Young Writers Society

Steve

   The engineering department was apparently the most competitive department on the ship, even ahead of the pilots. That had always made Steve sad. He knew he, as a woodlouse, was not considered pretty, but in engineering they had the chance to create things that would be considered beautiful. And they wasted their time competing to be the fastest at designing and assembling washing machines.

Hopefully his boss, Mr Pondek, wouldn’t come back from the mentors’ meeting with a match-up for him today. He’d completed his assigned task in a leisurely ten minutes, which was quite fast – or as he preferred to say, careless – enough for him. He’d spent the past half hour doodling designs for a new viewing platform on the back of an apprentices’ league table.

It was going to have little pools so the fish could join the rest of the crew, instead of just swimming around in the dark. Their job was to monitor the tidal generators as the water sloshed back and forth in the hull of the ship, but there were literally thousands of them, and most just ended up milling about. Could it really hurt to let those without a job see some of the wonders they were helping propel the crew towards? Everyone else got to.

Even Steve regularly was allowed off the ship. Markets were the most common settings for the stupid apprentice tournaments, so every few weeks they were all bundled off into one of the market cities and told to run about the place and assemble something from the cryptic instructions of their bosses, which weren’t allowed to be annotated – just arrows.

Steve sighed. Mr Pondek’s office was dark as always. Steve hated that. He could make out all the objects in the room, sure. There was Mr Pondek’s desk, filing cabinets of building materials, diagrams scattered all over the place. But the murky lack of light brought Steve down whenever he walked in, no matter how happy or excited he’d been before he entered the door.

As Mr Pondek opened the door and waddled back into the room – he wasn’t a duck, he was just a cricket who couldn’t be bothered to lift his feet properly – there was a brief strip of light laid over the centre of the room. It was snuffed out as soon as the door shut, though.

“How did your little mission go then, Stephen?” Mr Pondek gestured with his head towards a pile of metal panels that Steve had soldered together. They had no pattern, they didn’t form anything. But Mr Pondek would know if each panel had been soldered with its correct partner, and if Steve had succeeded in following instructions.

“Fine, sir,” Steve said, “It was the same puzzle as last week.”

“You’re not supposed to remember that, idiot.” Mr Pondek chuckled. “How are you meant to test yourself if you just do the whole thing from memory?”

Steve had learnt early on not to question Mr Pondek’s logic. It existed independently of all other logic in the universe.

“Sorry, sir,” he said.

“Ah, not to worry, lad.” Mr Pondek leaned back in the spinny chair behind his desk. It had been designed perfectly to size, was maybe even a little too small, so that he looked like he dwarfed it. Mr Pondek seemed to like to dwarf things. Whenever they deposited a finished assembly into a matter generator, which scaled it up so that the object could be used on the ship, Mr Pondek always blanched and looked away as the new product was carted off to wherever it was to be installed.

Steve was not used to Mr Pondek letting a telling off, however illogical, go by easily. “How’s that, sir?”

“Ah, my boy, you’ll have a whole new set of instructions to follow tomorrow morning. It’s market day!” Mr Pondek’s face split into a wide grin, but his teeth were sharp enough to make it a grimace. “And I’m afraid I’m going to have to take off again. Here are your exercises for the rest of the day.”

He handed Steve a list of about ten more puzzles, though to be fair they were substantially harder than the last one had been. Then, with a brief chirp, he raised himself from his chair, sauntered across the room and didn’t even close the door properly as he left. Steve slumped and eased it shut, then took the list back over to the desk to study it.

The desk was barely visible under the cluttered papers and tools. Steve shoved some of the files aside to make way for his list and knocked a particularly thick one to the ground with a shove that was probably a tad too aggressive. It was hardly surprising he was grumpy, Steve thought as he levered his flat body to slide it back up the side of the desk. Mr Pondek never gave him anything important to do. He might as well not even be on the ship. The most important thing he’d ever done had been to help Treego Dart to find that little robot, or nanobot, as he’d learnt it was called. Mr Pondek had shown so little interest when he’d returned that he suspected he really had just been selected because he looked so similar to the tiny robot.

Well, Steve guessed, surely that made it his project as much as anyone else’s. If Mr Pondek didn’t care enough to read the report – or at least take three days to do it – then it was up to Steve to help Officer Dart solve the mystery of the nanobots. He dragged the file over to a dark corner of the room level to the door – just because he was justified to be reading the report didn’t mean he wouldn’t get in trouble if he was caught – and started reading.

First was a list of all the materials that had been detected in the tiny little Steve-sized device. Steel, aluminium, tungsten – that one was a little more primitive than he’d been expecting. And what the hell was Fetedun? The table he was reading had a column for a brief description. For Fetedun, the description read: “Directs the current according to the Mexium.” Steve could feel himself about to set off on a quest of words he didn’t understand and decided to visit the infocentre later to check the encyclopaedia.

Steve loved the encyclopaedia. It was like having a whole planet – Earth – on board the ship at all times. Steve had never seen Earth. Now that they all had access to the medicines of Earth, he was likely to live much longer than would be natural for his species, but his parents, who’d been in the prime of their brief lives at the time of the Awakening, were not so lucky. Their body clocks had ticked too far for reversals, and Steve had lost them both while he was going through Youth Training on the JCST primary space station. Regardless, from what he’d read, and that was a lot, Earth seemed like a decent enough place to live.

As he started work on his exercises for the day, he planned his trip to the infocentre. He’d start with the encyclopaedia, but maybe he’d do some research on whatever market hub he was being sent off to tomorrow, then he’d get out a couple of novels and lose himself in his tablet’s scrollbar for the rest of the day.

When it came to it, he couldn’t actually find any entries for “Mexium”, but he knew exactly where to find his Dickens’ collection. He spent a relaxing evening flicking between ‘Great Expectations’ and his plans for the viewing platform, which, as he ambled back to his sleeping quarters, he decided was only fair compensation for the farce he was going to have to go through the next day.