Batey Ascending

Years ago, the Earth was devastated. I was part of the quick-witted group of humans, who chose to get out while we could and left everything behind. Not that I was leaving much in the first place. A broken home with a runaway sister, a mom too poor to help and a dad too drunk to care. I thought I’d have it all in the sky, so I escaped when I could.

The Unknown Blues came out of nowhere on a mammoth space craft the size of the 48 continental states. They held position over Earth for a couple weeks while they sorted out their communications and sent down an envoy for a peaceful mission. And it’s a good thing they came in peace. According to the news reports, these things were astronomical in size.

The White House meeting had to be done by crane. Their speaker came down and through the Washington Monument, which was some kind of hand rest for its big, scaly tube-like arm. It had two heads with shattered hole looking eyes leading into a long darkness. Not at all friendly looking, like an off-brand Jell-O dinosaur looking monster, but they were smart.

We all knew it was coming, even if we never did anything about it. The planet was under threat of destruction. Not from them. They were here to observe it and called it a geographic anomaly. They said planets this volatile usually never have much life to get in the way, but after trips across the centuries to scout it out they realized they couldn’t just sit back while the molten mantle of the planet erupted without saving a couple of us “interesting” humans first.

I still remember the confusion. How straightforward it was for me to just go up with them, and how tough everyone else took the news. Fighting broke out. Wars were declared. It was a pandemonium in the supermarket, all shelves were dematerialized almost instantly since no lines were required. Everyone that stuck around dug in and waited for the worst. The rest of us? Nuts to that idea. We wanted to live.

And part of living meant giving things up. I went from one slum to another. They took everyone that wanted to come, no matter where from, no matter why. Some people were leaving Earth for nefarious reasons, others were just desperate like me. Rich and poor, race, status, none of it mattered. It was a yes or no vote and you’d get beamed up when the time came. A piece of cake when you have no idea what waits for you, right?

We gave up Earth, but we didn’t leave it behind. Earth was in us, and all that. Home is where your heart is. There were speeches like that pretty much every day that I can remember when I was still arriving, political propaganda to keep our spirits up. After so long you just get used to hearing it and it loses meaning, so people started to forget what it was supposed to be about.

The spaceship was huge. It had its own atmosphere. It was an entire country that could fly through space and kept itself in orbit of the Earth on some axial angular magnetic - on the side, sun on one side and far enough away not to get in the way of the Moon’s orbit. They already kind of messed up the tides when they showed up. I’m not hip to a lot of the science, but it was a raw deal.

That’s part of why they helped us in the first place. Aside from the environmental Armageddon they wanted to watch - they’re tourists, of all the things they could be - they seemed to respect our attraction to culture. Music, sports, entertainment, all the things we wasted our time with and spent too much money on. These super-intelligence species from outer space wanted us because we were entertaining. To live on an ever-ticking bomb of a planet on the brink of destruction or to take a leap of faith for a better future with these extra-terrestrials. Who’d say no to that?

The immigration process was surprisingly standard. We all got immunized to most communicable diseases. The U.B.s even took aside some real sick people trying to escape their medical debts and developed cures almost overnight for whatever ailed them. Instant remission, AIDS was gone forever, and they sent their results down to the people on Earth as well. And even then, they got hated for it, because they were aliens. Some people never change and I’m glad they’re not here.

But there was a problem, one they did their best to prepare for, but even a cosmic intelligence might underestimate just how many people are willing to take this kind of chance. Housing is small, for everyone. There’s no wealth or anything, it’s all need based. So, everyone’s got the same kind of struggles, but they still find new ways to make it special to themselves.

I went from one slum to another, but this slum was city sized. Tons of people in cramped, towering buildings. Everything was some kind of asteroid metal that absorbed sound. Everyone had their own little world inside their rooms that they never had to leave. It was just like the future some people expected out of Earth, but it came at us way too fast.

Transport? Free and fast. Food? Synthetic but identical. Entertainment? That was the kicker. It was the one thing the Blues didn’t have for us. The first long stretch of time on board the Gibraltar was almost painful to get through. It put a lot of people in perspective of how much they relied on entertainment just to pass their time and give them meaning.

And our solution, as humans do, was to make it all up again. Start over and make it better. And the thing was, we had all this new technology to learn and work with. The U.B.s were more than happy - with “happy” being a kind of grey area with their weird faces - to let us tinker around with their tech. Certain human geniuses went on the rise to create and develop new gadgets and tools, and with money and time no longer a contributing factor in the invention process, we got ourselves into an entertainment renaissance.

We all found a new purpose, and so did I. A high-flying, technologically aided sport called Batey.

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