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
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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.