My own asteroid!

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. No one can and that’s the best part. You can scream to your heart desire, and no one will hear you. You can fart, and burp and swear and shout, and no one will hear you. I wasn’t going into space, obviously, that would be just dumb. I wanted to be a hermit, not dead.

New New Mars was just basically a dead planet anyway. The first two Mars had been long deserted expect for bacteria and robots left to clean up the debris. New New Mars was becoming that way. Of course, I had only known New New Mars and no other planet. I had been born through a machine that was long now considered outdated in the form of baby production. In fact, my birthplace had long been shut down for being a safety hazard.

Life itself has been boring. You wake up at 25 :00 hours and work in the Einsteinium and Hawkinium mines. You then I injected yourself with your food and slept.

Once I though I had spotted an old New New Mars treasure. It looked to be a unicorn. I drilled through the walls to try and reach it, careful to not hurt my treasure. It turned out it was just a bag of Americanum placed weirdly. I was later told by my supervisor that the species originated on Old Old earth and was called a northern white rhino and how they had been bravely brought back from extinction. That was probably the highlight of my career.

However, I had technically died three times, in three different accidents. but the para-necro-medics had been able to revive me every time. I was not going to have this luxury again, I told myself. I could be the victim of a crime, or a Natural or Unnatural disaster and no one will hear the distress signal before it too late. I could be attacked by a milky way whale on my lone stationary asteroid and die. This time for good.

But then I thought to myself, isn’t this what you have always wanted? To be free and careless and without any society? I did. I saved enough money for an asteroid and went through the usual psycho-memory sessions.

The psycho-memory sessions had been fruitless, but they determined that I wasn’t suffering from anything that would make me want to reject society. I had a normal childhood from infancy to my teenage years raised by my assigned parents as an only child. They even checked me for old earth diseases or Old Old Earth diseases like psychosis or depression, which went extinct in the 22nd century along with the final cases of bubonic plague. I looked back at my memories of going to New New Mars Disneyland and the ruins of Intermediate Atlantis found in the canyons of my planet. I could never afford to visit another planet. And here I was, getting off on my own private asteroid.

“Respected Sir, Madam, and non-binary entities, please remain seated and hold on tight as we leave New New Mars. Do not stand up, as this may result in injury” started the voice over on my rickety old spaceship as it started firing up and getting ready to blast off.

“This is it” I thought to myself. I looked down on the surface of the planet where I was born, where my parents were now fossilized and where my whole 100 years had been. A century wherein I spend time doing a monotonous job and didn’t really like most other entities , regardless of their species. I still had another 70 I reminded myself.

I looked tenderly on the horizon towards the long trip in which I could get off to board another spaceship that will take me to my deserted asteroid.