Chapter 3 — The Ship That Never Looks Back

Numbers On The Golden Board

Little Vinh, the daughter of the next-door neighbor, sat crouched on her doorstep when Khe Lam passed by the next morning, her hands clutching a hand-held learning board, her eyes red.

"What's wrong with you?" Khe Lam stopped and squatted down to her eye level. Vinh was fourteen years old and had just taken the Dinh Floor exam last week — an exam that every child born on Khoi Nguyen had to take exactly once in their life, with no chance of retaking it, no exceptions.

"I missed my wish level." Vinh said, his voice choked. "I want to enter the Seasons Layer like my mother, learning about plants. But my points are only enough to stay in the Roots Layer."

Khe Lam didn't know what to say to comfort her right away — not because there was a lack of words, but because she understood that feeling too well to pretend it wasn't as bad as the girl was feeling. The Ky Dinh Floor was designed, on paper, as a fair way to allocate manpower according to ability: a comprehensive test of logical thinking, fine motor skills, memorization and a face-to-face interview, administered simultaneously to every fourteen-year-old on the ship, the results of which determined which floor they would train and work on for the rest of their lives. But everyone knew, even though no one said it out loud, that children from the Dome Floor always had private tutors from the age of eight, while children from the Root Floor like Vinh only had a few short review sessions in between helping their families.

"The Roots aren't as bad as you think." Khe Lam said, trying to keep her voice sincere, not the cliché consolation that adults often use with children. "I've also been in the Root Layer all my life. There are days when I'm so tired that I don't even bother to eat dinner. But there are also days when I fix a pipe, hear the water flow again, and know for sure that I've just kept a thousand people with clean water for tomorrow's use. No one in the Season or Dome Layer feels that as clearly as the people in the Root Layer."

Vinh didn't answer, just lowered his eyes to the board, where the score number was clearly visible in red ink, next to the small words: "Allocation: Root Layer — Basic Engineering Team."

"Do you know why your interview score was low?" Khe Lam asked, his voice gentle. "I heard your mother tell you that during exam preparation week you still have to help sell goods at the market every night."

Vinh nodded, his eyes still glued to the board. "My classmate Thao was sent private review materials for half a year by her aunt - who works at Dome Floor - for half a year. She passed the Mua Floor with the highest score in the grade."

Khe Lam had no fair answer to give, because the truth was inherently unfair, and pretending it was fair would only make her feel worse when she realized it later. "Ky Dinh Floor is said to build abilities. But a fourteen-year-old's abilities are largely his family's abilities, not his own. I don't think it's your fault."

"So why do people still let it be an exam, sister?" Vinh looked up, the question suddenly sharper than his age. "If everyone knows the approximate result, why not say it directly, so people don't have to get their hopes up?"

Khe Lam stood silently for a moment before that question, a question that she herself, at the age of twenty, had never found a satisfactory answer to. "Maybe because if it's frankly unfair, people will have to fix it. As for making it look like a fair exam, people just need to comfort those who fail, and that's it." She patted the girl's head, then continued walking, carrying a familiar feeling of heaviness - a feeling she had had since she was fourteen years old, when standing in front of a similar sign, even though the result had never been a shock to her. She always knew she would stay at the Root Level. Not because of her grades, but because after her father passed away, no one in the family could afford to give her a private tutor, even when her grandmother sold most of the jewelry left over from her youth.

***

At noon, the entire Root Tuan Re group gathered at the familiar communal restaurant - a row of metal tables and chairs placed against the wall in the living area, where people exchanged Gas Tickets for pre-cooked meals from the collective kitchen. Trinh Yen My was already sitting when Khe Lam arrived, hunched over a notebook, writing something in small, neat handwriting.

"Learning more?" Khe Lam sat down opposite, placing the rice tray on the table.

"Review for technical promotion exam." Yen My did not look up. "Next month there will be a promotion review. If you pass, you will be transferred to the team responsible for the central water filtration system. The salary is higher, but you have to work more night shifts."

"Are you really planning to take the exam?" Phung Bao Nhan, who had just sat down next to him with an unusually full tray of rice, raised his eyebrows. "The night shift at the central water filtration area is rumored to be terrible. The guys working there say there are strange noises coming from the deep tunnels, no one dares to go alone."

"The strange noise is just due to acoustic resonance in the duct, there's nothing mysterious about it." Yen My closed her notebook and finally looked up. "Besides, I need more coupons. My mother's health is poor these days and she needs more regular check-ups."

Ha Dinh Khiem, sitting at the end of the table, was engrossed in telling a group of friends the same age about yesterday's pipe repair, exaggerating a few details to make the story sound much more suspenseful than it actually was. Khe Lam smiled faintly, eating while observing her three teammates - people she had worked with for six years, knowing how each held the welding torch, how each reacted when tired or worried, but had never, not even once, told them about the evenings she wandered to Deck Day, about old man Bui Dac Sinh, about the three bowls on her dining table.

There are things, she thinks, that people keep not because they don't trust them, but because they are so used to keeping them that they don't know any other way to share them.

"I heard there's a big Target Orientation Ceremony next month." Phung Bao Nhan suddenly spoke, his mouth still full of rice. "It's not a regular ceremony, it's a special ceremony - commemorating the two hundred and forty-seventh year of the journey, there are people from the Dome Level coming down to attend in the main hall of the Root Level, and it is said that the Council Elders will also come."

"Council Elders down to the Root Level?" Ha Dinh Khiem turned and his eyes lit up with curiosity. "I've never seen any Dome people down here, except for technical inspections."

"This is a big deal." Trinh Yen My said, her voice a bit more cautious than the excitement of the other two people. "Every time there is a big event like this, security checks will be tighter than the week before. Everyone, remember to keep your Gas Ticket records clean, don't get involved in anything unnecessary."

When Khe Lam heard that sentence, a strange feeling passed through her chest - not really fear, just a vague wariness, like the feeling she had last night when standing in front of her house, trying to put together the disparate pieces that had not yet taken shape. She hasn't done anything wrong. But Bui Dac Sinh's words - if anyone asks you about that bundle of gray cables, don't tell me more than what you just told me - suddenly echoed in her head, more clearly than when he said it.

"Did you hear anything about the old cable report yesterday?" She asked, trying to keep her voice normal as if she were chatting.

"Mr. Dang sent the report this morning." Phung Bao Nhan replied, not noticing anything strange in her question. "I heard that the Central Technical Committee responded quite quickly, saying they would send someone down to check more closely this week. Probably because the Destination Ceremony is coming up, they don't want any technical problems while the Dome people are landing."

The answer is reasonable, normal, nothing suspicious. But Khe Lam still felt a slight tension in his chest, the feeling of someone who just realized he was standing at the edge of something bigger than himself, even though he didn't know exactly what it was.

That afternoon, when her team received orders to mobilize to the area near Dong Sang to help repair an irrigation water pumping station, Khe Lam walked in the crowded hallway, still thinking about Vinh, about the red scoreboard, about how this ship divided people into clear classes as if it were a natural law and not a choice someone made a long time ago.

The pumping station is located right at the boundary between the Root Layer and the Season Layer, a transit area where two different gravities meet, creating a slight unsteady feeling every time you step through the partition threshold. The air here is different — more humid, carrying the smell of synthetic soil and steam from Dong Sang's drip irrigation system blowing back through the ventilation slots, instead of the familiar smell of hot metal and motor oil of the Root Layer. A middle-aged man wearing a green uniform from the Mua Floor stood waiting next to the broken pumping station, his arms crossed over his chest, an impatient expression on his face.

"Finally someone came down." He said, not really reproachfully but not very warmly either. "The vegetable bed on the third floor has been dry for nearly two hours. You guys told me forty minutes, now it's been over an hour."

"Sorry, we had to take care of another incident before we got here." Vu Khac Dang replied, his voice was calm but did not bend down, he put down the tool box and started checking the pump. Khe Lam realized, not for the first time, that the way the people of the Mua Floor talked to the people of the Root Layer always had a certain distance, not necessarily contempt, but never really considered them as equals - as if each layer was used to its position in an order that no one wrote into law but everyone understood implicitly.

Repairing the pump took less than twenty minutes — just a blown fuse due to overload, a small matter compared to what her team usually handled. On the way back to the Root Floor, Phung Bao Nhan mumbled something about the people of the Mua Floor always overdoing everything, but Khe Lam just remained silent, looking through the glass separating the green vegetable beds under artificial lights stretching far and wide - a world completely different from hers, only separated by a wall, but as strange as if they belonged to two different ships.

My heart still thinks about how, perhaps, not all the choices of those who came before have been fully told to those who come after - about Vinh and the red scoreboard, about the invisible boundary between floors that everyone walks through every day but few stop to ask why it exists, and about Bui Dac Sinh's words that still echo somewhere in her head like a reminder that hasn't yet been fully deciphered.