Ayzebel squinted into the piercing white-blue light that radiated down from the apartment’s ceiling-mounted LEDs and scream-croaked into the blinding void, “Akello—you’re late, boy!” Mothering done, she collapsed back into the sweaty stupor of her early morning delirium. Somewhere beneath the soured cloud of sleep and pain, Ayzebel’s true self, half-asleep and coming down fast, felt the first tugs of the day’s addiction. The juice was already calling.
Down the hall—and thanks to Caeros’s Social Office of Architecture and Engineering, only about three meters away—Akello blissfully ignored his mother’s warnings. She screeched several more times, but Akello just nodded in time to the beat and kept dancing.
Yeah, he was going to be late today. Like yesterday and the day before that and probably even the day before that. No one really cared. Akello knew his mother was really only worried about her next juice run. It didn’t matter. Not really, is what Akello told himself as he smiled into the small mirror permanently fixed to the back of his room’s door.
When you work six days a week, sixteen hours a day, what’s an extra five minutes here and there? Lunde was lazy, and it was always more fun to bluster about deducting Akello’s pay than to actually make the effort. A delicate ecosystem of abuse. Where had he heard that? Akello smiled. Probably Sashi. That kind of thing was always her thing.
Nothing about the world he inhabited felt especially delicate to Akello. Caeros was concrete, steel, and slabs of armored glass—superstructures built on superstructures stacked on superstructures. The entire planet, a confused mass.
A favorite track came on and Akello suddenly froze in the middle of his small room, closed his eyes and swayed to the rhythm, savoring the moment. Eventually he glanced at his wrist terminal, acknowledged the time, and sighed. The old man was lazy, so being a few minutes late might be entertaining—but anything beyond that would be inviting trouble. He had to get moving. The crowds would be thick. More protests were expected, and rain and fog were just entering their heavy cycle.
And normally that meant Akello got left picking up the slack. Of course there’d be yelling, but then, there was always yelling. So yeah, Lucky Mart could wait.
Akello closed his eyes, pirouetted in time with the beat but stumbled on a tear in the carpet and almost lost his balance while he hopped on one leg struggling to pull on his favorite pair of pants. He snagged his bony right knee in one of the holes, panicking briefly that he’d done irreparable damage. But no—a quick glance showed all the tears remained moderately sized and perfectly frayed.
“Indestructible,” Akello said, smiling to himself as he slipped back into the reverie of the music and his morning routine.
Still in time with the music, he dropped into a squat and connected the cable dangling from his pant leg to the electrical jack embedded in his left shoe. He hopped a few times, nearly falling over, and shook his leg until the bunched cable relaxed into place.
“Stupid wires.”
Sashi, one of his oldest friends, had taught Akello how to rig his custom designs and cautioned him against counting on cabling to supply the energy for the illuminated filament in his clothes. He wished he could afford the upgrade to a rechargeable wireless battery pack, but the only person getting lucky at Lucky Mart was Lunde. Akello put it out of his mind. It was too early to think about all the things he’d never be able to afford.
He bobbed his head to the pulsing rhythms, snatched the black bomber from the protruding wire-spoke of his mirror, and pulled it on. He tugged at the jacket’s hem and popped its faux collar as he admired himself in the mirror, ignoring how it hung loose on his bony shoulders.
“Broke as a joke, but still looking good.”
The building began to tremble as he posed in front of the mirror. Akello’s eyes widened with excitement and he darted to the small window—the only one in his room. Craning his neck to peer upward, he searched the sky for the interplanetary transport he knew was about to punch a hole through Caeros’s cloud layer. He held his breath in expectation.
In a fleeting opening of clouds, he could just make out the gray ghost-like outline of Caeros’s largest moon, Urus. Then whorls of vapor spilled across the sky, smothering the scene in shadowy gray upon gray depth.
Akello exhaled, closed his eyes, and let the reality of his world slip away. There he was, on a transport, leaving Caeros forever. He floated through imagined octagonal halls, propelling himself in zero gravity by grabbing handholds on the walls, until he reached the bridge and sat in the cushioned pilot’s chair. His left hand wrapped around a phantom joystick. His feet pressed on imaginary pedals.
G-forces pressed him into the seat as the ship passed from the limits of atmosphere into the vacuum of space, where the whole of the Malin Galaxy spread out her spiral arms, welcoming him.
The ship changed—corporate transport, military frigate, private shuttle—as Akello piloted through gargantuan Jump Gates, traveling from star system to star system. In this fantasy he was both inside the ship and outside it, watching her sail. The images in his mind were a collage: holo films, ads, serials, and propaganda clips, stitched into the fabric of his day-to-day life.
Still staring through his small window, Akello barely registered the chirp of the alarm at his wrist. But the persistent tone brought him crashing back—to Caeros, to the Enceladus district, to the tenth floor of the compartment he shared with his mother.
He frowned at the cracked face of his government-issued terminal and sighed. His shoulders slumped as he stepped away from the window and back into reality. Dream shattered. Time to go.
He frowned again, examining himself one last time before rushing out. Where before the mirror had been kind, now it mocked him. Big fuzzy hair, lanky limbs, jagged greasy curls. He frowned. Then made a tough guy face, parted his hair to the side, and grinned.
Ready.
He grabbed his ratty satchel from the doorknob, its sides covered in worn patches from famous ships. Every day he worried it would give out—but a new bag meant losing the patches, and just thinking about re-sewing them was exhausting.
One step out, and he nearly tripped over a wine bottle his mother had likely thrown in the night. He picked it up, tossed it in the bathroom trash, and retrieved clean clothes—pants, shirt, underwear—from the hall closet.
He left them on the far end of the couch, where his mother sat wheezing through a ventilator.
“Don’t forget my juice,” she said, mask raised just enough to speak. “We’re out.”
“Okay mom,” Akello called, halfway out the door. “I won’t forget.”
“Forgot last night.”
“I said I won’t forget.”
He peeked his head back in. “Bye, Mom.”
He slipped out, careful not to slam the door. He didn’t want to give her anything else to yell about. Ten flights down. Same groaning stairs. One more day—just like the last, just like the next.