THE LAST HECKLE BARGE

I spent my youngest years on a Heckle Barge, one of the last few that remained in the ITZ. It was filled with the most desperate of the desperate, the most lost of the lost. Families that had been without a homeworld for seven generations. Old men that had never seen a real sky. Children that were too tired to tease one another about their cybernetic implants. To walk the cold, innermost halls of the barge was like touring a morgue. But the truly haunting citizens of the Heckle Barge were the ones who had come from real worlds. Young men, women, and zams whose sky had been taken from them by overpopulation, or hatred, or mistakes. Unlike the generational residents, they knew what they were missing.

The Heckle Society, established hundreds of years ago, did everything it could to make the barges hospitable. There was natural gravity, and areas of lush vegetation, and copious simlight that was even healthier than starlight. The best medical technology in the Zone counteracted all the physical harms of barge life. Virtual reality programs that were banned in L1-L3 worlds were permitted on the barge to distract from the uneasiness of floating. But nothing could make the residents forget that they were there because there was nowhere else for them to go. Nowhere where they would be truly accepted, except for this Heckle Barge, one of the last few that remained in the ITZ.

I lived on this Heckle Barge while my father and the rest of the Council of Light terraformed the homeworld now known as Antaria. It was the largest planet ever terraformed, a Jupiterian-sized rock with more than enough space for the last few Heckle Barges to unburden their loads and allow the sents to spread out. Of course, space was never the issue — there was enough uninhabited space on the 27 existing planets of the ITZ to accommodate trillions of sents — but it wouldn’t be their space. It might be the single defining trait of the human species, our need to own something, and the cycles we burn to define what ownership means. Why is a slice of a newly terraformed planet acceptable, when a patch of land on a 500-year old planet isn’t? You could come up with a dozen reasons. Alledge lack of resources. Claim divine right. Bring up past injustices. It all means the same thing — it just doesn’t feel right. It wouldn’t be human, to simply accept what someone else hands you. It has to be earned, or bought, or fought for, because that means someone else wants it. And that means you’re not alone in this universe.

Though I lived on the Heckle Barge, I was not bound to it like the rest of the inhabitants. I visited three Galaxia before the age of 12. I was tutored by some of the greatest minds in the ITZ, my father included. He had other sons and daughters, but none that he led like me. I witnessed first hand how he crafted a world for the last few Heckle Barges, as he had crafted a dozen worlds before. I watched him turn the vacuous voids of the ITZ into a home for all sentiency, one that would last us until we no longer needed a home at all.

I can remember the day he arrived to celebrate my seventh birthday, only two days after I had actually turned seven. My mother would say, ‘he was present for your birth, and he knows you will live a very very long time, so what does it matter that he misses a birthday or two?’ He’d missed them all, apart from the first, but I knew he had good reason to.

My mother took me shopping to buy a new outfit for my father’s visit. Small bursts of air fanned my face as my mother flipped through partitions of muted pants, each posed as though they were being worn by an invisible child exactly my size. The colors were drab, such was the fashion on the Barge. Occasionally a new group of people would arrive on the Barge, and spark a trend of more brightly colored fabrics in a quadrant, but eventually even the trendsetters themselves would slip into loose-fitting grays and browns, and the spark would fade.

“I think I saw some deep fuschia pantaloons in here yesterday, I wonder where that model might be,” my mother said, ever lit by her own flame.

“Why were you in here yesterday, did you buy me something else?” I asked excitedly.

“No no, dear, I was helping Mem. Jarviston buy some clothes for her son. He’s lost more weight unfortunately and she just can’t bring herself to pick out anything new for him…” she trailed off, a familiar look descending on her weathered face. My mother’s bright hazel eyes and round pink lips beamed vitality, but decades of barge life had sucked the youth from her skin, leaving her with many small wrinkles around her eyes, and deep lines around her mouth. ‘Smile lines’, she called them.

“You mean Kurt Jarviston? He’s been watching school from his pod all week. Is he sick?”

“His house you mean,” my mother corrected me. “I hate this new lingo you kids have come up with, it makes it sound like we’re all living on a workship. And no, he’s not sick, he just needed a little pick me up in the form of some new pants!”

Sick was a word that had a special meaning on Heckle Barges. The communities were so tightly contained and curated, there were no viruses or bacteria to cause the sicknesses that occurred on real planets. Enpathogenic diseases like cancers were as rare as they were on any L1 world. When someone ‘got sick’ on a Heckle Barge, there was only one sickness that was being referred to. The Waste.

There’s a medical explanation for the Waste involving neurotransmitter physiology, but a better way to describe it was giving up. It was a depression that acted like a virus, sometimes lasting for days, sometimes for months. It was every bit as contagious as a virus, often jumping from one family member to the next. It could be fatal, if the sufferer had opted out of neural agonist treatment while they were healthy.

It may come as a surprise, but healthy people often opted out of medical intervention on the Barge, and so the Waste was a terrible, real threat. It was one of the only ways a person could die on the Barge, other than old age, and thus the right to do so was a strongly held prize. A way out for those that had no other escape. Some prayed for it to come. Once word got out that someone was sick, some would even flock to the sufferer in an attempt to catch the Waste.

I didn’t know it then, but my mother knew the Jarviston’s were sick, and that they had elected not to receive neural agonists nearly a year prior. As my mother was not a medical bot, but a mere human, she could therefore provide them with care without violating the Bargian laws. Often she was able to save the sufferers. But Kurt Jarviston, his mothers, and his two sisters were all dead before my next birthday.

My father and the rest of The Council of Light, they know humanity. They know what is best for humanity. If the most dejected members of our species needed a place to really live, then the Council would build them one. They would pull the energy from the stars, and bend the elements to their will. For humanity. For the poorest of humanity.

My mother is humanity. She was born and raised on our Heckle Barge, and dedicated her life to helping the people on it. She hones in on a single person, envelops them in her warmth, solves their every problem. She continues to do it today, on the now bountiful Antaria, years away from where I now live. Some children might feel abandoned by a mother like mine, but I know it’s because there are others, the poorest of humanity, that need her so much more than I do.

It was on my eighth birthday that my father finally cured the Waste and delivered the poorest of the Heckle Barge from their suffering. I thought I could not be any happier when he appeared that morning to help me cut the birthday cake, but that moment was surpassed only hours later when I helped him launch the terraformation of Antaria.

I was sitting on the floor of my father’s office in the Heckle Barge, playing with chrome mini-mag bricks, when Amican Stone appeared at the door.

“Aldus, we have the power supply ready,” said Amican, my father’s colleague and famed member of the Council of Light.

My father turned off the privacy screen that had been shielding his work, and his face. ….. [CONTINUE READING]