🌔

Better not waste time when you’re already in enough trouble, you decide. You head for the back end of the academic block, where the elevator waits to take you to the world of engineering.

You step inside. This one is always a rougher ride than the spaceport elevator--slower, bigger, built to carry heavy machinery. The apparent pull of gravity weakens as you ascend toward the middle of the colony. You reach your level and check your orders to see where to go.

You come to the familiar barrier of metal rushing past you, waiting for the opening to allow you to cross into the counter-rotating segment. It’s always loud in these liminal places in between the halves of your world. Once you reach the wall you see you aren’t alone. You almost didn’t notice 7 here, being as quiet and unassuming as ever.

A quick glance at each other serves as a greeting.

“Where are they using you today?” you say.

“I don’t know.”

The wall slides open in front of you. You step across the threshold, and the ground beneath you changes direction. You get your balance, much better at this than the first time. 7 crosses alongside you.

You now see the central engineering corridor stretched out before you, with passageways leading to the various sectors of the module. A girl slides down the ladder in front of you. It’s the engineer you met the other day, Die.

“7, Aydan.” Xe looks up seemingly at nothing. You know this gesture--checking xer internal terminal. “You’re both going to main power.” Xe points you in a straight line down the walkway.

“Calibrating more instruments I guess,” you say.

“You know it,” Die says, climbing back on xer ladder. It’s always something needing calibrating up here.

“Well let’s get to it...” You walk with 7 down the long hallway. The reactor is all the way in the back of the colony, a long walk in low G.

You look down at the terminal strapped to your arm. Some music while you work would be nice. You scroll past all the albums in your archive, but pause on one. Reflections of the Æther II by Pulse. You can’t listen to that here, not until you’re in a controlled environment. But it fascinates you nonetheless. The album art itself mesmerizes your Autistic brain--colors that shift in a pulsating rhythm, ripples of hue and saturation expanding in a polyrhythmic discord.

“Um...”

Glancing to your side you see 7 looking over at the artwork too.

“Sorry! Didn’t mean to overlook your display...” she says.

“It’s alright, if it was anything important it’d be my fault for projecting it down here visible to the whole world,” you say.

“So that’s the new Pulse album...” she says.

“Oh, do you like Pulse?”

“Reflections of the Æther I was probably the best album of 2253...there’s nothing quite like Pulse,” she says.

“So you like generative æthercore too,” you say.

“Yeah...” she says.