Work Text:
It’s not like microbiology paid well.
Actually, go back. I had paid to do that. 8 years of study had left far too much student debt, even with scholarships and the assistantships I had done. And while my post-doc research position had paid okay, it hadn’t been spectacular, or even good.
But research money had been a blank check compared to teacher’s pay.
Getting used to teacher’s pay, as I dug myself out of the pit I had firebombed my career and life into, kicked me right back to the worst of my grad school days. Roommates, the odd hunger you get when you’re bad at remembering to eat and don’t have much that you want to eat, and I spent too much time reading pedagogy methodology papers rather than examining any of the reasons I was in that situation.
Which meant the first time I managed to get online to look, around 4 weeks after unexpectedly moving onto a large boat in the middle of the ocean, I had a bit of a shock.
I had money in my account.
Not lots and lots, but more than the rough estimate that several years of living with the same monthly financial cycle told me there should have been.
Shaking, I logged into the account that owned my soul (the remains of my student loans).
The balance was $0.
Not an amount larger than the principal I had taken out at 18 (thank you compound interest), but $0. The last transaction was a payment of the exact outstanding amount, paid from an account number I didn’t recognize, dated roughly two weeks ago.
What happened two weeks ago? I would remember paying off my loans in their entirety. I’d never had that kind of money! Neither had my Mom, when she was alive. And god knows my grandmother hadn’t either, before she died and the last of her estate went on the medical bills.
So. My account was in the black.
For the first time in my life.
I signed out, removed all saved profiles (shared computer), and sat blinking at the screen. It blinked back at me until a Nigerian (I think) engineer tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was done with it. Given that I couldn’t remember why I had gone to use one of the few outside access terminals with a qwerty keyboard in the first place (my school email to send back a pack of marked end-of-term tests and Facebook to contact Marissa as there was no phone signal in the middle of the sea, which I would remember 18 hours later), I let her have it and wandered onto one of the quieter upper decks. The Chinese sailors still gave me the side eye, but less so than before.
The air helped. The sea helped. The salt helped in the way it always had since I was a kid poking at the tide-pools in Coos Bay, taking samples of the water to see what life was floating around in there. Mom had bought me a second-hand microscope when I was 10. Gosh, I’d loved that thing. Not that I could take it with me after, but I could pick out a direct line from there to here.
I hadn’t thought about that in ages. I hadn’t thought about Mom in ages.
The railings under my hands were solid. There was salt spray on my face. I could hear the petrels and shearwaters that followed the carrier around in hope of an easy snack.
There had been times in my life where money, and its lack, was a countdown timer. At 18, fresh out of the foster system but with months until college and the shelter of dorms. Post my ‘Goodbye, Academia!’ hissy fit, no severance, and a flashing timeline of you have 6 month’s rent, you have 3 month’s rent, you have 1 month’s rent screaming in my mind. Sometimes I’d sofa surf. Sometimes I ate ramen for a month.
You did what you had to do.
And now. All of that. Just, not there.
I focused on the horizon to stay upright during the rush of giddiness that flushed through me. I could do anything! I could rent an apartment with actual floor space! I could make an irresponsibly large donation to Sci-Hub as thanks for free journal access and a kick in the teeth to journal publishers! I could buy a Lego USS Enterprise!
And my classroom! No more weekends at flea markets looking for wild posters. And the snack drawer I could keep for my kids!
No, right, yeah. I was on a big boat. No lightning round, no lava beanbag. No kids who came in before the first period because they’d given their breakfast to their younger siblings and knew I would have something for them.
The slide from financial freedom buzz to the clench of missing my kids landed me back on earth. On water? Where had this money come from?
Stratt’s office was pretty close to the officer’s conference room everything had started in. Like all spaces on this ship the ceiling felt weirdly low to me. The floor outside the office had spots where the paint had worn down to the metal underneath. Which officer did she turf out to get an actual office space?
Stratt was, well, Stratt. A month of daily progress meetings and being a sounding board as she reasoned out the ethical choices she was faced with hadn’t made her less strange to me, but the strangeness had shifted. Stratt was the metaphorical unstoppable force and everything was moving out of her, our, way. She had one aim. Once you understood that she wasn’t so weird after all.
I had decided I liked her. I think she liked me? She’d decided that I was useful, at least. She sort of asked for my input in the decision to put the crew in a coma. Several times she’d flown off to meet with someone and then asked me to catch her up on all the different teams’ progress. Dimitri had started showing me the Spin Drive Group’s results a couple of hours before update huddles, and my new work calendar was populated with meeting invites for months in advance that I definitely hadn’t put there.
I told myself to stop dithering and knock.
The desk was covered in papers that must have had some rhyme or reason to them. There were no less than 3 coffee mugs balanced on the papers. I could see another on the floor hidden behind the sofa arm. Stratt herself was dressed as plainly, and as Europeanly, as ever, but a few strands of her hair were out of place. There was a tiny smudge of eyeliner under her left eye.
Huh. This was the second most disheveled I’d ever seen her. I was kind of surprised she told me to enter. I didn’t know if she would have let anybody else in.
Maybe she did like me.
I wanted to ask her how she was but I didn’t know if I could.
“Dr Grace,” she said, snapping me out of it. I ducked through the heavy door, letting it swing shut behind me. The square chicken-wire window in the door made the corridor outside look like blobs of undefined light.
“My student loans are paid off,” is what came out of my mouth.
It’s not what I’d meant to say straight up, especially with how tired Stratt looked. Okay, it was, but I was going to lead into it, not blurt it out with no finesse! You’d think a man in his late 30s would have some sense of what he was going to say at any point but without a semi-rehearsed classroom situation I could be useless about that. I stuffed my hands in the pockets of my fleece and fiddled with some pocket lint.
I watched her blink and visibly change language tracks in her head. “Your loans?”
“Gone.” I manipulated the pocket lint into a log shape and rolled it back and forth over my fingertips, smoothing the fuzz. “There was some left, and as of two weeks ago kaput, nothing. And I didn’t do it. But you have the world’s money. And are the only person who I can think of who would. So did you? ‘Cause otherwise I’m going to have to tell them it’s a mistake and…”
Stratt cut me off.
“Sit down, Dr Grace,” she said, and I did, abruptly, in the folding chair in front of her desk.
“I have, essentially, kidnapped you.”
That sounded harsh. “I’m happy to be here,” I protested, even as my brain went she’s not wrong, you haven’t even been able to go and get more of your clothes. Some arrived in a duffle a few weeks ago and you don’t like thinking about how they got here.
I thought I was getting better at reading Stratt’s expressions. She barely raised an eyebrow but I could tell that it was sardonic.
“I’ve kidnapped you. We could be kind and call it conscription, but it’s kidnapping.”
I tried to protest again, to soften the terms. I really didn’t like the word kidnapping. It made me think of stranger danger adverts and horror movies. I hated horror movies. The jump-scares gave me hiccups and hiccups hurt.
Why was I trying to lessen the objective truth? The human brain really could be an incredible organ. I’d already acclimatized to my current situation and was contextualizing in the way that would best ensure continued mental stability. Wow.
And gosh, it would be nice to have a few more pairs of underpants, and socks that didn’t make me want to hop up and down with how distracting they were. An actually soft t-shirt with the labels already cut out. And a pizza (the food here was pretty good, don’t get me wrong, but I’d never eaten so much rice in my life), and a really long, hot shower. And some kind of sweets. I missed Red Vines. And Skittles. And green plants. I had a very fussy monstera at home which was probably dead.
“... are vital to the success of this mission,” Stratt said, and I snapped back into our conversation. “And are being compensated appropriately. Actual salaries are still being worked out, but the HR people…”
“We have HR people?” The look on her face shut me up again. Stratt had access to HR people. Of course there were HR people too. You needed the HR people to help corral all the other people. Wow, I would not have wanted to be a HR person on this multi-national, multi-organizational project. That sounded like hell. I was suddenly very glad that it was just me, my astrophage (my precious!), and my engineers. And Dimitri’s propulsion team. And Dr Lokken’s structural team. And 3000 Chinese sailors. But no HR on the ship.
“The HR people,” and we were back on topic, “have assured me that final payment of all educational loans is the start, while they arrange an actual stipend.”
Well, it made sense. I’d gotten the idea that a lot of the people who worked on this project did so via an institution. But those of us on the carrier, the core team, I supposed, had no hierarchy, no administration. We just worked on what was in front of us. It was both very freeing -I did love being able to deeply focus on one problem like this- and terrifying at the same time. What if we failed? What if we missed something? What if, without the somewhat methodological process of peer review, a team mis-recorded something and it got taken as gospel and that caused problems in the future that we couldn’t even anticipate now?
Anyway, institutions had money. They had a budget. They could be given grants and bequests. So far the boat crew (we had to come up with a better name than that) had been skating by on the ship’s engineering expertise and resupply for specifics that got literally shipped to us.
But someone, somewhere, had to be paying for that. At the end of the long economics chain that was supply and demand were people making things and operating machines. And those people needed payment.
“So I’m getting paid for this?”
“You’re getting paid for this.”
Holy cow! The number Stratt quoted me was twice my research salary. That was a lot of money!
I left her office in a bit of a daze and nearly tripped over the lip of an inset door. Stratt wasn’t just talking about an amount of money that would have given my fun budget a guilt-free increase. I mean, she wasn’t offering Silicon Valley amounts either. But what should I do with that amount of money? Keeping my apartment wouldn’t take much at all, comparatively. And I was living on a boat; I didn't need to pay for food or anything like that. I just had to ask for the equipment I needed and it appeared. My expenses had abruptly gone down.
I ended up in my cabin. It was tiny and I was lucky to not have to share it. My engineering team was 10 people spread across 3 cabins. I was glad to have one to myself as it meant I could lie on the floor with the lights off and focus on the low vibration of the propulsion systems without anybody interrupting me and asking if I was okay. Sometimes you just needed floor time.
My mind kept drifting back to summer camp. There was a programme, when I was a teen, that put on one for foster kids. It was a science camp, with actual woods and a lake and sleep-away cabins.
I had loved it. I didn’t have to worry about unexpectedly having to share an already full room with another child in the middle of the night. I didn't have to say yes sir, yes ma’am all the time or get my knuckles rapped for disrespect. I didn’t have to focus on being good and quiet or I’d face the impatience of someone who looked at me like I was a job.
I know I was sent there because it was free, but the adults treated me like I had interesting things to say. They wanted to hear about where I’d found the Blue Cobalt Milkweed Beetle, and its lifecycle. They wanted to hear my misapplied theories about what happens if you jump at the same time as a plummeting elevator hits the ground (elevator safety doesn't work like that, grown-up me was very happy to know). They tolerated my tendency to disappear up a tree with a Star Trek novelization for hours.
I’d gone every year, until I was there as a junior counselor rather than a camper, answering the wild, curious, child-logic questions. In college, if I timed it right, I could hop from one camp to another across the west coast as a counselor from when dorms kicked me out until they opened up again. If I was tight about it, it paid enough that I only had to do some tutoring during college semesters to have enough money to do things like pay an astronomical amount of insurance for a 20 year old Subaru and occasionally drink too much beer or take a mysterious pill or two in an effort to get along with my peers. I’d stopped once my PhD really got serious and had started again after I’d crash landed at the bottom of the Ivory Tower. It was why the school had hired me, on the condition that I get my teaching certificate at night school during my first year.
I was happy at that camp. It had given me friends.
I’d been a teacher/counselor at the regional equivalent in Sacramento for the past few years, as well as teaching for a month at a much fancier daily summer school in Noe Valley with kids that I usually felt kind of sorry for, pushed so hard by high parental expectations and with no time to play between that and music and dance lessons and more tutors. This year was looking to be the first one that I wouldn’t spend leading crazy experiments and preventing as many S’more’s burns as possible for a long time. It wasn’t like I would need to make up the income over the summer anymore.
That’s not why I did it. I mainly taught at camps and summer schools to pass on what was given to me, and to make the teenagers groan with as many terrible science pun t-shirts as I could.
I’d nearly cried though, on the Skype call with Nathan and Mackenzie, who ran the Sacramento County Foster Association camp, telling them that I wouldn’t be able to make it this year.
But now, I had money! I could set up some kind of scholarship and more kids would be able to go! Or they could get some new equipment! The thought had me scrabbling for a notebook, until my watch beeped at me to let me know I had half an hour until it was time to go and collect the latest astrophage progression results. And that had me scrabbling for the most recent projections so I would know what to expect before going down to the carrier’s nuclear reactor and seeing what the breeders had cooked up.
It wasn’t until nearly six months later that it properly sank in. Stratt had taken me back to Geneva, for some kind of meeting with various high level bureaucrats. I was pretty sure I was only there to translate our scientific progress into ordinary person. We were sitting in a cafe away from the main building campus and I paid for our food without thinking about it.
I’d never done that before. And Switzerland was expensive.
It’s not like I hadn’t traveled before the project. My research had started with extremophiles— microbes adapted to live in the edge cases of where life was possible. It had led nicely into astrobiology.
For all of modern scientific history we had looked at places that we thought life couldn’t possibly exist in, and found it. Chemically extreme hot springs? Life. Tiny tiny life. Deep within the Antarctic ice sheets? More life. For so long we had thought that life was impossible without light. And then we went to the bottom of the gosh-darn oceans and there it was! Not just microbes, but multi-layered, highly active ecosystems, all based on life that used chemosynthesis to produce energy. Lots of them. Everywhere.
And now we’ve exposed earth life to space conditions and some of it was fine. There was life in the most radioactive place on this planet! And it thrived. So I still thought my hypothesis about the Goldilocks Zone not being so special had merit.
But, travel. My thesis research had included going to those extreme places (usually a chemical waste dump in the middle of a desert) to get samples. And conferences. That had involved flying. I didn’t like any of the feelings or the people involved in flying. It was better now I only flew in a private jet, and had something (not last minute presentations) to work on, but I still didn’t really like it.
Though, did you know that it’s much easier to sleep on planes when the chair you’re sitting on transforms into an actual bed? I did now. It was also much easier to marvel at the incredible application of force physics that was aviation when I wasn’t in a chair that hated me next to a person who had no idea how to eat with their mouth closed.
Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t been asked for my passport once. Stratt told me to come with her, and I did. Given that I hadn’t updated it since I started teaching, it was most certainly out-of-date.
All this was still novel to me every time I got on a plane with Stratt. I was constantly bemused by the sheer convenience of it. Travel was so… streamlined. I’d always known that whole we all have the same 24 hours thing was stupid. Before, if I needed to fly somewhere I’d have to show up to the airport 3 hours in advance, deal with the lights, crowds, the TSA, and horrible crackling tannoy announcements. Private Jet Ryland had to show up to a separate, smaller terminal, show his Petrova Project ID, and would be on a plane in 20 minutes. That plane would be in the air 10 minutes later.
Something caught my eye as I left the cafe with Stratt. We’d eaten there as it was one of the few places in the city she liked. In her own way she could be as particular as me. The view over the mountains and the stormy sun reflecting in the lake had been worth us going out of our way a little bit.
It was a specialty sock shop.
Stratt had already told me that I wouldn’t be needed for the afternoon. I was pretty sure she had budget stuff to go through, and boy was I glad to not be a part of that. I promised her I’d meet her at the Institute at the time we’d already arranged to leave, watched her get in the car, and get driven away.
The socks in the shop were colorful, and lots had crazy patterns. I ignored most of those and went straight for the ribbed sports socks. They didn’t have too long loops of thread on the inside. The toe seam was positioned in a way that meant I would never step on it. The top band was strong enough that they wouldn’t slide down and flop around my ankles. A half English, half google translate French conversation with a shop worker confirmed they would stay like that after numerous washes. They were 50% cotton, 50% bamboo.
I bought 20 different pairs of white socks with various color stripes around the top. They were perfect.
I didn’t even look at the price at the checkout. I didn’t need to.
Wow.