Rapid Decompression
About fifteen minutes before Teller Funston’s alarm was set to go off, his sleeping pod was gently picked off the rack where it had spent its night and delivered to the queue at his customary exit point. When the alarm went off — quietly at first, and then quickly louder, accompanied by a gradual but rapid lightening inside the pod, as well as a subtle increase in the airflow — Teller opened his eyes and sat up, looking around for his clothes.
The strategy he was pursuing — the race between his upcoming slot at the exit point and his ability to get himself awake and ready to be out of the pod — was his current idea for getting himself up and to work on time. The pods were big enough to sit up in, and it was perfectly ordinary for people to wake up and spend some leisurely time watching videos or reading or whatever they did before scheduling an exit.
Teller had found that for him, that was a recipe for procrastination; so he had his morning scheduled so that he had ten minutes, after his alarm went off, before the pod appeared at its exit point; if he wasn’t up by then, the pod would take another, longer tour through a rush-hour of other pods all moving to get their passengers out at roughly the same time.
The motivation classes he’d been required to take as a boy had emphasized that finding the right strategy was a continuing discipline; that the set of habits that got you through today were only a way-point, a plateau along the way to the next set of strategies.
This morning, he got his clothes and a robe together just as the pod slid into the exit and opened; he rolled out of his pod and walked over to the showers.
It was a fifteen minute walk-and-elevator-ride from the exit point at the ground level — at the outside skin of the giant tube of a ship that Teller lived in — to the offices of Maintenance Engineering, where he was employed. He didn’t have to be there, though, for at least an hour; time for breakfast, sure, but also…
The cherry blossoms were blooming, in the orchard up on the surface level. Teller loved to walk through the cherry orchard in any case, but during the bloom he made a point to be up there every morning, walking among the pink clouds.
Most of the orchards and other farm and park land were at surface level, twenty floors above. There was a light array along the spine of the ship that created a simulated diurnal cycle, which made it easy to just plant and grow things; there was a constant mist that made for a nice even Mediterranean climate.
The cherry orchard was near an elevator lobby, which made it a convenient and popular place for a walk, but this time of morning it would be fairly empty. Teller strapped on a pair of hiking shoes, with ankle support, from the rack of mostly identical shoes; clothing was one of those things — you could have your own, if you wanted, keeping it clean and cared for and stowing it in your pod, or you could use the ship stuff, and just toss it in a bin at the end of the day.
The elevator ride was just long enough to space out. In one of those stupid brain tricks, every year during cherry blossom season he ended up playing the same thought pattern over in his head, the same basic one-sided discussion of a topic that he mostly managed to not think about, the rest of the year.
Living out a life in a middle generation on a generation ship, it was difficult, some times, not to think of the whole thing as basically pointless. His great-great-great grandparents had had a vision, and his great-great-great grandchildren would fulfill that vision, but in the mean time Teller, and everyone that he knew or would ever know, was going to simply muddle along.
Colonies founded by a ship which had had a continuous internal culture, especially one which had been intentionally guided through the social phases of the last few generations of the journey, had a 58% higher success rate than colonies founded by original colonist-minded populations who’d been frozen and slept through the centuries of travel.
About half of that difference was due to the unreliability of the freezing and thawing process.
There was an Earth story about the cherry blossoms, a metaphor: The cherry blossom is already dead when it leaves the tree and falls, fluttering, to the earth. The metaphor is of a human life: When you’re born, your death is already fore-ordained, just like a cherry blossom, blooming and then falling. You don’t have any control over whether you’ll land on the ground, be ground underfoot, be returned to the earth; that will happen. But you do have some say in the shape of the fall.
Teller came up here during the cherry blossom bloom to think about the shape of the fall: His fall, personally, as well as the broader fall that represented the journey of the ship, the fate of a future colony he’d never see and the hopes of people long dead when he was born. Everything in Teller’s life was in mid-fall.
Today was peak bloom. He walked among the clouds of falling blossoms and thought melancholy thoughts, and stuck his hands in his pockets.
So it took him a couple of seconds to realize what had happened when the air suddenly filled with fog. Just like that, one second it was clear and the next second he was walking in a cloud bank.
Something in the back of his mind, training from when he was small, shouted Explosive Decompression! at him, but he was already running for the elevator lobby before the thought formed.
#
When the doors of the elevator opened on the level just below ground level, Teller was holding his breath, just in case he had to hit the “door close” button fast and go down some more. It was unlikely enough that Ground Level — the big inner space at the center of the ship — had suddenly decompressed, that the thought of everything else being decompressed as well wasn’t that far fetched.
Instead, what he saw was emergency first-responders in yellow-green all-purpose suits pulling cases out of nearby elevators and turning the plaza into an emergency response center.
Teller just stood and goggled for a minute, before walking up to where someone with a clipboard was sitting at a folding table with a banner hanging off the front of it reading “Emergency Response Command Center.” In the time he’d taken to run for his life and then ride an elevator one floor, these guys had managed to set up an Emergency Response Command Center.
In a society where opportunities for meaningful work were few and far between, where keeping the same job for more than a year was considered basically selfish, changing career tracks was easy and encouraged. Teller, at twenty-three, had changed career tracks twice; he’d started in Security, and found that incredibly boring, because there were relatively few laws and those mostly enforced in the creche, as the Security people said: People followed the laws because they’d been taught how and because the laws made sense, not out of fear of Security.
So after a year Teller had switched tracks to emergency response, which had involved constant drills; he’d lasted two years before the knowledge that the last major incident which actually required a response had been a century before had driven him to find a more immediately useful track.
Maintenance agreed with him. He loved walking all over the ship, carrying a bag of tools and the keys to everything, just fixing stuff; he’d changed ship sections and specialties at the end of each year, plotting a career trajectory through all the permutations of field work before consenting to be stuck behind a desk.
“Hello,” said the woman behind the table, her pen poised above the clipboard. It was very easy to scan handwritten documents and make them digital, but in a response you couldn’t always count on having electrical power, so a clipboard was an obvious organizational paradigm. “This area has been designated as the Emergency Response Command Center for an incident happening on the floor above, I’m going to have to ask you to find somewhere else to be.”
She smiled as she was saying it, and seemed like she might be genuinely interested in his response. Teller had had that training, too.
“Hi,” he said. “I was on the Ground Floor when it Decco’d. I’d like to give my statement, if it’s required, and also volunteer for the response; I used to be First Responder track, I’m certified in External Operations and have three years of internal systems…”
Another woman with a clipboard came walking briskly up. She had her clipboard under one arm and was making shapes in the air, clearly not truly seeing the world in front of her: Obviously using some sort of heads-up display. She stepped obliviously between Teller and the woman sitting at the table.
“Total marge,” she said. “I don’t have any EVA people, Thruston and Jaffey spent the night together, if you believe it, on the other side of the ship, they won’t be here for thirty-five minutes at a minimum even with overrides. The software that runs the vents up there is in complete lockout mode, someone’s going to have go in there and manually close all the fucking vents…”
The internal spring that was keeping her wound tight ran down enough that she noticed the uncomfortable breach-of-etiquette look on the other woman’s face; she turned briefly and took in Teller.
“Oh, hey, Funston.”
“Jonquil.” Teller kept his face blank. Jonquil Harris had been someone he’d had huge crush on; a big part of getting out of First Response had been getting over Jonquil.
“Oh hey,” said Jonquil again, actually registering him standing there, “Funston. How is your certification status for EVA?”
Teller shrugged uncomfortably. It was half a day, once a year, to keep his certifications up. “Um,” he said, “Up to date, why?”
#
The main thing about the cutoff valves for the emergency decompression vents is that they were attached to the emergency decompression vents, which were huge holes in the surface of the ground-level. They were currently great sucking maws, pulling the ground-level atmosphere out into space.
The temperature in the vast ground-level space was dropping fast, and the oxygen levels were already down to roughly zero; the whole point of the rapid decomp vents was to get rid of the atmosphere fast. No-one seemed to know why they were open right now: Some sort of software problem, was the consensus.
The longer the big vents stayed open, the colder it was going to get; the colder it got, the more of the plants on ground level died. If they all died, feeding the ten million people on board would become a huge problem.
Which is why Teller found himself climbing into a stripped-down EVA suit, preparing to run completely around the inside of the cylindrical ground level, closing the big manual-shutoff valves as he went.
It was the cherry trees. They couldn’t survive the cold for too long, and it was going to get that cold before the first-string EVA people got here; so Teller strapped into the big, stupid suit and clomped over to the elevator and turned and looked back at everyone watch him go and just as the doors closed wondered if he should have done something cool like saluting or something.
The doors opened on a roaring, rushing storm: Apparently there was still enough atmosphere to be rushing out through the vents at howling high speed.
The ship was basically eight kilometers long, and two and a half kilometers wide; so it was going to be an eight kilometer run, with a stop every kilometer to turn a huge wheel for five minutes.
It sounded like something Teller’s PE teacher would have made up to keep PE interesting and educational.
He took the first step out of the elevator and was nearly knocked off his feet by the swirling, unpredictable wind. He recovered from the stumble and began to run — plod, really, but plod at a running pace — toward the first of the vents, which was not very far away. He looked up and saw the spine, the big long tube that ran down the center of the ship, covered in lights to create a day-and-night pattern; beyond the light-spine he could see the other side of ground level, could see the big vents over there.
He figured it was going to take him about an hour to get around the entire level; by the time he was halfway around, the other EVA people should be starting around the other direction, so really he’d probably end up running flat out three-quarters of the way around and then walking the last quarter. So: Six vents to go.
The big wheel that closed the first vent was a lot easier to turn than he expected, but it took longer than he expected, too, and at a certain point, when the vent was closed enough to mostly stop the airflow, there was a sudden shift in the airflow around him, a sudden dead-air feeling.
Teller finished closing the vent and ran for the second vent site.
Approaching the second vent, he could feel the currents in the air getting stronger, more unpredictable; something, he thought, about the same pressure being pushed through seven-eighths the vent space… then six-eighths, as he spun the second vent closed.
Each vent closed made the next one get more squirrely and weird; by the time he was approaching the sixth vent, he was getting knocked off his feet regularly. He was exhausted, the running and the heavy, bulky suit taking its toll.
He could see the other team laboring around the… well, for him it would be the seventh vent, for them it was their second; that meant that this was Teller’s last vent, all he had to do was turn the damed wheel one more time and he could collapse and just sit here for a while, letting the oxygen system in the suit feed him all the air he could suck in.
As he grasped the wheel, he could feel the air change; something… the other team must have gotten their tube closed. Teller was just beginning to think about what implications that might have for the airflow around the tube he was working on when a sudden gust picked him bodily up, tearing his hands off the big wheel, and tossed him effortlessly out the vent and into space.
#
The tube was actually a couple of yards across and about five hundred feet long — the thickness of the habitation part of the hull — but the pressure of the escaping gasses spat him through it faster than he could track, and suddenly he was floating in space, outside the hull, watching as the huge wall of ship spun away from him.
A cloud of cherry blossom petals surrounded him.
“Fuck,” said Teller, and then there were voices in his ear, giving instructions and asking for confirmation and generally being loud.
There wasn’t anything in the way of an EVA rig on the suit he was wearing; no vents or rockets or anything. There was enough air for… he checked the HUD display… a couple of hours, probably, which meant that there was more or less nothing he could do except stay still and not flail around too much.
He’d done this as a drill when he was a First Responder, and had done similar things every time he renewed his certifications, so there was no panic in his assessment of his situation; he knew how the rescue process was going to work from here — or how it wasn’t going to work — so there wasn’t much point in doing anything at all.
He considered putting on some music.
After a while he realized that he had tuned out the voices on the radio because they’d be able to tell him whether he was going to be rescued or not and he was pretty sure the answer was “not.” With an effort of will, he tuned them back in.
“…Funston, can you hear me Funston? No, he’s still not answering, his vitals seem stable but…”
“I’m here.”
There was a long silence at the other end, which more or less confirmed what Teller suspected: Now that he was answering, they were going to have to tell him that they couldn’t reel him back in.
Fuck it, though: he’d already come to terms — in a very shallow way — with that reality.
“Funston, We’re still working up a plan on this end, I’m not sure we’re going to have a tether out in time…”
“Understood,” said Teller. His own voice sounded distant in his head.
“Listen, Funston, is there anybody you’d like to talk…”
“No,” said Teller, “Listen, I’m just going to put some music on, okay?”
There was prolonged silence from the other end, which Teller took as consent; he selected a menu on the HUD and brought up a playlist at random.
He closed his eyes; after a while, he opened them again.
He was still floating inside the cloud of cherry blossoms.
There would be a memorial, probably; at least one, just, some sort of out-of-the-way statue or something, with the names and stories of people who gave their lives to…
Well, honestly, if he hadn’t gotten the vents closed, it was possible the crops would have died, which wouldn’t have meant that anybody starved, exactly. It simply would have meant that the carrying capacity would have been lower, which meant in turn that they’d have had to put some people in suspended…
They’d have had to freeze some people, and those people would have woken up at the end of the line, when the ship arrived. Teller stared around himself at the cherry blossoms and suddenly he understood why the vents had suddenly blown. Imagine, being one of the people who started the colony at the end of this long trip…
He was imagining it when something hit him, hard, and then he was tumbling, head over feet, and it took him a while to get his head together and turn in the prescribed sequence that got his tumble under control; by the time his attitude was corrected so that he could think about what was going on, all he could see was a small dot that looked like it might be another space suit, headed away from the hull of the ship at high velocity.
He, on the other hand, was headed straight at the hull, which was now a huge wall that he was flying towards; he did his best to turn around, but he was still facing at an awkward angle when he hit the hull and bounced, but he managed, barely, to grab onto something — one of the thousands and thousands of grab bars welded to the outer surface of the hull for exactly this reason — and, after his arm was jerked hard enough to render it into one long numb dull ache, he hung there, watching through the cherry blossom cloud as the little speck that might have been a spacesuit got smaller and smaller.
#
Hanging onto the handhold, his arm numb and his breath knocked out of him from having hit the hull, Teller tried to remember that he’d get his breath back, if he just waited, and that he had another arm, which he should probably grab something with.
His breathing trouble was making it difficult for him to think clearly; he was watching the frozen cherry blossoms, doomed now never to hit the ground but instead to fall forever, disperse and disappear: They’d become too distant to see individual petals, so as the cloud dispersed it simply became invisible.
When his breath came back, it was with a piece of insight: Every breath, every inhalation, he was filling his reserve tanks with a raw material from which he was able to refine a substance that his body was perpetually short of; that his entire life was a series of emergencies, a rapidly falling oxygen level line, and the trust that the next breath was coming.
He just had to hang on, on the outside of the ship, and rescue would come. He just had to live his life, hopping from one capacity-timing emergency to the next, somehow passing on genetic and professional information before you finally succumb to one of the continuous chain of emergencies that was life.
Someday, someone at the other end of the chain of emergencies that he was in right now would land on a distant world and become the first person on a new world, spreading out into the stars. He’d always sort of imagined his situation, middle generation on a generation ship, as sort of the short end of the straw, as lives went; but honestly, how many people who’d lived had even that? Most of the people born on Earth had simply had to hope that someday someone would figure out something interesting to do.
Long after he could breathe again, he hung there in space, staring at the distant stars through what had been a cloud of frozen cherry blossoms, thinking about breathing.
Eventually he noticed that people were yelling at him, through his radio; he acknowledged the yellers, made sure that they knew he was alive and had had the wind knocked out of him, that he was okay now.
There was an icon blinking in the upper right corner of his visual field: Someone he knew had sent him a priority message. He selected it and watched the animation as it expanded into a video-player box.
“Funston,” said the image of a woman he recognized vaguely as one of the senior techs in his department. She looked like she was caught between laughing and crying. “Well done, I applaud you. I just wanted to say… “ She looked away, then back at the camera. He could see that she was in a suit like the one he was in, talking into a pinhole.
“I was the one who blew the hatches,” she said. “I wanted the chance to be… well, you’ll have figured it out, or soon will. I didn’t mean for you to die for it, though, so here I am.” She looked away again, then back at the camera. “I’m going to open the vents on the suit as soon as I can’t see the ship anymore. I just wanted you to know, it was me that was the villain, so the fact that I saved you at the cost of my own life isn’t heroic, it’s just… keeping my own villainy from getting out of hand.”
She looked into the camera, blinking, for a few seconds, and then the video ended.
Teller was blinking back his own tears as someone grabbed him and clipped a line to a buckle on the front of his suit. As they pulled him back along the outside of the ship toward the nearest airlock, the tears started to flow in earnest, floating around the inside of the helmet.
And then they pulled him inside, and all the tears fell at once.
