“Prepping?” Ivy said.
“That’s the only thing I can think,” Dinah said. “Prepping for a five- to ten-thousand-year stay.”
“They’re not the only ones,” Ivy said.
It took Dinah a few moments to catch her friend’s meaning. Then it was clear, just from the look on Ivy’s face. “Are you shitting me? Cal?”
Ivy made just a suggestion of a nod with her eyes. “Mixed in with the stuff you’d expect from a fiancé—which is none of your business—he asks me questions about things like the comparative merits of lithium versus sodium hydroxide scrubbers. He requests copies of Luisa’s PDFs about the sociology of persons confined in small places for long periods.”
“He can’t think you’re not going to notice that.”
“Sure. I’m going to read between the lines.”
“What do you suppose he’s thinking?”
“Well,” Ivy said, “he does have sole authority over a huge submarine designed to ride out global thermonuclear warfare. And when the United States ceases to exist, I guess there’ll be no one above him, chain-of-command-wise. What’s a commander to do?”
“But how would it work?”
“I think a lot depends,” Ivy said, “on whether the oceans boil dry. If I were him, I’d make for the Marianas Trench and keep my fingers crossed.”
“I would think it would be even harder than staying alive in space.”
Ivy looked at her friend with dry amusement.
“What?!” Dinah said.
“Staying alive in space is going to be a piece of cake, remember?”
“Oh yeah, sorry. I forgot. .” To put on my makeup. “It would present some fascinating challenges,” she corrected herself, switching to her best NASA PR voice.
“I think it’s like what we are doing,” Ivy said. “You have to break it down into a lot of little things and solve them one at a time, or you get overwhelmed.”
“Is that what we’re doing?”
“Yeah.” Ivy rolled her eyes.
“What’s on your mind? Other than the need for comic relief?”
“You. How you’re doing. Your health,” Ivy said.
“Oh my god, is this an actual meeting? Are we on official business here?”
Ivy ignored her. “You haven’t been logging much T2 time.”
T2—the second torus, which Rhys had been responsible for building — had started to spin on Day 140. Its simulated gravity was one-eighth of Earth normal, only a little greater than that on the first torus. It was bigger and spun more slowly, which Rhys hoped would make it a little more comfortable. Simply being in it helped counteract some of the negative effects of living in space for extended periods of time. People who lived without gravity suffered a gradual loss of bone density and muscle mass. Eyes went out of shape and vision deteriorated. Space station crews tried to fight this by using exercise machines that placed stress on the bones, but these were stopgap measures meant for people who were only going to be in space for a few months. Dinah, Ivy, and the other ten members of the original Izzy crew had now been up here for close to a year. During the first few months after Zero, no one had paid much attention to long-term health issues. Everyone was going to die. Scouts were showing up dead on arrival. It had been all emergency, all the time. But during the months of hamster tube building and structural consolidation, the life scientists had been quietly having their say. This wasn’t the first time Dinah had been nudged in recent weeks about her failure to spend more time in the simulated gravity field of T2.
“It’s just hard to go back and forth between gravity and no gravity,” Dinah said. “It makes me barf. And none of my stuff is in T2.” She was referring, as Ivy would know, to the shop where she worked on her robots.
“But isn’t that mostly remote work? Writing code?”
“Yeah, I just like to be where I can see them out the window.”
“Don’t they have little cameras on them?”
Dinah had no answer for that.
“Whatever you’re doing here,” Ivy continued, “you could do from a cabin in T2, where the gravity would build your bones.”
“It’s also Rhys,” Dinah admitted. “Things have been a little weird with him and I just don’t want to—”
“Rhys never even goes to T2,” Ivy said. “He’s been hanging out with the inflatable structures team.”
“Okay,” Dinah said. “Give me a place to work on T2 and—”
“There’s another thing,” Ivy said, and let out The Sigh. The Sigh was what Ivy did when the powers that be were making her do something ridiculous. It would never show up in the transcript of a meeting, but it changed everything.
“I don’t even want to guess,” Dinah said.
“We have all become characters in a reality TV show,” Ivy said. “You might not be aware of it.”
“Nah, I haven’t been watching much TV.”
“Well, it’s all people have to do anymore, down on the ground. The economy is shutting down, and people are just eating beans and entertaining themselves with screen time.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve been asked to pay more attention to message shaping.”
“Message shaping? What’s that?”
Ivy let out The Sigh.
“Okay, never mind,” Dinah said.
“People want to know what became of their Uppity Little Shitkicker.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Ivy said. “People like their ULS. They remember the thing you did with Tekla. Tekla porn is a big thing now too, by the way.”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“Anyway, people are asking where is plucky Robot Girl and her mechanical menagerie.”
“That explains some weird emails I have gotten.”
“From random strangers?”
“No, from my own family! I don’t read the ones from random strangers. How about you? What’s your role on the reality TV show, Ivy?”
Ivy stared at her coolly. “I’m the uptight bitch who can’t handle it.”
“Oh.”
“To American viewers, I’m not fully American. To Chinese viewers, I’m a banana.”
“I’m sorry, Ivy.”
“That’s the bad news.”
“Okay, and what is the good news?”
“All the people saying mean things about me on the Internet are gonna be dead in four hundred and thirty-three days,” she said, deadpan.
Okay. It was an example of that dark humor thing.
“After that, none of it matters — except my ability to be of service to Our Heritage.”
“Okay, baby, how can I help you?” Dinah asked. “We could take a selfie, you and me, and I could post it on the Uppity Little Shitkicker blog.”
“You and I are going to go for a ride on the first operational bolo,” Ivy said, “and you are going to be reminded of what one gee feels like.”
Casting of Lots
DURING THE FIRST FEW DAYS AFTER THE MOON HAD BLOWN UP, Doob had spent hours gazing up at Potatohead, Mr. Spinny, Acorn, Peach Pit, Scoop, Big Boy, and Kidney Bean. They were visible in the daytime, just as the moon had formerly been, and even on the rare day when it was cloudy in Pasadena, or he was stuck indoors, he could pull up a window on the screen of his computer and watch them on a live video feed.
After he had figured out that they were going to kill everyone on Earth, he had become a lot less interested in staring at them. He had, in fact, sometimes gone for weeks without looking up at the gradually spreading cloud of debris. Sometimes while walking across a dark parking lot or driving down the highway he would catch sight of the moon-chunks in the sky and deliberately turn his gaze away from them. They filled him with horror and even a kind of shame over the fact that he had once found the whole thing such a fascinating science treat. He did not want to be reminded of it. Instead he tracked the slow disintegration of the moon-pieces through spreadsheets and plots shared with him by his graduate students and his colleagues. He did everything he could to reduce the whole state of affairs to two numbers. One of these was the Bolide Fragmentation Rate, or BFR, which was a measure of how frequently big rocks were being made into small rocks. The other was, quite simply, how many days remained before the White Sky.