The EMP Line’s trajectory spanned Nanosuelta’s three moons – an electromagnetic propulsion train that hopscotched from Point A to Point C. Back where humanity came from there had only been one lonely moon, so A, B, and C seemed the most practical way to label them.
Fabulosa was half in the bag already. She’d downed a fifth of potato hooch while camped out in the hollow of a giant cable spool, waiting for the lunar transit police to pass her by. Fortunately, the rail yard was a big place, and the transit cops were not paid enough to be thorough.
The two officers made a beeline for the tarpaper bunker where the train crew smoked stogies and bartered away any unclaimed and/or misplaced contraband.
Fabulosa hit the ground running. She’d drunk too much; Point C and Nanosuelta trembled blearily in the pea green sky above. The ground beneath her boots seesawed to and fro as she tore toward the open train car.
Fab never freight hopped before; her boots never left Point B when it came down to it. She knew there was a bustling multiverse just beyond the great silence, and figured Point C –– with a pit stop on Nanosuelta –– were frightening enough steps to take before committing to the great big scary plunge into whatever lay beyond that.
The train car smelled like a windowless bathroom where the flushing toilet and ventilating fan were on the fritz. Her boot soles played a tremolo against the corrugated titanium floor as she scrabbled toward the car’s darkest corner.
A psychic alarm sounded off in Fabulosa’s head. Fab was “touched” psychically. Nobody knew if it was something given off by the lunar soil or something in the atmosphere, but heightened empathic abilities were common among those born –– or stranded for too long –– on Point B. She had a shrink once who likened it to the way spending too much time in the water makes one’s fingertips prune.
Fabulosa sensed someone coming. She felt their muddled thoughts crowding her brainwaves.
Getting caught meant a hefty fine and a return to the life she so desperately sought to shed. Her parents had been spaceniks –– travelers on a planet caravan in search of Eden. Maybe it had been the psychic abracadabra emitted from Point B that lured them there.
All Fabulosa knew was that Pops was out to lunch. He peddled hacked avatar mods out of some next age phrenology shop to support his psychotropic implant habit. Moms had tucked tail for Nanosuelta before Fab was out of diapers.
Fabulosa used to watch Nanosuelta drift across the night sky and try to imagine what it was like down there. She’d try to spot Moms through the brindle of Nanosuelta’s algae-red oceans, tattered clouds, and tarnished gold landmasses –– far more romantic than squeezing herself into the corner of an abandoned freight car that smelled like a rest stop lavatory as she was now. The potato hooch made the very darkness spin.
An acidic tang needled the back of her throat. She tried to choke it down, but the vomit simply rerouted through her nostrils. It erupted like an aerosol of split pea soup.
She’d given herself away. A character carrying the psychic stink of middle management –– the type who’d sell his grandma down the river for a title promotion –– skidded through the boxcar’s double doors. He held a power washer as if it were a sawed-off shotgun. A maintenance crew avatar oscillated above his head. At least he wasn’t the police.
“You’re trespassing.” The spotlight on his power washer bathed Fabulosa in quivering blue light as the man tried to shake the fright out of his HAZMAT onesie and farmer’s waders. “Th-this is a livestock car––p-place’s crawling with contaminants. Y-you shouldn’t be here.”
He had the squat frame and squared-off features of an off-world contractor. Natives were raggedy, pulled-apart, some might even say fey –– on account of Point B’s artificially induced gravity. Extraterrestrials were brought in for muscle and grunt work.
“You a mule?” he asked.
Fab was packing the half dozen psychotropic implants she’d swiped from Pops –– quick money on the underground market, small potatoes compared to the cartel mules set up in economy class with sleeper cars and continental breakfast. Fabulosa lacked a clever retort. She settled for a psychic push.
It was a native parlor trick: a brief unraveling of an adversary’s psychic gestalt –– a mental sucker punch somewhere between temporary dementia and a night terror. The man triggered the power washer just as Fabulosa fired it off. He shrieked like a kid in a funhouse and dropped to his knees.
Now there’d be headaches, thought Fabulosa, questions –– headaches and questions she did not need. She needed to be unobtrusive if she was to pull this off. Fabulosa crouched beside him. She swiped the vamp stamp on her wrist across his clearance swatch, and duped his avatar. Name, rank, and serial number––the whole nine yards. His avatar fizzled; it’s liquid bronze aura filled the serrated diamond embedded in Fabulosa’s wrist.
She bolted. Boxcar after boxcar –– the rail yard rolled on forever. Fabulosa weaved around cars, under, over, and in-between. She couldn’t shake the smell of rotting things from her nostrils––that livestock car. It carried a psychic stink too. Pain. Fear. Confusion.
Strange things had been sprouting up across Point C after the development corp. started terraforming the moon’s far side. Edible organisms. Sentient too, rumor had it.
The spaceniks were already up in arms. Protestors crowded the platform. It was just the right amount of chaos to allow her to slip onto one of the passenger cars unabated.
The maintenance avatar duped onto her vamp stamp might get her through automated boarding. Commuters elbowed their way through the crowd, exchanging volleys of jeers with protestors. The protestors’ avatars approximated spritely, adorable things somewhere between peapods and teddy bears –– the livestock, the edibles, the byproduct of Point C’s recent terraforming. Nothing anyone in their right mind would eat, thought Fabulosa, reminding herself that once upon a time people ate pigs and dogs.
She burrowed her way through the crowd. She recognized some protestors –– burnout spaceniks from the phrenology shop under Pops’ place. She swiped her vamp stamp against the automated boarding sensor. The passenger car doors chimed open. A mechanized tentacle swept her in. The doors shrieked shut like a rusty guillotine.
The car was climate controlled. It smelled of lavender. The crystalline walls and one-way UV-protected windows kept the angry acoustics of the mob outside. Fabulosa felt as if she’d already been whisked off to a better place.
Molded benches ran the length of each wall to accommodate foot, tire, and tread traffic down the car’s center aisle. Fabulosa squeezed between a frazzled waif of a thing toting what appeared to be a newly hatched dupe in a baby sling, and a gourd-shaped company man in a zip up suit sprawled across two seats.
Fabulosa smiled aggressively. She wriggled her hips to stake out her spot on the bench. The imp in the sling grasped her sleeve, clawing with breakfast link fingers.
Fabulosa shrugged it off. The imp’s caretaker nudged Fabulosa in the ribs. The woman coughed, as if having a difficult time choking down the concept that Fabulosa –– or anyone else on the train––would be anything but enchanted by the inane pestering of her pygmy in a sling.
Fabulosa firmly believed that the universe, stretching on in eternal tedium, was one of the solitary things as bloated and simultaneously devoid of substance as the human ego. Albeit the universe did not rely so heavily on third parties taking note of it.
Fabulosa felt the repugnant body heat of the thigh pressed up beside her –– the thigh of the sprawled-out man in the zip up suit. He stank of stale sweat and cologne. Fabulosa half-wondered if she should have just braved the lonely, stinking livestock car like some hobo of old.
The passenger car had filled. A press gang of crotches lingered eye level, their owners yammering at their avatars and pawing grab rails above their heads like jungle primates who’d lost all joie de vivre.
The car shuddered. A chime sounded shrill over the feed. The door lock whispered shut. Fabulosa felt dizzy. She’d smuggled her way aboard and was off to a whole other world. Just like that.
The train bucked. Standees latched onto the grab rail. They swayed like a drunken conga line. The lodestones and discusses deep that composed the engine’s oppositional field generators sounded off like sleeping giant’s molars ground amidst uneasy sleep.
The faces through the passenger car window, protestors and switch operators, drones, clones, pickpockets, and vagrants, washed to fleshy blurs as the train picked up speed––the station, the star scrapers and hovels, the entire ecosphere Fabulosa had called home, gone in a wink as the train plunged into the exit channel, out into the soundless, colorlessness of space.
Her heart beat like a battering ram against her breastbone. Fabulosa was confident she’d keel over and die before getting anywhere near Point C. She’d seen the moon through the TV Eye her entire life, walked its streets via virtual implant, but could still not imagine what it would be like to actually be there –– to be anywhere but the only tired, tiny place she’d ever known –– to breath Point C’s recycled air and hear the musical lilts of its population with her own ears, not some virtual approximation. To finally be.
The train cars steadied on their course. The passengers returned to their business, as if being slingshot through space was the most natural thing in the world. An andro sitting in the row across from Fabulosa flashed her a smile. Fabulosa smiled back and dropped her eyes.
The andro was dressed to the nines. Fabulosa could feel the heat of the andro’s lingering gaze. Fabulosa shifted on the bench so as to shield herself from the andro’s line of sight behind the straphanger whose crotch lingered two centimeters in front of her nose.
She worried the andro might be rail police –– they worked plainclothes sometimes. She glared up at the arrival countdown clock.
The bleating of someone’s crooning avatar suddenly drowned out the now gentle, rhythmic churning of the train car’s oppositional field generators –– it belonged to some looky-me with a Mercator map of decorative bone grafts across his jaw line. The pixelated avatar acted attention starved as its master, the little neon, eight-bit abomination waltzing above its looky-me’s oblivious gourd, belting out “Old Maid in the Garret”––a tune Fabulosa quite enjoyed under different circumstances –– like tomorrow was a rumor.
Perhaps he’ll get it, after a verse or two, thought Fabulosa, perhaps this clown will see how much his warbling avatar is upsetting me –– how much it’s upsetting half the train –– and reroute the feed to his auditory implant. She watched people shoot the looky-me dirty looks. The boldest among them sighed. The meek shifted uncomfortably on their bench seats. But they all had yet to say anything.
The gourd-shaped company man just beside her –– the guy in the zip up suit sprawled across two seats –– started snoring. His head lolled like a decommissioned robot and came to rest on Fabulosa’s left shoulder. She shirked him off and tried to move over, which earned her an elbow from the, apparently territorial, waif beside her. The waif’s infant dupe in the sling screamed bloody murder.
Fortunately, that managed to wake the company man beside her, who Fabulosa thought might choke on his final snore before coming to. Unfortunately, he didn’t. The wailing baby joined the looky-me avatar’s discordant chorus. Fabulosa looked around to gage other’s reactions –– to see if someone might actually do something about all this ruckus.
She made the mistake of reestablishing eye contact with the lecherous andro still gawking from across the aisle. Fabulosa shifted again so the straphanger whose crotch hovered eye level in front of her established a buffer.
These people were the worst, thought Fabulosa. The looky-me actually had the audacity to up the volume on his avatar. Why would anyone in their right mind, in a million years, thought Fabulosa, ever think an entire train car of strangers would ever want to listen to your crappy playlist?
Her leg trembled. If no one would speak up, she would. She sprang to her feet, throwing the straphanger whose crotch had been hovering two centimeters from her nose off kilter. That inadvertently created a domino effect down the grab rail. The row of near-comatose commuters wiggled, weaved, and shimmied to evade one another.
The guy who’d been hovering in front of Fabulosa pulled some real-time ninjutsu; he squeezed stealthily into the void she’d left between the company spreader and the waif-and-dupe and snatched up her seat right from under her.
The woman standing beside her sniffed the air and scrunched her nose. She had a shrill voice and spoke loud enough to be heard over the deafening croon of the looky-me‘s singing avatar.
“You reek of liquor,” she scolded Fabulosa, as if that were a greater offense to the world than this woman’s scrunched-up, judgy face and harpy’s voice.
Fabulosa half considered giving the woman a psychic push, but figured there was no use pulling out the big guns on minor irritants. It was a long way to Point C and there was no telling what she’d face down the line when the first few minutes proved this taxing.
Fabulosa had a sinking feeling in her gut. She couldn’t help but worry that she had built up escaping Point B a bit much––and that maybe, even if there weren’t worse places, that maybe the entire shebang from one side of the multiverse to the next, had its faults.
She tried to drown such thoughts. It was her fear talking –– her doubts––the smallest parts of her, the most anxious bits, planting little mental landmines to lure her into turning back. Besides, if Point C proved a disappointment, there was always Point A, and beyond that Nanosuelta, and beyond that, points unknown.
She was a tumbleweed of nervous energy with nowhere to put it all, so Fabulosa stormed toward the door where the looky-me bobbed and weaved, singing flatly along to “Old Maid in the Garret.” He and his avatar were butchering a lovely song. What’s worse, is he was looking straight at her, but it was as if he was looking right through her –– as if Fabulosa wasn’t even there at all. She balled up her fists and dug her nails into her palms.
“Excuse me,” said Fabulosa. All that elicited were a host of side-eyes from other straphangers. Some of the commuters she’d caught huffing and puffing at the looky-me’s lack of consideration now seemed to be huffing and puffing at her.
“There are others on this train,” Fabulosa declared, nose-to-nose with the looky-me.
“Yeah?” He smirked.
“Yeah –– and not everybody wants to hear your music.”
The looky-me shrugged. He went back to staring right through Fabulosa, and flew right back into his off-key accompaniment.
Fabulosa swatted at the eight-bit abomination hovering above his head as if it were a mosquito. The avatar phased. Her backhand whistled past the looky-me‘s ear. He ducked theatrically to evade the symbolic gesture of her blow.
“Hey,” he whinnied. “That’s assault.”
The eight-bit abomination re-projected itself on the looky-me’s opposite shoulder and returned to crooning.
“What you’re doing’s an assault on my ears,” Fabulosa insisted, “the ears of every passenger on this train car!”
Her mind edged toward the little trigger in her head. A strong enough psychic could put the brakes on the entire line––even send them back to Point B Station. The looky-me had done enough damage. She would not allow him to foil her entire trip.
This was her time –– her ticket to a second chance. A ruckus rose from the far end of the car. Fabulosa stormed back to her spot on the bench, the spot now co-opted by the ninjutsu straphanger. He tugged on her belt loop.
‘Consideration,’ she thought, ‘at last.’ She bent her knees, poised to swap spots with him. He did not budge.
He only shook his head and tsked, indicating the looky-me and warning, “You ought to be more careful. You never know when you’re going to be dealing with a certified crazy nowadays. Best not risk it.”
‘Sheep,’ thought Fabulosa. She could feel the smog of all their uncertainties, the psychic sprawl of their collective neuroticism creating gridlock in her brain.
One simple push would wipe the slate clean. Give her a little breathing room. The ruckus at the far end of the train grew louder. A solitary voice. Shouting. Drawing closer.
Salvation, thought Fabulosa. A like minded passenger fed up with it all just like she was. She was certain those shouts were the shouts of someone who’d had enough –– another stubborn goat among the sheep, bleating, horns poised.
The sandwiched mass of commuters parted magically for the upstart making his or her way down the car –– the shouting close enough now that Fabulosa could make out what was being said. A woman’s nasal voice: “Equality for edibles,” she rallied. The protestor’s avatar barreled through the other passengers’ avatars––a simple rectangle, reminiscent of a café sandwich board––BEINGS, NOT BREAKFAST––ticker taping across it in bold, migraine-white lettering.
The keeper of the nasally voice wore her hair in black liberty spikes. A silky, Nanosuelta-tone muumuu clung to her stocky frame. Once she had passed, the other passengers went back to their business of pushing reality back down in its hole, drowning in their customized audio/visual feeds and whatever other cerebral fixes their avatars happened to be feeding them.
But not Fabulosa. She appreciated how this poseur spacenik seemed to make all the other passengers as uncomfortable as they had made Fabulosa feel.
She latched onto the protestor’s forearm as the spacenik nudged her way past. The psyches of those around her erupted like a riled-up hornet’s nest as she did.
“What’s the story?” asked Fabulosa, nodding coolly toward the sandwich board avatar declaring BEINGS, NOT BREAKFAST.
She could feel the spacenik’s arm begin to tremble. Fabulosa feared the woman might burst into tears, or spontaneously combust, right then and there; such was her euphoria that someone bothered to pay the least bit of attention to her.
“I’m glad you asked,” seethed the spacenik, pirouetting accusingly against the backs of the ambivalent commuters pressed against her.
Fabulosa noticed the waif-and-dupe scowling at the spacenik. The dupe screeched. When the waif noticed Fabulosa glaring back at her, she scrunched up her nose like she smelled something dead.
“There are sentient beings down on Point C,” railed the spacenik, “and the corp. suits think they have the right to grind them into breakfast links!”
Fabulosa half wished the development corp. had started with the passengers on this cursed train car if they were looking for unethically harvested foodstuff. She stared up at the portholes in the roof, at the big black empty, dreaming of how nice and quiet and uncluttered it must be out there.
“Sickening.” Fabulosa played the spacenik so as to rob the angry hive of commuters around her of a fraction of a moment’s peace. “Outrageous,” she stewed, “sickeningly outrageous.”
Fabulosa glared accusingly at the company man in the zip up suit sprawled across two bench seats. She noticed sweat beading his brow. He cleared the phlegm from his throat. “You’ve probably never been there––never seen ’em with your own two eyes,” he peeped. “Th-them critters’ th-thick as bricks. All’s they do is breed and take up space.”
Fabulosa wormed between the straphangers and the waif on the bench, getting right up in his face. “We any different?” she scowled, jutting her chin toward the waif’s wailing dupe. The waif pulled her parasitic cloneling tight to her chest.
“If stupid is the only prequalification for supper,” said Fabulosa, “half of us ought to start queuing up for the spit.”
It wasn’t so much that Fabulosa swallowed the spacenik’s stick hook, line, and sinker –– but for all the spacenik’s proselytizing, she’d been the first aboard to consider, or even acknowledge, someone or something outside of the dull confines of herself.
Even if the spacenik was grandstanding –– espousing some flavor-of-the-minute rallying cry –– she’d managed to pee a bit of color across the gray, prickly drab of commuters gridlocking Fabulosa’s psychic radar.
If Fabulosa had wanted the status quo, she’d never have bothered stealing her way aboard in the first place. Half these schlubs could travel halfway across the universe, Fabulosa realized, and not go anywhere, the way they kept their heads jammed so far up their own backsides. This wonderfully abrasive spacenik was driving them back without Fabulosa having to fry one brain cell on a psychic push.
But alas, all good things must come to an end. The spacenik clutched Fabulosa’s wrist, urging Fab’s arm skyward as if they’d just been awarded a gold medal in some two-person relay. All that fantastic color the spacenik rained across Fabulosa’s psychic map began to lash like angry tentacles in Fab’s head––colorful, constricting tentacles. Fabulosa was hit with the startling revelation that this do-goodnik of a spacenik might just very well be another bull in a china shop, a bullish ego poised to flatten anybody unwilling to play the game by her rules. Fabulosa shook her hand free.
The spacenik frowned, hurt. She scrabbled for her wrist again, but Fabulosa evaded her grasp.
“It’s you and me,” the spacenik crowed. “Us versus them.”
“Look, sister,” said Fabulosa, wagging a sardonic peace sign in the woman’s face. “What you’re doing––it’s not a bad thing, but you can’t use those edibles down there like a pair of stilts –– you can’t just hop on the backs of their misfortune just so you can pee all over everybody else from on high.”
“Face it, ladies,” the company man mansplained, “we’re all just meat being shot through space. Some of us just got a rawer deal than others.”
“That’s not what I’m getting at –– at all!” seethed Fabulosa.
The waif beside him rocked her dupe in her arms. “Can you all keep it down, please?” She passed her hand over the crown of her monstrous, pocket clone’s head the way a magician might work some hocus-pocus over a top hat. “She just settled down.”
The looky-me cranked up the volume on his obnoxious avatar to drown out the bickering, and the andro across the way thought it a good time to purse lips and blow a kiss in Fabulosa’s direction. Some sighed, others grumbled –– everyone retreating further into their feeds and prefabricated follies, plunging any hint of the world beyond themselves down their respective cybernetic rabbit holes.
Fabulosa could feel their psyches bristling in her head, ashen and prickly. It was like being thrown in a cement mixer with a thorn bush –– the passengers finally found something they could all rally against –– something worth standing up for: themselves.
How dare this scraggly-haired, Point B rube try to smoke them out of the neatly manufactured temples of self they’d paid for and built up around themselves –– they traveled premium for a reason, after all. Fewer riffraff.
The train’s proximity to the next moon over must have amplified Fabulosa’s innate psychic abilities. She could actually hear them all thinking now.
Spinster, thought the waif, dupe suckling her breast. Snob, dismissed the andro, coveting the round curve of Fab’s hips. Skank, thought the company man in the zip up suit, no wonder she’s so pissy at the world, as he perused the market feeds and thumbed the half empty bottle of boner pills in his pocket. Sellout, fumed the spacenik, elbowing her way toward the next car down –– the entire train was infested with link-gobbling cannibals and corp. shills –– nobody half enlightened as she was.
The glut of psychic racket left Fabulosa with no space to breathe. No place of her own. So she pushed. She pushed back against all those psyches, all those cumbersome egos –– it was like popping a roll of bubble wrap –– the satisfying snap of synapses, followed by a silence as lonesome and fragile as the calm in the eye of a storm.
The looky-me’s limbs fell slack like doll parts. A domino line of catatonic straphangers planted face right where they stood. The dupe quit its bawling. Its waifish host quit caterwauling. The spacenik’s tongue tripped over all that proselytizing. The company man was seized by a wide-awake nocturnal emission that soiled his freshly pressed zip-up suit, and the lecherous androgynies’ pupils rolled back like the cherries on a slot machine, to a place where there’d be no more room for gawking and drooling.
‘I could keep going,’ Fabulosa thought to herself, ‘I could push all those psyches as far as I possibly can, ’til they’re lost to the heavens like train smoke.’
She paused. ‘But that’s just what they’d do –– what they’ve always done,’ she considered. All of history, all of life, felt as if it was to her –– in that one frozen moment––just one ugly game of one-upmanship, one big pissing contest in the multiverse’s least tidy toilet.
Fabulosa’s psychic trigger finger trembled. She felt herself drifting, a pinball in a pinball machine sans flippers or bumpers or tilt. She was just another sardine in a can heading nowhere. And she was okay with that.
She pulled back. The passengers sprung back to life, brushing themselves off, whinging and whining, checking their feeds. Then the train car bucked, stammering, as it aligned with the railway catheter that mainlined into Point C’s ecosphere.
They’d arrived. Fabulosa wriggled through the press of travel-weary bodies at the train car door. Point C. She breathed in, feeling as if a great weight had been lifted off her chest.
She stood on the platform a moment and drank it all in. She watched the passengers hustle away –– the looky-me, the waif and her dupe, the andro, the company man, the spacenik lagging behind the rest. They’d all become unpleasant anecdotes before she knew it –– if she remembered any one of them at all. She was almost glad for not having turned their brains to cauliflower.
Then she felt a sudden tug –– even this far from home –– a needling at the tent pegs of her mind. The train cars were being loaded again for the jump back to B.
A press of bodies were being herded into a towering, portable maze –– a series of interlocking corridors that could only be seen from the height of the platform. Mammalian, edamame-skinned teddy bears. The edibles were being sent to B for slaughter, prodded into the same dingy livestock car she’d first stowed away upon.
Their eyes caught Fabulosa’s –– eyes no different than hers, their eyes and their worries –– sentient minds sans all the clutter and pretense and intellectual drapery that rattled round the human gourd.
Fabulosa felt their bone-deep, world-weary ache, their paralytic fear, though they had no way to articulate it to a people who had lost their capacity to listen. An automated wrangler –– one of last year’s models –– prodded the edibles forward despite their protestations, despite their fright frozen limbs, via a herky-jerky articulated appendage of barbed, electrified stingers.
Fabulosa scanned the crowd for station agents. She scrambled down from the platform edge, almost breaking her neck as she freefell among them. She shook out the pain of her twisted ankle.
She limped under, over, in-between the edibles, until she came to one of the jigsaw seams that kept the collapsible maze together. She pushed, and watched the wall hinge open. Edibles scattered. She wasn’t quite sure where they could go, but she wasn’t quite sure where she might go, either.
A New Jersey native, James Edward O’Brien currently resides in Queens, NY in the US with his wife and three rescue dogs. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in The Literary Hatchet, Eye to the Telescope, and Spunk: Art & Perspectives. Follow Jim on Twitter @UnagiYojimbo.