Aggressive Tan

Monarch turned on his beacon to attract a public pod while he watched the private pods skimming across the sky towards the city. He hated his name, part of the craze among new parents to give their children the names of whatever species had gone extinct that year, because it let people know exactly how old he was. He heard the hum of the pod long before he felt the downdraft. The private pods, of higher quality and better-maintained, were almost silent. He climbed aboard, programmed his destination in New San Francisco and secured the canopy. As the pod rose into the municipal flightpath with a gut-wrenching ascent, Monarch considered himself lucky to be in a pod that didn’t smell like it had been thrown up in yet. This was a lucky night. He was going to see his favorite neurocaster perform at The Synapse, a theater that was an exact replica of the Castro Theater that used to stand in the city before the Big Shift.

The descent of his pod was slowed down by private pods. His public pod was designed to give up its place in line when a private pod approached and Monarch seethed as he watched more than twenty of them, expensive Indian models, descend and park before he could. Of course, they were full of tanners. They thought they owned the fucking world and lived each day as if they would die tomorrow. Which wasn’t strictly true, but their lifespans were significantly shorter than groundlings like him. Monarch had never even been to the moon, let alone the mining camps in the Cloud Top Colonies of Venus.

He walked into the arena and found his seat near the back. These cheaper seats had speakers built into them that carried the sound that came directly from the neurocaster’s feed. The tanners were all seated in the front two rows and in private boxes behind the stage where they received signals directly into their own neural implants, stimulating their auditory and optic nerves directly. The groundlings had to depend on a humble hologram that seemed to float twenty feet above the stage for their visual input.

Monarch, and every other occupant of The Synapse, was simply glad to be there in any capacity as he watched Vesuvian, one of the most talented neurocasters in the solar system, take the stage and plug her brain into the console. The sound of waves crashing and the chattering of a hundred-thousand different species of animals filled the heads of groundlings and tanners alike as an image of the Earth, as the planet looked before The Big Shift, floated in the air spinning.

Vesuvian spun images of all that was erased by the Big Shift and man’s folly. She showed the aggressive tan suffered by the Venusian miners, close to the Sun like Icarus. Trading years of their life for the golden light of wealth. Monarch wept and never thought of the tanners in the same way again.