Project Aspire

Chapter 4 - Simon (Written by Penegrin Shaw)

 

And the first men became two, just as the brothers were two.

The men of the cold lands were the noble Cainites,

Ranging and hunting the beasts of the earth,

And the men of the hot lands were called the Abelines,

Eating of the fruit of the land and the fish of the rivers.

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My amigo, Dr Sneed, picked up my bones like I was wrapped in swaddling and he set me in a basket and put me into the reeds of the river. Ants wearing lipstick danced upon my skin to the tune, the bass and the beat of Bebopalula and I scanned the room for Amanda, because she was my baby, except she didn’t know it.

I liked Dr Sneed. He dressed in black like Johnny Cash and he ticked a lot from his tourettes. Never swearing, just ticks of it; throat noises and buh-buhs here and there. Tick tock, tick tock. To think they’ve cured Cancer and HiX and this guy was still going around with strangers thinking he was a retard, because a wire was frayed a little somewhere inside of the genius that is he was. IQ 163, according to his file.

‘Hey amigo’ I called out to him, but he disappeared before I could add to it and thank him for keeping it quiet all that time. My habit.

I must had been the worst Medic in the history of the Corp and one of the only people on the project that didn’t need the salary, apart from Amanda. At that moment, it made me the sucker, the one with the dick in my mouth, but I was spinning and some of it was real, it was going on, man.

I was laughing my head off as my tin can popped out and the ship gave birth to me, or shat me out; G-force making my cheeks look like I was blowing on glass.  Pieces of the ship started falling off and it burned like a Viking funeral, but I had my own sparks going off in my brain, like wow.  I was way too gone to notice all the details, but there were details I’m sure. I knew I’d get the news feed later on from the others, if we lived. I saw another pod zoom maybe half a mile ahead of me and it sent me on one, laughing my arse off; a real tickler. A Bobby Dazzler.

Self-medicating just moments before it all went tits up, was probably a stroke of genius on my part, as I’d been pissing the bed for weeks with my night terrors and I wouldn’t have fared too well in that situation had my blood not been pumped full of this and that; stuff for the battle zone, washed down with a glass or two of Mother’s Ruin.

My mind swam still within those same reeds of itself and I was thinking of a candelabra I’d bought once for mad money, for no reason at all… I don’t know why, maybe I’d seen a comet or part of the ship, but sparks were forming and flying like blistering rain. Then I was thinking of other things;  a reboot of something called a Ludewig Aero Strassenzepp Doubledecker that I’d ridden on in a city that I couldn’t quite place just then, a tattoo I got done old style at a barracks on Mars, a fjord in Norway where I’d waved at the northern lights to the horror of the superstitious locals, my mother before she leapt to her death, a single day I had spent (drunk) perfecting my quiff; greasing and combing, making it high (you need a good quiff in space) and lots of Amanda...

Bebopalula.

I was trying to raise my hands to my face, but I realised that Dr Sneed had strapped me in, which of course he would do and that became funny and it got me again. I saw my reflection in the porthole of the pod and I was blowing on that glass again from the G’s.  Stars shot past me, or I shot past them, it reminded me of the first snowfall on the pyramids and Arabs on Motoskis, then war. Something always reminded me of war.