Free Ride

"So, what's the catch?"

The sign said "Free Passage to Earth!" I had to admit that I had never heard that one before. I'd seen lots of signs near the port saying things like "Cheap Flights!" and "You cant beat our deals!". They were all scams, but I had never seen anyone who thought that the general populace was stupid enough to believe in a free ride.

The owner of the sign put his elbows up on the shelf of the window of his kiosk and leaned out. He didn't look like a slaver, but then again, they never do. He looked me up and down, taking in the non-descript clothes and middle-aged face. I was clearly no prize for the slavers–not pretty enough for sex work and too old for mine labour.

"There's no catch," he said with a native Mars accent. "It's a new kind of ship, and they're taking a select group of passengers for no charge to prove the technology works."

"Uh huh."

"You have to pass a physical and psych eval, and there's still Terran Customs and Immigration to deal with, but it is totally legit."

"Uh huh." 

He showed me a pamphlet that was reasonably well printed on high-quality recyclin. "It's a new kind of translight drive. They've sent lots of drones through and some manned flights too, but people, well, you know, after that problem with the Nuria, well, they're a bit leery."

"Leery. The Nuria turned itself and its crew into a bunch of photons."

"Yeah, like I said. It's made people a bit nervous. Most people can't afford the trip on a regular passenger ship, even if they can pass the physical. Alta Translight, the company with the new technology, hopes they can get a few people to try their ship for free. Then the passengers can go online and tell everyone how safe it is. There will be interviews and vid appearances. You could be famous."

I walked away wondering whether I was desperate enough to try this. Earth was no paradise, but at least I would not be living underground in a room the size of an average Terran bathroom and eating "surimi" made of krill-flavoured algae cake.

Over a bowl of surimi noodles at my favourite spot overlooking the port, I read the pamphlet and then looked up Alta Translight online. They claim to have taken the technology that had worked out so poorly for the Nuria and stabilized it so that a trip from Mars to Earth would take less than a day, unlike the passenger ships which could take many months, depending on how close we were to Mars-Earth opposition. Sometimes Earth and Mars were so far apart that it took less time to wait until they got closer than it would take to fly that far. We were pretty close to opposition now. 

They did not go into details about the ship's technology. Despite the name, it did not actually go faster than the speed of light. At this time in our orbits, light would take around five minutes to go from one planet to the other, and the actual trip in the new ship would take almost a day. They claimed that the drive sidestepped normal space so that a fairly slow speed covered a lot of distance. The drive itself protected the passengers from the non-space that the ship traveled through. 

I knew I could qualify for the trip on physical grounds. I had been born on Earth, so I did not have the problems that native born Martians had with Terran gravity. I had even tried to keep in shape. It marked me as an expat, which was very inconvenient when I was trying to blend in, but what can you do. I still had Terran citizenship so that was not a problem either. The problem was the psych evaluation. There wasn't a psych evaluation for the trip out.

"Hey, Lien, my sweet lotus," I said to the ancient lady who had made my noodles. "Should I go back to Earth or stay here?"

"Are you crazy?" She looked around her tiny stall with its improvised plastic walls and unstable shelves. She slept on a mat under the counter. "Who would stay here if they didn't have to?"

The physical exam was a breeze, as was the legal paperwork. Now I had to convince the psych AI that I was not crazy. The basic interview went fairly well. I have spent a lot of time convincing psychiatrists that I did not see ghosts, or whatever they were, any more. I knew they weren't actual ghosts, since they didn't look like people. They were more like pale, almost transparent parade balloons drifting around. They didn't make noise or seem to affect anything. They would just drift out of a wall, across the room, and be gone. They came in all shapes and sizes, but most looked something like stylized sea creatures. Every now and then a huge one would occupy the whole room like a fog. Once I realized that no one else saw them, I just tried to ignore them.

The move to Mars had taken all my money even with the subsidy for tech workers. I had really thought that I wouldn't see them any more once I got off Earth. Ha. The ones here were different, though, more like fronds of seaweed and big curly fiddleheads. I knew I was crazy, but I seemed to get by all right despite it. 

The psych AI had me hooked up to physical sensors, of course. When it started asking questions about my beliefs and then started drilling down, I knew I was in trouble. 

"Do you believe in God?" it asked.

"No."

"Incorporeal entities like ghosts or spirits?"

"Uh, maybe."

"Have you ever seen a ghost?"

"I don't think so. I have seen things I can't explain, but I don't think they were ghosts, if ghosts are the spirits of dead people." I actually did call them ghosts in my own mind, though.

"What do you think the things you have seen were?"

"I don't know."

"Guess."

I didn't know what the least damaging thing to say was. If I lied, the AI would know. "I honestly don't know. Sometimes I think they are just other forms of life that we usually can't see, for some reason."

"Why do you think you can see them when other people can't?"

"I wish I knew."

"Can you see any of them now?"

I looked away from the one in the room so I wasn't strictly lying. "No."

When I left, I was convinced that I had missed my chance, probably the last chance that I would ever have. I could never save enough for a passage back. I would spend the rest of my life nursing MarsCorp's racks of antiquated servers until I got mugged or died of alcohol poisoning.

Better get a head start on that alcohol poisoning thing.

I woke up in my own bed for once, with my terminal buzzing at me. Was I late for work? No, it was not my shift. It was a message from Alta Translight telling me that I had been accepted and asking me to please contact them to confirm the schedule for the orientation session.

The Pincoya looked like a small shuttle that could carry maybe twenty people. There were ten of us at the orientation session on the docked ship. They went through all the safety protocols and how to eat, drink, and piss in zero-G without making a mess. The translight drive was under the floor and not accessible to the passengers. It was proprietary technology and they would not answer any questions about it. If that was not acceptable to us, we were welcome to leave. No one left. 

They gave each of us a long contract that needed at least ten signatures. I didn't read it all, but I assumed that I had just agreed that I was on my own, no matter what happened, and that my next-of-kin had no recourse against Alta Translight. Seeing as I had no choice, I signed everywhere there was an X and sealed the last signature with a retinal scan.

The front of the small ship had an actual window where the pilots could see out. Passengers would also be allowed to look out the front so that we could share that experience with the interviewers on Earth.

Departure was in two days.

MarsCorp was none too thrilled that I had managed to escape, but I had paid my own way and did not owe them a thing. My coworkers and I partied like it was New Year's Eve and everyone told me over and over how jealous they were and how much they hated me and loved me. The next day, I packed a small bag with the few things I cared about, and walked down to the dock with actual hope in my heart. Either I would make it home or I would be vapourized. Both were better than my current situation as far as I was concerned. 

We were dosed with anti-space-sickness meds and strapped in. The dock let go of us and the inertial-drive automatic tugs towed us out, and turned us so that we were not going to bombard the surface with the translight drive's backwash, whatever it was. Inertial drive would be a very cost-effective method of space travel if you wanted to take twenty years to get where you wanted to go. There was a countdown and then suddenly there was the strangest sensation I had ever felt

I had outrun the ghosts. The half-seen objects that had surrounded me my whole life were gone. This hadn't happened on my slow passenger trip from Earth to Mars ten years ago. I had despaired when I realized that the damn things were everywhere and that I would never find a place where I could feel like a sane person.

I was just sitting and enjoying the solitude when my name was called. It was my turn to go up into the cockpit and get a promotional photograph taken. I went in and looked past the captain and co-pilot out the front window. It looked very strange, not what I had expected at all. I had thought there would be something like star trails, but it was more like flying through a cloud. It definitely did not look like normal space. We drifted past giant foggy shapes, and I gasped as I realized that they were ghosts, as gigantic as translucent zeppelins. There were navigational displays that showed what one might expect to see, without the ghost shapes, but through the window I could see them like fantastically shaped asteroids. I was gaping like an idiot, and the co-pilot, who was trying to take my picture, was staring at me. Then a giant ghost loomed up in front of us. I yelled "Go around it, go around it!" but the captain was already changing course to avoid it.

The captain turned and looked at me. "You can see them?" he asked. 

The co-pilot took me back through the passenger cabin to a small room with a desk and bunk beds. She sat me down and looked at me very seriously.

"Very few people know what happened to the Nuria," she said. "The Nuria's co-pilot said that he saw shapes in the void that the captain couldn't see. The last thing anyone heard before the ship was destroyed was the co-pilot screaming 'Oh no! Go around it!' and the captain saying 'Go around what?' Since then, there has been a lot of research into trying to understand what that co-pilot saw." 

"We still don't know what they are, but we do know that only a few people can see them. And we know that if a ship with our translight drive flies into one, it will be destroyed."

"I don't know if you paid much attention to the non-disclosure section of your contract for your trip with us, but it is comprehensive and very enforceable. When we get to Earth, Alta Translight will offer you a job, a good job with good money."

He smiled at me. "Congratulations, you have just won a free ride."