by Zen DiPietro
She laughs. “I doubt that will happen from just a few lines at the end. But you’re right, I’d hate the life of a major celebrity. So I guess I can check this experience off my list and keep looking forward to what’s next.”
“Like our visit to Earth?” After the glamor of all this movie stuff, my hometown might be a downer.
But she says, “Yes! I’m looking forward to seeing the places you think are worth visiting, and meeting your nana, too.”
“She’s not like she used to be. It’s sad.”
“None of us is what we used to be,” she points out. “It’s just life. And we keep living it until we can’t anymore.”
“You’re right.” The elevator’s taking a long time. It must have been at the top when we arrived. “I’ll keep that in mind. At least Nana’s still around. At her age, that’s something, for our family.”
“Yeah!” She swats my arm in a way that, where I’m from, means, You asshole! But for Greta, it’s just playful agreement.
I wonder if there are mental adjustments she’s had to make to interact with people from Earth. Surely there are things we do that would normally mean something else to her.
I’m about to ask when the elevator doors open and a group of six Second Chance travelers shuffle off wordlessly, looking stunned.
Greta giggles as we board. “What do you think happened to them?”
“I don’t know. I’m just hoping this thing has had its fun and will leave us alone.”
I brace myself.
Going up.
Without even asking? Greta and I exchange a look, but don’t dare to speak aloud. The Chance 3000 might take it as a hostile act and retaliate.
A hundred and fifty thousand people die on Mars every day.
Is that a threat? It kind of feels like one.
Greta is not wearing a look of confidence either. She mouths What now? at me, but all I can do is shrug.
The average person on Mars spends six years of their life waiting in lines.
Is it…is it trying to depress us? Is this what happened to the people who were on here before us?
One in every three thousand Martian babies is stillborn. No reason has been found.
Greta’s mouth drops open.
Arrived at up. Have a nice day.
“Nice day, my ass!” Greta says. She’s carefully waited until we’ve exited the elevator before speaking. She turns and kicks the door. “Wasted lives and dead babies! You’re a dickweed, Chance 3000!”
We turn back around only to see a nice family of four staring at us in shock.
Greta’s eyes widen and she bolts. I bolt after her.
When we’re out of earshot, she hisses, “I’m probably going to get complaints about that!”
I’m sympathetic. I really am. I’d hate for something like that to happen to me where I work. But for it to happen to Greta, who’s surely never had to endure something so embarrassing, is kind of funny.
I snort.
She looks at me in surprise as we reach her cabin door. “Are you laughing at me?”
“No.” I try to smother a snicker but fail, and not only laugh, but cough painfully on top of it.
I clamp my lips together and hold my hands over my stomach, trying to contain my mirth, but it doesn’t work. I’m shaking, laughing, and gasping for breath.
After a moment of looking outraged, Greta giggles. She holds her hand over her mouth as she laughs. “Oh, I shouldn’t be laughing…stop it!”
She swats my arm.
“You stop it.” I swat her arm right back.
We laugh there in the corridor for two of the best minutes of my life. Then she swipes her hands over her eyes. “Ugh. I need to get to the showers and wash off all this movie makeup. It’s not like the regular kind. This stuff seems like it’s made from tar or glue or something.”
I’m disappointed to part ways, but following her to the showers is a total creepo-pervert move, and I don’t care that for some water-conserving species it’s normal.
Since I don’t want my disappointment to show, I say, “I guess I’ll check in with work, make sure nothing important came up. Want to meet for dinner?”
“Sure. That’d be nice. At the bar?”
I was kind of hoping she’d offer her cabin, but I act like I totally meant the bar. “Yep. Just give me a call when you’re hungry.”
“Will do.” She gives me a funny little salute. “Thanks for coming down to the set today. Sorry you didn’t get to be there longer.”
“I’m not,” I admit. “It was interesting, but I don’t think Mars is my kind of place, other than the hushpuppies.”
She nods sympathetically. “Okay. See you later, then!”
She disappears into her cabin.
I linger for a moment, just in case she remembers something and pops right back out. She doesn’t, though, so I scoot on down to my own cabin. In my book, it would also be a creepo-pervert move to stand outside her room, waiting to see her shuffling down the hall with a change of clothes and her loofah.
We have dinner that night, and it’s entirely ordinary. Regular food, regular conversation. Since Pinky is still on Mars, we don’t even have her unique perspective to mix things up.
But ordinary is good. Normal is really, really nice. Between the two of us, sometimes our luck skews her way, and sometimes it leans mine. But the equilibrium we have for this dinner, in all its average glory, is pretty special to me.
Afterward, she walks me back to my cabin. “This was nice. We don’t even have to be doing anything special, and I still have a good time.”
“I had a good time, too,” I say.
We proceed to have a perfectly normal, run-of-the-mill awkward moment. I’m so flush with our ordinariness that I lean forward and give her a kiss on the cheek.
She smiles and I bask in the moment, until Gus comes hustling around the corner. When he sees us, he slows his roll and tries to be all proper.
“Is something wrong?” Greta asks.
“It’s the elevator, miss. It has deeply insulted some Gvertflorians by implying that they appear to be octopi.”
I grimace. I’m glad dealing with that situation is Gus’s job and not mine. Gvertflorians do not have any sense of humor at all. They are dreadfully serious.
“Poor Gus,” Greta says when he’s out of sight. “I’m sure that won’t be fun to deal with.”
Funny. For once, someone is having worse luck than I am.
After Greta’s gone and I’m tucked up in my cabin, I take some time to appreciate my change in fate.
13
The next three days are pleasantly mundane. Whatever happened on Mars seems to have energized Pinky. She’s been particularly cheerful lately. The three of us fall back into our regular routines of fork training every other morning, breakfast together, and working during the day.
I could easily spend forty or fifty years this way.
Then we arrive at Earth, and my feet are suddenly made of lead. Earth is part of my old life, when I was never happy and I was due to die any day. I just don’t have good associations with the place and I feel like going there will be begging bad redshirt luck to come find me again.
It’s like a joke. Why did the redshirt return to his doom? To help his cyborg nana.
Fine. I didn’t say it was a good joke. Quit judging. I’m worried for my life, here. Hahas are scarce when you’re fearing a grisly death.
Maybe I should be making more progress with my phobias, but I’ve only had six months of this kind of life, compared to twenty-plus years living under the spectre of doom.
These things take time.
I’m using all of my self-calming techniques as I descend to the planet of my birth. I breathe deeply. I visualize my health and well-being. I calculate the odds of various possibilities. Most of all, I stick close to Pinky and Greta. They are the only way I’ll make it out of this alive.
The elevator doesn’t give us any shit, and for that I’m grateful. I have enough o
ccupying my headspace right now.
Greta’s been trying to teach me to look on the bright side. So, on the bright side, at least my cyborg nana is less likely to disapprove of me hanging out with a Garbdorian and a Mebdarian mutant. I think she’d have been fine with Greta even before she got assimilated, but I could see her finding Pinky unnerving. Nana lived a fairly sheltered existence as a redshirt. Until the cyborgs showed up, anyway.
We reach the bottom and the doors open. Here we are. On Earth. My old stomping grounds. The place of my birth.
The place I hadn’t intended to return to.
Nana still lives in the same little house. You’d think her daily life would change a lot more after assimilation, but it isn’t like that with the cyborgs. They’re not raising an army or anything. They’re slowly building a consensus, which will eventually become a majority. Then they’ll be able to control things on a political level. It’s smart, in a slow-moving, grass-roots kind of way. Since people who are assimilated are still citizens of their respective planets, they can’t be deported.
All Nana really has to do, outside of her knitting and her crappy baking, is report to the cyborg union every week. She says the meetings aren’t so bad, either. Cyborgs aren’t much for waxing poetic or playing to the crowd. They just announce basic information and that’s that.
Plus, Nana gets a monthly stipend from the cyborg union. So it’s not all bad. I like knowing she has plenty of pocket money to play canasta. Even after her big change, she’s a wicked canasta player. Her implants actually make her better at it, to the dismay of her card buddies. So the change hadn’t been all bad for her.
I hate the idea of her suffering equipment failures, though.
We walk up the neat little stone path that leads up to her door. She used to be a good gardener, but not so much these days. Though she weeds and waters regularly, she has no eye for landscape design. She mashes plants together in one space, then leaves adjacent swathes entirely barren. And she tends to make everything way too geometric.
Not everything needs to be a sphere or a cube, Nana. These are shapes that just don’t occur very often with plants.
I step up, ring Nana’s doorbell, and wait.
Nothing.
I ring again. I can hear the bell inside the house, so I know it isn’t broken. She said something about her acoustic processor not being right, so maybe she can’t hear?
I try the door, but it’s locked.
“Charlie?” A voice comes from behind me.
I turn and see Nana’s neighbor. “Hello, Mrs. Dubstep. Nana’s expecting me, but not answering the door.”
“Yes, she left a message with me. There was an emergency canasta session, and she’d gone to it. She said to tell you she’ll be back in four hours.”
“An emergency card game session?” I’m unsure what would constitute such a circumstance.
Mrs. Dubstep nods.
“And it will last four hours?”
She nods again.
“Ah, okay, I guess.” What else can I say? “We’ll come back later.”
“It’s good you’ve come to visit. You’re such a good boy.” Mrs. Dubstep smiles at me. “Her hand keeps falling off, and it’s driving her crazy.”
My nana’s hand keeps falling off, but she’s off on an emergency four-hour canasta bender. Sure. That makes sense.
Mrs. Dubstep disappears back into her house, which is a mirror of Nana’s cute little cottage.
I look to Greta and Pinky. “I guess that leaves us some time for sightseeing.”
“Yay!” Greta hops up and down. “I want to buy a funny hat.”
Is that a thing where she’s from? “I’m not sure if there will be hats,” I say. “I mean, maybe. Mostly we have t-shirts and water globes as souvenirs. But we can look for hats.”
As soon as I say it, I feel like a putz, because if Greta wants to find a hat, she will. But she just beams at me, full of apparent excitement.
“Okay. Should we start with the Statue of Liberty? We’ll need to take a train, then a ferry.”
Greta hops some more. “Let’s do it!”
Pinky nods, so I lead them down the lane and we catch a taxi to take us to the train.
Pinky frowns at me. “A taxi, to get to a train, so we can get on a ferry? This is inefficient.”
“I know. This part of New France is like that.”
“New France?” Greta looks puzzled. “I thought the Statue of Liberty was on some island near New York. I had to memorize a lot of sightseeing facts when I started with the Chance Fleet, and I’m sure I remember it.”
“You’re right,” I assure her as we get out of the taxi and purchase train tickets at the automated kiosk. “Historically, this part of Earth was known as New York. It’s part of a region that was known as the United States until recently. About fifty years ago, we struck a trade alliance with France. One stipulation of the deal was renaming the state New France.”
“Those are the wine and cheese people, right?” Greta’s face scrunches up as if pulling these facts from her brain is painful.
“Yeah, no one saw that change coming. And between you and me, behind closed doors, we just keep on using the regular names. The renaming is just a commercial thing. It’ll change back in a few years anyway, when the naming rights expire.”
“Wow.” Greta seems stuck between being impressed and being confused. I frequently feel the same way about it.
We walk across the train terminal to the boarding platform.
“We wait here until we get the signal for boarding to begin,” I explain.
Pinky’s looking at the train the way a five-year-old might. All big eyes and enthusiasm. “Think they’ll let me shovel coal?”
I hate to disappoint her. “No, they haven’t used coal for a few hundred years. Too messy and inefficient.”
Her expression falls. “Is there anything I can shovel? I’ve always wanted to do some manual labor aboard mass transit.”
It’s a strange dream, but who am I to judge?
“I don’t think so,” I say gently. “But maybe you can meet the driver.” Usually this privilege is limited to children, but I think in Pinky’s case they’ll make an exception.
“I guess it’ll do,” Pinky says sourly, crossing her arms over her chest.
People hustle by, carrying bags and suitcases. I’m glad we’re not at the station during a peak time. I hate crowds. Already, this place has more activity than I’d prefer.
A man in a dapper hat yells in a resounding voice, “Allll aboard!”
I start forward, but Pinky and Greta keep standing there. “That’s the signal to board,” I say.
“What, that bellow?” Greta blinks at me.
“Yes. It’s nostalgic. From the days before electronic messaging.”
“Oh. Cool. I guess.” Greta shrugs and follows me.
Pinky looks unimpressed. I think she’s still mad about not getting to shovel coal.
“Do you think I could get a hat like the one the guy who yelled was wearing?” Greta asks.
What’s with her and hats today? But I don’t say anything about it. “That’s the one you want?”
“Yeah. I like it. It’s so…stripey.” Greta nods.
“I’m sure we can find one somewhere.”
“One for me, too,” Pinky says. “Stripey is cool.”
We board and find our seats. Greta and I sit side by side facing front, while Pinky has the opposite pair of seats to herself. She faces us, frowning. Scowling, actually. The people across the aisle have noticed and are getting nervous.
A car attendant hurries over. “Is everything okay over here?” Waves of worry seem to roll off her.
I defer to Greta so she can work her magic.
She gives the attendant a big smile and, is it just me or does she seem a little extra luminescent for just a few seconds there?
“Hi,” Greta says warmly. “We were wondering if we could visit the engine car and meet the engineer at some point. It�
�s our first trip on an Earth train.” She says this last in a confiding way, which comes across as delightfully endearing.
The attendant glances from Greta to Pinky and back. I don’t think I even exist at the moment, as far as she’s concerned. “I’m sure that could be arranged. Welcome aboard. Is there anything else we can do to make your ride enjoyable?”
Pinky’s scowl eases into a mere frown. “Do you have that drink stuff Earth is famous for?”
The attendant looks puzzled, but keeps smiling. “We might! Do you know the name of it?”
“I’ve heard it’s yellow and sour like battery acid.” Pinky looks hopeful.
The attendant has no response to that. She just keeps smiling bravely.
“Pinky, do you mean lemonade?” I ask.
“That’s the one!” Pinky nods.
How is a bartender unfamiliar with lemonade? If it were anyone else, I might suspect some sectarian rube-ishness at play.
The attendant nods. “Of course! Shall I bring three lemonades while I send word to the engineer?”
“That’d be sporting of you,” Pinky says approvingly.
The poor woman looks so relieved that I feel sorry for her, and she hurries off to score some lemonade.
I peek at the people across the aisle. They keep giving us furtive looks, but don’t seem as anxious as before.
Twenty minutes later we’re sipping lemonade, watching the landscape fly by the window, and waiting for the engineer to call us up. I don’t really want to visit the engine. I don’t hate trains or anything, I just don’t need to visit the place where the driving happens.
When the attendant returns to let us know we can go back to the engine, I opt to remain. “You two go have a look. I’ll stay here.”
“You sure?” Greta asks. “I could stay here if you’d rather.”
“No, go ahead.” Pinky’s already on her way, so I whisper, “Just keep Pinky out of trouble.”
She giggles and nods before hurrying off after our tall friend.
They remain absent for the rest of the ride. I don’t mind. With the gentle rocking of the train, I could almost fall asleep. But I won’t. Because falling asleep in public is a great way for a guy like me to get robbed, beaten, or wake up in a tub of ice in Hoboken with both my kidneys missing.
