Three

We’re gathering at Breathe Easy’s headquarters today, to ship off to the moon for training. We’re supposed to stay in the facility overnight, and we’re all in one large, dormitory-style room. I just finished packing my apartment, which has been more of a jail cell since I entered my plea deal. I’ve been dreaming of this expedition for weeks, and I haven’t been able to go anywhere! It’s nice to finally be out of that place, looking at different scenery.

I was the first one here, which they requested so I could work on another entry. The main building is huge – 4 kilometers tall by itself, an impressive accomplishment in any city, but since we’re in the middle of the Dust Bowl Desert, it gets direct glare from the sun that is almost blinding when exiting the train. As you approach the building, you can also see their launch center, the StarTram, which uses magnets in some way I don’t fully understand to launch carriers into space. The center seems very close by, but by the time you’re up the front steps of the skyscraper, you realize that it’s actually several kilometers away, and it’s just mind-bogglingly massive! It’s 2,000 kilometers in length, and you can only see the most populous end, where all the engineers and crew live and work. Beyond that, it’s 200-meter-wide black tube that stretches in the most southern, uninhabitable regions of our continent.

Aside from the skyscraper and living complex, and a smattering of smaller, sparkling gems of buildings, it’s desolate out here. No one’s lived in the area for generations, because reservoirs dried up a long time ago. Fortunately, Breathe Easy’s whole business is to provide clean water and air to the world, so when they decided to launch space mining operations, they started shipping in water for their workers, and they got the land for cheap.

Breathe Easy elected to add to the national food system, rather than deal with expensive shipping to a remote desert location. I am not sure, but I suspect they have a deal with food processing businesses to ship fresh fruits and vegetables to towns unlucky enough to live around the edge of the desert.

There’s an absolute horde of ruddy-skinned Ikin working the gardens here. Lots of fruit trees – I saw nectarines and pomegranates, mostly, but also a few plums and figs. I also saw the classic nut tree trio: pistachio, almond, and pecan. I’ve never had enough space to grow my own fruit trees, but I’ve dreamed of having an apple and pear orchard, with grape vines twining their way throughout.

There’s also thousands of my former Gadhavi family on campus, but they’re mostly engineers and scientists with their thick, dark hair hanging in their faces and deep brown eyes lost in notes or the ground. It looks like there must be a call center, because a small army of too-blond Senfte just left the premises for what I assume is their lunch break. And of course, there’s a few jumpsuited Bakalov technicians, who I assume are here to test and maintain the StarTram. The Bakalov do love to scowl and look serious.

The main building is an impressive 4 kilometers tall, as I said, with a 6 kilometer wide base, with grand curves up to a point, like the very tip of a needle. Reportedly, it can hold 500,000 inhabitants, but there’s only 30,000 workers on the project, who work inside the building at any one time. The Ikin probably live off-campus, or in underground housing. The first ten floors appear to be mostly restaurants and shopping, which probably provide employment for spouses of the Senfte in the call center, and convenient access to goods and services for everyone else.

There’s a few smaller skyscrapers – just a kilometer tall, each – dotting a ring around the outside of the main building. There might be additional housing for the Gadhavi out there, and I suspect the Hou CEOs probably own a building each. There’s only 5 of them total who run the company, but I bet their families are with them. I hope so, because it could get pretty lonely in this expanse of burnt yellow and tarnished blue land.

Someone once told me that in any Hou family, only one spouse needs to work. I don’t believe that, though. If you had good work before you got married, why wouldn’t you want to continue that?

There’s enough buildings that I bet there’s also a few dozen Arany on retainer, as well, to make television shows for the workers, and advertisements for the company. I can’t see any of those delicate, golden-skinned creatures wanting to live in such a remote place, however. They exist for the spotlight, after all.

As at home, all of the buildings here are huge carbon and clear acrylic hives of activity. However, the sunlight is so direct here that each building glitters during all of the hours of daylight each day. It is late afternoon, and we’re at the northern edge of the continent, and the sun is setting in a pink and orange haze in a cloudless sky, and the glass is glowing a hot orange-yellow. It’s so beautiful that I almost don’t want to go. I want to stay here more than just two days. But, I do get to go on an incredible voyage to a new life, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much.

It looks like the other women are starting to arrive. We’re all being housed in one large dormitory-style room, so I’ve been told, because they want us to get used to being in a confined space. Rabbah is, currently, only 500 meters by 400 meters, so it can tightly house all twelve of us. We’ll need to take our space craft, which will be about 200 meters wide and 600 meters long, and add that material in a constructive way to the settlement. Once the second group arrives, we’ll be able to build more habitation with that material, as well. And, as our population begins to grow, we should have a solid shipment schedule back and forth with Earth – we send them raw water, they send us things we need like carbon fiber and silk and crystals.

Anyway, they’re cramming us into one room so we’ll get to know one another. I’m very excited to meet the group, actually, because I’ve never had many women friends, and if the criteria for application was similar to what I filled out, then there should be many like minds on this mission. I’m going to take a break and go meet them!

*

Well, I met all of the women a few hours ago, and they are not as like-minded as I’d hoped. I guess I thought, since I’m a fallen Gadhavi, there would be more, but there’s only one other Gadhavi in the group – Chloe, who was also recently de-casted through an employer’s lawsuit. Everyone else is Bakalov or Ikin, with a couple of Senfte, and, yes, a couple of Araboa!

Until yesterday, I had never seen a member of the Araboa caste in person before. I’ve seen pictures of them on the news, under arrest for terrorism, or that one man who became a member of the Ikin after suing for asylum. Their hair is dark, like us Gadhavi, but their skin is eerily pale, almost pearlescent white, and their hair tends to be curly. The ones I’ve seen before often have thick wrinkles and tangled hair, but these women were composed, clean. I didn’t speak to them much, but I wonder if Breathe Easy cleaned them up before they came onto campus. They’re de facto citizens now, instead of outcasts from far away on the Bainbridge Island Colony, so they should present themselves as citizens I suppose.

There’s also a fascinating-looking woman, named Ihsan. She’s Ikin, but unlike most Ikin I’ve seen – she has thin blond-ish hair hanging down narrow shoulders, framing a thin body. But she’s not thin as though she’s careful what she eats, but like a person who has spent most of her life not eating properly. It’s hard to see. I’ve never seen that kind of blonde hair before, either. She didn’t speak much, but her slight accent makes me think she might be from Gartrikki or thereabouts. Warlords shift the borders so often in the Wild East that it’s hard to keep up with who is calling what chunk of land by what name.

A Bakalov woman named Haven is our mission leader, apparently. She’s worked in Breathe Easy’s West Coast factory for years, managing the techs and seasonal Ikin crew. She says she was good at her job, too, so that means she will know a bit about water purification and air filtration, which will be useful in a non-Earth environment!

She did say some odd things, though. She said that she’d been in contact with the CEOs of Breathe Easy for years, telling them about mining operations and how profitable they are, so in a way, this entire expedition to Europa is her idea. The Jovian moon is the only other source of water in our solar system, and since sending crews into space is so cheap now, it makes sense to harvest from there while we wait for the oceans on Earth to completely settle down. She said that the Hou leaders appreciated her input so much that they promoted her to the lead manager of Rabbah. Well, at least she knows what she’s doing.

I admit, despite being stripped of my caste, I find it hard to take orders from a Bakalov. We aren’t exactly members of our castes, though, if we’re not on Earth, so I should get used to it. Haven is very well-intentioned, anyway. She overdid her mousy hair in an updo just to impress us, and wore far too much blue eye shadow for the occasion – and if I notice these things, they can’t be acceptable! But, it’s a sign of her enthusiasm, and I think that will make life on Rabbah that much more enjoyable.

I told her that I was working as the media liaison for everyone, to help promote the mission to the public, and she thought that was a great idea. I made sure she knew that I would be writing at a terminal for a few hours before going to sleep, since I had to finish this entry. Haven has a very tight schedule planned, and I’m sure she’ll come in here any minute to check on me and make sure I’m going to bed. That’s the Bakalov, though! Efficient to the T, and demanding. I know efficiency – what personal assistant doesn’t? – but the demanding part will take some getting used-to! I suppose that comes from years of keeping Ikin in line. Laborers are always stubborn.

We’ll be getting fitted for suits tomorrow. I don’t know too many details, but I do know that we’re getting special full-body suits that can help us handle the three-week trip through zero gravity. Bone loss was a serious problem for early astronauts. Thankfully, businesses have solved that problem for us. I hope we can customize them a little bit, as well.

Two

Breathe Easy informed me after my initial entry that I should go into more depth about myself. While I’m hesitant, they know what readers will want. Here, from my own perspective, is my story. 

It’s a tough story, I have to admit. For all my enthusiasm about the Breathe Easy excursion, I have less enthusiasm about the society I’m part of. No wonder I ended up in court.

Years ago, I worked as a personal assistant to an Arany self-help expert. His name doesn’t matter anymore – you can look it up if you really want to, but I don’t want to continue to drag his name through the mud. Anyway, there were several of us who were his personal assistants, and one of my fellow Gadhavi who worked there was named Alan. He took an interest in me when I started working there, just out of school, but I admit that I didn’t take much interest in him for a long time.

You see, although I had a secure job that provided the usual apartment, food, transportation, and stipend, I wasn’t happy. I’ve never been happy as a Gadhavi, really. I’ve always been curious about agriculture, knitting and sewing, and circuit-building. When I was a kid, with the excuse of being a history buff, I convinced my parents to procure books on all of these subjects. I guess in a way I am a history buff, because I certainly look to the past, rather than the present or the future, for hope.

Once, when I was 11, I tried to make my own dye out of oak leaves from the nearby park, but the resulting mess forced me to work two summers in a row to pay off the bill my parents’ company sent us. I destroyed the porcelain in the bathroom, I wasted water. It was awful.

But I couldn’t stop. Instead of trashing my old, torn clothes like most kids did, I made thin strips and taught myself basic weaving. Instead of sending my computer to the recyclers’, I lied to my parents and tore it apart to study the boards and crystals inside. I began sneaking seeds out of apples and planting them in the park near our apartment. They never grew into anything, but it was worth a try.

When I was in my last two years of college, focusing on writing skills, I finally got my own place through the school’s administrators, and started a window garden. I tried to grow everything from seed that I could get my hands on, even if I knew it might get too big for the box. I saw some sprouts on occasion, but I knew that I wasn’t growing proper window box plants. Those are things like herbs and flowers – I was using fruit seeds, since that’s most of what I could grab.

I was hired immediately to work with the self-help guru, which was a great job. Not only was I given an apartment in a nice part of town, and a decent stipend, I was guaranteed a certain amount of free time every week, with exceptions for busy seasons. I immediately filled my free time with trying to grow food from seed. I discovered, slowly, that there’s an underground network of meetings for people like myself who want to make their own products, regardless of the health and safety dangers. I joined a sewing group, and learned to stitch fabrics together. I joined a group of circuit benders, and learned to solder, although I never had a knack for technology. I joined a group of agricultural enthusiasts, who kept a plot at the other end of town from my apartment. When they offered me garden space, tools, and some heirloom vegetable seeds, I almost cried.

I had my weekend time filled, so when Alan asked me to go to dinner with him, or coffee, I refused him several times. He kept asking, though. I could see other women in the office eyeing him, especially after the first couple of years that I worked there. He was handsome, it’s true. I just had more interesting opportunities filling up my time off.

Eventually, though, my sewing group got busted. It was a week I didn’t go because I was sick, and spent most of my evening sniffling and redoing my personal budget so my time away from the office wouldn’t mean I’d get a bill from my boss. I heard they’d been raided a few days later, when one of the gender-neutral members, Zuzan, left a note under my door. Hand-written, of course, something I was in the midst of teaching myself to do.

So I had an opening in my week that I didn’t know what to do with. I mourned the loss of the group, in secret. But a few weeks later, when Alan asked me if I wanted to go to lunch with him sometime, I realized I could say yes.

I wouldn’t have a lot of opportunities to impress. I’m not a very attractive woman, especially compared to other personal assistants in the caste. I’m not unattractive, but I was so focused on gardening and mechanics when I was growing up that I never mastered the art of flattery, makeup, or keeping my seams straight. Fashion was beyond me, but not beyond most of the women in my office, who kept their hair perfectly coiffed, and managed to match their earrings to their nail polish, and their jacket buttons to their lipstick. It was intimidating. I realized, early on in my job, that I would have to take the first offer that came along for marriage within my caste. I didn’t want to disappoint my family, but I didn’t know how to go about landing a mate.

So Alan, a handsome, traditional Gadhavi, asked me to lunch, and I finally had no more excuses, so I said yes. We went out on our lunch break, and in traditional courtship fashion, he asked me to dinner that evening, which I said yes to. He took me to a lovely restaurant, where I drank a bit too much wine, which made me laugh a bit too hard at his dumb jokes. I wasn’t laughing for the reasons he thought I was laughing, which still makes my stomach churn with guilt.

A few weeks later, our garden patch was busted. I’d stopped going, in deference to dating Alan, because he was nice enough that I might consider his forthcoming marriage offer, but I mourned the loss of my cucumbers and tomatoes. I don’t think they found my DNA on any of the tools, or I would have been busted a long time ago. But the raid gave me more official time to spend with Alan. Soon, I dropped all of my Maker groups and settled into a routine of television and dinner and drinks with my partner.

About three months after we started seeing each other, he asked me to marry him. It was the earliest appropriate time that he could have proposed. I said yes, because I thought maybe, just maybe, this man made me happy. We were both history buffs, so we had something to talk about. Maybe comfortable and happy were the same thing. So we got married.

Alan actually found a church for us to get married in, allowing his history buff side out, researching what buildings in our area and credit range used to be. In an effort to create as little waste as possible, the vaulted-ceilinged building had been turned into a nondescript government office, perfect for an early and inexpensive marriage. We got a certificate, and signed it in front of two witnesses in the lobby. Some of the Gadhavi secretaries thought it was sweet.

So we began living together, as a married couple, with Gadhavi plans for children and an application for a larger apartment and a joint bank account and a joint stipend. We talked a lot about the future. I started taking medication for a consistently upset stomach, and Alan fussed over me whenever I felt ill, as a Gadhavi husband should. I rarely called off work because of the growing ulcers, which is what a good Gadhavi wife does. I managed our finances carefully. I made sure I got to work first, so I could leave first, to have dinner on the table for Alan when he came home, his smile wrinkling the dark circles underneath his eyes.

We gradually ran out of things to talk about.

At some point after our first anniversary, I began thinking about sewing again. My fingers were itchy with the impulse, but when we’d moved to the married couples’ apartment complex, I had thrown away all of my planting and sewing projects. But I wanted to feel callouses on my fingers again, from needles and gardening tools and pens with ink or solder in them.

I started making excuses for my absences in the evening. Working late was a classic, but sometimes I used the excuse of seeing my parents. I lied about their health. But really, I was going back to Maker groups. I found the group that had taken over the gardening bed and helped them replant, with aggression. I found a knitting group and more than once slept on the floor of the apartment that hosted the gathering. I soldered until I couldn’t breathe, and had to go to an oxygen bar to clear out my lungs.

I stopped offering excuses after a while, because it became customary for me to not return home more than twice a week.

Alan gave me nearly another year before he confronted me about it. He’s a gentle soul, but he does not like defying tradition, and it is not tradition for a Gadhavi wife to be gone so often for so long. He meant no harm, but I was scared.

I told him the truth, however. And he was disgusted. He immediately filed for divorce, and severed me from access to our money. That meant I had stipends piling up that I had no access to. I didn’t take him to court, because I had no money to do so. My employer didn’t care, and most of the personal assistants didn’t care, either. I started staying home more, which wasn’t a good solution to my money problem. I began selling vegetables from my garden on the side, just to get enough money to ride public transit. I barely had enough to eat.

Two weeks after I signed our divorce papers, security showed up at my new apartment. With hardly a word of explanation, they raided the place. They found notes on my lenses about meetings, and investigated the groups. They found fruit and vegetables that I had grown myself – they looked like nothing in the company stores.

I was allowed to stay in the apartment, but I was dragged to trial by the company. A company-assigned defender pleaded my case, and he kept arguing insanity. Pressure from my job, clearly, this had influenced my marriage and my dedication. How else could I act so outside of my caste?

I was headed home from the courtroom when I first saw an ad for Breathe Easy’s grand expedition to Europa. I gathered as much information as I could, losing sleep while making expensive long-distance calls to chipper customer service representatives. I never gave them my name, but when I finally had a long enough document, full of information about Rabbah, I presented it to my attorney. I would never be able to pay his fees, and I would never be able to pay my debts to my employer, unless I took this on. If I can mine enough water and oxygen from the seas of a distant moon, then maybe I can be free.

The most appealing part, of course, was getting as far away from Earth as possible. I am glad that I am able to repay my debts, but just leaving – this is enough. I am out of the way of society and living on my own terms. I know very few of you out there understand that, because things work for you and you’re happy enough. But I never was.

Now I can be what I want, without destroying everyone else’s lives. Also, I am so sorry for Alan’s sacrifice.

One

I am the official caste-level messenger for Breathe Easy’s first off-planet mining excursion, which will take place on Europa.

I have to offer a caveat: I do not represent the Hou leaders of Breathe Easy. I was recently de-casted in court, although I am from the Gadhavi caste. My name is Aelis. You may have heard about me in the news.

Breathe Easy has honored me with this responsibility, to communicate with the working classes at Breathe Easy on their behalf. I realize that writing is an antiquated form of communication, but I am trying to get used to it before we leave. As a former Gadhavi, I have administrative training, which means I am more familiar with language, writing, and presentation than many of my fellow colonists will be, and I suspect that is why Breathe Easy chose me to represent them. We will be far away on a large moon, so not only will communication take some time to reach Earth, but as some of the first outer solar system settlers, we will need to conserve our computers’ processing power and memory. But Breathe Easy wanted to make sure the public was current on how our colony was doing, so … here we go!

I’m writing this from my own apartment, which won’t be mine for much longer. I was surprised that I was allowed to keep the apartment this long, actually, as I was not employable during my two-year trial. But I digress. 

If you have not heard from one of the Hou or Arany managers yet, let me explain the project to you. Like many mining companies, Breathe Easy decided to reach out to those of us who are officially unemployable, whether because we were de-casted, or recently emigrated to this country and need to be integrated. While I struggled in court, I began to see advertisements for their mining operation on Europa, and asked my court-appointed attorney if the program might perhaps take me on for rehabilitation. I am fortunate that they agreed.

Breathe Easy is a company that, quietly and efficiently, has been mining ocean water for several decades. As more ice melts all over the world, there’s more water for the company to process for consumption. They pull out salt for food production, some other trace minerals, some oxygen for oxygen bars, but most famously, they supply drinking water to about half our continent. Truly, they do amazing work!

As you know, there’s a huge amount of competition for asteroids to mine, and some long-existing colonies in space have proven their economic worth and in the last twenty or so years they were officially Incorporated. But, no other businesses have thought of going out past the asteroid belt to mine some other parts of the solar system. It’s not like anyone else is using it! And it was only ever just barely explored before the December 21^st Revolution and subsequent Declaration of Incorporated Personhood and the Amendment to Structured Society and Right Living.

We know so little about this place called Europa. It’s one of Jupiter’s four largest moons, so we know it will take a few weeks for us to get there. We know it has a liquid ocean with less mineral content than Earth’s ocean, and we know it’s just a little smaller than our own moon. We have records that the ice is not too difficult to drill through. Apparently, original estimates from the old National Aeronautics and Space Administration suggested the ice might be hundreds of kilometers thick, but it turned out that in some places, the ice melted on a seasonal cycle and it was only a few kilometers thick. At worst, it was 20 kilometers thick. For a company as industrious as Breathe Easy, this is no problem!

Breathe Easy’s plan is to take over the existing station there, and build several extra junctures onto it with pieces from our space craft. The original drilling site was in an area called the Conamara Chaos, a place with lots of constant melting, so we should be able to find the original docking station. I have no idea how to do that, but I’ve been assured that we’ll get the best training available in the week that we’re at the Moon Base.

Once we find the docking station, we’ll still have to live on the craft for a few more weeks while we affix air and water filtration systems, then readjust to close to normal Earth pressure. NASA’s station was sunk deep into the waters of the moon, to approximate Earth gravity as much as possible using the pressure of the ocean. There’s still no good ways to imitate gravity, so we might suffer some physical side effects, but everyone I’ve asked has said that those aren’t serious. Maybe some stomach trouble, but it will go away once our bodies adjust.

So, as we adjust to the new gravity, we’ll also take pieces of our ship and build onto the station, we will have workout rooms and living spaces, and we must start a garden, upgrade generators, install new quantum computers, air and water and waste filters … there will be so much to work on! That’s why, I’ve been told, the initial team is entirely women. Most of them are from the bottom castes, because they have the right skills necessary to do the hard labor. There will be a second wave of colonists joining us in six months, I’ve been told, but I have not been told if they will be upper or lower caste, immigrants or nationals, etc. I have been told that the group will most likely be men, as we will be on Europa long-term and Breathe Easy does not want us to become lonely. Although men do not work in the same kinds of hands-on, physical jobs, their focus on the political will help us communicate with Earth and keep our culture overall more structured and efficient. There was an insinuation of more … “companionship” … so perhaps we will be assigned husbands.

Considering my first marriage, I can’t say I would be disappointed to have someone else worry about companionship for me.

I’ve heard that there might be Araboa coming with us, as well. I admit, that thought frightens me, but there was that recent case of that Araboa man who won a court battle to be integrated into civilized society. He’s a happy Ikin these days, or was as of the last article that was published about him.

Maybe we’ll like it enough on Europa to stay forever. Maybe that’s the point. It’s an escape for me, I can only guess what sort of escape it will be for most of the others.

If you know anything about history, you may know about the original settlement on Europa: it was a group of scientists who were there to test long-term exposure to non-Earth gravity, and do scientific research on Europa. There was no reason for them to be there other than curiosity, which seems very strange to most of us now, I know. Of course, a lot of what I’ve taught myself was due to curiosity, so it’s good to know that sometimes, there’s a financial benefit at the end of that tunnel!

But back to the colony: they were there for a couple of years, I think, when their food and air began to run out. Granted, back in that time, they rarely went into space, and now we go into space all the time to mine asteroids and visit the moon and Mars. We’re pretty familiar with getting around and surviving for at least a year at a time. And, the grand hotels of Mars grow their own food, so we know pretty well how to do that, too! I think the focus of our food supply might be more water-based, but there’s lots of people on Earth who practice aquaponics and such, and I bet there’s a few of those people in our group. But, anyway, the primitive early group from NASA died before they could leave the colony. It’s tragic, isn’t it? NASA couldn’t get them out in time – and afterward, they didn’t get any missions funded because it seemed too dangerous.

Breathe Easy is willing to dispel that myth of danger. I’m excited to help them.

Oh, also: apparently the original colony was called “Europa Station One.” Not a very original name, right? I mean, it’s easy to imagine that they wanted more stations in time, but you’d think they’d start naming them, like we name cities. Creative names, that remind us of grandeur and success. Now that Breathe Easy has purchased the station, it will be called Rabbah. That sounded very Biblical and foreboding, so I decided to look it up. It means “The City of Waters,” because in the area where the ancient Hebrews lived, a group had a city at the intersection of two large rivers. There was supposed to be a sarcophagus there, too – it first made me think that the original station was the sarcophagus, and I felt scared because of the association! But I thought about it, and I think they just used a Biblical word because, well, we use so few old superstitious words these days, and it is sort of like going on a pilgrimage. We’re going on a pilgrimage to new waters, to find ourselves.

From CEO of Breathe Easy, Cheng Xun Xiu

The recent news involving our failed mining colony on Europa has spread too many rumors for this leadership to rest any longer. Many suggested a thoughtless move on the part of myself and my family, which put the financial future of this company in danger. Others said that we showed little regard for those whom we employ, to recklessly send them deep into our solar system in search of something we have easy access to on Earth. Still others accuse us of using humans as pieces in a game, like politicians, then discarding them when they became too inconvenient.

I wish to put all of these rumors to rest.

Breathe Easy, Inc has been in business for over a century, since our ancestors signed the Declaration of Incorporated Personhood, and took a solemn vow to help restore humanity. Our species had made many stupid mistakes and the Cheng family created this company specifically in agreement with the Declaration, to keep humans alive. We had to create structure to work together, in order to save ourselves from rising oceans, unbreathable air.

The oceans did, of course, seem like fertile ground at first. But as the tides rose, so too did competition – not with other Incorporated Businesses under the Declaration, but with pirates, rebels, renegades, who thought they could save the Earth on their own, without a legion of help. These groups mined the planet down to its barest core and left little for the rest of us, who merely wanted to survive. There was no more metal, oil, gas.

Some of our intrepid fellow businesses took to the stars. They, too, in the first fifty years were accused of misusing the resource of living human workers to profit. Many of their employees, most of whom were the lowest castes, died terrible deaths in space, trying to mine distant bodies. But after some attempts, these businesses succeeded in their quest, and soon, precious material began flowing back to Earth.

This was all that Breathe Easy wanted. The seas are battlegrounds and we lose too many workers to continue to find use in this world’s oceans. We turned to space, but this time, not for gold and iron, but for water. We knew from the old world’s records that Europa had liquid water beneath an ice crust, and with some facilities already set up, we had our most brilliant Gadhavi engineers work out how best to get there, how a group of people could best survive, and how we might train them. It came to our attention that we could find many useful skills among this country’s defectors and criminals, those whose minds still, for some reason, did not fully come into line with saving the whole of humanity.

In other words, we discovered a way to make the useless useful again.

These criminals took to the idea. However, a criminal element is not easily suppressed, and those urges sent them to their doom. It was not us, it was not our planning, but it was they themselves, impure of thought, who ended their own lives. They could not meet our terms, and they would not work with us.

The following is a first-hand account from one of the colonists. We have kept these records in our files, not releasing them to the public, because much of the material is controversial and emotionally painful. We assigned a fallen Gadhavi to write this account for us, and you can see for yourselves how her spirit simply could not bend to the task of keeping all of our species alive.

We apologize for the graphic nature of this account, but it was my strong feeling, as the current CEO of Breathe Easy, that we must allow the public, all castes, to know this material, to know what truly happened.

In corpore plena.