Transition: Chapter 1
A note before you continue onto the main event. This is a prequel to my debut novel, Transference. It’s available in a lot of different places, and I’d love it if you gave it a read. I put my novels up first on Substack, completely for free, because that’s the writing I’m doing. I’m releasing these as first-drafts, which means there will be errors, plot holes, and issues. Part of this is to normalize that writing is a process, and it doesn’t usually (ever) start with glorious perfection. Part of this is because the serialization keeps me on a cadence that I like to work to. A lot will change between now and release, because I am very much a “fix it in post” writer. One of those instances occurs with the quick perspective shift from close third to first in this chapter. It almost certainly won’t survive an editing pass, or I’ll have to really double down on the technique, but I like playing around in drafts.
If you like what you read, subscribe! Send me a note! Tell your friends! It all helps. Oh, and the image I’ll be using for these is from a natural pin-hole camera that forms in my daughter’s room at the right time of day. I love that it exists.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Micah
“I tried to kill myself last year.”
Micah says it while rolling a lit cigarette between his fingers, a smile on his lips. It’s a flippant statement, thrown out with the reckless abandon of someone that’s certain they’ll be misunderstood. That the meaning will be lost on the beautiful face he’s speaking to. He stares into the kind, dark eyes of the other man, whose boyish face falters for a moment at the statement.
“Are you a hunter, then?” His English is thick and slow, each word chosen through a fog of drink and who knows what else. No one smiles that much normally, not here. The corners of his words are rounded by a heavy foreign accent.
All around them are other conversations in broken languages, pieced together through some small, shared mutual understanding that leads only to a collective misunderstanding.
Alpha station - where people come together. Micah hears the advertisement in the back of his mind, and grimaces. He craved to speak easily with someone, anyone, and not for the first time. To not enunciate and project, his speaking rate unconsciously slowed for the listener.
“Yes, of experiences and meaningless life lessons, mostly.”
The brows of his companion, dark perfectly sculpted things set against wonderfully dark skin, furrow in confusion. Concern? What’s his surname name again? Liu? Hsieh? Micah couldn’t remember, and instead of letting this concern him, took a drink from his bottle of beer, and followed it with a long drag off his nearly forgotten cigarette. Fuck it, I wouldn’t have remembered it tomorrow anyways.
“You cannot hunt here.” His companion responded, clearly confused.
Micah fought back an overwhelming urge to sigh, to roll his eyes. We’re in the middle of space on a mechanical bubble of artificial gravity and reprocessed air, flying around in the orbit of a home world all of us want to forget. The beer we’re drinking is probably, somehow, made from our own recycled piss. No, of course there isn’t hunting here.
“Look, did you want to come back to my place tonight?” Micah says, crushing the remainders of his cigarette into a tray overflowing with them. It’s cramped, poorly lit, and mostly covered by a bed that’s too small for two, just like yours is I’m sure.
The other man cocked his head, unsure of the meaning or unsure of how to respond. Idioms never translate well.
“Do you want to fuck me tonight? I am ready to leave.” Micah spoke each word forcefully, clearly. He stopped short of making any obscene gestures to make sure his meaning was understood. Others nearby turned to look, overhearing him. Some with interest in their eyes, others with conceit.
The other man grinned and nodded eagerly. Micah grabbed his hand and led him from the crowd.
–
Curious, I follow him closer. I want to see things through his eyes.
–
We walked the corridor back to my room, abandoned now but for the chittering of rats in the darkness. They’d infested the station long before I came here, riding the coattails of human civilization, eating our detritus. In time, they warped like us to become something different, something new. The size of cats, skin strained from cancerous mutations, they were best left alone.
Shafts of artificial light punctuated the hallway, bastions of clarity that made our drug-strained pupils scream. When we passed them, we squinted and smiled at each other, hand in hand. In the inky black between, we giggled, stumbled, and flew. Our balance lost to to the booze, a few lines of Luna, and that fucking reduced grav they switched to every evening.
He’s pretty, or the cocktail in my gut is doing its job correctly. Fresh-faced, shaved smooth, dark eyes and skin, he smelled recently showered which was an intoxication in itself. When you’re inebriated, your brain blurs edges to find symmetry and lessen the mental load, so everyone looks prettier. The thought, drunken pillow talk from an old lover, ricochets around the dark chasm of my brain until I shake my head to clear it.
We enter another pillar of light. I turn to find his face different than I remembered in the darkness. Lighter skin, a close cut beard, twinkling blue eyes squinted against the sudden illumination. My smile falters for a moment. Fuck, was I remembering a different night? A different person?
The darkness consumes us again, and in it, the string of people who have shared my bed come to me. I try to count them, to remember them all, to place their faces in order, but I keep getting it wrong and revising it. Is it still called loneliness if you fill the void every night? No, It’s only loneliness if it comes from the lonely region of France. At that nonsense thought, I smile.
When the light breaks in again, and I turn to him, he’s changed. He’s pale and skinny, with lanky hair. I drop his hand and back away as adrenaline soars through my drug addled brain. It brings clarity, and fear. His smile widens, impossibly huge.
I look down the hall, trying to moar my drifting reality back to solid ground, and under each lamp is a different reflection of me. They mirror my movements, backing away from a different person in each. I whip my head around, and find it extends in each direction. What the fuck is happening here?
“Is everything okay?” He asks, and I flinch backwards. His voice is a pantheon of voices. A cacophony of dialects, tones, and pitches. All of them familiar. It echoes down the hall and through my brain.
I take a step backwards, half into the darkness, and he reaches for me. In every shaft of light, some other version reaches for me too. I see them, in my periphery, as his hand draws near.
I run from it into the void behind me, hands outstretched to find the access hall I know is there. I run blindly into the pitch, guided by the squeals of rats as they run from me. I follow them, and when their noises echo off the walls around me, I know I’ve made it into the passageway.
I don’t remember running into the low hanging metal pipe, I won’t see it really until the next morning, only suddenly my ears are ringing and I’m lying on the ground. Vertigo writhes inside me, and I vomit a torrent of undigested booze and drugs and sadness. It splashes against the cold metal flooring, and then the true darkness takes me.
–
In my concussed fever dream, I stare out into the twinkling blackness of space through a full height viewing window. In the thick, reinforced plastiglass, I see a vague reflection of myself. More of a form than an image, my outline defined by the muted illumination of distant stars. When I move forward to touch it, the whole viewing window pulls away like a curtain in my hand. Behind it are lines of gray static snow as far as I can see. A humming white noise fills my head, it builds and builds and builds.
–
I wake to fluorescent lights, the smell of my upturned stomach, and the noise of small, scampering feet. My head pounds, and with a wince I push myself off the ground to a sitting position. It breaks the crust of dried vomit and unleashes fresh waves of ick across my nostrils. I rub the heels of my hand against my blurred eyes, and when my vision clears, I stare at a rat that’s lapping up the pile of spew. It’s tail is half missing, hair spills haphazardly from its swollen body.
“Fucking christ, what the hell was all that.”
At the sound of my voice, the rat looks up to meet my gaze. Its eyes are beady, a red rimmed black.
“Ya ran into that pipe there, kid. Better to not do that in the future, I’d reckon.”
The voice yanks me back into some semblance of sobriety, and I spin around to look down the hall. The sudden movement sends pain lancing through my brain, into the backs of my eyeballs and halfway down my spine. There’s no one there. What the fuck? Memories of the past night resurface. The multiples of us, and that dream. Bile builds at the back of my throat.
“Ey, down here.” I look back and lock eyes with the rat. It’s sitting on its haunches now, waving at me. A speck of vomit clings to its lower jaw. “Yeah that’s right, I know, talking rat. Very surprising.”
I stare at the thing dumbfounded. I consider the lines of Luna from the night before, the layers of booze. Am I dead? Is that what this is? I look around again at the same shitty, overly bright hall of the orbital station. The metal is as stained as I remember it, dirty and dingy is a way of life up here.
“Kid, can you talk? It’s a lot more interesting if you respond, ya know?”
I lock eyes with the rat, and open my mouth. “Are you God?”
The rat laughs at me. It’s the kind of expression you’d expect to be accompanied with knee slapping and crying. I find myself nonplussed at being laughed at by a talking rat who is potentially a figment of my imagination. “God? I just ate your vomit off the floor, and you think I’m some magical deity that’s come to visit you? That’s rich, kid.”
“But you’re, talking. Wait, are you like, an experiment or something?”
“Are you struggling to not call me a lab rat right now?”
“I mean, I know that the science deck is working on something important, so I just figured that maybe–”
“I was a science experiment?”
I nod meekly in response, wondering if I’ve offended this rat, and what that even means about my clearly flagging sanity.
The rat sighs. “No, kid, look. Maybe it’s best if we don’t talk about what I am.”
“Oh, then what should we talk about? Have a casual conversation about the weather? It’s really nice today, they must have turned up the heat a fraction of a degree because I’m only partially reminded that we’re surrounded by an unlivable vacuum. I heard we’re expecting solar flares by midday though, which will almost certainly affect my doom scrolling when it blacks out our communications network.” I’m waking up more, and can’t keep the sarcasm from my voice.
“You just woke up in a pile of your own vomit, and a rat is talking to you. Shouldn’t you like, go back to your room or something? I don’t know, take a shower? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but you smell.”
I open my mouth to make another witty response, and then close it again. The talking rat, or whatever is creating this sign of my own crumbling grasp on reality, is clearly right. Moving slowly, with my hand on a nearby wall for support, I make my way to standing. With eyes lowered from the heavy lighting, I start the journey back to my room. Behind me follows the scratching of tiny rat feet. I’m too hungover for this shit.
–
The station is busy. As I slowly move down the halls, half blinded, shaky legged, and with a piercing headache, a sea of people flows around me in both directions. Some of them are uniformed officers dressed in their sharp military blues, they’re always hurrying, and as I get closer to my room I see more of the white uniforms of the science crew. There are a few other civvys like me wandering the halls, obvious by their plain, brown uniform, maybe making their way to a shift in the mess hall or janitorial.
None of them seemed to notice that there was a cat sized rat following in my footsteps. Potentially, this is because it was Monday and most of them were at least slightly hungover, as evidenced by their bleary eyes and ruddy faces.
Everyone up here is required to work, it’s part of the housing contract. Which doesn’t mean the civilians aren’t paying through their nose for a placement, we are. It’s hard to argue against when the only other option is to be part of the dockyards on earth. I’d done my time down there, and thankfully escaped to this lap of luxury. And conveniently, being required to work also means it’s damn hard to get fired, they just give you a different employment contract.
Allegedly, I should be working my shift in janitorial right about now. Which almost certainly meant that I would be receiving another angry voice memo from my supervisor. It was a new position, after my boss at the bakery got me reassigned, but I’d already blown off half the shifts with claims of migraines. I wasn’t sure where I’d get reassigned after janitorial, but at this moment signs were certainly pointing to me finding out in the near future. Do they just throw you out an airlock when you flunk out of shit cleaning duty?
I looked behind me, and hot on my heels was the same lumpy, partially haired creature from earlier. Maybe I could just claim that I missed my shift because I was so concussed that I thought a rat was talking to me? It would add a bit of flair to the usual, anyways.
I turn the final corner to my room, and find a small crowd gathered in white uniforms outside my door. I furrow my brows, hoping it will give me access to a deeper level of understanding, or at least make me look thoughtful, but the pinching movement sends pain lancing through my temples. I slam my eyes to shut it out, my hand coming up to ease the pain, and momentarily lose my balance. So it is that I gain the attention of the gathered medical professionals by careening into a nearby wall, a grimace on my face.
With all of their eyes successfully moved from staring at my entry way to now considering my vomit stained clothes and lack of balance, I push myself back off the wall and smile at them. In my mind, it is a dashing smile that easily transfers the knowledge that I am fully in control, not at all still drunk, did not suffer a concussion after a potential drug fueled mental break, and am not now currently, nor have I ever been, associated with a talking rat. Unfortunately, it sends shooting pain through my temples again, and a repeat of the previous falling against the wall episode, which from their mumblings is successful at convincing them of only one thing.
“Christ, he’s still hammered.” I hear one of them say.
“Seems that way.” Another one responds, vacantly.
“Citizen, we came here for a health check as requested by your employer. Are you currently experiencing mental and/or physical duress that would require assistance? Please keep in mind, a full report will be made of this situation, including bloodwork, if so.” One of the whites says, her eyes boring into mine.
“I’m fine, just hit my head last night and need to lay down. Should be dancing by midday I’d bet.” I say, meeting her cold gaze. When I blink, all of the white uniformed faces become hers, like it’s been copied. Cold fear races through me as memories of last night surface, and then the nausea hits. I empty the contents of my stomach, whatever small amount is left, onto my shoes. When I look back up, their faces have returned to distinct people again, each of them looking disgusted in their own personal way.
“Dammit, Frank, order a cleanup crew. God that smells awful. Look Mr. —” She looks up into the corner of the hallway, the typical sign of accessing a file on an augmented contact lens. “Mr. Angelos, with your permission I’m going to help you into your apartment and let your employer know that you’re sick today, but will contact them tomorrow. Do you consent?”
Dignity shattered, or maybe just splattered onto the hallway between us, I grunt and make an affirmative hand gesture as another wave of nausea rolls over me. A firm hand grabs my right arm, and guides me into the room. The woman, whose eyes are ringed with something resembling compassion, which I then realize is pity, sits me down on my bed. She wipes my face down with a warm washcloth, and helps me remove my puke stained clothing.
Only then do I remember that my studio apartment is a wasteland littered with piles of crumpled clothing, and teetering mountains of dirty dishes, replete with decomposing scraps of food. I momentarily look around at the mess, and meet her eyes. “Sorry, I would have cleaned if I knew I was having company.”
She rolls her eyes in response. “Please lay down, Mr. Angelos.” With a soft pressure, she guides my shoulders down onto the mattress. I sink into that soft pressure, and when she turns off the lights in the room, I start to drift. The sound of scurrying, clawed feet picking up momentum across metal flooring echoes in the small space, and then with what I can only picture is an impossibly high jump on those tiny legs, the lumpen form of the rat lands at my feet. I consider briefly kicking it out, but as it makes itself comfortable in the crook of my legs, I realize that I don’t care enough to do that.
Why didn’t any of the med staff see it? Did it slink in behind them? Before I can pursue this thought with some reasonable, probing questions about the current situation, sleep takes me.
–
I dream of the docks. Of those hot, tiring days underneath the oppressive sun. Covered in that mixture of sweat and oil that was inescapable. It clogged my pores and ruined my complexion. No matter how much I tried to stay clean, to not let the docks get under my skin, to not let it infect me, it was an impossible task. That place gave everyone that worked there two things; acne, and the inescapable loneliness that comes from knowing you’re at the end of the line.
We built ships, but none of us ever saw that. We saw the minutiae. The bolts that held it together. I wasn’t skilled labor, I was a warm body that on most days could swing a hammer, and understood that things generally tightened when rotated to the right. And so, everyday I did meaningless jobs with a rotating crew of other meaningless people.
My body became ugly with the work. That slender frame I had for so long cultivated, mostly from an extreme avoidance of physical labor of any sort, disappeared. Muscles strained and bulged from my tired shoulders, their deep lines carving down onto my chest and back. Abs rippled in tight, countable rows. In the mirror, I was an alien to myself.
I dreamed of the day the reporters came. All excited bustle, cameras angled upwards to the skyline of the structure, framed beautifully against the sky, and away from those of us working below. Except for one of them. He wandered down into our midst, a press badge hanging near the chasm of his low buttoned shirt.
I remember his smell, most of all. That clean scent, tinged with vanilla, cut through the machine grease of our world. It cleared my sinuses, and made me look up. He was pretty, but not overly so. It was the sadness in his eyes, that common understanding, that made him beautiful. When he approached, one hand holding his camera, brows furrowed in concern, I stood up instinctively. We all did, really.
When he photographed me, I didn’t smile. We were all dead men on a dying planet, building ships for those that would live. The man’s camera sought truth, and so I let him see truth, written in the lines of sadness in my eyes. And he pulled the trigger.