Piece by Piece | Ultimate SciFi Smack Down [✓]

[R1-P2] Boring Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

When the party started, I wanted to leave.

I'd thought the guests would be tourists, but many of them were obviously investors. Investor tours made me feel like an animal on display in a zoo.

Ohhh...so investors are why we'd spent a week deep-cleaning the facility.

I almost escaped the Utopia Planitia Front Hab without seeing anyone I knew. An acquaintance and party host, Deirdre, stopped me at one of the exits.

“Hey!” she smiled at me. “Happy Friday! You’re Jacob’s roommate, yeah?”

I grunted in the affirmative.

“When’s your birthday again, Frett?”

My voice was hoarse. “I’m Shanpen.” Only friends called me Frett.

“Gee, sorry. Did I miss it?”

I sighed heavily. Deirdre was from Earth. “October,” I said, the month of my bEarthday. When this did not satisfy her, I said, “Thirtieth.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re a Scorpio.”

It’s a flattering thing to start conversations with contemptuous disgust. She said Scorpio the way I described parents who brought crying babies on crowded, dangerous Martian transports, or sandstorms during harvest season, or Deirdre’s conversation topics.

“Mars has different astrology,” I said, even though I didn’t believe in astrology.

I desperately looked for an excuse to leave. The room was hexagonal, and filled to maximum capacity with about two dozen people.

Then her kitschy accessory caught my eye. “What’s with the garden gnome?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s my son!” She held him up so that I could examine him. He had a jolly expression and wore a red phrygian cap. “Doc travels with me to major events so that I can tell the difference between corporate-sponsored memories and real life.”

Hey, that was pretty smart. I remembered my fictitious vacations the way that I remembered video games or dreams. I’d heard that there were people who went out in real life, though, so it could be confusing for them to tell real memories from fictional ones.

She said, “I got Doc 'cause I told Judy this crazy story about how I was on vacation in Copenhagen, and there was this guy—well, long story short, I realized I’d never even been to Holland in my life! That’s when, right in the middle of my conversation, I realized it was artificial. Wild, right?”

“Copenhagen is not in the Netherlands,” I corrected her. I was irritated because I’d had to learn Earth geography in school.

“Yeah, I know,” said Deirdre, ignoring my pedantry.

Her dismissiveness surprised me. Maybe "Copenhagen, Holland" had been part of her memory, one of many details that programmers add to show that it wasn’t real. To her it seemed like an obvious giveaway, whereas I felt clever for noticing it.

So I’d come off like an idiot who’d just explained a story to the person telling it.

“Anyways, enough about me,” said Deirdre, a phrase that gave me false hope. She ruined it by asking, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?”

I never bothered making one. Plus it wasn’t even the Martian new year yet.

I grabbed a flute of champagne from a passing host. Inside the glass’s stem was a tiny hourglass. A single grain of sand fell each second, to remind us that Earth’s GMT midnight was a mere forty-five minutes away. It was mid-Sol here.

“How long’re you here for?” I asked, trying not to sound too passive-aggressive.

“Oh, another cycle. You know how difficult real travel is. That’s the lovely thing about memory vacations, you know, not having to deal with rockets and orbits. And all of the crowds! Sure, corp vacations are fiction, but the Pandemonium is so stressful—”

I finished the champagne in a single swig. Talking about artificial vacations was the Martian equivalent of talking about the weather. You know, it’s-hot,-but-it’s-the-humidity-that's-unbearable kind of smalltalk, except that Martians loved to complain about the weather, too.

“Oh, darn it. I forgot to feed the fish,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

I had no intention of returning. We both knew it.

“See you later,” said Deirdre. “Say hi to roommate Jacob for me.”

“I will,” I said. I would do no such thing.

I put the empty glass on a table and walked toward Aquaponics Bay in SciHex, even though I meant to return to my quarters. I must have been too busy chastising myself for my lack of social skills to remember I'd lied.

I picked my way through a series of redundant blast doors. My frustration grew; the doors had been optimized for safety, not convenience.

Finally, at the center of the massive, sterile SciHex unit plaza was my favorite subunit on the planet: Agriculture.

Our puny, indoor Aquaponics Bay was inefficient for growing food, but kids appreciated the surviving goldfish and tolerated the carrots.

In the greenhouses where I worked, we grew more efficient, boring, genetically engineered crops. They were designed to deal with Mars's soil, seasons, and climate. I thought they were awesome. I’d given a tour there once and a kid fell asleep in a row of cabbages. I didn’t lead tours after that.

I wondered if fish got bored. Maybe food would entertain it. I fed it.

I watched the fish flash orange-gold in its feeding frenzy.

It couldn't leave their tiny boring habitat, or it'd die. Unlike fish, though, we could make ourselves believe that we had vacationed, to boost morale. I wondered if fish would experience artificial memories the way we did.

I eventually realized I'd spent twenty minutes fretting and anthropomorphizing a fish. How sad was that?

For some reason, I’d been annoyed by Deirdre, but she’d done nothing except try to hold a conversation with me.

I returned to the party. Maybe it wouldn’t be terrible.

Deirdre was surprised to see me again. She greeted me at the door. “Shanpen, I'm so happy you’re back!”

“Hi, Deirdre. Sorry, I don’t mean to be obnoxious. But...I gave it some thought."

"Okay?"

"If you want, you can call me Frett.”