365 tomorrows

You remember when Billy first went into space, don’t you? First time one of those crazy rockets of his went off with him in it. First time he sent up the big rocket, not those little ones with the sensors made of old cell-phones and other garbage. Chuck always said he’d send up Chairman Meow, or Mr. Catkins, or Daisy’s kitten Cindy next, but he didn’t. Billy went up immediately, soon as he knew as he could.

You hear what Daisy said? She was just in here, you just missed her. Billy calls her now and then. Only one from round here, ‘spect. She told me Billy says the Jupiter colony wasn’t gonna work by the end of next year. Called it the biggest failure of his life.

Daisy’s doin’ well. Says her VD’s cleared up clear as day, and she gonna get back to work. That boy of hers is gettin’ tall. She made a joke about how someone needs to market a daycare for prostitutes. That’s Daisy for you. Always got a sense of humor.

She made some joke about Billy; can’t remember what it was.

Remember how Chuck broke Billy’s arm soon as he came down? Billy told everyone it was from re-entry, but a bunch of us saw him crawl out of that craft using both arms after landing. You saw it was Chuck, didn’t you? Slammed Billy up against the wall, kicked him in the stomach, spat in his face. We all did a bit of that, but Chuck broke Billy’s arm, make no mistake.

You seen Chuck recently? He looks good. He’s serious about quitting this time. Ever since that last binge, he’s been serious. You know, the one he pawned his prosthetic leg to finance. You said he’d be clean after losing that leg in that car accident, but he proved you wrong, eh? But he’s serious now, he said so.

Still hard to believe Billy went, ain’t it? Even after we all saw him, saw that rocket made of junk and debris took off into the sky? No one thought it would, despite what Billy told us about super-dense material and reverse-gravity fields an all that other hoodoo he’d spout. But there it went, rocketing into the sky, out of Filt Street, out of Sporboro, out of the goddamn state and country and world.

Anyways, here’s the usual; you’re still one of the best customers here, even after what happened to your throat. It’s amazing you can get enemas to work like that for you. Bottoms up! Ha! See you next week! The wine’ll be restocked!

What was that joke about Billy…

The aroma of cooked vegetables filled Leba’s nostrils as she finished mixing the oils for the final touches of her dinner. All the guests had been waiting to taste her delicious mixture of carrots and lettuce with roots and peppers as spices. In fact, the whole of the community adored Leba for her talents at making their normal everyday meals into something exquisite.

Though, even as Leba prepared the courses, her sister Enias watched and listened as their guests of honor eagerly awaited her sisters’ well-prepared meal. They laughed and smiled as they readied themselved for the feast they were about to receive and many even went so far as to ignore Enias for the time being until their meals were to be served.

Jealously was a trait that indicated the annual shot wasn’t working and even though she knew this, Enias kept the idea from public. She had thought that the guests must have known, since they spent so much time around the two. If they knew, she mused, it must not be wrong.

Enias began to wonder why they had to eat with tongs. Every edge of the tongs perfectly sculpted to be as dull as could be, and yet she wondered what tool could be used to supplement them. The very idea that larger portions had to be torn by hand boggled her mind.

The sour sister sat watching the guests and the table lay out like a large slab of marble with its pretty silk dressings, and she began to wonder if there would ever be something else to consume, something else to appease their honored guests. Perhaps in the back of her mind, Enias wanted to be her sister this night. Though now she was getting impatient as time was going by and there was no response from the kitchen.

As the laughing and the carousing of their guests went on, Enias became agitated and impatient. She stood, excusing herself and made for the kitchen where she would politely remind her favored sister of the importance of pleasing their guests with punctuality and good offerings. She entered through the swinging doors to find her sister kneeling over what looked to be a broken tong. Her left hand gripped her right wrist as she looked on in sorrow and horror at the crimson fluid dripping down her finger.

Looking upon the scene, Enias’ eyes were transfixed upon the very wound inflicted by the shattered wood of the tongs. Her sister was holding back tears and all Enias could think of was the something trying to unleash itself from the back of her mind. She could not define it and yet it pushed harder, trying to break free as the blood flowed. Suddenly it all broke free, and Enias knew what her and her honored guests had been missing all along. She would impress them this night.

Dear John,

I loved you John, I want you to understand that.

The Core wasn’t wrong to match us as marriage candidates; it just didn’t understand who you were really, the physical you. When we spoke and wrote and sent all those mad pictures over the Core - that was some other John. You used to write to me like a mad lover. You told me you would carry me though fire. You treated me like a partner, you told me you would always have my back, and that you could always trust me to have yours. I had compatibility with seventy-eight men over the Core, but none of them wrote like you, none of them sent the kind of beautiful pictures you did, or the songs you composed, or the mad videos you hacked together for me. No one was like you. That’s why I married you John, you were singular.

When we bought this house on the floating islands, I thought I was about to enter a dream. I was going to be living with the most amazing man on the pacific islands in a planned community. We dreamed up a thousand adventures for when we got here, do you remember?

I told myself a lot of excuses when we moved in together. You were adjusting, it was a new place, and it would take a while for you to find your feet. You were rude because you were nervous. The drugs were just your way of making yourself comfortable, the way you yelled was just your passion. You said you would carry me though hell, but you couldn’t love me enough to clean your clothes or rub my shoulders when I was tired.

After a while, I began to feel as if I had been tricked. I invented odd fantasies, that someone else had written those words, had sent those videos. I was being played on a trick, a terrible lie. Perhaps it was a program designed at seduction that you had bought; perhaps you bought me for the price of a cruel hack.

You asked me why I haven’t been bringing you meals, why I haven’t set the dials to clean the house, why I haven’t been talking to you. I thought you were a big liar, that I was wrapped in a lie, and I wanted you to suffer for what you have done. But that’s not the person I want to be. I don’t want to live as a bitter woman, angry about the life I keep choosing to trap myself in. I have to go away.

You are not the person I love, you are some strange, twisted imitator, some dreamer who dreams himself better than he is. You are so good at this that you fooled the Core, with all it’s wonderful psych tests and profiles. You fooled me too. You might even be fooling yourself.

I have to leave you. I cannot stay with the John who lives in that house; he is not the man that the Core matched me with.

When you become the man in those messages, find me.

-Tara

Science has become the new standard of belief. It became the boundaries of thought and idea. I helped it grow to that, I helped to smite imagination and faith. Isn’t it strange that I call upon you now?

When we completed the humane genome it was called a genius. I bore medals that weighed on me heavier than any pressure ever had of completing the sequence. Still, I persisted and sought to copy everything we were. It began in an egg and a sample, and it was complete. One child became two children became hundreds of children became thousands upon thousands.

Perfection is the word many would use to tell the stories of the population becoming less flawed and more like it should have been all along. I did that, and even then the medals outweighed my guilt. It didn’t stop me, however, and I sought to perfectly secure the world of the past in nothing but a tube of glass. Already, science was becoming a crutch for everyone as the imperfect died of disease while the processed thrived.

It was I who brought back the extinct ones, and even then I started to forget where they came from in the first place. My mind was so transfixed upon finding more out about ourselves that I had misplaced the idea of the unseen. Instead, I saw the prehistoric fly again and the tribes of Australia’s natives walk again. The Croatian tribes were born to sterile labs and I watched them grow to become perfect like the others.

I gained perfection. I extended my life by altering my own code so that my work could live on. Others found this, and they too came to cease aging and continue on as if nothing had been different from the day they stopped growing older. I killed off the very idea of dying men. I made the human race happy, and I also made them empty.

They tore down their instruments of war and pollution and they cheered me still. They venerated me in books until they were also burned into nothing. The books came first and the churches came next. The symbols were gone; the texts were ash. I admit it all. I killed you, and I am so very sorry.

They will not allow this in public any longer, so here I am on my knees and my hands clenched together crying out for God. Even inside here, it is not safe. We’ve become two hundred and seven now and we are without you. Faithless and lost despite what everyone else believes.

There will be no more children, now that we all live forever. There will be no one to think differently or learn anew. I started out with a test tube and placed you inside of it to suffocate you. We never meant for this to happen, we just wanted to perfect ourselves. Things weren’t so simple and I want you to come back. I’m praying for you now and hope that you forgive me for doing it. Please come back so that you can forgive me. Please.

Harun did not think she was being unreasonable. The passenger obviously felt she was, but what did she know? Nothing, Harun concluded. Nothing that was worth anything anywhere but planet-side.

“Look,” Harun said. “You cannot take this much luggage. There is not much space on the ship, and that isn’t going to change any on the station. You cannot bring all of this.” Harun gave the variety of suitcases and valises spread out on the shiny plastic customs table a disdainful wave. Harun had already emptied them all, and was slightly disgusted at the auspicious wealth of the contents. Metal eating utensils, glass picture frames, paper books.

The waste was rampant.

“I’m not leaving my things behind,” the passenger said. She had a slight accent and a queer way of motioning with her chin to make a point. Neither of these things did anything to raise Harun’s opinion of her.

“Then you’re staying,” Harun said, folding her arms across her polyester uniform.

The passenger scanned the items on the table, fingering a few of them. She let out a diminutive sigh, and seemed to grow smaller in the hard plastic chair. “What can I take?” she asked.

Harun gathered up most of the passenger’s clothes, a business-like scowl concealing her delight and wonder at the softness of the some of them. Not all of the clothes fit into the passenger’s smallest bag, so Harun left out some of the more delicate articles.

“This,” she said, holding up the bag. “This is all you can take. The rest will have to be recycled. Things like this, though, I don’t know what we’re going to do with.” Harun picked up a doll from the table. Its painted face was done up in a coy pout, and its body was garbed in an elegant kimono. Harun was slightly repulsed by it, a feeling that intensified when it occurred to her that the doll wasn’t clothed in polysatin, but real silk. “The clothes we can recycle, possibly. But the body….the body is made of clay—”

“Porcelain,” the passenger and her chin interjected. “Suki is made of porcelain.”

“It’s clay,” Harun said. “This isn’t even furnace kindling.” She was about to toss it back on the table in disgust, but the passenger yanked it out of her hands. Harun held back an unprofessional smirk as the passenger cradled the doll like a baby.

“Then let me take her,” the passenger said. “Please, let me take her. You said yourself, she’s of no use here. Let me take her.”

Harun hung her head. The people never understood. It was like talking to children. “It’s not just a matter of use. It’s also a matter of space. That thing is clay and silk and paint. It will be of no use to you on the ship, no use to you on the station, and I can guarantee you will not make it to the colonies with it, because it’s going to take up space you need for important things. And as you can see, there’s no room in your bag.”

The passenger looked at the doll she was cradling, then at what Harun had designated as her only luggage. Setting the doll down and giving the lacquered head a reassuring pat, the passenger turned her attention to the small bag. She removed a wool jacket from the bag, rubbed the soft material up against her face, and then carefully placed the doll inside the bag. She raised her head to meet Harun’s eyes.

“Now,” she said. “I am ready to go.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Harun said. “That jacket’s made of fine wool—”

“And Suki is made of fine clay,” the passenger said.

Harun watched the passenger take her small bag toward the loading port. She started at the elements of the passenger’s luggage. The overhead light glinted off the metal and glass in a way that was not entirely replicated by the plastic table underneath.

“Wait,” Harun said. The passenger turned. “Wear the jacket. Wear it as you board. It’ll be hot, but you can take it off as soon as they seal the doors.”

The passenger’s tight, pale face brightened. “Thank you,” she said.

“Skin and bones thing like you, going into space,” Harun said. “You’re going to need all the help you can get, with what you’re made of.”

“This is a disaster,” said Herman Goodrich. His magnetic chair glided away from the table and bobbed gently as he threw his excessive weight into it, then it obediently slid back into place. Goodrich wiped a glaze of sweat from his forehead and reached for a donut before opening his console. Around the conference table, the other members of the Department of Media Relations waited for their leader to continue, but he did not. Instead, Goodrich focused his attention on the document projected into the air before him. The silence was palpable.

“Sir?” Dugan, the second-year intern, was the only one with the courage to break it. Goodrich looked up crossly.

“Did I give you permission to speak?” he snapped.

“No, sir.”

“Then don’t. Have we suppressed the medical report?” Goodrich continued. The question was directed to Kimley, who nodded. “And the man’s family?”

“Bribed,” Kimley said, “But the ER footage is still on the net. We can’t cover up the shooting itself.”

“Would anyone care to explain to me why the Prime Minister’s ray gun was set to lethal?”

“It wasn’t, sir,” said Kimley. “The man had a pacemaker. It malfunctioned at the livestock-stun setting.”

Goodrich nodded. “A true hunting accident,” he said with some relief.

“CNN wants to interview the victim,” Kimley continued.

“Well, tell them he’s recovering. It’ll blow over.”

“Sir,” said Dugan, again interrupting.

“I told you-“

“Sir, an interview might help us in this situation.”

“You know how the Prime Minister is with interviews.”

“I mean with the victim.”

Silence.

“The victim’s dead, Dugan,” Kimley said.

“They don’t know that. I’ve been researching the automated decoys that the Secret Service uses during the Prime Minister’s transports, and-“

“You want CNN to interview a decoy?”

“It would only take a couple of hours to make a cast of the victim’s face, and we have the Prime Minister’s phone logs for voice modulation. We’d be controlling every response.”

Herman Goodrich considered this, frowning slightly.

“It’s not a bad idea,” Kimley said after a pause.

“Fine,” said Goodrich as he pushed the magnetic chair from the table. “Set it up. I want a test video in five hours.”

As she pneumatic door slid shut behind the department head, Kimley smiled at Dugan. “You’re going to be good at this,” he said.

The pitter patter of sneakers came in rapid succession down the halls of the Great Southcrest Shopping Center. Dustin had a hankering for cheesesteak and was anxious to get back to his group before they left the shopping center. He spun around a corner and saw the signs for Chuck’s Delicious Steakies flooding his senses like a strobe light.

Licking his chops, he stopped to catch his breath and slicked his hair back to walk forward to the stand. Fingers fished out a few crumpled bills as he slapped them on the counter. “Two large Steakies please.” The owner raised his brow at this and pointed at the sign next to him: OVER 65 ONLY.

“Denied!? C’mon! Those Steakies are 55 at best!” he said with far more force than necessary.

His mistake became obvious when he heard two chairs pull out from a table behind him, “Hey, noob. You’re in our shopping center.”

The boy shut up and slowly turned. He’d fucked up, but he knew there was a way out of this. Two Jockies, and both of them were wearing some pretty leet jackets. They might have been blue, green or even purple jackets, but to Dustin the Destroyer they were all red. One of them put down his Steakies Drink and cracked his knuckles. Such an emote never bothered Dustin, so he’d play it cool till his group showed back up.

“Hey guys, seems like I am a bit above my level cap here, so why don’t I let you go and get back to owning your third stringers.” What started off as a nice exit turned into fighting words. The Jockies narrowed their eyes and the QB started to Charge. With a sigh, Dustin prepared to perform a Kick to the Junk.

That other Jockie came up from the side and Left-Hooked Dustin just as the kid’s foot landed right between the QB’s legs. Figuring it’d buy him some time as he reeled from the punch to the face; Dustin backed up and started to run.

Even though he knew his ability to run was vastly inferior to the Jockies run speed, he just needed to make it far enough to alert his group. A punch to his left shoulder sent him stumbling to the ground. It was all over.

It was all over until two trash cans flew from across the dining area and slammed into the Jockies, sending the QB stumbling while his Running Back went in for the kill on Dustin. Thinking fast, Dustin performed a Knee Bash just in time for his buddies to leap across a few tables and knock the Jockie to the floor.

Dustin stood up and laughed while brushing off his flannel shirt. He nodded to his fellow Grungies and looked down at the two Jockies out cold, “Who’s the noob now?”

It happened in a late night Karaoke bar on Mars. Neil had hit the high note on the Pop Remix of “Some Enchanted Evening” when he felt a white exultation, his feet lifting off the stage by a celestial breath, his eyes cracked open but unseeing. Then he fainted.

His friends took him to a doctor. They weren’t particularly worried; doctors could bring a person back from anything more than dust and Neil was still breathing. Neil was slight and pale from living underground, easy to carry into the doctor’s office.

The doctor looked at the light in Neil’s belly and told him the answer even before he did any tests. Neil had a baby star inside him. The doctor didn’t seem as surprised as Neil imagined he would be. He told Neil that people were made of ancient stardust; it was only logical that one could be born inside a person as much as in the depths of space. The doctor was very concerned. Too much longer and Neil’s organs would be consumed, already his liver was ash.

There was a cure.

The doctor took Neil to a place far underground, near the Mars core, to a room guarded by old-fashioned metal robots. There, in a sterile room, was a box, bound in black skin and iron rivets. It was a squatting, monstrous box that formed frost around it. Inside, the doctor told him, was a little black hole. The box itself was old, made by a race that had fallen into extinction far before the earth had even started to spin. It was made for eating stars.

Neil’s doctor could chain him to the wall and open the box, just a tad, just a crack, and the star would be sucked right out of him. His damaged organs could be replaced, but if he waited much longer, he would be dust. Neil put his hand on the box, his fingers stuck like magnets to the top. The cold chewed his skin like a mouth full of needles. The skin on his belly glowed with a peach light that pulsed rhythmically. The star was growing.

The hungry box waited.

Neil said he wanted to think about it, but the truth was he didn’t want to think at all; he just wanted to get out of that room, away from that box. The doctor warned him there wasn’t time, but Neil pushed out to the street, to the spaceport, where he maxed out his credit and bought a ship. By now, his fingertips were twinkling.

Neil pushed the ship out as far as he could, burning white from the inside. He inhaled toxic gases, spray-paint, glue, whatever he imaged stars ate. He lived in a pool of his own sweat, his skin as dry as sand. When he was deep in space he opened the hatch door and the cool sucking dark enveloped him. Neil opened his arms, a supernova sky.

Originally, Karen went along with the idea because she was certain her roommate wouldn’t come through with the goods. True, Jill had befriended (“befriended.” Chrissy giggled, her fingers hanging in mock quotation marks) a number of important people in the university’s psychology program, but the idea of sleep aids seemed like the idea of affixing electrodes to the testicles of rats. Sure, rat-zappers had some historical clinical purpose, but what decent university would still have something like that around?

Staring at the crudely-pressed blue oval in her hand, Karen could have sworn she felt a distinct shudder pass through her non-existent rodent genitalia. The three girls sat cross-legged on their respective beds, and only Jill seemed entirely comfortable.

“Are you sure this is safe?” Chrissy asked. Their third dorm-mate wore her yellow hair in the conservative braids of a Europan farm girl, and she was prone to fits of irrational giggling. Karen was counting on her to back out.

“The human brain is programmed to sleep,” Jill said with the unwavering confidence of a first-year student who’d never read conflicting e-texts.

“Not anymore,” Chrissy argued.

“Of course it is. It’s primal. Way deep. You know, in that Freud thing. Your brain has years of sleep to catch up on. No implant can cover that.”

Karen said nothing, and Chrissy made a quiet sound that should have been the beginning of a chuckle but died somewhere in her throat.

“It’s totally safe,” Jill continued. “Your unconscious mind’s been storing up images for your whole life, and once you’re out,” she waved her flattened palm in a gesture that was not at all reassuring, “they’ll all spill over and you’ll dream. Like a movie all about yourself. And they go, like, an hour per minute because your eyes move so fast.”

“How do we know to wake up?” Karen finally asked. This stopped Jill for an instant.

“I don’t know. We just do. That’s how it works.”

“What if we don’t?”

“We do,” she said forcefully, and threw her hand to her mouth to down the pill without the assistance of water. She smiled, as if daring the other two to follow suit, and Karen and Chrissy locked eyes and nodded before placing their pills on their tongues. “Sweet dreams,” said Jill.

“Sweet dreams,” Karen repeated.

The roads of Rajeev were packed due to the mass exodus to the docks, and presumably, off-world. My skimmer was resting quietly on the dusty pavement, the hours–no, days, it had been days, hadn’t it?–spent idling had left the poor conveyance without enough fuel to keep it hovering, much less actually moving. Not that it mattered. A road filled beyond capacity has a tendency to turn into parking lots, and this one was creeping in that direction even before I showed up and nudged my way in.

If I hadn’t been hauling someone else’s life, I would have gotten out and walked.

I heard the fuel peddler before I saw him. His progress down the line of non-moving vehicles was slow, but his amplified call carried far across the grassy expanse.

“Keep you moving! Keep you moving! Solid, liquid and atomic! Chemical means of forward motion! Keep you moving!”

It seemed like an eternity until he reached me, his progress determined solely by the whims of the mule that pulled his cart. From the way the man sat, it was evident that he had long resigned himself to the fact that while he sat in the driver’s seat, it was his four-legged partner that handled all the controls. I searched in my pocket for a sugar cube. The mule pulled back its thick lips and stopped.

“Howdy,” said the fuel peddler, doffing his Shanghai Lions baseball cap. “You look stuck.”

“I am,” I said. “And you look like just the man who can get me moving.” I inquired about the price of fuel for my skimmer. With a straight face, he told me.

“That hardly seems fair!”

“No, it’s not,” said the peddler with a grin. “But you ain’t moving without it.”

“Then I’m not moving at all. I don’t carry that sort of dosh on me.”

“No matter,” he said. “I am an adaptable man. I see that’s not air you’re hauling.” He motioned to the load on the back of my skimmer, the clocks and pillows, the flatware and picture frames.

“None of that is mine to give. It is someone else’s life. I am merely removing it from this planet before the cataclysm.” The mule was attempting to fish another sugar cube out of my coat pocket. I gave him a carrot instead, which he munched noisily.

“But…Why?”

“Because I was asked to. Because I did not arrive in time to remove the woman who owned it.”

“So you’re stuck here, ” the man said, sandpapering his thick fingers against his stubble. “Possibly going to get caught in the cataclysm because someone wanted the remains of a life?”

I scratched the mule behind the ears and under the chin. “That’s the long and the short of it.”

“That hardly seems fair.”

“No, it’s not. But I ain’t moving without it.” I gave the mule another carrot. “If you are as adaptable as you say, I think we can arrange something…”

It took the rest of the day to reach the docks by mule. And while I was out a skimmer, I did manage to get the old woman’s life off the world, before it ended. That skimmer couldn’t run over grass, anyway.

And I had plenty of sugar and carrots.