Chapter 12 — The Ship That Never Looks Back

Subject Does Not Have Correct Answer

"Are you going down to the technical area alone again?" Uong Khac Tram asked, sitting down opposite Bach Van in the navigator student's private reading room, where the simulated natural light was much softer than the industrial lights of the Root Floor that he had just left an hour ago. "You know teacher Vuong doesn't like students leaving their assigned areas without notice."

"I asked permission properly, I just didn't tell you." Bach Van replied, opened the notebook, turned to the page he just wrote in area forty-two. "I need actual data for my module report on spline systems."

Uong Khac Tram raised his eyebrows, his eyes glanced over the notebook page with undisguised curiosity. She was the only student in the class to come from the Mua Floor, having passed the Dinh Floor with an unusually high score four years ago, and since the day she entered the Dome Floor, she had learned to observe things more closely than her fellow students who were born with all the privileges—a survival habit of someone who always had to prove she deserved to be here.

"Did you see anyone down there?" She asked, her voice gentle but somehow searching.

"A maintenance engineer came to re-check the repair." Bach Van replied, trying to keep his voice normal, even though Do Khe Lam's strange question about the forty-first year of his journey still lingered in his mind. "She explained the coupling mechanism quite clearly, helping me understand much better than reading the textbook."

"Root layer people?" Tram asked, not with disdain but with a mixture of curiosity and implicit understanding — she herself had once stood on the outside looking into this Dome Floor world. "Be careful. Not because there's anything wrong with them, but because if someone sees you spending too much time talking to people outside your class, someone will ask questions — especially the son of the Chief of Instruction."

Bach Van did not answer immediately, just closed the notebook. He knew Tram was right, even though he didn't want to admit it. As the only son of Kieu Trong Nghiem — the head of the agency that drafts and censors the ship's entire educational program — Bach Van's every action carries an invisible weight that other students did not have to bear. His father always reminded him, since he was young, that family reputation was something built over many generations but can collapse in a single moment of carelessness.

That evening, when he returned to his family apartment in the upscale residential area of Floor Dome — much more spacious than what Bach Van had seen when he had the chance to visit Floor Floor's living quarters, although he himself had never thought much about that difference until recently — Bach Van sat at his desk, opening his optional reference for a maritime history report.

His father was reading documents in the office next door, the door ajar revealing a warm yellow light and his figure bent over the desk - a familiar image that followed Bach Van's childhood, his father always busy with work whose importance he never really understood until he started the pilot training program and realized that the Department of Instruction controlled nearly everything taught on the entire ship.

"Dad." Bach Van lightly knocked on the door frame. "Can I ask you a question, dad?"

Kieu Trong Nghiem looked up, took off his reading glasses, and signaled his son to come in. "You ask."

"The ship's history textbook I'm studying has a section to read more about the first years of the voyage, but it's quite sketchy." Bach Van said, standing in the doorway. "I'm curious, why isn't that stage taught in detail like the later stages?"

There was a very brief moment, almost unnoticeable if Bach Van were not a son who had lived under this roof for sixteen years, observing his father long enough to notice every single change in his face—a pause in his eyes, a slightly longer-than-normal breath before answering.

"The first phase of the journey is largely purely technical issues — calibrating systems, stabilizing operational processes." Kieu Trong Nghiem replied, her voice returning to its usual calmness, to the point that Bach Van almost doubted that he had just imagined the pause. "There aren't many historical landmark events to teach in depth, unlike later periods where there are stories about people, about community resilience, that are easier to inspire students."

"I understand." Bach Van nodded, although the answer did not completely satisfy his curiosity. "Thank you, father."

He returned to his room, but his father's answer was still lingering in his head, resonating with the strange question of the maintenance engineer he met that afternoon. Both — one at the pinnacle of the ship's educational powers, the other at the base of the working class — each, in their own ways, display an unusual sensitivity when it came to that same obscure period of history. A coincidence, perhaps. But Bach Van had learned enough about probability in astronomy to know that sometimes, what looked like coincidence was just the sign of an unrecognized pattern.

He opened the optional reference material — a digitized collection of old technical reports, mostly dry and lengthy, which few students actually read in their entirety because it wasn't required for the exam. He scanned the headlines, looking for anything related to the fortieth year or so of the journey. Much of the literature on that period focuses on routine, unremarkable maintenance reports.

But in a side table of contents, near the bottom of the list, he found a short note: "See also: Operating Modification File 041-H (additional access required)."

Bach Van looked at that text for a long time, her finger hovering above the screen. 041-H. He didn't know what that number meant, but the phrase "additional access required" caught his attention — during his four years in the navigator program, he had never encountered an elective reference with such limited access. Elective material, by definition, should be open to all qualified students.

He tried clicking on the note, and the screen displayed a familiar message, short and cold: "This document has been moved to a restricted classification. Please contact the Founding Archives to request access, with a valid reason."

Founders Archives. Bach Van had been there once during a mandatory first-year tour of the training program, a vast space with countless shelves of physical and digital records, manned by old, quiet archivists. He never had a reason to go back there, until now.

He sat quietly in front of the screen, pondering. Part of him — the part that still believed in the system his father represented, the part that had been taught since childhood that any restriction of access had a legitimate reason to protect public order — wanted to close the document, continue writing the report with what he had, forget about the number 041-H as an inconsequential detail not worth worrying about.

But another part, the part that made him choose the navigator profession over any other easy path that his background could open up, is the part that still clearly remembers what his mother — Tong Bich Vuong, who spent his entire life as a navigator before passing away from illness six years ago — once said when he was young: "A good navigator is not someone who always knows the way. It is someone who never stops asking whether the path he is pointing is really the right one." — that part made him type into the search box a new request line, sent to the Founding Archives, asking for access to file 041-H, with the clearly stated reason: "Additional research for the maritime history module report."

He sent the request before he could change his mind, then sat watching the confirmation screen appear, his heart beating strangely faster for such a seemingly simple action — as if, somewhere deep inside, he had sensed that he had just knocked on a door that shouldn't have been knocked on, and now had to wait to see who would open it, or if it would open at all.

He turned off the screen and went out to the small balcony attached to his room - one of the rare privileges of residents of the Dome Floor, a private space overlooking a large simulated window, where the stars were reproduced with much higher detail than the public screen on the Root Floor that Bach Van had heard about through a classmate who had the opportunity to visit the residential area down there. He stood looking out at that simulated space for a long time, thinking about his mother, about the evenings when she had stood with him in this very position, showing him how to distinguish the constellations named according to old legends from Earth, names that had transcended two hundred and forty-seven years of light and time to exist in the memories of children born who had never known what the sky really looked like.

"Is the path I'm pointing really correct?" He muttered her words back, looking up at the motionless points of light, and for the first time in his four years in the navigator program, he wondered if that question applied not only to the technical navigational decisions he would have to make in the future, but also to the very historical path this entire ship had traversed, long before he was born.