To live on the Altos Five research station was to live by the Gate.
Technically, it was Primary Airlock F10. But nobody called it that.
It opened when the sun rose and closed when the sun set 18 hours later, and that cycle was the iron law of life on Altos Five.
Because when that Gate opened, heat and oxygen from the station flooded into the shallow valley in which the station sat, and the energetically opportunistic local flora and fauna reacted to such sudden wealth by going through what, for it, would normally have been thousands of life cycles in those precious daylight hours.
Thus, it was during these hours that the people who lived there and who had brought this strange surplus with them when Altos was established a hundred years ago could scurry out and gather, hunt, farm, and otherwise do all the things so vitally needed to keep the 75,000 souls who lived there attached to their 75,000 respective bodies.
It was not supposed to be like this. Had everything gone as planned, all but a couple thousand stalwart citizens would never have set foot on the untamed surface of Altos Five because the station’s very advanced hydroponic and aeroponic gardens were more than capable of producing enough food for a million people, let alone 75,000, or so the manufacturer claimed.
In reality, the yields started off underwhelming and only got worse from there. And by the time it was clear that the whole damned system was going to die in less than five years, a massive civil war back on Earth was spreading like wildfire throughout Human Space, the civilization that had put them all there had collapsed, and it was equally clear that nobody was going to show up to fix those “gardens” any time soon.
Altos Five was on its own.
And that meant people were going to die.
What followed was their own pocket sized civil war which saw the population of the station drop to 30,000 over the space of 10 months as people fought over who would get to be among the “precious few” who would get whatever was left of the stored food once the gardens died for good.
Everyone knew what would have to happen once that ran out.
In the end, it was the very research they were there to do that saved them. A group of radical young scientists, engineers, and technicians hid away in a part of the station everyone thought was unlivable and dedicated themselves to one problem and one problem only : how to make the local flora and fauna edible.
In its native state, it was virulently toxic to Terran life. But our young heroes stubbornly refused to accept that, and worked day and night in their secret enclave to come up with an efficient way to neutralize the toxins and make what is left into food.
And that is what stopped the Rationing Wars. Our band of heroes suddenly showed up with brand new food in large amounts and the fighting stopped just as suddenly as it had started ten months earlier.
And it was as if they had all woken up from a terrible nightmare. The madness left them and finally people could take the time to grieve both for the dead and for themselves.
Nobody talked about that time, not even historians. Nor did they talk about all the suicides and killing sprees and outbreaks of random violence that came after.
Everyone knew it had happened, even though it wasn’t even taught in schools. But everyone born since then can, if drunk enough, and around the right people, tell you the story of how their parents took them to the secret graveyard where their ancestors were buried and how they got to be there.
Since then, they had been the people of the Gate. When the Gate opened, you rushed out to get as much done as possible.
And when it closed, you were either back inside, or your died.
There was no third option.
More after the break.
The gate cont’d
There could be no third option because if the Gate was still open when the sun was fully set, everyone would die, inside or out.
The nights were so cold on Altos Five that they could freeze the oxygen and moisture right out of the air… and out of your body.
And despite everyone having grown up under these conditions, the Gate still claimed about a dozen lives every year.
Not bad for a mobile population of over 60K going in and out every day.
But ask the families of those who died if those are “acceptable” losses.
And then there were the questions in everyone’s eyes. What did they do wrong? Why weren’t they inside on time? What was wrong with them? What HAPPENED?
It all boiled down to one real question : could it happen to me? Or can I safely tell myself I would never do what they did?
The people of Altos Five talked big about how they were tough and rugged survivors and how they (especially the men) would never get caught “outside in the dark”.
But when the Gate actually took someone, not even the biggest talkers of them all would breathe a single word that would suggest the departed was somehow inferior.
No matter how they died, you bowed your head, said it was a tragedy, and kept your damned mouth shut about the how and why.
If the family wanted to share that information, they would.
But you sure as shit didn’t ask.
And time was long past the point where they kicked up a fuss, held ceremonies, and talked a lot of crap about how the dead were “martyrs” and “heroes”.
That maudlin Americanski bullshit was never going to fly with the serious minded and taciturn Altosians of today.
These days, people just did their jobs and kept to themselves and their kin. Public events were rare and attended mostly out of a sense of duty.
A popular columnist summed it up thus : the modern Altosian commemorates much, but celebrates absolutely nothing.
And so, they survived.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.