Theta Ship Five

In the near future, a young woman sneaks on board a spaceship by stealing another woman's identity. But things aren't as easy as they initially seem.

They were practically begging me to sneak onto TS5. I know that sounds like bullshit"how easy could it be to sneak onto a spaceship? But the truth of the matter is that government workers, even those on spaceships, are overworked, underpaid, and bored. They really don't care enough to bust anyone for most of their shenanigans.

I’ve seen ships like this one before. Government funded, one of many. They were developed as low income housing, an ingenious way to deal with poverty and overpopulation. Two birds with one stone. Luckily for me that also meant that security would be lax"who would want to sneak onto a floating tenement? It didn’t even have a real name, just a generic Theta Ship Five. They’re all made up to look and feel like you’re living in the suburbs. The ceiling is covered in peeling pale blue paint. They have dusty plastic potted trees and stiff fake grass all over the place. I’ve heard that on some they even have recordings of bird chirping that they play in the morning. These kinds of ships only come back to earth once a year or so, which means I just had to hang around long enough for it to take off.

There was a table in the front of the lobby (made up to look like a town square) with ID cards. I came in as late as I needed to, there were only three cards left on the table. A woman behind the table looked at me. “Hi!” she said. “Your ID cards are here, you can check in in town.” Her eyes were bright as she beamed at me. Not a strand of her blonde hair was out of place. I wondered how long it would take for her eyes to glaze over like all of her coworkers. Of the three cards on the table only one didn't have a picture ID. I snatched it off of the table and tried to look appropriately bored. When I looked down I noticed the hard concrete beneath my feet was spray painted a dirty red color with uneven white lines.

Before too long, a woman came up to me. She was a heavy set woman with no neck. Years of working a dead end job had taken their toll on her"her face was weathered and her skin was pasty. She had a dulled expression as she asked, “name?” I held up my ID card proudly, trying to look confident. She gave it a quizzical look. Suddenly it occurred to me that my card might say I'm an Eight-foot tall black man or something. S**t. Why didn't I check it? She nodded. “Brandi. Pretty.” She said flatly.

“Thanks, it's short for Brandilla.” She didn't smile. “Really? Nothing?” I shrugged. “Okay...” She scribbled my name off of her list.

“23 Calvin street.”

I tried to guess how long I could stay before anyone figured it out. In the next few hours, we’d take off. TS5 would launch into space...to be honest, I didn't think that anyone would care enough to look into my story.

The ship wouldn’t go back before schedule for anything, not even to bring someone like me back to earth. At least, I hoped…this was unprecedented, and if it wasn’t, it never made the news. But that didn’t mean that this would be easy…if and when they found out that I wasn’t supposed to be on board, all bets were off.

I wondered briefly what it’d be like to be a prisoner on TS5.

Suddenly the room grew quiet. “Alright, everyone! We’ve got one hour until the launch. You’ve all got your house numbers. Most of you are on Calvin street.” The speaker gestured towards a hallway that had a gray, rough-textured matting to make it look like a street with strips of fake grass on either side. “The rest will be on Allen, it's the next one over. Follow me.”

I headed down the hall (street?) in the direction that she pointed and made a mental note to figure out where they stored their computers on the ship. I needed to know some more about who I was.

Brandi Ordell spells her name with an “i,” like a stripper. I would have thought “y.” Brandi isn’t short for anything. She’s three years older and two inches taller, though that’s close enough not to be a problem. There’s no picture in her file, which is good"one less thing I have to delete. Little changes aren’t too big of a deal, but too many will raise some red flags. A defense system was put into place to prevent vandalism…a few years back there were some problems with kids hacking the system. The threshold is different for each ship, but once you hit it they lock you out and the file has to undergo inspection. She has brown hair like I do, but she has blue eyes. I have brown. I changed the note in the file and prayed that no one looked into the access dates. You need a decent amount of clearance to do so, though. If anyone that important was checking into the files, chances was I would already have been caught.

There was another thing, too. Apparently Brandi Ordell had an abusive boyfriend named Charlie Muller. There are dozens of police reports, hospital records, and medical bills that popped up. Where better to hide than in space, right?

It makes me wonder why she wasn’t here.

Other things I have to remember: my mom’s name is Jodi Ordell. She got pregnant with me when she was a teenager, which I know because the file shows her getting support from the State. She spent some time on one these ships as a child. Brandi’s employment record is spotty. She’s currently out of work. Her last job was in a hardware store, which seems like an odd change from her past experience working as a waitress. She was fired for stealing. It doesn’t say what.

I learned all of this information while in a small office that is, thankfully, not far from where I’m supposed to be. It’s on Calvin street but very obviously not a house…it’s too small to be mistaken for a home, and there was a sign on the door that had something to the effect of “DO NOT ENTER” on the door. If anyone walked in, I could theoretically claim that I got lost. They’d think that I was a complete idiot, but they hopefully wouldn’t be too suspicious. The passcode to get into the computer was the same as it was on every Theta ship.

I put everything back the way it was before I got there, and left. Once outside I was already on Calvin Street, right by the 30^th house. What number did that woman say? 24? No, I remembered. 23. I looked at my watch. It was almost 7:00 PM. I just wanted to go to my new house and sleep. I had an interesting road ahead of me.

23 Calvin Street was exactly the same as everyone else’s. The walls were made out of concrete, and they were painted a dingy yellow color. The place had two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. The furniture was rock hard. It only had two variations: it was either bolted to the floor (as if we were someone how going to hide a sofa under our shirts when we left) or it wobbled a bit. Rustic, I thought. Authentic. Homey. There was a desk and small, empty bookshelf that was actually made out of wood, which was a pleasant surprise.

My roommate was an angry drunk. The way she saw it, she had her side of the house, I had mine. Her name was Josephine, I now know. She was mean, but she kept to herself. As far as I knew she didn't have any friends. I don't think I ever saw her leave the house, and I never really saw her talking to anyone. On the kitchen table there were a few pieces of paper with information about the ship. One had a list of classes the ship offers to make its inhabitants more employable or better at managing money. One of them was for basic computations on a Raydon X723 networking system. Knowing how to run a Raydon is something most employers would take for granted, but I suppose for some of these folks it was new information. And the fact that Raydon invested a lot of money in the Theta program didn’t hurt. The important thing was, if you sign up for this class they give you a Raydon to work with. They weren’t very powerful, and the ones that we got were at least five years old (which is about 100 in computer years), but I was able to use it to solidify my place as Brandi Ordell.

Back in the good old days, identity theft was fairly simple: all you needed was to get your hands on someone's social security number, maybe their mother's maiden name. Things were a little more difficult (and dangerous) now. You have to change certain properties in your blood to be able to do it. For a while, the only way to steal someone's identity was if you literally had them sitting next to you. About five years ago, though, someone figured out how to do it just by knowing the signal that their nanotransmitters (the things they put in shots that you get as a baby) are putting off. It's dangerous, though. You have to plug your body into a computer. It's dangerous with a good computer and effective tubing, but with a Raydon and some knock-off wires? It would be suicide, if I wasn't good at what I do. Well, that and I have some common sense. A man died last year from trying to do this"he was a decimal off in his calculations, and he stupidly plugged in to his heart, thinking it would make it easier to get in to his blood. His heart exploded. Idiot.

There's another problem, too. Once you do this, once you become someone else, there's no turning back. The person you used to be is legally dead, and no one can come back from the dead. Whoever you become is who you are.

There's also the issue of the real Brandi. I don't know what it must be like to be on the other end of this kind of fraud. I've only ever known people on the fraudulent side. But then, I guess no one knows people on the other end. Once you're off the grid, you're gone. Your credit, your job history, everything"it's gone.

I signed up for the class and made a point of showing up exactly half the time. That was the rule, you had to show up half the time in order to keep the computer. I hate little arbitrary rules like that. I considered showing up for the first or last half of every class just to be an a*****e, but decided against it. I reckoned it wasn't wise to call attention to myself in my situation. The class was taught by some woman who looked like she was found on an archeology dig and had the profound ability to believe that she was right now matter how wrong or stupid what she was saying really was. I sat in the back and tried to keep my mouth shut. I got the computer a few weeks in.

With a little fine tuning I was able to use the Raydon to keep an eye on the ship’s operation. It also helped me monitor the news that came into and out of TS5, including one memo that read, in all caps, “BRANDI ORDELL: WANTED FOR THE MURDER OF CHARLES MULLER.”

And suddenly I knew why Brandi didn’t get on the ship.

Her blood, which was now my blood, was found at the crime scene. There was no mistaking it. No question of innocence"Brandi was obviously guilty, and she didn't try too hard to hide it. She'd beaten her boyfriend to death with a hammer. Oh, so that's what she stole. I started trying to calculate my chances. How much time I had left. All of a sudden there was a knock at the door, and I had at least one answer.

By the end of the day I was under house arrest and I had a lawyer. He wasn't a great one. He was a stuffy man with graying hair. He wore suits that were two or three sizes too small for him, he looked like a stuffed sausage. And his shirt always looked like he'd kept it in a drawer all crumpled up in a little ball. I called him Rumple-shirt-skin in my mind, I don't remember his real name. I think he only worked this job because he couldn't do anything else. He didn't seem to care at all about the case, though I guess that probably worked out for me.

The rules, the law, isn't the same for people like Brandi. I guess I should say for people like me. There was no dancing around the subject. I was as good as guilty. By the end of the week I would have been officially declared guilty and sentenced to death"only rock stars and celebrities get cushy life sentences.

My lawyer started to ask me questions. “So. Where were you on July 23^th?” He sounded like the teacher on Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

“I don't know.” He sighed.

“Were you...” he looked down at his file. “killing Charles Miller.”

“Muller.”

“So you were killing Charles Muller.”

“No! I wasn't killing anyone!”

“Did you attack Charles Muller.”

“No.”

“Did you get into a fight with"”

“Look,” I told him. “All I want is your computer and an hour.”

“Why.” He asked. I struggled to come up with a satisfactory answer.

“Can't...can't you just give a dead woman one thing, no questions asked?” He rolled his eyes.

“Fine.”

Josephine sat at her desk and took a long drag from her vodka bottle. She didn't bother putting it in a shot glass anymore, it only slowed her down. She was taken aback by her reaction, the world was getting fuzzy around the edges. Normally that didn't happen until she was much deeper into the bottle. She shrugged it off and drank again, which sent sharp shooting pains into her stomach. What the hell? The world started to go black around her. Suddenly she looked down on her desk and saw a handwritten note. She grabbed it harshly, squishing it in her hand. She breathed heavily as she labored to read the words on the page: I'm sorry. It read. I've never wanted to"

The headlines the next day were nothing out of the ordinary. There was almost no mention of the suicide that had taken place on board the ship. Only a small blurb for the loss of one of their own. Brandi Ordell's suicide note was short and to the point, they said. She wanted to die on her own terms. She didn't regret what she did; she'd done what needed to be done. People got bored, quickly lost interest. Within hours Brandi was old news. When the ship landed two days later, Josephine was one of the first off.

Josephine Breslow has a miserable life. I've legally lost five years of my life, and I swear it feels like it's true. Every so often I get these pamphlets in the mail about overcoming addiction. Sometimes it comes with an advertisement for a new liquor store in the area. Target marketing, they know their stuff.

Sometimes I get hateful e-mails from the people that I've wronged in my life. One time I got drunk and responded to a couple. I really got into character...it was actually kind of fun.

My new mom wants me over for Thanksgiving. I told her it wasn't a good idea"she called me an ungrateful b***h and said I was just like my father. Didn't really know what to say to that.

People who knew Josephine, or knew of her, all hate me. I suppose I got off easy, given everything that happened on board TS5. But it kind of blows having all of these people think I'm this terrible person. But what can you do?

Author's Note

Help with the title and the last line would be greatly appreciated...also, sorry if it's confusing.

Reviews

[OctaBrain]

I liked it, definitly. I will admit that i was confused about the ending but after a second read i got it. If you like writting, i'd say you've got a potential. (before you read this next part, keep in mind that i have never written anything of my own beside music lyrics) When i read your story, I would see things that could use improovment, however, i didn't really care because there was a very natural and engaging way you write. I was pulled into your story.

[The Red Fox]

Nice, I like the writing style, very engaging. The grammar could use some work, the orphan parenthesis were really distracting. The title is your first chance to give the reader an idea of what kind of world they are jumping into, so I would suggest something much more descriptive. I read it in much less than two hours, but I have a feeling it will stick with me for longer than that. The last line needs work because there is no story element or emotional impact in it. The problem is that nothing really happens. A better option might be the indication that she is about to get caught, or conversely that she cannot change her id again because of some new advancement. Something more than "I guess I will steal someone's id again."

[zainul]

The story is awesome.
It engaged me for about two hours.
I suggest the title of the story might be 'Theta Ship Five'
I can't give any idea about the last line at this moment.
Thank you Julia for sharing the nice work.