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A quick waft of pure oxy­gen raised Shinsei’s con­scious­ness gen­tly out of deep sleep and into REM, allow­ing him the briefest flash of a dream before an elec­tronic chime com­pleted the job of rous­ing him to wakefulness.

“Good morn­ing, Shin­sei,” said a dis­em­bod­ied voice, at once reas­sur­ingly moth­erly and utterly syn­thetic. “It’s 0615 on Mon­day August 22, AD2912. Your upcom­ing events: in 45 min­utes, First Day at Work. In six days, Johann’s Birth­day. In 40 days, First Pay­check Due!. In 47 days, Mis­sion 20^th Year Party. This con­cludes your diary.

“Esti­mated arrival date at Epsilon Eri­dani B is Feb­ru­ary 7, AD2937.

“In your news­feed today: The pop­u­lar netgame ‘Hori­zon’ is due to receive a major update this week, with three new high-level areas to explore and a host of new SS-Rank weapons and armour. Rumours sug­gest that the update may include skill tweaks for the Hunter class to increase their playa­bil­ity in PvP. The upgrade will mean the Star Child server will be down from 0200 to 0800 on Wednes­day August 24.

“Lat­est fig­ures from the Celes­tial Fleet Schools Board sug­gest that aver­age exam grades have risen this year, continuing-”

“Off.”

Shin­sei swung him­self out of bed and onto the cream-carpeted floor, and stared blearily at the walls for a moment.

“Cof­fee. Shower,” he said to no-one in par­tic­u­lar. But his Angel heard, and understood.

He thought about it for a while as he stood in the shower wak­ing him­self up prop­erly, a job the alarm sys­tem never seemed to man­age. He’d always spo­ken out loud when he’d given Angel com­mands at home — it was polite, after all, and it at least gave some impe­tus to start talk­ing. Oth­er­wise, many a fam­ily would pass an entire evening in silence. There was some­thing that just felt good about talk­ing, even though it was slower than just think­ing. Or per­haps it was that there was some­thing bad about not talk­ing, like the less we talk, the greater the dan­ger that we might for­get how to.

Plus it had been trendy, recently. Talk­ing to com­put­ers was kind of retro, like in the ancient sto­ryscreen shows they made us watch in His­tory lessons to learn what humans used to think inter­stel­lar travel would be like.

“Dry.” The shower stopped blast­ing him with water jets and switched to hot air instead.

Trendy, huh? That was some­thing Shin­sei sup­posed he’d have to for­get about now. He wasn’t a kid in school any more, he was an employee. And not just any employee — fif­teen years old, and already about to start work for one of the most pres­ti­gious com­pa­nies in the Fleet!

Shin­sei stepped out of the cubi­cle, dressed, grabbed his cup of cof­fee, and sat down heav­ily on one of the boxes he’d still not unpacked. He took a sip, and sighed.

“Angel, data on my neighbours.”

Images and text flooded across his vision, accom­pa­nied by sound that bypassed his ears. The Angel could have just dumped the knowl­edge straight into his short-term mem­ory, but he pre­ferred it this way, at least until the caf­feine kicked in.

“In Cabin F,” said the syn­thvoice, “Xiao Wing.” His pic­ture flashed up.

“Looks like a nice enough guy,” Shin­sei mut­tered. “Age fif­teen! Must be a school-leaver like me. Next.”

“In Cabin H, Alexan­dra Harrisson.”

“Not bad!” Shin­sei zoomed her image out a bit. “Pretty hot, actu­ally. Twenty-two though, half my age again. Damn.”

He fin­ished off his cof­fee, then grabbed the packet of fillers off his bed­side table. ‘Guar­an­teed sati­a­tion!’ it claimed in mul­ti­coloured let­ters. ‘That full-up feel­ing for three hours from just one pill! Full of vit­a­mins and minerals!’

He chucked two in his mouth and swal­lowed hard. The boy could almost feel his mother’s dis­ap­prov­ing glare, but he looked around his bar­ren apart­ment and smiled. “Inde­pen­dent man, now,” he said to him­self. “Can eat any­thing I want!”

The block was empty when Shin­sei stepped out. Row upon row of cabin doors, walk­ways of glit­ter­ing white plas­tic, even the oblig­a­tory pot­ted plants, but no peo­ple to be seen. The ever-present syn­thvoice woman picked up on his curios­ity, and pro­vided a voice-over.

“This block con­sists of twenty-five cab­ins, of which only ten are cur­rently occu­pied. This block is one of many that were set aside to cope with the ris­ing pop­u­la­tion of the Star Child, and has pre­vi­ously been empty. Assum­ing cor­po­rate recruit­ment of school-leavers fol­lows last year’s trends, the rest of the cab­ins should be filled by-”

“Stop,” said Shin­sei. “I was enjoy­ing the quiet, actually.”

‘Audio Off’ flick­ered at the cor­ner of his vision.

“Now, direc­tions.”

The floor in front of him lit up with a thin red line, gen­er­ated some­where in the ship’s vast com­puter net­work and inserted into his own visual cor­tex, bypass­ing the real world entirely. He fol­lowed it to the near­est tran­sit stop, which was only a cou­ple of min­utes’ walk. Not bad! But his heart sank when his tran­sit route flashed up. Six­teen stops into Nexus F, twenty-eight decks down, and another seven stops on a dif­fer­ent line.

“Alright,” he thought as he walked along, address­ing his Angel. “You were right, 45 min­utes was push­ing it. Wake me up at six from now on.”

By the time Shin­sei finally made it to the tran­sit stop, it was well past seven in the morn­ing. From the sta­tion to his des­ti­na­tion was not too far a walk, but down on these decks, it would’ve been easy to get lost with­out elec­tronic assis­tance. Up on the habi­ta­tion decks there were open spaces, parks, holo­graphic sky and sim­u­lated sun­light. Every­thing was built to look like Earth before the war, or so they said. But down here it looked like the ancient sto­ryscreen space­ships did — grey and white cor­ri­dors twist­ing between rooms of unknown func­tion, six feet wide and ten feet tall and all exactly the same.

A tall man in a severe-looking suit and an even more severe-looking scowl met him at the door. Above him, and after a sim­i­lar fash­ion, a sign declared the door to be “Illu­mi­nated Research Cor­po­ra­tion, Deck 34, Entrance G22”. They said this wasn’t the kind of com­pany for big, flashy adver­tis­ing, and they weren’t wrong.

The man tut­ted and looked at his watch. “Twelve min­utes past seven,” he said. “I trust this will not hap­pen again?”

“No sir.”

Shin­sei fol­lowed him inside, won­der­ing if the man wore such an archaic thing as a watch just to make the point that he took time­keep­ing Very Seriously.

“Wait here for a moment.” The man addressed his com­ment to thin air, but the boy pre­sumed it applied to him. “Now then… Angel, con­firm iden­tity of this per­son.” A pause. “Assign cor­po­ra­tion, Illu­mi­nated Research Cor­po­ra­tion. Assign job, Neu­ro­sci­en­tist. Assign rank, one. Assign clear­ance, Black two.” Another pause. “Wel­come to the company.”

It took Shin­sei a few sec­onds to fig­ure that the man was talk­ing to him again.

“Oh! Sorry,” Shin­sei said, shak­ing the man’s prof­fered hand.

“You’ll find your office through there,” he said, indi­cat­ing a big set of dou­ble doors at the end of the lobby. And with that he left through a side door, still with­out hav­ing intro­duced himself.

Not the most tra­di­tional of wel­comes, but then, Shin­sei sup­posed, they did say that Illu­mi­nated wasn’t the most tra­di­tional of com­pa­nies either. But it was an hon­our to work for them, def­i­nitely. Every­one had been very clear on that.

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