Death Vector Part I

Part of a sci-fi story I managed to squeak out over a few nights. Needed a diversion. Rest to follow in the coming weeks.

Charlie Yellowhorse spit sunflower seeds into the air before me like a machine gun spraying bullets. The latest seed twirled a few inches from my nose, spinning end over end, glistening with saliva. A moment’s distraction made me turn my head to mark the floating trail that mapped our progress from Charlie’s mouth all the way back to our bunks. Usually, robotic vacuums or smart vents would have snatched the seeds after a few minutes and recycled them back into the ship’s hydroponics system but not today. Today, everything except for us dozen idiots was strapped down tight as a snare drum, robots included.

“Hey Terry, I gotta tell you something,” said Charlie.

Suddenly, the sunflower seeds slammed into the bulkhead at my side. One struck my cheek with the force of a bee sting and in a moment of panic I thought it would get lodged inside my ear. The padding on the crash ladders helped, but my knees and elbows ached from eating that much unexpected momentum. When I sensed a lull in the motion I snatched the sunflower seed off my face with a curse. The rest of the trail had disappeared, too.

It wouldn’t be long now.

“Couldn’t you knock it off just for today?” I grunted.

The ship rocked and groaned all around us. The direction and force of gravity seeming to change by the microsecond. The Salish was as well built as any Martian vessel, but after our rapid-fire course corrections over the last few seconds we might as well have been inside of a bullet ourselves. A bullet trying to shoot another bullet in the depths of space. That last maneuver had to have been damn near a full earth standard gravity. Who knew how much fuel that had burned? We just had to pray our little vessel was tougher than the Olympia and could match her heading before the lights went out for us both. And that there weren’t any stealth drones in firing range that we hadn’t already spotted and countered.

In another moment, we were weightless again.

“So anyway, Terry. As I was saying, I gotta tell you something. The Word commanded it.”

“If we die out there, can you at least let me die with my own name?” I mumbled, as I resumed making my way up the ladder.

Terry meant a lot of things. Terry as in Terran. Terran as in from Earth. A Terry could be a person who studied a subject which provided no benefit to their society, but even then it carried peculiar Martian prejudices. A gender studies major on Earth could be a Terry, someone whose entire job was to uselessly complain. But a gender studies major on Mars, who tracked, honed, and crafted rituals to affirm and sanctify identify certainly was not a Terry. If you were involved in business or government and your work made the world worse or prevented other people from being productive, you might be promoted from a mere Terry to the closely related Martian insult “Anti” as in “Anti-Productive” or “Anti-Human.” No one was hated by the Red Seed more than Antis. Mostly, a Terry was an irresponsible child who refused to grow up and leave home, and whose desperate need for unearned resources and attention was killing his parents.

Most ethnic slurs from Earth history were far less insulting.

A dozen Martian Braves chuckled down the line, except for a few who gave disgruntled mutters as they wiped sunflower seeds off their pressure suits. In the long months of our voyage they’d grown used to the bickering between me and Charlie. I did my best to keep my shoulders forward and my back straight. Almost all Martians were to some degree prejudice against people from Earth, but Martian Braves practiced xenophobia like a sacred art. I had been advised fighting would only make it worse. After several rough encounters, I’d finally begun to believe it. A little bit, anyway.

“Sure, Terry. You know I like you. A lot of the Tribe said we can’t let a Terry come with us. We’ll turn our backs for one second and he’ll be putting all sorts of petroleum poisons and exogenous hormones in our food. Or he’ll start trying to make dirty movies when he realizes he’s too lazy for a proper job and then he’ll have to bring his parents over to the Tribe so they can get divorced and marry someone else, ‘cause everyone knows a Terry only has eyes for a girl if she’s also his step-sister—”

“That’s enough, Charlie!” I shouted.

The Salish sort of… stuttered all around us. As we had trained, I wrapped myself tightly to several different rungs of the crash ladder and tucked my head between my arms. We’d caught the Olympia unawares. She’d be limited in her maneuvering speed. No way all her crew were in kinetic harnesses. I mean, how could they ever have expected us to hit them out this far?

The Salish bumped wildly and I felt my insides turn to ice. I almost lost my grip at several points and if my earth hardened muscles were struggling, I knew the Braves had to be close to exhaustion. The g’s we were pulling were well beyond what automated controls in the Olympia allowed and nobody who lived their whole lives in space had muscles accustomed to this. Some pilot over there had to be executing this lunacy manually. How many necks of his own crew was that pilot breaking in these few seconds?

How much longer did we have before the Black Out? In our simulations, this part had never lasted more than a few minutes.

I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the radar display screen in the moments before we’d left the bunk.

We’d fired our mine first as planned. We had a twelve minute strategic advantage before they’d even seen our first drone swarm. That was huge and already placed them well within our Black Out radius. That’s why we could still move and our thrust maneuvers were within a range we could manage. We were almost sure to be able to course lock before EMP’s took out the fusion drives on both the Salish and the Olympia. We were just trying to shrink the gap enough to make the distance between ships passable for anyone dumb enough to try.

Modern space warfare had once been a ludicrous lose-lose scenario. Suicide drones alone had seen to that. The advent of anti-matter EMP’s had changed the paradigm. For a distance better measured in light seconds than kilometers, it was now possible to disable all the tech of your opponent while the crews resorted to the most barbaric sort of stone-age fighting. Either one side killed or captured the other by hand, or someone won the race to turn the power back on and blasted their opponents to hellfire. Either way, victories and losses were total.

Slowly the maneuvers tapered off.

We were on an ever closer parallel course.

I swallowed, hoping our nav computers were faster than theirs. The Martians had forbid us to bring an AI pilot, and had about slit my throat when I suggested doing so. Their Word forbid such.

“Hey, I said they were wrong! I defended you!” Charlie insisted, still spitting out sunflower seeds.

I didn’t know how he could even talk with so many seeds in his mouth, or how he hadn’t choked during those maneuvers. His manner was so casual you would have thought we were at a baseball game.

“I said our Terry isn’t some deranged pervert looking to ruin everything good and pure in the world because he’s bored and too lazy to go outside! Our Terry isn’t some eternal child willing to let the world burn around him before he wakes up and takes responsibility for his society. No, I said ‘Our Terry is a psychopath, who couldn’t get his rocks off killing people one at a time so he had to go and make horrible weapons for the military industrial complex. Our Terry is an irresponsible genocidal maniac who doesn’t believe people deserve to live free lives so he built doomsday weaponry for dictators. But hey, Terry is on our side now so that means no step-sisters of any kind!’ So, anyway, back to that thing the Word said I gotta tell you.”

The ship rocked, harder than ever this time as our nav computers fired millisecond quick course corrections to tighten our course with the Olympia. I had to put both arms on the railing to keep from falling down the crash ladder. For a minute, even Charlie, who would no doubt one day talk trash on his way to the afterlife, could do nothing but hang on for dear life.

We were still again, moments later.

Then, just as he had been during the first Black Out that still haunted my memory, when all the Earth had gone to hell in a hand basket, Striker appeared.

If you had forced a group of children to binge-watch old 2D action movies from the 1980’s and then asked them to imagine the toughest, meanest, most hard-ass soldier ever born then Striker would have been something close to the class average. Though no one had said so, I suspected his nickname was because he always had an expression like you could strike a match on his jaw. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but God I hated him.

We were both from Earth and both military men in our fashion. Yet we could not have been less alike. It was a testament to his menacing demeanor that no one in the Red Seed had ever even dreamed about calling him Terry.

“We are minutes from detonation, team! Helmets on. We need to be in the hik, ASAP. Every second we delay after Black Out increases the odds of missing the Olympia. Unless you want to be Death Vectored you better snap to! Charlie, spit out the rest of those goddamn seeds. I need you combat effective the second we launch. They could have a fast-follow drone on a kill signal trigger trailing outside EMP blast range and I need you eyes up.”

“You got it, Chief,” said Charlie.

In a very businesslike manner, Charlie turned his head and pulled back his lower lip and spit an absurdly large number of sunflower seeds into a small plastic sack. He released it. The sack made its way to the neighboring crash ladder like a slow motion cannonball and then struck there held by the cohesion of Charlie’s saliva. His helmet was on a moment before it had time to stick. I made sure to do likewise before Striker took anymore notice of me.

I had nothing to fear. Striker was already making his way further down the line, throwing himself along the crash ladder like a gorilla, fearless of course corrections. His muscle tone was still as good as it had been on Earth, though I had no idea how that was possible short of wildly illegal gene modifications and surely the Red Seed didn’t respect him enough to inject him with that kind of tech. He knew I was in this until the end, same as him. He’d seen to that.

I quickened my pace to the launch bay, keeping two points of contact with the rungs of the crash ladder at all times. A dozen Braves did the same, all of us focused on forward movement. The recycled air of my suit smelled like what I figured one of the forests back in my grandfather’s day smelled like. The air recycling was Martian bio-tech, a lining in my suit that scrubbed carbon dioxide and recycled it as oxygen faster than any natural plant, technology unmatched by anything on Earth. Even without tanks, I was good for up to a week to stay suited, and all it required was some liquid that smelled suspiciously like chicken broth. I understood the now slight broth smell would worsen and eventually replace the forest smell the longer I remained in my pressure suit. I was not looking forward to that.

Charlie slapped my shoulder to signal we had hit the launch bay. We could no longer hear each other with helmets on, so I let myself go limp as he pulled me over and then I did the same for the man behind me. Charlie scrambled to the hik at a rapid pace, crawling like a spider through a web of hastily strung crash ladders. The air-recycling system in my suit was the least impressive piece of Martian bio-tech I’d seen since leaving Earth. Every Martian Brave of the Red Seed was nearly seven feet tall. At a mere six feet, I was wearing a suit that had originally belonged to Charlie’s daughter. They had the audacity to claim it was all natural.

Before Mars-Earth relations had gone to hell and information exchange was still somewhat transparent the IQ of every member of the Red Seed had been measured to be exactly 100. Not the average, the individual measurements. As in, every single person taking the test had scored 100. The normal bell curve distribution had been traded in favor of a straight horizontal line. As a middle finger to the Earth authorities attempting to shut down the Red Seed genetic engineering programs, it had been wildly effective. I’d seen studies that estimated their average IQ, in Earth terms, had to have been at least something like 225 to accomplish that feat.

The Red Seed didn’t need me for my brains or even my earth-hardened muscles. They needed me for my biometrics. The reason Striker had dragged me along on this mission was simple. I’d been part of the team that had built the Olympia before it was hijacked by the Middle Kingdom.

In only another minute, I found myself strapping into the hik. We had a few more bumps but the harnesses were enough to keep any of us from breaking a bone. I still thought of the thing as a canoe, but even that was too grand a name. It was a simple piece of wood with some supplies strapped to it and a few places to sit, a hollowed beam of what was often called Space Spruce, but which in reality was a cousin of teak. Our stupid, stupid spaceship. Even warriors in the stone-age had higher technology than this thing. When the EMP finally detonated the danger would come from being spotted by a fast-follow drone honing in on our vessel. For that reason, we could bring absolutely nothing metal on our journey for fear it would be visible on radar.

I finished securing my place behind Charlie at the head of the hik and tried to keep myself from shaking. Not from the course corrections this time but sheer terror. The hik was long and narrow, only wide enough for one man to sit behind the other, and carved with ancient Salish artwork of whales and crows and a hundred other little figures I’d seen since being taken into their company. The Red Seed looked at every surface as a chance to celebrate their heritage. I hooked my carbon wire to the back of Charlie’s helmet. A little plastic spring kept the wire taut. It was the same principle that allowed children to turn two tin cans into makeshift telephones. There were no electronics, or any non-biological modern technology anywhere. Nothing that could be picked up on any scanning technology for any of the fast-follow drones trailing the mighty Olympia. At the other end of the hik was a drive sled, but we all called it the bow. The hik was the arrow.

As soon as lights went out we were going to be shot into space so, so fast.

I hoped I didn’t puke in my pressure suit again. That had only been in the first training exercise, but still it had been one of the worst experiences of my life. I hadn’t done it more than that first time, but then it had all been pretend still. There was no one to save me now if I did it again.

“Sound check, Darryl” I said.

“Sound check confirmed, Terry” said Charlie.

All the other men piled in.

“Sound check, Medicine Man,” the man behind me laughed.

“Sound check confirmed, Greg,” I replied.

When I’d first landed on Mars and met the Red Seed, Charlie had made sure to tell me the ultra secret sacred tribal names of every Brave. Greg had been the first one to crack and let me in on the joke. They didn’t have any secret sacred tribal names at all. That had been before I’d gotten to know Charlie well.

Minutes stretched.

We were in a vacuum but I swear I could hear the arc of all that power slamming through the Salish. Some of the Red Seed claimed to understand how it worked but I wasn’t so sure the AI that made the damn thing hadn’t rewritten a couple of Laws of Physics to make it work. Not for the first time in my life, I wished I’d been born before the Advent when the most dangerous things you could run into had been conceived and built by human beings.

The lights went out.

The launch bay doors cranked open. I’d almost forgotten we brought along a mechanic just for that purpose. I couldn’t remember his name but he was there turning a literal crank to open the doors. We waited a silent three minutes, so tense that not even Charlie spoke, then I saw a bright burst of light outside the open launch bay doors. The Olympia had just ejected its anti-matter core and the particles were colliding with the stellar winds. Our own core followed another moment later, but I could only see it in reflections on the bulkheads outside the launch bay doors.

Either the Olympia’s EMP had fired first or ours had. The end result either way was simultaneous Black Out. Two ships sailing in space with no power, traveling in the straight line trajectories they’d been under the moments before losing engines.

Now it was a race.

We would launch ourselves across the dark space between ships, hoping to arrive before a trailing cargo drone of precious back-up chips. Every ship had one traveling stealth at a safe distance, usually a three day follow time. Once that drone docked, each ship’s crew of mechanics would rush to manually reboot and restart their anti-matter drives. All the while working against failing life-support and who knew what other catastrophes. Whoever rebooted first could either blast the other ship into a million pieces or else provide deadly support in taking the enemy as salvage.

We would only delay a minute, time enough to leave the anti-matter trailing behind us so we didn’t cook to death if a solar flare kicked up, knowing that no doubt someone over there was doing desperate things like venting atmosphere to try to take us off a parallel course. If we missed, there would be no second chances. We’d float off into the void forever, beyond hope of recovery until our life support failed. Death Vectored, as the Martian’s styled it.

I was not prepared for what lay ahead. I could not imagine it, though I somehow I had found myself committed to this action. It seemed my whole life I had been a ship moving without its own engine. Doing one thing after another, mechanically, without a will to steer me. Except for Penny. I had chosen her only to lose her down the Well. Now I was not different than this dead ship moved only by the actions of others.

Space is impossibly vast. Our journey to the Olympia would not take minutes, or hours, but days. Days floating through the abyss. How had I done this to myself?

We lurched forward, like the start of a roller coaster. Just like a roller coaster. My heart pounded so hard I could feel it in the tips of my fingers. I felt faint.

“Hey Charlie, what was it the Word wanted you to tell me?” I shouted.

Anything to not focus on the forward motion. Anything not to imagine an eternity falling through space. I didn’t even stop to wonder this was the first time Charlie had ever given me a message straight from the Red Seed’s bizarre Space God.

“Oh, nothing. Just, something it told me the first time I had to do something that was really scary.”

Just like that we left the launch bay. Darkness surrounded us. Nothing tethered us any longer to anything I had evolved to understand as normal. We fell through the air and never hit the ground. There was no ground. There was only the night sky now, forever. My whole body screamed that it was wrong, that there was supposed to be a ground and a sky but there was nothing. Nothing but stars.

Far ahead, so far I couldn’t even see it, lay the Olympia and an impossible feat left to perform. My stomach was in my throat, next to my heart. I had to pretend I was brave enough for this. If I could pretend, maybe I wouldn’t throw up in my suit again. Maybe I could pretend to be someone brave enough to survive this and atone for having left the only woman I ever loved to rot back on Earth. Maybe I could make my pitiful, wretched life mean something.

“What’s that?” I asked.

I sounded scared even to myself.

“Don’t be a pussy,” Charlie laughed.

FIVE YEARS EARLIER

Striker was all smiles and charm the night of the Black Out, and for a psycho space-killer remarkably funny even if he wasn’t trying to be. Penny must have thought so at least because she had barely stopped laughing from the moment we all sat down for dinner. Striker had been my ZGJ sparring partner for six months in lunar orbit. We’d kept ourselves entertained by throwing each other around an empty water container we’d converted into a makeshift dojo while the rest of the crew lost themselves in VR sims of Earth. Call me a glutton for punishment, but I had found keeping myself active by trying to avoid getting choked out by a three-hundred pound gorilla while practicing Zero Gravity Jiu-Jitsu preferable to pretending to be the sultan of an imaginary harem and then letting a strange mechanical pump bring me to climax.

Even among the Mish, I was strange.

Striker and I weren’t quite friends even then but were friendly. You’d think with there being almost no one else in the world like either of us that we would have become close, but there was always a distance to Striker I knew better to encroach. He’d appeared in my life at the perfect time when I’d needed a companion. We were close enough to be on friendly terms and yet we knew that we were in some ultimate sense incompatible, like two animals of different kinds who had found themselves by coincidence at the same watering hole. He had his boundaries and I had mine, but back then I certainly had no inclination that he’d inserted himself into my life on purpose.

“So you’ve met them, then? The Space Mormons?” Penny asked.

I would have been so jealous of the way Penny leaned across the table if her free hand hadn’t held mine so tightly. There’d never been any doubt between us. Strange as that was, bewildering as our entire relationship had been, and as often as my family begged me to break up with her because she was nuts, we were the kinds of crazy that went together. Like a hand in a glove. Maybe in another time our differences would have mattered more but in the age in which we lived we were the same in all the ways that mattered. It was the opposite of my relationship with Striker. Penny and I were different on the surface but the same underneath. Like how the same plant potted in two different kinds of soil could take on two wildly different appearances, but still be the same species.

“Well, begging your pardon, they don’t call themselves that, ma’am. Space Mormons is kind of a goof we use back here down the Well. That’s gravity well, if you get my meaning.”

Part of why Penny laughed was how difficult it was to get Striker to speak for more than a few sentences. He seemed uneasy with her, like a shy kid being forced to talk to a friendly teacher. It was incongruous with his stature and I found myself wanting to laugh a few times, too. I certainly hadn’t laughed under the thousands of arm-bars I’d taken in lunar orbit so we had a debt to settle. Penny made him more uncomfortable with her small talk than I had ever done during sparring sessions.

“Go on! I’m used to all the space talk from Darryl. What else?”

Striker sighed like a kid giving a book report and that made Penny laugh all the harder.

“Well, when the colonies started there were a lot of Latter Day Saints on the first passages. That’s back when Mars was nothing but a bunch of red dirt. Everyone figured they were all crazy so they used the name Space Mormon and it stuck. That part is still true since a lot of the Martians who never left are LDS. There are all kinds of other people that fall under that term now even if they’re not Mormon at all. The Hajj, for instance, well, they get along with the LDS okay but they all went up there on money from Saudi Arabia and they still face Earth to pray to Mecca five times a day. Their leaders had an in with Musk so it was all private transport before the Mars Colonial Act was passed. There’s got to be near to a hundred and twenty-thousand of them now in New Mecca. Then there’s the Vyoma, they came later but bigger when the Indian space program finally built their own version of Starship and most of them are Hindu. There’s maybe two-hundred or so thousand of them. There’s other names for all the little groups, mostly from their home country’s space programs. Astros are all Americans for the most part. Almost a million of them now. If you go to the main space ports, they’re all the ones there mainly. Newer York is nothing but Astros as far as you can see. Lots of X’ers mixed in there too from the Musk folks and outsiders can’t much tell the difference. There are about a million of them, too. Cosmos are Russians. You get the point. They’ve all got their quirks, like most people I expect. Only ones you don’t want to call Space Mormons to their face are the Red Seed. They don’t care for that much.”

Somehow Striker managed to convey the Red Seed’s disdain for the term Space Mormon with the perfect amount of understatement to set Penny giggling again. Striker was the kind of guy who would be at home fighting tentacled monsters under the ocean and never break a sweat. Small talk was the only thing that could ever unsettle him. Penny kept babbling, totally drawn in by the mystique of other planets.

“I can read all of that! Lots of those people still pop-up on the old 2D social media. But you’ve met the Red Seed! You’re one of the few who ever have and is walking on Earth! They’re more invisible than the Amish! What are they like? As a people, I mean. Personally.”

Striker raised an eyebrow at the word “read” but then he was crazy as we were in his own way. No one read anymore. Not anyone with a NeuraLink, at least. Why read when you could “Grok” someone else’s reading? Professional reader was one of the last real jobs. None of us had a NeuraLink. Or at least,  Striker had a model so antiquated it was little different than a mobile phone from a hundred years ago. The sort of supposedly un-hackable military issue biological model made from your own tissues that had been pushed at me a hundred times in the service and which I had declined on each occasion. We three stood out more than any Amish ever had in my grandfather’s day. Penny and I were both totally natural. Even among the Mish, we were odd balls.

Striker sighed, obviously relieved to no longer be the center of attention, while the waiter did the whole song and dance that showed off how educated he was to have an actual job serving food in a restaurant. I had never understood what they spent all those years learning in waiter college, but I figured they must spent a lot of time on showing people how to hold their own hands. He never gave any signs that he was tapping into his NeuraLink for help with the menu or anything, though, which was a feat of memory few modern men could achieve. This place was known for the all human touch from the food to the service. They even washed the dishes by hand. Probably had taken the waiter eight years to get a doctorate in hospitality to win the job. If the place had gone anymore Luddite it might have been called Amish, but somehow Penny and I thought were both too modern for that kind of a thing.

We Mish are like the origin of our name. Mish mash. A whole bunch of contradictions held together with baling wire. There was no better term for all those people who had decided to more or less halt their adoption of technology to the level it had been just prior to the Advent.

“I would like a steak please. From a cow. You got those, right?” I grunted.

The waiter nodded. I’d been hunting deer for meat since late in grade school. My dads were naturalists, at least, and swore off all the genetically prepared stuff. Enough of the Mish felt the same that we’d been able to successfully fight legislation from Wireheads to shut down hunting rights. Cow was something else, though. Raised up to be killed. There was almost nothing like that anymore.

“Yes, our beef is ethically sourced from stock that has been modified to be unable to feel pain and—“

“That’s fine. I’ll eat it. Rare, please,” I added.

Striker did a better job pretending to listen. And Penny did a wonderful warm and caring customer in a restaurant performance.

I hated the whole experience, generally. It struck me as disingenuous and felt somehow like prostitution what with trying to force an inorganic connection between two strangers, but Penny ate it up and I guess I took it as my job just to buy her an expensive meal wherever she wanted before I had to leave on a long trip. We were all pretending we couldn’t just print whatever we wanted at home. Or that having a robot serve it to us would be somehow different. I would eat their cow steak, sure, but I couldn’t tell the difference between what they’d serve me and what I could print back home. That’s what places like this were for, pretending. Pretending that we still lived in a world that made sense where what you did for a living was tied to your survival. It only ever made me think of the Relationship Economy and how much I hated human interaction being the fundamental driver of an economic system. Still, you had to respect someone who chose to have a job, whatever it was. It was too easy to do nothing in those days.

“You know you could just walk into a restaurant in the old days and get hired as a waiter with no experience, right?” I muttered.

“They also used to let you own a pet without a training license. The world’s changing,” Striker said.

“Well, maybe I also think we should be able to own dogs without having to train for four years first,” I mumbled.

I let the conversation drop. I had a tendency to go off on rants and I didn’t want to ruin the dinner. One of my great great grandfathers had been a podcaster before the Advent so I supposed it was genetic. I wished my desire for a desperate and underpaid but authentic workforce didn’t seem like such a forced cope. I had one of the last real jobs in the universe, after all. A job that only a human could do. And it still made me feel useless.

“Come on now, I haven’t forgotten. What are they like? The Red Seed, I mean.” Penny pressed.

“Mean as hell.” Striker response was instant.

“Darryl says you were there for almost a year. You were the only one they let walk out of his own free will let after they kicked out the census teams.”

Striker took a sip of whiskey and shot me a glance out of the corner of his eye. I shrugged. He knew Penny and I didn’t have secrets. I’d explicitly told him so before he’d told me about his experience.

“Well, ma’am, I don’t think the Tribe would have taken too kindly to me if I hadn’t accepted their invitation to walk out right at that moment. The inspectors got to be a bit… pushy and I guess the Tribe felt they needed to make an example. I may have walked out later but best guess is that it was only about ten minutes difference. So, I suppose you could say I got to know them a bit on the Census. As much as anyone not born into the Tribe anyway. Enough for ten minutes of courtesy in the end.”

Penny signaled for him to go on and her eyes had that faraway look again. The kind of look that would send my mother into hysterics, begging me to break up with her and work my way into a respectable polycule or even to buy an AI girlfriend. Or just be alone and miserable but at least pump myself full of life extension drugs so I could keep her and my dads entertained in their dreary, miserable immortality.

“Well, I don’t know where to start. Almost all the first colonies failed, you know. Mars seemed to be DOA less than a decade after people started going there. You can find old 2D’s of comedians making jokes about it all. No one thought we’d even make it to Mars for a long time. Then suddenly, we could get there, we could bring enough stuff to live, but what we didn’t have a lot of was people with the guts to make it all work. The Mormons stuck first, like I said. They believed in it, you see. They believed in the mission, that we were are the reproductive organ of the Earth. That it’s our job to carry life out into the universe, that we have to work to sustain the species.”

Penny mumbled, “a pain not of our choosing,” an old line from some ancient YouTube or Substack philosopher or another, I expect, and though it had barely been a whisper it seemed to breathe life into Striker and he seemed excited for the first time that night. I still don’t know if they were reading the same stuff. I suppose I should have asked.

“Yeah! The people who just went there to mine or whatever, well, they didn’t have anything to sustain them when things got hard and they left. Hell, to this day, it’s still a miserable dusty rock looking to kill you the second you stop paying attention. The people who were only in it for the money didn’t last a decade. The Mormons believed in what it was doing to them, though. They believed that Mars was forging them in the same way they were forging it. They were the first ones. The Red Seed came next, even before the Hajj. All of them believe in that, by the way. The Covenant, you’ve heard of it, I’m sure.”

For the first time that night Striker was electric, speaking with the same confidence with which he fought. This was his live-wire, the thing he could speak about without having to pretend to be anything other than a warrior. Even our over-credentialed waiter stopped to eavesdrop, though it could probably get him disbarred from the waiter association or whatever. This was a kind of animism you didn’t find often and the only place I’d ever seen anything like it was old 2D’s where people expressed patriotic fervor.

“They still talk about Casino Mike the way the Amish talk about Jesus. The Salish call him the Crow, like he was an incarnation of their trickster god. They keep his social media footprint locked up like its the Bible. Some call him the Cat Herder, too, because the tribes weren’t organized back then like they are now. No one even thought that was a remote possibility. They were all different peoples before he came, divided by space and by history. They say he was a man so slick he’d steal everything you owned, tell you about it, and you’d thank him for doing it. Casino Mike came made his fortune, then he gathered up the Navajo, the Cherokee, the Iroquois, the Hopi… too many to name. He gathered up all of the tribes and he said there could be a new home for them among the stars. He said that if all the other peoples of the Earth were content to stay there and be devoured by their appetites that he would plant a Red Seed on a Red Planet until it grew to sprout Red Men to walk over all the worlds in the universe. Last thing anyone expected was for a bunch of tribesmen to spontaneously organize and put down roots on Mars, but they did. Goddamn did they ever. Fierce as hellcats and twice as mean, they carved their homes out of stone and dust. Their legends says that he won free passage for all the tribes in a game of dice with Musk back when the Star Man was crazy from old age, but I don’t think that’s true. It was the Mars Colonization Act the same as everyone, but the Red Seed talks about it like it’s true. They put themselves at the center of every story. It’s hard to explain. Have you ever run a sim where you’re back in olden times? Like when you’re in a castle or something and you have to defend it. They’re a people. One people. I mean, everyone on Mars is like that more than here. Like the Amish, maybe? The Red Seed more than anyone, though. They are a people and they know it and it’s them against the universe. They have the temerity to win, too.”

Penny’s smile was genuine.

“Well, Striker, glad to finally meet you. I’m afraid I haven’t played any sims. But them being a people, is it anything like us and the Middle Kingdom?”

Striker shook his head.

“Nah, they have a purpose. It’s deeper than paranoia about what some other group of people is doing. Like how the Amish have more kids than almost anyone else even though the Wireheads could blast them all away with nukes. They don’t care. If we hadn’t discovered life extension the Amish would have taken over the country. Hell, they still might. The point is, they know who they are. The Red Seed is that way. They believe in something, all of them together, and it keeps them strong.”

The waiter coughed.

“Pardon me, sir, are you a Space Marine?”

Striker reached out for a piece of bread that had been placed on the table as an appetizer. He’d been too polite to eat while addressing Penny. Now he spoke with a full mouth, evidently not including this in the category of rude behavior so long as he wasn’t speaking to a woman directly.

“Who’s asking?”

“I’m a Pilgrim, sir. Or at least, I’m saving up to be one.”

“You’re no Pilgrim until you’ve been up the Well and I’m no Space Marine.” Another man might have let his sleeve fall or something to look tough. As it was, the tattoo of a seal in a spacesuit playing a banjo on Striker’s forearm remained hidden. Only men in the Machine Counter-Intelligence Orbital Seal Teams got those. It was pretty much the last actual military force on Earth. Striker had no need to look tough. In a world where almost everything was recorded, and you could get an AI to spin you up a custom sim about anything you wanted almost before you could finish asking for it, MCI headquarters was one of the last places in the solar system under a surveillance blackout. I’d never been there but I heard credible rumors that they wrote out all their paperwork out longhand with pencil.

“Sir, I don’t mean any disrespect. I can tell you’ve been up the Well. You’ve got that look. Another year here and I can make fare.” For the first time I noticed that our waiter was young. I should have noticed straight off but he couldn’t have been much older than twenty. I’d assumed cosmetic gene therapy from the passing glance I’d given him before, because a twenty year old waiter was as rare as a twenty year old surgeon had once been. Striker seemed to notice the same thing.

“You sponsored? Martian immigration is more than just paying to get there. You have to have someone willing to take you in. There’s people to this day who still don’t know that only to get sent back once they get there.”

“No sir, but I have an application in to join the Bradburyville colony.”

“Why would you want to live in that Musk forsaken hell-hole?”

“Everyone else auto-rejected my application, sir.”

“What are your qualifications? Other than waitering, I mean. Waiter college isn’t very useful up there.”

“I’m taking hydroponics and self-sustaining ecology, sir.”

“You taking the Mars courses? Earth courses aren’t worth toilet paper.”

“Yessir.”

“Well, too bad. Virtual learning is barely toilet paper, too. Let me see your hands.”

The waiter, the boy really because that’s what he was, obliged. Striker stabbed the boy’s palms with his fork. The boy flinched but he didn’t cry out.

“Tell you what, I’m going on a mission to Lunar orbit a few weeks from now. I’ll be back down the Well in six months. When I come back, we’ll all visit this restaurant again. You go do something to toughen up. This isn’t a test for brains, you understand? This is a test for balls. I don’t care if you spend your time lifting up rocks and carrying them from one end of a field to another, but if I can jab your hand like that when I get back and you don’t flinch I’ll put in a good word for you with the Astros at Unum or Newer York, your choice. They won’t notice one more body there. That’s where a kid like you needs to start. You wouldn’t make it in a place like Bradburyville.”

The waiter who was certainly not offended nodded eagerly.

“Anything else I can do to prepare, sir?”

Striker thought on it a moment.

“I want to see that you’ve at least imagined regretting your decision when I get back. Go sleep with a few girls. You’re giving up a utopia your ancestors only dreamed about. I’m not recommending you to get sent up the Well if you are just going to get sent right back down it again. My reputation is mud if I send a Terry up there.”

Striker returned to some angry bread chewing. Almost off-handedly he gestured for the young boy to leave. As simple as that, the boy left.

“That was kind of you to offer,” Penny said.

Striker snorted.

“He won’t make it. He won’t be here when we come back. Mark my words,” Striker grumbled.

“He’ll know he can’t hack it a little quicker. It’ll help get it out of his system. That boy is Star Drunk. They all think it will be easy until they get their first few blisters. Or the first time they have to Walk the Void. That’s when they understand it’s not just about the mind. You’ve got to have it in your guts, too,” I said.

“Nah, your soul,” Striker corrected.

I nodded agreement.

“Amen to that,” I said and raised my glass in the air.

I took a long pull from my drink, something I normally would not have done if I hadn’t been trying to keep up appearances considering the company, which is probably why Striker thought it was the perfect time to ask Penny when we were planning to have children.

Hey, Striker may not have had anything to prove but I did.

“Oh, we’re waiting for marriage. Darryl understands my chastity is very important to me,” Penny replied.

… and my giant manly bad-ass drink traveled from my esophagus, back up my sinuses and came out of my nostrils like dragon fire. It hurt like nothing else on Earth.

That’s how I missed the moment of the Black Out.

I know the time exactly because it’s when the clocks stopped working. All the clocks on the West Coast of the United States. 7:43:31pm, the exact time to the second that the Middle Kingdom struck at Hawthorne.

Later Penny told me it was like the whole city wept. Then it boomed, from several million robot brains all bursting in their casing at the same moment. When I could finally opened my eyes to see, with Penny patting me lovingly around the nose with a wetted handkerchief because she was too nervous to do anything else, I saw Striker’s back as he stood to survey the horizon. There was not a light on in the city. The wailing started then, and I remember that with all my senses. It was like you could see the despair in the air. All those people, Wireheads, who had been stuck in sims for decades suddenly waking up in vats. And then the others… the unlucky ones who had real metal wires running through their brains instead of genetically engineered ligand rich cells… those poor bastard’s brains just cooked. That close to ground zero, some of the older folks with real metal fillings said that even their teeth sparked.

When the pain cleared, I realized then that Striker wasn’t looking at the city anymore. He was hovered over the waiter, with his fingers pressed to the boy’s neck. I slowly walked toward them keeping my hand tightly around Penny’s. Blood poured from the boy’s eyes, nose, and ears. It didn’t make sense that he had a unit that old given his age, but later Penny and I would figure he had to be an Amish kid who had left the Ordnun on rumpsringa. Facts were facts. He must have had a metal NeuraLink because his brain had cooked. I can still see his eyes half bulging out of his head in my memory.

“Looks like you ain’t getting the chance to prove yourself, chief,” Striker said with a grimace.

I don’t like to think about the choices we made that night. I want to say it was shock but it was something colder than that. We wanted to live and we didn’t want to die. So how many living people did we walk past on the way to the apartments Penny and I shared?

I’ll never know.

Hopefully none of them had children and that’s the part that bothers me most. No way we could have dragged ten-thousand atrophied bodies out of there. If we heard a baby cry I think we would have stopped but we weren’t tested on it. There were a lot of Wireheads in that neighborhood, and we’d bought there because the property was dirt cheap. I don’t think I’m lying to myself. I hope not.

Being who we were, we all had bug out bags ready and enough to spare for Striker.

We made it out of the densest areas of the city before the panic started and blocked all the roads. There are a lot of Mish still, even if there are more Wireheads. We had bikes. Penny and I had a two seater. Striker took the spare. We were the fastest things fleeing the city that night. Striker especially, like he had been prepared for such an eventuality.

It wasn’t until four hours later that the Middle Kingdom made their landing and we saw the explosions on the horizon. No one was fighting back but apparently they were worried our defense turrets might somehow get rebooted.

Neither Striker nor I were foolish to run toward the flames. With Hawthorne gone, the nearest place for either of us to go and make a difference was Starbase. If that wasn’t gone as well.

Penny was first to point at the lights on the moon. Twinkling little lights, that I’d once called an abomination to the night sky. Now, they were like silver ingots.

“There’s still light on Luna. They didn’t get everyone,” she said.

We were halfway to Vegas when rumor caught up to us that all the devastation had been wrought by a single EMP device. Enemy propaganda, mimeographed onto yellow pamphlets, dropped out of ancient gas-powered prop-planes spread the message. The Forbidden Emperor, we later learned it was called. In English anyway. Now, it’s more famous than Fat Boy or Little Man from three hundred years ago. An AI designed anti-matter super weapon and one of the earliest models of anti-matter EMP. A more modern device would have darkened the world.

The yellow pamphlet promised that there were many more like it.

Penny and I were married in a little chapel off the strip by a Mish priest. I think we did it mostly to tell the Middle Kingdom to go to hell. Also, we loved each other and we knew how much that meant now that the world was at war. That night she said she would have preferred for me to convert first, but with recent events there was no time for me to embrace God the old fashioned way.

I admit, for a few hours that night at least, that I believed. If I could hold her again, perhaps such faith would never leave me. She’s gone now, though, like a precious penny lost forever down the Well.