Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Between Screens

Originally published by Galaxy Press

I was fourteen when I first skipped across the galaxy, trying to fit in, trailing the older boys who had ditched class. Cox, the grunge leader of the group, tattooed and modified, ran the skipper code hacker with one hand and shoved me through the portal with the other. One moment I could hear the others laughing, the next I was in an empty station on my hands and knees, picking myself off the cold floor, heart racing. I didn’t know much about skipping, or space travel—I had only been off Earth for a week—but I knew it wasn’t cheap. A moment later I heard the others stumbling in after me, shouting in fear and excitement.

“We’re caught.”

“By who?”

“The pigs!”

“They tracing us?”

“’Course. Gotta skip. And trip the pigs. Lose ’em, yeah?”

“Sure, sure.”

I was shoved by three other boys through another skipper, and like that, I was across the universe, in another grey skipper station, running from the pigs who were light years behind.

They never did catch us, not that first time. Cox made sure of that, rerouting stations with his hand hacker to throw them off. We skipped, racing down long hallways in abandoned stations. We skipped, shoving through dense crowds of business drones. We skipped, diving past upkeep bots. We skipped until my world spun and nausea swelled inside me.

When we arrived at our final destination—a claustrophobic, cold room—a dozen boys were touching-up a rigged cacophony of gerrymandered technology. Some of the boys I recognized from school. Their stares jarred me. I was foreign to them, tan Earth skin, natural brown eyes and hair, a stark contrast to their pale features.

A screen that looked scarcely different from a threadbare bed sheet was draped on one side of the room, a blindingly bright projector shone on it from the other side. Wires and ancient technology, a haze of smoke, the stink of synthetic bliss, and worn blankets and pillows filled the cold room.

Cox bumped and pounded two tall, thin, pimply boys who were entering some final calibrations on the projector, “Ready, ready? The telescope spitting what we need?”

“Sure, sure,” the two answered in unison and returned to their work. Their complexions were more corpse-like than the other spaceboys, and their greasy light hair curled at their shoulders.

An image flickered on the screen. It was a black canvas speckled with burning white stars. The projector clicked several times, then the image zoomed in on a planet, green and blue, much like Earth, but with strange-shaped continents. All the boys quieted. Cox pushed me to the blanket-covered floor and stuck a warm drink in my hand, “Drink up, new kiddie, the lightshow’s starting.”

“What’s so special about it?” I asked, taking a sip of the burning elixir. A boy next to me hushed me as if I were speaking over some audio, but there was no other sound in the station.

“Boys projectin’ the light. That’s a planet, this ain’t no movie. There’s a telescope outside of this station. Boys hacked it. Boys real smart with equations.” Cox tapped a finger to his temple. “Real sharp. Taller one’s name Timmet, other’s Trager. Real ugly, but so sharp they’re smarter than the teaches we ditched. Sure, sure.”

“That’s another planet out there, hundred light-years away?” I asked.

Cox nodded, irritated, then punched my shoulder, “Just watch. I ain’t seen it at this angle yet.”

Sitting, I began to watch, but nothing seemed to happen. I gradually became aware of a hand on my back, slowly rubbing as if to annoy. I turned to look, but the light from the projector distorted my vision. I could make out the shape of a girl, narrow with long synthetic dark hair. In the dimness and blinding projector glare, I thought I saw her wink. She hissed, “Don’t lose your lunch, new kiddie.”

Before I could respond to her, a gasp from all the boys brought my attention back to the screen.

A meteor hurdled for the planet, brown and jagged. The two masses collided. Breaths hissed in. A shockwave slowly spread from the impact, followed by a wall of ocean. Cox turned toward the projector and yelled over the silence, “Timmet, Trager! Zoom in! Can’t see nothing.”

The brothers tapped away with their hackers, the telescope zoomed in, and our projector followed the shockwave as it ate forests, deserts and mountains, obliterating all to dust and magma. It zoomed in further. A city came to view, quaking, buildings falling, ants scrambling. Then it was dust too. And then a wall of water. The projector flicked to several other dying cities before the visible half of the planet was devoured and dead. When it was over, the entire room fell silent. The telescope flicked back to the impact site—a circle of red-orange magma, glowing as the tectonic cracks slowly tendrilled across the planet like stretching skeletal fingers. The nausea from skipping returned. I accidently tipped my drink over, but no one seemed to notice, their eyes were nailed to the dying world.

“Why?” I managed to utter, “Why did those people stay? They must have known their planet would die.”

“Misguided principals.” Cox shrugged. “Or just too poor to leave. Not like you, new kiddie.”

“If I was rich, I’d still be on Earth,” I began, but something buzzing on Cox’s hip took precedence. He fumbled at the device, brought it up to his face. His eyes widened. Pointing his finger toward the skipper gate, Cox started to shout. Boys began to clear the skip station, running, packing up pillows and synthetic smokers and hard drinks, spilling their possessions everywhere as they jumped through the skipper. Cox jerked me to my feet, “Move, new kiddie—the pigs’ve found us.”

I turned to look for the girl, but she was gone. Cox shoved me forward. “You hear me? No time.”

Then I was skipping again, Cox at my heels, more boys chasing after, hooting. Instantly through space we ran: Abandoned comet drill site. Packed synth-steak meat house. Sliding living quarters. Busy commercial district, grey and dull. And a hundred skip stations between. The boys began to split, skipping off to different stations.

Pigs in pale suits popped up here and there, never able to crack us with their electric batons, though once, right before we lost them for good, one dove for Cox, catching his ankle. I kicked the fat man in his teeth, stomped the hand that had captured Cox, and shoved us both through the portal. When we finally lost them it was just Cox, Todd, and I.

Cox swung a tattooed arm over my shoulders and squeezed, “Kiddie, you did good. Respect, respect. Did good watching that planet blow for the first time, too. I’ve seen it five times now. First time was the hardest. But it hooks you, yeah? It’s a day later and you want to keep watchin’. Skip to new stations where the light ain’t passed through just yet. See it again, at a new angle.”

Yes. This is what I wanted. Right?

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

Cox laughed and pushed me forward. “You’ll see. Go on home. See you at school tomorrow.”

When I finally found the way back to my living quarters, I could hear mom crying in her room. She was still grieving over dad, though she claimed that the sudden weeping outbursts were due to the artificial days and nights, or the synthetic smell of life in space, or some other lie. Luckily, she didn’t notice me slip in, nor did she complain when I drowned out her moans by blaring music in my cramped room while I struggled to sleep.

The next morning I ate synth-meat for breakfast, rushed out the door before mom could bring up dad, and used my school pass to skip to the school station. My first three periods I drifted off, day-dreaming of skipping, kicking a faceless patrol officer in the teeth, but mostly about the dying planet. In my daydreams I could hear the peoples’ cries. Why hadn’t they left? Surely they weren’t so poor that they couldn’t leave. Who would choose death on a planet over life across the million space stations?

At first I sat by myself at lunch, sure that no one would want a tan Earther sitting with them, but, to my surprise, Cox grabbed my shoulder and gestured over to a table where Todd, Timmet, Trager and a few others from the night before sat.

As I joined them, I heard discussion of last night’s exploits—rehashing, bragging, hyperbolizing. Cox cut in, explaining how heroic I was when I smashed officer piggy’s teeth in. After that the other boys seemed more accepting of me, listening when I spoke, giving the occasional nod.

By the time lunch was dismissed, they had begun planning another show, but this one was something new, not the same dying planet from another angle.

Reluctantly, I ambled to class, a dark boy in a scuffed hallway full of skulking corpses, my mind fixed on skipping, wondering what the new show might be—Cox, Timmet and Trager had kept me out of the loop. In class I sat in a listing chair, impatiently leaning back from my desk, not listening to some teach chew the side of her mouth. Suddenly, I felt a kick on my tailbone, hard enough to sting. I glanced back; it took me a second, but I recognized the girl from last night’s show.

She winked a pale-blue eye. Her hair was dyed darker than my natural color; it shimmered purple if the light caught it just right. She wore a splash of cherry lipstick, and I spotted tattoos swirling up the side of her neck: a few colorful planets, some stylized stars and a spiraling galaxy—not the sort of ink you’d find on Earth.

I raised my eyebrows. Her complexion didn’t seem as grey as the others’. With a quirked smile, she passed me a folded note on synth-paper. It read: u planning on going to the next show? Shit, did I really want to go? I wrote back: sure, sure, what’s your name? And tossed it back to her while the teach wasn’t looking. She responded with: Name’s Lem, next time you better sit next to me. When I looked back at her, I could tell just from her crooked smirk that she was aggressive, cocky, vivacious.

Though I had lived on Earth for fourteen years, and breathed real air, drank real water, and ate real food, she somehow had lived more than me.

I sent back: sure, sure.

After we received the notification to switch classes, Lem followed me to the science hall. I didn’t know what to say, so I awkwardly smiled as she complained about the dearth of girls at last night’s show. I nodded like a fool, bumping into other students in between gawking glances. She must have been late to her next class, because I had hardly entered mine before the tardy notification appeared on the cracked screen of my tablet.

I remembered nothing of the rest of the school-day. I assume I spent it scribbling sketches of dying planets on synth-paper, ignoring teachers. After school I roamed the halls looking for Cox, Todd, Lem, or any of the gang, but those who hadn’t ditched earlier in the day, hadn’t stuck around after school. When I got home, I was already irritated. Mom—her eyes rimmed red—put on a smile for me. That irritated me more.

I left after dinner, ignoring mom’s silent pleas to be comforted.

I paced our sector, subconsciously moving toward the skip station, but without the handy hacker Cox had, I was marooned, unless I wanted to pay.

As I roamed I passed silicon flowers and earthen landscape murals so awful they only could have been painted by someone who’d never stepped foot on Earth’s surface. The bleak, artificial lighting did nothing to uplift my brooding.

Why had they stayed? They were ants on our cosmic threadbare screen, scurrying, helpless. Too poor? After father had died, mom and I were too poor to live anywhere but the stations.

Could it have been different long ago? I asked myself as I studied the awful perspective of a different earthen mural. None of the shadows looked right, and the trees were far too thin. Was Cox’s gang where I should try to fit in? The mountains looked like triangles, completely inorganic, completely wrong. How long could they go ditching school and skip-hacking before a pig bashed them? The sun was a brighter orange than that, the sky more blue—this painting belonged on a wasted planet, full of frantic ants. What happens if I got stranded on some station a billion light years away? Trees don’t grow in concentric rows, and there’s no patterns to the way leaves sprout from branches. Why did they stay? Why didn’t they just leave?

Over the following weeks I grew closer to Cox and his gang; we were vines twisting together, using each other to reach a sunspot, not that any of my new friends would get the metaphor. We poured hours of work into discussing plans over half-eaten synthetic lunch food, spreading the news only by word of mouth to those we knew wouldn’t rat, hunting down potential show sites: the station had to have a powerful telescope that the brothers could hack, and it couldn’t be in a high-traffic area.

I hardly saw Lem in class—I think she ditched more than not—but when I did, her cherry smile brought my thoughts away from indecision. Cox’s gang was the key to the lightshows, and lightshows were the key to her. She was the most attractive space girl I’d seen, and I’d chase her to far-off galaxies if given the chance.

One day between the first show I’d seen and the second, Lem and I ditched before Earth History class. Using a battered old skip-hacker Cox had graciously given me, I took her to stations we’d never seen. We walked through offices—stealing idle hand tablets, synth-papers, and whatever would fit in our pockets, ran through cafeterias—snatching genuine planet-baked cinnamon bread and rolls with real butter, laughed in game rooms as we played VRs with what little money we had. In the cold, bleak expanse of our galaxy, I had found light.

Back home I would lie awake on my thin mattress thinking of Lem’s dark hair with its purple shimmer, wondering if she was thinking of me too. It was a nice change from my brain replaying my father’s babbling death as fast-acting poison ate his body. I never saw it, the leak at his station was far above Earth, but that hadn’t stopped my mind from speculating about his final minutes.

Hell, I was beginning to be able to ignore my mom, too—but it wasn’t all wonderful amongst the bleak stars. I still second-guessed myself. Joining Cox’s cohorts could lead down a strange path. I’d never run with a crowd like that back on Earth. But the stations were different from Earth. To fit in here, I told myself, I had to run with these guys.

On the day we set up the show room, I ditched class entirely. My whole body trembled in anticipation. This room yawned bigger than the last, and I was one of the first to arrive.

Cox unsuccessfully attempted to hang the screen while Trager and Timmet worked on the projector and hacked a nearby space telescope. Cox caught sight of me. “Damn Earther, you scared? Your skin’s white as mine. Relax. Come here, help me hang this damn thing.”

“Sure, sure. Not scared—excited.”

“Don’t drop the screen. Your fingers shakin’ too much.”

“No worries.”

By the time we finished setting up, a dozen boys lay about the floor on insta-inflate mattresses and backpacks, smoking paper soaked in colorful synthetics, drinking delicious toxins from recycled bottles, playing the knockout game.

More came skipping in. And girls. Three girls, then four, awkwardly watching the boys. But Lem wasn’t there.

She’d come, I knew, unless she got caught by the pigs. I shook off the thought; she was too quick and determined to be caught.

Someone slapped a bottle to my chest. I drank, spilling the burning, icy liquid down my chin. Todd slammed me on the back, hooting. My head buzzed, harmonizing with the hum of the station’s electronics. The lights dimmed, hacked. Yet, it felt too early to start, more people were passing through the portal every minute, Lem wasn’t with them.

An uproar of murmurs met the flicker of the projector. Too soon, the murmurs said. Friends on their way, it complained. An image flashed, a volcano bleeding orange and red. More complaints. But what could we do? There’s no rewind button on telescopes.

Cox stood, “Ease, ease. This is a preshow. Settle your pretty heads. Staunch those flowing tears.”

Tension in the crowd dissolved as we realized that the best was yet to come. A wet pinch on my neck startled me. I turned to see Lem, she’d snuck in and bit me on the neck, playfully, “So tense. Need to relax, Earther. Let me work on your shoulders.”

She massaged my back. I could smell the synthetic sweetness of a hand-rolled cigarette between her cherry lips. She pulled me to her, touched my lips to hers, and exhaled a remedy, a toxin, a delight into my lungs. My world spun for the moment, her tongue in my mouth, fingers running through hair.

We kissed, her tongue assertive, experienced, mine stumbling, awkward. On the sheet above, magma flickered and flowed. She was my first kiss.

Our passion had not worn off when the show started, but we mustered a glance at the screen. The room was stifling with packed body-heat. Despite the haze in my head, and the pounding of my heart, I made a mental note to tell Cox that we would have to scout larger locations for the next show.

On the screen I saw a city, old, like one on Earth from thousands of years ago. A foreign-looking people crossed streets, drove cars, pedaled goods, rode bicycles, as the telescope scanned them, focusing here and there, zooming in and out, panning. Nothing happened for the longest time. Just as I thought the crowd would begin to grumble, a smoldering light flashed across the room, piercing, hot, so bright Lem and I winced.

It was as if the brothers had pointed the telescope towards a star. Then the smoke lifted, and Timmet punched past half a dozen filters until we were seeing through the dust cloud as if it weren’t there.

Thousands of people lay dead in the streets; thousands more walked about, dying, flesh dripping from their stumbling frames. Buildings had become liquefied skeletons stretching up toward the telescope, some still bending and breaking in the firestorm’s wake.

Trager zoomed in on a man burnt so badly that his clothes and skin had become indistinguishable. He staggered as if blind and begging.

For what? Water? A quick death? His family? His lover? He latched on to anyone who passed, but most shoved him off, or avoided him narrowly, searching for families of their own. They were just as blind, just as naked.

There should have been the sappy cry of a solo violin. But there was no sound but the hum of the station and the breathing of its inhabitants. A boy laughed awkwardly, cracking midway. Or was he a man? We existed in that awkward stage somewhere between the two.

I felt Lem’s hot breath on my neck, soft cherry lips kissing my cheek. My jeans stiffened. I glanced back up at the begging, melted man, then filled my existence with Lem.

When all the death and dying and love and lust were over, no pigs came to interrupt us. The boys slowly trickled out of the skip station, drunk and high, whooping and laughing; Cox, the brothers, Todd, Lem and I were the last to skip out.

Cox smiled at Lem and me, “Not bad, yeah? Dark shit. Tell more of your girlfriends to come.”

“Sure, sure.” Lem said, smiling.

Then off we skipped, losing a friend here or there.

Over the next weeks my life consisted of three things: ditching class to explore the stations of the universe with Lem, planning and scouting with Cox and the boys, and lying awake in bed, ignoring mom while dreams of dying cities and planets kept me up.

For the first time in my life I wasn’t making straight As. Truthfully, I didn’t know what kinds of grades I was making. Mostly, I didn’t care, but there was a part of me—maybe the same part that occasionally dreamed of Earthen fields and real food—that tugged at my intestines.

On the occasion that I did go to class, I would sketch. I drew dying worlds on synth-paper, colliding meteors, cracking crust, bloody magma. Then moved on to cities—drowning, burning, screaming, wheezing. I would write captions like “Come See the Lightshow”, or “Watch the Wonders of Dying Worlds—Live!”, imitating movie posters I’d seen on Earth.

During a scouting trip, Cox saw one of my sketches after it had fallen out of my torn pocket. “Cheeky. The Earther’s an artist.” he said. Later he commissioned me to draw more, picked out his favorite design, then, in code, jotted down several skip station coordinates and times on the side, copied it, and passed it to people we trusted—to spread word of the next show.

At some point I suggested to Cox that we should get a band to play live at the next lightshow. He and the boys resisted the idea, but I managed to convince them to at least allow music during the preshow. They agreed, so long as I scrounged together the band. I accepted their challenge.

Earth was inspiring, full of young musicians and would-bes, but the stations weren’t. Luckily, a cramped corner of our school held a music hall where I periodically wandered between classes. I wasn’t looking for the best; we needed trustworthy guys, no one who’d rat us out to the teachers or pigs.

It didn’t take me long to spy and recruit Rodney, a boxy boy with a shock of dull blond fuzz that sprouted in wilting patches on his cheeks. He played saxophone and violin, terribly. An outcast, a rust artist, a pugilist, a perfect recruit. His weak connections in the music hall were enough for me to infiltrate and recruit four more equally qualified musicians on the promise that synth-smokers and some heavy bottles would be provided for their services.

So the next show had live music.

Strings screeched, buzzed, hacked, and coughed; the music was perfect. Rodney and his band played, still making the same mistakes they’d had while rehearsing thirty minutes before, as two dozen excited cohorts skipped into the current show-station.

Cox grabbed me by the shoulder, hard, pointed to the band, and said, nodding, “Aye, new kiddie, you ain’t bad for a peach-skinned Earther.”

I nodded back thinking: They may call me “new kiddie,” but I’m no longer an outsider, no more than anyone else here, haven’t been since the skip home from the first show, since I kicked that officer’s teeth in.

“They’re shit terrible,” Cox said, tossing a clanking rucksack full of bottles at me, “but people seem to like ’em. Give Rodney and ’em jars of piss booze when the show starts. Keep one for you and Lem.”

“Sure, sure.”

Two boys broke out in a fight. Just as I felt, Lem put her arms around me. One of the brawlers fell into a violinist, and was thrust back into the clash. People whooped and hollered, as the two blackened each other’s eyes, until one of the bruisers was too broken and bloody to fight, and Timmet and Trager flipped the projector on to a new preshow.

This time we saw a ghost planet, already dead. Skeleton cities, dried canyons where rivers had once flowed, all living things long ago turned to dust. I wondered, how far away would we have to skip to catch the light and witness the downfall of this civilization?

A tornado lashed the land. Lem traced a finger around my forearm and looked up at me with a devious smile, “Your brown skin’s turned pink. Give it more time and it’ll be as sexy as mine. But…in the meantime, it’s looking a little bare.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She jabbed her fingernail into my forearm, “Let’s modify. You’re lacking…tattoos, piercings, implants.”

I laughed nervously. What would my dad think? He was dead. And my mother? Who cared what she thought. “And you have a needle and ink, or some rusty implant gun?”

She smiled, “I told Todd to bring some. He’s just as talented an artist as you. He’s got clean stuff.”

He wasn’t. And he didn’t.

A violin screeched. A quake split a dead desert. And a needle pierced my skin. I’d decided on a tattoo of a planet, and was told it would look cool. It felt like a knife scraping, cutting, digging at my arm. I emptied half a jar of piss alcohol down my throat, lit a synth-cig, and watched the panning ruins of a ghost planet.

When the outline was done, Todd snatched my alcohol and splashed it on my arm.

The lights dimmed. The show started.

Then another show. And another.

So we went on, in whatever abandoned skip stations we found, for months, our posse slowly growing by word of mouth and the handouts I’d designed. Each show a memory with a different tattoo, piercing, scar or glowing implant. The pigs busted us sometimes, catching a few kids too drunk, stoned or slow to skip away.

Our lightshows became more frequent; we needed researchers who knew when and where cosmic tragedies had happened, and people good with equations, and techies, and musicians.

I’d go to school on occasion to recruit. Other than that, school meant nothing to me, the show, everything. Our enclave of misfits grew, as did my bond with Lem.

And as I spent the next months skipping across the galaxy with our gang of outsiders, my yearning for Earth waned; the memories of grass underfoot and wind brushing skin, once vivid, now faded. But did any of that matter?

Mom didn’t have a chance at getting us back to Earth. And I was too busy seeing new worlds to care if she did. I was in a river, slow flowing but with a current too strong to fight. Sure, I could swim for the bank, but oblivion was beautiful. The shows began to blur into each other, sometimes a planet died—war the killer one show, nature the next—sometimes it was just a city, occasionally a malfunctioning skip station.

They mixed like a trillion wisps of smoke commingling, fornicating, trapped in a room of flickering light. It was intoxicating, addictive.

Tattoos crawled up my arms, piercings punched holes through my skin, flashing implants danced up my spine. Friends came and went, but Cox and Lem were always there, never missing a show. True friends, true cohorts.

Then came one show, one particular show, where I realized the dreams of my father’s death had stopped entirely, shoved aside by the preparation and intoxication of the lightshows.

It started like all other shows. Rodney’s band played as friends skipped in from across the galaxy to a cramped room just warm enough to make sweat bead above the brow. The preshow flickered—a junked satellite station spinning in and out of orbit only to be drawn by its planet’s gravity and eaten in fiery gulps by its atmosphere.

Lem bit my lip and whispered something in my ear. Timmet and Trager tinkered with the projector, finalizing calibrations. Boys almost old enough to be men rolled about kissing girls who were almost women.

Somewhere, someone was in a classroom learning something.

The screen skipped. I felt a sense of familiarity. Earth, and a station just above it, round with vast clear windows, greenery on the inside. My stomach knotted itself. When was this? Where were we? How many light years from Earth? One? Two? How long had I been in interstellar space? In the skip stations? How old was I? Fifteen? Couldn’t be older than sixteen, but what’s a year and a half when you’re in a thousand different stations, light years from the embrace of seasons?

In my mind’s eye I saw my father on his death bed, weeping sores covering his skin, just as he was after the rescue team had skipped him back to Earth. He babbled, the radiation sickness frying him from the inside out. On the screen an infrared filter spotted a solar flare lash the station like a whip. The telescope zoomed in. Masses of doomed men and women pounded at the domed windows.

It was a research center, the same one dad had worked at.

What was I doing here? Watching people die? I wanted to stand up, to skip off, just…leave.

Lem felt the muscles in my back tense. I looked down at her hand on my arm. Grey. And so was my arm, except for the tattoos, all up and down my arms. When had I gotten those? In that sobering moment, I couldn’t remember half of the scribbles. An Earthen landscape sprawled across my left bicep, horribly inked by someone who’d never stepped foot on a planet. Who had done that one? Surely, not me. Hopefully, not me.

In the waning light, my tan was a figment of the past, a figment of Earth spinning below the domed station on the screen. I was a corpse, just like the rest of them, not an outsider. And we were kids no longer.

I tried to stand. Lem pulled me to her, licked my ear, “Baby it’s just getting good.”

“I think I should leave.”

I could hear her smile. “You can’t leave.”