I have not done anything of cosmic significance in four days and it has been genuinely wonderful.
Constellation has given me a direction — chase the artifacts, understand the visions, figure out what the universe is trying to say — and I intend to do that. I do. But I arrived in New Atlantis with the artifact delivered and no immediate next step, and somewhere between the Lodge and the spaceport I apparently became the kind of person that strangers feel comfortable approaching with their problems.
I genuinely cannot explain how this happened.
It started with Kelton Frush, who I met near the MAST district looking like a man on the edge of an academic breakdown. He's a researcher. He'd deployed a series of environmental survey probes around the city that he needed to collect (apparently urgently) and at least one of them had gone missing — gone dark, wandered off, lodged in places it shouldn't be. He asked if I might collect the 4 that he hadn't had time to retrieve himself.
I had nothing pressing. I said sure.
They were exactly where you'd expect survey probes to go if they malfunctioned and nobody was watching. Stuck in a tree, hidden amongst foliage... One had been found by a child, who called it an "egg", and he sold it to the nearby Supply Depot. I tried to convince the woman running it to give me the probe, but she wanted some credits for it.
I got it back from her, and brought the 4 I'd retrieved back to Kelton.
Kelton was grateful, I think. He was a bit distracted by some apparently dangerous readings.
I met the head of the Sanctum Universum while I was in that part of the city.
I want to be careful about how I write this because I don't want to be unkind. The church believes that the universe itself is divine — that space, the stars, the act of exploration, all of it is sacred. The Keeper was warm and earnest, and we had a chat about his book "Between the Grav Jumps". Then one of his parishioners (if that's the term they would use) asked if I'd be willing to hand out slates to a few folks who had come to the church in the past, inviting them to come back.
It wasn't too many people, just 3 specific folks in the city that I had to track down. One was a particularly angry woman protesting (alone) outside a building I identified as the Freestar Collective Embassy. I didn't engage her in much conversation, I've seen her breed of "protestor" before. Truly some things don't change. The second was a ginger kid with a nose ring who I think is being pressured by his girlfriend to leave New Atlantis. I think he went to the church seeking guidance, though he seemed afraid to admit it. I actually met his girlfriend, by pure coincidence, and she seems like a sweet girl working as a janitor in the transit line. When we talked, or shortly after we stopped talking, I instantly found myself feeling... Hm. Empty.
The last person was a pretty nice guy, if maybe not all there. Diligent, working in the same UC Supply Depot where I'd... "recovered" the missing probe for Kelton. He seemed just happy that people thought about him enough to send the slate inviting him back.
It was a fun diversion. But here is what I keep coming back to: I arrived in this world through something I cannot explain. A glowing artifact showed me visions I don't have language for. A man in a black suit spoke to me about time like it was a road he'd walked before. I don't know what I believe. But I have a great deal less certainty than I used to about what's impossible.
The Sanctum looks up at the stars and calls them holy. I look up at the stars and feel something I also don't have a word for.
A man at Gal-Bank asked me, very politely, if I would help collect on some outstanding debts owed to his institution across various systems. Initially he tried to shoo me away, then realized I wasn't a new employee. When I introduced myself as a ship captain, his eyes lit up.
He called it debt collection, and as far as I can tell he's being on the level with me. I told him I would, but explicitly promised no concrete timeline. He seemed thrilled by this regardless, and provided me the location of the first debtor: a con man hiding on a small moon. I am honestly kind of shocked, and very intrigued.
Later that same day, on the other side of town, an old woman flagged me down and asked if I was going anywhere near Mars. I said I could be. She had a letter — actual paper, sealed — that she wanted delivered to a friend in Cydonia. She seemed aware that sending an actual pen-and-paper letter in this day and age was silly, but was insistent anyway. I had to respect it.
I took the letter. She had the look of someone who had been waiting a long time to ask someone that question and I wasn't going to be the person who said no. She even paid me up front, which I tried to refuse but she insisted yet again.
The Well is the lower district of New Atlantis — under everything, literally, accessible by elevator. It's where the people who can't afford the upper city end up. It also, as I now know from personal experience, is where you go when you want to do commerce without attracting the wrong kind of attention. The Trade Authority office down there has a certain flexibility about it that their name doesn't quite advertise.
I hadn't planned to spend the afternoon there. A MAST employee, Louisa Reyez, stopped me on the way out — power problems in the Well, she said, failing conduits, the grid was overloaded and it had been a crisis for long enough that someone had to actually go fix it. She looked at me the way people in this city apparently look at me now, which is like I might say yes to things. She was right about that.
I spent most of the afternoon down there tracing the fault, replacing couplings, talking to the residents. It is worse than the upper city. That's just true — it's underground, the air is recycled twice over, the housing is whatever fits in the space available. People know each other's names because they don't have any choice but to. They watched me work with the careful attention of people who have been promised fixes before and received nothing, and I found I wanted to actually finish.
The brownouts stopped after a few hours, but Louisa wasn't done. She'd been sitting on a theory the whole time — that the Trade Authority had been siphoning power from the Well — and she wanted to take it to Zoey Kaminski, the TA's New Atlantis manager, and she wanted me there when she did.
Zoey had the confidence of a spider watching the room already caught in her web. While Louisa made her accusation, Zoey brushed it aside without blinking and disappeared into the back to get evidence. When she came back, she looked surprised, and then amused. There was power siphoning happening, she confirmed. But not to the Trade Authority. Through it. Someone had been using their infrastructure as a conduit.
Another few hours after that, working with Zoey and Louisa (a match made in hell), I tracked it to an apartment topside. The tenant was long gone. He'd been running a program off the stolen power — skimming fractions of credits off Gal-Bank ATM transactions, the kind of thing that adds up slowly and never trips any alarms. Both MAST and the Trade Authority wanted the information I'd collected. I gave it to the TA.
My distrust of government bureaucrats, it turns out, is something I haven't managed to shake.
This next little adventure is one I'm hesitant to document.
Someone — I didn't ask their name and they didn't volunteer it, which should have been the first sign — hired me to pick up a package from the Trade Authority in the Well and deliver it to him. I should have noticed that he was paying me to walk the equivalent of a half mile and carry a package for half of that. They described it as art, with no elaboration.
When I reached the Trade Authority and spoke with Zoey Kaminski once again, I was handed a briefcase and told that all the "necessary paperwork" was updated and included. Art doesn't need paperwork. I knew at that moment I was entangled in something I should have avoided.
By that point I was already committed. I played along, telling her I understood.
I delivered it, and I'm not going to pretend it wasn't exhilarating.
A man who runs the ENHANCE! clinic in the commercial district had misplaced a slate with patient data on it — sensitive records, the kind of thing that turns into a liability if it ends up in the wrong hands. He was understandably frantic. I found it at Whetstone, the steakhouse nearby. He'd left it there. That was it. That was the whole mystery.
And a bartender at the spaceport had a shipment of goods confiscated by security on what sounded like a technicality. I made some inquiries, did a littl bit of smooth talking, and I convinced a maintenance guy to open the door. The goods were "released". She poured me a drink and said I looked like someone who was getting used to something.
I asked what she meant.
She said: you've got that look. Like you keep being surprised by life.
I didn't answer right away. She wasn't wrong, exactly, but she was also missing something — the surprise is not just life throwing the unexpected at me. It's that it's SOMEONE'S life. That a person could live like this, just moving through a city fixing things that needed fixing, sitting at a spaceport bar getting read by a stranger. That this is a thing humans do. That she does. That I did today.
I thought about my wife, which I try not to do too much because I can't do anything about it and I still need to function. She would have liked the bartender. She would have liked my little adventures in the Well, probably. She has always had more patience for people than I do. Maybe that's why I've been doing what I have. Just trying to fill the void she left in my life.
I walked back to the Lodge at the end of the day with aching feet and the faint smell of the Well's recycled air still on my jacket, and I stood outside for a minute looking up at the New Atlantis skyline against the dark.
I don't know what I'm doing here. But I keep being handed things to fix and I keep fixing them, and I'm starting to wonder if that's its own kind of answer.
Going to sleep. Mars tomorrow, probably. Someone's waiting on a letter.