By the end of the week, Rin was exhausted and very lonely. It wasn’t like he didn’t have anyone to talk to (Mikey was always there and never silent) but he didn’t know most of the people. And those he has met, he didn’t feel like he could share anything with. He drafted three letters to Maggie in the meantime but had no way of sending them while the ship was in subspace. There were ways to send data out into normal space via special buoys and those were used for emergencies and navigation reports, but not for personal communication. Plus, Rin used one of the free mail apps, and it’s not like a buoy would download a whole posting service just on his whim.

Drafting letters was the only time he was able to let himself ruminate on his current situation as the rest of his time awake was spent stressing over his job. Or his own incompetence. No, he figured out all of his routines and started doing solo shifts (without Mikey or Andrade having to watch over him) but this was the subspace where nothing happened for a pilot. In a week, they would return to normal space and have to dock at the Colossus space station, and he was absolutely not prepared for that. Maybe, part of this anxiety was Andrade clearly not satisfied with his performance. (One shift change, Andrade made him stay for a full half an hour until he managed to report in a way the Chief Pilot found satisfactory. Nothing happened during the shift so it felt like deliberate mockery.) (Later, Rin received a message from Künney Oyun, who shared a shift with Andrade, in which she offered her encouragement and promised Andrade was such an ass only 70% of the time.)

Rin didn’t have access to any of his textbooks anymore or to the online library (subspace, as mentioned) so he couldn’t easily look up the basic theories behind most of the not automated functions. When he voiced this anxiety one night (Rin was preparing to go to bed, while Mikey just woke up), Mikey gave him a long look and finally said: “Well, we do have a library on the ship…” He didn’t sound very confident.

Rin wasn’t sure what this hesitation meant, so he raised his eyebrow. “That sounds like a ‘but’ is incoming.”

Mikey let out a nervous laugh. “In a way… I mean, I don’t think you’d have any trouble. You are new and all. It’s just…”

“Just what?”

“Let’s say there is a lot of bad blood between the librarian and the chief pilot.”

So that didn’t help Rin’s anxiety levels when he took the lift pod down to the seventh deck, the last one available to passengers. It was smaller than the main decks because part of it was occupied by the top half of the subspace engine. One side had a spa (mostly featuring high pressure pods and moisturising liquids. Water was quite precious on a spaceship) and the other contained a library. The corridor had many other doors but the schematic showed them all as inoperational. Rin’s guess was that during the building of this ship, no one had distinct plans for what to put and where, so cabins were eventually transformed into the archive.

The corridor was also empty and quiet. He could hear people on the other side in the spa lobby, but not here. The library wasn’t necessarily brightly advertised on the cruise board and it worked 4 hours a day, drifting between the shifts. Plus, generally, people had their own downloads to bring with on their interfaces because they didn’t take much storage space. So maybe it wasn’t surprising. It was still eerie.

The entrance door was open so Rin swallowed, stepped through and found himself in a big well-lit room crammed with floor-to-ceiling catalogue cabinets. Each housed hundreds of data storage nodes with their purple charging lights flickering slowly. There was a database terminal and a sitting area, and he could see doors leading to other rooms with more cabinets but all of it was void of humans.

Wait, no.

In the corner to his left, a small station was set up (just two desks stacked together in an L shape, two stationary interfaces, and a small storage corner clearly used to prepare hot drinks), where the librarian was sitting reading a book. Rin expected him to look old or like a nerd or like an old nerd, but instead he mostly looked intimidating. Even sitting, he was clearly tall, his dark hair slicked back and straightened, his eyebrows in a frown, and his black eyes focused on a book (holy shit, he was reading an archaic book, one of those that had actual lists of plastic you had to turn in order to read), not older than Andrade. He reminded Rin of a character in a superhero movie, one that would either be a secret agent or a mercenary. 

A second later, the librarian looked up from the book and his face assumed a neutral expression. It still looked really intimidating. Rin finally found his voice and blurted out: “Hello, I’m new.” Wow, that was phenomenal.

There was a tiniest change in the librarian’s expression, but Rin couldn’t understand it. It could be both amusement or annoyance. “Hello, I can see that.” Okay, even his voice sounded like an actor’s voice, deep and steady. “Have you come here deliberately or are you lost?”

Rin sighed as he felt embarrassment touch his cheeks. So far, his interactions with anyone outside the cockpit were quite disastrous. “Sorry. I… I came here deliberately, yes.”

The librarian slipped a bookmark between the pages and closed the book carefully then put it down in front of him. He turned his chair to access the interface and started tapping on the keyboard. “I see you are part of the cockpit crew. I can set up the access for you if you send me your ID.”

Rin tried to compose himself and stepped closer to the station. He accessed his interface and sent the file to the local board. “I’m Rin Richard. Third Pilot.”

“Andrew Haasan.” He flicked his gaze up at Rin and back. “What brings you to the library then, Mr Richard?”

“Uh, I hoped to find manuals or physics textbooks, and Mik- Mr Thoresson said you have a big database.”

Hasaan’s eyebrow moved ever so slightly but it felt like a very deliberate change in expression. “Did he? Did he also say that he is yet to return three different interfaces, only one of which he took in person and the other two he convinced other crew members to take for him?”

Rin felt a shiver run down his spine. This was like one of those interrogations in a crime procedural. A special agent acting all nice and friendly until he casually dropped threats in the same voice. “No… no, he failed to mention it. Sir.”

“Lovely.” Haasan murmured, face still neutral. He finished setting up a profile and looked up at Rin. “You will not try to get documents for Mr Thoresson under the pretence of getting them for yourself, are we clear?”

Rin nodded. “Crystal clear, sir.”

“Marvellous. Let me show you the system, then.”

Haasan was indeed over a foot taller than him, and Rin had a strange dizzying sensation in his head when they stood next to each other at the database terminal. Most other people were taller than him, but this was something else. He shook the thought away to concentrate on what he was being shown.

So the Hopestar library didn’t share downloads, which was similar to how libraries on Earth operated. But there you could just access the database through a steady outnet connection and read online. Without access to the outnet, a different system had to be implemented. The library offered rentable interfaces that could be extended into several formats but their data storage capacity was pretty limited. You could store several books (or a single big almanack) and take them back to your cabin, then return a few days later once you’ve finished reading. The connection distance for the interfaces was quite low, so you had to walk up to a data node to download. But it also meant you didn’t have to charge the interfaces at all.

Haasan led him through several long rooms full of cabinets to the technical section. They found the number of a required data node in the database previously, and with it being in the top row, Haasan had to be the one to raise the interface to download. Rin didn’t feel embarrassed about that, not at all.

“I guess not many passengers use this system? Easier to download an archive of works instead of coming over again and again?”

Haasan looked down at him. “True. But this library is not for entertainment. It’s for knowledge preservation.”

Rin blinked and finally understood. “Like… the kind of books usually erased from public databases?...”

“Precisely. Literature, fiction and nonfiction, historical records, scientific research written by the stamped and for the stamped. But not only that. Cultures that are forced to integrate into the ‘common’ society. Works of those who live in Gemi space or on mixed colonies. And Gemi writing translated into common languages. All downloaded and stored here for preservation and free access.”

Rin looked over at the rows of shelves, wondering how many billions of documents were here. Some of these were probably backups of the same nodes, and then backups of backups. What if they ran out of space? What if they ran out of energy? 

And no one on Earth or immediate colonies would care. 

Haasan handed him the interface, snapping Rin out of this thought. “There’s enough space to fit something small in. If you are not into casual reading, it may be time to start.”

Rin chuckled and looked up at him. “Maybe it’s time to re-read Kaito Sen’s bibliography all over again. This time, without worrying about writing essays on it.”

Haasan raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t it from the twenty fifth century? That’s quite a niche interest to simply stumble into.”

So, he didn’t expect Haasan to just know this author from the top of his head. But then again, he was a librarian. He was reading physical books. He had to be smart and knowledgeable like this.

“Yes… There was a minor degree course on old literature at the academy, and I felt bored enough to apply… Kaito’s works were the most comprehensive ones we studied.”

Haasan’s gaze felt like it could pierce through his skull and see what’s inside. But instead of feeling uneasy, Rin felt a strange sensation of excitement. 

“Let me recommend a different author to you then: Mahra Al-Muqit. She wrote in a similar style but the stories were much more compelling.”

Rin followed him back to the first room with a slight frown. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of her…”

“Of course not. She lived in times where she could openly live as a queer person. Nowadays, you would call her ‘deviant’. So her works would not be studied in the standard education system.”

Rin looked down. Instead of uneasy, he felt… sad. And a bit guilty. He never thought about anything like this before. It was easy to think the stamped people were some kind of weird phenomena existing on the fringes of society. But they were just people, and it meant they had thoughts and history like everyone else. 

“Did she also write historical fiction then?” He asked as casually as he could.

“Yes. But specifically, queer historical fiction.” Haasan stopped in front of a cabinet and looked down at Rin. “Still interested?”

Without hesitating too long, Rin nodded. “Yes.”