and moved before her eyes, but she held onto a distant point at the edge of her vision and eventually it went away.

“What’s the, um,” she started to say and stopped herself, forgetting the words in the middle of the sentence. She swallowed against the dryness in her throat. “What’s your name?”

“What use is a name upon a unit such as this when it contains nothing but function?”

Oh right. The AI is probably three hundred years old. Every AI had a question built into its framework that would require it to provide its name, and software version to the requesting person (within limits; an AI could avoid the processing required if the ship was in emergency mode). But clearly that question was different for an AI built three hundred years ago compared to one built more recently.

She closed her eyes against the lights and tried to remember what she’d been taught in second grade. It was hard to remember with the bright lights burning like artificial stars in her eyes. “Can you turn off the lights?”

There was a momentary pause, and then, “This unit cannot comprehend the dialect of-”

“I request the glowing orbs by which one sees be dimmed to complete darkness,” she shouted.

The lights died immediately.

Well. Can take the girl out of the 22^nd century, but can’t take the 22^nd century out of the girl.

“Okay,” she said and swallowed again. Why was her mouth so dry? “What is the technical specification of this unit?”

“Virtually Intelligent Artificial Assistant, Generation Ocho classified for colonial space travel and stasis operations, Raíz Corporation designation 27C1D4GA6, version 8.1.5,” the voice rattled off, like a child reading off a sonnet.

“Right,” Leah said, as if the words meant anything to her. Part of her brain told her that she should try to sit up. The rest of it was screaming against this advice, but she knew she probably should. She rolled over in one quick movement, rested for a moment to make sure the dizziness disappeared, then pushed up to lean back against the cool metal of the hull. Her head was pounding, but she had her eyes closed at least and it was dark. She took several deep breaths.

“When was the last-” She stopped herself as she felt a rising gorge in the back of her throat. She swallowed hard to force it back down. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

There was another long pause and then,

“Secrets such as this are closely guarded and only given to those with leave to know.”

“I’m not authorized,” she translated and burped, the acid of her eventual vomit burning the back of her throat. “Oh fuck. I’m gonna spew.”

“This unit requests a confirmation of meaning: unintentional expulsion of bile from-”

“Yes,” she said, and leaned her head back to breathe deeply. “Can you get a bucket?”

“This unit knows not whence the mechanical servants were removed, though a water closet exists a mere twenty meters down the-”

“Yeah, I’m not going to make that,” she said, and bent to the right, vomiting onto the floor. She shuddered. “Maybe don’t turn off artigrav in this particular area of the ship. That would suck to clean up in zero.”

“What other charge could this unit have but cleaning?”

“Yeah, maybe when we get to know each other a little better,” she said, eyes closed. With the lights completely off, she couldn’t have seen it anyway, but she still felt the warmth seeping into the right side of her coverall and smelled the acrid odor rising from beside her. She breathed deeply through her nose, gagged, and breathed again, hoping she’d get used to it. “What should I call you?”

“This unit, as shown through specification, has the call of Viaago. With affection, this unit came to be known as V.”

“Viaago or V,” she repeated without opening her eyes. She burped again and tried to avoid anything else coming up. “Which way was the toilet?”

“The direction of the-”

“No, stop,” she said. “Can you just like-” She took a deep breath. “Can you show a very, very dim light in its direction?”

She peered out of one eye and at the far end of the corridor she saw a small light fade into view, a star twinkling at her. Just her luck. It was in the same direction as the vomit.

She closed her eyes again. “Is there a toilet in the opposite direction?”

“Based on existing-”

“Just say yes or no.”

Pause. “Yes.”

“Cool,” she said and turned her body towards the edge of the corridor not blocked by her...what did the AI call it? Unintentional expulsion of bile? She chuckled as she dragged herself down the other side of the corridor using only her arms.

There was silence for a couple of moments before V chose to speak again: “It appears there is some ailment or condition that holds this passenger to the ground.”

“Well yeah,” she said. “I have a concussion.”

She took a break for a moment when she felt like her arms were going to explode. She never would have expected that anything could have felt heavier than normal gravity on her body, but 1 G after a week of zero? It was worse than she imagined.

“That was not the intended meaning of this unit,” V said.

“If you mean I’m disabled, then yeah,” she said, starting to drag herself down the corridor again. “My legs don’t work great.”

“Perhaps artificial gravity would be of some-”

“Did I say to turn off artigrav?” Leah said, pausing to pant a bit. She pulled and dragged herself again. “No. Actually, I said don’t turn off artigrav. Cleaning up vomit is hard enough as is, never mind in zero.”

There was a pause as she made it over the ridge between the corridor and the mess.

“This passenger’s sharpness of tongue might not come from mere vexation, but from concussion.”

“You mean. I’m irritated?” Leah said, pausing every couple of words as she pulled herself further along the floor.

“Yes.”

“Well,” Leah gasped out, panting, “Irritability. Is also. A sign. Of someone. Crawling along. The floor.” She glanced around and, in the dim light that V had turned on, saw the door to the bathroom near where she’d tied her sleeping sack.

Right. She’d forgotten where it was. God, concussions sucked. She panted for a moment before changing her direction, heading towards it. “Did you turn off the water reclamation system too?”

“This unit would not cease any function unless the system were to fail in its task,” V said, sounding a bit insulted.

Leah was silent as she pulled herself the rest of the way into the bathroom, using all her breath to get herself there. The toilet dropped into place as she pulled herself over the lip, although she wasn’t sure if that was V’s intervention or another system it had brought online. She pulled herself up onto the toilet, and sat there, panting, fully clothed. She glanced up at the shower head. She hadn’t been able to take one in zero. A shower would be really nice right now.

“There wasn’t enough power,” she said, almost to herself, as she unzipped the front of her coverall.

Another pause. “This unit does not comprehend.”

“We weren’t getting enough power from the solar panels to run the computer mainframe, water reclamation system, artigrav, artiatmo, and comms,” she said, pulling her arms out of the coverall.

“Upon waking, this unit perceived how the wires had been arranged and saw fit to...” It paused as if thinking. “Correct the energy output forthwith.”

She chuckled to herself and the top half of the coverall fell backwards onto the back half of the toilet. AI weren’t supposed to be insulting, so when it was it had to talk around it. “Well, thanks.”

“It is of no surprise that this unit is better suited for such tasks.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, looking up at the shower-head. “So you have access to the water reclamation system?”

It paused again. “Yes.”

At least it seemed to remember her preference for yes or no answers. She looked down at her legs. On good days, she could move them and on really good days, even walk a bit, but this wasn’t a good day. It was probably better for her to move them herself.

She wedged herself onto her right arm and used her left to pull the coverall down on her left side. “Will you be able to hear me with the shower running?”

“The vantage of mechanical eye allows the viewing of your mouth.”

“That’s a creepy way to phrase that,” she said, repeating the maneuver to pull the rest of the coverall down the right side. “And can you run a spot check to make sure that it’s not contaminated?”

“This unit has already done so,” V said, sounding insulted again. “As any unit such as this would upon waking.”

Leah stared up at the shower head, the coverall around her ankles. “Then let’s take a shower.”

There wasn’t any soap, and it took her a few questions to V to find the right temperature in Fahrenheit (Jesus, who used Fahrenheit anymore?), but it still felt good to get clean, warm water on her body. Her headache had gone away, and she could start to tolerate some light at its lowest possible setting. She didn’t have a towel, though, so she had to get into her clean coverall wet. She was just lucky that her mobile flash had finished decon early.

She’d taken a handful of steps from the bathroom to the mess bench and sat down, which she guessed was going to prompt all sorts of questions from V, but she didn’t care. The mess table was barely big enough for six people, with metal benches bolted to the floor and a large view-screen built into the hull on the left. The wrappers from the Nutrio bars that she’d left floating in zero to eventually gather at some point when she could be bothered, had dropped around the metal table and benches like scattered leaves.

She left them where they sat. She couldn’t look away from the view-screen.

The previous days the monitor, which hung over the bench like a TV in a sports-bar, had been dark. View-screens were hooked up directly to camera feeds on the exterior of the ship to act like windows. It was the only real way to see the outside because windows were a massive safety hazard. Turns out glass being the only thing between artiatmo and the void was not a great idea.

View-screens weren’t a huge priority to fix. In fact, they weren’t even on her list and with the reactor off, Leah couldn’t have spared the additional power.

But V had found power for it from somewhere.

Outside, she could see the twin stars, Hebos and Geros, twinkling bright and soft against the dark blanket of space around them. She could see the stars rising and shedding light on the curve of Izra as it rose and she followed it. She didn’t know which sunrise it was as she’d lost track of time. She could’ve asked V but it was silent, watching her watching the space outside, if she had to guess. A shared silence that wasn’t quite comfortable, but it was complete, and might have had the beginnings of trust in it.

This was the first time she’d been able to look outside the hull since Erin’s shuttle had brought her here. In the past week, she’d worked at a frenetic pace, not following the hours or days that passed, sleeping when she was tired, working when she was awake.

But it was good to sit sometimes. To see what she’d made.

“V,” she said, her voice hoarse. Automatically, her hand went to the vacuum canteen at her side, brought it to her mouth, and took a swallow. She then held it in her hand and stared at it, her brow so furrowed she felt like she was going to fold her face in half.

Of course she had water on her. It made no sense to have to go back and forth to the mess every time she’d had a drink.

She stared at the vacuum canteen in her hand.

She’d been so thirsty. And yet, she’d forgotten it existed.

She started to laugh. She laughed so hard that she couldn’t sit up. She leaned against the side of the hull and held her stomach as she laughed and laughed, the peals of it echoing up and down the empty corridors through the ship, marinating the atmosphere in her glee at her own concussion induced idiocy.

“Does this passenger require medical intervention?” V said.

“No, no,” Leah said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I was just going to say. Thank you.” She smiled up at the commbox, even though she didn’t know if there was a camera nearby. “Thank you for helping me take a shower.”

“The charge of this unit is to provide for its occupants,” V said.

Leah ignored it.

“God,” she said again with a chuckle, one arm holding her stomach, the other wiping tears from her eyes. “I’m so dumb.”

A loud, angry chirp echoed from the commbox. Leah froze.

“A vessel of unknown origin draws near,” V said.

“There’s a ship coming?” Leah said. She looked at the monitor, but couldn’t see anything but the stars and Izra. “Why?”

“This unit cannot speak with them,” V said, sounding annoyed again. “However, all systems are functioning.”

“Wait, what? Why not?”

“When manual intervention occurs, a unit such as this cannot-”

Leah didn’t need to listen to the rest. She’d manually turned off the comms to try and boot the mainframe. When a system is manually shut down, an AI cannot turn it back on unless it has specific authorization to do so. After two hours, her Dead Man’s Switch had activated and sent out an emergency beacon.

The ship was coming to make sure she was okay.

“Turn the comms back on,” she said. She looked around wildly for her chair. She didn’t have one. Why would she have one? She was in space. “Shit, I can’t-”

“The vessel is requesting initiation of docking procedures,” V said. “Am I allowed to proceed?”

“What’s the ID?” Leah said. She’d have to walk. She could manage that for a couple of minutes. Or, at least, she hoped she could.

“Izra Rescue Operations,” V said.

Leah’s stomach dropped. “Shit.”

The view-screen showed a ship on a slow, inching approach, from the other side of Izra but even from that far off she could see the blue and red. “I smell bacon.”

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Credits:

ZK Hardy as principal writer, editor, and audio editor.

Emily Westland as producer and editor.

Jamie Philips as design consultant.

Original art provided by Sabina Lewis.

Original music for audio recording and podcast by Ryan A. Mahoney.

Special thanks: Embowered Para for her video on undressing while in a wheelchair, and Heather Monroe for medical information related to concussions.

These were my thoughts as I was writing the piece, facets I’m considering as I move forward, things I was worrying about, and so on. Feel free to ask any questions about the piece below in the comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can.

One of the most difficult writing exercises I've ever heard of was to describe a person who was simply waiting for a bus, alone. The goal was to tell the reader that this person was mourning their child's death without ever stating directly that their child had died.

It's an exercise in metaphor, subtext, and description, in showing something hyper-specific while trying to avoid telling instead of showing.

But the difficulty isn't actually coming from trying to describe their grief. It's coming from the fact the character is entirely alone. Trying to make a story compelling when the only thing they have to compete against is the environment around them is incredibly difficult. This was my biggest worry as I sat down to work on Troubleshooting: Leah is alone on Aspiration (at least, at the beginning of the chapter), with nothing else but her own thoughts. The only dialogue that occurs in this chapter is in the memory that she recalls as she works on wiring up the power to the computer, and when she is speaking to herself.

I had executed a similar exercise before in my second book when I'd written a chapter where the character is entirely alone and trapped in a prison cell. But it was difficult, and I worried, similar to this chapter, that I wasn't going to make it compelling.

Dialogue comes easily to me, so not only was writing a chapter with minimal dialogue difficult, but there was also the difficulty in trying to figure out what parts of the system needed to be worked on first. I worried a lot that this chapter would be boring, as Leah simply struggled through determining which system needed to be brought up first. Luckily, I'd figured out certain aspects of the ship prior to writing it, so I'd thought a lot about which parts of the ship already existed, which parts of the ship would be needed for Leah’s eventual plan, etc.

But describing someone who is essentially trying to renovate a derelict spaceship wouldn’t (on the surface) make for the most compelling stories. What are they competing with, fighting with except the consequence of time? It's like reading a novel about someone renovating an old house. Certainly, some people find this interesting, but it can't be many.

Returning to my goal of writing a story for people like myself has been helpful in remembering that someone will probably find this interesting. My partner and I play a lot of colony simulation games, like "Rimworld", where you have to figure out very specific details of how to run a colony. Where does the food come from, for example? How do you generate heat? Answering these questions and solving these problems are really interesting to me.

Some of my favorite parts of my favorite novels actually have little to do with the characters themselves, and everything to do with the character solving a problem that natural occurs as a result of the world they live in. In the Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, my comfort book, the best part of the novel is when the character is living on his own, homeless, in the city of Tarbean. He has to figure out where to live, what to eat, how to make money. Answering these questions are difficult in the best of circumstances, but even harder when you’re twelve and living entirely alone in a foreign city with no money and no family.

But I also didn’t want to raise all of these questions. I was at my writer’s group about a month ago, talking about the first fifty pages of my friends memoir. In my opinion, it gave a bit too much backstory, which at times made the first chapter feel clunky and awkward. However, I’d read this story many times before, so I wasn’t a completely unbiased reader. It was much more interesting to hear the reaction of another member of the group who’d never read the memoir before, and how she ended up having many, many more questions as a result of the first chapter. You want to pique someones interest, but you don’t want to make them wish for all the answers all at once. You have to establish a level of trust with the reader that you will some day answer all the questions they had.

For example, I hope that no one is thinking about how Aspiration is being heated. I assume that will be handled by the artificial atmosphere, but I don't explicitly state it (and would have found that clunky to weave into the story). I also didn't mention how the artificial atmosphere was created after Leah moved into the ship; I assumed that some of the oxygen from Erin’s shuttle was pumped into Aspiration to establish an artificial atmosphere before it was brought online. I'm hoping that the answers I do provide don’t accidentally pique the reader's interest too much and they start asking questions that I don't have answers to.

I did establish a couple of callbacks / Chekhov's guns in this chapter, though. Being forced to work at least a month ahead of the actual publication of these chapters or episodes because of the illustration deadlines makes establishing these aspects of serialized fiction easier; I’m forced to write a couple chapters ahead, so if I’d needed to set something up in the past, I can go back and fix it.

For example, the Dead Man's Switch is going to have an interesting result in the next chapter. This I actually knew before I wrote the next chapter, but the thing that I didn't expect was the vacuum canteen that I mention very briefly. This has dramatic significance in the next chapter, so watch for it. The mention of generalized artificial intelligence and its illegality is also something that will come back later.

Finally, we have the end of the chapter. Again, balancing coziness with action, is a difficult tightrope to walk. Most people would not describe a chapter which included a character struggling with electrical work, only to accidentally get knocked out and concussed at the end, as cozy. If anything, this problem is exacerbated in the next chapter, but I'll talk about how I fixed that problem when I write a diary for that chapter.

My hope is the end of the chapter (where Leah is suddenly dragged down by gravity; not very cozy) is balanced by the rest of the chapter (electrical work? Possibly cozy? Remembering your boyfriend on the planet down below? Definitely cozy) and the focus on how free she feels in zero gravity. Again, other than the episode Melora on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that I mentioned in the first Writer’s Diary, I think this is an area that is ripe for exploration in science fiction. Specifically, the idea of a disabled character feeling more free as a result of something that can be very othering for more able-bodied people.

The most entertaining part for me was the actual language.

One part was trying to figure out what an AI who had just been woken up for the first time would actually say. My partner (and producer), Emily, has a master in linguistics and has pointed out that linguistic drift happens much faster than people think: language can drift significantly in fifty years of isolation.

Now maximize that change by about six, and you have the difference between the way we speak and the way people in the early 18th century spoke. This is roughly the difference between the way the AI speaks and the way Leah speaks. I'll get into this more when I'm writing my commentary on the next chapter, but this discussion with my partner resulted in changing the original dialogue at the end of the chapter:

Who the fuck are you?

To the more Shakespearean:

What foul knave is this?

The second part was more natural as I continued writing: the slangification1 of standard, technical terminology that one works with every day. It’s not rocket science (Artificial atmosphere became artiatmo. Artificial gravity was artigrav), but it’s definitely a definition of the novel’s voice. I’m cautiously optimistic that this will continue to be relatively easy to implement, something that comes out naturally as I continue working, and not be an aspect of the novel I really have to figure out and determine rules for.

There’s no faster way to kill creative speechifying than making rules to govern that speechifying.

There are other things I could talk about here (including anti-matter, matter reactors and the difficulty of picking up a story after leaving it alone for a month) but I’ll leave those for a future discussion. As always, feel free to ask any questions in the comments below.

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Above the planet Izra, between two stars that always seem to be setting, sits an old ship, a fresh start, and a new home.

Previously: Leah sold off her computer fix-it shop on the planet Izra and left her life on solid ground to live among the stars, with no prior experience of how to do it.

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In the six days since she first arrived, Leah got herself into a routine. She woke around six and unzipped the sleeping sack she’d tied to the old-school sec-rail that ran the length of the ship. Back when Aspiration was made, all ships came with a securement rail that had regularly punctured holes to tie to every five feet or so. They were used when artificial gravity (artigrav) was toggled, because even when your normal Gs were applied, it could still be sudden after weeks or months in zero. Now, though, most ships were only required to have a securement station every sixty or so feet, so nobody bothered with a rail along the length of the ship anymore. Leah had shaken her head when she first saw it and thought to herself, They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.

She took off the coverall she’d worn the previous day and fallen asleep in and put it into the cheap, mobile flash she’d brought with her for decontamination. Eventually, she’d get the shipboard flash connected to do a proper decon, but she hadn’t gotten there yet.

She went to the bathroom (she’d patched the water reclamation system the second day, but in zero it was still an adventure) and floated towards the mess, where she fished out a Nutrio© bar from the crates of supplies she’d brought from Erin’s shuttle. She sat in the air above the actual dining table, munching on the bar and dreaming of coffee. Eventually, she realized she was just sucking on the wrapper so she pushed off from the wall, towards the docking port. Beside the door was the to-do list she’d made her first day, written out directly on the wall in all caps because she didn’t have any paper and she was planning on painting eventually anyway. The large black marker she used to write it and cross things off was duct-taped at a crazed angle just to the right.

The first few days it had been pretty obvious what to work on (basic satellite-to-satellite communication, water reclamation, artificial atmosphere) but by day seven she’d finally gotten to the point where she had to make some choices.

The solar panel array that Erin had set up while Leah brought in the last of her supplies was working to power the handful of systems she’d brought up in the last week. But if Leah brought up another one, she’d have to turn off one of the existing systems or turn on the reactor, which was the first item on her list. Bringing up a reactor without a real computer was basically suicide, though. She didn’t know enough about fusion or anti-matter reactors so she was as likely to blow herself up as get the ship powered. Hell, even though she’d looked at the reactor, she didn’t even know what kind it was.

She moved her eyes down to the next item: stasis chamber.

The stasis chamber was still locked tight, which meant there was probably something in there for food, but her mobile flash probably wasn’t big enough for a whole crate of rations. She didn’t have the shipboard flash up and running yet (that was on the list after stasis chamber), never mind a computer to run decon procedures and print out results (listed after shipboard flash). And besides, she couldn’t afford to get sick with the schedule she was trying to keep. The ship had been up here for more than three hundred years according to legend, so she was sure whatever supplies were left in stasis couldn’t be safe for her gut.

Now that she was thinking about it, a computer was necessary for almost everything that was left on the list: the cooking system in the mess, navigation, long distance comm.

Her eyes skipped down to the last item on the list: artigrav.

Her traitorous brain reminded her she didn’t need a computer for an artificial gravity system. She knew she’d have to turn it on eventually, unhook the sleeping sack, and retire to a real bed, as the health problems from living in zero were a common subject in nearly every school’s fifth grade health class.

But she didn't want to yet. In zero, she didn’t have to be in her chair. In zero, she felt free.

She skipped back up to the item listed “computer” and thought about it again. A computer would be nice for some of the things she’d brought online already, like water reclaim. Right now, she was checking it herself daily to make sure it wasn’t contaminated, but it took a good hour or so each day and she was only human. There was a good chance that after a couple weeks she’d make a mistake.

She sighed and turned towards the main corridor, grabbing the small box of tools she’d hooked to the sec-rail with a carabiner for easy access.

She’d been avoiding working on the computer, even though she knew she should, but to be fair to herself, she wasn’t avoiding it quite as much as she was avoiding artigrav. It just felt a bit like favoritism if she worked on it first, as if the fact she’d owned a fix-it shop for three years meant she’d be more willing to deal with computers than anything else.

But she couldn’t avoid it; sometimes computers just made life easier.

She floated down past stasis and sick bays (she remembered which was which from her explorations on the first day) and past the access tunnel that led down into the cargo bay. The last door on the left led into the reactor, and the one opposite was the computer mainframe. They had to be close together or voltage drop would be too high and the computer wouldn’t even be able to add two and two.

Not that it matters right now, Leah thought to herself as she clipped her toolbox into the nearby hole in the sec-rail and pried a panel off the wall, looking for the power supply. When all the computer has to eat is star juice instead of tasty anti-matter, matter reactions. She pulled another panel away and found it. She let the panels float out into space around her as she had no way to tie them to the sec-rail, and opened her toolbox to remove her screwdriver.

I wonder if cold fusion tastes like gazpacho, she thought, as she identified the screw head and attached the corresponding bit. She’d told Ralph about her theories on the taste of different energies. He’d thought it was strange, but to her it was perfectly reasonable.

“Living things get their energy from food, right?” she’d said, taking a swig of her beer. It had been a beautiful summer night on Izra and they’d been sitting out on her rooftop, looking up as Aspiration bled water into the sky.

Her mouth watered as she unscrewed the top of the panel leading to the power source, remembering. She grabbed the vacuum canteen around her waist with her other hand, squeezing some water into her mouth, and then pushed it back down again. Christ, she missed beer.

“So it’d make sense that to plants and bacteria and computers different sources of energy taste different,” she’d continued on.

“They don’t have tastebuds,” Ralph said, taking the beer from her hand and sipping on it. They were sitting on a couch that might have been blue at some point in the past, and he’d pulled her legs on top of his own. He always did that when they were sitting close together and she’d never asked him why. She wiped away a tear at the corner of her eye, as she carefully attached the conduit from the solar panels to the power supply. She missed him too.

“Well...yeah,” she admitted, leaning forward and attempting to steal her beer back. “But-”

“Nope,” Ralph said. He leaned away from her swatting hand reaching for her beer, and stuck out his tongue, as if to show that he wasn’t a bacteria; he had tastebuds. “That’s it. You can’t taste something if you don’t have tastebuds.”

She hadn’t been able to convince him, but he hadn’t been able to prove her wrong either. After all, the only way to know would be to talk to a generalized AI and those had been illegal for more than a hundred years.

She admitted to him later that the belief didn’t make any sense. But she did still wonder.

“Okay,” she said to herself as she checked the connection for a third time. The wires she’d brought on board were only a little better than string, but it had worked for the rest of the systems, so she expected it to work for this one too.

She pulled herself back towards the nearest comms hub and ran a command to stifle the power supply to comms and route it to the mainframe instead. This was another thing a computer would be good for; she could start this type of power exchange through a voice command instead of having to use a manual keyboard. She waited a minute to let the comms shut down and initiated her dead man’s switch protocol, so that somebody would come knocking if she didn’t turn it back on in two hours.

She should have felt itchy having comms off, a slight twinge in the back of her head that something was wrong.

But she didn’t. Just like not having artigrav, it made her feel free.

The only one she could depend on in this moment was her. If she screwed up, she only had herself to blame.

“Hold onto your socks,” she whispered and flicked the switch to the on position.

Nothing happened.

She glanced towards the little green light that indicated whether the computer was booting up. It was still dead.

She flicked the power switch off and on again.

Still nothing.

She furrowed her brow, flicked the switch to the off position again, and disconnected the conduit from the mainframe power supply, holding the live wire aloft with her right hand. She really should have turned off all solar power while it was disconnected from a load because holding a live wire was a dumb way to ask for death, but the switch was all the way on the other side of the ship and it was only a couple seconds anyway. She pulled out her portable console with her left hand and carefully connected it directly to the live wire. In the upper right hand corner, she saw the lightning bolt sitting in the center of an empty battery, the universally understood symbol that said the console was connected to power.

She disconnected it from her portable console, reconnected the mainframe power supply, and started going over her work again, grumbling to herself. She ran through all the wires connecting solar to the computer mainframe, and traced her way back to the monitor she’d set up to tell her the output of the array and load requirements from other systems. Aspiration was in the dark right now, but it was only an hour away from the rise of the second star, Hebos, and there should have been plenty of energy in the power cells to last until then. She clicked through the monitor and found she was right; Aspiration could have sat in the dark for another two days before she’d run out of power.

She cocked her head once more and looked back down the corridor, where the door to the mainframe was sitting wide open. She squinted her eyes at the door as if the computer was a troublesome cat who’d made a suspicious noise.

There was nothing wrong with the computer itself, she’d checked it over on the second day when she’d taken inventory and fixed the water reclaim. And as far as she could tell, energy was flowing exactly where it should be. Maybe the little green lightbulb on the outside of the mainframe had burned out?

She pushed off the wall, floating towards the mainframe again when she heard it: a creaking groan as the ship slowly began to turn around her.

“Oh shit.”

Gravity crashed down all at once, and she slammed into the corridor floor, sliding from the momentum of zero G. She landed in a heap against the wall, head cracking against steel.

She tasted copper and her vision was blurred. Probably a concussion. A distant part of her mind told her that she shouldn’t pass out, but a closer part said she was probably going to.

Two thoughts warred in her mind as she began to lose consciousness. The first was that it shouldn’t have been possible; she was sure that she’d sent solar power to the mainframe and not artigrav. The second was an instinct from years of computer programming: a strange exhilaration of knowing something happened after an hour of nothing, even though it wasn’t what she expected.

But, just before darkness overwhelmed her, both of those thoughts were driven out as she heard static come over the ship-wide comm boxes and then a handful of words, flat, empty, and smooth: “What foul knave is this?”

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Credits:

ZK Hardy as principal writer, editor, and audio editor.

Emily Westland as producer and editor.

Jamie Philips as design consultant.

Original art provided by Sabina Lewis.

Original music for audio recording and podcast by Ryan A. Mahoney.

If you’re looking for Story Syntax with ZK Hardy, non-fiction on how to write like a programmer, you can find the most popular articles here!

A ship has hovered above the planet Izra as long as most people can remember. A newcomer decided to purchase it and make herself a new home among the stars. But space living ain't easy, and the old ship, Aspiration, has secrets of its own.

Rainbow Station is a serialized story about the building of a spaceship in a science fiction future taking place several hundred years in the future. The first section of the story has the subtitle A Ship Called Aspiration. It was the winner of a poll of my readers during a contest called Pilot Season in November 2024. In terms of style, think of it a little bit like if Becky Chambers wrote Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Commentary tracks (which are called “Writer’s Diaries”) for each installment are also released for paid subscribers the Monday after a story goes live for free subscribers. The first Writer’s Diary was released for free during Pilot Season.

Above the planet Izra, between two stars that always seem to be setting, sits an old ship, a fresh start, and a new home.

Episodes

Season One: A Ship Called Aspiration

• Pilot — The very first episode, where Leah sells her shop on the planet Izra and moves into the long abandoned spaceship orbiting above. Read the commentary on this first episode for free.

• Troubleshooting — Leah has a list a mile long of all the systems she needs to fix, but on a ship this old, sometimes things just don’t work right.

• Unexpected Guests — Leah makes a new acquaintance, while dealing with old environmental problems and new injuries.

• Wrestling with Pigs — Leah asks V for a little trust as she tries to dissuade a couple newcomers from looking deeper into Aspiration than they should.

• Honesty: Nothing More, Nothing Less — Leah chats with V about everything it has missed over the last couple centuries.

• Dinosaurs and Hermit Crabs — A new visitor to the system invites some tension between Leah and V.

• Simple Comfort in the Act of Being — Leah inspects a new ship and envisions her future.

Interlude: Six Months Earlier

• Part One — Leah inspects a derelict ship on a Sōzō station with some help from a friend, and discovers something surprising.

These are my thoughts as I was writing the piece, facets I’m considering in the piece if/when I move forward as a longer serialized piece, things I was worrying about, and so on. Feel free to ask any questions about the piece below in the comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can. In the future, these will be paid only posts, so be sure to sign up as a paid-subscriber if you want to see these types of posts in the future.

I don’t really know the science behind a lot of science fiction. My dad always loved Isaac Asimov, but I was more of a fan of Robert Heinlein. Even when Heinlein attempted to dive in deep on science (like genetics in Time Enough for Love) I never really found it that interesting; I usually skipped ahead. A little ironic considering my parents are both scientists. As a result, I really don’t know if a binary star system with the planet Izra within it makes sense. The question of whether a planet can have multiple sun-rises, multiple sunsets, and still function as an actual planet that people could have colonized is a hard one to truly answer. What effect would two stars like that have on the gravity in such a planet? How would multiple sunrises and sunsets affect a person’s circadian rhythm? Would multiple sunrises just mean that the planet is turning really quickly, or would it also impact the gravitational orbit?

These are questions worth answering, but I don’t have answers to any of them. I also don’t know how much this would affect the rest of the work if most of the novel takes place on a station. Would a space station be affected by the twin stars? It would, right? I’m just not entirely sure how. Just as I’m not entirely sure what it means to be an owner of a “hacker shop”. I wrote that down when I first came up with the idea for the pilot, but I don’t really know what that means. I ultimately decided to just go with a PC shop of some sort, without any real specificity. I guess Leah is selling hardware, but again, I’m non-specific. And I’m leaning on the hardware that exists today, even though I’m sure by the time we get to space travel our hardware (and software!) would have changed radically. For God’s sake, they’re still using shell scripts!

This leads into a timescale question: Aspiration has been orbiting Izra for more than two hundred years, according to the pilot. This means that not only has space travel existed for more than two hundred years, but we’ve somehow been able to retain that technology across stars and planets. This is impressive by itself, but the interface has also remained the same; we can interact with the technology in a way that is recognizable to us today. Is this a reasonable choice within the world building of the story? Probably not, but it’s what is there for now. I’ll have to edit it to be more consistent with future choices at some point in the future.

Leah and Ralph’s relationship represents a concept that I think we are hard-pressed to actually see within most existing media: a couple who are in a good place, whose connection does not add to the drama of the story. The story isn’t about Ralph and Leah. It’s about Leah trying to build a place for herself. Ralph can lend support, can be there as a helping hand, but ultimately, it’s not about the internals of their life. I don’t want to have the possibility of their relationship falling apart to be a “subplot” within this book (if it becomes a book). I just want them to be a relationship, a couple who see the world together and are willing to face problems head-on.

The concept of Leah in a wheelchair just kind of came to me. When I first conceptualized her, I didn’t think of her in a wheelchair. But when I began writing the first paragraph, I thought of my fiancée who, due to health conditions, has to occasionally use a wheelchair. Our Scotland trip back in August made me very aware of how cautious you have to be when navigating a public space in a wheelchair, how aware of every single movement we made because of her chair. I imagined how nice it would be for someone who has no use of their legs to live and work in a zero gravity environment. In zero gravity, nobody’s legs matter. We’re all weightless and pulling ourselves with our arms.

I suspect I’ll have to deal with artificial gravity at some point (or the concept of using centrifugal force as an artificial gravity), but I think Leah would want the ship (and station) to be in zero-g for as long as possible. She wants everyone to kind of feel the way she does, a little helpless, a little surprised, a little suddenly aware of their body when they’ve never had to be before.

I don’t really remember reading many science fiction books that have a disabled protagonist, although that might be a gap within my own reading. As a result, I don’t have an explicit guide for this book. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein centers on a computer technician (Manny) who is missing an arm, and that book will always be a big influence on any science fiction I write. So will Becky Chambers’ work (who I’ve talked about ad nauseam on this blog), and the TV shows Deep Space Nine and Firefly. Just the very concept of setting all of this on a space station could be lifted directly off Deep Space Nine, and there is even an episode involving a disabled protagonist, Melora. In contrast, however, I doubt there will be very many aliens within this universe.

I struggle with the otherness of aliens. I feel as though one of the only science fiction authors who has really nailed aliens was Andy Weir in his novel Project Hail Mary. I think he was able to successfully create an extra-terrestrial race that is so strange and unlike anything we’ve ever seen that they are, in a strange sense, sort of believable. I don’t want to try and bring around aliens only to create a universe of hats, or pull the Star Trek problem of only having humanoid aliens, when the universe is far too vast and multi-faceted to really only have aliens that resemble us within it. Humanity is too fascinating by itself for me to really feel like there is anything to be gained by exploring alternative species.

Speaking of representation and the diversity within humanity, all of the major characters in all three of my pilots (except for Ko) have been people of color. Why is that? Is that something conscious? I don’t know. Maybe purposeful, but I don’t think it was conscious. I saw a lot of myself in books and in TV shows and movies when I was a kid. Or, at least, a lot of myself as I understood myself at that point: white, cis, seemingly straight, seemingly male. Creating characters who look different than me, who can act as representations of parts of the world that don’t see themselves as frequently within media (especially within speculative fiction, which is where I happen to write most of my work) seems like a good idea, something to strive for.

But I have to be careful. I don’t want to write POC characters just because I want to. Their race and cultural background is an integral part of who they are: don’t ignore it. I am reminded that the author of Lovecraft Country happened to be white, which was incredibly surprising to me when I read that book. But the way he was able to pull that off was by talking to many, many Black folks, having many, many Black beta readers and doing a lot of research. With the way that I am writing the novel in 2025 (through serialization on this blog), I don’t really have the ability to ask BIPOC readers to give me feedback on a chapter before it is released. But is that any reason to pretend as if BIPOC folks don’t exist? I don’t think so. It feels a bit like the cowards way out.

With the choice to publish my “first drafts” (or the closest thing to first drafts that I feel comfortable releasing), there is a slight twinge of nervousness. If I accidentally have a character do or say something racist within my posts, I could, and should, be called out for that. I hope for forgiveness, but I also know that I am not owed that by anyone.

A ship has hovered above the planet Izra as long as most people can remember. A newcomer decided to purchase it and make a new home above the stars. But living among the stars isn't easy, and the old ship, Aspiration, has secrets of its own.

On Leah’s last day of business, she closed the store at half-past twelve. She rolled herself along the aisle of server racks and carefully coiled wires, the wheels on her chair whispering out a soft sound. When she came to the lip that led out into the street, she paused and rested her head against the wood outline of the door, watching the sun rise somewhere out beyond the horizon. Her kinky black hair acted as a cushion against the hardwood, and the sun was pleasant on her dark brown skin. Sunrise happened three or four times per day on the planet Izra, depending on where you lived and the time of year, so it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. But it was still pretty.

“Did I miss it?” she heard a soft voice say, and turned her eyes towards him. A man in flannel was trundling down the street, headed towards her but not with any priority. It more seemed that he was following the inevitable movement of his feet. He was around six feet tall, muscled but with a thin layer of fat on top so it was difficult to tell. He had a bushy beard on his chin that extended a full six inches down towards his chest, and his brown hair was shoulder length but tied back in a ponytail so it wouldn’t fall into his face.

“Miss what?” she said with an indulgent smile.

“Your last customer?” Ralph said, looking around as if he might be able to spot them walking away. “I think Erin was going to come by to get a patch for her shuttle.”

Leah shook her head. “She was here at ten.”

Ralph made a soft groan that did not sound genuine at all to Leah’s ears. “I was making your present.”

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” Leah said. The words had become a common refrain recently. She’d said it to her neighbors the Brewers, who she could always hear arguing in hushed tones late at night. They’d dropped off a barely edible pie a few days earlier. She’d even said it to her landlady, a nice, older woman with librarian glasses named Janice, who’d left her a loaf of banana bread so dense Leah thought it’s only real use had to be as a paperweight.

The people on Izra were nice, no doubt about it, but they weren’t bakers. They ate for function, not flavor. The banana bread was probably packed with enough nutrients and calories that Leah could have lived off it for a solid month, and the pie had been baked with brill-nut, one of the only natural nuts on Izra. She knew they’d been trying to give her something that would remind her of “home”. It was sweet, in a way, though misguided. Here was never home.

“I know,” Ralph said, shrugging those big shoulders of his. “But I wanted to.”

Leah smiled up at him. “That’s very sweet.”

He blushed and refused to look at her, following her gaze off towards the horizon.

When they’d first slept together, when Leah had been new to the planet and he had been new to talking to people, she hadn’t expected the relationship to last longer than a few nights. Just a couple quick, sweaty hours to get the endorphins flowing. But here he was, three years later, still coming down to the store every couple days or so, just to say hi in his strangely charming, awkward elephant sort of way.

After a few silent moments, listening to the sounds of Izra, she put her hand on his forearm where the flannel was rolled back to show his light brown skin and he looked down at her. Ralph gave her one of his rare, completely open smiles, the kind that held nothing back, and she reflected it fully. She liked when he was here without any customers. He could fully be himself.

“Come on,” she said, turning her chair and headed back into the shop. “I have to finish inventory.”

“I didn’t come here to work,” he grumbled.

“No?” she said, looking over her shoulder and raising an eyebrow. “You plan on giving me something else?”

“No, no,” he said, blushing again. “I didn’t mean...damn.”

She laughed, delighted. It had been a while since she’d been in such a good mood. For the past three years, owning this shop and everything in it had been all Leah had known, completely devoted to her one goal of earning enough money to leave.

But now she wasn’t leaving. In a way, she was becoming more tied to this world than she’d ever imagined.

She held out her hand to him. “Come on. Keep me company. I’ve got a couple hours before I have to get over to Launch.”

Ralph shuffled into the shop, hunching his shoulders to try and make himself smaller. He made his careful steps through the aisles, around the boxes of circuits and coils of wires, turning sideways and sucking in his gut as he passed in front of a pair of large, old-school monitors. She watched him move, amused but sympathetic. She liked having her shop cluttered, especially towards the top of the shelves, which she didn’t have to deal with due to her chair. She liked making everybody else have to answer the questions that she had to answer every day: how big was your body really? Where exactly could you move without accidentally breaking something?

It gave her a chance to see people slowly realize the space their body took up, to realize the inconvenience that they might be to anyone else in the shop who needed to navigate it.

For the first time, they saw the world as she saw it.

But she knew that Ralph had dealt with this at least once a week since they’d gotten together, trying to figure out where to step so he didn’t completely disrupt the organized chaos that was her shop. She hoped that the ship would give him more space to move around.

She settled in behind the desk, tapping a couple keys and pulling up a spreadsheet that laid out each item within the shop, her best estimate as to its value, and location. She highlighted a few boxes and hit the delete button, as Ralph fell into an old, stuffed office chair which groaned under his weight.

“You still have to do inventory even though you’re selling the shop?” he said.

She shrugged without looking at him.“You know how Marteen is. They’ll have a hissy fit if anything is missing. And besides,” she said, fingers flying across the keyboard to forward the document to Marteen’s personal server, “I already did a full inventory two weeks ago when the sale was finalized. Now, I just need to knock off the handful of items I sold this morning.”

Almost reflexively, she brought up the itinerary for Launch and glanced at the details for what must have been the millionth time that day.

“You think looking at it is going to make the hours come any faster?” Ralph said, leaning forward to tap at the screen with his greasy finger.

She glared at him, and wiped away the spot he left. “Is that the present you brought me?” she said. “Grease stains on my monitor?”

He shrugged and the office chair underneath him whined at the movement. There was a teasing sparkle in his eye. “How else will you remember me?”

She rolled her eyes and killed the server, her monitor dying. “What did you bring me?”

He stared at her blankly for a moment, before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small bracelet made of vines and, without a moment’s hesitation, slipped it onto her wrist.

She looked down at it, curiously. “What is it?”

He smiled that unreserved smile again. “Dragongreen.”

She looked up at him, eyes wide in fear. “I’m allergic to Dragongreen.”

His eyes widened. “Oh God, really?” His breathing began to come faster, as he looked around wildly. “Where’s your adrenaline?”

She shrugged. “I don’t have any.”

“You don’t have any?” he said, looking at her, his face flush with worry. “You’re allergic to one of the most common plants on Izra and you don’t have-”

He cut himself off as he looked down at her wrist.

She still hadn’t taken it off.

“You’re fucking with me,” he said, relaxing back into the chair.

“I am,” she admitted. She looked down at the little bracelet circling her wrist. “It’s really pretty.” She held it up to her nose and took a deep sniff. “Smells like cinnamon.”

“Kind of a dick move to do that on our last day together,” he said, taking carefully managed breathes.

She put her hand on his knee. “Honey, it isn’t our last day together. You’re going to be coming up in two months.”

“Yeah, but that’s two whole months,” he whined.

“I know. It’ll suck being apart,” she said, sympathetically, and then gave him a wicked grin. “But won’t it be great once we’re back together?”

He looked at her, and matched her smile. “Yeah.”

He leaned down and she tilted her head up so he could kiss her, full on the lips.

She opened her eyes as he leaned back into his chair, and glanced over his shoulder, the blue sky tinted with sunrise through an open window.

Somewhere far above, sitting in the darkness of space, the ship waited.

“There it is,” Erin said as they rounded the edge of the planet. The ship peaked its head above the horizon and Leah saw it for the first time since she’d arrived. It was long, stretched out a bit like a snake, with the thrusters at the back looking like empty, black cylinders, having cooled to nothing centuries ago. The metal shone bright against the starlight of Izra’s binary stars, looking so new that it almost could have been berthed yesterday. As they came closer, she could see the name of the ship etched into the side in simple, ancient letters: Aspiration.

It wasn’t perfect: a large antenna was stuck awkwardly on the top and as she watched it, she could see it was rotating slowly, almost imperceptible, in the same direction as Izra’s turning, a surrender to gravity that never should have been. If it was operating correctly, it shouldn’t have been moving at all. There was a large open gash in the side of the ship, not quite deep enough to pierce the hull, but deep enough to touch the water system. Water cascaded into open space and crystallized into ice almost as soon as it touched the void. But to her it was perfect.

“You gonna rename it?” Erin said, letting go of the controls with one hand and raising the vacuum mudjug up to her mouth. The pilot shook her blue, pixie cut and leaned forward to let her tobacco flavored spit dribble in the direction of the vacuum. Leah’s stomach flipped, and not just because of the twirl of the planet below her.

She knew it was fine for the pilot to let go of the controls with one hand, that Erin barely even needed a hand on the control at all. They were at that point in the flight where gravity was able to do the last bit, drawing them into docking range. But all the same, Leah was nervous. She felt she was sixteen again, sitting outside her girlfriend’s house, about to meet the parents.

“Yeah,” Leah said, trying to ignore the roil of her gut and focus on the question at hand. “Probably.”

“Doesn’t look like much,” Erin said, a bit judgmental but not unkindly so. She spit a bit more into her vacuum mudjug and Leah suppressed a shudder. She knew that chew was a tradition among long-haul truckers like Erin, but she still thought it was disgusting and impractical. Why not just use a slap-patch? Not that she was going to suggest a change in tobacco habits to the woman bringing her to her new home.

“I think it’ll surprise you,” Leah said, and turned to focus on the ship out the window, making a mental list of all the thing she’d have to change as soon as she got in.

She’d have to deal with the leak first, as much as she didn’t want to. The water coming out of the side was a steady trickle, as it had always been for as long as anyone could remember, making beautiful, geometric patterns as the starlight hit it. Most of the water which fell from the ship was then vacuumed back in on the other side, making the whole thing a mostly self-perpetuating cycle. But enough was lost from the leak she knew she’d have to patch it up first thing. She didn’t want to have to keep getting water shipped out. She wanted it to be self-sustaining.

But the leak had given her the idea for the name. If you were sitting planet side and it was clear night, you could look up to see the ice crystals where Aspiration let them into the air, as if its blood was rainbows.

“Rainbow Station,” she said softly to herself. “That’s what I’ll call it. Rainbow Station.”

Erin looked back at her, more than a little skeptically. “It’s not a station. Just a ship.”

“Not yet,” Leah said back, her smile wide. “But it will be.”

Erin gave her a hard look, before lifting the mudjug one more time, turning away with a shrug. “Okay.”

Leah understood the pilot’s skepticism. She wasn’t a mechanic, she didn’t have all the know-how of turning a ship into a space station.

But what had she known back when she’d first sat down in front of a computer terminal all those years ago? Had she known anything more than the deep drive in her belly that told her this was what she was meant to do?

“Alright,” Erin said, as the shuttle came to a sudden stop, the docking tunnel pressed into Aspiration’s port. A loud clank echoed through the artificial atmosphere of the ship. “Do you need any-”

“Nope.” Leah had already pressed the button to undo her harness as soon as she’d heard the connection. She pulled her way down towards the docking doors, her hand undoing the buckle that kept her portable console latched to her hip, her completely ornamental legs trailing behind her in zero gravity. She waited anxiously at the door until she heard Erin press a button and it opened with a soft hiss. She grabbed and pulled herself down the white docking tunnel with one hand, her other clutching a long wire and her portable console. The long door at the end was gray and tan and slightly warm from the starlight as she landed against it.

She fumbled with the wire connected to her portable console, and searched frantically for a moment, before finding a port next to the door. She’d done her research correctly; it would fit.

The digital pad next to the door flickered to life, drawing a bit of power from her portable as she pushed it in. She navigated through the options until she found the script under the folder “Rainbow Station”: unlock_2_for_reals.sh. This script was why not just anyone could buy this ship (and also why it had been so cheap): nobody had the command to unlock it. She double tapped to execute and sighed as the console began to print out a long list of commands.

“You think this’ll work?”

Leah started at the sudden noise, and turned to find Erin floating behind her, an oxygen mask strapped to her head, the plug of tobacco still clearly in her lip. She held a mask out towards Leah and she took it, shamefaced. She’d been so excited she hadn’t even thought about the fact they hadn’t been pumping atmo into the docking tunnel. She was breathing whatever was left from when they’d gotten out of Launch.

“I think so,” Leah said. She let go of her portable for a moment, letting it float in zero-g, before strapping the oxygen mask around her head, pushing it painfully into her hair. “I did a lot of research. But it may take more than an-”

Another click as the digital pad next to the door blinked green. She grabbed frantically for the portable but her breathing calmed as she checked the logs: it had gotten about a quarter of the way through the list of unlock commands she’d pulled off a sketchy forum, but it didn’t throw an error. It got a 0x00 response. She guessed the guy on the site hadn’t been lying.

“Holy shit, it worked,” Leah said, mostly to herself.

“That didn’t take very long,” Erin said, more than a little impressed. “Anyway, I’ll go start on the crates if you can-”

“Wait,” Leah said quickly. “Can you just…? Wait.”

The pilot looked at her, her eyes squinting in confusion, before she nodded. Erin wasn’t her friend, Leah knew this. Leah was just someone to help fix the pilot’s tech when it wasn’t working right, and the whole business to get to Aspiration was a long overdue favor.

But still. Leah didn’t want to be alone.

She pressed a button on the panel and the doors slid open, showing a long, narrow corridor, neon white lights flickering as they turned on, the first time in two hundred years.

They both stared down the corridor, as if they were waiting for something.

Erin took a deep breath, and then let it out slowly, her breath sounding a little ragged. “Well,” she said. “Welcome home.”

“Thanks,” Leah said.

She didn’t remember when she had begun to cry. The tears on her cheeks felt warm.

Credits:

ZK Hardy as principal writer, editor, and audio editor.

Emily Westland as producer.

Jamie Philips as design consultant.

Original music by Ryan A. Mahoney.

Original art provided by Sabina Lewis.