Tripping

Episode Four.

“Oh, stop your complaining, Ted. You’re always so-ooo negative.” Shirl was excited. She repeatedly put on and took off her sunglasses while they were waiting to board the shuttle tube. The air here, at the launch site, was hazy from the dust being flung up as the shuttles rocketed skyward. Her glasses clarified the scene, and magnified the heavenly view of the Skyland Retreat. “So lovely, we’re going there!”

 Ted was a chubby, anxious podiatrist. He was more frightened than impressed of the spectacular transit station as well as their destination. He couldn’t help saying so. “Well, this is a bad idea. You know I don’t hold with all this futuristic mumbo jumbo. You don’t know what’s up there. And these capsules getting flung up into space, that doesn’t seem safe. Not at all.”

 But Shirl was hanging onto the arm of an elderly man behind in the line, gushing over the prospects. Ted glowered, looking pasty in the loud Hawaiian shirt his wife had laid out for him in the morning.  There was a wan woman looking back at him from further up the line. She appeared grief stricken. Ted scowled and slumped into a pose, glaring down at the dust that swirled around his new, white sneakers.

The line moved ahead slowly, but in a timely manner. People disappeared in ones and twos into the pneumatic tube shuttles and after a brief intermission whooshed up a hundred feet encased in a plastic tube, then over the top and into an arc, in their egg, riding on a string all the way to the Retreat. The egg capsules were small and quickly disappeared from view of the watcher’s un-enhanced eyes. Shirl looked up though, craning, and saw a glint jumping off one shuttle as it approached Skyland. “Ooh,” she exclaimed.

 Skyland was a hastily constructed mesh of Klantien and plastic beams. Domes, above and below, filled out the assembly, filled with forests and towering habitats. The shuttle capsules had but one windowed opening, and it spun slowly showing views, after erupting out the tube’s summit, of the retreating transit station – then the earth – up to the approach of Skyland Retreat. In procession the capsules climbed up the line and entered the center of the floating world. They hooked onto a rail and smoothly rode through the girded interior, and finally emerged into a brightly lit conversion dome.

“Welcome, welcome to the Skyland Retreat,” said a uniformed woman as she ushered the visitors from their seats. The passengers emerged gingerly from the eggs onto a white platform and onto a moving walkway. Then as their heads swiveled on their necks to take in the views, they traveled on the conveyor out of the welcome dome and into another.

 “Welcome, Welcome…” she said. Shirl took the woman’s hand and stepped out, sliding her sunglasses into her pocket. Ted followed, unconvinced. The woman put a hand on his shoulder, guiding him to the walkway. He thought he could hear a whirring coming from her. Her movements seemed uncanny, even mechanical.

 “Is there an exit around here, somewhere?” But the woman was already waiting for the next egg, and Ted rode away, straggling behind Shirl as she held her Flix aloft, filming the dome and scanning the surroundings.  

Aloft, in the sunside domes, the workings of Skyland remained a mystery to the lucky vacationers, as they rode through on the conveyor belt going from one spectacle to another. Ted scrunched into himself, examining the walkway and the structures and fauna as they moved along. A planting of cactus passed, and as Ted took a step back to get a better look, the belt hit a snag and lurched. They were just about to pass into a connector tube, and Ted hooked one of his sneakers behind the heel of the other, and he stumbled, and then fell off, tumbling into the dirt beside the conveyance. Shirl was too enthralled and didn’t miss the ever moaning Ted, as she rode into the next dome.

 “Welcome, welcome,” said the uniformed woman who looked more or less like the first welcoming woman. Shirl didn’t notice. Suddenly she was lost in a crowd of dozens of Earthers, all pointing and whispering. This dome was the biggest and buildings towered around the edges. In the center was a deep lake set inside a circle of white sand beach. The water was the bluest Shirl had ever seen, and it percolated in the center, sending gentle, rolling waves in concentric circles to lap at the beaches. “Welcome to heavenly Skyland Beach. Here you can relax and play, and the Skyland attendants will see to your every wish.”  Several welcoming women now pushed a bottle into the hands of the vacationers and guided them back onto the walkway, where they traveled around the beach and palm tree groves toward the high rise hotels. Occasionally a fork would appear, and a rider would shift to another track, while the rest traveled on.

 Finally Shirl found herself diverted and she wondered silently where Ted had gotten to. A low, beige hotel sprawled before her and Shirl took a sip from her bottle. The juice inside was thick and sweet, and she immediately took a longer swallow. Delicious! she thought. Ted would probably hate it, but Shirl wanted more. Another woman waited for her at the hotel, and Shirl stepped off where the track curled off, turning back toward the main walkway. “Welcome, welcome,” she said. “Welcome to your room. There are refreshments and everything you need is inside. Welcome to Casa la Playa.”

 The room was furnished much like any hotel suite she and Ted had been to with dressers and a bed and side tables. There was a glass desk and a minifridge. The bathroom was tucked behind a wall and Shirl peeked around to see the loo and a big walk in shower. Big enough for two, but when was Ted going to find his way? On the king sized bed was swimwear and towels. Shirl changed into a one piece suit and took a fruity drink onto the porch where there were two chairs and a pair of binoculars. She sipped at the bottle, which was good, but not like the first, better drink, and peered through the binoculars onto the crowded beach.

 A man and woman reclined under an umbrella on beach chairs, sipping their drinks. They were satisfied. They were listless. The first day they arrived, after slurping up their thick beverages, the couple walked in to the beach and played on the sand, then dove into the warm water, letting the waves wash over their bodies as they rolled together in the surf. Under the dome, they were young and energetic and happy. Five days in, they laid unmoving at the water’s edge, or in their beds, sated, with their bellies full and round. The two barely acknowledged each other, quaffing fruity drinks and moaning. “Oh look, there go Lucy and Renaldo.”

 Lucy and Renaldo were wrapping up their vacation. They had put on a few pounds and now wore bathrobes over tight fitting swimsuits. “Thank you for staying, come back again!” said a uniformed woman. They stepped onto the moving walkway outside their room that faced the beach. All the rooms faced the beach.

 “Well, that was nice,” said Renaldo. He laid a hand on his distended stomach and belched. “I don’t feel so good.”

 “You ate too much,” said Lucy. “You let me eat too much. You haven’t touched me for a week.”

 Renaldo huffed. “You just lay there and moan, and fart. Then you complain. It is past time we get back.”

 “Whatever.” The rolling walkway unexpectedly descended below the sand, and the couple dove into darkness. “The hell?” Lucy grasped Renaldo’s arm.

 In the dark they heard a skittering noise, and were lightly touched here and there about their bodies by cold, pokey things. The darkness transitioned to mere greyness, they still couldn’t see well, and shadowy shapes moved around them, touching and sometimes separating them. Dreamlike, they slumped and were enfolded into the welcoming grasp of Galactic Spiders. Lucy and Renaldo were now inconsequential.

 Inside, in the guts, small sugary grains had washed down the gullet and took a turn in the stomach, enduring the harsh acidy hell that heaved about. For a day the grains sunk and rose in the slurry of chunks and fluids that rained down from above. They expanded and shrunk dangerously, until they were flushed out into a contorted tunnel of slime. One by one the cooked grains attached themselves by hooked tentacles onto the channel walls, gripping tightly as the fetid slush pushed by.  Most couldn’t hold, and were expelled with a multitude of muck out a sphincter, eventually into a furnace that burned the waste into an ash that was released and floated on the winds across the face of the earth.

 But the persistent grains grew. They filled the tunnels and stopped up the guts, until finally the brittle hooks snapped and the stony grains, pocked like cratered meteors, descended methodically through the undulating river of flesh. The guts would quiver and shake, as the host organism wailed demonically, singing a song made for the devil’s ear.

 One at the time, the choir’s number would drop, as a thrashing body would still and the slime coated eggs dribbled out into a pan, to be collected by chitinous appendages.

 Between the surfaces, in a jungle of Klantien braces and high strength plastic netting, dwelled the colony of Galactic Spiders. They scurried through the underbelly web of their world, seeing neither the heavens nor the earth. And they were content. Unknown to the people of earth, the spiders made up ninety-nine percent of the overlord’s population. The immensely fat and segmented scorpion queens made up the remainder, and the face of their regime was handpicked humanoids, augmented to appear mostly earth-like, with pleasing faces and silky voices.

Episode 5