Chapter 2 — The Ship That Never Looks Back

Three Bowls On The Table

Grandma had already prepared three bowls on the table when Khe Lam arrived, even though there were only two people having dinner.

It's a habit she's kept for many years, so long that Khe Lam can't remember exactly when it started — she only remembers one period, when she was little, she used to serve four bowls, then three, then kept it at three ever since. No one in the house ever said outright who the third bowl was for. Khe Lam learned not to ask questions from a very young age, with the instinct of a child realizing that there are questions that keep adults silent for longer than normal.

"Wash your hands before sitting at the table." Doan Bich Thu did not look up, his hand was still scooping synthetic seaweed soup from the pressure cooker, the familiar pungent smell spread throughout the small, narrow kitchen. She was over seventy, but her hands were still steady, and her voice still had the deep authority of someone who was the head of a recycled fabric weaving group before retiring. "What's the matter with you coming home so late today?"

"Repairing a pipe joint in the old corridor, near the heritage cable area." Khe Lam turned on the faucet, letting the regenerated water flow through her hand at the pre-programmed rate — twelve seconds, no more, no less, unless there was a special priority code. "Mr. Dang said he would report to higher authorities."

"Be careful with those old cables." She put the bowl of soup down in front of her, her eyes flashed with something hard to name - not really worry, not really just a normal warning. "In the past, people weren't as careless as they are now, but everything has its age."

Khe Lam ate in silence for a while, looking at the third bowl of soup placed quietly at the corner of the table, the heat rising and gradually dissipating into the cold air of the cabin. She once tried, when she was fifteen, to ask her grandmother directly who the bowl was to remember—mother, or father, or both. Grandma only replied one sentence, so brief that Khe Lam still remembered every word verbatim five years later: "To remember those who didn't have time to finish their meal." Then she stood up to clear the table, not giving her time to ask more questions.

Her father, Do Viet Khiem, died when she was twelve years old, in a maintenance accident recorded in official records as a "sudden pressure incident in the area near the Primordial Core". Khe Lam remembers very little about him — a large hand holding hers as she walked through crowded hallways, the smell of motor oil on his work shirt, and one last evening when he sat by the bed telling her about the stars, his voice low and slow as if reciting a private prayer between father and son.

She hardly remembers her mother at all. Lam Vinh Chi disappeared when Khe Lam was just one year old, in an event that his grandmother only ever called in the vague phrase "an accident at the Root Layer, it was very chaotic back then". There were no photos or records Khe Lam had ever seen that clearly state the details. Once, when she was in elementary school, she looked up her mother's name on the public Memories of Origin system at her neighborhood library, only to receive a brief gray message: "No records found matching current access permissions." She didn't try to look it up a second time. There were doors that close so tightly that people learn not to push anymore, just because every push hurts.

"Are you going somewhere tonight?" Grandma asked, when she saw Khe Lam finish eating faster than usual, she stood up to put the bowl in the dishwasher.

"I'm going out for a moment. Going for a walk." The answer was familiar, vague enough to not be a direct lie, specific enough that Grandma wouldn't ask further.

Doan Bich Thu looked at her for a moment longer than necessary, then nodded, returning to her work mending an old shirt with needle and thread by hand - a habit she kept from her time working in the weaving group, when automatic machines were not enough to serve all the fabric needs of the whole ship. "Return before curfew in the residential area. Don't let the security guard put your name on the night watch again."

"I know." Khe Lam put on a thin layer of clothing and walked out the door.

The walk to the Bottom Deck was a nearly forty-minute walk from her quarters, through three main corridors, two spiral staircases leading down closer to the Ring's spindle—where gravity was slightly lighter, enough to make each step feel a little unnaturally buoyant—and then a dark side corridor, with only a few lights working at intervals, weak yellow light falling on the rust-stained metal floor.

The Bottom Deck did not appear on any of the guide maps given to new residents, not because it was forbidden but because it was simply forgotten — an additional deck originally built for the purpose of storing spare supplies, then gradually emptied as more modern storage facilities were built in more convenient locations. Now it's home to a handful of people who don't want to, or can't, live in the official residential area — lonely elderly people, people who had had problems with the Phieu Khi file, and the old man Khe Lam was looking for.

Bui Dac Sinh sat on a homemade chair made of recycled metal frame, in front of a work table cluttered with old parts, the light from a small welding torch shone on his wrinkled face. He was in his seventies, perhaps closer to eighty — no one, including himself, remembered his exact age, because his original records were long lost in some sort of data system conversion. Khe Lam has known him since she was thirteen years old, when she wandered here for the first time after her father's funeral, looking for a place where no one knew who she was.

"There you go again, little girl." He didn't look up, his hand was still removing an old electronic component, as carefully as if he were performing surgery. "What can I bring you this week?"

"I brought some leftover copper wire from today's repair." Khe Lam sat down in the chair opposite, took out a small roll of string from his pocket, and placed it on the table. That was their tacit exchange — she brought him legal leftovers that the maintenance team was allowed to keep, and he exchanged them with old stories, pieces of memory about the ship that no textbooks taught.

"What's wrong with your face today?" He still didn't look up, but his voice had changed a little, so subtly that only people who had known him for many years would recognize it.

Khe Lam recounted the story of the water leaking pipe, the old gray cable bundle, and Vu Khac Dang's words about reporting to the Central Technical Committee. She told it as if it was just a normal work story, but while she was telling it, she noticed his hand stopping for a second on the part he was disassembling.

"Early cable." He repeated, slowly, as if he were tasting each word. "There's still a lot of early things still lying dormant under this shell, little girl. They built this ship more carefully than people want you to know."

"What do you mean?"

Bui Dac Sinh put down the components and looked straight at her for the first time. His eyes, although dimmed with age, still maintained a sharp gaze that made Khe Lam always feel like he was looking through him to see something behind.

"What I mean is that this ship is older than you've been taught to believe, and there are many layers beneath the one you're standing on." He spoke, his voice slow and somewhat incoherent, like someone choosing each word carefully so as not to say too much. "There are pipes, cables, leading to places that even the people in the Dome Level are no longer aware of. The pipe leaking water today — it's just a thermal expansion, just like your leader said. But sometimes small expansions like that are right next to much larger things, just no one has touched them."

Khe Lam was silent, waiting for him to continue. But Bui Dac Sinh just shook his head slightly, picked up the components again, and returned to his unfinished work as if the conversation had never gone further than a small talk between two acquaintances.

"Go home, girl. Before curfew." He said, not looking up again. "And if anyone asks you about that bundle of gray cables, don't tell me more than what you just told me."

That sentence stayed in Khe Lam's mind all the way home, weaving through every dark hallway and every spiral staircase, until she stood in front of the door of her small apartment, looking at the yellow light shining from the crack in the door where her grandmother was still awake, waiting for her to return. That old man never said a meaningless sentence to her. And for the first time in her life, Khe Lam realized she had just been warned about something — even though she didn't know what it was.

She stood outside the door for a while, letting the wind from the ventilation fan on the ceiling of the hallway blow across her face, trying to rearrange the disparate pieces in her mind: the strange hiss of valve number seven, the early gray cable bundle, Bui Dac Sinh's frozen eyes, and the three bowls on the dinner table that were always served even though there were only two people sitting down. None of that, in isolation, is worth worrying about. But when placed side by side, they evoked a vague feeling in her, like standing in front of a puzzle that was missing too many pieces to make out the true shape, though still enough to know for sure that the picture existed.

Inside, the clicking sound of grandmother's knitting needles stopped when the door opened. "Are you back?" She asked, without looking up from the shirt she was mending, her voice was so familiar that it became a part of the house itself, like the sound of a water pump running steadily behind the wall. Khe Lam responded with a short "yes", took off her coat, hung it on the hook in the familiar place, then went to her room, carrying the feeling that tonight, sleep would come later than usual.