92) Curfew

    “Gotta get home, gotta get home, gotta get home.” you say, over and over again. You notice people in the train car are looking at you and you repeat your mantra silently in your head, hoping in vain that it will help somehow.
    It’s five minutes from curfew, and you’re ten minutes from home. No way are you going to make it even if you had the spring legs from your next stage.
    You squeeze out of the train car between late night adults with their proud wings out, taking up too much space and heading to the pubs to drink them selves silly. You’re the first out of the train’s sliding door, but it doesn’t matter. You’re first through the turn style and running up the escalator, but it doesn’t matter. You look down at your watch as if that would help to turn back the time. Your heart races and your thorax burns in embarrassment.
    Once you leave the train station you can see the town’s church, your home for the last few years, just beyond a copse of decorative trees in their familiar swirls. You run faster than you’ve ever ran before and you think maybe you can make it.
    You run red lights and you hop over parked cars. You barely avoid a epileptic larva from the Builder Caste. The main dorm approaches you with its blank and shining white facade which represents the pure heart of Light, or at least that’s what the brochure said. It’s far better than living on the streets, than staying with the parent, or earning a living in the aphid mines. You only have to hold on for a few months until you can molt then you can get a courier job and a tiny room share in the city where the real action is.
    You think you can hear the locks slamming shut from a hundred yards away and you wonder if the stories the other individuals in your instar told you were true. They can’t be true, you think. Rules are for children. You think you can sleep inside the covered doorway and apologize profusely in the morning.
    You finally get to the front door, huffing and puffing, the tender flesh between your plates pulse an angry red. You’re two seconds late.
    You try the door, but it’s obviously locked. You bang on it a bit, but give up when it starts to hurt your fists. Then there’s a slight hissing from above you. You wonder what it is.
    As tiny drops of bitter smelling mist hit your exposed carapace you remember a mumbling old nun telling you about the way they clean the building at night. It’s part surfactant and part hormone. Now you remember why the nuns said that if you’re out past curfew it’s better to find somewhere else to sleep.
    You look up in the sky at the still bright line of the McDonald Space Elevator. The last bit of sun shine glints off the top well after night has begun down at the surface. Then you hear the buzz of the cleaning beetles and run for your life.

91) Protest

    “Good Morning, my name is Tracy LeBar, I’m here with channel Star news, and I’m down here at St. Mark’s Place in front of the New London Government Health agency’s main building. In a scene reminiscent of the previous century’s class war sit-ins on Earth but with more prosthetics and wheel chairs. We’re here among several thousand protesters who have been camping here peacefully here for the last two weeks.”
    Pull back to establishing shot of encampment, traditional tents, rapid fab shelters, and foam houses are packed closely together on the field until they meet the road about a hundred yards away.
    Cut to commercial. Then back to Tracy walking among the protesters. She turns the microphone to a healthy looking young woman with a sleeping baby in a pram.
    “Hi Ma’am, do you have a moment?”
    The mother smiles back beatifically. “Of course.” She wipes away a stray lock of hair.
    “Can you tell us why you’re here?”
    “Sure, we have a great system here. People get healed and we have the longest lives in human history, you know. But the quality isn’t always there. Sometimes it takes too long to regrow an organ or fit new limbs. And I’m here protesting for my son here who will benefit the most, you know? I’m a nurse and I see a lot of the waste and profiteering that goes on on the other side.”
    Cut to microphone on a young man with sparse beard growth. He holds up a mecha hand and flexes the delicate fingers.
    “Yo man, I built this thing myself and it’s way better than the crap they hand out at the hospital. But, like, I have a degree in engineering so I can do this. But I’m too young so I can’t get a job doing it, you know? So I have to get a minimum wage job flipping burgers and I can only do that part time. Hell, I was fired from my last job for making the fryer warm up 20% faster. What’s wrong with this world? I mean, I can help, but no one wants to pay for it. And the people that run shit. Also, I’ve heard there’s secret technology they’re not even releasing to us.”
    Cut to middle aged man in suit in a wheel chair.
    “Yea, I’m a postal worker, corporate. I probably deliver your mail, up there at Star Networks. I lost my arm to a letter bomb back in ‘78.”
    He holds up his mechanical arm that doesn’t look as fancy as the earlier one, it’s covered in thick pink plastic. He flexes his fingers for the camera and they look eerily non human.
    He continues, “And now I hear they have the technology to give me my arm back. Not a transplant from a dead body, but my own flesh and blood. I heard they knew how to do this years ago, but they’re not releasing it because it’s too easy to do at home and they can’t make a profit off of it. All I want them to do is release the data, you know? Why should they get even more profits from our suffering? They already own 50% of the planet. They already have a monopoly on health care. Why should they continue to scrape us for every credit they can when all I want to do be whole again?”

90) Free on Moon

    “Luna 5, this is Beta Seven Construction, please respond, over.” I was late, but I didn’t think I was that late. I had finished emergency repairs to a large mirror array at the North end of Mare Frigoris and was looking forward to getting out of my suit, a warm shower, and some solid food.
    All that came back was static. That was fine, it’s a fairly hairy frontier country on the edge of space. Communication networks get overloaded, antenna get hit with micro meteorites, all sorts of things can go wrong which is why I didn’t worry until several hours later when Luna 5’s broken dome appeared over the horizon.
    My mind raced trying to figure out what had happened. It didn’t look like a meteor strike and we have several layers of defense and this kind of destruction shouldn’t be possible. Then I noticed a glimmer off to the East about a hundred yards away. I drove over to it and tried my radio, “Luna 4 this is Luna 5 come in, over.” I tried the other three bases, but got the same response. I stopped my cart, got out, and stood next to a black and twisted piece of the dome.
    “…” All that came back was hissing white static.
    Finally some sense kicked in and I swapped over my visor to infrared. The edges of the broken dome were hotter than the rest. I looked back at Luna 5 and I could see a huge plume of the lost air fading up into space like wind swept hair. My last meal rose in my throat with the cloyingly sweet taste of synthetic beef.
    I switched over to the emergency frequency. “S.O.S This is Frank Wu Seven at Luna 5, repeat this is Frank Wu Seven and Luna 5, come in, over.”
    “…” No response. Either all four of the other bases were down or our com system had been wasted. I didn’t like either possibility so I double checked my own systems. They were working fine.
    I was hungry, thirsty, tired and without supplies. My home was gone, tens of thousands of my friends and coworkers were gone. I was afraid to go in to see all the carnage, but I needed to go in to stay alive. I pumped some de-tension and go-within into my blood stream at heroic doses.
    The place was a horror show, but on the neuroleptics it felt cardboard thin. I don’t think I could have saved myself any other way. Everywhere there were blackened bodies curled up in pain, random limbs,  and the dried out and mummified. It seemed like a horror show you’d see at a festival or fair. I almost expected someone to pop out from a corner and come at me with a chainsaw spraying fake blood. Eventually I found some rations, bottles of water, and tanks of air. The com room was blasted away so I had to still rely on my suit’s radio which was still silent.
    I found a dark supply closet and fell asleep in that. I was shielded from radiation better than my suit alone, but when I woke up I had forgotten to drug myself. I thought everything was okay until I got up and opened the door and the previous day’s images came back at full force. And it wasn’t a crepe paper show to scare children, it was my loved ones. I had recognized three of my fellow Frank Wu clones, The Bio Chamber’s cat, and one of Lily’s clones, the pale blue number on her neck obliterated by burnt black char.
    I fell over with a soft clunk and cried and wailed for at least an hour. Tears and mucus in a suit is a serious no no, but I couldn’t help myself.
    Eventually I picked myself up and drugged myself, this time with some caffeine too so I could get a move on. I scavenged some more supplies and left the habitat.
    I drove down to Luna 4 and it was the same story, blasted out dome with a fading plume of air diffusing into space. Luna 3 was the same as well, but their com room was somehow intact. Behind my numb haze I was probably jumping for joy, but in the moment it was only another series of mechanical functions to perform.
    “S.O.S. This is Frank Wu Seven at Luna 3, please respond, over.”
    “…”
    I repeated myself several times. When I was about to give up the radio hissed into action, “Luna 3, this is Terra 1, we hear you. What is your status? Over.”
    Instead of relief I felt nothing besides the changing gears in my head. “Terra 1, everyone is gone, the domes are destroyed. I think I’m the only one left, over.”
    “Luna 3, we are at war with hiss… crzzt… “
    “Terra 1, please repeat, over.”
    “…”
    I stared at the equipment which had just been full of life and let me touch home for an all too brief second. I felt a rumble through the ground. I ran to the bulkhead wall. It’s a good thing I did as a red hot cloud of debris ripped through the corridor off to my left. The ground shook again and knocked me to the floor. A third explosion picked me up, threw me into a wall, and knocked me unconscious.
    The next thing I knew was the taste of blood in my mouth and a spinning headache. I tried to get up, but my leg was pinned beneath a large piece of debris. I pumped in pain killers until the limb turned icy then numb. I pulled and pulled but I couldn’t get free. I labored for hours denying that fact. Eventually I did the right thing, the only thing I could do to survive, and amputated.
    I took a while deliberating, it’s not something you want to get wrong. I eventually decided that right above my knee would be the optimal spot. I programmed the procedure into my suit and let it do its grisly business.
    A local anesthetic went in at the site then the suit pinched around the area and sealed it off. Then, like a shot, a super heated circular steel guillotine snapped into my flesh, cauterizing it, sealing it from airless space, and freeing me from several tons of steel and concrete.
    After spending a few minutes recovering from the shock of watching a bit of me be cut off I pulled myself out. The stump tingled, but that was it. I crawled to an open space and saw what had happened. My mind boggled. I wasn’t an investigator, I was just a third level technician. I couldn’t imagine who would want to destroy the moon bases. They were an international effort. We even had chapels of every religious stripe.
    I found a twisted bit of metal to use as a crutch, hobbled back to my cart, and headed out for Luna 2, guarded but hopeful.

89) Crack and Follow

    I yelled at my laptop and banged my fist on the table. Even though the only other two students in the lab at 3am had their headphones on they gave me withering looks. I ignored them and went back to my problem. Everything I tried was coming apart at the seams. I couldn’t tell if I was hungry or full or needed the toilet.
    A chat window popped up from my roommate, that kind of guy that never takes classes that are too difficult, “hey bro you still up? come down to ferocious for some after party!1!!1!!”
    “Yeah, maybe.” I typed back.
    “lots of drunks chicks maybe even your type, lonely loll ;)”
    Drunk? Random walk? Wiener Process? Lectures from the previous year in statistics and fluid dynamics bubbled up into my head.
    I ignored my roommate’s message and loaded up my raw data again. The raw data that the University’s basement quantum computer had politely churned out for me in an instant. Its fifteen million q-bits had been mine for a solid millisecond at the beginning of the semester and I was still trying to work out what the resulting thirty terabyte state meant.
    I had asked the computer to factor a large sequence of huge and possibly prime numbers, but the results that came back looked like the nastiest noise I’d ever seen. I spent twelve weeks trying to make sense of it. My advisor was getting pissed, I was getting pissed, but the numbers didn’t want to do anything sensible.
    Later that afternoon back in my dorm room after I had implemented the new search parameters I took a disco coma nap while the computer churned away.
    A few senseless hours later my terminal dinged, like a snap I woke up and rolled over to its glowing screen.
    I stared slack jawed at the results. It didn’t make any sense, it went against all intuition. I’ll reproduce it here if you don’t believe me, see attached binary for raw data and initial program filters.
    It says, “86% Disc0unt! bUY V16A-RA & LEV7IRA T0DAY!!! One Day Shipping!…”
    You can see the message go on and on for several more lines in the same fashion.
    I’ve pinched myself, but it doesn’t make any difference. I’ve checked and triple checked. I’m considering taking a fail in the class because no one anyone is going to believe me, ever. There’s no way, no way in the world.

88) The Plague

    I sat down at my tiny breakfast nook in my tiny apartment with my bowl of Capt’n Crunch in rice milk and flicked on the little black and white television I have there. The morning news talking heads prattled on into comfortable noise and I dug into the treacherous meal. A successful breakfast of Capt’n Crunch requires that one take every jaw movement with mindfulness. It’s very zen that way. Several missteps in a row and their sugary deliciousness will rub your gums or pallet raw.
    It wasn’t until I’d nearly finished my bowl that I noticed the talking heads had been blathering about the same thing the whole time. It was a subtle change from the usual political debacles and local news interest. In their place were interviews with scientists, sanitation workers, and concerned citizens talking about cockroaches.
    Now I’m not a bugophobe, hell I’ll catch spiders and let them out my window with a reprimand, but I had a roach crawl between my legs one balmy summer and I loathe the things. I’m impressed with their survivability, but they’re so damn nasty.
    Since my cheep little TV only got one channel I clicked it off and ate the rest of my breakfast in uncomfortable silence, listening to myself think.
    Would I get that build out on time? Do I need groceries? Did I pay rent this month? I think I did…
    Later, out on the street and well on my way to work I noticed something strange. Every third or fourth person was walking in a daze with snot dripping out of their nose. With the first few people I thought it was allergies and that they were particularly uninterested in personal hygiene. It’s a big city so it’s not like I would point that out to strangers. But after the tenth person with gleaming clear snot coming out their nose I was concerned and began to walk with my arm over my nose. It wasn’t until I saw that every other person needed to blow their nose that I noticed this glazed over look in their eyes and a strangely erect posture like they were proud of their runny noses.
    I double timed it to work at that point and was careful to hide my skin under my shirt when opening doors. Safely inside the building I breathed a sigh of relief. At my desk I logged into my terminal. I had a project that was due before lunch so I jumped into it and ignored my usual loafing around news websites. I slipped on my headphones and rocked out to some tracks from the band CSS, a friend had sent me them. The music and the code shoved everything else in my head out into the aether. I was in a serious groove, it was my art, there’s a reason I’m paid the big bucks.
    I finished the code and passed it off to the Q&A for testing. I was on fire and there was another tasty project in my inbox. I jumped on it and was coding until well past 1pm. Lucky for me the tea cart lady was trollying by. I flagged her down and got myself a prawn sandwich, a bag of crisps, and a soda then I was quickly back into the world of semicolons and recursive functions as I shoveled fuel into my face.
    Time passed and I made a significant dent into the project, a controller driver for a class of medical equipment, dry, but a good challenge. The day came and went, but I didn’t really notice. 
    Close to the end of the work day someone touched me. The shock nearly set me into a fit. People at work know not to interrupt me without some warning. I turned around, ready to deal out some severe nerd rage, but it was my supervisors boss, Alice, a tough big city woman everyone knows not to mess with. I tamped down my anger and instantly noticed two things, one she was smiling like she was in love and two that she was still holding the naked skin on my arm.
    I deftly slid out of her grip and rolled back in my chair. Edged into my cubical I didn’t have space to run away, but it was instinctual.
    She said in the sweetest voice that was equally music to my ears and eerily out of character, “Hey, come on, you gotta check this out.” She took a step back and motioned for me to follow her.
    Instead of running like I should have I followed her to the full wall glass windows at the end of the floor. Usually it’s a meeting area but the chairs and tables had been moved out into the hallway or pushed against the wall. Everyone in the office was there in various states of undress cuddling on the floor or holding each other. It was too much for me but I couldn’t look away at the horror of their naked flesh, these previously sane people that I had shared polite office space with for the last five years. But now that whole pretense of boundaries and personal space was gone. I hadn’t noticed it before, but Alice hadn’t been wearing anything below her austere business jacket and she was a big woman.
    I slowly backed up into the hallway until I noticed what they were looking at. It was well pass sunset, but up in the sky a orange red and purple luminous trail of clouds was dancing in the sky. It started well behind the city’s skyline. It continued up and over us and I assumed it continued past the horizon behind us. My skin crawled as the clouds literally danced like spastics. These huge diffuse collections of water vapor, brightly colored against the black sky danced and twisted, betraying their size and all reasonable expectations.
    I stood there, rooted to the floor, my logical brain flip flopping. I sneezed and someone laughed. I wiped a trail of mucus from my nose and it felt really good. That ecstasy of slight friction continued to grow from my nose and face and spread out to my whole body until I was a warm sack of pleasure in a human form.
    I looked back out the window and the moving clouds echoed the waves of warmth in my body, here then there, wave after endless wave.
    Someone from on the floor reached up and held my hand and a bolt of pure white love shot through my arm and straight to my brain. I looked down and it was the normally be-speckled and aesthetically repulsive Barry from accounting. But now he was another divine human, another child of the goddess and pure. He was smiling and I knew exactly why. I crumpled down to the floor and embraced him.

87) Free Jump

    You double check your suit, clips and locks, pressures and dials. Everything’s set. Then you look out the door of the shuttle and it’s sublime. The Earth is huge, and though you have watched the training video the size and brightness of the Earth hits you with a religious weight and you have to look way for a breath, away from the unblinking eye of the Goddess.
    Your instructor pats you on the shoulder and you hear him over the radio, “What a sight, eh?”
    You reply, still a little in awe, “Yeah, wow. I never knew it was that big.”
    He just laughs and says, “Ten seconds, you ready to go?”
    You say, “Yeah yeah yeah!” And give him two big thumbs up and look back out the cargo door. It’s still the Earth, huge and bright and sacred, but that initial embarrassment is gone and you can make out North America from under the cloud cover. Your bowels loosen up a bit as you contemplate the size of the jump you’re about to do. You’re 110 Kilometers up in the Thermosphere.
    A count-down pops up on your visor, “8,7,6…”
    You grab the sides of the door and lean all the way back like your were taught. The count down blinks red “3,2,1…” and you jump.
    Nothing changes in front of you, the Earth is still the same size. But bringing up your rear view the shuttle shrinks down to nothing quickly. After years of sky diving you kind of miss the rush of air even though you know up here your ears burst if they were exposed.
    Slowly the Earth begins to grow until all you can see is green and white and brown. It’s a long twenty minute ride until your chute will open.
    Random thoughts flitter through your mind. You wonder how your kids are doing, what’s for dinner, what you’re going to get your mistress for her upcoming birthday.
    The altimeter flashes for a second as you pass 90Km. Then the suit’s automatic systems kick in, your joints lock, the blast shield comes up on your visor and the video camera kicks in and even though its all fire you can make out some land masses.
    The rumbling of the atmosphere is rough enough to make your normal cast iron stomach lurch. Before you can control yourself you feel acid crawling up your throat and kick yourself for not taking your instructor’s advice and going without breakfast, but that ham and cheese croissant and peppermint mocha were so tasty. There’s nothing to do about it and the worst thing that can happen happens, you throw up in your suit mid drop. It stinks and the smell stings your eyes.
    You miss your cue, three soft beeps, to override the suit and fly through the air doing stunts and generally enjoying your self, which is why you took the trip in the first place. Then the suit goes into dead locked emergency backup mode to make sure you get to the ground safely in another fifteen minutes.
    ‘Well, that’s fifty grand down the tube’ you think to yourself, chagrined.
   

86) Mary's Vacation

    Mary got up a few seconds before the alarm went off in anticipation of another perfect day. She popped out of bed and slapped the clock just as it was beginning to wail. She scrubbed her teeth, flew through her morning stretches and skipped into the kitchen for buttered toast and Vegemite that should have just popped out of the maker. Except the familiar smell wasn’t there, that salty tang and light burnt smell was replaced by a fresh grassy smell.
    Her heart sank and the long forgotten tightness of depression in her belly started to creep back in. She shook it out and faced her fear of losing the routine that gave her life a steady keel and walked into her little nook of a kitchen.
    And from the platform of her maker box gazed out at her the most adorable bright eyes set in a round little twee face made of white fuzzy cuteness, a tiny tea cup sheep. It gave out a weak little high pitched bleating sound and moved to jump off the platform, but found the ground too far away.
    “No, no, no, not today. Why today? It’s Thursday. Thursday isn’t special. What are you doing here?”
    It looked back at her and bleated, this time it was more of an old soul kind of be-in-the-now sound. Then it folded down on its nubby little knees and sat on the maker box platform disturbing little piles of still dissolving support structure.
    Mary stood there for a minute, seething at the injustice of it all. Today was supposed to be like every other day. Today is like every other day. Today is supposed to be like yesterday. No matter how often she repeated that mantra the stark reality of the tiny little lamb could not be ignored.
    She walked over to the lamb in the box and it pricked up its ears expectantly. She frowned at it and punched up the box’s display. She scrolled through several pages of errors in the log file and eventually found the only name, one James Savage. She made the box print out a receipt with James’ name on it and shoved the slip of paper into her pocket.
    Mary unceremoniously picked up the lamb, brushed off the remaining little flakes of support material and set the animal on the ground. It bleated again, accusingly.
    “Look you little fuzz ball, Jimmy got their wires crossed and printed you out here. I’m not the animal type. Hell, I’m not a vegetarian, but you wouldn’t even make a light snack.”
    The little lamb looked up at her and said, “Blaaaa.”
    “Can’t it just wait until I have breakfast? My blood sugar is low.”
    “Blaaa.”
    Mary sighed and rubbed her face. The lamb walked over to her and softly bumped into her ankles.
    Mary said, “Fine, I give up. Fine, ok? We’ll find your owner right now. Ok?”
    “Blaaa.”
    “Come on.” Mary walked to her front door.
    The lamb bounced over to Mary as she held the door open and looked up at her with those tender loving eyes. She shooed it into the hallway, closed the door behind her and walked to the elevator. The lamb was right behind her the whole way.