ASMSG Scifi Fantasy Paranormal Emagazine April 2015 | Page 36

ANGEL 6.0 Travis Luedke Dancing in Zero G dance at lights-out his test results would be the same every morning. Doctor D’Anton Pascal doesn’t like to lose arguments, although it’s been happening more frequently. I had appealed to Carver, the Liaison to the Gran. Carver struts around like he owns the whole station. At first he agreed with D’Anton that “I shouldn’t be flying all up and down the hub like a maniac.” After I showed him what I’d learned to do with my tongue, he agreed I should have a little freedom to dance when I wanted. After a year of dancing without incident, D’Anton stopped complaining. Dancing in zero G is like virgin sex – scary, exhilarating, nauseating, awkward, yet liberating. I only danced during lights-out when the white coats are sleeping. They don’t like to be reminded of how different I am, and I don’t want them reminded. Ear buds turned all the way up, I moved with the flow of my music. Fast, I spun, twirled and leapt off the crossbeams. Slow, I glided into the gradual sensation of gravity at the outer edge of the station’s central hub. The edges of the two hundred meter hub cylinder had a mild one quarter G. Zero G is only at the exact center of the hub, absent the seventy kilometer-per-hour centripetal spin of the station. Only in the center am I truly free, nothing to hold me back. D’Anton has tried to stop me from dancing several times in the last two years. He complains that people were not meant for zero G. But I’m not like other people. He says it affects his readings on my biorhythms and blood chemistry. I say that if I always 36 | P a g e My music hit a grungy bass and I dived through the centripetal gravity well and flipped between the girders and cross beams, faster, harder and faster still. The hollow plastisteel thrummed with my impacts as my hands and feet slapped in time like a drum. I launched off the last beam into dead-center zero G, and let my momentum carry me to the gravity well on the other side. The trick was compensating for the opposite direction spin. I’d been doing it so long it was second nature, but not at first. I never told anyone about the time I broke my arm on a crossbeam. Nothing major – I was back in form by the next evening at lights-out. All my attention focused on my music, and the wondrous euphoria of flying free as a bird, I didn’t immediately notice my audience. It wasn’t until I smelled their musky animal scents that I saw them watching me from the catwalk below. The Gran. They weren’t due for three more days – must have arrived early. By the time I saw the three Cats led by Carver, they were already pointing at me, halfway across the catwalk, thudding along in their magboots. I floated through the air and touched down on the other side of the hub. I turned off my music to better hear them as the tallest Cat gestured to me a second time and yipped a question to Carver. D’Anton would be furious they had seen me. I dropped straight down the access hallway and let gravity take me into a full slide away from the hub.