The Scale

Lora didn’t own a scale. She didn’t even own a full-length mirror. Not that she didn’t care about her appearance; she didn’t want to be seen as the type of person preoccupied with looks. Lora knew what she brought to the table, and it wasn’t her physical attributes. With a chin too square to complement her plump cheeks, and hazel eyes set a fraction too wide to be considered appealing, the sum of her features didn’t add up to striking or cute, much less beauty. She wasn’t skinny, but she wasn’t fat. Standing at a scant 5’4”, with short limbs and stubby fingers, Lora had never been interested in athletics, considering herself clearly unfit for them. The logical niche for someone with no beauty and no athleticism was academics, but Lora didn’t have the patience for endless book learning or the effort required to assimilate complex subjects. Besides, becoming nerd simply because she was unattractive was too cliché to suit her tastes. No, Lora had one standout quality going for her. Call it determination or tenacity, it was the trait around which she’d fashioned her whole identity. Anyone acquainted with Lora Reinhardt knew that she was a person who always went after what she wanted – and got it.

“Cliff, order a scale,” Lora called out, kicking her shoes off at the front door.

She peeled off her jacket and hung it on a peg, absently tracing a circle around the planet of the embroidered Muscadine Transportation logo.

The limits of safe human travel currently didn’t stretch much beyond Mars, but since earth’s long-range scouting drones had detected a habitable planet in deep space, every transportation company in the solar system had become locked in a race to be the first to make colonizing Terra Profunda possible. The details of Muscadine’s Terra Profunda program were top secret, but that hadn’t deterred the flood of applicants aiming to become pioneers into the new frontier.

>><<>><<

“Celebration cookie?”

“Thanks, Gino.” Lora took a chocolate chip cookie from the proffered container. “Congratulations. If anyone deserves to be accepted into the Terra Profunda program, it’s you.”

“Thanks.” Her coworker beamed. “I’m just glad the evaluation is over. When’s yours?”

“Six weeks.”

“Wow, that’s a long time to keep you on tenterhooks.”

Lora shrugged. “With everyone who signed up, it’s bound to take a while to process the applicants.”

“Well, if they accepted people on attitude alone, you’d be a lock.” Gino pointed with mock-sternness. “Don’t let me down. I’m expecting you on the team with me.”

Lora saluted jestingly as a grinning Gino stuffed a sugar cookie into his mouth. A storm cloud wearing paten black heels passed near her desk.

“Would you like a cookie, Tia?” Lora pointed to the container.

“Fuck you,” the storm cloud answered. The angry click of her heels stopped short as Tia paused to sneer Lora up and down. “And if you want half a chance at seeing Terra Profunda, you’d better lay off those things.”

The terse patter of Tia’s shoes disappeared down a hallway, leaving Lora gaping.

“What the hell was that about?”

Gino answered in an undertone, “She just got rejected. Apparently, the technicians said she was too heavy. There must be some weight restrictions to the deep space technology they’re developing.”

Lora’s brows came together. Tia wasn’t that big. Maybe a little chunkier than Lora.

“I’m sure you have nothing to worry about.” Gino read her expression. “I mean it, you’re going to be on Terra Profunda with me.”

“You’d better believe I am,” Lora said, biting into her cookie.

>><<>><<

Lora had set Terra Profunda in her sights. She was determined to make her name synonymous with the likes of Amelia Earhart and Buzz Aldrin with her exploration of the new world. And if shedding a couple pounds would help secure her legacy, that’s what she would do.

“Cliff-”

“Please narrow down your description,” Cliff’s electronic voice responded.

“A scale,” she repeated to the digital assistant. “For weighing.”

“Kitchen scale, bathroom scale, or-”

“Bathroom.”

“Do you wish to measure BMI, BMR, bone mass, muscle mass, water, metabolic age-”

Lora blinked. She’d had no idea selecting a scale would be so complicated. It seemed they could measure anything nowadays.

“Just something that tells how much I weigh.”

Cliff searched the internet. After Lora twice recalled the digital assistant from its wanderings into the vintage and antique category, it finally found her a basic scale.

According to Cliff, the average weight for a woman of her height was between 108 and 158 pounds, the ideal average being 130. The wide range seemed completely arbitrary to Lora, but if that was the score, so be it.

Her new scale told her that she weighed 153.2 pounds.

After Cliff politely informed Lora she was on the wrong side of thirty to expect quick results, Lora decided she would lose five pounds in two weeks. Lora’s goal felt as arbitrary as her target, but it was set. The outcome was a foregone conclusion.

>><<>><<

The office pool was a box, filled with lines of gray tables stretched end-to-end, dotted with rolling desk chairs. Minimalist, like some twenty-first century person’s idea of what the next century might look like. The retro-future vibe was Muscadine Transportation’s attempt at providing its employees with a lighthearted atmosphere, but there was a reason open floor plans had gone extinct. Anytime an employee sneezed, a fog of disinfectant aerosol rose from handheld air scrubbers until the cloud threatened to accumulate into a chemical rain.

There was only one thing spread quicker than a cold virus under the flood of LED lights.

“Did you hear?”

At Frank’s loud whisper to Janice behind her, Lora jabbed her fork into her salad, more irritable than usual. Though she had eaten nothing but vegetables the entire week, the scale that morning revealed Lora had only lost a pound and a half. She crunched lettuce at her desk, halfheartedly doodling a list of alternate diet options. With five weeks left, at this pace she would reach 144.2 pounds by her scheduled assessment. Well within the average weight range. That was likely all that mattered. She could probably afford to add dressing to her salads.

“Someone else from our group got rejected,” Frank said.

Lora stopped mid-crunch. Mangling lettuce in her molars, she sat up in her chair and slowly drifted back.

“Who?” Janice hissed excitedly.

“Ming. She was too heavy, apparently.”

“Ming, too heavy? You’re out of your mind.”

Lora mentally scrolled through her memory for an image of Ming and her figure. A chronically anxious woman always wringing her hands popped into her mind. A vertiginous flash of panic hit Lora. Ming was a waif. Lora could trip and accidentally crush her.

Lora swatted her digital list aside and loaded a fresh document. Somehow, she needed to lose weight, a lot of weight, and fast.

>><<>><<

The slice of chocolate cake in the display case was staring at her. Lora glared back at it, waiting for the barista to blend her vitamin drink.

“No, Mom.” She adjusted the earpiece so the microphone could catch her response clearly. “I’m not coming over for dinner.”

It was a moist cake, rich and dark as healthy soil. Lora tried imagining it was made of dirt. It made the thought of eating dirt suddenly appetizing.

“Well, if everyone else is there, you won’t miss me.”

You deserve me, the cake seemed to whisper. What’s the harm in a little indulgence? No one ever need know.

“I told you, Mom, I can’t. I’m on a diet.”

Lora hung up on her mother with a terse “I love you” as the barista set her vitamin drink on the counter.

“Would you like a slice of cake?” the girl asked.

Lora’s head shot up with an offended glare. “What? No.”

“I’m sorry,” the barista apologized meekly, “you were just staring so intently.”

“Mind your own business.”

Lora swiped to send payment. She snatched her drink and her gym bag and stalked to the elevators. Ignoring the available cab someone held open for her, she shoved through the stairwell door and began her daily trot upward.

Cliff had recommended cardio for weight loss.

One week remained before Lora’s assessment for the Terra Profunda program. In the past month she had tried three different diet plans. In the past seven days, she had ingested nothing but vitamin beverages.

Lora’s scale this morning had read 131.0 pounds. She figured she could reach 125 by the end of the week.

Never missing an opportunity for more cardio, Lora sat down at her desk chair and immediately began swiveling back and forth. She never stopped moving nowadays. She had all but stopped sleeping, since her body seemed incapable of lying still anymore.

Lora’s new full-length mirror reflected a lithe figure, and her plump cheeks had sunken to better suit her chin. She should have felt lighter, but Lora felt loaded down the past few weeks, like she’d gained fifty pounds instead losing twenty-two.

A slice of chocolate decadence suddenly filled her vision.

“What-?” Lora’s swiveling halted.

“Emily was accepted for Terra Profunda.” Gino grinned. “She bought cake for everyone.”

Emily. Lora knew Emily. Emily was fat.

“Would you like a slice? It’s from the coffee shop downstairs.”

The chocolate cake seemed to smirk at her in a smug echo of Gino’s clueless expression. As the saccharine scent of cocoa and sugar rose to her nostrils, she salivated. Lora’s stomach grumbled in complaint of the spit it received instead of cake.

Take me, the cake seduced. If Emily can get in, surely you have nothing to worry about. What goal can satisfy you like I can?

Lora dragged her gaze from the plate and lifted it to Gino’s face.

“Fuck off,” she snapped.

>><<>><<

The morning of her evaluation, Lora’s scale measured her at 124.8 pounds. Lora wished she could revel in the success of meeting her goal, but suddenly the numbers, which had seemed so critical the past six weeks, felt as arbitrary as they had when she’d begun. A terrible anxiety filled her. It would surely be enough. It had to be.

The first thing Lora did upon entering her assessment was look for a scale. To her surprise, she couldn’t find one. A technician with a Muscadine logo embroidered on his lab coat approached her carrying a smooth silver helmet with a glowing blue tail.

“Welcome, Lora,” he said. “My name is Vikram Singh. I will be administering your evaluation today. Please, have a seat and put this on.”

The technician handed her the silver helmet. Feeling silly and self-conscious, Lora put on the headgear on and fussed with it until Vikram said it was fine. He consulted a handheld device, and began asking her questions. His inquisition seemed more conversational than probing, but if it was meant to put Lora at ease, it failed. As the pointless chatter stretched on, Lora’s answers grew terse and resentful. Get to it already, jackass, she thought as Vikram rambled.

After twenty-eight minutes, “I’m sorry,” the technician told Lora. “You’re not going to Terra Profunda.”

Vikram removed the helmet. Lora’s head swam.

“What? Why-” The chair must have been a scale, she realized. “I’m too heavy.”

“Yes, you are. I’m surprised you know the term.”

“Everyone does,” Lora said bitterly.

Vikram’s brows knit together in confusion.

“What? Oh, no, you misunderstand. Our engineers can now preserve human flesh on journeys into deep space, but the human mind doesn’t survive the method. Muscadine developed a technology that separates the body and its consciousness, then stores the mind as data.

“Every mind takes up an incredible amount space. It’s strange, but each human consciousness varies greatly in its data richness. While some minds are weightless enough to fit on relatively few drives, most consciousnesses we evaluate are too what we call ‘heavy’ for our present storage capacity. We can’t seem to figure out why.”