The Betrayal

The soft electric hum of generators and the continual light suck of air filters didn’t register in the hearing of those on board the space station anymore.

The expanse of the circular control deck, especially, was so familiar to those who worked it that it was furniture, like the skin of their day. For the deck crew on rotation, it was home.

The workstations were adorned with accomplished artwork, featuring intricate penwork of evergreen edible plants from the greenhouse quarters, portraits of fellow sisters, and the twenty-strong station’s real-tech robots, as well as the brownish-grey spectacle of a tired Earth – the things they held as precious. It was a quiet life on board. The most eventful things that ever happened, like space junk impacts, power disruptions and clogged filters – they never seemed frightening or disruptive, just the warp and weave of the maintenance of a colony in orbit.

Every one of the female faces that passed by in the corridors, or sat savouring food in the canteen, who stared at diagnostic screens, or talked about their feelings on the worn settees in the relaxation rooms – they were all like family. Indeed, in some ways, they were a family, one that never evolved, as each woman had been grown from the original crew’s DNA in the section they called The Womb. They knew each other well; there would never truly be any surprises in behaviour.

There were gatherings every third day in the large ‘townhall’, to talk, to share, to sing – and reinforce the sense of togetherness they had to run a tight station, to maintain their purpose, and guard the sovereignty of their feminine species. Outside, space was also a wallpaper of a kind, and Earth, a beautiful portrait picture that broke the void with its mass and its intricate surface collage of mountain ranges, and dune wildernesses as a matt of muted, pale colours.

They liked the predictable, and they counted on the predictable, but the one thing true about the predictable is that it will one day shatter. Once in a while, the clockwork of routine, the sense of safety and security and all that is held, cracks and fragments with a single incident, something that does not make sense in the accepted pattern.

It all began on that control deck. It began with a man, a man who had broken the rules.

“There’s been a crime, Matriarch. This man has no permission to be on board. He slipped into the station on the last resource exchange with Alpha Orbital with a counterfeit pass. Someone was covering for him. I believe he has spent private time with a sister. We found this, rolled up in a battery case he was carrying.”

The Matriarch was a title Sonya enjoyed, and it suited her. Her presence exuded an unquestionable authority, and she appeared almost arrogant by necessity. Sonya held out her hand to receive the scrap of paper from the affronted and excited cargo inspector, a slight woman with critical eyes and pursed lips.

Paper was one of the rarest of their resources; permitted for art only, once every Earth year and then reconstituted in a mulching machine the following. It felt odd to hold the paper scrap when it had been stolen and misused. When she unravelled it, there were carefully handwritten words scrolled down its length, neatly in lines. There was no name it was addressed to, no signature, just lines of earnest words.

Her face seemed to slump in a kind of horror, as if seeing a ghost that she had always assumed was there but never witnessed until that moment.

She read it in her mind only. It took a few long seconds, each second adding weight to the air.

We must be careful to remain quiet and small. The memories of our nights together are so beautiful and delicate. Our secret should be in the shadows, as we are animals running amok out of our cage. Every time we do this, it could be our last, but I will regret nothing. Your bed is forgiveness; the electricity of your touch is the cure to any doubt. We freeze at the sound of footsteps beyond your bedroom door, but our hearts are bright like stars with no end to brilliance. You know I only trust and love you.

“It’s what people used to call… A love letter,” she frowned, agitated.

Sonya could see the confusion on the inspector’s face and chose not to reveal any more insight. Despite its intrinsic value, she crumpled it up into her fist to make a point and stared with disdain at the bedraggled male brought before her. He was thin with scruffy hair, pale skin, and nervous energy. He was in regulation blues, standard garb of the low-level workforce on the only other space station.

Sonya was silently relieved he was not someone with a senior role, which could pose problems with diplomacy, potentially even conflict. She thumbed her lip and saw an opportunity to showboat her status, create drama to spread, and hold court with the crowd of a dozen uniformed women on the bridge.

“Courting between a real flesh and blood man and a woman is as barbaric as it is ancient. It’s disgusting… Your deluded words remind me of what this turns into, and what happens when we sisters trust men. As you would know, one of Draper’s deputies was found to have abused one of our sisters. The man was punished by Draper with demotion, isolation and finally castration. Our sister returned to our station traumatised. I cut Alpha’s rations from our garden by fifty per cent for four months. Draper sent a communique to me personally. It said, ‘Why did you make him do this? The woman was wearing provocative clothes, short sleeves and exposed legs…’ It was men who caused the last Earth war… They use their logic to justify anything they choose, and they always will. As a man, now proven as a liar, you pose a threat to us all.”

Miles Gent had been forced to kneel; a tall security droid was holding his skull and pushing it forward and down in submission before Sonya, who revelled in her elevated position like an empress in her sprawling command chair on the large, curved bridge of Venus One. She wore a unique uniform, a purple, royal colour, with a matching headband and five tight arm bracelets on each arm to signify the highest rank.

The pressure on him was telling as he struggled. He could not fight and win against AI and hydraulic arms; the station droids were ten times stronger and quicker than any person.

Station Matriarch, Sonya Egless, was one of the most powerful human beings alive. The only other with her match of status was the leader on Alpha Orbital, millions of miles away in the void. He was the bold-headed, six-foot-seven-inch-tall Station King – as he titled himself. Max Draper commanded four hundred and thirty souls on his male-only space station, around the overheated remains of Earth. Reports from exchange visits were that the station had a very different, darker personality than Venus One, down to the musky smell of the corridors, the high volume of voices and music, even the machines looked different – harder, dirtier.

Male and female segregation was the law before Earth’s last oxygen burned out. The stations had been around for hundreds of years, one for males and one for females, and they were intended as permanent refuges for humanity’s scrappy remains. The Great Segregation had been a long time in the making. When robots became convincingly human in appearance, they could be programmed with acceptable or desired behaviour and, with genetic procreation possible as a simple laboratory procedure, the sexes no longer depended on each other for anything of real value. The last remaining tribes of men and women stared at each other with cold indifference, with a feeling that the other side was alien, wrong and fundamentally unpleasant. With time, they did what came naturally to them all, and they defaulted to a mutual mistrust and despising. A love letter from a man to a woman, like an unimaginable relic of another era, another way of thinking, was disturbing. It represented a naive time, a time of lies and human frailty, a time of daydreams that turned sour under inspection. Men and women were so fundamentally different in their species that they were always bound to be dangerous to each other.

Miles had made a big mistake and committed a significant cultural crime. He had fallen in love.

There was no name on the letter, which was addressed simply to My love, and that meant there was a traitor in Sonya’s ranks to add to her woes. A woman in the glistening halls of her sanctuary had broken the vow and their sisterly trust; this person, whoever she was, had let her feelings soften to a man, and it was perverted.

“I will not only have the name of the sister you corrupted, but I’ll also have the story of how it happened, and only then will I decide the manner of your punishment. I need to know so this can never happen again.”

“May I stand?” asked Miles calmly.

There was a sharp silence. He had spoken out of turn.

“Break one of his fingers…” ordered Sonya, and the droid complied without hesitation.

There was an audible snap of a thin bone. Some of the onlookers covered their mouths in horror. Violence was a rare thing to see, especially around the control deck.

Miles only winced, determined not to reveal the magnitude of pain that was rippling around his nervous system.

“… Now you can stand. But if you move out of your place, I’ll instruct the droid to break another…”

Miles noticed the droid was fundamentally male in format, but with adjustments in design, female adornments, stripped of some indicators of male identity. It wore soldered-on jewels and colourful, bright clothes. Its life-like hair had been shaven close to the fake skin, in neat stripes. The word ‘fake’ was etched into its forehead. Beyond the costume, the robot looked real enough, yet something about it remained eerily unnatural. Its human face held no malice, nor happiness, nor any real emotional programming, making it appear as if it were in a permanent trance, under some spell. It made it easy to comprehend that its clear blue eyes were just cold AI filters embedded in glass lenses.

A solitary bead of sweat trickled in escape down Mile’s forehead, partly from fear, partly from the shock of having his little finger cracked at ninety degrees. He could feel uncontrollable shaking as adrenaline surged, while he could neither fight nor flee.

“Now you speak!” she demanded, with one long green-painted fingernail pointing at his mouth directly.

He caught his breath by swallowing hard and decided to tell the story, but not reveal the name. The story was important, and the order of it mattered, and in a way, he was glad of a crowd to hear it.

“I was on a resource exchange some time ago. I’m just an unloader, as you can see. I was getting the boxes off the hold, and apart from cleaning and inventory checking, that was my job… In short, I’m nobody, especially on Alpha Orbital. They have smarter people to think, stronger people to do, I am as low as they get in the chain… I need to explain that, for context…”

His hand shuddered more violently as the pain grew and natural endorphins subsided, but he did not look at it; he kept his focus on Sonya, just below her eyeline, to engage but not to offend with direct eye contact.

“What I discovered, though, made all the power, work and hierarchy meaningless for me- because I found something more than all of that. It started innocently enough. I had to be escorted with a container of apple seeds to a deeper section of Venus One near your garden section, and that’s when I noticed her… I could not look away, as if it were pure magnetism. Her beauty took my breath away – not just physical, but she shone from within. I couldn’t help it, my heart began to beat faster, I had a feeling that welled up inside that’s impossible to truly describe, but I will try. I can’t even say it was pleasant, but it was powerful, real, and it felt like huge unrelenting gravity. It felt like I was on pleasure drugs. All these feelings were wrapped in a tight ball behind my ribcage… Sounds were louder, visions were brighter. I think this was what they used to describe as love at first sight, in the old ways.”

“It sounds like the feelings you get before combat?” smirked the Station Matriarch, and some of the onlookers laughed out loud, but she was intrigued enough to let him continue. She motioned to him with a roll of her hand.

He cleared his throat before speaking again.

“When a newborn is grown in the lab, there is a natural sense that comes over most of us, I am guessing you too, that you need to protect it, your job, your duty, is to protect it from harm… That is similar to the feeling I got. The female droids we have on Alpha are designed and intended for our pleasure; they are objects, and they do many of our chores and our bidding. As you know, one droid on one charge can work three jobs. We look at them like you look at your male droids, as tools for doing anything that we want; that’s it. This is not the same feeling… This feeling takes over, it changes everything…”

Sonya’s stare hardened, and he realised he must choose his words more carefully.

“What I mean is, it feels like a purpose, like everything else is just noise in the background until you spend time with them again. I guess it’s like having a best sister, who happens to be a man.”

Sonya shifted uncomfortably in her seat, her lips contorting as if someone had spat at her.

“I caught her eye. We just stared at first. We got away with it as no one noticed, and then we got away with smiling and joking with each other, and we were alone together for just ten minutes to begin with, but that was enough – so we hastily made plans to meet again. We would brush each other’s hands, smile and look at each other, say small things, but we both knew straight away. We learned how to kiss; it was intoxicating. Then there was more, you see, more than kissing. The memories of our nights together are so perfect…”

“Enough!” shouted Sonya, closing her eyes and holding up the palm of one hand for him to stop.

The deck’s surly security chief stepped forward and was permitted to speak.

“I think we should throw him out of the airlock, Matriarch, before he pollutes our minds anymore with this vile nonsense.”

Sonya scratched her chin, looking hard into her captive’s watering eyes. The pain of the injury was obviously not waning. Miles was breathing hard, and his arm remained juddering in the shock of the assault.

“…Give me her name?” demanded Sonya.

Miles sucked-in deep, like he was about to dive deep underwater, anticipating the next torture.

“I can’t do that. She has done nothing wrong…”

“I’ll tell you your options, Miles Gent of Alpha Orbital. One, we throw you out of the airlock, two, we send you back to Draper, who will have his own way of dealing with you, or three – we find a punishment that fits the crime uniquely, but either you tell me the name of our sister in this, or we’ll find her from what you have shared with us already… But by then you’ll have no fingers left to hold her hand…”

Miles panted with dread but shook his head. His heart was racing. Some of the deck crew were already looking away in anticipation.

Sonya nodded – accepting he was going to make the hard choice, but before she could dispense judgment, a woman in the room stepped meekly forward, a senior communications specialist on deck duty. She was small, with mousy hair and a pale complexion, clutching an analytics tablet with arms across her chest, as if she was using it as armour.

“Please, don’t hurt him anymore, it’s me. I’m the one…”

“No!” he protested, and the droid pushed him hard in a jolt as a warning.

Sonya was shocked. She knew this woman as a confidant, someone with empathy and a sense of sisterhood that transcended most in her inner circle. Indeed, Nina Chalize was a good friend to everyone on deck. It was inconceivable that she had betrayed them all.

“Nina?… Why?”

Nina looked panicked, flitting her eyes to the exits and the viewing screens as if she wanted to escape the room any way possible, a guilty blush erupting across her cheeks.

“Like Miles said… I want to be with him…”

There was a wave of gasps across the deck, a response to surmise a mix of disbelief and indignation.

Sonya looked fleetingly at Nina’s workstation. The portrait slapped beside the screen there resembled what they had assumed was a male droid from behind, like a silhouette, and the corner of the paper appeared folded back, but Sonya realised now that it was missing, torn off neatly.

Miles turned to face Nina and managed to force a small smile, gripping his disfigured finger, trying to reposition it into a straighter shape.

Nina shook off her fear and, with a boost of bravery, walked toward him to be by his side. It was her statement.

In response, Sonya furrowed her brow.

It was clearly time to deliver her verdict.

“My understanding is that it begins with a physical addiction, togetherness, and then, inevitably it ends badly. Men are confused about love; it is all in the history files. There is a story that haunts me to this day. The first nuclear bomb ever dropped was on a city called Hiroshima. The B-29 bomber that dropped that bomb was called Enola Gay, named after the mother of the pilot. What kind of sickness was that? One man killed over a hundred and forty thousand people in the name of his mother, for the love of the woman who gave him life himself. Men use love to justify annihilation, and women are left to watch or pick through the mess.”

Sonya’s knowledge of history and politics was one of the reasons she had morphed into an unchallengable leader. She had not finished her lecture.

“Your misadventure is not compatible with our way of life, and like a virus, this idea of companionship between the genders might infect others if I let you stay onboard. But still, you’ve not hurt anyone technically, not yet…

“I’ll banish you both on a one-way trip to Earth. You’ll receive provisions for three months, plus insect larvae, so you can breed your stock, and one box of apple seeds. We know the coordinates of an abandoned experimental research station on Earth called The Garden. It is safe from radiation, has a contained air supply, and it can draw water from an underground source. There is also a growing lab on the site with soil. It’s small but manageable for two people. I guess that you will likely perish – but if you wish to spend the rest of your lives together, this will be a fitting solution for you. Understand, you will never see any other human being again, and that’s my final decision…”

The security chief was visibly irritated, wanting blood and a spectacle, perhaps a reason to go to war with Alpha Orbital; she hated men with a spite that fuelled her. Sonya knew better. Balance was sometimes required. Quietly pull out the offending weeds so as not to spoil the crop. Despite this male’s lowly standing, she realised that Draper was a petty man ready and willing for a fight at any opportunity; he enjoyed fighting, he lusted for reasons to assert dominance. She anticipated that if she killed this man, no matter who he was, it could ignite a fire that could threaten their trade for resources, which meant a threat to everything they held dear.

Her solution was one that even Draper would understand – a banishment to a near-impossible life, but they had been given mercy of sorts, a chance at least. It was an unusual solution to an unusual problem.

She did not expect what happened next; no one did.

“Thank you,” they both said, smiling, with gratitude and warmth, and they held each other tentatively in an embrace. For a second, they looked like one person as they hugged close.

“Thank you!” they repeated, and the two kissed passionately, the first kiss between a real man and a real woman that the sisters on deck had ever witnessed.

“Just know this,” snorted Sonya, leaning into the room from her throne-like chair, “After a month of hunger and hardship, this attraction you have, mark my words, it will turn to bitter resentment…”

“We’ll gladly take our chances,” replied Nina as respectfully as she could.

Sonya’s eyes glanced at Nina’s physique and noticed a shallow bump under her jumpsuit, one that could be mistaken for exceeding her rations, but it was subtle and barely noticeable. She chose to say nothing, for what good would it do?

The couple were grinning and lost in each other’s orbit.

It seemed to be obvious to the perplexed, staring crowd on the deck, that they had been given everything that they had wanted – simply, each other.

The End