Migration

Sarah Goes To The Farm

The Vac was cool and clean, a gleaming probe gliding effortlessly through the tubes that traced arteries above, below and around the Metropolis and out to Echo Farm. Sarah and Zoe sat next to each other, silently holding hands and watching their reflections in the glass opposite. Sarah's thumb rocked gently backwards and forwards over the young skin on Zoe's hand, and every now and then they smiled at their reflections or glanced left and right towards each other.

The compartment was quiet for a weekday morning, with only a small group of passengers sharing their journey. A young girl opposite was talking to a group of Hollers that sat like tiny dolls on her lap, behind her a smart man in a utility suit was swiping through reports and shifting numbers. On some mornings every carriage would be buzzing with Hollers of all shapes and sizes, clustered around every traveller. But not this morning.

Far down the compartment, a woman sat awkwardly across two seats, her young child fast asleep over her lap and shoulder. His stick thin legs dangled down from his mother's clutches and swung rhythmically back and forth with the movement of the train. Sarah studied his face, perfectly shut down and expressionless as he slept. She thought how astonishingly beautiful his tiny face looked, made so utterly content and pure that she couldn't think of anything more perfect. She felt how much she wanted to go to him and plant a tender kiss on his forehead, to share everything he had. She remembered when Zoe would sit across her just like that, a tiny weight pushing down with gentle warmth on her breast and stomach. She squeezed her hand a little and Zoe responded by resting her head softly on her shoulder.

A young Asian guy sat silently a few benches further away, intently watching his fingers as they twitched and tapped against his thumb, as if they were counting through an endless equation, whilst occasionally pushing his tortoiseshell glasses back against his brow. Sarah didn't take him for a Holler at first, but as she studied him absentmindedly, his dark utility suit changed to a smart white shirt with a black tie in a gentle wave of transformation. He had short, jet black hair that writhed and twisted maggot-like, tightening into taught knots on his head before gradually sharpening into neat spikes that he disappeared every now and then with a sweep of his hand. She wondered why he was travelling so silently on his own. Hollers never did, they only ever came to interact with someone physical, and she felt her forehead crease a little as she pondered his story. He looked lost in dark thoughts, brooding in silence at his fingertips and every now and then shooting sharp glances randomly towards the roof, the carriage walls and other passengers with awkward, disconnected jolts.

After a couple more stops the train shot out of the darkness of the tunnel and into the glaring sunlight of the day. The change always made Sarah's ears pop and she felt a little adrenalin rush with the speed of the landscape that now raced by. She clenched her teeth a couple of times, feeling the grinding at the back of her mouth and yawned her mouth wide open to clear the pressure that had dulled her hearing with the wrap of the tunnel. When it finally cleared, the hiss of the air conditioning jumped back into her ears and she wondered why she hadn't noticed it before.

The sleeping boy had also been disturbed by the sudden return of the day and now sat up on his mother's lap, lazily steering his half awake eyes around the carriage. His gaze bumped in to Sarah's and he let it rest with her for a while, unbothered by their meeting. After a few moments she threw him a smile, which he received gratefully and sent one back, wide and bashful, before burying his head in his mother's shoulder.

The young Asian guy had disappeared now, perhaps just to the next carriage, perhaps to appear on some device somewhere else, or maybe to explore somewhere altogether different. She wondered what that must feel like, to be so free to move and change however and whenever you wanted, to exist in any number of places at once, to flit at will between the worlds of eternity and mortality. After thirty years of guessing, she would know in less than an hour.