I always remember my mother, sitting by the window in our little coffin of an apartment; a claustrophobic place of unendurable pastel colors, plastic walls, and a cheap, pink carpet floor that always looked raunchy despite my mother’s cleaning attempts. She would be smoking a cigarette – the illegal kind that she got in exchange for pirate copies of sensory videos - and she would sit there, on the carpet, with her arm resting on the windowsill and her legs crossed, telling me all about how it used to be on Earth, while behind her thousands of lights shone back from the Megablock-factories, evidencing thousands, tens of thousands of us – The Hive- working on the millions of parts that keep the post-Terrestrial world working.
[SYSTEMS ON LINE– TACTICAL DEPLOYMENT PROGRAM INITIATING]
“It was paradise”, she would say, “you could pick wealth out of the trees with your bare hands, and oxygen was free”. Every afternoon, on the windowsill, while I studied my flowcharts for the School Robot War Tournaments, she would repeat how wonderful Earth had been. The prize was a portable music player, which I coveted obsessively to escape the repetitive speeches that entered my consciousness like the proverbial Chinese torture water drop. “Thousands of miles of green vegetation, pure air, and clean water; fields for running and playing Fukbol” –or at least that’s what she called it- “and wonderful animals to watch.”
[LAUNCHER CHARGED – SAFETIES OFF]
[COORDINATES CONFIRMED – LANDING AREA CLEAR]
But that was a long time ago, in her delirium to escape her sixteen-hour long workday at the factory, my mother would remember old chapters of Terrestrial videos about the way it used to be, just before we caved and hid away from our own sins in space colonies and planetary bases. Of my mother’s memories, only “Fukbol” and School Robot Wars kept me from ending up as just another light bulb maker, working sixteen-hour days in a Megablock-factory.
[MEKA IN POSITION – LAUNCHER ALIGNED]
[CLEAR ORBITAL LAUNCHING ZONE]
Blood is a fascinating thing. In zero-gravity it surprisingly comes together and coagulates. I always try to think about this after a battle because it reminds me that, in the end, we are fighting among brothers. Sometimes I get very profound in the middle of a battle, and my superiors are always on my case for sending koans during battle, but I have illuminated more than one fellow soldier with those in times of need. On all those occasions, Earth has been a beautiful background against which our nations “negotiate”, but never a place, the ground, the sky, gravity, or inertia.
[LAUNCHER CHARGED – LAUNCHING IN 5]
I believe it was my destiny. Either that or I sought this without thinking about it. In any case, it is time to search for the paradise that my mother always spoke of. Sitting in this 5-ton death machine, I try to imagine what down there is so important to warrant the creation of an operations base in an environment so inhospitable and devoid of economical interest –believe me, we have tried- that three of our most prominent pilots (with good reason or, in my case, for bad reasons) are required to leave the frontier conflict and reassigned to…
[4, 3, 2, 1…]
…nothing?
[LAUNCH]
[SYSTEMS ON LINE– TACTICAL DEPLOYMENT PROGRAM INITIATING]
“It was paradise”, she would say, “you could pick wealth out of the trees with your bare hands, and oxygen was free”. Every afternoon, on the windowsill, while I studied my flowcharts for the School Robot War Tournaments, she would repeat how wonderful Earth had been. The prize was a portable music player, which I coveted obsessively to escape the repetitive speeches that entered my consciousness like the proverbial Chinese torture water drop. “Thousands of miles of green vegetation, pure air, and clean water; fields for running and playing Fukbol” –or at least that’s what she called it- “and wonderful animals to watch.”
[LAUNCHER CHARGED – SAFETIES OFF]
[COORDINATES CONFIRMED – LANDING AREA CLEAR]
But that was a long time ago, in her delirium to escape her sixteen-hour long workday at the factory, my mother would remember old chapters of Terrestrial videos about the way it used to be, just before we caved and hid away from our own sins in space colonies and planetary bases. Of my mother’s memories, only “Fukbol” and School Robot Wars kept me from ending up as just another light bulb maker, working sixteen-hour days in a Megablock-factory.
[MEKA IN POSITION – LAUNCHER ALIGNED]
[CLEAR ORBITAL LAUNCHING ZONE]
Blood is a fascinating thing. In zero-gravity it surprisingly comes together and coagulates. I always try to think about this after a battle because it reminds me that, in the end, we are fighting among brothers. Sometimes I get very profound in the middle of a battle, and my superiors are always on my case for sending koans during battle, but I have illuminated more than one fellow soldier with those in times of need. On all those occasions, Earth has been a beautiful background against which our nations “negotiate”, but never a place, the ground, the sky, gravity, or inertia.
[LAUNCHER CHARGED – LAUNCHING IN 5]
I believe it was my destiny. Either that or I sought this without thinking about it. In any case, it is time to search for the paradise that my mother always spoke of. Sitting in this 5-ton death machine, I try to imagine what down there is so important to warrant the creation of an operations base in an environment so inhospitable and devoid of economical interest –believe me, we have tried- that three of our most prominent pilots (with good reason or, in my case, for bad reasons) are required to leave the frontier conflict and reassigned to…
[4, 3, 2, 1…]
…nothing?
[LAUNCH]
