Fiction Story #4

1/4/11

WANJING: City of Endurance

Coming off that colony ship, I felt a strange mixture of torture and release, like a sailor coming back to port, knowing that he’s safe – and at the same time, missing his lover. I mean, just about anything beats prison, and Chinese prison is worse than that, so when the Powers That Be offered to commute my sentence to time already served if I’d agree to board the colony ship for Wan Jing, I figured – hey, it’s gotta be better than here. Hell, anywhere’s better than here, right?

Yeah, well, I didn’t know.

Sitting in the cargo transport, strapped into the netting, I should’ve frakking known. The ship was ancient – even by Galactic Exploration standards. Some clown had even dug up an old analog clock with real moving hands that ticked off the seconds and minutes and hours as we rocketed through space towards that horrible little ball of dirt. It’s where the old expression “clockwise” came from.

When I asked one of the handlers what the story was with that clock, he just smiled that big, gap-toothed, I’d-love-to-punch-him-in-it grin of his and said, “That? That’s what we use for a fan!” and proceeded to laugh himself to a new color.

I walked right into that one. He had probably waited months for someone to ask him that.

And so, for days, I ate and slept and sat and stared, strapped in to the cargo webbing, along with the cattle, and cargo, and the 340 other prisoners/workers strapped down in the hi-density webbing of the cargo ship. We all got fairly comfortable after a few days—or as comfortable as you can be while living 24/7 in total view of complete strangers. Frakk it. They were all cons, too, probably, and more than a few inmates. When we needed to use the facilities, we used a little tube that protruded from below each of us from the deck at our feet. No solids in our diet, so we just needed the one tube. We all joked at first that our piss was being recycled to the guys below us as water. When the handlers extended tubes for us to drink from that extended out of the ceiling, nobody joked anymore.

Man has long had an obsession with exploring the universe. When mining operations ramped up on Luna back in ‘32, I never saw the glory (or the point) in that. It’s a rock. A lifeless, grey rock. So what?

But, Mars — now, that’s a different story. When the first ships went to colonize that mysterious red planet, everybody watched the newsfeeds for reports on their progress. We cheered in the streets when they landed safely. When the first reports came back of initial terraforming progress, it was like everybody’s team had just won the Championship all at once.

(To be continued...)