Pai stood hunched over the screen, bending it forward and backward, rocking on his heels. One of the children slithered against his calf. Its huge eyes wet and round, set back in its flattened skull. He glanced down at it and handed it a nub of Shine Gummy from the only elephant tusk on Mars.
The child scrambled away on all six limbs, clutching the sweet in its front teeth.
“Where oh where could our little lamb be?”
He stretched the screen into a three-foot bent plane and knelt under it, trying to trace the ancient spaceship he sent hurtling towards Enceladus. The comms went down. Alona told him they would. He could feel her eyes on him. She stood wrapped in a luminescent synthetic wool blanket, chewing on her thumbnail.
“Well, what does this mean for the sickness?”
“We can’t know that yet, Starbeam.”
“Why didn’t you install the upgrades I listed?”
“Those are expensive.”
She sighed and pushed away the child who leaned against her thigh, crouching and nibbling on the gummy Pai gave it earlier. It grunted as it fell backwards snatching at the air.
“I made him trust me. I played dumb because you said you would install those upgrades.”
“I said I would think about it, Alona.”
“I acted like I didn’t know what a boyfriend was. Like a rube. A common GagGirl from the flotillas.”
“He doesn’t know the difference.”
“I know the difference. It’s wrong. He’s ignorant.”
“Things are more complicated than that. You’re young. You don’t understand these things. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten you involved in this.”
“Oh yes, Pai, by all means, do the calculations yourself. Let’s waste the illegal, and since you’re so obsessed with it, expensive education I nearly died getting.”
“Come now, Starbeam, that’s a bit much don’t you think? It was one incident.”
Alona creased her brow and turned up her ElectroDlight nicotine delivery system. The lights flashed red indicating the maximum level.
“Just one incident,” she repeated back at him.
“It happens to GagGirls all the time,” he said. “You should be grateful for all of this.” He gestured at the flooded carpet being vacuumed by a single box-shaped robot.
“Mechoben in space. We’re supposed to be fixing this, Father. It was supposed to be a temporary fix.”
The sun stood cold and distant, just barely visible through the radiation glass. Pai looked back at the bent screen.
“We have to find him,” he said.
Alona snatched the child’s ancillary arm and dragged it out of the room. The nodes from the nicotine delivery device detached and swung from her skin, exposing the sores on her hands and arms. The child pattered after her, dropping bits of sticky candy in its wake.
***
The Holy Book™
Traditionalist Text
Chapter 5 Verses 1-8
1 Protect me, oh Lord Mechoben.
2 I leap at Your voice. I spend at Your command, for to spend is to truly know Thee. Thy Market fills for the worthy. If You find mine labor worthy, fill me as Thou sees fit.
3 Those who deny Thy will shall suffer. Their bowls fill with blood and their daughters foisted unto production. Nay, not to show Thy will and glory through the bodies You hast gifted unto them, but to toil.
4 Toil is a joy and my heart is filled, for Thou didst command the harvest of stone and fuel for Your great empire.
5 I will sit at Your side, for I am chosen by Thee.
6 Those who deny You in vanity, choosing man and the things of this plane over Thy perfect will, will be reduced to nothing. Your hand will not be stilled in their punishment. You shall make them like a pool of plasma.
7 You will wipe them clean from the universe. Their skin will be like ash and their faces like skulls.
8 Exalt in Your power, oh Mechoben.
***
Finding the wizard, El Mago, was easier than Riff expected. She watched so many ten second stories where someone lost something, usually a diamond or a rare Nazi artifact, and they didn’t recover it until five episodes later, after drifting through space or dodging Venus’ lightning storms in an AntiPressure Skidder, until the song ended, or the hero clutched the thing in his Armani-gloved hand.
Instead, she dreamed El Mago into existence.
Mama swapped her monitoring patch with a hacked one that reported the stats of every GagGirl combined into an average. Of course, that meant she was unable to access the custom streams curated by an A.I. assigned just to her. They trained the programs to read the blueprints of dreams so they could “make everyone’s dreams come true.” It said so on her mirror. It said so on the screens. It said so from her implant.
“It will make your dreams safe, mija,” Mama said as she braided Riff’s hair in the communal baths, her scarred arms striated with hard muscle. Black as a crow’s back in twin plaits, so tight they pulled the skin on her temples. She could not remember Mama doing this before this moment.
“Safe?”
“Si, they can’t see into your head with this.”
“Mama? Where were we in The Before?”
“We cannot talk about that. The devices can’t hear us in here, but they can read lips a little bit.”
Mama patted her braids and spun her around by her shoulder, wrenching her back.
“You need to be very careful.” Mama stared into her face and for a moment she was unrecognizable, someone or something else. Her mouth a thin line. A memory of her thumb against Riff’s neck when she couldn’t do something. Something to make Mama proud. Something. “Don’t be stupid.”
“What does that mean?”
“I remember you like to talk too much. You always talked too much.”
The steam billowed around them, her mother’s fingers digging into her shoulder. Riff felt her pressing something tiny and hard into her palm.
“Close it. Close your hand. Take it now, while they can’t see as good.”
Riff closed her hand and looked in her mother’s face, which melted into its usual neutral expression.
“Ok, Mama.”
The red ration lights blinked, and the water turned off. Riff sucked some moisture from her forearm and took the pill. Pills were rare now in the age of transdermal patches. Ultimate convenience! Perfect dosage! She almost forgot how to swallow it and gagged as the bitter powder coated the back of her tongue.
“Find the wizard,” Mama said and got up. The skin on her bare hips sagging only slightly, rumpling like soft bedding. Soon she would be retired. No longer useful for this profession. Everyone knew that once the injections and the surgeries stopped lifting and smoothing, it was over. No Use. No Excuse.
“Impractical for The Corporation to pay for the old ones,” she overheard a director say, smoothing Shine for Men along his neck.
Numbness pressed the back of her eyeballs as she walked back to the Sleeping Quarters, her feet warm in the soft all-natural DogWool socks. By the time she slid under the blankets she had already emerged on the other side.
The Dreaming.
She was not she any longer. She was he, her body leaner, taller. Her hands thick. Her testicles irritatingly noticeable, sticking to her thigh in the spacesuit. She squatted and shook her leg. The power in her limbs was intoxicating.
A distant electronic voice in the helmet hummed in her ear.
“Can you find others? People from Earth? Is there a system?”
Another voice. Vibrating from her own mouth and throat.
“No. We only have access to the terminals to link us with The Commissary. A dollar a day makes you healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
A tundra of white spread out before her. Cathedrals of light blue ice curved against a huge planet hooped by rings. Saturn? She had seen ads of the Hydrogen farmers in their mech suits, standing on asteroids with Saturn in the background on the vids. Smiling into the yellow light at fortune. To work is divine.
She tried to speak into the mouthpiece, but only hummed a familiar tune. The ice crunched underfoot as she walked. The voice returned in her mouth and throat, whispering.
“What do you get if you cross a wizard and a blizzard?”
She remembered. She remembered. She remembered. Her head flooding with images. A forgotten and forbidden idea – a brother. A brother who pulled her around in a skimmer too fast, skidding around corners until she tumbled onto the hard floor, hitting her head against the edge of a wall. She had screamed when the blood pattered onto the floor in quick drops, but he had picked her up as fast as he could, crying. He took her to a room. A room on Earth like the bathing chambers, but there were no screens, only a reflective surface and a cold platform with basins where clear water spouted from shiny spigots. He kept saying something to her in that dead language. The language she dreamed in. Lo siento Lo siento. I am so sorry. Aquí. Mira, no hay problema. Tears and snot mingling in the reflection on their faces. He patted her head with a soft white cloth and dabbed it with something from a brown bottle. No le dolerá. It won’t hurt. I swear.
He dabbed something warm and slippery on her brow. “It’s worm medicine. It comes out like a worm. See?” He squeezed the tube and a long rope of clearish goo oozed out. He grabbed a box and pulled out three strips and peeled them apart. “I have a joke for you. What do you get if you cross a wizard with a blizzard?”
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She sniffled and asked him, “What?”
“A cold spell. You get it? Please don’t tell Mama about this.”
Mama called him El Mago when they were young because of his ability to make food disappear from the house. He could eat and eat and eat. She remembered eating together with plates piled high with something. She couldn’t quite place it. A plastic woman in a veil holding a baby, while a group of men holding curved sticks stood in the corner next to a thing with colorful lights. They were salty and filled with something like dog meat, but it was something else. The red grease running down her brown arms.
She was in her brother’s body. “Brother” was an extinct word. She tried to think a joke at him.
If he heard, he said nothing and kept trudging through the ice to a lake in the distance that blinked with green nodes.
She tried controlling his movement by lifting a suited hand. She focused her energy, her very being into lifting a hand. He lifted his right hand just to his waist, and she could feel her gaze being drawn to it. She tried again.
Knock knock, she thought forcefully. She tried to use her own voice. She thought hard about the sound and texture of her voice. The notes and timbre of it.
“Who’s there?” He whispered.
She grinned and could feel the corners of his lips rising.
Boo.
“Boo who?”
Aww don’t cry.
“Who are you?”
Do you remember when Mama had a bad day and she hit me with a slipper when you spilled something but she blamed me? The slippers had eyes on them and ears? They were white. You told me ‘tough tits’ and hid somewhere for hours?
“Where?”
She struggled to remember that name of the place where they had lived. The sunshine was so bright and the water so blue, until the floods and the sickness.
I can’t remember, but it was Earth. I had another name then, I think. Mama calls me mija, but I don’t think that’s it.
“How do I know you aren’t me? I mean, in my head?”
I don’t know. No sé.
Riff could feel something slipping out of their shared right nostril. A black tendril waved in front of their eyes, teetering and swaying against the concave surface of the helmet. She could feel blood running hot from her nose, from his nose, caking in the hair on his upper lip with no way to wipe it away through the helmet. The itch of it, the smell of it. She lost him then. She could feel his heart pushing blood and his lungs burning with panic. He clutched at the sides of his helmet, pulling. Searing pain echoed through his right temple, choking him.
Don’t take it off! Keep the helmet on! She thought at him through their shared panic.
Another voice entered. Not his and not hers. Another.
WHO
The voice thrummed and purred. It sounded like a thousand voices all at once and at the same time like a sole woman weeping in a chamber.
Rasp’s panic was choking out all reason and thoughts. Riff felt sweat dampening their body under the protective suit. The monitors were screaming. Graphs and lines and numbers bounced in front of their eyes. Then like moonlight coming through the transit door after months of windowless space travel, it came to her. She was dreaming. She willed calm sensations into their mind. Being wrapped in soft arms, a full belly, falling asleep in a clean place, cool water rushing around feet. She injected a piece of a memory of a white creature with gray tipped wings and yellow webbed feet honking and screeching as it drifted above them. She could feel air surging back into their lungs, the red haze lifting from their eyes.
WHO
The voice repeated.
I am Riff and this is Rasp.
AND THE OTHER
What other? Who are you?
CHILD
There is no child. Just us.
An image of a cold, still mountain rose between them. The ice vibrated under their feet. The slightness of the sensation reverberated in their chests, as if the being was shifting focus. A mountain across the lake puffed white clouds against the hazy half terraformed sky.
PAIN
Rasp’s scattered thoughts congealed again and returned, pushing down Riff’s questions.
“Why did you hurt me? I didn’t do anything to you,” he said, his voice breaking through the static.
CHILD
“Who are you?”
WHO
Rasp coughed and threw up his hands, the taste of copper in his mouth. The lake lit up in long wavering green streaks under the ice. In the distance, the ice humped up into a huge mound. A booming crack shook the ground as the ice broke. A dark shape the size of a shuttle glided under the ice toward their boots.
Feelings of confusion and anger flooded both of them, and for a moment an image of two-legged beings driving piles into the ice floated to the top of their consciousness. Searing pain erupted again at the base of Rasp’s skull. His stomach heaved as a multi-colored shining pattern of triangles resonated in his left eye. Vomit filled his mouth and dripped from the sides into his helmet. He gagged again, forcing it down, remembering his astromining training stream. Swallow it down, so you don’t drown.
Riff thought an image of herself at the huge voice, naked with her hands open, and tried to mimic its speech patterns, pushing past the pain.
Children. Riff. Rasp. Who?
MOTHER BIG CHILDREN
The voice was giddy almost. The pain subsided in their head. Riff pressed.
Are you MOTHER?
The shape under the ice shifted left and then right, wavering. A hunk of ice tipped, revealing a slick, muscular section of a larger being that slipped back under the surface. The being seemed to be thinking for a moment. Rasp’s body rebelled against the proximity to it. Blood. Vomit. Sweat. His guts straining and aching.
US MOTHER WE TOGETHER
You are a mother?
YES
Is there a father? Familial structuring was considered wasteful by The Corporation per the teachings and restrictions brought on by Mechoben in the late 21st century. Riff had trouble remembering what a “father” was even after Mama mentioned it. She projected an image of the being under the ice and imagined another being wrapping around it like interlacing fingers in held hands.
NO
How do you make more of yourself?
NO
Where are your…um…smaller ones?
NO
The being punched up against the ice, breaking it into jagged platforms that bobbed and lurched in the sea below.
Rasp was coughing now, taking little snatching breaths to fill his burning lungs. His trembling body caved into itself onto the ice. He gagged and pressed the emergency button on his suit. Blackness framed the cold blue ice mountains. Pressing. Pressing. Pressing. Riff fought against the darkness, the pain. She screamed into her brother’s mind and in turn into her own. The black covered her eyes, her mouth. The taste of copper in her mouth. Her back twisting into a tortured arch.
And then she woke up. The amber light flooding the empty sleeping chambers.
She looked at her hands. Her nail beds were blue.
***
Al found Riff at the Commissary pressing selections at random from the 475th menu. The Robopicker V45 droned along the shelves, knocking the selections into a monitored HoverCarton with her name and picture flashing on the screen affixed to its side. The HoverCarton stopped in front of a dog leather bikini she hadn’t selected and flashed a picture of her wearing the bikini. It didn’t compress her flesh on her hips and under her arms. Instead it showed her as perfectly smooth, her skin the color of BugMilk, instead of its usual brown.
Al was in feminine form, compact and clad in artificial silk, her eyes expanded and painted into alien hugeness. She approached Riff and placed her hand on the small of her back. Riff was out of regulation by being bare-faced, her dark eyes small without the usual line of Cosmoblack Liner. Her small breasts were draped with childlike fabrics, all printed with images of mining equipment and outdated brandless transmitter screens.
Al jerked out her cosmetics pouch and tried to apply some AppleCheeks BloodBlush to Riff’s face. Riff pulled back from her, wiping away the fine layer with her excavator-printed pajama sleeve.
“They will catch you if you don’t put something on,” Al said.
“Good. I hope they send me to an asteroid.”
Al looked over her shoulder and pressed the heel of her hand over the electronics panel where the Listen-Ins were usually planted.
“What’s wrong, my heart?”
Riff ignored the question and turned back to the Commissary selection screen.
“Why can’t I buy anything from the fifth tier?” Riff punched at the screen with her middle finger.
“What fifth tier?”
“Look.”
A line of grayed-out products marched across a screen Al had never seen before. Her adrenaline monitor beeped. She could feel a familiar burning in the crook of her elbow as a relaxant was released into her bloodstream. She always chose the ChillRide series when she bought the mandatory endocrine packets. Less nausea.
“How did you find this?”
“I have to tell you something,” Riff said, ignoring her question.
Al leaned on the panel, the plastic biting into her hand.
“You can always tell me things, but can we meet where the moon rises?”
“I have a brother.” The word seemed to echo around the empty room.
“That is a really bad word.”
“Why?”
“Come on. I think you need a relaxing bath.”
Riff’s face gathered into a furious scowl under her uncombed hair. Her fists hung by her sides.
“Riff, a bath. With lots of steam.”
She nodded and put the selector tablet down. Al stroked the hair out of her face and offered her an elbow, growing her stature some. The ShopBot hovered as they walked away, drifting between Riff’s erratic selections.
***
Document 19/47
Prime Execution of Mining Operations: Personal Logs
Collector’s Edition
Hello again, my son. I want to tell you a little bit about Mechoben, because I am certain that you will be told many things about him and about me. Perhaps less about me; it seems they want to hide me from you. I am surprised they haven’t taken this ritual from me. Please understand they won’t take things from you all at once. They will take it piece by piece and haul it away to drift amongst the dead Chinese satellites that circle Earth. Sometimes they will make you believe that it’s up to you to decide whether you want to let them in. It will inevitably take the form of something desirous, something that only the rich and smart have. They will tell you that you can be rich and smart if you take or do or see this thing. Ultimately, they will own you if you give into these things. The things that I gave into. I keep promising no advice. I seem to have failed again.
I digress. I wanted to tell you about when I knew him.
We were both stationed at the base in Okinawa when we were still young. When Okinawa was still there, I suppose. I don’t want to be misunderstood. Most of my service was stretches of boredom punctuated with terror. The resource riots were still contained to Africa and South America then, and we were terrified to go to the deserts and die. We used to drink a drug called alcohol to numb us some, and Mechoben, or Mahaffey as he was known at the time, would come with us to the places where they sold it to us. You ingested the stuff, and it burned your nose and throat going down, but it made us forget and it made us remember at the same time. Sometimes we danced and sometimes we cried and sometimes we fought.
One night he told us to forget rank. I won’t get into details about what rank means, as it is probably meaningless to you since they dissolved government military after I left for this cold rock. How I miss being close to the sun, dangerously close to its warmth. He ordered us drink after drink until we could barely stand. His drink came with a yellow flower that bloomed as liquid was poured over it. He smashed it against the wall sending shards of glass flying across the room. The bartender threw up his hands and screamed at us. I couldn’t blame him. We left, slinging our arms over one another and laughing as we tracked whiskey out on our shoes. Cigarettes dangling from our lips.
We went to another place to keep drinking and to play a game with sticks and balls called pool. By the time I left Earth, those games were dying because of the quarantines. We got there, and I beat Mahaffey, or Mechoben as you know him. He was furious. I’m going to use some language unbecoming of a father now, but this is how we spoke to one another back then.
He said, “Ok fuckheads, forget rank. I’ve got a game we can play,” and he smashed my cheekbone with a pool ball. I lunged across the pool table to get him, but he lurched away and my buddies held me back. He picked up another pool ball. “Your turn.”
I picked up the cue ball and bashed it against his face. Blood oozed out of his nose. He didn’t even wipe it away. You see, alcohol eased physical pain too. We hardly felt a thing. We took turns hitting one another until our eyes swelled shut and our lips split. An old Okinawan woman with fierce black eyes chased us out, swatting us with her papery hands. It was then that we realized Mahaffey was nowhere to be found. We panicked. We couldn’t get back on base without him and his car. (You may have forgotten about cars as well, but that is an aside for another time.) So, we stumbled through the streets of this foreign country yelling his name. We sprinted down every alley and peeked into every bar trying to find anyone who spoke English or Spanish.
We finally found him sprawled on the steps of a brothel, his wallet laying open and a woman poking at him with a broom. His car was crushed against a light pole, a thin thread of smoke rising from the engine.
We gathered him up and sobered him up as best we could, pouring water and coffee down his throat until he could drive. It was past curfew to get back on base, except for him because of his rank. We all piled into the trunk of his car, three men stacked on top of one another, stinking of alcohol and bleeding from our noses. It was so dark and so hot in there.
When we drove up to base, the MP must have smelled the booze on his breath. Or seen the damage to the car. One or both. They opened the trunk to find us there, still drunk and beaten blue.
I swear to you what happened next is true. It sounds like a joke and I know you love those, especially knock knock jokes. The platoon commander brought us into his office and lined us up. A picture of a bloodhound and a large grinning woman sat on his desk amongst neat stacks of papers. The fluorescent lights hummed and flickered. He looked us up and down, taking in us in. We were a sorry sight. My right eye was swollen completely shut.
“Who did this to you, Marines?”
We all looked at one another.
“It’s alright. You can tell me. Who did this?”
I think it was Briggs who pointed at me and then at Garcia. Then we all pointed at one another.
“You did this to yourselves?”
“Sir, yes, sir,” we all said in unison.
We were not allowed to leave base for a good two months after that. Mahaffey coasted. He always seemed to walk between the raindrops.
I suppose my reasoning in telling you this is so that you know what he really is. He isn’t the Son of God, though the further I get into space, the less I am convinced of any gods. You mother would be happy to hear this, I think. Once she called me a colonizer for going to mass on Christmas Eve. Like I said, extremely powerful. Maybe she should have just called me foolish. Is Christmas still a tradition on Earth? I ask not because I expect an answer, but more to sate the loneliness out here.
I will end this transmission with a joke because I know you love them and because I am tired. They don’t tell you this about space travel, but the radiation truly does makes you tired.
Why did God decide to not have Jesus in Mexico?
He couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.
Signing off.