They assigned me to a session with Dr. Yassine. A nice enough guy, if a bit fidgety. Forgive me if I think doctors who work with people on the edge should be calm, collected, and stately, but if I were ever on the fence about killing myself, I think Dr. Yassine’s inability to sit still would have driven me to it. I almost got up and grabbed his hand to stop his pen from tapping. Almost.
He wanted me to “explore myself verbally.” But when you don’t feel comfortable with someone, it’s not easy to open up. I didn’t want to “explore” with him. It’s not that I had a problem telling him what was going on in my head. It was just that I knew it would be a lot more helpful for me to share it with someone else. Someone specific.
I resolved to stop telling Saul I was fine when I wasn’t. I hadn’t seen the harm in keeping my emotional distance before, but now … Keeping up appearances wasn’t worth crumbling inside.
So I made my next report ahead of schedule, and tacked on a letter for Saul. I told him everything. How I was feeling. How I was coping with the suicide.
How I was sure there would be more to come.
I wondered—in writing—about purpose. Mine seemed obvious enough. But what about the others? We’d created false purposes for them—something to keep their DNA busy until we reached the anomaly. The engineers hated being called mechanics because that’s not what they wanted to be. Nika was a historian, a diplomat, and that meant she needed to be working with people and their history. As noble as she made archivist seem, it wasn’t who she was.
Saul made all of it seem okay. He reminded me of the mission. How Earth was counting on us. We were brilliant scientists, doctors, inventors, thinkers, and Earth had given us up for a greater purpose.
I was looking at things too narrowly, he said. That our purpose was in the journey, in experiencing life as humans had never experienced it before. I found our situation—locked in tin cans hurling through a vacuum—boring, depressing. He said the people back home found it wondrous. That my messages were now studied all over the globe.
[You can’t see the forest because you’re a tree] he’d sent. [A tree might ask, Why do I grow here? Why do I produce cones instead of fruit? Or, why must I lose my leaves when that tree stays ever green? If you could show the tree how it fits into the forest, how it provides so much to the greater being that is the forest, what might it think of itself then?
[Show them the forest, Margarita. The trees are dying because they don’t see the forest.
[P.S. I have a daughter now. I named her after you. People have been naming their children after you voyagers for years now, and probably will for centuries to come.]
The metaphor might have been heavy-handed, but it and his postscript were exactly what I needed—what all of us needed.
But it took six months and three more suicides for me to take action. And I regret that to this day. As a member of the governing board (all department heads had a place in politics) I had a duty that far exceeded my station. But I was still so new to independence that I had yet to grasp my authority. I was basically a kid trying to be an adult—to be a leader. They had trained and trained and trained us until I could recite leadership principles in my sleep, but in the end, a person also has to want to be a leader. To rise to the occasion. I only wish I had found my place sooner.
I couldn’t change the past. But I was pretty sure I could change the future.
I put in a personal request to see the captain. In later years that would have put me on a waiting list as long as my arm. Back then I practically walked in.
Entering Captain Mahler’s situation room, I lead with the holoflex-sheet. In my eagerness to prove a point I’d forgotten to salute and do our introductory dance. Nothing like starting out on the wrong foot when you’re trying to save your entire community from emotional collapse.
He sat at the head of a beautiful marble slab, the kind that made the most intriguing tombs and best kitchen counters. Green, with beautiful flecks of gold and iridescent carbonates, it was out of place. Almost every portion of the ship was metal or plastic—carpeted floors being the major exception. But the ship designers had wanted to give us little pieces of nature wherever they could—maybe they’d known better than I had how much we’d miss such things when they were gone.
The holoflex-sheet plopped in front of Mahler before my clipped greeting met his ears.
Five sentences into my rehearsed speech, he cut me off with a violent, chopping of his hand. “To whom are you speaking?” he said through a clenched jaw.
The question tripped me up, as it was meant to. “Uh …”
“As you did not address me, I can only assume this flippant diatribe is meant for someone else. Yet I believe we are alone.”
It was then that I realized both my mistake and that I was intent on preaching to the choir. I’d come to him to talk order and systems. To discuss individualism vs. hive mentality. I wanted to argue for the very thing the captain hoped for: militant commitment to the group’s goals over individual wants and needs.
Immediately I backtracked, saluting at attention, barking out my station and my purpose, addressing him in the manner he deserved to be addressed.
“Sir,” I began again. “We have a distinct disconnect between the command team and everyone else. We are not a military convoy, but neither are we civilians. I believe this message from my Earth contact illustrates our problem. Most of us are wandering around in our own little worlds. The members don’t see how the pieces fit, and I believe that to be the source of our convoy-wide depression. We need to rethink how we think, if you will.
“We were each taught how special we are. As individuals. Yet, for some reason, we weren’t taught that the group is special. That devotion to the group is required for success. Yes, we were instilled with devotion to the mission, to the anomaly, but not to the convoy and each other.
“We need a better sense of community, and at the moment I can think of no better way to bring that about than to change the way we do things. I know there was a plan, and that it was supposed to ensure our stability, but it won’t work. Father—” this was tough to admit, but I swallowed and pressed forward “—Father was wrong. He wanted a ‘be all you can be’ attitude, when what we need is a ‘be all we can be attitude.’”
Mahler passed his hand under his chin, scratching it lightly, clearly weighing my statements and considering his first words on the matter carefully. “I wasn’t supposed to address this until the elections. Matheson and Seal didn’t think we’d have any suicides at this point, but things seem to be moving along faster than expected. Whether that’s problematic or all for the best will make itself clear eventually, I’m sure.”
“Sir?”
“The suicides were expected. Not planned—don’t give me that look. Just planned for. They were built into Matheson’s equations, and he figured if we had fifteen or so suicides in the first five years that would actually strengthen our society—much in the way you suggest.”
Flabbergasted, my mind went blank. I couldn’t even be sure I’d heard him correctly, let alone understood. “Sir, may I sit?”
He gestured toward a spot near the other end of the marble slab, but I took a seat at his right hand. “Are you saying Mother and Father knew some of us would die this way? That Lexi and—?”
“They didn’t know who, but they had guesses. Matheson’s calculations indicated a rash of suicides was inevitable, but that the tragedy would give us an opportunity. Misfortune can have many different effects on large populations. It can drive some into chaos, but the more empathetic the group, the more emotionally aware the individuals are of the other individuals—”
“The more likely they are to band together,” I finished for him, nodding.