Life in Molniya Quarantine

[Bainsdrookel]

I wake up on the designated sleeping side of the cylinder. I’ve coded the ambient lighting to respond to my breath and activity, because ‘wake up’ is maybe a misnomer; it takes a good half hour for me to roll out of my bedding. It’s only out of hard won experience I’ve had over the last nine months that has me make the bed. I’ve had to revise a lot of the minutiae of daily life that weren’t part of the astronaut training program everyone had before they were stuffed into these titanium cans and catapulted into orbit to live out the next few years as humanity’s contingency if things turn out really bad earthside.

I roll to the exercise side. I’m just in time for my friend Pamela’s streaming yoga/flex routine. We’re both in similar eccentric 12 hour Molniya orbits, so our daily routines sync up nicely. In the beginning there was a lot of support from earthsiders to help us maintain ourselves and stay sane, but a number of factors have increasingly made us grow into mostly relating to our peers out here in the black. Cultural drift in the need to relate to others having similar experiences is already differentiating us. And there are practical concerns: exercise routines have had to be reinvented to make up for the insanity-inducing Coriolis effect of this habitat. Back-of-the-envelope math tells me that you’d need at least a 12 m radius cylinder to comfortably simulate gravity. For us? We got 4 and were told to make it work. It’s been quite the journey to keep our nutrition paste in our bellies.

And besides the practicals, there is the deeper emotional needs having to be met. Pamela doesn’t guide me through her routine with words about feeling the support of the earth under me; she and I are both primates gracefully being centrifuged against outer titanium shells, our only protection from being flung into the black void.

After Pamela’s nervous system calming routine - I think I’m developing a minor crush on her - it’s time to sit and meditate. There isn’t much freedom of movement up here, but I’ve finally arrived through trial and error at a hack for my meditation where I can get the full outer space experience. The gold standard here is to be able to look down on the Earth. The Overview Effect is a luxury afforded by spacelife. But because what everyone needs for long-term survival is gravity. Those elite astro and cosmonauts of the 20th century? They spent an inordinate amount of time keeping everything including themselves squeaky clean and clear, because even the slight detritus of everyday living becomes a huge liability if it’s floating in free space.

So the cylinder is rotating, and that dizzying spin can kinda ruin the majesty and tranquility of gazing at the great Earth. And just stabilizing it digitally feels like cheating. We want to be able to view it from the central porthole. So with a bit of help from my friends and a frivolous expenditure of maneuvering fuel, I’ve found a way to align my cylinder on a particular part of my orbit and spin my body counter to that so I can see the whole earth, stably, for a full hour at perigee.

[Bainsdrookel]

As I watch the Earth in seeming calm stasis while the rest of my world spins around me, I digest the snippets of expressions, cries into the void, coming from the Random Access Forum of Thoughts. I often can’t tell if they’re from earth or orbit. They help me feel connected in the microwave background of my melancholy.

@SilverRose

We are alone in the universe.

It is very relaxing.

Why even bother wearing clothes? I get up when I want, eat when I want. The universe stretches down the hallway, to the bathroom and the kitchen. I do have enough room to swing a cat though, but she doesn’t like that.

@Geoffwithag

I hesitated in writing this - the feeling that I mustn’t write such things down is strong - because the words might mean something dire;I fell I might be coming apart (I can’t think of another, better way to say it).

@Fel

and I’m sick of reading sick of reading sick of / i want a story and a news with people of another name / i want to know people outside this language / i understand it but it doesn’t have to be mine / better jet off / better the room and accelerated death / but 2001’s past and we are stuck, equal

@Ananara

But what is the purpose of it all? What makes it meaningful ? How do you know when you reach that point, is it a feeling? How is it that others seem to so perfectly know what their purpose is and fulfill all their obligations and still have the capacity, mentally and physically, to do other things?

@ctrlcreep

If I had more I would stretch myself thin, to cover it all, to blanket it in greedy skin. I would keep it safe, I would crush it small, condensed into a neutron ball, and it would glow just like a star and seep its needlight from my scar.

@disco4robot

Sometimes there is a ocean between us, sometimes some mountains. Mostly there is time that fogged up and clogged up like old water. An old cloud. An old ocean. A gentle distance.

@Shruti

It’s been quiet for months. Everyone, for the first time, seemed to be together. We were not all in this together. No. I didn’t think so. The guy next door had lost his job. I was freelancing. We were different but our experience of vigilance and lockdown merged at a point I couldn’t put my finger on. As yet.

@Zelda

The postcard was old, the blue ink had faded a little, but it still smelled like his sunny seaside town. The postcard was old, but time had lost its relevance anyway.

The silence that morning had felt, I dunno, particularly lonely? So I had tried to clean. That’s always what they tell you to do. Avoid losing your mind to passivity at all costs!

@Player1

Suprised he is at the core, because what was there is not there before. I’ve seen the plankton and lost my mask, I’ve risen to every task and so when he gets all the way hot, will he have what he has taken…is it a lot?

So many stories of killing Eve, but we are in love and you don’t know what I have up my sleeve.

I’ve lost countless times and will trust the rest and I sure as fucking hell hope this works out for the best.

@Illias

Has the world changed?

I imagine that it is brighter now, and scrubbed clean of the plague. We have always been good at pretending that everything is fine, but when everything is so clearly not, I hope that we have gotten better at taking action. That we are spurred by a vicious sense of justice, by a dominating kindness. That we no longer overlook the parts of society that we would had not acknowledged in the past, my present, and instead rally to their aid.

@Maud

Friends had gotten used to long periods of silence between messages or calls, there wasn’t much to say these days anyway, and Maud always seemed to just be getting on with life. They supposed that was exactly what she was doing now.

She could hold her life in her hand now, it had become so small.

@tomas

This world is filled with joy, that man will say

And I will foreshow something soft in the deepness of my spring

And my niddle-noddle will make him fall asleep.

@EdgarSwift

When you think about it, we are all just strange spirals along the axis of time.
See, we are 4 dimensional creatures projected onto 3-dimensional space. X-Y-Z and t. Each instance of our existence on linear time a snapshot in 3d-space and then rendered into a graphic we call life.

But watched from 5d in full 4d, our routes travelled becomes this strange swirling pattern in space.

Yes, If you zoom in close and look at us with the lie of Earth is an inertial system in the realm of time then we appear to be lines filling in the same beaten paths most of the time. Rise from bed, god to work, go home, occasional deviations, then return to the pattern.

But this is a geocentric lie that should have died along with the pope that trapped Galileo at home at the advent of the Copernican principle.

We do not live on an inert mass of rock. We are on a huge magnet hurtling through space in a cork screw around the captive fusion explosion we call Sol. Each of us leaves a unique swirl to the giant repetitive one. And we are in fact not even a strand of hair in the huger picture.

The universe is a huge weird untangling mass.

But we live instant to instant, our minds projected onto 3d space. So we see life and not the patterns.

@WereBear

A century plus of trying to overturn the Cartesian dualism with a series of thought experiments.

Some of them dirty and sickly because of those who thought them up.

Some of them ill defined and loosed upon those who mostly don’t do more with their bodies than their minds.

A sneaking, horrifying suspicion that bodies are obviously.

That they carry.

Then melt.

Your body is behind your eyes.

@TonyMarx

Is emptiness a feeling or a state?
Can you explain that again to the ones whose faces are the definition of that which we are trying to, but cannot describe.

Those which are incomprehensible. As comprehensible as a train of thought of words strung together by some form of previous, presumably persistence of knowledge.

@Gallow

The darkness in there is like a blanket across my mind, not warm, fuzzy and comfortable, but just there. Covering everything, blocking everything out. That darkness has been my friend many a time, a place of solace and contemplation. Somewhere to find a moment of inner peace.

@Kerak

stuck here:
indefinite thought
finite space
atoms to atoms
dust to dust

I listen and feel the presence of all these others as my own. And the overview effect has its way with me, and I open a channel and speak to the RAFT.

[Bainsdrookel]

For the Love of Emptiness

When the walls close in,
when being seems too much to bear
when life is like a raft lost on the endless sea,
consider what truly is unfolding.

The future, where everything possible is probable,
there are so many possibilities that any one of their existences are as close to impossible as anything can be.

The past is where all possibilities collapse
into a singular story,
written in ink that cannot be rewritten;
the ink slowly fading, smudging over the page.

Between the certain and the impossible,
between past and future,
is the boundary of existence.
As it shifts and transforms,
all things come into being.

This cross-section is the experience you’re having;
no more and no less;
unbounded by your perception;
your own personal ice cream cones cutting through spacetime,
meeting and being met with distant millisecond pulsars and blazars at the edge of the observable.

Close to the boundary, cause and effect wiggle and leapfrog across each other,
quantum foam on the universal latté.

This boundary is where there is something to say and do,
the only time there is any influence at all on reality.

The experience machine in the middle between the light cones of past and future,
soft tissue in a bone container.
Hearing these words is a tangle of particles rearranging themselves,
propagating and sustaining tiny waves across the quantum fields.

Primate brains connect through quantum enabled tunnels,
electrons propagating miniscule waves through circuits,
turning to coherent photons traveling between distances,
activating back into electron waves,
becoming photons hitting a retina,
turning into meaning:
a superposition between two states of being
blinking into and out of existence.

These tangles of particles sitting degrees away,
turning around crusty ball of fiery magma
itself a mote of dust floating through vast emptiness.

Even in our separation
there is intimacy,
because there is no thingness to things,
only intimacy between.

Existence is precious.
Existence is limitlessly strange.
A tiny set of whirling eddies and bubbles on the latté,
anomalous knots in the smooth fabric of vast emptiness.