Erica arrived to her bloc exactly a half hour early, as she did every morning. As soon as she arrived, she went about switching everything on, making her way around each room to make sure everything was set up for the day to start. Her own office was neatly organized, everything in the same place as she had left it the previous day, but she still made sure to straighten up files, organize her desk, move things around until it looked even better than before and had been arranged to her satisfaction. As she made her way throughout the reception area, she resisted the urge to organize others' workstations that had been left with papers strewn about, pens lying around. She saw that one of the receptionist's screensavers on her monitor was a slideshow of personal photos she had brought from home. She scowled, shaking her head. She couldn't imagine that images portraying a happy life back on Earth would be good for morale. These people should be motivated by discovery, by the new frontier that they were lucky enough to be chosen for. Even so, the smiling faces of the children on the screen made Erica feel a slight pang in her chest, a distant yearning, but she just as quickly shrugged it off. There was no time to think of such things.
By the time she had finished making her rounds and gotten everything into perfect opening condition, she still had fifteen minutes before her shift was supposed to start. Taking the opportunity for what it was, she went back to her personal office, using a key from her keyring to open the bottom drawer and pulled out a binder, organized with tabs and color-codes. It looked just like any other patient file, filled with reports and diagnostics, but this one wasn't official. It was her own personal journal of sorts, where she took note of things she noticed about everyone who came into her bloc, things that had no significance on a medical report but things that mattered nonetheless. Mannerisms, interactions, social activeness, spirituality. Sure, there were mandatory psychological interviews that she conducted quarterly for each individual on EDEN, recording things like morale, motivation, productivity, on the lookout for symptoms of depression or psychosis. Being in a dark, semi-enclosed space over a long period of time can do a lot of bad things to a person, regardless of how strong they are mentally.
For the most part, things were going well. In the time since she'd taken over the medical wing four years ago, she'd only seen two breakdowns and one death, which was unrelated to the individual's mental state. Some people simply couldn't handle it, even after years of training and grooming.
She flipped through the pages of the binder, sitting at the front desk in the reception area, mentally ticking off names, associating each one with a face. She'd personally gotten to know just about everyone here, although she could tell she wasn't exactly popular among them. She tended to keep to herself, and people liked to tease her, telling her to loosen up, have some fun, enjoy herself. But she did enjoy herself. She enjoyed her studies, she enjoyed being productive, she enjoyed doing what she was sent here to do and furthering the mission of EDEN. Every second of every day mattered. Every task was important. Every day determined whether they would survive another day, another week, another year. If they were going to sustain themselves, she had to be on task, every minute of every day.
Before she could read any further, Erica heard the distant incessant beep of an alert from one of the control rooms. Closing the distance between herself and the source of the sound, she saw a flashing red light indicating that there was a fault with the power. As much as her engineering side wanted to take a look at it herself, she knew there were people better suited to do so, and she retrieved her tablet from her office, forwarding the alert to the appropriate department. Before she returned to her binder, she took a moment to look over the machines in the lab. A couple of them had switched to battery power, a dim yellow light indicating they were on power-saving mode. They were far more advanced than the clunky machines she had used on Earth, during her residency. Almost everything here was automated; the robotics teams at SpaceEX knew damn well what they were doing. But still, everything had manual overrides just in case of malfunction, and sometimes Erica was tempted to just use everything that way, just to feel a bit more needed, a bit more necessary, but she figured things were set up the way they were for a reason -- most likely to lower the risk of human error-- so she let things be as they were.
She heard a voice then, an unmistakable Irish accent saying her name in the front room, and she grinned, making her way back to the front room. Thomas Hackett, though a bit more easy-going, was an admirably hard worker, highly skilled in his specialty, and he'd been here far longer than she had and still maintained an optimistic disposition. However, her grin quickly faded when she emerged to see her binder open on the front desk, him standing just beside it, fingers flicking a page over. She almost immediately barked out an order to step away, but she held back, reminding herself of how uptight everyone said she was, and simply forced out a polite, "Excuse me, I'd prefer it if you didn't flip through classified documents." She closed the distance between them, picking up the binder and snapping it shut, embarrassed. She was sure he probably figured it was just another office file, but horrified at the idea of anyone knowing she kept her own personal studies. She cleared her throat, taking in his half-zipped up jumpsuit, the faint indication of a stain showing on his tee shirt, and she found herself compulsively straightening her own lab coat. "Can I help you?" she asked, knowing full well he was here to make sure the electrical fault had been corrected.
