Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel by Michael D. O'Brien Page A

duty. For example, the kitchen staff wear white, two-piece outfits with hair nets. Medical staff wears robin’s egg blue, same design. Maintenance staff (cleaning, laundry, etc.) wear pale green. Social facilitator staff wear ordinary business suits with neck ties (identical for male and female facilitators). When off duty, all working people dress themselves in a rather narrow selection of ordinary clothes—whatever was trendy at the time we left Earth.
    Women seem to be more inventive than men in this regard. They either have queen-size wardrobes stashed away somewhere, or they are constantly busy making alterations. Many of them must have brought needle and thread on the voyage. Intentional anachronism: none of them know what a needle or a thread is. They probably have electronic gadgets that unravel seams and stitch the cloth into new shapes. Jewelry is also a big item.
    They are very vulnerable to stylistic herd mentality, for reasons which throughout my entire life I have never—never—been able to understand. This year they all wear their collars up, touching their chins; last year they had no collars on their blouses and wore pantsuits, with cleavage. The year before, it was demure lace at the throat and a skirt from the waist to the knees, below which the pant legs remained black elasto-cling, unhealthily constrictive. The skirt has risen to mid-thigh in recent months. How do they communicate to each other what they must do next?
    My own sartorial standards are simple and unchanging: cowboy boots, jeans, checkered shirt, red bandana around my neck, and my thousand- Uni tweed blazer over the upper torso. Strapped to my waist is a frayed leather belt. Clipped to it is the trusty survival kit I bought during my teens with my first wages, containing the old fold-knife, flint, and compass. You never know when you might need to hijack a jet or find your way back to your home planet.
    Day 110 :
    I try to put in two or three hours each day, working on pet theories, doodling with unified field conjectures, inventing mathematical neologisms (Neil-ogisms), having my fun. It keeps the mind alert and stimulates motivation with the promise that I just might extend the frontiers a little. However, after three months of it, my attention is wandering. I am experiencing what I have so rarely felt in my life, a sense of “boredom”. When I first realized what was happening, I felt a stab of fear. Would this infect me more and more, I wondered? Would I become a tiger, pacing a cage, and end up frothing at the mouth and clawing the walls of my room? Or (more apt) would I become a flea bouncing frantically inside a matchbox? Such hallucinatory prospects paralyzed me for a few moments, and during this brief but horrible event, I glanced at max (don’t capitalize him, Neil, for heaven’s sake, don’t capitalize that name!), afflicted with a sudden craving for a film to watch. Socially approved escape mechanism number one. An escape encapsulated within an interstellar escape mechanism of epic proportions, a multitude of escapes stacked one inside the other, like Chinese boxes or Russian Marushka dolls.
    I tore my eyes away from max —from the max—pulled on my snake bite boots and went for an angry, limping hike all around the four concourses, avoiding every elevator and driving myself up and down the stairways. It helped. But it left me a little rattled.
    I gotta get out more!
    Interesting how my written notes have become fewer and farther between. I make entries in my voice diary each day, small memos, noting the names of those whom I meet: for example, my weekly chats with Xue, and also the nonscheduled exchanges I’ve had with the astronomer Strachan McKie of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, designer of the new tower at the ROE, author of many brilliant, somewhat idiosyncratic books—yes, the very man after whom the McKie Ultra Deep Field was named—that apparently empty corner of space where he discovered about three