Station Six


 
 
 
 S.J. Klapecki
 STATION
 SIX
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 About
 With the Black Dawn series we honor anarchist traditions and follow the great Octavia E. Butler’s legacy, Black Dawn seeks to explore themes that do not reinforce dependency on oppressive forces (the state, police, capitalism, elected officials) and will generally express the values of antiracism, feminism, anticolonialism, and anticapitalism. With its natural creation of alternate universes and world-building, speculative fiction acts as a perfect tool for imagining how to bring forth a just and free world. The stories published here center queerness, Blackness, antifascism, and celebrate voices previously disenfranchised, all who are essential in establishing a society in which no one is oppressed or exploited. Welcome, friends, to Black Dawn!
 To Joan; thank you
 
 
 STATION SIX
 
 
 Chapter One
 Some sixty-million miles away from Earth, Max was hungry, nearly broke and standing in line for an ill-advised Everything Burrito. “Everything,” of course, still meant there was no meat; only off-brown, tasteless soy protein. But that was the price they paid for not being wealthy enough to go to the proper restaurants. They were still tabulating the money in their head, how they had three days left until payday but needed to eat before work and just didn’t have the damn time to make breakfast that morning. Their mind broke their current balance, plus payday, up into portions for rent, bills, HRT, food, and that meager sum just shrank further.
 “That’ll be seven twenty-three,” mumbled the employee through his exhaustion. Poor man didn’t even have the time to cock his hat right. Max extended their hand, the corp-mandated pay-pad on the heartline of their palm passing under the laser reader. The machine beeped a merry tune, and Max turned around without saying thanks, hurrying off to work.
 A twinge of guilt pulled at them as they considered their bank account shrinking: the debt they had to pay to LMC; the rent they had to pay to Kallihan Housing; a dozen more tiny costs and infractions and hits to whatever they made. In theory, there was a saving’s account—one they hadn’t checked outside an automated email cheerily informing them that at the current rate, they’d have “enough to retire by 2856! Only 723 years left!”
 Fucking joke.
 And overhead, as they moved through the food court, was the station owner. Not in person, of course. On the massive screens that flanked each side of the food court there was a blond man with chiseled features, a butt chin and so much product in his hair it looked like a congealed mass of platinum dye in the light. Mr. Ashe, CEO of LMC and personal overseer of this Station Six, was speaking his pre-recorded announcements.
 “Hello, my LMC family.” Max wished they hadn’t broken their earbuds—what they would give for some chance to let electrodrone albums drown out his words. But they supposed the world hadn’t been fair thus far and wouldn’t start now. “I am pleased to report that because of our hard work, preparations for the future have been going along quite well. The Automated Future Plan is in full swing—all thanks to you. New vistas to explore are opening. New worlds are being made. And you all are vital to that. Remember: LMC leads the future. The future that we all build together. Any concerns about your coming employment opportunities may be directed to the relevant offices.”
 Max concealed their rage. If they had just an ounce less restraint, an iota less fear, they would throw the burrito at the screen and start ranting. They couldn’t, of course. That’d get them arrested, searched, security would get involved. It would be a whole mess. They bit their tongue as they walked.
 Seven weeks ago, automation had been announced. Seven weeks ago, Max felt the floor of the world fall out from under them. The entire station was going to be converted, made into a resort and vacation destination with exactly as few human personnel as it needed to stay functional. Every damn worker was going to be given a new “employment opportunity” elsewhere. Hearing that, reading the words, seeing over and over again the jobs available, struck Max like a harpoon to the heart. Mars. Io. Europa. The Asteroid Fields.
 The writing was on the wall. If automation went through, LMC would just send them deeper into the solar system, trap them in another contract, another binding set of legal chains. Everything they had built here, such as it was, would be uprooted again. They had been displaced once, when they signed up for this station. They remembered the recruiter’s office clearly. Sterile, clean, eggshell colored and logo filled. The kind smile of the cute recruiter and the scratch of a stylus against a screen. A five-year contract to work on Station Six, followed by a trip back to Earth, provided they could pay off the cost of the trip—monthly installments, of course. It sounded good, what with all their other prospects dissolving after they gave up on college.
 Those debts, starting with the cost of a roundtrip and compounded by rent and utilities and more, had done nothing but grow. Not through any fault of their own. Paid eight bucks an hour, they ended up splitting that up best they could, but between food, rent and utilities, it was never enough to fully cover the basics. Every month there was something that had to be shifted, an offer from the company to mercifully take on whatever Max couldn’t pay for and add it to that mountain. With interest, of course.
 It was a long, long way to work, and they were already pretty late. Or would be. Slept all of ten minutes too late and now they had to cross the football-field-sized expanse of the food hall, after going through the elevators that lead from the apartment’s low floors all the way to the connecting point. Moving sidewalks ferried people back