Anomaly
Memoirs of Ray Decker
Return to Start Here
Editor’s Note:
This separate memoir entry is preserved in the expanded edition of Transmigrant, of which only a single copy exists. The volume is housed in a sealed case at the Imperial Institute for Historical Reconstruction. Though undated, archivists estimate the entry was written by Ray Decker at approximately twenty years of age—roughly five years after the pivotal incident described at the conclusion of the text.
The piece is notable for its rare first-person insight into Decker’s early life aboard the generation ship Perseus, and for its candid emotional tone, which stands in contrast to the more composed voice of the main memoir. Whether intended for private reflection or eventual inclusion in the broader record is unknown.
Lysander Arkwright, Senior Fellow
9th Day of Solace, 1058 GR
When I was young, they thought I was lazy. But they didn’t understand.
They didn’t understand me.
I wasn’t lazy at all. I worked harder than all of my peers. I had to. They were better than me. Smarter than me. They understood it all easier than I did. It was natural to them.
To get good grades I had to work twice as hard—yet they called me lazy, lecturing me on work ethic, with no clue how exhausted I was at ten.
The rest of them could sit in their little education pods, watch the lectures, and test well. They could go to the lab and do well. It was almost no effort.
While they were playing after school, I was still in my pod, reading and re-reading. Watching lectures again and again. While they were roughhousing on the Ledo deck, I was in the lab again, trying to coax my beet seeds to grow.
Later when they began to pair off, exploring things like holding hands and kissing, I was in the lab still trying to remove perchlorates from regolith to make my soil nutritious for root and stalk.
While they were nurturing relationships, I was watching a tender sprout, weeks behind that of my peers, finally break through the soil.
But I was the lazy one.
To be fair, I probably was at times. I grew to hate botany. My peers couldn’t have imagined that mindset. They were designed to be good at it. They had been indoctrinated since before birth to love it. I was just average, trying to keep up.
But it wasn’t just in botany, the role we had been assigned since before our conceptions. It was true across the entire five-kilometer length of our world. Every being on the Perseus was engineered, designed, and educated to love a role that had been selected for them two centuries before they emerged from the birthing pods.
I had to work harder than everyone else because I was fundamentally out of alignment with the entire system. I wasn’t designed to be a botanist. But that was my role, and there was no escape from that prison sentence.
But that’s not really true either. You could escape. Right out the airlock. And maybe not by choice. My goal was to stay as far away from the airlock as possible. I was the most at-risk of the six thousand souls on board, and I knew it by the time I was nine years old.
Not Earth years. Tellarian years. Although I cannot remember the difference. I knew once when I was younger.
The mission would take 236 years. We were at the tail end of it. About a century ago, when we grew close enough to the star to understand the patterns on Tellarius, our future home, we had discarded the Earth-based calendar in favor of the new one that would carry us through to future generations.
I, unlike the generations that came before me, would live on the planet someday.
Some day soon.
It scared the shit out of me.
Maybe even more than the airlock. That would be a few seconds of pain and panic. I wondered if the pain and panic of being on a planet would last for my entire forty years of life.
I made mistakes. Dangerous ones. I did too well at things I was not supposed to know. I did too poorly at the things I should have done expertly.
My dad was always covering my tracks. He was a software guy. But every time he had to do it to cover for my mistakes, it put us all at risk. And I’d get a lecture from him.
Lectures at school. Lectures from Dad.
It came to a head when I was eleven. Too many red flags.
Garner was ready to label me as an anomaly. A tag that would, essentially, be a death sentence. And probably not just for me. Maybe for my whole family. Anomalies weren’t allowed.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
“You’ve got to work harder,” Dad said.
“I work hard all the time.”
“Really? Is that why you spent two hours in the flight sim last night? Is that why you spent an hour in combat training on Monday?”
“Everyone else gets done by two o’clock and does whatever they want.”
“Won’t be any consolation if they float you.”
Later that evening we met with Garner and the implication was clear.
“We have some concerns,” Garner said.
“Like what?” my mother asked.
“Ray’s not keeping up with his peers. His scores are low.”
“His scores are meeting the standard,” Dad countered.
“Yes, but barely. He should be exceeding the standard,” Garner said.
“Then why is it the standard?” Mom asked.
“That’s not the point,” Garner said. “He’s doing unusual activities.”
“Kids are allowed to participate in whatever activities they want,” Dad said.
“He shouldn’t want to do these activities. It’s unusual. Flight simulator time? Nobody in botany does that.”
“Ray does,” Dad said.
“He’s the only one. That’s the point,” Garner said.
“Nothing illegal about it,” Mom countered. “He’s allowed to like what he likes.”
“Technically true,” Garner said. “But there’s a pattern. Low scores. Choosing activities that aren’t normal for a botanist. Inferior product in the lab.”
“Again,” Dad said, “He meets the standards.”
“Look,” Garner said, “We all have jobs to do. You do, Ray does, I do. My job is to ensure the success of the mission. We can’t have anomalies.”
The word came as a shock as Dad stood and Mom put her face in her hands.
“What did you just say?” Dad asked, his voice tinged with menace.
“I’m not saying he is one,” Garner said, backtracking a bit. “But we have to be sure. So he’ll undergo the test. He needs a ninety-five to pass.”
“He’ll pass just fine,” Mom said, her voice soothing.
I spoke up for the first time. “I can do it,” I said.
And I was right. I got a ninety-six. The lab performance was the risk, but I got a ninety-three. Thankfully I did well enough on the written test to pass.
When I turned fourteen and we were less than a year from the new rich planet, I won the lottery. It shocked me and my parents and invoked envy from others.
Why should the lazy one get the prize?
It was a rather unpleasant year, feeling the stings of fiery darts thrown at me as a fourteen-year-old. It wasn’t my fault I won. I didn’t even enter. I didn’t even try. It was just automatic. A random selection. It just happened to fall on me.
There were efforts to withdraw and redo the lottery. But despite Garner’s disdain and suspicion of me, he let it stand.
I was fifteen when I stood on the planet for the first time. The first human being to leave a foot impression on the soil of this new world, our new home. Imagine being the only human being on a whole planet slightly larger than Earth!
But I was only there for a few minutes before the others came, under the light of a blazing hot star. It might have been the first time I ever felt truly warm.
Imagine our surprise when the radiation burns appeared later that day, followed by stinging pain and then the horror of our skin drying up and peeling off. We were sure it was the end of our mission. We had come to a world where the sun burns us.
We thought, at first, that it was a catastrophic failure, but we learned to manage it. Stay out of the sun during particularly bright days. Don’t spend more than a couple of hours with direct sun exposure to your skin; or, if you must, coat your skin with zinc oxide and kaolin clay to protect yourself from ultraviolet radiation. It was nothing we had expected—to get sunburned.
It was worse for botanists like me, forced to spend hours a day outside. But our bodies adapted. After a few cycles of burning and peeling, my skin darkened and the sun became less effective, like I’d built up a tolerance to the radiation. The medicalists explained it in terms of melanin and pigmentation—things beyond my understanding.
But my plants loved the sunshine. They grew in ways I had never achieved under the artificial lights of our generation ship. We quickly exceeded our food quotas. The work was hard and steady, but to our surprise, it took far less effort than we had planned to meet our nutritional goals.
We were settling into the planet nicely. In some ways, life here was easier—more relaxed—than it had ever been on the ship. There was no constant need to maintain fragile systems when the entire planet itself was one vast, natural life support machine.
But I was still the lazy one despite working longer hours than most. I produced nearly sixty percent more than my original quota, but I still lagged behind the others who regularly ran at 175% or higher. This became a point of contention with Garner.
And yet, we could not possibly have consumed all of the food we were producing. Since the planet was more productive than projected, Garner kept raising the quotas—not out of need, but to push us, even though we had fallen well below our original population, owing to the failure of the birthing lab.
Still, life here was mostly tranquil. Harder in some ways. Easier in others.
At least until the renders showed up and killed fourteen of us in under four minutes—mostly children, including the one girl I thought I might have a future with. She was just fourteen.
It broke me.
I’m still broken from it.
Transmigrant is a survival thriller in a speculative fiction setting. You can find the complete novel on Amazon. The audiobook version, narrated by Eric Priessman, is available on Audible.