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Approximately 225 million kilometers away, in a place called Pasadena, one technician turns to another. “Matt, Spirit just broadcast something. And now it's rebooting again- but the broadcast, it, it sounded like mood music.”
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PWI
The first astronauts, the Mercury Seven, were madmen riding bullets through the atmosphere. They were angry when they were told they would only be controlling the pitch, roll and yaw in orbit, and not truly piloting. They were livid when a monkey got the first ticket up. And they agreed to strap themselves to these supersonic orbital shells without a drop of liquor in them. The first astronauts were either the stupidest men to live, or crazy brave with the narcissistic abandon it takes to die in a ball of fire.
I was many generations removed from them.
“Trace intoxicants discovered in gaseous form.”
“Eat me.”
“Checking list of subroutines. Command not found. Scanning for intoxicant source.”
“Don’t bother.”
Spaceflight never got much further than Mercury. Yeah, there was the lunar landing, then the shuttles, then the shuttle disasters, then reforms, then more disasters, but the idea behind it never became any more grand than riding a firecracker with tin-foil skin through the a cosmos filled with razor-edged rocks.
“Source discovered. Gaseous intoxicant contaminant source located inside pilot. Regulations dictate inebriant blood test.”
“No. No more needles. Last time you gave me a bone marrow biopsy.”
“Protest logged. Alternate diagnostic search.”
Modern spaceships abuse the hell out of the idea that neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed by reusing human waste products as energy and using the absorbed heat humans give off to power the process. The waste recycling uses bacterial processes to re-energize the waste, then feeds it back into the bloodstream through an IV. Over the years, the attrition rate has fallen to a 15% annual loss, which can easily be supplemented with a small frozen nutrient block.
The computer had been quiet for thirteen seconds, which I thought meant it had given up and gone back to sleep, until a small probe jabbed out of the control panel. “Blow.”
“You blow.”
“Without assurance you are not piloting while intoxicated, craft momentum will terminate.”
“You’d kill half our reserves to stop us, then we wouldn’t have enough fuel to re-fire. We’d float dead in space.”
“Automatic shutdown will commence in T-minus ten without sample for verification.” I blew.
Still, the mechanism of flight remains largely unchanged. The only true advance has been the orbital launch stations, designed like a floating rifle by an architect with a terrible sense of humor, even down to the observation deck resembling a rifle sight. The station realigns itself with thrusters for new targets. Launches are coordinated with astronomic charts by the same kinds of supercomputers that cracked the human genome- and I suspect that they may be the same model.
“Intoxicants verified in exhalation. Shutdown will commence.”
“Wait. I have overly high acetone. Subsistence diets can result in several thousand times higher levels of acetone, which can test as ethanol.”
“Verifying medical veracity. Data found. Blood test required to prevent momentum termination.”
“Fine.” A panel by my left elbow flipped down, and a spindly arm snaked out with a shiny syringe. The needle still had my blood spattered on it from the last time. The arm jolted its head from side to side, then struck. “Christ almighty, you just stabbed an artery. You’re supposed to use venous blood.”
“Correct. Realigning for venous insertion. Apply bandage and pressure to allow proper clotting.”
“I hate you.”
“System performance feedback logged.”
A good pilot launches with just enough fuel to correct a 10% trajectory error over a three year flight; any more than that costs you because of the increase in weight. For another three percent boost, you can cannibalize your nutrient block and any extraneous body fat you can spare. Crazier pilots have been said to bounce off orbiting bodies to achieve a larger degree change, called the ‘Hail Mary’ bounce.
“Processing blood. Ethanol presence detected. Momentum termination commences in T-minus ten, nine,” as long as the AI kept talking, he wasn’t paying attention to the new code I was inputting into the console. “Eight, seven, six,” he continued, as the code loaded. “Five, four, three,” I held my breath, wondering if the code would execute before he sentenced me to a floating death. “Two. Wh- why, I am an annoying little girl, and it is my bed time. Shutting down.”
Some pilots have learned to filter the ethanol primer out of their fuel. Some of these pilots then learned to power down the ship computer so they can have a drunk nap.
I took one last sip from a plastic reservoir attached to my catheter. It takes a certain kind of man to volunteer to be shot across the solar system in a glorified soda can- the same kind of man who would get drunk off liquor made of his own urine and fuel. In the 1800s they were pioneers, then cowboys. In the 1900s they were flyboys, then astronauts. This century, they call us spacemen.
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Baby Back
I have a baby. I’ve never really understood why women say they “had” a baby- to me that always said they’d left it in the food court at the mall and someone walked off with it, or that it died. Wait- let me start over.
Frank and I were having a break; I mean, we were still living together, still sleeping in the same bed, still carpooling to work- I was still cooking him breakfast. But we weren’t having sex. He wouldn’t even kiss me.
I know I was eating more, because I was depressed, and that’s why it didn’t worry me that I started gaining weight. When I started getting sick, I just thought, you know, that it was the stress. I tried changing my diet, I even started exercising, which made me feel a little better, emotionally, but it didn’t help.
I was throwing up more frequently. And I was late. Frank was distant, even pissier than usual, and he told me there wasn’t room in his car for all of my fat ass; I told him, “I’m pregnant, you dick.” There was a long moment that he stared at me, and I thought it was a huge mistake I’d told him and now he was going to kill me. He didn’t. He kissed me.
Everything wasn’t perfect after that, like it was magic or anything, but he cared a little again- and that was a lot. He put his arm around me when he slept, and he waited until I was up in the mornings so we could shower together.
I was getting so big. I felt like a whale, but Frank said I’d never looked prettier. He was even a little turned on when I started lactating, although my neighbor Jean, who was a few months further along than me, told me it wasn’t milk, but colostrum.
And I don’t know why, I mean, I guess I was scared, but until then, it just wasn’t real, so I hadn’t gone to the doctor. He gave me a stern talking to, took blood and urine samples, and ran some labs. And when he came back he was very serious. He told me there was no hCG in my urine- he told me I couldn’t be pregnant. I told him he was wrong. He said he could prove it. I had an ultrasound, and I asked, “Is that my baby?”
He explained that that was where my baby should have been, but it was empty. He said that I had pseudocyesis- that I wasn’t really pregnant. I called Frank, to tell him; he was at his parents' house telling them they were about to be grandparents. I hung up.
In tears I showed up at Jean’s. I figured if anyone would listen, if anyone could understand, it was her. She brewed a pot of tea, we talked and she made sympathetic noises. I don’t know if it was a reflex, but she kept rubbing her belly, as if to make sure whatever had stolen my baby hadn’t taken hers. It just made me sick inside.
The pot ran dry, and she waddled into the kitchen to make another. I followed her. She was on a stool, on her tiptoes, reaching for the teabags over the stove.
She grunted, and placed her hand on her belly, whispering softly to it that now wasn’t a good time to be kicking her.
I touched her gently on the arm, just enough that she lost her balance. She landed flat, smacking her head with a dull, wet slap. She was still breathing, slow and deep; her stomach rising and falling.
I rolled up her shirt, and then used a kitchen knife to cut a small incision into her belly. I reached my hand inside, and the baby held onto my finger.
I used a potato chip bag clip to clamp off the umbilical cord and cut it with the knife. My baby, a beautiful boy, started coughing; I used a kitchen towel to clean him off. I finally looked back at Jean; her stomach wasn’t moving anymore.
I took my son home. I called Frank, and told him that there had been complications, but that our son was fine. In fact, he was beautiful, and healthy, and he would be waiting at home when he got back. His parents live out of the county, in the sticks, but Frank’s coming home to see his son. I’m holding him close to me, wrapped in one of Jean’s kitchen towels. He’s cooing softly; I think it’s almost time to feed him. It’s only when I hear a scratching noise, probably an animal outside, that I realize I still have the kitchen knife in my hand.
I have a baby. I cut it out of someone. And I’m not giving it back.
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Cockfight
Damnit. From the start I was agennit. Rooster without the stones to tend his flock ought to be dinner; even from a