First, he needed to eat. His belly growled and darkness was folding in vast rapidity over the house. This strange house. The water receded, and the many-eyed thing was just floating tendrils in a tank again. He reached down and touched his testicles, fearing them gone. And while he could not remember love, he could remember something akin to it. A fear of loss.

He stepped across rich rugs drenched with deeper colors from the wetness and went toward the enameled door with a golden curved handle. The door swung open at the warmth of his touch. Silence amplified around him. The hallway curved, dark and steady, before him.

A single robot with a tiny hologram of a naked dancing woman rolled over the floors of the room, ripping up pieces of the carpeting and depositing them in one corner. The butterscotch light from the cold outside glowed from the Anti-Rad Never Burns™ windows. Soon the distant sun would be below the horizon. Like the others, the room had no screens.

Rasp’s stomach ate away at his throat. He waved at the robot. The robot rolled over to him, dragging scarlet threads of carpeting behind it.

“Can you scan for your master?”

“I am at your service.”

“Ok, scan for Alona.”

“You are so strong and brilliant.” The voice was husky. Seductive.

“Where is the place with the food?”

“I love you.”

The naked woman writhed on top of the robot, flickering in and out.

“I love you. I love you. I love you. I love anyone. I love the cancer in your lungs. I love the fuzz on your tongue. I love you. I love you.”

Rasp tipped the robot over with the side of his foot. The hologram shimmered out, dousing the hallway in the strange filtered Mars light. Rasp’s hunger was becoming frantic now. He remembered something soft and salty from The Before. Something folded in a big green leaf and steaming. Something filled with animal protein and dripping with red grease. The word for it was on his tongue. On his chest.

A small lilt of laughter echoed from the room furthest down the corridor.

“Alona?”

Water sucked at the soles of his feet from the saturated carpets as he picked his way down the hallway toward the giggle. A sign above the door had pictures of animals from The Before in a line. Some with Xs drawn through them in a stolid black print. Rasp leaned his shoulder against the door frame and waved his hand in front of the sensor. The door slid open, and a small hand darted between the panels to grab his jumpsuit. Rasp lurched back as fingers wormed into his front pockets, grabbing, pulling him into the room. Hands poured through the space in the panel, tearing at the cloth of his out-turned pockets, twining through his fingers, drawing him inside the room and onto his knees. The hydraulics hissed behind him as the door closed like water over a too-deep dive into cold water.

Once inside the room, the hands receded, sliding out of his pockets, untangling from his hands.

He was afraid now in this silent place, where women jutted through the darkness and touched him, as real as vaccinations, as real as any man.

The screens had bathed him in light and sound. The men sometimes laughed at his jokes on the rigs. Sometimes, the older men nearing their permanent retirement, would remind him about animals. Animals he couldn’t remember anymore. They wanted his jokes to feel real. After all, what is a chicken anyway, and why is it crossing the road? Were the roads soft in the summer heat? Shimmering, crumbling infrastructure clinging to soccer cleats, fracturing like a too-dry cake?

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

***

Alona stood at the head of a long table, piling glistening proteins and strange fruits onto her plate. Rasp sat on his hands on a bench against the wall. His chest still ached from the heavy dose of sedatives Alona had dripped into a cup of cold, clear water. Pai had gone back into the skins to rest, she told him, smoothing back his hair with her three fingers. Rasp had pleased him very much.

“You performed very well, Rasp.”

Rasp eyed her plate of food, saliva pooling in his mouth.

“We are going to use you after all. Do you want to know what for?” She set the plate before him, wiping the edges with a white napkin.

“Sure I do.” He reached for a hunk of warm jellied protein. Alona nodded her assent, and he popped the fist-sized chunk into his mouth. It gushed warm, velvety fat across his tongue.

“We are funding a mission to the moon of Enceladus. Mars is becoming crowded these days, you know with Earth being in its current state.”

“What’s wrong with Earth?” Rasp asked.

He never paid any attention to The Corporation’s news feed. It scrolled over every surface for hours upon hours. Men with shiny white teeth, plump from injections of Shine into their lips, banged surfaces with their fists and flashed pictures of dead children clinging to one another on vast islands of plastic rainbow confetti. This is what unemployment looks like.

Alona pulled at a thread on the tablecloth, picking it into a tiny loop.

“Earth has been declared Non-Viable by The Corporation.”

“Oh ok. What does that mean?”

“It means that there are no more resources for life there. They can’t even sell sun time now since that last incident with the salt miners.”

Rasp had no idea what she was talking about, but he nodded with mock understanding, picking up a Frooty Tooty Mars Pop™. They were very expensive in The Commissary. A whole month’s work of exterior asteroid work bought one packet of them. He ignored the teal-colored fruits shaped like bundles of tear drops, sparkling with what might have been real sugar. His vision blurred again from the sedative.

“Oh yeah. So you want me to get on a Star Liner and go to Enceladus? Because those things from the tank before?” He searched for a clearer definition of things. Dog is to cat as razor is to _________.

“The Natsar – the things from the tank – talk to you,” she said. “And there are no Star Liners to Enceladus.”

“Oh.” There was an emotion teasing at the surface of his mind, one that could get you retired. The emotion of clenched teeth and torn knuckles. He only had thirteen more demerits before hard mine time and twenty-five more until early retirement. He pushed the emotion back under the surface and dipped his fingers into the melted pool of protein on his plate. He thought of jokes. Knock knock. Who’s there?

“Of course, this job will pay. You may even be able to pay off your Commissary account,” she said.

“How long will I stay there?”

“Well, it is a colonization expedition, so hopefully forever.” She leaned across the table.

“How come you don’t send androids? Like with Mars?”

“Androids can’t breed. And besides, we need someone who can communicate with the Natsar already there.”

“But, I have a contract with The Corporation.”

“We own part of The Corporation, Rasp. You will do this for us. We have already written a clause into your contract.”

Alona unfolded a torso-sized tablet and pressed at the folds on the screen until the heat from her hands melded the wrinkles into the table. She tapped at the screen several times, her brow furrowed. She drew her fingers from either corner until the screen turned to face him. A single one-inch by one-inch box blinked yellow.

“We just need your initial here.”

Rasp pressed his right thumb into the box. He always signed with his right thumb. He had never not signed something.

***

The Holy Book™

Chapter 3 Verses 12-20

12 The people did heed His words, for the poor did eat the poor and the rich did eat things that swam in the sea and flew in the air and walked on the Earth.

13 And lo, His return was marked by The Darkening, for He did arrive draped in Armani and shod in Versace as the prophecy foretold, and He called himself Mechoben.

14 The crowd waved white lights above Him, collecting Him for generations to come. And they did implant Him in their own lives to live on forever.

15 And though there were many, He touched the multitudes with His fingertips and promised them air, water, and flight from this planet. And He spake saying “the deserving will have a place in My kingdom, for My Father rewards toil.”

16 But from the crowd, a small child emerged carrying a single soy protein shake, and Mechoben took it and motioned for the three greatest men to come forward, and so it was.

17 Mechoben put the protein shake on the ground and said, “Let the greatest among us have it.”

18 The largest of the men came for the shake, and Mechoben retrieved his iPhone XXIX, confirming a payment to the largest man, and asked, “Is 400 units enough for this?”

19 And the largest man walked back into the crowd, and the rest of the crowd did wish for His blessing and Mechoben sent them all 400 units and supped from the shake.

20 He put the empty shake on the ground and said, “He who has the most, holds the most,” and left the people for a small time.