by David Larson
“Let’s grab a plate brother,” Bob said as he rubbed his hands together.
Mike and Bob walked up to the end of the line and Bob handed him a plate. The plate was a plate only in the sense of the word that it was round like a plate, had an edge like a plate to keep your stuff from falling off, but it was made out of something that wasn’t paper, but it wasn’t china either. It was kind of both at the same time, and neither one.
“What’s up with the plates?” Mike asked.
“Why,” Bob said with mock suspicion “did it make a snide comment to you? They can be turds sometimes.”
Mike just looked at him.
“I thought it was funny,” Bob said.
Mike just waited.
“It’s kind of like a plate,” Bob said “but it isn’t.”
“Yeah,” Mike said, “I’m getting that already.”
“You see we’ve pretty much done away with waste here,” Bob said “The plates are more of a recyclable than biodegradable. Recycling is a great concept but there’s quite a lot of pollutants that are given off into the atmosphere from the process. Also, washing dishes wastes quite a lot of water, and adds detergents back into the soils. So these plates are dumped in that hole over there.”
Bob pointed at a tube sticking out of the ground about the same size and height of a 50 gallon drum.
“There’s an electric conveyor under there that moves the dishes, flatware, cups and food where it’s all ground down to a powder. The organic material kind of separates itself, is skimmed off the top, and added to a kind of compost pile. The dinnerware dust that’s left over is pressed and polished into more stuff to eat with.”
Bob and Mike sat at the end of a long table already filled with people.
“Everybody,” Bob said waving his arm over the crowd, “this is Mike. Mike, this is everybody.”
Everyone smiled and greeted Mike, and Mike smiled back.
“So, who’s making the food?” Mike asked.
“Right now, I’m not sure,” Bob said. “We have enough people that really love to cook here and they usually stay in the job. If you wanted something other than what they’re putting out, anyone is welcomed to go back in the kitchen and make their own. Actually quite a few people do just that.”
Mike looked down at his dinner and had no idea where to begin. Everything looked and smelled excellent but nothing looked familiar. It almost did, but not quite. Some of it might have been cauliflower in a cheese sauce. If cauliflower were pink, and cheese were soft green. Some of it might have been steak. If steak were white and had no grain to it.
“What am I eating here?” Mike asked.
“Let’s see,” Bob said as he looked at the back of his bare wrist again. “I’d say you were eating dinner.”
“You are hilarious,” Mike said. “What is this?”
“Different forms of vegetables, what you’d call eggs, and some jazzed up cereals,” Bob said as he examined a chunk of something that looked almost golden on the end of his fork.
“Why is this the first time that I’m seeing this?” Mike asked. “The stuff I’ve been getting in my room up until now has been just exactly like what I would eat back on Earth.”
“We raided a Costco before we left the animal farm” Bob stopped in mid chew and looked at Mike “Sorry…I mean Earth.”
Mike raised his eyebrows and searched Bob’s face for truth.
“That part,” Bob said, “is true I’m afraid.”
“We weren’t sure how you were going to take to our diet here so we brought you a starter kit so to speak.”
Mike remembered the package of turkey jerky he had the first day he spent on this planet.
“Is there any beef,” Mike asked “or fish, pork, or glowing jackalope, or whatever in your diet?”
“Glowing what?” Bob asked.
“Never mind,” Mike said “do you people eat meat, or are you simply vegetarians.”
“Vegetarians I guess,” Bob said. “We have no concept of killing here, Mike. And in order to eat meat we’d have to kill something first. I mean, I guess you could just walk up and try to take a bite out of a pig’s ass, but I think the pig might get a little prickly if you did that.”
“Everything is grown right here and tended by the community,” Bob went on. “Everyone shares in the responsibility to grow and harvest the food. ‘Why?’ you may ask. Damn good question. Because everyone here, as I’ve said, knows the difference between right and wrong, and is simply unable to choose the wrong thing to do. Working toward the common good is right and sitting on your ass while you let others do the work is simply wrong, and consequently not even considered.”
More music with ignorant lyrics was flowing out of the ceiling and the one-man band was taking a break.
“What time do they serve meals here,” Mike asked, “and is there a limit on how much I can eat? A…I don’t know… a rationing system?”
“Eat as much as you want brother,” Bob said “over eating would be both wrong and not good for you, so no one does. But seriously, eat, your beaver shit is getting cold.”
Bob shot Mike a huge grin.
Mike put a fork full of something beige into his mouth. The taste was incredible! No, ‘incredible’ could never do it justice. As soon as whatever was on his fork hit his taste buds they exploded in culinary orgasm. His salivary glands ejaculated so hard into his mouth that it hurt his jaw. The taste was deep, and magnificent, and heady. It was like he had never tasted anything in his life. It was like he had been sleepwalking through one watered down meal after another in his previous life. It was like…like…he was coming home for the first time.
“Oh my sweet holy baby Jesus!” Mike said, “what the hell was that!”
“No pollution, dude,” Mike muttered through a mouth full of food. “No chemical fertilizer, pesticides, or whatever have EVER been introduced into this soil.
“Pretty freaking awesome, right?”
“It’s like my entire body just woke up,” Mike said.
With that the music overhead changed. There was some type of gravely mechanical techno voice repeating something over and over. Mike was pretty sure it was saying ‘gotta make a move to a town that’s right for me.’
Bob slapped his hands down on the table and shoved his wide-eyed face into Mike’s.
“Oh my great googly mooglies!” Bob almost shouted at Mike, “is that you? Did you put that up?”
Bob grabbed the arm of the man sitting next to him and pulled the laughing man off the bench.
“Shake that groove thing brother,” Bob said.
Bob and the other man were dancing hand in hand. Bob spun his partner, pulled him back and the couple spun around the floor.
Lipps Inc. slid into the groove of Funky Town. ‘Talk about it, talk about it, talk about it…’
A woman next to Mike pulled him up and onto his feet. Together they sung around the open parts of the floor until a man stepped in, grabbed Mike and whisked him away. As he and his partner glided around the dining hall he saw the woman he had been dancing with a moment before spin around the room with another woman. It was wonderful and awkward all at once. Mike worked pretty hard to make sure he and his partner didn’t touch penises; that would just be too gay. Then his dance partner grabbed him by the waste for a pelvic to pelvic tango spin.
It was odd; his penis didn’t seem to care that the only thing separating it from another penis was two layers of fabric. Mike let the moment take him away.
Life was carefree, beautiful, and unending.
Eight:
Mike was standing at one end of a large garden plot. The loose-fitting Cong wear had already replaced his Earth-side jeans. Although many people on his new home wore something that resembled denim, including his best friend, Bob. Mike preferred the comfort of perpetual pajama wear. His shirt was something that more closely resembled a ‘guayabera’ in a soft earthy maroon…well earthy on this planet anyway.
Mike leaned lightly on a shovel as he
watched the sun climb silently through the morning clouds that lay across the horizon like lazy white stallions stretched out in a pasture. Sun rays poked through the soft openings allowed by the clouds and splashed a breathlessly glorious display of commanding orange and gold rays in all directions.
A tear slowly rolled down Mike’s cheek, slipped into the crease next to his mouth, and dissipated under his chin. He had never been this happy in his entire life. He couldn’t wait to get to work in his new role as farmer. To get his hands dirty by tilling up the rich loamy earth of his new home. In the short time that he had been here he had become fully committed to this perfect new world, and he would do anything it took to stay here.
He would do anything it took to defend this place.
He would fight to his own death to preserve what this world stood for.
He would kill to keep it.
Even as he stood there drinking deeply of painful beauty that surrounded him, as ever single sensory perception that he felt bombarded him, making his nerve endings feel like they had been sandpapered…
He still was unable to see the duality of his want, and human frailty against this perfect paradise.
He was the worst kind of virus. Both deadly and unaware of his predisposition to inflict pain and death on those he cared for so deeply.
Nine:
Mike stood up and brushed the soil off the knees of his pajamas. A fairly large, deep black earthworm…
“Earthworm,” He thought, “it can’t be an earthworm. It must have an exotic name. Some type of other worldly name. After all this is another world.”
He realized that he had never ever asked what the name of his new home was. He guessed that it wouldn’t really make a difference if he asked anyway because he’d only get the translation of what the chip in his head told him people were saying anyway.
He decided that he would name this place Avalon. Avalon was the perfect name. He daydreamed about having a statue of himself erected in the middle of Washington DC. Mike, the deep space explorer that discovered a new, and gloriously beautiful world at the farthest reaches of space. Well, he assumed it was the farthest reaches anyway. He actually had no real idea where he was in relation to Earth.
“Some explorer,” he thought to himself. “What if Columbus had no idea where he was and started naming places haphazardly?”
No matter. He was standing on a brave new world, someplace in outer space, and he knew he was the first one there to claim it.
A woman walked up behind him and touched him on the shoulder.
“Hey Mike,” she said. “It looks like you might be lost in thought there.”
“Oh,” Mike said turning around, “hello Ingrid. Yeah, I guess I was. It’s just this place, I guess. I’ve never dreamed anyplace could be this…I don’t know…perfect.”
“I’m glad you like it here,” she said. “Do you think that you’ll be able to take any of it back with you to help at home.”
The question was like a cold slap in the face. He had hoped that he hadn’t visibly flinched. This was home, but he had a lot of convincing to do before he was able to let the proverbial cat out of the human sack. He knew it was a deception. But it was just a little deception, that he was sure his new hosts would understand in time. That is, after they got used to the idea that they had an Earthman living among them that had no intention of leaving.
“I think I can,” Mike said.
“Does everyone here know about Earth,” He added, “and how it came to be populated the way it did?”
“Of course,” Ingrid answered, “you can’t really grow if you don’t conduct a personal examination of yourself and why you do the things you do. Everyone here is doing that every single minute of every day. That goes individually, and as a group, and of course, as a planet.”
Mike smiled, “I guess that makes sense.”
“We spend quite a lot of time on history here,” she went on. “Of course children are taught the history of our world…”
“History,” Mike interrupted “is written by the victors.”
He smiled.
“I’m sorry,” She said “it must be lost in the translation someplace. I’m not sure I understand the word you used. What’s a victor?”
“On Earth,” Mike said, “history is usually whatever group of people who won the war make it out to be. The winner, or victor, always paints the struggle of their people as the underdog, and constantly on the brink of destruction. Then there is a story of some sort of amazing victory in the face of amazingly unwinnable odds, and they emerge victorious. Naturally the enemy lacked any form of virtue and the winner prevailed despite all odds. The stories we tell our children are rarely truth in its purest form.”
“I only understand about a tenth of what you’re saying,” she said in a wide-eyed expression that bordered on horror.
“That will be the last of my Earth lessons to the masses,” Mike thought…wrongly.
“That’s a good thing,” Mike said “Almost nothing from Earth translates to…”
“By the way,” He said. Stopping in mid thought. “What do you call this place.”
Ingrid regained her bovine smile “We call it home” she said.
Mike heard the word but, of course, the word he heard didn’t match the movement of Ingrid’s lips. Avalon would have to do until he could learn to be a better lip reader.
“I really would like to know more about where you’re from,” Ingrid said. “Like I said, we learn about the history and our connection, but there really is nothing like hearing it all first hand. People that have never taken a deep space trip to Earth haven’t had the chance to witness it.”
“Honestly,” Mike said apologetically “It’s not all that amazing. I mean compared to all of this, it’s pretty much like white rice compared to a banana split.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Ingrid said “I have to get back to work now.”
She reached out and touched Mike’s arm.
“It really has been a pleasure talking with you Mike,” she said “we have to do it again sometime.”
She smiled and turned to go back to work.
“Was she just hitting on me?” Mike thought. “I mean I guess that could just be the way people act here. But it sure seemed like she was hitting on me.”
He had never really given much thought to intergalactic sex since he had been here. It was kind of like when he was in bootcamp as a kid. The rumor was that they had been putting saltpeter in everyone’s food to keep them from getting an erection. But the facts were much less ‘deep state’ than that. In actuality the constant stress of bootcamp life kept them all exhausted and on edge. The last thing they were thinking about was sex, or girls at all for that matter.
He guessed that being here was a lot like that. But now that he was settling in to what his life had become, the possibility of a relationship seemed almost doable.
“That could get pretty messy though,” he thought. “What about kids, and what would I have to do to get a marriage license out here.”
His mind was moving way too fast for his intellect to keep up with. It was like running down an extremely steep hill. His strides were quite a bit longer than his legs would allow for. It was just a matter of time before his thoughts tripped him up and he fell into a jumbled heap at the bottom of a grassy slope of his subconscious.
Mike decided it was time to go back to his long row to hoe. He knelt back down into the soft rich earth and started to turn over the soil around what might have been soy beans…if soy beans were iridescent blue. He picked the random weeds out and dropped them into a basket.
There was a low-grade hum in the air coming from a set of white wooden boxes next to the garden. Things that looked like a gecko mated with a bumble bee swarmed around the box as they darted in and out of several holes in it. Mike imagined that there was something in that box that would resemble honey, but in fact really wasn’t.
Occasionally Mike would take a break and walk over t
o the nearby stream. The first time that Bob had told him he could drink right out of the stream Mike was a little more than skeptical. The water from a stream at home probably held more disease and horrid ways to die than anyone could ever possibly imagine.
The first mouth full of pure stream water Mike had was just like everything else on Avalon so far. When he stuck his hand in the water it felt silky and smooth like someone was pulling a peacock feather across his hand. Once in his mouth the water was sweet. Kind of like a pineapple, but not really. Like a pineapple and caramel corn had a baby, and that baby peed rainbows. Yeah, that was more like it.
Working the earth in the warmth of this sun, in the unearthly beauty of the landscape surrounding him only to be able to walk a few steps and drink deeply from the stream of pineapple-caramel-corn-baby rainbow pee was never going to get old. Mike was never going to get jaded. And even as he thought that, he realized that the simple fact he was telling himself it would always be new guaranteed it wouldn’t be. At some point he would surely start bitching because the moon wasn’t red enough, or the rainbow pee wasn’t sweet enough, or he just didn’t feel like working that day so to hell with it.
“Hey, Mr. Green Jeans,”
Mike stood up when he heard the familiar voice behind him.
“What’s up Bob?” Mike said brushing his hands off on his pants legs. He stuck his hand out and instantly withdrew it.
“Old habits die hard,” Bob said.
“Yeah I guess so,” Mike said, mentally chastising himself for the instantaneous habits of his former home.
“Hey buddy I got a treat for you tomorrow if you’re interested,” Bob said.
“A treat?” Mike said . “Like every single other treat I’ve had since I arrived here, or is it a different kind of treat?”
“I’d say it was totally different than any of those kinds of treats. You being here has kind of got the entire planet talking.”
