The Greater Crime

Curfew isn’t just an evening ritual, either. The people living in the residential domes are cleared out every morning in the same way as the business domes are cleared at night, and the air is usually cut off in the residential domes, too, during the day. So you can understand why no one has gardens here on Minerva, like people do on Earth. Here, soil is also more precious than gold, and even hydroponic orchards are controlled by the agricultural specialists. The average Joe does his job, whatever that happens to be, and he doesn’t gripe about it, or else he’ll lose his job and become one of the vagrant "dome drifters". The dome drifters haven’t got homes and run the risk of being caught in the checkpoint every night and sent into forced labor outside the colony. And of course they run the risk of starving.

The worst part is, the computerized system can’t always tell who’s a drifter and who is gainfully employed. The whole curfew thing isn’t just a way of saving air reserves, either. The curfew was established to save money on air and to keep people from bringing back anything they might receive through the black market in the business dome into the less-monitored residential domes. All citizens are checked for possession of unauthorized items at the curfew checkpoints. And the curfew is an ingenious way to monitor the citizen’s activities, to keep them from traditional, telecommunication work, which somehow recently got the reputation of being inefficient. People simply have to go to the residential dome to work, so that the Minerva Corps can save money on air. And sometimes I think telecommuting was outlawed because the work is practically unmonitorable by those who crave absolute authority over everybody. People like the despotic Earth government officials I thought I’d left behind. People like the dignitaries and chiefs of Minerva Corps.

The sad thing is, a lot of the people who telecommuted, as people have traditionally done in our solar system for centuries now, just weren't able to change jobs so late in their lives, and a lot of them ended up as drifters. I heard once that a drifter got expelled from the colony and set adrift in space; after that, the Minerva Corps made a big fuss about publicizing their free shuttles to Ganymede, where the Ganymedians would pay any price to human miners for precision work. I don’t know if that’s true or not, since I haven’t been to the dark side of Ganymede in more than ten Earth years.

Anyway, Minerva Corps has weeded out what they call "inactivity", and sure, the colony is prospering. The head of Minerva even built himself a new dome that floats above the rest of the colony; there’s no direction in space, but Minerva was set on the same solar parallel as the rest of the Sol system’s planets, so I guess you could say the dignitaries' dome is "above" the rest of us. There was a minor leak in the dome a while back, I heard, and the dignitaries still worry about sabotage from the pirates, which is another reason why the regulator forces have grown in the last few years. I’ve flown by the new dignitaries’ dome on my outer-colony patrol, and all I can say is, it’s a good thing the rest of the colony doesn’t know about what they’re missing.

Of course, all of the outer colonies have a cooperation pact to aid each other in case of a real emergency; we’re still too vulnerable to risk confrontations yet, even when conflicts break out between the Earth and Mars; but, with the second Cold War of human history in full swing, it’s hard for the outer colonies to keep neutral. Both the Earth and Mars keep pressing Minerva and the other colonies to choose sides. Maybe it’s only a matter of time before there’s more to worry about than food shortages; the regulators talk about war now and again, and about trade embargos. I just clock in and do my job. Maybe because the regulators get paid more than anyone else here in Minerva with money and extra luxury items from Earth, they talk more about the possibility of war than about the necessity of freedom.