Out There

by Saundra Mitchell

Genres: YA LGBT & Pride; Anthologies

Synopsis

Into the queer new yonder!

To conclude the trio of anthologies that started with critically acclaimed All Out and Out Now, Out There features seventeen original short stories set in the future from fantastic queer YA authors.

Explore new and familiar worlds where the human consciousness can be uploaded into a body on Mars…an alien helps a girl decide if she should tell her best friend how she feels…two teens get stuck in a time loop at a space station…people are forced to travel to the past or the future to escape the dying planet…only a nonbinary person can translate the binary code of a machine that predicts the future…everyone in the world vanishes except for two teen girls who are in love.

This essential and beautifully written collection immerses and surprises with each turn of the page.

With original stories from:
U. Agoawike
K. Ancrum
Kalynn Bayron
Z Brewer
Mason Deaver
Alechia Dow
Z.R. Ellor
Leah Johnson
Naomi Kanakia
Claire Kann
Alex London
Jim McCarthy
Abdi Nazemian
Emma K. Ohland
Adam Sass
Mato J. Steger
Nita Tyndall

Release date: June 7, 2022

Publisher: Inkyard Press

Print pages: 304

Sample

DOUBLERSAlex London

I didn’t send my consciousness to be reborn on Mars because I thought you would fall in love with me again. I think you should know that. Whatever we do next, I want you to know that. I did a lot of things because I thought you would fall in love with me, but not this.

Remember in soccer, when I twisted my ankle slide-tackling you, even though I had no clue how to slide tackle? That wasn’t because of my deep commitment to my team’s defense. That was so that you’d notice me. So that our limbs could tangle as our bodies fell; so we’d taste the same cut grass in our mouths and our sweat might mix across our skin.

So, yeah. Joining the school soccer league? Totally about you falling for me and, literally, on me. Beaming my disembodied consciousness to another planet? That was something else.

---

I didn’t send my consciousness to be reborn on Mars because I thought you would fall in love with me again, but when I open my eyes in the regeneration room, there you are, sitting by the slab, and I think you’re holding my hand. My muscles are stiff, but I look down, and sure enough, that feeling in my hand is your hand holding it.

Except, of course, it is not your hand and it is not my hand, at least, not that I recognize them. They’re both bigger and there’s a silvery tint to the skin, undertones of copper and gold, with crackly lines running through like on old pottery. The feeling’s unfamiliar too, duller but also clearer, like my nerves work differently than they did on Earth.

You squeeze and the signal fires up my arm, through my shoulder and into my brain. I actually feel it happen and there is a moment where I know I can decide how to feel the squeeze. Is it affection? Does it hurt? Do I choose to feel it at all?

This is super strange.

“It’s super strange, right?” you say, your thoughts echoing mine. For a moment, I think holy shit, you’re psychic now? But I know that’s not how the process works; that’s just how we work. You always knew what I was thinking at the same time I knew. It’s why we were such a good couple...until we weren’t. “The rebuilt nervous system is slow to wake up,” you tell me. “And it’s designed to give you more control over it than you had on Earth. Helps manage some of what we have to do here. We’re all assigned pretty physical jobs.”

I remember something about this from the orientation video they made me watch before the Upload procedure. Our consciousness would be converted into data and broadcast on a tight beam to a server on Mars. There, it would then be downloaded into a body grown on Mars by our contract holder, to specifications for thriving in an environment that is hostile to human bodies.

The lungs work differently because of the atmosphere; the eyes, skin, and bones too. Everything that Earth biology spent millennia evolving had been redeveloped and repurposed for life on humanity’s new home. If indeed we are still humanity and not just, like, human-adjacent beings.

Sort of how our phones stopped really being phones eighty years ago, but we just kept calling them that. Most of them are rings or watches or implants now and nobody actually “calls” each other.

So yeah, I guess we’re still human. We’re just an expanded definition of it.

I realize now, this isn’t my own idea. It’s something you once told me, and it came from an essay you read for class. I never read a single one of the essays we were assigned. Probably why my grades were crap.

Though, if I’m being honest, my grades were crap because I spent more time staring at the back of your neck than I did listening to the lesson modules.

“What are you doing here?” I ask you, and my voice comes out weird. I suppose it’s the first time these vocal cords have been used. How long had this body been in storage before I was downloaded into it? How long ago had my signal been broadcast from Earth? Was I already dead down there?

---

I didn’t send my consciousness to be reborn on Mars because I thought you would fall in love with me again. I know that’s impossible after how we broke up, after the things you said to me and I said back, but when you see me walking through the vacant lot behind the southeast solar farm, I take a grim satisfaction in how you shoot up to your feet like you’re gonna run, then go network error still, like a game frozen midsequence.

“What are you doing here?” you ask me, your voice coming out strained.

And you thought I couldn’t surprise you anymore. I believe that’s one of the last things you said to me when we broke up, remember?

Nothing surprises me anymore, you told me. Not school, or work, or games, or even you. Everything’s like a tram on a track, moving along the same route, over and over and over. I need something new. Someone new. Maybe a lot of someones.

I remember that pretty clearly. You basically dumped me to sleep around, which, sure, I get it. We’re young and discovering all the different things our bodies can feel and make someone else feel and yeah, okay, I’m shy about that stuff, but our relationship was more than our bodies. It hurt me a lot more that you wanted to be with other people romantically, to 

have real relationships with people who weren’t me. I’d have liked it better if you just cheated on me in secret.

Except no, I wouldn’t have. I wanted you to still want me, but I also didn’t want to change.

I remember that you told me: “You’re too cynical.”

You were crying. That was rich. I was getting my heart broken, but you were the one crying.

“Sorry,” you said, wiping your eyes. “Lacrimae rerum.”

You always did that, dropped in quotes and sayings, and sometimes they weren’t even in English. People thought it made you deep and intellectual. I used to. I was so impressed by how impressed everyone else was. Dating you made me feel smarter, so being dumped by you felt like failing an exam.

I didn’t realize that remembering trivia is not a personality. At the time, it seemed like one, at least, one that was better than mine. I guess I was using how people saw you as a way to like myself more. Obviously, it didn’t work.

“It’s Latin,” you told me, though I hadn’t asked. “It’s from Virgil. A brokenhearted Aeneas tells the sad tale of the fall of Troy and weeps for the world and its suffering.”

“So I’m a city in ruins and you’re the noble survivor?” I scoffed. I had the urge to punch you. I admit it. I wanted to hit you but also to let you throw me down and ravage me like barbarians sacking an ancient city. Or was it the Greeks? I don’t know history. I just knew I wanted your hands on me, one more time, hard. Like with the slide tackle. Something about making you hurt me turned me on.

I probably need therapy. You always said I did. Of course, my mental health is no longer your problem. You don’t get to have an opinion or your hands on me anymore. Not in this life.

But you still weren’t done dumping me. Remember?

“Disliking things isn’t a personality,” you said, mirroring my own thoughts about you, though the mirror had a jagged edge. “I’m sad for you”

“I dislike things that suck,” I explained. “Ocean acidification. Water speculation. The Star Wars-Dickens Crossover Universe.”

“That’s what I mean!” you told me. “The SWDU isn’t even out yet and you’ve decided it sucks. I’m tired of it. I want to be excited about things. I want the thrill of potential. I need optimism in my life.”

“I’m optimistic about us,” I told you.

You snorted, like a laugh and snort at the same time. Is that a chortle? You chortled at me. “That’s one thing you shouldn’t be optimistic about,” you said. “We’re done.”

And then you walked away. You even left me with the bill for two teas and an untouched scone, even though your family is loaded and mine’s on public income. I used to think it was nice how you didn’t let your family’s money be a thing between us, but acting like it didn’t matter was actually bullshit. I understood I had to pay for the scone—I’d ordered before I 

realized what our conversation was going to be—but you didn’t need to make me buy your rosemary pepper tea. That was just cruel.

Also, who orders rosemary pepper tea?

Still, I shouldn’t have done what I did next, outing you to the marketing software like that. I apologize. The technology makes destroying each other too easy. I updated one little link on my profile, one little status change, and boom, suddenly all the ads that popped up in your life were gay, gay gay.

It was only a matter of hours before your grandma turned on the TV with you in the room and saw what the system was selling you. She knew that the marketing never made mistakes. She probably knew about you before then, but it’s one thing to suspect, and another to see it right there on the screen in half-naked rainbow-lit discount prices.

Obviously, I knew how she would feel about it. She was one of the last people on the planet who ate those chicken sandwiches. I’d been offended by the ads the algorithm showed her for as long as we were together. I guess it was time to return the favor, give her a taste of her own marketing.

Did you know I did it on purpose? Of course you did.

I’m curious, is that why you decided to do the Upload? Was it to get away from your family’s judgment, to find freedom someplace they couldn’t follow? Or did they push you to do it, thinking it’d be better if you had a new life on Mars, away from them? Away from me?

I ask, but to be honest, I don’t care about the answer. You made your choice. You dumped me; I hurt you; you signed up.

We were never supposed to see each other again.

Except here you are, standing stunned in the firelight below a bridge past the shantytown, looking as gorgeous as ever.

I admit, for a moment, I don’t want to hurt you. I want to take your hand gently in mine and run away with you, both of us on the road, always moving, from haven to haven, hiding out from the scanners and the hunters, and looking up at the night sky together, daydreaming about what the two of us might be up to on Mars.

But the moment passes.

“You know why I’m here,” I tell you, because that old trick still works. You know me as well as I know myself.

“You’re here to kill me,” you say.

I shake my head and remind you, “You’re already dead.”

---

I didn’t send my consciousness to be reborn on Mars because I thought you would fall in love with me again, but you help me sit up on the slab and find my footing in the lower gravity.

Our

new bodies have more mass, so we still stick down to the ground like on Earth, but it takes a bit to recalibrate the brain. We’re in no rush.

“Of all the gin joints...” you say, quoting a movie neither of us has actually seen, but I laugh, because you’re not really referencing an old movie; you’re referencing us, all the other times you said that to me. “It’s not a coincidence you’re here, huh?”

“No,” I tell you.

I look out the open window onto the rocky fields of Mars. The clouds are low, yellowy-pink and grey. They remind me of the sickly storm that was drifting in the day I went for the Upload.

My ears buzzed, I was so nervous. No one ever talked about the procedure hurting, but I still worried. I never liked needles and didn’t have any tattoos. I remember them warning me that yes, there would be some pain.

“Pain is a part of life,” they said. “We need to record your responses to it. Pleasure too.”

They showed me pictures of us together from public surveillance. They showed images that were real and deep fakes of us together, of you with other people, of me with other people. Of me as a child. Of my parents. Bits of movies I like. Bits of movies I hate. “The process is content-agnostic,” they explained. “We measure physiological response and synaptic connections. Your memories and emotions are the by-product of those reactions. We record and transmit the phenomena, not the by-product.”

Can you believe that? The technology to transfer human consciousness to bodies on Mars treats human consciousness as a by-product, like toxic sludge from a refinery. I’m shocked it works.

When my dads were teenagers, it took eight months to get to Mars from Earth. A massive amount of energy was burned just to get out of Earth’s orbit, and they had to haul everything they needed with them. Once on Mars, the people had to live and work in sealed pods and could only go outside in intense spacesuits that carried their own atmosphere inside them. A puncture in the suit could be fatal. A puncture in one of the habitats was catastrophic.

The Upload solved that problem by converting us into data and transmitting in minutes more settlers than they could’ve previously done in generations.

Those first settlers established labs to engineer the new bodies in, set up receiving stations, built a whole system of competing settlement corporations to download humanity’s settlers and put them to work on labor contracts.

Genetic engineered and biohacking made life on Mars possible. Contract capitalism made it thrive. Now there are open windows.

The view of the red dust mountains and gleaming new buildings makes me think of sci-fi novels I read in middle school. Humanity builds its daydreams, and we marvel when they become real, as if there was any other source for reality. At some point, all this was a fantasy. It was never my fantasy. Not until you.

“So it’s not a coincidence you’re here,” you say. “You signed a contract?”

“I did,” I tell you.

These better bodies have a cost.

Of course you chose one of the most expensive Upload services. Your new body is stunning and strange, and I suppose mine is too, now. You wouldn’t believe what I had to agree to in order to pay for this Upload. Then again, what I had to agree to was the whole point of doing it. I could’ve chosen any service. I chose the one you used.

I need your help crossing the room. You support me as you lead me to the supply locker like you once led me to the toilet at Safaa Nargasian’s party. Remember that?

I’d had one too many hits from two too many vape pens, and turned a seriously awful color. You know when you feel your face changing color and don’t need a mirror to tell? Shame does that, and so does puking. I had both about to burst out, and you took me by the arm and led me to the toilet, and rested your hand on my back while I hurled.

“It’s okay,” you told me. “Our bodies teach us what we need to know. They don’t want to hurt us.”

I loved that, the tenderness of it. Yes, it was a lie; our bodies hurt us all the time, but as far as lies go, it was a nice one.

So I gave up vaping because of you. That wasn’t the last thing you taught me about my body. Even right then, that night, you taught me more. You handed me a towel to wipe my face, gave me a little spritz of the mouthwash you always had on you, and then, after a far-too-brief interim since I puked, you kissed me. Even with the mouthwash, it was a bold choice. Once you decided on something, you did tend to go all the way with it.

Safaa’s bathroom was still decorated like when they were little and loved Disney. Characters from Fro10 and Toy Story 22 stared down at me when I went down on you. It was super awkward—I’d never done that before—and we both started laughing. We never actually finished the dirty deed (thankfully... I was still totally inexperienced and didn’t want you to know). We just laid on the floor and looked up at the characters and talked about Disney trivia until Safaa pounded on the door to make us go home.

Until the day I went for the Upload, people thought we’d had sex in Safaa’s bathroom. I never told them otherwise. I assume they still think it now.

I can’t believe I feel like myself, remember things that I remember. I’m me and you’re you, and we’re here. On Mars. But if I remember everything, then so do you. So I ask you now, “What are you doing here to meet me? It’s not a coincidence either.”

You laugh, a real one, not a chortle. “You gave me the push I needed to Upload,” you say. “And it’s the best choice I ever made. When I heard you were coming, I volunteered to greet you. They were going to send a stranger, but you deserve better than that.”

“No, I don’t,” I admit, surprised that I don’t feel my color changing. Do these bodies not blush or do I just not know how it feels when they do? Shame still exists here, I notice. It hitched a ride with me, a parasite of memory, and it’ll settle in the universe wherever people like me settle, people who keep secrets.

“We’re on a new world!” You grin as you guide me to the door. “Try to relax. Let’s leave our old baggage in the old orbits.”

I realize I can just do that. I can just let my shame go. I don’t have to feel it. I don’t have to feel anything. I can decide.

Yeah, these new brains are pretty cool.

It’s a fine line between forgiveness and amnesia. The cynic in me thinks you’ve crossed too far into forgetting instead of forgiving, but it’s starting to feel really nice to have your hands guiding me, even though they are not the hands I remember. Your voice isn’t even the voice you had on Earth, and yet it is undeniably yours. I take it as a good sign that we still know each other in our new forms, a sign that life here isn’t so much a break with the past, as a fork in it. All we had to do was say goodbye to our families, give up our bodies, and agree our lives on Earth were over.

Not everyone agrees so easily. Some people can’t let go, can’t achieve escape velocity from their old orbits. I’m counting on that, in fact.

“I’m still sorry for what happened with your family,” I tell you. “For what I did.”

“I owe you some tea,” you tell me, and just like that, we have our first date on Mars.

“You’re paying,” I reply, enjoying a real, genuine laugh with you.

“So, why did you come?” you ask. “You’d always been opposed to the Upload.”

I wish I didn’t have to lie to you on our very first date on a new world.

---

I didn’t send my consciousness to be reborn on Mars because I thought you would fall in love with me again, though I admit, I did do it to find you. It wasn’t that hard. There were only so many places a teenage fugitive could hide, and we’d been here before. I expected surprise and maybe some fear, but you regain your cool so quick it startles me.

“Come have a tea with me,” you suggest, like we’re on one of our dates. Always tea with you. I guess I can admit now that I don’t really like tea. It’s basically just thin soup people use an excuse for conversation. I only ever drank it to spend time with you.

“Sure,” I say. “We’ve got time.”

There are others around; they eye me suspiciously. Everyone has face tattoos, wild patterns of lines and waves, barcode and QR grids and nonsense squiggles. It’s all to trick the face-scanning software. Your face is unmarked, and you’re wearing a floppy hat that doesn’t suit you. I can’t help but notice the lean-to beside you—a tattoo pen rests on a steel barrel. In the shadow, someone grunts. They’re getting work done.

“It’s not my turn yet,” you say. “Anyway, it’s nice to see you.”

You sound glad I’m here, which throws me. You shouldn’t be glad, right? I shouldn’t have been able to find you. I shouldn’t even know you’re alive. If you’re upset, you don’t show it.

Back when we were together, I loved how you had this adaptability, like any crap that came your way was just an unplanned delight. You can twist your attitude like a blade. Are you

doing that now, turning that invisible blade just in case I’ve come with a real one?

I have, of course. I don’t go anywhere without a blade, and haven’t for a while.

Remember when we took that long walk by this solar farm and those three jackers rolled up on us with their home-print guns? I never had anything worth stealing, but they took your phone and made you unlock the password by putting a gun to my head. I’d been jumped before, so I knew they probably wouldn’t kill me, but you were so sincere in your worry, you didn’t just unlock your phone for them, you told them about the credit in each of your gaming apps, and when you saw one had a MageScroll Ultra tattoo, you told him about a great side-quest hack. By the end of the mugging, they gave you your phone back (after draining the accounts), and apologized for “the whole gun to the head thing.” You had that way with people. Disarming charm, literally.

“Be careful out here,” they told you. “Bad sorts around. Doublers and the like. They’ll kill pretty boys like you two for sport.”

They left you grinning.

“What?” I asked. “What are you smiling about?”

“They called my boyfriend pretty,” you said, wrapping your arm around me, pulling me to you. You smelled like dryer sheets and a little bit of sweat. Your breath had a tang of rosemary on it. You kissed my forehead and added, “I couldn’t agree more.”

I tended to stay the realist, and I suggested we get out of there, back to more populated areas. “I don’t think they were lying about the Doublers.”

“Of course they weren’t lying,” you said. “Why would they lie?”

“So let’s go!” I urged. I’d never seen a Doubler outside the news or the movies, and I didn’t care to.

“They can’t be all that bad,” you told me. “They’re just people. Aren’t you curious?”

“About Doublers?” I shook my head. “No.”

You looked disappointed in me, like my lack of curiosity was an attack on you. We’d just been mugged, and I still had the metallic adrenaline taste in the back of my mouth and wanted to sit in some air-conditioning and calm down, but I hated disappointing you. You never understood how your beauty combined with your endless optimism was a kind of an aggression. It made people want to please you, even against their own better judgment. At least, that’s what it did to me. It overrode my will, rewrote the code that ran my life. You were a hacker, without touching a screen.

“I mean, I’m more curious about how pretty you think I am,” I tried, hoping a little flirting would deflect the moment, but you were undeterred.

“Let’s go see,” you suggested, and started walking below the solar arrays, whistling some song, trying to make yourself conspicuous.

You assumed they’d come out and find you, right? You’d always been rich and smart and handsome, so you assumed people always wanted to meet you. You were the center of any room you entered, even when you weren’t. There was no world you could imagine where a bunch of Doublers hiding out in a solar field would not want to meet you.

After forty minutes, when no one showed themselves, you took me up on my offer to go back to the shopping center and make out in the tea shop. I could tell the whole time that you blamed me, like the Doublers didn’t reveal themselves because of my doubts. I felt like the kid who ruins Christmas by not believing in Santa Claus.

But the Doublers didn’t stay in hiding because of me. They stayed in hiding because they are criminals, and we were, at that point, still living citizens with a duty to report them.

You thought they were so romantic.

I thought they were idiots.

Doublers are legally non-people. Anyone who Uploads but avoids termination of their Earth body is a double consciousness fugitive. They’re marked for summary execution. The system doesn’t allow for two of the same person, one on Earth, one on Mars. The whole point is to ease the burden on Earth’s resources while populating Mars. Most Upload centers eliminate the Earth body the moment the data upload is complete, but it’s a privatized system; there are always flaws. Mistakes, escapees, filing errors, bribery. Any system that people can create, other people can find a way to game. It’s a law of the world as constant as gravity. Maybe more constant.

There are always news stories about Doublers who become rapists and serial killers, Doublers who steal or spread disease, Doublers who, quite simply, become monsters. Books and movies too.

One, about a woman who stays with her husband after he turns Doubler, was banned, but everyone saw it anyway. They say the book was better than the movie, but the concept didn’t feel realistic to me. How could you love someone who abandoned you on a decaying planet and was, at that moment, living a brand-new, prosperous life on Mars?

You loved the movie. I should’ve known.

“It’s only unrealistic because the stories we choose to believe create our reality,” you said. “We are what we pretend to be.”

“Okay, that’s Vonnegut,” I told you. I’d found your quoting endearing when we’d first started dating, but over time, I felt like it became my duty to keep you honest or maybe just to remind myself that you weren’t smarter than me; you just had more time to read. I had a job.

“True things belong to all humanity,” you said.

“So do lies,” I answered. It was one of our dumber arguments, for being totally philosophical. Also, as far as I knew, neither of us had ever read Vonnegut. I bet you picked up that quote up from your grandma. She loved all those dead white authors, even the ones who probably would find her worldviews abhorrent. My dads weren’t really readers, unless you counted star charts.

I’m sidetracked. Memory’s like that. Open one door and find a dozen others to walk through. I guess that’s how the Upload works too. With the right equipment, once someone’s talking, feeling, their synapses light up. Scientists can clone a body from the tiniest bit of DNA

, as long as they have the right cells. I guess they can reproduce a mind from a memory, as long as they find the right one.

We take a seat on some old crates, acting like it’s just another date at the tea house, though I can feel the watchful eyes of a dozen Doublers from this little encampment on us, wondering about me. They’re right to be wary of strangers, but I’m not here for any of them. I’m only here for you.

“I just have peppermint,” you apologize, which is a relief to me. “And no cookies to go with it.”

“Well then I’m out of here,” I joke. I feel a moment of vertigo; the crate spins under me, and I fear I might topple off it. I smell something sour, and my vision goes white for a fraction of second, like I’m looking directly at the sun. Then I see double, my own hands echoed in front of my face, my tongue circling two sets of my own chapped lips.

“Relax,” you say. “Take a breath. That happens sometimes. It passes.”

I regain myself.

Some people say that Doublers dream their double lives and it drives them mad, but I’d been a Doubler for a few days now and all I’ve dreamed about was finding you. I try not to think about the other me up on Mars, because he wasn’t why I did the Upload. ...