Not everyone is popular in a colony. The colony votes to cast out the most unpopular person, and it turns out to be you. You get ready to be shipped out, and you find…
I want you to put yourself in my position. See if you can sympathise with me.
Imagine you’re in a little pod, the type that can carry one human adult a short distance within the vacuum of space. There are tubes connected to a soft mask covering your mouth and nose. You’re conscious and your eyes are open. You can see panels of switches and blinking lights in front of you, but these are just relics from when the pod was used for ship-to-ship transportation and its occupant actually had some control. You don’t have any control. Your body is wrapped in a protective black plastic material, and the rest of the pod below your head has been filled with foam packing peanuts.
The pod itself isn’t the bad part though. You know that unless there is an accident, you will only be in it a few days. The bad part is why you’re in this pod in the first place. Why specifically it’s you in the pod.
I’ll explain. Imagine that you’ve lived your whole life within a little colony burrowed into an asteroid. It’s a community of a few hundred people, running a very efficient, very compact society. Literally, everyone knows your name. For all practical purposes, the colony, your colony, Dunbar 5, has been your entire world for your whole life.
You know that one of the problems with a little colony like that is genetic drift. It’s healthier when there is an injection of new genes every so often. Fortunately, there is a way Dunbar manages this.
Dunbar has neighbours in the asteroid belt. There are other similar colonies of humans living in similar hollowed-out rocks. Occasionally, the differential in orbital speeds will bring two colonized asteroids relatively close together. When this happens, there is a tradition of making an exchange. Usually, the exchange is a one-for-one adult male deal, just for the sake of fresh genetic material on both sides. Every colony has its own way of deciding who gets sent. Dunbar is a very democratic place. We just do it by elections.
So, once again, imagine you were me a few weeks ago. The Macdomin colony has just caught up with Dunbar and is within a few ten thousand miles. They want to do an exchange. An eighteen- to forty-year-old man for the same, as usual. Everyone is excited. It’s a big event in a little community, after all. Everyone is talking about who is going to get sent. You have a few ideas, decide who you would like to never see again, but don’t really think on it too much beyond that.
Voting day comes. Everybody casts a ballot. The old women in charge of tallying the votes spend maybe an hour counting and recounting while everyone else waits. The head vote-counter clears her throat, gets everyone’s attention, and says a name.
It’s your name. No one seems surprised. Except you.
What does this mean? It means that a plurality of your compatriots think that among men aged eighteen to forty, you are the biggest asshole on the asteroid. It means that they would be happier to never see you again than any other dude in the place.
Let that sink in. This whole time, you had been going around telling yourself ‘I’m a good guy. Sure I got some rough edges, but who doesn’t? People like me.’ But actually, they don’t.
So then, shortly after that, you’re in this pod, all wrapped up in plastic. You can’t feel any sense of movement, but that’s normal. The packing peanuts are just a precaution in case there is a hard landing. You don’t expect to feel anything until the pod is reopened on Macdomin.
You got some time to think about your life. You think about the bust-up with Cindy a couple years back. In your mind, she was the one acting like a real dick. You think about the time you got drunk and were giving your romantically hopeless buddy a hard time in front of your other friends. You thought it was all in good fun, but was it? You think about every goddamn time you embarrassed yourself. Every time you were rude or callous or selfish. You start to feel the searing heat of shame making your body sweat inside your plastic wrap. Jesus Christ. Why did you say all those stupid things? Why the fuck did you act like that every bloody time?
After a while, you calm down. A little voice in the back of your mind makes a good point. You fucked up all those relationships. Yes, you did. But the beauty of the situation is that you will never see a single one of those people again. When the pod opens, you’ll be in a different colony, and every relationship will be a new one. This is going to be the freshest of fresh starts. All you have to do is change. Can you change? You think maybe you can.
Here comes the funny part. You don’t know how long you’ve been in the pod. It could have been hours, or it could have been days. They told you it would be about four days before Macdomin picked you up. Maybe it’s been about that long. But you’re psyched up and ready for it. For the moment the pod is cracked open.
It cracks open. There are a handful of faces looking in on you. And you realise you recognise every goddamn one of them. The pod hasn’t moved at all. You’re still in Dunbar’s bay sitting on the launch pad.
“Macdomin had some technical difficulties with their launch and cancelled,” someone tells you. You’re pulled out and unwrapped. Nobody makes eye contact. You shuffle off naked, back into the asteroid, a few packing peanuts still clinging to your skin.
Now here’s what I want to ask you. Can you begin to imagine what my next day was like?
END