🌘

After your not-so-secret meeting, you join Zeta in the Evocation School tower, the tallest structure in the colony. It led you here to an elevator with little explanation.

“We’re going to practice Obfuscation in the Evo building?” you say.

“Best training room at TLA, they say. I haven’t been yet, but I made a reservation so we shouldn’t be disturbed,” it says.

As the elevator climbs, you feel the pull of spin-gravity weaken. By now you’re finally acclimated to the 0.3G environment of TLA, but suddenly your weight feels much more familiar as you climb to a position in the cylinder with centrifugal pull comparable to the Moon’s gravity. And you keep going, feeling lighter and lighter until you come to a stop in microgravity, floating at the exact center of the cylinder. Outside the elevator is only a small room leading to a door up on the ceiling.

Beyond that door is the microgravity training room, a large space situated on the central axis of the colony, an almost-spherical room made up of triangular panels, the largest of which is directly across from the entrance hatch, and made of glass. It’s dark inside, and only starlight shines through the window, distorted through the watery shield of the colony wall beyond.

You lose your grip on the door handle and quickly lose the surface as the slightest motion you make causes a reaction, turning you in ways you struggle to wrap your head around. You remember your magnetic boots and activate them mentally through your terminal, and they pull you down to the nearby floor.

Zeta looks amused, already standing rooted to the floor by its magnets. “Tell me you’re a Lunatic without telling me you’re a Lunatic,” it says.

“Hey, I’ve only ever been in microgravity for short spaceflights in a small compartment, this is…”

“All colonial kids learn to handle this, basic education in safety during rotational issues,” it says.

“Yeah, we were more worried about issues like environmental control malfunctions causing us to boil alive or freeze to death, gravity is something we take for granted.”

“That’s why you’re supposed to pass a microgravity qualification test before training here,” it says.

“But I haven’t done that.”

“Me neither, but you don’t have to follow a lot of rules when you have good ObTech,” it says.

“Well, I’m already impressed,” you say.

“Then let me impress you more. Let’s let go of the floor.”

“But–“

“This is the perfect place for practice, it’s quiet, isolated, we can keep it dark, and we don’t even have to feel the pull of spin-gravity. Let go of it all and relax and your technopathy will be at its strongest.”