The Inter-Galactic Transfer Point 27

Part 1 – On a world, far away

I was off-duty and sitting at an observation window looking out into the dark void when my best, that is, only friend joined me to contemplate the darkness of space. I say darkness but it wasn’t truly dark; there were millions of light specks out there, all showing where a sun and a possibly inhabited world may be.

My friend is Epsilon 32 and, as you would probably guess, is a little older than me, as my name is Gamma 12. Everyone on the Transfer Point has a name that signifies how long they have been here. I do remember, when I was very young, being spoken to by Alpha 60, the last of the original crew, but it was now long gone and the oldest Officer is Beta 12. Most of the working stiffs in the Transfer Point are Deltas and I am now the youngest to be trained in the mysterious methods of Transfer. My friend, Epsi, and I work together on our shift but it tends to spend its whole time looking at its device, leaving me with all the work

IGTP 27 is a tiny spot on a tiny world in a vast and endless arm of the Andromeda Galaxy. What we do is mine a specific mineral which this world has in abundance and it gets taken away in transport jump-cruisers. The mineral is in great demand as it is processed with other elements to make the fuel that the jump engines use. I have the idea that there are only a few worlds with such a supply of high grade mineral in the whole Universe.

Epsi had been lucky to get such a good job in the main pod as most of the younger crew were busy mining and that meant that the workers were mainly Epsilons, although there were only two other Gammas on the planet besides me. It sat next to me and we just gazed outwards for a while before it said that we had better get some food as it was nearly time for our shift.

After grabbing some munchies from the CrewChef we went to our duty post, a stuffy room with lots of screens, panels and about a zillion switches that was our pride and joy for the next eight planetary hours. Looking at our roster we saw that there was a jump-cruiser due in about an hour, which gave us time to check the systems. The transfer itself never took long, we were using a device which everyone called ‘Scottie’ and it de-materialised the items at one end and re-materialised it at the other. It was not a difficult job, one just had to remember that the code for the link being secure was ‘The Beam is up’ and a successful transfer was confirmed by the code ‘Cargo is Spock on’. It all seemed strange to me but I had been drilled with the correct codes and told that they were a remnant of our history and should never be forgotten.

There was a vague rumour that I remember from my early days that the ‘Scottie’ had once been used to transport humans but we never used it for that these days. My training had insisted on that and the reason given was that our particular ‘Scottie’ had a glitch which affected a human passing through it, no matter what direction you were going. They were going to send us another one, or so someone said about twenty planetary years ago, but we just had to put up with the one we had for the moment. It had no effect on the cargo, though. We got all the supplies we needed and the mineral went as it should.

When the jump-cruiser appeared at the jump end point we opened up communications with the crew and verified what they were sending down to us. This time we had fifty empty mineral containers and twenty containers of supplies. There was an automated system we used and one-by-one the containers were ‘Scottied’ down with the system taking them to the right place on the base. We then lined up fifty full containers of mineral which were sent up to the cruiser. We monitored all of the process on screens to make sure everything went well. We could see their ‘Scottie bay’ on our screen so that we never sent something into a space already occupied.

The whole process took up most of our shift and the Captain of the jump-cruiser or else one of its officers remained in constant communication with us. At the end of it they thanked us for a job well done and then laughed when they signed off, saying “Tranny 27, we will be back.” After they jumped away we shut down our ‘Scottie’ as there was not another transfer scheduled until our next shift. I commented that we seemed to get all of the transfers lately and Epsi said that it was probably because we were the best operators on the planet.

As we walked the corridor to our quarters I said “I wonder why they never turn their vid-link on; we can see their ‘Scottie’ bay but we never get to see the crew. I suppose they can’t see us, either.” Epsi laughed and said “Sure they can see us, there are two vid-links in the control room and they are on the whole time we are in operation. I suspect that they have a good reason for us not seeing their control room but I have not yet figured out what it could be.”

It then showed me what it had been doing today while I did all the work. It had delved into the base library and pulled up as much history of the planet as it could. We went and sat by the window again while I had a look at it. There were some pictures of some of the original settlers and I recognised Alpha 60. It was listed as the head of the youngest ‘family’ that had been sent to this planet. I asked Epsi what a family was and it didn’t know and said that there was nothing in the records that explained the word but there were big chunks of records that had been wiped out.

We had an after-shift snack from the CrewChef and went to our own rooms. My room was not large but you don’t need it to be when all you do there is sleep. All our clothing was issued into a slot every start of our day and the old clothes went into a hopper for recycling. Other than my sleeping tube there was just a set of drawers with some keepsakes in them, such as some of the toys I played with when I was very young. Growing up on Tranny 27 meant learning about living and working on the base.

My toys were mainly models of the mining machines and bits and pieces of the equipment we used every day. I had learned how to repair pretty much every bit of equipment we used inside the base and I know that most of the Epsilons had learned how to take a mining machine apart and put it back together again. As I thought about it I was struck by the fact that there were so few of us Gammas here and that there had been no new crew-members since I was created. I knew that the other two Gammas worked with the Betas in their section. The only time I had met with one it looked different from me.

All of the workers on the base kept their hair in a buzz-cut for overall cleanliness. This Gamma, however, had longer hair down to its shoulders. Its clothing was different to mine and was a much finer material that draped very nicely on its body. Mine was a good, hard wearing cloth and much duller. Gamma 3 told me that it had been told to talk to a certain Delta on our decks and had been surprised at how plain our quarters were, compared to the Beta ones. I asked it about its hair and uniform and it said that it was what the Betas wanted to see and its companion there, Gamma 7, looked much the same. We didn’t have much time to talk and that was the last time I saw another Gamma for quite a while.

I lay in my sleeping tube and, for the first time, wondered about the future. I had been of working age now for over ten planetary years and there had never been a sign that there would be more of us. I had been pretty much all over the base and no-where had I seen a facility that could be used to make replacements. There were medical rooms but no-where looked like it could be used for cloning. Then it struck me that we could not be cloned as almost every crew member I have even seen looked a bit different. It was a real puzzle but I allowed myself to sleep to the soothing music inside my tube.

When I woke up I stood in the cleaning tube for a few minutes as the ultra-sonics cleaned my body and then took my new uniform and put my arms and head into the holes and allowed the material to drop over my body and then I was ready for some food. We all wore soft slippers inside the base and my movements were almost silent as I went to the CrewChef and got some munchies and a drink. A few minutes later Epsi joined me and asked me to come with it to a quiet corner because it had found out some interesting things.

Firstly, it said, of the twenty containers we had received on our last shift, fifteen of those had contained droids. My head shot up at this as droids were a rare commodity at the best of times and never been known of on Tranny 27. It said that two containers contained what was described as ‘domestic/pleasure’ droids and had been consigned to the Beta and some Delta quarters. The rest were ‘mining worker’ droids and had gone straight out to the mining site. That was weird, my thoughts had been answered,; the miners were going to be replaced by droids. I had no idea what the ‘pleasure’ part of the other droids was, it was an alien concept to both of us as the only pleasure we had experienced was the joy of a job well done. I now wanted to know much more but had no idea of how to go about it.

Marianne G 2021