The day finally came when I gave up and decided to suicide. Not that I hadn’t considered offing myself before, but heck, I’m an optimist, or at least I’ve always tried to be—as foolish as that can sound even to me. 

What is it to be an optimist, anyway? In the face of the ugly realities of this life, I guess it’s the ability to come up with something, anything that might convince you that the day to day deadening drone is just the veneer of the world. That maybe, just maybe, being alive can have meaning beyond the Corp’s bottom line.

I know; that’s stupid. 

Do your job, they tell you, get it right, and the rewards will be yours. What rewards? Better food? Longer rec time? More access to VR escape? And if you’re very lucky and last long enough, when this asteroid is played out, you might—just might—get a chance to be relocated to one of the in-system planets they’re terraforming with all this stuff we’re mining. 

Didn’t sound worth it to me. Not when I knew I was and would always be an empty shell, alone within myself.

Even so, I tried really hard to believe there might be something more. So I told myself tales to try to fill the hollowness, like my childhood memory of my spacer. 

It was back on Earth, when I was pretty young, probably no more than five years old. My mom’s hand slipped from mine, and I was swallowed up by the pathway crowd. All I could see were lots of legs pushing me here and there and everywhere, so I couldn’t get back to the safety of mom’s hand. I should have been terrified, but it turned out to be my first real adventure, all by myself. 

That’s when I met her, an honest to goodness spacer, who rescued me and told me about the stars. I’d never seen stars or bare sky or anything outside the warren of buildings that was my entire world. 

My space hero had a metal hand, a lopsided beat-up face and a faraway look in her eyes, like all she could see were the stars that were hidden to everyone else on Earth. She lifted me high onto her shoulders so I could see over the crowds that swarmed around me, far above all those legs and feet pushing me around. And while she carried me to the nearest safestop, she told me stories about her stars. Yeah, I liked that, and I never stopped thinking about her, but I never learned her name or anything else about her. 

Mom didn’t believe me, that I’d met an authentic spacer. But that didn’t matter, because I knew she was real, and I could hold that memory inside me.

So that’s what I mean. Being an optimist is like finding a treasure invisible to everyone else—like my space hero, like her stars—hidden because the world is so crowded with big, ugly things, and life keeps kicking you around. An optimist can find that treasure when everyone else has given up—even when it seems impossible that anything like it could exist. 

I never saw anyone like my spacer again. Not on old crowded Earth where the food riots and water bounties pitted even mothers and daughters against each other—well, at least my mom and me. And not on Zoras 7734 where our tunnels in the seismic ground are more the maw of a coffin than living space.

I’d been on 7734 for about three years cognitive, give or take a Zoras month. Long enough to rate a private room, even though it meant giving back a slew of credits every month. That morning when the lights came on for my shift, I couldn’t drag myself out of bed. I lay there on that hard shelf, in the itchy sack that they give us for bedsheets, and I couldn’t move. My arms, legs, and torso felt like separate, disconnected lead weights, as though 7734 were three times Earth gravity, rather than 0.67 EG. My head was swathed in the fog of lights that were too bright, dull walls that were too grey, and yet another drab day that wouldn’t be any different from the hundreds before it and the many thousands to come. 

I was already late. Jim Thomas, my supe, was sure to dock me a bunch of credits and give me an extra bit of shitty code revision that would tangle up my day—unless the bastard was feeling particularly “friendly.” But I was in no mood for his shenanigans. Hell, the Corp already owned my body; what right did Thomas have to consider it one of his job perks?

So I lay there in my bedsack, not wanting to move, knowing that every second I delayed the worse it would be when I logged in late for my shift. And that’s when it finally got through my thick noggin: mom had probably been right all along. There are no hidden treasures, nothing beyond the struggle to stay alive for one more day, then another, then another. Why bother? 

The only answer was to drag myself out of bed, get dressed, and, instead of slumping off to work, grab the lift up to the surface and go for a long walk. 

I’d heard it isn’t such a bad death. A stroll under the stars until my air supply dwindles and my body starts shutting down. It’d be like falling asleep, but with no more nightmares and the promise of never again having to get up. 

Sounded good to me. 

When I first got to 7734, I’d save my credits to fill a couple of air tanks, and I would go up to the surface every off-shift I could. I’d gaze at the swirling stars, so bright against the black sky, and I’d make up stories about constellations that hadn’t been named yet. After all, I figured, somebody had to do it. Right? Like those ancient Greeks or Egyptians or whoever it was who first used the stars to navigate the human heart. So I’d figured we need those kinds of stories now, to become our myths, our guides to the future.

My first constellation—and I guess my favorite—was a group of 10 stars that I called My Space Hero, because I thought they looked like a woman pointing to some faraway unknown. The Wanderer’s Eyes were two unusually bright stars surrounded by faint glimmers. Baby’s Breath was a shimmering nebula. I found so many stories in the sky swirling around me; all I had to do was listen carefully. 

I hadn’t gone up to the surface for...oh, I don’t know how long. Initially, I told myself it was just good to know it’s up there, and that I could see such wondrous sights any time I wanted. But that wasn’t it. I no longer knew why I’d want to gaze at the stars or create myths or whatever it was I thought I was doing up there. Besides, I was always too tired after my shift to do anything but eat, sometimes have a quick screw and then sleep. Sleep got to be the best part of the day—if I didn’t dream.

So I decided that morning I’d go back up to the surface and see my stars one last time. A stroll until I slept forever under my private constellations whose names would die with me. 

 I reached into the cubbyhole under my bed and grabbed the first clothes my hand touched. Not that there was much to choose from. All the same regulation gear: tough sensible underwear, faded blue shirts and pants. Mine varied only in the patterns of stains or wear.

As luck would have it, the top shirt was one that used to belong to Jonesy’s old live-in before he croaked. I didn’t remember his name or what he looked like, but he was a real loser. Still, Jonesy liked him for a while. The night he didn’t come back inside, she bawled her head off, right there in the rec hall, not caring who saw her. Then she got over him, and a new guy moved in with her. She put out the dead man’s stuff at last week’s swap meet, and I traded a stupid old food transport bottle I’d carved up for his shirt. Didn’t know if she really wanted the trade. My guess was she was just tired of seeing me dressed in stains and rips.

Anyway, I put on that shirt for the first time that morning. That’s when I found it, when it knocked against my left breast with a sharp thump. An honest-to-goodness photo in a genuine Earth-grown wood frame, about the size of my palm. 

The picture was of a woman. I guessed she was about my age, in her thirties; something about her made me feel that it was an honest picture, no rejuve or retouch. Just her, for real. Her head filled the frame so I couldn’t see any hints about where she was or when. And it was a flat picture, not a holo, like hobby antique buffs make. I fooled around with a guy like that in school for a couple of weeks. He once showed me a print he’d made from an old-fashioned computer he’d cobbled together from junk parts, the way they used to be built centuries ago. This was that kind of flat print.

Can you believe it? This dead guy brought something like that in his pack. Geez, when I’d weighed in at the spaceport on Earth, I had to toss my hairbrush to come within regulation mass for liftoff. So what did Jonesy’s dead guy throw away at the spaceport when it was either that or this picture? And set in real wood, too, to protect it, I guess. That wood must’ve cost him more credits than I’ve ever had to spend.

The woman in the wood frame smiled at me, and somehow it made me feel the way I did when I was a kid and my spacer lifted me high above the crushing crowd. Not that she looked anything like my spacer. This woman had a smooth, unscarred face and thick, dark, unruly curls. But it was her eyes; they held me, as though she could see me clear across the years and space that separated us. No one except my spacer had ever looked at me like that. I mean really looked right at me, into me. Not mom, not any of my so-called lovers and certainly no one here on 7734. We’re all taught young to let our eyes slide over people, to avert our gaze rather than encroach. But my spacer, and now the smiling woman in this picture—they looked, they saw me.

I put the picture back into the skirt pocket where it belonged and headed for the nearest air lock. She’d be good company for my walk.

All that energy that had surged through my nerves now balled up into a tight nail-gouging fist. I punched and kicked those damned controls, each blow reverberating in my bones. 

That lousy piercing disembodied voice screeched, “1,300 credits for vandalism. Cease at once and report to your supervisor.”

One last futile kick, that had little heart in it, generated a parting, “875 additional credits charged to your account for vandalism. Report immediately to your supervisor.” I peeled off the suit, left it on the ground where it crumpled at my feet, and clumped away.

Now, to look at me, you wouldn’t believe I had no luck with men. I mean, I’m not bad looking, right? At 39, I’ve still got curves in the right places. Sure, I’ve lost lots of weight; mass loss is unavoidable out here. But my breasts still perk up instead of fall. The lesser gravity’s got to help with that. My face might not be pretty by Earth standards, with eyes that are too big, too brown, and too sure. I never learned to flutter my eyelashes and talk softly like the popular girls back home. But heck, I’m one of the more attractive ones here. Or so the guys told me when they were putting the move on me.

It didn’t help that the scums out here were real losers. Sure, I tried a few, but only for a tumble, not for a live-in. What I didn’t get was no one here wanted to move in with me. They talked a good tale until we had our sex. Then they moved on. 

Maybe that was my fault. I never knew that dead guy was anything but a loser. But looking at my smiler, I realized he must have had something. I’d hold the picture and wish I could remember his face, so I could understand what I’d missed when I had looked at him.

I needed to know about that guy, and the only person I could ask was Jonesy.

I’d known Jonesy since the spaceport. We’d arrived on 7734 in the same shipment, and we were thrown together a lot during our orientation. We even bunked in the same dorm for a while, and sometimes we’d chat. About nothing. Just the kind of noise you share when you’re tired of talking to yourself, and the person in front of you is a familiar sort. I suppose you’d say she was my friend, as much as you could be friends with anyone on 7734. The Corp found ways to keep us too busy for anything like a real friendship. Still, I guess I’d have stuck my neck out for Jonesy, if she needed me to. And, yeah, I suppose I knew she might’ve done the same for me, if I really, really needed it. But that would’ve meant I’d have had to ask her, and I had a hard time asking anyone for anything.

Mostly trees and meadows, with blue skies, but also a house with a face looking out through a window at birds flying on the ceiling. That face was my smiler, the woman in the photo. But the birds were wild, fantastical creatures, like I’d never imagined, except maybe in dreams. I’d forgotten that so many colors could exist, could really be seen by the human eye, certainly not in my gray life. 

“Al did it,” she said without me asking. “He used almost-dry surplus pigments from maintenance with other stuff he got in trade. He even blended in leftover food and other trash to make the colors.”

She pointed at the ceiling where she’d hung my carved bottle from the luminant panel. When she touched the bottle to make it swing, the dancing light made the flowers seem to move as though there was a breeze, and I could swear that a couple of the birds flapped their wings. Geez! Did I create that?

She gestured for me to sit on a chair that was covered with patched-together pieces of old clothing, so it looked much more comfortable than its hard frame was ever meant to be. When I sat down, I realized that under the cloth it was just like my regulation chair. All the wrong angles for a human body, designed instead to come apart easily and stack neatly. Still, it felt good to sit on it and know someone had found a way to make it different, make it her own.

Jonesy sat on her oversized bed; I guess her series of live-ins had helped with extra credits to pay for it. She reached for a sack, pulled pieces of different materials from it, and began to sew them together, while she talked to me.

“Smith, I was as dead inside as they tell us we are when I met Al, dead as you were before you got that picture. But you’re not anymore, are you?”

I stared at her. I didn’t know how to answer.

“Because we let them.” Jonesy stared at me, almost as though it were a dare or maybe a promise. “But we want now.”

“What? What do you want?” I asked.

Suddenly, several people were talking back and forth, the way I never saw any group chatter, not since coming to 7734. So many voices that I could hear only snippets coming from all directions.

“How can we know what we want, if we’ve never had it?”

“Like Watkins not knowing to go look at the stars.”

“Or wanting to hear Smith’s stories.”

“Or make my own… stories and stars.”

“You know the Corp isn’t going to like this,” one guy warned, and it turned everything on its head, tearing our cocoon apart, letting in cold reality. “We’re gonna be branded troublemakers if we don’t watch out.”

“Why? For telling stories, sewing, carving? That’s stupid.”

“For talking, dreaming, thinking for ourselves.”

“People have disappeared for less.”

Jonesy shuddered when she heard that last one. I knew what she was thinking, because I was thinking the same thing… Al. If he didn’t suicide, what did happen? 

One by one the same folks who were so animated and happy to be chattering together slunk away. Their eyes down, no longer looking at each other, their shoulders hunched. I didn’t blame them, I felt the same way. 

For a few moments, I had thought maybe, just maybe we could get out from under the Corp’s fist, be something more than meat ’bots. But naw, I realized, that would never happen.

Jonesy and I gathered our stuff and shuffled back toward our room. Watkins caught up with us. Without a word, he handed me the plex portrait, then took off. Darn if he didn’t have a bounce in his step.