I had never been to False World before. The interstellar cruise on Horizon Finder had made it part of the itinerary after media interest bloomed over the outpost in this far-off, forgotten solar system. One red dwarf star, one marbled-milky gas giant and a world made up of the garbage from a thousand colonies, shipped out and dumped in space.
False World was entirely made of plastics and metals, dirt, dismantled buildings and a trillion discarded goods; things broken or not wanted. There were mountains of rusted vehicles, rivers of oil, and skeletons of technology from the swarms of people that had spread through the galaxy.
On the star maps, there was a little caption under False World, an in-joke made from embarrassment, which simply declared: ‘Because you don’t shit where you eat.’
The messy sphere was slung in a long orbit and officially classified as a planetary body. A tourist’s shuttle excursion was worth the extra credits to everyone on board, so when I signed up, many were jealous they had missed the chance. It meant visiting a place that no one believed could exist. The huge plastic ball had somehow managed to create a weather system and in long-range scans life had now, beyond all odds, been detected on the surface and studied.
In any other circumstance, I’d be beaming from ear to ear but I was numb. Everything had already gone wrong.
“Helmet’s on and check the seals, it’s not pleasant out there, believe me, you can’t breathe it in, and if you did you’d be sick, I tell you, all garbage and sulphur and the bad stuff.”
I was travelling alone now. I had spent a month in my cabin drinking and so I decided to do something, in light of what happened, to do anything to distract my brain. On an interstellar cruise, you didn’t leave until the end, no matter what. I wished that had been true for my son.
Empty shells
The door had never really meant anything much to me before. It was just a normal blue door on a suburban house, the paint was faded and there were cracks in the panels where the sun had baked it over the decades. Jane had been in my life for 20 years and the thought that she would never wake up next to me again, never smile at me in the garden or sit with me on the sofa – it hurt my chest, it made it hard to breathe.
I had to go in, one more time, I had no choice. Henry’s things were in there, his schooling computer, his clothes, his toys. I had to load up the car and then get out of there forever, call someone, sell the place, and just go somewhere else. My sister and brother-in-law could keep us both until the crying stopped and the shock turned to an ache, but it was a sanctuary in the horror, nothing more and nothing less. We would need to move on and resettle somewhere away from this.
I pressed my thumb onto the door pad and it clicked open in recognition of my print. I was confronted with that familiar scent. The warmth from the heaters wrapped around me. Her dusty work boots were by the door and her long beige coat was on its peg. I stared at them and noticed my hands shake as the shock returned. I felt compelled to whisper her name, to entice her back from death for just one last hug. Her things were painful to be with, like memory had hardened into the stuff she left behind, as if these objects were living for her still.
When Jane died it was such a sudden horror, completely inconceivable, no lingering, no goodbyes, just a morning routine in a hurry, dropping toast – butter-side down, late for the school run and then hearing the news from a stranger. It was like a black wall had appeared in the living room, a massive cold edifice towering over the furniture, drowning our little keepsakes in darkness and shadows.
I set about the house like it belonged to someone else, like I was auditing for accounts but it took minutes before I had to stop just to breathe, just to anchor myself, grip onto the sideboard with both hands and white knuckles, like the house was about to plunge into the centre of the Earth.
“Henry,” I said plainly and then repeated it, “Henry,” and that was my mantra, that was the only word to keep me from falling forever.
A picture of Jane as a college student was on the sideboard next to her collection of sea shells. She wore a purple V-neck T-shirt and had the whitest smile. Her blue eyes shone, with the strongest life force. How was it even possible someone so alive could die at all, let alone by a freak accident?
Nothing would ever make sense again.
There was a moment that I fixated on. It was when we had snuck outside with a bottle of Chardonnay one frosty winter night. Henry was deep asleep – we were tired to the point of exhaustion from shifts of staying up with him. The garden was stunning. We had blue fairy lights trailing across the pergola and the fences. The cold was turning our breath into flumes and the stars were shining like hope. We were whispering our secret thoughts and sipping from the crystal glasses. Before we had Henry we would book the disaster tours – rapid response tourism to disaster events by passenger drones – and we would see so much of the world’s terror as it happened. But one child was all it took to return our sensitivity. Danger seemed less appealing almost immediately. At least for a while, we comprehended that a little life relied on us.
The only option was to escape – get far away, just me and my beautiful, desperately sad son. We had to escape the house, the street, the people, the world – get on a tour ship and see the star system. We had to throw away everything our lives had been. That was the sadness of life after loss. I had some savings in the bank and I would sell the house anyway. This was the time to live in the now. I already learned that tomorrow is a false promise.
The things we loved
The ground was moving, like an ice floe, large plates of metal and plastic, shifting like scales on a dragon’s back as it lumbered on. The male guide with his crewcut and thin frame looked young, too young. I saw his nerves for just a moment when the hatch opened. It was a second where he held his breath sharply. When he did begin to address us, his practised delivery was from a book, from training on board. There was little in his demeanour that reassured me he had much experience and knowledge or cared about us beyond ticking a box about this allotted off-ship assignment.
“Now, activate your transponders, just in case. We have suffered one disaster in this voyage, and it’s space, so there is always one incident, and let’s believe that was it – but nonetheless, let’s be ultra-prepared. This is only the second sanctioned visit to this place, you’re practically walking on virgin ground.”
He gave a silver-gloved thumbs up and smiled in his well-lit space helmet, uneven teeth beaming back our way with calm confidence.
He held a device up to scan the hills of discarded household rubbish. Some of the life forms here were not that friendly, having evolved from all the things we did not want, and who could blame them?
“Here’s a fun fact, did you know that everything manmade doubles every twenty years and has been since the start of manufacturing in ancient times? We love making stuff, don’t we? This planet is now 98 percent manmade and every single item you see today has been thrown out of someone’s house, factory or city. That’s incredible! Now, follow me – let’s go to the so-called Valley of Dog Bowls.”
The Valley of Dog Bowls was a silly net meme that every other kid in the galaxy had seen. The plastic bowls were tatty, chewed and discarded and made up a grand canyon on the planet that stretched for fifty miles. We had landed close, and seeing it from the porthole windows of the shuttle was jaw-dropping, as we had curled toward the tatty world’s surface.
We walked in a stilted, awkward fashion in a single file behind the guide as instructed. The suits were clumsy but manageable. Our guide kept peering back at us as if he believed we needed to see his smile to feel safe.
The edge of the valley entrance was sheer and he stopped metres before it plummeted into great depths.
“Take movies, take time, but stay behind this line,” he said, drawing an imaginary line on the ground with his finger.
“Think of all the dogs that loved those bowls, licking their lips and chowing down.” he beamed, in full tour guide mode. “Now these bowls are bricks in the wall to this amazing valley and if you look hard some days, you see odd creatures on the valley floor, about the length of a car, like oversized slugs, feeding off the organic materials that drip off these feeding stations. Some say they came as eggs on the rubbish barges but no one knows. They are just one of many life forms that have learned to live in this wonderous world of garbage.”
As the couples around me began to chatter and move about, activating their camera units on their helmets, I heard something behind me where the shuttle was positioned, with its ramps down.
I instinctively turned towards the noise and at first, was confused. A small boy was standing there near the ramp, with no space suit, no helmet and just a brown blanket draped about his small frame. He was staring at me. I gasped and almost fell back. It was Henry.
“Daddy,” he said gently but I could hear him clear enough.
I staggered forward toward the figure, my legs almost giving under the weight of shock.
The guide began to panic behind me, I heard him shouting but the noise seemed to bounce off me.
“Sir, no, sir, that’s not real…. Sir!”
“Henry!” I screamed, my lungs almost exploding with grief released.
When I reached the closest ramp near him, the boy glitched, the image wavering as if interference had broken a signal.
“Sir! That is a mimic!”
Mimics were one of the strange lifeforms that had evolved here on False World. I had read a small article on them, but when confronted with the impossible, when it meant so much, it was like being stabbed in the heart.
Mimics prayed on strong distraught emotions and vulnerable minds. Live brain scans had been used by scammers for decades, turning them on the victims to cripple their senses. They would tune into real-life trauma and amplify the memory holographically, usually to catch people cold, or extort money. Mimics had evolved, the AI took on a life of its own and broke free, carried on the backs of bio-cybernetic spiders. They instinctively lured victims in and fed off their intense energy signatures. If you came in too close, it would trigger a ‘hardware interface’ which practically meant inserting a feeder-spike directly into the brain tissue. This may have been the first time a mimic in this world had seen a human, but it knew what to do.
Close-up I could see the image was blurry, the hands not accurate, like the gaps in my memory had been filled in, with a patchy guess.
Still, I needed to say: “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry….”, and I crumbled to my knees.
The holographic image disintegrated before me and sure enough, the odd, half-metal, half-flesh arachnid revealed its true form under the hologram. It was dark and crab-like, and it was clearly working me out as its prey. It scuttled closer for a better angle of approach.
Before it could jab that narrow spike through my visor, the young guide had yanked his blaster from his holster and blown it into a thousand pieces, scattering more debris into the uneven floor of abandoned clutter. The violent flash and spray of parts momentarily shocked me back to myself.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, my eyes shut.
The guide thought I was talking to him.
“No harm done, just glad you’re safe, Sir!” he squawked in a deliberately heroic tone, waving at the other tourists as they broke out into spontaneous applause.
Human stuff
I bundled my son up into my arms, the blanket falling away from him as I ran. He awoke slowly, muggy and disorientated, looking about over my shoulder without a word, sensing activity but not alert enough to process the situation. Passengers and crew were running in the corridor, all civility reduced to panic. I clearly remember Henry’s hand on my neck, gripping gently as if it were a tree in a gale, something real.
I knew I was going to die. The ship was burning.
Dozens of bodies were adrift beyond the torn hull of the Horizon Finder, blood boiling out from their eye sockets and gaping mouths. They were dressed in night clothes or naked, pale against the void. From the window of the cabin, I watched them glide into space, arms angular in arrest. I caught glimpses of objects; a kettle, a child’s toy, a suitcase.
The latches were locking down but it was futile. Large sections of the cruise ship had been breached when the debris hit.
The captain had been so confident earlier in the day, as he tracked the fast-moving cloud of rocks on radars and yet something had malfunctioned, as no one had been ready when the alarms rang out.
“Daddy?” he mumbled, eyes hooded from slumber.
A young woman was curled into a ball in the corridor as others ran around her, focused on the luminous arrows guiding them toward the life pod bays. I pressed my face hard against a portal to get a view and watched as the life pods fired into orbit into deep space, one at a time. It felt like lunacy, desperate, but what other choice was there, to live a little longer with a small hope of being picked up by some passing freighter, or die for certain on a disintegrating ship? I saw the coloured sparks spray as the locks snapped off from the cruiser’s hull and the capsules jettisoned from the remains of the tour ship. One or two ploughed straight into the path of the rocks that tore through space. The grey orbs shattered into fragments or span out of control into oblivion, damaged and doomed.
I knew what I had to do. Henry was finally aware of the predicament we were in, and began to sob. I heard the horror in his weeping – that knowledge that you cannot ease with hollow words. I ran for the life pods.
By the time I reached the bay, a brawl had broken out for passage in the pods remaining. This was life or death – no policemen, no saviour on a telephone, no judgement. Two large men were punching a thin elderly man in the face, their victim already on the floor and spitting up blood and teeth, his shaking hand trying to confuse their well-targeted blows – by his side, a now discarded kitchen knife. Some women were screaming and swearing and I took a wide path around the mob until I was steps away from a pod’s open door.
There was a similar scuffle in the vessel when I peered in. A crewman was trying to unlatch a teenager from his seat to steal it. I shoulder-barged into the circular room. I felt a fist connect with my jaw and managed to pull Henry from my shoulder and push him into the pod’s interior before I was dragged back and kicked to the side. The pod door began to shut automatically and screams of fear erupted from those still marooned in the bay. I could just make out my son’s shrill voice.
“Daddy!” I heard. “Daddy!”
As the pod’s door shut, it triggered the larger airlock door to descend. The noise and panic around me muffled into the background. I filtered it all away so I could tune into the last words my son said to me. That plea, the yearning not to be abandoned, it was a physical moment staring into me.
The pod shrank away into space until it was a pinprick of light, forever diving into the bleak chasm of darkness at unimaginable acceleration.
And like that, Henry was gone too.
It felt like an illusion. I wanted someone to snap their fingers and tell me I had been dreaming because it was too cruel to be reality. I felt the true enormity and empty promise of time and space for the first time. I could sense it, endless and unforgiving. Time was an illusion and space was by definition, nothing. It was the same as death.
The sirens stopped as abruptly as they had started.
I could hear the crackle of flames licking the ceiling, the sobs and groans of the trampled as they tried to pitch their fists to stand on their feet.
Crewmen came running down the corridor in immaculate khaki uniforms, far too late. I turned to watch them stomp toward me, their eyes focused like elite sportsmen – looking up the corridor with purpose, unconcerned that the pods were all gone.
One slowed and stopped beside me – catching a breath and commanded: “Sir, you must come with us. There is a chance…”
I felt sick.
“Sir!” he repeated, louder, like I was deaf and confused. “Follow us to the main deck. We’re going to jettison this section of the hull, the fires, the breaches, they are in the living quarters, not the flight deck and engine room. I am sure we can work out some new cabins from the crew deck. This is great news for you, Sir. We have to move now!”
He grabbed my arm roughly, irritated I was not responsive. It dawned on me that I could still live.
“Sir, it’s all going to be fine. Come… You’re a valued passenger. You don’t know how lucky you are. Those pods will perish! We’re in the backend of nowhere.”
Somehow, I found the will to follow him. I heard myself groaning in emotional pain, unable to disguise the depth of despair.
He said without missing a beat, “Try to hide your emotions, Sir, you have to be positive.”
Outside in space, through the fogging windows, I glanced again at the hundreds of personal belongings floating and spinning, a debris field of products, signs of life like fossils in a tide, objects that no longer had meaning as their owners were dead. Litter was like spores we released to root into anything nearby. It was what we left behind, and what once mattered. It was the evidence that we had existed, like the weeds feeding from the dirt of a grave.
The End
Dystopian Days 