Estimated oxygen time: 17:57:39

I flew low towards Ctesibius, making myself a bit harder to spot against the backdrop of the sky. If Vempress saw me making my way towards the cliff, would she stop me? As if the ghost of Ctesibius still dwelled there, and the ghost of Diocletian still feared its conspiracies. The jet quickly shot me up the cliff, and stopped me just as easily.

The entrance to Ctesibius’s cave didn’t change, aside from some for some of the lights having been turned off, but that was enough. I entered through the mouth and kicked clumsily from wall to scatter-lit wall. With each kick I recalled more of what had happened here—Ctesibius’s First drawing a knife to kill one Diocletian; Second trying to get the other one with his torch; Diocletian murdering Third in a cloud of metal shards; First’s confident expression behind her rifle, certain that Diocletian would just sit down and talk.

Ctesibius’s mistake had been expecting Diocletian to see reason. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake with Vempress.

The hall at the end of the tunnel was full of soft, yellow light, the luxurious bulb that Ctesibius afforded themselves, now weakened, enough that I could see that it was no light bulb, just a single exposed wire, heated. Strange, that Vempress hadn’t taken all of the batteries for herself. Maybe she hadn’t found them.

In the light, I saw Rachel crouching over the piles of debris, her body half hidden in shadow. She fumbled, her movements methodical and efficient, with the shattered and smelted devices, things that had taken days to build, ruined in mere minutes. I recognized Vempress’s style in the conservative way pieces of equipment had been welded together as to become unusable.

Rachel started when she finally saw my shadow cast over her, then steadied her gaze on my face, trying to hide her startlement. The one fierce brown eye I could see, still bloodshot from crying, revealed her anger. At Vempress, or at Ceres, or even at me. It was much better than the panic she’d shown, the last time I’d seen her. There was a vitality in her movements. Power.

“How did David do?” she asked, her tone casual, though her lips were pursed in impatience.

“With what?” I said as I stepped closer.

“The newcomer. He was excited about it.” Her eyes were back on the debris pile.

“He didn’t get to try. She didn’t want to talk; she just ran away.” I walked closer, realized my shadow was blocking the light on the pile she was looking through, then stepped aside. Ctesibius’s main hall was different without the people in it, working on this and that. Too quiet. In one corner I noticed the device Ctesibius had offered to use on me—the small bubble to take my helmet off, now slashed open and useless.

“Weird,” Rachel said.

“It has to happen every once in a while. I’m sure he did everything he could.”

“No, I meant why are we even surprised? How can we trust anyone, out here?”

“With David, it’s easy. All you need to do is look at him and see how much it all matters to him,” I said. She had made it clear that she likes him. Maybe our trust in David was something we could bond over.

“That’s the thing, right? You trust David because of those puppy eyes, but I don’t have puppy eyes.”

“You’re here, aren’t you? Isn’t that proof enough?”

“I was curious, so I came here. But I don’t understand how you two can convince yourself to care. I wish I could. What does it matter, what we do here? Nina told me about the shuttle, and the thousands of names that were signed on it. Thousands of people who’ve come here and died. Even if we helped one person, which I doubt, it’ll amount to nothing, weighed against those people who have didn’t get shit. David told me you want to change this place, to have some order and jobs and roles, but even if you did, what would it matter?” She held on to her helmet with both of her hands, and shook it. A loose strand of her curly hair settled on her face, but she didn’t seem to notice. “It makes me nauseous just to think about all that’s happened here,” she said, glancing again at a pile of bent metal and broken electronics. “And the future makes me claustrophobic. Jesus.”

“Why are you doing this with us?”

She looked up at me for a moment, then back down at her hands. “Because the world is full of cowards. Every world, even this weird, little one. I can’t change how other people think, but I can try to be a little less weak than the rest. You want to correct the world? Just think about what it is that a coward wouldn’t do, and do that.” She pulled a long line of suit material out of a pile, spooling it around one arm like an electric cable.

“If it won’t matter, why do anything at all?”

“Justice,” she said, and I cut her in, waving my hands to let her know we should stop. Did David not tell her that we’ re being tapped? We’re conspiring against Vempress, we could at the very least pretend not to. Or does she just not care?

“What do you mean, justice?” I let the terror show on my face, mouthed no, no, no. I tapped my ear for emphasis.

She grimaced, as if my wanting not to be heard was some spineless, sycophantic groveling and not simple caution, but in the end nodded slowly. “You and David were kind to me, and I’ll do you justice by helping you rebuild the lines,” she said—lying for David’s and my benefit. “It’s my last chance to make an actual impact.” She put a gloved fist into a gloved hand, to signify her true intention.

“Not the last,” I said. “After we’re done with… the building of the lines, we could build more things. A lot of people chose to spend their last day in this cave, making useful thing. You could do that, too.”

“Useful? What the hell could be useful here? If there isn’t anything that gets someone back inside, that helps someone survive, how is a piece of metal going to help anyone? And if you say you also want to siphon oxygen from people, I swear to god…”

“I don’t. I swear.” I haven’t even thought about that option. The only thing that seemed worse than living as Vempress’s pet was killing to stay here.

She sighed, the anger draining out of her. “I shouldn’t have come here. I should have stayed with David. Taken that last chance…” She stopped, as if she suddenly realized where her words were leading, and wasn’t quite ready to go there yet. .

“What last chance?”

She bit her lip. “This is a place of last chances—to hold someone in your arms, or laugh or sing, or speak your mind. To do something right. I wouldn’t have given away any of those chances for all of the water ice in the asteroid belt—but I gave it up because he asked me to.” I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but I had a feeling I would if I just let her continue. “And here I am, wasting my time looking through this trash because someone decided they want to do things the soft way. Because they don’t want things to get rough.” She looked directly at me, making it very clear what she was talking about. This society hasn’t even formed yet, and it already has its open secrets. “So what the hell, dude? I understand David,” her expression softened the smallest bit every time she said the name. “He’s a gentle soul—but you?”

I smiled. That one conversation with David was enough for her to figure out that he really wouldn’t want to kill anyone, no matter where. But she wanted to kill Vempress, too, and didn’t understand why I’d be against it. “It doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” she said, her eyebrows rising slightly, her tone suspicious.

We couldn’t say much else out loud, and some instinct told me not to put our helmets together yet; not to strain her trust that much, just yet. “What would you have done?” I asked. “If you were in my position?”

Her eyes told me everything I needed to know about her thought process: they blinked in confusion, then narrowed as she realized what I might be suggesting, then widened in disbelief, then closed. “Not the same thing you would,” she said finally.

Would someone eavesdropping understand what we were talking about? I wondered. “I understand. Let me show you something, then.”

She followed me reluctantly to the inner chamber. Here, too, everything was in shambles, the lab turned into heaps of trash, the once ordered and useful now chaotic and useless.

I floated near the wall, tracing the grooves and gouges left by a drilling machine that had left ages ago.

“I thought we were in a hurry,” she said, as I found the hand-hold I’d been looking for. I placed my feet against the floor and pushed that segment of the wall upwards. It detached cleanly, exposing the hidden room Ctesibius had shown me so long ago.

“What are you doing there?” she asked, unable to see clearly. I put the piece of wall down. It took me a moment to find the loose wires that served as a switch, but finally the lights went up.

She approached the opening, and The Egg. “What the hell?”

“Can you imagine how many days that took to build?” I said, sounding like Ctesibius once had.

She didn’t appear to share my sense of wonder. “What is that?”

“A handmade spaceship. It’s just missing a couple of components.”

Her eyebrows furrowed in consternation. “Were they getting help from the inside?”

“No. They did it all by themselves, adding a piece each day. Their name was Ctesibius. They couldn’t get the microbes they needed to make that thing sustainable, but believed that one day, they’d find a way, and send someone far enough to forget about this place. They united around that cause. They didn’t even tell the others about it. They pretended to be selfish, when in reality they had a much larger goal in mind. Dreaming of the one person who’d get banished to Last Day Town to die, and instead would get sent far away from here. Instead of drowning in despair, they all worked together just to help one.” I brushed the metal scaffolding, feeling a pinch in my chest.

She snorted. “That’s it? That’s the comfort? It looks like something out of a nightmare. I’d rather stay here and choke than get sent up there in a coffin.”

“I’m not asking you to go up there, I’m asking if you’d want to build it, so someone else will.”

“I wouldn’t. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have the time.”

“You won’t be alone, that’s the point. More people will join Ctesibius, and once your time is up they will recruit others, and it will all be thanks to you. What you build isn’t the thing itself, but how people get to spend their time.”

“And you expect me to look forward to building that? Because I’m not.”

“No, you’re clearly still looking backwards. Ctesibius isn’t just a crazy idea, it’s person after person choosing to put their past behind for something greater. And when I look at you, I see someone who isn’t letting the past go. You’re bothered, and I need you sharp. This place needs you sharp.”

“This place doesn’t need me. It doesn’t need anything. You wantt me to look forward… to what? To building that? Because I’m not.”

“No, I want you to look forward to looking forward…”

She shook her head again. “You’re even sadder than I thought. I don’t have time for this.” She kicked off the wall, back towards the piles.

I changed the course of the conversation as I followed her. “Did David tell you about Pythia’s duty? About confession?”

“He told me the basics,” she said, then stopped herself against a wall. The light lit her face, and she looked shy, as if she were hiding something. “But we said we’d talk about it once we regrouped.”

“Confession is a tricky thing, and Last Day Town understood this. That’s why people working together never got to hear each other’s confession, so they won’t be judged by each other. We have all done things we’re not proud of. The confession is first and foremost about you telling the story to yourself, but in order for you to tell it truly, you need a listener whose opinion doesn’t bother you too much.”

“Like you?”

“You tell me.”

“How do I know you won’t tell anyone? Use it against me?”

“Then I’d hurt myself more than you. Pythia have nothing if not their trustworthiness. So are you ready?”

“What—right now? I thought you said there isn’t time.”

“There isn’t, but there’s even less time for you to be confused and unsure about what it is you want to do here. We can’t afford to be unfocused.”

She hesitated. “Aren’t there more pressing things to focus on?”

“Yes, but that’s why this ritual’s so important. We can let go of the past and focus on the now.”

“I don’t feel like talking.”

“Not even if it helps you make a bigger impact?”

She sighed. “I’ll try. But no promises.”

I bowed before her, and put my hands behind my back. She proceeded carefully, and put her helmet to mine. “In the name…”

#

Dina puts the piece of paper under her tongue. It’s an archaic method of ingesting the drug, but she looks so goddamn cool—her thick eyelashes quiver as almond colored-and-shaped eyes look up, red tongue slamming down over the paper; like the slab of a sarcophagus, thick lips closing like a tight seal. She sends Rachel a kiss all the way across the room “Psychedelics are the only way to commit suicide without making your mother cry,” she says. Her head tilts to one side, letting her black hair fall over her cheek.

“Is that yours?” Rachel sits down on the bed, looking at Dina as she dissolves and becomes someone slightly different. It used to scare Rachel, seeing her like this.

It’s the end of another hard day at the same old hard job: monitoring cooks who try to cut her product or take shortcuts on her recipe; micromanaging couriers who refuse to take the longer, safer routes; scripting her customer service professionals to make sure they tell the bored, anxious wage workers who are the heart of her clientele everything they need to hear to keep using; and her least favorite—bargaining with mafia dogs who threaten to take a bigger piece of the pie than they already do.

By the time she can let her guard down and be herself for a little while, she’s too exhausted to do anything but sit on the edge of the bed and keep from falling asleep. Dina’s standing, long arms bent behind her, hands resting on the counter, sharp hip bones poking though her jeans. It’s as if she’s unfazed by their day, as if she let it slip by her, through her, without it taking anything away or leaving anything behind. She closes her eyes, and Rachel knows she’s feeling the chemical dissolving in her blood stream, in her brain. “Does it matter?” she responds, her voice is peaceful, nirvanic.

“Well,” Rachel says, trying to sound as sophisticated as Dina seems, “if you died since the first time you thought about it, it isn’t yours, but it isn’t anyone else’s either.”

“Correct,” Dina says. “But it doesn’t really do that anymore. It used to. Every time was like diving into death, and having someone else swim back to shore.”

“This has to be one of your worst pitches. I don’t think there’s something you could say that could make it sound less appealing.”

“Why not?” Her gorgeous eyes open, mesmerizing Rachel. “Wouldn’t it be nice to know that tonight you go to sleep, and someone else will wake up in your body tomorrow to do the things you’re afraid of doing? Wouldn’t it be… relaxing?”

“No!” Rachel laughs, but she means what she’s saying. “I want to live my life. If I die tonight, who cares who’ll do my job tomorrow. I’d rather just kill myself properly, my mom be damned.”

“And you’re alright with what we’re doing?”

“We’re not really killing anyone. And even if we were, they would have had it coming. Yeah, they would. They wasted their lives standing by while Ceres was going to shit, and now they’re all going to die unless we do something about it. Fuck. Them.”

Dina nods, and smiles that confident, sexy smile of hers, ever relaxed, ever sure of herself, never faltering or anxious or afraid or anything that Rachel naturally, constantly is. Rachel tries not to let it show on her face how much that nod and smile mean to her.

“Wow,” Dina says flatly. “You’re so cold blooded. I don’t know if I even feel safe in here with you,”

“Fuck you,” Rachel says, and laughs again. She’d be afraid that other people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between one ‘fuck’ and another, that they wouldn’t follow what she meant. Not Dina, though.

“So it wouldn’t have mattered to you this much if we used poison instead of Acid? Then why did it take me so long to convince you?”

“I would have, if we’d had to. If it was the only way to survive, I would have helped you commit genocide.”

“Luckily, we can make do with culture-cide,” Dina says, obviously pleased with her own cleverness.

Rachel wonders if it would have sounded clever if anyone else had said it.

“But really, are you ok?” Dina’s now concerned, as if her sharpened senses have caught some process going on in Rachel that she hasn’t quite realized herself.

“I’m just… I’m getting dizzy. I can’t fully grasp what we’re doing here. It’s like… It’s too big for my brain to hold it all in.”

“You feel guilty,” she says, and Rachel doesn’t deny it. “Because you’re subjecting them to something you won’t go through, yourself.”

“Is it so bad that I’d rather not die? I’ll do what it takes, when it’s time.”

“That’s good,” Dina says, her voice sweet, “because it is.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Deadly so. I got the codes.”

Talk about dizziness, huh? Rachel can’t believe this is really happening. “You didn’t even tell me you had an approach.”

“I didn’t know either.”

“Well then, where did it come from?”

“Do you remember the girl from my kindergarten, whose mother went missing?”

“Yeah, the daughter of some important minister. It was on the news, right?”

“The daughter of the chief director of the ministry of air, yes. She started crying today, and when I took her to another room to quiet down, she started talking about how she thinks daddy might have done something to mommy the night she disappeared.”

“And what did you do?”

“I recorded it, of course. He was more than willing to send the codes after I sent him a clip of that, though he insisted that it was a fake and would never hold in court. I don’t think he knew that she’d seen it happen. We’ll go in the morning, before he gets any ideas.”

That’s Dina for you. Acting in the moment, seizing opportunity as it arises and barely taking any pride in it. Not only did she nail it, but she didn’t even seem that eager to tell Rachel. If their roles were turned, Rachel would have started bragging before even closing the door behind her. Even though Rachel has essentially become a drug kingpin from her tiny apartment, rediscovering manufacturing schemes that were lost when Earth was abandoned, she knew that she would’ve never gotten there without Dina holding her hand, confident enough for the both of them. Will I ever be like you? Rachel’s afraid to ask out loud.

Dina looks at her. Her expression is blank, her eyes calm like two little ponds, peering into depths unknown. Driven by some otherworldly intuition, she quotes:

Your desire to remain as you are is what ultimately limits you.

And the words flash a light unto Rachel’s soul, and in that light she sees herself, whole.

Rachel has been a coward for a long time, and Dina has been more than patient—she hasn’t pressured her at all, even when they moved in together to save for the project, even when they started sleeping in the same bed. Dina has a way of showing what she wants without being demanding—and it’s an undeniable fact that Dina, so much cooler, so much wiser, wants Rachel. Wants her close, wants to love her, wants to be loved by her, wants to fuck her so hard she’ll forget what part of the solar system they’re in. Rachel has said that she doesn’t know what she feels; that she loves Dina, but she doesn’t know how; that she needs more time to think about it. Dina always nods and understands.

But there’s no more time. There’s nothing left to wait for, nothing to think about.

She gets off the bed, taking one scared step after the other. Her eyes are on Dina’s knees, but she can see the smiling lips at the edge of her vision. When she raises her eyes to Dina’s, Dina’s are closed. There’s something to be said about the way she leaves herself open, completely vulnerable, while somehow making Rachel feel like the one without power.

Rachel’s almost touching Dina now, feeling the energy radiating off her, even in motionlessness. Rachel wants to be like that more than anything. She touches her lips to hers, gently, then harder, and Dina, as pliant as the surface of water, lets her proceed.

But Rachel feels nothing. No fire in her guts, no lust—so she pushes more, using her tongue to pry open Dina’s lips, and Dina stops yielding and grabs Rachel by the hair (palm flattened against the back of her scalp and closed into a fist, a grip that’s confident but not painful), pulling her back, thrusting her tongue into Rachel’s mouth, but still nothing happens; no birds singing, no roar or raw desire. Maybe if she just gave it more time; if Dina kissed her harder, held her tighter…

In the end, it’s Dina who pulls back. Their lips detach but stay close. Dina’s still holding the small of Rachel’s back, the back of her head, though her grip has lightened into a caress. Rachel’s hand rests limply on Dina’s shoulder.

Dina takes a deep breath. “This isn’t working for you”—a soft whisper, warm against her cheek.

Rachel represses the instinct to apologize. “I wish it did,” she says, hoping that the words will bring some comfort.

“You tried. Now we know.”

“I—”

“Let’s go to sleep, ok?” Dina says. She goes to brush her teeth, slowly enough that it doesn’t seem like she’s running away, and Rachel watches her, and feels a dark, disturbing question rise in her, hidden in shadow. What is it? She searches the deep pools of her own heart, finds nothing.

Rachel is the little spoon, as always, like a ritual they both know. Dina’s warmth against her back is comforting, familiar. “I love you,” Rachel whispers in the darkness.

“Didn’t think otherwise,” Dina says, and Rachel can hear the smile in her voice, but she can also hear the distance, like there’s a wall between them. Still, Dina clutches Rachel closer, pressing her belly to Rachel’s back and the front of her thighs to the back of Rachel’s thighs, and Rachel thinks that she feels, against her butt, the warmth of Dina’s pussy, radiating like an engine revved up but left to idle, all of that excitement and anticipation pumped in preparation for an event that won’t happen.

For a moment Rachel thinks that she should give it another try, see if she can’t get in the mood. But what’s the point? Why make Dina even less comfortable than she already is?

But then, just as she’s about to fall asleep, the half—no, quarter dose of Acid she scraped from under Dina’s tongue finally hits her.

First, the feeling is of becoming alive, of becoming real, but then there’s an expansion, as if her imagination can carry more, encompass more. What she experiences is not as intense as a hallucination, but not as mild as a daydream; she feels that she could open her eyes and shake herself out of it whenever she wants.

The blackness under her eyelids reshapes into complex geometrical forms, architectures that make no sense, until they do. She finds herself looking from above at a little lab—a room with clean floors and bright white lighting, with a spacious cage in its center. Within the cage, six pinkish-grey rhesus monkeys sit and groom each other, looking alert and somewhat nervous. Above them, by the roof of the cage, a robotic water sprinkler waits. Rachel recognizes this experiment—she read through it with Dina a long time ago, though it took her a couple of late-night discussions to fully understand its significance.

A man in a white lab coat lowers a bunch of bananas through a hatch in the cage ceiling. One of the monkeys darts towards it as soon as the researcher pulls his hand back through the hatch.

Rachel remembers the methodology—the sprinkler is there to provide negative reinforcement, spraying all of the monkeys with water to teach them that touching the bananas is bad. But when it happens, it’s nothing like she imagined—the water shoots out with excessive force and keeps going, targeting their noses and mouths, going from one to the other while the monkeys try to run or hide behind one another. Their voices, high-pitched and scared, might as well have been the voices of babies crying in her ears.

Finally, it’s over. The wet, shaken monkeys huddle together, comforting each other with caresses and hugs. Another researcher opens the door of the cage and pulls a monkey out. They walk hand in hand, the rhesus monkey surprisingly obedient, until they reach the wall of cages at the end of the room. The researcher puts the monkey back in his personal cage and takes one from another cage, and they walk back to where the experiment is taking place. The new monkey climbs in quickly and the researcher closes the door behind her.

A second researcher sits by the sprinkler controls, staring amusedly at a screen Rachel can’t see, eating a banana.

The new monkey spends a moment greeting the others in the cage, then, confused as to how no one else has thought of it, start shuffling towards the bananas resting in the corner. The other monkeys place their little hands on her, grabbing her arms or pulling her fur. She makes a confused, distressed sound, and there is a short but vocal conflict. Soon enough, she understands the will of her brethren and gives up.

Only after they quiet down does the researcher again take one of the monkeys away, and brings another. The process repeats—reaching for the banana, getting physically stopped, a little shouting match. The monkey that only a moment ago reached for the banana is now screeching at the newer, more ignorant monkey for having tried to do the same. Rachel notices the way she glances sidelong at the others to make sure that she’s in line with them, that she’s doing it right, that they don’t know that she has no idea why they’re shouting the new monkey down. Finally, the new monkey gives up his efforts, and the group becomes civilized again.

The process repeats six times, until there’s not one monkey in the cage that saw the original spraying and knows why bananas are forbidden. All they know is that it’s very important no one touches them, and it’s up to them to make sure.

When the sixth monkey is taken out, Rachel’s perspective drops until she’s not looking from above, but from the eye level of one of the scientists, and then lower, from inside a cage by the wall.

“Go on,” a man in white lab coat says to her, as he hunches down to open the cage door. He leads her by the hand to the larger cage, where the experiment is being held. The man monitoring the sprinkler is packing his bags. The scientist calls out to him, “Yiftah: you going already?”

“Yeah, I shut it down after the first shot. The thing,” he waves a hand towards the group (no, not the group, but something that resides among the group, between its members), “more or less runs by itself.”

The hand she’s holding rises a little, as the researcher shrugs. “Your funeral,” he says, then opens the door to the cage. Rachel doesn’t want to enter, but she knows that’s what’s expected of her, so she does. The latch clicks behind her.

The others eye her suspiciously. She doesn’t go over to groom them, and they don’t come over to her. Not until she looks at the cluster of bananas. The turn of her head is enough to activate them all, ready to teach her a lesson. She looks back at them, trying to feign relaxation and disinterest, but they aren’t buying it. Their eyes track her every move.

Fuck it. She dives for the bananas.

Ten hands get in her way, pull at her clothes and hair and wrap around her throat, lift her up in the air as the monkeys scream at her, their faces condemning her for breaking their traditions, for daring to think her own thoughts.

She bites the arm closest to her mouth, thick fur between her teeth, rubbing against her tongue. The monkey pulls back his arm and smacks her in the face, the pain surprisingly real.

She thrashes as hard as she can, landing one monkey with a kick right between the eyes and knocking it back, but it’s no use. They toss her against the wire wall of the cage. She’s out of their hold, but they block her, towering over her, as if she somehow became smaller. She can still see a flash of yellow between the wall of furry limbs. She slams her body against them—if only to prove to herself that she hasn’t given up—and they knock her back down, taunting her to get up again, proud in their ignorance.

This is what Dina must have seen already. This is what she already knows. Faintly, back in the real world, she feels her body being held, hugged from behind. She’s here, Rachel remembers. Dina’s here.

And there she is, in the dream, standing above Rachel, tall and proud, and Rachel feels even more weak and pathetic for what she let them do to her. Dina smiles that smile that she knows so well, that says she accepts Rachel as she is, with all of her stupidity and weakness.

Dina claps her hands, not a thunderous sound but a snap, breaking the monkeys’ concentration. They look confused, reawakened, like they can’t remember why they’re doing what they’re doing, and they fall back. Rachel stumbles to her feet and looks at Dina, who nods, the smallest movement of her chin, towards the bananas.

The monkeys follow with their eyes as Rachel crosses the floor of the cage, as if it’s perfectly natural. She peels a banana in two slow, confident motions, but wakes up before she gets to sink her teeth into its flesh. Her mind must not have been prepared to simulate what success tastes like.

When she opens her eyes, she’s wrapped in Dina’s arms. “You’re safe,” Dina whispers, “I love you. You’re safe, I love you,” again and again. Rachel must have moved in her sleep, or said something.

“I bet you do, you slut,” Rachel mumbles, half asleep, and her eyes close again to the sound of Dina’s laughter.

When she wakes up in the morning, Dina’s standing, looking intently at a map of air piping, at its tight turns and dense notations, going over it and over again, tracing different trajectories with her finger as if they were the wrinkles of complex, manifold genitalia. She’s assessing the different times at which the laced air will hit different parts of the asteroid via the distance the air will have to go, but Rachel thinks that even Dina has a capacity to dream, to romanticize, to fantasize about the moment after their success. “It’s all so close,” she whispers in that voice she has when her focus is absolute, when Rachel could piss on her floor and she wouldn’t notice. “This world is so small, so connected.”

And it’s a good thing that it is — their plan wouldn’t make any sense, otherwise.

Dina puts the screen down and leans against the counter behind her, stretching to hold the tall surface, shifting her weight from side to side like a spider. Rachel remembers trying that pose, how uncomfortable it is, as if her spine and Dina’s are made of completely different materials.

Her gaze turns from not acknowledging Rachel’s existence to suddenly acknowledging nothing but it. “You ready?” Dina grunts, her voice low and smooth and feral.

“Hell yeah,” Rachel says, and for once, she feels as confident as she’s trying to seem.

Dina puts another tab under her tongue. Rachel considers telling her about the dream she had had last night, but there’s no need. In the deepest sense, Dina already knows. “You’re going to finish the entire payload, if you keep this up.”

“A hundred million doses; that’s quite a high,” she says, and smirks. Her eyes dart towards the two suitcases waiting by the door. Rachel’s eyes follow.

Lysergic acid is a highly specific drug, pharmaceutical jargon meaning that it reacts only with the receptors in the brain it needs to affect, which happen to be the same serotonin receptors that the brain auto-activates while dreaming. The same receptors that are important when it comes to revaluating deep-seated beliefs. In practical terms, six kilograms are enough to blast one hundred million people out of their minds, and change their minds about what society does to them and what they do to others. To make them ask themselves if they know why they’re keeping other monkeys from reaching for the pile of bananas.

Many people have gone through the process: freed themselves of shackles and saw for themselves, unclouded, only to slowly but surely let society bend them back to the same crooked, unnatural form they had before. Let’s say, for example, that you realize that it’s insane to pay rent for a volume of space. Oxygen makes sense, because somebody needs to mine water-ice and run an electric current for the electrolysis process, though it’s still pretty bad that it’s a monopoly, but how does it make sense that they’re making us pay for space, every month? How can anyone own it in the first place? And because all of Ceres belongs to someone, it’s insane that you have to choose between renting or dying. So you realize that it’s not the space that you’re paying for—you’re paying not to be thrown out. Having that revelation, you try to talk to people about it, but nobody wants to listen.

That’s just the way it is. Nothing we can do about it, they say, or: What are you complaining about? You have a good job! And after a while, you stop bringing it up, and at some point you forget it even angered you, and when someone brings it up with you, you only shrug, defeated.

And that happens every time someone tries to change our basic assumptions about culture, they get shut down, condemned heretics or weirdos, excused for being romantics or just young. (Either that, or they make the rebellion modest enough that society accepts it as a sort of harmless, amusing fringe.)

Not Rachel, though. Rachel knows she’ll keep the fire alive. She always has, even without drugs, somehow stoking the innermost chambers of her heart with that flame of refusal—a simple non-acceptance of the way things are, keeping it alive even in the toughest cold, even at the desk job, even as a drug dealer running a mean, cut-throat business. She always remembers the only reason to stay in this shitty world is to fix it.

Dina says that, among the monkeys, there’s a spectrum between being completely obedient and completely defiant. Some reach for the bananas many times and have to be stopped violently. Others don’t try to reach for them at all, reading the cues off the other monkeys, but will be the first to stop others—with violence, if needed. Obedience doesn’t mean non-aggression.

Rachel doesn’t think it’s just that, but that a person’s character, whether sophisticated or brutishly simplistic, can be summed up in as little as one sentence. For most people, that sentence is “Why even bother?” or “It’s not my fault.” For some it’s “I deserve everything”, and others add “If I work hard enough”. Whatever that sentence is, it guides their work, their love life, the way they treat their friends.

For Rachel? She thinks her sentence is something like “Will you fight?”

Will you fight, or will you perish without leaving a mark? Will you fight, or will you end your life knowing that you haven’t even tried to fix the world? And, on nights when she’s feeling particularly vicious—Will you fight, or will you lie on your back and take it, like the coward that you are?

And she will fight. She’ll have her revenge for thousands of years of society devouring its hosts. She will kill culture itself, fucking parasite that it is. One good hit; that’s all it would take. And that’s what Acid does to you. It kills you. Dina’s right: It kills what you were, and puts in your place someone fresh and new, with your memories. Rachel knows she’s going to commit murder—mass murder, even. But she doesn’t feel bad for the people she’s about to kill, any more than she feels bad for the person she once was.

And it’ll be worth it. One freed person will eventually let society scare them back into place, but if everyone’s freed at the same time, there’s no one to push back. The monkeys will realize that the threat no longer exists; that they’re free, and can live happily together, eating bananas. Easy to imagine the utopia that will arrive, after the operation—after political, societal, and sexual norms are re-examined and remade. A place where compassion and free thought are commonplace, once the unnatural cruelty and coldness that we’ve been teaching each other is discarded, and society realizes what a fruitless struggle it’s been engaged in, sister against brother, while the orchestrators watched from above and laughed.

If they succeed, Dina and Rachel will save these people—they will save Ceres, before it sinks completely into selfish chaos. Yet her fingers shake as they close around the suitcase’s handle. She’s always been a coward. That much hasn’t changed. But she’s a courageous coward now. Will she fight? She tightens her grip on the plastic. Yes. Yes, she will.

The plan is that they strike at two different hubs at the same time, making it harder for the authorities to catch them as well as stop the flow of oxygen in time. The routes are not in the same length, so Rachel gets on her way first (of course she volunteered to take the longer walk), and Dina should leave thirteen minutes later. She hugs Dina with everything she has, and Dina kisses her on the cheek, smirking again.

The walk is long and lonely, but Dina’s with her, she reminds herself. She’s always with Rachel, wherever she is.

Eventually she arrives at the air-main monitoring hub and puts her thumb in the fingerprint reader by the door. Just like they were promised, the door unlocks. But the room behind it isn’t empty like she was told it would be: It’s full to the brim with police officers.

She’s on the floor in seconds, slammed hard into the ground, cuffed and secured so tightly she can’t even attempt to struggle. They seem to be taking some pleasure in confining her, keeping just enough weight on her that she can keep breathing, barely. They don’t outright beat her, but they make sure she regrets whatever she did to put herself under their knees.

The shock and grief of having her dreams shattered doesn’t hit her yet. Maybe Dina did better on her side? Rachel will be locked up, but maybe Dina will succeed. Once society is changed, they’ll release her, right?

She spends the first couple of days in prison slowly letting go of hope. Some guy spits in her food and she kicks him in the dick, wakes up in her cell with an electric burn, but other than that there isn’t much to write home about. At night, she tries to decide whether she regrets trying. Sometimes she feels proud to have gone out fighting; sometimes she cries, thinking about the life she’s going to miss, a loss too great to process. She misses Dina so much that she worries the constant pain under her heart will actually cause health complications, that she won’t even make it to the end of the week.

But she does.

In front of a judge and two attorneys, she stands in a transparent cage and watches a video of herself entering the air-main. The officers waiting inside seem alert, but not bloodthirsty. When she opens the door and they subdue her, it’s nothing like she remembers—they’re dispassionate, extremely professional. Even when they pin her down they seem to be using a minimal amount of force. She, on the other hand, thrashes like a wild animal. She screams. The speakers play her voice loudly and clearly—the wailing of a simian mother who finds that her nest has been plundered, her babies stolen. The shrill sounds finally form words. “Dina!” she howls. “Dina, help me!”

She doesn’t remember any of it. In private, watching such a tape would be profoundly disorienting, but with the three men in the room, watching with expressions of mild interest and amusement, she’s flattened by the intensity of the humiliation. That her hardest moments, her lowest despair, are being watched by strangers… It reminds her something, but she doesn’t remember what.

Next, they play an audio file. A call to a police public line. Rachel hardly recognizes Dina’s voice as Dina tells the operator everything they planned, the location of the hub Rachel, mentioned by name, is supposed to hit, and the time she is supposed to arrive. And then, just when Rachel thinks nothing could be worse, Dina begs.

“If you stop her in time, I’ll stay free, right? Please: I don’t want to die.”

The recording ends, and the judge politely asks Rachel for her final statement, anything that could help them view her in a favorable light.

They want her to talk so she won’t have time to process what she heard, but there isn’t that much to process—the recording is obviously fake. Regardless on who snitched to the authorities, Rachel’s identity would lead them to Rachel’s apartment, and that would lead them to Dina, and whatever recordings of her voice they have on hand, making it easy to fake a new recording if one is using illegal software. Dina hadn’t left any traces of her identity on the web since she started using, and Rachel recognizes the subtle differences in her intonation, parts of old identity Dina, her Dina, does not longer possess. Or maybe Rachel is just rationalizing to herself so she won’t have to admit her best friend betrayed her. What a cruel trick they are playing on her, trying to get her to feel so alone and betrayed that she would betray anyone she can.

She tries to come up with something to say. Some words to express the bitterness, the futility that she has felt for a long time now and tried stupidly to sweeten with hope and dreams of change. “I shouldn’t have had to do this,” she says finally, her voice steady, admonishing.

“Are you expressing remorse for your actions?” the judge says.

“No. I’m not saying that I shouldn’t have done it. I’m saying I shouldn’t have had to do it. It was your duty to see that you stopped being human beings. You’ve transformed into parasitic worms, and not even the kind that’s decent enough to restrain themselves so the host survives longer. You shouldn’t have let things get so bad.”

“No remorse, then?” he asks, eyes on the screen, where he’s tapping on a touch menu.

“No.” Rachel knows that she’s still a coward. It’s easy for your last words to be something defiant, because the other monkeys have nothing to threaten you with. For the attempted poisoning of one hundred million people, there is nothing she could say that would redeem her. But she can still have revenge, can’t she? What was the name of that wife-murdering asshole? She doesn’t remember. “The supreme director of the ministry of air. Ask his daughter what she thinks about her mother disappearing.”

The judge raises his eyes from the screen, and trades worried looks with the attorneys.

NEXT: Ctesibius III