Orbits

Tom & the Ship, featuring a Landing

Ten million buxom female fans were shouting Tom's name—while jiggling their buxom-y parts. It was a wall of sound that cut into his bones through his ears. He was everywhere. In every puckered mouth. In every shade of eye. There were so many people in the crowd they sat on and crushed each other, using others' heads for stools, shoving their hands in faces to gain balance. They even made a squirmy carpet on the aisles.

Everybody wanted him.

But they weren't loud enough to drown out the sound of Nathalie's text when she asked him if he'd heard the news.

He ignored her at first, lifting his eyes then raking them across the rows of the stadium, which made waves like water. Parted his lips for a smile, allowing metallic sweat to fall into his mouth, and roll down his tongue in a stream of beads. Expertly juggled the soccer ball with the heels of his graceful feet.

The air was coloured by sunlight. The grass was fresh and pixel-free green. He was moving like he'd invented the sport.

Glorious.

Then Nathalie video-called, and the game froze, paralyzed by a telephone icon. The audience was still and silent, the only sound the trilling dring of an incoming call, reverberating within his skull. Even the sun seemed dimmer.

She also sent a second message, which was accompanied by an anxious emoji.

Please pick up!

Tom was about to dismiss this as well—he was halfway into the curt nod that would do so—when another text registered. The letters appeared as a giant banner in the sky, thick in odd places.

THE SHIP WILL BE LANDING SOON.

Although the sun was, in fact, dimmer, it was still quite bright, and Tom still had to squint to read the words. They left him stone—except for his fingers. His fingers were jittering and unsteady.

THE SHIP WILL BE LANDING SOON.

He made the game vanish with a nod.

A dizzying transition. The blander dimensions of reality were almost an ocular slap. His eyes discovered walls and hard empty floor, along with the body regular blood and muscle stimulation kept toned and young. His pod was dark—save for the Mind Map, where Nathalie's message gleamed, and which he immediately enlarged, so things were less dark—and airless, as if the darkness were something physical that needed to take up space. There was the always-distant, always-present hum of the ship's engines, but the pod wasn't broadcasting its usual background music to muffle it. Everything was disturbingly silent, and it felt as if a giant was holding Tom's breath by the throat.

Pressing the telephone icon with a thought, Tom maneuvered himself onto his legs, accepting Nathalie's call standing up.

She appeared to be quite unnerved.

"We're really leaving, Tom!"

Natalie's pod was equally dark. The pale glow of her face, lit by her Mind Map, contrasted sharply with her shadow-coloured hair. Natalie had not been born pretty, but the ship fixed her up every day, and she only video-chatted with her best angle facing forward.

"That doesn't seem right," Tom answered. "I don't believe it."

His fingers betrayed his nerves. If the ship had arrived, that meant no Mind Map (for the Mind Map was connected to the ship's servers), no stimulators, no food pills, no back massages, no games, no curated dreams. No pods. (The ship would leave them behind on the planet's surface and return to Earth in the search for more survivors. The ship would drop those survivors on another "viable" planet and repeat the process.) It was a prospect that made his chest feel like it was short a heart.