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“Good evening, sir,” Dave says pleasantly, hiding his crossword puzzle under his computer keyboard, as the front door chimes. “Do you have a reservation?” “Afraid not.” The guest fiddles with his suitcase. “I saw the No Vacancy sign, but I gotta ask—” “No problem at all.” Dave’s keyboard clatters busily, a series of well-practiced keystrokes.
Alvin’s scripts arrived in yellow envelopes. They were hand delivered, placed inside his letter box as if part of the regular mail, but with no address or stamps on it. The scripts were typed on unlined paper. They were short, never longer than a page, never more than a scene. The scene would be set inside a shop, or a bar.
Once a decade, a titanium-nosed shuttle plows through the rings of the planet Tartarus with a new batch of prisoners destined for the Orpheus Factory. The debris that makes up the rings is so thick that it thunders like a hailstorm, deafening the passengers. As the orbiting debris bounces and scrapes against the hull, the prisoners squeeze their eyes closed
Ever since I was little, I wanted to be the bomb. Not a bomb. The. It wasn’t enough for my smile to light up every room, to be loved by my family, my friends. The day I was born, two planes crashed into New York City, killing thousands. The adults tried to hide it.
The two of us, myself and this man I did not know, sat at a table in a windowless white cell with an indefinite light source. I was afraid, as afraid as a human being can be. I remembered every step that had brought me here and I did not consider this a place of safety.
We lost because we fought. In the beginning, everyone thought it was irresistible, the violence. No research had been done yet; no autopsies undergone. The news about these strangers from the stars didn’t even break nationally.
“Is there a problem, officer?” “We’re not the police.” My partner, Enrico, places his palm against the door, ready to test the old man’s resolve. I tap my finger against my thumb and SNAPbeam the warrant to the old man’s synaptic cache. “We’re EPF.”
How did we end up here? The humans before me had the same physiological traits as I did, yet still we had no means of communicating with one another. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Words and phrases spilled from their mouths, a torrent of sounds bleeding into one another, syllables pouring out in a drum roll, unending and uninterrupted.
I was sorry even before I got caught. The first inkling that we were not going to get away with it came when we were messing with the AI art generator app. You know, the kind where you put some words in and out comes a trippy image. I typed in: Gothic lemon pie running away from the sun. I was expecting something yellow with an errant eyeball.
Warning! This review contains spoilers. To answer the question on everybody’s mind: No, controversial filmmaker Manuela Riviera’s new documentary The Reunion of the Survivors of Sigrún 7 doesn’t reveal what happened during the forty-five days the spaceship went missing on its way to Mars or how mission commander Ruben Corto died.
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