by Gary Martin
A hand then grabs me by the shoulder from behind and turns me around. It’s the girl. She’s standing in front of me, staring into my eyes with her flickering, unnerving red ones. Her skin is pale and smooth, she has piercings in her nose and lips and is stunningly attractive. She moves her face close to mine. For absolutely no reason I stupidly think she’s moving in for a kiss, but she moves her lips to my right ear and whispers, “Posh prick.” I stand back, trying to place those words. She then turns around and walks off with the now annoyed looking soldier. Who the hell is she?
The door to the clean room is anything but. Amanda presses her hand against the grimy pad next to it, and I follow her as she walks through. I still have no idea what I’m doing here and watch in slight shock as Amanda takes her clothes off. She then walks onto a conveyer belt, which starts to move slowly forward. With a hiss, a three-pronged clamp then comes down from the ceiling. Amanda looks down and the longer middle prong shoots down into the top of her spine.
“Fucking hell!” I shout and stand back. I’m not ready to see someone die in front of me again, but I watch transfixed as the smaller prongs either side then stick into her shoulders. They open out, and her skin is effortlessly removed revealing a plastic and metal skeleton covered in tiny silver squares.
The skeleton disappears through a hatch, and the skin hanging from the clamp is clumsily dropped to the deck with a squelch.
“Bollocks. It always does that,” a voice from behind me says. I turn around and see a very tired looking man, probably just older than me, wearing a stained white boiler suit.
“Does what?” I ask.
“The skin’s supposed to follow the fuck bot’s inside into the clean room to be steamed. Gonna have to do it by hand now. Useless piece of shit.”
“Fuck bots ...?” I’m at a loss. He smiles.
“You must be John. My name’s Edward. Welcome to the worst job on the ship.” He passes me a metre-long stick with a clamp taped to one end. “Pick up the flesh with this, go through that door and give it a thorough clean. Got plenty of sprays and shit out there to deal with it.” He turns and starts to go out the way he came in.
“Where are you going? I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“I’m going for a sleep, and it’s fucking obvious what you’re doing. Just make sure you empty the waste sump,” he says and walks out of the room, leaving me with a pile of synthetic flesh to deal with.
I poke the skin a few times with the stick and pick it up. It’s much heavier than I expect it to be. I walk through the door with it into the clean room and place it on the table in the middle. I look behind me and there’s an armed guard at the door, inside the clean room, watching me. To my right, Amanda’s skeleton is being steamed in a glass booth. Above that, an empty chamber is steaming away to itself. I guess that’s where her flesh is supposed to be.
I lay Amanda’s skin out so it resembles the shape of a person lying on their front, but flat. The skin looks real, there are tiny hairs, moles, and blemishes all over it. I grab a cloth and a spray from the cleaning materials closet and start to clean the feet and legs, moving cautiously up to the backside area. There’s a slit that runs all the way up the back, so I decide to open it up and peer inside.
I’ve heard before of androids that work in the sex industry but never seen one in real life. I always assumed they were basically glorified mannequins with fuck holes. Android technology and A.I. came a long way quite quickly a few years back but people got scared and paranoid. Before long, the only ones left functioning were the ones solely programmed for sex. And from what I’d heard, they looked a bit shit. Nothing like this.
The inside of Amanda’s skin has lots of tiny silver squares and wires running through it. I guess they’re some sort of magnetic guides so the skin can easily be mounted back onto the skeleton and stay in position. There’s also something that looks like a hot water bottle attached by clips to two tubes that line up with the vagina and anus and look like inside out male sex toys. Which I guess they are. The rubber bottle has a display that says full on it, and it doesn’t take me long to figure out what it’s full of. They come to the clean room, or flesh reclamation, when their tanks are full so they can be emptied and cleaned, only to go back out and get fucked by soldiers some more. A never-ending cycle, which I’m now in the worst part of. I unclip the two tubes and pull out the waste sump, gripping it with two fingers by its edge, and hold it as far away from me as possible. Two fingers was never a good idea, it’s quite heavy and starts slipping out of my grip. It falls and my instinctive reaction is to grab it before it hits the deck. I succeed, grabbing hard with both hands, but squeezing so tightly that it bursts, covering my face and chest with a rancid smelling bukkake of probably a hundred men’s gone off semen. I vomit instantly and I hear the guard laugh hard.
“More are coming in, you better get back to work,” the guard says, after he’s composed himself.
I move over to the sink and wash my face. That was horrible. At least the guard seems to have a sense of humour about it, even though it was at my expense. Looking through the mirror, I see the guard moving toward me so I turn around.
“I said get back to work,” he says quietly, then out of the blue hits me in the stomach with the butt of his rifle. I collapse on the deck with the wind knocked out of me.
“Get up!” he shouts, and I hear a click followed by the buzzing of the rifle charging.
Struggling to breathe and shaking with fear, I grab the towel rail under the sink and pull myself up.
“Three more Amandas and a Keith have come through so get cleaning and emptying or you will be put to death.”
Sixteen hours of cleaning and emptying. No breaks, no slowing down. It’s been the longest day of my life. Any time there started to be any sort of backlog, I got hit with the butt of a rifle and threatened with death. The guards changed halfway through my shift but the attitude was the same. Shout, shout, hit, hit, death, death.
“Time’s up. Sleep, and I’ll see you here in eight hours. Don’t be late,” the new guard says as my shift finally finishes.
I limp out of the clean room, and the guard decides to hit me on the back of the head with the butt of his rifle for good measure. I see stars in my peripheral vision but keep walking out into the recreation area. The bright lights and music begin to swirl around my head, and I feel like I’ve got severe vertigo. Before I know it, my knees buckle and the deck quickly starts heading toward my face.
25
“What do you think you’re doing?” a female voice whispers in my ear. “Get up.”
I feel someone grab my left arm, trying to pull me up, but not quite having the strength to do it.
“A little help would be nice,” she says.
I get up on to my knees and look up. Her eyes are still glowing red and still intermittently flickering. I notice a small crowd of people starting to form around us so I quickly get back on my feet. I wobble, and the girl links arms to steady me.
“He’s just had a few too many, don’t worry. I’ll get him back to his quarters,” she says to the crowd, which then starts to disperse. She then leads me through the hall.
“Are you a fucking idiot or something? What the hell do you think you were doing? If they realise that you can’t get through just one shift without collapsing, they will kill you. There are no second chances here. You work or you die,” she whispers loudly in my ear.
“Then I think death sounds pretty good. Well, better than flesh reclamation anyway.”
“Oh, boo fucking hoo. You have to clean out some soiled sex robots, how awful for you. I’ve been forced into basically being one,” she says and looks away from me.
“Oh shit, sorry.”
“Look, I do it because I want to live. If I say no, that’s it. I’m getting out of here one way or the other, and I can’t do that if I’m dead.”
“There’s nowhere to go. It’s the end of the world, and we’re not important.”
“There is so
mewhere to go. The Utopia project. It’s where anyone who didn’t die or get picked up by Skylark went.”
She points at an unused table; we head to it and sit down.
“It sounds like bullshit,” I say. “Captain Baseheart did mention something about it when I was debriefed, but it doesn’t sound like it’ll last long.”
“I don’t care. Anything is better than here. And faith that there’s something better gets me through, one day at a time.” She smiles at me across the table and offers her hand. “I’m Annabel.”
“John. I know you somehow, don’t I?”
“I haven’t seen anyone I know for months. When I spotted you earlier, you looked so familiar. It made me genuinely happy to see a face that I recognised. Then I realised why. A few years ago, some friends and I tried to rob you.”
“Rob me?”
“Afraid so. You were wearing a ridiculous purple tuxedo and your handsome friend pulled out a mini E.M.P. device, so we bolted. I’m really sorry about that. Those were very different times.”
“It’s okay. As it happens, that evening ended quite well for me. Would it make you feel better if I told you it wasn’t a mini E.M.P. Jacob was carrying, just his aftershave? He is ... was very good at improvising.”
“We talked about it later on and realised how stupid we’d been. But we were young and, you know, really stupid.” She smiles at me again and her red eyes start flickering.
“Doesn’t that get annoying?” I ask.
“It’s been like it so long, I don’t even notice.”
“I think I’ll call you Flick from now on,” I say and grin.
“Only if I get to call you a posh prick from now on,” she says and grins back.
“Not sure I like that. Nope. I absolutely do not. But fuck it, posh prick it is.”
“Good. Okay then, posh prick, how did you manage not to freeze to death on Earth? How did you get here?”
“That’s a long story.”
“So? Tell it.”
I’ve only been talking to Flick for ten minutes, but I already feel like I can tell her anything, like I can be completely honest with her.
“I worked on a ship that dumped rubbish on the sun. The ship was sabotaged and most of the crew were killed. We limped back to Earth on thrusters alone, until we were picked up by the Zeus. Everyone lived happily ever after.”
So instead of honesty, I lie by omission. I guess I’m so excited by meeting someone out here that I’ve met before, I don’t want to ruin it by saying, “hey, you know your life? The one you liked back on Earth? I was indirectly responsible for ending it.” I’m a nice guy like that.
“That wasn’t a long story,” Flick says.
“I missed a few things out, but them’s the basics.” It really wasn’t.
“I’d say you’d have been better off staying on that ship of yours.”
“Me too,” I say.
“Is there any way we could escape on it?” she asks, looking hopeful.
“Afraid not. The main engine is fucked and it’s being taken apart for spares.”
“Well, I guess you’re not my ticket out of here then,” she says and gives me a cheeky grin.
“I never said I was. Anyway, you really wouldn’t want to put your fate in my hands. That would be foolhardy.”
“No more foolhardy than ending up here,” she says.
“How did you get here?” I ask.
“It seems so long ago now. Once the underground computer network stopped working, I started running out of hope. I was so cold. The one bright side was the red slum area had never looked so pretty. Everything had been burned out or looted but was covered in snow and a hard frost that softened its lines. It may have looked nice, but it was a freezing hell. It got to the point where we couldn’t even light fires for warmth anymore, it was so cold. I fully expected to die. I had helplessly watched most of my friends freeze to death, and I was waiting my turn. Then Skylark sent troop ships, and I was herded up with anyone else left alive. We thought we’d been rescued, but they just wanted the lowest of the low for slave labour. I was told that I had to be a whore, or I would die. So, I’m a whore.”
Flick looks down at the table and sighs. I put my hand out and give hers a squeeze. She smiles, then looks around the room a couple of times. She stands up and moves around the table next to me.
“We’re not really allowed to stay here after our shift, it’s soldiers and crew only. Best get back to our quarters. Hopefully I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, then kisses me on the cheek and disappears into the crowd.
As I limp back to the quarters I share with Robert, I realise I’m in a surprisingly good mood, which makes no sense considering the day I’ve had. Meeting Flick has been a revelation and has given this broken old man a small glimmer of hope. And probably the horn too, if I’m honest. But hope that Ez may still be alive, Jacob and Terrell maybe, too. If I’ve managed to meet a random person from my past, from my city, on this very ship, then the odds of at least one of them being scooped up when Skylark sent its ‘rescue’ ships down are in my favour.
My mood starts to darken as I get lost in the maze of corridors. I’ve only been to my quarters once, and my brain just doesn’t want to give me its location. I’m feeling so tired I think I might just curl up into a ball and sleep on the deck when I notice a blue glow coming from a viewport and decide to have a look instead. Through it, I can see the sun. It doesn’t look right. It’s now almost completely blue with a purple halo. It must be to do with the cooling down process, I guess. It looks almost beautiful. I stare at it for a few minutes and then decide I really have to find my quarters or I’ll be a dead man tomorrow.
Just as I’m ready to give up, some of the graffiti on the walls starts to look familiar and I realise I must be close. A guard is leaning against the wall next to the door when I finally get there. She sees me and stands up straight.
“John Farrow?” she asks.
“Yes,” I reply bluntly.
“You’re late. You should have been here two hours ago. The captain has told me to take you to the medical bay. Follow me.”
I look longingly at the door, knowing that behind it there’s a bed for my tired body to collapse on. It’s only six hours now until my next sixteen-hour shift, and I badly need to sleep. I look back at the guard who’s now walking away from me.
Without any real choice, I reluctantly follow.
We get to the AG shaft, she scans her eye, I follow her to up to level fifty-seven and on to the medi-bay.
The place is tiled white and is pristine. The whole place smells of cleaning fluid and, apart from the odd beeping of heart monitors, it’s eerily quiet. There are around fifty beds scattered around the deck and for the most part they’re empty.
The guard walks me past the beds and to one of the side rooms.
“He’s in here,” she says and opens the door for me. “You’ve got five minutes.”
I walk past her and into the small room. The door is shut behind me.
There he is. The bastard who killed Kerry and ended the world. There was a point that I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. He’s looking better than I’ve seen in a while, and I hate it.
“Tim,” I say.
He looks up and smiles.
“Hello John … you look tired.”
“You look surprisingly well,” I say.
“Lots of drugs and I’m being fed by a drip. I do feel quite good as it happens.”
“Fuck you,” I say.
“I suppose I deserve that. Why are you here?”
“Common courtesy, I guess. I’m afraid … I’m afraid that because of your injuries, you’re going to be put to death.”
“I suppose I deserve that too. Does that make you happy? I know you couldn’t do it yourself. I couldn’t either. Now my death has been taken out of both our hands.”
“No. I’m not happy. It would have been better if your plan had worked properly. Everyone dead. That would have been nice. Not this horrible l
imbo. But you fucked it. Now Skylark are in control of everyone and everything that’s left.”
His eyes widen.
“That’s not possible. Where are we?” he asks.
“We’re on the Zeus. A Skylark destroyer.”
“No. That’s not possible. You wouldn’t be that foolish. I have a vague memory of you saying we were being rescued, but it’s a jumbled mess.”
“I clearly am that foolish, because here we are. We’re all going to die here. Skylark only want people who can work, so you’re going to die just a little bit sooner than me or Robert. But not by much.”
“No … I did this to end Skylark,” he says quietly.
“Well, you failed. Badly.”
“You need to get me out of here John. I can fix the sun. I know I can,” he says desperately.
“With what?”
“Just get me off of this ship and I’ll figure it out.”
“I can’t even get myself off. I’m just as dead as you are.”
“Now’s not the time to give up. I know I’m the last person that you’d want to save, but you have to do this. You have to.”
So many conflicting emotions are flowing through me. If I do nothing and wait a few days, that’ll be it; karma will have balanced itself out. But if there’s even a chance that he can fix the sun, I might have to try. Are these just the words of a desperate man? I can’t believe he’s suddenly got himself a conscience. It’s way too late for that.
“I’m not sure I can or want to.”
“You’ll do what is for the best, John.”
“Just keep on with the lie for now. You’re Tim. They’ll torture you if they know the truth,” I say.
“I’m aware of that,” he says.
The door opens with a creak.
“Time’s up,” the guard says.
“Goodbye, Tim,” I say, then turn around and walk out of the room.
The guard leads me out of the medi-bay and back to the AG shaft, I head back the way I came.
I open the door to our quarters and look straight at my bed. It looks so enticing, so comfortable, even though I know it’s not.
