June 4: Beach
A/N: There was/is? This series on… netflix? Hulu? About people traveling to some distant planet and this guy is a priest and gets summoned there and I was drunk and fell asleep about 15 minutes into the first episode and have ZERO desire to watch it again BUT I did get the idea of the Media Room from that episode/series/drunken dream.
A/N2: Always, always thank you Ro. You are the best Beta I could ever dream of having.
Paloma
The schedule was God, on Mars. Everyone was beholden to it, had signed the sacred covenant and agreed to obey the commandments. Any deviation from the schedule could lead to disaster, and failure to comply with the schedule could and often did result in punishments ranging from reprimands to shifts hauling ore at the remote Site P, where the next Martian colony would be installed.
There were precious few things in the schedule to look forward to. It was, quite simply, the codification of the misery of life on Mars.
Every moment of the day was regimented and regulated and monitored. There was no freedom, no privacy, no free will for any colonist.
From the day you arrived on Mars and received your occupational selection orders to the day you shipped out or got boxed up, the schedule controlled your life.
Zechs had lived more of his life according to a schedule than most of the colonists; had, of course, offered token rebellions against the schedules set by his superiors in the past - nannies, military school instructors, superior officers - and when he arrived on Mars, he offered up yet another token resistance.
Lights out was scheduled for 2200, every day, regardless of circumstances. At 2200, every single light in the primitive Martian colony went out or into low-power mode, except for in the control module, communication module and medical module. The residential modules were plunged into a darkness that rivaled that of space.
On his first night, only two hours after stepping off of the shuttle and going through the medical inspection and chemical bath all Martian emigrants were forced to undergo, Zechs had been ushered into his quarters and told he had five minutes to settle in before lights out.
He had, of course, not anticipated the absolute void of darkness.
His datapad light had been enough, however, for him to navigate around the sparse room, to find the bunk, the drawers embedded into the wall that held changes of the dull gray clothes that everyone on Mars wore.
He was nearly changed into a fresh gray pair of trousers when the colony AI started to berate him.
Lights out. Lights out. Power conservation mode is in effect until 0600. Lights out. Lights out.
The AI had continued to berate him as Zechs laid down on the stiff bunk palette and tried to log into the central computer network.
Lights out. Lights out. Power conservation mode is in effect until 0600. Lights out. Lights out.
After fifteen minutes, there was pounding on Zechs's door, and then the swoosh of it opening.
"Turn out the fucking lights," Zechs's neighbor, who he had met only briefly, growled.
The man, an L2 engineer who had looked Zechs up and down with a sneer of disgust earlier, waited for Zechs to power down the datapad.
Zechs had laid awake in the dark, staring into the nothingness that surrounded him, and realized life on Mars might very well be the death of him.
The next morning, as he was shown how to log into the data terminals, he saw the flag on his file.
First infraction. Broke power conservation.
He wasn't sure who was responsible - the AI or the engineer - but Zechs soon learned that the smallest possible deviation from the schedule could be treated like gross insubordination.
Even his poor sleep was logged, commented on by the overworked colonial doctors, held against him when he tried to argue for different shifts in the greenhouse.
The only handful of minutes that were truly free - or at least as free as was possible on Mars - were also scheduled.
The Media Room, which Zechs had sneered at on his first day, was the coveted haven that each colonist was scheduled to enjoy in private for fifteen minutes, twice a week.
The room was one of the few modules on the colony that had any kind of privacy - the walls and doors were opaque and there was, remarkably, sound-proofing insulation.
The Media Room was a right, but one that could also be revoked - after four infractions for breaking curfew, Zechs had had his Media Room privileges revoked for two weeks.
Ironic, how motivating it was to turn off the lights so he could regain those fifteen minutes.
As the name indicated, the room came with a projection and audio configuration that could play nearly anything in the catalog of human recordings.
The first time he had used the room, Zechs had called up a famous pre-colony production of Tosca and watched fifteen minutes of the opera.
After regaining his Media Room privileges, Zechs had simply sat in the darkened room in silence for fifteen minutes, the irony not lost on him, and allowed himself to breathe.
It was Noin's suggestion, however, to stop calling up films, plays, operas or concerts, and to instead call up places.
He spent fifteen minutes in Sanq's long-destroyed royal palace. Fifteen minutes in New Edwards. The Brazilian rainforest zone. Niagara Falls.
But finally, he found the beach. The one he had visited in his childhood, before everything. Paloma Beach.
His father had taken him there. His mother had held him in the waves and taught him to swim. His baby sister had toddled across the sand and ruined the castle that Zechs and Marticus had built together.
Zechs found the beach and he stayed there.
Every Media Room time slot was spent at the beach. Sitting there, listening to the waves, desperately remembering the feel of sunlight warming his skin, the rumble of Marticus's laughter. The feel of cold water washing over his toes.
Wishing he could feel anything like that ever again.
-o-