Zero is a Gate

Day 0: Waiting to Launch
Excerpt from the Personal Journal of Rio J. Park

Tomorrow I’ll turn 70.

If I’m still alive tomorrow.

If not I’ll have lived a short but, I think, ultimately meaningful life. That is, I really have changed over the years. Matured. Grew. Growth is the fruit of life: if you aren’t changing and learning, you aren’t living.

By that definition, I guess I’ll never die. I don’t think the soul ends after our body passes away.

But if I am alive tomorrow, in the traditional sense, I’m going to want cake. Ergo, three mini chocolate bundt cakes make up a one eighth of my allowed “comfort item” volume. One for each of the crew on the Gate Ship Bon Ki.

I wonder what Mars and Fatimah have chosen to bring with them? What comfort can any object bring, really, untold distances from a planet we may never see again? From a planet we have so few ties on we have volunteered to never return?

I think, for me, it’s less that I have no ties and more that all my ties lead me to this. When I read the mission specs it seemed almost inevitable. Trained as a biologist and botanist, worked in ecology before moving into environmental science – air and water filtration systems, sanitation, the whole gambit. And then pivoting, at around 46, into medicine. I needed to, I felt, to truly understand the systems I was advising on. The medical degree landed me on Moonbase – a dreary place visually, but full of colorful, passionate people. Of course, I was mostly hired for my habitat design capacity, but it was my work there as a general practitioner, a true town doctor, that really mattered. I’ve always been interested in life, that’s why I studied biology to begin with. But being a doctor made me interested in people. An important step in my growth, I think.

It’s that dual fascination, both with life as a process and life as an experience, that I am most tied to, and it’s that which prompted me to apply for the gate mission. Of course, that’s not why I was chosen. It’s always easier to send someone to their death when they aren’t naive. Or young and full of untold stories. I might have another thirty or so years of productive life – certainly I won’t retire until at least 85 or 90 – but society can’t pretend that being 70 is same as standing on the edge of 27, still not able to comprehend, let alone see, the horizon.

Plus, on a ship with only three crew, every year of experience matters. A biologist and a doctor in one package was too much for them to pass up.

I wonder why the other two were chosen? Having lived with them for six months during training, I don’t have to wonder why they wanted to be.