Published January 11, 2017.
Re-posted with new material on May 14, 2017.
"Learn To Be Lonely"
It is your obligation to speak the truth, and everyone can either take it or leave it. But truth must be in us. We live in such poverty of the truth today. ~ Mother Angelica
Samuel Holt valued truth higher than almost anything else. He had raised his children to be truthful, seek knowledge, cultivate wisdom, and speak out against those who told lies or spread misinformation.
Though she was operating under a false identity, Katie—now trying to think of and refer to herself as Pidge—still tried to avoid telling outright lies. She figured that as long as she managed not to cross that line, she would not be going completely against the ethics her father had instilled in her.
There were times when she had to lie to maintain her cover, and she felt guilty, wondering what her father would think of her; but she tried to compensate for her untruthfulness by calling out people who told lies. It was maddening how frequently people mentioned the Kerberos mission and how carelessly they repeated the Garrison's misguided conclusions about what had happened.
Katie used to talk aloud in order to work through difficult problems. Usually one of her family members served as her audience, depending on the topic she was wrestling with. Even if they said nothing in response, just verbalizing her thoughts made them easier to examine objectively. That process was no longer an option at the Garrison, where Pidge had to keep her research a secret, so she tried doodling instead. She was not artistic, but she found she liked it more than she had expected to; it was almost therapeutic, not having to be so precise as in her data collection and analysis.
Pidge tried to conceal or carry all of her possessions that would give away her identity or help in her research. If there was ever an occasion to evacuate, she would have to bring her data with her; and if the teachers ever had a surprise inspection, she could not let them discover her identity or confiscate her equipment or notes. She lived with the mindset that any day might be her last at the Garrison, with the chance of being discovered or having to run away always on the horizon.
In order to get around the Garrison after curfew and infiltrate areas that were off-limits, Pidge figured out how to hack into the security cameras, and replaced their live feed with recorded footage of the security officers passing at regular intervals. She had to schedule it based on when each individual guard was on patrol. She was careful to only change the feed at the times and places in which she was active, not wanting to jeopardize the overall safety and security of the school. She never went outside of the Garrison, so there was no need for her to change footage of people entering and leaving the grounds.
Pidge kept daily status reports to her mother vague enough that, if intercepted, no one could deduce any of her secrets. She did not share anything about her hacking, research, or observations. As a result, Colleen came to know more about the social scene of the Galaxy Garrison than the progress of her daughter's mission.
I got assigned as a communications officer. My pilot and engineer seem friendly. I only wish I had time to spend with them outside of training.
Blending in it easier than I expected. The classwork is easy too. It's the hands-on team-building stuff we have trouble with.
People mention Kerberos pretty often. When they do, it's hard to keep my opinion to myself.
My team's engineer brought baked goods from his visit home. He gave me some peanut butter cookies.
One of the flight simulation options is a rescue mission to Kerberos. I don't know what to make of this.
I'm a lousy communications officer. I wish they'd train me as a pilot already.
Getting lots of data but not sure what it means or how much is relevant to me.
I think my team's pilot has ADHD. I'm not sure how he got this far in the program, or whether it'll be safe to really fly into space with him.
I think something big is going to happen, but I don't know what or when.
My crew failed a simulation today. I'm starting to wish I'd spent more time with my teammates when they invited me. Maybe then we'd get along better. Now they don't even invite me anymore.
These updates were the highlights of Colleen's days, reassuring her that she was not alone.
With all three members of her family gone, she had more time to herself than she had had in years, probably since before she was married. It was almost uncomfortable. She had always had at least one person to spend time with. Less people meant less cooking and cleaning to do. She was more meticulous in her housework than ever before, but still finished it more quickly than she ever had when Katie was living there.
Bae-Bae was her main source of comfort and company. She gave Colleen a reason to get up each day and maintain some sense of a routine. Colleen walked her twice a day, and went out to buy groceries and visit the library a few times a week.
Colleen tried to stay vigilant about what was happening in space and in the scientific community. She tried to spend more time reading. She kept up with academic and scientific circles, continued to watch the news channels and read the magazines, even though she took the information from their journals with a grain of salt.
But she also tried reading for leisure too, the way she had when she was younger. Sometimes, just to fill the silence in the house, she read aloud to Bae-Bae, who curled up next to her on the couch or on her bed. She studied Sam's favorite Bible books, and reread her favorite volumes of poetry and classic literature. It was a bittersweet pastime, because she associated so many books with the happier times in which she had read them.
Matt and Katie had always preferred to read nonfiction, but Colleen had coaxed them into reading some children's classics—The Little Prince, Peter Pan, A Wrinkle in Time—on the pretext that they were about stars and planets. They used to read those stories together when Sam was away on missions. They had related to the characters who were away from family and friends on other planets. Colleen rifled through these books now, but could not bring herself to reread them, when her own story was still unfolding, her family's fate undetermined.
Unfortunately, she kept seeing her family members in fictional characters, even in the most unexpected stories. Watching Shakespeare movies, she saw Matt and Katie in Sebastian and Viola (who pretended to be a man), siblings who were separated and thought the other dead. She identified with Mrs. Murry, wondering where her scientist husband was, and with Mrs. Darling, wanting to leave the window open so her children could return.
Looking through an anthology of Greek myths, plays, and epic poems, an illustration of Daedalus and Icarus nearly moved her to tears. But then she turned to the section containing the Odyssey, and smiled as she read about Odysseus' reunions with Telemachus and Penelope. Everyone else had believed that Odysseus was dead, and urged his wife and son to move on. They had just about given up hope. But he came back to them in the end. And while they waited, Penelope kept fooling the suitors who urged her to believe that Odysseus was dead. They were just as gullible as the Galaxy Garrison officials.
Author's Notes
Music: "Learn to be Lonely" by Minnie Driver, from The Phantom of the Opera (2004)
The theory that Lance has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been circulating around Tumblr, and as someone who as ADD and knows people who have ADHD I think it quite plausible.
Someday, I would like to write a crossover of VLD and Twelfth Night. If you haven't read or seen the play, go out and read it, or read the novelization "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Illyrian Madness" by ModernDayBard here on FFN, and you might see as many perfect potential parallels as I have. The only reason I'm putting it off is because I want to wait until the show is over so I will have all possible material to work with.
1-11-17: Something really cool happened to me a few days ago. On Sunday, the feast of the Epiphany, I went to a church service and heard a sermon about the Magi and what we can learn from them. The pastor described the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism and how one of its tenets was, I quote, "the pursuit of truth"! Hearing my own title used in a sermon seemed like a seal of divine approval.