When Douglas Hadje pressed his hands against the sides of the L5 System, he always imagined that he could sense his aunt along with however many ‘great’s preceded that title, sense all of those years separating him from her, and he pressed his hands against the outside of the system every chance that he could get. If he was sure that he was alone — and he often was — he would press his forehead to the glassy, diamondoid cylinder and wish, hope, dream that he could say even one word to her. His people, now nearly two centuries distant from the founding of the System, forever felt on the verge of speciation from those within. Did they still think they same? Did they still feel the same? Their hopes were doubtless different, but were their dreams?
But always his hands were separated from the structure by that thin layer of skinsuit, and always his helmet was in the way of the diamond shell, and always he was at least one reality away from them.
+He would spend his five minutes there, connected and not by touch, thinking of this or that, thinking of nothing at all, and then he would kick away from the cylinder out the dozen or so meters to the ceiling of his home, climb through the airlock, and perhaps go lay down.
+Others knew of this. They had to. All movement outside the habitat portion of the system was tightly controlled. Everything was on video, recorded directly from his eyes through his exo. All audio was recorded.
+But he never spoke, and he always closed his eyes. For some unknown reason, he was permitted this small dalliance.
The System sat stationary at the Earth-Moon L5 point, a stable orbit with relation to the Earth and moon such that it only very rarely required any correction to its position. Once a day, as the point rotated beyond Earth from the point of view of the sun and more briefly by the moon, it fell into darkness, but other than that, it was bathed in sunlight unmoderated by atmosphere. It rotated at a stately pace in relation to the moon and Earth such that its vast solar collector was always pointed toward the sun.
The station itself comprised three main parts. At the core of the station was the diamondoid cylinder, fifty meters in diameter and five hundred meters in length. The solar collector was attached to the end of the cylinder facing the sun, spreading out in a series of forty thousand replaceable panels, one meter square each, held in a lattice of carbon fiber struts. Surrounding the cylinder was a torus, one hundred meters in diameter and as long as core cylinder itself, such that it was forever hidden from the sun by the solar collectors. Seventy-seven and a half thousand acres, of living space, working space, factories, and arable land, all lit by bundles of doped fiber optic cables which collected and distributed the light from space and cast it down from the ceiling. The entire contraption spun fast enough that he had an approximation of three quarters of Earth’s gravity.
That is where Douglas lived along with about two hundred others.