[Issue 2024.68]

‘Escape Choice’, Emma Burnett

Art © 2024 Cécile Matthey

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Dear Dr Baek,

We regret to inform you that there has been an incident with Max at school today during our mandatory evacuation drill.

Max will be required to stay after school tomorrow to repeat the drill, and we feel we need to meet with you to ensure this behaviour is taken seriously for everyone’s safety.

Yours in voyage,

Maresa Lehrer

---

Max glanced at his mother’s face. She had that line between her eyebrows, which sometimes meant that she was thinking, and sometimes meant she was annoyed. He looked briefly at his teacher, sitting across from them. Her face was too blank for him to interpret.

He looked out the window and started counting stars that looked blue.

“Max, it would help if you engaged in the conversation.” His teacher, Maresa, had asked something and wanted an answer.

He muttered, “I hate the escape pods.”

“Yes, you’ve said that,” his teacher said.

“I don’t like getting into them. They have no alone space and they’re too noisy. People touch me.” He glanced at his mother. She nodded with what he thought might be encouragement. “They have no bathrooms.”

“There’s a flip-out toilet in each one.”

“It’s not private.” He looked back out the window. “I don’t like them, is all.”

“But… that doesn’t matter. You’re not supposed to like them. If there’s an emergency, no one’s particularly going to like them, are they?”

“All the other kids like the drills, though. I don’t.”

His teacher took a breath to reply, but his mother cut across her. “I really don’t think this is helping,” she said. “We’ve been trying to work through this for years. He’s always had a problem with chaotic spaces.”

Max hated when people talked about him while he was in the room, but they did it a lot. He crossed his legs on the chair and fidgeted with his fingernails, picking harder when their voices started to rise.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think you’re dealing with this the right way,” his mother snapped.

Maresa’s face wasn’t blank anymore, and her voice was edging towards the volume she used in a busy class. “Yeah, well, maybe I’m not cut out for this!”

“Maresa, you signed up for the job.”

“I signed up to help teach half a dozen kids, ten years ago. No one predicted this bumper crop of kids.” She looked down at her desk for a moment. “I didn’t realise what I was signing on to.”

“There’s another option.”

“Oh, come on. You know I’m a bad candidate for cryosleep. We both are. All those complications with people under thirty, and now,” she gestured at Max. “It’s not like we can go to sleep and leave them. I get that I’m not the ship’s best teacher. I’m a road planner. I’ll be properly useful when we arrive. But I’m trying, here.”

Max was getting restless. The office was too bright, the chair’s fabric too creaky. The adults were too loud, and anyway, he didn’t like listening to them argue. He wanted to be in his quiet, tidy room.

Something moved across the window, blocking his view of the stars. He stared for a moment, then uncrossed his legs and walked to the window. He suddenly wished he could be the person blocking his view, and he touched his forehead to the glass.

“I want to do that,” he said loudly. He pointed at the window, at the person doing a hull inspection. His mother and teacher looked at him, confused. “I want to be out there, where it’s quiet. If I take care of our home, I’ll never have to get in an emergency escape pod.”

“But,” his mother said, “But, Max, I’m a scientist.”

“So?” His forehead scrunched.

“So, I… I just assumed you’d, you know, work with plants. Like me.”

Max felt his stomach tighten. His mother worked in a busy laboratory. There were sharp smells and bright lights in there, and lots of people with elbows that bumped you. “Do I have to do what you do?”

“I never thought about it. I guess, maybe not?”

Maresa stared at Max for a moment, face unreadable again. Then she nodded. “Hmm. That’s an idea, Max. I will talk to maintenance, find out what training you need to do in order to work with them.” She smiled. “We need ship caretakers. It’s a long journey.”

---

Dear Max and Dr Baek,

Keeping you both in the loop. As you know, Max’s training finished last week, but we can’t offer him a position until he’s prepared to do regular spacewalks. We’d like him to join the team, but he’ll have to suit up and go out.

Max, we’d be excited to have you on the team. Please let me know your decision.

Best,

Wayan

---

Max was relieved to be done with a busy day and away from the crowded cargo hold. The day had been full of people talking and bustling around him. It had been draining.

He leaned a hip against the countertop in the little kitchen he and his mother shared, stirring the gently simmering sauce. He wished she would let him concentrate.

“This is what you wanted, Max. You trained for it.” He thought she sounded frustrated.

The timer rang, and he turned off the cooker. He poured the noodles and vegetables, picked fresh from the ship’s gardens, into the sauce. Then he mixed everything gently together.

“Dinner will be ready in two minutes.” He glanced at his mother’s hands. There was vermiculite under her fingernails. “Wash.” He pointed towards the bathroom. She tutted, but went.

He took a deep breath in the suddenly quiet room and stared at the countertop. He counted flecks of red in the moulded plastic. Once he’d reached twenty, he started to pull out plates and cutlery, two glasses and a bottle of cold water.

“You love being out there,” his mother said, coming back into the kitchen, wiping her hands on her trousers. He was tempted to tell her to wash them again, but tried to pretend he hadn’t noticed. “You’ve wanted to work with the exterior maintenance team since you were little.”

The folds around her mouth meant uncertainty, that she didn’t understand.

He put on his thinking face and tried to order his thoughts. She didn’t rush him. They laid the table and sat down.

He stared into his plate for a moment, then said, “I do want to be out there. It’s beautiful. And so quiet. It’s easy to focus.”

“So, what’s the problem, then?”

He wished she didn’t sound so aggressive. It made it hard to find the words to explain.

“There’s no shitguard.”

“I… What?” she asked, around a mouthful of noodles.

“The EVA suits don’t have shitguards to absorb cosmic radiation. The ship does. The emergency shuttles do. Even the cryosleepers have shitguards, in case of emergency evac. It’s part of the waste system, but it also protects us. It’s not right that the maintenance crew don’t have protection.” The noodles were soft and flavourful, the vegetables just slightly crunchy. He chewed, satisfied. “I think it’s fair. I don’t want to walk out into space and immediately get irradiated.”

She frowned. “Have you raised it with your boss?”

“I did, yeah. He said a shitguard would make the suits too bulky.” Max took another bite. It had taken a long time to get used to combined textures, but now he loved it. “I think he was blowing me off.”

“Right,” she said. Max waited for her annoyance to bubble over. Although she tried to stay calm, his mother often told him to stop whatabouting and just get on with things. He’d mostly stopped trying to explain that his whatabouts were important to him. “So, what are you going to do?”

He looked at her in surprise, and nearly burst into tears as a rush of gratitude welled up.

“I guess, maybe I could talk to Wayan about doing more training inside the ship. There’re all sorts of internal maintenance things I don’t know. Maybe I could learn more about navigation, too. I was talking to one of the trainees, Kaley, about it.”

“Oh, yes?” His mother smiled.

He looked back down. “We talked. She was nice. Also, I was wondering if maybe you could show me around your lab?”

“You know I’d love to. But why?”

“Well, I have some thoughts about the EVA suits, how to develop an algae shield, maybe? Thicker cell walls or something? I thought, maybe you could help me.”

His mother smiled, and reached across the table to touch his hand briefly, before he could pull away. “I’d be delighted. You know I’ve always wanted to get you involved in my plants.”

---

FFS, Max, you can’t be serious about staying. The ship will be fine by itself. It doesn’t need a crew. It’ll be in geosynchronous orbit. Besides, you’d be alone up here, for, like, ever.

Don’t be an idiot.

Kaley

---

Max hung from the ship. He could feel the safety cord anchoring him, but otherwise he drifted in the nothingness. His comms were turned off, so he couldn’t hear any chatter on the line. No one would ping him unless it was an emergency.

He stared at the planet below.

They had arrived over a month ago, spent weeks scanning, sending scouting missions, making sure the calculations from decades before were correct. His mother had gone down with one of the early groups, to start off the farms they’d need in order to support the ship’s residents. Her messages sounded excited. Max missed her but had absolutely no interest in joining. The planet looked foreign to him, and he wasn’t into it. He’d been born on this ship. It was his home, and he wasn’t planning to go anywhere.

He looked back at the booster he was fixing. The weld looked solid, and the readouts were good. He moved back towards the airlock.

Once inside, he drained the algae from the suit. It sloshed back into the vat, lit by growlights. He liked to think it was happy to be home after the excitement of going out.

Then he put on his headphones. The ship was busy, full of bustling people packing up their lives, getting ready to start a new one. It was noisy, chaotic. He’d taken to wearing the headphones whenever he was in the corridors, dulling the echoing noises. People assumed he was listening to something and left him alone.

He checked his to-do list. Broken food court dispenser. Unlikely to be quiet there. Leaky sink. That’d be easy and he could lock the bathroom door. Perfect. Max turned a corner and nearly ran into Kaley. She gestured for him to remove his headphones.

“Hey,” he said.

“Jackass.” It was a response, though not the one he’d hoped for. She leaned in and kissed him briefly. “You know, you wouldn’t need those headphones if you just did your EVAs and then came back to my quarters.”

He shrugged. “There’re things to do. Plus, I won’t need them when the ship is empty. When everyone else is planetside, it’ll be calm. Quiet.”

Kaley’s face was hard to read, but he thought he detected anger. She was good at hiding her emotions, though, and he sometimes struggled to guess. He’d asked her before to tell him outright, but he wasn’t sure this was the right moment to remind her.

She turned and started walking. Max decided he was supposed to follow her, so he tucked his pad into a pocket and fell into step next to her.

“You’re not actually serious, right? Like, for real?” she asked.

“I mean. Yeah, I am. We’ve talked about this before. It’s what I want to do.”

“I don’t get why you get to make this decision, though.” She was storming down the corridor. She pushed past people, and a few of them stared after her. Max tried to look apologetic. “You’re choosing for both of us. We are supposed to be partners.”

Max hurried after her. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry I’m your partner?” She took a left and opened the door to her rooms. He followed her in.

“I… no?” He paused to think, stared at a spot on the wall. “I’m sorry we want different things.”

“You don’t seem to care what I want. This is all about you.”

Max felt this was unfair. Her perspective was all about her, after all. He had suggested that Kaley stay up here, at least for a while. She could manage the satellite launches that would support the new planet’s comms system, work with the ground crew on continuing to unload the huge amounts of supplies still in storage on board. Kaley wasn’t interested.

Max didn’t want to have this argument again, so he shrugged.

“No one else thinks you should stay here, either. Not your mother…”

“Actually, I think she’s ok with it, now she knows we can talk on messages,” he said. “I got a message from her…”

“Don’t interrupt me. Maybe she says it’s fine, but I doubt it. And the rest of the crew think it’s crazy. You’re separating yourself from everyone. It’s not normal.” She prodded him with a finger. “Hey! Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

He made eye contact for a moment, then looked away again. It was too much, trying to think and look at her.

Max wished he had the words to convince her, to convince everyone, that he was making the right decision for himself, but in the end, he didn’t have to. This was what he wanted to do. It felt right to him, and they didn’t have to agree.

“Look, the ship is going to be parked, but it needs someone to make sure things are ok. Like, today, I was outside, did a fix on one of the boosters, which could have died and the whole ship might have careened down to the planet. Or last week, I mended the water link to the biodome. Without it we’d have no seedbank. Or…”

“Yeah, fine, whatever.” She kicked the wall, and Max briefly felt annoyed. He’d just been talking about mending the ship. He guessed that’s why she’d done it.

“You could stay?” Max tried again.

“No, I couldn’t.” Kaley’s face had gone unreadable. “And I don’t want to. Everyone is going down. We’re waking the last of the cryos today. It’s all kicking off.”

Max tried not to make a face. He wasn’t looking forward to even more people bustling round the ship. At least it would be temporary.

“This is what our parents set out to do. It’s what we’ve been raised to expect. Brave new worlds and everything. I want to be part of that.” She stared at him for a moment. “You just don’t get it, do you?”

Max shook his head. “No. But I don’t think you get where I’m coming from, either. This is my home, it’s where I belong. You know I used to get upset when they’d make us pretend to emergency evac? It’s gonna be chaos down there. You say that’s what you want, to be part of all that. But I don’t. I want to be somewhere calm. Somewhere I feel safe. I’d like that to be with you, but if it’s not…”

“Fine.”

It sounded like a very final response.

“Maybe we can keep talking, though? You could tell me how it’s all going down there?”

She shrugged and turned away. Max thought this was fury, though it might be sadness.

He felt sad, too. He knew it would be a lot of change for both of them. They’d been together since she’d taught him about the ship’s navigation. But he hoped that she’d find new, satisfying work down on the planet, find the kind of relationship that worked for her. Because he felt good about his choice to stay and maintain the ship, and keep doing research on things that mattered to him.

His pad pinged from his pocket. He pulled it out and looked down. Drama in the cryoroom. He looked up at Kaley, but she still had her back to him. It was a clear signal.

Max put his headphones back on, and left the room.

He would miss her. And his mother. And so many others. But, really, he was looking forward to just being here, being himself, in the deep quiet.

---

Heya mum,

Yep, I got the data you sent—your adapted plants are looking amazing! I’ve got a new strain of algae going, working on one that’s transparent when it’s not photosynthesising. I’ll send more info soon.

Also, I’ve been watching the roads getting laid out from up here. NGL they don’t make sense to me, but I’m sure Maresa knows what she’s doing.

Had another satellite launcher failure, but it’s under control now. Good times.

Love to everyone (esp. Kaley. I don’t think she’s ready to talk, but maybe pass it along?)

M

© 2024 Emma Burnett

[Issue 2024.68]

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