Earthian

Inspire

Owijer treated us to a nice warm meal that night in one of Valiant Base’s cafeterias; they got Más Rápido delivered to the Moon somehow, and I was stoked. Practically crying. It’s nice being catered to sometimes.

Then our host showed us how to operate the archways using our phone-tattoos, and we were allowed to bed down for the night.

My room was… odd. A hollowed out sphere with a flat bottom, like a scoop of ice-cream melting on the sidewalk. The furnishings were made of a soft material in dull grey, like a baby elephant’s hide.

I’ve always been a finicky sleeper, so there was no chance of real rest. Instead, I sat there for hours looking at and fiddling with my new phone… which happened to be printed on my skin. Or maybe it was a perfectly thin sticker. I really couldn’t tell. It was just there.

A swipe across its surface brought up the interface: diagrams, text, and pictures laid directly over my vision, even when I closed my eyes. They only went away when I swiped it back off.

Throughout most of that first night, it just told me to go sleep. Appointment in 8 hours, 6 hours, 3 hours…

Daylight. I can feel it… see it through my closed lids. It’s like I just woke up in a sunny field, on top of a not-too-rough blanket. I could spend the entire day like this. Just…

Why am I in a field?

I open my eyes, and I’m in my little grey pod–the baby-elephant suite–and the sunlight is coming from something floating near the ceiling that’s too bright to look at.

I hear a ringtone, and look all around for my cellphone but it’s nowhere to be found. It rings again, and my wrist itches, so I scratch it. The Seelio phone’s interface pops up and plays a short video from Owijer, explaining our upcoming training schedule.

Guess what? Training starts today.

As I swing my legs over the side of the bed, all the phone’s graphics fade, leaving only dim traces behind. But when I try to focus on them, they brighten back up right away. “You clever little squids,” I say to no one.

Across from me, there’s a weird table shaped like a brick, and a set of clothes laid out neatly on top.

There’s a one-piece jumpsuit made of something silvery, with angled streaks of blue, and more of the same color on the shoulders and collar. It doesn’t look like anything I’d ever buy… except maybe if Wiley was dragging me to a sci-fi Halloween party.

There’s a logo on the breast in a really aggressive typeface. It says E4.

I know what the 4 is… but what the heck is with the E? I suppose it doesn’t matter much.

I lift up the jumpsuit intent on putting it on, and I’m hit by an immediate roadblock: there’s no zipper. No buttons, no screechy velcro, not even a seam.

I have some aspirin in my pack somewhere.

I’ve now reverted to monkey-mode, holding the material up right in front of my face, flipping it around, sniffing it. The lightly-antiseptic odor teaches me nothing.

My inner monkey gets angry and I tug on the fabric, and it just comes apart. It splits down a perfectly straight line where I’m sure it had been one solid piece only seconds before.

I push the two sides together and they seal back into one, like two puddles of syrup on a paper plate.

“What the heck is this stuff?”

The phone interface jumps into action and highlights the suit with a glowing box. Friendly letters nearby say Polyplasmer Compound — Details Unavailable.