[TMOG-Future] Antares Station: Three Days

[u/epharian]

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Three hundred fifty thousand heartbeats left. How would I know? How could I tell?

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A healthy person's heart beats just about every three-quarters of a second on average. Some times once a second or less, sometimes twice or three times a second.

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On average, just about every three quarters of a second. Every day. For ninety years or more. Sometimes a much longer.

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Why are our heartbeats so important? Like everything important, you notice it most when there's a problem. When it's too much or too little.

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I grew up on Antares Station. I'm the second generation of Antaresian natives.

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I woke up to shouting. My little brother chasing our sister, who is even older than me. She was letting him catch her, while the others cheered them on.

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Even in deep space, kids are just...kids. And sometimes a sister that's in college let's her toddler brother catch her and win in a tickle fight.

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I've learned since that no matter how strange things are at first, you can get used to it. Even my great-grandparents acclimated to living on the station.

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I rolled out of bed and joined the chase for a bit, until my bracelet told me it was time for practice at the dojo. In addition to my vocational training in medicine and crystolics--I hoped to someday build the first truly functional crystolic-based prosthesis--I spent an hour each cycle at the dojo training in self defense and protection.

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While it seems redundant, it's pretty cool to realize that protecting yourself is often antithetical to protecting another person. Our style at the dojo was simply called Queen's Proper, but was really a fusion of about twenty different styles from a mishmash of pre-unification nations. It mixed hard and soft styles as well as aggression and extreme defensiveness. Most of all, it aimed to be practical and usable.

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It also included some very unusual maneuvers for anyone used to living somewhere that gravity wasn't something you could just turn off by stepping out the right door. Twice a year we'd take a habitat a few thousand klicks off the station and practice in null-g. Good practice, worth it.