The sky looks clear, it’s a hot summer day and the scorching sun turns the far spectators into a shapeless, quivering, impatient amalgamation of colors. Faint sounds reach us, coming from distant loudspeakers; the exact words are lost on me, though I couldn’t care less about what they have to say.
I turn my gaze to the three inmates walking before me; they march with their wrists firmly secured behind their backs and their heads pathetically bowed down, and I do too, it’s a force of habit. In front of them the astronaut accompanying us confidently waves her hand at the drones, showing her impeccably white teeth framed within a perfect smile.
Reaching from behind, I hear the rhythmic footsteps of the guard. He’ll be making sure we don’t cause any problems during our journey, which sounds ridiculous only because it is: do they expect us to hijack the rocket and drive it straight into the fucking sun? Obviously, we’re already at the mercy of our navigator; the best we can do is cross our fingers and hope she doesn’t mess up.
I watch the inmates get enveloped by the darkness as they enter the hatch, I pause. Birds are chirping; the sun rays force me to squint, I can’t make out any detail except the deep blue tint of the sky. I want to savor this moment, it’s the last I’ll see of planet earth. Something lands on my shoulder before shoving me into the door. “Move it.” I almost trip on the hinge, but manage to catch myself on a handle rooted into the wall. The guard stares down at me and look— one of the first things we learn in prison is to never look them in the eyes, the guards, unless you’ve got a death wish or something. But right now I’m filled with such an indomitable hatred for this guy that it doesn’t really matter. He’s about one foot taller than me, somewhat bulky, in his mid-twenties so he’s about half a decade younger than myself. As I’m studying him, his face curiously contorts, I barely have time to realize he’s scowling at me as I feel every ridge under his military boot press against my bottom. Must have been hard to resist, the bastard, watching me all hunched over like that. Like a sailor to a siren, he couldn’t escape the call of my already humiliating pose. I hit the cold pavement shoulder first and I feel my joint push outward in an unnatural position, for just a moment, before slotting back into place. I hiss through my clenched teeth while tears escape my eyes, tracing a wet path along the cheeks. It hurts, but I feel lucky not to have fallen on my jaw.
“Are you daft?” He says, not expecting a response, as he turns to the touch screen next to the door. He smothers his wireless ID card onto the display and with a chirp the machine accepts it. Orange lights begin blinking as the air lock slowly closes itself; it slots into place and hisses loudly before a metallic clank reverberates through the padded walls. Not one sound reaches us anymore, only the piercing, quiet humming of the ventilation system.
I gather myself, trying to move my sore shoulder, feeling relieved that at least it’s not outright broken. A metallic sound catches my attention: the astronaut has begun climbing the ladder leading to the top of the rocket and as I try to peek upwards my aching joint throbs in horror. The guard proceeds to free us from our handcuffs and it takes us about ten excruciating minutes to reach the cockpit, where two columns of exactly three seats each await our arrival. They look comfortable enough and the dim gray of the fabric compliments neatly the rest of the room’s grim palette, which only serves to inch me ever closer to a crying fit. But I manage to push down the knot developing in my throat before it has a chance to hold my dignity captive and I take a seat. The layout of the room reminds me of a small theater that closed down when I was little; it had two floors and was somewhat larger than this one, but not by a lot. I nervously keep fidgeting while waiting for something to happen; the only thing keeping me company are the metallic voices coming through the speakers embedded into the astronaut’s neckband. I don’t understand what they’re saying, nor are they supposed to be of any meaning to me; just numbers and lists of components that seem to be in working condition.
Bored and anxious beyond anything a breathing exercise would be able to fix, I glance right, toward the other side of my row; a tall raccoon dog sits quietly in his seat, looking pensive. His body almost totally still, the only life sign giving away his sentience are the paced movements of his deep breaths; other than that he might as well be mistaken for a life-sized puppet. The fur around his arms is long and fuzzy, hiding the strong frame buried underneath; The orange suit he’s been given can hardly contain all of his bulk and it’d look funny if it wasn’t sad. His eye turns toward me, revealing a bright amber pupil; his facial expression blank and willfully deprived of meaning. I realize I’ve been staring at him for a while, it’s a habit of mine and it usually ends in me getting caught just like that; kind of an inoffensive vice, but rude nonetheless. So I slowly bring my attention back to my own intertwined thumbs, trying to be nonchalant about it.
Still, I move on to my next target, to the cobra sitting in front of him. His scales catch the light and reflect it in turn, giving his greenish color a vibrant, yellowish undertone. He’s much more slender than the raccoon dog, but the lack of legs, made up for by the huge, slithering tail, confers him a lot of added mass. I haven’t had much experience with his species, rarely saw them in the flesh; so I’m a little intimidated by the sheer length of him. He looks composed, inquisitively studying the room in front of him with eyes made of gold. His clothing is pretty much made up of an elongated variant of our shirts, reaching far below the navel, where his hips are supposed to be, like a dress of some sort. Below that there’s just his tail, naked and lubricated; folded onto itself in order to take as little space as possible, and yet occupying a good portion of the small corridor nonetheless. I decide it’s for the better to leave it at that, not wanting to catch his attention; not quite out of politeness but more from a feeling of uneasiness he manages to evoke in me, though I can’t quite put my finger on it.
The last inmate remaining is sitting right in front of me. I can’t see him all that well from here, but I’m afraid I recognized him long before we got to the rocket. His name is Lauro, he’s a goat and we used to go to middle school together. Of course, he looks much different now: puberty has gifted him with a stronger jawline and a leaner body, not to mention the constantly-pissed-off face and pinkish vibes in complete contrast with the shy and insecure kid I used to know. That being said, he’s either sitting awkwardly or he has not grown much taller during those twenty-something years. He was a good kid but, in hindsight, I wasn’t; I wouldn’t blame him for holding a grudge. I’m perplexed as to how he of all people managed to end up with a life sentence on his head; guess people change, a lot. What’s even more perplexing is how we both ended up being chosen for the expedition, the chances are slim to say the least and I guess that these things happen, but it’s hard not to let my mind wander in search of meaning and causality. Randomness just isn’t a good explanation in the search for closure.
I notice a familiar, rhythmic pattern coming through the voice box, but I can’t quite understand what it’s saying. Until, I do. “…four… three… two… one.” The machine groans and roars as the bulkiest demons hell has to offer start pulling on this powerless body of mine downwards, towards the depths of the earth. I try to fight it, to reach out for anything to hold onto, if only to stop feeling so powerless against the overwhelming might of the g-force holding me in place. I even try to shout, but the sound never reaches my ears, only the low, rumbling screams of the engine. As I lose track of time, the seconds seem to slow to a crawl, everything happening both too fast and in slow motion. I’m unaware of how much time passes as I realize that my body changes direction; no longer being forcefully pulled into the seat, it now seems to be raptured in the opposite direction, pulling ever so slightly onto the seatbelt. Having escaped the greedy clutches of planet earth, possessively holding onto its ungrateful offspring, we begin floating in space.
My body reacts to the lack of gravity, I feel my limbs trying to leap out in order to catch myself as if I were falling. It’s not a pleasant sensation at all; in fact my stomach muscles start to collapse on themselves as I hear myself retching through my shaking fingers. If they hadn’t made me spend so much time in those zero-g chambers during the weeks leading up to the launch I would have definitely made a mess. I look around once more, feeling a little ashamed about the sounds that just came out of me. Sure enough I’m not alone in my distress: from the seat in front of me I hear Lauro’s muffled heaving; the raccoon dog seems to be trying hard to look composed, but the labored look on his face and rigid posture betray him; the cobra in front of him looks annoyed more than anything. His tail flails in the air as if trying to get a grip onto the ground beneath him, but without gravity his mass alone cannot generate traction, leaving him at the mercy of his own instincts. Glad to know we’re all kind of a mess right now.
Rowan’s torso raised and fell slowly as I took a quick glance back at him, trying to not wake him up. I was carrying a basket weaved from bamboo by our grandma; we had many like that one just idling in the attic, but that didn’t stop mom from lecturing me that I should be extra careful while handling it. I guess it was more of a threat than a warning, but she didn’t need to make it sound like one, I just knew and she was aware of that. So I carefully unloaded it into my new room, smaller than the one we used to share, but I liked the novelty of it. It was supposed to be some sort of studio where mom could get work done, but since she bought herself a laptop she just sat wherever. It got to a point where, by silent agreement, her older and much beefier desktop PC became our possession, which we used mostly to play video games. Eventually she gave up the room altogether and since I’m the older sibling I got to call dibs. After scattering my junk onto the mattress I took hold of the basket and went back to the old room, loaded the basket with more junk and turned to face the door— “You can’t have that one.” Rowan was lying in his bed, supporting himself on an elbow and looking straight at me, “You already got the computer, let me have the console at least.” Something about his phrasing ticked me off, “I’m pretty sure I can, actually. I bought it with my own money so it stands to reason that it belongs to me.” He looked furious, but kept staring at me with his mouth agape and no words to fill it with. So I waited, letting him turn the little gears in his slow little head; with each passing second his face tinted with a slightly deeper shade of red. “Why do you hate me?” Now I was baffled, looking dumbfounded with no comeback at the ready. I scoffed, but really I was taken aback. Hate, that’s a rather loaded word; but what took me by surprise wasn’t his improper use of the verb, but rather how perceptive my younger brother might have actually been. It was one of those not-too-rare moments that I was proven wrong about him: he wasn’t dumb, or not nearly as dumb as I thought. I hated being contradicted and I hated being found guilty, “Stop being overdramatic, it’s just a toy.” Somehow, that seemed to hit a nerve, his voice started trembling with anger, “It’s not about that, you know it’s not about that.” He pushed the covers away and got up, “That’s what you do, you don’t care about getting along, you just— you just manipulate people into getting what you want.” The anger started to gnaw at me precisely because he was right, because he was being reasonable while I was being a dick.
But I’d die on that hill; I could not accept being given a lesson from him of all people, “So cry about it. Show mom those pitiful tears of yours, so you can play the role of the powerless victim; then tell me who’s being manipulative.” I was sure he was about to burst, that any second now he’d give into his barely contained anger and charge at me with his weak little arms. I was ready for it; in fact I was looking forward to it; itching for an excuse to hit him back. But instead he kind of, took a deep breath and calmed down; as if he’d channeled all the poison in his system to then purge it in one long exhaling motion. “I’m done,” his voice was neutral, almost unbothered, “I could never earn your approval, no matter how hard I tried to become someone you’d be proud of; but you never liked me back. So that got me thinking, that maybe I’m not the problem, that maybe there’s nothing wrong with me; that you just hate me and there’s nothing I could ever do to change that.” A horrible feeling started creeping into me, washing over me in a thick, cold sludge of shame. I opened my mouth, not even sure about what I was going to say, but he interrupted me before I could get a word in, “You can get out of my room when you’re done and never come back in. You’re not welcome anymore.”
I jolt awake, feeling a thick, gloved hand squeezing my shoulder; it’s the guard. Behind him the other inmates are taking turns descending the ladder. “Wake up goddammit. We’re taking you to your cell.” I’m still disoriented and I barely understand what’s going on. He grunts, putting emphasis on the annoyance in his tone, “Get up!” I fumble with the belt, eventually getting it open. It doesn’t fall back down, of course, but it still surprises me; the metallic shape just kinda stays there where I dropped it. The hand slips from the top of my shoulder to my armpit and I get pulled out of my seat with barely any effort. I find myself against the bulk of the guard for a moment, before getting shoved away, towards the end of the queue for the ladder. I expect to trip up again, but instead I keep falling indefinitely, my feet never finding ground to stand on. With my arms outstretched in search of something to hold onto, I realize I’m on a direct collision course for the raccoon dog’s back. I give up trying to squirm away from my predicament as there’s nothing within arm’s reach to hold me in place, bracing myself for the embarrassment more so than the impact. As I approach him I realize just how big this guy is: while our heads are now floating at matching heights, my feet dangle just below his knees. I’m a pretty tall girl, I transitioned after puberty, so I’d say I’m a rather hefty frame of reference. I instinctively wrap myself around him, trying to make myself as soft as possible and it works surprisingly well; I feel my velocity drop to near stillness as his thick fur dampens the impact. The big guy barely moved an inch, I’m starting to hope that he didn’t feel it at all; I’d just climb down and act like nothing happened.
That’s not totally unlikely: under all this fur I can feel some serious muscle mass, with a nice cushion of fat in between; he’s like an onion, if onions were hot— he’s looking at me. Of course he is, my grubby little mole paws are shamelessly groping him, I let my mind wander too far. I guess I’m now riding a fine line between getting murdered and getting fucked; probably both, in which order though I’m not sure. “I’m uhh, still getting used to the lack of gravity, sorry.” I say, in a pitiful tone. He averts his gaze, “It’s all good.” I can feel his torso rumble under my arms as he speaks, his voice is deep, but also higher pitched than it could be, as if he’s trying to be less intimidating than he appears.
I let go of him and slowly drift away, toward a handle on the roof with which to anchor myself. We’re escorted to a section of the rocket housing four coffin sized nooks; they’re padded on the inside and there are many belts creeping out of the seams. “So, first of all, my name is Dahlia and as long as you are on this spacecraft you’re in my care.” The astronaut’s feminine voice is loud and authoritative, kind of androgynous, actually. “These are your beds, you’ll be sleeping here for the duration of the trip, which will take us nearly a week. We’ll be locking the hatches to this room as soon as I’m done going over your situation. It’s just a formality, I’m sure they’ve drilled it into you enough, so I’ll keep it short.” She gesticulates as she speaks, so she needs to steady herself every so often in order to avoid floating away. “Once we get near Venus’ orbit we’ll detach this room, which is programmed to park itself in the designated landing spot of the colony. The bottom hatch will open, leading you directly into the floating island.” Lauro interrupts her explanation as soon as there’s a pause in her monologue, “What if it fails to land? Would we just fall to our deaths?” The astronaut rolls her eyes while waving her hand dismissively, “It won’t fail. Anyway, once you get acquainted with your surroundings you’ll be expected to tend to the garden; the plants will be your primary sources of sustenance and oxygen, so it’s in your best interest to do your job well. You don’t have to bother with the maintenance of the outer shell, since most of it is fully automated; we wouldn’t allow human error to burn trillions of dollars quite literally into thin air. Still, if the alarm starts ringing it means that the air composition got messed up, which probably means that the sulfuric acid is somehow getting in; if that happens you need to act quick or the whole island will soon drop to the surface. Of course, you wouldn’t want to breathe in Venus’ atmosphere, so wear your protective gear first.” Cold sweat starts to drip down my shoulders as I get increasingly uncomfortable; I never chose to go on this mission, I was selected by some unknown committee for some equally unknown reason and that was it, my opinion from that point forward simply didn’t matter. I had gotten used to life in prison and I had learnt how to stay out of trouble; I was doing fine, until I got drafted against my will. “The mainframe will tell you about what’s wrong and where, just follow its instructions and you may be fine. That being said, we don’t expect that to happen, the whole thing is pretty solid on its own, so you can rest easy. Any questions?” The raccoon dog raises his hand, “What about the astronauts on the colony, won’t they be able to fix things if the need arises?” Dahlia looks at him with a puzzled expression. “There won’t be any astronauts, you’re on your own.” Now I’m totally confused; I look at the other inmates as we exchange glances of disbelief. Lauro butts in first, “That’s not what we’ve been told! That’s not what anyone’s been told! What about the space station orbiting Venus, is that one empty too?” Our guide rubs her forehead as if not expecting this conversation, “Right, I guess it makes sense that they didn’t tell you yet. Anyway, I already told you all that I’m allowed to share.” Lauro’s eyes are now bulging out in panic, “So that’s it? We just go there and do some gardening?” She looks at her wristwatch, not bothering to look us in the eye, “Yeah, that’s the gist of it—” Lauro keeps interrupting her, getting visibly more agitated each time, “That doesn’t add up at all. You can build a self repairing floating island on fucking Venus, but you can’t have some robots tend to the garden?” The astronaut waves over at the guard as she reaches for the top hatch, “Look, I’m just in charge of taking you to your destination, if you want answers you’ll need to ask someone else.” The cobra decides to intervene, “Then let us. If we may, I’d like to have your permission to use the radio, we’ll talk to your superior.” She shakes her head, “You may not. I wasn’t suggesting you could talk to them, I was speaking hypothetically. Anyway, that’s all the time we have for today; we’ll see you in about eight hours.” Before she completely disappears in the ceiling, the reptile manages to get a few more words in, “I’m hungry, could we at least have dinner before going to sleep?” She stops, seemingly thinking it over, the guard throws him an embittered look but says nothing, “Twenty minutes tops, then we’re locking you in for the night.”
We’re brought into a room that looks nothing like a kitchen or a dining room. There are many identical suitcases lodged into one section of the wall; Dahlia takes one out and it opens on its own since there are no locks keeping it closed. She retrieves a small plastic bag with a nozzle at one end and then pushes the suitcase towards me, “It’s dehydrated food, read the labels if you don’t understand what you’re looking at.” I choose a random bag and turn it over, the text “asparagus”is written at the top, followed by Russian and Chinese characters for presumably the same word. I don’t feel hungry right now, anything’s fine, especially since I expect these slabs of nutrients to taste as bland as they look. I offer the suitcase to Lauro since he’s closest to me. He examines my face as he takes it, but says nothing. Once each one of us has taken a dinner of their choosing, our guide slots the suitcase back into the wall. She fills her plastic bag with water and then microwaves it for less than a minute. She then reaches for some scissors magnetically fixed to the wall, and uses them to cut the bag open, decapitating the nozzle. Now she’s scooping up a meatball and it smells like real food. I’m beginning to regret my hastiness, maybe I should have taken my time going through the menu. We each take turns rehydrating and then heating our food; mine tastes okay, but I’m eyeing the raccoondog’s beef steak he’s eating with a surprising lack of finesse. That makes me think: we don’t even know each other’s name. We’re all standing at equally distant corners of the room as if greedily guarding our food; in reality, I think we’re all just outcasts who don’t know how to talk to other people. I’m not the only one noticing the awkwardness of the fleeting glances and unbearable silence filling up the room.
As if on cue, the cobra, who now seems to have gotten the hang of being in zero gravity, clears his throat: “I believe we’ve gone long enough without proper introductions, so I’ll take it upon myself to break the ice. My name is Yves Durand, pleased to make your acquaintance.” He then proceeds to take a bite out of his burger patty, followed by a mouthful of the creamed spinach he’s holding in the other hand (I did not catch that we were, in fact, allowed to take more than one thing). We raise our heads to look at each other, trying to figure out the order in which we’ll talk. We fail to tacitly figure that out, instead we just kinda stand there, with food in our hands and a dumbfounded expression draped over our faces. I take a deep breath, “My name is Briar Holloway, nice to meet you.” Short, simple and straight to the point; I feel a sense of accomplishment in having done the bare minimum without messing it up, which is kinda sad now that I think about it. “I’m Lauro.” He regurgitates those words, accompanying them with only the slightest motion of his wrist, not bothering to look or sound friendly. I don’t know how he expects to survive the rest of his life out there on Venus if he doesn’t intend to befriend us; then again, what’s left of our lives might not be too long. We all turn to the raccoon dog and I swear I can see the faintest pinkish undertone paint the inside of his ears; is he blushing? “Óliver Delgado, glad to meet you.” He says, in his rumbling voice, referring to everyone in the room and yet looking straight at me; before timidly turning his attention back to his dinner, as if trying to bury his head in the sand to make the predator disappear. With that out of the way, the room is once again filled with silence, occasionally broken by the sound of gulping and munching. “Does anyone know why, out of all the people in the penitentiary system, we’ve been chosen instead of anyone else?” I say, trying to not let the conversation die down. Initially they all just shake their heads, then Yves speaks up: “A committee was formed in order to plan for this mission. The specifics of why inmates were needed or how they were chosen has not been shared with me; but I know that there has been a rather thorough background check of some thousand prisoners or so. That’s as far as I could get them to talk.” Lauro, who’s been standing silently in his corner, crushes his empty food bag into a ball “And how do you know that? All I could get out of anyone I tried to talk to was total silence.” That has been my experience too. The reptile retorts dryly, “I’ve got friends.” Lauro, not satisfied with the answer, keeps inquiring, “Fine, but what they told you still doesn’t make sense. You say that they ran a background check on only a thousand people? That’s way too few. There are millions of us locked up in prison, did they just grab a handful and call it a day? Seems unprofessional to me.” I’ll give Yves the benefit of the doubt: “Maybe we’re just cannon fodder of sorts. Wouldn’t be above them to treat us as subhuman beings.” Or maybe that’s just my neurotic brain speaking. Óliver hums pensively, trying to get our attention, “What if they just needed something to start with? What if they weren’t interested in our skills but in our relations to one another? They wouldn’t need to look into the past of every prisoner, just the ones who know each other.” That sounds odd and kinda hard to believe, but nonetheless it seems eerily fit to explain me and Lauro being in the same room. How did he even come up with that? I instinctively glance at my old schoolmate to find him staring back. We all fall back into quietness, pondering the ramifications of the raccoon dog’s theory. Soon after, Dahlia descends the ladder, followed by the guard who’s donning his usual deadpan expression that I’ve come to despise so deeply. “Time’s up. Make sure to ball your trash as hard as you can and dispose of it into the bin behind the big guy.” She gestures towards Óliver, who then moves out of the way to reveal a tall drawer firmly set into the wall. We do as she says; I’m second to last in the line for the trash bin and as I turn my back while heading for the descending ladder I catch a glimpse of Lauro trying to score a free throw, nailing it with ease without that pesky old gravity complicating things. I pretend to not see his little moment of joviality, afraid that he’d give me shit for it; but I do make a mental note to try and talk to him one on one, whenever I feel ready.
As I descend towards our chambers I see the astronaut and the guard standing next to the hatch, I guess they have no need to descend further since they’ll close us in from the top. I stop for a moment, turning my head towards Dahlia to get her attention, “I— need to pee.” Admittedly, I feel like a small child asking the teacher for permission to use the bathroom, but I never had to pee in space and I want a mentor right now. “You’ve got all you need in the room down below, just turn the valve on the suction tube and do your thing. For number twos there’s a toilet looking thing next to it, you’ll recognize it once you see it.” I feel my ears blush a little, I don’t want to have this conversation, so I just nod and rush downstairs. Lo and behold, I do easily recognize the toilet and that one’s got to be the tube I’m supposed to pee in; but here’s the problem: there’s no door. I’m sure I’m just not looking hard enough, “Could I get some privacy?” I half shout, making sure she understands I’m still talking to her, “Nope.” She answers, with a higher pitched fluctuation in her voice at the end. She’s not even pretending to be sorry for me, just “sucks to be you” and a shrug; at least that’s how I’m picturing her right now. “Don’t miss a drop, we need to recycle all the water we can.” So she just admitted that we will drink our collective piss for the rest of the week. It’s not just the guard, she gets off seeing us suffer too, if not more than him. I float toward the dreary corner of the room while still thinking about the two sadists escorting us to our graves and the hopelessness of the whole situation somehow lifts a bit of the dread off my shoulders.
So I’m in the corner, making sure no one can get a glimpse of my genitals, but it turns out to be a futile endeavor, the room is just too round. I cup the funnel at the end of the tube in one hand and bring it toward my hips, pushing the elastic ridge of my pants with the other, just enough to make my penis peek out. It floats. I try to not get mesmerized too long by that little discovery, so I proceed to turn the valve on the side of the funnel. The room begins to hum and the tube starts sucking me in; just a little, with only the slightest breeze pulling on my pubic hair, but there’s no other way to see it: I am in a room full of strangers supposedly watching me while getting sucked off by a plastic tube.
It’s so humiliating I might laugh; but I don’t, I just focus on the little shapeless droplets falling down the translucent pipe. After what feels like an eternity the pee stops coming out. I clean myself first and then the inner side of the funnel with some tissues from a dispenser not unlike the ones you’d find in public bathrooms. There’s a faucet nearby, I use it to clean my trembling hands, making sure to take my time; it smells of rubbing alcohol. I turn around and the zen-like state I had fallen into from pretending my problems away fades abruptly. My head is lowered toward the gray pavement; I don’t really want to show my face right now, but I still throw a quick glance upward, urged by some irresistible curiosity; all I manage to catch is a wry smirk on Yves’ face and that’s my cue to not investigate any further, to spare myself any more shame. I strap into bed and soon enough the hatch closes. As the lights go out some tears stealthily escape my eyes. I wait for them to fall across my cheeks, but instead they stay there, stuck between the eyelids. Not having even managed to cry properly, I finally let out a small chuckle before drifting into sleep.