Optimism: A Wroth Worlds Expansion Era Story

The idealism of space colonization can’t outrun corporate greed.  Part of the Expansion Era, “Optimism” exposes the inner workings of Lamb Higley & Hillard, a company playing a key role in our novel Void.

The company wrote the lie on the outside of the personnel transport with the overly-dramatic name Optimism in bold, glossy yellow paint. The captain played his role in the deception over the public address system with such static and in such a language few, if any, in the cabin comprehended the words, much less the meaning. The text in page after page above temporarily blank signature lines had only provided clarification to those whose English language skills outweighed their hopelessness. Hopelessness was a prerequisite for sitting in that cabin in the Optimism.

Each story wove through common threads. All befriended an agent from Lamb, Higley & Hillard, LLC, nearly always from the same region of South Asia. Those with families spent weeks and months debating between three years that could be spent at home and the promise of financial independence known to few in their social circles. Promises of pay varied with the skill of the worker. Jagadish possessed engineer skills his recruiter priced at nearly twice the pay of a similar job on Earth, plus the accompanying bonuses and benefits expected from employment so far removed from home.

Severe flooding along the coast at home deepened the poverty and accompanying desperation upon which the illustrious British company fed to fill its infrastructure needs throughout the system. The small firm Jagadish had worked for, maintaining electrical systems on rusted cargo ships and stained fishing trawlers in Chittagong, had thrived during the floods, only to be burnt to the ground by neglect and inattentiveness. While the ashes still steamed in the summer rains, an engineer from Dhaka found Jagadish sipping tea he could no longer afford while hiding from the family he feared he could no longer support. The man wore a blue knit collared shirt upon which the silver logo “L2H” flashed in silver embroidery. They spoke for nearly three hours, during which Jagadish focused on his devastation and the man’s message of financial hope in space, without the mental energy to ask the questions he knew he should have.

Three months passed filled with paperwork, preparation, and constant battle with his wife over the decision he made without her. Those months ended in a long carpeted corridor bridging the gap between the packed waiting area on the departure station and Optimism’s hull. Two lines stretched down the corridor, one containing no more than fifty people in clothing from expensive outfitters, and a second containing nearly two hundred others with whatever clothes they possessed. A harsh melody of dozens of languages and the odor of anxiety distracted Jagadish. He tried to tune it out by staring at the beauty of the void outside the small window by which he waited for an hour and a half.

Jagadish assumed both groups shared similar accommodations. He assumed the smaller, better apportioned group sat in similar faded seats side by side with their neighbors and eating the same flavored protein. Had he thought about it, he would have further assumed the segregation sprouted from differences in language, as few of the men waiting around Jagadish shared his ability to speak English, or the other two languages of space, Russian and Mandarin. The thoughts remained distant, as did logic, while they walked them into the hold of a slightly aged commercial transport, filled with row after row of matching seats. Their compartment had no entertainment services, the stewards passed out no alcohol, and their meals came cold in prepackaged rations that could be heated unevenly by the self-heating container. Jagadish suffered boredom poorly, and had brought with him a few books stuffed into the small backpack he was permitted to bring.

Jagadish had little time to read on the trip, though. The man sitting next to him, a shrimp farmer from Sylhet, spoke incessantly for hours on end, mostly discussing his pet otter. The two had little in common, he an educated Muslim and his neighbor a subsistence Hindu, but, in their brief conversations, Jagadish learned he was in the minority on the flight. Nearly every other individual came from either the farms or the factories with little education.

The themes amongst the conversations around him were common enough: hope at financial independence, but the homogenous need for that hope varied enough from Jagadish’s own need that he took note. Nearly every other man crammed into that compartment had hope of building something new, of pulling themselves out of their life-long circumstances no matter the cost. Jagadish became self-conscious, only wanting his middle-class standard of living back. The presence of so many desperate men concerned him for another reason. Statistically speaking, and if what the L2H recruiter had said were true, there should have been other engineers on board.

Whatever happened with the other passengers in the cabin in front of them was a mystery. The division between the two chambers kept any pollution from the back out of the front. Certainly, the occasional glimpse flashed through the dividers, long and frequent enough for Jagadish to piece together an image of what lay on the other side. It almost became a game to him. A steward would pass between the sections at the same time someone went either towards or away from the lavatory. He would look at the fabric on the corner of the last row, or the scratches and wear of an armrest, or the distance between the brackets that affixed each seat to the floor. He analyzed these images, comparing them to the rows of seats around him. The attitude of the noise contrasted just as greatly. Sporadically throughout the hours, laughter would rumble down the aisle, rising over the nervous white noise of those in the rear of the vessel.

He enjoyed his view, though. Four rows of seats ran the length of the cabin. Those in the middle barely caught a sliver of blackness between the bodies on either side. Perfect black pinpointed with stars floated motionless outside the window only a meter away. No matter what happened, his new opportunity gave him a reason to leave the planet. A once in a lifetime opportunity.

By no means did he spend every waking moment of his childhood dreaming that someday he would see beyond the blue sky, but he had maintained a curiosity lingering in the back of his mind throughout his adult life. The escape from orbit only intensified his curiosity. The black made it all appear so close. He began to think of more than the science, he pondered the logistics and the mechanisms that let man, company, and machine push out so far. L2H needed people to clean, cook, serve meals, dispose of waste, wash linens, and every other minute detail needed to oil the machine of space development. One estimate told Jagadish that, for each individual actually mining or building, four people provided support, and two of those supporting roles were played by unskilled L2H workers.

Twelve full days past before the complex first appeared through the viewport over his neighbor’s shoulder as a cluster of blinking lights, never synchronized and never completely going dark. He discovered the hub by tracing the paths of incoming and outgoing flights, themselves so dim at first they were difficult to find while he reconstructed several lines of floating ants back to the flurry of activity at the center.

Slowly they approached, despite their speed. Three hours passed from the time Jagadish identified the hive until he the details resolved. Like most, he heard the name “Ceres Station” and assumed one self-sufficient hub floating among the asteroids. One central station existed, certainly, an oversize lozenge with piers and docks protruding from either end like visible cracks radiating from chipped glass. It dominated the view, sucking in all objects save a few crumbs of buoys marking the channels. Further out, away from the station’s event horizon, clusters of separate facilities docked bulk transports while they either took on or dropped off cargo. Skeletal structures pointed spotlights at injuries to be healed on craft of all sizes. One such facility engulfed a ship large enough to carry pre-fabricated orbital stations, and that facility, in turn, provided no more than additional detailing to the entire complex. In between them all, pairs of red and green lights ferried people to the hub.

Jagadish, glancing over his shoulder at the hold full of his countrymen, wondered if they would all be staying in the one location and, upon application of his engineer’s thought-process, realized why there were similarly packed flights to the facility once a month. All the dots connected. Every ship sitting off the station required a crew onboard, a crew at the station for moving and storing the cargo, a crew at the satellite facilities for maintenance, an organization to manage operations at the station itself. Each member of those crews needed beds to sleep in, food to eat, entertainment for off-hours, stores, bathrooms, and utilities. Each of those services required people to provide basic, low-skill support. Those low-skill laborers, in turn, required similar facilities, creating a cycle feeding upon itself. Jagadish found himself, in his transport’s compartment, surrounded by fodder for the beast. Nonetheless, he felt pride along with the sense of non-belief he was becoming a small part of such a machine.

Every few minutes, a newly resolved detail required further study. Throughout that time, his ignorance kept him from noticing their approach path. It seemed as though the pilot had taken them on a tour of the entire facility, going down the length of the hub from point to point so Jagadish examined every recessed window and every pier jutting out into space. Then, without warning, they turned away from the primary station.

It disappointed more than alarmed him. He tried to rationalize it, but, from the moment he saw the center of expansion into the outer system, he wanted to be a part of it. He had to be a part of it. What started as a necessary evil became a desperate dream. After such a long trip, another few days or even hours away from the activity only teased him. His heart sank as they approached some satellite facility hanging outside of the view from his small window. Stewards walked down the aisle with huge garbage bags picking up the leftovers from the many pre-packaged meals consumed during the trip, and people began to shuffle around in anxiety. The ship eventually slowed, and, right on the edge of Jagadish’s peripheral vision, he saw  the gray metal edge of the building. A tendril reached out from the edge to a small shuttle, nondescript save the blue field with the silver, stylized letters “LHH” worn on the side.

The lights brightened without warning. A white man appeared in the passageway between the two compartments. He held a microphone, as did a man behind him who looked more like Jagadish. The L2H representative spoke in short bursts, and the man behind him translated. Reading off the script, the men informed the passengers they were at a support facility and would be given their job and housing assignments shortly. Without further comment, the western man disappeared behind the divider, avoiding any questions.

Passengers stared at each other. Some shifted. None substantially moved until one of the stewards irritatingly gestured for the first row to move forward. They did, standing with their heads titled awkwardly under the overhead compartments and hauling whatever bag they brought on. The steward stopped them after two steps towards the door, causing bodies to pile in the aisle.

Jagadish remained in his seat, not necessarily patiently but with the knowledge it would be some time before the rows in front of him cleared enough for him to leave. He waited. The passengers standing by the door waited. It lasted longer than a temporary pause. At one point, the steward stepped away to talk to someone, and the person at the head of the line moved further towards the door. The L2H employee who had given them instructions appeared again from behind the partition, barking at the passenger. Confusion followed until the translator emerged.

Jagadish could not overhear the conversation, only the tone broadcasting a change in attitude from the cheerful solicitation for help found in the job posting back in Bangladesh, or the well-wishes and thanks at the Gateway before they boarded the ship to Ceres. This tone removed all choice. Jagadish realized did not recall seeing either the man or his interpreter before on the trip, inferring that they stepped on board the moment the umbilical extended to the ship. That tone and sentiment came from the facility. It lived there.

He hoped his first impression was the wrong one, but the translator shadowing the L2H man provided an unspoken form of psychological backup. Instantly, Jagadish hated the translator. The words coming out of his mouth in native Bengali mirrored the English in both language and tone. That bridge between L2H and the poor passenger standing feet away from him actively chose the corporate side. The incident flared, then passed, and they waited.

Jagadish could not tell for how long they waited. He watched the corner of the building through the window near him, but nothing appeared. He picked up his tablet and read, using pages to mark distracted time, twenty-three of them before he again watched the edge of the facility. Examining a small shuttle clearly, he noticed movement through the windows. Uncertain as to whether he actually saw it or projected it, he recognized one of the white men who had boarded the flight with them.

The line began to move. He stored his tablet in his backpack, shuffling down the seats into the aisle. The ramp funneled everyone together into a single file line, held up by the slightest hesitation of those in front of him. Heads blocked his view forward and aft, and featureless bulkheads ran only a foot off either side of his shoulders.

The confines of the ramp dumped them into a cavernous holding area. Harsh lights reflected off dented metal. Rows and rows of industrial shelving running away from the outer bulkhead only partially filled the space. The size of the room muffled sound as all the passengers shuffled wordlessly down a rubber path laid atop the metal. Their path led left. To the right, a carpeted area ran along the bulkhead to a room carved out in the corner. Jagadish caught the last passenger from the forward compartment disappearing into it, carrying luggage. The room must have led them to the other shuttle, and Jagadish realized he had, once again, been separated.

The line pushed him forward, past rows of haphazardly stacked bags. His fellow passengers grabbed theirs as they walked by, hopefully finding it before the mass of people shoved them past. Jagadish’s baggage stood out as an oversize, heavy-duty plastic suitcase on wheels. He rolled it out just in time before being pushed forward.

Three desks manned by Bengalis serviced every passenger from Jagadish’s compartment. He waited, sitting on his suitcase while names were checked against registers before passengers became workers, grouped together behind the desks in anticipation of further guidance. He shuffled forward either every minute or every ten, often making no progress as desks sat temporarily vacant. After the first hour of waiting, the excitement felt by those around him began to wear off, and the soundless expanse covered their disorganized group.

Jagadish resumed reading his book, occasionally looking up at random sounds escaping from deeper inside the support facility or readjusting his position in line. Intermittently someone counted the people who had made it past the desks to cluster along the wall and would escort groups of them deeper into the station. He tried to remain patient, but days of travel-sleep and the harsh lighting threatened to tear his calmness away. The irregular movement of the queue took nearly three hours to bring him to the older man sitting behind the desk on the left.

The man gave no greeting, only stating the word “name” in Bangladeshi. Jagadish provided it, and the clerk input the information into his computer. A few seconds later, a card slid out of the slot on the man’s desk. He gave it to Jagadish. It displayed the photo taken of Jagadish when he arrived in Earth orbit, bleached out but mostly recognizable.

“This is your ID card.” The man said with the bored repetition of someone going through the same routine nearly a hundred times that day. “It’s also the key to areas that you can access. Have it displayed on you at all times. You will live in room L33 here. If you stand against the back wall, someone will take you to your living area. Your job assignment is on Ceres Main in food service. Someone will meet you at L33 to take you there at four o’clock tomorrow morning.”

The routine flowed from one sentence to the next so seamlessly, Jagadish believed he must have been the one who erred. Noticeable alarm should accompany such a disparity. “I’m sorry, there must be a mistake. You said food service? I’m an engineer.” Those around him must have scoffed at such a foolish plea. In retrospect, he knew the poor man behind the desk did not make Jagadish into a food service provider, just as he knew announcing his professional qualification impacted nothing. In his fantasy world, the man sprung into action, apologizing profusely and giving him exactly what he wanted.

The clerk ignored Jagadish’s fantasy, shrugged his shoulders, and pointed to the screen hidden from Jagadish’s view. “It says your assignment is food service.”

“I need to talk to someone.” Surely, someone further up the food-chain could rectify the error.

“You are talking to me.” The clerk’s annoyance made itself clear.

“Do you know why it says ‘food service?'” The belligerent question invited a belligerent response, but, to the man’s credit, the clerk remained civil, or, at least, unanimated.

“No.”

Civility aside, Jagadish was not satisfied. “Then I need to talk to someone who does.”

The civility ended, and the tone heard aboard the shuttle reappeared. “You can talk to someone later. Go stand over with the others.”

“I’m not moving until I talk to someone.” Jagadish understood people, if not this alien environment. The moment he moved and permitted the continued grinding of the machine, that machine would turn him into a by-product, discarded amongst the flotsam of the asteroid belt.

The clerk rolled his eyes, as though such displays regularly occurred, then, meeting Jagadish’s, understood something. Whether it was Jagadish’s point of view or that he was not going leave unless someone spoke to him, he did not know. The desk worker stood and walked away. People behind Jagadish groaned at the further delay. Again, he waited, standing anxiously by the desk looking at no one.

Somehow he had known. An empty sensation filled his stomach shortly after boarding the flight, and it had sat back there with every line drawn between those who looked like him and those who thought like him. Solutions did not come to him should the worst manifest. Turning back would be a challenge, but it was something he could do, if necessary. He could not have been the first.

He looked down the line still idling behind him, wondering if there were any other like him out there facing the same predicament. He thought about the times shortly before when, waiting in line, he had noticed people standing next to an empty desk while one of the three clerks left. How many of them had been in the same position? How many of them panicked when learning of their lack of choice?

The Bengali clerk returned with a pot-bellied man in an ubiquitous L2H polo shirt who walked like he made far more money than his mediocre bureaucratic work was worth. He scowled contemptuously at Jagadish, meeting his eyes for a few seconds before turning to the clerk. “Tell him food service is the only job available.” He spoke loudly, taking painful pauses between each word while making nonsensical hand-gestures.

“I speak English.” Jagadish said, not waiting for the translation. Rather than surprise, he received only irritation. “And my contract says that I am to be an engineer.”

The man smirked. “Your contract also says that there is no guarantee that job is available.” He replied. “Didn’t you read that… in English?

He had, and discounted it. He had interpreted the clause as meaning there might not be a specific engineering job available. No reasonable person could have expected they would take him all the way from Earth to Ceres without some arranged job commensurate with his experience. Certainly, the passengers from the other compartment, the ones who flew out towards the hub on the smaller shuttle, had jobs arranged. He wondered how long L2H had known he would not work as an engineer. The thought of the division in the transport between the men in polo shirts and the rabble in the back nagged at him. Somehow, he had known.

“I don’t want to work in food service. I am an engineer. I deserve a job as an engineer.” Jagadish tried to maintain his dignity, but struggled in front of others who may have been similarly duped.

“There isn’t an engineering job.” The man said, clearly projecting to the rest of the room that Jagadish must be crazy.

Only one option remained. “Then I want to go home.”

Five fingers, too fat to be extended completely, reached out from the man’s hand. “Certainly. That will be thirty-eight thousand dollars. U.S.”

“Excuse me?” Dignity fled. Jagadish yelled at the man in front of everyone. The man, holding all the power, remained arrogantly calm.

“Your contract is for three years. It clearly says that if you decide to leave before those three years, L2H recovers the cost of bringing you all the way out here. It costs nineteen thousand dollars to take one of you people all the way from India or wherever, to here. We also have to feed you and provide you housing during your trip. So, two trips, one out here and one back, will cost you thirty-eight thousand dollars.”

“If I had thirty-eight thousand dollars, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

The man shrugged, fully knowing, and counting upon, that fact. While the clerk stared at the broken Jagadish, he spoke up in Bengali, whispering desperately as though the supervisor next to him could not hear the conversation. “You must take it. They will lock you in a room for months waiting to send you back.”

The supervisor ignored the conversation. Jagadesh had the impression he understood at least the topic, and hoped his lackey would talk some sense into the newcomer.

“What do you mean?” Jagadesh replied. The clerk spoke in hyperbole, he felt certain.

“They have to send you back if you want to go, but only when they want to. Take the job, and at least you will do more than wait for a ship that never comes. It’s better to have options than none.”

Jagadish eyed the man suspiciously. After all, the same clerk, moments before, had been far from a friend. While he could not comprehend being locked in a room for months, waiting to go back, he also could not comprehend traveling such a distance only to be forced in a skill-less position.

The L2H bureaucrat spoke up. “Look, buddy, even if you wanted to screw yourself and go home, I can’t tell you when the next flight is available to take you. That, and we’re still going to get our money from you if it takes the rest of your life. So, which is it?”

In an instant, he made a choice. Looking the clerk in the eye and hoping he deserved trust, ignoring his anger at the man a few moments before, he chose to have options.

They pointed him towards a group of those similarly situated. As soon as he arrived, the same fat man followed him, and established himself as a leader shepherding the group through the holding area without a word. Movement somehow felt good, like progress. The man’s waddling strut in front of Jagadish spoke of a man ready to tell a story to his buddies over cheap bourbon later that evening, laughing. Jagadish tried to exemplify a person who refused to be broken, no matter how his mind collapsed in upon itself.

They left the room in which he had spent the last three hours and through a warehouse filled with rows of shelves three stories tall containing massive plastic bins moved by a robotic arm. The deeper into the station they got, the more removed Jagadish felt from the process that brought him there.

Oddly, so far back from any window, he nearly forgot he was in a huge complex floating in space, or that he’d arrived after a voyage of hundreds of millions of miles. He walked through an industrial facility that, other than the barely perceptible bounce in his step caused by the artificial gravity, easily could have sat in some urban, terrestrial environment. The psuedo-familiarity mitigated his irritation and apprehension. In those moments of denial, he could have been heading home or taking his desired job just as easily as he could be walking into pure oppression.

They turned towards a small doorway nearly blocked by the last rows of shelving. Jagadish pushed his suitcase through, wondering how the pudgy man in front of him fit through the door that wouldn’t open completely. The hallway they entered closed around the small group, covered with scrapes and marks down its length. Jagadish stepped onto a stairway, noticing how the metal grating supporting each of his steps was bent and discolored, the whole structure shaking with each footfall. After a landing, they turned back around, walking underneath the way they came, back down an identical corridor. The L2H man opened a heavy metal containment door and gestured for the men to enter.

The room was no larger than two shipping containers. In fact, it appeared as though the room they were in had once transported goods to those reaches of space.  Such containers were a frequent building material for modular support stations, or so he had read. What once carried tons of goods or supplies contained nearly forty-eight men.

Bunk beds crowded the floor, without room for the top occupant to sit upright, and crammed so close together one person barely could walk between them. Filthy clothes hung from the beds, and the stench of molded sweat oppressed everyone inside. At one end, poorly lit doors revealed an overcrowded and unclean bathroom, with open toilets and showers that let Jagadish watch, from his position in the doorway to his new home, men vacate themselves. While the group paused, overwhelmed, the L2H guide turned to leave. “Someone will be here at four to take you to work.”

“What time is it now?” Jagadish surprised himself that he could even conceive of such a basic question at a time like this. The man seemed to be just as surprised before checking his watch.

“Twenty-two-forty-five.” He said. “You have fifteen minutes until lights-out.” The man closed the door, and an electronic lock slid into place.

All the awake occupants looked at the newcomers. He had stepped into some form of interim state. Those bodies around him seemed interested in the newcomers only insofar as they represented change, however slight, in their familiar environment and routine. No face smiled and each eye sat heavy on a dark pillow. Their minds closed off, leaving only their bodies stuck on that island surrounded by the sea of space.

Jagadish began to shut down in despair, taking with it his curiosity and inventiveness that gave him purpose. Within the three minutes’ walk from the small desks upstairs to this room, they stripped him of his goals which drove every action he made. The purpose of waiting slammed him backwards into a nearly catatonic state as his mind reset.

Inches measured privacy. Some made ostrich hides out of their clothes to bury their heads for sleep. Several torsos lay on the ground with faces concealed under dirty shirts or pants. At the end next to the bathroom, two sets of bunk-beds remained unoccupied. Surprisingly, no one had stolen the folded blanket and pillow left on them. He collapsed onto one, wishing another sweaty body lay between him and the toilet. Nearly as soon as another recent arrival crawled onto the bunk above him, the overhead lights shut off automatically.

The bathroom light glared yellow across his face, reflecting off a sign hung by the door. “Lamb, Higley & Hillard, LLC, does condone human trafficking. Report all alleged abuses immediately. This notice required by law.”