Noumenon Infinity

Vanhi was the first on the shift shuttle. She buckled up as other workers poured into the craft behind her, pulling the heavy harness straps over her shoulders one at a time. Most of the new recruits were dressed in slacks and button-downs, which would be hidden under lab coats and bunny suits once on the experiment ship. Vanhi hadn’t changed out of her jeans and loose-fitting kurta.

A thin, black-skinned man with yellow around the edges of his eyes slid into the seat next to her.

“Gabriel! No one told me you’d come aboard. Good to see you.” She held out her hand—the shoulder straps keeping her awkwardly pinned.

They hadn’t seen each other since he’d been awarded his Ph.D., and she’d gotten no direct word on whether or not he’d accepted her invitation for a stint aboard the convoy.

He shook her hand, but with a hesitancy. “Good to see you as well.”

She felt the corners of her mouth twitch, her smile slip, and she feared her expression was giving everything away, laying all her guilt bare. He seemed reluctant to talk to her. Did he know something? No, no, that couldn’t be it. Perhaps he suspected, though. Gabriel had seen Kaufman grease enough palms in his day that he likely believed—and not unrightly—that Vanhi had caved to a number of their advisor’s ethical mishandlings. Their faces were plastered all over, after all—always the two of them, together.

She felt sick and turned away.

Of the twenty people crammed into the shuttle, fifteen of them were new faces. Well—somewhat new.

She noticed Chen Kexin, whose uniform indicated she was a new Breath security guard. Vanhi had seen her face before—seen several of her faces before, actually.

While none of the convoys’ crews were entirely identical, most of them shared a core of at least a thousand clones who were present on all of the original twelve missions. People whose skillsets and fitness for service had been seen as ubiquitously advantageous. Those whose contributions to things like food processing or practical medicine would not be affected by the size of the crew, purpose of their mission, or growth-cycle patterns.

After all, why go through the hassle of identifying twelve suitable individuals to clone when it was far simpler to clone one qualified person twelve times?

Kexin was one of those individuals. And this particular clone had been displaced by the sudden cancelation of Convoy Twelve’s original mission. Vanhi felt a dagger of guilt slash across her side as she imagined the devastation Kexin and her contemporaries must have gone through. What would it be like to have someone tell you that the very reason for your existence—something you’d been training for your entire life—had been canceled?

At least they were all offered retraining and positions here, Vanhi thought, though it did little to assuage her regret. Sure, some had jumped at the chance, but others had vehemently rejected the offer, choosing to make their own way in the world instead. Because Convoy Twelve’s crew rotated, there were fewer than fifty clones aboard at any given time.

Vanhi didn’t know what job Kexin had originally been intended to perform, but she suspected it wasn’t security.

She’s been repurposed, too.

Kexin, like the other new crew aboard, had spent the past month in final training, and today would be their first shot at the real thing.

The seat on Vanhi’s right was occupied by a man with a deep brown tan. She glanced at his badge, trying to discern what position he’d come to fill.

Noticing her side-eyeing him, he made small talk when their glances met. “I like your, uh—” He pointed at the sundial. “What is that?”

She smiled secretly to herself. “A gag gift.”

“It’s nice.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m Stone—Stone Mendez Perez.”

“Vanhi Kapoor.”

“I know,” he said sheepishly. Vanhi wasn’t surprised at his admission or shyness—it wasn’t like the Planet United Mission heads weren’t paraded across the news every other month. It had taken some time to come to grips with her newfound celebrity, and luckily she was able to escape a lot of the global fame out here in space. Still, there was something about Stone’s manner that wasn’t simply “star shock,” but she couldn’t quite place it.

“I, uh, saw your ship dedication speech on the Moon,” Stone continued. “It’s why I applied for the remote-piloting job.”

Her stomach shriveled. “That’s—that’s great,” she said, trying to sound chipper, sure the words rang as hollow as they felt. It’d been years, and still the memory of that day was sour in her mind. “Where, uh, where are you from?”

“Originally? Puerto Rico.”

“How was the trip from Earth?”

He looked up at the shuttle ceiling and smiled a little.

“First extended space stay?” she asked knowingly.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Used to think I was hard to impress. Then I saw Jupiter.”

She smiled as the lighting shifted in the docking bay, yellow warning beacons flashing as the hangar decompressed.

When the exterior doors opened, three shuttles gently lifted away, carrying their passengers out into the dead silence of space.

The three convoy ships hung like fat insects hovering over a bottomless pit. Starlight dimly reflected off the portions of hull not directly illuminated by windows or exterior safety lamps. Sol was a cool pinprick in the distance, unobscured.

The housing ship, Pulse, was the most balloon-like of the ships, almost like a dirigible, save for the twinkle-light pattern of windows forming a multitude of great lines down its sides. It had been designed to hold tens of thousands of people, but less than fifteen hundred—consisting of crew and crew families—now called it home. Most of the interior rooms had been repurposed as command centers and supply storage.

Breath was the second ship, a long, thin bar, with dumbbell-like protuberances on either end. The center section was lined with giant windows for directly observing the experiment pods, and antennae and sensor towers stuck out of it in a haphazard-looking fashion. One dumbbell end contained the docking bay, the other was the experiment launch point.

The final ship, Life, was more of a warehouse than anything, and had a boxy shipping container quality. Fitting, as it stored the components for the experimental devices, the pod shells, and the mini-SD drives. “Mini-drives” was a misnomer to challenge all misnomers. While the SD drives that powered the convoy ships were the size of small office buildings, these were still the size of a studio apartment, the pods themselves matching single-family homes for square footage.

As the shuttle approached Breath’s docking platform, Vanhi caught sight of the resupply ship out of the corner of one window. It had originally been intended as the garden ship for Convoy Twelve, now, too, repurposed. It slid slowly away, putting enough distance between itself and the convoy to turn on its own SD drive for the brief jaunt back to Earth.

Bye, Swara. Safe journey.

She suppressed an impulse to wave at the ship, not wanting to seem silly in front of the new recruits.

Docking went smoothly, as did badge-check and equipment dispersal.

While the new hires lingered to unload their gear, Vanhi beelined for the breakroom, where she prepared a cup of oolong. Taking a deep breath, she savored a calm moment before the workday began.

The new crew members would be finding their stations in the mission control room now, settling in. Everything felt fresh, hopeful.

Today, she told herself, today we’ll sink a pod into a new SD.

After preparing herself a second cup, she hurried to the mission control room, angling for her station in front of the curved windows, eager to stare out into their testing ground for a moment before beginning.

One hundred and fifty-eight crew members worked mission control, either in the official control room, or in backrooms for supplementary support. The primary mission control room was also known as the Experiment Observations Lounge, the EOL, and it was stuffed to the brim with staffers working side by side at crowded console banks spanning across seven terraced platforms. The room was curved, much like an amphitheater, and the platforms provided a stadium-like view of the outer windows.

The ship’s long inner hall also sported a bay of tall windows, allowing special visitors to watch as a launch commenced.

The flight director’s platform jutted out from the right side of the room, and gave Vanhi an excellent vantage point for observing her staff and the experiment field. Opposite her station, on the left wall, were several projections of various readouts.

As she took her seat, Vanhi dialed her chip phone into the “loops.” This would let her communicate with any member of mission control directly at any time.

Once everyone was settled, she checked in with her newest crew members, including the shift’s pod attitude determination and control officer—Stone Mendez Perez, the man who’d commented on her sundial. He would control the pod like a drone, directing its flight pattern to the testing ground, then retrieving it if and when it reemerged from an SD.