The sun burned overhead as Pom and Mei sought shelter in the shadow of the mesa. Pom began to unpack the supplies from their buggy, while Mei hooked up their provisional solar array to make a start recharging the buggy. The battery was almost dead.

Mei knew their remaining time was short. If they would not be able to replenish their water in the next few days, they were going to die. They had spent three days at their base camp at their landing site, but the lack of a water source had forced them out of the small rocky canyon. The landscape they had traversed the past days had proven bleak and inhospitable, consisting of elevated regions of hardpan that gave way to salt flats and flowing deserts.

Fine, dry dust was everywhere, its electrical charge making it cling to their vehicle and clog up their filters. Their air tanks long spent, Pom and Mei had to resort to breathing the local air, using an improvised filter mask. Pom’s lungs burned. Already exhausted from his efforts, he squatted down.

“It has been four days. We have traveled hundreds of kilometers. No sign of water, and still no sight of the crater,” he mumbled through cracked lips. The last two days, they had disabled the buggy’s climate controls in an effort to conserve energy and extend its action radius. Today, that gamble had paid off. Had they not saved energy, they would not have reached the mesa and would now be stranded out on the sandy plains, the heat erasing what was left of their rapidly dwindling supply of water.

“We don’t even know where the crater is, the landers instruments were totally fried” Mei answered, hooking up their radio receiver to the solar array, using its substantial surface area as a makeshift antenna.

Just as it had ten times before, the display on the receiver failed to list any signals.

“Either they still don’t have any of their antennas up, or that dust is putting up so much interference that nothing gets through.”

“It’s to the north-northwest, I just know it is!”, Pom snapped back, agitated.

Mei knew better than to argue. In their present situation, any direction would be as good as any other.

Pom saw her doubt. “I don’t need the filthy instruments, I checked where the sun came up and set back at the canyon,” he said, repeating the arguments he had already made the previous days. We are on the northern hemisphere and our latitude put us about eight hundred kilometers south of the crater! And I checked the moment the sun rose. We were an hour and twenty minutes off to the east!”

Pom sprang up and kicked at the rocks to vent his frustration. “I may be from the moon, but I know how to navigate on a shoddy planet in the absence of satellites!”, he ranted.

“Calm down and save your water,” Mei snapped back. She checked the reclamation vat and gave it a disapproving look. They were losing too much moisture to the dry air, as the filters were not designed to recover it.

“Why don’t we have proper desert equipment,” Pom persisted in his laments.

“Because Gliese 777 had lots of ice and because the fabricator can produce water from rocks,” Mei sighed. “Look, we just need to find the crater, and the rest of the team should already have all the water we can wish for.”

The receiver gave a beep, and Pom froze. However, before Mei could move over and look, the signal was gone.

Mei brought up the logs. “Just a glitch,” she said. “It wasn’t on any of our frequencies.”

Pom scoffed, then started unfolding his shelter. Like they had done previously, they would rest during the day, and start moving again in the late afternoon after the batteries had finished charging.

“What was it like? On Luna?” Mei asked, trying to steer Poms thoughts in another direction.

“The same as any other place under the UEC,” Pom answered. “You work till nobody deems you worthy of investment. And then you die.”

Mei was silent, not willing to provoke Pom further.

“I guess at least I’ll die free. Not generating profit for one company or another.”

“We are free,” Mei replied emphatically. “Even if we survive this ordeal and make it to the crater, how do you imagine the Company is going to have any kind of influence here?”

“Well, there’s ARI, for one.”

“Woodward is in command, and she doesn’t strike me as a topscaler. None of the surviving people are. Well, perhaps the colonel, but I don’t know.”

“Hmmm,” Pom said, giving the idea some thought. “I suppose that’s true. You’re a senior officer after all.”

“I was only third medical officer,” Mei explained. “The same scale as the commander was, originally. All my direct superiors are dead.”

“It’s a bit suspicious, innit? All the senior officers dying. If I were a believer in conspiracies, I’d say ARI wanted to take over. Artificial Intelligence is banned for a reason, but hey, they

just had to make an exception for interstellar ships… Yeah, let’s give them one more opportunity to kill humans!”

Both had seen the dreadful historical footage of the AI-caused global economic catastrophe of the twenty-fifth century that plunged earth into two years of total anarchy and left over ten billion people dead. The newly formed UEC passed a general prohibition of the technology in the aftermath. However, as time passed and humanity spread throughout the solar system, AI has proven to be a necessity to reach other stars. The UEC had reluctantly eased the restrictions after a covert AI-controlled expedition was the first to successfully reach Proxima in the wake of several failed human-led efforts.

Mei pondered. “I trust ARI. It is a miracle anyone is still alive after all this time.”

“Then why are all the officers dead?”

“There actually is a good explanation,” Mei began. “The topscale people lived on planets. Planetary atmospheres are exposed to cosmic rays - the stuff we try our best to keep out of orbital habitats - which create a lot of nice radioactive isotopes, such as carbon-14. Nothing you’d have to worry about normally as that stuff has a halflife of nearly six thousand years. But if you’re in stasis for tens of thousands of years, they have mostly decayed and destroyed you from the inside out.”

“Nice story, but Commander Woodward is from Earth,” Pom argued. “That doesn’t hold.”

“She was in stasis for over a hundred, and then stuck on the Proxima orbital for five years, just like you. You two came in on the same transit ship. Reverend Sekhon too.”

“Right… I guess everyone from Sol was on DaFeng-148.”

“Of course. As much as DaFeng wanted to move all their assets to Proxima, they could still only afford to produce one ship every forty years or so. Was it really as bad as they told us?”

“As if the Proxima orbital wasn’t bad! It’s the same shit! All my life I lived out of a rented box barely bigger than myself. My investment changed hands a dozen times before the Company snatched me up and sent me out here. But hey, look at this,” he said, pointing at the shelter. “I got my own fucking palace now. And I no longer see any security portals that may as well spell ‘turn around and piss off, you dirty bottomscaler!’”

Mei paused. “You are an HR kid, aren’t you?”, she asked quietly. Although abolished before her time, the degrading practice had long persisted on Proxima. To sustain the labor force, bottomscale women were levied to bear children for the human resource cartel, earning an advance and a revenue share in their offspring. HR would invest in the child’s upbringing and education, which would leave it indebted for the rest of its life.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“They call us whore-kids,” Pom sneered. “Didn’t even get any enhancements, thanks to those cheapskates.”

“Tell me one thing,” Mei asked curiously. “How come you are so... rude? Don’t they stamp that out?”

Pom looked back, and Mei could see his characteristic amused, mischievous twinkle in his green eyes and a wide grin forming on his mouth, as if Pom took the question as a compliment. “Well, they tried. But I guess they couldn’t suppress that rubbish genome my putain-mère gave me. Almost failed the stability tests though. Twice.”

“What would have happened if you failed those?”

“The same as when you fail any of their important tests. You’re a write-off.”

“And then they kill you?”

Pom laughed, but he rasped as his dry throat was sore. “No, of course not. Paying someone to put that on their conscience costs credits. They kick your indebted ass out, and let society do its thing. Either you find someone that has use of you, or you starve, and if you get in the way while doing so, security snatches you and sends you off for indentured labor. On Luna people don’t tend to last long there. Especially not kids.”

Mei was silent. While her own youth had been far from easy, she couldn’t imagine what Pom had gone through.

“You know, I’m glad about one thing,” Pom said.

“What is that?”

“That I must have outlived all those filthy topscale bastards. We probably survived the UEC and the Company too. I can’t imagine any of that still exists. And I swear, if we get to the crater, I am not going to allow the perpetuation of any of that shit.”

“I wholeheartedly agree with that,” Mei said as she removed her shelter from the buggy and began unfolding it. Pom moved to help her set it up, but Mei declined. The heat of the day was picking up rapidly, making her uncomfortable. She left the half-deployed shelter for what it was and returned to the vehicle to drink from a canteen.

Pom moved to help her set it up, but Mei declined. The heat of the day was picking up rapidly, making her uncomfortable. She left the half-deployed shelter for what it was and returned to the vehicle to drink from a canteen.

“Only two days of water left… at best…”, Mei sighed in desperation.

“I know,” Pom said. “Sun's getting bad. I am going to rest. You sure you don’t want a hand with that shelter?”

===

When Mei crawled out of her shelter, Pom was already up and awake, squatting next to the radio. She had slept poorly, waking up several times to heat and thirst, with her eyes hurting and her skin dry and rough.

There was a stiff breeze, and the sky had become slightly hazy, obscuring the otherwise impressive night sky of Messier 39. She turned around and saw dust clouds in the distance, in the direction they had come from.

“You should take a look at this,” Pom said, quietly.

Mei shuffled up beside him and looked at the screen. Three more entries had appeared in the logs while they had slept.

“It’s on the same frequency every time,” Mei said.

“Yes,” Pom said. “Any idea what it could be?”

“A natural phenomenon? If it is a signal, it is way too distorted to make out anything more than what could possibly be a carrier wave.”

Pom grumbled, realizing that whatever it was was not going to help them get out of their precarious situation.

“Sun’s almost down. I’ll go furl up the solar cells. Compact your shelter, mine’s already on the buggy.”

Once the sun had set, the pair of them packed up their belongings and continued on their way. As they drove, the darkness all around them was punctuated only by their headlights and the occasional flash of distant lightning in the sky behind them. They drove in silence for a while, until Pom broke it.

"You ever think about what we're doing?"

Mei was tired and thirsty, and didn't feel like engaging in conversation. Still, she knew that she needed to talk more if she wanted to keep her mind off the intense heat and dryness all around them. Her throat dry again, she drank the last from one of the few remaining canteens before replying.

"Like what?"

"Like… I dunno. Everything? The past, the future."

"Not really a great time to think about the future now, since we might not have one."

"Yeah, I know, but still..."

"I think about the past a lot,” Mei finally admitted. “Good times with friends and family."

"Me too."

Mei couldn't hide her surprise. "You have family?"

Pom was silent for a moment. "I had a wife..."

"I’m sorry… What happened?"

"She..." Pom swallowed hard. “She didn’t make it. She was dumped along with the aft section.”

Mei didn't know what to say. She could hear the pain in his voice. She wanted to reach out and comfort him, but she hesitated.

"You don't have to tell me," she said.

"No, it's OK," he said. "I should talk about her more."

"If you're sure..."

"I am... Her name was Jocelyn. We were married shortly after arriving at Proxima..."

"How did you end up on the Dolya?"

“Well, that's a different story."

"I'm not going anywhere..."

Pom smiled.

“We were... Different from most of the others outbound from Sol. Most just wanted to carve out a life for themselves in a new world, no doubt assuming they were gonna be welcomed to an idyllic life on Proxima. Jocelyn wanted to build something more. A new purpose in life, a new society with likeminded people. One where we would never make the mistakes of the old worlds.”

He sighed, then yanked the wheel suddenly to evade a large boulder, half buried in the sand.

“Of course,” Pom continued, laughing from the sudden interruption “Reality caught up with us the moment we arrived and found out that we weren’t allowed to go planetside. No, we were going to be stuck in an orbital and I was sold off and assigned to asteroid mining, Jocelyn to accounting."

"And then the Company purchased your investment?", Mei asked.

“Well, just mine, and they simply bought off Jocelyn’s marriage clause... they didn’t need another accountant after all. We barely got the credit together in time to pay for her ticket...”

"That's awful!", Mei exclaimed. She knew those in the lower grades had it bad, but the Company casually destroying their marriages was shocking even to her.

Pom sighed. "We both pulled 20-hour shifts in the end and spent every last cred to get her a ticket to come with me, only for her to die. Because she loved me..."

Mei reached out and touched his arm.

"I'm so sorry..."

"Yeah... Well... I guess Jocelyn would have wanted me to move on."

"Let me drive for a while...", Mei offered.

"You sure? I don't mind..."

"I insist. You go rest a bit more."

"Thanks... And thanks for listening..."

Mei took the wheel and continued driving. She looked at him. He was already fast asleep, his rough face peaceful for once.

She drove on, thinking about her own life.

The two of them had a lot in common, she realized. They were both sold off by their parents to the Company, Pom for money and herself... well, she wasn't sure what the reason was. She was just told one day that she was going to work for the Company, not that she had much choice in the matter.

At least he had Jocelyn, even if only for five years. She had no one...

"I wish I could be with you...", she whispered to the air.

There was something about the emptiness of the desert that changed her.

She didn't know why she was saying it. She had never professed feelings for anyone before, and was unsure whether her feelings now were even real.

And yet, despite Pom's deplorable background and standardized upbringing, she saw a genuineness about him that she had never before seen in anyone.

She looked over at him, and he stirred in his sleep. She wondered if he was dreaming about Jocelyn.

She wanted to be in his dreams. She wanted to be loved.

She kept driving, the vast open sand plain stretching out before her like an endless black ocean.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to feel something, anything.

But there was nothing there. Just an empty void in her heart, like the desolation that surrounded her.

Hours passed in silence, the only sounds being the soft whistling of the buggy’s electronics resonating and the noise the wheels made as they caught bumps or plowed through patches of gravel.

It was still dark, the sun having not yet risen. The dust had settled, and the sky had turned a deep blue-grey in the early twilight, speckled with stars. It illuminated the desert with an otherworldly glow, making the dry sand sparkle like snow. Exhausted, Mei stopped the vehicle and woke Pom.

He stretched, then cursed when he saw how long he had slept. The two of them got out and looked around. The desert was barren, but they had been climbing steadily. In front of them, a range of dark grey that cut a jagged line across the horizon.

"We'll reach those hills by dawn," said Pom. "Then I'll find a place to hole up for the day and set up the camp while you sleep."

Mei nodded. She gazed at the hills, an ominous dark outline against the sky, and yet another barrier between her and survival.