104: SHELL

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It’s a special day on the spaceship. We all gather around the little table in the medbay while Lina sets down a small incubator and places three perfect little chicken eggs inside.

“That one’s named Omelette,” Tinera says, pointing. “And that one’s Quiche, and the third one is Meringue.”

“How will you even tell them apart? They’ll look identical when they’re born.”

“No, I’ll know.”

“I can’t wait to eat an omelette,” Sam sighs. At Tinera’s shocked look, they clarify, “I mean from the eggs the chickens lay. Not that Omelette.”

“This is going to get confusing,” Denish mutters.

“It’ll be fine when they’re born!”

We stare at the eggs for a couple of minutes, get bored, and all drift off to a lunch of green salad and mead, because why not, any time is mead time on our fun and normal spaceship. Tinera talks excitedly about how nice it will be to finally have egg salad again.

“Why do people on Luna eat so many eggs, anyway?” Lina asks, picking bits of cucumber out of her salad.

“They’re an easy protein source. Have you every tried to raise a cow on the fucking moon?”

“… good point.”

“I bet the first chickens on Luna hated the gravity,” Tal says. “I bet it sucked for them.”

“The gravity on Luna’s fine! Do you know how long it took me to get used to being really heavy all the time once I was transferred to Texas?”

“No, they’re right,” I say. “Moon gravity sucks. I could never get used to it. And every week you have to get in one of those centrifuges to exercise your body systems and keep your muscle strength and bone density up. Hated those things.”

“Oh, yeah, the grav treatments are so much worse than having grav treatment all the time, which is what being on Earth is like. Or being on this spaceship. I hope Hylara is low gravity. That’ll show you all.”

“Initial Kleiner readings showed Earthlike gravity,” Captain Klees says, but the tension in the room rises all the same. Earth is a very, very long way away, and the Kleiner array readings from that distance aren’t completely reliable. Gravity is one of the easiest things to calculate from a planet, based on how it affects the motion of other objects, but a lot else that we have could be wrong. The readings say we’re heading to a planet with water present, a thin atmosphere, and an electromagnetic field. But at that kind of distance, they could so easily be wrong, or there could be other things that they can’t measure. We could be heading to a Venuslike pressure cooker. We could be heading to a radioactive ball of cancer. We could be heading to a silicate hell of carcinogenic powders that coat everything, so that one poorly decontaminated pressure suit could track slow and painful death back into the living dome for all the colonists, a place that can never be tamed and never be safe, a place more dangerous to live on permanently than the Courageous itself. In so, so many ways, we have absolutely no idea what to expect out there, no idea if the rapidly approaching end to our journey will even be worth it.

Who thought this project was a good idea, again?

I take a sip of mead. And then I freeze. Because something is deeply, deeply strange.

“Tinera,” I say, not quite believing what’s happening. “Tinera.”

“Mmm?”

“This mead. Is this…” I sip it again, to confirm my initial impression… “Is this not completely terrible?”

She grins. “I know, right? I think I’ve finally got the process nailed down.”

“Not terrible? Are you sure?” Tal grabs the bottle out of my hands and takes a swig. “Betty and Betty’s shiny gold hotpants! This doesn’t taste like paint thinner at all!”

“Not even a little?” Denish asks. “No burning at all?” He opens a bottle of his own, takes a big swallow, and frowns at it suspiciously. “Hmm. This actually tastes like mead.”

“If I drank this in a bar,” Tal says, “I wouldn’t even demand my money back.” Ke goes to sip from the bottle again; I yank it out of kes hands. Ke can get kes own.

“Would it be your own money?” Lina asks.

Tal grins. “My money is never my money. Or, you might say, all money is my money. After all, can anyone really be said to own money?”

“Yes,” the rest of us say in unison.

“Do you think Hylara will have money?” Captain Klees asks.

Sam shakes their head. “Hylara won’t produce anything in our lifetimes beyond basic maintenance necessities. It’s going to be years of building domes and critical life support systems and getting food cultivation up and running. There’ll probably be come kind of currency system, with everyone getting a budget for luxuries, but if there’s an economy, it’ll be a heavily planned one. For the rest of our lives, at least.”

“So there probably will be money,” Tinera concludes, “but in smaller amounts and without the rampant uncontrolled wealth disparity that we’re used to seeing.”

“Good,” I say. “I hate money. There’s nothing like the culture shock of going to university and, surprise! You have to care about money now! I mean, my parents taught me about it, but I didn’t think it’d be so fucking important.”

“Does Arborea not have money?” Tinera asks.

“Oh, we have money. We have international trade and complex government-funded research projects and time-based land agreements. We just don’t tend to use it much in daily life. The people running laboratories and overseeing the nodes need to do complex speciality trading, so they use money all the time, but for most of us, what we need we either make ourselves or trade with our neighbours.”

“Barter?” Lina asks.

“Sometimes. There’s a lot of barter during the bigger festivals, where clusters might travel and see people they don’t usually see, but most of the time we don’t even bother with barter. We ask others in our cluster for help; our siblings and parents. Or we ask other clusters within the same node; our close neighbours. Barter’s only necessary for people you’re not close to. Most of what we do on a day-to-day level is just… helping each other out. You give your neighbour what they need, you ask for help when you need it, and it probably all evens out. Complicated trade wasn’t something that I ever had to deal with, personally, because I was too young to be running a lab or supervising the island development or whatever and didn’t need to organise for speciality goods to be brought in. Then I went to university and it’s like, oh, you want food? We trade money for that here! Massive culture shock, let me tell you.”

“You know what I’m looking forward to, with money?” Tinera swigs from her own bottle of mead. “That fucker in CR3 not having any.”

“Which fucker in CR3?” Denish asks.

“You know. The rich fuck.”

“Dor Delphin,” the Friend says. “Of Delphin Synthetics.”

“Yeah. That guy. Imagine you get on a ship like this and head off to be a Space King or whatever the fuck he thought would happen, and then you wake up in your new kingdom and some guys is like, ‘welcome to the colony, here’s your monthly credit ration, you’ll be building the dome frame. Here’s your spanner.’ I still don’t know how we’re gonna build a decent colony out of this shithole, but that’s my personal goal for whatever we end up with – making sure that one guy has to get up every day and use a spanner. His Earth money won’t mean shit out here.”

“A worthy goal.” I raise my bottle in a toast. “To building a society where Dor Delphin has to get up every day and use a spanner.”

“To building a society where Dor Delphin has to get up every day and use a spanner!” Everyone raises their bottles of mead, forkfuls of salad, or in the Friend’s case, stack of notes that it brought with it from the medbay to flip through.

“That guy’s great-grandad is my hero,” Tal says dreamily. “World’s most impressive CEO. I almost got a job working for Delphin Synthetics, once, in information security.”

We all stare.

“You almost took a job?” Sam asks. “A normal job for a real wage? Fair work for fair pay?”

“Oh, yeah. I love salaried jobs. They make robbing big corporations so much easier.”

We all relax.

“Seriously, you’d be amazed at the security details someone will give you if you’re meant to be there. Get a job with someone and that’s like, thirty per cent of the doors open. The trick is having a solid enough false identity to get hired under so they don’t know who you really are when you rob them blind. But Delphin Synthetics? Way beyond my skill level. Admirable work.”

“You couldn’t make a fake ID that could fool them?” I ask, trying to keep up.

“Oh, I could do that; fake IDs are easy. But they are an investment, and the question is return on investment. Anyone can be robbed with infinite time and infinite resources, but there’s a point where the dollars stolen per hour of work just isn’t worth it, especially since it’s always a risk. Getting into Delphin Synthetics is easy; the problem is that they keep barely any of their money in Delphin Synthetics. There’s like, six or seven layers of other companies that they cycle it through; I have to assume for tax purposes. They’re only a Texan company on the surface, they go overseas immediately through Torpin Rubber and Elurade, and that’s normal for tax dodging, but then they dodge to other countries and at some point it’s just too tricky to follow them without leaving a trace. I found where they were keeping almost all of their money but I had no way to get it. Some countries are weirdly isolationist with their fiscal policy.” Ke grimaces. “It’s not fair.”

“Let me guess,” Tinera says, “they were hiding their money on the moon?”

“Oh, no. I’ve robbed the moon before. They had it in the second hardest place to pull money out of, right after Mars.”

“Korea.”

“Nah. Korea’s easy. Anything they want to protect, they just send to Mars, so they themselves barely bother with security. Delphin Synthetics is a shell on top of six other shells that all hide where their true money is – a bunch of applied science labs hidden in Antarctica.”

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