The Lighthouse Keeper

“Throm – throm – throm” it hummed unendingly like a huge heartbeat. The thing pulsed as if it was alive, but it was not. An astonishing engine, the brainchild and culmination of a whole team of geniuses now forgotten, it was almost alive. This giant had no human to take care of it. There were long, dark, empty corridors and unattended switchboards that had lights flashing, rarely used sleeping bunks, mostly idle kitchen facilities, even an unused pool table. Generally, the gears on this colossal machine ran perfectly, always lubricated just so. The switches switched when they should and the chains pulled when they should, the fans fanned when they should and the computers processed when they should.

Years ago after much agonizing, “It” was finally given a name. They called it “The Lagrange”, after Joseph-Louis Lagrange, an 18th-century mathematician who came up with the effecting theories. Joseph Lagrange basically said that all celestial bodies in outer space have points between them that are “dead zones”, areas where the various gravitational and centrifugal forces balance each other out between two large bodies such as the sun and earth. Space probes, free flying telescopes, space stations, and other assorted things can be sent out and just parked in these gravitational Lagrange points. Therefore with much fanfare, The Lagrange was sent out to such an earth – sun gravitational dead zone to park there and be used by a multiple of missions. Exploration or construction projects for mars, mining efforts for the moon and free flying open space manufacturing could be resupplied from The Lagrange. Some missions would need The Lagrange to grab them as they flew by and throw them even harder so that they could do what they needed to do but not trundle as much fuel around. Some would stop to reconfigure their ships for more efficient continuing missions. The needs were endless. The Lagrange was expensive, impressive beyond measure and perfect, well almost. The problem was that time after time something would fail and sometimes most embarrassingly so.

Once, at the start of the world games with millions watching, The Lagrange got to many instructions at once, became confused and went into an automatic shutdown. Only static came to millions of viewer screens instead of awe inspiring pictures. This was supposed to be a great debut with especially composed fanfare by a world famous composer who came out of a ten year hermitage just to do it. The composer didn’t say another word after being left standing there, baton in hand.

As with anything, there was always that unexpected fly in the ointment, the processor that needed rebooting, the titanium engine block that just needed a hammer rap on the side and the fuel cell that needed a quick membrane change, an inconsequential thing if a person did it but nearly impossible to accomplish without one. At obscene expense, teams of dramatically overpaid specialists would have to put their noble butts on the line, (which is why they were so obscenely overpaid), to head out and fix The Lagrange. Usually it was just something small but sometimes it would take two teams, the first one figuring out what was wrong, the second sent out to fix it with the needed parts. Once even a third team was sent because a parliamentary oversight committee demanded verifications. So, after much anguishing with long committee meetings, policy rewrites and media spin doctoring, they admitted all much to their chagrin. The doctorates could hardly mumble the fact for the cameras.

Yup they sadly conceded, they needed a….a…regular, plain old, human out there. One lab coat in the lineup of lab coats even put her hand over her forehead when the confession was made. They needed someone to be out there to rap the thing on the side, to jiggle the switch, to just unplug it and plug it back in again, to quickly change a light bulb. There was a drawn out silence before the storm after this admission.

Then the news tidal wave hit. Beautiful media talking heads endlessly blathered with pictures behind them. Experts were called in with graphs. Animation repeatedly showed The Lagrange’s systems and where each failure was. Cameras on the street got the regular person’s opinion. Politicians opined. Former politicians wrote exposés. Well known clergy prayed. After the media beating of the dead horse until it was a jelly, the consensus remained. We must send a person to take care of The Lagrange, to keep it going at all times, but who?

This started a second media circus. There even was an Elvis impersonator involved for a while. A whole flock of serial programs started up just on this theme. The person with the sad story ought to be a candidate to go. The person with the happy story ought to go, good looking, bad looking, handicapped, athlete, and on and on. Music stars sang about it. Novelists wrote about it. A central question always remained.

Who would be a self-flagellate enough and with astonishing lack of self-concern enough to do this? The person could easily die out there yet the person had to not be suicidal. The person must be self-motivated enough to be able to pull this off, be disciplined, and have the instincts to keep him or herself and the place running. The biggest question was who could stay focused after years of tedium? The longer that various committees looked at the job the more impossible the job description seemed to get.

Spin doctors came up with a job title. The needed person would be a Lighthouse Keeper! Now didn’t that sound downright romantic and adventurous, all at the same time?

The search started with everyone involved. Game companies offered their entire inventory of games, (some even with attached movies about the games). Of course when one game company offered and got all the free press, all of the competition did as well so whoever the “Light House Keeper” was would certainly be entertained. This started a stampede of other services. Financial investments, photography services, publishing helps for any books that the lighthouse keeper would want to write with intellectual rights protection, online degrees from prestigious universities, they all scrambled to have the right to advertise that “The Lighthouse Keeper” was using their products. All of this before a candidate even was thought of, let alone picked.

The research showed that the Lighthouse Keeper would be spending most if not all of the rest of his or her life alone. There would be extremely rare visits from other people passing through. Usually though, the Lighthouse Keeper would be far away from anyone, alone over the holidays and no sick relief. After a term, the Lighthouse Keeper could be “traded” with another mission but even then, there still would be extremely long periods alone.

In the end, with some objectors aside, we humans are incurably social creatures. There is a wide spectrum of opinion concerning what “social” means but whatever that is, we are it. We don’t do well alone. We get weird, even crazy. We do strange things, even harmful ones. When the various space agencies did their various field tests, after a period of lengthy solitude tests, subjects did horribly. They destroyed equipment, even life sustaining equipment. They ran lickety-split naked through the test station hallways, they used things for what they were not designed to do like space suit attachment tethers used as sling shots of frozen food globules. Subjects began agonizing processes of “personal body artwork” by heating up stainless steel lab utensils and then burning areas of their own skin. (In that last case the overriding scientific group had to intervene and scrub the experiment.) A solution needed to be found. Human endeavor itself was at stake here. The Lagrange needed a “repair lab mouse,” (ahem,) a Lighthouse Keeper, to keep everything running out there in the dead gravitational zone.

After all the Pomp and Circumstance died down, there was one person who kept staying on the potential lists as they got shorter and shorter. He was a classic, techie nerd that lived technology and nothing else, even was passionate about it. His shock of hair continually stood at attention in a horrible bed head so he would never make it on any fashion magazine cover. He wasn’t tall and he wasn’t short and not chubby nor skinny. He kept a relatively clean but not obsessive apartment. He didn’t have political opinions and he didn’t have a social agenda. He owned nothing of consequence. He was single and didn’t have much family to speak of. He wasn’t drawn to crowds and didn’t need special attention. He had no substance addiction with only a wine now and then and a coffee each morning. Best of all, he was a rather boring guy, no criminal past, no major achievements, no major failures and almost always on time. He worked, exercised some, read some, ate in a relatively healthy fashion, paid his bills on time and didn’t want pets. On the rare occasions that he stepped out of his usual home, work, shopping, laundromat, church, routine, he almost always showed up alone.

Needless to say, Kaito was used to being by himself even in a crowd and that might have been his most useful trait. He had no girlfriends, close friends, no current naughtiness or skeletons in any closet even though the FBI looked very hard when things got to that level. He did have technology answers to most of his problems which only made him even a better candidate. For example, his kitchen now ground his coffee, put the correct amount in his coffee percolator and then brewed it at just the correct time in the morning, all with not needing Kaito’s intervention, usually. Even the FBI doesn’t know everything though otherwise Kaito would have been scrubbed from the list because he had one secret. To the FBI’s defense, the drastic change was a recent one. They already flipped the switch that Kaito was the chosen one but then life, or God, sent in a check mate.

To explain, after having given up years ago, Kaito as in danger of falling in love! Had the FBI known this, Kaito would have gone off the list immediately because lovers are notorious for being unmanageable. The fact that love coming to Kaito could arguably be categorized as an official miracle by anyone’s standard was besides the fact. It really should not have happened so all of the FBI’s working parameters were correct, again to their defense.

The day of the huge change started as always, Kaito began his morning in his usual boring way, with breakfast and a walk to the downstairs car garage. Never deviating from the usual, he drove his little, nondescript car out into the morning demolition derby commute. The automatic card reader pinged Kaito into his workplace building after Kaito parked his car in the endless parking lot. If there was a person coming into work as well, Kaito would be polite but in a hurry. He always came early to beat the rush of those who seem to need to time it down to the very last nanosecond and still be categorized as “on time.” Then it was Kaito on his computer all day in his cubicle, all alone. Now and then he would need to interact with a co-worker about something but that was relatively rare and professional only. Once the clock said “4:30pm,” Kaito would rush home to be alone again, though he did occasionally take different ways home for a change in scenery. This then, was Kaito, day in, day out, season in, season out, year in year out, as the FBI noted.

What the FBI could not have processed was that recently Kaito was hurrying home to spend an evening alone again when he was accosted, (there is no other word for it.) As Kaito slouched down his apartment building hallway that afternoon, an apartment door in a long line of identical apartment doors burst open and a running body nearly knocked him down. 

“A-a-h-h-h” a female voice screamed! The whipping door was accompanied by a swarm of a tear producing black smoke following a wild eyed woman with hair all askew. Kaito didn’t have a clue what to do.

The shocker in all of this, even with tears now suddenly pouring from Kaito’s eyes from the cloud, the lady was still an apparition of beauty. Her thick, long, black hair and dark skin told of places exotic and wonderful. Then beyond any of Kaito’s ability to imagine, the beautiful person grabbed Kaito and clung to him! That stunned Kaito more than the smoke did. Kaito bravely helped her away from the door. She certainly needed the help. She was stumbling and gasping. Tears were pouring from her eyes. “Here, let me help you” came from somewhere in Kaito!

He fumbled for his keys, opened his apartment door and found her a place on his living room couch. Then Kaito got her a towel to wrap her eyes in and a glass of water to help with her choking. Finally he ran back to her apartment with a second dish towel over his face like a warrior set to fight an enemy, powered by energy completely unfamiliar to him.

The cloud in her apartment hit Kaito as if it was made of stone. As he entered the swirling hell his eyes were streaming more tears than he thought possible and he could hardly breathe. Kaito had the where with all to turn off the stove where the smoke was pouring from and run through the apartment opening windows. There was a ceiling fan in the dining area so he turned it on to full speed. Kaito turned off all the screaming alarms. Then he retreated out, slamming the apartment door behind him before he fled, eyes uncontrollably weeping. He hurried to his own apartment.

As Kaito ran down the hallway of identical apartment doors a horrible thought came to him. “This never happens to me! I did it! I finally did it! I think that I just went insane and am hallucinating.”  Thankfully the lady was truly on his couch to undo that frightening theory, still dabbing her eyes. She seemed to be recovering but now Kaito needed administration. She jumped up from the couch to help him and even in his pain, Kaito never felt anything as pleasant as when she touched him.

“What was that?” He finally was able to ask as she alternately dabbed his watering eyes and then hers.

“I am so sorry, I spilled a whole can of crushed red pepper into the oven. I thought that it would be OK so I set the pizza on the oven rack anyway.” She spoke with a beautiful accent.

Kaito’s brain processed quickly. “Oh my God, we have been pepper sprayed!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The crushed red pepper, with the oven’s heat it made a pepper spray cloud!”

“Pepper spray?” She really didn’t know what that was.

“Yes, you can get a can of it and put it in your purse so when someone threatens you, you pull the can out and spray the person.”

“Why?”

“To protect yourself, the person attacking you will have the same effects that we just had.”

“Really, that is legal here?”

Kaito smiled. “Yes it is.”
“I could have used such a spray the other day.”

“I am so sorry.” Kaito was sincerely concerned. She saw this.

“No it is I that should be sorry. I pepper sprayed you most undeservedly.”

“It was an accident.”

“All the same.  I am sorry and my name is Aarushi!”

“Aarushi, what a beautiful name. My name is Kaito.”

They both smiled, then Aarushi did something that she never did before but it just seemed right. “Kaito, as a token of my gratitude for your help, would you care to share my pizza with me if it isn’t burnt to a crisp?” Kaito’s mind did a quick back flip. Did he just get asked on a date? He never had been asked on one before! Better to not treat it as one. “I turned off the oven when I was in there so the pizza should be OK” was the best that Kaito could answer.

They both ended up agreeing that cheese pizza heavy on red pepper actually was pretty good. They also discovered a mutual love for classical music though Kaito preferred symphonies and hated opera. “Three scenes later and she is still screeching about the poison that she just took” he exclaimed concerning most operas.  “Come on and die already” he finished! Aarushi thought that this was extremely funny but she loved operas. “Oh, the passion, the emotion, the love!” Aarushi went to her key board to make a point about a Puccini opera. She played astonishing piano and Kaito remembered classical pieces relatively well so they had a fantastic time, just as friends, enjoying each other, no pressure. Before they knew it the evening was very late because tomorrow was a work day. For the first time in memory Kaito fell asleep in his apartment that night with a huge smile on his face and Aarushi’s phone number on his phone. Aarushi fell asleep in her apartment with a smile as well. No pressure, just friends, but, well friends, for now. Had the FBI waited for just a few weeks, it would have been evident that there was a serious change in Kaito’s life, but no!  They couldn’t wait. About two weeks after the apartment event the two huge, bald guys in trench coats suddenly standing in Kaito’s work cubical looked as if they never smiled in their life, ever.

“Kaito Ito?”

“Ah,…yeah?”

The big guys moved in unison to hold their arms out, tiny badges in their huge hands. “FBI, agent Johnson, this is agent Korozanski, please come with us.”

“Huh, why?”

“You are being drafted sir.”

“Drafted?”

Though it started quite frighteningly the day ended up being rather cool. The only thought Kaito had in the whole brain overload was “wow, after years of monotony, change sure comes in bunches”.

Kaito seriously was tempted. This all was extremely cool to have the run of a multi-trillion dollar tech dream toy. 3D printing using basic building blocks for food, medication, and many supplies made it possible for any meal imaginable, any sickness to go away and any needed item. Every video game in existence would be available. Working on the cutting edge of technology, Carbon nanotubes, boron nitride nanotubes, and diamond nanothreads, fuel cells and regenerating computers with auto-updates, it all was a techie nerd’s dream. Yeah he would be alone out there but, wow! Kaito was prepared to excitedly accept the challenge!

But later he was shaken into reality by Aarushi in what was rapidly becoming “their” coffee house. They have been coming to the coffee place after work now nearly every day since “the pepper.” Kaito could tell something was bothering her as he excitedly updated her. 

“But…but, Kaito!” She looked like she was about to cry. “You will be all alone up there!” Then Kaito had a memory from way back when his grandma said that “God intends for most of us not to be alone.” Aarushi looked vulnerable, even heart broken. It dawned on him at that moment that she was falling in love with him.

This was so inconceivable to Kaito that he just sat there, staring at her, stunned. At the same time Kaito knew that his techie nerd dream could not work in tandem with this sweet new reality. This was not the endless fantasy that always is a nerd’s life, but reality! Aarushi actually had huge tears coming quietly from her giant brown eyes. Kaito never dared to fall in love yet at this moment, he admitted that he did. Softly Kaito touched her elbow to try to assure her and she turned to him. Kaito gently took Aarushi into his arms and the words just came out of him on their own, “I will not leave you, I promise. I have an idea!” Her happy eyes exploded life into Kaito’s very soul as they stared at each other.

Once again, it is established fact that lovers are the least manageable of all humans. “No” Kaito said to the bank of dark suits.

“What” was their incredulous reply?

“I said no!”

“You can’t say no!”

“Yes I can.”

“We can force you into the ship!”

“You know, I researched this and found that you can do that,” Kaito replied.  “However, space law has always supported the position per 1988 and 1999 code of conduct for space station crews in free space, that the authority of the captain is typically absolute and unquestionable.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, as the only person on the ship, I will be the captain.”

“Perhaps.”

“Not perhaps, that will be so.”

Silence.

“Therefore, if you force me out there, I can decide if a mission is unsafe and activate a return to earth if I wish.”

Silence.

“Therefore, you need to hear me, I am not going, but I have an even better idea.”

“Even better idea?”

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen, let me present my concepts on avatar robots that essentially can do everything that I need them to do, repair what needs repaired, be on station at all times, and I can do this from Earth and not have to be compromised way out in space, alone. Better yet, I give you a way to fund all this.” The committee of dark suits had no concept of the creation marathon Kaito just accomplished, made possible only because Aarushi was there, supporting, giving ideas, bringing coffee and feeding Kaito. It all was as much her ideas as his own.

“Hm-m-m, go on” the dark suits said.

Kaito smiled. “Well ladies and gentlemen, let me bring up a file for your perusal. With my avatar robot systems, think of the savings! No life support needed. No required return to Earth. Better yet, once we start punching these avatars out by the hundreds, we can rent them for people here on earth to have a space tourist experience. We can sell the avatars to manufacturing, mining and scientific institutions. The opportunities will be endless.”

The entire board of dark suits was speechless after Kaito’s impassioned presentation. Then they looked at each other. An older dark suit sitting towards the end of the line was the first to speak but what he said was meaningless.

“Option 12.”

The entire bank of dark suits looked as if they had an epiphany and they quickly gathered into a huddle leaving Kaito sitting and staring. He heard hushed mumbling for quite a while before the bank of dark suits retook their seats. A leader stood facing Kaito. The spokeswoman took a gulp of water before admitting. “We like your avatar ideas very much. We expect your considerable work on the whole concept to continue during your flight to and while stationed at The Lagrange, but, we are still sending you.” Kaito was aghast.

“What, I thought that you heard me say no!”

“We did Kaito, we did. We suspected that you would say that. However, the whole point of this entire, multi-nation, international effort is to have HUMANS be able to travel throughout space and live on more than one planet or moon, not just robots.”

“But…but…my avatars?”

“Those are fantastic ideas and you will have the time in route and in the Lagrange to start something huge, but we still need you to go!”

“I won’t go, I promise you!”

“Kaito!”  The spokeswoman of the dark suits did something extremely uncharacteristic of her committee, she smiled. “We understand the problem here.”

“You do?”

“Yes, the problem here is the “alone” part.”

“The alone part?”

“Yes, you can’t be alone, so our answer is to send a church.”

“Send a what?”

“There is no better term Kaito, than an existing one. Send a church, which is a group of people that are committed to each other and already has an agreed group philosophy and set of interaction rules to get through all of the challenges together.”  

“But…but…this is a scientific endeavor.”

“Yes, and how is a church not scientific?”

“Uhm…ah.”

“Kaito, is Aarushi willing to marry you?”

“Ah, we just met a few weeks ago.” Kaito was shocked that they knew of her, let alone her name.

“Both of you need to put this question on extreme priority and think about it, you have about six months.”

“Six months?”

“Yes, look Kaito, we realized that in order to overcome insurmountable problems we had to be willing to listen to ALL points of view, which included Christian ones of course. We thought that Christianity had a fantastic idea concerning space loneliness. You will be traveling and living in space with a church, about forty people.

You will have set moral guidelines, understandable rules, increasing methods of confronting sociopathic behavior, we like it.”

“Hm-m-m, sounds possible.”

Lovers always are the most unmanageable but they also usually have the best answers over the long run. 1 Thess. 4:1-12