Hugh Howey: Half Way Home

For some reason, my entire body burned as I went, my face feeling as if it were on fire.

A few mornings later, I made my first major mistake, one that would alter the course of our little colony for the worse. Our foursome had stayed up late the night before, bemoaning the progress on the rocket, the mission package, and the infrastructure needed for long-term survival. We came to a conclusion: the moment Stevens had died, everything had changed. Tarsi told us how Hickson had the supply group scavenging more for parts than food. Kelvin pinpointed Stevens’s demise as the moment construction found themselves pulled off farming and moved solely to propellants.

Hickson had begun misallocating our energy—sapping what remained of it in the process. I had become lazier myself, concentrating more on how hard my neighbor worked or how much the person across from me consumed at dinner rather than looking to my own labors or my own plate. Maybe it was my training bias. I had been pulled out of—and was therefore permanently stuck in—the late twentieth Earth century. I knew from experiments there that we would all be dead before the rocket was complete if we continued down our current path.

So I decided to take action. Later that morning, I went to have a talk with Colony.

I found Myra at the door of the command module. She and a few others from that first night had taken up residence in the structure. Hickson had moved in after Stevens died; rumor even had it that his handful of belongings showed up before the funeral.

As I approached, I noticed how tired Myra looked. From what little I knew of her, I had a hard time imagining how she could cohabitate with the guy presently running our colony into the ground. She attempted a smile by way of greeting but couldn’t quite manage it.

“How’re you holding up?” I asked her.

“Fine,” she said, nodding her head. “Hickson’s not here, if that’s who you’re after.”

“Hickson? I’ve got nothing to say to him. Why would you think I came for him?”

“Oh. He told me this morning he really needed to speak with you.” She looked past me toward the cluster of modules and parked tractors. “Must’ve crossed paths.”

“I came to see how you were doing, see if you wanted to come spend a night with us. We have a little group that sleeps in a construction tractor.” I turned and pointed. In the distance I could see Tarsi and Kelvin still out on the hood. “We talk at night, and I just thought—”

“I know where you sleep,” Myra said. I turned back around and saw her shaking her head. “I can’t. It wouldn’t feel right—”

“What? No!” I laughed and shook my head. “No, not like that. I’m a psychologist. If you need to talk, well, forget my profession, if you just need any friends—”

“I have my group here,” she said. “I’m Hickson’s girl now.”

It isn’t often one experiences true speechlessness. Not wordlessness, the inability to come up with the right thing to say, but a moment of absolute muteness. Throat constricting, lungs inoperable, mouth dry, jaw unhinged. Truly unable to speak, even knowing what I wanted to say. Or shout.

Myra seemed to hear it all. She shrugged. “He makes me feel safe,” she said. “And it meant not having to learn to sleep somewhere else. Anyway, I’m starting to see those first few days as a training program. My final one. That was the life—minus the grief and the shock—that I’m supposed to work toward. To eventually live. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to feel like that again.”

“Were—you and Stevens, you were together those first days?”

Myra nodded and wiped at her eyes. “It was just training,” she whispered.

I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her close to me, wrapping my arms around her. But I could feel her own arms between us, the hard bone from elbow to wrist lined up vertically in front of her chest like bars in a protective fence. Or perhaps a restrictive cage. I held her and tried to comfort her but just ended up disgusting myself. If an embrace could feel like molestation, that one certainly did. I was wrapping up a thing that didn’t want to be touched, so I let her go.

“I need to speak with Colony,” I said. I stepped past her and into the command module, shaking my head with the shame of the encounter.

Behind me, her voice cracked as she tried to argue—to say I wasn’t allowed—but I heard her resistance crumble before she could even erect it, the squeak of her voice like the last wail of something dying within her.

And in those uncomfortable, tragic moments, Myra had perfectly demonstrated why I had come to speak with Colony. She was moving through a deteriorating progression, the will to live leaching out through her pores. She had arrived at the last stages of some disassembly line, one we all were traveling down and couldn’t seem to get off.

I sat in the center seat, directly in front of the main monitor. It reminded me of Stevens, and I had a brief terror of sullying the spot, until I remembered who probably spent a good bit of his time in it now. Again, I thought of Myra and felt the imaginary belt beneath us move several feet, taking me further down that line.

“Colony?”

“Hello, Porter,” the computer said. It was the same calm and collected voice of my training, of my simulated childhood—the same voice that had soothed me that first night in the command module. Now the calm in its voice just made me angry. The lack of urgency seemed like an absence of feeling, rather than the possession of some inner strength.

I gripped the edge of the table, trying to maintain my balance, to remember why I had come. “Colony, we have some problems around base.”

“I am well aware of that, Porter, and I am working hard to correct them. We should be able to resume production at the tank facility this afternoon. A revised timetable will be posted by your group coordinator.”

“I’m sure it will, Colony, but I wanted to talk to you about why those production revisions need to be drawn up every day. And it isn’t this planet’s limited ore supply.”

“If you have a theory, I would be more than happy to entertain it.”

“Of course, that’s why I came to you. I think it—we think, some colonists and I—that the more we focus on the construction of the rocket and the less we concentrate on basic needs, the more we’re getting behind on both.”

“You believe this is a question of morale,” Colony said.

“I—well, yes! I think you nailed it completely. I have several psychological arguments planned, if you’d like to hear them.”

“Porter.” Colony paused, leaving my name hanging in the air. “Who taught you what you know of psychology?”

I sat, dumbfounded for a moment, before dropping my head and peering down at the keyboard in front of me. Lines of fire retardant were still stuck between each key, and dirty smudges could be seen on the desk where someone’s palms had been resting.

“You did,” I whispered, feeling like a complete fool.

“I sense humiliation, which was not my intent. I had merely hoped to save you the time in arguing, time that could be better spent in production.”

I nodded. I understood the logic but still felt miserable inside. I actually could feel my energy to work being sapped away as a depression grew, fueled by a sense of worthlessness.

“I appreciate you coming by, Porter. You are a valuable member of this colony.”

“Thanks,” I said, about as lifeless and sincere as the computer’s voice.

I stood up and began to walk away, when the computer said: “Porter.”