Colonization

by Alex Lang

  “You’re such an ass,” I said, turning on the afterburner way sooner than I should have, just to watch him squirm. That was a big mistake.

  “What are you doing?” he whimpered as his sweet, androgynous body was pelted against the seat.

  “Look,” I pointed to the far-off battle scene on the view screen. “There’s our fight. Too bad we don’t have time to land and refit. These armor hardeners aren’t gonna do much good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, they’re great against energy weapons but they don’t do much against kinetic charges, which is usually what the Gurns use. Just gonna have to make due.”

  “Daria, please. I’ll replace that implant with a better model. You won’t have to wear dark glasses all the time. Just get us out of here.”

  “Meh, I can handle these guys. Hold on …”

  The Stomata was using defense drones against three fast-moving raiders. I could see the tiny robotic ships’ tracer fire. But the pirates were ignoring the drones and aiming their weapons at the barge. In the distance, two other mining craft blasted asteroids with drilling lasers as if nothing was going on. When you work in the business, yield is everything. Poppa never liked to stop mining, even when pirates were nearby.

  I caught a glimpse at the console. “Damn,” I yelled, after seeing the afterburner had eaten through a good chunk of my capacitor reserves. If that pretty medic hadn’t riled me up, it all would have been fine.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “We’re short on energy, that’s what.”

  “Well, you do have backups in this thing, right?”

  “Not really. I got the cheapest modules you can get.” That wasn’t really the case, but not too far off from the truth. Did the best I could with poppa’s insurance money.

  One of the raiders had scrambled after me. I fired four pulses. My laser had better range, so the Gurn had to veer away before he could fire.

  “Yea!” Axium yelled. “Brilliant!”

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” I asked him.

  “It’s exhilarating. Go get that one,” he replied pointing.

  That’s when Gurn projectiles slammed into us. My poppa used to say the Gurns hunted in a pack, like wolves. Now I knew what he meant. The raiders were playing with me. I looked down at the flickering panel and saw my shields were gone. The raiders’ weapons had fractured most of my starboard armor plating. Stuff’s too brittle for kinetics, see.

  For a moment, that slimy smell of burned polymers and flashing warning lights blended together until I was back on my poppa’s barge. Then, I remembered I was jacked into the new nav system. It was nothing to locate the other Gurn that was bearing down on me. I wasn’t no kid this time. I could do something about these bloody pirates. This time, I told myself, I wasn’t helpless. I punched the afterburner and trained my weapon on the attacker.

  With my long-range pulses and the enhancements, I thought I had the edge, see. My pulse laser scorched into the Gurn raider over and over again. Wouldn’t you know it though, just before I cut through his armor, my lasers stopped cold as the last drop of capacitor reserves went poof.

  I found myself helpless, with no active hardeners, no weapons, and no way to scramble out of there. “Oh no,” I whispered, watching with my jacked eyes the other raider barreling up from behind. I reached over to Axium and patted his pretty hand. “We’d better get in the egg,” I said.

  We found ourselves floating in space. There we were, protected only by a thin sheet of metal with a low-grade life support system. After finishing off my ship, the raiders raced towards the barges. I don’t know why they let us live. The bloody Gurns would have taken us prisoners if

  they knew who was aboard. Axium would have fetched a nice ransom. I hit the tiny engine on the pod and headed towards the nearest station.

  We never went on another date after that. Go figure?

  Friends from tweets.

  THE SEA OF KNOWLEDGE IS PALE and still, milky-white, and when people immerse I imagine impregnation taking place, the droplets of the ocean like semen, sliding inside them, drilling into each cell and making a new memory, a fresh little foetus of understanding.

  All they’re actually doing is standing still, blinking, but I think that’s a lot less poetic than my version.

  He says, “Taylor, it’s impossible to love you,” and he blinks. What is he searching for in his head? The best ways to dump your girlfriend? What’s the most passive-aggressive bullshit you can put on someone in one sentence? Or perhaps he’s tweeting this as he says it, with a hashtag to suit:

  #breakuplines

  He smiles. I think of the tweets he’s receiving from his many followers:

  Seriously? Lmao

  Would raise a smile from him? Split that famous face? I hope not. Maybe it’s simply that his eyeballs have dried out in the ferocious air-conditioning of the hotel lobby, and he needs to rearrange his expression.

  “It’s because I don’t have one, isn’t it?” I ask him.

  “No.”

  “If I had one, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?”

  “Yes, we would. Well, I might have emailed you instead, to be honest. You know how I hate public scenes.”

  “I’m not making a scene!” I say. I consider throwing his coffee over him, but then the receptionist or the people sitting in the corner might blink twice and start recording this whole incident. Next thing I know, I’ll be on Youtube in a clip entitled:

  JAKE QWERTY GETS COFFEED BY SILVER HAT GIRL

  And a billion people will see it and smirk whenever I pass by.

  “You’re paranoid,” Jake says. “You think everything is about you. But I have needs, too.”

  I have needs, too-6,700,000 hits

  LMFAO

  “I hope you asphyxiate,” I tell him, keeping a pleasant expression. “I hope you drown in that scummy sea of semen you like to flail around in. I hope your eyelids drop off from overuse and your brain gets fried in an electrical storm. And I bet your art is utter shite, with extra fresh smelly shite on top. I bet you’re utterly talentless in every way that it is possible for a human being to be talentless.”

  He stands up and dusts the crumbs of his skinny muffin from his light canvas trousers.

  “I’ve got over five million followers who think otherwise.”

  “They don’t think, though, do they? They follow.”

  Jake blinks. Maybe he’s scrolling through a list of his disciples, trying to find one with a less than vacant expression. Or maybe I nearly made him cry. Whatever it is, it’s enough to spur

  him to walk away, out of the hotel lobby, on to the street, moving fast, putting as much distance between us as he can.

  I watch him go. I don’t follow.

  ***

  I was first diagnosed with IEHS in my mid-twenties. It’s a rare condition, and some people still believe it’s an imaginary one. The headaches, nosebleeds, dizziness, stomach cramps, fatigue, and mood swings started in Secondary School, when the routine keyhole implant was fitted to my ocular nerve, along with every other eleven-year-old in the country. My symptoms corresponded perfectly with the onset of puberty, and so my GP told me I was one of those sickly teenagers, and my body would grow out of it. She was still insisting that when I turned twenty-one and was spending most days in bed, jobless, lethargic, depressed.

  My mother made endless tea and I headsurfed all day and all night, sinking myself into social networks, making a thousand friends without once feeling the need to meet any of them. I watched films, played games, held long conversations with strangers, until the day I came across an article about people who had rejected their implants, for various reasons. Some had religious objections-nobody should be inside your mind except God, that sort of thing-and some just liked to be different, retro. But there were those who said the implant made them physically ill.

  The article stressed no medical evidence had ever been found. It still hasn’t, as far as I know
. Maybe it’s been hushed up in the name of progress, I don’t know; I think to become a world-class conspiracy theorist you need to have an implant. It would take too long to piece it all together without instant access to a zillion statistics. Imagine researching something like that in paper archives. It makes you wonder how the human race got anything done before the arrival of the Internet.

  I suppose that shows my true colours. I hate being different. I would have the implant back again this instant, if possible. If it didn’t trigger a migraine that left me incapable of doing anything than lying in a darkened room and making ow sounds.

  I remember what it was like to have the world in my head, and I miss it. I miss knowing what everybody thinks about everything. 200,000 likes for the photo of the cake I baked for my aunt’s birthday party. 680 reviews of the new ebook from that author I like. I didn’t have to leap blind into any decision-what coffee shop, what colour lipstick, what food to give to the cat. The friends in my head made those decisions for me. If they hadn’t heard of it, then it wasn’t worth knowing.

  Now I’m alone. And I have to be brave. I have to be the person that walks into the metaphorical party with the sneaking suspicion that her dress is rucked up in her knickers. That is my life, every minute of every day.

  Wait. Not quite. Once a week I still have friends.

  ***

  It’s half past five on a Thursday, and that means I can walk out of this hotel lobby and make my way downtown to my self-help group.

  “Friends” has become a word of myriad meanings. Instead of defining “friends” as “people I’ve never met with whom I have formed an online connection based on similar interests and extended peer groups,” I define it here, traditionally, as “people who live in the same geographical area as me and are as miserable as I am for the same reason.” I think the original definition of the word is long dead, and nobody except me seems to be mourning it.

  I reach the café a little late; I see my group from the outsider’s point of view, which is an unwelcome reflection on how stupid three people with their heads wrapped in tinfoil can look. I would take off my own, but it does cut down on the headaches, nausea and dizziness. Really, it does.

  I nod to the barista, and he smiles, and blinks, and starts to make my decaf Americano which I really don’t need after the scene with Jake, but it’s hard to sit in a café and not order anything, particularly when all the other customers are staring at you and posting pictures of your tinfoil-hatted group on Facebook with a witty caption or two.

  I sit down, and Len, dear Len, asks me, “How are you, sweetheart?” I blurt out my bad news, and then am unable to speak further due to a tight throat and the fear of bursting into loud, uncontrollable sobs. It may be a self-help group, but it’s always had more of a polite conversation vibe than a collective and open pooling of misery vibe.

  “Oh no!” says Deb. “No no no. Oh dear.” She’s so lovely, always commiserating, and refusing to accept sympathy for her own large array of problems, such as diabetes, a slowly dying mother, and having to survive on a government-funded budget of sixty-seven pounds a week.

  “He’s a moron,” says Tom, who is young and huge and pierced at regular intervals. Eliza throws him a suspicious look. Tom and Eliza have recently become a couple, in a tentative sort of way that’s painful to observe on a week by week basis. Occasionally they hold hands under the table and we all pretend not to be aware of it.

  I let them wash me clean in their sudsy sympathy, and it’s quite a pleasant experience until we get to the rough towel-dry at the end, where I’m meant to stand back on my own two feet again and come out buffed from rebuff.

  “I-we-always felt that he wasn’t right for you, Taylor. Maybe you’re really meant to be alone for a while.”

  “What?”

  They all shuffle back in their seats, a collective response. “We all think you could do with some time to yourself,” says Eliza.

  “The meaning of discussion group is not that you all take it in turns to discuss one of the members when she’s out of the room,” I tell them. “The meaning of discussion group is-” No words come to me. If I had a link, I would search the online dictionary and find an amazing answer, and spit one out with vitriol to look sharp and sassy and so in the right. But there’s nothing.

  Len takes my hand and squeezes it. “Poor thing,” he says.

  He’s right. I am poor. We all are. We live in an information poverty, where we can’t ever be as good as the people around us. We won’t get jobs, because they are all advertised online, and everyone applies in their head. We can’t complain to our MP because she only accepts tweets or emails. We can’t escape because the car tax system involves being registered under a valid username and the bus and train timetables are all PDF docs. Buying a ticket is done with the blink of an eye, anyway. It’s all a blink of an eye away.

  I close my eyes.

  Tom murmurs something, about how I’ll be fine, and I’m tough, and Eliza agrees with him, and changes the subject. Soon they’re having a normal conversation around me, as if I don’t exist. As normal a conversation as people wearing tinfoil helmets can have.

  ***

  I lie in my four-poster bed that night, under my foil canopy, and think of Jake, and the digital interest he is no doubt generating at this moment. The clear lens of the world focuses on him, and he loves it. He probably told his publicist he was going to break up with me two weeks before he told me, just to make sure he’d get the most surftime from it.

  And yet, and yet-what? Surely he is indefensible. But if his way of life was offered to me I would take it. Wouldn’t I?

  Jake and I met at a deserted monument to the past-an art gallery. A Mondrian exhibition. We stood side by side, strangers, in front of “Composition 2.”

  “The lines looked different in my head,” Jake said, and I said, “Nothing’s the same in anyone’s head.” I thought we were alone in that room, sharing a private moment. Later, in bed, he said to me, “You make life feel more … personal.” That was what he loved about me-I was unaware that there were 3,000,000 people in our relationship.

  And the reason I loved him? The opposite. Because I never felt alone with him. He was my clickable link. Through him, I connected.

  I lie there, not knowing whether to punch the pillow or punch myself. I wish somebody would pop into my head and tell me how I feel.

  ***

  I last three weeks without Jake, and then I make an appointment to have the implant on my ocular nerve refitted.

  My group are aghast.

  “You’ll kill yourself!” says Deb. Eliza and Tom clutch hands; they’ve progressed to above-the-table displays of affection.

  “Maybe I’ve grown out of it. Like asthma.”

  Deb sits back and crosses her arms over her chest. “If you really believe that, take off your hat.”

  “These stupid hats are just placebos anyway,” I tell her, and reach for mine. I put it in the centre of the table, where it sits between our coffee cups like a new-age salt shaker. A speck of pain, a pinprick, pops into life above my left eye, but I ignore it.

  “Please, please,” says Len, shaking his head, “You’ll make yourself ill.” I love Len dearly, but this time his compassion only galvanises my resolve. I put my share of the bill on the table.

  “Goodbye,” I say. “I don’t belong with you any more.”

  I leave my tinfoil hat on the table, and I walk away.

  By the time I reach the tube station I can’t see straight. There are glowing white lines in my head, undulating in time to the pulsing pains running through my body. I’m at the top of the