Diaspora Ad Astra (13 page)

Jeremy wiped the tears from his eyes and saw it was Lena. She was above him now, and she made the Ls inches from his face. Then she grabbed the neural band.

Jeremy held onto it, tried to keep it on his head. It was a struggle, Jeremy holding the band with one hand and his other hand holding his pants away from the wound, and
Lena’s body swaying to the music in her head and just her two arms yanking at the neural band.

And Jeremy’s most intimate friend betrayed him.

They say that when it’s a struggle between the head on a man’s shoulders and the head between his legs, it’s always the latter that gets its way. As he tried
to keep the neural band on, he couldn’t help but watch the way that Lena’s body moved, and though his thoughts were focused on keeping the band on, he got sprung. The wound scraped
against his zipper and the pain shot up, making him lose his grip.

The sugary sounds began to fill his brain and then his subconscious kicked in. It gave him something he hadn’t thought of before. “Computer, room
lockdown.”

After he uttered the words his brain surrendered, and he laid his head back, feeling no more pain.

The computer initiated the lockdown, and the blast doors came down. The blast doors were sturdy enough to block out all kinds of radioactive waves. In seconds the room was
sealed off from the rest of the ship and the Sexbomb transmission. Jeremy regained consciousness, waking to the pain in his crotch.

Lena was standing there, the neural band in her hand.

You bastard!
she screamed at Jeremy as soon as she saw the state she was in.
What am I doing in here with you? What did you do to me? To my clothes?
She
jumped on Jeremy and began slapping his arms, which he’d used to cover his head. Jeremy started crying because her body was scraping against his and the zipper was scraping off even more skin
near the open wound.

Please, stop. Please.
Jeremy pleaded but Lena kept slapping and scraping. But she heard the repeated pleas and their sincerity in her head, so she felt sorry for him
and stopped.

Jeremy wiped snot and tears from his face and tried to compose himself. He was still breathing heavily and being the weird kid that he was, he wasn’t used to such
adrenaline-driven situations. He wanted to unzip his pants and check the damage he’d sustained.

Tell me why I’m in here and what happened, or I’m gonna kill you!
Lena said to Jeremy, standing over him and planting her foot between his legs, just
centimeters from his threads.

Please give me the neural band.

Tell me what’s going on.

I will, but please give me the neural band.

Why should I? What’s it going to do?

I’ll show you, but we have to wear the bands. Please, trust me.

Lena was scared. How could she trust him, she had just found herself alone in a room with him, her memory blank as to how she got there, her clothes tattered—everything
was just too weird.

She sat down in front of him. She held the neural band with her left hand. She held it behind her, so that Jeremy could see it, but it was out of his reach. She planted her
right hand on Jeremy’s thigh and he winced. Jeremy held back tears as he pitched another tent.

Here’s the deal, I’m going to hand this over to you, but if you make any quick movements, do anything funny, I’m grabbing your dick and I’m
squeezing and bending it until it looks like a slinky.
(She didn’t actually say slinky, though, she referred to one of the children’s toys they’d grown up with on the ship
that resembles today’s slinky, but then letting her say slinky here makes things easier for us.)

Jeremy whimpered at the thought.

Lena handed him the neural band, then put her left hand on his other thigh. Jeremy thought that his hard-on couldn’t get any more painful, but it did as he shivered and
scraped against his zipper. He put the neural band on.

“Okay, Lena, now I’m going to command the computer to open a box.”

“Okay.”

“Computer, open my storage box and bring it to me.”

The computer’s robotic arm brought a small metal box, about the size of a lunchbox, to Jeremy. Lena eyed the robotic arm warily, and as the arm approached, she moved her
hand down Jeremy’s thigh, as if to threaten.

“Lena, put on a neural band.” She looked into the box and saw all kinds of weird gadgets inside.

“You made all this stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

“Thanks. Please put on the band.”

She put it on and suddenly she felt a kind of melancholy, a feeling of immense isolation. Neural bands were available for anyone who wanted to shut in their thoughts or shut
out everyone else’s, but she’d never even thought about using one before. Her mind had always been so open, had always been the place of imagination and conversation, of interaction
with others. Now she was all alone with her thoughts, and it felt terribly lonely.

She looked at Jeremy with pity as she realized the loneliness that he put himself through by wearing a neural band. But then she realized that if he knew what everyone thought
about him then it might make things even harder. She remembered all the pranks they had played on him in his head before he’d made the neural band, all the times when everybody would get
together to send him mean mental messages.

She wanted to take the band off. It was depressing. She couldn’t understand why he was making her go through this. She felt sorry for him, sorry for what they had done to
him, but she also hated him now because he was making her realize these things.

“Lena,” Jeremy called to her, snapping her out of her daze, “here, look at this.”

He moved out of the way and let her sit in front of the computer terminal.

Lena’s eyes widened with shock as she saw the whole ship converted into a giant dancehall, everyone singing and dancing like the Sexbomb dancers.

***

“What’s going on, Jeremy?”

“Wait, could you turn around for a second. I kind of got scratched up in my family jewels (of course by that time they’d evolved some other euphemism for their
private parts, probably something to do with space objects or stars or something or other, but again, family jewels helps make things clearer for us) and I want to see how bad it is.”

Lena turned around, disturbed by the idea that Jeremy was zipping down right behind her while all this weird stuff was happening. At the same time she was thinking that it
might just be par for the course. “So, how bad is it?”

“Well, you did a pretty good job scratching it up, but it was messed up when you got started on it. I’ll live, but I’m having a hard time walking.”

“Sorry. So what do we do about this?”

“I don’t know, I can hardly think with all the pain I’m feeling down here. Besides, if we try to go outside, everyone’s going to attack us and turn us
into dancing and drooling zombies too.”

“We can’t just stay in here. I thought you had access to all the ship’s controls? Why not just shut it off? Did you ever find out where we got it from? And
how’d you hurt yourself like that anyway?”

Jeremy zipped up and went over to the computer terminal. “Okay, let’s find out. Computer, review most recent data received from outside the ship.” The
computer beeped and flashed out a display of the files.

By this time the starship was running into the transmissions sent centuries ago. It could be explained by the idea of the movement of waves around the universe, and that waves
are also particles, so when they travel they also disperse, and they bounce off other things but they can also be collected, and some other complicated stuff. If you’re really interested in
it, then you could probably read something by Stephen Hawking. But for our purposes, just think of sonar; say, how a dolphin uses sonar.

So a dolphin is swimming and it emits a sound wave which, if it hits something, bounces off that thing and returns to the dolphin. That way, the dolphin knows if there’s
something out there because the sound wave returned. Now remember the sound wave has been broken up and that the parts of the sound wave that hit something returned. But there may be parts of the
wave which just kept going. So now think of a TV station, beaming out shows via satellite, and its waves are going to hit the satellite and shoot those shows down to your TV, but there are going to
be some stray waves that are going to keep going, and going, and going, until they bounce against something big enough to make it bounce back and not just divide it.

With these kinds of things coming in, the computer had a firewall to protect the ship against dangerous waves. And now Jeremy was checking if the firewall had gone up.

“I can’t believe it,” he said.

“What?”

“The computer firewalled it. It’s there, it’s right there, the computer firewalled that transmission and someone opened it up anyway. The computer has a
self-protecting system that keeps any threats out, stops them even before they reach us, so this should have—but no that’s impossible, is there something wrong with the computer
or—” and in those seconds of contemplation the opening theme of
2001: A Space Odyssey
boomed in Jeremy’s head. Lena was lost around the time Jeremy said firewall. After
that, for her Jeremy had just started mumbling on and on and now he was in some sort of daze. This guy’s really weird, she thought.

“Hey, what does that mean?” she said, pointing to one of the quarantined files that had an X on it. Lena leaned in to look at it and Jeremy started to feel
uncomfortable. Her skin was touching his and there was another struggle between his two heads to stay focused. This time he won out.

“Accessed. Wait that means someone on this ship accessed the file! Someone let it in.” He kept typing, brought out the reasons for the quarantine. “It says
here that there were slight subliminal messages laced into the program. Just some minor things, nothing that should do this much damage. I’m going to put some of the scanned images onscreen
for us to see the nature of the program.”

On the monitor were shown some of the Calendar girls, which got Jeremy up again. He did his best not to show that he was in pain so that Lena wouldn’t notice. One shot
showed Joey de Leon grabbing a girl’s ass. Another showed the hosts ridiculing contestants. They switched scenes to a song and dance performance where the good-looking singers were perfectly
out of tune. They switched again to segments with the Sili King and the Ulo King. First, the Sili King chomped down as many chili peppers he could in a minute. At the end of the segment he was
crying. Then it was the Ulo King’s turn. An industrial electric fan was brought out and turned on to show the audience that it was in good working condition. Then its cover was screwed off
and the Ulo King stepped up. He waited until the fan reached full speed, then he stuck his head in to stop the fan from spinning.

Then a scene from the
Laban o Bawi
segment where they were tempting the contestant with money while showing her the possible cash prize she could get. There was a row
of stands, and on each stand was mounted a placard with the number zero. But on each end, which was supposed to signify the first and last number of the possible amount, there were red cards
covering the number. It meant that, depending on which stand held the number one, she could win either one million pesos, or one peso. The hosts tried to tempt her, taunted her by pulling the red
cards up in small increments, then abruptly letting the cards go so that they would fall back down to their original spot. They did this over and over, prolonging the woman’s waiting until
the she was almost in tears, confused by everything. And all the while, dancing behind her were the Sexbomb dancers. One of the hosts fanned her with the money they were offering her to
Bawi
, but still she chose
Laban.
And when they pulled up the red cards it showed she had won one peso. She began crying and then the shot went back to the dancers.

Jeremy and Lena were shocked. They’d never been exposed to anything like this. The scientists of the first generation had made sure the ship was stocked with the finest
art and literature and cinema and music and anything else that could enlighten those who would be born on the ship about the great cultural achievements of Earth. They even allowed a lot of pop
art, which was one reason you could find Sandler and Schneider on the same row as Spielberg. But they’d never been exposed to anything like this, and they didn’t know how to approach
it.

Of course let anyone today see this stuff and it’s nothing. Especially when you’ve seen
Jackass,
or better yet
Jackass: The Movie
. But
they’d never seen
Jackass.
And seeing this, they could only come to one conclusion:

“Oh my God, it’s some kind of torture show! Horror show that they use to entertain people,” Lena said.

“I’ve got it. In the morning, when my brother and sister came home, no one was affected by the subliminal messages. It was only when your class went that all this
started happening. It’s because their telepathic powers weren’t developed yet. But with you guys, it’s like you amplified the message with your minds which got the whole ship like
this.”

“So let’s just turn it off. Turn it off like you did when we were in here, when you got me free of it.”

“I can’t. The person who accessed it has higher authority than me. Even if I hacked it, that person could just turn it back on. We’ve got to get to the main
server. If we get there, I can delete the whole program and all the copies of it.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

“But I can barely walk.”

***

Jeremy knew some short cuts in the ship, through ventilation and maintenance shafts and service corridors, and that got them through most of the way. It was really tough for
him though. Slow going because if he was in front, he’d be crawling along gingerly until Lena would get impatient and start telling him to hurry up. Or they’d switch and Lena would be
in front of him with her butt shimmying, and he couldn’t help but pop a boner. Still, they made it through. Down to the last hallway that led to the computer’s main server. They were in
a shaft that would drop them into the middle of the hallway.