The rain beat down in sheets outside her window, obscuring the view of people milling about twenty floors below and making patterns on the glass. She lay on her bed, covered by her warm duvet, looking through the huge window, across the suburbs and to the television grey sky above, while cramps coursed through her abdomen. She never felt more attuned to her body than during this time of the month.
Being a Spacer in the Stellar Corps was a step up from her previous position as an accountant with Boring, Inc. Exploring the vastness of space was much more thrilling than arguing with upper management over leave applications, MC rates and the other tortures that only the HR department could bring to bear. Besides, deep down, an office, number-crunching job with little room for her creativity never really appealed to her inner desire for exploration. When Stellar Corps announced a vacancy in 2040, she was among the first few applicants.
'When's your next?' said Scanhoil as he stepped in.
'I'm not sure, but I think 8000's pushing the limit.' She brushed her hair, looking away as she spoke.
'You know we'll have to reach the bottom one day - without practice, we're going to have a problem in deep space.'
As part of the acclimatization program for zero gravity, Stellar Corps decreed a series of rigorous deep-dive programs for budding pilots. Suits had been invented, able to withstand the enormous pressures of kilometers of water, while being sleek enough to let curves be visible. She had gotten the latest model, a light one with an oxygenated fluorocarbon based liquid that she could breathe. On her latest dive to the ruins of the Titanic, it had proved its worth over many times as she navigated through the tight corners of the wreck.
Scanhoil walked over to her clothstand and looked over at the suit. She'd attached a keychain with a plushie animal on the zipper, it looked to be something resembling a cross between a blue hornless unicorn and a turtle. She'd told him it was there for good luck. At 3800m, with the darkness and weight of the water surrounding you, and the silence of the depths the only sound you hear, many divers tended to become semi-religious.
She noticed his motion in her peripheral vision. 'It's a pity they've stopped production for the series. Poor margin, they said,' as she let out a heavy sigh, 'guess all good things must come to an end.'
'That makes it one of a kind, doesn't it?' Scanhoil ran his fingers across the surface and felt its texture - it had a smooth-skinned complexion, almost as if a person had been skinned to make the suit.
Kaya turned her gaze toward him, baffled yet amazed. Where did he get all that positivity, she thought to herself. 'You're one of a kind,' she said with a poker face. Scanhoil looked at her with a blank face, wondering if she meant it as a compliment or otherwise.
'How's your project going?' she asked, before he could react. Scanhoil's eyes lit up in an instant and, without delay, dived right into the details. The perfectionist in him began taking the wheel of his intrigued mind. 'I've been thinking,' he said, as his face took on a thoughtful expression, 'instead of categorising them according to colours, perhaps their absorption features would be a more appropriate header. But absorption features might not be obvious to some, and that might cause confusion and inconvenience to users.' He had been working on his stellar log as a side project, with the goal to create a holographic portal that provided access to all information available about every single star in their universe. It was a splendid idea that complemented his hobby of grouping things together. If extraterrestrial beings really do exist, Kaya was pretty sure that he would attempt to sort them into groups too.
Scanhoil sat on the foot of her bed as he whipped out his Holovect, a circular mobile holoprojector. Its holographic interface activated within a millisecond, with laser beams projecting a 3-dimensional network of his masterpiece at 16K Ultra HD resolution. A column of filter options ran down the left hand side of the projection. With his fingers dancing in the air, Scanhoil selected 'Blue' under 'Colour'. Kaya was captivated. Various coordinates in the 3D prism glowed brighter than the rest; all of the Blues in the galaxies were identified.
'How did you do it!?' Kaya exclaimed in awe, completely forgotten about her cramps. Scanhoil couldn't be more excited to share what he had learned and started to explain the technicalities. She didn't understand the bulk of it, but Kaya knew one thing: Blue Giant was her favourite.
Blue Giant. The moniker given to a NGC-1401, a variable star, tucked in the backwaters of the Andromeda galaxy, a lonely 2.5 million light years from Earth. What stuck in her mind however, was not its constantly unpredictable orbit, nor the abnormally high concentration of helium-3 determined from its absorption spectra, but the unique shade of blue it took. It was a light, baby blue hue, and it reminded her of the cerulean skies visible from her hometown, and the idyllic, carefree lifestyle she had as a child there, playing in the boundless fields of grass by the golden rays of sunset.
Kaya and Scanhoil both graduated from the 49th Stellar Cadet Course. Kaya had a laid back attitude, preferring to study just the night before the theory tests, which still put her near the top of the class. Her interests flitted around the myriad of subjects available, from rocket propulsion to magnetohydrodynamics. She never really took a serious interest in any particular field, but embraced cosmology as a whole. 'To explore where no one has ever been' - the motto of the Stellar Corps had resonated deeply with her even before joining the Corps.
Even as a child, the nebulae and galaxies called out to her - from the pastel hues of the Bubble Nebula, the religious speculation surrounding the eye-like Helix Nebula, to the furthest humanity had ever looked out into the depths of space - the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. During long office meetings at her previous job, she'd sometimes close her eyes while a staff member droned on about quarterly figures, and imagine herself flying across the void, past Pluto, asteroid fields and into interstellar space, looking out into the entirety of the Cosmos.
Scanhoil hailed from one of the older Science Colleges in a rural city. A methodological organizer, he had spent years categorizing the galactic objects. This came at the cost of his social life - many times, he could be seen in the Observatory on a lonely night, staring out into the sky lost in thought, or seated at a table, his face bathed in the neon glow of the Holovect, calculating some unknown planetary trajectory. He rarely frequented the local bar, and was often seen in the Spacer Museum, browsing the old records of the previous missions to Mars and Jupiter.
It was therefore a surprise that they became friends. Kaya remembered the night: she was scheduled for a dive the next day and her regulator was missing. Nearly at her wit's end, she asked for help on the InterWeb, not really expecting anything. Instead, when she opened her cabin door the next morning, she found a box containing a regulator and a note from Scanhoil: "I saw your message, and I don't really have anybody to dive with so yea." For the whole of last year all he'd do was smile shyly and walk away everytime she tried to return it, until one day when she signed him up for a dive and offered him a brand new regulator and he had no choice but to accept.
