by Forbes West
Jaime pops his head out of his bedroom for a moment, looking concerned.
“Well, maybe I’ll see you off-world? Let’s make that happen, right, Jaime?” you say, as Tyler’s confused friends look on in amazement. Jaime gives you a thumbs-up.
“It’s a deal!” You return his thumbs-up and leave the house. As you exit, you see Tyler’s new black 2012 Maserati; California license plate TylerIs1. You pick up a loose brick from the small garden outside the front door, feel the weight of it with your right hand, and then throw it through the windshield in one epic smash, sending a thousand little pieces of glass all over the place and setting off the alarm.
You walk down the street under the afternoon sun, feeling chilled but also strangely liberated at the same time. You shake out your arms, punch the air directly in front of you a few times, and keep walking.
You walk to your car, which is a beat up 1995 Honda Civic POS painted that ugly post-apocalyptic primer. You get three feet down the partially sandy beach road only to find out that the engine light you have been unfortunately ignoring is right about something; your car’s just died.
You leave the thing in the middle of the street, making the quick calculation that if you are in The Oberon by next year, which is fast approaching, no one’s going to be bothering you about abandoning the car. So you leave it here, in the middle of a suburban street, and hop on a piss-smelling bus.
You remember that you are poor and without a father who can gift you a Maserati.
Later, as you chew on a fingernail on the bus ride to work after riding it from Tyler’s house, you see a large billboard across the street. The advertisement is already fading from weeks of sun and rain but you can just make out the block letters:
ADVENTURE AND A NEW LIFE AWAIT YOU.
START YOUR MOVE TO THE OBERON TODAY! CALL 1-800-OFFWORLD TO SEE IF YOU QUALIFY FOR SETTLING! COLLEGE GRADUATES WANTED!
OFFWORLDNETWORK.COM
The stylized blue and white symbol of the Off-World Network takes up the rest of the billboard’s space.
You take out your cellphone and start to dial. After ten minutes on hold, a helpful operator finally comes on the line, and you talk all the way to work. The operator tells you what you need to do in order to apply.
* * *
Half asleep behind the counter at Subway, as lifeless as a doll, you wait for the customer to make up her mind about whether she wants pepper jack or provolone on her sandwich. Your green shirt and hat are covered in grease stains and probably bits of mustard that have been misplaced. When the customer finally decides on pepper jack, you start to put on provolone by accident, ask if she wants bell pepper and onions with that, and can’t be bothered to listen to her response. Out of habit, you look up. You’ve asked her a question, after all. She’s a tall woman, forty years old, beefy but not fat. Thick glasses cover her face. She is someone who can definitely put you down pretty quickly.
“I asked you a question. I asked you a question, Miss. Why are you putting provolone on my sandwich? Did I say provolone or did I say pepper jack?”
You blink a couple of times. “Oh, sorry, I’ll take it off...”
“I want you to start over. I want you to start over right the hell now.”
You look up, confused. “You want…wait, what? A new sandwich?”
“Damn right, I want a new sandwich. You got that provabone crap all over my sandwich.”
“Provolone. Not provabone,” you reply. You start to smolder, getting angrier and angrier. One eye starts to twitch a little. You reflexively grab onto the cross around your neck.
The customer behind her is snickering and muttering something to his friend. A few “Yo, dawgs” are thrown about in muttered whispers.
“I can just take it-”
“Is there a manager here? I want to talk to a manager right damn now,” the customer says, raising her shrill voice. She is slapping the counter with her palm. “You have not been concentrating on my meal at all. This is just poor customer service, Miss, and I believe that some compensation is in order.”
You stand quietly for a second, biting your lip. “Look, I’m sorry, but I can just take the provolone off.” You start to remove the little triangle slices from the wheat bread. “See? There.”
The customer snaps her fingers in the air. “I don’t see a thing except for poor customer service.”
One of the other customers is filming the exchange with an iPhone and snickering. Your manager, an Indian man in his late forties by the name of Rajendra, comes out and apologizes to her. The woman asks for compensation, stating that she is there every day (which is not true, this is the first time you’ve seen her). The manager offers to give her a free set of three cookies. You watch this in absolute disgust, and mutter about this being bullshit.
“What did you say to me, Miss? You want to say that to my face?” One of the other customers is cracking up about the whole exchange while still filming with his phone.
The manager asks you to finish making up her sandwich. You smile a little and just leave, walking straight out the front door after tossing your apron into the garbage.
* * *
When you arrive at the small two bedroom, one bath Marina Pacifica apartment that you share with your mother, you trudge up the stairs after a half hour bus ride that would normally have taken you just five minutes if you’d had your now broken down car. It is bare, sparse, cold to look at. It’s not dirty, per se —it’s even got a little bit of a view—but it has a soft prison cell décor: old, bland furniture and a bland carpet within soft beige walls. You sit down on the couch, turn on MTV, cry a little, and stare at meaningless television. Before long, footsteps outside your apartment tell you that your mother is now coming home. She opens the door almost as if she is bursting into the apartment to make an arrest.
“Sarah! So your car’s broken down again? And how are you gonna fix it without me paying for it?” your mother cries, her voice shrill. As she gets closer, you can see the lines on her face and her perpetually watery eyes. However, the years can’t take away her good looks that she’s definitely passed down through her genes to you.
You don’t say anything at first. Your mother relents for a brief second, sitting down at the dining room table. You don’t say anything but turn the TV’s volume down.
“Oh, just go goddamn mute, I don't give a rat’s ass.” She blows out her breath and takes a moment to look through the contents of her purse for something. “I’ll call Triple A tomorrow, but...” She slaps her hands together. “Next time I’m going to really kick your ass, sweetheart. You don’t take care of anything. Anything.”
“I took care of it and I can pay,” you say and your mother just waves her hands around, humming at the top of her lungs so she can’t hear you. She does this all the time, and it makes you want to scream. It’s so childish and surreal you now just feel a sort of crazed pity and hatred for your own mother. “Could you listen?” you ask, dejectedly. “I broke up with Tyler.”
Your mother replies with a dismissive, “Thank you for telling me that. It’s really fascinating, the love life of a teenager.”
“I’m twenty.” Your mother stares at you for a moment, looking like she wants to ball up her fists and take a swing at you. “I’m moving to The Oberon,” you add, off- handedly.
Your mother looks like all the life has left her body for a moment but she raises up her defenses again and her angry self quickly returns. She walks over and flips the muted channel to something else.
“What on earth for? You really hate being around normal people?” she says, her voice sharp as she sits in the loveseat watching an old pirate movie —Captain Blood, you think, with Errol Flynn. Swashbuckling pirates are fighting each other, slashing with cutlasses and shooting cannonballs at each other’s ships.
“Jaime sort of turned me on to it. I called the local Network office, and I qualify since I have an associate’s degree. I have to go in for an interview, but they have a lot of settling slots av
ailable.” You cough into your hand.
“Fantastic.” Your mother rolls her eyes, saying the word like it is loaded with poison. She steps out of the room.
Unconsciously, you take a look at the framed picture of your smiling sister that’s hung on the wall behind the TV for the past few years. It’s actually a framed copy of TIME Magazine with the headline Professors of a Different World next to it. She was a tall, attractive brunette with hazel eyes, and the picture was of her on a balcony somewhere.
You stare at the picture for a while. The television is now showing flickering images of the game show Jeopardy before switching to a line of jabbering commercials for random products, cars, and orichalcum for everyday use. Your mother returns to the room.
“Your sister was a professor—a professor of xenoarchaeology—and she’s missing. She knew everything—and I mean everything—about The Oberon and she died out there. You are just a naïve little bitch of a twenty-year-old girl who doesn’t know her asshole from a hole in the ground. I’m sorry to talk so crude, but you know it. You know it.”
You stare at her for a long time. “I’m twenty years old. I don’t need to listen to you,” you say coldly. “Since Rachael disappeared and Dad died, I’m just your punching bag.”
“You are not going to The Oberon. Period.”
“I’m going.” You stare right into her eyes.
Your mother lights up for a moment, smiling. “Sure! Sure, just go, go on out, go to The Oberon. Enjoy that life. Be like your sister—someone who thought they knew how to handle anything and everything until they wound up missing one day. You go and do that.” Your mother has this hideous smirk on her face that makes you hate her even more, which you didn’t know was possible.
She squints at you. “I say it’s wrong. There’s nothing for a little girl there. It’s nothing for a girl to be dealing with, I just know it. There’s only—what’s the word I’m looking for? Promises of money and death. But you go ahead, my little girl. Go ahead.” She sits right next to you, her eyes looking straight into yours. “Sarah, you need to remember something. Something very specific.”
“What?”
Your mother slams your arm hard with a closed fist, making you yelp with surprise and fear. “There’ll come a time, little girl of mine, when you won’t have me or anyone else to tell you what’s right and what’s wrong. Remember that! There’s only that small, still voice inside that can tell you that. You can either listen to it or ignore it. You can’t just have some outside person tell you that. And what does that still voice say to you now? Does it say to play around in The Oberon, make your mother sick with fear? Or does it say to stay here?”
You shake a little and start to cry. Your mother tells you that she’s taking a nap because she’s tired after work, but catching the look on your face, her voice softens a little. “You will never do it, because you’re weak. Right, sweetheart? You are a weak person. You’re not like your sister at all. She was strong, and you are weak. You’re weak compared to her.” She holds your chin in her hand and looks you in the eye. “You will never do anything like going to The Oberon because you are weak. Unlike your sister, unlike your father—it’s no fault of your own.” She caresses your cheek for a moment and then lets you go. “We can go to Hof’s Hut. They have a Thanksgiving deal, two for one. We’ll split it, real cheap and good. You like that, right, sweetheart?”
You nod.
You pretend to go to sleep early that day, occasionally looking at your phone. Text after text from Tyler come in, at first apologizing about cheating, then wanting to talk, then calling you a bitch, and then calling you something that rhymes with punt and starts with a C.
It’s midnight and you sneak into your mother’s room. She’s asleep with earphones still in, listening to some odd relaxation music. You grab a prescription bottle of Vicodin off her bathroom counter and sneak out again. In your lonely little room, where a muted TV plays old episodes of MASH, you pop a couple pills and wash them down with a gulp of water from the sink. You sit down in front of your computer, boot it up, and delete photograph after photograph of you and Tyler during happier days. You then eliminate him completely from your Facebook account and change your status to “single”.
After a little bit, the Vicodin hits your system and you get a bit angrier. You find a box of letters from Tyler, and before you know it, you rip each and every one in half with a dull, drug-induced slowness, muttering curses to yourself as you shred every bullshit little note, every scripted lie. In one of the letters, Tyler talks about marriage a little, in hesitant and specifically vague terms. You rip it up.
When you are all done, you look at the prescription bottle of Vicodin, thinking of what you could do with that right now, what you could do to yourself with that. You take another pill and put the bottle back into your mother’s room. Stoned on prescription pills, you jump back on the computer and start cruising the Internet, coming upon the Off-World Network’s settler recruitment site.
Good Morning LA ABC 7 KABC
Aired November 21st, 2012
David Ervine: Anchor
...Seen ten months ago, it has been confirmed that it should appear over The Oberon skies around June of next year. And now, Karen, I think we are getting what has become the most popular part of the show. Let’s take a look at California Weather Control over at Grissom Island in Long Beach.
*CUT TO*
Karen Whitemore: Presenter
Thank you, David. Sorry, Southland, even though you were looking at a nice weekend full of sunshine, here’s Aaron Sizemore from the Off-World Network...
Aaron Sizemore: NWS Orichalcum User (Weather Control)
Good morning.
Karen Whitemore: Presenter
Aaron is an experienced orichalcum user with a level five rating. He is here with his baton, embedded with the rarest type of orichalcum to be found in The Oberon. Now, Aaron, the Department of Agriculture is looking for a small storm for the area because we are a little bit behind in rain volume, is that correct?
Aaron Sizemore: NWS Orichalcum User (Weather Control)
That’s correct, Karen. The Department of Agriculture is concerned about what little rain we have had so far, so it’s our job to make up some ground so we can avoid a drought. I know everyone watching is probably going to hate me for doing this, but I’ll have to begin.
Karen Whitemore: Presenter
Literally raining on their parade?
Aaron Sizemore: NWS Orichalcum User (Weather Control)
[Long pause] Sure. Now I’m going to ask you to back away about one hundred feet—you and your crew there—and I will begin the process in—checking my watch here—in exactly two minutes.
Karen Whitemore: Presenter
Now, David, as I am sure you are watching right now, we are moving away from Aaron who is now in this wide open space on Grissom Island. This island is open and uninhabited. It gives the ori user the best view of the sky and keeps him away from all the possible interference that can happen if this were to be done in a city environment. As you can see behind me, Aaron is exhibiting the ori glow—which, since he is highly skilled and trained to conduct weather control, is turning the air around him to a deep green. Weather control has been, of course, the most successful ori practice to come from off-world and is responsible for those perfect summers that have been such a boost to tourist areas like Long Beach or San Diego.
However, as much as I think everyone would love to be consistently rain and cloud free, we do have to ensure that agriculture in the area is taken care of, and so we do need maintenance storms like the one Aaron will be creating. The Weather Service tells us that every time an ori user takes control of the weather it costs the taxpayers forty-four million dollars. This includes the user’s training and time and also that this particular ori is worth forty-three million for every gram, which is always useless after the weather has been controlled.
As you can see behind me, Aaron is levitating several feet above the ground;
his arms are outstretched and his eyes have now taken a strong appearance of almost pure white light... If you can still hear me right now, David, beams of green, almost like lightning, are spreading from Aaron’s chest, eyes, and hands and are now bouncing across the entire sky. He is descending downward, and the green bolts are disappearing. He is back on the ground and back to his usual self. I’ll give him a moment to rest, and then we can go over there and ask him. Oh, he’s come over here, David, and he’s-
Aaron Sizemore: NWS Orichalcum User (Weather Control)
It’s a rush, it really is, I tell you that much. I don’t think anyone will understand—but it’s something else. Phew...It’s a feeling that you are actually one with the Earth, but it’s a bit much. It’s very exciting...
(Loud thunder clap drowns out audio.)
Chapter Two:
Network Interview
You end up on a street corner in downtown Long Beach the very next day, outside the Off-World Trade Center building, staring up at the height of it. The sign confirms that you are in the right place. You look in desperation at your watch, and Mickey Mouse is letting you know the unfortunate—five minutes late to the interview, 11:35 am. You get a face full of warm, wet wind and diesel fumes as you move down the sidewalk. Rain is coming down hard, soaking the dress clothes and coat you have worn for the interview. The heels you wear hurt your feet.
You walk into the first floor of the Trade Center and past the glass doors that separate a very small throng of protestors proclaiming “Stop the settling!” and “No blood for ori!” A statue of a Ni-Perchta warrior in full armor with an ori-staff and a model of the Ni-Perchta city of Solomon’s Bay laid out on what looks like a giant stone palm are centered in the lobby.