Danger and Devotion

Crazy days.

You reach the station, and you can see that everything is as it shouldn’t be. Even as the shuttle lands, you can see a difference in the colony, this facsimile-city all wrapped in a bubble.

Docking completed. The electronic voice sounds like music.

You swipe your wrist to show your passport.

The security guard says, “Well, everybody else is going the other way, perhaps you’ve noticed.”

“I’ve noticed,” you say, unsure how much you want to engage with this guy.

“You must be a little bit crazy, eh brother?”

“A little bit. Look, how bad is it down there?’

“Hm. Bad. There’s a reason you had so much space on that shuttle you just came down in.”

“What about… the sick… I mean…?”

“No cure. They get better or they don’t.”

Your stomach curdles, and your lips are turned into hard iron getting these words to come out: “How many…?”

“30%”

“…. which way?...” You have almost no voice.

“30% live.”

Nothing is what you want to hear.

#

And the city streets are nothing you want to see. As the plunging lift takes you down into them you feel your skin prickling, it’s as if you can feel this contagion milling around in the air. Stupid, you tell yourself, since the experts don’t think it’s airborne.

But the experts, also; what do they know?

Knowledge is in record scarcity. This virus – most likely a virus though it doesn’t really act in fully virus-like ways – came from deep space. It came from where ordinary viruses wouldn’t be doing so well. And now here, in the warmth and pumped air of expatriate civilisation, this thing is thriving, this thing is partying, it’s never been happier.

And you walk down the glass streets, noticing the way the lights from the roadside, from the windows, from the holographic ads all just slide through the grass in coloured waves. There’s a golden tinge to the whole cityscape. And it’s all-but empty; this contradictory quiet in the tight, built-up confines has a graveyard feel about it. As shiny and new as it all looks, it has an aura of abandonment, of and-this-is-how-they-left-it. As powered as the colony is by the sun, these lights might go on forever; when all traces of human life are gone these ads might still sing out through the streets, hawking goods and services to the customers who can no longer see them. The lifts might keep going up and down. Archeologists might walk through here in a hundred-thousand years and find a city that is clean and bright and moving, with only the flesh absent from its workings.

Most of the apartment buildings have been turned into makeshift hospitals. Hers is no different.

You approach the main door. It’s locked down, but you can scan your wrist and request entry. Entry? You’re scanned for symptoms.

Are you sure want to enter? says the screen.

You think, yes, and the door responds.

#

Her eyes are at war when she sees you: horror with hope, fear with relief.

When you get to her bed, she sits up, staring. “You can’t be here.”

You twirl for her as if to prove a point: “And yet, here I am.”

“You have to leave.”

“It’s too late.”

“No it…” but of course it is.

“Why did you come here? You’ll get sick.”

“I’ll get sick alongside you.”

“I don’t want that.” And you know that that’s about exactly half true.

“I want it. Where there’s me, there’s only you. I had to come. I have to be with you. There’s no point in sending me away, it’s too late now.”

She knows it. She throws herself into your arms and just hangs on there. Clinging with all her strength.

You push her back so you can look at her: her face pale and warped with shadows, the glisten of sweat, arms already noticeably thinner. You’ll find a doctor, you’ll ask them how she’s doing, what her prospects are, what you can do to help. Soon, you’ll do that. For now, you just want to hold onto her, you just want to keep feasting your eyes on her and taking in every detail.

She reaches up and brushes your cheek with her soft, tingling fingers. “You’re mad.  You’re my own personal lunatic.”

And you kiss the back of one of her hands; “Don’t I know it. That’s most of what you love about me.”

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work