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

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.

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