Sitting down. Here I SIT. No. I don’t. Here I FLOAT. In my upless downless hole. There. I can see my ceiling… slash floor… slash wall slash wall wall wall… They’re all WALLS. They give me all this crap to “aid my enviromental acclimation”. Strap it on and — Wow! Pretend gravity! “Well… let’s stand here so we can pretend that THIS is the floor today, and that THAT’S the ceiling, and let’s say over there’s WEST”, just so I don’t spend my entire day vomiting from the vertigo. Falling. I just wish I could feel like I’m falling, like I COULD fall. I haven’t felt PULLED in soooo long. To THINK I looked forward to this. Weightlessness. I always thought it’d feel like flying does. How it feels in my dreams. Then again, I imagine that when you fly, you would always feel the pull, the DOWN. And it’s the escape from that, when you can outrun the Earth, that feels so good… I don’t feel anything here.

Sometimes, I have to let go. Strap down every thing loose, close everything up, crouch down low against a wall, turn the suit off, push and GO! FSSSHHH! into another wall and FSSSHHH! and wall and FSSSHHH! and wall and FSSSHHH! and GO!! and oohhh MAN! That’s the best illusion of gravity available. IM-PACT! Smash yourself across the room into that far wall close your eyes and for a moment, for just a split second, it feels like hitting ground, Mother Earth pulling you to her come home my child into my arms kiss me kiss me kiss me… oooooo the smallest of breezes against your face, you wanna scream it feels so GOOD and you GO! AAOOOO!!!

Usually, after a couple of minutes of this, I push off too hard, or I hit something sharp. Something. I cut myself, smash my head. It stops me. And I float there, breathing hard, and the memory of pressure, of wind, stays on my skin for a couple of absolutely perfect seconds. I breathe hard and I watch the sweat bead on my arm.

Watches sweat bead, shakes arm slightly, watches beads float in the air.

But it doesn’t last forever. Couple of seconds.

The 54th penal unit of the Icarus Mining Project. Icarus 54. Some corrections officer’s idea of a joke. The perfect name for those of us who try to fly higher than they are… supposed to. Hang a left off Mar’s and here we are. TA-DA! Asteroid miners extra-or-din-are. You know, some times I wonder why there aren’t more of us up here. I mean, considering the fact you get your sentence reduced by at least two-thirds when you volunteer. I don’t know. I guess some people would rather deal some pretty massive risks of infection, to life… in a rock. The huge doses of solar radiation might be a small deterrant too. I don’t know.

There’s only a thousand or so of us caretakers up here. Caretakers. What a perfect word. WE. DON’T. DO. ANYTHING! Here’s how it is. Each Icarus station is planted in an asteroid — living quarters, food and waste processors, comm terminal, blah blah blah. Then the mining droids are launched. They zip off to an asteroid, extract all the goodies, bundle them up, and set them aside for a cargo drone to pick up. Asteroid done, they zooms off to the next one. And what do I do? Once, every day, I look at my handy dandy readout, and I see that, Yes, everything is proceeding exactly as it is supposed to, just like it has every single day that I’ve been here. I enter the A-OK code into my terminal and ZAP, the boys at Daedelus Station are up-to-date. Then I wait to do it tomorrow. That’s it. Technically, I’m here in case of a foul-up, ready to leap at the first sign of danger. And, oh, let me tell you, you should see me in action-

ALERT ALERT ALERT exhaust port jammed exhaust port jammed exhaust port jammed. Oh no. Not the exhaust port. That leaves me only one option. BAM! Switch to the first of FIVE reserve exhaust ports and inform Daedelus about this oh-so-dire emergency. Every station and every excavator is rigged up with so many redundant systems. There’s only been one case of a real emergency in an Icarus. Core meltdown in the station. Oh yeah, like he could do a lot then. Just a shadow on the wall after that. But hey, we are expendable.

I’ve been here for two hundred and eighty-one days. Only three years, two months, and twenty-five days to go. Give or take.

A guy in a small, claustrophobic, cube of a room (the living quarters of the Icarus asteriod cell), wearing a tank top and boxer shorts. He is also wearing a lightweight harness down both arms and legs, ending with a pair of very large metallic/plastic boots, reminiscent of ski boots. He turns on the terminal.

Hey squirt.

I promised you a bedtime story, didn’t I?

Okay.

Here’s a story.

There’s this guy. He’s a scientist, but not a scientist like we have now. He’s, like, a just after fire, just after the wheel, half-magician sort of scientist. One of those guys that discovered the secret to everything, only to have the rest of the world believe in something else. Or in nothing. Well, this scientist, he sees the birds flying over his tower day after day. And he wonders, Can I do that? Nowadays, people would just say something like, We don’t have the bone structure or Our body mass is too large or something. But not this guy. He watches these birds and he thinks. He tries things, throws them away tries something else. He nevers says, I can’t do this, no way. And then, one day, he just knows how to do it. He gets these piles and piles of feathers, thousands of them, from eagles and falcons and condors and albatrosses, the biggest feathers he can get, because they have to be strong enough to hold all his weight, and he sits down for an entire day and an entire night, sticking each feather onto his arms and his shoulders with a drop of melted wax. Can you imagine the pain he must have felt after a while, drop after drop of melted wax onto bare skin, for hours? And then, finally, it’s done. He stands on the roof of his tower, his arms spread out, fluttering in the breeze. And he looks at the birds flying over him, and around him, and he calls to them, Wait for me. I’m coming. And he jumps off that tower and he starts to fall. But he’s not worried. Slowly, he begins to swing his arms into the wind, and feels this horrible stretching ache in his shoulders which each downward push, feels the wind pound his body, making his eyes stream tears. And then, suddenly, WHOOOOSH! a warm warm draft of air scoops under his wings and he’s thrown so high in the sky, towards the clouds. And his arms HURT! The wind wrenches his shoulders and his arms to what has to feel like breaking. But he’s laughing and screaming into the wind becaue he is FLYING and the birds are with him and he is above the whole world and it is so so so much more than he ever imagined.

Now. The whole time this guy’s in the air, his little brother — some people tell the story with him being his son, but for you, he’s his little brother. So — his little brother is watching him out of his window, watching him come in and out of view, moving faster and faster, faster than the wind, like the best of all possible birds. And that’s all that he wants that is suddenly all that he has ever wanted. To fly. He’s ten, eleven. What else do boys want at that age? What else do boys want at any age?

So, that night his big brother tells him that tomorrow is his turn. They stay up all night, putting his feathers on for him. And with each feather, with each drop of liquid burning wax, the kid wants to cry. But his big brother smiles at him, he holds his hand, and he tells him about the birds and about how the wind feels flowing up from underneath you and how warm the sun is so high in the sky. And he doesn’t cry once. The next morning they’re done and they look out over the tower into the wide open air. His big brother’s yelling to him, because the wind is blowing all around them, about how to hold his arms and how to glide on top of the wind and he tells him that it will hurt because their arms aren’t used to flying but they’ll get used it and it’ll be better than walking or jumping or swimming or anything.

With a deep breath, he pushes off from the top of the tower and almost immediately FFSSSHHHH! he’s in the wind and rising up up and away and his brother swoops up with him and he’s laughing and they’re both laughing and it feels better than the whole rest of his life.

Now this kid is really small, undersized almost, sort of like you squirt, and the wind is throwing him all over the sky. But he’s doing like his brother told him and he’s not fighting it, he’s letting it take him higher and higher, up higher than the highest bird. He’s looking down and the eagles look like sparrows and the sparrows look like dragonflies so far away and the world is like the maps his brother draws for him and he doesn’t feel so little in the sky. He flies harder and harder trying to reach the very top of the sky it’s so close he can almost touch it and it’s so warm he can’t tell if he’s crying or sweating there’s so much wetness on his face it’s not drying in the wind and it’s getting warmer and warmer and he wants to touch the SUN!

He’s almost there he thinks he’s almost there — but it’s getting so hard — It’s so hard! — and it was so easy but his arms just started getting tired and he’s flapping his arms faster than ever but WHY IS IT SO HARD?

In the very corner of his eye he sees this little blur this small streak and he looks and sees this long thin trail of feathers his feathers floating away and his arms look like they’re melting the wax is melting streaming off and down the ends of his fingers his arms look so small and he looks up and the sun is falling away up and away and the wind has him ripping him reaching down and ripping the air out of his lungs whipping his arms and legs round and round beating at his stomach and face he can’t move he can’t breathe he can’t think and he is falling falling falling fallling falling fallingfallingfalling…

Down.

And the big brother, flying far below the clouds, he can’t do anything. He does NOTHING. He can’t do anything other than watch, than stare, as this dark spec gets larger and larger, sinking towards him, inhumanly fast. And his mind tricks him suddenly he’s the one falling falling towards this black black pit high in the sky Please please please let it be me LET IT BE ME and the pit is falling pulling itself closer and closer and hard as he tries he can’t hold onto the trick it’s not a trick and it’s not a pit and it’s too close and-

He… doesn’t make it. The big brother takes the body, and buries it, and… he buries the wings. Buries the wings. No flying now. Not now.

I don’t think he should fly. The big brother. He doesn’t deserve to. Not when…

Not after that.