Ted unclipped his own harness and followed Marco. “Babe? Baby, I’m sorry. I’m a fucking idiot…”
“Your ship will shortly be accelerating to near-light speeds made possible by FentiCorp’s gravitational engineers’ Push-Pulse network. In a matter of moments, you will be propelled beyond the edge of the solar system and beyond the limits of current human exploration. FentiCorp thanks you for your bravery and pioneering spirit. You carry the destiny of humanity with you among the stars, and FentiCorp is proud to be a part of your journey.”
There was a soft chime from the console, but there was no one there to hear it.
“You are now leaving the solar system. Goodbye, and good luck.”
-
WE’LL ALWAYS BE HERE
S. L. GREY
Pluto’s skin is sallow, almost grey, when she stands in the darkness, something she does often. She shivers against the bulkheads, wishing that she could just drop this burden, walk outside and crumble to icy shards in the first impossible wind. Sharon, on the other hand, spends all her time in the solarium, playing childish games with the braindeads.
Pluto was cursed from the very start. She grew up believing her parents had named her after the planetoid, and something about that resonated with her◦– the coldness, the peripheral darkness, the loneliness◦– but found out on her last birthday, when she turned fifteen, that they named her after an animal in an ancient fucking cartoon on 2D. A “dog”, they’d told her in the delayed-release message, a symbol of loyalty and friendship and joy, colour and innocence, but she’d never seen a dog and in the pictures she saw they looked like deformed freaks, bent and cowered, using their arms to walk and covered with matted hair. Their holos emitted the most unholy stink of rot and halitosis.
Nice one, parents. She reminds herself what cunts they were every time she misses them.
Pluto and Sharon were sent away when their parents died. Whoever was in charge considered it an unproductive use of Earth’s dwindling hospitable space to harbour orphans, and they certainly weren’t going to be sent to any of the plush new territories on Mars or the Moon. The day after the service they were packed off to Eros, the furthest, really, they could be sent from home without being dead.
Pluto looks out of the viewport across the lilting wastes to the solarium, the colourful, fake terraforming, the sun lamps embedded in its dome outglaring the real sun, which lurches in and out of view as the bone-shaped rock topples through space. Just the thought of that nauseous sun sends Pluto fishing for her motion sickness inhaler. Unbidden, a memory of her mother intrudes, cradling her hand, damping her forehead when she had a fever, her father lying in the next cot, reading a story to Sharon. Pluto was always the sick one; throat infections, ear infections. Sharon would just blunder along through her childhood, always wrapped up in her own imagination; padded, impervious.
She had a vague sense of the enclaves back then, places where they would be made safe from the virus. Some of her school friends and their parents had already gone, sold everything they could to leave, but there was the one-child limit. She didn’t understand it all then; it only played out in those late-night discussions in the lounge. “We can’t separate them. We just can’t.” Both of them crying. She forgives her mother, but she hates her father for crying. It was his job to be strong, to come up with a solution. But he just sat and cried. Until it was too late and they got it too. Just as well, then, that they died before they had to choose. It was only logical that they’d choose Sharon.
Pluto moves to the back wall and touches her hand to the bulkhead, trying to feel the frigid, real vacuum outside. Just a couple of metres and she could be frozen to nothing in the fresh void. She thinks of her parents in those last days, always trying too hard to be cheerful, trying to put a positive spin on it. “The solariums on Eros are beautiful, honey,” her mother would say. “They try to make it nice for you. They know what the young people want. And we’ll always be here.” She’d pat Pluto’s chest, as if that would make everything better.
“It’ll be like a holiday camp,” her father would chip in, but so unconvincingly. She’d watch him turn and wipe his eyes dry.
Sharon has decided that it’s time for another group makeover. As the leader of the Ugly Pretties, it’s up to her to choose the group’s new hair style. After much deliberation, she’s chosen something called a “short Dutch boy cut” from cycle sixteen of her all-time favourite history show, America’s Next Top Model. Last night she managed to procure a pair of scissors and a mirror without L.O.L.A the hygiene bot noticing (an easy feat as L.O.L.A’s surveillance units have decayed past the point of no return) and a comb from the box containing Sister Angelique’s last effects. While she waits for the Ugly Pretties’ feeding tubes to be removed by the canteen bots, she heads to the solarium to practice her walk. It’s hard to keep straight-backed and focused now that Eros’s gravity stabilisers are on the fritz, but she does her best to imagine that she’s striding down a fashion show runway, Tyra Banks and Miss J cheering her on from the sidelines. She loves Tyra Banks. Tyra’s what a perfect mother should be. Harsh yet kind, always full of advice on how to smize◦– smile with your eyes, find your inner confidence and pose for that perfect ugly-pretty shot.
The rest of the Ugly Pretties finally file into the solarium. Pluto calls them brain-fucked retards, which isn’t really fair as they can’t help the way they are. Before Sister Margaret’s bones deteriorated and she went to the great nunnery in the sky, she told Sharon the reason why the Ugly Pretties are unable to speak and understand only the most basic of commands. According to Sister Margaret, their parents put them into cryogenic storage during the Canadian cataclysm decades ago in an attempt to keep them safe. No one knew what to do with them when they were accidentally defrosted and brain-damaged, so they were shipped off, like Sharon, Pluto and the other unwanted girls, to Our Lady of Eternal Resolution’s orphanage on Eros. Sedna is the most damaged of the group (“nothing more than a meat puppet” Pluto calls her), Makemake’s skin is always clammy, and Eris and Haumea’s eyes never seem to focus. But they’re all Sharon’s got since the other girls succumbed to the bone-rot that wiped out the nuns and the counsellors. “You and your little followers,” Pluto likes to hiss whenever they run into each other in the canteen, “make me fucking sick.” Still, Sharon always feels a thrill when her twin sister speaks to her. Insults are better than being ignored.
“Welcome,” Sharon says to the Ugly Pretties. “I see before me four beautiful young ladies. Four beautiful young ladies who are in need of a… makeover!“ Sedna merely grunts, Haumea absently bats at the drool that continuously leaks from the corner of her mouth and Eris and Makemake sway as the gravity pull knocks them off balance. Sharon wishes, just once, that they’d squeal and jump up and down like the models on Tyra’s 2D show. Any reaction at all would be good. Sharon smothers a wave of despair. She can’t give into it. She’s the leader, the queen bee, she needs to keep upbeat and perky. She decides to start with Makemake. “Girlfriend,” Sharon says to her, “I’m going to wipe away that dreckitude for once and for all.”