I toss and turn in my bed before the alarm goes off. It’s time to go but motivation is hard to come by. I was late leaving the inn last night and those last few whiskeys have left me in a bad way. My stomach is churning and the head feels like it’s about to explode.
Just a few seconds later, from total darkness a sheer brightness shines through his bedroom window from the billions of lights suddenly switching on outside. Such is life on a space habitat. Time to go whether I like it or not. It’s at times like this he would ponder what it would be like to live on Earth. For the lighting to increase more gradually, to breathe natural air and not be certain about the environment he would face. Slowly, he put on his worn clothes.
Another day of drudgery lies ahead but needs must. A small amount of porridge my only comfort. Walking out of my hut I pause briefly to survey my surroundings. Green fields for pasture, sprinkled with occassional huts and tree lines. Then I look up an see the town of “Bealach an Tirialaigh Nua” in the distance. It is still only a speck albeit a growing one. This is the space habitat of “Nua na hIarmhí.” It is an agrarian settlement of three million souls with a surface area approximating that of France. The only gravity is of the rotational variety.
I walk down my overgrown laneway to get collected for work, one of the few people who is not tied to manual labour. My job is that of an architecture systems analysis, occupying a grey area between manual area and those tasks left to Artificial Intelligence. The air taxi should appear over the distance any second now.
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