Isaac came aboard the Eurydice at Ganymede. He was part of the crew that installed the hyperbaric chambers in the Turner-Al Saad Executive Spa. At the end of the shift, he'd excused himself to the lavatory and then just never left.
He had to see it. He had to be a part of history in the making.
Dak had helped. He'd hacked the in-house debit portfolio and created a dummy account for Isaac. All of Isaac's payment scans would ping the dummy account and come back showing sufficient credit. There'd be a whopper of an unpaid balance by the end of the trip, but that was for the shipline's accountants to worry about. Given how much they stood to make on the voyage, a write-off that size was meaningless.
Isaac still would have preferred to book a legitimate berth on the ship, but that was out of the question. Ticketing was through a high-end Martian brokerage with alpha class system security. Well beyond Dak's abilities. So Isaac would have to make due, casually napping in hidden corners and common areas. That was fine, as far as he was concerned. He didn't intend to sleep much anyway.
The maiden voyage of the Eurydice would last just under ten Earth Years, arriving to port at Janus in Alpha Centauri, exchanging passengers, and then setting off back to Ganymede for another decade's travel at particle warp. The fastest passenger flight of all time. Faster than angels, the advertisements had said. "Faster than demons, too," Isaac thought to himself.
And that was the thing of it. Isaac had no interest in Janus. And while he had every intention of sampling all the various luxuries the Eurydice had to offer, that wasn't what drew him to stow away aboard arguably the most luxuriant ship ever built.
It was the hubris. The defiance. The wondrous arrogance of it all. The Eurydice was simply the next evolution of mankind's innate sense of entitlement - the desire to control all, to conquer all, to have all. To Isaac, it was a historic moment in more ways than most could recognize.
So Isaac bought a tailored suit in a small boutique on the 215th floor and paid premium credits for a spot by the railing, under the crystal clear Lucite shielding, to watch the great ship - the greatest ever ship - slide slowly away from her housing in the orbiting dock. He saw the twinkling lights of Ganymede below and the twinkling pulse of the stars above and smiled.
Seven days later, the Eurydice boosted into particle warp.
Isaac passed much of those early days up on the deck, watching the distorted milky, silver streaks of distant stars slip past. He read borrowed books - real paper books - in the central library and watched old movies in the antique film theater on the 20th floor. He played games of Go with an elderly man he'd met in the terrarium. He visited the sprawling brothels that dotted the aft-end of the ship and paid extra for the privilege of sleeping a few hours in a real bed.
Months passed as the Eurydice cut through space - enormous and weightless. A rogue planet moving faster than the space around her could properly account for, splitting the nothingness and finding the deeper nothing within.
Malaise set in. Not for Isaac, but for the larger population of the ship. No luxury, no matter how fantastic, is impervious to the perpetual degradation of monotony.
The fantasy began to curl at the edges. The real text below became visible. Life took over.
But not for long.
Isaac was in a salon getting a haircut when the explosion happened. It cracked like thunder, which was a sound Isaac hardly believed he remembered. There were screams and confusion. A warning siren. Then a soft voice ringing through the PA.
Do not panic. Please remain where you are. There has been a small collision. There is damage to floors 85 through 142 on the starboard side. Emergency response crews are engaged. Do not panic. Remain where you are. Do not panic.
Some listened. Many did not. In the end, the damage was more substantial than the crew were willing to let on. At least 3,000 people were either blown to pieces or sucked into space. Three sizable farms and one of the larger animal pens were destroyed.
The Eurydice was not crippled, but the faith of the passengers was shaken, and shaken badly.
They would not turn back. In truth, they couldn't turn back. They were plotted for Janus. There wasn't fuel enough to slow down, turn around, and boost back into particle warp in the opposite direction. But the passengers did not know this. They only knew that they were not invulnerable; that they were hurtling at mercilessly dangerous speeds through an ocean of darkness they now saw as hostile.
Metal workers on the 225th floor began making guns. Isaac bought one.
The grocery stores on the lower floors began to have shortages. The cheap restaurants stopped being cheap and the expensive restaurants got more expensive.
A temporary situation ship administrators said. A symptom of the losses suffered in the collision. Things would get back to normal in a few seasons.
But the people on the lower floors became hungry, and they went into debt buying food. The in-house debit portfolio had mandatory cut-offs once your debt levels got too high. Travelers were cut off from making additional purchases. No food. No power. No anything.
The admins on the Eurydice hadn't planned for paupers. There was no welfare. There were no social workers. Many starved. Admins could be heard casually suggesting suicide.
Things got worse.
Isaac tried to help at first. He used his dummy account to buy food for poor strangers. But then a man tried to cut the scanning strip out of Isaac's wrist. And another did the same. And that second time Isaac had to shoot the man.
So Isaac was a murderer. And the ship was full of dying, desperate people.
And then one day they blocked off the 100 level. All 100 floors, quarantined from the rest of the ship.
Isaac bought a knife and more bullets. He spent most of his nights in the brothels, paying absurd amounts to sleep alone with the door locked.
There were explosions in the 100s. A series of them. Isaac could hear them all the way up in the 400s.
Do not panic said the voice on the PA. Do not panic.
"They'll blow straight through the hull!" screamed the men and women of the top floors. "You have to stop them."
They sent warnings down to those lower floors. Warnings and threats. But no one went down there. And there was no way to know if anyone ever heard those threats.
The explosions continued.
Finally, the Captain ordered the life support cut for all 100 level floors.
The explosions stopped.
And the middle class became the lower class. Food did not appear by magic. Money did not appear by magic. Isaac shot another man. Later he shot five women while escaping from the brothels.
There were whispers of another rebellion. A construction company on the 240th floor was found in possession of materials used for making bombs.
They closed off the 200s as a precaution. Life support and everything.
Isaac ate dry handfuls of cut oats and packs of freeze-dried fruit as he sat under the Lucite shielding and watched the universe slip by. He shot anyone who got too close.
More explosions. More explosions. Shops raided. Shops raided.
Every now and then the crew would manage to grab a brief moment of order and the explosions would stop and everyone would look around and wonder what they had become and where they were headed. They turned the life support back on for the lower levels. They had to. They needed the farm land.
The wealthy were the poor, and everyone else was dead.
They rebuilt the farms. There was no livestock. That was over. But they tilled the soil and brought it back to life.
And sometimes they forgot that it was working and they killed each other again. But then they remembered.
And always the Eurydice slipped through the blackest space, heading towards a planet they'd nearly forgotten about. Moving too fast to be helped. Too far away from anything to stop.
Isaac lived. He tilled. He foraged. He hid. He killed. But he lived.
The Captain and the Helmsman were long dead by the time they reached Janus. Thankfully, the ship remembered what to do. They found a berth and finally - finally, finally, finally - the Eurydice came to a stop.
Isaac disembarked. He'd thrown away his gun. He'd thrown away his knives. He rode the transport down to the surface and touched still land for the first time in forever and cried a decade's worth of forgotten tears.
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