The Loneliness of Distant Beings

Chapter One

I know that they're birds, but only because I've been told. So many of them, sitting in a long line and waiting, and I don't know what it is that eventually makes them lift but they do, all of them, all at once, flickering into the sky on a thousand tiny wings. And the sky I've only ever lived outside of is blue, so blue, swept across with clouds like brushstrokes.

They always show this, this same bit of movie, on the big screen at funerals. I guess we all get the metaphor or whatever. Then they show some pictures of the dead person, just a few, normally their crew shots at passing out or Christmas balls or them in their dress uniform or what have you. But this time is different; right at the beginning there is an image of my great-grandmother on the planet she left behind, peach-cheeked, tanned, squinting in the sun, sand clinging to her legs. There's this kind of gasping sound from everyone when they show it.

Great Granny Bea had a lot of photographs, some printed on to card so you could hold them in your hand. Hold them and peer into them like windows. And when you looked into them, there she was looking out. Younger. Now she looks out of them alive, when in reality she is dead.

The funeral is the same as the others. Once we've laid the flowers Production have sent we stand and look, look at a box, and then Grandpa makes a speech. He doesn't even mention the fact that Bea was the last one in this place who ever lived on Earth, but I know we are all thinking it. I know the reason so many people have come today is because this is it – somehow now we really are all alone.

And then we leave the airlock, leave her there and walk away. Grandpa is the last to leave and it seems he only remembers to go at all because I take his arm just then. I guess that this part never gets any easier, no matter how many times you do it.

The lock doors slide over and we watch through the thick circular windows as the outer door opens, both sides simultaneously like giant jaws, and then she is gone. Out there, flying through space to who knows where. Just like she was before, really, but now she's doing it all alone.

I barely hear the first-session circuit announcement. I left the wake early only to fall into a horrible, deep zombie sleep. And this is why I am dreaming still while I pull on my trainers and tracksuit and head to Main gangway where I stand there yawning so much that I am trembling and wet-eyed by the time the runners streak past me and I join them, like jumping into moving water. I have music on my pod but I guess I'm not even listening to it, or even really thinking as we head down Main, irresistibly falling into step with each other until we're banging along like a beating drum. People on their way home from their third-session shifts walk one side, single file, eyes on the floor. Some of the noisy pumped-up guys at the front reach up and touch the trunking that's low overhead as we pass, just like they always do, and I could scream for the gaping chasm of boredom that this has become.

This is prescribed by Dr Maddox. That's the only reason I do it, have to do it, to keep myself out of Correctional. Dr Mad isn't a believer in long-term medication for 'children', preferring natural remedies, such as telling him all the horrible things that are going on in your head and running around in pointless circles, which he claims will produce endorphins, but I'm pretty much still on the fence about it. I spend quite a lot of time thinking the medication would be the better option, even if it does make you feel like someone pulled your brain out and replaced it with a damp sponge.

But anyway, this is why I find myself running circuits with all the flyboys from Engineering and the people who have somehow managed to get fat on the miserable rations we get dished out at the cantinas. I have been doing this every day now for more than a year, since I managed to get myself sprung out of Dr Mad's clutches in Correctional, where I was held for five weeks because I kind of decided to stop speaking for a while and then (one particularly bad night) tried to dig my way out of this place through the metal walls with my bare hands, tearing all my nails off in the process, and everyone decided it was because I was crazy. But look, it's something that I don't particularly like to talk about because, you know, it's pretty embarrassing, and the whole thing created a load of miserable memories I'd rather not take ownership of, whatever Dr Mad says.