The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

take the bus. She had to call a car. She fiddled with the cell phone.

‘Will you give me your number?’ Elías asked. ‘I don’t want to keep using this Friendrr thing to find you.’

‘I should tell you to make me an offer,’ she replied.

He looked at her, offended, but then his gaze softened. She feared perhaps he might bark an amount after all. The thought that he might take her seriously, or that she had said it in anything but mockery, made Amelia reach for her purse. She found a stray piece of paper and scribbled the number.

‘Bye,’ she told him and headed downstairs.

MARS, SCENE 2

INT. MARS BASE – NIGHT

SPACE EXPLORER sits next to the bed where THE HERO lies. He is injured. His ship crashed near her father’s lab. He dragged himself from the wreckage. She cleans and bandages his wounds. SPACE EXPLORER is not truly a space explorer. The script has been rewritten and she is now ROMANTIC INTEREST, but for the sake of expediency, we will continue to call her SPACE EXPLORER. THE HERO shall remain THE HERO.

SPACE EXPLORER tenderly speaks to THE HERO. This is love at first sight, for both of them. THE HERO tells SPACE EXPLORER how he’s come to warn and protect the outpost from a marauding band of SPACE PIRATES. But SPACE EXPLORER’s father thinks something else may be afoot. He is a dedicated scientist working on a top secret project and fears THE HERO may be a spy from an evil nation sent to steal his work.

Despite only knowing THE HERO for five minutes, SPACE EXPLORER defends the stranger. Later, during an interlude inside the ‘futuristic’ outpost, which is a building shaped like an egg, THE HERO kisses SPACE EXPLORER.

Cue swelling music with plenty of violins. Fade to modest black.

5

The Zócalo was being transformed into a cheesy winter wonderland, complete with an ice-skating rink. The city’s mayor trotted the rink out each year to please the crowds: free skating, fake snow falling from the sky, a giant Coca-Cola-sponsored tree in the background. It wasn’t bread-and-circuses anymore. Now it was icicles and festive music.

This spectacle meant a lot of people wanting to make a buck were ready for action. Teenagers in ratty ‘snowman’ costumes offering to pose for a photo, peddlers selling soda pop to people waiting in line, and thieves eager to steal purses.

Pili was also downtown. Like anyone their age, Pili had no permanent job, cycling between gigs. Working at the marijuana grow-op, checking ATMs in small businesses to make sure no one was skimming them, selling spare computer parts. Christmas season this year found her servicing the machines at a virtual reality arcade.

‘They’re probably going to shut them down in a few months,’ Pili said. ‘All that talk about virtual reality dissociation.’

‘Is that a real thing?’ Amelia asked.

‘Fuck if I know. But the mayor needs to score points with the old farts, and if he can’t combat prostitution and crime, this is the next best thing. Virtual reality addiction.’

‘It seems like it would be a lot of trouble to shut everyone down. There’s a lot of arcades.’

‘It’ll just go underground. Fuck it. It’s slow today, ain’t it? We should have gone to the Sanborns.’

They were eating at the Bhagavad, which wasn’t a restaurant proper but a weird joint run by a bunch of deluded eco-activists, open only at odd and irregular hours. You paid what you wanted and sat next to walls plastered with flyers warning people against the dangers of vat-meat. Amelia didn’t care about veganism, Indian spirituality, or the fight against capitalist oppressors, but she did care about spending as little as possible on her meals. Not that there weren’t affordable tacos near the subway, but like everyone joked, long gone were the days when they were at least made with dog. Nowadays, rat was the most likely source of protein. She did not fancy swallowing bubonic plague wrapped in a tortilla.

Unfortunately, the bohemian candor and community spirit of Bhagavad meant the service was terrible. They had spent half an hour waiting for the rice dish of the day, which would inevitably taste like shit watered in piss, but must have some kind of nutritional content, since it kept many a sorry ass like Amelia going.

‘Do you have to be back by a certain time?’ Amelia asked.

‘Kind of.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s okay. I’ll grab a protein shake if it gets too late,’ Pili said, dismissing any issues with a wave of her hand.

Pili was always cool. Nothing ever seemed to faze her, whether it was the cops suddenly appearing and chasing away street vendors while she was trying to hawk computer parts, or the sight of a bloated, dead dog in the middle of the road blocking her path. Perhaps such self-confidence came from a secret, inner well, but Amelia suspected Pili’s tremendous height had something to do it. Pili was strong as well. She wore sleeveless shirts, which showed off her arms and her tattoos, and she smiled a lot.

‘All right. But if it gets too late, just say the word.’

‘Nah, don’t worry. Hey, you still need that money?’

‘No, I had a gig,’ Amelia said, thinking of the two times she’d seen Elías.

‘Friendrr, huh? Look, you can make a lot more at the blood clinic. The only requirement is that you have to be twenty-seven or younger, no diseases, no addicts.’

Amelia knew it was easy. That was what scared her. She was inching toward twenty-seven and after that, what could she sell? What could she do when she wasn’t even fit to be a blood bag? She didn’t want to get hooked on that kind of money, but there didn’t seem to be anything else beckoning her.

Giovanni Schiaparelli peered into his telescope and he thought he saw canals on Mars. Lowell imagined alien civilizations: ‘Framed in the blue of space, there floats before the observer’s gaze a seeming miniature of his own Earth, yet changed by translation to the sky.’

Mars, Amelia’s Mars. Always Mars, in every stolen and