FUNCTION-L₃ #10

1230 Months Later...

2255-01-16 12:44:21 新千葉 > Welcome to AtaraChiba! The L₃ Chamber of Commerce and the AtaraChiba Civic Corporation wish you a happy visit!

You wake up to a message in your head, an automatic greeting from the colony--you’re here! You extract yourself from your sleeping bag fastened to the wall, excited to see the colony for yourself. Floating in microgravity, you pull yourself over toward your seat. Three days in this little pod, an express shuttle from the other side of the Moon-Earth system--you’re ready to feel gravity again, and have more than a few cubic meters to move in.

You pull yourself up against the little circular window, looking around as the stars pass you by in the craft’s rotation. Before you can find the colony, something else catches your eye--a sphere of deepest blue, half-illuminated, swirling with wispy white clouds covering the edges of brown continents tinged with green. You’ve been trying to catch sight of it the entire voyage, but the shuttle was never oriented the right way. You’ve wondered about it for your entire life, but this is your first time ever laying eyes on it directly--the Earth. The source of your life, the reason you’re here at all--it looks so delicate, floating out there, so insignificant, and overwhelmingly beautiful.

Before you can fully take it in, it drifts out of view, replaced by a much bigger world--from your perspective. AtaraChiba colony--bigger than any colony you’ve ever seen--a long cylinder of shining metal, closed off except for the glass panels on the ends, giving you a glimpse into the world contained within--layers upon layers of structures, platforms, skyscrapers, bridges--green gardens, flashing lights of commercial centers, and depths you can’t make out beyond them. Large curved radiator panels embrace the colony on the far end, where the reactor must be housed, and nearer to you the spaceport comes into view--many little stars drifting inward and outward, bright plumes of maneuvering thrusters glowing in the Sunlight. Before long, you’ll be on the inside.

You are Aydan of Luna, 184 months old, a second year technopath candidate at prestigious Translunar Academy, and this is the farthest from home you’ve ever been. As you drift further into the range of the colony network, the neural conduits recently implanted under your skin spark to life like a full-body antenna. The interface collar around your neck picks up the signals from inside and out and interprets them for your system. After days of isolation on a shuttle, you finally feel connection again. You reach for the cable trailing behind your neck and pull your terminal toward you, floating with you in microgravity, to magnetically attach it to your sleeve. Part enby, part machine, cyborg, this is what it means to be a technopath, what you and many Autistic kids like you aspire to be.

Weeks before your next semester starts, you’ve traveled here to Moon-Earth L₃ to visit your beloved girlfriend, Akiko, just as you promised her in the conditions of a duel you lost.

Now that you’re in-network again, you could message her to tell her you’re docking soon! Or you could take a moment to check in with your good friend, ÆON, someone who’s much closer to you, yet intangibly far all the same.