The Stomata was using defense drones against three fast-moving raiders. I could see the tiny robotic ships’ tracer fire. But the pirates were ignoring the drones and aiming their weapons at the barge. In the distance, two other mining craft blasted asteroids with drilling lasers as if nothing was going on. When you work in the business, yield is everything. Poppa never liked to stop mining, even when pirates were nearby.

I caught a glimpse at the console. “Damn,” I yelled, after seeing the afterburner had eaten through a good chunk of my capacitor reserves. If that pretty medic hadn’t riled me up, it all would have been fine.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“We’re short on energy, that’s what.”

“Well, you do have backups in this thing, right?”

“Not really. I got the cheapest modules you can get.” That wasn’t really the case, but not too far off from the truth. Did the best I could with poppa’s insurance money.

One of the raiders had scrambled after me. I fired four pulses. My laser had better range, so the Gurn had to veer away before he could fire.

“Yea!” Axium yelled. “Brilliant!”

“Are you enjoying yourself?” I asked him.

“It’s exhilarating. Go get that one,” he replied pointing.

That’s when Gurn projectiles slammed into us. My poppa used to say the Gurns hunted in a pack, like wolves. Now I knew what he meant. The raiders were playing with me. I looked down at the flickering panel and saw my shields were gone. The raiders’ weapons had fractured most of my starboard armor plating. Stuff’s too brittle for kinetics, see.

For a moment, that slimy smell of burned polymers and flashing warning lights blended together until I was back on my poppa’s barge. Then, I remembered I was jacked into the new nav system. It was nothing to locate the other Gurn that was bearing down on me. I wasn’t no kid this time. I could do something about these bloody pirates. This time, I told myself, I wasn’t helpless. I punched the afterburner and trained my weapon on the attacker.

With my long-range pulses and the enhancements, I thought I had the edge, see. My pulse laser scorched into the Gurn raider over and over again. Wouldn’t you know it though, just before I cut through his armor, my lasers stopped cold as the last drop of capacitor reserves went poof.

I found myself helpless, with no active hardeners, no weapons, and no way to scramble out of there. “Oh no,” I whispered, watching with my jacked eyes the other raider barreling up from behind. I reached over to Axium and patted his pretty hand. “We’d better get in the egg,” I said.

We found ourselves floating in space. There we were, protected only by a thin sheet of metal with a low-grade life support system. After finishing off my ship, the raiders raced towards the barges. I don’t know why they let us live. The bloody Gurns would have taken us prisoners if

they knew who was aboard. Axium would have fetched a nice ransom. I hit the tiny engine on the pod and headed towards the nearest station.

We never went on another date after that. Go figure?

Friends from tweets.

THE SEA OF KNOWLEDGE IS PALE and still, milky-white, and when people immerse I imagine impregnation taking place, the droplets of the ocean like semen, sliding inside them, drilling into each cell and making a new memory, a fresh little foetus of understanding.

All they’re actually doing is standing still, blinking, but I think that’s a lot less poetic than my version.

He says, “Taylor, it’s impossible to love you,” and he blinks. What is he searching for in his head? The best ways to dump your girlfriend? What’s the most passive-aggressive bullshit you can put on someone in one sentence? Or perhaps he’s tweeting this as he says it, with a hashtag to suit:

#breakuplines

He smiles. I think of the tweets he’s receiving from his many followers:

Seriously? Lmao

Would raise a smile from him? Split that famous face? I hope not. Maybe it’s simply that his eyeballs have dried out in the ferocious air-conditioning of the hotel lobby, and he needs to rearrange his expression.

“It’s because I don’t have one, isn’t it?” I ask him.

“No.”

“If I had one, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?”

“Yes, we would. Well, I might have emailed you instead, to be honest. You know how I hate public scenes.”

“I’m not making a scene!” I say. I consider throwing his coffee over him, but then the receptionist or the people sitting in the corner might blink twice and start recording this whole incident. Next thing I know, I’ll be on Youtube in a clip entitled:

JAKE QWERTY GETS COFFEED BY SILVER HAT GIRL

And a billion people will see it and smirk whenever I pass by.

“You’re paranoid,” Jake says. “You think everything is about you. But I have needs, too.”

I have needs, too-6,700,000 hits

LMFAO

“I hope you asphyxiate,” I tell him, keeping a pleasant expression. “I hope you drown in that scummy sea of semen you like to flail around in. I hope your eyelids drop off from overuse and your brain gets fried in an electrical storm. And I bet your art is utter shite, with extra fresh smelly shite on top. I bet you’re utterly talentless in every way that it is possible for a human being to be talentless.”

He stands up and dusts the crumbs of his skinny muffin from his light canvas trousers.

“I’ve got over five million followers who think otherwise.”

“They don’t think, though, do they? They follow.”

Jake blinks. Maybe he’s scrolling through a list of his disciples, trying to find one with a less than vacant expression. Or maybe I nearly made him cry. Whatever it is, it’s enough to spur

him to walk away, out of the hotel lobby, on to the street, moving fast, putting as much distance between us as he can.

I watch him go. I don’t follow.

***

I was first diagnosed with IEHS in my mid-twenties. It’s a rare condition, and some people still believe it’s an imaginary one. The headaches, nosebleeds, dizziness, stomach cramps, fatigue, and mood swings started in Secondary School, when the routine keyhole implant was fitted to my ocular nerve, along with every other eleven-year-old in the country. My symptoms corresponded perfectly with the onset of puberty, and so my GP told me I was one of those sickly teenagers, and my body would grow out of it. She was still insisting that when I turned twenty-one and was spending most days in bed, jobless, lethargic, depressed.