Are you okay, sir?

I opened my eyes and lifted my chin from the cold, smooth bar table and looked at the thing speaking to me. Are you okay, sir? it said again, same tone and intensity. I coughed a little. No more. Im fine. My drinking moment was over. The mood in this place has become so dismal that the bars servers no longer use the standard, traditional, cheerful scripts they used to. Any answer gets you another drink now, unless you specify youre done. The server, an old ROBOT5 series, accepted my answer and slipped away almost anxiously to another booth. We can drink without being seen here, and without seeing other people. The guy on the stool next to me was still in his own, personal drunken dream, succeeding in leaving reality behind longer than me, at least this time. His hand lay wrapped around his glass. I left the scene as I had done time and time before: contemplating having another one-last-shot of Venusian verbroon, but getting myself out the door before being able to rationalize it. It goes to show, its not easy for anyone. I headed back to Unit 642, located in Unit Cluster 3, where refugees from UE-America are concentrated. Ive been here since four weeks into the catastrophe, about a month before the Earths condition really plummeted. Ive been watching people come and go, like ants fleeing a colony, and that suspended, blue marble die. Theres constant reassurance coming from different kinds of speakers, some moving through the halls with robotic legs, some perpetually clinging to the walls. They tell us all that were safe now, that were out of harms reach and should rest for a while. Just rest. Here, nobody is the same as they are outside. Certain parts of you stop workingyour ability to be happy, your physical reactions, and even your memory. Youre only a watered down version of yourself, until you make it out. Thats the consensus in the crowd, at least. The long hall hadnt changed much after several hours. The same garbage still littered the floor, mostly junk food wrappers and black-marketed antianxiety shooters, now temporarily legal. People rest in the hall, and then they go off to rest somewhere else while others replace them. Some are Martians, some Titanites or Venusians, but since this is the Earth Space Station, most of the people are from Earth. They are the last there will ever be. After a while of being here yourself, its rather easy to tell which groups have just arrived and which groups have been here a long time. There are certain telling symptoms within everybody here, leaving nobody out. First, there are the fresh ones, the Newcomers. With their constant wailing and vocalized despair, theyre usually the ones disrupting peoples rest here. They cant help it, though. Theyve only just realized that they will never step foot on their home planet again. By the time they get here, that truth has fully hit them and they promptly break down. Even if the trauma of the situation

hit them before they left Earth, theyd still have enough energy to cry and carry on here, since the trip up only takes a couple of hours. Everyone thats been resting here can inevitably experience another wave of Newcomer disruption. The newcomers distress reawakens recently quelled feelings. They make life here unbearable. This first stage lasts 3-4 days, minimum. Eventually, the Newcomers will become, what I personally call, the Huddlers. Their volume will be reduced to a minimum, but there will still be crying involved, and sad, red faces. The Huddlers lean on each other, taking whatever comfort they can get. Its quite pathetic, but they surely dont care. You can find these people in the provided chapel units located in every other hall, sucking support from the chaplains and staff. The Huddlers I saw today seemed uninformed that our hall lacked a chapel, and I noticed two of the four were already metamorphosing into the next stage. I sat by watching, most placidly and unreserved. After a couple more days, a Huddler starts to dry up and become distant, leaving other fellow Huddlers behind. These people are known as the Calmed. If ghosts were real, they would be upstaged by the Calmed. They move through the halls silently, often gawking at people in traffic disturbingly. Some call it confusion, but I think its a bit more than that, though I cant be sure. A long time ago, people who suffered from such mental displacements were claimed to be shell shocked. Thats about as close as you can get to a comparison. Then again, its almost like back on Earth, when you would walk down the street and notice an old-timey robot or two, apparently fried and non-functioning. It was impossible to know if such robots were on stand-by, disconnected, or alive, staring at youor flat-out dead. Watch their heads move, then stop, visually fixated on you, and think to yourself that something must be going on behind its eyeshis or her eyes. Same thing with the Calmed. Walking the hall this afternoon, luck had it that I would also run into someone clinging to the last stage of this new kind of grieving. Stage three forces a person to be void of emotion, but stage four somehow completely reverses it, turning him or her into a temporary zealot with unbridled ambition. Whether theyre experiencing delusions of grandeur or an epiphanic miracle, if you offer them a few seconds of your time, youll leave with an hour wasted, and youll be none the wiser. I watched him standing over the group of lost Huddlers, persuading them that Satan took their home from them, and other terrible things to say to the weak and distressed. I bet I could have smelled the burning of his chosen god surging through his amygdala and hippocampus, fueling the fire coming out his mouth, if only I got close enough. One of the Huddlers became frightfully upset by the mans words and wailed a few pitches higher ineffectively. I kept walking, my head down so as to not provoke him. You learn how to leave certain things alone after a while. None of the people going through these four stages look out the windows provided in certain areas. Most windows are dimmed or covered by various media. The one time I saw a Calmed looking out the large bay window, found on

the outer wall of our units dining area, I came to the conclusion that she could have been looking at anything, or nothing at all, and still express the same dangerous indifference. I learned how to use my hopes better after that. Resting, they say. As if the quality of forced dormancy everyone has here could ever be called such a thing. Were supposed to rest here because the Earth is dead and people have to deal with themselves before they can move on to some other planet, reinvigorated to do it all again. Our arrangement here is called a civil aid. Well, a good amount of people have given in to what they call rest, but there are some like myself that subscribe to a whole other process of grieving, and it happens all in one, nicely packaged stage we call being the Burned. Were all a little different in how or why we take in our chosen distractions (drinks, inhalers, stim packs, primal entertainment), but we all do something to keep our minds foggy, not to forget, but to alter our trauma. Our cravings are pathetic, but at least we dont seek disingenuous attention. Isolation, while on mind-altering substances, enables a lot of inner reflection, and thats really what we need now. Before entering the unit, appropriately labeled U642 overhead, I was asked to do a routine BIO test. The memory of doing long tests like these when I was younger still plagues me, but the tests performed on me now arent as long, and not nearly as invasive. I stepped forward without hesitation and offered the back of my neck to the kind-eyed, rusty skinned, Venusian woman who waved me over. These tests are routine on most space stations, especially in dire circumstances like this. Everyone aboard is required to be tested, whether human (including Exclusive Planet Breeds), or robot (any deemed a person under EPUL bill 64292, section 6). Once every four days isnt too annoying, and lately Ive gotten away with doing one every eight days, since there has been a reduction in staff because of potential hysteria outbreaks in nearby units. Ever since the Tragedy of 2613, tighter precautions must be taken to ensure the safety of the masses. That day, a passenger infected with a Martian species of hocliss boarded the Mars Space Station and caused a mass hysteria, leading to the total destruction of the Space Station after three weeks of chaos. Tests like these are given to people already aboard the space station, though, to catch people before they develop into a potential danger for others. Using the Cartright method, staff can administer very simple and streamlined tests for all types to make sure people dont become too psychologically damaged, becoming a danger to us all. My head was still foggy from the potent drinks I had slung down my throat passage only hours earlier, so my body hummed a little as I struggled to maintain perfect posture for the doctor. I regret being a slight nuisance to her. She maintained a warm smile the whole time, even when, to my surprise, she

realized my type after seeing the robot-exclusive port for her testing apparatus on back of my neck. You fooled me, for sure, she offered, and I smiled back politely, thinking the same thing. People dont really focus on species anymore, since the amount of kingdom classifications for both sentient and non-sentient life has expanded a bit since the humans first outer planetary colonization in 2045; now we focus on type. What type is your slave? What type is your pet? What type of food do you prefer? Or, the line I hear far too often: Just what is your type anyway? Some day, it just might not matter anymore. The room was the same as it was when I left it, except for who was in it. Thirty small tables made up a five-by-six grid, suggesting to people in passing to stop and rest a while. Most of the furniture looked Earthly, yet foreign. A few couples were sitting, looking tired and talking quietly to other members of their tables. The people seemed to have been success stories of the grieving process, all ready to leave this place and start again on another planet, except for one woman, quiet and alone at one table, fixated on or past the wall before her. Two men, both wearing distinct suits that suggested they were Earthlings, slumped comfortably over a hologram game of chess while their could-be wives sat at the next table over. The rings around the eyes of the women contradicted their smiles. Theres not a doubt in my mind that well be fine now, I heard one of the men say to the group, stroking the top of his orthodox haircut. Well mess around on Mars for a bit before we head off to Titan to settle down. Our Recovery Allowance activates in three days, and then were out of this hell hole. I approached the window, fighting the need to flinch at the mans words, and stared out into the madness still happening outside the Space Station. There, a few hundred thousand miles from where I stood, in the middle of cold, black, lonely space, Mother Earth lay dying. A sort of red dust, eerily similar to that of Marss atmosphere, enshrouded the planet with unnatural chaos. The once sparkling blue planet now displayed great smears of grays, browns, reds, and oranges, with virtually no traces of its once dominating, radiant blue oceans. Its failing atmosphere appeared curdled, exposing terrible scars of fire and gas on the Earths skin. If any life still survived there, it would be dead in a few weeks. Whatever really caused this to happenwhether a singular cause, or a thousand seemingly insignificant causesthe Earth, our once beloved home, was dying and had been left for dead. I stored the image into my head to remember forever. The verbroon was still in my system, flowing through highly refined and similarly human veins and triggering various chemical reactions that effectively temporarily alter my state of consciousness, but its effects started to falter. It couldnt compete with the emotions I felt while standing there, looking at the ultimate kind of manmade destruction.

After a long while of paying my respects, I looked back to the tables where the group had sat, expecting to see them gone. Only the man who had spoken remained, his head lay propped up with an elbow, eyes covered with one hand. When he looked up, he gave me a contemptible smile. I almost felt sorry for him. I turned back to the window to behold the burning, crumbling Earth one last time. After a couple hours of introverted thought, sitting at a small table in the corner and sipping coffee enriched with crushed mandu root, I was running at full coherence. The bitter taste of the mandu root, a native plant on Venus, has a curious effect on both human and robotic brains, boosting consciousness without any disadvantages. From what Ive gathered, the root is very slow growing, and most often, somebody gets to the plant before its ripe to eat. People extract the stringy center for making frivolous things withclothing, jewelry, various technological componentsand leave the rest of the root to die. A vendor on Earth, who I now realize was Venusian, had offered some in small pouches for free as a kind gesture, since it was clear there was only a market for substances that took people away from reality, not for those that brought us closer. I accepted one politely, as others ignored him, and when I sampled a pinch of it that night, I experienced reality as if I was brand new again. That beautiful tabula rasa feeling. When I went back to the vendors location the next day, though, in the cold, ground streets of the city, the man was gone. The small crate that held the pouches of crushed mandu root lay tipped over in a puddle of muddy rainwater, barely salvageable. That day, I managed to rescue a couple pouches worth and have been rationing them well ever since. I used the last of it today. As I approached the large hallway, I saw that it was dimmed, which served to inform everyone that it would be nighttime on Earth, though no such time exists there anymore. For the night, the walls displayed a familiar pattern to us Earthlings: dark, hickory slabs, with a dark mahogany trim around the tinted windows, suggesting we were all in a log cabin, far out in cold, cold space. The thought of it amused me, but to everyone else, it was undoubtedly a comfort worth having. I almost expected to hear a creaking sound among the illusional floorboards beneath me as I started through it. A few people lay asleepor passed out drunk, or deadon the long, red, cushioned bench stretching along the full length of the outer wall. The windows above were fogged black, tinted to block out the pelting light coming from the sun and Earth. About halfway down, a man was copulating with what looked to be his slave, right on the bench. It was almost too reminiscent of home. The man wore garb appropriate for a Martian, and a scummy, red face to match it.

After making the connection, I was no longer surprised. There are no laws against doing that in public here or anywhere else, since Martians were living everywhere now. When they left Mars to populate more of our solar system (likely for political and economical gains), they fought hard to be able to still practice their disgusting rights from Mars. There are far too many of the Unprogressives to resist them, no matter how immoral they are. As I approached the area, the guy looked at me, momentarily stopping his savage grunting and thrusting motions. I almost didnt notice that the slave he was exploiting wasnt moving, barely breathing, as if incapacitated while being violated. The guy was despicable. I bared my teeth as I completed the last six steps to reach him, his body shifting towards me in my approach. His trousers lay fallen at his feet, and after my knuckles dug swiftly and painstakingly painfully into his large stomach after I leaned forward within a centimeter from his ugly face and belched the toxic, anesthetizing gas from deep inside my robotic lung reservoirshe tripped backwards onto the floor. Grimy bastard! I yelled, expecting no one to hear or care. My hand was shaking. I stood looking at the ambiguous human slave that was now breathing normally. Im a damned fool, I thought, knowing that if the Martian died from the poison now infecting his airways, the slave would surely be reissued to another Martian anyways, or even worse, to a convert. At least you will have some real rest for once, at least for a while, I decided. The slave lay still, oblivious. The sound of feet running down the hall from where I came in startled me. I didnt expect anyone to be awake during this hour, or at least have enough energy to care about quarrels, since they happened often. I started to panic. I knew full well that the punishment for a robot attacking a human was always death, no matter what the circumstance. That was universal law, and I had stupidly ignored it to lay vengeance on a deserving, scumbag Martian. This is it, I thought. Come get me, you bastards. Set me free from this world. But the bastards didnt come. The humans who destroyed the Earth, who evade truth and damn the virtuousthe humans I had grown so familiar with, hating their ignorance and tolerating their wrongdoingsdidnt come. Hey! a womans voice projected down the long hallway. Hey! Cease conflict! Hey! It was the doctor from earlierthe short, smiling, understanding, Venusian doctor that had scanned me without being typist. I stood there without plan, waiting for her to come and finally judge me. Her warm smile was gone. Hey, she said one last time, powerwalking up to the scene slowly. Whats happened here? I said nothing. How could I? A burst like fire happened inside my chest. I was caught in the act and would go peacefully. Then, the man, who I would later know as Rol Gevard, came to my defense.

He was a tall, slender man, with arms slightly longer than my own. His face was a diluted orange, roughly shaven, and his eyes were very sharp. Another damned Venusian, I mused to myself, realizing I had seen many recently. Apparently, he had been just out of sight when I carried out my attack on the Martian. From where I stood now, I could see him sitting there comfortably on the bench. After I locked eyes with him, he got up clumsily onto his feet and started walking over with mild swagger. By the time the doctor approached me, he was only a few feet away. My heart started pounding harder. Why are his pants down? she asked after briefly scanning the scene. She spoke innocently, as though she couldnt allow herself to assume anything. Then, the man spoke. He greeted her with words I do not know, and then, in perfect English, said, This man did something good. That is all. The doctor turned to him, looked at his face, and then moved back to the body on the ground. I lay still, not even breathing, like an inanimate object that turned itself offlike the robots of the past. I didnt understand what was happening between these two. Then I realized it: they were looking how to cover the whole thing up. Nobody moved. The woman stood professionally, hand in hand. She took a deep breath and exhaled, then spoke again, this time in their native language. I felt stupid witnessing the discussion, only knowing a few words that some English slang was derived from. The key word used was machina, Venusian for robot. I broke my statue act and turned to look at the man again. Eyes locked in hers, he smiled at her, and she turned and walked away. Well, the man said, looking at me again when she was almost out of sight. How about a drink? I looked at him incredulously, wondering for what, or why. My head hurt, and my body was still craving a drink, now more than ever. I nodded, not knowing what to expect, and walked with him to the bar. We sat at a small table overlooking the bottom level of the two-tiered bar. The place was still rather packed with various drunks and madmen looking to escape for a while, and the atmosphere was foggy as usual. Smoke, music, noise, lights, and a plethora of exciting and terrible smells polluted the air, convincing overstimulated senses to give up and give in to the chaos of the massive bar. Guy, I replied, when he asked me my name. He had already introduced himself as Rol Gevard, a commoner from Venus that had been visiting Earth on a business trip before things went bad and the planets population started evacuating. My indifference towards people like him had been suspended since the incident in the hallway, when he saved me for some unknown reason. A ROBOT5 waiter bot interrupted briefly to gather our order: two whiskeys, two verbroons, and an order of lava rings.

We sat quietly, taking in the scenery. I let my tense body loosen up with the music. The whole southern wall of the place bumped and spewed noise from hundreds of speaker dots poking out of it, and the vibrations soothed my feet. I looked at my savior; his dark black and blue posthuman suit clung tightly, but not too revealingly, against his long body. His attire clashed with his orange-ish tan skin, but suggested he was someone of higher power, perhaps a senator for a world office, or maybe an ex-politician clinging to his good looks. Breaking the silence, I started my inquiries. What did you say to the doctor? Im unfamiliar with Venusian native tongue, especially your dialect of it. The man looked at me, unsurprised and uninterested in telling me much. His voice told me he knew he was in control of the conversation. I told Sessa not to worry. To overlook what you had done. Your help was unnecessary. Why did you defend my crime? Why do we do anything at all? And besides, you did not commit a crime. You know it. I wont bore you with what I think, though. I looked at him more earnestly. What do you want? The man didnt budge. He kept his gaze on me, looking into my eyes in a cheerful, friendly manner and said, The waiter has already taken my order. Theres nothing more that I need, besides my ticket home. Youre looking for a slave? Dont be ridiculous, he said, obviously offended. Weve no use for slaves where Im from. We are all free there. It is nothing like what youve seen on Earth, young Earthling. I snickered at the thought of such a place. At certain points in life, and altogether quite often, the people of Earth had always wanted to retreat to somewhere better, where it was possible for men to be passive and equal at the same time. Only in stories did it ever turn out to be true. I turned my head away. What if he wasnt lying? A couple moments passed in silence, and the waiter soon delivered our drinks and lava rings. Another conversation inevitably followed. Do you like this stuff? he inquired, talking about the mess of deep-fried onion rings dipped and splattered with red sauce and crushed moon pepper. Do you like oil? I retorted. He chuckled for a second and smiled. Ahh, thats right. Robots dont have taste buds. Dont have anything we humans have, except for the same pitiful need for a drink thatll blur your reality. I must have forgotten about that. Please excuse me. No, I said, giving in. I dislike the artificial sauce. He laughed again, this time with more vigor. Of course you do. Youre a robot, after all. How silly of me. We sipped our drinks without anything further to say as we watched some of the people pass below us on the bottom tier. Theyre all rats, you know, he said suddenly. He was looking at a group of tattooed and grungy looking humans circled around a large table with a pole

and a red-skinned, naked dancer on it seducing them for money. One of the women slapped the girl stretching her behind out in front of her, giving out an exciting laugh, blending into the intense music. I finished my first glass of verbroon and reached for another one, but deciding to pull it near without getting started on it. So, were you a native? he asked, losing focus in the distractions. I looked at the glass of verbroon sitting in front me in, fingers making contact possessively. I held back from answering for a moment, and then gave in. Yeah. I was a native. I paused again. Theres no going back, after this, I argued, but I knew it was time to move on. My fingers touched the crystal glass still filled to its brim. I moved them away. He moved forward more to hear over the noise. Thats when I finally remembered who I was. It was the first time since before I arrived in this stagnation-promoting trap, this space station. It all came back to memy life, and everything I know and had previous memory of. It was still there. I just needed a reason to be that person again. I was born and raised in a rather small megacity, located in section 32 of UE-America. I started out working in a robot repair shop with a man I considered my father for a while. It was part of the program to work there to know what it was like to be human. I became curious and volunteered at the closest hospital, mending and invading human bodies under close guidance. They liked me there and insisted on paying me. It was very different there, as I was treated as a lifeless tool in other places. The human bodies I worked on were all the same, which was very different from the robot bodies I fixed over the years. Robot bodies got better, more refined. We were changed a lot, becoming progressively more complicated. There was so much to learn about robot bodies, but when I started learning about their minds I was underwhelmed. They were so simpleso crude. It was here that I started working on humans instead, hoping to see something different; I did. The human body was simple, even boring to probe sometimes. All of your parts are in the same places, with only very small variations between each planets humans. I expected that the inverse for robots would be true in humans: because the human body was so simple, the human mind must be as extraordinary as our robot bodies. I devoured knowledge on human psychology, sociology, and philosophy (though the library would only rent books to my human father). I learned so much, but at the same time, so little, having an intuitive understanding of physics and evolution. I needed to see the human mind work naturally, under stressI mean really work, not like the humans I had seen every day for a decade. I was tired of the simple racism, sexism, typism, and all else that most of Earths public subscribed to. I needed to see the human mind work in harsh situations. And, well, I had my opportunity. The Earth started to blow, and everyone was sent here.

Rol moved in his seat uncomfortably, yet kept his head close enough over the table to not miss a word. The music was slowing down now. An intermission was coming. I watched them for days, I continued, looking down at the table. I failed to see it. I couldnt find what I was looking to see in themyou humans. People were frantic and highly distressed, and not just humans. Robots showed the same signs of depression and coping, but they recovered from the trauma more easily. But how? This perplexed me. Most robots were old, moving tin cans with barely enough consciousness to count as a living person. How did they manage to overcome something so devastating faster than a humanan organic, natural, living creature that should have long ago figured out how to cope with an event so severe? For a while, I began to believe some humans werent alive at allwhich is pretty absurd, I know. I looked at him, but he didnt say a word. Perhaps, I thought, he doesnt understand what Im saying at all. I leaned back in my seat, becoming slightly embarrassed. Almost as absurd as it is for us humans to believe that you arent alive at all. He smiled, and then I knew that he understood. Finally, I had met a human that could understand what I had to say. So where do you go from here? The question caught me off guard like it had many times before in my head, and I frowned. Ive been here a long time, now, I said, not knowing exactly how to respond. I guess Im not sure whats left for me out there, or even if there is anything else. What about you? The man hesitated a moment, looking at the empty glass in front of him. Ive been here a long time too, looking for people that are just like you. Other planets have taken many things from us in the past, mostly things we found little value in on Venus. Now, its our time to take from them. He looked at the crowd below again, watching people slam credits down onto the stained stage still holding the erotic dancer. I hope you will come. After a few seconds more of looking at me with a smile, Rol Gevard stood up from the table and produced a small, crme colored envelope out of a midback pocket. The envelope was ordinary, without hints to what lay inside. See you there, my friend, he said in a farewell tone, indicating his time was up. He lay down the credits to pay the bill and then the envelope before taking his leave from the bar. When he was no longer in sight, I picked up the envelope from the table and opened it. Tucked away inside was a thin piece of dried mandu root, a small book for translating, and a transport ticket to Venus. So there I was, in a bar a few hundred thousand miles from my dying home world, with the opportunity to move on. I looked around again. Venus, I thought and smiled. I couldnt pass it up.

The ROBOT5 waiter bot was making its rounds and came up to the table, asking, as scripted, Are you okay, sir? I refolded the envelope and placed it in my breast pocket. Yes, Im fine. No more. And just like that, as the waiter bot left me without any hard feelings, it and everyone else ceased to matter. I left on the next flight out. Venus, dont let me down.