Rasp woke up from cryo with a full cath bag sloshing next to his hip and so, so thirsty. Cryo was old tech, and Rasp wondered why Pai hadn’t updated the engines to the Folder’s EZ Time and Space™ models. It probably had something to do with creds. He’d never had a positive amount in his Commissary account, so he had no notion of cost.
He stood up and stretched, tugging at the electrodes still attached to his muscles to keep them from atrophying. The ship’s A.I. fizzed in and out of the speakers overhead while he touched his flaccid penis, fussing over it. Making sure it was usable.
“Please proceed to the lavatorium immediately for decontamination. CryoSleep™ chemicals need to be rinsed from the skin immediately.”
Yellow footprints lit up on the floor, some malfunctioning and sputtering.
“Follow the footprints directly to your left to the lavatorium.”
The A.I. cut out again and then returned.
“Step three: rinse with the green solution. Step four: apply the cream in the large white dispenser on your right to your exposed mucosa. Step five: take tablets one through six before exiting chamber.”
Rasp walked naked down the narrow corridor, the gravity drives whirring. Rubbing his upper arms and yawning.
The lavatorium stood open, a pitch black crevice. Rasp reached his hand into the opening and waved to activate the lights. A single line of neon tubing clicked on, painting the room a pale pink. The yellow footprints shut off. A spigot directly above him dripped something viscous and cold onto his scalp. He touched the red panel beside the shower box. The door slid shut behind him, leaving him in the dim pink light. The cold drip drip sliding down his shoulders, washing down his legs and into the collector below. The spacecraft creaked in the high winds, compressing the wall around him for a moment. The itch of the chemicals sluiced down his calves.
The liquid cut off and the A.I. buzzed back as a fine clear mist gathered on his skin.
“Proceed to the sleep chambers for appropriate garments. TerraNatural is all natural. TerraNatural Believes in Your Happiness.”
“Want to hear a joke?” He asked the voice.
“Proceed to the sleep chambers for appropriate garments. TerraNatural is all natural. TerraNatural Believes in Your Happiness.”
“Why was the A.I. feeling sick?”
“Proceed to the sleep chambers for appropriate garments. TerraNatural is all natural. TerraNatural Believes in Your Happiness.”
“Because it had a virus.” He smiled to himself.
“Proceed to the sleep chambers for appropriate garments. TerraNatural is all natural. TerraNatural Believes in Your Happiness.”
The yellow footprints blinked under his bare feet. The nailbeds under his toenails were bulging. Black half moons pooled under the nails.
“Hello? Pai?”
Rasp pressed his fingertip to the bead of hard scar tissue on his inner elbow from The Before, when doctors saw citizens one by one. He ground his teeth, scraping his back molars together until he could feel the drag and the click in his jaw.
He was alone. Without eyes on him for the first time. Without coworkers. Without The Corporation.
He jogged to the next comm button on the wall still naked and damp.
“Hello? Rasp reporting in from cryo.” A drop of blood patted onto the panel. He rubbed the back of his hands under his nose. An arch of brown red smudged across his skin. The next panel greeted him with the same low drone and nothingness. “Rasp from planet’s surface.” He imitated a Pornographic Art Film he saw back in training, where a space captain landed on a planet filled with identical women with six breasts lined up on either side of their navels. Certified real implants with razor thin scars curving white and maroon under the nipple. Nothing enhanced. It cost 74 hours of hard drilling time to see that art film.
“Captain Rasp, here. Please copy. Over.” Nothing. The comm button had a diagram with two figures facing one another with three feathered wings protruding from their mouths.
The screens in the ship flashed ads from ten years ago. Ads he had always and never seen, their familiarity a balm. Sticky Froots made with REAL gelatin. The yellow footprints flashed again.
“A.I.? How do I contact Mars? How do I talk to Pai?”
“Please proceed to the next chamber. If you are confused, follow the yellow footsteps.” The A.I. crackled.
“A.I., where are we?”
“Please proceed to the next chamber. If you are confused, follow the yellow footsteps.”
Rasp’s moisture-wrinkled skin prickled into gooseflesh. Aloneness came with a price. It had been so long since he was alone, he couldn’t imagine himself with no one. The space in his head that he filled with fantasies of winning the AutoJot AutoLottery™ and women with no spaces in their teeth and real implants and vast platforms covered in warm fabrics was still occupied by others. Men he had known on rigs. Men he knew from trainings. Men from the Shine factory. All were milling around the women and the sunny rooms in his head.
He followed the yellow footsteps to the suiting chamber, where he was dusted with a fine lime green powder. He leaned backward onto a sheet of flexible gray fabric that encased him and then snapped off, leaving him coated and warmed. He tried the comms again. No answer.
The ship rattled in the wind. The yellow footprints half-flashed in the dim vent lighting.
***
The first mission brought Rasp to a lake of clear ice.
After he walked in tight loops around the stations for thirty-six hours, the screens lit up with pictures of a person shoving on the breather helmet. Please align base of Breather 2.5 with carotid implant. If no carotid implant exists, please align fingertips on indicated grooves. He plunged his head into the helmet. Boredom had come quickly. The Pornographic Art Films were old; the women in them even older. Some even had hair on their mons. Perversion. Mechoben demands The Smooth Touch. Even the games loaded onto the customizable workers’ tablets were low-violence and non-VR.
The winds rattled the craft even as he pressed the frown face icon with each disappointing art film. No androids. Very little blood. Boring. Putting on the helmet gave him a sense of duty and he knew that the suit meant leaving the ship. The screens told him so with slip warnings. Bend your knees when exiting. Breathe normally.
His suit contracted around his chest when the door slid open and the cold hit. The ground crunched under his feet. The whiteness of it seared into the horizon of bright studded dark. Golden dun Saturn hung close, peering like a gardener over a seedling in the frost. The terraformers blinked in the distance on top of a small geyser.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
He reimagined himself as the hero of a Pornographic Art Film, treading through the vast wilderness of the Black Hills to blast the tops of mountains with explosives and hold trim women around their waists. Gouts of steam launched into split-skin cold. The artificial gravity drives The Corporation implanted into the ice in preparation for colonization fastened him to the surface of the planet. Walking so far made his lungs burn and his thighs ache. White flakes of ice floated down in flurries, leaving huge piles around him. Rusted RoboDrone Dozers chugged ahead of him, packing and scattering the geyser snow into a canyon of drifts. He followed the blinking line displayed on his helmet’s VR screen. He placed humming solar markers shaped like feathers, as instructed, as he moved down the rough road toward the volcano. As he twisted the rod into the ground, he felt something skitter over his boot. His heart monitor chirped. A fist-sized hole in the ice beside the anchor point for the marker collapsed as a shiny jointed tarsus slipped into the ice.
“Options,” he said into his mouthpiece.
Please choose a suboption.
“Find local communication channels.”
Please select from the following:
* Fresh n Clean: Saturn’s Leading Industrial Harvest Company
* White Holiday and Virtual Pet Store
* Enceladus Burns
“Enceladus Burns,” he said into the mouthpiece. It had Enceladus in the name.
The helmet hummed for a moment before a voice sizzled in his ear.
“Encedalus Burns on gen channel niner here. What’s your position, RASP 2544-46?”
“Let me activate my beacon.” He fumbled with the old display and found the flagging option.
“Oh shit, son. You’re here on this moon?”
“Yeah, The Corporation sent me. Do you know how I can contact Pai and Alona?”
“Which corporation?”
“Sorry, what do you mean?”
“I mean which corporation sent you. I have a list here of Mechoben approved companies.”
“It’s just The Corporation. There are no others. That’s illegal according to The Corporation’s Bylaws for Society and the Worker.” Rasp repeated what he heard in one of his favorite pornographic films.
“Well, if you can’t tell me which corporation, I can’t help you talk to your people.”
“Are you here on Enceladus?”
Silence. Rasp kept trudging against the light gravity, following the lines in his helmet. His chest burning from the effort.
“Yeah. Yeah, we’re here. They were supposed to come get us about 40 cycles back when we finished the terraform on Mount Agni, but no one showed up. Are you taking us back?”
“I don’t think so. I’m here to get to the lake, I think. That’s what my helmet is telling me anyway.”
“What do they want with the lake after all this time?”
“I don’t know.”
It dawned on him that he had never asked Alona or Pai what they wanted him to do here. He hadn’t asked a question since The Before. A real question. About what his purpose was, what retirement meant, what happened in The Before, where was his sister, what is a sister, why didn’t he remember anything from Earth.
“You don’t know much, do you son?”
“Nah. They told us that knowing too much makes your penis smaller. Who are you?”
The voice laughed. “I might ask you the same thing.”
“I’m Rasp.”
“Yeah, I can see that from your chip.”
“Who are you?” he repeated.
“I’m James. I’m from The New Confederate States of America. I think my family is still there.”
“What station is that on?”
“It’s on Earth.”
“I have to tell you something.”
“Alright then.”
“Earth was evacuated when I was pre-labor age. We all went to stations. Each according to his abilities. The Corporation saved us. Well some more religious people think that Mechoben saved us. There are some hard-labor colonies there still, I think.”
“Can you find others? People from Earth? Is there a system?” The voice got higher and hitched. A reaction to something he said. No Soothe Sad™ transdermal patch here.
“No. We only have access to the terminals to link us with The Commissary. A dollar a day makes you healthy, wealthy, and wise,” he said, quoting the motivational scrolls he saw in the Skinnies.
HMMMM…THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR CONNECTION marched across his screen. A cartoon of a striped planet slipping into a black hole covered his helmet viewports. YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT YOUR DESTINATION. WELCOME TO LAKE MOROSKO. The message cleared and bright lights from great black towers wrapped in gaseous spumes flooded the white ground in front of him. His fear hormones inundated his muscles. His guts tightened as he peered into the light-cut darkness.
Great sheathes of ice encased the Just Like Earth™ terraformers launched from some inactive asteroid. The engines, powered by nodules implanted in the reflective surface of the ice and fed by the volcano, blinked green. The ice glowed underfoot with each timed flash. The radio in his helmet droned health statistics at him about his heart and lungs and core temperature.
A small cylindrical object striped in reflective material stood on the far side of the lake.
“Hace frío,” he whispered, his voice thick. Something dark glided under the ice.
***
Document 14/47
Prime Execution of Mining Operations: Personal Logs
When you were born, your eyes were blacker than anything I had ever seen. Blacker than the space between stars, I thought when you opened those puffy pink-lidded eyes to gaze into my face. You were not beautiful. You were red, and the skin on your head was crusted and wrinkled. But not everything that has worth has to be beautiful. Is nitrogen beautiful? Is Lactobacillus beautiful? I suppose if you read this letter, take that last lesson as my only one indulgence into fatherly advice, because it’s becoming clear to me that I will not make it back to Earth like they promised.
You were one of the last to be born in the traditional way. The generation of Body Borns. Before it became too expensive for babies to be born like that.
I watched your mother swell with you, her skin stretching into pale rivulets along her brown hips. Hips that she squeezed into slacks, squatting in front of the mirror with them unbuttoned to stretch them before she dragged a jacket over them for court. She was not motherly. She was not wifely either really, but she was powerful. I was surprised she agreed to marry me at all. I think she liked my hard hands and my rank. She was a goddess. I take a risk even making that word tangible or available for view. It sets me apart from the others and that is rarely a good thing out here in The Black.
We got too far for personal transmissions as soon as they slingshotted us around Mars. There was no infrastructure on this moon before we got here. The last time I saw you, you were trying to pat your mother’s face, as she held your pudgy arm away from her fresh make-up. She was sending me a digital divorce document to sign with my fingerprint. We lost connection before I could send it back. I want to be very clear here – it was the right thing to do. It was the hard thing to do, but it was the right thing to do. I was surprised that she didn’t want to stay married for the political clout it gave her, but no one owns your mother. She did not cry, though you did when she hissed at you when you grabbed her bottom lip and smeared her lipstick.
I stayed in my bunk after that call, reading and rereading the divorce documents on my scroller wrapped in one of those silver blankets they issue at your induction. They don’t tell you this, but it is always cold out here.
We were approaching Saturn’s rings when all comms went down – earlier than they told us. I was looking out of one of the tiny port holes, holding my breath at the beauty of it. The ice rings are a sight. They drift like diamonds around Saturn’s swirling yellow belly in all that dark.
I suppose I should mention that I was one of four people chosen to go to Enceladus, our small white hope. I was not chosen because I was special. I want you to understand that. I was chosen because I have trouble keeping my mouth closed. I promised only one lesson. Perhaps I meant two lessons. Your second lesson is something my grandmother taught me. I assume your mother still calls her Abuelita. We argued about this. When I grew up they called me a beaner. A wetback. I couldn’t ask you to shoulder that. I digress.
Your great grandmother was a maker. She was always making. I remember sitting in her kitchen with the yellow linoleum floor, helping her make tamales for Christmas Eve, kneading the lard into the masa. My uncles laughing in the backyard, the sound of beer cans being crushed underfoot drifting through the tiny open window above the sink. She had a pink plastic bucket with Minnie Mouse on it where she heaped the fat. The smell of the pork braising in the spicy red broth. Serrano. Pasilla. Puerco. I almost cannot tell you about this in English.
This was before the decimation of pigs because of the viruses. Do you remember pigs? That’s what pork was. Masa was made from corn.
Anyway, after we spooned the masa and dropped the tender pork into a divot, we rolled it all in a corn husk and steamed it in a pot big enough to bathe two children in. Then we sat together in her velveteen recliner and watched television. She liked shows about angels. Before Mechoben, there were hundreds and hundreds of religions. I won’t say anything about that. You probably don’t know what an angel is and it seems a futile exercise to try and make you understand.
She held me close one Christmas Eve and said to me, “Mijo, la lengua no tiene hueso, pero corta lo más grueso.”
The translation is “the tongue does not have a bone, but it cuts through the thickest things.”
I trust that you will understand my meaning. Your mother is, after all, herself.
I will leave you with this for the time being. I hope these transmissions will make it to you some day.