Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  The bossy were there to supervise, in full space suits so that their fragile lungs could breathe real Earth air.

  * * *

  “Jake, are you awake?” Kostya asked.

  There was a hand on Jake’s shoulder, shaking him, but he was floating on opioids, swimming through dreams of sunshine.

  “Jake, you are missing the soap opera.”

  The hand shook him again. Jake followed its pressure back into consciousness, where he discovered himself in his sleep rack, next to Kostya. Their racks were stacked in the zhiloy tent, the residential tent, which maintained an Earth-like atmosphere and a stronger gravity. They were given four hours in the zhiloy every few days to reoxygenate what remained of their human bodies.

  The tent was divided in half: on one side were slave racks; on the other were the living quarters of the five bossy in charge of Phaenna7. A clear panel divided the two sections—clear so the bossy could keep an eye on their workers. But visibility went both ways.

  “Lev and Makar are going to fight,” Kostya said with quiet eagerness. He added, “I don’t want you to miss it.”

  Jake turned his head. The bossy in question were just on the other side of the partition. Lev, who was small for a boss, with permanently narrowed eyes in a weasel-like face and a body so wiry it made you wonder if he ever ate anything at all, was poking his fingers aggressively into the chest of Makar, a brute of six and a half feet, with perpetual stubble along his jaw, regardless of how often he shaved.

  “Did Lev find out about Makar and Zlata?” Jake asked. They had seen no hard evidence but were nevertheless convinced that Phaenna7 was host to a budding bossy love triangle.

  “Probably. Or he suspects. Oh!”

  Makar had swiped Lev’s fingers dramatically away from his chest. This was their television, an ongoing saga of the barely human humans called the bossy. The barely human slaves called Kostya and Jake tuned in whenever they could.

  Jake rolled onto his side for a better view. Zlata, the woman in question, was at the far side of the boss tent, drinking with other bossy and pretending, very unconvincingly, that she hadn’t noticed the brewing trouble between Lev and Makar.

  “She gets all the good ones,” Jake said.

  “Because of her willowy figure. Look at the minx, parading her womanly parts for all to see.”

  Zlata had stood up from the table, revealing her ample bosom, thick biceps, and shaved head. They had once seen her arm-wrestle Makar and she’d given him a run for his money.

  “She’s for sure the most beautiful woman on this asteroid,” Kostya pointed out. “And the least beautiful.”

  Both statements were true since Zlata was the only woman on Phaenna7.

  They observed with interest as Zlata crossed the tent to step between the two men, causing the argument to erupt into a three-way shouting match. Their voices were muted by the intervening wall, so Kostya filled in the dialogue as he imagined it:

  “I don’t like men who are taller than I am, Makar,” he said, in a fair imitation of Zlata’s voice. “Or hairier. I am vain about my own facial hair. Hey, get your big chicken hands off her”—that was Kostya’s version of Lev, presumably, who was now shoving Makar—“or I will grow out my own beard and shame you both. Beard competition?”—this was Kostya as Makar, a booming voice slurring his words—“I crush both of you with my chicken hands! You will be as insects, splattered across the floor— Ow!” This last was Lev again, because Makar had shoved him to the ground.

  Jake was laughing helplessly as Zlata turned her back on both men—“Boys, this is not acceptable!” Kostya said in Zlata’s voice—and Lev walked off in a huff. There was nowhere for him to go, so he ended up sitting on the floor, facing the blank wall. “I’m happy over here,” Kostya whispered, as Lev. “This is where I meant to be all along.”

  Still laughing, Jake asked, “Why chicken hands?”

  “Chicken hands are skinny, with claws.” He pointed at Makar’s hands, which were of an opposite description; they looked like nothing so much as baseball mitts.

  “Makar’s hands are huge.”

  Kostya, who was fond of irony, waved away this objection. “They are the size of a chicken, then. Chicken is a funny word.”

  It did sound funny now that Jake thought about it. “You know chickens don’t have hands?” he pointed out. “Only feet.”

  “Is a detail.”

  * * *

  Details. Not all of the details were awful.

  There were moments, when Jake stood unshielded on rock, sunlight burning one side of him, cold freezing the other, holding his breath in the raw nothingness, that he felt freer than he ever had before. His old body would have died in seconds. Now, he could withstand the radiation and vacuum and extraordinary shifts in temperature for whole minutes, with no permanent damage. He could look out, with no faceplate, no atmosphere, nothing between him and the expanse of the galaxy. From Phaenna7, there were colors in the heavens. The Milky Way was a bright wash of infinity. Nebulae and the galaxy Andromeda hung in blackness in perfect clarity. Cosmic and solar rays bombarded him; the cold was another kind of assault. The injury was constant, but Jake had become greater than the pain, as his mechanical feet clung to a rock hurtling through open space. He was something new.

  But then, new or not, he would remember that he had become merely a thing, an object, a machine. Working at the molten metal and rock, being tinkered with in an opioid haze, recuperating in a metal sleep rack. He could see the infinite universe, but he was looking with the eyes of a slave.

  13. WC

  They had found an out-of-order bathroom on the train, and that was where they made themselves comfortable for the long ride. Yulia sat crosswise on the closed toilet, her upper body slouched against the wall. Jake and Kostya had wedged themselves into the floor space, so that Jake was blocking the door if anyone tried to get in—which had happened several times already.

  Yulia’s heavy eyes flicked to Jake. “They gave you best and worst,” she said. “Best view, worst job.”

  “And many other ‘worsts,’ ” Kostya said. He was looking out the window of the WC. It was daytime, a weak, short day, and the landscape of snow was growing increasingly barren with every hour they traveled. The cities and large towns had slipped by long ago. Now the desolation was broken only by the station buildings of tiny train depots, old electrical towers, and the rare farmstead, entirely frozen in midwinter. And on they went, east and east and east.

  Yulia didn’t have her phone, but every so often one of her hands would reach up to her collarbone to touch the place where it usually sat. When her fingers found nothing there, she shifted, checked her pockets, as though she couldn’t get comfortable without it.

  “You want to know what time it is?” Jake asked.

  She stopped fidgeting and shook her head. “No, doesn’t matter. Just habit. We travel all day.”

  Someone tried to shove the door open.

  “Toilet’s not working!” barked Yulia. “Can’t you see the sign?”

  “Then why are you in there?” a voice outside demanded.

  “Fuck off, that’s why!” she snapped.

  They heard footsteps stomping off. The three of them fell back into a state akin to suspended animation as they watched the snow-covered land roll by.

  “I can imagine how the government justified taking you, Jake,” Yulia said in Russian, sometime later. “But, Kostya—how could a Russian citizen come to be taken?”

  Kostya did not take his eyes from the view or give them any sign that he had heard Yulia’s question, and yet she did not repeat it. She understood, being Russian like Kostya was, that he was taking his time. When he spoke, his voice was flat.

  He said, “My father gave me to them.”

  14. FREIGHT

  For Jake a
nd Kostya, asteroid mining slaves, the chance to escape came not as a carefully considered plan but as a sudden revelation. The slaves were surviving well after a year on the asteroids, but the bossy were getting ill. It was no flu or virus taking down the old-fashioned humans, but rather a gradual wasting away. Recycled air, low gravity, and engineered food rations had taken their toll.

  As the bossy weakened, the slaves gained a modicum of freedom. Jake had begun to walk outside whenever their overseers took a break from work, and Kostya began to linger just within earshot of the bosses in order to eavesdrop. This was how he heard about the resupply freighter, only hours before it arrived.

  The freighter was not properly expected by any of the bossy—their comms and record keeping had fallen into disarray—and as the ship approached, the asteroid camps went through hours of disruption and confusion. That day, when Kostya and Jake exited the mining tent at the end of their shift, the hot particles of platinum still radiating against their human parts, Kostya touched Jake’s arm and whispered, “Stay close. We’re leaving.”

  On Phaenna7, the weak bossy gathered their things and herded the slaves onto the shuttle. They were going to rendezvous with the freighter at Phaenna6, the largest of the three asteroids. But before the freighter arrived, they had decided to rotate the slaves from one asteroid to another, which, apparently, the bossy were supposed to have been doing the whole time. If Kostya and Jake had tried to plot out the proper actions, they would have failed. But in the chaos, two of the proklyatyye raby—two of the cursed slaves, identical to all the others—slipped away and were not missed.

  As the freighter’s engines ignited for the return journey, they were hidden in the cargo bay, where giant blocks of platinum, sucked from rock and reformed, were stacked from floor to ceiling. Their own half-mechanical bodies were heavier than ordinary humans, but they were a mere rounding error when hiding among mountains of dense metal.

  For food, they had what they were able to grab in those final moments on Phaenna6—a case of nutrient vials. The entire freighter was pressurized, so there was air to breathe. But for insulation, they had only the tarps and ropes that had been holding down a pile of rock samples at one end of the bay. These were enough for their near-indestructible bodies. They made a bed for themselves atop a stack of platinum cubes. For the long, cold months of the journey home, they huddled together in this nest in the darkness. They kept themselves suffused, because the fake skin helped maintain warmth and also allowed them to remember that they were separate from the unforgiving metal all around them. Mostly they were quiet, almost hibernating, and using only a tiny portion of a food vial each day.

  “I sometimes think we’re dead,” Jake said at an unknown moment in what seemed an infinite stretch of moments colored only by the hum of the engines and, rarely, a noise from the upper levels of the freighter. The ex-bossy were up there, huddled in their bunks, perhaps, waiting out the journey.

  “For sure we’re dead,” Kostya replied unexpectedly. “They stripped everything from us before we left Earth.”

  This was almost completely true, Jake reflected. And yet they were here, in this freakish state of existence.

  Sometime—days or many weeks—later, Kostya said something so softly Jake almost missed the words. He said, “I think he knew before he found us.” His voice gave the impression of being far away, even though his mouth was only inches from Jake’s ear hole. Though there had been no conversation for a long time, Jake knew immediately that Kostya was speaking of his father. It was a topic his friend had avoided in all their months together, and it was the one topic, when touched upon, that made his voice disappear.

  “When I was little,” Kostya continued, “I thought pidor was only another bad name you called someone when you were angry. My father would yell it at people who got in his way, or who annoyed him. ‘Pidor!’ Like saying asshole, I thought. He used the word only for men, but he didn’t usually swear at women anyway, so I didn’t notice so much that it was a word for men.” His words came to Jake like a conversation overheard from a neighboring room, a distant drone.

  “I was twelve years old when I learned that pidor means something different,” he said. “There was a boy on the street when we were walking home at night, my father and I. This boy was maybe eighteen, and he was standing at the corner of a building, dressed like a girl. Almost, you could think he was a girl, because he was pretty, but a second look would tell you that you were mistaken.

  “This boy, for some crazy reason, he decides to talk to my father. Can you imagine? He said, ‘Hey, handsome, give me a few minutes and you’ll walk away smiling.’ I mean, even a twelve-year-old couldn’t mistake what that means, right? It made me—what’s the word?—shiver with a kind of terrible excitement. My father had a different reaction. He punched the boy without even a pause. He turned, punched, walked away. One, two, three. It took no time at all. The boy had been standing, and then he was on the ground, blood pouring from his nose. Over his shoulder my father said, “Otvratitel’noye pidor izvrashchenets. ‘Disgusting faggot perverts.’ So I realized pidor was a special word for boys like him.”

  Jake heard Kostya swallow in the darkness, a very human sound. “Looking at that boy on the ground, I understood that I had been going through my life happily for twelve years, but that was going to end,” Kostya said. His voice was so remote that it seemed he had separated from the freighter and was slowly drifting away through open space. “I was a little kid, so I didn’t think about sexy stuff too much. I had curiosity sometimes, like any kid, but that was all. Except, whenever I thought about the future, about kissing and love and taking my clothes off with someone—whenever these thoughts would pop into my head, I saw myself with another boy. Not a particular boy, just a boy. I liked boys, I thought. Maybe I loved boys. It had never come into my mind that there was something…incorrect about it. But. Pidor. Punch in the face. Pervert.

  “My father said to me as we walked home, ‘Government is getting rid of them, but not fast enough.’ A feeling comes into my stomach, like I am falling. Because what if I am one of ‘them’?”

  Silence and engine noise for a long while, but Jake imagined he could see Kostya among the stars.

  “I did not let myself think about other boys after that,” his friend continued. “This was easy when I was twelve. Not so easy when I was fourteen and fifteen. I had a neighbor, Vasily, he’s three years older than me. God, forgive me, he plays hockey, he’s tall, he’s got arms like…” Kostya shuddered with the thought of him. “It was hard not to look, not to imagine…but he was untouchable. A man, almost. Girls would follow him after school. Then one day he’s at my house, because we live next door to each other, and we were often in each other’s houses. I’m in the bathroom washing my face, and then he is in the bathroom with me. I think he has made a mistake, walked in by accident when the room is occupied. But there’s no mistake, and then he is kissing me, we are taking each other’s clothes off. Even if I had thought about that boy with the bloody nose at that moment, I could not have stopped. It would be like stopping a flood. Or an eclipse. How can you?

  “For a month, he was at my house or I was at his house, anytime our parents were out. We kept our secret but I did not let myself think about why we kept it; I did not let myself think about my father and the government getting rid of ‘them.’ ”

  He paused, and the hum of the freighter’s engines filled their ears, along with the distant clink of motion on the floors above. Jake could feel Kostya moving. He was, Jake thought, putting his hands to his head, as if warding off a blow.

  “He found us one afternoon,” Kostya whispered. “My father came home from work early, throws open the bathroom door, thinking to find it empty, but instead he finds us. You cannot believe how fast he moved. There was one second when he paused, looking at us. We are almost naked, so there is no explanation except the truth. Then he throws his
fist at Vasily’s head. I’m alive because Vasily was closer to bathroom door when my father walked in.

  “There is a sound like a melon cracking open. One punch. Vasily fell like a dead man. He was a dead man. When he hit the floor, blood came out in a river. My father called an ambulance and they took him to hospital, but he was dead when he arrived. One blow, brain bleeding, Vasily dead. Pidor.

  “He slapped me, but he didn’t yell. He said nothing. Truth is, he didn’t speak to me again. Also he didn’t look at me, only looked through me, you know? At the wall behind my head, at the floor beneath my legs. And then he drove me to the detention center and handed me over to them.”

  “What?” Jake had not meant to ask the question so loudly. The sound of his own voice startled him.

  “My father surrendered my Russian citizenship and gave me to the man who ran the detention center. The Undesirables Prison, we call it.” Kostya’s voice was coming back. Jake imagined him swimming through space and climbing into the cargo bay. “It’s a place for people with political beliefs that are not allowed, people who believe in genetic modification, people who are non-Russian in nature, like me.”

  “Non-Russian?”

  “If you are not reaching for the ideal, if you don’t fit in with our Oath of Principle or our motto—‘Live as humans are meant to live!’—you can be classified as non-Russian. What Vasily and I did is not part of the ideal.

  “After a few weeks, they sent me and some others to Estonia. You know the rest. We were the first batch, you were the second. The end.”

  “The end,” Jake echoed. “My father gave me away by accident. Yours did it on purpose.”

  “What a pidor he was,” Kostya whispered. He was not crying, because he couldn’t cry, but Jake could feel his friend’s body shaking.

  He curled himself against Kostya so they were lying on their sides, fitted together perfectly, matching half-humans with soft, artificial skin. Then Jake put an arm around Kostya’s chest and slid his hand up until it rested over his friend’s heart.