was about to swallow me seemed friendlier.
I took my son to the gate where my waiting and smiling husband was. He had in his arms a squirming two-year-old Hope. My husband smiled wider and looked at me lovingly, setting
a palm lightly on my womb. Slow, warm tears flowed on my cheeks. But they did not hurt.
There was one more thing I could do.
The Day the Sexbomb Dancers Invaded Our Brains
By Carljoe Javier
Sometimes it got to be a real drag for Jeremy being on a generation starship.
But then when you think about it, wouldn’t it be a drag if you were on one, too?
There’d be nowhere for you to go, except around the starship. There aren’t many places for stopovers, since a planet with a hospitable atmosphere rarely comes
along. The only friends you could have would be on the ship, and they’d get pretty boring too. Your parents would have been born there, you’d have been born there, your kids would be
born there, and you’d probably die there.
What made things even worse was that Jeremy was weird. It’s not that he was a freak or anything like that. It just so happened that Jeremy didn’t like big groups,
or loud people, or speaking in public, which was pretty much speaking anywhere on a generation starship.
He liked to brood.
And on a generation starship, brooding was extremely weird. He liked sitting around and thinking, talking to himself, figuring things out like why they were there or what his
purpose was; deep things that didn’t really have any answers.
When he was a little kid he’d be brooding when the other kids would run by and slap him on the back of the head. As teenagers it was found that they were the first
generation to develop telepathic powers. So when the other kids weren’t making out with each other in their minds, they’d swing by and interrupt Jeremy’s thoughts, just to annoy
him. To stop them from invading his mind, he developed a neural band which he wore around his head to block out any external forces.
Jeremy had to admit that it wasn’t always a drag on the ship. The ship was almost as big as the country it had come from, with different simulated ecosystems, a holodeck
that could transport him to any time or place, and a humongous library where he could read all the knowledge of the Earth, at least up to the day that the ship left; they couldn’t have any
idea how things were going on Earth because it would take years for any communication to reach them, so the people on Earth didn’t bother to send messages and the people on the ship
didn’t expect any.
His liking to read in the library made him even weirder. Everybody else preferred the holodeck, since the virtual world was created there for you. It was the main instructional
tool. He was the only kid who liked going to the library. He was so weird that he was the only kid who understood the Dewey decimal system. These days you’re weird enough if you understand
the Dewey decimal system, so what more on a generation starship that had been in space for, well, generations?
But then who else on the generation starship should this story be about? What fun would it be if we just talked about one of the normal kids? All we’d have is a fairly
typical story of an ordinary youth growing up on a generation starship. And most of the other people on the ship wouldn’t have any recollection of what really happened on the crazy days that
started when they began receiving TV transmissions that traveled all around the universe and back and into the generation starship’s receptors. This is a story about scantily clad women and
zombies and a weird boy named Jeremy.
***
On that day, Jeremy was brooding in a corner near his family’s apartment. He was thinking about something philosophical, probably something existential. After all,
didn’t the meaning of things become more complicated on a generation starship where the designated purpose of your life was to survive and reproduce so that there
I took my son to the gate where my waiting and smiling husband was. He had in his arms a squirming two-year-old Hope. My husband smiled wider and looked at me lovingly, setting
a palm lightly on my womb. Slow, warm tears flowed on my cheeks. But they did not hurt.
There was one more thing I could do.
The Day the Sexbomb Dancers Invaded Our Brains
By Carljoe Javier
Sometimes it got to be a real drag for Jeremy being on a generation starship.
But then when you think about it, wouldn’t it be a drag if you were on one, too?
There’d be nowhere for you to go, except around the starship. There aren’t many places for stopovers, since a planet with a hospitable atmosphere rarely comes
along. The only friends you could have would be on the ship, and they’d get pretty boring too. Your parents would have been born there, you’d have been born there, your kids would be
born there, and you’d probably die there.
What made things even worse was that Jeremy was weird. It’s not that he was a freak or anything like that. It just so happened that Jeremy didn’t like big groups,
or loud people, or speaking in public, which was pretty much speaking anywhere on a generation starship.
He liked to brood.
And on a generation starship, brooding was extremely weird. He liked sitting around and thinking, talking to himself, figuring things out like why they were there or what his
purpose was; deep things that didn’t really have any answers.
When he was a little kid he’d be brooding when the other kids would run by and slap him on the back of the head. As teenagers it was found that they were the first
generation to develop telepathic powers. So when the other kids weren’t making out with each other in their minds, they’d swing by and interrupt Jeremy’s thoughts, just to annoy
him. To stop them from invading his mind, he developed a neural band which he wore around his head to block out any external forces.
Jeremy had to admit that it wasn’t always a drag on the ship. The ship was almost as big as the country it had come from, with different simulated ecosystems, a holodeck
that could transport him to any time or place, and a humongous library where he could read all the knowledge of the Earth, at least up to the day that the ship left; they couldn’t have any
idea how things were going on Earth because it would take years for any communication to reach them, so the people on Earth didn’t bother to send messages and the people on the ship
didn’t expect any.
His liking to read in the library made him even weirder. Everybody else preferred the holodeck, since the virtual world was created there for you. It was the main instructional
tool. He was the only kid who liked going to the library. He was so weird that he was the only kid who understood the Dewey decimal system. These days you’re weird enough if you understand
the Dewey decimal system, so what more on a generation starship that had been in space for, well, generations?
But then who else on the generation starship should this story be about? What fun would it be if we just talked about one of the normal kids? All we’d have is a fairly
typical story of an ordinary youth growing up on a generation starship. And most of the other people on the ship wouldn’t have any recollection of what really happened on the crazy days that
started when they began receiving TV transmissions that traveled all around the universe and back and into the generation starship’s receptors. This is a story about scantily clad women and
zombies and a weird boy named Jeremy.
***
On that day, Jeremy was brooding in a corner near his family’s apartment. He was thinking about something philosophical, probably something existential. After all,
didn’t the meaning of things become more complicated on a generation starship where the designated purpose of your life was to survive and reproduce so that there
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