Alona sat with her legs tucked underneath her, an ElectroDlight nicotine delivery system flashing purple and green as it gripped the skin on the palms of her three-fingered hands. She flicked her wrists dismissively at the female android who was draping Rasp in silver fabric. Rasp had an erection and a stomachache. The sedatives and rich foods weighed on him, and the android’s soft hands and large eyes replayed in his mind over and over, like in the Pornographic Art Films. The android patted him on the chest and stepped back.
“That’s the anti-radiation fabric in Sad Story Gray?”
“Yes.” The android reached over and flipped the fabric over Rasp’s cloaked erection. The two women giggled.
“You know I’ve never seen one in real life?” Alona said. “Never had a male lover. The last ones approved were years before my time.”
“Me neither.” They looked at one another. That look. The men in the theater look. Hungry.
Rasp was suddenly afraid.
“Father would be furious. He’s supposed to be unspoiled,” Alona said.
“We could just look at it.”
“Wait. Wait. We should consult the morality guide.”
Alona reached under her chair and grabbed a tablet. She tapped the surface and stretched the membrane larger so the android could peer over her shoulder and see.
“Oh no. Mechoben says here ‘Females shall not look upon man’s nakedness, for he is dedicated to his holy purpose. The purpose of work and the purpose of getting.’”
“What does it say about man looking upon our nakedness?” The android asked. Alona ignored the question.
“Well, you are technically not female, so Father couldn’t be mad about you looking.”
“I am female.”
They burst into laughter, grabbing at each other’s arms. Rasp stood there in front of them, his body stiff.
“Let’s look at the concordance about man looking at us naked.”
The women scrolled to the back of The Holy Book™ flicking their fingers across the screen. The android stacked her chin on Alona’s shoulder and draped her arms over her as she gazed into the screen.
“You want to hear a joke?” Rasp piped up.
“What’s a joke?” The android slid her silver gaze over him.
“It’s like a story, but funny.”
“Oh ok. Yes. Tell us a joke,” The android said.
“My girlfriend said, ‘You act like a detective too much. I want to split up.’
‘Good idea,’ I replied. ‘We can cover more ground that way.’”
The women creased their brows in unison.
“What’s a girlfriend?”
“What’s a detective?”
Rasp reached back to The Before.
“Back on Earth, men and women lived in the same place and even worked together, I think, and so if a man and a woman were in the same house they were boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“Like Pai and me?” Alona asked.
Rasp noticed that the Martian woman’s intonations changed often. Sometimes she flitted and giggled. Sometimes she crouched over screens reading languages he had never seen before, her voice deep and resonant as brass.
“Yes.” Rasp nodded.
The women laughed, and Rasp was pleased that his joke worked. Sometimes they worked in the Shine Factory or the mine. Sometimes they didn’t, and the other men slapped the back of his head in the cameras’ blind spots.
The door to the room was open to a dark hallway, and Rasp caught a flashing reflection that floated from one side of the door to the other from the corner of his eye. The white orb floated about three feet from the floor in the hallway and the lights flashed away into the darkness. The women stopped laughing and looked over their shoulders. Their lips tightened and the android pulled a SilverStretch 55 blanket over Alona’s shoulders.
“We should get him prepped for Pai,” Alona said, looking over her shoulder again. Her nicotine delivery system flashed red over the tips of her fingers. She walked over to a thin door in the wall and waved her hand over a blinking purple light on the right. The door slid halfway into the wall. Alona waved her three-fingered hand over the light again. The door didn’t move. She sighed and pressed her shoulder against the door, the android looking on as the door gave a few inches.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
A small humanoid was crouched in the corner of the closet, gripping the legs of a vintage space suit. Alona laughed and gestured for Rasp and the android to come look more closely.
“Look at him. He’s just a baby.”
The humanoid imitated her smile, its teeth overlapping one over the other. It had a fine down covering its spindly limbs and bloated belly.
“What is that?” Disgust rose at the base of Rasp’s throat.
“Oh him? He’s one of my brothers, I think.”
Alona pulled the suit away from the creature’s grasp and pushed the door shut behind her.
“But, wait,” Rasp said.
“For what? You need to be decontaminated and put on this suit before Pai gets here.”
“But what about that person?” He pointed to the door.
“Oh. They don’t live very long anyway.”
Alona draped the suit over his shoulder and patted his cheek. Rasp looked at the closet door as the women laced fingers with him and guided him away from the dark.
***
Document 23/47
Prime Execution of Mining Operations: Personal Logs
I remember Mechoben from the beginning, when he came to us for the first time and he was just so beautiful in his full plate Armani Kevlar. It shone. He shone before us and touched those among us who had nothing at all. He showed us that death is just a passing phase. This was before retirement when we all worked until our purpose was exhausted and then crumpled into uselessness. Like he says, “God is in the screen and we are God.”
Now, this was in The Before when we wrote everything down on our phones. We had these devices where you could still hide things from everyone. I can’t believe how unprincipled we were. And people kept each other and animals in small places. You don’t remember animals do you? The devices were meant to bring us together, to keep us organized, to have everything we loved in one place, and we did. And we chose so much that we ended up alone again.
After a long time of this, he flowed to us. This was after the riots in New Orleans when the water finally washed away that crumbling quarter. Yeah, they said the levees would hold. They said the pumps would work. They always said that. But it was another hurricane and another, and we tried to hold our breaths, but no one came for us this time. A long time ago, before we were born, there was a hurricane where the city was completely underwater. Up to the tops of buildings. Up to the sky in brown water. Washed it away. Did you know that? I digress.
Mechoben found us in a dirty bar, eating generator-fried protein balls. It had been six months since we had seen anyone from outside the city and he came carrying low interest rates and glistening screens. He brought us things. Our devices hadn’t worked for some time and we missed THINGS. He stepped down from his bright white boat into the bar with us and picked up Ms. Ruby, with her ashen skin and rotting teeth and wrapped a stole around her shoulders. It was real fur. Cat fur, I think. White and soft. He could look right through you. I think she cried right then.
The bartender, if you could still call him that (we didn’t have any money and the only booze left was some home-distilled stuff made from bags of sugar and corn syrup and palm sap), poured a bit of the village gin into a Dixie cup that had been washed so many times it was pink. Mechoben picked it up and poured it into a silver chalice, which he sipped from. He kissed the women. Oh yes. In those days men and women stayed together in the same place. I told you that, didn’t I?
He had eyes so blue and hair so fine and blond, just like he looked on the screens. He touched my shoulder and handed me the most beautiful white shirt and a watch that scrolled inspirational quotes. He asked me if I had ever been to space. I told him that was for rich people, but not like that. I was so worried about offending him. His hands were soft and unbroken, his nails trimmed and polished.
“Not anymore. Not with my new program. Everyone can go now and you’ll have a job perfect for you, based on your 31 most attractive attributes.”
He reached into his Gucci backpack and handed us all hard tablets with employment contracts drawn up and ready for our finger signature. Real work in space. Our fathers and their fathers had worked on rigs and in restaurants, all of that long gone when the floods came again and again, orange plastic Popeye’s cups floating by as we paddled our pirogues from one place to the other looking for booze. My father once told me that we were born to work. The Bible said so. Work made us men. We thought space was for the rich. I wish we had left it that way.
***
Pai guided a suited Rasp across the windswept landing pad and gestured at a small space craft shaped like a smooth thigh. Blips of painful blue light shot across Rasp’s right eyeball. The wind pressed against their progress, but Pai trudged on, dragging on Rasp’s suit to hurry him along. The sun stood far and cold against the horizon. Rasp wondered if he had ever not been sedated. A painted-over outline of a sprawling woman peeked through the chipping paint on the side of the craft. His heart beat in a slow rhythm as a ramp slid from the side of the spacecraft.
He and Pai struggled up the steep angle of the ramp until they reached the silent interior of the ship. All of the seating and control panels were draped in white opaque plasticine sheeting. Malfunctioning advertisements repeated themselves on the sheeting, jerking images of naked women and white teeth and flat screens stumbling over the folds. Pai’s boots left long, narrow imprints in the fine layer of Martian dust on the slick gray floor.
Pai’s voice came into Rasp’s ear through the EasySpeak 4000. A smiley face made of dots flickered on the glass of his helmet.
“Do you see the smile?” His voice mechanized by his filtration helmet.
“I see it.”
“Good.”
Pai pulled back the sheeting and pressed a glass screen with his long middle finger. It blinked gray and then white, flooding the control room with light. Big squares with moving images of a cartoon creature with a long black and white tail filled the vacant screens, inserting its fingers into five round holes and then pressing its forehead against a curved strip above. The looping image filled the inside of Rasp’s helmet. Insert digits now. Insert digits now. Insert digits now.
“Put your fingers in the slots like the picture.”
The holes blinked pinkish on the control panel. Something itched in his fingertips, a small ridge rippled under the skin of his nail bed, pressing the nails up like translucent lids.
“Go on, then.”
His hands were electric, tingling and tensing toward the blinking finger docks. Pai watched his ticking fingers as he slipped them in. Cold seized him. A chart unfolded over his helmet with the same cartoon creature as before waving its huge black and white tail at a white-veined moon. The pictures deepened and a yellow dashed line ticked its way across his helmet screen, linking cartoon Mars with cartoon Enceladus. Round and pure white.
Are you sure you want to travel 8 AUs from MARS to ENCELADUS? Blinking in red.
Rasp pressed the thumbs up button with his crawling pointer finger and looked around. Pai was waving to him from behind the closing bay door.