Forgotten Skies
Feusel was impatient. Granted, he had good reason to be impatient. He waited for the transmission from Lake Bonneville about where he would serve a mission for Golden Deseret.
It was supposed to come in today. That’s what the local bishop had told him. He drummed his fingers on the store counter. No one was even coming in to the storehouse to get food, but he had to sit here for six more rotations of the station before he could—
His transmitter vibrated.
With no customers, he pulled it out of his pocket. It was from his mother. The transmission arrived. It would be waiting for him at home.
He pranced around the room, delighted at the news. After an entire year of waiting—sixty thousand rotations—it was finally, blessedly, thankfully, amazingly here. Missions were difficult to go on in Golden Deseret, especially the mission Feusel had applied for. He wanted to go on an exploratory mission, meet new cultures, go to new planets. What if he got sent to the Zenos System? No one from Station Sariah-9 had gotten called that far away.
Missions usually occurred in your local area. “It is good for the Lord that you serve your fellow beings” was usually the call, and then the local administration would assign you to various tasks. Help the elderly. Serve in the storehouses. Clean the outside of the station (even though, in space, it didn’t get too dirty. Sariah-9 did, though, because it went into an atmosphere and out of the atmosphere of Dantu-10, the planet it cycled around). Garf had been assigned station cleaning duty.
How was station cleaning duty serving God? Feusel had wondered. Garf seemed to have accepted it as such, but Feusel couldn’t. He was going to serve the people of a far-off system. He knew it. And he knew that God knew it too. He trusted the Apostolic Brethren to assign him to the correct space where God needed him—in an outer system.
He knew he was going to get called to an outer system for two reasons: he had taken language courses in school and had emphasized engineering work. It was honestly probably the only way off this station—get picked up by the Golden Fleet as it buzzed out of Golden Deseret into the cold reaches of space. To do that, Feusel had known he needed knowledge of ships (engineering) or knowledge of how to make contact with others (language). Serving a mission, especially one in even a lesser out quadrant like Alma-62 or Beta Gamma, would propel him out of this station and into a new life.
He hadn’t let himself dream until this moment. If Golden Deseret and the Apostolic Brethren felt he was needed in his local area, the bishop would’ve been the one to tell him. But because a transmission had come through—well, that meant something different than space ship hull cleaning for his service.
He couldn’t get too carried away with his thoughts though. Big universe, Feusel, he told himself as he tried to busy himself with cleaning the already clean storehouse. Time started to slow down and speed up as his last six rotations passed. No one came in—middle of the month storehouse duty was a drag because most people only came at the beginning of the month—and finally, blessedly, thankfully, his replacement arrived.
Feusel rushed home on his scooter, dodging and weaving in between the little amount of traffic throughout the station. Sariah-9 was a storage station. It held food and supplies for the people working on Dantu-10. That’s why it went up and down through the atmosphere regularly. Honestly, probably another reason Golden Deseret had sent him a transmission. Feusel could handle planetary entry.
Bursting through the door, Feusel was met with a loud cry of “Surprise!” His mom had gathered together what looked like everyone he had known so he could open his call. He beamed at all of them—even Garf (technically Elder Hansen now, because he was still on his mission) had been allowed by Bishop Staves to come. Feusel beamed at them all. He tried to make pleasantries, but all he could focus on was the transmission machine on the wall.
Everyone knew Feusel’s attention was hyper focused, so they let him be as he made his way through the room of friends to the transmission beacon. With a shaking finger, he reached out his hand and touched the screen.
A hologram materialized in the middle of the room. Sister Genju S. Hazi, Fourth in the Apostolic Brethren, materialized. Feusel couldn’t keep a smile off his face. If Sister Hazi was the one to give him his call, he knew he was going to the frontier. She was over missions outside the Empire.
“Dear Brother Feusel Cunningham,” she began. The hologram stared at the wall behind Feusel because it was recorded rather than live. Probably not even recorded—just run through a program and then delivered. “You are hereby called to serve as a missionary for Golden Deseret. You are assigned to labor—“
This was it, Feusel thought. The moment he had been waiting for. The moment—
“—on Earth in the planetary shipyards.”
Feusel felt his stomach drop. Sister Hazi kept talking, but Feusel didn’t want to listen. Earth. Planetary shipyards. Earth was the farthest away from where he wanted to be. It was the center of the Empire, sure, but still—the planetary shipyards? He wanted to serve as an engineer on a spaceship, not on some simplistic planet.
“The Forgotten Skies will be there to pick you up at the assigned time.”
Everything he had done, everything he had worked for, and he was being forced to go to Earth.
The transmission ended, and everyone cheered. It wasn’t as loud of a cheer as he thought he would’ve gotten if he was called to Alma-62. People patted him on the back, shook his hand, hugged him. When everyone had left, his mother told him Forgotten Skies would be here in seventy-two rotations, which wasn’t too long.
Forgotten Skies, what type of imperial transport is that?
Resignedly, he started to pack his things to start his next two years at the center of Golden Deseret.
I am participating in #Archtober from the ARCH-HIVE. They challenged creators to create something every day, or every other day, for the month of October and base it on a theme. I’m free writing for 30 minutes every two days based on the two-day schematic and theme rules they’ve established. So, the writing will probably not be super coherent, but it’ll be fun.
Missions are central to the lifeblood of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They are communally perceived to be the change from childhood into adulthood, the journey into becoming an actual part of the society, in which you can then reproduce within the society, engage in greater service, and be fully accepted as an (almost) agential being. I tried to envision how missions might appear in Golden Deseret, which is a post-Millennium space empire run by the theological inheritors of Mormonism.
