The alarm cut through my restless sleep, a jarring jangle of metallic notes, like a xylophone hurled down a flight of stairs. The foam mattress beneath me gently breathed as I shifted, rolled, and sat up on the edge of my bunk, ducking my head to avoid the swinging legs of my upstairs neighbor. Three days ago, I had woken, yawned to the ceiling, and felt the unique sensation of a heel ramming against my front teeth. We had exchanged apologies afterwards, him holding a lightly bleeding foot, me cupping a swollen lip, but eating ax kicks for breakfast leaves a lasting impression in the motor cortex.
For any of you that skipped the last two episodes, I say first, “why,” and second, I’ve had a significant change in accommodations for my Rail voyage to Le Straud. This is not the Singular Devotion, listeners, oh no. There is no such thing as first-class quarters, no private bathrooms, no screens displaying scenic waterfalls, no doors made of motorized plants. This is the Goodenough Kanemori. The only plant here is a browning ficus towards ship bow, everyone shares their living space with at least forty others, and if somebody has night terrors, you learn about it fast.
A quick check of my Twinnon Peregrine showed that the buffer was still feeding me data outside realspace. Persistent emails were coming in from Palladium’s human resource department. They were reminding me that I lack credentials under their name. There were messages from relatives I never communicate with, awkwardly checking in on how I’m doing. There were nervously cheery messages from Sad-Eyed Girl. She was asking if I’ve finally read her manuscript. I set them all to read, just to bring down that ever growing number on the mail icon.
If my listeners have forgotten about Sad-Eyed-Girl, she did me a big favor back in Episode 2, essentially putting me on the road to Le Straud. I had… offered to help her out in return. Since then, four months had passed. I hadn’t made any progress.
I put my Peregrine down and reached for my crutch. It was a Haseyo Stutter, adjustable length and straps, all painted in a terrible safety orange. Its branding was nearly worn off completely, barely legible beneath dings, scratches, and the odd ragged edged gouge in the plastic. In permanent marker, someone had scratched “get well” on its shaft. Supplied by the Goodenough Kanemori's worker office, my “mobility assistance system,” squeaked in protest every time I sank my weight into it, and it always tended to slip if I moved faster than a limp.
My ankle ached inside its compression bandage. I was a week past pain medication. No, thats… not exactly right. I was a week past the medication my budget could afford, but my ankle still had some time yet before the tears and splits in its tendons would heal up. Other passengers had mentioned that I should stretch it more often, and I always said that would be a great idea, that I would in my spare time. Unfortunately, spare time wasn’t something I really had, and so I just tried to ignore it. A mostly useless limb.
The passengers and I moved in a cluster along the laminated flooring throughout the Goodenough Kanemori. The halls here were wide, but doors were a rarity, as were concealing plating. Fibre-optic cabling bound with zip ties draped across the burnished skeleton of the ship’s hull, across ventilation ductwork patched with coils of shining silver tape. Some of that tape still dangled on the roll, stubbornly clinging to a half sealed sheathe of insulation. Christmas lights were wound in the rafters, wrapped twice around each spar, blinking red here, green there, white elsewhere. I followed the so-called blue line with a group of fellow laborer-travelers, as I had now for weeks during our voyage.
Whoever envisioned the Goodenough Kanemori has got to be a utilitarian sort. Everything is open and exposed like the chassis of a car in a scrapyard, accessibility to key components ranking far and above aesthetics. This ethos wouldn’t cut it on the Singular Devotion, almost certainly would result in a string of negative reviews across the buffer, with direct consequences for that Rail line’s profit margins. But the thing is, the Goodenough Kanemori has nothing to prove. Or if it’s trying to prove something, then that something is the following:
“Even a skeleton of a ship can find its way forward.”
The Goodenough isn’t intended to be a pleasure cruise like the Singular Devotion, instead, it’s a work vessel. That is, of course, where we are all heading now. To work.
We lifted our legs in sequence, stepping over the knees of a technician as he worked to strip out some unidentifiable, smoldering component from an HVAC system, setting it aside and snapping his fingers, signaling his partner for a refurbished replacement. Components here cycled, moving from machine to machine on an inscrutable sorting algorithm of most necessary to least. Above us, only maybe six in ten christmas lights twinkled on their strings.. What’s the phrase? Ride until the wheels fall off?
Together we pushed through a pinched access corridor, accepting small bundles of work clothes and respirator masks from ship staff. Respirator masks again, listeners. Seems like no matter where I travel, I’m always at risk of filling my lungs with uh… let’s call it “spicy air.” Coveralls and dark gray masks donned, my fellow passengers and I entered a large space, a cavernous hanger, choked with towering piles of loose garbage that spilled outwards from great compressed cubes of junk. Our footfalls faded from sticky thumps to crunchy crackles. In time, we broke off from one another and knelt in the trash. I unbuckled my crutch, lowered myself into castoff waste, and pulled a plastic sealed pack of cardstock from my pocket, its pages pinned together by bright red loops of cheap metal. The ship crew provided them bundled into every pair of work clothes, to help identify valuable trash. It’s titled… let me get it… “Gold in the Gunk.” … Yup, that’s a name.
A horn sounded as we settled in, and we all set to sorting trash from slightly more valuable trash.
I’m Oscar Yasui, formerly a professional food critic, currently an independent food journalist, and you’re listening to Gastronaut.
We’ve all gasped at how quickly a trashcan seems to fill to capacity, we’ve all tsked tsked at the sight of a dumpster lurking in the shadow of its own private tower of waste. Contrary to some schools of thought, I see this behavior less as hand wringing and more as the result of generational conditioning. Priorities shifted slowly, but when the oceans died, when man started settlements on the plastic masses and toxic gas drifted through cities, alarm bells started up in heads all over the planet. That alarm lingers, like tinnitus, somewhere between our ears and our minds, and it’s made us shyer about all the husks and chaff and castaway takeout boxes we leave in our wake.
But you don’t know trash, until you’ve seen an entire world’s worth of the stuff. That comes just a bit later, for now, let’s wade through four hundred tons of drek. Don’t quote me on that number by the way, I didn’t put the stuff on a scale.
Anything that could spoil, rot, putrefy, those things have long since been folded back into the food web, into agriculture. Somewhere, someone or something is eating our leftovers. It’s one of the few positive things to come out of the Great Sea Crash of the 21st century. Between the filters of my mask, preliminary recycling, and the incredible sterilization efforts made by industrial class garbage facilities, the smell is muted--metal and oil and ozone and gasses.
Go figure. From smelling wines and cheeses to waxing poetic on trash. Let’s call it a reflex, listeners.
By design, by a terror that’s been been built into the bricks and silicon that forms all infrastructure, waste has to go somewhere. Ours aren’t the first hands to hold these items, though it looks like no one would want to touch them. Trash is like a sneeze, or a cough, or fingernail clippings: nobody wants it around, but their evidence screams that somebody is… or was… alive.
Those stories are all I can think about as I sift through headphones that clearly have been chewed on by dogs, or almost-new shoes with holes burned straight through the soles. There are shopping carts missing wheels, dolls missing their legs, keyboards missing their keys, refrigerators gutted and half melted by fires. Anything heavier goes to more specialized, crunchier facilities. But the rest is towering, immense, this cargo bay is the second largest section of the ship after its drive system, but even with all its space it feels claustrophobic in these narrow warrens of pressed garbage cubes. And all this? We sort it by hand.
And even if there isn’t any food, anything organic outside of plastics and the occasional byproduct, there are the takeout containers, emblazoned with kappa and bison and floral arrangements. There are plastic clamshells, torn apart and picked dry. Bottles, crushed and warped, their blemishes looking like frost where the blue plastic has turned white from stress. We have disposable plates crunch underfoot like dead leaves, bent and split by their compression into the massive cubes around us. Everyone thinks of containers and packaging like liminal spaces. You go through the exterior to get to the interior, and then you toss that exterior aside. But you can’t really move food anywhere without some sort of packaging, without at least the bare minimum to store it. So in that way, this garbage is like the food’s shadow. Perhaps unnoticed, but always present. I’ve thought long and hard about how many people there are in every gravity well in the system, but only in the cargo hold of the Goodenough Kanemori did I start trying to picture all of our shadows, all together.
In one pile, red cartons with holographic embellishments crunch beneath my feet like lobster shells, their splitting and cracking carried up to my ears. Takeout boxes. I lift them up and try to catch the hologram art at just the right angle. The letters D and F in rainbow shimmer, Dreamtime Fusion. Garbage is like memories, sifting up to the surface again after being thrown away. Dreamtime Fusion was a bistro chain I reviewed once, outside Wuhan. Its business model centered around an interior intelligence slamming different cultural dishes together, running it through a taste evaluation program, and then performing some algorithmic magic, “culinary natural selection” they called it. It was to determine what the menus should be. Very weird place. I sniffed the container interior, hoping against hope I might catch a whiff of something, a reminder, even if that reminder was rancid. Just plastic. The smell of nothing.
We move from stack to stack, some having been marked by ship crew or passenger workers as likely spots for mining. Workers would attack the sides of these cubes with jackhammers, crooks, and rakes, collapsing them into a river delta of knee high garbage. It’s all very old school, all very artisanal. Workers are given waders to traverse the garbage, but many just sit at the outflow and pick through whatever they can find, notebooks in hand to track whatever the ship’s managing company is looking for. That was my job too, if you were wondering. I knelt beside this great banquet of unwanted things and picked through by hand, reading my analog cardstock to see if I’d “struck gold” so to speak.
The cardstock are simple tools for the workforce, reference sheets that let laborers compare items they sift out from the mats of trash to colorful printed pictures on the pages. Nothing ever has any words or symbols on them, besides values in Nu Solar Standard. Find something good and you can turn it in to some members of the crew for appraisal, and maybe a fraction of the value listed on the card. Listed across its thirty-nine pages are an eclectic mix of graphics cards, high priced toys, appliance components, a host of metals and brands and materials. Some pages even have little inserts with textured paper; you can run your finger across them, just to get a feel for what you’re looking for. I’m embarrassed to admit, listeners, but I felt a surge of those good, good endorphins when I matched my first item to the cards. A little robotic figure, hands broken off, body caked in mud, wearing a torn camouflage uniform, a french flag on it’s shoulder, face a broken screen. A toy soldier from an old war, I think the last great war of Earth? I’m not a historian. I cleaned it up until I was certain, and turned it in fighting a smile.
The little hits of excitement don’t carry you through the whole trip, listeners. And the extra money means very, very little. They ripped the tiny soldier apart for his wires, I think. For the fraction of precious metal still wound up in his back.
There are scores of us here in the cargo bay. All arranged in those gray coveralls, and marked with reflective tape at the back, the stomach, the elbows and the knees. They make us a little easier to find if a cube collapses. People here come here from all over, or at least thats what I can figure out from what meager conversation I’ve exchanged with the others. Small talk isn’t about the weather here, on account of there not being weather for tens of millions of miles. Small talk is about where you’re from and where you’re going. A woman missing three fingers on her right hand, with a tattoo of a ravenous bulldog might grunt “Luna, to Wanabi Station Pluto.” A man with a nervous smile and a scarlet birthmark across his bald head might croak out “Earth, to Ersi, Xin Tian.” We’re all tired and nervous and crumpled, I guess. Though I could always be projecting. Listeners, I’m tired and nervous and crumpled.
We do most of our talking outside the garbage bay. when we’re not raking and scraping and sorting and picking. The respirators here are even older than the ones at the Duke’s Estate, the like that Rufus and Kali wore, so they aren’t that fun to talk in. In the garbage bay, we express ourselves with how we move. A heavyset man might communicate his strength by bringing a deluge of junk toppling with only a few large pulls of his ax, where others might take ten. A young girl shows her boredom by idly rolling a bent wheel back and forth between her hands, even as her father snaps his fingers and grips her shoulder. “Pay attention.”
It may seem like mindless drudgework, and it is, listeners, it is very much drudgework. I can’t imagine I’ll be itching to return to the Goodenough Kanemori if I have even half a choice. But it isn’t mindless, even as you’re constantly working, sweating into your mask, gritting your teeth and hissing over the slow passage of time. Cursing at a cut from jagged plastic, or a pinch from shifting metal. I will the clock to move faster, checking my tablet, reading the fifth email this month from Sad-Eyed Girl about her manuscript.
I’ll read it when I have time. I don’t ever seem to ever have any time. But I’ll try.
Your eye learns, very quickly, to pass value judgements onto every image that strikes it. You become a walking price scanner, sifting through a formless aggregate for what might be worth your time and energy. Yet your brain, it’s cooking itself trying to put numbers to the numberless, it starts turning in your skull. Everything you see might have a story, a pattern, and that pattern might, just might, lead you somewhere helpful. Could that smashed keyboard have been thrown out alongside an expensive computer? Could that clump of shopping bags indicate a shopping spree? Viewed as such, even worthless bunches could lead a trash sorter towards a score. I know, even editing, that this is a trick of perception, listeners, but…
These piles of garbage, they get me thinking. They get me thinking about archeology. See, historically, when a human settlement is abandoned for whatever reason, wind and rain and shifting topography, or even more exotic forces, immediately set to work erasing everything. But when anything has been anywhere for a decade or longer, total erasure is real hard to do. Listeners, I’m sure you’ve heard of tombs and ruins and how useful they are for studying the lives of communities long gone. But for every successful dead man moldering on a pile of treasured possessions, we have the exact opposite. We call those; middens.
A midden is basically an old pile of trash. You’ve got broken pots, flakes of rock, shells or bones of animals, and plenty of human shit. These are things that nobody wanted, things that were in the way, or things that didn’t have a purpose anymore. A midden is the other side of the coin for a tomb, obviously, since you usually didn’t want to bury your dead king in the village’s collective crap. But both kings and garbage were buried all the same, and both have value for archeologists. Slivers of rock might be split off from tools, mollusc shells might signify fisheries, shards of pots might be stained with dyes and grain meal. With the passage of time, this garbage gains new significance. But a constant is that all that castoff junk is a sign of people, of their lives, of their work. With a tomb and its personalized belongings, you get the feeling of “I was here.” But with a midden, you get a similar, but distinct message. “We were here.”
More on that later. Let’s get back to the life of a food journalist sorting garbage.
For our efforts, every passenger is paid a wage that gives enough to eat, enough to pay for a few “luxuries” in the commissary, and technically enough to save. Find something useful in the trash and you get a bonus to your weekly wage, and that translates to more luxuries or more savings. Don’t meet your quotas and you’ll barely eat much at all. Don’t work at all, and you’re either eating your savings, relying on the kindness of others, or uh, starving.
I had a joke about this in an earlier script, but starving isn’t really fun, so I left it out. Traveling on this ship makes it kinda hard to joke about these things.
On the Goodenough-Kanemori there isn’t much of an option available to you as a passenger. True, some of the folks who ride this Railship sort of just cruise, tickets paid for, whiling away the coming months in about as much comfort as a crowded barracks affords. But if you’re riding the Goodenough, odds are you’re hurting. In Episode 3, I mentioned that you don’t get complimentary meals on your ticket. In Episode 3, with an embarrassingly breathless quality, I rattled off all the benefits that were available to a passenger aboard a wealthy and well established Railship. But I wasn’t clear, necessarily, as to what a ticket really gets you.
A Railship ticket gets a passenger space to exist aboard a Railship, it gets them a crash couch, it gets them a room that is not theirs, but that they can use for a time. It gets them water, it gets them oxygen, necessities that, should a passenger be deprived of, then they wouldn’t last a week. It gets you security. There was a time where that wasn’t a universal guarantee, but the fourteen year career of Mervin Spelts -- you might know him as “the Starbound Strangler,” did us a favor. It wasn’t like crime on these laissez faire vessels wasn’t a problem to begin with, but Spelts targeted rich and poor passengers alike, so companies and nations put a law together in a decade.
He also killed at least thirty people, possibly more, but this isn’t a true crime podcast.
Okay, so then, what doesn’t a ticket get you? It doesn’t get you free healthcare. Due to shipboard law, the crew has to treat you for any issues you have, but the flip side of that is the bills just hurtle into your insurance, or, if you don’t have insurance, your wallet. I got my crutch for free as a loaner, because the ship isn’t crewed by actual monsters. Just ruthless pragmatists. With the crutch I can work after all, but the analgesics, those were extra. Again, my budget for those ran out before the pain did.
Ships, they aren’t legally required to give you food, unless you are crew, or unless your passenger document explicitly states that you are ineligible for ship work programs. But when that’s the case they can also choose to turn you down as a passenger. Every ship has a work program though. On the Singular Devotion all of that business was hidden behind walls, in corridors, in kitchens, in laundry rooms. Automation is widespread in this day and age, but with all the promises of a fully automated future, we seem to forget one undeniable fact: human labor will always be cheaper than automation. Some ships despise it when a passenger defaults. Some tolerate it, like the Singular Devotion does. The Goodenough Kanemori expects it, and profits off it. If those two physicists the ship was named for took a look at what their names were attached to, I can’t really picture them smiling.
This is the sort of vessel that you ride if your options are limited, if necessity outweighs squeamishness. This is the transport of those who need a change in their circumstances. Not want, but need. No such thing as a bus line when you’re crossing the Rails. Earth to Mars, Mars to Earth, our system to the colonies, the colonies back to here. I’m no historian of migration, listeners, I’m a food journalist. But the Goodenough Kanemori is an example of the pathways that Le Straud cuisine followed on the way to our own solar system. This wasn’t always the case. Before the security cordon tightened, wealthy families fleeing Le Straud would ride on vessels similar to the Singular Devotion, mobile five star hotels. Those who fled were still refugees, sure, but refugees with enough resources, liquid assets, or sway back in the colonies to ride that relatively easy path. But for every actor or CFO or politician that fled the Marsh Cartel War, or the Blue Bay Massacre, or any of a half a dozen other conflicts that weave the bloodstained tapestry that is Le Straud’s contemporary history… You can safely assume tens of thousands of others took a vessel like the Goodenough Kanemori. They paid for every inch of travel with hard work. Know how many inches are between Pluto and Le Straud? Neither do I, listeners, but I think on this ship I’m going to find out.
I didn’t travel with anyone from Le Straud on my voyage, because I think it’s safe to say that very few Straudian expats are returning home, back to the war. But you can find graffiti scratched into some of the bunks here, if you peer beneath the more modern layers. Tourist stickers from Lea te Suldan Station, depicting those great stacks of shopping complexes and restaurants, or the blue sands of their artificial beaches. Behind a ventilation grill you can see lists of names, each preceded by the phrase An Nghỉ. Requiescat im Pache. Rest in Peace. On a bulkhead I read “I killed 8 in Blue Bay and I loved every minute!” with a little smile etched beneath it.
Labor vessels like the Goodenough Kanemori. A panic ticket that empties your pockets, crushes your savings, and leaves you with the option to work or starve. That’s the kind of option that isn’t really an option. The kind of option that makes you wonder why ships are even permitted to push this sort of no win situation in the first place.
The cuisine of Le Straud followed this ribbon of speed through the stars, and it is that ribbon that I’m chasing back to its point of origin. But I cannot, ever, stress this enough. The only romance in this kind of travel is just words on the page, my voice in your ear. Living this kind of travel means ten hour work periods, with a day of your choice each week for rest. No risk of being fired, sure, but this combines all the trials of a shared rental with cafeteria food and manual labor. You sort more garbage than you could ever hope to finish, week after week, watching your savings gently tick down, five or ten Nu each month.
And let’s talk about food, but not Le Straud cuisine, no, I mean what you eat aboard a Railship like this one. Obviously we’re going to talk about it, you’re six episodes deep into a podcast about food, listeners, I’m not going to ramble about trash the entire time. Just…most of the time.
A blare, low and loud, rattles the cubes and signals our work day is done. Each of us cart our findings over to small bins marked with our passenger numbers, and toss our salvage inside to be scanned, picked over, evaluated, and disassembled. If all goes well, maybe, maybe we’ll get a bonus on top of our daily salary. Ahead of me, a mother in gray coveralls fusses with a crying daughter in tiny blue jeans and a stained green top. The little girl is red in the face, fuming in the way only a four year old can, wielding the word “no” like it’s a thing of arcane power. It isn’t enough. I watch a small portable game system tumble from her fingers into the waste chute, where the rest of her mother’s additions quickly buries it. To the commissary with all of us. Time to eat our earnings.
You’ve seen the meals of a first class passenger liner. Let’s talk about what they serve on an economy class work barge.
The meals on the Goodenough Kanemori aren’t made in a kitchen, and they’re not made in a food extrusion system. These are sturdy packaged products, often the same packages that swamp the halls and corridors of the trash bay. Kenneman’s is here, that grocery super conglomerate, as is Stella Eats, Jadeite Milspec, NewTastee. The crew appear to grab whatever is at hand when they hit port. Anything edible, anything cheap, anything that cooks by pulling a tab, or turning a dial, or snapping the package over your knee to induce a chemical reaction.
Silver rectangles slide easily from cardboard wrappers. Eaten cold or blazing hot at bunkheads. There aren't restaurants or cafeterias or mess halls for passengers. The crew has a place where they eat regularly, but I struggle to call them out on it. It’s barely twice the size of a walk in closet: a countertop and a table with three chairs. The open spaces of the Singular Devotion seem like lavish displays now, now that I’ve experienced eating knee to knee, hip to hip with other passengers in noisy bunkrooms.
So what exactly are we eating? Inside a clamshell of grey or olive green plastic, inside a foil bag that hisses air when you puncture it, is dinner. Typically reprocessed soy derivatives with tastes added during the manufacturing process, reshaped to be appealing to the eye and inoffensive to the tongue. Cheap and easy to produce shells and wraps of wheat dough that’s gone through factory processors. Everything doused liberally with flavorings. At the very least, nothing on our plates… well, trays… could ever be considered bland. For one, the colors are bright and appealing, vegetables are strikingly green, fruits glisten with juice, meat is seared delectably brown. These meals are positively loaded with kick: with salt, with umami derived from MSG, from old-flavor mainstays that have been tuned and retuned with exacting precision, calculated for a ruthless ratio of edibility to cost. With all those chemicals comes smell, and when it hits your nose it’s immediate, overwhelming. The mouth waters before the brain even really knows exactly what it’s smelling, courtesy of some olfactory black magic conducted in the factories. Nutritious? Surreptitiously. These meal packs are clever about how they sneak in vitamins and minerals. The chocolate pudding in Stella Pack 13- Oh yeah, so, to explain, I learned quickly that we, that is my fellow passengers and workers, never called them by their exact brand names while aboard the ship. Everything was just manufacturer’s numbers and brands. You didn’t shout out, “Anybody have a Hungry Man’s Thinking Slim Deluxe!” Complex dialogue just meant that a good prospective meal would vanish into someone else’s hands, so instead you shout “Kenneman’s Fiver! NewTastee Seven Seven Special!” It’s sort of ike a diner and an auction house had a child.
Back to the chocolate pudding. It’s creamy, with a sticky mouthfeel that makes it a nightmare to eat without something to wash it down. It tastes like chocolate, but it’s sweeter than chocolate, heavier, oilier, and its aftertaste fades from chocolate to a flavor like raw dough. And its finish is, well it's a bit granular. This pudding, or pudding facsimile, contains enough calcium mixed in to nearly cover your entire dietary requirements for the stuff, at least for the day. More importantly? It’s as sweet as can be, sweet as you wanted desserts to taste when you were five and fiending for sugar. It might not be quite the flavor of pudding a person might expect, but it’s no multivitamin, and the crazy thing is: all the desserts operate with this kind of black ops parental vibe. I don’t really see anybody reaching for a pudding like this with other options, but here in the Goodenough Kanemori, a tray of fruit gummies, or a slice of iron dense cheesecake, or an unmelting ice cream sandwich, are delicious, coveted things.
Most of these packages are, technologically speaking, descended from a host of military and spaceflight advancements in the latter years of the 21st century. Soldiers and explorers used to eat these, far from home and without any better alternatives. Then through that natural trickle process technology takes, it found its way to the civilian sector. On the meal kit, I believe historian Bairnes Eppin said it best:
“Notably, the so-called “self-cooking meal kit” only flourishes commercially and logistically in harsh conditions where it lacks any kind of culinary competition. Inhospitable colonies, orbital construction yards, active warzones, the lightless depths of space between solar systems. It is cheap in bulk, a fractional value per pound, with a shelf life so long that most customers treat it with hesitance. It is the extremophile fungus of the cooking world. Easily crowded out by competitors, but utterly dominant where nothing else can endure. Too often the meal kit is lauded as the coming wave of the future: a bevy of culinary options that eliminates the need for kitchens, shortens logistics trains, and prunes grocery budgets, but evidence time and time again proves this assertion incorrect. Food pills were considered revolutionary as well, so long as they were eaten by the destitute masses overseas, kept well away from first-world tables and pantries.”
So, you might be asking “Oscar! You Rascally Scamp! Get to the point! Are these cheap meal packs good, or are they trash?”
The point then, right listeners? Good or trash. And that’s the Goodenough Kanemori, right there. I would have never boarded this Railship with any other options available. I’ll even admit that I’ve never been on a ship quite like her in my entire life. Why work for passage anywhere? Why pay for a ticket aboard a pressurized set of scaffolding, like a half constructed building turned sideways and strapped to a rocket?
The passengers of the Goodenough Kanemori aren’t replete with options. Consider that I entered with one functioning leg, pursued by a rich and powerful man, at the height of desperation. If I ever went back to Mars, I’d be some sort of slave-butler. My situation would be this perfect mix of horrific and farcical. If I was to speak that story to anyone else, they’d probably assume I was joking.
I don’t yet know if the passengers here are all fleeing their own personal Dukes, but despite our very different points of origin, the comparisons begin to emerge. Some are wearing prosthetics, and more than a few of those prosthetics are a size too small for their bodies. There are scars, and though I’m not at all an expert, some appear to specific, too personal to be blamed on rogue machinery and careless workplace behavior. When you see children, they’re always visible around the huddle of their families, and half those children work alongside the rest of us in the garbage bay, on their knees besides their parents, sifting through trash and consulting a picture book that… Well, that probably looks familiar to their eyes. Grounding, maybe. I’ve seen all kinds of adults scratch their heads at these books, or scoff. Men and women with markings from workgangs, constellations of stickers and patches on the clothes they wear. Others in their mid thirties staring at the books with the yawning anxiety of a life lived wrongly, turning terribly.
But these kids, guys, they don’t ever blink. In their world, books are either entertainment or education, and these are firmly in the latter category. They may not care about the work, or even understand it. Some of them are too young, but their parents drag them out because garbage daycare feels more secure than leaving them in the bunks. But their little eyes just track over the pages. If they’re real young they call out the colors and shapes, and their parents will give a weary grin or a stony scowl, depending on their personality. But if they’re older then they start scanning the pile, start sifting with tiny hands. Little mirrors of adults, with gangly limbs and awkward heads and those awful haircuts that we all collectively decide children should have.
The people I work beside in the cargo bay. Nobody here is posturing, nobody is threatening, everyone is too tired, with a day of work always ahead of them, even if their shift is ending.
And yeah, on that note I haven’t seen any real signs of crime among the population I ride with. It doesn’t feel like a prison yard, or, ech, I should say a popular depiction of a prison yard. The only prison I’ve ever been in had tempurpedic mattresses and a library for crying out loud. My warden was a madman who wanted me as a live-in gourmand. Well, joke’s on him! I still have the bastard’s high price designer pens! I keep them in a bag beneath my changes of clothes, next to Ernest the savorflame mushroom’s micro-greenhouse, and the rest of my remaining valuables.
“But Oscar” You guys are probably still asking, becoming frustrated that I haven’t yet answered, “you one legged jackass! How do the meal kits taste?” I’ll get to it, I promise I’ll get to it.
So the thing is, on a ship like this you don’t get the exterior views as much. You don’t get to look out into the between, where the Rails take you and you hope to return, the Land of the Saints. The crew get looks, of course. Not just because of the internal hierarchy of a vessel like this, but also for more sane, reasonable purposes. A ship is a complicated thing, and the problems it suffers while active, which is to say howling at incredible speeds through unreality, means that everyone has to be vigilant for errors. Unless passengers and crew are big fans of getting exposed to the between. Uh, the between won’t mutate you, or at least I don’t think it will. You’ll sail out into the bubble from the Rail stations and your body will just uh… Well, you die.
But while you aren’t working, if you know who to talk to in the crew, if they’re in a good mood and not busy, you can get a peek at the exterior cameras. Again, not very important while you are traveling, but when you arrive at a stop, you can get a good view of whatever station or world you’re hanging above. In this case, that destination…
Was the planet Neptune.
Neptune hasn’t changed much since it was first scouted by colonial resourcing efforts. In the previous century, where all the excitement was, it represented a tangible goal for corporate and government space flight. But they all were, right? And now with entire alien biospheres at our disposal, Neptune’s tumultuous exploration and usage rights are a historical footnote. Which is a shame, because like every time we first visited a planet in person, it represents a hell of a story.
But Neptune well… it isn’t as big as Jupiter, it has no biosphere, it doesn’t have anything people are fighting over. There were a few jokes about lighting it on fire, what with the high methane concentration, but a lack of oxygen put the kibosh on that. But listeners, Neptune is one of the last stops on the exit to the solar system. It has next to no strategic value, none of Jupiter’s great moons, its atmospheric wind speed is apparently too fast to mine helium and hydrogen. Uranus gets mined instead, for its plentiful reserves of valuable gasses. Neptune even lost the uniqueness of its brilliant blue color, so famous in older photography of the gas giant. In reality, it’s that same pale, frigid blue of Uranus.
But Neptune is still a gravity well, so it’s still a stop for Rail travel. Companies leave automated refueling and resupply stations in orbit. This is a- funny story, this is where where the modern pirate thrives, not heroically swashbuckling onto ships like privateers or kidnapping crews for ransom like villains. Think of it like bike theft. Something halfway valuable left unattended, secured by a lock and a camera system. Mostly protected by way of being in the ass end of the solar system. There ARE ransoms, but they’re usually malware on cracked supply nodes that forward transactions to criminal parties. Again, not particularly dramatic.
So who cares? Well… Neptune is where the garbage goes.
I was editing Episode 5, my bandaged fingers struggling with the interface of my Twinnon Peregrine, when a crewmember shouted for me at the doorway. Unlike us passengers, the crew wear a kind of flight suit, all patched and repatched and customized with little personal touches. The man in the doorway had a twin pair of crossed rainbows on his shoulder, with stitching that read, in a cheery sans serif font, “Rather be Dead!” I had spoken with him in the halls earlier on the voyage about getting a look through the exterior cameras once we entered orbit. He had told me that he might. Now he was waving for me to hurry up, and I closed Sad-Eyed-Girl’s manuscript. I only made it to page three. It was good, I didn’t have the energy to keep reading.
We drifted beside each other through cramped corridors until we came to a scratched and pitted doorway, its frame marked with the notches of a thousand passing suit pauldrons. Glimmering silver bright against a rind of corrosion and oxidation. We pulled ourselves along now, having dropped out of the false gravity of Rail travel, back into that total weightlessness of open realspace.
The room was wall to wall with equipment, but mostly abandoned by staff. Screens flickered and warped, displaying chromatic aberrations or grainy distorted voids. My companion didn’t even curse at the state of the ship’s sensors, instead he yawned, punched a few keys and swiped a fingerprint smudged display. The resolution quavered, shimmered like rain, and then resolved into an image.
Neptune, pale blue and fragile on the screen, appeared to be speckled like a robin’s egg.
I’d never seen Neptune before, not with my own eyes. The images you can get online don’t really do the planet justice.
Neptune is, even from high orbit, completely clogged with trash… Those are the “speckles” I was talking about. Here, where the sun is dim and distant, one thirtieth the size of what you would see from Earth. This is where all the trash in the solar system goes. Not the organic waste, nothing that can be easily and economically recycled, nothing that anyone would want. The brittle and broken skeletons of starships, fall like dead whales, amidst a sea of plastic and metal, glittering in great floating swathes, or clumped into the massive cubes that fill our cargo hold. Pyrite in mineral oil. Diamond dust suspended in aspic. At this scale, all the trash we’ve been sifting, all the things that have even partial value, that stuff is completely invisible. Gone.
Just 23% of all our waste ends up here. Or, rather, 23% of all waste that isn’t “downwell,” resting on the surface of a planet. Here is collected all the remains of modern human spaceflight, of the extant colonization of the Sol system. It travels, on lazy orbits down to the dense and frigid atmosphere of Neptune. Just a touch warmer than the depths of space. Friction and speed burns plastic and steel to cinders, tears ship hulks into so much alloy confetti. What is strong enough to survive plummets down and down, through an atmosphere as wide as four Earths, to be compressed and crushed against a scorching ball of rocky aggregate, somewhere beneath those pale blue clouds.
Whatever survives this journey won’t ever be seen by human eyes again. Probably not machine eyes, either. The pressure down there is far too great, and besides, what value is there in observing scorched and frozen and mashed bits of tungsten or advanced steel or whatever else could possibly endure down there?
There came a rumble through the decks, the screens shook in their cheap plastic framing, the image became impressionist, stars went from points of light to flat white squares. The rumbles sent a few loose items tumbling wildly, and the good samaritan crewman and I gripped our contact points and leaned hard against the floor slash wall of the ship.
Then the rumbling ended, and everything returned to normal. Almost normal. The balance of the ship had altered almost imperceptibly.
asked what that was.
“The drone, probably,” the crewman replied. “It’s got our cargo now and is bringing it in for a dump dive.”
They built the Rail Station close, but not so close that it would be sandblasted by the great cloud of debris surrounding Neptune. Massive armored drones ferry what needs dumping down to the planet.
I expect some of you are still wondering how this connects to food. Well, on the subject of food… Let’s circle back to middens.
Neptune itself is a midden. A great repository of all our unwanted and useless things. We drag our outdated hulls and our nonbiodegradable plastic and our fused electronics and our industrial effluvium. We drag it between reality to dump it over a great ball of gas; of freezing methane. Just like we made a point to shove our garbage into a hole at the edge of a village one hundred thousand years ago.
Remember how I called packaging and garbage kind of a shadow of people? These signs of labor, of work, of general folk is all hurled down a gravity well to be annihilated. It’s no black hole, but realistically I can’t picture anyone ever going down there. But I doubt any artifacts keep their historical significance once they’ve been subsumed into Neptune’s hyper-compressed, super-heated core.
Kings get their burial mounds, their pyramids, their armies of neatly ordered terracotta soldiers. Historically, the rest of us get graves, but communities -- civilizations of people, those get middens. Yet starfarers have buried their trash so deep that no one will ever find it.
Look, the meal packs they serve aboard the Goodenough Kanemori, the premade dinners and pudding cups and enchiladas. Are they good, or are they trash? Would I recommend them to my listeners, wherever they may be? Would I please stop waxing poetic and get to the damn point already?
The food is okay, listeners. It’s good enough, it sustains you, and it fills your belly. And sometimes the flavors synchronize with your rough expectation of how a meal should taste. Sometimes. It is the food of making do, and that is what the people here are doing every day. They’re making do with the rules of the Goodenough Kanemori. I’m making do.
But they have no other option but to make do, trapped in a cylinder of wire and metal racing between points of light in the sky. They don’t have a pocketbook large enough to afford a trip in contentment and safety, so instead…
Three months into my journey and I’m certain; I can’t recommend the Goodenough Kanemori. We could sit here and argue about whether it’s a better or worse option than other ships in its class, pick apart the relative squalor here, the wages there, but that isn’t the point.
The food is enough to keep you alive, and occasionally you’ll find it enjoyable. But you don’t exactly have any other options here. I think, just as important as the food on this hulk, is the trash we leave behind. All that effort, all those remnants of the work done aboard the Goodenough Kanemori, all the signs of the people here, erased.
One day, and I don’t know when, the Goodenough Kanemori won’t be profitable to repair, to maintain. A team of workers or drones will strip it, melt down all its parts, scrape off the graffiti, the footprints on the walkways, and send what remains down into the clouds of Neptune.
And there'll be nothing left for anyone to remember.
I’m Oscar Yasui, former licensed food critic for Palladium, current food journalist for the independent podcast Gastronaut. My next shift starts in about three hours, 5 AM ship time.
Thank you very much for listening.