I'd lived and breathed mathematics, physics, and physical discipline my whole childhood.
I was lucky -- I loved it. Some parents try and force these disciplines onto unwilling children, desperate for the prestige and security the colonial development program offered. To me, there was nothing I'd rather be doing, and I was good at it. Serendipity.
Something the moronic bureaucrats who assess applications couldn't appreciate.
At the time, I was angry. But you can only be so angry for so long. After you're done, you can either kill yourself, or the anger goes somewhere else - and you move on.
I moved on. To excel at the work of capsule design and maintenance. Not quite as exciting and glamorous, but a life.
Still, my application must not have been totally forgotten -- or the capsule design world is longer-reaching that I thought - as of the low-level Pluto IV support units needed a final hand, and came to me.
Apart from me, it was full of younger astronauts, fresh out of academy.
So, now at the ripe-not-spoiled age of thirty-five, I was finally to head out towards the stars. I suspected the age wasn't a coincidence (though I prefer to think of it purely as a decade-late realisation of a miscarriage of judgement). It was a barely concealed secret that things had been going wrong with some of the colonial missions. The result of expanding too fast, and putting crews together fresh out of training. Personal clashes, petty politics, youthful hubris. Those kind of things.
Anyway, we didn't get particularly close to the stars, in space distance terms. Pluto IV was tasked with supporting duty on Charon, monitoring plate movements, temperatures. Lots of graphs. Still, I liked being out here, on the frontier.
So when, eighty-seven days into our five-year deployment, a frustrated second-level engineer had thrown his drink at the beautiful but aloof Second Technician Amy Black, but managed instead to hit the lighting control module and cause a small electrical fire (and sparked a resultant 03.12AM colony-wide alarm) well, it wasn't totally unexpected.
To me, at least.
It still shocks me that they don't plan for these human problems and just hope everything will work out. Just because you have roughly equal gender ratios doesn't mean everyone's going to play happy family together. But I guess if they wanted my opinions...
Our commander was only twenty-five. He was a nice enough kid, but his technical, routine-focused training hadn't really prepared him for this. Perhaps that's why the gathering he called to discuss the issue somehow included me, alongside the heads of all the separate colony functions.
We all talked around the problem. Our motley gathering of sixty-five souls hadn't strongly bonded. What lurked under that was, effectively, quasi-adolescent sexual frustration. From what I gather, they don't really discuss this at the academy, and hoped for the best. Evidently, this was a problem that there was no plan to cover.
So they made the right concerned noises, nodded, and the meeting seemed like it was heading for an awkward, conclusion-free end. Until Isabella Richter - head of medicine - made a solution.
I didn't understand the chemistry -- I'm an engineer, such things are beneath me -- but it could be summed up as inhibitors, administered weekly in the food. Kill the sex drive; kill the problem.
Isabella was a bit of an enigma. In her looks, she was stunning; the stereotypical German alpine maid, with long golden hair, blue eyes, and breasts that pulled your eyes magnetically no matter how conservatively she was dressed. Insert your own amusing gravitational anomaly simile.
We'd established something of a connection over the past few months; she seemed to seek me out for company. Maybe it was the fact that I was able to treat her as a human. She had a sharp mind, and I enjoyed her company. Perhaps she just enjoyed being away from the rest of the crew, who I suspected were quietly snide and resentful of her positions and looks.
In particular, she had this way of looking at me. Maybe that's egotism, and she looked at everyone that way. But it made me feel like she was
really
looking at me, in a way that most people don't. You either know what I'm talking about here, or you don't.
Anyway, her suggestion was greeted with somewhat embarrassed requests for more information, the meeting adjourned. I expected that would be the end of things.
Until two weeks later, when the same idiot as before (really,
really
, drunk this time), reacted again to his failed courtship by storming out of the capsule, and promptly spiralled away soundlessly into space.
No hand-wringing this time; our glorious leader had to do something. One sexually frustrated death on a colony can be construed as misfortune; two looks like carelessness.
So it was decreed that any 'anti-social' behaviour would result in the perpetrator being deported back to Earth by semi-stasis pod, dishonourably discharged. Three and a half years in what amounted to effectively solitary confinement, with a job cleaning sewer gunge off the soy production vats when you got back.
In addition, Isabella's inhibitors were a go. Straight into the food.
A few weeks later, some of the crew approached the Commander. If they got married, could they stop the inhibitors?
And that is how, within just another forty-seven days, no fewer than twelve couples had been formed, almost half our colony's population. And they say romance is dead.
And all was at peace with the world. Everyone seemed calmer.
Except Isabella.
We continued to spend the same amount of time together, but there was more of a spark to her. She'd always had the habit of speaking somewhat cryptically, in stories about her past that her eyes almost teased me to gainsay.
Then one day, straight talk.
"You're closed off."
I didn't reply. I don't really know what she expected.
"You're closed off," she repeated.
She smiled at me then, conspiratorially.
"I find these people insufferable sometimes."
I thought, I know you feel like an outsider, even though I don't know why. And you know I feel like an outsider, even though you don't know my resentments specifically.
I held her gaze.
We spent more time together.
And, over time, she laid out her plan.
We (well,
she
) would tamper with the inhibitors in the food. People would still be shut down, on the one level, unable to orgasm. But the
desire
to do so would return.
And, as Isabella pointed out to me, it wouldn't be an
unnatural
desire. It would just be what every other colonist dealt with.
I was beginning to see more of this side to Isabella -- and although this sounds dangerous, it felt really more playful, teasing, to those who she chose to show it to. I know, having told you someone actually, physically, died, you might think this was a superbly malicious act.
But that was a freak accident. The guy was an idiot anyhow.
She also wasn't really asking me to do anything. Isabella ran all the medical facilities; I was just a spectator, along for the ride. No corroborating testing apparatus here, and besides -- how much of a humblebrag would it be for a colonist to explain to a commanding officer that you're still getting turned on even through a dampening effect? I didn't expect many reports.
Nothing really happened at first. After two weeks, I wondered if anything would. Part of me was relieved that the threat of criminality retreated. Part of me was disappointed.
It took Isabella to point it out to me first.
"Look at Amy."
It was lunchtime, but the canteen was nearly empty. And there, prim-faced Amy Chui was failing to be particularly surreptitious in running her hand inside her jumpsuit, down to pinch on her thigh.
Amy Chiu. Extremely attractive, albeit in a poised way that could seem more porcelain carving than living human, particularly when she pursed her lips and gazed sternly through her wireframe glasses. Which she did a
lot.
But when the knock at my capsule door was followed by her presence late during the evening of the next day, her cheeks were flushed, hair mussed.
"Hey," she said. Trying to pull herself to composure, feigning informality, badly.
So this is the effect.
Prim, proper little Amy Chiu. She'd chewed me out once on wiring installation, so I won't deny I took pleasure in letting the silence hang.
She shuffled, looked down, and then started to talk. Blurting out the words as fast as she could.
