"I'm very grateful for the hard work and the find. The patients suffering from acute radiation exposure are still in the balance, but it improves their odds considerably. Five more have been identified as they leave the latent stage and came in for treatment, and the others are getting worse, so you've found them just in time, really. It's likely to be several weeks before everyone is fully recovered. In five days, we'll know whether anyone else is likely to die of it."

"Reactor's fine so far. Little to report."

"Do you think you could raise the new modules we brought back yesterday?"

"Only one each day, we don't have enough skilled hands to go faster safely. And we're using up a lot of our stocks of, I guess, 'hard resources', with all this construction, by the way. Hardware, electrical equipment, that kind of thing. Running the vehicles will wear that down too some, the environment isn't exactly friendly here- Things wear out, need replacing. It's not a major concern yet, and also there's plenty to salvage out in that debris field, but it's definitely something to be aware of."

"We can make more. The workshops and maintenance facilities attached to each module have all the tools and databases needed to run small-scale industry. Just about the only thing we can't do yet is fabricate new processors, but we have the tools to make the tools, there. Though specialized industries like that rely on specialized knowledge."

"There are tons and tons of spare field programmable gate arrays and other chips specifically because they're harder to make more of. Those are like generic all-purpose CPUs, sort of. Anyway. The bottom line is, we can make more hardware things like gears, bearings, batteries, and motors if we have the raw materials. Full machine shop and so on. Getting the raw materials is a medium-term concern- We'll need to identify good mine sites, set up a mining module, and then haul out the automated extractor and turn on the refineries. Plenty of electricity for it thanks to the nuke plant, and I was looking over the plans and think we can recycle some of the waste heat from depleted steam in industrial use too."

"I'm keeping an ear to the ground as far as the mood in the colony goes. People are relieved, of course, but that just leaves space for questions, like where the fuck are we and what happened. Morale is above average right now. Six out of ten. We definitely want to go look for the bridge and get the full story now, though."

"The two heavy transports are alright and can keep salvaging today, but our rovers need a break for recharging and maintenance, as I mentioned before."

"Nina, can you set up the other habitat module we recovered? Giving people more space to stretch their legs will soothe down tempers... Tomorrow it'll be the recycling module to preserve our supplies as best we can, then a second hydroponics module, then a mining module, and we'll go from there depending on what else we recover and how the situation develops."

"Sounds like a plan, boss. I guess there's no such thing as weekends around here."

"Perhaps once we're more established. In the meantime, the call for names for our new home has resulted in... Extensive... Results. Does anyone want to review them with me to pare it down? We might end up having to do two rounds of voting- To cut a list of dozens down to three to six or so, and then to choose one from that."

"Hoo boy, what are people saying to get that reaction out of you? I submitted 'Exodus' and 'Nova Terra' and 'Svalbard', but now I gotta see this."

He passes out datapads wordlessly.

Aeternis
AnyPort
Astraux
Aurora
Autonomous Republic of Crash Survivors
Avalon
Avalon't
Beyoncé
Blessing
Bob
Carver
Charon
Cryos
Cryothis
Discovery
Dog
Earth Two
Eclipsia
Eden
Eminent Domain
Endurance
Enterprise
Exodus
Exponential Growth
F1rst
Faith 
Fimbulheim
Foundation
Freljord
Frostbound
Frosthaven
Glacies
Glacium
Hawaii
Hesperis
Hibernia
Hope
Htrae
Icehole
Icelis
Igloo
Janus
Junkyard
Jörmungandr 
Marisa Espanoza
McMurdo
Michaelangelo
Mir
Nadir
New New York
Nivis
Nordis
Nova Terra
Oops
Permafrost
Pitcairn
Planet'); DROP TABLE SUBMISSIONS;
Pluto
Refuge
RenDaire
Santa's Workshop
Saturn 
Shark
Solstice
Stygia
Svalbard
Tabula
Target
Tenacity
Test option please vote for this
Thule
Valley of the Wind
Von Neumann
Wegotthis
Whiteout
Whiteplains
Winterhold
Yellow Submarine

 "...And that's only a little bit of it."

Dog. Seriously... Dog???

"'Please vote for this'? Okay, that's actually kind of hilarious."

She can't help but let out a snort of laughter at the 'drop table' one.

"At least people are having fun. I'll go over the deluge with you, Shen. Let's filter out all the jokes then post it, vote for however many you like, the ten with the most votes survive to round two?"

The first half of Marlene's life is directed toward structure and stability. Her parents are college graduates with big dreams and big debts, and she can't follow them. She knows it's a weakness, that she has the potential to launch the next Amazon or discover the Theory of Everything, but she can't. She gets a job unsticking robots in a warehouse and lives with her parents until she can afford a pipefitting class.

She knows it's a selfish, privileged thought, but she thinks it anyway: she can handle being poor, but she can't handle being broke, which is a different thing that's not entirely about money. Maybe the 'human touch' pays better than carrying shit for the actual pipefitter, but it leaves her mom a wreck every weeknight, and Marlene is not going to let herself get trapped in that cycle of burnout. So what, she's selfish and privileged and can't bear to think about how lots of people say they can't handle being broke and then go broke anyway.

It helps that she's lucky enough to actually enjoy rice and beans. It helps that she can fit herself into a tiny room without getting antsy about it. It helps that she doesn't have any expensive medical issues - and obviously she's not going to transition until she can afford the endogenous estrogen gene therapy, which costs as much as a car, and not a budget brand. (The implants are nice if you don't want to take pills every day, but they only last a few years, which is useless as far as she's concerned.)

When she turns thirty, her parents give her the money they had wanted her to use for college. It's not much, objectively, but it's about what she saves in a year, and it's enough for her to start studying to be an aircraft mechanic. "You always wanted to fly," her dad says. "Lots of people work in ground crew while they study to be pilots, right?" (She does not actually have what it takes to be a pilot, and he would know that if he actually looked. Then again, he somehow hasn't figured out that she's trans, despite her friends calling her 'Marlene' in front of him.) She snarls. "Where did you hear that, maybe last month when I was talking about my classmate Gary?"

She graduates and moves to Albany. She apologizes to her dad. She earns more money than she's ever had in her life and saves half of it.

The second half of Marlene's life is about enjoying the structure and stability she's secured.

She does her job. Night shift sucks, but if everyone hates it that's all the more job security for her. She runs every evening before work and then binges Wikipedia on the bus to the airport with her phone brightness on max, obsessing about a new topic every week or two.

She buys an old, sturdy computer and learns to program. She fills her GitHub with a dozen projects, each abandoned with more TODOs than functions. She downloads hundreds of pirated textbooks and reads the first chapter of each.

She finally transitions. (The way with pills every day; she likes having savings.)

And then, the Exodus project begins. It's obviously the purpose her life was missing up to now.

But can she get in? A background in the military would have been nice, like all those old astronauts. Her current job in aircraft maintenance seems like the next best thing. The only problem is that it's her only thing, and that's not good enough.

She makes a list of skills it would be nice to have. There's no way she's going to become a licensed engineer, but she can learn the basics, right? Actual engineers probably spend their day using specialized software for simulations that needs a bunch of on-the-job training anyway, right? She doesn't actually know if that's true, but it's her only hope. She finishes reading some of the textbooks and does the exercises. She's not going to be as reliable as a real expert, nor as comprehensive as a thumbdrive of files, but she's aiming in between those two: real, living, flexible understanding of the core parts of many fields.

She writes a terrible text-only rip-off of Kerbal Space Program. She makes flash cards. She begs every contact she has to get her a chance to shadow different engineers for an hour and see what their work is actually like. (And then she makes a list of everything she didn't understand.)

The Exodus applications open. She writes up a 'resume' that describes why she thinks she fills a valuable niche, only mentioning her traditional qualifications at the end - 8 years at United Airlines, Aviation Tech with A&P Certificate - and then getting weird again to say that she has studied to be an Avionics Technician too but didn't bother taking the test because that would mean less time for studying.

She gets in! ...to the training program. Which is also an extended interview. She worries every day that this will be the day they decide that she's too easily tired or unsociable or should have started studying a decade earlier, and each dinner the gossip is about someone else getting canned.

Launch date approaches. She gives away her savings to her friends, everyone who helped her, even hunts down that now-retired pipefitter. And a bit for her parents, grudgingly. 

She's not the next Bezos or Einstein, she knows that now. It was never an option. But she has a purpose on the mission. She can handle everything about about launching shuttles, even if the computers are destroyed and they have to do the math by hand, and she can design a replacement for any part if it's only one part missing and her replacement is allowed to be heavier and worse. She's not a genius, giving new insights to humanity. She's not even a mediocre mechanical engineer. But she can keep this chunk of knowledge alive.

Now it's the third ...half... of Marlene's life. It's exciting being on a new planet, of course, but stability is still vital. Carver is in charge now, and they have protocols for establishing a new government, and they must balance between populism and totalitarianism.

Her name submissions were Janus (kinda obvious, already the name of a moon of Saturn) and Icehole, which she hopes the officers don't veto. She meant it seriously, as a way to keep morale up.

"Hey. Merta. How are you?"

Mumble.