Noumenon. Marina Lostetter J.

to travel across the dome, even receding slightly as it made its way toward the horizon, implying a greater vastness than the ceiling actually possessed.

      A curious calf came over to check me out. It made a silly, high-pitched version of an adult moo, and let me pat its nose.

      That was when I realized I missed Earth.

      When I’d been cooped up during the test years, I’d always known I’d go home again. That I would run in the fields again, stand on the rocky Icelandic shore, and stroll down the village parkway.

      These nine ships were the whole of my reality from now on. Not only in terms of the area I had to explore, or the atmosphere, or the company, but also in terms of flow.

      Children aren’t born and off to school in less than a year. That’s not right, it’s not real. If I ever chose to raise a child, he would not magically transform before my eyes as Saul’s son had.

      We were separate—severed—from Earth in every possible way. It was a memory, and I found myself missing things I had been eager to leave. Father, Mother, all those who watched over us. I hadn’t been ready to receive my independence. Had anyone?

      I cried then, with the baby cow nuzzling me and the pseudo-sun shining down on both of us. Homesickness was not something I’d ever had to contend with before. And it was something I simply had to learn to get over, because home was lost to me forever.

      On my way back to my cabin I tripped over a vacuuming robot. I cursed and kicked it, though it only buzzed and beeped an error message in return. “Stupid machine.”

      The depressive mood was not mine alone. The sparse news from Earth contributed to our sense of detachment, and most of the updates we received were negative—new conflict in South America, a tsunami in Asia, a devastating earthquake in Europe. And when Saul told me the littlest convoy had been lost, I didn’t know how to react. One of our twelve, completely gone.

      But, after we hit our one-year anniversary, and the first new babies had been successfully tube grown, the unthinkable happened.

      We had our first suicide.

      “Mags! Margarita? Margarita, let me in!” Fists banged on my door and panicked cries stabbed through the walls. I woke up startled and disoriented. It took me a moment to place the voice as Nika’s.

      My fumbling brain knew something was off before I made it through the dark to open the door. It wasn’t just the alarm in her voice; she hadn’t called me on my implants, and was ignoring the door’s buzzer.

      “Lights,” I demanded of the room. I met my friend with a terse “What?”

      Tears flowed down her puffy cheeks, and her lips trembled. I’d never seen Nika cry before, and these weren’t typical bad-day tears. Something horrible had happened, and she was near hysterics.

      “He, he—I just found—I—” The hiccups started, and she couldn’t get any words out.

      I pulled her inside, sat her down at my small table, and pulled the comforter from my bed to throw around her shoulders. Without asking I made her a cup of tea in my kitchenette and plopped it down in front of her. She barely acknowledged the mug.

      Gritty sleep rimmed my eyes. Rubbing it away, I pulled up a chair beside Nika. When the hiccups stopped and her breathing steadied, I prodded. “What’s wrong?” I’d never known Nika to get unduly emotional. If she was upset, things were bad.

      “I went to go see Lexi. I couldn’t sleep. He was working the night shift and— Ooh, God.” She let her forehead fall to the table. “He’s dead.”

      Had I heard right? “How?” I lowered my head to her level. “Nika. What happened?” Lexi was an engineer, and Nika’s biological cousin. I thought maybe there’d been an accident, that some of Mira’s machinery had caught him. Never in a million years would suicide have crossed my mind.

      But that was exactly what had happened. Lexi had hung himself deep in the bowels of the ship.

      “What does it mean?” Nika asked. “Weren’t—weren’t we screened for this? We share genetic code. If he can kill himself …”

      “No,” I jumped in. “You couldn’t. It won’t get that bad.” I put my arms around her, but knew we couldn’t sit there. We had to tell someone—the captain. “Nika. He’s still there, isn’t he?”

      “I couldn’t touch him. I saw and I—I ran. He’s still there.” The realization that she’d left him hanging in his noose disturbed her, and she fell apart again.

      Nausea made my stomach boil. The situation hadn’t hit home yet, hadn’t grabbed my emotions yet. Which meant now was the time to act, before I became a puddle like Nika.

      I’d have to report this to Saul.

      At the thought, I was instantly ashamed, embarrassed. But now wasn’t the time to think about that, so I pushed thoughts of later duties aside and helped Nika to her feet. “We have to let the security officers know.”

      “I left him there,” she mumbled. “I ran and left him there.” She felt like a rag doll in my arms.

      I’d thought to drag her to the security offices near the bridge, but she’d fallen into a stupor. Nika stared into space like she could see through the walls. My best friend was in shock, which meant I was left holding the bag.

      This seemed like as good a time as any to give the convoy-wide security alert system a spin. I activated it via my implants, choosing the officers only option. A red light blinked at the edge of my peripheral vision, letting me know the alert had gone through. Immediately, I second-guessed the action. Perhaps I should have left Nika alone in my apartment and gone to the bridge myself. Maybe this didn’t constitute a convoy-wide emergency—or did it? It was our first death, and it was as unnatural as they came.

      “I.C.C., are you there?”

      “Yes. You have activated the—”

      “I know. There’s been … Nika’s cousin …” I couldn’t get the words out.

      “You are hyperventilating,” the computer observed.

      I was—my hands were going all tingly.

      “Close your mouth and inhale slowly through your nose.” I.C.C. was clearly more concerned with my present state than why I’d used the alert system. I wasn’t sure what to think of that. Wasn’t sure what to think about anything, actually.

      Security officers busted through my door like they were performing a drug raid. My apartment-for-one became a sardine-can-for-twelve in under two minutes. The officers separated Nika and me in an instant—thinking a domestic dispute, I’m sure. It took me a few minutes to assure them we weren’t the problem. They were overly eager and hopping, as unsure in the execution as I was in the concept, but itching to do their duty, to solve whatever the problem might be.

      Unfortunately, the hubbub pushed Nika into silence. I couldn’t get the exact location out of her, and bringing up Lexi’s work agenda from the cached files only told us he was scheduled to perform routine maintenance. So they left me to attend to my poor friend while they scoured the ship’s innards for a body. It took me a moment to realize our big mistake—we had all forgotten to ask I.C.C. for help. I.C.C. would know where he was.

      “I.C.C., do you have Lexi’s location? Please direct the officers.”

      “I will. Your breathing has normalized.”

      “Thank you.”

       Stupid. So stupid. I.C.C. should be programmed to alert us to this kind of thing. We shouldn’t have to stumble upon it. Privacy be damned.

      Like everyone in the convoy, I knew Lexi, if only on the level of acquaintance. He’d seemed happy whenever I saw him, but I’m sure I had seemed happy to him, too.