out of practice

Routine. Discipline. A will of iron. Focus. Plus some drugs and brainwave massage.....that's what it takes to stay relatively sane and functioning out in the Ort Cloud in a singleship doing three years. There's nobody to talk to, unless you want to talk to yourself, or to the shipbrain. Both of these companions become pretty boring pretty quick. 0600 (GMT) you slide out of your bunk into the micrograv, and trip a little ways into the galley....seven choices for breakfast....you can let ship decide, or you can decide....or you can roll the dice.....they roll funny in the silly excuse for gravity from ship rotation.....it doesn't make much difference really....all the choices are pinged out of the food drawer tasting like nothing much, cobbled together together from your basic nutritional building blocks, stored in bulk behind the bulkhead. With your strange excuse for coffee in hand, you can take a few minutes to access a news feed. What's the point? It all seems to be long ago and far away, anyway. By 0700 Routine asserts itself, and you become focused on Work. Work involves scanning monitors, with feeds from the robots, which are busy digging around in an Ort Cloud iceball, grabbing all kinds of interesting things and tossing them into sacks to bring back into the cargo hold. Things like little chunks of minerals, or bizarre organic globs of stuff that nobody can figure out how they got here.....and later the food thing pings out lunch....and later....dinner. And leisure time....damn.

A shrink program keeps track of your behavior, and makes you answer questions as part of the afternoon routine.....right before leisure time. And if it thinks you are getting too crazy, it puts something in the food, or in the booze. Leisure time consists pretty much of booze and interactive pseudosocial programming. And all the time, the big bucks keep clicking into your bank account back on Mars. Wonderful. And just when you're about ready to walk out the door with no suit on, it's time to lock things down at last and start the long boost back towards the Sun. Thank God, or whatever.

Europa is where you can get off the blessed ship. The whole can of worms slips into a slot in the side of a big damned space-station, and you have returned to civilization, such as it is. The gravity simulation is stronger here, but the shipbrain has been making me exercise on the way in, to beef myself up for civilization......and the shrink thing has been trying to get me ready to interact with other humans after 36 months of extreme isolation.....

I come down a corridor to Inbound Processing, and there is a little reception room with a real female person behind a counter, like at a doctor's office, or something.....I'm already starting to feel confused, even with the dose of social interaction drug that was in my oatmeal this morning. The female is a pro at this stuff of course, she smiles calmly and speaks slowly and concisely.

"Mr. Williams? How are you this morning?" she asks.

I try to smile, I try to respond in words....but nothing happens, I just stand there dumbfounded. I'm not used to talking, except to myself. I'm used to dealing with machines, not with people.

"Erg...um....ah" I say.

She tilts her head a bit....she is listening to instructions from some program.....she pours a yellow liquid into a little plastic cup and offers it to me. I take it from her, and drink it down. Sensations flow through my brain.....sensations that result in a new focus.....I try to talk again and say:

"Thank you. Ah, I'm doing OK this morning, how are you?" Now I'm feeling more pleased with myself. Specifics work.....specific targeted drugs do their job....now I can proceed with the Inbound Processing process......