the corporation’s interrogator

aboard this keepsake ship, torn between death and life you stand naked before the Emperor’s Truth. your rebel assault has failed, Xin. that was your name, was it not? i have been instructed to break you, and to give you a new name. i may choose to throw you overboard into the zero kelvin unknown. the cosmic freeze may yet force your tighest door. trust me, your perceptions are false. as your interrogator, i have a right to your requiem. for your transgendery, you will be punished with chechen relish – but the empire is merciful, and the corporation is only interested in your likes and dislikes. we have great use for people such as yourself. you may yet choose to join our chase, and aboard this ship complete the revelation. here are your ghosts, a flurry of hunger-like illusions. to begin with, all the relations between your particles, and your emotional ancestry. we shall carry out the test for you to join the corporation’s workforce: you may yet ascend to pinnacles of salesmanship still unknown. you do want to become successful,  do you not? my understading is that that is what drives you. you no longer wish to be a servant. but why, I wonder… this choice of transgendery? it does not seem to harmonize with your goals. something other than yourself is what gets in the way of getting what you want. you do want to be accepted, to be liked even. to be worshipped, perhaps?

Xin

The conqueror worm has you. Suffocate me, or force me to imitate the bear. I find comfort in my bad luck with the dice, with love, with my miserly parents. There’s nothing that you can witty out of me with your creative multi-screen, I have built the damn things. I know every withering silicate memory in the cycle, there are no tricks left that you can play on me.

the ecology student

along a stretch in the stream of ancient stars, I first discovered Dr Firn’s scarlet spaceship racing across the
northern sky. Pulsing at half a million miles an hour, its mind had a diameter of the full moon. Aboard it, he
had created a whole eco-system. He and his wife, in an attempt at human enterprise for happiness and justice, had
been pilgrims across the galaxy. On large scales gravity operates on a different level. Among the dark and lonely
reaches of this multi-verse, Dr Firn had been a probability, and orphaned travellers have continued to follow his orbit
long after his parent cluster has dissolved completely away. There may be hundreds of even thousands of such stellar
scientists and humans ringing in our galaxy. And yet my discovery is precious. In recent years I have found myself
going back to the memory of his wise words, his humble demeanour, and the wonders of his celestial gardens.
To push through a vast foreground of stars, to lead the way gently pointing out the direction, indicating that the
original cluster was not torn apart violently. Sitting there under the shade of unaided trees, at a particular age
and distance, eating his carrot cake, finding a cosmic highway for morality, spanning more than 130 times the stream
of our knowledge, and yet holding out against the tidal forces of our Milky Way galaxy. His body may have rotten
in the ground in a nameless tomb on a nameless asteroid, and his companion wife may be holding out in grief. Yet
I do not despair in this time of war; I was lucky to be his friend, and while the digital sky may flicker and offer
thousands upon thousands of wicked, false truths, I can skim through the fake (be a friend to Orson Welles) and know
that many are currently trying to answer big questions. How far Dr Firn’s halo extends, I do now know – yet I do
know that the dark matter, spherical in shape, invisible, surrounds us. I am optimistic about the chances of humans,
our earth-bound eyes sometimes stray across a whole new universe. He was my friend, and I loved him.

the engineer

Some say that everyone has a thing that shapes them. Makes them who they are. For me, it’s the war. When I was a child, I lived under a dictatorship. I loved football, I watched the World Cup, supported the valiant versus the bullies. Not much has changed since then. I am now an engineer, a migrant, a citizen of the new world. “If you have no memory, then I want you to remember … the good times that we had. Crowns of violets, and roses, and crocuses.” On this planet, those who walk heavily, carry their needs, or lack of them. I want to renew this unspeakable grief. I want to help others. I really do. And yet there is so much to do. Going back to the sources of evil, I stumble on my ego. I was really good at making things. Taking them apart, and then building them back. One day, I was helped by a professor, he asked me, what my grief was, and then gave me a book. My family are all dead, or they are here, with me. Except for an old auntie, who said, I am too old to start my life anew. Being an engineer is about knowing how things work. That gets me closer to the Truth, and perhaps being close to it, it makes me more likely to know how to help others. The war, it’s the war that drives me. My brother stopped living, he just sits. My father and my mother, they live a life of relative comfort, in a minuscule apartment, supported by our government. But no longer. There are new laws being drawn up. War refugees are parasites, they said. The prime minister of Europa is out and about, telling lies about migrants, about refugees. They say that soon, we shall be sent to Jupiter for rehabilitation. The old dictator back on Earth used the very same word. As an astronomer, as man of God, I can say what Rumi once said: “The astrolabe of God’s mysteries is love.” Compassion is my telescope, and equipped with that, I am to see the spiritual dimension. That is, if they do not chop me up in pieces before the year is out. Yet there is hope. On Tyche, the hypothesis planet in the Oort Cloud, the human species has been able to create a new Palanese society, where ecology and psychology are core issues. We can stamp it out, folks.

”  ‘I’ am a crowd, obeying as many laws
As it has members. Chemically impure
Are all ‘my’ beings. There is no single cure
For what can never have a single cause.”