Mission One

Chapter 1: Jasmine & Cedar

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But I did. I do. All the time. The screaming never stops. When I adjust my focus, the muted screaming still fills the background noise to my thoughts, a constant reminder of a choice.

I breathe in deeply, filling my lungs and pushing my diaphragm down to ignite my vegus nerve in the hopes of slowing a racing heartbeat. My heart slows to a regular pace and I breathe in another breath of jasmine and cedar scented oxygen through my CLT, attached only recently and reluctantly. Oh, but the smell is so much better now, and my thoughts are able to shift to the task at hand.

The addition of Customized scents to our Life Tubes was the final tipping point, leading me to allow the procedure to take place. It's short, but painful at the injection site as the Nano-life-formers are introduced at the base of the spine. The entire process takes about 24 hours as the NLFs create a half "me" and half "them" tube, connecting at key, overlapping points along the endocrine, nervous, circulatory, and digestive systems in the body. While the entire NLF process took only 24 hours, my choice of jasmine and cedar as my customized scent, took a solid week.

I sat in the scent room for hours smelling each option and weighing my choices. My assigned life facilitator checks in on me once every 5-10 years to adjust my dosages and add system upgrades as needed. This means that I would be stuck with my scent for at least 5 years. I wanted something that wouldn't turn out to be worse than the stale, dead air I was currently suffocating in. Some of the others chose fruit smells like strawberry or peach. The thought of that made my stomach turn. It seemed like torture to smell something you could never eat. The sweetness would turn into a sort of poisoned taunt as you ate your pre-apportioned, protein-filled ration. Some chose a salty sea breeze to remind them of their windy seaside origins. This I could understand, but I wasn't a lover of the sea. I was a lover of the earth. When I clicked on the jasmine smell in the scent room, I was immediately transported to my grandmothers home in the before-times California. Her yard was outlined with jasmine bushes and when they were in bloom, I was in heaven. I would set up a lawn chair right next to the edge corner of the front yard and breathe in the smell of the jasmine and listen to the bees buzzing from bloom to bloom. It was the first scent I clung to. Days later, when I finally clicked on the cedar smell, I felt my grandfathers arm around me as he would dig through his big cedar chest and find old memorabilia and regale me with stories of the good old days. Yes, those were the memories I wanted to hold on to, the future I was on a mission to create. Jasmine and Cedar would keep me grounded, while floating in space.

At first only those deemed essential workers, or those that kept the ship running, such as the specially trained mechanical engineers, a select number of level 2 through 4 life facilitators, were injected with the LTs to keep the systems running over the long haul, insuring the success of the mission. The rest of us were in a deep sleep state, monitored by a complex computer algorithm that would freeze our development, while continuing to properly nourish and stimulate our nervous system, and muscles avoiding atrophy and brain function loss. The designers didn't have a customization option for the LTs when the ship launched. It was something we developed later.

The ship had been designed to replicate the seasons, days and nights as they would have been experienced in one of the temperate zones on earth. This was originally designed to amplify the mental health of the essential workers as they would be the only conscious life-forms on the ship on the 500 year journey. The 144 pod cohort sections, each with 40 members, were kept in a constant state, mimicking the sounds and temperature of a mother's womb.

The essential workers kept the ship running smoothly for 7 years into the mission, before a section of the deep sleep support system failed, awakening 40 of us, an entire cohort, with slim chances of coming back online during our natural lifetimes.

Within days, the deep thumping and maternal whooshing in our cohort environment was driving even the calmest of the 40, nutty. So, one of the first things we did after the awakening was to expand the earth-like environmental pattern from the below decks to take over the original programming. In a matter of days we were back to a semi-normal state of functioning.

The lucky 40, or unlucky, as many of us might argue, spent the first 6 months after the system failure working on solution after solution with no useful options. There was one time we thought we had a smaller section of our pod-cohort up and working. Three brave souls volunteered to hook themselves up to the newly working pods. Assured that we had a fail-safe in place in case of another system failure, we went through the steps to get them properly integrated. With nourishing, waste and neuro-stimulation tubes firmly secured and health certifications completed by the two awakened level 5 life facilitators, each of the three was ceremoniously given a dram of the sleeping solution and secured into their pods. If this worked, we could apply our lessons learned to the rest of the pods either pod by pod or in small groups. Every one of us, all selected for our keen abilities in problem solving, critical thinking, creativity and decision making agreed to move forward.

For 3 years it worked and we celebrated, by doing exactly what we had agreed. Apply what we learned and get the rest of us under, to complete our journey to EHA24. Six additional groups of three were added to the updated pods leaving us with 16 left to process. These 16 included myself, a climate scientist, known for speaking out early against the One New World forum and their corrupt acts against the future of our only Earth, but a late recruit to the underground project to settle and terraform a distant planet found 30 years prior, called EHA24, two level 5 life facilitators, four biologists of various specialties, two programmers, two structural & mechanical engineers, one quantum physicist, one architect, a noted philosopher-poet, one educational specialist and a political scientist.

We spent most of our days working to ensure that the processes we had updated were aligning properly to the master algorithm and maintaining a close watch on the 21 souls we had subjected to our experiment. We enjoyed three balanced meals per day, that were strategically pulled from the rations originally planned for the final 3 years of the mission. We tried to keep our power usage to a minimum so that the essentials in the lower decks weren't having to work harder than necessary and to make sure we had more than enough for our final terraforming and landing parties. I was especially thankful for the unlimited library available in the learning level and spent many of my days reading and engaged in conversation with a few of the others on topics ranging from classical fiction to climatology and the human experience. There were a few minor romances that sprung from the close quarter living we found ourselves in, but they stayed light and manageable, mainly a result of boredom and loneliness. A fight once broke out between the group of biologists, of all things, but was settled and we all moved on. For the most part, it was a gentle existence with an unspoken edge of unease that we all found our own unique ways to ignore.

It was at the end of the 3rd year in the winter-state, around Earth-Christmas that it happened. There wasn't a large beeping or an alarm. The the pods just began shutting down, one by one, more quickly than we could manage. We were lucky to even notice, except that one of our teams of three was taking part in a routine round reviewing vitals and algorithmic alignment. The equipment just stopped as though a plug had been pulled from a wall outlet. Robert, the biologist in his team, immediately called in, "Mayday! Mayday! We've got a system failure in pod section 8! We need you guys here now!" There was a mad rush to meet the group. On our way down we noticed other vital indicators dropping and dispersed as best we could to gain control over the situation. As we attended to one, another across the cohort would begin to fail and we'd have to split our resources to try and stem the damage. We called down to the essentials to send their best engineers and programmer to the upper levels to help out. With this many minds, there had to be a fix, but there wasn't. No matter what we did the 21 pods out of the original 40 that failed 7 years in, just seemed to sputter out. The life facilitators were able to resuscitate 10 of those who had volunteered, including 2 of the original 3. It took 12 weeks for them to recover after detailed attention by multiple life facilitators. It was after they were re-introduced into the rest of our company that we began to notice the change.

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