Orphans

16

16 “Just lie back, relax, we are preparing to leave,” a calming voice says—it’s not metallic or robotic, not scratchy or booming, it’s not meant to offend or dominate. It’s there to soothe, to remind you that there is goodness and comfort in this world, if not the next, and you need to believe it, embrace it and never forget that this voice is there for you and only you regardless of the truth. For what’s truth anyway—just something you accept as fact, regardless of what might be the case. I lie back and an E.C. enters the room to give me a sedative so that I will fall asleep for the start of our journey. “You will soon be asleep,” the voice continues, making love to me and wrapping me in warmth and joy. Sedatives are wonderful, but this is about more than sleep, it’s also about nourishment and replenishment, and drugs alone can’t guarantee that, hence the voice. The voice is female, the voice of the lover, the wife, the object of desire, affection and need, and ultimately the mother, everyone’s mother who ever lived. The first voice you hear upon entering the world, a time when everything is possible, when love is pure, and when the possibility of endless fear and confusion is still muted and tamped down, because at that moment, and this moment, it doesn’t have to be that way. “Close your eyes. Think good things, happy things,” the voice says. Not everyone can make it through this moment: the moment of departure, the moment just before space beckons. For some the anxiety is too great, the fear of O R P H A N S 60 the unknown too overwhelming. And while they could give us drugs that halt our memory as they do in the Terrax lab, no one can spend months in space travel with no memories of take-off to draw from. Without memories there would be no dreams, and without dreams we would slowly die, cell by cell, moment by moment, something the Corporation only learned after failing to understand this before they began sending people so far away. “You’re doing great, just take a deep breath,” the voice says as the engines on the shuttle come to life with an enormous hiccup of electricity and fire and life, the slight scent of ethanol wafting past me as I settle back even further into my bed. I take a deep breath and then another, my eyelids growing heavy and crashing together. There is movement below me and around me, a slight hum, some grinding, and there is life. There is also the sense of being pushed from below and above all at once, compressed between invisible hands, flattened and stretched. Breathe. Think good things, surfing, making love, chewing SynthKhat on the beach, holding Joey. And now there is floating, floating and spinning and spinning and floating, weightless and fatigued, so very fatigued. ...