Pilot: A Ship Called Aspiration
Leah's last day of work and her new home.
This is the third pilot within Pilot Season, where each week I will be putting out a new first chapter, followed by a poll to see which story I will continue as a serialized novel in 2025. Subscribe to be informed when the poll drops.
On Leah’s last day of business, she closed the store at half-past twelve. She rolled herself along the aisle of server racks and carefully coiled wires, the wheels on her chair whispering out a soft sound. When she came to the lip that led out into the street, she paused and rested her head against the wood outline of the door, watching the sun rise somewhere out beyond the horizon. Her kinky black hair acted as a cushion against the hardwood, and the sun was pleasant on her dark brown skin. Sunrise happened three or four times per day on the planet Izra, depending on where you lived and the time of year, so it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. But it was still pretty.
“Did I miss it?” she heard a soft voice say, and turned her eyes towards him. A man in flannel was trundling down the street, headed towards her but not with any priority. It more seemed that he was following the inevitable movement of his feet. He was around six feet tall, muscled but with a thin layer of fat on top so it was difficult to tell. He had a bushy beard on his chin that extended a full six inches down towards his chest, and his brown hair was shoulder length but tied back in a ponytail so it wouldn’t fall into his face.
“Miss what?” she said with an indulgent smile.
“Your last customer?” Ralph said, looking around as if he might be able to spot them walking away. “I think Erin was going to come by to get a patch for her shuttle.”
Leah shook her head. “She was here at ten.”
Ralph made a soft groan that did not sound genuine at all to Leah’s ears. “I was making your present.”
“You didn’t have to get me anything,” Leah said. The words had become a common refrain recently. She’d said it to her neighbors the Brewers, who she could always hear arguing in hushed tones late at night. They’d dropped off a barely edible pie a few days earlier. She’d even said it to her landlady, a nice, older woman with librarian glasses named Janice, who’d left her a loaf of banana bread so dense Leah thought it’s only real use had to be as a paperweight.
The people on Izra were nice, no doubt about it, but they weren’t bakers. They ate for function, not flavor. The banana bread was probably packed with enough nutrients and calories that Leah could have lived off it for a solid month, and the pie had been baked with brill-nut, one of the only natural nuts on Izra. She knew they’d been trying to give her something that would remind her of “home”. It was sweet, in a way, though misguided. Here was never home.
“I know,” Ralph said, shrugging those big shoulders of his. “But I wanted to.”
Leah smiled up at him. “That’s very sweet.”
He blushed and refused to look at her, following her gaze off towards the horizon.
When they’d first slept together, when Leah had been new to the planet and he had been new to talking to people, she hadn’t expected the relationship to last longer than a few nights. Just a couple quick, sweaty hours to get the endorphins flowing. But here he was, three years later, still coming down to the store every couple days or so, just to say hi in his strangely charming, awkward elephant sort of way.
After a few silent moments, listening to the sounds of Izra, she put her hand on his forearm where the flannel was rolled back to show his light brown skin and he looked down at her. Ralph gave her one of his rare, completely open smiles, the kind that held nothing back, and she reflected it fully. She liked when he was here without any customers. He could fully be himself.
“Come on,” she said, turning her chair and headed back into the shop. “I have to finish inventory.”
“I didn’t come here to work,” he grumbled.
“No?” she said, looking over her shoulder and raising an eyebrow. “You plan on giving me something else?”
“No, no,” he said, blushing again. “I didn’t mean...damn.”
She laughed, delighted. It had been a while since she’d been in such a good mood. For the past three years, owning this shop and everything in it had been all Leah had known, completely devoted to her one goal of earning enough money to leave.
But now she wasn’t leaving. In a way, she was becoming more tied to this world than she’d ever imagined.
She held out her hand to him. “Come on. Keep me company. I’ve got a couple hours before I have to get over to Launch.”
Ralph shuffled into the shop, hunching his shoulders to try and make himself smaller. He made his careful steps through the aisles, around the boxes of circuits and coils of wires, turning sideways and sucking in his gut as he passed in front of a pair of large, old-school monitors. She watched him move, amused but sympathetic. She liked having her shop cluttered, especially towards the top of the shelves, which she didn’t have to deal with due to her chair. She liked making everybody else have to answer the questions that she had to answer every day: how big was your body really? Where exactly could you move without accidentally breaking something?
It gave her a chance to see people slowly realize the space their body took up, to realize the inconvenience that they might be to anyone else in the shop who needed to navigate it.
For the first time, they saw the world as she saw it.
But she knew that Ralph had dealt with this at least once a week since they’d gotten together, trying to figure out where to step so he didn’t completely disrupt the organized chaos that was her shop. She hoped that the ship would give him more space to move around.
She settled in behind the desk, tapping a couple keys and pulling up a spreadsheet that laid out each item within the shop, her best estimate as to its value, and location. She highlighted a few boxes and hit the delete button, as Ralph fell into an old, stuffed office chair which groaned under his weight.
“You still have to do inventory even though you’re selling the shop?” he said.
She shrugged without looking at him.“You know how Marteen is. They’ll have a hissy fit if anything is missing. And besides,” she said, fingers flying across the keyboard to forward the document to Marteen’s personal server, “I already did a full inventory two weeks ago when the sale was finalized. Now, I just need to knock off the handful of items I sold this morning.”
Almost reflexively, she brought up the itinerary for Launch and glanced at the details for what must have been the millionth time that day.
“You think looking at it is going to make the hours come any faster?” Ralph said, leaning forward to tap at the screen with his greasy finger.
She glared at him, and wiped away the spot he left. “Is that the present you brought me?” she said. “Grease stains on my monitor?”
He shrugged and the office chair underneath him whined at the movement. There was a teasing sparkle in his eye. “How else will you remember me?”
She rolled her eyes and killed the server, her monitor dying. “What did you bring me?”
He stared at her blankly for a moment, before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small bracelet made of vines and, without a moment’s hesitation, slipped it onto her wrist.
She looked down at it, curiously. “What is it?”
He smiled that unreserved smile again. “Dragongreen.”
She looked up at him, eyes wide in fear. “I’m allergic to Dragongreen.”
His eyes widened. “Oh God, really?” His breathing began to come faster, as he looked around wildly. “Where’s your adrenaline?”
She shrugged. “I don’t have any.”
“You don’t have any?” he said, looking at her, his face flush with worry. “You’re allergic to one of the most common plants on Izra and you don’t have-”
He cut himself off as he looked down at her wrist.
She still hadn’t taken it off.
“You’re fucking with me,” he said, relaxing back into the chair.
“I am,” she admitted. She looked down at the little bracelet circling her wrist. “It’s really pretty.” She held it up to her nose and took a deep sniff. “Smells like cinnamon.”
“Kind of a dick move to do that on our last day together,” he said, taking carefully managed breathes.
She put her hand on his knee. “Honey, it isn’t our last day together. You’re going to be coming up in two months.”
“Yeah, but that’s two whole months,” he whined.
“I know. It’ll suck being apart,” she said, sympathetically, and then gave him a wicked grin. “But won’t it be great once we’re back together?”
He looked at her, and matched her smile. “Yeah.”
He leaned down and she tilted her head up so he could kiss her, full on the lips.
She opened her eyes as he leaned back into his chair, and glanced over his shoulder, the blue sky tinted with sunrise through an open window.
Somewhere far above, sitting in the darkness of space, the ship waited.
“There it is,” Erin said as they rounded the edge of the planet. The ship peaked its head above the horizon and Leah saw it for the first time since she’d arrived. It was long, stretched out a bit like a snake, with the thrusters at the back looking like empty, black cylinders, having cooled to nothing centuries ago. The metal shone bright against the starlight of Izra’s binary stars, looking so new that it almost could have been berthed yesterday. As they came closer, she could see the name of the ship etched into the side in simple, ancient letters: Aspiration.
It wasn’t perfect: a large antenna was stuck awkwardly on the top and as she watched it, she could see it was rotating slowly, almost imperceptible, in the same direction as Izra’s turning, a surrender to gravity that never should have been. If it was operating correctly, it shouldn’t have been moving at all. There was a large open gash in the side of the ship, not quite deep enough to pierce the hull, but deep enough to touch the water system. Water cascaded into open space and crystallized into ice almost as soon as it touched the void. But to her it was perfect.
“You gonna rename it?” Erin said, letting go of the controls with one hand and raising the vacuum mudjug up to her mouth. The pilot shook her blue, pixie cut and leaned forward to let her tobacco flavored spit dribble in the direction of the vacuum. Leah’s stomach flipped, and not just because of the twirl of the planet below her.
She knew it was fine for the pilot to let go of the controls with one hand, that Erin barely even needed a hand on the control at all. They were at that point in the flight where gravity was able to do the last bit, drawing them into docking range. But all the same, Leah was nervous. She felt she was sixteen again, sitting outside her girlfriend’s house, about to meet the parents.
“Yeah,” Leah said, trying to ignore the roil of her gut and focus on the question at hand. “Probably.”
“Doesn’t look like much,” Erin said, a bit judgmental but not unkindly so. She spit a bit more into her vacuum mudjug and Leah suppressed a shudder. She knew that chew was a tradition among long-haul truckers like Erin, but she still thought it was disgusting and impractical. Why not just use a slap-patch? Not that she was going to suggest a change in tobacco habits to the woman bringing her to her new home.
“I think it’ll surprise you,” Leah said, and turned to focus on the ship out the window, making a mental list of all the thing she’d have to change as soon as she got in.
She’d have to deal with the leak first, as much as she didn’t want to. The water coming out of the side was a steady trickle, as it had always been for as long as anyone could remember, making beautiful, geometric patterns as the starlight hit it. Most of the water which fell from the ship was then vacuumed back in on the other side, making the whole thing a mostly self-perpetuating cycle. But enough was lost from the leak she knew she’d have to patch it up first thing. She didn’t want to have to keep getting water shipped out. She wanted it to be self-sustaining.
But the leak had given her the idea for the name. If you were sitting planet side and it was clear night, you could look up to see the ice crystals where Aspiration let them into the air, as if its blood was rainbows.
“Rainbow Station,” she said softly to herself. “That’s what I’ll call it. Rainbow Station.”
Erin looked back at her, more than a little skeptically. “It’s not a station. Just a ship.”
“Not yet,” Leah said back, her smile wide. “But it will be.”
Erin gave her a hard look, before lifting the mudjug one more time, turning away with a shrug. “Okay.”
Leah understood the pilot’s skepticism. She wasn’t a mechanic, she didn’t have all the know-how of turning a ship into a space station.
But what had she known back when she’d first sat down in front of a computer terminal all those years ago? Had she known anything more than the deep drive in her belly that told her this was what she was meant to do?
“Alright,” Erin said, as the shuttle came to a sudden stop, the docking tunnel pressed into Aspiration’s port. A loud clank echoed through the artificial atmosphere of the ship. “Do you need any-”
“Nope.” Leah had already pressed the button to undo her harness as soon as she’d heard the connection. She pulled her way down towards the docking doors, her hand undoing the buckle that kept her portable console latched to her hip, her completely ornamental legs trailing behind her in zero gravity. She waited anxiously at the door until she heard Erin press a button and it opened with a soft hiss. She grabbed and pulled herself down the white docking tunnel with one hand, her other clutching a long wire and her portable console. The long door at the end was gray and tan and slightly warm from the starlight as she landed against it.
She fumbled with the wire connected to her portable console, and searched frantically for a moment, before finding a port next to the door. She’d done her research correctly; it would fit.
The digital pad next to the door flickered to life, drawing a bit of power from her portable as she pushed it in. She navigated through the options until she found the script under the folder “Rainbow Station”: unlock_2_for_reals.sh. This script was why not just anyone could buy this ship (and also why it had been so cheap): nobody had the command to unlock it. She double tapped to execute and sighed as the console began to print out a long list of commands.
“You think this’ll work?”
Leah started at the sudden noise, and turned to find Erin floating behind her, an oxygen mask strapped to her head, the plug of tobacco still clearly in her lip. She held a mask out towards Leah and she took it, shamefaced. She’d been so excited she hadn’t even thought about the fact they hadn’t been pumping atmo into the docking tunnel. She was breathing whatever was left from when they’d gotten out of Launch.
“I think so,” Leah said. She let go of her portable for a moment, letting it float in zero-g, before strapping the oxygen mask around her head, pushing it painfully into her hair. “I did a lot of research. But it may take more than an-”
Another click as the digital pad next to the door blinked green. She grabbed frantically for the portable but her breathing calmed as she checked the logs: it had gotten about a quarter of the way through the list of unlock commands she’d pulled off a sketchy forum, but it didn’t throw an error. It got a 0x00 response. She guessed the guy on the site hadn’t been lying.
“Holy shit, it worked,” Leah said, mostly to herself.
“That didn’t take very long,” Erin said, more than a little impressed. “Anyway, I’ll go start on the crates if you can-”
“Wait,” Leah said quickly. “Can you just…? Wait.”
The pilot looked at her, her eyes squinting in confusion, before she nodded. Erin wasn’t her friend, Leah knew this. Leah was just someone to help fix the pilot’s tech when it wasn’t working right, and the whole business to get to Aspiration was a long overdue favor.
But still. Leah didn’t want to be alone.
She pressed a button on the panel and the doors slid open, showing a long, narrow corridor, neon white lights flickering as they turned on, the first time in two hundred years.
They both stared down the corridor, as if they were waiting for something.
Erin took a deep breath, and then let it out slowly, her breath sounding a little ragged. “Well,” she said. “Welcome home.”
“Thanks,” Leah said.
She didn’t remember when she had begun to cry. The tears on her cheeks felt warm.
If you’re curious as to my thoughts and feelings while I was writing this piece, click the button below to see my commentary, which goes live on Monday, November 25th.
ZK, not quite sure what this story is really about but I'm definitely intrigued. I enjoyed installment #2, though I think this one edges it out for the #1 slot. My vote is for this story to go on. It looks like the beginning of an interesting adventure. I want to see more!