First Entrance

[just_a_chemical]

[previously: Morning in Rapture. Contents include little girls brainwashed to drain fluids from corpses, as well as some who aren't quite dead yet; also dysfunctional family relationships, also injectables.]

Here come two more life forms, Enterprise. One you can't see: it's internal. Girls have their secrets. Don't you pay it any mind.

The one you can see is a lanky teenager, almost six feet tall, barefoot, wearing what looks like a 1940s nightgown (her little white sacrificial-victim dress), and carrying a book and a foil-wrapped pep bar.

This obviously wasn't where she expected to end up. She'd been headed into her room, where the quarantine door would lock behind her and she'd lie there pretending to read until the sickness subsided. Process all these new memories in peace, but this--

Either it's a very bad reaction to her latest treatment, or she's suffering a relapse in her mental conditioning, or... or she's suddenly in another place.

She's not sure which option is worse.

Comments

[splendid_roman]

He smiled and shook his head. "Not really. There have been a few rockets America and Russia have been sending up into space, but that's about it. I think they'd have managed spaceships eventually, though."

[just_a_chemical]

"I've heard about rockets," she says. "They had them toward the end of the war, didn't they? Not into space, though. Not all the way up."

But they have stories of people going into space. The sort of exceptional rugged-individualist types that her city favored.

"And now here we are, in the future."

[splendid_roman]

He nodded. "I'd love to know how we got from rockets to spaceships like this." It was long enough that it probably wasn't that big a jump, but it felt like it.

[just_a_chemical]

"Trial and error," she says. "Probably a lot of error--which there's not likely much margin for, not in space."

Even less than there is on the ocean floor. People are fragile, and they need a habitable environment. And there's relatively little between them and the void of space here, same as there's not much separating the people of her city from the pressure of the ocean.

[splendid_roman]

He nodded. "No, there's not. I hope not too many people died." He couldn't imagine that no one did. It would be so easy too - just a little hole and then no more breathable air.

[just_a_chemical]

Pressure wants to equalize. Give it the smallest chance, and it'll find a way.

"I hope they've fixed all of that by now--not the vacuum, but put systems in place, backups and emergency equipment and whatever else they need. This place seems so big, though--the way the outer wall is curved, it's like it's part of a circle. If it's an entire circle, it's a very, very big one."

[splendid_roman]

"They must have tested it thoroughly or they wouldn't let this many people on a ship this size so far from anywhere." Or at least he hoped they had. "It's probably best not to think about it too much."

[just_a_chemical]

"This doesn't look experimental. It looks like... like fairly far along the process of design evolution. So it's probably quite safe."

Unless they just put all their resources into making it look very good on the inside, which she doubts. Look at her city's bathysphere industry--no matter how many luxuries a designer puts in, how fine the seat-leather is, how rich the sound from the radio speakers, the wealthy weren't going to buy them if they thought they'd leak. Or explode.