Short Story

By: Clayton Ray Randell

Out Of Thin Air

You don’t realize what cold weather is on Earth. At night on frosty ground you can feel a chill creep into your joints. What you are feeling in the dull ache of your bones is outer space. An icy hand of death pressing down through the atmosphere. It’s all about stillness. Space has slowed since the “Big Bang”. The very atoms have lost the oscillations we know as heat energy.

Like an invisible frozen ether it rolls across the planes of my new home. The thin air is unable to support life. Even if I could take off my helmet and keep from freezing, the lack of air pressure would cause my blood to boil to the surface. No fear of that though; the noxious atmosphere would choke you to death before that.

When did this all start. Surely back on Earth. That is where humans came from. Foggy memories are all that is left. Sent here at ten years old. My parents had procreated without a license. After years of hiding we were discovered during a trip to the emergency room. I had been bullied in the street by other kids and knocked down. They told me I talked funny.

Arriving at the hospital we were asked to be genetically identified. My father gave them our I.D. cards but the clerks insisted. Security stepped out from doorways all around us and my mother started to cry. Blood was drawn from all of us. Not that they had to draw it from me there was plenty seeping from a rent in my forehead.

My D.N.A. was unlicensed. Unpaid for. Several of my genes had been mapped by Monsanto and patented. So were everyone’s D.N.A strands. The whole complex bio-organism of Earth catalogued and invested in. My parents D.N.A belonged to them before the patent was issued. Grandfathered into the law. I however was in violation. My very life a theft from a multinational company. Two options lay before me; imprisonment for life or deportation.

Only one place left to be deported to. Global economy had created global rule. Moon bases and orbitals were all property of some company affiliated with all the rest. My only refuge was Mars. I am contractually obligated to pay for my voyage out here with twenty years of labor. My family was told it would only be five years but eventually everyone is escorted to the airlock during the trip out and asked to sign for fifteen more or disembark. So far no one opted to float endlessly in space. So here we are, thousands of children.

Despite the dependence on our masters we enjoy a strange freedom here that was not available on Earth. Earth has become a see of identical faces. Everyone is pressured to conform. The newscasters and sitcom stars speak the same cultivated English and are echoed by the captive T.V. watchers. People, who are too frightened to be alone and too scared to go outside, work continuously to mimic the monotone patterns of speech they see and read everyday. No one dares to stand out for fear of ridicule or censure. The madness is so pervasive that people are beaten by neighbors if they complain using taboo words like oppression, control or denial.

Without the freedom of words there is no freedom of the soul. There is no creation or emotion. Language is the programming for our brain. If someone controls the input so do they control the output.

Here on Mars we are all considered misfits and freaks. Our slang is considered poor upbringing. Our art is ignored as mad scribbling. The only true human culture left is toiling away on a world that at every turn is willing to freeze it, pop it or irradiate it. Yet we are freer than those at home.

Someday the Earth will pass into extinction. Strangled to death by the greed and intolerance of an elite few. All that will remain of humanity will be the bastard children of the brave, scrawling paintings on cave walls and writing poetry in red sand.