Aboard The Argo

Horticultural

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In this area of the ship, fruit and vegetables of many varieties are grown in rows, their roots suspended in a nutrient gel. Lamps above the plants provide the necessary light required for photosynthesis. The carbon dioxide breathed out by crew members is pumped directly to the plants, and likewise the oxygen they release is then returned to the crew. A clear walkway runs through the center of the room to allow for quick access to the engine room from the elevator.

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Kyarion walked through the length of the room on his way to Argo: Engine Room and smiled satisfiedly at the rows of vegetation.

Coming down the ladder in one corner that came from the mess room, Marcus hopped off the ladder before he'd reached the very bottom and headed along the rows of plants. He carefully inspected each plant, making mental notes about the level of growth and the general health of each plant. Any that were bearing fruit or vegetables that had reached full growth were also mentally checked off, as he would later go round to these plants again and collect the fruit and veg for processing and storage.

Alec stepped out from the elevator and headed for the far corner. He ignored the people working on the plants themselves as he walked. In the corner, he climbed down a ladder which led down to Argo: Technical.

Quickly darting into the room, Zhora slowed her pace slightly when she realized that there were other people in the room. As of now, she still wanted no concern to surface until they were ready to let on to something. Offering the workers a smile and wave, she continued on to Kyarion's location in Argo: Engine Room.

Pace grinned as he walked in and eyed a cucumber plant. "This one looks like it might be ready tomorrow, huh, Marcus?"

Marcus walked over to where Pace was examining the vegetable. "You could be right, friend. Not that I've ever liked them." He screwed up his face. "Odd taste."

"Perhaps they could be pickled then?" Pace chuckled. "You can make a variety of flavors with just the right spices."

Marcus raised an eyebrow at Pace. "This is an intriguing idea. Perhaps we can look into this?" He rubbed his chin. "Would it be allowed? The vinegar and such..." He looked at Pace. "You have caused my brain to rumble, friend!"

Pace hummed. "I'm certain there's some sort of fermentation machine on this ship, so the vinegar should be no problem..." He grinned at Marcus. "I can't think of many people that don't like some variety of pickles. In my experience, there are gherkin people, dill people, and people that that just plain don't eat their veggies. I'm sure if we ask nicely we'd have permission~"

"I think we could ferment vinegar easily," Marcus mused as he clipped some extraneous branches from a bush. "But this would cause carbon dioxide production." He tapped his chin with his pair of clippers. "Maybe we should look into curing the vegetables?"

"Right...we need to keep everything on the ship balanced..." Pace muttered before turning back to Marcus. "Maybe. I don't think I've ever tried that before, but it's worth a shot."

"It should be easier," Marcus mused, disposing of the trimmed twigs. "We dry and spice the vegetables - we could do it somewhere quiet and out of the way." He closed his eyes and a smile split his face. "Ah, our own secret cured vegetables!"

Pace smiled. "That sounds interesting...But I can't help but wonder how secret anything can stay on this ship."

"Very true, my friend, very true," Marcus chuckled. "In any case, looking for a hiding place and setting up some curing will be quite the distraction." He smiled again. "I haven't been this excited in years!"

"It will certainly give us something to do." Pace agreed with a grin. "And as long as we have spices and vegetables, we'll never run out of options. You do, after all, grow quite a variety."

Marcus nodded. "Yes, they were very generous with what they started us out with." He smirked. "Although, we are of course limited by what we already have here - no seeds in outer space for us to collect."

"Well, that doesn't limit us too much." Pace smirked. "If we get bored, we can start cross pollinating to make something new. After all, humans shaped agriculture through selective processes for thousands of years before we took to the skies."

"Sounds like you're the expert here," Marcus commented before continuing along the lines of plants. "I know how to tend them, but I don't know what I could manage in creation."

"Really, the main stumbling block would be that you can't cross-pollinate outside of species." Pace frowned slightly. "You can cross a butternut squash with a pumpkin or zucchini, for example, but not with peas, corn or tomatoes."

Marcus nodded as he loaded a tray with various colours of peppers, plucking them gently from the bushes that held them. "That makes sense. I look forward to your expertise in this area." As he loaded the tray into a slot in the wall, he turned back to Pace. "My friend, I was wondering if I could ask a favour of you?"

Pace raised an eyebrow at Marcus's question. "Go ahead."

Marcus ran a hand through his thinning hair and looked up and down the hallway. "I'd like you to help me keep an eye on Nytera." He shook his head. "I have tried to keep her happy and safe on this voyage. But she was just a girl when we left Mars. Now, she's grown up on a floating shell. I worry about her."

"Of course, I'd be glad to help." Pace smiled. "She's still in that phase where everything us older people do is an offense. But she's clever. Depending on how she uses it, that can be a very good attribute."

Marcus leaned against the wall and put a hand to his head. "I can't help but worry. She was in a group of no-good tech thugs. She idolised some of them, they were more family to her than her parents in someways." He shook his head. "I'm afraid that some of their attitudes rubbed off on her."

"Their attitudes, maybe." Pace agreed with a grimace. "But as far as we know, she never saw what they really did. And she hasn't shown signs of brainwashing. If anything, we're lucky she was separated from them when she was."

Marcus nodded. "Still, I worry. So," he continued, "will you help me, friend?"

"Gladly." Pace nodded.

Marcus sighed with relief and smiled. "Thank you." He gathered another tray and went back to the lines of plants. "You have no idea how much joy that brings me," he said to Pace while focussing on finding ripe specimens.

"Is there anything in particular you'd like me to keep an eye out for, at the moment?" Pace asked.

Plucking a few peppers from a plant, Marcus glanced over at Pace. "Anything that could show that she's..." He tried to find the right words, grimacing slightly. "... bad. I know it sounds like an over-controlling parent's words, but anything that is morally wrong with her."

"Ah. In other words, anything that seems more than just abrasive or curious?" Pace said.

"Absolutely," Marcus said as he started looking into the gel of some root vegetables. "She can be as angry or as annoyed as she wants. But anything that has gone on that came from that gang..." He shuddered at the thought.

"I'll keep my eyes open, then." Pace replied.

"Thank you," Marcus repeated. He pulled a number of carrots from the nutrient gel and wiped the goo off of them. "So, what are your thoughts on this other ship?"

"Well," Pace began with a thoughtful expression, "Toya seems to think that someone back home made a faster ship and we probably won't hear about it for another year or so... Personally, I think they'd make the communications faster before they'd do that."

"It's a puzzle," Marcus said as he transported his tray to the wall hatches. He leant against the wall once he'd deposited his load. "I don't feel good about it. The ship changes course, we head towards this... thing... and we still don't even know if it's friendly or not."

Pace frowned. "It does seem suspicious. Just as the ship appears, our course is changed without any of us actually influencing it. Almost like they're able to hack into our systems."

A shudder ran down Marcus's spine. "What else could they influence if they can access our systems? The oxygen? The water?" He shook his head. "It's times like these that I wish I was back on Earth."

"It does make us seem a little helpless..." Pace agreed.

Slapping the wall, Marcus straightened himself up. "That is enough of worrying what might be. It is only worthy of worrying about what IS." With that he strode to one end of the room and collected a flask of water on a table, taking a deep gulp.

Pace frowned as he thought to himself: But the problem is that we don't know what it is.

Finishing his drink, Marcus replaced the flask and grabbed another tray, heading for the row of pulses.

"Need any help with the harvesting?" Pace asked, trying to shake away thoughts of the other ship.

"If you don't mind," Marcus said, holding out the tray for Pace. "It'll give me a chance to plant more seeds."

"Why would I mind?" Pace chuckled as he took the tray and began checking and collecting ripe vegetation. "More seeds means more food. I can't imagine anyone objecting to that."

Marcus smiled at Pace's good nature regarding the work. If only more people were like him, he thought to himself. Collecting a number of vials of seeds from a hatchway, he proceeded to walk to where those plants were kept together. Whenever he found a likely patch large enough to sustain plant growth, he pushed a seed into the nutrient gel there.

Pace continued harvesting until he came across a tomato that seemed a little too soft. "Marcus? Is it normal for one fruit to ripen a touch quicker than it's neighbors?"

"It is if it is closer to the lights than the others," Marcus said as he plugged another seed deep in the goo that fed the plants. "Why? Is something wrong?"

Alec climbed out from the technical room and headed straight for the elevators. Climbing into one, he pressed the button that would take him to Argo: Computer Hub.

Pace glanced at Alec momentarily before responding to Marcus. "This one looks like it's almost rotten, already. I know you wouldn't miss a ripe one, though..."

"Hmmm," muttered Marcus as he went to where Pace was looking at the tomato. He plucked it from the vine and smelt it. "I have no idea. Perhaps the nutrient gel here is a little overused," he said, prodding at the gel. He took the tomato to a bench at the side of the room and opened it up. "Hmmm. The plant may be diseased." He quickly returned to where Pace was standing and pulled the entire plant from the gel. "My friend, leave that tray and fetch a trowel. We need to take all of the gel from where the plant was and dispose of it. Quickly." With that, he took the plant and half ran to a black and yellow striped hatch. Opening it, he placed the plant inside.

"Right." Pace put down the tray and retrieved a trowel. "Do you want me to put the gel on the tray?"

"A bucket," Marcus called out. He pressed a button next to the striped hatch and the plant was incinerated. He headed for a console and started typing in a report of what they had discovered. "How did a disease get into our plants?" he murmured to himself.

Pace got out a bucket and started scooping the gel into it. "Under different circumstances, I'd assume it had immigrated from where we left. But it's been seven years. It'd have to be a very slow-acting disease...."

Heading back to where he'd dissected the tomato, Marcus placed the tray into a hatch and pressed a button next to it. "There. Sealed until we can investigate it further." He went back to where Pace was working. "Good. When you have it all in, place it in the incinerator."

"Right." Pace said as he finished scooping up the gel and headed for the incinerator. "Would you like me to take samples, later? Perhaps there's some sort of microorganism tainting it."

"Yes, I would like you to analyse the tomato I have in storage there," Marcus said. He took two panels from a drawer and placed them either side of where Pace had scooped out the gel. That area would be left to be properly sanitised. "Ah, this whole day has been too much excitement after 7 years of repetition."

"Toya will probably complain that she missed out when I tell her about this." Pace mused. "Should I put the entire bucket in the incinerator, or do you want to keep and sanitize it?"

Marcus considered the bucket for a moment. "Get rid of it. I don't want to risk a thing. We lose the crop here, we're done."

"Well, I guess we can't exactly make a pit stop for supplies." Pace joked as he placed the bucket in the incinerator.

Marcus carefully washed his hands at a sink before collecting the seeds he'd started planting. "A strange ship. The Argo changes course. And now a plant that appears infected." He shook his head. "This is all coming together in some sort of crazy coincidence."

Pace blinked at the word "coincidence". "...You said that if they're too close to the light, they could ripen faster. Are there any other technological aspects that could cause that?"

"Nothing that I can think of," Marcus said as he rubbed his chin. "With this being such a controlled environment, it is almost impossible for anything to go wrong with close monitoring."

"Then it's almost definitely a biological issue, if computers have nothing to do with it." Pace nodded to himself.

"Yes. If..." Marcus muttered. His eyes were drawn to the empty space in the rows of plants. The gap between tomato plants seemed to him now to be an area of dread.

Pace followed Marcus's eyes and frowned. "Aren't there sensors that monitor the gel and plant conditions? Humidity and temperature and all that..."

Nodding, Marcus moved towards the empty area. "There usually is some fairly regular scanning. I wonder why nothing was detected."

"Should we report it?" Pace asked. "They may need to run a system diagnostic."

Marcus shook his head. "We should check on that tomato - it might not be a contagion. I'd rather only report something if it actually IS something."

"If you say so." Pace nodded.

"Are you free now?" Marcus asked, looking towards the tomato that he'd split open. The fruit and its softness worried him more than he was willing to let on.

"I could look it over." Pace said as he approached the tomato. "I'll probably need equipment to run some tests later and be sure, though." He gave the tomato a searching look and waved his hand upwards a little to smell it. "....It doesn't smell rotten. And I don't see any mold. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't any mold spores."

"Perhaps we could head over to the science center and take a look?" Marcus inquired.

"Good idea." Pace agreed. "It'd be best if we had a sealed container to carry this in..."

Marcus rummaged in a tray of containers and found a box that could be hermetically sealed. Placing the tomato inside it, he nodded to Pace before heading to the doorway next to the elevators and towards Argo: Meat Lab.

Pace smiled to himself as he followed Marcus to the Argo: Meat Lab.

Kyarion walked through from the engine room and took an elevator to Argo: Quarters B.

Coming from the engine room, Zhora paid little attention to the room's occupants in her anticipation of the ship's arrival as she followed Kyarion to Argo: Quarters B.

Some time later, Marcus came out of the elevator and began cleaning up the various workstations and picking fruit - the work was more to keep himself busy than from necessity.

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Accessible locations from here:

Argo: Engine Room (accessed via doorway)

Argo: Quarters A (accessed via elevator)

Argo: Quarters B (accessed via elevator)

Argo: Computer Hub (accessed via elevator)

Argo: Entertainment & Mess Room (accessed via elevator or ladder)

Argo: Meat Lab (accessed via corridor next to elevator)

Argo: Technical (accessed via ladder)

Argo: Docking Bay (accessed via elevator)

Argo: Garage (accessed via elevator)

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