Alex Sherman - The Tourist

The company pounder jostled down a long tunnel in the bowels of the rock. Its eight legs drummed a steady rhythm that Chocky felt in his bones. When the tunnel curved, and the pounder changed direction, the bodies inside it kept moving. Thing called momentum. Chocky didn’t know how many there were. The pounder could hold two tons of ore; instead it was full of people. Those on the outside of the huddle slammed up against riveted walls, caked with frost from their breathing, so cold that skin stuck to it and got pulled off in strips when yanked away. The ones who touched the walls fought their way inward desperately, biting and clawing and kicking toward the warm center of the huddle. Those nearer the center clawed back. Chocky fought savagely, thinking he could feel himself dying but never really sure. His numb parts were hatched by cuts, marked all over by sores and bruises.

Chocky couldn’t die. Not while the virgin needed him. He was her servant, and he felt for her a ravenous, insatiable need.

The pounder was never meant to hold living, breathing creatures. The company liked to improvise. Chocky felt a curve in the tunnel, a change in the rhythm of its claw steps, and he braced himself for another round. Fear and lust and fury, a turning heat between his ears. His breaths were shallow, his heartbeat was slow. No sight, no vision. He lived in a darkness so total that he had forgotten the word for it. No need to distinguish between dark and not-dark. There was only the ashen touch of skin-on-skin, the sounds of bodies, moving and breathing and farting. Murmured threats, sexual moans, bawdy anecdotes intermingled. On top of that, distant rhythms: the churning servos of the pounder; the machines of the company grinding the rock’s mineral flesh to slurry; the rhythms of distant sounders feeding it all back, turning it into song. He barely felt it, but it was enough.

Chocky’s left side began to burn. So close to the edge, he needed the warmth of the center. He sidled inward, looking for crevices in between flesh. Skin like stretchy fabric. Bite into it and it comes apart.

Chocky tongued his sharpened teeth.

The tourist’s first days on the rock were worse than jet lag, worse than planet lag. It was not a place with a time difference, where days were longer or shorter. It was a place with no days at all. The last stop, the outpost farthest from the sun, a lifeless rock with no name but a long and unpronounceable string of digits. The sun was only one star among many, barely brighter than the rest.

“Please understand. This outpost was meant to be run by a skeleton crew. Two thousand miles of tunnels, a hundred thousand autonomous mining systems, radiation levels that can be fatal after a week of exposure. Those were the conditions that the company prepared for, and that was challenging enough.”

The company representative felt pressured to answer for an ore hauler full of dead Squatters. The tourist let her speak, stunned by her corporate ambivalence in response to so many deaths, but afraid to say a word in response for fear that their request to go underground, into the tunnels, would be declined.

The tourist had to remember not to call the Squatters “moles.”

“The original design called for a crew of no more than fifteen, working yearly shifts. Due to acts of violence against company employees and equipment, we now have a full crew and an additional ten-person security detail. So long as the Squatter population continues to disrupt mining operations and to endanger company employees, we are forced to take action with what we have available.”

The asteroid’s surface was a crust of water, ice, and gray rock, never-ending twilight under a too-bright tapestry of stars. No sky, no clouds, no swirls of dust. There was barely enough gravity to keep a body from floating away if it jumped, just enough to pull it back after a journey of slow, drifting hours.

“If the Squatters continue to sabotage our operations, if they do so much damage that the operation is no longer profitable, then the company will be forced to close it down. Where will that leave the Squatters? They can’t take over. They don’t have implants. They’re ignorant, violent, cruel. We may then be allowed to evict them, at last. But until then they are, technically, legally, autonomous. They are not our responsibility until they do enough damage that we are forced to take action.”

The rock was an island nation of exiles on the dark edge of space. A population of stowaways settled on the rock in the early days of the outpost’s construction, before the first company overseers arrived. They lived in the tunnels themselves, surviving lethal radiation by crude but effective genetic modification. They cultivated water and oxygen from deposits of ice. They siphoned food from the stores left for company operatives.

When the operatives arrived, they found themselves severely understocked, and they lived on minimal rations for the two years before the next shipment arrived.

“This terrible accident with the pounder, for example. No employee was involved. Strictly autonomous. You won’t believe me, but I’ll tell you anyway. Whatever happened in there, they did it to each other.”

The surface installation was lead-plated. The Squatters lived underground, unprotected.

“Do you know what they call the other colonies? Prison planets. That’s what they say. They think that they’re the ones who are free.”

The tourist brought their own suit, specially designed. No lights. The moles hated lights.

“They don’t want law or order. Even responsibility. It’s a cultural thing. Really.”

The suit had heavy radiation shielding, 3D imaging mapped by infrared depth-mapping, a power supply that would last for weeks. Non-lethal defense systems, an array of protective countermeasures. Multiple redundant sensory feed backups. It could walk the tourist back to the surface by itself if anything were to happen underground.

“I know that this sounds callous and insensitive. I know that I can’t convince you to stay on the surface. You’ve been given permission to conduct research, and I won’t try to dissuade you. But please, be careful down there.”

The tourist left as soon as possible, and went down. They saw their first mole in the elevator, the last place where there would be light. Its age and sex were indistinguishable. Folds of skin hung loose and floated, bobbing along with subtle vibrations, drifting as if suspended in liquid. It was pale, very pale. The tourist stared at it from behind the opaque globe of the suit’s visor. It did not react. Although blindness was not congenital, the tourist wondered if it could see at all, if the use of its eyes had been lost to atrophy.

Chocky flung his way along the Promenade one great thrust of his arms at a time. He encountered other unseen Squatters sharing rungs on the long ladder. Passing in pure darkness, they heard, smelled, and felt each other. They muttered chants and obscenities. Their bodies collided and bounced away, never accidently. Hands grasped at Chocky’s face, pockets, genitals. He struck with arms and elbows and they struck back at him before parting, sometimes with metal stubs and short blades. The cuts and bruises marred and softened his already ravaged skin.