The unionizers have officially stopped working while they
wait for a response to their transmission. That has left me in charge of
changing out all of the filters. Vivien wants nothing to do with the group
anymore, so she’s been hard at work, probably to ignore much of what is going
on, but her partner Dagon still spends time with Zariah and Suharto, Chloe,
Samira, Yuda and Guo. Abbas, Chloe’s assigned partner, has taken over Dagon’s
and Chloe’s work, harvesting and cataloguing. As a former Ikin, he has picked
up the art of gardening quickly and I’m glad that he’s left the unionizers to
work here. Someone has to.
I finally swallowed my fear and read up about unions, in the dark days before the revolution. They employed a tactic called strikes, where all the workers would walk off the job, which would force the company they worked for to lose money. It didn’t work very often, but all the way until just after the revolution, when the Declaration of Incorporated Personhood became hallowed law, some people could not get used to the demands of the job and went on strike.
I think that is what the unionizers want to do now, but we are so far away from Earth, I don’t see how our starvation will inconvenience Breathe Easy. I don’t want to die here just to make a point.
I spoke for a while with Yuda and asked for the group to release Ihsan from her prison. I need the help with the air filters, and I don’t think anyone else in the non-union group could learn how to make and replace them. Zariah and Chloe do not like me so well, but Yuda still appreciates that I am willing to learn many skills. They released Ihsan just yesterday, and her help with the air filtration system made all the difference. I was able to replace most of the filters, and I hope the air will finally begin to clear. Bulus came along for the ride, and I might use him more for that sort of work – he picked it up very quickly. He still shadows Ihsan, seemingly hopelessly lost, like a puppy.
Yvain, meanwhile, has tried to get in with Kailash, Rusul, and Fletcher, which means that Payam has finally been forced to spend some time with Samira. Durada has finally kicked Cyril out of her room, and he has gone to live with Samira, so I don’t know where Payam is staying. I know that Yvain only wants to use his influence to keep them from becoming too extreme, but I don’t think that group is even worth talking to anymore, after they attacked Chloe. Both sides are too willing to abuse human life without understanding what it means to lose that help.
Granted, if we had fewer people, we wouldn’t have as many mouths to feed or have to change the filters as often.
I snuck in last night to the computer room, which Kailash jealously guards during the average shift. I have no idea what he does in there all day, there’s no such thing as instant communication for us. So I wanted to know, and dove into the communication archives. I hoped to find a response from Breathe Easy, but I did not see one.
Instead, I saw several communications – which have been going on for weeks – with military groups on Earth. Discussing the union talk. How to stop it.
Kailash is Senfte, and his anti-union friends are not military. The military men are either unionizers or neutral – an odd development, and I wonder if the brain melt that Yvain talks about had something to do with that. Kailash wanted advice on military training, organizing, attacks. One correspondent suggested that Kailash enlist Vahan, because of his military family. That has proven not to work – now that Vahan’s defect has come to light – and Kailash needs more advice. And he is receiving it, descriptions of strength training and weapons creation. And I suspect he is relaying this to the rest of his people.
No wonder Yvain has stayed so involved. He never speaks about them as though he likes them, but he is in fact keeping a lid on their explosive violence, which, with no military family or training, would go disastrously wrong. I can only imagine what they have discussed printing out or poisoning or sabotaging. I have not had the stomach to ask him yet for details, but I will soon.
The stress makes me sway one way, and then the other. A few days ago, I thought to ask Ghadir to help me find a way to hide the food so that the unionizers couldn’t eat, but now I want the anti-union group to suffer as well. Besides, I am not a Hou. It is not for me to bestow food unto the masses, only to worry about my part in the whole.
There is some good news, as a few of us work to keep the colony running. Vivien wants to release the latest octopuses – we have five of them, but I don’t want to name them because I am afraid that they will be slaughtered – so I am coordinating with her to load the barrels onto the supply ship and send them on their way to Earth. The octopuses are still very small, but perhaps they could push the barrels anyway.
Thanks to the hard work of Bulus, Abbas, Yvain, Ghadir, and Natsuki, we have sprouts coming up and our nutritional loaf will last long enough for the plants to grow. Ghadir has started feeding us a lunch of seafood stew, including some scaly fish that have begun swarming around Rabbah, pecking at our bivalves. But we have lots of bivalves, and our tube worms have grown to huge proportions. I thought they almost looked like lobster tail when they were cooked, and I think maybe Ghadir will serve us tube worm steaks at some point soon. We will not starve in the near future, unless Chloe decides to destroy our garden again.
I finally swallowed my fear and read up about unions, in the dark days before the revolution. They employed a tactic called strikes, where all the workers would walk off the job, which would force the company they worked for to lose money. It didn’t work very often, but all the way until just after the revolution, when the Declaration of Incorporated Personhood became hallowed law, some people could not get used to the demands of the job and went on strike.
I think that is what the unionizers want to do now, but we are so far away from Earth, I don’t see how our starvation will inconvenience Breathe Easy. I don’t want to die here just to make a point.
I spoke for a while with Yuda and asked for the group to release Ihsan from her prison. I need the help with the air filters, and I don’t think anyone else in the non-union group could learn how to make and replace them. Zariah and Chloe do not like me so well, but Yuda still appreciates that I am willing to learn many skills. They released Ihsan just yesterday, and her help with the air filtration system made all the difference. I was able to replace most of the filters, and I hope the air will finally begin to clear. Bulus came along for the ride, and I might use him more for that sort of work – he picked it up very quickly. He still shadows Ihsan, seemingly hopelessly lost, like a puppy.
Yvain, meanwhile, has tried to get in with Kailash, Rusul, and Fletcher, which means that Payam has finally been forced to spend some time with Samira. Durada has finally kicked Cyril out of her room, and he has gone to live with Samira, so I don’t know where Payam is staying. I know that Yvain only wants to use his influence to keep them from becoming too extreme, but I don’t think that group is even worth talking to anymore, after they attacked Chloe. Both sides are too willing to abuse human life without understanding what it means to lose that help.
Granted, if we had fewer people, we wouldn’t have as many mouths to feed or have to change the filters as often.
I snuck in last night to the computer room, which Kailash jealously guards during the average shift. I have no idea what he does in there all day, there’s no such thing as instant communication for us. So I wanted to know, and dove into the communication archives. I hoped to find a response from Breathe Easy, but I did not see one.
Instead, I saw several communications – which have been going on for weeks – with military groups on Earth. Discussing the union talk. How to stop it.
Kailash is Senfte, and his anti-union friends are not military. The military men are either unionizers or neutral – an odd development, and I wonder if the brain melt that Yvain talks about had something to do with that. Kailash wanted advice on military training, organizing, attacks. One correspondent suggested that Kailash enlist Vahan, because of his military family. That has proven not to work – now that Vahan’s defect has come to light – and Kailash needs more advice. And he is receiving it, descriptions of strength training and weapons creation. And I suspect he is relaying this to the rest of his people.
No wonder Yvain has stayed so involved. He never speaks about them as though he likes them, but he is in fact keeping a lid on their explosive violence, which, with no military family or training, would go disastrously wrong. I can only imagine what they have discussed printing out or poisoning or sabotaging. I have not had the stomach to ask him yet for details, but I will soon.
The stress makes me sway one way, and then the other. A few days ago, I thought to ask Ghadir to help me find a way to hide the food so that the unionizers couldn’t eat, but now I want the anti-union group to suffer as well. Besides, I am not a Hou. It is not for me to bestow food unto the masses, only to worry about my part in the whole.
There is some good news, as a few of us work to keep the colony running. Vivien wants to release the latest octopuses – we have five of them, but I don’t want to name them because I am afraid that they will be slaughtered – so I am coordinating with her to load the barrels onto the supply ship and send them on their way to Earth. The octopuses are still very small, but perhaps they could push the barrels anyway.
Thanks to the hard work of Bulus, Abbas, Yvain, Ghadir, and Natsuki, we have sprouts coming up and our nutritional loaf will last long enough for the plants to grow. Ghadir has started feeding us a lunch of seafood stew, including some scaly fish that have begun swarming around Rabbah, pecking at our bivalves. But we have lots of bivalves, and our tube worms have grown to huge proportions. I thought they almost looked like lobster tail when they were cooked, and I think maybe Ghadir will serve us tube worm steaks at some point soon. We will not starve in the near future, unless Chloe decides to destroy our garden again.
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