Down To Earth

Chapter 1

Lucy stepped out of the elevator and into a new adventure. The door slid shut behind her. It squeaked slightly as it closed, making her jump with surprise. During the lengthy journey, she had been wondering whether she was making the best career move. She didn't know what lay in front of her, perhaps something terrible, but she couldn't go back. This was because, turning around to look at the strange door, she realized she hadn't the faintest idea how to reopen it. The maker had clearly not cared about, or not bothered with, 'usability'. That wasn't exactly true, as you will see, but at that time, and in her current predicament, Lucy had but one choice. Taking a deep breath, she pulled herself together and pressed onwards, keeping the wretched thing behind her.

Lucy suspected that those deranged door designers had also been entrusted with choosing the room's colour scheme. She had no particular reason to think this, other than being determined to blame both atrocities on one group of individuals. After many committee meetings, in which, as the old saying goes, they had tried to design a horse and ended up with a camel, the room was chosen to be a painfully bright shade of white. The obvious side effect of this was imprinted on all the staff's retinas, which was precisely the problem: Only pairs of complimentary sunglasses could prevent a mass walk out. Waiting for someone to appear, Lucy pressed a few buttons here and there, mostly without incident, and tried to look anywhere but the walls. The floor was as squeaky to walk on as the door had been. She realised that the entire place, and everything in it, was brand new.

The room was quite large, and her nervous pacing took her past the various paraphernalia on display. She decided, however, that there would be plenty of time to peruse through it all later and that now was the time to focus on the imminent meeting. Lucy was anxious to make a good impression. She knew that she could come across as intense at times, and that, if left unchecked, her bright blue gaze could leave someone with the uncomfortable feeling that this girl knew an impossible amount about them. She looked away from a picture on the other side of the room, forgetting that photographs tended not to be paranoid and that she could continue admiring it without incident.

If, on the other hand, the photographs had the ability to gaze back at onlookers , then it might have noticed that it had something in common with Lucy. It was the famous Earthrise photograph and it depicted vast oceans of lunar rock, frozen in time within the vacuum of space. But, that was merely the bottom half of the iconic image, for just above the lunar horizon lay the familiar blue hues of the Earth. She could imagine the excitement running through the astronauts as they rushed to capture the iconic image. Lucy knew that blue was her colour, and her world.

She had been waiting now for what felt like an age, but which was closer to ten minutes. Amidst all her nervousness resided an almost childlike excitement for this new opportunity before her. It was the type of feeling that reminded her of her youth and, in particular, travelling with her brother and their family at the beginning of their summer holidays. Inevitably, comparisons like this fail spectacularly as soon as one realizes that a packed car at the height of summer is in no way similar to this irrationally white room.

As if to violently rebel against the lack of colour, Lucy’s hair was a flame-red and of an intensity which matched her eyes. She resented having to wear the grey clothes that she had been given. She resented how rudely prominent the company’s logo was on them. She even had time to resent not having smuggled enough of her, usually colourful, attire in the bag by her feet.

“What have you got there?” a voice asked, amongst the squeaking of a near-by door.

Shit, Lucy thought. She turned around and saw the owner of the voice, a man.

“Let me get that for you,” he said, with a pained expression on his face.

“Are you OK? Did the doors get to you too?” asked Lucy. She surveyed the man, smiling as she did so.

“No, it's just, I'm taking a while to adjust to this new way of life, you know?" His voice was pleasant but as pained as his demeanour. "This way, if you please." He led her through several of those squeaky doors with a surprising degree of success.

Lucy was disappointed that there seemed to be no end to all the white, deployed so enthusiastically elsewhere, but, nevertheless, she couldn't help but ogle at the technology on display.
"Did you choose the colour scheme?” she asked, hoping that he wasn’t also responsible for those insanely complicated doors.

He glanced at her, still looking peaky, and shook his head noncommittally. "No, that would be the Art Department. They're a strange lot. I haven't seen them since their last design meeting."

"Oh, really?" said Lucy. "What happened?"

"I'm not too sure, but I gathered it was something to do with camels and procrastination. Ah, we’re almost there.”

Lucy continued to follow him until he said, “In here, look!” He managed a weak smile at her look of surprise.

As Lucy entered the room, it became apparent that she had, in fact, moved from one building to another. Or, that is what it had seemed. Quite why two buildings were arranged this way, Lucy didn’t ask. Moreover, she wasn’t even sure if they actually were buildings in the first place. If the man had seemed more talkative, she might have asked him why the separating door was built so strangely. However, one thing she did know was that this was a place designed for one purpose: to build spacecraft.

Lucy's guide had left her standing just inside the wonderful room and walked off, presumably to finish adjusting to his new way of life. She looked around at the machines and half- finished spacecraft panels and found, to her surprise and relief, that nothing was squeaking. There wasn't even, for that matter, anything particularly new. Everything was in a state of disorganised chaos, but in a good way.

Machines of various size and purpose were arranged throughout the large room without any obvious logic, but, as she looked around, Lucy thought it all seemed to be working, somehow. It was such an intellectually fertile place. Not only had areas of alarming cleverness sprung up through the chaos, but so had several disappointing vegetables, which had taken advantage of the situation.

Note that this is in no way a criticism of the excellent catering provided by the company for which Lucy, if all things worked out, would be about to work for. The vegetables mentioned were actually dangerous side-projects and other spectacularly bad ideas, whose remnants were dotted around the room. Peculiarly, some of these ventures had involved some of the more suspicious looking spacecraft panels and real life vegetables, but that is another story, with its own interwoven narrative.

Lucy, who was not usually one for elaborate and extended metaphors, thought that this area appeared about as industrious as the previous one had seemed sterile (in other words: very.) Cables and piping were all around her, but she was only bothered by the subspecies among them who had chosen to be floor-dwellers. Eyeing a group cautiously, she stepped over them and continued to explore the room.

The reason for her caution was this: whenever Lucy discovered a tripping hazard, she would, almost invariably, discover it with her feet. Her clumsiness was a 'whole-body condition' and her brother could attest to this. Specifically, one or two of his fingers had evidence to support this, since their childhood. Lucy had accidentally broken them, you see, during a highly enthusiastic game of conkers.

The two of them had left the car after they had finally reached one of the holiday destinations of a summer long since departed. The car was packed to within an inch of its life, to the point that they weren't really camping at all. Instead, they had hauled anything and everything within the house, not previously put there by the builder, across the channel to France. She and her brother, after a long and thorough meeting with their parents, had successfully negotiated an adventure in the woods next to the campsite. This is where the incident happened.

"You should make your string longer," said Lucy to her brother, who was examining a conker that had been previously threaded. "It'll go faster." They were standing in a clearing next to a large chestnut tree, and she was right: it would.

Lucy had read in a book, from her father's highly distinctive collection, how to make the perfect conker, and she was confident that it would have a illustrious career. Determined as she was, Lucy had followed the books pedantic instructions by the letter, and the finished article was expertly prepared. The resulting competition was short and decisive. One hospital trip later, including the realisation that conkers is just about the hardest British activity to explain to a French doctor, and the rest of the holiday consisted of decidedly less woodland adventures.

"Hello?" a voice said, different from the first man's.

She looked around, but he was nowhere to be seen. Deciding there was nowhere else for the voice to be in three-dimensional space, she looked upwards to find a hand proffered in a rather awkward attempt at a handshake. She obliged nonetheless, saying "Lucy Diamond, pleased to meet you."

He was standing on the first of several floors from which she supposed construction could take place on epic, spacecraft-sized scales and at different heights at the same time. Lucy thought that this, in itself, was a good idea, but she couldn't help noticing the lack of any spacecraft-sized objects in her immediate vicinity.

"I'm Paul," the man said, leaning on a barrier and peering down at her. "Do you like our workshop?”

"Yes," began Lucy, uncertainly, “But, it's a bit-."

"A bit, what?"

"All over the place?" she suggested, wincing.

"Well," he said, looking as if the thought had genuinely never occurred to him, "It's how I work, I suppose."

That was something that Lucy could believe. "Does everyone here work like this?" she asked, pointedly.

"Oh no, everyone else is much more conventional, and, if you ask me," he continued, leaning closer, "Much more boring."

Lucy nodded at this, but decided that she would wait and make that assessment herself. She liked Paul, for all his quirks, and she could see that he was in his element in this environment.

It was at this point that he seemed to realise that the correct thing to do would be to continue the conversation on the same level as Lucy, because he leapt down with a kind of eccentric spontaneity that made Lucy jump in surprise.

"Do you do that often?" she asked, as he landed surprisingly lightly beside her.
He answered her as if the manoeuvre was much less fun than it actually was. "From time to time," he shrugged.

Lucy followed him to an area that seemed to contain some of those dangerous side projects. She watched him curiously as he began typing into a rather antiquated console that would seem out of place in all but the most intellectually fertile of places.

"I like it: it's retro," he said defensively, seeing her raised eyebrows. "It helps me remember how far we've come, since the Dark Days."

Lucy thought this was an unfair way describe Digital Rights Management. A piece of technology awoke, silently and discretely. Unlike the console, it was anything but antiquated. She had just received a message from her husband, but only she could read it. Superimposed on a part of her peripheral vision were the words: 'When will you be home? And good luck! Love, Adam.' Lucy smiled at this, but she knew that she might have to spend several days at a time working here. She replied with a few flickering eye movements and some spoken words, feeling a small pang of guilt.

"Are you ready to meet the others?" asked Paul, after she had finished talking to herself.

He finished typing into his retro device, pressed enter and began to wait for something to happen. He had been watching Lucy's antics with a rather puzzled expression, her strange eye movements appearing to be the onset of a seizure, when safety alarms began blaring throughout the workshop. He looked upwards at the noise, barely concealing his pride.

Lucy gasped as a crack emerged in the ceiling above them. The two halves slowly moved apart, revealing many more storeys of construction floors on the right and a huge empty space to its left. The total area combined was colossal. Looking back at the entrance, which had appeared to be the boundary between two buildings, she could see that the white rooms were, in fact, the interior of a spacecraft and the wall was outside of the ship. Indeed, way up above them the 'wall' curved and Lucy could see the top of the ship: it looked like the spacecraft's bridge, complete with curved, blackened windows. However, given the designers' less-than-conventional approach so far, appearances were probably deceptive. The amount of noise being generated by the alarm sirens was proving to be deceptive too, for Lucy didn't notice at first that Paul was trying to get her attention.

"It's not bad, is it?" yelled Paul, over the racket. Lucy wished he would wait until it was quiet again, but she agreed with him. The ship was elegantly designed, for its size and class. Deciding to give it one more shot, he also said, "She's one of the most beautiful ships I've worked on!"

With the sort of thud that usually accompanied several tonnes of metal crashing to a halt simultaneously, the ceiling finished retracting, the alarm stopped, and Lucy could hear again.
"Its so big already!" she said, feeling a little disappointed. She had been expecting to start work on the project, more or less, from scratch. "How far have you got with the construction? It looks almost complete."

"Oh, not very far at all," said Paul, ruefully. "There's a lot more to do around here. What you see is mostly just the outer shell. The climber needs to be installed, which is where you come in, I suppose? And, most of the interior is being built out here in the workshop."

Lucy nodded, glad to hear that there was plenty to do. Although, from what she could see in front of her, she would need to construct one hell of a climber.

A few curious faces poked out from some of the highest construction floors above them. This wasn't one of the scheduled openings: someone was clearly showing off below.

Of course, the main point here was to allow the engineers to work on the spacecraft easily and at various vantage points, some of which were currently being occupied. In order to make this possible, they needed to be about as outrageously clever as they had been whilst building the spaceships themselves, which came and went frequently, along with their typically pleased customers. However, Lucy was more concerned with her immediate impressions of the place, with holographic displays everywhere she looked and robotic arms moving here and there, silently and expertly.

Lucy had been drafted in by the latest, rather special client, the UK Space Agency. She had applied for an engineer position and was astonished that she had been given the job, not that she was under-qualified. Space ventures sponsored by governments tended to be highly daring and interesting, so she had leapt at the opportunity, rescuing her bank balance in the process.

On the other hand, commercial spaceflights were either rich billionaires looking for thrills, and, it must be said, finding them, or they were tourists tired of the Earth. There was never the prospect of pushing any frontiers: either a spacecraft would be built for comfort, to the point of obscenity, or it would be built to be as safe as possible, while carrying as many people as possible, and charging for the use of as many basic facilities as possible. None of this appealed to Lucy.