HiveArk

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. I, for one, know that not to be true. At least, I know I heard my mother’s. The others say I was just imagining sound to match the horror and fear I saw on her face when it happened. But I swear I heard her, and the echo of the memory still haunts me.

It’s 67:07 and I just woke up in another cold sweat, with the last sound of her voice reverberating in my soul. I shiver and pull my shiny silver blanket to my chin. My bunk on NouveauArk is a standard one-bed dormitory. The same one everyone else has, if they sleep alone. We’re told, even the Captain’s quarters are like this.

The space is limited to ‘sleep need only’ so it is incredibly tight. I may have enough room to extend my arms straight above me, or to sit up and not hit my head. I know from my friend, Cheynillena, that the interior bunks are pitch black at “night”. Due to my condition, I was given a bunk in an exterior facing pod, so when the faux-planet rotates, I catch a glimpse of our suns. The ship’s doctors thought it would make me feel less claustrophobic, but even years later, I still have to have them refill the pill bottle I keep in the wall pouch next to my pillow. I hate it here but I understand - they had to make it this way to evacuate everyone. This room feels more like a coffin than a home, but it is the only place I can call mine, and most days I figure it’s better than living out whatever time was left on our dying planet.

I was nine-years-old when we launched. They sent us up in one of the many Blast-Ships, holding 1,000 Pointiuens each. Now we’ve been here for what could be considered the measure of a decade. Time and days are not the same in space though.

The Ark was supposed to be state-of-the-art. I guess it was the best they could do in this scale for the time they had to complete it. They built it in space, massive portion after massive portion. I remember watching the news of its progress from the Foodsive, the room where we always ate our meals. A new portion would be completed in a mount’s time. They were usually ahead of schedule. The structure was beginning to take its full form, a global hive.

The news never failed to make me lose my appetite. It wasn’t just the thought of blasting off into the unknown to live in the massive artificial planet showing, more than half-built on screen, or the frightening passage from planet surface to Ark, but also the accompanying scenes of destruction on planet, which we were aiming to escape. Droughts in some places, floods in others. The planet was burning and drowning and swallowing our species and all the others whole in the process.

I learned in my 5th-year-compulsory education that this happened to the nearest inhabited planet to our own. Our tech gave us the visibility to see what happened to them. They killed their planet, and even though some lived in small space stations, everyone on surface, perished. Our leaders, in similar fashion to Earteth.23’s seemed unwilling or unable to effectively alter the path we were traveling towards planet destruction, but they did build the Ark. Some of us think the government and corporations chose Ark building over planet restoration for control of the people and profits. It was better to take the money for a massive build than alter their ways to avoid polluting.

I lay on my side now, my knees tucked to my chest. I am staring out the bulbous plexall-glass at the head of my bed-bunk. It’s dark again, the suns have moved out of my view. I look at the neon orange glow of the clock. In 30.09’s time, the artificial day will start. I’m always counting down the night until the day and every day starts the same. A tone will sound alerting me that I should get dressed in my shiny coveralls and :15.5 later my bed will slide into a communal area and turn lateral for my exit into section 607 life. Artificial gravity will mean I have to climb down a ladder to the base level of the cylindrical hive.

Like the escape pod Blast-ship that brought us here, section 607 holds space for 1,000 of us. But there’s only 987 in this pod at last count. Less a few of the elderly who have passed in the last 10 years and of course, less my mother. I remember it like yesterday, every morning when I’m jolted awake by the memory of her scream. Doctor Zellian says it’s normal for trauma to haunt you this way.

We were the last ship of the day, and the airlock-link had some mechanical issues. They were only transferring 1 at a time. It was an incredibly slow and inefficient method for such a well laid planetary escape. I had no idea this wasn’t the normal way, but I think my mother must have known. We had all passed through the double seal doors, only my mother was left in the ship. She had seen to it that everyone moved across before her.

“No good deed goes unpunished” as they say. She had made it nearly to our end of the airlock tunnel when the latch released. I know I heard her cry out as she slipped away into the vastness, her eyes wide with panic and pain. She knew I would have to grow up here alone.

In the days and years afterwards, I observed hundreds more transfers to the nearby hive tunnels. I have seen what it should have looked like and I have seen it go wrong, but nothing like what happened to mom. I have seen their negligence though and carelessness too. The deceased “buried” unceremoniously via ejection into space, like garbage. I have seen tragedy and pain. They don’t care about us as individuals - we are numbers to them. I almost wonder if we should have just stayed behind on our doomed planet. At least there we would have our dignity.

In 21:78’s the artificial day will begin. We will line up and file to our various jobs throughout the Ark. Some will manufacture clothing for the 3,000,000 souls on board or replacement parts for the many pieces that will wear out and need fixing on the Ark. Some will work in the Medicroom. I have been trained in the Foodsive. I will prepare nutritives and help feed the masses of the food we’ve grown and harvested in an artificial greenhouse. It’s a well laid survival and I am a cog in the same machine that cost me my mother. I will go to work like everyone else. But what they don’t know is, I am not like everyone else. My job is not the only thing I am working on here.