Noumenon

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

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

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

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

Hell no.

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

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

But I pushed all that from my mind as I tucked my holoflex-sheets under my arm and headed for my closet. I was to report the facts, just the facts, nothing more.

The space was as cramped as I remembered it from our two years of isolation. We’d simulated everything during that time. I’d done this job before. It was nothing new, and yet … everything had changed.

We’d left Earth behind. We were on our own. Truly.

I wanted to leave the door open, as I’d always felt a little claustrophobic in the communications room, but the two nearest security guards kept peeking through the door—very distracting. So I shut myself in. And once again, I wished the room had a window. Luckily, it wouldn’t take me long to send the report.

I connected the thin, plastic holoflex-sheets to the server and organized the message into SD packets. It shouldn’t have taken me more than ten minutes to get everything squared away.

However, halfway through my upload the server connected automatically to my implants.

[Message received. Sender: Earth Com Center 23, operator Saul Biterman]

I was supposed to send the first message. Was something wrong? I scanned my instruments: there was no emergency indicator. Had we miscalculated the time dilation? Was I late?

I was a little annoyed. I’d trained for this my entire life, how could I have messed it up already?

The message downloaded in the next moment, and I transferred it to a blank holoflex-sheet I pulled from a desk drawer. I wanted to see it all at once, be able to manipulate it. Sure, there was no need to translate it holographically—I could translate it in my head while reading it—but I wanted to have a physical record in case it was something I needed to take to the captain.

Turns out, it wasn’t something Mahler needed to see.

It was short, and a bit confusing.

It read simply, How are you?

That was a strange thing for him to ask. I was about to tell him how we were—no need to be preemptive.

But maybe he wanted an impression of our well-being, something besides a record of events and functions. So I whipped up one extra packet and uploaded it with the rest.

We’re fine, thank you.

I finished my upload, gathered my notes, and went about the rest of my day attending to my journalistic duties. But, benign as the question seemed, I couldn’t get it out of my head.

How are you?

Saul and I had worked closely, but never gotten personal. Like a grade schooler never really gets to know her teacher, I never learned much about Saul as an individual.

Age wasn’t a barrier, neither was language. But there were other extenuating factors.

For one thing, I didn’t meet him until the summer of my twentieth year. Everyone else had already met their specialists, and since I was one of the last to get my official training, I was both nervous and excited to receive him in the drawing room of my group home.

Buttoned up tight in a pressed suit, I sat in one of the high-backed chairs trying to focus on my posture. I wanted to make a clean, professional impression when he was shown in. With one look at me I wanted him to think I was the right person for the job, that I could handle the responsibility.

It wasn’t just paranoia or an eagerness to please—Nika’s mentor had gone to Mother to ask if she had the right student. If that had happened to me I would have been mortified.

Father came in first and held the door open for Mr. Biterman. I leapt to my feet—before he even had time to glimpse my well-planned pose—and my hand shot forward of its own accord.

It wasn’t until we’d finished our initial shake that my mind registered anything about him. The first thing I noticed was his sticky palm, and my first impression swiftly snowballed from there.

His dress shirt was stained at the bottom—as though he’d dropped food in his lap at some point—and wasn’t tucked in. Despite the smile, his face held a sour expression, one I feared permanent. And his eyes didn’t meet mine. Saul was only ten years older than me, but he’d gone prematurely bald, and to make up for it he’d grown a thick, unkempt beard.

I resisted the urge to ask Father who this man was. I knew he was my tutor, despite my desire to believe otherwise.

We were formally introduced, then Father indicated for us both to sit before he left. I’d hoped he’d stay and help break the ice, but he rushed out of the room muttering that he was late for another appointment. I wondered if that was really the reason, or if Mr. Biterman’s company was as off-putting as his appearance.

I smiled, crossed and uncrossed my legs, and literally twiddled my thumbs waiting for my specialist to outline a plan, or start a lecture, or whip out some comm equipment.

Saul might have been alone in the room for all he acknowledged me.

“So …” I began. Slowly. I’d hoped he’d interrupt me. When he didn’t, I pressed on. “Do I get a syllabus, or a prospectus, or … Do I need to ask Fath— Dr. Matheson for certain books?”

He reached into his trouser pocket and dug around for a moment. His mining produced a crumpled scrap of yellow paper. Without a word he handed it to me by means of an unenthusiastic flip of his wrist.

Hesitant, I leaned over and took it. The scrap was clean, at least—no food stains. Glancing sidelong at this strange man I’d been saddled with, I smoothed it out in my lap.

It was a scribbled schedule for the next week, with dates, times, and places, but no indication of what was supposed to happen during the appointments.

Once I’d read it over, I looked up to ask him a question, and was startled by the silly smile that had replaced his indifference. “Well, see you tomorrow, Ms. Pavon,” he said, as though we’d just finished with a delightful visit.

That was the first of many awkward times with him. It took me months to get used to his strange mannerisms, sudden disconnects with now, long silences, and a plethora of other quirks.

I was baffled, at first. And also a little insulted. Here was a man whose expertise in communications had landed him one of the most important tutoring positions in the world—he was training ambassadors to space (myself along with seven others—three on different convoys), and would be his students’ main connection to Earth once they left the ground—yet he couldn’t hold a normal conversation.

If anyone other than Mother or Father had brought Saul into my life I would have thought it a colossal joke.

But, like a good little soldier, I held in my doubts and accepted the training. As it turned out, Saul was a capable teacher. He taught mostly through illustration and hyperbole rather than pontification, which I appreciated. And when it came to his work he was quick and accurate, but it wasn’t until I advanced to decoding on my own that I realized why he had the job.

While the man couldn’t smoothly string five words together in person, he was a whiz when it came to communicating long-distance. Without all of the physical cues to get in the way, with the words stripped bare, he was the most articulate man I’d ever met.

The difference was so apparent that when he came to grade my first solo decoding work, I asked him who had written the message.

“Me,” he said, looking up from the many red marks he’d already placed on my paper. His brows didn’t knit together, he didn’t frown or squint sideways at me like a normal person would when trying to decipher the implications of what had been said. But by that time I could recognize his special brand of confusion.

“I know you coded it.” I walked around the large warehouse space with my hands in my coat pockets. We’d been allotted one corner for training, and for housing the server and other equipment. Other machines I had no name for—utilized by other convoy departments—took up the three remaining corners. “But who composed it?”