Universal Monsters Chapter XVIII
“There was always going to be an extinction event, so it was my job to bend Mars,” Space said as he worked something out in the middle distance. Like he was pulling the memories through a crack in time.
Everyone gathered in a circle like we were at camp and that was okay because we all knew it was a ghost story coming.
Jackson said before we went on we needed music. He told us it would be more cinematic. None of us knew where all this electricity was coming from but Brinkmire had read a book called “The Hiding Place” that he said was also about monsters and that it taught him not to look too closely at blessings like this and we thought that sounded good.
Frank found a copy of Back to Black in the planetarium PA and he put it on to soundtrack the story. We listened to the dead.
Space continued. “There was always going to be an extinction event. If it wasn’t this it would have been anything else. Not many people had hippogriffs in the office pool, but this was always going to happen. Most of us didn’t even guess this century, but this is what futurists are for.
“We already had one ice age, what’s to say we won’t have another? Or a lava age. Or a Geoff age where everybody gets turned into a Geoff and then a Geoff-only disease wipes us all out. You can’t trust the weather. Or Geoffs. I dunno. Asteroids are a good bet. Nuclear war. Nuclear winter. Smallpox. Bigpox. There are a million ways the human race could die. A million ways we haven’t even thought up, yet. Like that Geoff thing. The very best case scenario is overpopulation, probably. Where we live long enough to fuck our way to the planet not being viable. Nowhere to put us and nowhere to grow the food to keep us. I mean, that was best case, not really a concern now I guess. Not for a while. Anyway. There is no long-term scenario where being Earthbound makes sense. But I should go back. I met this girl in college.”
He pauses like he’s listening for someone to call to him, but the only other voice in the world as far as we can tell is on the speakers. Amy Winehouse is saying, “We only said goodbye with words,” while the sun rises for the forty-fourth time today.
“I should go back further,” Space said.
“I was born genius. I guess that’s how most people catch it. If there were a pill to prevent it you should load up on that shit.
“My IQ can’t be accurately measured. Gifted they call it. But genius is a gift like a puppy is a gift. It’s mostly a responsibility. Genius pisses on your carpet all the time. Genius will eat all of your shoes.
“When you’re born genius you have a lot fewer options than you think. You’re supposed to do something to…I don’t know, fix us. It’s treasonous to the species to play Street Fighter or to watch TV or to sleep when you could be curing something or figuring out how to make pizza out of nothing but corn and the tears of Africans. That’s what they tell you. I decided to use my genius to get us off-world. Like you mean it. Mars. Mars is the only real option right now. Mercury is a suicide run and we can’t stay here. A single planet is irresponsible. It’s a closed system. Those are never sustainable. That’s QED.
“Mars is a shitty option, though. No magnetic field, really, it’s balls cold, we still have no clue what the water situation is like up there, but if there is any it’ll be a bitch to get to. It’s a shithole, but maybe we can shape it.
“I built my first rocket when I was three. Mostly it was pressurized cleaning products and a little black powder from some of my dad’s bullets and a bunch of Pringles cans and duct tape. I worked on the thing for two years. By the fifteenth iteration of the design I achieved low-earth orbit. With potato crisps. The first seven set small fires. The eighth gave a deer a heart attack and taught me that, in a pinch, I can perform CPR on a dear. It mostly tasted like leaves. The ninth one burned down most of my parents house and that was the last time I saw them.
“They never knew what to do with me. They looked at me like we look at Fraction. Like we’re not the same species and one of us is fucking scary. Like I had a second head that was hungry for human flesh or, I don’t know. I didn’t really know them so it’s hard to guess how they thought. I can’t remember being touched by my parents even once. Still I didn’t mean to… Anyway. So they packed up the things that were only mostly singed and took off in a car I built the year before. They didn’t tell me they were going and I waited nine days and then I called social services myself from a neighbor’s phone because they cut off the utilities when they went.
“The next six months are mostly foster homes and beatings,” Space says.
Amy says, “Love is a losing hand.”
Space says, “When I turned six I got scholarships to private schools. I went to class but mostly at this point I was working on building a rad shield for space exploration. Before me, any theoretical trip to Mars meant nine months and at least twice the radiation exposure any human can withstand. Without a proper shield we’re just a bunch of burritos watching Cheers reruns while we cook. No point in bending a planet we can only get to dead and glowing.
“I built the shield and NASA bought it. I sold it cheap because it didn’t take a mind like mine to realize the American space program would be fucked sideways any day. They told me when I was out of college to give them a call and I was nine and I told them to give me five years.
“I falsified documents to make it look like I had parents so I could leave school on holidays and during the summer I took AP classes and I never kissed a girl and I worked on teraforming theory, because without resources like you wouldn’t believe it’s awfully hard to work practically with teraforming.
“When I was twelve I went to CatTech and I met this girl and she had poetry in her fingers and in her eyes and it bled into everything she touched and, of course, that’s why I had to kill her. But I didn’t know that, yet. And, of course, neither did she.”
And Amy says, “The shadow covers me.”
And we listened to the dead.
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