There are two ways to measure a day on the moon, but it was unlikely that anyone other than the scientists of New America knew what they were. What everyone else knew was the result: from their perspective, it came down to about twenty-nine and a half earth days. What everyone actually cared about was that they only had real sunshine every other month.
On the surface of the moon, which humans had taken to calling Luna ever since they came to live on it, a large, curving dome with a shimmering silver-blue surface began to unfold its shell. A hundred miles of glittering proto-metal temperature-regulating panels shuddered and slid back on each other, down, down, down the surface of the dome to its base. The process only took several minutes and was nearly soundless to the inhabitants, separated as they were from the panels by a hundred feet of solid, thick, hyper-dense megaplexi, a form of synthetic glass.
Within the dome, faces turned up and quiet sighs of pleasure and delight peppered bedrooms, offices, walkways, levehicles, stores, and parks. Thousands of things divided the citizens of New America in this age, but the warmth and purity of true sunlight brought them all together for some precious minutes every other month.
When a human night fell, the panels would recover the dome, and thousands of satellites would converge above, outside the synthetic darkness, to soak up precious sunlight on their solar panels. And when another moon night fell, the hearts of men would deflate--just a little, in most, but just enough in others--and crime rates, suicide rates, and violence would rise for another month as humans scrapped and despaired in their dome's false, synthetic sun as well as during its truly starry night. It was astounding how true and false sunlight could have such affects on people. Psychologists were still going mad about it, and the remnants of Earth's population had been settled in their domes on the moon for nigh on two hundred years.
One thing everyone, or at least everyone who had ever gotten stark raving drunk--and, in an enclosed glass ball on a barren satellite currently being devastated by overpopulation, filthy air, and the very foundations of buildings and homes crumbling from weight and years, that was indeed most of the population--could say for sure was that real sunlight definitely hurt more in the eyes of the hungover.
In a small, cramped, two bedroom apartment based in a small, cramped, condemned apartment building hovering erratically in the lower portion of New America's many hovering levels of habitation, a young man with a new haircut was waking up.
"...well-known and by some revered, psychologist Dr. Allen Krieger, author of "The Pants Anomaly" and, many argue, the most recent mass-cultural phenomenon many are calling the Fem-Masc movement...Everyone please give a warm hand to our guest tonight!"
The thunder of thousands of hands cracking together jerked my head off the pillow. I stared blankly at a dim grey wall with a one-foot-square chunk of glass stuck in the middle of it. Gears churned sluggishly as I tried to make sense of why applause was coming from our apartment window, and how people were standing outside it when I was twenty floors up.
"Thank you, Mr. Downey."
"Richard, please."
"Heh, Richard. Oh, and before we go any further, just to prevent any future confusion--the word is actually pronounced mazz."Masc" is taken from the front of 'masculine', but you say it with a z sound. Otherwise it can sound like a 'mask' that you wear."
"Haha, I was wondering about that, I appreciate that...Allen? Can I call you Allen?"
"Sure, I'm fine with that."
"Now, there are several questions I--and I'm sure the audience too--would love to know the answers to..."
I wiped grime and sleep sand out of my eyes and finally made sense of the lights and shadows playing on the wall. I groaned and flopped back down onto the couch.I'd left the living room wallscreen on last night.
I was torn between digging the remote out of the couch to turn it off and leaving it. On the one hand, effort. On the other, I really wanted to go back to sleep.
"...that masc--I'm sorry, mazz--women are naturally more aggressive and prone to violence than your typical feminine woman?"
"Aggressive? You mean, more forward, more dominant, more persistent, bolder than feminine women? Sure. They're also more of all those things than feminine men are. That's part of being masculine. And as for violent? Well, that depends on what you're talking about. If you're talking about a teenage masc punching the schoolyard bully in the face, sure, because that's something anyone forward, dominant, persistent, and bold would do. If you're talking about whether or not a masc is likelier to smash a barstool over someone's head because they insulted her boyfriend, well, that depends."
"Depends on what?"
"On the people themselves. You see, people in our society are so programmed to think feminine equals woman, and masculine equals man. But that's not true, as I conclusively prove in my book. It contains plenty of interviews and evidence to support that not all women are feminine, and neither are all men masculine. Maybe we're not the majority, but we exist, and that matters, and you can't say we don't or it doesn't. It's not a genetic coding you're born with. It's a personality trait. Masculine people are going to be more aggressive, and possibly more violent. Feminine people are typically more submissive and deal with confrontation in less hands-on ways. It's all about perspective, and I've proven in my book that the perspective that sees these traits as connected to gender is simply incorrect. "
"You're throwing a lot of unconventional ideas at us all at once, Allen. Would you mind if we go back and analyze some of them more closely?"
"I would love that."
I would love to go back to sleep, but I couldn't find the wallscreen remote and I couldn't connect to it with my palmface chip because it was malfunctioning. I stared blearily at it and tried to remember whether I'd punched someone in the face last night. I was pretty sure I hadn't, but whenever I got blackout drunk I did things I'd never do otherwise.
And man, last night I had been blackout drunk.
I stumbled through the tiny hallway of the tiny apartment I shared with my mom and her boyfriend. We called it a two-bedroom, though technically my bedroom was a large closet. No, really. My bed wasn't even a real bed, it was a standard twin foam mattress with the last third cut off so it would fit, and that took up the whole floorspace. I had a wall cabinet Suq'd(tm) to the top of the wall over my pillow that I kept nice clothes in. Everything else I shared with my mom in her dresser in her and Louis's room. I usually did sleep in my closet, but last night I obviously hadn't made it that far.
I kept as quiet as I could, because if I was lucky Louis slept most of the day and wouldn't wake up until I'd gone out for the night. Louis did most of his...cooking at night. And if Mom woke up and heard me she might think I was a "burglar"--seriously, who even says that?--and wake him up to find out.
It had happened before several times. It was very sad.
And considering Louis usually hit me with a baseball bat and asked questions later--a few times I was pretty sure he had recognized me and just used it as an excuse to hit me with something--I did not want to take chances.
I fumbled in the dark for about five minutes and barely kept the shelves and shelves of pill bottles--most of which were not there legally--from crashing to the floor several times. I finally found the bottle of hangover cure and downed about four of them. You weren't supposed to take more than two at once, but whatever.
Then I went back to bed. In my closet.
When I woke up again it was because of more noise. I froze with my heart in my throat, listening.
"...can't understand what is so fucking hard about buying me one dress, just one nice dress, so I can go the Benefit this year not looking like a gutterhumper."
I heard my mom giggle. "But doesn't he get you one every year anyway? Why the sudden change of routine?"
"Because he paid for another dress about a month ago, and it was, like, ninety k creds, but like, I didn't know he was expecting me to wear that dress, like, he thought that was the dress I'd wanted for it. I keep trying to explain to him that no, it was just a really nice dress I wanted, and I've spent the past month planning my outfit and now I'm ready to..."
I relaxed and tuned them out. It was just my mom on the phone with her friend Alissa Miyazaki, the latest wife of one of the biggest business tycoons in NAD, and the only reason she even knew that tiny gnats like us existed was because she used to live in our apartment block. I'd babysat for her several times, and the rumour was Tristan, her kid, actually was Miyazaki's biological son from an affair...God, when was it? He'd been fourteen the last time I babysat, though it was more hanging out by that time, he was a good kid and I'd tried to keep him that way. That was three years ago. Was he really seventeen already? Damn. That made me feel old. But twenty-six wasn't really old, was it? I was just being self-conscious, right?...Damn. It was way too early to think about this at...I coaxed my clock hologram out of my palmface...shit, one in the afternoon. For some reason I had a feeling this was bad, and that there was something I should have been doing.
Anyway, the only reason his mom was bigwigs these days was because Miyazaki had moved her in after kicking his last wife out, to spite her for the divorce. In another year he'd be back out chasing ass again, and another year after that she'd be back down here with us, rolling in grime and struggling to breathe the smog-thick air.
I stood, balancing on my squishy sawed-off foam mattress, and fumbled for my gas mask on the nail next to my nice-clothing-cabinet. Then I climbed quietly out of my closet and muttered a greeting-and-goodbye to my mother as I passed her in the living room on my way to the door. I doubted she even noticed.
I was halfway down the stairs(the levelator hadn't worked in years, and since this was technically a condemned building, I wouldn't have risked it if it had) and already pulling my mask on when I realized I actually had no idea where I was going. I paused, pulled my mask back off, and patted myself until I came up with a half-charged cigalectrik. I took a long pull on it and thought as I blew the vapor out my nose and mouth.
Normally I slept the day away until I went out at night, but I had this nasty, nibbling feeling I'd done something nova stupid last night, or I'd forgotten something I really, really should have remembered.
I puffed more vapor out and nibbled on a hangnail, trying to think. I'd gone out with friends...but I was always going out with friends. People I called friends.
My palmface fizzled and cracked as I curled my fingers around my cigalectrik again, and I winced as an internal spark from it shocked my palm. Okay, first things first--I could start by checking up on who I'd contacted last night, and maybe they could remind me what had happened and what I'd done.
I flexed my palm and yelped as it shocked me again, harder. Scowling stubbornly at it, I flexed a few other commands. It either shocked me or fizzled at each one. I groaned, tilting my head back against the stairwell wall. I wasn't contacting anyone, or reaching anything in my Palmface, until I'd gotten the stupid thing fixed. ...The wall didn't feel like it should.
I kept my head against it, trying to figure out what was wrong. I took another drag and turned the cigalectrik back off, jamming it into my pocket for later, and rubbed the back of my skull back and forth against the wall.
Part of my head was feeling my hair pressed between my skin and the wall. The rest of it...
I slowly reached my hands up and patted my hair. Or where my hair should have been.
I'm sure they heard me screaming all the way to the top floor.
The pigeons
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