Authors Note: While the name of this story implies that it may be similar to the other story I wrote, which was sci-fi/horror, this one is not like that one at all. This one is more a reflection by someone, who’d rather be stranded alone in her space than be a part of the world as she knows it.
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Earth Date: 0927 Hours, December 30th 2165
Station: Eirene
Personnel: Captain Europa “Eura” Vance
Entry As Follows…
Dear diary, no I guess I shouldn’t start it like that. That’s how I might’ve started one of these when I was a kid, but, I’m not. This is Captain Eura Vance of Space Station Eirene, and I’m recording some personal thoughts for permanent record, in the event that…I don’t know, I get fired? No that’s not it, in the event I can’t just keep living here. I wanted someone, somewhere to know that it wasn’t my choice.
I’ve been stationed here on Eirene for nearly a year, and I’m scheduled to return to Earth tomorrow, or at least…I would have, if I had left about a month ago like I was supposed to. If you’re reading this, well I guess by now you’d know that I didn’t. I’ve turned off my radio communication with Earth also. They’re probably panicking down there, or they don’t care. Not many people on these stations even still talk to Earth. Most report to command on Station Zeus, the “father” station, and easily our largest and what most people would say is the “most successful”. Thousands of years of evolution and progress and we still think success means bigger and better. I just got so sick of hearing from them.
I know it’s hard to be alone, anyone who goes on a solo mission knows that. We’ve all been extremely well educated in the field of astro-psychology, and they give us basically entire pharmacies and say they trust us to use them with discretion. I’ve got everything from green tea to heroin in my medicine cabinet. Obviously I’m smart enough to know what to take and when, but damn they’re so willing to spend a bunch of money and call it good. More money spent means bigger and better and more successful to them. I just can’t take it anymore.
More people should spend time alone. Not necessarily full sectors away from Earth, or Station Zeus, but there’s no room left for people to be alone in those places. Station Zeus is basically a big city in space, and it’s awful. I had to be sent up there for acclimation measures, which I luckily exceeded at, but imagine New York City in the early 2000’s, but with a million more people, and no central park. If that sounds okay to you, then you’d better just stop reading, because you won’t like what I have to say. I think people who live like sardines are no better than sardines. You need to be alone sometimes, and the only place to be alone is in your own room in your living quarters, sorry “spacepartment”. They got away with re-branding military minimal living quarters, and selling them to people for millions of dollars.
Of course, money doesn’t really mean anything anymore either. I’m honestly not sure why we even still have it. I guess to keep people down on Earth, even though there’s more than enough room up here in the stars, or on our other planetary settlements. Money stopped mattering when Alphonse Beritellucci, an early successful asteroid miner brought back 25 million carats worth of diamonds, yeah worth over a half a trillion dollars. It broke the market, and scientists finally realized and accepted that in an infinite, expanding universe, our resources were infinite too.
I’m amazed we didn’t discover that sooner, but people were so averse to eliminating human labor back in the early 2010’s that how would economists have eaten then, if we told them scarcity isn’t real in an expanding universe? I mean, from what I’ve read it seems like a lot of people were worried about eating back then. Did you know there were people in America without clean water at the time? And that people used to charge people for water? I can’t even imagine. There’s an infinite supply of water from comets, of which there are millions. There’s enough water in our universe for every human being to have 100 million metric tons, and people used to charge money for water. It blows my mind. The people on Station Zeus still talk about money like it means something. They need some way to compare themselves to other people, but don’t ever bother comparing things like their wisdom, insightfulness, or happiness.
Anyway, things used to be just supremely fucked up for humankind, and in some ways, still are. I was supposed to go home, to see my family for the new year, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I don’t want to see how we’ve ruined our original home. Any astronaut will tell you, “there’s no place like Earth”, which of course objectively is a lie, there are infinite planets that resemble our Earth, but what they mean is, “there’s no place like home”, and we’re right about that.
There’s also an older saying, “home is where the heart is”, but most people don’t know what it means to have heart. People used to think it had to do with having strong convictions and believing in things. People used to think it meant, be with people you love and wherever you are is home. Everyone was wrong. See the problem with using sayings like that, is they came from the past, so you apply them to the past. Each of those statements are are about identifying where home is, either by a reflection of the past that lead you there, or by analyzing your present moment. But saying and learning should be applied to the future.
Human beings have always been obsessed with the past, and history, which I think is weird. I know, I know, history repeats itself, and if you don’t look at where you’ve been you can’t understand where you are and how you got there. But have you ever considered that those things don’t matter? I mean, not that they’re unimportant, but that those saying were made up to keep people thinking that?
History repeats itself. That’s a factual statement, or the saying, if you don’t learn from history you’re doomed to repeat it, that’s a statement. But, humans have studies history for over a thousand years, and still keep repeating it. You want to know why? In my time alone, not valuing history, I’ve learned. Because you do what you know. If you know how history played out, then that’s what you’ll do, because you can’t start something new when building on the blocks of something old.
That’s why I jumped at the opportunity to do a solo mission so far away from everything. See, the purpose of my assignment here on Station Eirene, well you probably know they named the stations after Greek gods for whatever reason, see we can’t even get new and original names… anyway, Eirene was the personification of peace, and so I’m here, sending out signals, or at least supposed to be, to tell other life forms that we’re peaceful.
They could’ve had a robot do this job, it’s so easy to sit here and send signals, I mean most of the time when I was doing my job I’d press a blue button on the console once every hour or so, and set it to automate when I went to sleep. But the brass said that they wanted someone here, in case some alien race tried to make contact, so that we’d seem “personable.” Do you know the etymology behind the word “personable”? I doubt any aliens would even know what a “person” is. That’s how shortsighted most of us humans are. So I volunteered to do a useless job, just so I could be alone for a while.
It’s really hard to think of new things. I’ve been trying for a few months now, since I’ve stopped working. Sure they could send someone out, messages still take about half the travel time so if I was supposed to leave a little less than a month ago, they probably sent me transmissions that would’ve arrived right as I was shutting down my radio equipment, a couple weeks after. So they’ll send some more transmissions trying to reach me, and giving me time to fix any malfunctions. That’s probably what I’ll do in a few days, turn it back on and say it’s malfunctioning and I decided to stay out here to fix it, it’ll take another couple months, and they’ll say “roger that, over and out” and I’ll be fine.
Anyway, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what we did to Earth, and how slow we evolved as a species. We knew the universe was infinite but believed in scarcity. We knew learning history meant that what we learned was a model for us to repeat. We knew that time spent in nature increases happiness and we tore nature down. We’re very conflict driven. We seem to want things to be contentious, well, some of us at least.
Imagine a perfect day. Whatever that looks like for you. I used to read old philosophy books, maybe it’s life out in what they used to call the woods. A small cabin by a lake of water, you’d awake, go fishing, make a cup of coffee, have a nap, a stroll through the sunlight into the evening, light a fire in the hearth, and drift off to sleep. Maybe you’d rather spend the day working and inventing. Wake up, drink some energy gel, and lock yourself in your workshop, devising some new solar converter, or radiologic-neural interface, you’d come out around dinnertime covered in grease and metal filings, have a long warm bath, and doze off. Maybe you’re more future-minded, and it would be closer to my perfect day up here. Wake up, hot cup of tea, read for a little while, since I’ve stopped pressing that stupid button I’ve taken to exercising a bit, napping, gardening, walking around the station, and designing a new AI for the station, to be a sort of friend against the loneliness.
Loneliness was a big problem back in the day. People blamed it on our technology, but that was like people who tried to tell us that spaceships flew through space. People fly through space, spaceships just make it possible. People cause others loneliness, technology just made it more possible. The world got too small. People would say the world is so big, but that’s another issue of the shortsightedness of humankind. When you connect two points through what we now would call a wormhole, that creates an illusion of shrinkage. You could look at anywhere on Earth through a monitor, and it was almost exactly the same as being there yourself, except, it wasn’t. You could go anywhere on earth with an individual mini-jet, and if you wanted to fly all the way around the planet, you could, in seven and a half minutes. We made Earth so small, and we became cramped. We got shoved so close together that all we wanted to do was have a little space for ourselves, but we kept building cities and all the land everywhere was owned by someone, see that I never understood either.
With an infinite universe, who would want to own land? I mean, I’m sure there are sociopaths out there even now who want to own all of Earth and evict everyone, but I think there are sanctions against that since it’s already owned. But who really “owns” anything? I certainly don’t own this station, but I can do whatever I want here, and I don’t have to ask anyone for permission, and it doesn’t matter. If I wanted to blow the station up, I could. It’s not mine, yet I have full control over it. I guess they didn’t used to have anything like this way back though, they weren’t thinking about the future enough. They really didn’t realize what infinite meant.
We’re just starting to conceptualize slipspace, which is a way of squishing two parts of the universe closer together. I don’t know how much I understand all that, that was way more physics that I cared to learn, and more than I need to maintain this station and live a peaceful life. Guess the Eirene name is pretty suitable both for the mission, and whoever got to live here. But we’re shrinking the universe down too, and I don’t know what will happen after that.
I think being alone scares people. I think that’s why people like cities. I could never stand them. I got to grow up just outside of one, well, as far away from one as you could get, which really wasn’t that far thirty years ago. But people seemed to like being around people, even the ones that frustrate them. People love conflict. I don’t.
I’m all over the place here, sorry, I guess I’m losing by ability to hold a normal conversation. Think back to that perfect day you imagined, was there any conflict? Any problems at all? Probably not, and if there was, then why do you want conflict in your perfect day? I mean conflict, discontentedness. Not challenge, you can challenge yourself without creating conflict. Not growth, you don’t need conflict to grow. That was a major misconception a couple hundred years ago in education, and still is unfortunately. People think that kids need to struggle to grow, but that’s just not true. I had an easy enough life, breezed through school, through the space academy, through my acclimation, and in my assignment here. It helps that school is all free now, just like water it absolutely blows my mind that we used to charge people to learn.
See? History is garbage, lets stop looking at what we’ve done, erase what we have, and do something new. That’s what they did with schooling and job requirements and all that. One guy proposed a new system in which anyone could teach anyone, anything, and the hours spent learning the thing were recorded in the “U”, a device that everyone, at birth, was given. Sort of like a smart watch, but smarter and better. It recorded every hour you spent learning something, and we didn’t need degrees or formal education anymore. It also kept track of all of your health records, so no matter where you went you had all your own data right on your wrist. The biggest hurdle was a hundred years or so ago, when we had to convince people that it was better to have all your own data on your person, instead of giving it piecemeal to various sources online where it would be sold and you wouldn’t see any of the profit. That’s part of how money became meaningless too, anyone could just sell their monthly “U” data to a data aggregator who would compile reports for anyone who asked.
See, we also stopped being selfish and foolish about data. At some point it became too easy for anyone to get anything they wanted online, so people agreed, I mean some people didn’t but they were fools, to have everything be open source. Anything you wanted to be private you kept on your “U”, and anything you didn’t you sold. No one had to work at anything more than living, and so arts and culture thrived, and with everything being open source, the amount of collaboration it brought was unbelievable. That’s probably how we managed to get to space so fast, and how now robots do most of our labor. There are still people who do jobs, like me, and believe it or not there are mailpeople on Station Zeus. They work with the robots sometimes, like buddies, and if they’re sick or make plans on a given day, they just shoot a quick line of instruction to the robot to take over the whole route, and they’re good. It’s an amazing system, and I don’t know how humans lived without it.
I do get lonely sometimes, but I’d rather be alone here than a sardine on Station Zeus, and…well I don’t know about Earth. It’s been a year, and the planet was in pretty rough shape. My parents were some of the people who were resistant to the “U”, and to all the changes. They haven’t realized that people need space, and while they’ve moved about a billion or so people off-planet it’s still pretty crowded down there. Temperatures have remained constantly too warm. We managed to avoid an environmental catastrophe but we haven’t reversed the damage. Leadership wants to try dropping a large ice chunk harvested from a comet into the Arctic Ocean and see if that helps. I hear there are programmers working on the robotics to handle it now.
I love it up here. It’s quiet, or noisy when I want it to be. I can turn on the radio receiver and listen to the sounds of space. Or I can turn on basically any media content that’s ever been created. With everything being open source, I can watch or listen to whatever. One thing history did well was give us Vivaldi. If you ever get the chance to walk alone through a space station, put on Vivaldi across the whole station. It’s a combination of eerie and euphoric and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt. So big inside, but so small outside. Like I said I’m working on writing a small AI so I can talk to someone, but that’ll take me another month or so. Most of the framework is already developed, but you still have to decide on a personality and other things that people have around age six. Not a lot, but some influences help distinguish them, it’s like AI genetics and I’m the mom, I have to give it some traits, and then it’ll learn how to be pretty fast.
I don’t know that I ever want to go back, to go home. I think of this as home now. If home is where the heart is, then where will the heart be in a year? Most people would say they don’t know, or can’t tell. My heart will be in my chest, and home will be here. I don’t know how long I can lie about the radio equipment. I don’t know what will happen if I actually do receive a broadcast. People have been so fascinated by aliens like they think something magical will happen when we meet them. Given human beings love for conflict, I wouldn’t be surprised if we want to meet aliens just so we can conquer them and win the biggest intergalactic pissing contest our universe has ever seen.
I hope they’re as peaceful as me, and they look at everyone struggling and scrambling to have more than they need and always wanting something else, and say “We don’t have to fight you, you fight yourself everyday. Be happy for once, peace out.” or however they’d that in their language. Man, I hope they have a cool alien language.
Anyway, if you’re reading this, I just wanted to explain myself a little bit, in the event they figure out what’s going on and send someone to take me out of here. I’ve really grown to be at home here at Space Station Eirene, and peace certainly is the mission of this station. If you find yourself stationed here after I’m gone, maybe this will give you some peace of mind about the loneliness, or some perspective about how having some space can give you some pretty great insights. Hopefully you’ll see how pathetic it is for humans to live like sardines when we have an infinity of universe right outside our door. How they’ve sort of tricked you into thinking how you probably think, or hopefully have thought, given that you’re thinking differently now. Don’t think about your history, think about the future. Think about how to best live a happy and peaceful life, and if you don’t want to wake up every day to push a silly blue button that’s automated half the time anyway just because that’s your job, then don’t. It’s okay. I don’t blame you.
If you’ve gotten away from Station Zeus then I really hope these words get through to you. I’m sure at first you might think that I’m some crazy woman alone on a solo mission who was driven mad, but I promise, all this time clearing my mind, has made me the most sane I’ve been my whole life, and I hope the loneliness is a teacher for you too. Perhaps my AI friend will still be in the station when you’re here. Perhaps you won’t have to be as alone as I was, in order to learn what I have.
If they’ve taken me away, then try to find me. All my identification should be in the station manifest and in the Earth Space Force official records. I don’t know if I’ll be on a different station, or back on on Earth, but try to find me. Tell me that you’ve read my entry here. Tell me what you think.
Tell me who you are. Tell me what you want to learn. Tell me if you’re alone.
I don’t have all the answers, but I do have my wits about me. I’m not a sardine in a can anymore, and if you’re here… on Eirene…
You’re not a sardine in a can anymore either.
Let’s hope you’re not just a sardine now.
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