Douglas Hadje — 2325

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.

To fund such a project, the torus had originally operated as a tourist destination. Many of the living spaces consisted of repurposed hotel rooms. It had long since ceased to serve in that capacity as humanity’s curiosity for space dwindled and spaceflight from earth once again began to rise in price.

To build such a project, the area had been cleared of much of the trojan asteroids that had collected there, either used for raw materials or slung out into space into eccentric orbits that would keep them from impacting earth or winding up once again captured in the same Legrange point. Even still, one of the many jobs was to monitor the area for newly captured asteroids and divert or collect them as needed. The material could be used for new solar panels, or perhaps the ten thousand kilometer launch arm attached to the butt-end of the torus, or of course the two new cylinders that had, over the last two decades, been constructed as half-scale duplicates of the core.

Little of this mattered to Douglas.

He was, he was forever told, a people person. He was an administrator, a boss, a manager. It was his job to direct and guide and herd people into doing what was required for this twenty-year project.

He cared about this with a fervor that was dimmed only by the idea that, somewhere within the mirror-box that was the System cylinder, his ancestor dwelt.

Douglas was the launch director. He was the director. He was high enough on the food chain that he had access to the textual communication line that connected the phys-side world to the sys-side world. He was the director, and he knew that, if he wished, all he need do was pull up the program and type up a letter, run it past security, and click ‘send’, and Michelle, his generations-gone aunt, would somehow receive it.

And yet he never did. He didn’t know why. He asked himself again and again what it was that kept him from reaching out to her. Was it that speciation? Was it the confounding societal differences? Was it that unfathomable distance between the physical and the dream? He did not know, he did not know.

Instead, he worked. He oversaw the construction of the launch systems, those two smaller cylinders that would be, before long now, flung out either end of the rotating launch arm at incredible speed. He worked with the sys-side launch coordinator to ensure that everything was working appropriately, that the micro-Ansible connection between the main system and the launch vessels was appropriately transferring entire identities.

Who this coordinator was, this confusingly-named May Then My Name Die With Me, he had no idea.

He needn’t even message Michelle directly. He had MTMNDWM, perhaps she would know. He could ask her. She could mediate.

And still, he never did.