Jupiter Blues

It is dark here. The lights in the workspaces flicker intermittently without conviction. We do our jobs like anybody in any factory might do theirs. Shifts are maintained, people complain that they work too hard for too few credits. You hear all the bitching and moaning, same as if we are in your town, down the street from where you live, or work, rather than six years out from Earth Orbit. In this regard we share a commonality. The difference is that if we cannot do our jobs, your planet, our planet, will be lost.
Pipes above and below the passageways constantly drip water heavily from the internal pressures and differential humidity. It is always dank in the work spaces. Constant dripping and sweating from the men and equipment cause the air to smell like steel and old onions. There are actually crews whose only duty is to minimize the safety risk of water on the decks. You would see the same things on an oil-rig or a ship carrying any liquid or pressurized cargo. The pipes are color coded, based on what they carry, wrapping the internal sections of the ship in a labyrinthine cocoon of multicolored weeping metal. The ships really are more like off-shore oil platforms but with all the working parts inside the hull. Oh yeah, they also orbit about 200 to 250 miles above the surface of a planetary moon.
The word is that we are running out of air. O2. You know; Oxygen, the stuff you take for granted every day, a couple of little, fairly common atoms combined that you likely never think about. Well, if things work right, we make it, Oxygen, sort of. The hilarious irony of running out of air here is that we are running an oxygen processing vessel, an irony that will not be wasted if we all suffocate. Oh yeah, if that isn't bad enough we are losing orbital integrity; we are descending into the Ionian atmosphere. Plans have failed and contingencies seem too few to discuss.
Darkness has enveloped the project. I heard that a couple of our sister oxygen processor ships have already fallen through the atmosphere into the fiery morass, some 200 miles below. We circle the Jovian moon, Io, in our own Oxy-Scrubber. It feels like we are in a declination of descent, slowly losing our orbital ellipsis. It gets in your gut after you have been out here a while you begin to feel the flow of space around the vessel. Like sailing a ship on the ocean, you begin to sense the delicate changes in attitude and direction. I am certain that we are falling, nearly imperceptibly, very, very slowly.
Crashes or rumors of crashes are always big news. Word travels quickly through the workforce; sometimes the gossip is true. They tell me that the end is quick, but the fall takes minutes. Supposedly, you super heat on the way in. You don't feel very much - yeah right - where did you get that report? 120 people, getting flash cooked into the thin, hot atmosphere of a planetary moon and you don't "feel" anything? I'm buying it. Uh-Huh.
The stories say that when the ship hits atmo, the Hubble Telescope can see the flare if the drop is on the Earth facing side of Io when you go all comet-like. The ship looks like a Roman - Fucking - Candle, that is; if anybody is watching. As in everything else, timing is important. Now I feel better. Think I'd rather see the show than be the star.
Management is tense. They know we are all fucked. Tersely worded memos allude to the possibility of absolute, cataclysmic failure. Management; that evil, nebulous entity, to whom everybody from the guy that makes your car to the NASA engineer who makes this stuff fly, refers, is not at fault - never is, right? We tried. We tried again and again. The only positive; on an Oxy-Ship, management is here to stay, for good or bad, they are on the boat with us.
Panting in the corridors is common. It is like the high-altitude training that we all had to live through back in the day. Puking in the helmets was not uncommon back then. Now we just adjust the meds and gas mixes in order to try and finish our shifts. From time to time, we are all still out of breath. This isn't easy. The commercials for aerospace careers look good, but once you are up here, it all changes. Using the crapper is even complicated. Zero G's can do horrible things to your daily activities.

I remember one guy, Smith, I think, nice guy, hands like a pianist. He died in a low Earth Orbit training event from an embolism. A fucking embolism took him out! 15 seconds after he said hello, smiling, he was bleeding from the ears, a bloody, god-awful sight. He was perhaps, the most beautiful human I ever met, kind word for everyone, with a gentle outlook on life, and a hint of irony in his eyes. We trained together a couple of times. I think he was a mission specialist in astrophysics or some such esoteric endeavor as far as I was concerned. He seemed a good guy, wouldn't hurt a soul. Dead, bigger than shit, right there on the deck in front of us, dead from a pressure chamber hit that should have shown up in Earth training. We weren't 100 miles in Earth orbit. Guess you never can tell about somebody. And here we are, circling a moon of a distant planet; some of us working in our government issued walking shorts, Jesus, what an unforgiving universe.
I do not suppose we will survive the day, but as I write this, and if you receive this message back on Earth, you have very little more time than we. The oxy-ships will stop seeding the Earth and the planetary oxygen will run out. We may burn up in atmospheric re-entry, but the 10 billion humans on Earth will run out of air, slowly, and not at the same time. I think we have the better deal in terms of a certain, if more sudden ending. There will be no time for rioting out here.
The oxygen plants circling Io were designed to provide the Earth a few more years of life while planet specialists worked on a solution that apparently would never come to successful fruition. Lost greenhouse gases have allowed solar winds to rip away at the fabric of the shield around our old world. Ultimately, there was not a lot that could be done.
If only we had understood Mars sooner. The lessons, I am afraid, are always right in front of us, obvious in hindsight and yet ignored in real time. Politics and science, when they are perverted to manipulated ends, rarely end up at the correct conclusions. Magnetic fields and solar flares do not capitulate to political whims.
Out here, we have done all that we can do, but the system is failing fast. The Jovian planet allows only so much meddling in its orbit. We found out too late. Found out the hard way. There is something else out here. We didn't know it. God, help us now, but we are too far from a rescue ship, or a miracle. Earth has a reckoning and I do not think that I will be alive to see it.
Some government hack decided we could not settle Io. No shit. The planet is barren, comprised of Sulfur Dioxide Mountains and Silicate Based - Fruited Fucking Plains. Do not pass go. Do not saddle up the ponies. This shithole is not the Midwest that Man envisioned. Hold the Conestoga Wagons and the Manifest Destiny; we aren't going anywhere.
I have an idea; perhaps generated from the deteriorating oxygen levels, but how about this: next round, pick a planet or a moon that might actually sustain humanity. I am not a policy maker, only a worker, so who the fuck knows.
Anyway, somehow, some bright-assed genius figured a way to extract the atomic oxygen out of the limited atmosphere on Io. Think of it as sort of freeze-dried air that we can ship back to the inner planets, Earth included. The firm has shipped mega-tons of fabricated oxy back to Earth in huge, disposable barges that we launch toward Earth daily. The firm has made mega-tons of credits on the deals, by the way.

That was the plan all along, not to Terra-Form the Ionian Moon; who the fuck wants to live here anyway, but to rape it like the strip mines of the 20th century did to miles and miles of Planet Earth. We are only here to suck out its natural resources in order to send them back to our own dying planet. Win one, lose one. A fair bargain if you are on the winning orb. No complaints, right, unless you are on the losing end of the deal. There did not seem to be anyone here that might complain, but what the hell did we know?
Much earlier, Venus turned out to be somewhat workable in this regard, a hell of a lot closer, but way too hot, yeah, right, like this place isn't. For reasons that I do not totally comprehend, way above my pay grade, we could not maintain sub-orbital transits that could be maximized from an oxygen production standpoint. There were some interesting elements in the Venusian clouds. Life might exist there in some form, maybe, but who gives a shit. Humanity put money over new frontiers, so we left that planet for the outer rings. Nice to know the human spirit of exploration reigns above the profit motives. Ha-Ha. We are alone, like we could not see this one coming. We are fodder for the beast of globalist capitalism.
Alarms have begun ringing. We are totally screwed. Claxons sounding the "Abandon Ship" signal overwhelm the senses. My ears want to bleed as the reverberations ring throughout the passageways signaling the death knell of our ship, our home, our work, penetrating each and every cell of your being.
Exactly how long can you live in a ten foot survival tube plunging into the bone crushing atmosphere of Jupiter? Interestingly, we have actually bet on that one in the past. My guess is: not so long. I figure that I won't likely collect on that particular wager.
No, I think I will ride the ship in. All apologies to Earth, to Home, we won't win this one. Training takes over. Shut down some systems. I remain in a calm panic as I feel the acceleration of the platform toward the moon's surface. I press switches and shut down more systems, like it matters, at the end.
It is dark here. The once failing lights have winked out one by one. Our shift has ended; perhaps the time of man is done. We have worked our jobs like you would have done your own. I hear the escape pods launching into the ether. No heroes, just guys doing their work; down the street or right across town. Guess we have been downsized.
May God have mercy on our souls?
The factory is closed for business. We are descending by the minute, the second.
No one will read this.
Oh Good Lord, it is so dark, so fucking dark. It feels warm in here. This really hurts, the pressure is too great. We are dropping faster than terminal Earth velocity as we hit the thin Io atmo.
Sluggish, lacking air, crushed to the deck by pressure, I crawl slowly, painfully to the starboard porthole. I am broken. I am done. I need to see. It is dark here.
What. What? Oh God!
Not alone. Not alone. Not alone.
Not......