ATALIS

CHAPTER 5: THE LAB

I wake up at 0645 local hours. I sit up in bed and rub my face, my disheveled hair all over the place. I slide off the bed and then stretch and look at my mobile, a small clear device that I had left aboard the ship. It's primary function is to check the social media and other intranet updates on the Godspeed. On the Promise I hadn't needed it. Now, I'm fully charged, and I have nothing else to do yet. The Captain will call for me when it's time to extract the information that I had downloaded from the Promise and examine it.

For now, I sit back on the bed and read my mobile. A ship this size with this many people generally had some form of communication network for civilians and off-duty workers. A social media application. The Godspeed had two; Dust, and Sphere. Dust is the official social media site, and users had 300 characters to use per Dust message, and could tag up to 300 people per Dust. The theme of the app is comets, asteroids, cosmic dust, and solar winds.

The other social media application, Sphere, is quite different.

The name is part of the theme of Dyson spheres or swarms. Massive constructs built to harness the raw energy of a star itself. Sphere is the more popular of the two applications, and not the one I usually frequent. Everyone on the ship is automatically subscribed to each other and the user is free to unsubscribe or block people from interacting with them as they saw fit. The security force on the ship monitored both social media applications equally.

Each app could be modified to have different user-created themes.

History had shown us repeatedly that social media could easily be weaponized with misinformation campaigns.

Most of the posts are of pets. It's universal on both applications. Pets, fluffy ones, floofies, they came up with increasingly ridiculous names for animals and often anthropomorphize them and their actions. Most of them are harmless. Some were intriguing. Well. That's one word for it.

Then there's complaints. Complaints about anything and everything. Complaints about repair teams taking too long to repair some small repair somewhere on the ship. I don't pay much attention to those.

It's not as common on Dusts, but every so often there would be a post on Sphere that catches my view. Androids. Androids among us? Is this an android? What are androids? Why do we hate androids, again?

I set the mobile down without looking at any of the posts today. I head over to the closet and dress in my uniform. A gray long-sleeved top and comfortable black bottoms that cover to the ankles, with a lighter gray top that goes over the first top with short sleeves. I put small socks on my bare feet then my shoes on and then head out of my room.

I knew some who didn't wear socks. It didn't make sense to me not to wear socks.

"Hayden, are you awake?" the Captain speaks in my ear.

"Yes." I respond. "I'm awake. Do you need me to go to the lab?"

"Read my mind. Yes, if you can. I'll meet you there."

"Did you sleep at all?" I ask, pointedly. He has a habit of not sleeping enough.

"Plenty of people went without sleep last night," he responds evasively. "Captain out."

I roll my eyes and then purposefully begin walking down the hallway to the lab. Once I arrive there, I open the door using my access code and walk into the laboratory.

Researchers are walking throughout the room, walking from examination room to examination room, studying a variety of items taken from the Promise. Most of them had those symbols on them, some didn't. Some seem like ordinary objects, just sitting in highly contained rooms. The entire room was black, and anything placed on the tables throughout the lab had a purple illumination around it. Any contaminants, any unknown items that infiltrated the room were scanned and illuminated with holograms. Any gases got the same treatment. The entire lab is hard-wired to show any contaminants of any kind.