20-Sep-2001
Title: Duo Out-take: What If? Star Trekking
Author: Erin Cayce
Notes: This is a short "what if?" sort of out-take based on the question of what would have happened to Duo if there had never been a war. It has no point and will not be a part of a bigger series. Comments welcome.
"There now, isn't this nice?"
My step-mom is an idiot.
This place is a dump. DUMP in all caps. Totally ghetto. Why did we have to move here in the first place? No one in their right mind moves to the colonies. Especially L2. All the convicts come here, like Australia on Earth. At least they have cool animals in Australia, and steak. I haven't had a good steak dinner in years. "It costs too much and shut your damn mouth" says Tanya (stepmom number Two, and current).
Like I'm stupid. I was just *saying*, you know?
I tell her I'm going out and I beat it out of our new "apartment" (I label it that in the most generous possible way). I have no idea where I'm going but it has to be better than where I'm stuck now, "home" (home is California, damn it!) with Tanya the Slut-bitch and my drunk-ass pop.
About three streets over I got mugged. Two guys with a rusty knife took my wallet and my jacket, kicked me, and ran off. I pissed me off a little, but in the end it only proved my opinon of L2. Bunch of convicts and cho-mos.
"Sucks to be you," someone said.
"Yeah, thanks for helping. Couldn't have done it without you." I glared at the f--ahem, who dared. "Who're you anyway?"
"No one in particular." He was an old man, was who he was. He had a huge long nose and ugly mushroom hair. I told him so, in all the authority of my fifteen years, and he laughed. It sounded rusty.
"Take care of yourself, do you? I suppose once you get big enough, you won't let street thugs like that get away without a few breaks and bloody noses." He moved toward me, and poked me in the shoulder. "Looks like you'll be big enough in the next few months. How old are you?"
Pop says people who ask questions you don't want to answer are probably criminals on the lamb hiding out from the police. Pop would know, since that's why we moved to L2.
The old guy kind of looked around furtively and then motioned me closer. Figuring I could take him, I shuffled forward a few steps.
"I build machines," he whispered. "Big machines. They fly. Faster than planes, faster than shuttles. And they have... "
The pause was killing me. I'm not really patient enough for dramatics. "Have what, grandpa? Cause I don't have all day."
"Weapons." He just barely whispered it. "My machines could reduce a city the size of London to ashes and dust."
That sort of shit had been banned by the Arms Treaty of AC 143. I knew because, right before Pop and his new "lady-friend" ripped me out of my school and dragged me to this hole, I'd been learning about it in history class.
But this guy was a psycho anyway. Probably he was just imagining it.
"Do you know what the Alliance is?" he demanded suddenly. He latched onto my arm, and I realised he was a lot stronger than he looked.
"Yeah. Let go." I tried to shake him off; he was hurting me.
"What do you think of them? Those white-haired ancients making decisions about how you have to live your life?"
"I never thought about it much. Let me go."
He moved in close enough for me to identify what he'd eaten for lunch. "Haven't thought about it? Haven't thought about the immigration laws, the right-to-bear-arms-qualifications, the taxes, the economy? Haven't thought about them deciding from their cushy million-dollar homes whether your mother can abort you as a fetus? Whether your father can keep his job or be shoved homeless and penniless into the streets?"
"I said I never thought about it!" I kicked him, like the muggers had kicked me-- in the shin, and I shoved at him with the arm he'd captured. He stumbled back with a howl and let me go--
and I didn't run.
I just stared at him limping and making this little whimpering sound. I felt seriously bad for him. He was just some homeless old crazy and the only person who'd talk to him was me, and just cause I was pissed off at my pop.
"Hey," I said.
He looked up at me, and I could see now how tired he was. And hungry. He looked really hungry, and thin, and sad.
"Hey, if you come home with me, I mean I can't bring you in because Tanya will skin us both, but I could sneak some food out to you." I touched his shoulder the way he had with mine. "Like some pizza or something. Or a sandwich."
That was how it started. Me and this old guy who became my only friend. If he'd had a name, he'd forgotten it. But he sure knew a lot about his machines, and after a while I started calling him Professor. Oddly I really liked him. He was totally obsessed with the Alliance and how awful they were, and once I admitted that I thought they were awful too, I couldn't get him to shut up about it. Sometimes it was impossible to get him to talk about anything else. But he'd show up every day around lunch time, when I got out of school, and I'd sneak him out something to eat, and we'd just sort of hang out.
He promised me that when I turned sixteen, he'd show me his machines. He said he had a warehouse and he'd built one. He was calling it some weird Japanese sounding name, the way video games use Japanese because it sounds all sci-fi. "Shinigami," he would say, and grin. I didn't really believe that it was real, but it was important to him and so I humoured him. He drew me pictures on the back of my textbooks of it, and it looked pretty cool, I had to admit. I could picture the whole thing. The boosters, the beam cannons, the cockpit, every control was etched in my imagination.
Pop found me with him one day, and he went crazy. He threatened to call the cops, then he went inside and came back with a shotgun. I jumped in front of the Professor, who wasn't doing anything, wasn't running, just waiting to see what would happen. I was scared he would die.
I thought Pop was actually going to shoot. He was so angry I thought he'd shoot straight through me to get to the Professor. All the screaming got Tanya's attention, and she added to the noise by shrieking in her high-pitched Jersy voice all over the place about some dirty bum trying to murder us all. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I realised that the Professor was gone. I hoped he was safe.
Pop gave me the whipping of my life. He'd hit me before, but nothing like this. He made my nose bleed, and my head hurt so bad I was crying. I hated him for that. At least it was the weekend; I didn't have to go to school and lie about my father beating me.
It was Tuesday when I realised the Professor wasn't coming back.
I thought maybe Pop had scared him off, or the threat of the cops, but Pop never called and mostly forgot about it anyway. I searched all over L2 for my friend, but no one had ever seen him before. It was like he'd never existed.
A lady walking past me gave me a buck. She had this look of oozing sympathy and she looked really bent up about the bruises on my nose and eye that Pop had given me. That was the worst part of it all, and also not the worst. Because it made me think.
I could run away. It wasn't like I'd be missed. And that was really all the thought I put into it. I did it. I never went home.
And I never found the Professor, either. Maybe he died, or maybe he got out of L2. He was still my best friend in my heart, but after a while I kind of had to let it go. I got a sharp reminder of him when the Alliance made a new law that said the homeless could be removed from the colonies. They could put you in jail. I got sent, but because I was a minor they put me in a "program." I got a decent job at a resturant, and by the time I was nineteen, I had my own apartment.
I went to Pop's funeral when I was twenty-seven. I read about it in the paper. He had had another kid with Tanya. My little brother. My name wasn't in the paper as his survivor, and no one at the funeral recognised me. It didn't bother me much.
When I was twenty-nine, I met the most amazing woman. I'd never had a serious girlfriend-- girls thought I was standoffish and weird-- but Hirde didn't act like that. She said she was kind of weird too, so it worked out. She payed half my rent and lived with me, and sometimes we talked about getting married but never for long. It didn't interest us.
When I was forty-seven, I lost my job (manager in a food chain) when work qualifications were re-defined by the Alliance. Because I'd lived homeless for almost a year, I was a "dangerous element of society" and they promoted some yuppie into my empty position. Hirde got sick and lost her job, and we couldn't make ends meet between the apartment and her medical bills. We struggled for a year and then gave in to the inevitable-- bankruptcy-- without insurance, Hirde couldn't get treatments for the breast cancer and I couldn't find work if I couldn't prove I was responsible enough to own a place of my own...
And I remembered the Professor then, and how he'd warned me. He'd seen it all back then. Maybe that was what had happened to him?
And I wondered what had happened to his machines. God, what I wouldn't have given to climb up into that cockpit I could still picture in my mind, and fly it all the way to Earth and bust up the Senate where they sat in their cushy million dollar homes deciding my fate without ever having to look me in the face and deny me my life. It would have felt really good. I would have loved reducing them to dust and ashes.
The news the day of Hirde's funeral was that L2 had cut off electricity to more than half the residents, and that a medical emergency of some kind-- plague, they were calling it-- had broken out, and the Alliance was taking all the sick people and sending them to a colony all of their own so they couldn't spread the disease.
The Alliance was telling us where to die, now.
I stood outside an electronics store window watching the news and I wished, I wished--
I wished there'd been a war, or something, a revolution, where I could have killed the people who'd made my life this way. Where I could have told Earth that they couldn't do this to me, to my colony, to the people in Space who didn't have anything to do with them. Damn them all to Hell, they couldn't do this to me. It wasn't right. It wasn't god-damn fair.
But there was no war. And all I could do was go try to find a trash fire tonight so I could be warm, and maybe avoid the cops and jail and hope that I never caught the space plague so I would have to be sent to a colony of the dead and dying.
The End
(:./erin/whatif)
