V Gram

Gram’s consciousness slowly dawned, covered as it was in a woolen cloud of a mid-grade hangover. His hand brushing against the clutter left on his bed. Seeing the fetid light creep in through his window, he groaned as he sat up. The pain reminded him of the previous night’s injuries. The sun was too high, his improvised alarm clock had failed again—he probably needed to tinker with the escapement.

“Ma! Why didn’t you wake me up? I’ll be late f’er my go’ damn toil!”

“Sorry, love, I just heard you come in so late an’ I thought…”

“Ah, forget it, Ma.” Gram said.

She saw him as he was throwing on his shirt. “What happened to you?”

Gram hastily pulled his shirt down to cover the prominent purple and yellow discolorations. “Nuthin ma, don’t worry about it, I gotta get going.”  

“You and Marco always getting into scraps, don’t you think you are a bit old for that now? Let me put some cream on it.”

“Ma, it’s fine. I’m a grown ass man I can handle myself.”

“Well, I’m just worried about you son. Can’t a mother do that?”

Shit, going to be late again. He wouldn’t get fired. He was no replaceable cog in the big machine that was Crius Aeronautics. Without him, their costs would skyrocket. Well, not skyrocket per se, but at the very least, go up enough so that the mid-level section manager would have to eat a plate of crow in front of an upper-level section manager. The mid-level section manager hated crow.

Gram was almost dressed. He tried to do something with his wavy locks of hair but no matter what he attempted, his hair was clearly set on rebellion.

His mom stood at the doorway. “Hun it’s cold outside, don’t forget your coat. Do you need a scarf? If you wait a bit, I can pack you a lunch.”

“We’ve been over this a thousand times. I got it.” Gram gave his mother a kiss on the cheek. “Luv ya ma.”

She gave him a hug, and he winced. Maybe he had cracked a rib after all. “Love you too, son.”

Gram threw on his dark green wool coat, buttoned it up all the way so that the collar would shield his neck from the wind, put on his leather gloves, and grabbed a green apple as he rushed out the door. He really had to save up enough for his own place soon.

If he was ambitious, he could probably do as Neeshka had suggested, move out of his parent’s place, maybe out of the lowlands entirely and into one of those nouveau middle-class digs in the midlands, a whole rung or two up on the social ladder. But he didn’t want to be around those types, pretend he wasn’t copper, he didn’t want the ersatz feeling of community, everyone smiling, knives behind their backs.

He enjoyed his work if only from a detached intellectual perspective, working terrestrially so that others might escape terra. Even if it was just a bunch of toffs having a holiday on the moon.

For a long time, people had been sold a bill of goods: that our future lies in space travel, that it would somehow liberate the human race. Free us from the shackles of this infinitesimal blue ball powered by a mediocre star drifting inconsequentially through an incomprehensibly wider galaxy that was itself not but a grain of sand in the big picture of the universe itself.

Pull the other one.

Space was, for all intents and purposes, basically an infinite vacuum featuring a few inhospitable rocks. No matter how much humans screw up Terra Firma proper, anything we find in space will remain a much worse option. Pretty obvious when you think about it: While tech might advance, and advance it has—aside from the few times humans found it in their best interest to turn swathes of land into shimmering green glass circled by ruined buildings and shadows; or those lovely times some inventor came up with a device whose sole utility ended up lying in effectively uninventing other, decidedly more useful devices. It just isn’t possible to square the circle that doing anything outside mankind’s ancestral home costs a lot of energy. Coming back costs a lot as well. Doing both, well, now that is really going to cost. Not to mention making a place habitable for the squishy little water sacks called humans.

Humans with their incessant need to breathe oxygen instead of sulfur, to have air pressure to keep our insides inside, to not have it be -200 Celsius or 200 Celsius but instead to remain within 0-45 Celsius—a rather pedestrian range when viewed on a galactic scale. Space travel was likely perfected, but it would never be perfect. What was once the hope of some starry-eyed dreamers and scientists had now become almost completely co-opted by the rich. Just another way to show off their wealth. Asteroid mining? It might never be cost-effective in terms of raw materials, but it did allow you to slap the word space in front of things and charge a hundred times more.

All the mining and machining necessarily meant that everyone and their brother now worked in a space-related industry. All so yuppies could drink champagne on a space station.

Human progress sure is a hell of a thing.

Slipping into the workroom, he looked around at all the people present, noting Marco still wasn’t around.

“Where’s that big lug?” He asked before anyone could comment on his later-than-usual arrival.

“Your chum didn’t tell you?” Tom asked, clearly enjoying giving Gram the news. “He took a little visit to the contracts and acquisitions, came out with a mint. While we’re here toiling, he’s probably knee-deep in steak and whores. Till the timer runs out and some hunter puts a bullet in his brains anyway.” Tom laughed and gave a playful jab into Grams bruised ribs. It was a cruel laugh, but then, Tom was just that kind of guy.

Gram’s work went slowly that day, his hands taking numerous pauses, his eyes glazing over during diagnostics. Tom had even been forced to chip in a little. He grumbled about it to no end.

It was quiet now. Gram could hear the delayed echo of his footsteps as he made his way through the cavernous rocket assembly room. The dolphins were scurrying around in the dim red light. The nighttime supervisor would be passed out drunk already. Dolphins rarely made errors. If they did, the morning crew would handle it. Walking into the vertical assembly silo, he craned his neck up to see the almost completed rocket. There was a lot of Gram’s sweat in that rocket. He had personally touched just about every wire in the second and third stages. Officially he was a grunt and paid like one. Unofficially he acted as one of their primary diagnosticians. At least it was more interesting than what he did when he got started. He walked behind the rocket. In its shadow was a ladder, one that went all the way to the roof. Gram grabbed the highest rung of the ladder he could manage and swung himself up. He proceeded to skip every other rung. It was a long way up. 

He sat on the roof, the permanent part that supported the rest when it folded out. It had two concrete rings, one inner and one outer. A C was formed between the rings with white rocks. It was large but not nearly large enough to be seen from space. Gram sat in his usual place towards the middle of the C, facing the upper city, next to a substantial pile of cigarettes. They were his brand, and not by coincidence. No one else ever came to the roof. It was technically off-limits.

He was sure to be alone there. Alone above the tenements, at an altitude where the miasma had thinned. His legs dangled freely over the side. He picked up one of the white rocks, throwing it at the nearby crawler crane. It responded with a deeply resonate clang. He lit a cigarette. The skyscrapers across the river dwarfed anything in the lowlands, even though the population was a mere fraction. Crius tower was a series of oblong grey circles rising in a wave. It was barely noticeable next to Atlas tower, stiff, sharp lines octagonal with bony ridges. It was the skeletal finger that had loomed over Gram’s childhood. But for the last ten years, it stood in the shadow of the expanded Hyperion tower. Once a tower, now an hourglass. An impossible gravity-defying hourglass. The new addition supported apparently by little more than an extended elevator shaft. From there, it grew out, an inverted pyramid of crystal and unknown black material. Four great grey columns grew up from the ground connecting to the top, but in truth, one couldn’t understand how such a massive structure would be possible without looking past the building to the hole in the sky. A tear in reality, blacker than black. The Elysian Void Bubble. As it spun in the breeze, the only evidence a distant observer had was the constantly shifting outline. When the wind picked up, it looked like an unsteady portal to an alien elsewhere. It was probably the largest advertisement in the world and the only one that was a structural necessity.

There, across the river, was where Marco probably was tonight. There, across the river, was where the man who was going to kill him was. Gram threw another rock. Marco had mentioned getting a contract the last time he got into his cups. Gram had laughed. How many times had Gram said the same? He shook his head. How was he going to get that hot head out of this one? The smoke from his cigarette rose in slow curls. His eyes fixed on the enormous structures breaking up the horizon. 

He cringed at himself. Who do you think you are? You chase wires.