Rasp sang a Shanana Schwoop Shigetty song as he stomped in time through the ice toward the little metal building. I’m a little clean, I’m a little dirty, but when I look at you, I get a little flirty. I see you workin’ it. I see you jerkin’ it. But it’s only as good as meeeeee.

MOTHER eased a tentacle over the ice and touched his membrane-encased big toe, stroking the nail.

WHAT SOUND?

“Sound?”

RASP SOUND.

“You know my name?”

YES. SOUND?

“Oh, you mean singing?”

SINGING

“Yeah, it’s music from Shanana Schwoop Shigetty, who is the greatest ever. She was built on a gyroscope and could rotate 360 degrees because her real human skin has snake DNA in it. I don’t really remember snakes, I don’t think. But I think they were like dogs. Their skin was stretchy so it wouldn’t rip when they wrapped themselves around all the people they ate.”

Talking felt good. The men on the rigs used to stuff shiny Anti-Rad fabric into his mouth when he talked too much. MOTHER just glided under the ice.

HOME SING I SING

“Oh you should sing to me. I love music.”

MUSIC?

“Singing.”

I SING.

The ice under his feet trembled, and a bolt of bright green light shot out from the dark blurry mass of MOTHER’s form, lighting the glassy surface into a feverish glow. A high shrill pierced the silence, then a thrumming in a steady pulse. Another high shrill, then chirps and static and an undulation that shook his chest. The ice split ahead of him. A perfect transparent pyramid of ice burst from the black split, hurling prisms across the white ground. Red and orange and violet shot across the ice.

I SING?

“Oh, MOTHER. It’s scary but really pretty. Prettier than anything.”

LOOK ABOVE.

Rasp craned his neck, feeling the membrane slide over his eyeballs pulling his bottom lashes. He squeezed his eyes shut and reopened them until the strange distortion cleared. A veil of light trembled above him like a flag in the breeze. A chorus of whistles bursting in every direction unfolded around him. Saturn squatted on the horizon line. Her rotund belly buoyed by delicate gaseous ribbons.

HOME SINGS.

His foot snagged on something, and he tumbled onto the ice. MOTHER worried under him, snaking and rippling. He sat up to face a bolted metal door. The distant building was right in front of him. Ice coated the hinges and the latch. A peeling painted sign reading Welcome to the United States Enceladus Expedition Headquarters dangled from a single attachment point on the door.

HERE.

Rasp struggled to remember what to do with a closed door. The Corporation had plotted every point of his life until this moment. Walk through this door. Give your blood here. Place auger here.

“MOTHER, are you sure there are people here?”

HURT.

“I know it hurts. But are there more like me that are alive?” He was afraid.

YES.

“How many?”

A wave of confusion from MOTHER overcame him. His back arched backward with the intensity of emotion.

“Ok, remember I asked you not to do that, though. It hurts me. Remember?” He yelled.

A ripple of regret tugged at him. MOTHER HURT.

“It’s ok. How many?”

NO.

He sighed and tried the latch. The ice held it fast, but it seemed to give. He patted his body forgetting that he wasn’t wearing a suit and had no storage for tools. He imagined at MOTHER. He pictured the door swinging open, the hinges smooth and easy. The room behind it filled with people on the fringes of his memory holding warm cups of liquid and platters of fatty, steaming meats. Women from his favorite Pornographic Art Films twined their arms around him, their hips pressing against him. Warm, fragrant hair falling around his face.

MOTHER’s tentacle snaked from a small hole in the ice and crushed the ice on the hinges. It then wrapped around the latch and jerked it upward. The crunch of breaking ice and the tinkle of metal pieces. A crack tore through the center of the door. The right side of the split fell to the ground beside him, leaving a maw lit with dim orange light. He leaned into the doorway as snow swirled in eddies past him.

“Hello? I’m Rasp. Anyone here?”

Silence greeted him in a long narrow hallway. The emergency lights glowed orange from their fixtures on the rough floor. Rasp looked back out at the howling white expanse.

“Are you sure they’re here, MOTHER?”

YES.

He stepped into the hallway.

“Hello?”

Something moved at the end of the hallway and darted away. It was shaped like a man, but its eyes glowed for just a moment before dissolving into a puddle. His face warmed, and his heart pounded.

Rasp started thinking of his favorite jokes. He knew an old miner on the first asteroid mine he was assigned to named Rusty, who he would exchange jokes with. He thought of Rusty’s hands, hard as horns and crusted with yellow callouses waving as he told jokes. The other men were repulsed by him because he was so old and hadn’t been retired yet, but The Corporation kept signing his paperwork excusing him. The rumor was that he used to be the leading expert on hydraulic drilling in The Before. Some said he had invented the process used to extract Helium-3 before the Third Age Oil Glut. He used to buy Ripple Top Beers and drink one after the other, giving Rasp every third one because he laughed at his jokes. His Commissary account was always full somehow.

Rasp racked his brain for a joke to tell the disappeared creature. He pictured Rusty sitting at the metal fold out table, illuminated hazy blue by the screens above him flashing images of Ripple Top Beer as they slugged down the stuff from plastic bags they had to punch through with metal straws that The Commissary rented out.

“An Earth doctor can't find a job on the lunar colony, so he opens a clinic and puts a sign outside that reads: ‘GET TREATMENT FOR $20 - IF NOT CURED GET BACK $100.’

A lunar miner thinks this is a great opportunity to get $100 and goes to the clinic.”

“What’s dollars?” Rasp had interjected.

“It’s Commissary credits,” Rusty answered.

“The miner says, ‘I have lost my sense of taste.’

The doctor tells his nurse, ‘Nurse, bring me the medicine from Vial 22 and put three drops in the patient's mouth.’

The miner says, ‘Ugh, this is hydraulic fluid.’

The doctor says, ‘Success! your sense of taste is restored. Give me 20 dollars.’

The annoyed miner goes back after a few days to recover his money and tells the doctor, ‘I have lost my memory. I cannot remember anything.’

The doctor says, ‘Nurse, bring the medicine from Vial 22 and put three drops in his mouth.’

The angry miner says, ‘That is hydraulic fluid. You gave this to me last time to restore my taste.’

The doctor says, ‘Success! Your memory has returned, now pay me 20 dollars.’

The miner pays him, and then comes back a week later, determined to get back his 100 dollars.

The miner says, ‘My eyesight is failing. I can't see at all.’

The doctors tells him, ‘Well, I don't have any medicine for that, so take this 100 dollars.’

The miner stares at the money and says, ‘But this is 20 dollars, not 100 dollars!’

The doctor shakes his hand and says, ‘congrats, your eyesight is restored. Give me twenty dollars.’”

Rasp started to repeat the joke to himself as he walked toward where the creature had darted away. He imagined himself on a vid, wrapped in Gucci and gold. His voice echoed around him, and shadows slid away from him. He realized as he got closer that there was a second automatic door that slid open and closed at seemingly random intervals. The emergency lights flicked off, leaving him in total darkness. Darkness like staring between the stars, pleading with something invisible that his grav boots continued to function, continued to adhere him to the barren rock.

Something glowed through the door. Two points of greenish light bobbed away from him. He touched the edge of the door, listening to it snick snick snick as it auto-closed. Something brushed against his leg in a long intentional stroke. The door closed. Rasp realized the door was movement-activated. He stood stock still. The door stayed closed. He waved his hand. It opened. Another auto-door snick in the distance.

A low hum sounded, and the orange emergency lights clicked back on. He stepped through the first sliding door. The hall was lined with doorways. Some rooms stood open, the once automatic doors pulled from their tracks and discarded in the hallway, some folded and crumpled like aluminum foil. A white powdery substance coated the floor. Tracks, some human-sized, were scattered across the hallways. Footsteps echoed from down the hall. Something clattered in the room to the right.

Rasp’s fear had turned into numb curiosity. He turned into the room where he heard the footsteps. His palms were cold and wet.

“Hello?” Rasp said again, his voice sounding alien and distant.

“Hello?” It was his voice coming from the farthest corner of the room. Not an echo.

He stepped toward the voice, suddenly overwhelmed with the need to see another person, anyone at all. His eyes drifted around the room. Tracks crisscrossed in every direction. Some were imprints of bare human feet. Rasp checked his wrist monitor under the membrane. The temperature was -35° Celsius. Black toe weather, Rusty used to call it.

A being stepped toward him from the shadows as he advanced slowly. It was him. He had only seen himself in the approved streams from the Lookin At U surveillance feeds they broadcasted on their personal channels in the mines, but he recognized the shiny healed chemical burns on his forearms. He, or this other version of him, clutched something in his hands and held it in front of his chest.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“Hi, who are you?” Rasp asked.

The being didn’t respond. Blood seeped into its sclera and it outstretched its arms toward him. Rasp saw that the thing it held was a perfect fist-sized black orb. The dim light that spread from the hallway seemed to drift toward the orb in a thin current. Rasp’s joints ached as he stared at this dark thing. The thing poured from his doppelganger’s hands, no longer an orb, but a shapeless thing. A void.

Suddenly there were dozens of versions of himself standing around the room, each holding their own black orbs. The orbs burst in their hands, slicing off fingers in a spray of blood. Some of the versions fell to the powdery floor as pieces of their orbs burst in their faces, losing the tips of their noses, their lips. Some fell to the earth, clutching their genitals, geranium red spilling from between their fingers in rivulets. Some crawled around, blinded by the shards, hunting for a handhold in the walls. One wobbled in the corner, sipping from the bowl that was created when the top half of its orb slid to the ground, severing its toes. Black foam dripped from its mouth as it swallowed in huge gulps.

Rasp looked down at his own hands and wondered in this strange silent moment if he was the first Rasp. The original. A perfect orb rested against his abdomen as he cradled it to him. The orb spun under his touch, fracturing into segments, fraying into molecules, tearing into atoms. Emptiness thinning and stretching until it became a thread. A horizon of nil.

1000 copies of his eyes landed on him as he bore his own orb, and they bade him to drink. He raised the orb to his mouth, his fingers prying and pressing against the smooth surface for an opening. Something grazed the side of his neck, and then pressure, a squeezing on his shoulder. He spun to face the source of the touch and found himself looking into his own eyes again. They were set in a creased, brown face with yellowing teeth and pockmarked cheeks. A ragged flak jacket hung loose on the thin shoulders.

He stepped back. Afraid.

“Oh my god. It’s you. You are so tall,” the old Rasp said.

“Who are you? What is this place?” Rasp looked around the room for the others. The orb in his hands was gone.

“We spoke on the comms. Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“Rasp, it’s me. It’s Papa.”

The man, Papa, pressed his palms to both sides of Rasp’s face and drew him toward him. Rasp resisted, leaning backward, away from this man. He broke free and tapped on his comms link. Still dead.

“We had a house in San Francisco. I made hamburgers on Sundays. I was in the military. My name is James. I had a last name, but I forgot it. I forgot your name. They gave me drugs, I think. I swear to you,” he begged.

Rasp felt a desire he had forgotten. It was a desire difficult to commodify, to bottle. It was the desire to hear his name said by this man. To feel seen by this man. It was against Corporation policy for two coworkers to touch one another. It went against workplace policy. It took away funds from the Pornographic Art Films. He fell into the man’s arms.

“Where have you been? What are these people?” he asked into the man’s neck.

“They sent me here. Didn’t Mama tell you? What people?”

“Something happened on Earth. Something big, but I think it didn’t happen very fast. I can’t remember either. I didn’t know that families still existed. I thought it was like the movies. Like Star Wars.” He rambled like James.

The room buzzed, and the lights flicked on.

“Ok, we have to go back to quarters. It’s not very safe here.”

Papa held his shoulders for a moment and looked into Rasp’s eyes. One of Papa’s eyes drifted right, the unmoored iris nudging against the sclera. A floral odor wafted around them, sweet and thick. His fingers digging into Rasp’s shoulder. Another feeling prodded in the corner of his mind. One that tightened his throat and sped his breathing. Darkness edged his vision for a moment.

“Hold on. I have to help MOTHER. I promised her I would help.”

“You have to come with me,” Papa said.

Rasp stepped backwards into the hallway. Papa followed, his hands tight at his sides.

“I’ll come right back. I promise.”

Papa looked at the floor and sighed. His largeness slumped. Dark circles ringed his eyes, and he shrugged.

“Ok, I will wait for you by the first door.” The floral scent faded and Papa’s eyes looked clear and straight again.

Rasp stepped back out of the bunker into the bright white and clear black. Steam rose around the membrane.

“MOTHER? What should I do? Can you see what happened? MOTHER?”

The wind whipped swirls of snow around his legs. The stars burned above him, copies of copies floating in burning suspension. Quiet.

“MOTHER?”

Still nothing. Rasp turned back to the bunker. Cold crept from the soles of his feet, numbing his toes. Papa stood at the doorway, his eyes wild.

“Come inside. You will freeze.”

“MOTHER!” He screamed into the wind once more. The membranous curtain of MOTHER’s protection crackling against the bitter wind.

Papa beckoned him from the doorway, the wind whipping his long gray hair.

Rasp trotted back inside. Papa slid the second door shut and bolted it. His gray jacket coated in ice. He wrapped his arms around Rasp, his coat crackling with ice and smelling like oil. Rasp looked down at his bare feet encased in membrane. Papa hadn’t mentioned it. Another dark shape slid around the corner.

***

Gram’s memories of Riff were fading with each caress, each rich meal, each game of Bicky Ball. Now she lay curled beside Alona with her head on her thigh as Alona smoothed down her shaggy hair. Alona’s android, Fey, with her silvery eyes, came in carrying vitamin tablets and Shine-fried dog sausage. The SynthFab Silk blankets bunched and slid under her as she sat up to take the platter. Dots of purple Spicy Sweet Secret Sauce circled each sausage.

Alona leaned over to grab a bit of the meat and giggled.

“Oh we are fancy ladies, aren’t we?”

Gram laughed. The casing popped under her new teeth fitted especially to her. Salty and spicy, the silky fat filled her mouth. Fey plopped down beside them on the huge soft platform and took a sausage for herself. Alona chewed and looked at Gram and Fey. Her jaws flexed, and she pulled a bit of gristle out of her mouth.

“Do you two trust me?” Alona asked. Her eyes went flat. Her changes in mood were frequent. Tempestuous. Darkness replaced by sun.

“Of course we do,” Fey said and looked at Gram, who nodded.

“I need your help. Both of you.”

They looked at one another and then at her. Alona shook her head and put the heel of her hand to her forehead. Her familiar snaked from one nostril to the other, leaving a trailing of pinkish fluid on her upper lip.

“Never mind. We’ll talk about it later. Let’s just enjoy for now.” Sunshine sluicing through storm clouds.

Fey and Gram scooted closer to her on the bed, petting her long, thin-skinned arms.

Gram got up and got her tablet. Her tablet. It was DNA encoded to Alona of course, but she kept it in the right bedside table. Her side of the bed.

“Want me to read to you?” She asked Alona.

Gram had learned to read quickly. Once Alona set up the correct program on her tablet, she soaked it up. Alona had to watch her assets carefully, as it was prohibited to teach lower-level employees like Gram to read without express coded permissions signed by the CEO himself. If they wanted to, The Corporation could set the camera to map Gram’s iris as she read. It was probably already noted in a server somewhere.

“Not now. I do need to talk to you both, though.” Another change. Always shifting.

“I’m sick. Not with anything you can catch. Not like that android plague a few cycles back. Not like that.”

Gram shrugged, and Fey nodded.

“Pai is too.” Something thumped lightly against the door.

They all went motionless. Alona got up, drawing her SynthSilk robe over her thin shoulders.

“Who is it?” She waved her hand over the transparency command for the door. It beeped and crackled. The door remained opaque. “Everything is broken,” she hissed. She manually pried the door open with her delicate three-fingered hands. Fey and Gram sat next to one another, huddled against the wall. One of the children spilled into the room, his extra arms flailing. He squirmed and skittered toward them before Alona could grab him. His smell overwhelmed them. Like diesel fuel and cooking meat. His many-fingered hands tugged at the blankets and slid over the vials of perfumes, knocking them to the floor. He scrambled away from Alona’s grasp and onto the bed with Fey and Gram, scratching their arms with his torn, yellowed nails. His collar beeped, lighting the microchip in the side of his neck.

Alona leaped on him, twisting his primary arms behind him while the ancillary limbs gripped the carpet, ripping it up in long green ribbons. Lice crawled on his scalp, dropping to the floor from the slight radiation in his collar. He screeched high and long as Alona grabbed his legs to drag him from the room. The child turned and bit her cheek, whipping his head to the right. Blood blossomed on her face. Alona let go of his leg and stared at him, as if she was listening very closely.

Gram leaped across the bed onto his chest and pummeled him with her fists. The child screamed and waved his arms in front of his face. One of his ancillary arms popped out of socket and flopped beside him. She kept pounding her fists into his brittle chest and snapping teeth, screaming and remembering. The loose recognition of pain in the factory girls’ eyes. The bottoms of her feet peeling away. Wandering around on some backwater on Earth before they found her alone, adrift, and so thirsty. Too ugly for GagGirls. Too stupid for electronics. Good temperament though. Perfect for resale.

The child howled, and then started to cry. Fey and Alona pulled her off of him using their weight to tumble her backwards away from him. An orangish substance like blood coated her knuckles and smeared the floor. She heaved. Alona, still pressing her hand to her face, grabbed the child and tore his tracking collar off. The glowing microchip in his neck faded under his skin. Fey reverted to her male form and wrapped her thick masculine arms around his neck until he went limp in her arms. She transformed back to female rapidly, hugging herself as she shrank and thinned. Bright blue rings faded like cigarette burns on her neck.

Alona leaned back against the wall, the collar dangling from her fingertips. Gram got up and put the back of her hand under the child’s nostrils while Fey got up to fetch a cloth for Alona’s face.

“Oh Mechoben. I think it’s dead.”

The orangey blood on her hands stank. Property damage carried the heaviest sentence from The Corporation as was mandated by the Holy Texts of Capital. Public termination and seizure of all Commissary assets. Public retirement.

Gram saw a public retirement at the factory once when a girl kept damaging the microchips. Her demerits kept stacking and stacking because of her clumsy fingers. It didn’t help her case in front of the disciplinary HR committee that she was somehow overweight and had a dusting of facial hair under her chin. She was charged for that separately. Failure to maintain hygiene standards. Failure to attain feminine standards. Failure to complete tasks assigned by a manager. Failure to perform duties according to Corporation minimum standards. Failure to attend regular stand-ups up to three times. Failure to attend Mechoben’s mandatory service. Property damage in the first degree. Desecration.

Upper management had showed up in-person. Their shining white suits trimmed in real bleached dog fur. Their shoes shined to crisp square reflections of the harsh lights of the factory. They patted the older girls’ heads, tapping numbers into their tablets, which they folded into squares and tucked in their breast pockets. The prettiest girls were often reassigned after management came onto the factory barges.

They wore Funny Face Armani Face Masks in Dejá Blue and spritzed their gloved hands with Germ Genocide sanitizer. Their androids, always in male form, but maskless and gloveless, dragged the offender from her bunk, ripping down her posters of Shanana Schwoop Shigetty and tossing her worn blankets on the floor as their fingers dug into her fleshy upper arms. They gathered all the girls onto the observation deck and programmed the monitoring bots to track everyone’s eyes. If they looked away, they would receive two demerits. Every girl was assigned a clicker with a random code. A cute boy wearing PupEars came on the announcement screen above them, bathing them in pale light.

“Today is a raffle! One clicker opens the airlock door! If your clicker turns blue, you win a scrub on one demerit and 1300 Commissary credits!” The boy said, hopping up and down.

They shoved the pudgy girl into the airlock and followed her in to strap her feet to the floor. It was Mechoben’s first commandment not to waste bioresources. The body must be recovered. She cried the whole time, covering her bare skin with her hands. She hadn’t even removed her body hair. A major violation.

“OK! On the count of three press the clicker until you hear a CLICK. Wiggle those little fingers now to get them ready. ONE. TWO. THREE.”

A chorus of clicks echoed in the silent chamber, each girl staring through the observation window. Their coworker and friend. She who made her bellybutton talk in the surveillance dead zones. She who shared her food with the young ones who hadn’t earned enough Commissary credits. She who fumbled and caused production to stop.

A creamy-skinned blonde with a surplus of Commissary credits squealed and turned to face the rest of them. Her clicker flashed blue. Winner. Winner. Winner. The alarm flashed, and one of the androids pushed through the crowd of girls toward the blonde. When he reached her, he wrenched her jaw, forcing her to face the observation window. His fingers left pink marks on her cheek, his nails grazing her left eyeball as he withdrew his hand.

The airlock door squealed open, and the condemned girl screamed. She screamed until her eyes rolled back in her head, and her body flopped into unconsciousness. Her digits swelled, and her body ballooned, stretching her skin into a tight round parody of a child. Blood oozed from her nostrils and down her legs. Her purple lips thickened into grim doubt. The timer above the observation glass read one minute forty-five seconds. Her skin drawing apart in thin seams.

The girls touched each other’s hands in silence as Upper Management mounted the maintenance platform to the right of the them. The androids drifted around the fringes of the room, silencing the crying, shifting, whispering, squirming girls.

The tallest of them addressed the crowd.

“She had to be punished. She was taking from The Corporation. Remember, Mechoben says, ‘I am your Father, but The Corporation is your mother. To take from her is to take from yourself. She is your shelter. Your comfort.’” Two weeks later they took Riff.

Gram seized Alona’s arm.

“They will kill us.”

“That’s a terrible word, Gram.” Alona’s tone was flat and empty.

The child spasmed at their feet.

“You’re rich. How do we get out of here? Do you have a craft?” She turned to Fey. “Can you fly it? Can we find a way to another facility here? On Mars?”

Fey was already cleaning up the mess. She stripped the bed sheet and draped it over the twitching corpse. Blue stress rings flared on her neck.

“Any transit is monitored. Heavily,” Fey said, tightening the sheet around the child.

“We should tell Pai.” Alona’s voice was thick.

“They will put us out in The Wastes. You are not chosen by leadership. You are female. They will leave us to die.” Fey grew an inch, her neck muscles thickened.

“I’ve seen it. They will,” Gram said.

“We could make it look like an accident, like we were playing or something.” Alona almost whispered.

“It’s been recorded, my love. It’s only a matter of time before it leaks to the streams.” Fey stood up, genderless and huge. “Please. You will be reeducated in a temple at best. We will be reconstituted to Shine.”

“Could you get in contact with a GagGirl? Is that something you are rich enough to do?” Gram’s tone was hopeful.

“I think so. I think we can.”

“I know someone who was relocated to the other side of Mars to be a GagGirl. She is on the streams all the time. She can help us. Right?”

“Shhh. I hear something.”

The lights flicked out, leaving them in blackness.

“The generator is down again. It’s ok. We’ll be ok.” Alona’s cold hands pressed on Gram’s back.

Something moved under Gram’s feet. A muscular lump rose under her bare arches. A drumbeat sounded from the hallway.

“He knows,” Alona said, tugging the fabric tight on Gram’s robe. “He knows.”