SOMA (LGBT-scifi-romance)

Chapter Three: The Cull

Sector 06: Cita Avis

Dec. 25, 461 After Cataclysm

For a moment, Soma just stared. "Cain, that's not... Maria?" He rolled Cain's body onto his back and pulled egg from Maria's face. They still breathed, but their pulses were slow. Their bodies tugged with spasms. Foam coated the inside of Cain's mouth.

Hysteria scratched behind Soma's eyes. He clapped a hand to his mouth to trap his harsh breathing. His face felt hot. Steam filled his shirt. Nearby, a light snapped out. Soma had seen this before. Leanne called it culling.

Swallowing panic, Soma retrieved his old thermal coat from the pile by the hatch. He tipped dry saba powder into his inhaler and stowed the tube of it in a pocket of his oversized pants. It took him two attempts to pull gloves over his shaky fingers. Nearly choking himself with a moth-ball scented scarf, Soma clattered to the tower hatch, slid open the glass, and flung himself out into space.

Abruptly, there was no gravity and he swung his arms to counterbalance. Cold crusted into his curly hair. Soma's tears stung. A ship alarm sounded from far away. Above, synthetic neighbours were catatonic; their bodies clumping into spheres like the trash and sewage.

The hatch slid shut behind Soma.

He grabbed a ledge and propelled himself towards a neighbouring apartment complex. "Help!" He choked, pounding on the landlady's hatch. "Please help! Everyone's—"

There was no answer. He climbed around the egg-shaped apartment until he found an unlocked window and slipped through. The landlady was crumpled next to her bed, a broken mug in her hands and her knees scraped open by shards of ceramic. Her eyes focused in opposite directions.

Soma took a red-handled screwdriver from the landlady's tool closet. He pried open two more loose windows into his neighbours' homes. All the tenants—the young Taylor couple and surly Mr. Tidbit—were unconscious.

Soma paused at Mr. Tidbit's window and looked up at Cita Avis rotating around him, orange and wet and cold, with junk spheres and synthetic bodies plugged between lunaroids. He'd never given it much thought, but he couldn't be the only non-synthetic in the sector—the only human. He couldn't be the only one left.

He launched himself to the cluster of floating syns, turning each over in his arms. There was Three-one, who always offered his tackbox no matter how many times Soma said he was asthmatic and afraid of needles. There was Klaus, and F-fifteen. Most of their programs were corrupted like Cain's, but in their own broken, awkward ways, all the syns had been family.

He had to find help. Pushing off F-fifteen's torso, Soma oriented himself towards the nearest nanocable ropeway, catching it between his calves. He climbed towards Earth far above him: towards a ceiling of tar oil oceans and bruised flesh-coloured continents, pocked with red sores. He launched from lunaroid to lunaroid, pausing occasionally to breathe feeling back into his cold fingers. He shouted for help until asthma suckled up his throat, and sweat froze his curls to his scalp and his arms shook. But if there was anyone left un-culled in Cita Avis, they were tightly barricaded in their homes. No one answered.

Sometime during his search, Soma stopped crying. There was a serrated sensation in his throat and a tiny singularity in his gut. Moisture gathered in icicles on his bottom eyelashes. Soma clung to the side of a water treatment plant and ventilated panic into his inhaler. "Cain was right," he hissed, voice carrying strangely in the silence. "He knew something was wrong and we talked him out of it."

The whispering thought of Cain and Maria brought panic crashing back. Soma sobbed and hastily looked beyond the lunaroids, through the smog, to where dozens of Lamia-class sky fish maintained the terraforming barrier with their mucus saliva. Their eel-like bodies moved in and out of the gravity well. In and out. In. Out.

Soma could breathe again.

So high up, there was nothing between him and the sun, which looked very cold without the filter of orange pollution. Stars didn't blink, not with such a thin envelope of atmosphere. Each of them looked like the eyes of dead things. There were no sounds except the dull whine of climate generators and the echoes of heaters and gravitation units. Soma stared at Sentinel Tower from afar. He remembered the storyteller who taught him about Earth—the girl who claimed him and saved him. She'd promised to protect them, even after the Man of Means took her away.

Soma cursed. "Stupid, stupid, stupid!" Leanne. Leanne was the answer.

He backed to the edge of the water treatment plant and rappelled himself down the nanocables, back towards home past a hundred comatose bodies.

He crashed into Sentinel Tower after dark. The hatch scraped closed behind him. He tore frost and knots from his hair. Lights came on sluggishly. Cain and Maria were collapsed where he'd left them. Their chests rose and fell.

He retrieved Leanne's com from Maria's wrist. His shaking fingers swiped along the chrome surface until he reached the emergency number Leanne had left: a pretty string of ones and threes she'd given them for absolute emergencies. "Please, please." Soma traced his thumb across the com.

Silence, then "please leave your message," the com told him, in a soft, familiar voice meant for stories.

Soma had always known Leanne would save them. "Leanne," he said. "Leanne, please."

Emycee's Note: 

Hi everyone, thanks for reading! A bit of a shorter chapter (had to split the original chapter 2 because it felt a little long), but I hope it all averages out. 

Thanks Dan, for making me feel welcome! As well as all the resources.