Requisition for Repurposing of Common Room 114
Applicant: Anna Whitfield

On behalf of the Society of Earth Film, Anna Whitfield requests the repurposing of Common Room 114 as a theater for group viewing of important historical films. Over the past five years, viewing Earth films and discussing the arts and politics of our home planet has become a more popular pastime. The Society of Earth Film currently has 132 active members and requires a space where people can gather to watch these films synchronously. Ship logs report that the room is currently used by two individuals, whose work could be regulated to a smaller space.

---

Sometimes I can feel the ship’s rotation. Even after forty years, when I do the meditations and open my mind and see the line of spirits trailing into infinity, I can’t help but feel like I’m on some sort of whirly-ride at the county fair.

It’s not infinity, I remind myself. We’re roughly 160 billion miles from Earth. Ten more generations to go. As free-floating as I feel, there’s a measurable beginning and end, even if I won’t be alive when we touch ground again.

I blink and the connection fades. I’m back in the conference room, sitting cross-legged on a worn cushion. Across from me, Timothy mutters an incantation and runs a knife down the length of a rubber snake. He wears the thermal suit the younger generation favors—too form-fitting for those of us who remember the importance of fashion on Earth. Gelatinous red oozes from the wound, staining the beige of his pant leg. The consistency is still too thick, but Timothy, who’s never seen an Earth snake, and rarely seen blood of any kind, doesn’t know any better. I’ll have to make a ticket with the 3D lab.

I let him rock back and forth, his muttering growing strained until his face turns purplish. But even with my poor eyesight, I can tell it’s not working.

“Timothy, take a break.” My voice cracks. “Get me a glass of water.”

His eyes fly open, but there’s no startle in them, just the usual disappointment that falls from his eyebrows to lips, then pulls his chin down to bow his head. He drops the limp snake on his woven mat and pads over to the water dispenser in the wall. The conference room was converted to a temple after the original plans for the ship had been approved—a reluctant concession towards the millions left to die with the planet. When we moved in, the mediums covered the plastic-molded walls with fabric and set up our ritual spaces. Back then, the room had been crowded with conflicting paraphernalia. Meditation bowls and Ouija boards brushed up against altars with synthetic mangoes and mimicry of animal sacrifices. Now there’s just my pile of pillows that I moved into one of the more desirable corners when Catalina passed, and whatever method Timothy happens to be trying this month. He’s a fastidious young man, and once he determines a method doesn’t work for him, he clears all hints of it from our temple, sending the materials he requisitions either to storage or recycling.

He hands me a cup. The water’s too cold and immediately cramps my sensitive stomach, but it soothes my throat.

“How’s the flock, Isabella?” he asks, settling in front of me.

“Thin.” I sigh, remembering the line stretched behind us. When we first left Earth, a tidal wave of souls surrounded the Generation, pushing us forward. For years, I swam through our ancestors’ spirits, concentrated and accessible in a way they had never been on Earth. But with time and space the ocean became a sea, then a lake, a river, and now it’s barely a stream that trickles behind us, a weak tether to the societies humanity once embodied.

“I wish I could see them,” Timothy says. The words are optimistic, but his delivery is flat. Wishing was fine ten years ago, when Timothy was a teenager and still had time to learn. It was fine when there were others to teach him. But I’m a mediocre medium and a crap teacher, and I’m dying.

“Have you tried the fruit rituals? The ones from Thailand?” I ask.

Chinda was the last of the original mediums, other than me. Though she believed mediums were chosen, not trained, she had left behind detailed descriptions of her methods for contacting the dead. Mangos and lychee were replaced with replicated facsimiles, and she had worked closely with the repro teams to get their textures just right. Of course, nothing grown in a lab can quite mimic the taste and feel of Earth produce. That’s the problem with hurtling through space. Besides the limited hydroponics station, everything is so fake. And spirits don’t like counterfeits. Yes, Timothy had tried Chinda’s methods. No, they hadn’t worked.

He had tried a bit of everything. Various types of drumming got him into trances. So did the sweating, even without burning the proper herbs. Though his powers have gotten stronger, he’s still only ever seen the ghosts that reside on Generation—the spirits of people who were born on the ship. Those who remember Earth tend to fall back to the wave, racing to the familiarity of their roots. Someday soon, I will be among them, and our connection to Earth will be lost.

“Maybe we’re doing this wrong.” His voice is small. A suggestion, never a demand.

The problem is we don’t know what we’re doing. Sixty years ago, the physicists and engineers were called to Paris to build a ship that could withstand generations in space. The sociologists and psychologists were called to New York to figure out how dozens of cultures would survive smashed together. But no one called the mediums anywhere. No one cared about the spirits we were leaving behind. Historians and archivists? Sure, they were important. But kooks who believed in ghosts? We made our own conference in Tucson, bringing together spiritualists, shamans, and mediums from as many nations as we could. The agenda? How to carry our ancestors, and all the knowledge they hold, with us to a new planet.

For weeks we shared our methodology and debated the best way to lure the lost souls on board the Generation. Our time was split between PowerPoint presentations and sweat lodges. Some suggested passing our powers into a single medium—a hook that would hold the spirits to our floating society. The idea gained momentum. Even I voted for it. But in the end we had to admit that none of us really knew how our powers worked. How can we pass on that which we don’t understand? Instead of conducting a magical imbuing ritual, we filed an official request. A single room in the ship that would serve as temple and shrine and sacred site. We filled the room with paraphernalia, curated by us and then cut in half by the bureaucrats organizing the ship. Too sharp. Too bloody. Too unsanitary.

When the ship lifted off, we called in all the ways we knew. Chanting. Moaning. Beating drums. Blowing flutes. It was a cacophony of desperation as we demanded the spirits follow. And they did. Strong and beautiful and loud.

So loud.

But over the years, the other mediums passed on. The spirits they held spiraled back across the cold expanse to the planet we had left, now dead and decaying. New mediums were rare—keeping the Generation running required more practical focuses—and when a parent consented and a child was trained, like Timothy, they could only see ship souls. The new mediums rarely bothered to come to the temple room. They were a part of the Generation in a way I had never learned to be, and they had little use for a room that held mostly memories and disappointment.

Timothy kept coming back, though. Three times a week, sometimes more, he could be found trying on new rituals like prom dresses, sure he’d eventually settle on the right one.

I once asked him, years ago, why he kept trying. He must have been twenty or so, and his eyes were bright and earnest.

“My parents came on the ship as kids. Four and seven. They can barely remember Earth. But my grandparents told them stories, and they passed them down to me. The things that stick the most aren’t stories of mountains and the sun—they’re stories about my great-grandparents, who were too old or too sick to pass the selection process. One of my great-grandfathers was young enough and healthy, but his wife had early onset dementia. There was no way she would get accepted. So he stayed behind and died with her. Those are the kinds of people we left behind—people who loved deeply and made memories that would be passed down for generations even if we determined their bodies weren’t worth taking. Why wouldn’t I strive for a connection with them?”

I had reached out and stroked his cheek, bristly with a new beard. “Shall we try to find them? If you brought your parents to the temple . . . ”

He shook his head, breaking the thick syrup of the moment, washing away all its sweetness with a single movement. “My parents have moved on. Their life is the ship. They don’t dream about where we’re going or celebrate where we’ve been. Besides, it’s not about my family. It’s everyone. The whole flock we’ve left behind deserves to be remembered.”

They do. But I am the only remaining hook, and none of the old ways have revealed the line trailing behind us to my young acolyte. If I die before he gains this power, the connection will be fully severed.

Coming out of my reverie, I ask, “What do you propose?”

Timothy, now in his early thirties, the youthful optimism settled into adult determination, leans forward, and takes my worn hands in his. “A waypoint.”

“A waypoint?” I echo.

“What if, instead of trying to connect with souls I will never fully understand, I develop a connection with you? Something strong enough to keep you tied to the ship and me tied to you.”

His young eyes shine with enthusiasm, and I hate to dash his hope. But I’ve felt the relief and release the moment an individual soul breaks off and returns to Earth. We have to be realistic. “Once I die, the temptation to fall back to our home planet—it’s a desire you can’t understand, but trust me when I say it’s strong, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to resist it.”

For never having communicated with the spirits trailing us, Timothy seems to have a fairly good understanding of how they work. One connection leads to another, pulling experiences out of the past. But he’s never had to communicate through time or space. His ghosts occupy the same rooms as he does, and they know the same struggles.

“A waypoint,” I murmur again.

I remember the spiraling expanse stretching behind us. It’s cold in space, and lonely, and it’s the last place I want to spend my eternity. But it’s an idea, and we’re running out of those.

---

Personal Communication

From: Isabella Martin
To: Anna Whitfield

I’m not dead yet.

---

It’s just like on Earth. We know the goal, we just don’t know how to get there. But this time we can’t requisition a room to shove our possibilities in and perform random rituals, hoping one works. We’ve got one chance, and we’ve got to get it right.

The urgency of the situation brings me to life in a way I haven’t felt in years, and I nearly tingle with anticipation each morning as I walk the low, curving hall from my bunk to the canteen where I’m given my daily rations of a synthetic mash that resembles grits. I eat slowly, forcing myself to chew food that shouldn’t need it, but my stomach’s sensitive, my esophagus weak. Then I’m in the elevator, and to the right are labs and offices. Places where people do real work. To the left are a series of three conference rooms. Ours is the last. The only corner of the ship that has ever meant anything to me.

We start by holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes while chanting. These rituals have never worked for him before, but they are all I know.

Timothy’s hands are soft and smooth in mine. They have no freckles from unsupervised summers in the sun. His eyes are crystal green and have never seen a forest. He has no idea what an ocean is. My chest swells as I try to impart these sensations to him. I remember my childhood in the mountains. His legs have no idea what a hill is. His calves have never burned without the measured cadence of the physio chamber. I try to make him understand what it is to expand the lungs and breathe deeply of thin air, grinning in accomplishment. But I cough as I remember my adolescence. My lungs are weak, my body frail, and nothing comes across as vividly as my experiences actually were.

Moments stretch between us, and I curl beneath the intimacy of it. Years have passed since anyone has stared at me. During the first years of our voyage, people came to our temple and asked to speak with the spirits of Earth. They had questions. Wanted to share family news. I would hold their hands and look in their eyes and try to find their grandmother or a sister who hadn’t made it through selection. The intimacy of digging into someone’s spiritual heritage had been heady, and I miss it now. But I can only hold hands and stare for so long before I’ve shared all that I can summarize in breath and gaze.

Days pass, and we switch tactics. We lounge on pillows and I tell him about my past. All my secrets. I share shame and pride—things I’ve pretended I had grown beyond in my role as a medium. I tell him about my years in the desert, taking drugs, trying to find myself or some semblance of truth, only to batter my body and tatter my soul. When words fail me, I hold his gaze and impart the sensation of purging—the way my body weakened and my spirit shriveled even as I thought I was growing.

“Isabella, I think I’m falling in love with you,” he says after I share the intimacies of one of my young and stupid relationships.

It’s an absurd declaration. I’m a withered old woman and he’s a vibrant young man. He doesn’t know what love is, and I have little need of it. On the Generation, romance, like everything else, is calculated to keep balance in a tight space—and so he falls in love with the wildness of possibility.

“Good,” I say. Because why shouldn’t he love me? Why shouldn’t someone remember me?

---

Notice of Repurposing

The Generation Commission of Common Resources has determined Common Room 114 to be best utilized by a group of no fewer than fifty people engaging in social, spiritual, or religious activities. As the Association of Mediums has fallen below that number, it has been determined that the room will be repurposed. This communication serves to notify current users that the room will undergo renovations starting at the next Earth year cycle.

---

We have sixty-two days to solidify our connection. That’s not true. I’ll probably live another year. Maybe more. But an era is ending. There will be no common room dedicated to communicating with Earth’s spirits. Even hurtling through space, the old are forced into memory to make room for the young.

My time is divided between the comfort of my bed and hours with Timothy. I almost forget that he has a life on the ship. Friends and responsibilities. But sometimes he leaves me to fulfill other duties. It’s during these hours that I try to strengthen my communications with the spirits of Earth. After all, our work will be meaningless if I connect to him and lose my tether to our planet.

This work feels different. Until now, I’ve beckoned spirits forth, allowing the few people on the ship that still believe blood and spirit is important to commune with specific ancestors. But now I shed all connection to the Generation and fill myself with the stories of Earth. The drama of land feuds. The desire for propagation seeping out from gardens and seas. I let myself run free through history. I rub against women who remember being fed dates by their first lover, his hand shaking, his eyes smiling. I ease into pools of anger and war, letting myself become ego and desire and ownership. So much self.

Not that we’ve left behind this pettiness. There are still power struggles on the ship. But there’s little room for real anger when our entire existence is at stake. I meditate on want. On ownership. Mine. Mine. Mine. I moan into the darkness, feeling all the things I gave up to be on this ship. Sunshine and love and friends left behind. Things that were mine.

---

Personal Communication

From: Anna Whitfield
To: Isabella Martin

It was never personal.

---

The door slides open and the bright light of the hall floods the room. I lose my concentration and, groggy, come back to the space. I’m about to ask for a glass of water when I notice it’s not Timothy standing next to me.

Anna is a generation older than Timothy, one younger than me. She was born on this ship, but at a time when stories of Earth were still echoing against the plastic walls. Staring at her, I feel my age.

“Lights, twenty percent, yellow,” I say. The room brightens at my command.

“Hello, Isabella,” Anna says. “I wanted to stop by and see if you need any assistance moving.”

The room is bare. At this point it has only my pillows in the corner and fabric on the walls. Perhaps she has a point. I hadn’t realized how much empty space is around me these days.

“Timothy will help me with the last of it next week. Don’t worry. We’ll be out on time.”

Her face softens. “I never meant for this to hurt you.”

“It doesn’t,” I lie. “I understand. Times change.”

She makes a circle of the bare room, then comes back to my nest of pillows. To my surprise, she sits down, crossing her legs, her back straight. “You know, Isabella, we’re not that different. We both want a connection to Earth. You happen to divine spirits. I work with imagery and story. But the result is the same: a connection to our past.”

It isn’t the same. I want to make her understand the tangible thread stretching behind us. Movies can be dusted off and watched, then tucked away for a few generations, but once our spiritual tie is cut, there will be no reviving it. Anna’s not the type that will ever see a ghost, though.

---

Open Invitation

Common Room 114 is open to communal use as a theater, managed by The Society of Earth Film. Find the attached schedule of movies and their relevant discussions. Advance reservations are appreciated as space may be limited for some viewings.

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It’s nothing like the theaters of my youth. Sofas line the walls, and in the center of the room is a nest of pads and blankets, not so different from the nest I’ve relocated to my bunk. People lounge around the room, families cuddle. Friends hold hands. They seem fresh and alive, and I realize I’ve been so trapped in reliving Earth’s memory that I’ve forgotten how beautiful living people can be. I find a sofa near the back and curl my feet beneath me as I search for a familiar face. So many people who boarded this ship with me are gone now. I catch Timothy sitting with a young woman near the front. The lights dim and she leans to whisper in his ear.

The movie isn’t one I’ve seen before, but it’s from my time. I recognize the cars, and I can almost feel the jerky movement as the protagonist drives across the screen. It’s a sensation unshared by the young, made obvious by the conversations after the film ends. They don’t understand rushing. Or distances. The concept of traffic is completely foreign to them. Timothy’s eyes brighten as he brings up the “midnight drive” he’s read about, in which people would get into cars and just drive, without a destination.

The discussion continues, assessing motivations and complications. I recognize some of the people. They’ve come to me, wanting to speak to spirits. But their faces were always reserved. Cautious. I’ve never seen most of them smile or laugh. I’ve definitely never seen them argue, and I’ve never heard such passion come from their lips. The liveliness of the discussion reminds me of the first meeting of the mediums. How we argued. How we cared about the future and not just the past. As I watch and listen, I realize I have little to add to these conversations. The voices blend together, and I doze, their hum a lullaby around me.

When I wake, the theater is empty except for Timothy, who leans a shoulder against the sofa I’m sleeping on.

“You came,” he says with a smile.

I pull his young hand up into my lap and trace his smooth skin. “Timothy. Tell me about your life. Tell me about the ship.”

In the theater, our relationship shifts. I become the vessel, and he fills me with stories of the here and now. Drama, politics, and desire. Recreation, food, and work. I never knew he had as many stories as me, and as his words fill my ears, I think that next time I travel that thread of our ancestors, I’ll have something to share with them. Stories that will make them want to stay with us. Stories that tie me to him.

---

Personal Communication

From: Anna Whitfield
To: Isabella Martin

I have a project in mind. Would you come to the Common Room tomorrow morning? If you are unable to make it, I understand. I can come to your quarters.

---

I pull myself out of bed and shuffle down the hall. Walking is difficult. The transition between laying and sitting and standing is worse. I don’t stop at the canteen. Food has long since lost its appeal. But I’m intrigued by Anna’s message.

The door slides open as smooth as ever, and I enter the dimly lit theater. Things have shifted again. In front of the white screen is a lounge-chair. A few feet away from it is a camera set on a tripod and two lights.

“Isabella, you came.” Anna’s voice is warm and tentative.

“You couldn’t have written out the project in your communication?” My voice is like gravel. “Made me come all the way here to figure out what you’re up to.”

She gestures to the chair and camera. “I’m making a documentary. I want to make sure we capture the transition from Earth to the Generation.”

I wave a hand, but my limb is heavy and slow. “That happened decades ago, and I’m sure there are films about it.”

She takes my elbow and helps me into the chair, and I let her. “You know as well as I do that history is not a single moment. It’s a ripple. It’s not cause but effect. It’s not ancestors, but generations.”

Anna’s talking too fast, or maybe my mind has slowed, but I nod along.

“I’m just going to ask you some questions.”

“About Earth?”

“About your life here.”

She clicks the lights on and I wince. “I can’t tell you much about my life here. It was lived in this room, remembering the past. But I guess, maybe, I can tell you about my friend Timothy.”

She nods. “That will do just fine.”

---

Notice of Death

Isabella Martin, 88 years old

No surviving family

---

Timothy’s there when my spirit leaves, but I don’t feel the tearing I expected. I slip easily from the unnecessary shell of body and ship, seeing Timothy as light and energy instead of man and molecule. He’s beautiful, and perhaps I’ve fallen in love with him, too. Because why shouldn’t someone see him for his potential?

I don’t rush back to Earth, though I do feel the embrace of loves long lost. I let taste and touch and sound rush over me, remembering Earth’s gravity and the way that planet cradled me. But instead of returning to it, I fall into a single point. Stillness. Behind me, the memories of Earth. Before me, the hopes of our future. I sink and hope I’m heavy enough to hold them both.