One Way Ticket on a Moonbound Train – James Edward O’Brien

“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.

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