Young Writers Society

For obvious reasons, Crane and Shell encouraged me to download terabyte upon terabyte of earthling media. Shortly after the Pax, it was mostly movies. Either Crane or Shell would tuck me under the magnetically locked blankets and do their best to curl up around me, twin tails dancing in the blue light from my tablet. Then it was homeschooling material, which I filled out during the mind-numbing weeks spent stuck in empty space, because I had little else to do, and Crane made sure that I stayed bored enough to want to learn my times tables. Then I started downloading news.

Crane and Shell cared little for earthling politics and news, partly because they did not need to care, and partly because they did not understand earthlings. I asked many times why gato could not understand earthlings when I seemed to understand both species so easily. Crane would always flick his tails and sneeze and make an excuse about needing to be elsewhere, like running space-time calculations or turning off the oven. Shell would turn a somersault—whether we were in zero-g or not—and shrug, saying that maybe I would be the mastermind who figured that out someday.

My wife tells me now that gato culture became ultra-homogeneous after the specifus tech introduction, and therefore the planet rarely sees the belief-clashing that has plagued earthlings for millennia. Then she points out that I was raised as though belief-clashing wasn’t a thing, despite always reading up on earthling problems, and thus understood both sides of the exchange.

I told Crane and Shell about the attack on Mars about a week after the event actually happened. The Ink sat in a tiny hole-in-the-wall docking bay in the Un terminal, looking cramped and huge, despite its actual dinkiness, and the three of us lounged about underneath the ship’s belly, waiting for the fold to open to the Avia system. My tablet lay on the ground between us, too hot to touch because of all the downloads.

“Tell us about Earth,” said Shell, shifting one paw to rest over the other. “What’s happened since we were last at a fold terminal?” Shell admitted once that he never really cared about Earth, but asked in order to make sure I would research my own home planet.

Tentative, I reached out and tapped the tablet screen. It was still warm, but the processor could handle a little search. In a few moments, I had a topic ready. “The main colony on Mars was bombed by Titan extremists last week,” I recited. “Since then, both UN and US spacecraft have engaged with the Titan forces in small skirmishes throughout the system. I think they want independence.”

“Who is ‘they?’” asked Crane, an admonishing growl in his voice.

“The Titan people.”

Shell turned to coo at his mate. “I think the antecedent there was obvious. And do stop with the grammar lessons. His English is as good as anything we make him listen to.”

As always, Crane pretended at being irritable. He rolled over so his back faced me and Shell, but his ears still swiveled our way.

“Tell us some more,” Shell prompted.

“I guess everyone is worried that Earth will be next?” I shrugged and looked down at the tablet screen, skimming for interesting tidbits. “There’s some stuff about this situation mirroring the American Revolution. That’s from the BBC. But all the American outlets are calling the Titan people terrorists.”

I read until Crane pulled down the boarding plank and Shell nudged me up into my room, and then kept reading. Though at the time, I would have said I just felt like reading a lot that day, I admit now to feeling a kind of morbid compulsion. I was curious about the people who had killed my parents. Not angry. It was as though I needed permission in order to hate, because I hardly remembered the Pax, and Crane and Shell never spoke of my parents except to mention little, neutral details.

You know Earth was never hit. A month later, as I sat against Shell’s side in a temporary roosting room on Avia, I scrolled through week-old news sent through the terminals, bored out of my skull. Crane was out stalking a target; his black fur made it easier for him to hide in Avia’s dark foliage.

Avia is hot beyond measure. Shell had cranked up the air conditioning in the room and settled into a tub of water, head heavy and lethargic, and I sat in front of a fan, wishing I could lie down and still feel the air passing over me. The red light of the system’s sun made everything look intimidating, even the windows.

“Titan extremists were intercepted sort of close to Earth’s moon,” I reported, letting the words roll off my tongue, slow and lazy.

Shell groaned.

“Apparently they were headed for DC, but their trajectory was bad and they might have fired a missile on some place in the Philippines, had the UN ships not stopped them.”

“That’s nice.”

When we stopped at a funny-looking, run-down pit stop in the Triune system, I tagged along behind Crane as he went to purchase an atmospheric reset, mumbling over the news I had picked up at the fold terminal and trying to get him to sound interested.

“The Titan rebels hit Europa today, did you know? And some people say they’re planning to hit every US base in the outer solar system within the week. Wouldn’t that be crazy? How would they do that?”

Crane told me that he didn’t know, and swished his tails along the ground in a gesture that I knew meant he was annoyed.

The next month, I was calling the Titan people pirates, and then independence fighters, and then terrorists, after they hit a passenger ship heading towards the fold terminal. Later I learned that the ship also had weapons in its cargo hold, ready to be shipped to the new UN flagship and attached to the UNGS Geneva, and the opinion article I read on the shipment hailed the Titan fighters as brilliant underdog tacticians.

I changed alliances again.

-A Life Unfolded: the Story of Tejal Sethi