The Last Life of Kyra Sant
Chapter 2: The Gray and the Sun
Chapter 1 Chapter 3
I dress in the gray uniform of knowledge workers and walk down the metal tube corridor.
"Heya mouse," JD says, walking past me with his friends. "You finally figure out how to make the leap?"
"It's Kyra," I correct. "And I've already made the leap thirteen times."
"Ooh, good for you, mouse. Don't want to get cut too soon." Laughter.
Ugh, another fail. "Reacting just encourages them," Miriam had said. "If you stop responding, or giving any reaction, eventually they will stop."
They call me mouse because I'm small and possess a nervous disposition, like I know I'm the bottom of the food chain. I look even smaller after shaving off my long hair for the neuroimaging circuits. But mostly they make fun of me because it's obvious I'm not from the elite classes. They know I'm not one of them, and I know I'm not one of them. JD's just stating the obvious, is it really that offensive?
I feel like I'm in a loop, every day doing the same thing, every day making the same mistakes. It feels like I'm drowning.
I am tough and imperturbable. Others' insults wash over me like water, I think. Gaslighting my own experience feels lonely. Even I'm abandoning me.
I get to the cafeteria line. Gray gray gray gray gray, I think as the machine doles out second meal. Everything is gray on the satellite colony, and the cafeteria is no exception. Even the few hydroponically grown plants on my plate are green-gray and taste of fertilized gray. Nothing has vitality. Here all is born of fusion energy and metal, never sun and earth.
The color was the first thing I loved about being in the tank. DMT-858 may be more stable than the standard DMT, but the colors are still spectacular.
When I'm reliving my previous incarnations' deaths, everything feels realer than real. The smells, the colors, the textures, the feelings. That's part of what makes it so challenging to navigate—the intoxicating vividness of it all.
On the space colony, everything feels like it's nursing an aluminum hangover. The drum of the air systems, the tik-tak-tik-tak-tik-tak of the robot cleaners, everything speaks of soullessness.
I survey the cafeteria seating. JD's settled with his cronies in their usual spot. I look for Arjun out of the corner of my eye. He's seated with Ava, always with Ava, and their crew. Arjun is acting out a scene and everyone is laughing.
I make a beeline for my corner and sit alone. I don't need friends; I have work to do. On my visor I tap the news feeds, like I'm anyone else getting my fix of the local gossip about the politicians or the export trades. Then I tap the opacity so people won’t see my eyes close.
In my mind I pull up the first death. I memorize every texture, every sound. Most important is the emotion. I go through the emotional discharge process. I feel the emotion fully while breathing in deeply, holding, and exhaling. I identify any thoughts that triggered the emotion and repeat them, letting the emotion build up. I feel it fully, surrendering. If I discharge the emotions, I won't be so immersed in the situation. Then I can re-orient and get to the hypersphere. Then from there the gate, and then—viola—into innerspace.
I pull up the second death. The first one was easy, I had seen it a couple times before. The second death hadn't come up before, so it gets to me. I'm trying to process the emotion but there's too many people around me. Tears threaten to streak across my face. I can almost hear JD pouncing on me, teasing me that I'm crying because I'm eating alone.
Breathe in for 4-3-2-1. Hold 4-3-2-1. Sigh out 4-3-2-1. I do a few rounds of breathing to calm my nervous system. How is it that we have the tech to build space colonies but still rely on breathing to regulate our primitive nervous systems? Maybe there was a technology before the first wars. We lost so much in the first wars.
I get through the other deaths. I play them in different orders, seeing if there's any residual emotion. Other than the second death, there's a few threads I'll need to go through tonight when I have space for full catharsis. I’ve been so tired when I get home, but I have to prepare.
I reinstate my visor’s transparency. My eyes are drawn magnetically to Arjun. Arjun has his arm wrapped around Ava. She tilts her head towards his. I let myself replay the memory:
On the first day of training, a tall man with gleaming golden-brown skin sat next to me. A few minutes before the morning lecture he turned to me and joked, "Statistically speaking, one in 10 of us will go crazy. Who do you think it'll be?"
I stared at his huge brown eyes, his broad grinning face. Why was he talking to me? I tried to shrink into the floor.
"Umm, statistically it's those who have a history of trauma before the age of 6. The board discourages applicants with early trauma as that can destabilize the core psyche." I stopped talking and realized that I said the completely wrong thing. I was supposed to point to someone, gossip, and laugh. Or say something self-deprecating. Anything but recite textbooks.
"Someone's been studying." He grinned a huge grin. It's like at the center of Arjun is a sun, and when he smiles at you he unleashes all that light into you, and you feel a warmth you've never felt as a child of the space colony.
And then Ava walked in. Arjun held his smile towards me for a half moment longer, just long enough to be polite, and then shifted to orbit around her. I felt like all the heat had vanished from the room.
That day I knew Ava as Ava the gorgeous, but I would come to also know her as Ava with the right answers, Ava from the family who owned one of the most successful export businesses in Erados-C, Ava the most likely to make it to the top research center in New Singapore.
Arjun didn't talk to me again after that day, but he didn't act coldly to me either. I didn't blame him. We were on the same space colony, but we inhabited different worlds.
I catch my thinking. I focus on the present. The present is where my power is.
In the present, I wonder what it's like to be Ava.