Zilly's War

Part 1 of 4

It had been thirteen years since she first said "I want to go to space." Sitting in the grass with her then-fiancé, looking up and daring to say what she'd never dared voice to her parents was a breath of fresh air, a step out of a dark room after days of sickness and seclusion. She'd never mentioned any ambitions to her parents when they were still alive. They would have been bitter – not that Eve would have minded.

The Milky Way looks a lot different from up here, she thought. She remembered how painted, how flat it looked from the grassy hill; much like her life. It seemed so simple. Stars. Some blackness. But she was in it now. And what an immense tangle! She'd only been in orbit for two months (whereas her predecessor had managed a seven-year stint before succumbing to fevers), but looking out the windows or glancing at the external monitors was a new experience every day. I use "day" only as a necessary term, of course. ZL-24971 had a day that approximated an earth-week, and even then the spacecraft was experiencing a wholly different sun-cycle, with 127 hours dedicated to exposure and the remaining 50 being spent in the shadow of the swampy giant. It was in these fifty hours of shade when she would spend the most time at the windows. The universe wasn't flat from out here. It was nothing like she'd expected, nothing like the movies had shown her, nothing like what S.T.A.R.S. had prepared her for. And it was somehow new, somehow different every time she walked from the aft window to the cockpit. It was wonderful, but awful. Back on earth people loved to complain about the mundane, how bitter, dull and repetitive life always ended up being. She'd been among the worst of the complainers. But people weren't meant for anything different. Too much wonder was making her small, so very small. She didn't like how small it made her. It gave her headaches.

Sometimes she wished she'd gone through with the wedding. She hadn't wished it until now, and she often questioned her own sanity for wishing it. But there it was. Her grassy hill memory was comprised of her then-fiancé's bearded face just as prominently as was that night's starscape. It was a good face, she remembered. Not that she had any lack of human interaction onboard the Virgil. Her predecessor's predecessor had been driven mad with loneliness after eight long (earth)years of orbiting, so S.T.A.R.S. had ensured a system be in place which would maintain the normal idiosyncrasies of a normal, healthy social life, should the Monitor choose to use the system. If the Monitor tended to be more of a loner, he or she could simply choose not to utilize that feature of the A.I. Eve tended to be more of a loner, but didn't entirely forego the use of the system. The hologram projections (though "hologram" is a rather antiquated word for it) moved naturally through the user's setting of choice in the rec-room. By attaching the neural-link – a harmless magnet-like device that latched on gently behind her shoulders – she could experience the holograms as if they were physically present, physically affective. Naturally, the most common use of the rec-room was for sexual release. Eve had used it for this purpose six or eight times in her months in orbit. It was a pleasant pastime, but a little silly, despite the fascinating innovation behind the A.I.

Earth-day 97 (hour 2328, as the official log demanded). The Virgil was coming round ZL24971 (Zilly, as S.T.A.R.S. chief Emilio Duncini had lovingly nicknamed the planet, after the mistress who'd meant enough to him to cost him twenty years of happy marriage) into the full blaze of sunlight. Eve always hated this part. Despite the windows' excellent UV-blocking, she imagined that it hurt her eyes. Mostly, she was pouty and angry that she couldn't see the surrounding stars anymore. But the aesthetics were irrelevant and it was time to go to work.

The life-signs were never active at night. Scientists had been baffled from the first time, twenty years before, they noticed a large, swampy planet in a star system not far from our own that was not only capable of sustaining life, but most definitely did. It was life that only existed on one side of the planet at a time, however. Without sunlight, the life-signs would fade and die. The best theory the scientists could manage was an ordinarily fantastic one: Zilly cycled through entire lifecycles of ecosystems and self-contained evolutions with every rotation. As one side entered the light, new life would form, evolve, grow and spread, before dying again when it passed into darkness 88.5 hours later. It was fascinating, and the earth people wanted nothing more than to find out what exactly was powerful enough to create life once a week as casually as taking out the garbage on Mondays. When Zilly first made the news in 2027, theories were not in short supply. Some of the more progressive New Age thinkers determined that Zilly was God. Non-thinkers went further to say it was humanity's destiny to go to Zilly and become one with her. The religious right said there was no Zilly, while the more reasonable among them blamed technology for faulty readings, and the conspiracy-theorists protested that the government had known about Zilly for decades and was somehow responsible for the planet's weekly mass-extinctions to prevent intelligent life from forming. Eve was always content with the Journal's weekly, unbiased reporting, but her curiosity was enough to push her into the S.T.A.R.S. (Spacial Technology for Advancements in Revolutionary Science) training program once she achieved her Masters in Engineering from M.I.T.