January 19th - The Earth is very far away. All that is and was in those two tiny little blobs. Good riddance. Earth is as it always has been. It sucked to live there. And the problem was all the people. One in particular just ruined the Earth for me forever. She hurt me so badly that I can’t tolerate living on the same planet as her.
When they found me and told me about this job, they were really surprised at how quickly I said yes. But then, they didn’t have all the information in front of them. I was disgraced, disowned, all but homeless, hungry, borderline alcoholic, unemployed and separated. I lived in HUD housing after I lost my job. All because the woman I married lied to protect herself. She blamed me for all of the things she did, going so far as to not deny allegations that I abused her and her child (which was totally false, I would never do anything to hurt either of them. A fact that was later mentioned by literally everyone but her and her lawyer, who then had the entire file sealed, but not before leaking her allegations. It was a very nasty business) all so she wouldn’t lose custody of her daughter. People are complicated. They have agendas. Life out here is less complicated. Robots don’t have agendas. The Symbiont doesn’t have an agenda. At least, they don’t have sinister agendas.
The Symbiont and I have been “conversing” over the last couple of weeks. It’s my job. It is a surprisingly robust program they’ve put in here. I help input data. It is a little frustrating, though. I guess you could say it’s a learning experience for me. The pareital core attaches metadata tags to all the information that it takes in and spends down time trying to combine data with similar tags into logical if-then statements. Each of these, in turn, is tagged and applied to physical, logical, epistemological, or philosophical rules in-built in the system. Those which pass the logic test are stored as “possibly valid,” which sounds really whiz-bang, but as the caretaker, my responsibility is checking the output. There’s some really whacked-out stuff that’s come out of that machine and we’ve been underway for less than three weeks…
We’re receiving routine data injects from Sapience. I get all news that is news in human space. We get digital copies of what they’re currently passing off as newspapers from both Earth and the Moon. Although the Moon is certainly less exciting half of Sapience, news-wise. Things rarely happen there. The most exciting thing to happen on the moon is the breeding of a huge habitable tree (see what I mean about the trees?!) that is shaped like a spiderweb/dome. Don’t get me wrong, I rather prefer living in a tree to a nuclear bomb shelter and I get that the Selenites don’t really have much to work with in the way of resources, but that’s their fault. They cut ties with the Earth. They declared themselves “independent but friendly”. And to their credit, they’re not complaining. That’s okay, I guess they’re doing alright.
Doesn’t mean I have to like ‘em. It just means I have to ride inside their hypersonic shrubbery.
My other duties involve minding the vegetable garden. I like gardening. I used to be a soldier, in my previous life. Part of why it was so easy for people to assume that I was an out-of-control abusive jerk. But either way, I’ve seen some really horrible things. I was present the day that the Peace of Tamil Eelam failed. I witnessed the Fall of Trincomalee. The Seige of Batticaloa. The Sinhalese Last Stand on the ancient fortress of Sigiriya. I saw the pogroms. I saw the soldiers opening fire on the refugee zone. I saw the rebel airstrikes and one horrible night I stood under a sky on fire with anti-aircraft artillery tracers. The Seventh Eelam War. It was small, by global standards. But particularly, quietly brutal. For me, it was like living the end of the world every day. How would the blood on our hands ever let us carry on a normal life? I guess making things grow is a kind of penance I pay to the universe. After so much destruction and killing, I am very happy to make things grow. It’s peace that I never found on Earth.
I have wheat, peppers, lettuce, kale, spinach, zucchini, and some fruit. Corn is out of the question. It drains too many nutrients. It’s kinda nice, though. I’m trying to keep on as much of a routine as I can. And I’m trying to adjust as much as possible to Enceladus’ environment. Which is tricky, what with me being a human with a 24-hour circadian rhythm and a day on Enceladus being 33 hours long. On Earth, they say that 8 hours of sleep is ideal, which means that one third of the day is spent sleeping and then there are 16 hours during the day in which a “normally-functioning” human is active. That sounds a bit much to me, but who am I to argue with the science? By comparison, that means that one can sleep for 11 hours and still have 22 hours of activity. It is very tiring. The doctors on Earth suggested the experiment. That said, the point of my day where I spend 8 hours validating the Symbiont’s parietal core output is coming up, so that’s it for now.
