by Luiza Sauma
‘Whatever happens,’ said Norman, ‘remember that you are all brave, formidable souls. You will be remembered. This is history in the making!’
The crowd responded with a hysterical roar. People were jostling, screaming, laughing, crying with happiness. Iris could feel their sweat seeping through their new clothes, into hers.
‘Yes!’ said Norman. ‘Ha ha. Yes! Welcome home, dreamers. Welcome home! Thank you for making this boy’s dream come true.’
Everyone cheered. Iris clapped and clapped until her hands stung. Norman bowed like an actor and laughed coyly, pointing at people and waving at them. At one point, he seemed to look straight at Iris. She felt an explosion of warmth in her belly. Through the windows, pink sand dunes shimmered under a hazy sun; even more exquisite than they looked on the website. In that region of Nyx, it was always the golden hour – her favourite time of day. This is real, she thought, this is happening. She continued clapping. Her hands ached, but she couldn’t stop. Her face was wet with tears.
As Norman began to leave the podium, she joined in with the chanting:
‘Life on Nyx!’
‘Life on Nyx!’
‘Life on Nyx!’
Later, everyone from Block G joined a welcome tour led by a cheerful American woman called Amanda – one of the old-timers. They began in the cafeteria, where she gave them a speedy introduction.
‘You might have already noticed that, from above, the Hub is designed to look like the sun – or even a flower.’ She grinned. ‘Everything radiates from the middle, from the heart.’
Most of the common areas were in the central, circular part of the building. Other than that, she told them, there were eight annexes: 1 to 5 contained Blocks A to Y, where most of the Nyxians lived; 6 to 8 contained the family quarters, the control quarters and the farm.
Next, she led them through the kitchen to an enormous storeroom packed floor-to-ceiling with produce. They shivered in the walk-in freezer and peeked into a laundry stacked with industrial washing machines. The living room was still and pristine, with new sofas and tall potted plants. They flashed their wristbands at the entrance of each room, emitting a high, satisfying beep. After the tour, Amanda explained, access would be limited to certain areas.
‘It’s just a safety thing,’ she said.
There was a workshop with hundreds of tools, waiting to be used. The medical consulting rooms were small, tidy and uninhabited; as were the family quarters, where couples and children would live together. Amanda led them past the control quarters, where the old-timers lived, but they didn’t go inside. Instead, they went to the control room, where Norman was working with three members of his team. It was a semicircular space, with a vast view of the landscape. There were no cameras in there. As the group entered, he turned, stood up and smiled.
‘Welcome!’ he said. ‘This is where the magic happens.’
He shook each of their hands, listening attentively as they introduced themselves. Iris’s heart skittered when his blue eyes met hers. As Norman explained the various functions of the control panel, she gazed out of the window. Several metres away, two people in oxygen masks were taking measurements on the sand.
‘Why don’t you tell them what’s going on out there?’ said Amanda.
‘Of course. As you know, we’re eventually going to bring more people to Nyx. My colleagues out there are making preparations for our extension, Hub 2, which we’re going to start building in a few months.’
‘Awesome,’ said Amanda, before turning to the group. ‘OK, guys, I have one more thing to show you.’
As they walked into Annex 8, they were shrouded by a cloud of humidity. The air smelled green and ripe. The farm had the proportions and grandeur of a Victorian greenhouse – tall, lustrous plants and a domed ceiling; a thousand shades of green set off by the pink landscape, which could be seen through the glass walls.
‘It’s open to everyone on Sundays,’ said Amanda. ‘It feels so good to be around nature, don’t you think? The rest of the time, it’s a regular working farm. You’ll all get the chance to work here. We want everyone to get involved with growing our food.’
Iris and Abby strolled arm in arm, like visitors at a genteel botanical garden, listening to the hiss of the water sprinklers and noticing the changes in climate – from hot and tropical in one section to dry and mildly warm, like a good day in England, in another. There were strawberries, courgettes, tomatoes, pineapples, avocados, salad leaves, plants that were more ornamental than edible – orchids, ferns, cacti – and many more that Iris didn’t recognize. As they walked towards the exit, she reached out and let the plants stroke her fingers.
Afterwards, the group hung out in the living room. Iris sat close to Rav, leaning against his strong, solid body. He was a personal trainer with an easy demeanour, the youngest child of Indian immigrants. When they first met in California, Iris had felt a sharp, instinctive attraction to his form and scent, as if they were animals in the wild, but it had mostly worn off since then.
Everyone had a story and every story had the same ending – leaving Earth, coming to Nyx. Rav told them about his favourite aunt, who had died young and told him not to waste his life. Vitor, who was slight and clever, with a hint of steeliness, talked about being an A&E doctor in São Paulo, patching up kids with bullet wounds, and about his parents, who had no idea he was gay.
‘Maybe they know now,’ he said, ‘if they’re watching.’
A guy called Jonah bonded with Abby – both were Jews, from the San Francisco Bay Area. They spent a while figuring out if they had any friends in common, but they didn’t. Hans from Berlin said he had spent a year nursing his mother, who had lung cancer. After she died, everything had felt pointless.
‘That’s why I’m here,’ he said, beaming.
Elizabeth from Cincinnati, Ohio, told them she had dreamed of being a singer, but ended up working in HR. She wore her blonde hair in a long plait, like Iris’s mother used to.
‘God,’ she said, ‘I was so glad to leave.’
‘That was one of the best days of my life,’ said Iris, ‘when I quit my job.’
‘What was it?’
‘I was a digital innovation architect.’ She covered her face, laughing with delight at how far away she was from her old life.
‘What does that even mean?’ said Hans.
‘Honestly, I don’t know.’
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ said Elizabeth. ‘None of it did.’
Over the following weeks, the summer-camp feeling continued, fuelled not only by the novelty of new people and surroundings, but also by the distant knowledge that millions of people were watching them on TV, learning their names and memorizing their faces. They became accustomed to the cameras; to never seeing the sun rise or set; to the automatic blackout on the windows; to always dressing the same; to waking, sleeping and eating at regimented times. There was a comfort to this regularity. Friendship groups quickly formed based on where people lived and what jobs they had, much like they did on Earth, but unlike on Earth everyone made an effort to be inclusive and open.
At first, Iris made friends with the other social media producers, but they didn’t work closely together, so drifted apart. Their duties were limited: taking a few pictures, writing some words and hitting ‘send’. Most of the content was created on Earth, in an office, but Iris couldn’t see any of it. She bonded more with Yuko and Stella from her cleaning team and, of course, with the other inhabitants of Block G.
In their spare time, the Nyxians slept well, ate wholesome meals and attended Rav’s exercise classes, but mostly they talked till their mouths were dry – about their lives, their countries and their old jobs, which no longer defined them. On Earth, these conversations were edited into digestible chunks of content: a syndicated daily show, short clips, blogs, images, tweets and memes. There was a livestream, too, for the die-hard fans who wanted to watch them in real time.
No one on Nyx seemed unhappy; everyone was content. Iris h
adn’t felt so good in years. Sometimes she thought of home, but she didn’t long for it. She hoped her family and friends were all right, she wondered whether they were watching, whether they had already recovered from her departure. A tsunami might have surged over London, sweeping the city into the sea, and she would never know.
It hadn’t been long. They probably hadn’t recovered.
It was autumn in London. The temperature would be cooling, the leaves reddening and falling from the trees. Iris’s mother would be taking her long black coat out of mothballs. Her old colleagues would be tapping away at their desks, writing reports and presentations. The city probably hadn’t been swept away. In all likelihood, everything was more or less the same – for now.
Fridays were her favourite. In the mornings, she cleaned with Stella and Yuko, who talked as much as they worked, and in the afternoons, she had a shift on the farm with Abby, Rav and Vitor. On Earth, Iris could barely keep a cactus alive. On Nyx, she learned to grow salad, tomatoes, potatoes, beetroot, squash – anything. Together, they sweated under the glass dome, enjoying the heat of the alien sun as they sowed, pruned, raked and picked, following the instructions of the head gardener, Sean – an American with several faded tattoos on his arms – until they were second nature. Afterwards, she would have a hot shower and lie in bed for a while, listening to something soothing and familiar from the Nyx playlist – the Frank Ocean song or Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’. Later, she would meet her friends in the cafeteria. They would eat the food they had grown together and then talk until the end of the day.
EARTH
* * *
Eight Years Ago
2.
Freedom
In London, January was the worst time of the year. The indolent fantasy of the Christmas period – long mornings in bed, long nights drunk, endless television – had given way to sober realization: oh, this is life. It was Iris’s penultimate January on Earth. She worked at Freedom & Co, a creative agency with outposts in New York and Amsterdam. Halfway through the month, sober realization morphed into turgid acceptance. It was Thursday – that Thursday; the day she found out about Life on Nyx.
In the afternoon she held a probation appraisal with her colleague Eddie, who she managed, in the tiny meeting room that had recently been christened the ‘IdeasBox’. (The boardroom was now the ‘IdeasLab’.) Forty minutes before the meeting, Iris had swallowed a pink Propranolol, which she’d bought off the internet. She didn’t like going to the doctor; she didn’t want to be on the record as a crazy person. Pills smoothed over her anxiety and gave it a sheen, like make-up. Before she had discovered them, the adrenaline in her veins sometimes forced her to flee rooms, like an animal from an oncoming car. She wasn’t comfortable with power, not even the small, insignificant kind. Alison, her boss, seemed like she had been comfortable with power since childhood. Would Iris ever catch up?
Most of her colleagues were around her age – somewhere in their twenties. Older people usually burned out, had children or nervous breakdowns, quit and retrained as something more meaningful, like pastry chefs or yoga teachers. The oldest person at Freedom & Co was Roger, the director, who rarely registered Iris’s existence. He shone with wealth and confidence, from his thick grey hair to his Italian leather brogues. Iris didn’t want to make pastries or teach yoga; she didn’t know what she wanted. She often thought: What happens to people like me, when they’re not young any more? The useless ones – where do they go?
It was an inconsequential meeting, but Iris thinks of it often. Memories are so strange. Some of them, even good ones, slip through her fingers like liquid, while others cling on for mysterious reasons. Snatches of dialogue from bad films, lyrics to songs she never liked. She remembers exactly how the IdeasBox looked that afternoon. The sun was coming down, casting a rosy shaft of light across Eddie’s handsome, puckish face, his wavy blond hair and blue eyes. Otherwise the room was gloomy, with the indefinite temperature of offices – both air-conditioned and heated – so that Iris’s arms prickled with goosebumps while her underarms leaked sweat. She hadn’t been outside since 9.30 a.m., not even for a minute. It was now after 4 p.m. Her limbs felt heavy and underused. Both of their faces were shiny and red, but that shaft of light made everything OK. It made the meeting feel like it was already a memory – hazy yet precise. Despite the pill, Iris still felt a little nervous.
‘Well, I’m pleased to say that you have passed your six-month probation,’ she said, in a rehearsed but casual tone.
‘Oh wow,’ said Eddie, his shoulders relaxing. ‘That’s great. Thank you.’
‘We’re really happy with your work so far.’
He sighed with relief, which made Iris feel sad for him – and for herself, too – for being so dependent on insincere affirmations. Both of them were pretending they hadn’t got wasted together countless times, that they hadn’t been flirting since Iris arrived at Freedom & Co, a couple of weeks after he had started.
‘You’re a real, uh, team player. Everyone likes you. We all love your work.’
‘That’s good.’
‘I was especially impressed with your content strategy for Pure Yogurt.’
Eddie smiled at her as though they were playing a game, which they were.
‘You took the client’s brief and went several steps further,’ she said. ‘They were really happy. It felt fresh and different.’ She was reading from her notebook as though it were a script, but she tried to cover this up by smiling and waving her hands around. ‘Alison and I particularly enjoyed the videos of people sharing their stories about the essence of purity. They were so … poignant. I almost had a tear in my eye. Honestly!’ She laughed, cringing with self-loathing.
‘Oh, good,’ said Eddie.
‘Meaningful content, the kind that really connects with people – it’s the dream, basically, and it’s so hard to pull off. The client was super-impressed.’
He laughed and she laughed, too.
‘I’m glad you liked them.’
‘There are a couple of other things to discuss, though.’
‘Oh?’ said Eddie, his smile falling.
‘Nothing major, don’t worry!’ Iris grinned like a loon. She could feel her eyes popping out of her skull, her face hurting from all the effort. ‘Rest assured, we’re really pleased with your performance, but there are a couple of things. I mean, you know you’ve been a bit forgetful at times.’
‘The Instagram thing?’
‘Yes, there was that,’ said Iris, disappointed yet empathic.
Eddie looked serious and apologetic. ‘I don’t know what got into me. I had so much work on that week.’
‘There was also the Facebook thing. Then you went on holiday and there was no way of getting hold of you.’ She didn’t ask, ‘Why didn’t you check your emails?’ but the question was implicit. Checking emails on holiday wasn’t an official requirement, but a spiritual one.
‘The client didn’t notice that one, though,’ said Eddie.
He didn’t care – he was her polar opposite. At the very least, Iris cared about looking like she cared. She couldn’t help but admire him.
‘That’s not really the point, Eddie. Alison and I spotted it before the client had the chance.’
‘You’re right, it was stupid.’ He looked down at the table. ‘I’m sorry. I just had so much on my plate. I’ve been feeling kind of, uh, burnt out.’
The golden-pink shaft of light was still shining across his face, over his eyes. Iris had an urge to take a photo of him because the light was so beautiful, but that would have been unprofessional. She would have to remember it instead.
Look,’ she said, ‘I know we’re not saving lives here, but just keep a list or something. I can’t keep covering for you. I want to make this work. Let’s put those incidents behind us, OK?’
‘OK.’
‘But in future, if you’re feeling like your workload is too much, just come to me.’ Iris swept her arm in the air, like a wizard with a wand. ‘I’m
your line manager. I can help. We can find a way around these problems.’
‘I really appreciate this, Iris. You’re such a great manager.’
It was a pantomime. Iris knew it, Eddie knew it, and they both knew that the other one knew.
‘No worries. Do you have any questions?’
‘No,’ said Eddie, which is what Iris had been hoping he would say.
‘Let’s get back to our desks, then, shall we?’
When they stood up, the shaft of light moved from Eddie’s face onto a shelf of marketing awards. Iris pretended to need the loo so they wouldn’t have to walk back to their desks together, making small talk. Her cheeks were sore from smiling and her head hurt from all the pretence – it was exhausting. She reached the door to the unisex toilets just as Alison walked out, neatly dressed in a blue trouser suit and white trainers, her blonde hair tucked into a bun. She smiled knowingly.
‘How was the probation hearing?’ she said, as if Eddie were a criminal.
Iris decided not to correct her. ‘It was fine.’
‘Shall we talk about it?’
‘Yeah, if you want to.’
‘Let’s go in here,’ said Alison, opening the door wider.
‘In the toilets?’
‘The disabled cubicle, not the main ones. There’s nowhere else private on this floor.’
‘We could go to the IdeasBox?’
‘No, this is faster. We’re already here. Just a mini-meet.’
A mini-meet was a five-minute meeting in which nobody sat down, for maximum efficiency. Iris didn’t want to have one in the toilet, but generally she agreed to anything suggested by senior staff – it made life easier.
So she said, ‘All right.’
Alison looked around to see if anyone was watching before they walked into the cubicle and locked the door. There were no disabled employees at Freedom & Co, so the toilet was mostly used for shitting as it was more private and spacious than the other cubicles. Hence it smelled like various shits by various people; a palimpsest of shit, faintly masked by a tropical-scented air freshener. They stood facing each other, smelling the shit of their colleagues.