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.
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