Everything was a datum. Say someone was, on the surface, a working-class person that might have struggled to pay for their lift ticket and immigration escrow to one of the colonies. But then they skipped the cheap filling meal he sold and went to one of the few expensive tourist trap places on the industrial side. Like, maybe the one casino they had? Well, that told people something too. Maybe they weren't as poor as they were letting on, yeah?
He'd already sent his first impressions of this new lady to a half-dozen addresses. It wasn't a letter, just a list of mostly single words, things he'd noticed: "Clean, neat, former military, switched-on, dangerous, groundsider, smart, polite, has the look of a hard worker, willing to assimilate." He didn't need to send more than that, as he was just sending his impressions. All of the colonies were careful to avoid letting dirtball intelligence operatives immigrate if they could help it. Even the Corporate controlled ones didn't want them. They might be owned by Corporations headquartered below, but they were run and manned by people just like him, and everyone was careful to screen immigrants carefully. Not just for spies, either, but temperament.
It was expensive to have children in space. Children had to grow up in full gravity for a significant amount of their childhood, at least until they were ten or twelve. Most people lived in half-g, at most. You could rent slots in public creches, where children could sleep at night in full gee, but it was pricey. Two people had to really want to have children to do it up here, as his parents had. The O'Neill colonies were one of the few places where most of the area was in full gee, but even that wasn't completely accurate as there were over a hundred traditional space stations in and around each of the pairs of longer, hollowed-out cylinders. It was much cheaper to live in these orbiting stations, so most people lived there rather than in the cylinders themselves, which had business, tourism, industry and agriculture in the full-gee areas, as well as, of course, the higher-end residential areas.
That meant that most population growth, even if they just wanted to maintain population levels, was still through immigration, and they didn't want any slackers, stinks or commissars up here. Integrating clued-in groundsiders into a workgroup was so much easier if they weren't gonks, to begin with. Former military people were pretty standard. They were usually pretty technically minded, respected rules and hierarchy, and as such, had a higher percentage of success from a spacer's perspective than the average dirtball civvie. Space was a dangerous place, and people who had often been shot at were usually pretty careful listeners when you started to tell them things like, "If you do this, you will die."
Even then, only fifty per cent of even this demographic worked out. The rest they shipped back to the dirtball. That was one reason why the fees for immigrating were so expensive, as they included your return ticket up-front in case you got kicked out. That, or they died doing something stupid. And that was expensive too! If someone forgot to double-check their O2 bottle charge, asphyxiated on an EVA, and floated off into space, you had to charter a tug to pick them up. Otherwise, their corpse could become a hazard to navigation. Not to mention the p-suit could still be reused.
He'd do what he was doing for free just to help filter the wheat from the chaff, but no way would he admit that! He received one to two hundred Eurdollars or the equivalent in New Yen from everyone he sold his impressions to!
He had a mortgage on his genetic treatments and life extension to pay off, after all.
I was one of the only passengers on the spaceship, as most of the area was devoted to cargo. I had one of the crewmembers explain the operation of my berth, which was more like a chair that could fold out into a bed. It had a curtain you could run around for "privacy." The man said cheerfully, finishing his presentation, "And below your seat is an emergency suit that you can don in case of a pressure emergency."
I glanced at the obvious pressure suit the man was wearing himself, just with no helmet on just now, and then glanced at the bulkhead walls and tapped them, careful not to push myself too much in zero-g. I had already needed this man's help to right myself once, and it had been embarrassing. The hull was aluminium, no doubt mined on the moon rather than shipped up from Earth, hopefully, with some sort of armoured layer between me and the vacuum of space.
I asked curiously, "How fast would it take this spacecraft to depressurise if we got holed by a micrometeorite?"
"Oh, in seconds," he said, smiling even wider.
I nodded, as that was what I expected. The volume of the ship just wasn't that large. I coughed delicately, "I'd like to try to put the suit on, just in case, so I can shorten any time I am floating around dying."
He grinned, reaching underneath the seat to pull it out. It was folded like origami and flattened, like a blanket, inside a heavy-duty clear plastic bag. "That's permissible. But these suits have to be recertified every time they are opened. They inspect the suit for small rips, weigh the O2canister, you know. Costs about thirty-one-thousand New Yen to recertify one. Still want to do it?" That was about the equivalent of four hundred and ten Eurodollars.
I nodded rapidly. It would be worth it at twice that price. He handed it to me and even walked me through the process, giving me tips on how I could shave a few seconds off here and there. I was tempted to wear the thing the entire flight over there, but it was clearly a thin suit designed only for emergencies. Not like the fancy pressure suit the crewmember had on. One of those sounded like one of the first things I might buy.
The trip was very uneventful, thankfully. I found myself surprised-utterly shocked, actually, at how much thrust the ship was putting out when we got going. I never actually looked at the numbers, but there had to be close to one-twentieth of a gravity of acceleration forces involved. That didn't sound like a lot, but it would make a plum bob fall true, and furthermore, it was actually incredibly fast acceleration for a spaceship carrying a lot of cargo.
I had been wondering just how it was possible at all for there to be any activity in deep space whatsoever. But assuming they could maintain this acceleration indefinitely, then you could travel from Earth to Mars in ten to fifteen days, not six months like I was expecting with chemical rockets.
I didn't know if that was actually possible because our flight plan, according to the entertainment system, was over thirty hours and did not accelerate continuously. Large segments would be in zero-g before we decelerated into orbit at the metastable point the colony of dozens of space stations lived in.
I had no idea how these spaceships worked, though, but it may be just a matter of them wanting to save fuel... or rather, reaction mass since it was fission-powered. I was curious how they dissipated the heat of a fission reactor without cooking us all inside the ship, and I wondered about how they shielded the cabin from the radiation the reactor put out during operation.
Thinking about that made me happy that I had picked one of the most expensive subdermal armour systems there was, not because it was so much better at ballistic protection but because it had top-of-the-line radiation shielding built in, and in a way that didn't make my skin look ridiculous, like the Michelin Man. You could definitely tell I had subdermal armour, but it looked like a normal armour install.
It was actually marketed towards workers in high-radiation environments like space, but even those working around neutron sources, too. It couldn't completely stop gamma and it could only moderate fast neutrons, of course, but it provided very good protection against most other threats. Perhaps it would make me opaque to scanners, too, although I still didn't know precisely how scanners worked, except that they weren't actually ionising like old-fashioned X-rays, so they were safe to be exposed to repeatedly and even continuously. That was something I kept meaning to study so as to help myself make hidden implants, but it was also something I never quite got the time to pursue.
We docked at the actual O'Neil cylinder instead of one of the many orbiting space stations, and I got out. I could immediately detect the false gravity. Although they were called O'Neil cylinders, the truth was that they took some liberties with the term. A true O'Neil cylinder should have an internal radius of eight kilometres or more. That had been the initial idea many, many decades ago.
His original idea also included paired cylinders that counter-rotated against one another, using complex series of bearings, all for the purpose of keeping the cylinder pointed at the sun. Extremely mechanically complicated and extremely expensive.
The stations here had no alternating land and window segments, as it was much cheaper to use artificial lighting. Not only could you maximise the useful area inside, but you did not need either a counter-rotating cylinder pair or the complicated bearing system. It was also smaller. Much smaller. Rather than an eight-kilometre radius inside, it was closer to one and a quarter.
Due to the lack of using the sun to power most things, everything was powered by fission reactors, although I had heard that there were plans to try to build a fusion reactor in one of the orbiting space stations and beam power into the cylinder. That would be interesting. Currently, the only commercially available fusion reactor design was about a two-terawatt plant, but you needed over fifty acres, plus a security perimeter, to house it. So, it wasn't really ready for space applications.
Although a mini-O'Neill cylinder, it was still incredibly huge for a space station, but by designing it this small, it became plausible to construct on a limited budget. And it could always be expanded outward, extending the cylinder out. However, this meant that in order to achieve one-g of simulated gravity, the cylinder had to spin at about point eight-five revolutions a minute. This correlated to a tangential velocity, or "rim speed", of over one hundred and ten metres per second.
As such, it was detectable. I could detect that the gravity was coming from spinning, but it was still considered in the "comfort zone" of such structures and people very quickly adapted to living in such conditions. There wasn't a customs entry, per se, but two men met me at the dock and took me into a small conference room.
Like a lot of spacers, especially those in the O'Neill colonies, they had an African phenotype. From my expert eye, I figured it would take at least another one hundred and fifty generations before comparative evolution caused their melanin to drop considerably due to no longer experiencing much UV radiation. Would spacers develop protections from other types of radiation over time?
I shook my head. No. Probably not. Not because it was impossible through evolutionary pressure but because we, as a species, had already eliminated evolutionary pressure. Artificial tinkering of the genome would ensure that they'd have whatever skin colouration they wanted, and the same was true for any artificial biological attempts at radiation protection. Those would come a lot faster, then be proliferated and eliminate any pressure for an evolutionary solution. Evolution was a messy bitch, anyway. It was the age of artificial, not natural, selection, and I was all for it.
"Ms Rahim, I am Kalu Igwe, and this is my partner, Jim," the first man said, and I blinked. I had been getting used to the mostly Nigerian-sounding names that I had heard a lot of lately, and then he threw me for a loop. Jim? Well, okay, "We work for the Republic here, and it's standard to have a chat with new immigrants. We are..."
I had been thinking of how Hana would reply, and this was too good a chance to pass up. I scrunched up my face and said, "Intel weenies."
Kalu blinked, but this "Jim" chortled, grinning. He nodded, "Yeah, precisely."
What followed was a polite interrogation. They already knew a lot about Hana Rahim, including her reason for immigrating, but were double-checking, crossing their t's and dotting their i's. It wasn't entirely counter-intelligence work, either, as they were building a list of things that I had to learn. The Republic would send new immigrants through classes for a few months, paying for it themselves, and would also help me find work, given Hana's stated specialities.
I wanted to groan in frustration when I discovered that there was a huge shortage of cybernetics surgeons and geneticists, to the point where, when they noticed my new cybernetics, including the radiation-shielding dermal armour, instead of being suspicious, they asked me if the doc I used was interested in space. And if so, they'd sponsor them to come up here.
Ah well. I had specifically picked this identity so that it wouldn't be too similar to the work I did as both Taylor and Hasumi, but maybe that hadn't been necessary. Still, it would be interesting to learn entirely new occupations, even if they were somewhat "common." But how common could zero-g vacuum construction actually be? There were certainly fewer people who could build a space station or spaceship in a vacuum than there were doctors on Earth. It was just a question of relative abundance.
It wasn't like I was here because this was my optimum choice, anyway. The optimum choice for this third identity as a hedge was to move somewhere in Europe, with a bunch of resources buried in the ground, and live a quiet life in the countryside.
Living on a space station, even one as large as this cylinder was, I wouldn't be able to quickly rebuild and reclone my first and second bodies if something terrible happened to both of them simultaneously. And there was a good chance I would live on one of the other, even smaller, stations. It would be possible, but not for years, depending on how closely I was watched and how much free time my work gave me.
In the worst case, I might have to leave to return to Earth to do it. Still, I was satisfied. I mean... space! I told myself it was protection in case of a sudden planetwide disaster like a large nuclear war or a gamma-ray burst, but the truth was I just wanted to come up to space now that I had the money to do so.
As I was starting my second week of "space kindergarten", I was also walking into the Konpeki Plaza building again. It felt very nostalgic to see the place, and despite the fact that it was the afternoon, I had just woken up. Synchronising sleep schedules had been a challenge, as the colonies arbitrarily operated on Greenwich Mean Time.
