Space Travel is Boring

space travel is boring.txt

Chapter 1: Space Travel is Boring
	My muscles twitched in what threatened to become full on seizures. The mag-stims, metallic bands around my skull, lifted from my head and stimulated the wrong areas of the brain on the way up. My stomach lurched, and I held down a gush of vomit in the back of my throat. The mag-stim bands finished retracting. The feeling passed. 
	The unpleasantness was a small price to pay for 12 hours of vague, artificial pleasure. The memories had already faded; I couldn’t quite remember what the device had stirred in my mind, except that I had kind of enjoyed it. The high grade stims were reserved for first class passengers and I envied them. I pulled my neck to one side, and then to the other. I was rewarded with a series of satisfying cracks. I hated Spring Airlines. Their seats didn’t recline and they wreaked havoc on my back.
	“Ladies and gentlemen, we will be arriving shortly at Huacheng International Airport. Please securely fasten your seat belts and notice the no smoking sign.”
	The plane’s polarized windows lightened and I looked down on Huacheng, which had been Manila 20 years ago. The outskirts of the city had been shelled to rubble and it seemed little effort had been made to restore them. In the distance, gaudy LED lights shone from bulbous skyscrapers, an obvious nod to the Pearl Tower in the model city of Shanghai. The Chinese’s infamous 9 dash line had slowly expanded over the years to become the 12 dash line, then the 24. The Indo-Pacific conflicts had not been kind to the Philippines. Then again, they hadn’t been kind to anywhere else, China included.
	The plane landed. I stood, stretched, and grabbed my bag from the overhead bin. Then came the worst part of the flight: waiting for the door to open. I slung my pack over my sore shoulders. It was all I had to my name. I hefted it and it felt sadly light. I waited for the haggard throng of humanity in front of me to lurch forward. It always seemed to take forever. Standing in that cramped compartment, always with some pushy asshole next to you, trying to make his move before the deboarding even began. Many of us had not showered for over 24 hours, or brushed our teeth. Human odors mixed with stale, warm air. 
	I watched one of the stewardesses make her final check as she headed to the front of the plane. She was wearing a tight green pencil skirt, part of the Spring Airlines uniform. Her hips swayed gently beneath the green fabric, a graceful distraction from the discomfort of the cramped seats
	The crowd began to shuffle forward and I followed them. Another pretty Asian stewardess smiled at me, 
	“Welcome to the Huacheng City. Thank you for your flying with us today!”
	I had always found the awkward syntax charming. I glanced up and down at her as I exited. Her uniform was perfectly tailored, projecting a manufactured charm that felt fittingly superficial. Her exaggerated, plastic smile finished the look. She could have been the model for Barbie: Communist Airline Prole Edition. I nodded at her on my way out.
	The airport was unremarkable. Sterile white floors, banking ads adorning the walls. I glanced up at the multilingual sign above. An arrow for baggage claim, pointing left. 
	I had no other baggage. 
	An arrow for “On-World” transfers. No use to me either. 
	Then, an arrow pointing straight: “Off-World” transfers. 
	I shouldered my pack and began to walk briskly in that direction. I was greeted by the typical Disneyland line endemic to most airports. I finally made my way to the guard. I put my palm on the e-scanner and my biometric data flashed onto the screen in front of him. I prayed silently that the counterfeit chip I’d had implanted worked. The name linked to the chip flashed on the screen in front of me: “Clyde Cash”. The letters flashed green. I felt relieved. The guard was clearly Filipino, and spoke Mandarin with a heavy accent. I had heard that in bygone days Filipinos were known for their above average English skills. Apparently, that had changed after the war.
	“这是你弟一次去外星吗？” 
	“对.” 
	“那你去登记一下。”  
	“好吧.” 
	He gestured to an adjacent station. I walked over. Another guard stood in front. A large tube projected from the table he stood behind. He gestured toward it and spoke in broken English,
	“Put arm in here.”
	“Why?”
	“If you get lose, family can pay. Make one more you.”
	“I’m not sure I understand…”
	“You put arm inside. Mandatory  waixing dengji system.”
	I reluctantly slid my arm inside the black tube jutting from the desk. My fingers reached the bottom. An inflatable cuff deployed and squeezed the top of my forearm. I felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my wrist. I had donated blood before and I recognized the cool, trickling sensation of my essence leaving my arm, being collected in a reservoir.
	I felt a release as the hypodermic instrument inside retracted. The cuff deflated, I pulled my arm out, and rubbed my wrist. Some sort of clotting agent had already ceased the flow of blood.
	“OK”, the guard said.
	I walked into a waiting area. There was a duty-free shopping area, which was of no interest to me. Hordes of Chinese tourists descended on it, buying cartons of cigarettes and bottles of expensive liquor, looking for a deal. Further on, a bar. Tsingdaos and Budweisers were 5 miyuan a bottle, an outrageous sum. But for man about to have his body broken down on an atomic level, sent across the solar system, and reconstituted at a space station on some godforsaken asteroid belt, it seemed like a pretty good deal. Especially since the buzz from the airplane vodka I drank earlier had worn off, leaving me with little more than a headache and a sour mood. 
	I passed my hand over the e-scanner at the bar, and tapped the menu option for Tsingdao twice, ordering a pair of beers. An icon popped up, and my social credit score fell 5 points, bringing me to a grand total of -158. I guess the CCP didn’t like me ordering more than 12 drinks in 12 hours. The bar tender passed me two cans of what was supposed to be cheap beer. I cracked one open and swilled half of it down, to get the full effect. The Chinese government had done away with the 3% ABV tariff after the war, and Tsingdao had roared back onto the market at a raging 5.5%. 
	A dirty looking old man sitting next to me nodded in my direction and knocked back a respectable chunk off his own drink, Binghua by the look of the label. I introduced myself as Clyde Cash. The named sounded ridiculous, which was why I picked it.
	“Where you headed?”, he asked with more than a heavy slur in his words.
	“Free Economic Zone #4. And you?”
	“Angeles City. Last Place in the Philippines the PRC hasn’t nerfed. You can still do what you want there.”
	His eyes were yellow, either an effect of alcoholism or hepatitis. Maybe both.
	“And what exactly is it that you can do there that you can’t do here?”, I guzzled another drink from my can.
	“The social credit system has ruined everything! A jaywalking fine here, a shoplifting conviction there! Before you know it, you’re in the 500’s and you can’t do anything without a cop coming to write you a ticket.”
	Evading the question, but he was right. The social credit score had come to be the defining feature of Chinese society. Anyone below a score of -500 was considered irredeemable. Break the 500’s and it was over. Of course, you could try to gain points by reporting people for minor transgressions. But even trying to snitch your way out of the hole was risky, because paradoxically, you might lose points for snitching. You either packed up to go home if you were foreign, or fled to one of the alien controlled free economic zones. Sometimes the Chinese didn’t even have that option. The self-crit camps had become an institution, God forbid you were hauled off to one.  
	“But why are you in the off-planet terminal? It’s only an hour by sub-orbital.”
	“Got a good deal on a blinker transfer.  Blink from Chengdu to Free Economic Zone #2, then blink back on planet to Manila. Stopped for a beer before the last flight.”
	I’d seen deals for blink jumps for on-planet journeys before. They were cheap, but risky.
	“You aren’t worried about blink tumors?”
	“Renal system’s already fucked. Won’t be long now. What’s a few tumors thrown in the mix?”
	I looked again at the man’s face. I saw it now. The eyes unlevel with each other, the crooked nose, the lumps covering his forehead. He had it bad. A classic case of “The Blinks”.	
	“Blinking” was the instantaneous transportation of the future. The tech broke you down at an atomic level, beamed your matter across space as energy pulses, and reassembled it at a set location. The problem was that the molecules couldn’t be put back together with total accuracy. “Almost entirely accurate,” they said. Over multiple blinks, that “almost” added up. It led to cosmetic deformities, rare cancers, nerve damage, and everything in between.  Most people were lucky if they could make a dozen blinks without manifesting effects. That didn’t stop them though. I clinked cans with the man. He swayed from side to side on his stool. 
	Bars in Asia were like going to the zoo. More depressing, but you could talk to the animals. I had met many men like him before, another alkie expat who showed up in Asia in his 20s and never left. For me, either a warning or a prophecy.  The guy probably taught kindergarten, which was a scary thought. 
	 Weirdos and degenerates seemed to gravitate to me. Occasionally, I wondered if it was because I was one of them. I checked the departures board. My group was set to blink out in 5 minutes. I chugged my second beer and headed to the gate.
	The blink chamber was barren. No adverts or furniture inside, aside from a multilingual sign illustrating which items were banned. No animal matter, no plant matter. It confused the scanners. They had been calibrated to distinguish certain things, like cotton shirts, but others still caused glitches. There was technical equipment humming in the center of the green hospital walls. People always said the color was supposed to be soothing.  No one ever told you the real reason. White had been deemed too graphic long ago; it contrasted with blood too much. With kelly green, the scarlet of blood mixed in to make a dull brown. Much less dramatic. 
	I stood on the circle under my scanner. It analyzed my composition, ratios of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and all the other myriad stuff that added up to a full human being. It examined the patterns my matter was woven into: proteins, sugars, lipids, and arguably most important, neural structure. Get the neural structure wrong and you end up with a gibbering madman, or a vegetable drooling on the floor. It had been an issue when the technology was first leased from off-world species. On-world techs didn’t know how to calibrate the scanners. Many a family had become rich through lawsuits. They said the phenomenon effected carbon and water based beings the worst, too many complex proteins. The cryonic ammonia based species had it easy. All their complexity came from the direct electron transfers that crackled across their relatively simple, superconductive bodies.  
	 I was to be broken down to my most essential parts and sent across the solar system in trans-spatial energy pulses. Of course, these pulses were not one-hundred percent efficient. Energy was lost along the way. Whatever was not received would be replaced from the matter bank at the other end of the journey. I wondered how much of “me” would be left after the journey, how much would be “original”. Those statistics were always left intentionally vague. I decided it didn’t make much difference. 
Take a cup of water, for instance: one molecule could have been, long ago, evaporated from the blood of some ancient warrior in battle, another from Caesar’s dying breath, yet another from Hitler’s piss. All were ultimately rendered equal and indistinguishable.
	A light above me turned from red to green. The chamber’s technician approached me and asked,
	“First time?”
	“Yea, how’d you know?”
	“You can always tell. Close your eyes, you won’t want to look.”
	He exited the chamber. From above, I heard a great thrumming sound, coming out in waves. The chambers occupants heard it too. Some seemed startled, others unphased. I covered my ears and took the tech’s advice, squeezing my eyes shut as hard as I could. 
	There is no way to describe the sensations as everything: my body, my senses, and my mind unraveled. Then, true nothingness. The uninitiated argue that vacuum is true nothingness, but they are wrong. The matter within the vacuum gives it form and flavor. 
	I had always had a materialist bent; was this death? There was no feeling of serenity, no release from pain or final epiphany. Only cessation of being. The word “disintegrate” took on a new meaning for me; not just a crumbling, but a total reversal of integration. It was a feeling only to be felt.	
	The world came back in a startling flash. One moment I wasn’t, then suddenly I was. I saw now why they called it “blinking”. The sensation was too much for me. I collapsed to the floor and began heaving. The beer came up first, in a warm geyser. Then my lunch, in increasing order of density. My diaphragm contracted again and again, until I felt it would cramp up and arrest my breathing.
	That was when I noticed him. The man next to me had been wearing a leather jacket, which now seemed to have fused into his skin. He screamed and began to tug at the loose bits protruding from his wrist. A strip gave way, taking a significant amount of his dermis with it. His shrieks reached a fever pitch, the wailings of a desperate man knowing he had just been disfigured for life. He clawed at his chest, pulling strips of leather and skin off his body in great slabs. Blood pooled around him and squirted onto the walls. They were right; the green mixed into the scarlet and dulled it to an unremarkable brown.  

	
Chapter 2: In Janitor’s Closet
	I had rented a small room, in the poor section of the nitrogen- oxygen breathers’ district of the space station. Janitor’s Closet, they called it. It was right up against the containment wall for the cryonic ammonia district. No matter how strong the air scrubbers were, ammonia gas always seeped through the walls and the floors. The whole neighborhood smelled just like cheap window cleaner.
	I looked at the filth encrusted sink in my room, the mildew lining the walls, and the thick coating of dust on the counters. I lay on my bed and stared at the water stains and mold running down the tacky blue and yellow striped wallpaper. “Mediterranean style”, the Chinese landlady who rented me the room had called it, whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean.
	“Shit,” I thought to myself, “This place needs a scrubbing.”
	I had been sitting naked on the bed, watching trash net broadcasts and getting drunk on cheap wine. I threw on clothes and speed walked down the corridors to the market. The air was abuzz with commerce. Stalls selling electronics, food stuffs, guns, narcotics, baby supplies, sex toys, and many other things lined the floor-walls of the commercial strip. Humans as well as Jackheads, the other Nitrogen- Oxygen atmosphere dwellers on station, moved from stall to stall, frantically haggling. 
“60 miyuan for the bag of heroin and the diapers!” shouted a young Chinese woman to a Jackhead vendor.
The vendor’s throat flap bulged out and cycled through pattern of iridescent colors. I think that pattern indicated annoyance, but it was always hard to tell without being able to see in the UV spectrum. 
“Miyuan are only good in the PRC. This is space. Flip your roll to Solars and we’ll talk!” A small implant on his throat translated his hisses and rumbles into clanging, metallic English.
	I’d already converted my miyuan, China’s state-run cryptocurrency for a new era, into Solars at a casino upon arriving. Each coin represented one Joule of solar energy, supposedly backed by a power vault somewhere. 
	Touts, mostly Indians and Nigerians, walked through the crowds promoting brothels and nightclubs which were almost certainly extortion scams.
	“You like sexy girls, man? Come to our club. Free voucher bro!” a heavily muscled Nigerian said to me, waving a flyer in my face.
	“No thanks.” I pushed past him. The last thing I needed was a 500 Solar beer I was forced to pay for at gunpoint.
	I finally found the cleaning product stall. 
	“What you want? We have real Windex, from on planet.” The man running the stand said in heavily accented English. He looked Japanese, maybe Korean. He was old, real old. Burn marks covered hia wrinkled face. He’d probably been in East Asia when the nukes started going off. 
	“Who the fuck needs Windex when none of these apartments have windows?” I shot back. “I want a whole cleaning kit. Mop, towels, bleach, brushes, everything.”
	He began to gather products and place them in front of me. It seemed to be all I needed.
	“How much?”
	“100 Solars.”
	“Bullshit. That bottle of toilet cleaner is half full and I can tell that mop has been used. 60 Solars or I walk.”
	“65.”
	“Deal.”
	I gathered my supplies and lit a cigarette as I sauntered back to my room. I lazily navigated the labyrinth of alleys and staircases. I made my way down a wide corridor on the way to my room. On it was a large, Chinese-style KTV called Linda’s. There was no artificial solar cycle in the Janitor’s Closet. The gaudy LEDs on the KTV's front illuminated the area in an unrelenting, iridescent glare. The area was trapped in the crepuscular stranglehold of Linda’s gaudy signage.  Every moment was a dynamically woven tapestry of humanity’s worst impulses trapped in a singular, unending evening.
	 A rotating staff of whores constantly called over the shouts of the drunken mob outside, enticing customers to come in. I had developed an attraction to the place. There was always something fascinating going on there—a couple arguing, a drunk puking, or a fight. If you were lucky, you could see all three at once. 
	I walked by slowly and observed the crowd. I saw Linda, the mama-san and namesake of the establishment. She stood among the horde of punters and degenerates, her flock. She was shouting at a man, brandishing a shotgun, withered face scowling. The man was soused, staggering back and forth on wobbly legs.
	“You no pay five nights! Pay now!”
	He took a drunken step towards her and spat in her face. 
	The gnarled old woman raised her shotgun calmly, and a brief explosion echoed off the walls. Gore and bits of bone splattered the crowd outside, but they took little notice. It was a weekly occurrence. Everyone tried to step around the expanding puddle of blood, trying not to soil their shoes. Linda walked back into the KTV with impunity.
	I arrived back home. I scrubbed until I couldn’t scrub anymore. The act of cleaning was cathartic, to see filth and grime whittled down to nothing and washed away. 
	I got a rag and prepared to wash the mold off the wall. Bleach, that was what I needed. A nice big slosh of bleach. I poured some on the rag. I liberally splashed more on the wall. That was when it happened. At first, a thin, white gas rose from the rag. I gagged, coughing, and dropped the open bottle of bleach. The gas thickened rapidly, stinging my eyes and burning my lungs. The room was small, and it filled up quickly. I collapsed to my knees and began to crawl to the bulkhead that led to the corridor outside. I barely made it to the exit before passing out. 
	It was the fucking ammonia! It had reacted with the bleach and turned my room into a gas chamber, Zyklon-B style. I lay on the ground, coughing and wheezing. I cursed the ammonia-breathing pricks who lived on the other side of the wall. 
	“You okay bro?”
	I looked up from my brush with death. A well-groomed Indian man was looking down at me. He was wearing a cardigan sweater and close-fit jeans, his thinning hair was quaffed just so. He looked very out of place for the usual crowd in the Janitor’s Closet. 
	“Yeah, I think so. Almost gassed me out in my own room.”
	“What happened?”
	“Used bleach to clean the wall. It must have reacted with the ammonia in the air.”
	“Fucking hell man, you used bleach? I thought everyone knew not to do that around here,” he chided me in his lightly accented English.
	I got up off the floor and dusted off my clothes. Dust from the asteroid rock that made the station’s foundation constantly rained down on the floor and it was all over my clothes.
	“Listen, bro, I got coke. Wanna buy some coke?
	“I’m good.” 
	Coke always made me too jumpy. I was more of a downer guy. He pulled a data chip out of his pocket. 
	“I got 30 terabytes of porn bro. Wanna buy some porn?”
	“No thanks.”
	He pulled out another data chip and showed it to me.
	“3,000 stolen credit card numbers bro.”
	“Not interested.”
	Yet another data chip came out of his pocket.
	“Every episode of ‘Hello Kitty’ ever made, bro.  It has 3 terabytes of the Rule 34 fan animations on there too. You into ‘Hello Kitty’? Maybe you have a daughter or a girlfriend?”
	“Listen, I’m not interested.” I said firmly.
	Then, I noticed the handle of a pistol sticking out of his pants. I thought of the street touts and the drug fiends who lurked in the markets. Suppose one of them got ballsy someday? I thought of Linda, wasting that guy in front of the KTV.
	“Is the gun for sale?”
	“Yea, bro. Indian knockoff of a Chinese copy of a Taurus Judge. Shoots .45 Colt and .410 bore shells,” he said as he pulled it out of his pants. The grip was cheap, textured, black plastic attached to polished steel. It had a snub nose. It looked new.
	“How much?”
	“300 Solars. Can’t go any lower.”
	The gun had no obvious defects, which was rare. Everything in the gun bazaar looked as if it would blow up in your hand. I reached into my pocket and handed him three hundred Solar worth of coins, the last of what I had. He passed me the pistol. I hefted it. The weight felt good in my hands. It felt like security. It felt like power. 
	I opened the cylinder and looked inside. It could hold five rounds, but only 3 were inside. Unmarked .410 bore rounds. They were probably homebrew jobs. I wasn’t surprised.
	“Listen, I need a post near death experience beer. Know a good place to get a drink?” I asked him.
	“I’m going to Jaded Lady Cantina now, bro. You can come with if you want.”
	
	
Chapter 3: The Funniest Joke in the World
	
I sat at our table, watching the hive of scum and villainy that was the Jaded Lady Cantina. Blink-scarred gangsters sat under the cantina’s cheap, multicolored LEDs, their hushed conversations carrying the stench of conspiracy. Jackheads lined the walls, throat sacks puffed out and shimmering in vibrant mating displays. The oppressive BOOM-BOOM-BOOM of tacky club music dominated the air, pounding against my skull. 
Everybody in the Jaded Lady had an angle. Nobody came here just to drink. My new companion, who had introduced himself as Waqas, wasn’t any different. He leaned in closer to me, practically shouting over the music.
“You ever work a fapiao scam, bro?” He was already grinning.
I sipped my drink. “Maybe.”
His fingers drummed nervously on the table.
“Think about it, bro. I have a fapiao printer in my apartment, real CCP chops, too. We print them, stamp them, and sell them to business guys trying to cook their books. They pay us in crypto. They get to write off expenses that never happened, and we get to keep a cut.”
“Sounds like work.”
“Sounds like easy money!”
I watched him. "And what do you need me for?"
"You got a good face, bro."
I laughed. "That’s the first time anybody’s said that."
"No, no. You look respectable." He poured another drink. "I bring in the clients, you play the accountant. We cash out before anybody starts sniffing around. Boom."
I thought about it.
"Alright."
His grin got bigger. "That’s my fucking guy."
“I like you bro! You have good energy,” Waqas slurred.
“Funny,” I replied tipping my beer to my lips, “most people tell me I have the energy of a man about to commit a crime.”
“That too.”
He produced a baggie of white powder from his pocket and dangled it in front of me.
“Now, we celebrate our new business arrangement. You want?”
I contemplated the baggie. Did I want my night to turn into a day? There was no real solar cycle in Janitor’s Closet, so I supposed it didn’t really matter.
“Fuck it.” 
Waqas poured a tiny mountain of white powder onto the table, then used the edge of a casino voucher to carve it into two massive lines. The bartender looked at us from across the room, rolled his eyes, and went back to drying glasses. We shoved our faces into our lines and snorted them with gusto. 
The world sharpened into something too real. My skin prickled. My teeth felt too big in my mouth. The music stopped being background noise and became a god beating on my eardrums.
“Good goddamn, where did you get this shit?” I asked him, struggling to catch my breath. My voice came out fast, words tripping over each other. My face had gone completely numb, and I could feel my heart beating in my head. I had never done coke this good before. 
“See, that’s what I’m talking about! Trade secret, bro.” 
When he looked back at me, his pupils were the size of moons. I saw his bug eyes lock onto mine, then drift towards the gun tucked into my waistband. 
“You gotta live, man. You ever shot a gun before?”
I shook my head. The words slipped out before I could think about preserving my image. 
“Not exactly.”
He laughed harder. “Come on, man! It’s time to learn.”
Before I could react, Waqas snatched it from across the table. With a manic look in his eye, he flipped the barrel out, spun it, and snapped it back into place. 
“Let’s go have some fucking fun!”
…
We stood behind the Jaded Lady, drunker than sailors and higher than gods. The alley smelled like piss and roasting meat. Waqas has built a tiny pyramid of discarded beer bottles in the alley several meters across from us. 
“Try to hit the one on top, bro. Just relax and squeeze; there’s nothing to it.”
I exhaled and squeezed the trigger. The shot went wide. A chunk came out of the already crumbling concrete on the wall behind the cans. The second shot clipped the edge of a can, sending it tumbling. A sense of exhilaration surged through me.
“Let me try,” Waqas stammered, barely able to contain his glee. 
I handed him the piece. He snatched it from my hand. Leveling the barrel, he casually plinked another bottle off the top of what was left of our pyramid.
I reached into my pocket and retrieved my cigarettes. I lit one, offering another to my new business partner. I took a long, slow drag. The smoke disappeared into the iridescent, ammonia haze of Janitor’s Closet.
“Now, for the real test.”
Waqas stubbed out his cigarette and grabbed a discarded beer bottle off the ground. He balanced it on his head.
“Can you make the shot, bro?” His eyes gleamed with madness. “Do you think you can do it? 300 Solars says you can’t do it!”
“You must be out of your fucking mind!”
“No, no, I trust you, bro! 300 Solars if you can make it!”
A crowd, drawn by the sound of gunfire, had begun to form at the mouth of the alley. Curious bar patrons and street urchins peered at us, watching the spectacle unfold. 
He spread his arms, grinning. The strobing lights of the Jaded Lady cast percussive shadows across the walls of his body, spread eagle. LED hues washed across Waqas’s face in shimmering patterns—red, green, blue, then red again.
	I leveled the revolver with one hand, aiming towards the empty bottle perched precariously on his head. My heart was slamming against my ribs. 
I pulled the trigger, and the shot went wild, hitting the wall behind Waqas several feet above his head. Hushed gasps escaped the lips of the huddled spectators.	
A look of doubt flickered across his face, and for a split second, I saw my own fear mirrored in his eyes. But there was no backing down now. 
The crowd's anticipatory hush hung heavy in the air, the silence more deafening than the pounding music had been moments ago. Pride, adrenaline, and the weight of expectation locked my hand in place. I had committed myself, trapped in the reckless momentum of the moment. My finger tightened again around the trigger, my knuckles whitening, and the pounding in my chest thundered louder than the music ever had. 
I had no choice left; I had to make the shot.	
I gripped the gun with two hands this time. I aimed lower and squeezed. 
	BANG.
	Waqas’s head dissolved into a pink mist. For a second, his body remained standing. A puppet waiting for the next command. Then he crumpled to the ground.
A thick, red pool began to spread beneath him. I never knew so much blood could come out of a man. I stared at his body, slack-jawed. Jagged chunks of bone jutted out from what used to be his skull. His fingers twitched slightly before going still.
I felt something bubbling inside me. A pressure building in my chest. Then—
I laughed.
A slow chuckle, then a cackle, then uncontrollable, shaking laughter.
Because this was the funniest joke in the world, wasn’t it? The sheer absurdity, the sheer waste of it all. One minute he was there, jabbering about Hello Kitty and stolen credit card numbers and fapaios, and the next—just gone. Poof. Another dead idiot in a world of dead idiots.
	A vibration in my palm snapped me out of my reverie. Probably just a spam message, but I swiped my hand to the right to open it anyway. 
“Nice shot”, it read.
My blood ran cold.
I looked around. The crowd was beginning to clear out, bored of the almost nightly occurrence of murder in Janitor’s Closet. If Linda could do it, why couldn’t I?  The music from the Jaded Lady thumped on, oblivious.
Who saw?
Someone had been watching me play William Tell Russian roulette. Someone who mattered.
I scanned the alley as bodies shuffled out, backs turning to me, faceless in the dim neon haze. None of them looked particularly important. A Jackhead with a swollen artificial throat sack, clicking softly as he breathed. An emaciated orphan picking at a rash on his arm. An old woman in a burqa, standing too still, as if waiting for something.
But out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement—someone slinking away, just past the reach of the neon. A tall figure, face turned down, coat swaying as they slipped into the dark. Too casual. Too deliberate. Their motion was too smooth, like they had a segway instead of legs.
I turned to get a better look, but they were already gone.
I turned back to my screen. The message had no reply button. No contact information. It was like it had been dropped into my inbox by a ghost.
I swallowed.
The high curdled into something else now. A jittery, electric feeling under my skin. Bitter paranoia uncurled itself and crept up my spine, cold and insectile. Neon colors continued their indifferent, electric dance over Waqas’s bleeding corpse- red, green, blue, then red again. Like a broken signal. Like a message I wasn’t meant to understand.
I needed to leave.
I needed to leave now.