The History of Übercorp

The technician stopped smiling briefly. He had never seen a last clone born before, but he had heard that the last were prone to moodiness. “Yes, you are,” the now-smiling again technician said. “You,” he said emphasizing each syllable, “are unique.” He smiled a too-big, toothy smile and flung his arms out to either side. “Just like all the other Henrys before you. Now come along,” the technician said. “Let’s get you dressed and out in the world.”

Once Henry was cleaned and dressed and handed his identification, he stepped out  of the lab and squinted at the midday sun. He tucked the envelope he was handed, which contained his address and school information, under his arm and started down the busy street.

Each Henry born left living arrangements and money behind for the Henry after him, and Henry 437 had been no exception. Henry had a furnished home waiting for him near the school he was required to attend, and enough to take care of his needs till he was old enough to care for himself.

I’ll have no one to leave anything to,” thought Henry, and he could feel the tears coming again.

“Stiff upper lip,” he could almost hear Henry 218, a famous war hero, say.

“Only babies cry,” said Henry 400, who was a bit of a bully.

Henry listened to the echoes and pushed the tears back.

He had gotten close to his new home when he passed an anthill and stopped. He leaned down, watching the thin lines of insects going about their daily chores. They all look alike, thought Henry and he tried to look even closer, focusing to see on a microscopic level, but Henry was a clone, not an android, and had to make do with normal sight. He imagined there were differences in the individual ants imperceptible to human beings but quite obvious to the ants themselves. He thought of the ants with different nicknames like “5-Legged” Steve, and “Short-Antennae” Tony, and “Bread Crumb” Pete and laughed out loud.

“Quite amazing, the ants wouldn’t you say?” The voice startled Henry and he nearly dropped his thick envelope right on top of the anthill. He spun around quickly, a bit angry for having been caught so off guard, and saw an aging man standing behind him. His clothes were well kept, and his grey hair neatly groomed around a friendly, laugh-lined face, with  the brightest blue eyes Henry could ever imagine seeing. The man seemed familiar and before Henry could respond the man spoke again:

“You’re a clone aren’t you, young man? I could see the scan bar peeking out from under your shirt. Henry felt back to where his shirt had come untucked and placed his hand over the scan bar that was a part of every clone. Each unique scan bar was used to identify each identical clone and was a safety measure to insure that no two like clones could exist at the same time. The thought of his scan bar being more unique than he was flitted across Henry’s mind.

“Yes sir, I’m Henry,” he replied.

“Henry, Henry,” the man thought aloud. “I knew a Henry clone when I was a boy. We remained good friends for many years. You do look like him,” the man said.

“Perhaps one of my predecessors,” Henry answered. He tried to imagine the man as a youth while he sifted through the memories of the last few Henrys before him, but could not place the smiling man.

“Well, Henry,” said the man. “What school will you be attending?”

Henry answered and the man’s face beamed.

“Why, that is the same school my great-granddaughter attends. Here is my address, you must come up and meet her when you are settled in.”

Henry thanked the man and neatly folded the address and placed it into the large envelope. They shook hands and each went off in a different direction.

Henry’s quarters were small and without personality. There were no pictures on the walls. There were no magazines; there was no music player. What there was were stacks of boxes left to Henry from the previous Henry. One box contained a stack of flimsy bookpads of some of the previous Henry’s favorite authors. Another box contained small mpdiscs of some of the other Henrys’ favorite music. In fact, each box held favorite memories and knickknacks from Henry’s past. As Henry handled the boxed items he was washed over with a feeling of contentment and familiarity and a bit of sadness as well. He would have no one to pack his memories for, and he would have no one feeling exactly the way he did now. “You’re unique, just like all the other Henrys before you,” he could hear the technician at the birthing center tell him, and he sighed deeply.

There was a single metal box sitting on the small bed with a note in a crisp white envelope taped to it. Written on the envelope was his name: Henry 438. He opened the envelope and read the letter inside:

Dear Henry 438,

I hope you like the place. It wasn’t an easy choice since I wanted to leave you with so much more. However, the rules are very clear on what can be left behind for each clone, so this was the best I could do. I wish I could tell you everything but you have so much you need to learn on your own. Eventually, the memories and feelings you have will be replaced with your own, and mine, and those of all the other Henrys before me will stay safely in the back of your mind to offer guidance in the form of distant memories. Enjoy the contents of this box. It’s quite a museum and I hope you enjoy rummaging through there as much as I did. Enjoy our memories as some day the Henry following you will enjoy yours.

Good Luck,

Henry 437

Henry read the last line with regret: of course, he would not know. No clone except for the last ever knew when the line would run out. Foreknowledge usually led to irrational behavior as many clones had tried to artificially extend the line through recloning and other illicit means. The only reason the last clone was informed was so they could attend to the legalities involved with being the last one.

Henry then turned his attention to the small metal box to which the envelope had been taped.

There was a tiny slit on the front of the box and Henry rummaged through his large envelope from the center and found an equally tiny magcard. He inserted the magcard into the slit and the box made a clicking sound as the lock released. Inside the box were six smaller padded rectangular boxes side by side. The first four boxes each contained one hundred clear metal tubes no longer than half of Henry’s child-sized pointer finger and about half the width of a pencil, filled with a pulsing blue semisolid gel. The fifth box contained thirty-seven of the same tubes. Folded into the final box was a device that looked like a pair of sunglasses with a tube-sized notch in the handle and an instruction pad.

Henry flipped the switch on the pad. A list of languages in native script appeared on the pad. Henry pressed English.

Congratulations, said the pad, on choosing the Plastore Reader/Writer 5000. Another fine Übercorp product. For quick start instructions, press, say, or think “quick start.”

“Quick start,” replied Henry.

You have chosen quick start, If this is correct, press, say, or think “yes”.

“Yes,” said Henry.

You have chosen yes to quick start, if this is incorrect, please press, say, or think “incorrect” to begin again within the next ten seconds. You may pause or end this instruction by pressing, saying, or thinking “pause” or “end” at any time during your quick start instruction.

“Übercorp is not responsible for the misuse of this item or failure to comply with the instructions contained within this manual. In some rare cases, headaches, nausea dizziness and/or fatigue could result from prolonged use of this product. Übercorp suggests a ten-minute break for each hour while using this product. Your quick start tutorial will begin shortly.”

The Übercorp logo flashed across the screen with a swish and a soft female voice saying “Übercorp.”

Thank you for choosing the Plastore 5000 from Übercorp. The Plastore Compound, the newest innovation in data storage is a gelatinous medium developed by Übercorp capable of storing one hundred terabytes of information per capsule.”

The manual went on explaining the proper insertion of the capsule into the reader/writer handle. To play back content, you simply pressed a button on the handle and put the reader over your eyes to watch the data. To record, you pressed a similar button and looked through the writer at the material to be scanned, or acquired it through a direct wireless hookup with a computer.

Henry placed the glasses over his eyes and chose the first Plastore capsule in the first box. He inserted the capsule into the handle and pressed the play button. Before his eyes were the parents of the first Henry. It was an old 3D image and not very stable. They were smiling and his/Henry’s mother held both arms around her pregnant midsection. The image faded to be replaced by a vid of a too-crowded hospital room. Henry’s mother lay in the center of the shaky shot while nurses monitored the various machines surrounding her. A doctor sat at the foot of the bed talking to Henry’s mother, coaching her. A new vid, this one of infant Henry in a hospital bassinet. Henry’s proud father and exhausted mother were staring down at him. The vids and pics flowed by as Henry 438 witnessed the chronicles of his DNAsake. Here he was taking his first steps. Here in preschool. A birthday party, a trip to the park—it was all there in a collection of images and scanned docs. The final images played. A too-small coffin, a new headstone with his name on it, only there was no number.

The first capsule played quickly and Henry inserted the second, not really to follow any order, but more out of curiosity. The same parents looking older and worse for wear. The center where the Henrys were born. The chamber as the first Henry clone was greeted and on, all through his life and the friends he had made and the places he had seen. Henry chose another capsule, this one more recent from Henry 436. There was no one but the technician to greet this Henry as he came from the chamber. And much the same as Henry did this morning, Henry 436 lived in a modest apartment. There were many pics he had taken and these flashed by. Henry recognized the old man he had seen earlier in one of the pics. The same startlingly blue eyes laughing from a more youthful face. He must be keeping himself young for his grandchildren and great grandchildren thought Henry. There were numerous vids and recordings. Henry 436 had a wonderful voice and spent a part of his life touring as a recording artist. Henry wondered if he would leave behind such a rich legacy. He had no Henry to leave it to so he wondered if he could leave it for the world.

Henry spent the next several days alternating between the Plastore capsules, and getting used to his surroundings. He walked through the neighborhood to get his bearings. He strolled past the school and gauged how long it would take to reach it. He was not scheduled to begin for another week, but Henry found himself feeling more alone than ever. Already the strong memories of the past Henrys were fading to impressions as he learned more about himself. If I lose them I’ll never have them again, thought Henry. All around him people went about their individual and unique lives and Henry felt anything but individual or unique. One morning he spotted the old man’s carefully folded address on his end table and decided he would visit. Perhaps he could learn more about Henry 436 as new memories so he would never lose him.

Henry was admitted into the sumptuous home by a very modern looking roboserve with copper- hued fittings with silver accents. The robot took off down the long carpeted hallway to announce the visitor. The robot did not return, but to Henry’s surprise the old man himself, whose name was Timothy, (“but you can call me Tim,”) came down the hall to greet him.

“Henry,” Tim practically bellowed. “I’m so pleased you’ve decided to take me up on my offer.” He paused, smiling. “Katherine will be so happy to make a new friend.”

“Actually, sir—”

“Tim,” interrupted Tim.

“Actually, Tim,” Henry began again, “I was wondering if we could talk a bit about the other Henry—Henry 436 as you knew him—I have some old pics and vids of you two and—”

“Henry, I have learned in my nearly two centuries that dwelling on the past earns nothing,” Tim interrupted again. He smiled. “Learning from the past earns everything.” He began to walk down the hallway with Henry following. “I’ve met a lot of clones in my day,” Tim continued. “In fact, my family and I own that very clinic you were born from.” He paused a moment to let this revelation sink in. “I must admit, I sought you out that morning we met. I wanted to meet the last Henry since I have so many fond memories of that other Henry from so long ago.”

They reached a plush couch in a sitting room down the hall and as Tim sat he sunk deep into the cushions. “You have a very rare and unique gift, Henry 438.”

Henry swallowed hard at the words rare and unique. “I do?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” Tim continued. “There will never be another like you, much in the same way there will never be another me. You don’t have to worry about leaving anything behind for another Henry. You can live your life just for you; keep the memories you enjoy and discard the rest just for you. You don’t need to fear judgment from anyone but yourself. They say the last clone is always the closest to the original stock and I can see it’s true.” He paused. “You know, not every clone line shares memories. There are some clones out there fully believing they are the only clone from a line and many of them are right. One-time clonings are common enough. In a way the shared-line clones such as yourself have it the hardest always, living for an ideal, for a successor.”

As Tim’s words were sinking in a soft voice interrupted from the doorway. “Excuse me Grandpa Tim.”

Standing there was a girl roughly Henry’s age. She had shoulder length pinkish-red hair pulled back from her face. Henry saw that her eyes were the same vivid blue as Tim’s and he could tell she smiled just as often. “I thought you and your friend would like some lemonade.” She started to enter the room, ice clinking in the two glasses Henry now noticed she was carrying. Seeing Henry for the first time, she stopped short. “Oh!” she exclaimed, not expecting to see someone so young. “Hi, I’m Katherine. Do you work for grandpa Tim?” she asked.

“Actually,” began Tim. “I invited him here to meet you, Kat. This is Henry and he’ll be going to your school.” Tim stood, “So if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some grownup stuff to do. Why don’t you two enjoy the lemonade on the porch?” He started to leave the room and at the threshold turned back “Remember Henry, rare and unique.” And with that Tim left the room.

“Wanna see the yard?” asked Katherine.

“OK,” replied Henry, and he followed her out to the porch, lemonade in hand.

Henry and Kat became best friends over the years and as he created new memories just for him, the memories of the previous Henrys faded. They were never fully gone, just echoes of guidance and hope. Henry stopped thinking of being the last. Whenever he looked into Kat’s smiling blue eyes he felt like he was the only Henry to ever walk the earth. He grew into a handsome young man just like the other Henrys. He would never leave a legacy for the world, but he did what he could by helping other clones acclimate into society as a counselor at Tim’s clinic where he was born. Many years later a very happy Henry held his firstborn son in his arms. An exhausted Kat tickled the baby boy’s tummy as Grandpa Tim, looking no worse for wear, laughed his fullest and loudest.

“So what will you name him?” asked Tim.

“What else?” Henry and Kat replied, “Henry.”

As Tim’s laughter once again filled the room, Henry looked into the face of his newborn son and suddenly realized he was not the last one: He was indeed the first.

Charlie Bonet is one of the original the League of Space Pirates callobrators, who developed many characters and locations in the universe. He's also an accomplished drummer, known for being a founding member of the seminal punk band Reagan Youth. He lives in Richmond with his wife and an undisclosed number of cats. 

Art by Nicole Gomez. Get the stencil HERE. 

She started to close the door, but he caught it in his broad, scarred hand. “And I’ve told you, it’s Dad or Daddy or Father, or something else appropriate. You’re my daughter, even if you do look like…” He forced himself not to finish the thought. “Anyway, M.G., you said you’d make dinner.”

She rolled her eyes. “I made soup this morning. It’s in the cooler—just have to wave it.”

“This morning? But what about school?”

“Cancelled,” she said, shrugging. “Something about not paying their bills and Übercorp putting an entry lien on the school.”

Artis acted surprised. “But that’s—”

“More of the same,” she said, and tried to close the door again.

Artis held it firm. “Come eat with me.” He said it as a command, but knew he’d long since lost that level of authority with her.

“I’m not eating today,” she said. And before he could say more, she added, “You can’t force me,” saying it with as fierce a glare as she could manage.

Artis sighed deeply, and the smirk on her face told him she knew she’d won. She pushed on the door again and he released it.

“Do your lessons on Überlearn!” he called through the door.

“Überlearn sucks!” she shouted back.

He started to answer her, but gave up. Überlearn did suck. He’d tried taking classes online himself a few years earlier, so he could get a better job—a better future for them both. But the classes were pathetic. Short, lacking in detail, peppered with errors, and filled with ads and product placement. And if you scored well on exams and passed your classes, your prize was a certificate you had to print out yourself, plus two sheets of Übercorp coupons for things you didn’t need—and probably couldn’t even get on this foul backwater planet.

He heaved a deep sigh and walked back to the kitchen.

Artis heated and ate a large bowl of watery, bland soup made with farro, kettle beans, and big chunks of stagroot. He often wondered if she cooked so badly to help keep herself from being tempted. When he was young, girls as shard-thin as she was were hard and mean and lonely. Times had been tough then, at least where he grew up, and girls with muscle and some extra curves were the swing. Artis caught himself thinking of Joellis’s mother and made himself stop. It never did him any good to think about Shilla.

His comlink zapped him, and he held his hand up to his ear. “Yuh.”

“Artis, my friend! Can I interest you in a card game tonight?”

It was Chellie. Artis smiled. “Absolutely. Shall we meet at Darvin’s shop—in about an hour?”

“Perfect. Oh—and bring your tools, would you? Darvin said he was having issues with his washer.”

Artis’s pulse ratcheted up a notch. It was tonight. “Right, will do.”

The comlink closed.

Perfect.

After Artis cleaned up the kitchen and took a shower, he knocked on Joellis’s door to check in before leaving. No response. He knocked again, harder, and the flimsy door popped open. He was simultaneously annoyed and relieved. He could, if he tried hard, convince himself he wasn’t really violating her privacy, since the door opened practically on its own. He stepped through the doorway before he could think better of it.

She was clearly gone. The room was small and dingy, littered with makeup, glitter, and tablets in varying degrees of brokenness. There was a narrow bed with worn purple sheets, a battered desk and chair, and a tower of dirty clothes in a corner. Artis winced. Surely, she was old enough to do her own wash. Would Shilla have done it for her, if she hadn’t left him alone with a little girl to raise, and only a single salary to do it on? He scowled and felt the old anger rush through him again.

She’d claimed to love the scientist she ran away with. Said in a note she was sorry—sorry for leaving him and for leaving Joellis—but he’d realized by then that Shilla mostly just loved herself. In a way, he hadn’t been all that sorry when she was gone. Back then, Joellis had adored him—almost worshipped him. He could barely remember that big-hearted little girl now.

He continued scanning Joellis’s room. There wasn’t much more. A small statue of a kura caterpillar that Shilla had gotten her one of the rare times an Übercorp ship had entered orbit and they’d been able to shop for the kind of useless trinkets no one would buy online and pay to ship. They’d spent almost six hours on board that day, before a security bot had alerted on a tag that had gotten stuck to Joellis’s shoe, and the poor child was surrounded by squealing bots calling out recorded warnings: “Halt! Stay where you are! Security is on the way! Halt!”

She’d been so terrified that they’d left as soon as security cleared them, leaving behind the things they hadn’t purchased yet. Joellis had loathed Übercorp from that day. So when Shilla ran off, Artis told her that Übercorp took her for destroying company computers. He was sure she’d believe him, and she did. Everyone did.

Turning toward the wall nearest the door, Artis wondered, for the first time, if he shouldn’t have been more careful to discourage her loathing of Übercorp. The wall was filled with a huge League of Space Pirates poster. “Handsome devils,” he said aloud, sneering. What on earth she saw in those shiftless posers he could not imagine. Rebels indeed. He supposed they might inspire people to take action when they had concerts nearby, but it’s not like they ever did anything themselves. It’s not like they ever risked their precious...

Artis shrugged and continued scanning her room. That’s when he saw a bowl under the bed. He slid it out and gasped when he saw the shard of a knife blade, coated in blood. Was she cutting herself? Frag.

He rubbed his forehead and then looked sharply at his watch. He was running late. He’d speak with her later, but for now, he had to skate.

Artis pulled her door shut and gathered his tool kit—having slipped a few extra items inside—and headed for the platform down below, forcing worries about his daughter from his thoughts. He must appear calm and untroubled in public, at all times.

As he walked down the corroded metal stairs toward the platform, looking out at row after row of nearly identical concrete apartments, Artis frowned. He’d never understood why, with less than ten thousand souls living on this barren rock, Übercorp had to pack them all into a small, walled city of cramped multi-story apartments. A little space would have been nice. Freedom from each other's noise and—as he climbed over a broken minitrike—freedom from each other’s detro.

It was efficient, he supposed. Shared walls and the insulation they afforded meant less heating and cooling expense—when the cooling worked, anyway. And it made surveillance easier.

The biggest reason was probably money. It had been made clear to everyone on the rock that this division of Übercorp was a cost center. The operation didn’t earn its keep, but Übercorp maintained it because it was their only claim on the planet. They could keep ownership of it for as long as they were squatting there, and mining it in however trivial a way. The result was that the cheapest materials were used. Housing was cramped and hadn’t had any reno in twenty-three years. And worst of all, because the money this division earned was so minimal, bonuses and raises were minuscule. It was next to impossible to earn enough to escape the rock, once you were there.

A train clattered into the station within a couple of minutes. The trains, at least, were reliable and ran frequently. Some things Übercorp did well, and that was one of them. That and toilets. The rest was a crap shoot.

He grabbed hold of the overhead bar as the door thunked shut, and he swayed loosely as the train gained speed. There were a handful of people on the car: three whispering teens with striped hair and elven ears; a tired, annoyed-looking woman wearing a maintenance coverall; and an Übercorpsman restlessly stroking his utility belt. Artis nodded to the soldier coolly, knowing there was nothing he carried and nothing he’d said on the eternally-monitored coms or Übernet that could cause him trouble.

The Übercorpsman nodded tensely and slid one hand closer to the laser rifle slung across his chest. They must be on high alert; Übercorpsmen usually seemed half asleep when they rode the trains. He’d heard it said that HX 1836 c—the sad excuse for a planet they lived on—was where an Übercorpsman’s career goes to die when he or she has screwed up with epic badness, although a low-level officer once told him he’d actually requested the assignment. Decent salary for a single man, decent benefits, and fuck-all to do, he’d explained. Plus plenty of opportunities for low-level bribe taking and midafternoon naps. It was his idea of paradise.

Artis found himself sneering again, and he shifted, pressing on his belly with a grimace to make it look like indigestion. Wouldn’t do for anyone in the car to report him for seeming dissatisfied. The contentment training and supervision he’d be subjected to would be unbearable—and awkward, too, under the circumstances.

The train lurched to a halt at his stop and he stepped off, followed by the Übercorpsman. A jolt of tension raced up his spine. He was tempted to stop and browse in a shop rather than risk leading the man to Darvin’s café, but then realized it was pointless. They could easily search his com traffic and find out where he was going. So, to Darvin’s café it was.

Artis was usually the last to arrive. He was at greatest risk, because he had access to the water treatment facility and was, thus, under the greatest surveillance. For that reason, they’d arranged a signal. If the Übercoffee sign was missing from the front window, he’d just go in, order a coffee, and leave again. If it was there, all was clear. Tonight, it was there.

He nodded to Darvin’s wife, Lexira, and stepped through the curtain into the kitchen, then through to a rear hallway, into a small storeroom, and back toward a shelf full of huge cans of Übercoffee and Übercreamer.

There were three new cans of Natural “Honey” Sweetener from StarrBees placed at about eye height. Artis whistled softly.

Smart. Any Übercorpsman who saw the cans would stop long enough to stare, and give them all a chance to cover what they were doing. And most corpsmen would probably just grab the sweetener and go. StarrBees’ honey sweetener had psychoactive properties. Those three cans—if they were what they claimed to be—were worth more than his annual salary, times two.

Darvin poked his head around the corner. “Nice, ‘eh? Bought them from a guy passing through.”

“They for real?” Artis asked.

Darvin chuckled, shaking his head. “I could afford that, I’d get my butt off this worthless rock. Think it’ll work, though?”

Artis stepped closer and leaned in, examining the labels. He nodded. “Nice work. I wouldn’t buy ‘em without testing the contents, if I had the credits, but if I were an Übercorpsman with low morals, I’d grab ‘em for sure.”

Darvin grinned and then gestured toward the shelving unit. “C’mon, everyone is downstairs already.”

The two men descended what was somewhere between a steep stairway and a very solid ladder, then moved through a cool wine cellar into a broader, well-lit room beyond. The rooms had been hewn, at considerable expense, from the dense rock that the whole planet seemed to consist of. Deep shelves lined the larger room, holding old equipment, spare parts for the industrial appliances the café used, empty foodservice cans, and boxes of papers.

Chellie, who’d called Artis earlier, and Marcu sat at a heavy, square table in the middle of the room, each drinking a coffee and snacking on a bowl of popcorn. Artis nodded to them, and they all sat, while Chellie shuffled a deck of cards.

They interspersed the first hand with small talk about their jobs, families, and joking discussion of the weather. The weather was what it always was, and always would be—at least until the local sun burned itself out.

Everyone thought, when they first came to HX 1836 c, that it might be a crappy, monotonous rock, but at least the weather was perfect. After a while, though, every last person found themselves wishing for any kind of natural disaster, as long as it meant the weather would change. And Artis had found himself at a loss to explain clouds to his own daughter, though she hadn’t asked questions like that for years. She’d somehow become a hostile teenager when she was just eleven—four years ago now.

Marcu kicked Artis’s boot and he refocused on the game, scanned everyone’s cards, and folded in disgust. Chellie folded, too, and Marcu and Darvin went back and forth, raising the pot to almost twenty-five credits before showing their hands. Marcu had two pair, and Darvin had nothing.

Marcu collected the cards, shuffled, dealt, leaving the pot in the center of the table. Everyone anted, and they played. Starting small, raising, a vague sort of tension in the air. Finally, a faint beep-beep could be heard and a green light went on over the doorway. They were clear—no surveillance, active or passive, could be detected.

The men placed their hands neatly on the table, so they could pick them up again if needed, and Chellie picked up the money in the pot and tucked it in his wallet. He’d spent almost twice what was there on bribing a bank clerk to make sure the school’s bills weren’t paid for three months running, and they’d all agreed to kick in what they could.

The four men sat back for a moment, looking at each other.

Darvin said, “I overheard a couple managers talking yesterday morning over coffee and rolls. Big pirate heist of an Übercorp freighter two days ago.”

“Really?” Chellie said. “They get anything good?”

Darvin shrugged. “It was empty. Pirates took the whole ship. Didn’t hear any details, but they looked tense. Really tense.”

“Was it nearby?” Artis said. “Übercorpsman on the train looked tense, too.”

Darvin shrugged again. “That’s all I know.”

Marcu placed his hands flat on the table and rubbed them back and forth. “Should we maybe wait...”

“No,” Artis said. “We can’t. This is the best opportunity we’ve had in...ever. We’ve got to do it.” They’d been plotting and planning for years, trying to find a way off the planet. All of them had been lied to about jobs, opportunities, and salaries. All of them had families and were desperate to make better futures for them. And they’d never even come close to a workable plan before.

The others exchanged looks, and then everyone nodded. The men stood, grabbed their gear, and Darvin triggered the hidden latch on one of the shelves lining the wall. The shelving unit swung out, almost entirely silent, and the men stepped through, each pulling out and keying a small light. The shelf snapped shut behind them, and they walked down the narrow tunnel without speaking.

They had half a mile to go, and not a lot of time to work with, so they moved as quickly as they could. They paused twice for Chellie, whose lungs were bad. He worked in the mines, overseeing teams of miners and a handful of MUNGOs. The safety gear was lousy, and almost impossible to work in, so most people left the respirators off. Chellie made more than the rest of them, but he’d die sooner. Artis didn’t think it was worth it—though with Joellis to care for, he often wondered if he shouldn’t have tried the mines anyway.

They arrived at last at the school’s basement, entering through a small hatch Marcu had put in himself while working on the seismic sensors that underlay the whole city.

“Wait here,” Marcu whispered, and went to disconnect the alarms and surveillance equipment as they’d planned. But just seconds later, Marcu ran back to them.

“Something’s wrong, something’s wrong!” he hissed at them.

“What, what is it?” Artis asked.

“The equipment’s already been turned off—the whole panel’s been destroyed. And I heard voices!”

“Where?” Chellie said. “Where are they coming from? Could it just be kids?”

“I don’t think—“ Marcu said, and then lights blinded them.

“Freeze! Freeze!” they heard a man shouting.

“Put your hands up!” another one called.

A woman hissed, “Frag it, what do we do? We gotta get out of here!”

“Well, we can’t just leave them here!” one of the men said, his voice cracking.

Artis thought they sounded young—and they definitely weren’t Übercorpsmen. “Look, why don’t we—“

“Shut up!” the other man said. “Come on—the four of you. Let’s go. That way, that way!” And he pointed his light toward the stairs leading up to the school. “Come on—run!”

“My tools,” Artis said, and he saw one of the armed men grab the box. Good enough. If they were found in the school, he’d have no defense. No hope.

And then they were running, the three with lights and weapons were urging them to go faster, and they were up, through the main hallway, out the doors toward the small playing field—another bleak expanse of rock—and they were stumbling and crashing up the ramp into a small atmospheric cargo carrier.

Chellie collapsed to the floor, wheezing and coughing, fumbling for what Artis knew was an inhaler.

“Hey—hey, stop that,” one of the young men yelled, pointing his gun at Chellie.

Artis realized the three of them wore masks. “It’s just his inhaler,” he said, holding a hand up and moving carefully to help Chellie. He slid the inhaler quickly out of the pouch his friend carried with him everywhere, and Chellie grabbed it, inhaling the medicine frantically.

The door of the carrier thudded closed and the engines roared up. The voice of the woman who’d been in the school came over the com system. “Guys, we have like twenty-six seconds. Buckle up, we’re outta here.”

As the carrier’s engines whined, they lifted off and everyone threw themselves into a seat, buckling up.

Chellie was still breathing hard, looking drago, but Artis met his eyes and he nodded. He was OK.

There were no windows, but they could feel the carrier moving at an enormous rate, swerving hard—left and right, up and down. And then Marcu said, “Twenty-six seconds to what?”

Artis looked and saw panic on Marcu’s face.

“Twenty-six seconds to what?” Marcu shouted.

“Wait for it,” one of the men said. “Four...three...”

The carrier decelerated abruptly, throwing them into their restraints.

“Two...”

And the carrier set down hard.

“One.”

A series of explosions roared, and the ground beneath them bucked. They could hear rumbles of collapsing buildings, and chunks of debris hitting the outside of the carrier.

The two men whooped, and the door to the con slid open. Two young women bounded in, cheering, pounding their fists against the others’ in victory.

“We did it!” the new woman said, and Artis gasped.

She turned and saw him. “Oh fragging spit,” she said. “Artis.”

“Joellis,” he said.

“What the frag?” she said.

“What have you gotten yourself into, girl?” Artis said, and then the ground bucked again, and there was a tremendous roar that went on for almost twenty seconds.

The four men and women—kids, really—held onto each other to stay upright.

“What the hell?” one of the boys said. “Did one of the charges go off late?”

Joellis pulled her mask off.

“Midnight—don’t!” the other woman said.

“Oh, it’s fine,” Joellis said. “It’s my dad and his lame friends. They won’t do anything. They never do anything.”

“Joellis—” Artis started.

“Don’t you dare try and lecture me. You always talk about getting off this hell planet—well, we’re actually doing something about it!”

“Doing what?” Artis said. “What is it you think you’ve accomplished?”

“Übercorp will have to come now. They’ll come, and then—then they’ll see what we can really do.”

“Wait,” Darvin said. “This was just bait? Bait to get Übercorp here so you can—what—attack their ship?”

“Yeah,” Joellis said, sounding just the slightest bit uncertain. “We can do it—I know we can.”

Artis shook his head at her. “You fool. All of you—damn fools.”

“And what were you doing there?” one of the boys asked.

“We had a plan,” Artis said. “A smart plan. A careful plan. We were going to damage the school supports just enough to prove the planet’s not seismically stable enough to have people live here safely. We were going to petition United Planets to rule the planet unsafe.”

The ground shook again, and the rumbling sound grew to a bellow before trailing off.

“And how long would that take? Years? Decades, maybe?” Joellis sneered. “You think too small. You always have. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

Artis flinched and said nothing.

Marcu said, “You used ZX9 explosives?”

“Yeah,” one of the guys said. He grinned. “That piece of shit school is nothing but rubble now.”

The four laughed, and the others took their masks off. A tall blonde boy with orange skin and green eyes. A shorter but incredibly skinny boy with what looked like quills in place of hair, and whiskers like a cat. And the other girl was a deep shade of green.

Artis didn’t recognize any of them. Joellis never talked about her friends. And he’d never really asked. He’d always been too busy making plans.

Marcu stood and cleared his throat. “We need to go. We—we need to evacuate. Immediately.”

“Evacuate what?”  the orange boy asked.

“The planet, probably,” Marcu said.

“My friend,” Darvin said. “You’re not serious.”

But he was, and the three men could see it plainly.

“Don’t be stupid, old man,” the quilled boy said. “This shaking will settle down, and we’ll—”

And the ground pitched so hard they all stumbled and fell, and held on to what they could. As the tremors began to fade, they heard more rumbling in the distance. More buildings starting to fall.

And then the sirens began. And they knew. They all knew.

Every six months, the whole population participated in emergency evacuation drills, in the event of severe volcanic or seismic events. Just a precaution; nothing was ever going to happen. Unless someone did something stupid and used the wrong kind of explosives, or too much—and the mines were far too well run for that. It would never happen.

The kids sat where they’d fallen, stunned into immobility.

Chellie had more piloting experience than any of them, so he went forward to take the helm and get them off the surface. Darvin sat beside him, and Artis and Marcu sat behind them, leaving the kids in the back.

Chellie eased the carrier off the surface, and they could see where they were at last—in a repair bay in the mining sector.

Darvin flipped on the emergency distress beacon and then keyed the radio, but there was nothing. No signal, not even a light to indicate power. “Frag. This must be why it was in the repair shop.”

“Trade places with me,” Artis said, and they shifted. Artis popped open the panel, and started checking circuit boards.

As they headed east, away from the city, they could see a thick cloud of dust over the area that used to hold the school—and hundreds of small personnel carriers were taking off from the surface.

A mid-size carrier was loading families from the engineers’ quarters, with men, women, and children running to climb aboard, when another tremor hit—a bad one. The building the carrier was parked in front of swayed drunkenly, back and forth, back and forth, and then leaned too far to the front, and the main support pillars gave way. The whole building collapsed slowly forward, crushing the carrier and everyone in it.

The four men watched it happen, groaning, knowing they were helpless.

Artis refocused and, as their ship passed over the city’s walls, he pressed home the last circuit board and the system popped on.

“—mergency evacuation notice. Repeat, this is an emergency evacuation notice. All ships report to tertiary assembly points. Tertiary assembly points only are to be used. All personnel must stay on board their ships. Log idents and locations, and login to central status to locate all personnel. Sector-wide emergency assistance requests have been sent. Please stay calm. Help is on the way.”

Artis began tapping their idents into the computer.

“Tertiary?” The orange boy was standing in the entryway looking confused. “What are tertiary assembly points? I thought we went to secondary points in the event of a real evacuation.”

“Unless the secondary points are too unstable,” Marcu said. “Jackhole.”

Orange boy scowled and started to say something, but Darvin held his hand up and shook his head.

The green girl said, “I don’t see what the big deal is. It worked, didn’t it? We’ll all get out of here—off this stupid rock. And it will cost Übercorp a ton of money. Even if we do nothing else, we accomplished that.”

“Sure,” Marcu said. “And all we have to do is survive until someone gets here to rescue us.”

There was a long silence.  

The quilled boy said, “Is that—I mean, are we... That shouldn’t be a problem. Should it?”

Marcu shrugged. “If your explosion initiates volcanic activity—which it probably will—we may all have a small problem with breathing.”

“Breathing?” the orange guy whispered.

“How many of these ships have contained breathing equipment? How many are capable of orbital flight?”

None of them. Not even one. The planet usually had an orbital freighter on hand to collect ore, but the last one had left three days earlier, and they weren’t expecting it back for two weeks—and they all knew it.

Artis asked for the kids’ idents and he keyed them in. Data soon appeared on the screen and he read off a list of each person’s family members who were accounted for. They sat grimly in silence waiting for more names to be added to the lists.

They were just five minutes from the tertiary landing site when the emergency alert system keyed on again.

“All personnel, please report to quinary assembly points. Quinary assembly points are on the Maxilla Plateau. All carriers currently on the ground at the tertiary assembly point must immediately leave the ground due to volcanic activity.”

“Frag it,” Marcu whispered.

“Where the hell is the Maxilla Plateau?” Chellie said.

Silence.

Artis tapped at the computer again and pulled up a map. “Whoa.”

“What?” Chellie said.

“It’s almost 800 kilometers from here. Do we have enough fuel?”

Chellie hesitated, then shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Artis turned off all unnecessary systems, and the eight of them sat in silence, moving further south. Night was falling, and they could see two glowing red and orange fountains to the east. By morning, the situation was likely to be far worse. And what then?

The green girl asked if there was anything to eat. Darvin checked the storage lockers where emergency supplies were kept. Empty. Nothing. No food, no water. The little cargo hauler didn’t even have a toilet on board. “What if I have to pee?” the green girl asked.

“God, there’s not even a bucket on this tub,” Darvin said.

“This is so plain!” the girl said.

Darvin growled softly. “If I didn’t know my family was safe, I’d toss that half-wit into the nearest caldera.”

“Alert,” the emergency notice resumed. “A freighter and a star cruiser will soon be entering orbit to commence rescue operations. All evacuations will begin at the quinary assembly point in forty-five minutes. Please collect your belongings and report to the evacuation beacon on the north end of the Maxilla Plateau.”

“Oh, thank you,” Marcu whispered. “Thank you.”

They were less than twenty kilometers away from the plateau. Hope began to buoy everyone’s spirits. Hope and the thought of friends and family, food and drink, and an escape, at last. It would be so wonderful.

The fuel alert signal began squealing, and the words “Reduce Altitude! Low Fuel!” flashed again and again on the nav panel. As they descended, Chellie and Artis were the first to see it: the glow of lava just below them, peeking through a thin crust of slightly hardened rock.

The computer announced, “Warning! Surface unstable! Ground temperature exceeds safety limits!”

Still, the screen blinked: “Reduce Altitude! Low Fuel!”

As they continued their descent, Artis could hear Joellis whisper, “It was worth it. It was worth it,” over and over.

As the carrier touched down and the lava made contact with the fuel cells, Artis said: “It was not.”

Meriah Lysistrata Crawford teaches research and writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, and is a private investigator, a writer, and an editor. She has published short stories in several genres, essays, a variety of scholarly work, a poem about semicolons, and co-edited the anthology Trust and Treachery: Tales of Power and Intrigue. Meriah’s hobbies include gardening; frolicking with her big, crazy bloodhound-mix pup; and playing frequent rounds of “is it fireworks or gunfire” in her neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia. For more information, visit her website at www.meriahcrawford.com.

Art by Meena Khalili. Get the stencil HERE. 

 “Her outstanding characteristic is receptivity.” At this, Maxilla's eyes snap open, and Luma feels a surge in her belly as Maxilla's eyes meet hers for a brief second. “Scores like this indicate someone who absorbs the emotional nuances of the people around her in vivid detail, with stunning accuracy. In olden times some called these people empaths, and believed they had supernatural abilities.”

Maxilla nods with satisfaction as Pavo drones on. “There are no indicators for mood disorders or addictions. The genetic code appears to be malleable and should respond well to modifications of any kind. The only abnormality in this overall excellent subject is a slight tendency towards an enlarged heart, which can mean a replacement organ will be necessary. But not until she is in the last third of her lifespan, rarely before the age of one hundred.” He strokes the paper, so rare, so fragile and smooth. Luma would like to touch it, too.

“She certainly has the makings of a superior Future. She will be placed in Entertainment,” Maxilla says, “and we will use her to probe the disturbances showing up in the fringe elements.”

“One thing,” says Pavo. “Doesn't the enlarged heart marker often mean a tendency towards...passion and romantic yearning? Traits that offer an undesirable sort of crack, or fault line, so to speak, that make a person susceptible to outside forces?”

Maxilla focuses the violet intensity of her large eyes on Pavo. One corner of her  full lips lifts. “Pavo. I'm surprised at you. How archaic and quite darling. That's such antiquated thinking—to pair an organ with feelings.”

“Of course,” says Pavo, looking down. “I am mistaken.”

But Luma registers a little blip. He's lying, a small social lie. Maxilla will be very amused at this later, in her palatial sleeping quarters. Of all of the employees of Übercorp, the privilege of being beside her at bedtime belongs to Luma alone. Everyone assumes she is just a mechanized assassin, a body guard. But when she was mechanized, she got something extra. Something only Maxilla knows about. Well, and the person who developed the technology. But Luma's first act as Maxilla's assassin was to give him a heart attack. Biologically identical to the real thing.

Tonight, like all nights, she will press her hand to Maxilla's and activate a transfer. She and Maxilla will review all of the people Luma was able to scan that day. The receptor planting process is going well. Nearly all of Maxilla's core management, unbeknownst to them, carry receptors. Luma looks forward to watching Maxilla in her sheer nightgown as she quickly flicks through the data that appears on her palm. She will have to sit close to see it, their thighs nearly touching, and Luma will secretly revel in the impossible voluptuousness and perfection of form and skin, Modifications reserved only for Maxilla, the future Galactic President and second in command at Übercorp.

“We're done here. Luma, take care of it,” Maxilla says, rising. “Luma?” Luma snaps out of her reverie and points at the stack of papers. They flash into a few floating ashes that she picks up and rubs between her fingers.

On the first day of her new position, Rayna notices a dull ache running up her legs as she walks down the glittering sidewalk that leads to Übercorp Entertainment, the building rising up over the smog line nearly one mile into the sky. They say it is like being on top of a cloud up there, that at night you can see the stars. She intends to find out for herself someday. She ignores her legs; it is a small price to pay to be four inches taller. The Modification techs said the ache would go away in about a week. Basics, walking on the ordinary sidewalk of gray cement, sneak glances at her. Her name and picture are not on Entertainment yet. When they broadcast her on the New Future Show, there is a chance she will get fans of her own who will call to her on the streets.

Picking out her Mod Package was harder than she thought it would be. The initial elation of being selected as a Future turned into stress as she sat with her Mentor and combed through the choices. She hadn't known that her genetic modification choices were bundled with Lifestyle, so that when she chose her long raven black hair and green eyes, it meant she also chose Office for her job and an apartment with gray walls, angular, rather uncomfortable furniture, and modern paintings with violent slashes of primary colors. She wanted blonde hair and violet eyes, but the only blonde packages available worked Attendant, and they also mostly had last year's favored round faces and tiny, pouty mouths. At least she had this year's high cheekbones and feline eyes. Her Mentor told her that Attendant  and Office jobs offered equal opportunities for advancement, but Rayna liked the sleek, streamlined clothes worn by Office so much better than the flashy, revealing clothes worn by Attendants. She'd had enough of that to last a lifetime.

“Are you sure?” her Mentor asked with a little frown when she made her choice. “You could travel so much more if you chose Attendant. Really see the Galaxy.”

“I'm sure,” Rayna said. But when the Mentor's frown got deeper, her heart raced. “Unless you think it would be better for me? I'm happy to change if you think it's better.”

The Mentor made a note in Rayna's file and smiled at her. “No. No, you are going to be very successful. I'm sure of it.”   

And now here she is, her new self, Stephon, the manager of the new Futures, waiting for her at the end of the sidewalk in front of the main doors. “Congratulations, Rayna,” he says. He has the silver blond hair of the Übercorp elite and this year's aquiline nose and steel gray eyes. “I am pleased to tell you that you will be working in the BandProduct Division as an assistant to the fourteenth supervisor.” He looks at Rayna to register her reaction. She smiles. “Zolla, who you will meet shortly, is your supervisor and she is in charge of the newly formed division of BandProduct for Young Adult Basics. Given the success of BandProduct for Tweens, Übercorp believes it's time to harness this market. Past time.” He looks at her intently.

“Absolutely,” Rayna says.

“I believe Zolla is going to have you do field work and go to...” He pauses and frowns at the bracelet of polished blue stones on Rayna's wrist. “That, I assume, did not come with your Lifestyle Package?”

“My mother,” Rayna says, her voice breaking. Stephon frowned. “She gave this to me when―”

“Take it off. We don't mix our old lives with our new ones.” He smiled at her. “It looks terrible anyway.”

Rayna was born on Svegolas, the planet of gambling and dry red dust, to Basic parents. The wealthiest of the Übercorp Elite came to Svegolas to experience excess in all its forms. Each city on Svelgolas catered to all the vices, but Greed had the best shopping, and Envy the long promenades where rich people  strolled in their finest clothes with Entertainment cameras trained on them day and night, broadcasting their good fortune to the masses.

Sloth had an artificial island, and beaches that rivaled the best on Earth except the waves were perfectly timed so the cadence of them breaking formed a rhythm that matched the heartbeat and enabled deeper relaxation. Also, the sand did not stick to skin.

Pride held all of the Übercorp awards ceremonies. Few knew anyone who had been there, but it was rumored to have halls of gold.

None of the Basics who worked in Wrath ever came back.

Lust, of course, was where the Elites went to satisfy any carnal desire the mind could imagine. The Exotics walked the streets, their Modifications including every size, number and combination of sex organs possible as well as  every permutation of human and animal the genetic code permitted. And all of them competed, whether through beauty or perversity, for the Elite dollar.

Rayna's parents worked in the city of Gluttony, on the vegetable chopping line. All day long they diced, pared and peeled, often coming home with cuts, always with raw hands. Of course all of the work they did could be done by machines, but on Svegolas the Elites prized the human touch, believing that a Basic making their soup by hand or scrubbing their linens with a washtub and board added an essence to a meal, or a night's sleep that deepened the experience.

Farther out from the lavish city centers were suburbs of less attractive, less expensive vices. Here Basics could buy a meal or an hour with a lesser Exotic, one whose earnings weren't enough to keep up with their Modifications; perhaps their shimmering scales were dropping off, revealing gray puckered skin. Some of them had modified beyond what their genetic code permitted and crossed the line from perversion into grotesque.

Still, to be able to spend money on sex or a meal was something everyone worked for.

The farthest out were the rows upon rows of tiny houses where the working Basics lived. Rayna grew up here, and ran in the red dust with the other neighborhood children. Her mother worked hard teaching her to chop. Her family carried beliefs from the olden days, one being that sex should only be between two marrieds. On Svegolas, the choice for children born to Basics was to follow the family trade or become an Exotic. The third choice, of passing the Future Testing administered at age eighteen, was not something Rayna's family allowed themselves to think about.

But one month after Rayna's eighteenth birthday, a Future came to the door. The impossibly tall blonde woman smiled, and someone from Entertainment began filming as Rayna's mother cried tears of joy and sorrow. That night, before Rayna got on the Übercorp vessel that would take her to Earth, her mother put the bracelet with the blue stones on her  wrist and hugged her close.

Rayna's first two weeks passed in a blur as she scanned endless columns of statistics and graphs detailing the listening habits of people in their early twenties. At night, she went to ÜberClubs with her new friends, or sat in her spotless apartment watching Entertainment while flicking through screen after screen of Modifications and dreaming of her future self.

“I think you can see what is happening here, can't you?” Zolla asks one afternoon over a medley of rare galaxy vegetables. Since it is her first business lunch with her new supervisor, Rayna does not have the nerve to order such an expensive dish. Not yet, anyway. Zolla had Modifications last week, and flicks her long silver hair back over her new, small, sharply pointed ears. She reminds Rayna of a fox she saw once on Entertainment, footage of forest creatures from long ago. She looks like she might pounce.

“It seems,” Rayna says tentatively, “like attendance at ÜberClubs is falling off in favor of small, independent venues.”

“Exactly. And we know that money follows music. If we analyze the buying habits of the followers of these bands, we see their consumption is falling off. The streets where these bars are located are lined with vendors selling clothing, trinkets, you name it. But none of these goods are authorized Lifestyle. Of course, people are free to make these faddish craft items. Übercorp supplies the populace with ample raw materials they can  purchase to make whatever they like. But BandProduct sees an enormous opportunity here. If we can distill what this demographic is looking for, we can fill that need directly.”

“I'm looking forward to seeing these bands so I can start figuring this out,” Rayna says.

“I hope you see the deeper implications.” Zolla looks at Rayna with steel grey eyes. “People making their own clothing and music—even the art on their walls—are stealing brainpower that could be used serving Übercorp. It works against the vision of unity.”

“I do see that,” Rayna says, feeling her heart swell with warmth at her good fortune. She is doing an important job for Übercorp. Tonight she will go home and try on her new clothes and find the perfect outfit to wear to the little bars on Friday.

“This is confidential,” Zolla says, leaning in. “Maxilla herself is monitoring all the divisions of Entertainment right now. I got word from Stephon yesterday. This level of scrutiny could mean promotion or disaster. Act accordingly.”

The inside of the bar is lit only by the glowing wall with the pyramid of liquor bottles. People stand in clusters drinking and talking. This is nothing like the ÜberClub Rayna went to last week with her coworkers, where Exotics pushed carts of tinkling glasses and decanters filled with the finest elixirs in the Galaxy. Mostly Basics fill this bar, with a few groups of Futures enjoying the novelty of a raw environment. At least, that is the motivation Rayna has gleaned from her research so far.

It smells of sweat and something sharp that reminds her inexplicably of the nights she laid awake in her parent's house watching the moons arc across the sky, wanting something she could not name. The crowd grows by the minute.

“Pay attention,” Zolla says. “League of Space Pirates is coming out.” The crowd cheers and chants “Orlok,” as a Basic man with black hair and the hoop earrings and coarse muslin blouse of an olden times pirate takes the stage, followed by the rest of the band.

Rayna looks at Orlok and wonders how the black stubble on his face would feel against her skin. Men on Svegolas are clean shaven, and Futures always upgrade to no body hair. The band launches into a song, and the music pulls the crowd closer to the stage. Rayna joins the crush. “Good idea,” Zolla murmurs into her ear. But Rayna is not thinking about work any more. The music is tearing through her like wolf song, and her heart pounds her blood through her veins; she imagines dark skies and lightning, a man pressed to her side.

People start dancing, nothing like the moves showcased on Entertainment. They stomp and knock into each other, flailing and lost in themselves and sometimes another. Zolla takes her arm and tries to pull her to the side. Rayna shakes her head and surrenders to the tangle of bodies, hips, hands, the slash of a girl's hair across her face. She surges with the crowd and feels her own thoughts unhooking and dissolving in a warm pool as the people start moving as one.   

Rayna is sweating and shaky when the band finally takes a break, clasping hands with people and laughing as she makes her way off the floor. Zolla stares at her. “You don't need to overdo it,” she says. But in the cool night air, Rayna smiles at the people lining the streets with the wares they stitched with their own hands, and the paintings they painted with their own hearts. Neither Zolla nor Rayna see Luma  standing in the shadows across the street.  In her bed that night, Rayna tosses and turns, remembering Orlok's eyes. When morning comes, she takes no joy in picking out her outfit from her closet full of clothes.

“Reverse the input to when she sees Orlok,” Maxilla tells Luma. “Are you certain her receptors were adequately wired to your detectors?” Luma presses closer to Maxilla and inhales quietly.

“Oh, yes, the connection couldn't be better,” Luma says. Maxilla smells like desert roses and cinnamon and Luma wonders for the millionth time if Maxilla knows about the snarl of love and desire coursing through her.

“What is she registering when she sees Orlok?” Luma knows damn well what it is.

“She is attracted to him,” Luma says.

Maxilla nods. “We can use this.” She smiles at Luma. “Pavo was right, I believe. This wave of free thinking in the Basics seems to originate from contact with this band. When Miss Rayna  hones in on Orlok, she'll soak up whatever is going on like a little sponge. Tell Stephon to send her back. Alone, so Zolla doesn't interfere.”

She is on the dance floor, under Orlok's eyes, the music wrapping her body in a storm of olden times, before the climate engineering that brought tame rain and theatrical lightning. Her lungs  fill with air; It feels like breathing for the first time. Rayna senses molecules in her own body shifting; she feels the seed of a new world.

The crowd stomp as one animal, and Rayna stomps with them. The heel of her boot snaps and she lunges forward into the arms of a Basic man. “You must have been very beautiful, before,” he says in her ear. Rayna knows it is true and her eyes fill with tears. He smiles sadly and kisses her cheek. “Don't worry. It's going to be okay someday,” he says. In her are the feelings of every person in the bar, and the people closest turn to her, touching her gently. This can not be undone.

When the night is over she walks out of the bar barefoot. This time, she sees Luma out of the corner of her eye. Instantly, Rayna registers a beam probing into her like tiny insect legs or a whisper, lightly touching her memories, trying to sort her feelings and thoughts. Her heart thuds horribly. She must seal herself. She focuses on the hard asphalt under her feet, and the sharp sting of little rocks pressing into her soles. She thinks of her broken boots,  Zolla's new ear Modification, the blue stones her mother strung on her bracelet. But she knows she has no barriers and she feels the ectoplasm of everything in her get sucked up into Luma's beam. Almost everything. All she can snatch back is the tiny new seed. They won't know everything.

Zolla pounds on her door. “Rayna! Your personal chip indicates you are in here! Open up!” Rayna's heart sinks. She forgot about the chip. Slowly she walks to the door, trying to compose herself and opens it a crack.

“Zolla! I was in the bathroom. Didn't you get the message I'm sick?”

“Why aren't you on Communication? We've been trying to reach you for hours. We have a dinner meeting. Stephon says it's with Maxilla, and she specifically asked for you! ”

Rayna lets Zolla in. She cocks her head at Rayna, looking her over with a frown. “I'm so sorry you had to come find me,” Rayna says. She tells Zolla about her stomach upset, and how she napped. Zolla's expression does not change, and Rayna finally soothes her by asking her to help pick out an outfit for the meeting. They choose pants made of vintage elephant leather, and when Rayna touches them, she feels the elephant's long ago death in her bones, the herd mourning the last of their kind as they dropped dead in the dust, shot down when the remnants of what used to be Africa were sold to Übercorp. She lets Zolla think the tears that fall are from the shame of almost missing the meeting. Reassured, Zolla leaves to get herself ready.

There might be just enough time.

The dull orange of sunset smolders above as she runs to the transport line that will take her to the bar. Soon they will be looking for her. The barman recognizes her when she comes in and smiles. She feels his warmth and it cuts through her fear. Each person, she realizes, is like the molten orb she once held in her hands as a child, shifting prisms of dark and light. He leads her to Orlok, who is alone in the back, turning the pages of an antique book. He stands and she runs to him. His eyes are speckled with green. She feels the lightning in his mind. “You have to go now,” she whispers. “They know.”

He presses his lips to her forehead. “Thank you,” he says. “You aren't safe anymore. Get to the Port. Wait here and  I'll send someone who knows the back roads.” He pushes her towards the door and is gone.

Rayna sits at the bar and feels her heart pulsing under the arch of her ribs, the imprint of his lips still warm on her forehead. When Luma comes through the door, Rayna is thinking she knows what it was she felt in her bed at night so many years ago.

It was longing.

There is nothing gentle about the beam that enters Rayna and plucks the seed from her mind. Luma is close enough for Rayna to look in her eyes and she feels the secret love tucked inside Luma, caught in the machinery.

“You know how it feels,” Rayna says to her, and smiles. What Rayna finds out, as the flashing pain explodes her heart and she stumbles out the door and falls into the street, is that asphalt can feel as safe and warm as your own bed while you’re drifting off to sleep.

Julie Geen is currently getting an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has written for Style Weekly, belle magazine and has stories and essays published in anthologies. Like everyone else, she’s working on a novel.

Art by Thea Duskin. Get the stencil HERE. 

But everyone else seems to. And thanks to the Übercorp employees' annoying need for romance, my career is not glamorous. I should be plotting the job placement trajectory of thousands of the most brilliant minds homo sapiens has ever produced. I should be shaping the future by matching the right person to the needs of the most powerful corporation in the history of work. I should be discussing the fate of humanity in the stars.

Instead I take too many stimulants to get going in the morning, and too many crushers at night because each and every day—a relative concept out here without a sun in our sightline—My high-powered job has been reduced to empathizing with the heartache of others.

Me—a shoulder to cry on—it’s absurd. Every day, listening to their pining, their wild-eyed insistence to be transferred near their lovebird. Then their defeated muttering for a transfer back to whatever rock they came from when it all fell apart. Brilliant minds, indeed. They are pathetic.

“A perfect comeuppance,” my Daddy declared when I called home with my tail between my legs. He thinks if I would find the right mate, then nothing else would matter. As if he knows. He and Mama met in their forties and had me via science. She is a chef. He is retired from an office and just drives around half the day. They meet for meals and paying bills. Some romance.

But he’s right. For all my education, vigilant work, and dedication to my career—in the end I am forced to spell it out for people like my Daddy does. “Space ain’t no place for romance,” I tell them. They never listen.

Übercorp Employee Incident Report QT15678

Location: Docking Station Hemisphere

EWM representative: Sadie MacHinton

Summary: Übercorp employees Ulrich XXXXXX and Alfonse XXXXX, both engineers in the architecture division on Hemisphere with over ten years’ service to the company, are under suspicion for sabotage of hourly efficiency, improper usage of company equipment, and damage to company workforce.

After an employee fitness review, this representative determined that Ulrich X assaulted Alfonse X causing damage to the orbital socket, scratches to the chest, and stress to the hair follicles. Neither employee admits to the assault but cameras in the architectural lab captured most of the incident in question.

Upon further review of camera data, this representative determined that other unsatisfactory non-work activities undoubtedly related to the assault undoubtedly related to the assault had occurred both both before, and subsequent to, the altercation.

This representative has met with both men. They are excellent talent, normally diligent workers, and have worked well together for years. They have resumed their work together. Neither has weapons access. Review of their experience and of camera data shows neither has combat training. They appear not to be viable threats to each other, other employees, or the company.

This representative recommends, due to the sensitive nature of their work and the need for project completion, that the employees be allowed to continue without the usual reprimands and engagement of punishment/re-education until XXXX when they will receive further review.

Sadie MacHinton, EWM 5

Ulrich had never felt such shame. He had spent his life in study and was proud of it. He was a man of equations, formulas, lines and dots—a zero and one man: if a dilemma is not fixed by a 0, use a 1. With enough logic and study, every problem could be solved. Anyone who said otherwise, he believed, suffered from hysteria.

When Ulrich closed his eyes at the end of a work day he saw order. A man of average height, receding and silvering hair, and not much in the lips department, Ulrich was neither a lover nor a fighter. Ulrich was an engineer and, as such, expected the very best of himself—calm, brilliance, and symmetry.

How could all of this be true of the man who awkwardly kicked, snatched at hair, and slapped about his fellow engineer three hours into their most recent shift? How could this still be true as he looked at Alfonse’s purple swollen eye and felt longing and ache? Who was Ulrich if at any moment he could crack again and not know himself, not know his own impulses through this haze? Who was Ulrich now?

Alfonse was neither ashamed nor pissed. His eye hurt. His scratches stung. He had the humiliating experience of trying to explain without explaining the situation to the officious Sadie MacHinton. But Alfonse was not feeling any pain. He was not concerned about the future of his career. He was not worried about the lost time on the project. He was not even anxious about the rumors that were no doubt starting to spread, and Alfonse had always been a person whose greatest goal in life was to be mistaken for someone else and then never noticed again.

Alfonse was unconcerned about all of his usual fears and anxious tics. He hadn’t had a snack in weeks. Alfonse was fearless because for the first time in his life, Alfonse was in blue fire love. And he knew that Ulrich was too. Alfonse was elated.

You don’t have to be part of the system, you know? You can be something else. You can be freedom. Stepping into the void beyond, you can be your own creation of art. You can flow and ebb. You can thrive. The system can be your fire. Be fire. Be art.

The Conflagration of the Dandelion spends a great deal of its collective energy being art. The Conflagration twirls. They frolic. They string beads. Oh hell, can they string beads. They string way too many beads to sell to furlough adventurers who want a reminder of how close they got to Conflagrating themselves for three days before they went back to work on whatever station, ship or rock they came from. Beads are the ultimate rebel souvenir in space. They are useless, dangerous, and hard to store. Nothing says, “Don’t cross me, I nearly joined an art cult while on my vacation,” better than a strand of beads in one’s quarters.

But mainly what the Conflagration consumes itself with is imagination. Or daydreaming you might call it, or drug-induced flights of fancy—a state of being where time is relative and productivity is measured in…well, not really anything. In other words, they are kind of bonkers with happiness.

Marco believes that, bliss and beads aside, the Conflagration is best at body odor: B.O., funk, wallowing in their own stink. Marco wonders if aging makes one’s nose sensitivity break. He may be twelve but he doesn’t think that means he has to be stinky.

Marco merged with the Conflagration of the Dandelion, group legend has it, by celestial gift. This could have led to a more messianic self-view if his giftedness wasn’t always called upon to clean up after a particularly grueling stretch of the elders being art. Marco would straighten, clean, and deodorize until one of the elders would eventually rouse herself and join him in a semi-tranced effort at teamwork. These efforts often evoked a nostalgia in the elder to share the story of Marco’s early years,and of of his father, which would also always wind around around to the era of the Dawn of the Blue.

Before the elders became kind of lofty and art–obsessed, Marco dreaded hearing his own origin story. It seemed to inevitably lead to elders kissing and tickling both both each other and moony-eyed Dandelion Petals, as followers of the Conflagration were called, before before pairing off for a few hours, only to return partially covered in blue body paint. As he and they aged, however, the tales of his arrival as a toddler in his desperate father’s pack roughly coinciding with the Dawn of the Blue became, as Weston—the next youngest petal at twenty-five—would say, “more dreamy and less creamy.”

We were counters and builders, soldiers and sellers, the story of the Conflagration began. We were mindless of our true nature. We didn’t bend—we chopped. We didn’t unite, we only briefly linked. We became the Conflagration of the Dandelion to be better people.

To be better at people.

To be.

And to people.

Dandelions could sometimes sometimes talk like this for hours.

This is what your father sought—the connection, the recognition of both his and your true natures: being and people. He was a beautiful artist, your father. He designed pods for the poor—entire living spaces from castoffs and acquisitions from those whose overabundance needed culling. There was rumor that he had been a Road Handler on the Detritus with the League of Space Pirates. Some thought that he was a refugee from the battles of piety between the Jacksonites and the Emoticons. He lived with us but only two Earth years, and he was so much art in that time—we knew him not as man, and so we never learned if any of the speculation of his past story was true in history’s sense. But your father was true.

Your father was poet–handsome, rugged–strong, and a seer. He could see the power in a piece of slag to be transformed into utility. He could see the music in teardrops. He was the first to see the fog as we moved to a new location. He was the first to call us to stop. You know the story of the Dawn of the Blue. Maybe it would never have been without you and without him. Do you remember what he called out?

And though he had heard the story so many times that he remembered it better than he did the man his father had been, Marco always loved saying the words along with an elder Petal of the Conflagration. Whatever they were doing, they would stop and say together:

“Caravan of friends, we must halt. I see fog. but Marco, quiet son, has seen a blue fire at the side of the road. We must return, for in the fire is a blue girl who is love. Our quiet son says Eye and now I see it.” And we did. And she was. Papula non. The woman of blue, the magician of love.

And so began the Dawn of the Blue. A cynic would say a bunch of productivity shirkers picked up a con woman hitchhiker who slipped them all the greatest con of all—a faith scam. A conspiracy theorist would say that Papula non was a spy sent from one of the warring religious extremes—either the Jacksonites, or the Emoticons, or both—to determine if the Conflagration of the Dandelion was a heresy that should be assimilated or annihilated.

But Marco had seen her with his own eyes, as they all had. She was tiny, like a ten-year-old girl, but in her eyes was the wisdom and beauty of a full grown woman. She was completely blue from her belled shoes to the blues of her eyeballs and every hair on her body. Papula non hummed with love. Her voice sounded stern and her words were not necessarily sweet. She could be downright volatile if you woke her up unexpectedly. But after just a day in her presence, , a person found the love in themselves and sought out the love in others. Like magic.

For the Conflagration of the Dandelion, this meant a change from what would have been little more than a glorified summer camp to a community of people who strove to do do their very best to live against the selfish, mean principles of the universe. The Dandelions may have been kind of silly–and aromatic–but they loved each other. After the arrival of  Papua non they had more focus. Flakey focus, but still... being, people and art are as good a focus on a cold rock in the universe's armpit as any other.

This was the story of the Dawn of the Blue. This was the story of the months when Marco and his father came to live with the Conflagration of the Dandelion; stories which sustained him long after his father’s untimely death. Stories he knew with all his heart to be true in a universe where truth was so often devalued. Years later when Marco became unfathomably famous, depictions of these stories could be found throughout the stars in his art.

“If we,” it sounded like Vee, “consider the strain on the main beams primarily, then we end up with the same structures we have always built. But, if we use this new concept the symposium proposed and instead look at the crotches,” Ulrich was saying, his German v’s sneaking through the w’s as they did when he was tired.

“I don’t think they say it like that,” Alfonse said through the slurping of his snack as he kept his eye ahead for the sign to the next storage center. He was not fully comfortable off the station, much less to be driving a rover on an unfamiliar moon. He snacked when anxious.

“They don’t say what? Vat?” Ulrich responded distractedly.

“‘Crotches.’’ I don’t think that’s how they say it in English. I think that means something else.”

“Nonsense. The beams meet there in the crotch. And we can completely redesign the station if we concentrate ourselves on crotches.” Ulrich continued, as he always did, oblivious to how he sounded.

Alfonse did not try to correct him again. They had worked together for years and most of the success came from Alfonse not correcting Ulrich too often, and Ulrich allowing Alfonse to do all the chemical work without any interruption—like having to speak with anyone other than Ulrich. Alfonse wasn’t a talker. Anyone who interacted with their team did it with Ulrich. But Alfonse was the genius.

Alfonse was concentrating on Ulrich’s latest structural engineering concept, visualizing it in his mind, when suddenly he came back to an awareness of his surroundings and feared he’d missed the turn to the next bank of storage units. He and Ulrich were checking out vintage architectural supports as part of a symposium to build better docking stations. The symposium “Past as Future: Bringing Back to Move Forward” wasn’t really for them. All of the speakers were years behind their team. But hearing the incompetence of others inspired Ulrich, so here they were driving around looking into old storage units to check out moldering beam crotches.

There was a hazy form in the rearview mirror. Alfonse slowed.

“Ulrich, pardon me, I wasn’t paying enough attention. Did we just drive through a particle fog?” He had the uncanny sense that they were no longer alone. “Did you see someone?”

The two men agreed that they’d had a strange feeling of having been absent for a moment. Alfonse stopped the rover. Both looked behind into the haze. Moons aren’t known for their fogs, but there behind them was what looked like a morning fog. And in it a blue form.

“Es ist Feuer,” Ulrich whispered in awe. “Es brennt blau.”

In the void where there should be nothing but ugly space modules, moon dust and rovers, there, indeed,, appeared to be a fire burning blue. It was not alarming but intriguing and attractive. Like a magnet to shavings.

From the fire and into the haze gracefully glided a small child. No, a woman. A small blue woman. Whether she spoke telepathically or not, neither could ever say. But clearly she communicated to the awed engineers, “I am Papula non. Let’s go.”

And the engineering team forgot their mission and went with Papula non instead.

Space is a rough road. It isn’t easy on faith. There is so little room for magic. It’s damn cruel to life itself. And as Sadie MacHinton’s father, Willem, would never let her forget, it ain’t no place for romance.

Willem MacHinton had dreamed of space. He had dreamed of being the first MacHinton to feel gravity leave his limbs so he could float free. He’d worked hard for the honor and had had achieved it after designing a keyboard that could be integrated into one’s shirt sleeve.

He was on a space station, signing off on all the patent agreements on this invention, living his ancestors dream when he…

He saw a blue fire. He pulled over, of course he did. They all do. But unlike the others, he did not find love where it had always been—in the arms of his friend, or in the art of his community. Willem MacHinton didn’t respond to the space magic or con or whatever it was like others did. Maybe he was the first one she tried it on, who knows?

But Willem MacHinton fell in love with Papula non—love herself.

That was a truly bad idea but when it camecame to Papula non, no one really chooses their path, she steps in theirs. They travel together. Suddenly there is a bright blue in their lives of dust and metal and black. By the time she leaves, her travelling companions are so transformed they don’t recall her departure, only how everything changed with her arrival.

Not Willem. Somehow Willem saw through the magic, the con, or the gift depending on your perspective. He saw past the non which negates any connection with her. Willem fell in love with Papula and he was no fool, she must have reciprocated in enough ways to make him see into her well-guarded heart.

It was impossible, though. She had become what she was for reasons he would never know and the universe needed a fire at the highway side that became love more than Papula non needed Willem. She had had departed and Willem left space for good, never telling a soul about the love he had known other than by his footnote to the adventure of his youth: Space ain’t no place for romance.

And so each morning he rises, washes his face with real water, keeps his fingers away from the technology he once designed and dreamed of, and on particularly dreary days, Willem MacHinton drives. The empty seat beside him becomes a phantom limb. He lets the lonely songs cry from the radio. And he scans the horizon for signs of a fire on the highway side. Blue.

But she is never there and her absence is a constant reminder.

Alane Cameron Miles writes commentary for Style Weekly and eulogies, but branched out into fiction for this collaboration. In her professional life she is a medical chaplain and bereavement counselor. In her free time she is the host of Death Club Radio on WRIR 97.3 LP Richmond, a palm reader, and an inventor. She is currently harnessing her own static electricity into a super power, but mostly just invents cocktail recipes.

Art by Barry Bruner. Get the stencil HERE. 

If you ask me, luring employees with the idea of a leg up in neurotech and then stranding them on the outskirts of nowhere, handing them a temp suit to survive the cold, and then sending them three miles under the surface to pick through rocks is just plain wicked.

Still, we all should have seen it coming, but none of us did. I guess all of those other pickers were just as gullible and desperate as I was. At least we only had to live with the consequences of that decision for two years, and my time of self-pity was almost up. Less than three months, and then I’d planned to go to Svegolas with a bankroll of salary and ready to blow off more anger and frustration than I knew I could hold. That is, if I made it that long.

I’d pulled a busted vidcomm out of a neighbor’s garbage bin last week and used it to finish the Gamma receiver I’d been working on. She’d tossed the thing out with more than three quads of battery life left, probably because she’s an idiot, but it was good for me.

As soon as I powered on the Gamma receiver and tweaked a few settings, it started talking. Pretty much the only things to listen to this deep on the fringe are comms from the Übercorp Outlet ships—where last season’s fashions goto die—and the occasional pirate rig hoping to intercept a transport. Anything would be better than watching the piped-in Übercorp video stream, so I was crossing my fingers for some pirate chatter. When I dinked around on the low end of the range, I stumbled across a voicebot listing off names and numbers. It might not have been a big deal, and I probably would have kept scanning other channels if I hadn’t recognized one of the names as belonging to my neighbor three cubes down.

Mert had always been sort of twitchy and weird. Once, he’d asked me, “You’re not stealing trash and building those gadgets to look through my walls, are you Sheanic?” I’d told him that I was just bored and that if I could build something that cool, then I certainly wouldn’t be picking kento out of rock every day in this place. He hadn’t seemed at all relieved. Hearing his name on the voicebot list did more than perk up my attention—it worried me that he might be dangerous instead of just paranoid.

I didn’t know why those people were being named in a broadcast on a channel that no one but a tinkerer on the outer rim might hear. I suppose the job, the magrail, and the mind-numbing safety recordings were making me stupid. It took me almost an entire week to realize that maybe someone was listening to that channel because it was their job to listen.

The day after that thought came to me, Mert didn’t show up for work. He wasn’t on the rail for three days, and I’m pretty sure I saw someone else being moved into his cube. I didn’t know what to think then, but my gut was telling me that whatever happened to Mert probably happened to all the other people I heard the voicebot name.

Were they all still there on Vakent-14? Are they? I don’t even know which tense to use anymore.

We’d all heard the rumors about what happens to you if Übercorp finds reason to fire you from this dump. Deeper mines. Transport loading. All of your shit launched into deep space. Most of the theories were ridiculous, but none of us had dared to screw up enough to find out the truth. Maybe that’s what Mert had done.

It was the last day of my workweek when I saw the rivets in Ravine-362. I had descended to my station at the very bottom of the mine, one of the deepest on Vakent-14, or so I was told. I’d been picking away at a kento pocket and filling my pods like a good little drone when a sheet of  rock the size of my hand fell away so cleanly that I flinched at the break in the monotony.

Where the rock had fallen away, I saw what looked like a plate of some sort of polymer or poly-metal alloy with two exposed gold-toned rivets. I touched them with my gloved hand just to be sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. The guy working next to me must have noticed me pause because he leaned his big temp-suit covered head directly into my line of sight to find out what I was looking at.

“Whoa! That is some weird stuff.…” He went back to chipping at his own grid, but I found out later that day that he’d said something to the supervisor like a good little Übercorp Retrieval Team Member. When the supervisor stopped me on my way to the meal break and asked if I’d seen anything strange, I just went with my instinct and said no. She didn’t seem convinced, and I noticed her looking at the name and number on my suit before keying in some kind of note or something on her daily report.

I’m pretty sure that’s when I figured out that I was going to be a Mert. When my suspicion was verified and I heard my name on the Gamma receiver the next night, I almost puked.

For two days and nights, I didn’t sleep. I half expected someone to slip into my cube in the middle of the night and whisk me away. The other half of me expected some kind of poison gas or something to creep through the breather channels into my temp suit. There was no doubt that I was starting to look as paranoid as Mert had, but maybe he’d had a good reason to be like that after all.

It was especially hard to chip rock and act normal when the supervisor kept coming by my grid and peering over my shoulder. The sheet of rock that fell away and had exposed what I suspected was the source of all my trouble was nowhere to be seen. I was working the same grid, but damned if I could find it again. I had no clue how it could just vanish, but more puzzling was the itch in the back of my mind that someone might have had a reason to hide it.

The guy who’d been working at the grid beside me and who had blabbed to the super wasn’t near me anymore. I’m not sure if I’d recognize anything other than his voice, so I never learned if they’d just moved him to another area or if he’d ended up on the list, too.

It had all started to feel like I was in some sort of sick psych experiment. If this had been one of Übercorp’s tricks, I would have been pissed, but I wouldn’t have been at all surprised. “Fool me once” and all that.

The next day, after my shift was over, I picked the bins for a spent audio chip. I had a bad feeling that I should make sure that someone else knew exactly what was going on with our so-called high-tech working conditions here on Vakent-14, but, more importantly, I felt that someone needed to know about that freaky voicebot broadcast and then maybe they could shed some light on what was going on with all of the employee disappearances.

You only need to keep secrets if you’re up to no good, and it was looking more every day like Übercorp had plenty of them.

I marked my third day with no sleep. It had been getting harder and harder for me to concentrate, but I managed to find what I was looking for in the trash bins and cobble together a launch bottle containing a recording of all I knew about the transmission I’d picked up on the Gamma receiver and the weird things that had been happening around me since then. That morning, I mounted the launch bottle on the roof and coded the ignition to a remote I slipped into the front pocket of my temp suit. It took all I had to lug that heavy hunk of junk up there, but I was so sleep-deprived that I didn’t even care if anyone saw me.

I waited until I went out to board the magrail and fired off the launch bottle. I don’t know if it was the way the temp suits muffle sound or the fact that nobody around there seemed to notice much anymore, but not a single person looked up at the red streak blazing across the sky from the top of our cube block. Lucky me.

The bottle was out there floating around in that pointless, empty space wasteland around the tiny planet. It sent out a weak value ping, all I could manage with what was left in all of the batteries I could scrounge, and I prayed that some pirates or scavengers would hear it and scoop it up. Whether they listened to the audio chip and decided to do anything about it was the real long shot. I knew it was a shitty plan, but it was all I could do with what I had, and I had to at least try and do something.

I managed to chip my way through another grid at work without fucking up or drawing too much attention from the supervisor. Despite that, there was still a really weird vibe, weirder than usual, and the way none of the supervisors even looked in my direction made me certain that it wasn’t my imagination. My time was almost up.

The ride home on the magrail was the same as always—everyone looked down at their screens and tried to ignore one another. Everything in the cube block seemed normal, too, so I slipped upstairs and locked myself inside my cube with a chair wedged under the access latch on the door. After grabbing some old crackers from my nearly-bare cabinet, my own fault because I didn’t want to risk a trip to the commissary, I fell into my routine of the past few days and sat down and switched on the Gamma receiver.

I halfway listened to the voicebot’s monotone broadcast of names and numbers and waited until anything sounded familiar. After an hour or so of hearing the same two dozen names repeating on an endless loop, the voicebot’s droning was broken up by short bursts of screeching distortion. Before I realized what was going on, a voice broke into the broadcast.

It was weak, a little scratchy even, but it was the best sound I’d heard in nearly two years. “I hope you’re still listening out there. We found your bottle and are using your intel to override a Dead Letter channel. This is Captain Orlok of the Detritus. We’ve locked to the coordinates of your bottle launch and can transport you from those coordinates at 08:00 Galactic Time. That’s twelve hours from this broadcast. If you can make it there, we want to help. I think your information could be very valuable to our cause. Good luck. Over.”

The screeching resumed, sputtered a bit, and then gave way to the voicebot I’d grown to despise. It took a minute or two for the experience to really sink in: someone had already found my bottle; someone close enough to Vakent-14 to broadcast to my makeshift receiver and, if I could believe it, to get close enough to transport me out of this kento mine hamster wheel in the morning.

Maybe it was the lack of sleep playing tricks on me. My twenty years of life had only been one disappointment after another. Good things just didn’t happen to me. Nobody had ever come to my rescue before,. Granted, I didn’t think I’d ever been in need of rescuing quite like this.

Thanks a fucking lot, Übercorp.

I hoped it wasn’t a dream, or worse, some kind of Übercorp deception. The thought crossed my mind that it could have been even more sinister than deception, like maybe I was hallucinating because of something that Übercorp piped into my vents or slipped into my water.

At that point, I was probably deeper down the rabbit hole than Mert had ever been. If I didn’t get off of that poor excuse for a planet, I feared I’d lose my mind for good. That fear pushed me to action.

If someone who had the ability to break that Gamma broadcast thought my information was valuable enough to snag me off of the rooftop, then I owed it to them and to myself to get up there. I just had to hold out for one more night. Übercorp was coming for me soon—it was something I felt in my gut. Look at what had happened to Mert. Hell, the same thing might have happened to the guy beside me on the grid who’d snitched to the super.

I double-checked the access latch on the door and wedged the chair in a little tighter. My temp suit was laid out and ready to step into at a moment’s notice. I gathered up my tools and the few gadgets that I’d pieced together to keep me occupied since I’d accepted my two-year sentence in the kento mines. Only a few went into a bag to go with me, and I stripped the rest of their power cells and stuffed the batteries into the bag too. I had no idea where I might be headed, how long I’d be there, or who I might be stuck with. I wanted to make sure I had the right things at my disposal.

Once everything I’d decided to keep was packed, I disassembled or stomped what was left. The last thing I needed was for Übercorp to go through my cube and find out not only that I could think for myself, but also that I had skills I could put to use with those ideas. I’m sure it would make erasing me a much higher priority. If they had hoped to turn me into one of their mindless Retrieval Team Members, they had failed remarkably.

It was surreal to see my life reduced to one temp suit and a bag full of tech toys pieced together from other people’s trash. I guess that’s what my life had been from the moment I set foot on Vakent-14, I just hadn’t seen it that way until my safety was in question.

All of the aspects of daily life as an Übercorp employee suddenly took on a shadowy cast. As if I’d taken off a dirty pair of optics, everything was becoming clearer.

We’d been conditioned for isolation and hadn’t even seen it happening. There was no place to socialize in the cube blocks, and the cube scanners mounted at each door notified supervisors if you weren’t in your assigned room at the curfew time. That made visiting in the residential areas nearly impossible because curfew was only a half hour after the magrail drop-off.

We had our Übervision broadcasts to keep us company, though. We could absorb all of the latest ads and infomercials for things we couldn’t buy because we had no space to store them in our tiny cubes, even if they could get transport to this armpit of space, which they couldn’t. We had our food and hygiene items that we bought in the commissary and the bag we brought from home when we first signed up for the job. That was it. Not even a single digicast from our families back home could make it out here, or at least none were allowed to.

I was grateful every day that I’d had to good sense to pack tools while so many others had packed for comfort and entertainment instead of practicality or else I would never have ended up with the tech trash that I did.

Those brainwashed people mightmay have actually saved my life. I’d had so many startling revelations in such a short time that that one barely even registered.

I checked the time and saw that I had four hours to go until I needed to be on the roof. The magrail left every morning at 07:00 GT, so I had the added fear that someone might actually notice that I wasn’t on board and report it. I’d never had a sick day before, but I hoped that maybe I could set my illness indicator and buy myself a little time. If only Mert could have seen me then.

I paced the floor and toyed with the Gamma receiver for a couple of hours. I had to stay awake and sharp since I had no idea what was in store for me. At 06:00 GT I notified the supervisors that I was ill and would be in my cube that day. Not long after that, I heard everyone around my cube start moving around to get ready for work. They shuffled down the hall and then towards the magrail stop downstairs as I pressed my ear to the door.

The cube block had fallenfell silent by the time the rail left, but I waited a little longer before pulling on my temp suit, grabbing my bag, and unjamming the door. Peeking my head out, I found the halls every bit as deserted as they sounded. It was a relief, but it did nothing to quiet the pounding of the nervous pulse in my ears.

I pulled the door closed slowly and slinked towards the emergency stairwell that led to the roof. I had only ten minutes to climb more than a dozen levels and meet a pirate transport outside. The idea took on such an absurd shape in my mind that I found myself laughing out loud by the time I reached the stairs. When I moved to open the door, I heard a noise over the sound of my crazed laughter—the unmistakable mech voice of an Übercorpsman.

“Stop—Employee—Please confirm ID number.” I looked over my shoulder and saw not one, but three of them. I didn’t slow down. I threw open the door and made a break for the stairs with them not far behind me. I made it one whole level up before I heard them enter the stairwell below.

“Stop—Employee—Failure to comply will result in detainment.”

I was grateful that Übercorpsmen weren’t designed for agility on stairs. Most of the shopping vessels where they served as security patrol were outfitted with conveyors and lifts so consumers didn’t have to expend much energy to spend their money. The temp suit slowed me down, but I wasn’t nearly as slow as they were. I just hoped my breathers could keep up.

“Stop—Employee—You now risk employment termination.”

The sound of their robotic voices grew fainter and I knew I was gaining ground. I put everything I had into taking the stairs two at a time. The tools in my bag clanked and crashed against one another and an idea popped into my head that brought another crazed smile to my face.

I reached the roof hatch, climbed out into the blistering cold, and dug out the soldering sparker from the bottom of the bag. It was only designed to connect circuit board components and lightweight wires, so I put all my hope in it that it had enough strength to melt a wire into the access latch and jam it closed.

My hands fumbled and the bulky gloves of the temp suit added yet another obstacle to the attempt. Tiny ice crystals crept across the edges of my visor and threatened to block my view. I knew it had to be the steam from my heavy breathing that was freezing, so I tried to hold my breath until the suit evened out the humidity. I couldn’t wait for the visor to clear completely, so I squinted through the ice and flipped the switch on the sparker.

It flickered twice and finally coughed out a tiny blue arc. I pulled a wire from the bundle of scraps in the bag and shoved it into the latch, praying the whole time that I’d finish the job before the battery in the sparker froze.

In less than a second, the latch filled with molten metal that hardened only a moment later. I didn’t have time to test to see if it would hold before the Übercorpsmen were wiggling it from the other side. Sliding back away from the hatch, I heard them start banging. “Stop—Employee.”

I stuffed the sparker back into the bag and scrambled to my feet. A hum surrounded me and sent vibrations through my bones. I was certain my ears were about to bleed, and I would have covered them if I could, but the temp suit was in the way.

Searching for the source of the sound, I looked to the sky and saw a transport pod descending that was easily twice my age and that looked to be held together with alloy patches and wishful thinking. It stopped about three feet from the rooftop, and despite the horrible sound it emitted, I ran for it. A door hissed open on my approach and a young boy stepped into view. He braced himself against the cold and yelled, “You Sheanic?” I nodded and he moved to one side, “Get in!”

The door sealed behind me and I knew at that moment that my old life was over. If Übercorp didn’t want to punish me before, they certainly would nowthen.

The hum was much better on the inside of the transport, but it was still too loud to talk and for that I was grateful. I sat down and buckled the safety straps before pulling off the hood and visor from my temp suit to rub my tired eyes. The kid gave me a weird look, somewhere between concern and pity, and lifted his chin a bit in a gesture of acknowledgement. I could only offer a sigh of relief in return.

I’m not sure how much time passed before we docked with the main ship because everything in the pod took on an odd, dreamy quality. It had been a while since I was in any kind of atmospheric pressure other than that on Vakent-14, so I assumed it was just taking me some time to adjust.

After securing the transport pod, the boy activated the door, jumped out with an unceremonious thud, and extended a hand to help me down. “I’m Spanner. This,” he paused and swept his hand around, “This is the Detritus. Come on, Orlok wants to see you.”

I followed him through cramped corridors, ducked under all kinds of wire bundles and breather tubes, and eventually found myself in some kind of lounge. I’d never actually seen pirates before, but I can’t say I expected them to look anything like the group of people whose eyes were suddenly all on me.

“Sheanic?” one said. I nodded. Apparently, I’d lost the ability to speak. More likely the exhaustion was catching up with me now that the adrenaline had worn off. “I’m Captain Orlok. Come have a seat and let’s talk about Vakent-14. Spanner will take your temp suit.”

“I will?” the boy asked. Orlok raised an eyebrow and waited. “Okay, fine. I will.”

I shimmied out of the bulk of the temp suit for what I hoped would be the last time. Standing in my coveralls, I gathered the suit and handed it to Spanner. The sheer weight of it nearly knocked him over. “Thanks,” I managed, and then took a seat on an empty couch.

“First off, I want to let you know that you’re not the first one who’s stumbled across a Dead Letter channel,” Orlok said. “I know you’ve wondered what’s been going on with the disappearing employees, and we have a theory.” The mood in the room suddenly shifted and everyone’s posture became defensive. Orlok looked at the woman sitting to my right and then back at me. “There might be a reason these kento mines are only on the fringes. I suspect you all weren’t put there to mine kento at all, but to uncover something more valuable. We’re pretty sure that Übercorp is borrowing its new technology from someplace else.”

I must have looked like he’d just told me that he was Lord of the Jacksonites because he chuckled a little before continuing. “Yeah, someplace like ‘not of the known universes’ or—and this one is not as unlikely as you might think—from our own future.” I was still reeling from his theory when he hit me with the knockout punch. “We are pretty sure any employee without clearance who stumbles across something the company is working to reverse engineer ends up as a lab rat for new nanotech.”

Even though it had been over twelve hours since I’d last eaten, I was pretty sure my stomach was going force out whatever it could. Was Mert out there somewhere living his worst nightmare and having a neurochip force-planted in his brain? Would he even remember what had happened when it was done? The room started to spin and Orlok jumped up and caught my shoulders before I fell face-first off of the couch and onto the floor. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re out of there. You’ll be okay. We’re working on a new identity for you and then we’ll help you get as far away from there as you can.”

I looked into his eyes then and only saw sincerity. “Thank you. I just… Tthank you,” I muttered. Tears dampened my cheeks for the first time in over a year and I felt a strange sense of relief pouring out with them.

“Aw, don’t cry. Hey, you know what always puts me in a good mood?” he asked with a grin. I shook my head and jostled loose a few more tears. “Casinos! Have you ever been to Svegolas? We’re on our way out there now for a gig.”

Beth Brown in an author, professional gardener, niche perfumer, and competitive weightlifter--though not always in that order. Her writing has been featured in print, film, and on television on Travel Channel, The Biography Channel, History, and the Emmy Award-winning program "Virginia Currents". You can learn more about her and her work at www.beth-brown.com.

Art by Maria Fabrizio. Get the stencil HERE. 

MUNGO B shuffled out of his lightless pod and into the hallway, absentmindedly secreting a protective coating over the portion of himself that would soon be reshaped for a very different use.

Across the hall, in an identical dark pod that had not had an official occupant in quite some time, a pair of eyes rested dully on the spot where he had been.

MUNGO B was the rare MUNGO who worked as a personal servant in a human home instead of on one of the more dangerous and industrial assignments that were usually reserved for them. That is, if you could call this a home, and if you could call its mistress human.

The mistress of the house was an ancient woman named Duchess Phoebula Haversham-Gaga. Her home, the manorship Kristallnacht, was an equally ancient, palatial starship that she had re-christened upon inheriting it, in honor of her favorite story in a history textbook from her childhood.

She was perhaps the least well known member of Übercorp’s ruling family. Although the Duchess was technically Maxilla Mandible’s great-aunt, she had never met the girl and disapproved of everything she had ever read about her. A woman, at the helm of Übercorp? A young woman willing to behave as she did in the public eye, so brazenly, so lasciviously, so…aggressively. Phoebula suspected that the girl must have warring glandular implants inside her, one pumping a flood of estrogen and the other testosterone for her to present the monstrous persona she did. Disgraceful. Unnatural.

Duchess Haversham-Gaga had become estranged from the family very early in life. At the time of her exile she was too young to understand why, and she never bothered to learn. Something about a botched commercial, an ill-timed tantrum. Whatever it was, she had been sent off to live with a distant aunt and uncle. They were distant in all senses—distant from the Übercorp limelight, from any cosmopolitan or civilized planet, and from their newly arrived niece.

It was then that she gave herself the title of Duchess. It sounded just grand.

Thine eyes are squiddly iddly jewels

thy hair a ploomf of gold,

if I could split thee into throols

I’d have more thees to hold.

I’d take each thee, then, in an arm

and lave them with affections

just hoping thou’rn’t too alarmed

by my numberless er…

“MUNGO B, report to Himmler Deck. MUNGO B to Himmler Deck. Bring disinfectant.”

Duchess Haversham-Gaga had one great shame in her life other than the hazily remembered “Fudgies” commercial incident. It was a later shame, an adult shame, and it was ghastly.

The direct result of that shameful, incestuous incident, Miss Pittance Haversham-Gaga, wasn’t so much ghastly as unfortunate. With a loving upbringing she might have learned to speak and read, to blink and close her mouth. With the resources at Phoebula’s disposal, Pittance might have been enhanced to the point of at least minimal human palatability. But such was the loathing in the Duchess’s heart for her—or rather, for her own role in creating Pittance—that she gave her neither attention nor financial support beyond mere sustenance.

Pittance, for her part, didn’t seem to mind the neglect. She didn’t seem to mind anything at all. Or to enjoy anything, for that matter. She spent the long, empty days of her life sitting inert in various locations around the manorship. Invariably, her eyes were glazed and unblinking. Her open mouth leaked a small rivulet of drool, which was usually brown and pebbled with partially chewed bits of Fudgies breakfast cereal, the only food she would eat.

Recently, Pittance’s favorite spot to sit was in the abandoned MUNGO pod across the hall from MUNGO B’s quarters. Her demeanor didn’t change when she was there, but she felt different. She felt a kinship with MUNGO B, this subhuman blob with the curious habit of oozing on paper.

MUNGO B turned to the next page of the fat volume that he had brought back to the pod with him. He got all of his writing paper in the form of printed books that he pilfered from around the Kristallnacht. Duchess Haversham-Gaga kept a small stack of books in each of the manorship’s many defecatoria, though none of them ever appeared to have been opened or read. As with nearly all of her practices, this one seemed to derive from a sense that things should be done as they had always been done, because things were better before. The people who existed before—and had since ceased to exist—held a kind of authority for having been. And because they were no longer messily, observably being, with all of that state’s attendant mistakes and regrets, the people who had been were perfect, their ways sacrosanct.

He looked at the markings on the page.

IN the Beginning, God created the heavens and earth.

The earth was formless, and void; and darkness was the face of the deep…

Carefully he emitted the solvent that he used to remove print from pages without harming the paper itself. As he spread it lightly across the page surface there was a strong smell of alcohol, and the letters evaporated away just as the liquid itself did. Page by page he did this, until the whole book was blank. When he finished, he turned back to the first page and gently ran an extended appendage over the smooth surface with an expression of such love, tenderness, and barely contained literary ambition that across the hall where she sat, Pittance nearly blinked.

He knew that she was there, of course, and she knew, he thought, that he knew. In fact it was for her, hiding in the abandoned pod across the way, that he wrote his most passionate pieces.

A part of him hoped that she snuck into his pod and read his work when he was called away to perform some demeaning task. It was certainly hard to imagine, though. He had never seen her move so much as a finger. But in his mind she became a normal, fully animated human being as soon as he lumbered out of sight. A blush flushed her ashen cheeks, her dead eyes blazed to life with an unmistakable sense of mischief, and she danced on tiptoe across the hall to ferret out his papers. As she read through them she might hold a fluttering hand to her chest, or scrub tears from her suddenly welling eyes. Sometimes his mind’s eye had to look away as she responded in the way that he most wanted her to, but didn’t feel worthy to watch.

He thought all of these things and more, sitting silent with his newly silenced book. From across the hall he heard a shy, droolly slurp. It sounded to him like the sweetest profession of love.

Abovedecks, in the Goebbels & Goering Memorial Master Suite, Duchess Haversham-Gaga was confused. This happened more and more often these days. After all, she was 231 years old, and had refused every newfangled neuroenhancement stimulant that her compeers relied upon to keep their brains and baser organs pumping. She read all about those people. She was not about to be like that.

But her confusion now was more acute. This time it had a singular focal point. What had happened to her bank?  

For over two centuries, since she had come to live on this manorship and been given a generous stipend for remaining disengaged from the family, her financial dealings had been handled by a subsidiary of Übercorp called 1st Intergalactic Plain Folks’ Credit Union at Legend Meadows. Sufficient money appeared when needed. Sufficient funds were withdrawn when required. She was only too happy to let it remain a mystery, one of those grubby activities better left to the lower races of humans or the Überbots to handle. But the bank had provided her with a holographic rendering of a miniature, old-fashioned vault, which she kept on a bedside table in her suite. She took great pleasure each morning in hearing the digital jingle of coins it made as it tallied the previous day’s interest and investments, adding and moving her money about.  

But now it was gone. Stolen, she was sure.

She had noticed a new face among the human servants recently—darker than the rest, with a hint of unnatural purple in its tinge. Probably some ungrateful child of decent but permissive parents, debasing himself with one of those temporary racial ‘enhancements’ she heard about on the news. Children wanting to play at being their lessers. Oh, the newsbots always presented these stories as novel and uplifting, as though the viewer should be moved by the generous intentions of the young and privileged, wanting to make a difference. But Duchess Haversham-Gaga could read behind their doublespeak. The disdain. The cynicism. And it was all very well. Let the children playact. They would grow up, they would see how ridiculous they were, and they would settle back into place. They would feel either comfortable regret, or smug self-satisfaction that they had done their part. Either way, they would settle in to watch their own children play at some new, sanctioned form of rebellion.

But while they were harmless enough to the big picture, their rebelliant actions while so deluded could still have consequences for innocent bystanders like herself, the Duchess thought. Stealing my bank. Surely her actual funds were still accounted for where they belonged—this was just a holographic bank, after all, merely a toy. But the incident itself would still have to be punished, and severely.

Or wait—maybe the thief had been that loathsome MUNGO she still kept about. She should have airlocked it as soon as the first book went missing.

Her train of thought was interrupted then by something shimmering above the bedstand, right where her bank usually was. It was a flat, white sheet, hovering there with a discernible air of patience, politeness, and deference. She leaned closer and read:

“Dear Ms. Phoebula Haversham-Gaga:

“It has recently come to our attention that your existence, however tenuously it is linked to the Übercorp family of businesses, results in a deficit of 0.0014% in the Potential Profit Index for the 16-25-year-old Semi-Wealthy-to-Wealthy Human demographic, which is, as you can imagine, Über-important to us.

“Respondents overwhelmingly identified several characteristics in your profile that contributed to a decrease in their Purchasing Will. It would be unethical and, we feel, not constructive to share their precise responses with you.

“We will, however, be correcting this deficit immediately.

“Thank you. We hope that you’ve enjoyed this interaction with Übercorp. Tell us how we did at ubcp://Übercorpcares.173892364548292xz-reply-survey.ubcp.”

Pittance… Smitten… Kittens… Kitchen…

Haversham… ravishing… slavering… ravaging…

“An Abridged History of Love,” by MUNGO 347526769B, “Being an odic account of the longings and aspirations of the best increment of this lowly agent of service toward the thrice-blessed and most beauteous female descendant of the most exalted and virtuous pinnacular family of human society, in which one learns of the nature of contented love, the guaranteed techniques of mutual satisfaction, the—”

“MUNGO TO GOERING SUITE. MUNGO B REPORT TO GOEBBELS-GOERING IMMEDIATELY. Bring a bucket. Bring several buckets.”

When the slobbering blob MUNGO disappeared down the hall in answer to his calling, Pittance came to life. First, she blinked. Then she closed her mouth. Then she coughed, and gagged, and spat a thick brown wad into the corner of the pod. And then she stood up.

Pittance crossed the hall with a lurching shuffle. When she entered MUNGO B’s pod, she kicked aside one of the dismembered volumes on the floor, and gathered up a stack of the loose leaves that were covered with his rough scrawl. The words meant nothing to her. They looked forbidding, judgmental, indicative of a world of meaning, sense, and structure from which she was excluded.

Several of the pages had been used for something besides writing, though. They featured rough drawings, some depicting objects that she recognized, and some that she didn’t. And then one drawing that made her blink and widen her eyes as far as they would go. She saw herself. A drawing of her face. Another of her entire body. Her face again. Sheet after sheet of drawings of her. Not particularly fine drawings, but she was recognizable in them. Those were her eyes. That was her hair. That was her—feverishly idealized—naked body. Everything rendered with an unmistakable tenderness and attention.

She felt a stomach-wrenching combination of surprise, curiosity, and revulsion.

When MUNGO B arrived at the Goebbels-Goering Master Suite, he found Duchess Haversham-Gaga sitting alone on her bed in a state of near-catatonia that brought out her familial resemblance to Pittance to an uncanny extent. He also found several mysterious leaks dripping from the ceiling. Even as he entered the room, the number of leaks appeared to multiply. Where the liquid droplets touched the floor, there was an unsettlingly familiar sense of erasure, and a strong scent of alcohol. Carpet disappeared from the floor in spreading pools of absence. The bed itself was becoming riddled with burrowing holes, like a giant Swiss cheese.

MUNGO B noticed that the Duchess’s gaze was directed to the bedstand, and so he went to see what she was looking at. Where he was used to seeing a sort of noisy, three-dimensional cube, there was instead a silent, shimmering plane, not unlike the sheets of paper he had just left behind. Oh, Pittance, he thought.

He scanned the short text on the page:

Hmm, thought MUNGO B.

He moved around the room, placing several buckets under several leaks, but when he went back to the first bucket to check on the rate of the drip, its bottom had dissolved away. The Duchess had not said a word to him, which wasn’t unusual, but she also had not moved, which was. She usually bustled about when he entered a room, and got out of his presence as quickly as she was able after expressing the requisite amount of distaste. When he thought to look toward her again, he was alarmed to see that several new leaks were dripping directly onto her. Where they touched her, she, too, began to disappear. A chunk of her beehive hairdo was already missing, and a hole was growing through her left shoulder. She didn’t appear to have noticed.

When he tried to move her out of the way of the drips, though, she sprang to life with a furious hiss. “How dare you touch me, you Mungoloid sack of—,” but at that moment a drop of the liquid struck her directly in the left eye. The effect seemed to shock her into silence once more. At the same time a new leak must have opened above, because MUNGO felt the cool, wet splash on his own skin. He recoiled violently and gave a whimpering screech, but nothing happened. His forearm was wet where it had hit, and that was all. Still, he backed away from the drips, which seemed to be intensifying mostly around the Duchess herself.

Most of the contents of the room, including the Duchess, were quickly dissolving. The liquid didn’t appear to be generally corrosive, though. Where it hit, it seemed to erase the traces of Duchess Haversham-Gaga’s existence within the ship—all of her belongings—but not the ship itself. If that were the case, MUNGO B wondered why he was immune. He had always felt like, and been treated like, one of her things.

Something in that line of thought made him think of Pittance, with the certainty that she would not be spared as he was. He left the disappearing Duchess and began to shamble as quickly as he could toward his pod.

When he got to the MUNGO quarters it was practically raining solvent. His pod was bare and gleaming like new. The cardboard box he used for a writing desk had dissolved. His beloved pages were gone. Frantically he crossed to the other pod, but it, too, was empty. Pittance Haversham-Gaga was nowhere to be seen. He left the level of his quarters and hurried throughout the manorship, searching for her. No one he could communicate with had seen her. No one interrupted their own panic to help him search.

Finally, when he had been everywhere on the ship at least three times and was too exhausted to continue, he gave up. He didn’t know what else to do. He returned to his pod. He squatted on the unnaturally clean floor and allowed himself to go completely blank.

Without willing it, the inky writing nib emerged from his uppermost appendage. Absentmindedly, he began to write on the nearby wall.

I don’t know that I can pinpoint the exact moment when I came to see into the pure heart of love…

He faltered, stopped, retracted the inky nib back into his body, and sat, unblinking.

Across the hall, in an identical dark pod that had not had an official occupant in quite some time, a pair of ghostly eyes watched him tenderly, but with a fierce and terrifying light.

The accumulation of molecules and spare parts known as Josh Hockensmith oscillates between a make-up of 49-51% Übercorp proprietary software and 49-51% Space Pirate DNA, depending on the brand of breakfast input from day to day. His Earth-based avatar is obsessed with books, the history of books, and all the ways that stories, ideas, and other absurdities that begin as a flicker in the brain have been turned into material culture for millennia. He makes artists’ books, zines, and handmade journals and sketchbooks under the name Blue Bluer Books. Instagram. Twitter.

Art by Cody Miles. Get the stencil HERE. 

“Hey Marty, yeah. I got dinged by space rocks just off Flag Pond Moon and had to make an emergency dive. Can you tow it back here and get it fixed?”  

A deep sigh on the other end was accented by a wheezing sound an octave higher.

“All the way out there, huh?”

“Yes. And I need it ready for Earth trip by tomorrow.” She knew Marty fairly well. A portly bloke who whined a lot about the work, charged too much, and was a general greaser, but he did the work well—meaning, he actually did the work: a hard commodity to find and trust at this end of space.

Another sigh, this time the wheeze was twice the pitch.  

“It’s gonna run ya, you know.”

“That’s fine. You know whose tab it’s on. I am sending you the beacon coordinates now.” Marle typed her fingers in the air sending the ship’s distress signal to Marty.

“All right, Ms. Loy, I will contact you when it’s in port and ready.” A final chorus of breath disconnected them.

It was finally her turn to order, she held up two fingers at the kitchen bot across the service table.

“Protein. Fruit.” In an instant her food arrived from the belly of the robot: two processed squares glazed with shiny red gelatin on top.

Marle took a bite of her breakfast and had another look around. There was a commotion across the walkway near the hotel as the Hub overhead speaker cut in with an Übercorp announcement. The omnipotent voice was as glazed as her breakfast, telling people to clear the way and remain calm in a castrated male meditative tone. Two Übercorp Bots pushed their way through the onlookers, followed by a human Übercorpsman. It was hard at first for Marle to tell the difference between the Bots’ expressionless faces, but they advanced with purpose, and they were heading her way.  

“Bad news,” she muttered. Marle hated Übercorp Security, her run-ins with them were never good. She started to slink away to avoid any potential trouble. 

“Marlene Loy,” the Übercorpsman bellowed, a surprisingly big voice for such a slight man, “Senior columnist for Known Universe magazine, please stay where you are and don’t make the bots clip you with a taser.”

“Shit,” she muttered and turned to them. “What is it this time?”

The scrawny drab fellow stepped toward her as the bots triangulated the area, ready to pounce and shock her if she so much as budged. His thinning hair was matted against his scalp as if drawn on by a magic marker. The uniform looked too big for his rangy scarecrow stature, like it was still hanging on a pole in a field, drawing a murder of crows. Marle smirked.

“You are wanted for questioning as to your association with the Pirate outlaws.” His breath wafted over her face like a tide of excrement.  

“No clue fellas, I’m heading back to the hotel.” Marle tried to negotiate around one of the robots. It zipped and twirled, blocking her way more aggressively. “Look, Scarecrow. I have no idea what you are talking about.”

He laughed, his teeth perfect and gleaming white, undoubtedly a perk for his service. “Now Ms. Loy, we are not some local authority. We are not fools. We know your ship is currently marooned on Flag Pond Moon and that you met with the League of Space Pirates there. So don’t make this harder than it has to be.” He swayed an arm in the direction behind him like a talk show host. “Please, come with us to the Security Office.”

“Fine.” Marle swallowed the rest of one food bar and slapped the other one, jelly side down, into the open palm of the thin man. “But this better not take long.”

She sat at a table in a room with no view of outer space. It all felt like it was closing in on her.  Cameras hovered in every corner and several embedded slideshow advertisements of Übercorp products familiar to her shopping habits scrolled on the walls. Known Universe even came up a time or two in the rotation. K.U. was, after all, an Übercorp product like nearly everything else.

Marle amused herself with thoughts of where she was supposed to be heading tomorrow: her mom’s house in Lexington Beach, Virginia, on planet Earth. She longed to see an evening sunlight on the open water that lapped against the red clay shoreline as she sat on the porch with her mother. They would often do this when she was home, sitting and chatting, taking in the view, and sometimes not talking at all. There was comfort in quietly enjoying the sun disappearing behind their small home and revealing the last specks of dust in the air over the ocean.

She thought of the League of Space Pirates song Noah Orlok played for her when on Flag Pond Moon and smiled.

Dust falls through sunlight, and it’s only you and me.

That was the one thing Marle may have missed the most about home right now, the dust. She looked through the ads on the wall for any hint of a particle, some floating microbe of human grime.  Nothing. Space stations never had any dust, ever. Joints like this were all concocted in hermetically sealed clean science. And while it did keep sickness down, sometimes, when she was more attentive, she could smell that faint aroma of sterilization. It felt like she was in a giant aseptic tank. If only she could get out of this mess right now, get her ship fixed and get the hell back home.

“So tell us, Ms. Loy, what are you doing in this part of space? A bit far for a celebrity magazine writer, don’t you think?” The familiar voice of Scarecrow Security oozed condescension throughout speakers in the room.

“Usually, anywhere I end up it’s against my better judgment.” She replied. “Plus, you never know where the talent will turn up. I’ve been finding a lot of diamonds in the rough out here these days.” Marle tapped a rhythm on the table, disinterested entirely. “You know, you wouldn’t make a bad story yourself, buddy. Have you ever given any thought to community theatre? I can see it now, Security geek reenacts the entire Shubeir Series of Space Thin Man—“

“That’s enough!” A door opened and Scarecrow came through with an Übercorp robot behind him. “If you do not tell us what we need to know, this Gitmo bot will help persuade you. Do you understand, Ms. Loy?”

The robot positioned itself behind her and she could hear the pneumatic pulse brain drill speed up near her right ear. Marle had heard stories of these torture bots, they were not pretty. Most who survived the interrogations were not too much for conversation. Heavy drooling and crazy, yes, but forget any ability to communicate with friends and family, or damn well anyone. She suddenly felt the fear.

“Okay, okay, shit. Can’t you take a joke?” The drill wound down as he gave the robot a nod.  “Where do you want me to start?”

“Who gave you the lead?”

“I don’t know, just some space jockey at a bar. You can’t expect me to keep track of people like that all the way out here, can you?” Marle sighed and blew at a curl of hair that dangled over her forehead. “Look, the guy told me he’d just flown over Flag Pond Moon and could ID the make of the Detritus. It’s that simple.”

“Go on.” He gave her a slow once over with his snake eyes

“It was a promising lead so I took it. He was right. Only I wasn’t planning on flopping my ship into the moon just beyond the outpost there.”

Marle recalled the surprise alert in the cockpit, it had scared the hell out of her. She was coming about to land near the Detritus, which was hidden near a small building outside of the local township, when something went wrong. Her two-deck sporting class, the Algonquin, was a tough little ship modified with top-notch protection for such conditions, so whatever it was that struck her ship and popped the alarm….She panicked. She felt the sudden jerk and shift of the hit, but it didn’t seem any more threatening than asteroid belt turbulence. It was those damned alarms that grated the nerves and worried her. It wasn’t the most graceful emergency crash landing—she wasn’t used to that sort of thing—but she improvised the navigation and managed to pitch the craft onto the surface at a good angle.

The alarms were screaming at her when she came to in the shadows., Flashing reds and greens and some damned annoying yellow button squawked at her. She was slightly concussed and spun around as Algonquin’s female meditative announced system failures. It could have been worse, the air was stable but leaking fast. Marle needed to get into a suit soon.

That’s when she heard the rumble of a vehicle stopping just outside of the ship. There was a hard metallic knock at the hatch below her, followed by muffled voices. She flipped a switch on a panel, opening the outer communications.

“Yeah. Hi.” She cleared her throat as she spoke.

“Is everyone all right in there?” It was a woman, stern and lethal sounding.

“Okay.” Marle locked her helmet over her head and the hiss of the suit air kicked in. “I’m a friendly. Crew of one and I’m coming out.”

The hatch opened and she dangled from the ship into the thick arms of a MUNGO, an enormous putty-like creature biogenetically engineered for slave labor. She wondered what this thing was doing all the way out here.

A woman pulled her up with one hand like she was a ragdoll. She was a freaking knockout, but with a look that seared right through Marle. This chick was figuring her out, and did, in an instant.

“Chroma,” Scarecrow noted, typing his fingers in the air. “Captain Orlok’s body guard.”

“Yes.” Marle replied.

“And that MUNGO must have been 347526769A. Another Pirate.”

“Wow, they don’t pay you enough for your deduction, do they?”

“Continue.”

Marle felt a tinge of excitement within. The League of Space Pirates were actually here. Ever since hearing Captain Orlok had gone outlaw after his father’s death, she had become inspired by the notion of upturning this whole damn Übercorp universe as well. She wanted, in her own small way, to contribute to the subversive. The interview in the magazine would be just the thumb to the nose to do it.

She stuck a hand out to Chroma. “Marlene Loy, senior columnist for Known Universe magazine.  How are you?”

“Hello.” Chroma let her go and said nothing else, but the eyes were saying plenty. This assassin was in high alert mode and could pull the organs from her chest with one move. Marle figured she was safe but shouldn’t pursue the interview just yet. She straightened and walked to get a good view of Algonquin’s damage till they decided what they would do with her.  

The ship seemed secure enough. There was some denting to her port and the nose was only about four feet into the lunar soil. It wouldn’t take Marty’s Tow long to pry it out and get it back to Galajunkja.

“That was quite a landing, Ms. Loy.” A deeper voice came from behind her, male. She knew exactly who it was without having to move.  

“Yeah, not bad for my second crash landing. An awful mess to be cleaned up, though.” Marle turned and tried to stow her elation. “Captain Noah Orlok, I’m glad to have found you.“

“Thanks, I think,” he replied.

Even though she had not seen him in a long time, Marle thought he was still handsome with the scruffy five o’clock, dark hair, and hoop earrings. A cunning man, even in some rag-tag space suit.

“You know we met once, a long time ago, at some Übercorp wine and dine when you used to work for them. You probably don’t remember.“

Orlok gave her a keen look and grinned. “You said something really absurd about the arm-sized shrimp cocktails…”

Marle snickered. “Yeah, that was the time. It’s kind of the impression I make.”

“Marlene Loy, it’s good to see you again.” He shook her hand.

“Sorry to hear about your father in the lab all those years ago.”

“Thank you.” Orlok smiled sincerely, and then looked over her ship. “So what brings you all the way out here to Flag Pond Moon? Sightseeing?”

“Well, I was looking for the League of Space Pirates, hoping to get an interview for the magazine.  But right now, my suit is telling me I only have a few minutes of air. I hate to use bad humor at a time like this, but do you all mind if we go someplace with a bit more atmosphere?”

Noah groaned then nodded to Chroma and Mungo. “I think we can probably arrange that. Let’s head back to the studio.”

“So they took you to their hideout?”

“Hideout? What are you, eight? It wasn’t a hideout. It was a recording studio. They were mixing their new record. I scooped that story, sucker.”

They entered a modest one-room recording studio ship called Snake Oil. It was one of those Ditch crafts that could be left behind for scrap or salvage. Ships like these were always being hunted down and destroyed by Übercorp. As the ships were one of the few things not created by them, they were marked as terrorist paraphernalia.  

The studio had an archaic eloquence like Marle had seen in some of her mom’s old books: paper posters of old bands on the walls, wires and equipment strewn about on tables and chairs, instruments propped up in in usable heaps—totally old school kick-ass. An engineer hovered over a mixing board, adjusting the levels. There was a track playing throughout the room.

Marle unlocked her helmet and took in a deep breath. She hadn’t smelled a place this real in a long time: a hint of band sweat, beer, dingy carpet and electricity, all totally fabricated, but it still reminded her of earth. She exhaled a long appreciative gasp.

“Looks like we found a reporter at the back door, “ Orlok said to the engineer. “Hey Dan-O, this is Marlene Loy from Known Universe.”

“Sorry to interrupt, and please, call me Marle.”

“Hi.” The engineer waved a hand in the air without even looking. “Noah, the rest of the Pirates are heading into the Detritus, I think the crash may have alerted the local heat.”

“We aren’t going to have much more time to mix this,” Chroma noted, darting an annoyed eye toward Marle. “I am sure the patrols will notify Übercorp once they get probes out here.”  

“You are right,” Orlok replied. “We better finish this track and move on to the next location. We have probably overstayed our welcome at this spot anyway. Dan-O?”

“Yeah, I’m on it.” The engineer did not miss a beat, typing fingers in midair, sliding two fingers to the left and twisting an invisible knob. “We have another Ditch ship lined up and can be there in a few days.”

Marle felt terrible about spoiling the mix; she shrunk back and tried to melt into the wall. The music was taking hold of her as a form of escape as she listened to the beat and the lyrics kicked in.

Extinction burst, the only home we’ve ever known

Spaceship Earth all alone inside a void

Maybe it was the crash finally catching up, but she felt the urge to be home with her mother on the beach. Way too much time out here in space, her soul needed a recharge. It had been, what, five years since being home? Marle hadn’t talked to her mother in months and that was not good. The music was somehow bringing her back into the arms of where she most needed to be. Her life out here scooping stories was cutthroat and vicious. Jerk-ass reporters and freaks were not good company to keep and she started to realize she had very few people she could call reliable friends. It seemed like everyone was using each other to suit their own means, herself included. She could not even recall the last time she just sat and had a drink with someone for kicks and giggles.

Marle decided, she was going home.

“Is there any way you could take me to Galajunkja on the way? I’m in a hotel there.”

He looked at her, as if reading her mind. “Will you be able to get a tow?”

“Yeah, I got a guy.”

“Sure,” Orlok replied. “And we can do the interview on the way. Sound fair enough?”

“Perfect.” Marle could already feel the home comforts embracing her.

“And did you get the interview?” Scarecrow asked, pressing toward her on the table.

Marle sat pensive a moment, remembering the ride in the Detritus. There were drinks, laughter and talk, it was a blur. She looked up to him with a soothing smile and shook her head.

“No. But I had a hell of a time getting back here.”

“And that is everything?”  

“As much as you are going to get without probing me. I bet you would like that.” She eyed him up and down, already assuming doom. He looked utterly lacking in sexual orientation, like a puppet, a uniformed eunuch. Perhaps he wasn’t that type. “Hmm, no, maybe not.”

He was silent, walking around her, calculated and deliberate. The sound of his boot-boy shoes echoed in the room, methodic, intentional, and kind of clichéd.

“Well, Ms. Loy, I am sorry to say that your travel privileges are revoked. You will be going back to Earth immediately. You will continue to work for the magazine as editor but on a probationary status until further notice.“

Marle had to keep a smile curling from her lips. She scrunched her eyebrows.

“My ship?”

“Impounded. You will be able to get it out of tow back on Earth when you get there. As for now, your belongings from the hotel are being boarded onto the evening Shuttle Freeze back to Earth; you will be joining them.”

Damn. The Freeze was the worst form of Public Transportation, freezing you so you  didn’t freak out when going a zillion miles an hour in an instant. The most god awful, jet lag hangover ever.

“Thanks for the ride.” She winked.

Marle walked up the boarding ramp onto the giant space bus at the tail end of Galajunkja. She looked across the platform, at the Hub, at all the degenerates and pilots and crazies that would actually stay out this far from everything. This would probably be the last time she would come this far into deep space. It was the ultimate frontier before hitting the edge of the universe, the place where the fingertips of Übercorp could only barely grasp. Beyond this station was wild, uncharted, and unknown. She imagined the Detritus far beyond Übercorp’s reach, flying to the next Ditch location.

Scarecrow was an idiot, she thought. That was why he was out this far. Classic ass-end post for a classic self-important screw up, and he fit right in. You can give a guy like that any information that happened in the past you want and he feels empowered, like he’s forced your hand in some card game. But he doesn’t know you’re the dealer and the game’s rigged. You never tell him the cards that will be played.

The next special edition of Known Universe was going to be a doozy. It would feature exclusive interviews with the League of Space Pirates, even an advanced track from their new album release, and a special insight about the cold case murder of Captain Noah Orlok’s father in the Übercorp lab. Shit was going to go down.

Marle would retire just before it would be released under her pseudonym, and go home to Lexington. Sure, they might come looking for her after it all hit the fan, but she didn’t even care anymore.  Marle would be where she had needed to be for a very long time now. Home.

Phil Ford is the co-editor and a contributing writer of the Richmond Macabre book series and his work has appeared in Throttle Magazine, Richmond, Magazine and Style Weekly.  Some of his latest projects have included the Kenton J. Stanfield Memorial Library (2015) and Madame Zoe's (2016) at Chop Suey Books with artists Noah Scalin, Thea Duskin and co-writer Alane Cameron Miles. When not in the word world, he is the guitarist for the retro futurist post punk noir band Get in the Car. He also is co-host of the weekly radio news program called Death Club Radio on WRIR 97.3, every Thursday at 12:30PMand DJs insane music every Friday from 5-7PM on Friday Clock Out. You can check out his band here. And his website here.

“I am also at risk, Doctor—and with more at stake than you.” Silencing Freeman’s imminent protest with a curt flick of her hand, Luma continued, “You will listen to me and then do what you can for me—even if it is just to listen. Maybe that is all I need, or all anyone can do for me. We will see.”  Doctor and patient stared tensely at each other as a shadow fell across the room.

0300 is less meaningful in space than anywhere else, but you can still feel it in you, a vestigial stirring in your bones like a warning sign telling you that you need to do something, decide. If your ancestors were Soil-Farmers it might be time to start emerging from sleep, but for most others it’s a rare alert from your body telling you to shut down for the night. The body can keep going beyond it, but you’ll pay for it, especially if you over-fuel the journey.

Chroma had seen so many 0300s that her body no longer warned her about them; her sleek, quivering body, slender and dangerous and alert to many possibilities, thrived toward explosion at 0300, even if it meant collapsing at 0600. Such is the life of an outlaw musician.  

A one-eyed guitarist, slung with his instrument over some chairs in an alcove of the cabaret, stared unrelentingly at Chroma; the intensity of the gaze seemed greater for the fact that it was monocular. Despite her explosive evening ecstasy, Chroma felt drawn to him for some reason she could not explain, although it was certainly not the reason he was after. She sat in front of him almost like a challenge.

Emboldened, the guitarist leaned in toward her and drawled, “Hey baby, when you were up there I could feel you, you know? I could feel your power baby, like the music coming out of you. Yeah those sounds licking you up and down, notes from that fat guitarist coming at you and you wiggling and shaking baby. I’m-a tell you I could do that to you and do it better too, you know what I mean?” In a drunken lascivious whirl he reached out a gnarled claw toward her. A look from her  was enough to stop its crawl, but neither backed down. Her two eyes locked with his one, which seemed to cut through the haze of the bar. 

“I’m glad you liked the show,” Chroma said neutrally while her fingers stabbed at the auto-waiter’s punch buttons. Two tall cylinders materialized at her side, one full of red liquid and the other half-full of a deep blue. She emptied the blue vial into her throat with a quick, practiced motion of her sleek wrist.

The guitarist laughed; it sounded like an ignition failing to turn over. “That’s right, nothing better than a bit of the blue for the old pipes after a show, yeah? A little something in your mouth….” His claw opened up and a finger touched her red vial, stroking it slightly, while his face wrinkled into a sordid leering grin.  

PsyDoc Freeman looked across the room and out the spaceview. His lips parted but no sound came out, as though he were frozen. A moment later he shook his head briefly, vigorously, as if to remove any debris. Finally he spoke:

“But, if Übercorp is using you—and your eye—to spy on this spaceship captain, couldn’t they just zero in on him through you and destroy him? Why are they waiting? Isn’t that what they want?”

“I don’t think they want him dead. I don’t understand it, and I don’t know why they are using me. I don’t know how heavily the Intelligence Department is involved in this. Why is Übercorp using an assassin for spy work, when they’ve got so many spies spread all over the universe?”

“So you don’t—you’re not with—?”

“The ID? No. Or at least I don’t think so. From what I understand it is possible to be working for them without knowing it. And for me it’s probably just a matter of time anyway. ”

“Before you are...enlisted?”

“Something like that. But I know that what I am is changing, and I think they may be finding that out. After all, it’s a child of Übercorp, this eye. They implanted it in me so they could record through it; it’s also a heat sensor, and it’s even a lie detector.” Freeman once again looked uneasy, and glanced nervously around the room. “But the night scope, the other component, is what has somehow mutated.  They told me it’s all mechanical, but…I think it might be organic. Or maybe it somehow became organic, while in me. Because it’s growing—its power is growing. I can see well beyond ordinary limits. I can see beyond that wall. I can see down the hallway behind it. And I am starting to see things that I have never seen before.”

“What’s behind the wall?” Freeman burst out, ready to leap out of his seat. Luma stared icily at him.

“Nothing. Nothing unusual. I’m not looking—that’s not the point. I’m trying to tell you I am beginning to see well beyond what others can see. Now listen to this.”

Freeman, only slightly reassured, nodded consent. Luma took a deep breath in and turned to look out of the spaceview while she spoke.

“This eye is penetrating into space far beyond what you can imagine. This eye burns through matter and can see into the farther reaches of what is known to us—maybe beyond that. Do you know how we speak of the universe as having corners? It’s a turn of a phrase, right? Just a way of speaking? If you said, ‘That’s an odd little corner of the universe’ I would take that to mean that you are speaking of an unusual little region of space, probably in an area somewhat remote from us. That is what you would mean, right?”

Freeman, his mind spinning, nodded.

“Well, I have seen actual corners. Do you understand? With this eye I have begun to see a definition to the universe. It has boundaries, Dr. Freeman, and I am beginning to map them. Do you know what I am saying? Space, the universe, or this universe—it is finite. It curves!”

Freeman, now actually sweating, emerged from his seat. In a highly agitated state he started to move around the room, darting glances all around as though in search of something hidden. Luma rose too but under a different propulsion: she was carried by her thoughts and her visions.

“Freeman, the last time I stared into the space of our universe, the last time I really looked hard, I saw a wall. And I stared at it for a very long time and it began to bulge. It moved,” and here she started to move around the room with him, in smooth round orbits opposed to his wild erratic jumps. “It bulged in and out, like it was breathing, or like something from the outside was pushing on it, pushing against the walls of the universe. I saw space itself…bend under pressure from outside its walls.”

Chroma stiffened her back against the wall. Some force had drawn her there, pressed her up against it, not entirely with or without her consent. Lines from the song she had sung earlier that night came back to her, pulsing through her mind, racing:

I can walk through walls for you,

there’s space between the atoms,

and I know I can line them up,

and one of these days with practice,

I’m going to walk right through to you.

She had written these lines independent of Captain Orlok, and she didn’t know why. They had come to her in a flash and she had scrawled them down half-asleep, awoken from some dark perilous dream. Orlok had originally questioned how they fit into the emerging song, but she was firm and he assented, working them into the narrative. She ended up singing most of her lines behind him on the fugitive recording and when she sang live her voice always broke through with a little more urgency on those words, as though she were calling out to someone unknown.  

The drunken guitarist had slumped onto the table. Chroma gazed at him as he seemed to slip slowly from drunken stupor into loaded, leaden sleep. “To sleep, perchance to dream...”—a fragment of an Old Earth text floated into Chroma’s head as she stared at the guitarist’s single eye, open but glazed and unseeing. Thinking of her own imminent collapse into the night as her energy began to fade, she managed to pull herself away from the wall and the table and started moving slowly and unsteadily out of the bar.  

If you see me lying on the floor, it’s OK. It’s OK.

The line from the song coursed in and through and around her head.  Then, as though in response, it repeated, as in the song, but this time fuller, as though many voices were singing it,

If you see me lying on the floor, it’s OK. It’s OK.  

I’m just taking a break from breathing.

I’m just taking a break from breathing.

I’m just taking a break from breathing.

I’m just...taking a break.

Luma continued to gaze out of the porthole. Freeman, his hand clawing at the octopus, stared at her, his mouth opening then shutting. He glanced backward at the door.  

“What is the Old Earthsign for the Twins?” Luma asked. "You remember, when the Old Earthlings would map out their futures based on how the stars lined up and on when they were born?”

“Gemini.” Years ago Freeman had authored an article on Old Earth superstitions. He remembered laughing smugly at the astrology concept. He wondered if he had laughed smugly about anything in these more strained recent years.  

“I can see them,” Luma said. “Yes,I can see the twins. They are moving!” After a moment she cried, “They are dancing together!”

The door to the room evaporated, leaving a shining blue rectangle of light where it had been.  Freeman jerked himself out of his seat and, shaking, scurried away from Luma, who, seemingly without noticing the interruption, had begun to stretch her hand out toward space, her face lit in a fascinated, searching smile.  

Two slender black-suited men stepped into the room, each man’s face concealed by an Übercorp gas mask. On the left arm of each man the octopus insignia was prominently displayed, the white tentacles spread out and all around, enveloping the limb. Framed by the fading blue halo of energy, the two men appeared as sinister angels. One took two steps further into the room and addressed Luma:

“You have deviated from your mission unacceptably and severed contact with Control. We are here to recalibrate you toward your surveillance target. Face us.”

Luma slowly rose, still staring out into space. Her index finger now lightly touched the space-window. Her gaze remained enraptured, wondrous.  

“The twins are dancing for me,” she said softly.  

Freeman appealed to the second black-suited man:

“You have what you want; I’ve done what you asked: now let me go.”

No one spoke. The scent of Freeman’s treachery seemed to leak out into the air.

“Let me go, let me out of here!” Freeman’s voice rose into a raspy whine. Luma turned slowly toward the Übercorpsmen, her finger still touching the window.  

“Twins dance for me, throughout the universe and throughout time. And I can walk through walls for you.”  

The lead Übercorpsman took two deliberate steps toward Luma while his counterpart remained behind, facing Freeman. “Your mission, which is deemed Important by Control, will be reassigned to another if you fail to submit immediately to re-calibration. If you fail to submit to re-calibration you will be sent to ID for Clarification. Submit now to avoid this. You will have no other opportunity and are fortunate to be granted this one.”

As Luma gazed at the Übercorpsman her face seemed to take on a slight glow as of energy radiating outward from within her head. “You…,” she began, “have no idea. You have no idea what I can do. And I am only beginning to understand myself. But I am growing.”  

The Übercorpsman moved his hand to his belt, his finger placed atop a shiny chrome button. A burst of static followed by a brief coded transmission fuzzed out of his shoulder receiver.  

Freeman muttered, “Right, I’m going, I’m done with this,” and moved toward the door, where the second Übercorpman stood in the passage.

The lead Übercorpsman turned his head slightly in Freeman’s direction and gave a barely discernible hand signal to the second man, saying, “You are no longer necessary.”

The second Übercorpsman swiped his right hand across the air in front of his body and a flash of blue light burst out of his clenched fist and ripped through Freeman. The PsyDoc, dead in an instant, crumpled into smoking burnt matter in the air; the ashy remains fluttered down onto the dirty floor.

Chroma’s body elongated:  her limbs, long and lithe, began to spread out, to stretch far into the eternal night of space. With wonder she watched as her fingers elasticated themselves through space and into the twilit infinity of the universe. Her mouth spread open and out, away, as her head reeled back and her hair spilled out, flowing, beautiful, into the blackness. The distant sound of drums could be heard like a ritual dance for no one, no one except Chroma, as her body became a dance; her body erupted into the night. Her mind, calm now, wrote words onto space:“I am floating. I am one. I am none. I am space. I am you. I am me. We together are one. You, me, and all the blackness of the brilliant white speckled night.”  

Chroma’s body started to fold in upon itself to unheard music—the music of the spheres, of the universe in motion. One of her eyes dislodged and travelled. It saw that the bodies of the stars and the planets of the space-sky were not separate beings but one whole, and they made sounds with each other. And amid all of this Chroma felt herself dissolving into the universe and yet retaining a kind of corporeal identity with her mind at its core.  

Her mind divided and folded into itself, a bisection that illuminated and expanded her thoughts.  Ideas no longer occurred to her, they entered and passed through her with the space air.  

In the blackness among the space dust and stars, white specks began to come together to form a shape. Chroma hazily peered at it from within her mind and her elongating body; it began to take on multiple forms, distinctly separate but the same. White tentacles cohered and began to probe.  

Chroma smeared out into the blackness stretching toward the octopus forming in space. I hate you, she thought drowsily but without heat. The words formed vaguely in her mind as a matter of course but now she could not grasp why. She watched as the head of the octopus formed and reared itself as though above space, yet it was of it, in it. The tentacles, now massive and still growing, began to work. Like giant wings they gathered power within themselves and started to flap and coil in elegant universal motion. Hate you, she thought absently. Half of her vision now was filled with white, the white of the engulfing octopus. Hate.  

The rhythmic drums beating around the universe swelled into hypnotic waves and the sound was all around her, washing up and down her universe-contorted body. One eye closed and the other saw more: everything, everywhere, moons, suns, planets, shadows, dreams, nightmares, octopi.  

Love and hate, she thought dreamily. The word love floated across her mind in the vision of the octopus, rising. The word was white like the octopus; the octopus was love like white. Chroma’s world collapsed and then rebuilt itself with new angles swathed in unknown colors to the sounds of an emerging orchestra. Just one eye, she thought, looking into one of the blank eyes of the octopus, one eye, one love, one world, one universe, and she smiled upon the octopus. The octopus did not smile back but the octopus enveloped, slow like milk, and Chroma felt as though she were both becoming truly alive and dying, her body now falling, falling into a blank abyss—

With a spastic jerk Chroma awoke, warm tears covering her face. Her body was sprawled out on the floor.  She gasped and heaved, taking in air violently as though she had been underwater.  Surrounded by darkness, pinpricks of white sparkled in the night like blinking eyes. An unfamiliar word was painted in new white brushstrokes on the screen of her brain, the letters reaching and twisting like tentacles: LUMA.  

The second Übercorpsman held a glowing ring of red light in front of him. It seemed alive—and it was—and Luma could not help turning her gaze to it, but only for a moment, and then she looked away, back into the blackest night of space.  

“Submit now,” the lead Übercorpsman said, and moved toward her. Luma began to shake her head, slowly and slightly at first but with increasing vigor as he approached. With a hand on the pane looking out into the stars she turned toward him with a grim alien snarl lashed across her face, a look so daunting that even the robot-like Übercorpsman hesitated a moment in his approach, a flash of something like human fear seeming to enter into him for that moment.  

The moment passed, leaving ashes in its wake, and the Übercorpsman stepped closer to Luma and stopped. “There is no more time. Submit now or you will be processed.” The second man’s red ring blazed up high, its flames licking the air.

Luma’s eyes bore into the lead Übercorpsman’s face with an icy power, star-shot and bold. “No,” she said, calmly but with a rising force. “No,” she repeated as her hands clenched into fists. “No,” she said again, raising her fists and tilting back her hand. The lead Übercorpsman motioned to the second man, who began to move but whose body was immediately arrested by an unseen force. Luma raised her right fist and the red ring of fire jerked backwards and up. It reared over the man’s head and paused for just a moment—a searing halo of blinding fire looming over his head—before looping down the man’s body, incinerating him and itself in the process, a consuming death-hoop now shuddering in remains on the charred floor.

Luma’s eye saw all and more.  

The remaining Übercorpsman, finally thrown into unrehearsed humanity, started toward the pile where his subordinate had been, but stopped short and turned back to Luma. Shaking slightly, he jabbed at a panel on his belt, but as he did so the belt and his uniform seemed to dissolve off of him, leaving him exposed and shivering in front of Luma and her eye.

Luma’s lips parted as her eyes widened and her whole body seemed to crackle with an energy that centered in her eye. With a slight whine like the planets shifting gears a cloudy burst of electricity spilled from her eye and cut through the Übercorpsman, dropping him to the floor dead in an instant with the wall behind him a smoky hole. As if through a mist, dancing words appeared in Luma’s head:

I can walk through walls for you,

there’s space between the atoms,

and I know I can line them up,

and one of these days with practice,

I’m going to walk right through to you.

She murmured, trancelike, “Stand beside the wall and wait….”

In another part of the universe, Chroma pressed herself against the wall again, her eyes wide open.  

Luma continued, “The wall just fades away,” as her finger traced a pattern on the wall nearby.  

Chroma began to shiver with cold.

The wall in front of Luma seemed to blink and shudder at her gaze. Her eye simmered and crackled with energy. She stepped up to face the wall directly, inches away from touching it, her lesser eye now closed.

Chroma, trembling, began to sing softly to herself.

The wall in front of Luma faded away into the air and space. Now I can see into forever, she thought as she took her first step into a twinned infinity.

Dean Knight is a Richmond stage actor who has performed in more than thirty mainstage productions in the various theaters of Central Virginia.  His fiction publications are “Section 39” in the limited edition multi-media art box Body of Evidence (also exhibited in New South Wales, Australia and Denpasar, Indonesia); “Target” in the short story collection Richmond Macabre, Volume II:  More Nightmares; “Cut To Make Whole” in Lamplit Underground; and “The Thing With the Strapped Face” published in Thirteen Myna Birds and also the basis of an interpretive dance by the Starr Foster Dance Project.

Art by Freehand Profit. Get the stencil HERE.