The Avatar program is, scientifically speaking, a great success. Economically, tailoring every avatar to an individual driver isn't cost effective. What the RDA needs is a general purpose Avatar, usable by anyone. While the technology is still years away, a third spot in the program alongside Tom Sully and Norm Spellman is sponsored to take the first step along that road…
Taw’ite (Avatar OC-Insert)
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Chapter 1 - Welcome to Pandora
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Chapter 1 - Welcome to Pandora
I think every kid nowadays goes through a Pandora phase. All the best parts of astronauts and dinosaurs, rolled into one. It's pretty to look at too, like one of those old photos of Earth from before the first Climate Collapse. Personally, my fascination with Pandora has always been about the Na'vi. Everyone loves pictures of Ikran in flight, and the Hallelujah Mountains are legendary for a reason, but an actual real life sentient alien species? It doesn't get any more interesting than that!
It was that fascination with the Na'vi that first led me into Anthropology. I know, it seems weird. How on earth did learning about aliens lead to studying humans? Well, information about the Na'vi was pretty sparse on earth, at least among the public. And when everyone wants to know about this incredible new thing, but nobody actually has any information? People start making stuff up, and they draw on stories they already know to do it. A solid half of the papers I wrote for my anthropology PhD started out as forum threads picking apart misinformation about the Na'vi and pointing out the stories that were being retold with the main characters painted blue.
I guess RDA must pay someone to keep track of things like that, because the ink was barely dry on my PhD before I was invited to become a candidate for the Avatar program. Over the course of 6 months from a pool of 300 candidates my cohort was whittled down to just 3. Dr Logan Harris, that's me for the strangers who are somehow watching this, Dr Tom Sully and Dr Norm Spellman. Tom didn't end up making it to Pandora, but that came later. First, I had to actually agree to the RDA contract. Surely after 6 months spent just qualifying for the chance, it was a foregone conclusion?
I sat across from a pair of faceless RDA lawyers (Rumor has it they have to get specially genemodded at law school) with the contract open before me, open to the offending section.
"Okay. Just… to make sure there's no ambiguity here, could you please talk me through this clause one more time."
The suits were too professional to fidget or break eye contact, but I still got the sense they were uncomfortable. "RDA is contracting you to take on an experimental new Avatar procedure, with the goal of testing methodology that current theories suggest might be applicable to the development of general purpose rather than custom Avatar bodies."
I stared back across the table, unimpressed. "And the practical effect of that is…?"
"Your avatar will not be entirely a blend of your human body and the Na'vi species, but rather a controlled change will be introduced to create a physical dissonance. This-"
I cut the man off as he puts an impressive effort into avoiding answering the question. I thought these were meant to be Lawyers, not politicians? "Please, in plain English, to ensure there is no miscommunication. What exactly is the 'controlled change' that will be introduced to my Avatar?"
A single bead of sweat rolls down the mans forehead in silence, unacknowledged. From an RDA lawyer, he may as well be pulling on his collar and stammering like something out of a cartoon.
"After a number of trials, it has been determined that with our current scientific understanding the only stable change that can be made to the Avatars genome is the physical sex."
"You want me to spend the next 10 years of my life, at least while in the avatar… as a woman."
"That is correct, Doctor Harris."
"And this is the only basis you're willing to offer me the contract on. If I say no, I'm out of the program."
"Indeed."
"...can I have a few minutes to think about it?"
Like I said, a foregone conclusion. I'd been dreaming of seeing Pandora with my own eyes for months by then, and dropping out would've ruined my prospects. I refused a few good, generous job offers to participate in the Avatar program selection process. Spent a couple months living on my remaining savings. With the money from the Avatar project I'd be financially stable, and the prestige would make getting work easy. Turning down the offer would give me a month to find a job before my savings ran out, and having turned down a spot in the Avatar Program without being able to say why (RDA has some truly water-tight NDAs) would make my shiny new PhD worth barely more than the plastic sheet it was printed on. It would seem RDA had me by the balls, in more ways than one.
I didn't need those few minutes to decide. I just had to come to terms with the decision I'd already made, and decide exactly what concessions I would wring out of them in exchange.
It takes 3 years to grow an Avatar to the point it will survive the almost 6 year journey to Pandora, and we spent that time in intensive training. We may be scientists rather than security personnel or miners, but Pandora is not a forgiving environment. By the time we were ready to ship out, I was fitter than I'd ever been and had a personally tailored exercise routine to stay in shape under the slightly lower Pandoran gravity. I could put on an exo-pack blindfolded in a personal best time of 3 seconds, and hold my breath while moving for a full two minutes in order to get to one. Norm, Tom and I spent our downtime practicing conversational Na'vi on each other, and reading Doctor Augustine's book on flora and fauna cover to cover.
But by far the most important (and exciting) was the Link training. It's not just that we needed to learn how to use all the Link hardware and get used to the sensation, although that's certainly a factor. We also had to train our avatars' brains to accept the input, to match their neural patterns to ours as closely as possible so the link can form seamlessly. The very first session none of us actually formed a successful link, despite laying in the machine experiencing that now familiar funnel of rainbow light behind our eyelids for a full 5 hours. And when we did finally start forming successful links, things didn't get much. It's incredibly disorientating to finally make the link and suddenly have all the senses (and muscle control) of an infant. Our only saving grace was that the avatars had the underdeveloped brains of infants too, unused to actually needing to process sensations and so coming through the link muted. I was a little worried about what the different, ah… "equipment" on my avatar would be like, but the tail took longer to get used to in the end.
The training kept us all busy, and before any of us knew it was time to say our goodbyes and board a shuttle that would take us to a ship in orbit. We had 2 days to get our affairs in order on earth and make sure we were completely packed and ready to go. We were each provided a duffel bag to store our personal effects; luggage space is at a premium on interstellar flights. Norm and I didn't have any family to leave behind, just a few friends who wished us well on our way, but Tom would be leaving his twin brother Jake behind. We'd heard a few stories about his antics in the marines, and of course what happened in Venezuela, but never actually met the man.
We'd all arranged to meet up and walk to the shuttle together on the day of departure. Norand I waited as long as we could past the meet-up time, but assumed Tom was held up by traffic or something and went on to the shuttle so we wouldn't be late ourselves. Nobody actually told us what had happened until we were already strapped in. Apparently he'd been stabbed during a mugging, left lying in an alley. By the time someone bothered to call for help he was already gone.
The training focused a lot on how dangerous Pandora is. How the air is poison, all the creatures that want to kill you… I guess in the excitement we managed to forget that's all true of Earth too.
———————————————————————
Everyone has at least a rough idea of how Cryo works. They stick you in a tube and freeze you so you don't age 6 years on the commute to work. Here's the part you won't know if you've never done it: they have to purge your system first. It's important, I certainly don't want to find out what happens if you wake up with a bladder that's more solid than liquid, but on top of being hungry enough to eat a direhorse it felt like someone had filled my mouth with sand.
As the cryo-capsule slides open, there's a voice shouting from further down the vault.
"-will be hungry, you will be weak. If you feel nausea, please use the sacks provided for your convenience. The staff thanks you in advance."
After a short pause, during which a technician finally lets me free of the restraints, the same voice comes again: "People, you have been in cryo for five years, nine months and twenty two days. You will be hungry, you will be weak…" I let his voice fade from my attention as I realise that the weightlessness really isn't doing my stomach any favors. I frantically think back to the training and lunge straight for the foot of the cryo-capsule, and just barely grab a sack in time to paint its insides with stomach acid. Another technician, drawn by the sound of retching, leaves a pouch of water floating by my head before moving on to release others from their capsules.
Welcome to Alpha Centauri, I guess.
The pictures of Pandora from orbit are breathtaking, a bluegreen marble utterly dwarfed by the gas giant Polyphemus that it orbits. Unfortunately those pictures are as close to seeing it as we get, since the shuttle down doesn't have any windows. We put on our Exo-packs as one at the orders of the Crew Chief marching up and down the line of passengers, the entire shuttle vibrating faintly as we enter the atmosphere and begin our descent towards Hells Gate.
Finally we touch down, and as we stand in line preparing to disembark and jog straight into the base itself military style, every eye is fixed on the shuttle doors. When they finally crack open and begin lowering, order breaks down for a moment as everyone tries to get a good first look at Pandora. I can't see anything past the crowd of bodies in front of me, but as we finally get moving with duffel bags in hand I get a good eyefull and it's… grey. We can see the edge of the jungle held back by a massive fence, but within the complex is just a massive expanse of concrete, vehicles and aircraft moving in barely organised chaos across the spaceport. If the sky weren't mostly free of smog, I could believe we were back on earth.
Jeering brings me out of my reverie. I've been jogging on autopilot, matching speeds with the person in front of me as we all run towards the entrance to the facility proper up ahead. There's a squad of security guys watching us make our way off the shuttle, jeering about "fresh meat". Not a single person in line reacts to the hazing, and I resolve to be similarly unresponsive. There's too much to get done today to bother with some bored guards.
We jog straight up through the control building, passing beneath the airspace control tower and down the main thoroughfare into the heart of Hells Gate. The layout of the facility is actually pretty interesting; while the original plan when RDA first set up shop on Pandora was to build a complex set of interconnecting, overlapping platforms that would together form a single structure, the realities of long term life on Pandora soon forced them to reconsider. The finished product reflects this, throwing out the precisely engineered angles and maximised productivity workflows of a simple arrow shaped layout of squat buildings connected by long corridors that does the job well enough and can be easily repaired. At the heart of the facility is Habmod 2, the tallest structure in the complex barring the airspace control tower with 3 above ground levels and a further 3 below ground. For the most part Habmod 2 is identical to Habmod 1 and 3, the neighbouring buildings also dedicated to housing personnel, but Habmod 2 is distinguished by being the central most building in the entire facility, and having an extra floor dedicated to the Commissary / Briefing Room and a Medical station. If you need Fed or Fixed, Habmod 2 is the place to be, hence its unofficial nickname of Hell's Heart.
Today, the commissary has been cleared out for us new arrivals. Security personnel line the walls as we file in, everyone grabbing the first free seat they see and turning our neat lines from the shuttle into a single large audience, security personnel mixing with miners mixing with engineers and administrators and scientists like Norm and me. I spot him for a moment across the sea of people, and give a quick wave before a hush falls over the room as a scarred figure turns away from the window and begins walking between the tables. I recognise him from the briefing before departure: Colonel Miles Quarritch, current head of security.
"You are not in Kansas anymore… You are on Pandora, ladies and gentlemen. Respect that fact every second of every day. If there is a hell… you might want to go there for some R&R after a tour on pandora." The colonel is walking calmly up and down the center of the canteen, occasionally gesturing for emphasis. "Out beyond that fence every living thing that crawls, flies or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubees."
The man very clearly believes every word he's saying.
I carefully make sure my face looks attentive while tuning out the paranoid lunatic that somehow wound up as head of our security, and spend the rest of the briefing mentally going over my itinerary for the rest of the day. Might as well get something productive done while we're here.
———————————————————————
Eventually we're dismissed, the colonel satisfied that he's instilled the fear of pandora into everyone. One of the concessions I managed to get in my contract was a hab unit all to myself, so while Norm goes off to find a bunk in the science building with the other Avatar drivers, I drop down a few floors into the ground beneath Habmod 2 where the executive quarters are located. There's two floors; the floor closest to ground level has a set of full suites with high definition holographic windows, but that's just for bigshots like Doctor Augustine, Colonel Quarritch and of course the current administrative director himself Parker Selfridge. The lower level is a step up from the communal housing in that they're individual rooms with a private bathroom each, but beyond that they're fairly spartan. A bed in the center of the room takes up and I know from the training packets that it can fold away into the wall to transform the headboard into a standing desk. The place is a little cramped, but then there's nearly 5 times as many of these rooms squeezed into the same space as the suites on the floor above, so I suppose that's not terribly surprising. I might have to do something about the lack of natural light though; perhaps borrow a sunlamp from one of the botanists?
It only takes a few minutes to unpack my meager possessions, a couple of changes of comfortable clothes (RDA provides clothing, but they're cheap mass produced stuff that can be replaced easily) and a few different books for both reference and recreation. I've never been one to need a personalized space to feel at home, and it was made clear early on that luggage space wasn't negotiable. A private room was just a matter of RDA changing what free space I got assigned to, but taking up more room on the interstellar ship? I'd have had better luck asking for triple my already generous salary.
A beep from my newly issued comm unit interrupts my musings while breaking in the bed. The orbital infrastructure of Pandora is basically nonexistent beyond some scanners and cameras for mapping purposes, so there's no phone network and everyone is stuck with either radio or company-issue communications units that only work within a short range of Hells Gate. Bringing up the message, it's from Doctor Max Cullimore, the scientist in charge of the Avatars when we're not piloting them. I'll apparently be working fairly closely with him due to the experimental nature of…
Dr Cullimore
-We need you in the bio-lab ASAP, it's about your Avatar.
I stare at the message blankly for a moment and then I'm out the door and sprinting, ducking and weaving past personnel in the halls and taking the stairs up 2 at a time rather than waiting for the elevator as ice creeps into my veins. The Avatars were deemed stable enough to leave earth so long as they were stored in the tank for the journey, but mine had always been a little unpredictable. Any number of things could have gone wrong on the long journey, and with the Avatars crated up for transport nobody would have noticed until now. I try not to let myself imagine cracks in the tank or deformities in the brain, and focus on getting to the bio-lab as fast as possible. Once i'm back on the ground floor of Habmod 2 there's too much foot traffic with all the new arrivals and departures for me to duck and weave, so I'm forced to impatiently follow the flow of people out towards the rear of the building at a brisk walking pace, nerves jangling.
After a tense 5 minutes the throng finally breaks up, a crossroads in the corridor taking most of the crowd towards either Genmod or Storemod, situated to our left and right respectively. I'm able to slip through the remaining stream of personnel heading into the single story Science Module and approach the Bio-lab at a jog, drawing a few stares from fellow scientists as I rush past. There's a commotion going on in the Avatar lab, and as I finally make my way in I can see the 3 tanks, Norm andTom Jakes avatars attended to by a couple of technicians each while a crowd blocks my own from view. I catch the eye of Doctor Cullimore as I approach and he quickly shoos the crowd away back to their tasks, finally letting me lay eyes on…
Uh.
Well, it's not as bad as i'd hoped. The avatar looks to be healthy, the proprioceptive sims have left her with good muscle tone. There's no cracks or breaks in the tube… and yet something MUST have gone wrong somewhere. Because while my Avatar looks to be about as tall as a human adult, she's utterly dwarfed by the tank which is designed to accommodate something the size of an adult Na'vi, which she decidedly isn't. She'd fit in more with the kids at Graces school than with the adults.
My face must be a sight to behold, because before I can actually say anything Doctor Cullimore is already rushing to explain. "I pulled the logs, the growth hormone that accelerates the avatars aging during transit? Someone at the other end must have fucked up, your tank was only outfitted with a years supply rather than enough for the whole journey. After it ran out, I'm afraid your avatar went back to aging naturally."
"...My avatar is 12 years old?"
"I'm sorry, Doctor Harris. We're going to have to take this to Grace. I know your avatar was supposed to be experimental but this is too much for me to sign off on without a second opinion, or at least some very careful scans of both your brains to make sure they'll sync. She's in her Avatar at the moment, but I'll message her to cut it short so we can go over our options. I'm Max, by the way."
The sound of Norm and Jake entering the room draws both our eyes for a moment as they make impressed sounds over their own avatars, and Max steps away to greet them with one last sympathetic nod in my direction.
I take a few moments to breathe through my panic at the thought of training for all that time, coming all this way and then not getting to use my avatar, and rest a hand on the glass of the tube, gazing at the girl inside as she twitches as if in restless sleep.
It would seem that my own dreams lie in the hands of Grace Augustine.
———————————————————————
I watched Avatar: The Way of Water last week, and came out disappointed by the story but enchanted by the world. Went back and watched the first film, to exactly the same result… what else is there to do but start a fanfic!
I think every kid nowadays goes through a Pandora phase. All the best parts of astronauts and dinosaurs, rolled into one. It's pretty to look at too, like one of those old photos of Earth from before the first Climate Collapse. Personally, my fascination with Pandora has always been about the Na'vi. Everyone loves pictures of Ikran in flight, and the Hallelujah Mountains are legendary for a reason, but an actual real life sentient alien species? It doesn't get any more interesting than that!
It was that fascination with the Na'vi that first led me into Anthropology. I know, it seems weird. How on earth did learning about aliens lead to studying humans? Well, information about the Na'vi was pretty sparse on earth, at least among the public. And when everyone wants to know about this incredible new thing, but nobody actually has any information? People start making stuff up, and they draw on stories they already know to do it. A solid half of the papers I wrote for my anthropology PhD started out as forum threads picking apart misinformation about the Na'vi and pointing out the stories that were being retold with the main characters painted blue.
I guess RDA must pay someone to keep track of things like that, because the ink was barely dry on my PhD before I was invited to become a candidate for the Avatar program. Over the course of 6 months from a pool of 300 candidates my cohort was whittled down to just 3. Dr Logan Harris, that's me for the strangers who are somehow watching this, Dr Tom Sully and Dr Norm Spellman. Tom didn't end up making it to Pandora, but that came later. First, I had to actually agree to the RDA contract. Surely after 6 months spent just qualifying for the chance, it was a foregone conclusion?
I sat across from a pair of faceless RDA lawyers (Rumor has it they have to get specially genemodded at law school) with the contract open before me, open to the offending section.
"Okay. Just… to make sure there's no ambiguity here, could you please talk me through this clause one more time."
The suits were too professional to fidget or break eye contact, but I still got the sense they were uncomfortable. "RDA is contracting you to take on an experimental new Avatar procedure, with the goal of testing methodology that current theories suggest might be applicable to the development of general purpose rather than custom Avatar bodies."
I stared back across the table, unimpressed. "And the practical effect of that is…?"
"Your avatar will not be entirely a blend of your human body and the Na'vi species, but rather a controlled change will be introduced to create a physical dissonance. This-"
I cut the man off as he puts an impressive effort into avoiding answering the question. I thought these were meant to be Lawyers, not politicians? "Please, in plain English, to ensure there is no miscommunication. What exactly is the 'controlled change' that will be introduced to my Avatar?"
A single bead of sweat rolls down the mans forehead in silence, unacknowledged. From an RDA lawyer, he may as well be pulling on his collar and stammering like something out of a cartoon.
"After a number of trials, it has been determined that with our current scientific understanding the only stable change that can be made to the Avatars genome is the physical sex."
"You want me to spend the next 10 years of my life, at least while in the avatar… as a woman."
"That is correct, Doctor Harris."
"And this is the only basis you're willing to offer me the contract on. If I say no, I'm out of the program."
"Indeed."
"...can I have a few minutes to think about it?"
Like I said, a foregone conclusion. I'd been dreaming of seeing Pandora with my own eyes for months by then, and dropping out would've ruined my prospects. I refused a few good, generous job offers to participate in the Avatar program selection process. Spent a couple months living on my remaining savings. With the money from the Avatar project I'd be financially stable, and the prestige would make getting work easy. Turning down the offer would give me a month to find a job before my savings ran out, and having turned down a spot in the Avatar Program without being able to say why (RDA has some truly water-tight NDAs) would make my shiny new PhD worth barely more than the plastic sheet it was printed on. It would seem RDA had me by the balls, in more ways than one.
I didn't need those few minutes to decide. I just had to come to terms with the decision I'd already made, and decide exactly what concessions I would wring out of them in exchange.
It takes 3 years to grow an Avatar to the point it will survive the almost 6 year journey to Pandora, and we spent that time in intensive training. We may be scientists rather than security personnel or miners, but Pandora is not a forgiving environment. By the time we were ready to ship out, I was fitter than I'd ever been and had a personally tailored exercise routine to stay in shape under the slightly lower Pandoran gravity. I could put on an exo-pack blindfolded in a personal best time of 3 seconds, and hold my breath while moving for a full two minutes in order to get to one. Norm, Tom and I spent our downtime practicing conversational Na'vi on each other, and reading Doctor Augustine's book on flora and fauna cover to cover.
But by far the most important (and exciting) was the Link training. It's not just that we needed to learn how to use all the Link hardware and get used to the sensation, although that's certainly a factor. We also had to train our avatars' brains to accept the input, to match their neural patterns to ours as closely as possible so the link can form seamlessly. The very first session none of us actually formed a successful link, despite laying in the machine experiencing that now familiar funnel of rainbow light behind our eyelids for a full 5 hours. And when we did finally start forming successful links, things didn't get much. It's incredibly disorientating to finally make the link and suddenly have all the senses (and muscle control) of an infant. Our only saving grace was that the avatars had the underdeveloped brains of infants too, unused to actually needing to process sensations and so coming through the link muted. I was a little worried about what the different, ah… "equipment" on my avatar would be like, but the tail took longer to get used to in the end.
The training kept us all busy, and before any of us knew it was time to say our goodbyes and board a shuttle that would take us to a ship in orbit. We had 2 days to get our affairs in order on earth and make sure we were completely packed and ready to go. We were each provided a duffel bag to store our personal effects; luggage space is at a premium on interstellar flights. Norm and I didn't have any family to leave behind, just a few friends who wished us well on our way, but Tom would be leaving his twin brother Jake behind. We'd heard a few stories about his antics in the marines, and of course what happened in Venezuela, but never actually met the man.
We'd all arranged to meet up and walk to the shuttle together on the day of departure. Norand I waited as long as we could past the meet-up time, but assumed Tom was held up by traffic or something and went on to the shuttle so we wouldn't be late ourselves. Nobody actually told us what had happened until we were already strapped in. Apparently he'd been stabbed during a mugging, left lying in an alley. By the time someone bothered to call for help he was already gone.
The training focused a lot on how dangerous Pandora is. How the air is poison, all the creatures that want to kill you… I guess in the excitement we managed to forget that's all true of Earth too.
———————————————————————
Everyone has at least a rough idea of how Cryo works. They stick you in a tube and freeze you so you don't age 6 years on the commute to work. Here's the part you won't know if you've never done it: they have to purge your system first. It's important, I certainly don't want to find out what happens if you wake up with a bladder that's more solid than liquid, but on top of being hungry enough to eat a direhorse it felt like someone had filled my mouth with sand.
As the cryo-capsule slides open, there's a voice shouting from further down the vault.
"-will be hungry, you will be weak. If you feel nausea, please use the sacks provided for your convenience. The staff thanks you in advance."
After a short pause, during which a technician finally lets me free of the restraints, the same voice comes again: "People, you have been in cryo for five years, nine months and twenty two days. You will be hungry, you will be weak…" I let his voice fade from my attention as I realise that the weightlessness really isn't doing my stomach any favors. I frantically think back to the training and lunge straight for the foot of the cryo-capsule, and just barely grab a sack in time to paint its insides with stomach acid. Another technician, drawn by the sound of retching, leaves a pouch of water floating by my head before moving on to release others from their capsules.
Welcome to Alpha Centauri, I guess.
The pictures of Pandora from orbit are breathtaking, a bluegreen marble utterly dwarfed by the gas giant Polyphemus that it orbits. Unfortunately those pictures are as close to seeing it as we get, since the shuttle down doesn't have any windows. We put on our Exo-packs as one at the orders of the Crew Chief marching up and down the line of passengers, the entire shuttle vibrating faintly as we enter the atmosphere and begin our descent towards Hells Gate.
Finally we touch down, and as we stand in line preparing to disembark and jog straight into the base itself military style, every eye is fixed on the shuttle doors. When they finally crack open and begin lowering, order breaks down for a moment as everyone tries to get a good first look at Pandora. I can't see anything past the crowd of bodies in front of me, but as we finally get moving with duffel bags in hand I get a good eyefull and it's… grey. We can see the edge of the jungle held back by a massive fence, but within the complex is just a massive expanse of concrete, vehicles and aircraft moving in barely organised chaos across the spaceport. If the sky weren't mostly free of smog, I could believe we were back on earth.
Jeering brings me out of my reverie. I've been jogging on autopilot, matching speeds with the person in front of me as we all run towards the entrance to the facility proper up ahead. There's a squad of security guys watching us make our way off the shuttle, jeering about "fresh meat". Not a single person in line reacts to the hazing, and I resolve to be similarly unresponsive. There's too much to get done today to bother with some bored guards.
We jog straight up through the control building, passing beneath the airspace control tower and down the main thoroughfare into the heart of Hells Gate. The layout of the facility is actually pretty interesting; while the original plan when RDA first set up shop on Pandora was to build a complex set of interconnecting, overlapping platforms that would together form a single structure, the realities of long term life on Pandora soon forced them to reconsider. The finished product reflects this, throwing out the precisely engineered angles and maximised productivity workflows of a simple arrow shaped layout of squat buildings connected by long corridors that does the job well enough and can be easily repaired. At the heart of the facility is Habmod 2, the tallest structure in the complex barring the airspace control tower with 3 above ground levels and a further 3 below ground. For the most part Habmod 2 is identical to Habmod 1 and 3, the neighbouring buildings also dedicated to housing personnel, but Habmod 2 is distinguished by being the central most building in the entire facility, and having an extra floor dedicated to the Commissary / Briefing Room and a Medical station. If you need Fed or Fixed, Habmod 2 is the place to be, hence its unofficial nickname of Hell's Heart.
Today, the commissary has been cleared out for us new arrivals. Security personnel line the walls as we file in, everyone grabbing the first free seat they see and turning our neat lines from the shuttle into a single large audience, security personnel mixing with miners mixing with engineers and administrators and scientists like Norm and me. I spot him for a moment across the sea of people, and give a quick wave before a hush falls over the room as a scarred figure turns away from the window and begins walking between the tables. I recognise him from the briefing before departure: Colonel Miles Quarritch, current head of security.
"You are not in Kansas anymore… You are on Pandora, ladies and gentlemen. Respect that fact every second of every day. If there is a hell… you might want to go there for some R&R after a tour on pandora." The colonel is walking calmly up and down the center of the canteen, occasionally gesturing for emphasis. "Out beyond that fence every living thing that crawls, flies or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubees."
The man very clearly believes every word he's saying.
I carefully make sure my face looks attentive while tuning out the paranoid lunatic that somehow wound up as head of our security, and spend the rest of the briefing mentally going over my itinerary for the rest of the day. Might as well get something productive done while we're here.
———————————————————————
Eventually we're dismissed, the colonel satisfied that he's instilled the fear of pandora into everyone. One of the concessions I managed to get in my contract was a hab unit all to myself, so while Norm goes off to find a bunk in the science building with the other Avatar drivers, I drop down a few floors into the ground beneath Habmod 2 where the executive quarters are located. There's two floors; the floor closest to ground level has a set of full suites with high definition holographic windows, but that's just for bigshots like Doctor Augustine, Colonel Quarritch and of course the current administrative director himself Parker Selfridge. The lower level is a step up from the communal housing in that they're individual rooms with a private bathroom each, but beyond that they're fairly spartan. A bed in the center of the room takes up and I know from the training packets that it can fold away into the wall to transform the headboard into a standing desk. The place is a little cramped, but then there's nearly 5 times as many of these rooms squeezed into the same space as the suites on the floor above, so I suppose that's not terribly surprising. I might have to do something about the lack of natural light though; perhaps borrow a sunlamp from one of the botanists?
It only takes a few minutes to unpack my meager possessions, a couple of changes of comfortable clothes (RDA provides clothing, but they're cheap mass produced stuff that can be replaced easily) and a few different books for both reference and recreation. I've never been one to need a personalized space to feel at home, and it was made clear early on that luggage space wasn't negotiable. A private room was just a matter of RDA changing what free space I got assigned to, but taking up more room on the interstellar ship? I'd have had better luck asking for triple my already generous salary.
A beep from my newly issued comm unit interrupts my musings while breaking in the bed. The orbital infrastructure of Pandora is basically nonexistent beyond some scanners and cameras for mapping purposes, so there's no phone network and everyone is stuck with either radio or company-issue communications units that only work within a short range of Hells Gate. Bringing up the message, it's from Doctor Max Cullimore, the scientist in charge of the Avatars when we're not piloting them. I'll apparently be working fairly closely with him due to the experimental nature of…
Dr Cullimore
-We need you in the bio-lab ASAP, it's about your Avatar.
I stare at the message blankly for a moment and then I'm out the door and sprinting, ducking and weaving past personnel in the halls and taking the stairs up 2 at a time rather than waiting for the elevator as ice creeps into my veins. The Avatars were deemed stable enough to leave earth so long as they were stored in the tank for the journey, but mine had always been a little unpredictable. Any number of things could have gone wrong on the long journey, and with the Avatars crated up for transport nobody would have noticed until now. I try not to let myself imagine cracks in the tank or deformities in the brain, and focus on getting to the bio-lab as fast as possible. Once i'm back on the ground floor of Habmod 2 there's too much foot traffic with all the new arrivals and departures for me to duck and weave, so I'm forced to impatiently follow the flow of people out towards the rear of the building at a brisk walking pace, nerves jangling.
After a tense 5 minutes the throng finally breaks up, a crossroads in the corridor taking most of the crowd towards either Genmod or Storemod, situated to our left and right respectively. I'm able to slip through the remaining stream of personnel heading into the single story Science Module and approach the Bio-lab at a jog, drawing a few stares from fellow scientists as I rush past. There's a commotion going on in the Avatar lab, and as I finally make my way in I can see the 3 tanks, Norm and
Uh.
Well, it's not as bad as i'd hoped. The avatar looks to be healthy, the proprioceptive sims have left her with good muscle tone. There's no cracks or breaks in the tube… and yet something MUST have gone wrong somewhere. Because while my Avatar looks to be about as tall as a human adult, she's utterly dwarfed by the tank which is designed to accommodate something the size of an adult Na'vi, which she decidedly isn't. She'd fit in more with the kids at Graces school than with the adults.
My face must be a sight to behold, because before I can actually say anything Doctor Cullimore is already rushing to explain. "I pulled the logs, the growth hormone that accelerates the avatars aging during transit? Someone at the other end must have fucked up, your tank was only outfitted with a years supply rather than enough for the whole journey. After it ran out, I'm afraid your avatar went back to aging naturally."
"...My avatar is 12 years old?"
"I'm sorry, Doctor Harris. We're going to have to take this to Grace. I know your avatar was supposed to be experimental but this is too much for me to sign off on without a second opinion, or at least some very careful scans of both your brains to make sure they'll sync. She's in her Avatar at the moment, but I'll message her to cut it short so we can go over our options. I'm Max, by the way."
The sound of Norm and Jake entering the room draws both our eyes for a moment as they make impressed sounds over their own avatars, and Max steps away to greet them with one last sympathetic nod in my direction.
I take a few moments to breathe through my panic at the thought of training for all that time, coming all this way and then not getting to use my avatar, and rest a hand on the glass of the tube, gazing at the girl inside as she twitches as if in restless sleep.
It would seem that my own dreams lie in the hands of Grace Augustine.
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I watched Avatar: The Way of Water last week, and came out disappointed by the story but enchanted by the world. Went back and watched the first film, to exactly the same result… what else is there to do but start a fanfic!