James Baxter's Blog

I put on my coveralls and looked out my bedroom porthole at the dark expanses of outer space. All clothes on the Santa Maria were hand-me-downs, designed from fortified nylon to last 600 years of space travel. Still, they were faded and worn, and my zipper was always getting stuck.

It had been a month since my 16th birthday, when I’d been assigned the role of engineer, the job I’d work for the rest of my life. It was either janitor, teacher, officer, caregiver, engineer, or you worked in the sickbay or the food lab. I never cared where I landed. 

“Good morning, travelers. Please head to the mess hall for breakfast,” came the Earth lady’s voice over the intercom. Radio signals took about four and a half years to get here from Earth, but the people at NASA perfectly timed their messages so they could tell us when to eat each day. 

I followed my parents and my little sister out of our quarters and down the hall. The metal walls were etched with pictures and messages from fourteen generations of crewmembers, from poems and portraits to initials, dates, or the traced outline of a hand. Paper was given out sparingly, most of it preserved in a climate-controlled vault at the school, so most people left their mark on the walls. I did it too, having graduated. They used to give us markers and small whiteboards to write and draw with, but we had to give them back when we were done with our education. The pages of all the books were laminated, so we couldn’t draw in those either. Every once in a while, the teacher would give out a few precious sheets of note paper, and I still had every single one, but I had filled every square inch, erasing and redrawing until the ancient paper flaked apart. So eventually I resorted to the walls, or the bathroom mirror when it fogged up after a shower. Mostly I drew animals, or what I imagined them to look like, never having seen one in real life.

We shuffled through the crowded mess hall, got our food, and sat down with the rest of our family. Cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews. But not grandparents. They stayed in the elderly wing. I forked a mushy piece of cantaloupe around my bowl of fruit salad. From what I’ve been told, in the cargo bay, there used to be cans of the meat and cheese of animals from Earth, enough to last the entire journey to Lambda 12, but the stockpile was raided in The Great Gluttony of 2084. I always wondered what that stuff tasted like. Now we just had plants from the lab.

I’d been to the food lab on a field trip once. It’s huge and there’s no artificial gravity there, so the plants grow in spirals and knots, not knowing up from down. Everything goes into the compost: food scraps, rinds, human waste, and corpses. Our water is recycled too, the sewage purified and made drinkable. It tastes like piss, but it has to be that way, or no one would make it to Lambda 12 alive.

The mission started in 1969, when the United States decided to take the lead in the Space Race by sending a ship to the nearest planet that seemed habitable. 200 enthusiastic couples from across the country climbed aboard the Santa Maria on a journey they would never see through to the finish. With one nuclear-powered rocket blast, they set off, and now, 352 years later, we were little more than halfway there, still flying along in the wake of the initial blast at 8.6 million mph, another 19 trillion miles until our destination.

“How has work been, Jaxx?” My mom was trying as usual to make me join the conversation.

“Good.” I felt I had already told her everything worth noting about my job, so I made the mistake of choosing a topic outside the handful of utterly boring ones that were acceptable. “Hey, did you know that on Earth they have these animals called monkeys and that sometimes they wash themselves with their own urine? Roth told me he read about it in a book. I thought it was really weird, but then I thought about it some more, and I realized we sort of do the same thing, in a way.”

Nobody seemed to find this revelation as interesting as I did. “That’s great,” said my mom in an uninflected tone. My dad looked particularly indifferent, scarfing down his second slice of toast. I was fairly sure my dad never wanted any kids, and he only had us for the extra food you get for contributing two offspring. You were allowed two kids, but no more. After the second one, you were sterilized.

Twenty minutes after our awkward breakfast, I was in the utility tunnels with the other engineers. Just like in the food lab, there was no artificial gravity in the tunnels. Most places had it, since too much time in zero gravity makes your bones weak, but to save power, they turned it off in some areas. I wished I could spend all day doing somersaults and backflips down the dimly lit passages, but unfortunately I had a job to do, and if you didn’t do your job, you didn’t get food. Engineers oversaw all the electrical work and machinery on the ship, from the heating system to the oxygen generators, radio system, wastewater recovery station, and lights. One of the few things out of our control was the propulsion system. The ship was on total autopilot, and if something ever went wrong with the thrusters, we were all screwed.

I floated down the corridors with Roth, the guy I was apprenticed to. He was in his thirties and had a clubbed foot from a few too many people doing their cousins. With a population of only 400, it wasn't too uncommon. Anyone born with clubfoot was assigned to work in a zero gravity area. 

The tunnel we were inspecting was particularly dark, the lights spaced far apart, so we had to use our flashlights. As children, they kept us from playing where we weren’t supposed to by telling us stories about alien monsters that bored through the ship and lived in these tunnels, gobbling up misbehaving children. I used to love drawing what I thought the creatures might look like, always with rows of teeth and eel-like bodies.

“You know how to check the oxygen generator?” Roth asked. I nodded and checked the meters on the giant machine, making sure the enclosed microalgae were properly photosynthesizing oxygen from the ship’s carbon dioxide. 

“Did you know there are animals with four stomachs?” said Roth. “Cows, deer, giraffes, and a bunch of other ones. I read about it in that book I was telling you about.”

“Why do they need more than one?”

“Better digestion.” We followed the pipes toward the next spot that needed inspection. “Did you know that on Earth, people can have as few or as many kids as they want?” he went on.

“Uh-huh.”

“My neighbors had their third child yesterday. Not sure how it happened but it did. Doctors immediately took her away. I could hear Alma crying through the walls for five hours.”

“Well, if everyone had three kids, we would overpopulate.”

He looked at me and shook his head. He had a gaunt and stubbled face. “It’s not everyone. It’s one family.”

“People wouldn’t get sterilized if they didn’t enforce the rules,” I said.

“Some people want one kid; some people want three. It would all work out naturally.”

I wasn’t sure he was right about that, but I didn’t feel like arguing anymore. Justifying taking infants from their parents put a sour taste in my mouth. We continued our work at the next set of machines, talking mostly about the Earth creatures in Roth’s book, then moved on to the next area, and the next. Eventually, the Earth lady’s voice announced that it was lunchtime.

“I can’t stand how that woman talks. Maybe it’s her accent,” said Roth. “I don’t get why someone 26 trillion miles away has to tell us when to eat.”

“Maybe it’s to keep in touch with us. To show us that their civilization still exists.”

He grumbled, not satisfied with my answer but not in total disagreement. We backtracked a little ways and met the guys who were delivering our food. If you were working, you didn’t have to eat at the mess hall, as long as the person picking up the food had proof they were doing it on your behalf. 

Lunch was a vegetable burger with fries. It was tricky to keep the fries from floating out of the foil bag, but I’d had some practice over the last month. Roth ate the same small portions as the young people since he had no kids of his own. His wife had left him because he was infertile, and she wanted the extra food. Now he lived alone in his quarters. I wondered if that was why he always seemed eager to talk to me.

We finished our meals and soon got back to work. Roth started operating the control panel for one of the boilers, and I waited for him to get done. “Did I show you how to do this, Jaxx? Come over here.” He turned to look at me. “What are you doing over there?”

On a metal pipe nearby, I had found an engraving of a man with a long nose peeking over a wall. I didn't know what it meant, but I decided to etch him a little hat with my screwdriver.

"You like to draw things, don't you?" said Roth. I nodded, and he reached into his pocket, debating over something. Finally, he pulled out a small notepad and held it out to me. “I found this in the cargo bay. Have it.”

“Are you sure? Those are rare.”

“I don’t really need it. I’ve been using it for work stuff, but it feels like a waste.”

He pushed the notepad in my direction, and it glided into my outstretched hands. “Thank you,” I said.

Roth grinned as I leafed through the delicate, yellowing pages. A few of them were scribbled with notes and calculations, but there was still room to draw on them. It was more blank paper than I’d seen in years.

"All right, now pay attention to what I'm doing, Jaxx. I'm going to have you do the temperature control tomorrow.”

That night, after dinner and my daily laps at the pool, I sat in bed for hours with a stub of a pencil, drawing monkeys and cows and deer and giraffes until I was all out of lead. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of a place where I could fill as many pages as I desired, and where pencils could draw for miles without getting dull.

Download some video games I made here.

I wrote a book called Sea Dog. Go buy it. Here is the full color version.

          Jesus woke up falling through pitch darkness. The last he remembered, he had bled out after being crucified by a bunch of Roman soldiers. He'd show them. Just wait three days. First, he'd have to deal with Satan.          After falling for a few minutes, Jesus hit the ground face first, knocking the breath out of him. He fumbled around and felt something hard and smooth. Running his fingers over the surface, he realized it was a human skull. In the distance, Jesus saw a point of red light and a line of people leading towards the crimson glow. He tossed the skull aside and approached the line. At the very end of the line was one of the men who had been crucified next to him. He wore nothing but rags, just like Jesus.       "Looks like you weren't able to save yourself, son of God," scoffed the man. "Get behind me, bro. We're waiting to check in at the gates of Hell."        Being the badass he was, Jesus cut in front of everyone and confronted the demon who was running the gates. The demon had skin the color of blood and the horns of a ram.        "Hey, you're not J.C, are you?" asked the demon.       "Nope. No clue who that is," replied J.C.       "Then explain those holes in your wrists. And the one in your ribs."       Jesus knew he wasn't fooling this guy, so he decided to take another course of action. He took one of the demon's horns in each hand and pulled them apart, splitting its head in half. Since the demon had no soul, it was not a moral wrongdoing. The people in line clapped in approval. Jesus continued past the gates and soon arrived at the source of the red light. A sea of flames extended as far as the eye can see, dotted with islands of black volcanic rock. Far above his head, covered with stalactites, was the roof of this infinitely large cavern. Demons with spears stood guard on the islands, and the souls of everyone who had ever died screamed in agony in the pit of fire. Luckily, Jesus was here to save some of those souls. He walked to the edge of the fire and a crowd of souls reached up at his feet.         "You're the one who can get us out of here, aren't you?" said one of them.         "Yeah, don't worry. I'm gonna kick Satan's ass. Then, if you're a good person, you'll be able to go to Heaven. It's pretty epic up there."        For the rest of that day, Jesus leapt from island to island, across the sea of tormented souls. He swatted winged monsters out of the air and pummeled demons with his bare hands. Despite exhaustion from the heat, he pushed on until he could no longer keep his eyes open. He found a small cave and laid down to sleep.        He woke up later to a couple demons poking at him with their pitchforks. Down here, it was impossible to tell how much time had passed. Jesus cracked one eye open, listening to the demons talk.        "I'm almost positive, man," said one of them, "This guy is definitely the son of God."        "You're damn right I am," said Jesus, springing to his feet. He performed a two-footed kick, landing one foot in each of the demons' crotches. They shot into the air, blasting through the roof of the little cave, continuing up until they splattered against the roof of Hell.          Jesus went on with his journey, descending through the several layers of Hell. Each one was hotter than the last, with louder screams and bigger and fiercer demons. On the third day, Jesus finally came upon the entrance to the ninth layer of Hell. The entrance was nothing more than a deep, enormously wide chasm, the bottom of which was shrouded in a smoky mist. Jesus dove into the pit, somersaulted several times in the air, then landed with one knee and one fist planted in the ground. He rose to his feet, leaving a fist-shaped imprint in the solid rock. Before him, amidst a mote of lava and howling souls, rose Satan's ashy-colored castle, topped with a multitude of thorny spires. A bridge made entirely of human bones spanned the length of the mote, and on the other end, behind an iron gate at the base of the castle, lay a shining golden key. That was the key that would release the souls of the innocent from Hell, and that was the key Jesus was looking for. As Jesus crossed the bridge, Satan himself appeared before him from a cloud of red smoke. A swarm of demons rose from the lava around him. Satan floated to the ground on his red feathered wings. He grinned, flicking his serpent tongue. He had a great pitchfork, a dragon's tail, the horns of goat, and a long goatee.           "You're not gonna be going back up there any time soon," laughed Satan.           Jesus leapt forward and delivered an uppercut to Satan's chin. The demon stumbled back and rubbed his jaw.           "I thought you were more of a love and peace kinda guy," said Satan.          "I am. That's why I'm about to mess you up." Jesus fought furiously for hours, fending off both Satan and his army of henchmen. He sustained many injuries, but because he had already been bloodied by the Romans, none of these new wounds were noticeable. Since he was already in Hell, he was not made up of Earthly flesh, but any living man would have died in the first few minutes of the battle. When Jesus had singlehandedly taken down every single one of the goons, he and Satan had nearly been overcome by exhaustion. Despite his fatigue, Jesus jumped into the air, grabbed Satan by the horns, and stabbed them into the ground. While the devil struggled to free himself, Jesus staggered toward the iron gates, which were now rising open on their own. Satan managed to dislodge his horns, but when he tried to swing his pitchfork at Jesus, it was if there was an invisible wall between them. The moment Jesus picked up the golden key, he heard a rumbling from the direction he had come. He turned to see countless beams of angelic light pouring from the sky, bursting holes through the roof of Hell. The beams shined down on a good portion of the souls in the fiery pit, sucking up the innocent ones into Heaven. They cheered with joy as they ascended through the holes in the roof, while the villains who had been left behind howled in despair.           "You're even letting the gay ones free!" cried Satan, watching his prisoners float away.            Suddenly, one of the beams was cast down on Jesus, and Satan's mighty castle shrunk beneath him. Then there was a flash of warm light, and Jesus woke in a cave, completely healed except for two holes in his palms and one in his side. He got to his feet, and the stone door of the tomb was set aside.