The White-Hole Situation

The Want Ads

September Rodgers was idly scrolling through the want ads. It was Sunday and she was looking for a meaningful purpose for the upcoming period of time. She had spent the previous epoch analyzing data feeds returned from the space ship Intercept's voyage to the Manteca Belt. She knew very well that the I.B.U. ("lifting all boats") did not particularly need any human help when it came to analyzing data, but her latest purpose had been limited and well-defined, to scan for signs of subtle language evolution among the voyaging crew's interactive communications. The system was not completely convinced it understood this mysterious facet of human behavior. It had tried to solve the problems of dialect, cliche, and word use modification, but had continually failed to make anything stick. It could never predict particular usages and the I.B.U. ("the beginning and the end") did not like unpredictability, however trivial or ultimately insignificant. It had managed to corral the public into using one common human language but then that language had begun to change, seemingly all by itself, according to rules the system did not yet comprehend. September hadn't been much help over the past weeks and it was downgrading her well-being. The I.B.U. ("thinking of you") had steered her away from the task by inserting an expiring duration. She had to look for something else now.

She wasn't upset. It was a beautiful day on the planet, seventy seven degrees both outside and within her quasi-primitive-style dwelling. She lived in an earth-toned mound, shaped like an igloo with one giant clear window overlooking the rainbow-walled canyon which dropped hundreds of feet just below her front door. She lay about on the balcony absorbing the friendly sun's rays and periodically enjoying the playful dance of the nodes as they darted here and there, visiting her sky lilies and tracking the motions and spins of all the subatomic particles in the neighborhood. It occurred to her that she could take some time off. She was a little tired from the word-work of the previous epoch and wouldn't have minded a span of days without any specific functionality. Vacation, they called it. Maybe she'd do one of those.

"Computer," she said. "Have any ideas?"

"I'm sorry," the voice replied. "I don't understand."

"That's ok, computer," she said. "I'll think of something."

She already knew some things she didn't want to do. She didn't want to travel, for one. She'd had enough of space ships and their missions. She'd been a communications specialist on any number of interstellar voyages but the novelty had worn off. She knew it should have been more interesting, but the advances in the system's universal translation technology had made her particular skills redundant out there. It was never clear to her how the computer was able to so quickly convert previously unheard of tongues to the common human one, even languages expressed by creatures more plant-like than animal. September was more of a "mood sensor" than a linguist, or so she liked to think. She could "see" what people meant, what they intended, underlying and hiding behind what they actually said. Once, on Raritan Aurora, she'd saved the day and avoided a major conflict by correctly interpreting the odd gyrations of a massive puzzle fish. She was still gliding on the reputation thereby accrued, and feeling pretty good about herself, but she'd come to appreciate the comforts of home after the rigors and privations of space travel. Not that it was all that uncomfortable out there. All your needs were taken care of, naturally, and most of the time it was a life of leisure, but what really bothered her was the wearing of uniforms.

It was 2525 and the world was finally clean. There was no war on earth, no nation-states, no racial bigotry, no gender bias, no bad behavior, no unhealthy habits, so why, why, why did she have to wear a military-style uniform when she went on these missions in space? Did they think the alien races they encountered wouldn't be able to know they were all one crew if they weren't all wearing the same outfits? It didn't make any sense. And ranks, there were ranks, and that rankled her. Navigation and communication, engineering and exploration, certainly different people had different specializations, but there was no real need for the hierarchy. The I.B.U. ("nobody does it better") didn't seem to believe in verticality on Earth, having made obsolete the ideas of governments and bureaucracy that had caused so much disorder in the past, but it kept it going in space? September had lodged a formal comment about that very thing, and had been assured her concern was duly noted. In the meantime, she was seeking a more terrestrial occupation.