I would pay pretty handily for a weekend right about now.
A side effect of yesterday’s narcolepsy was that I had trouble sleeping last night; kept waking up every hour. I heard that somebody in another group had a bad reaction to the nanite shift and got sent home. But even my insomnia was not a picnic.
Of course, they took us back to low orbit today. We were running more group trials. My group was doing ‘dry’ runs of the first few stages of the enviro process. Here’s how it works: They take asteroids and grind them up. We liberate hydrogen and O2 from it, then burn it to make water. We first use bacteria to start breaking down the rest of the material, then introduce a series of algae species that convert it further. We have to churn it up and maintain the balance, but at the end of it we get a combination of soil and nutrient-rich water to use for the hydroponics and the soil plants (‘dirtoponics’).
Everyone was worn out, from the nanites and from the week. At first I thought it was stupid to throw us into it like that, but that’s how it’ll be – we will be tired, and we’ll still have to perform.
We got back and they told us to do whatever we’d like with our roomies, so that we’d all get along better. We all decided to go to sleep.
