Black Sky

The paper was soft, in an unpleasant way. Putrid and damp, eaten through by mould or some other rotting spore, it matched the once green print, now faded into a particularly sickly shade. Qyo was revolted by its silken touch, but there was also something rousing about communing with such a primal relic that money was.

The banknotes, though of different denominations, still stayed in their original neat piles. Qyo counted through them, estimating a grand sum of twenty thousand. American Dollars, spelled the little fade letters, so the stash must have come from before the glaciers. Not what Qyo was hoping for.

The oblong bag containing the money, along with some other archaic junk, was the only rescuable item from the flooded ancient dwelling. Records showed the pre-glacial man living in high towers divided into smaller flats for separate families, so there was still hope for more treasures to emerge from the ice mass as it melted in the scorching sun and revealed lower floors. But for now, twenty thousand American dollars were all Qyo had to work with to score a solid meal.

The walk back to the city was always more tiring than the way out. Qyo had to take off the thermal wear gradually as she moved out of glacial chill and into the nuclearly heated habitable zone, and the best indication of when to lose another layer was drowning in her own sweat. But this time round she was too busy wondering how much twenty thousand pre-glacial dollars could score her to complain about it. Maybe an entomostew?

Qyo’s first stop back in town was at the Sniffer’s. She didn’t really believe he could smell an item’s worth, but everyone at the stock exchange did, so the truth didn’t matter. She joined the long queue of scavengers hoping, like her, that the salacious boor at the end of it scents enough value in their find to grant them entrance into the market. A hundred terabytes was the absolute minimum.

She rummaged through the bag absentmindedly. Several pieces of evidently unsupportive undergarments, a tiny brush – probably for teeth or cleaning nails, a little black book, and a heavy L-shaped contraption. Its little trigger reminded Qyo of the sonic blazers carried around by the peace corps. She though not to take it out of the bag.

She flipped through the notebook though, its pages as repulsively smooth as the money. Some housed rows of digits subtitled with names, others had crude urban maps glued to them. Red crosses must have marked places of interest.

At the back of the little book Qyo found short paragraphs, each of them annotated with a different number of minuscule polygonal symbols.

Crrystal Shine – flexible, can do splits both ways ****

Lolly Pop – makes a lot of noise, some clients pay extra for it *****

Linda Lace – keeps talking throughout, many complaints **

Lemon Squeezy – reliable but got pregnant once ***

Qyo had to put the book away. Too much reading gave her headaches. She kept thinking about the little symbols, though. Stars. The pre-glacial man thought there were millions upon millions of them floating around Earth, most of them with their own planetary systems just like the Sun. He spent unspeakable amounts of those American dollars on blasting himself out of the atmosphere in a glorified tin can, hoping to explore them. To this day, some believed in the stars. In a vast cosmos and its bigger purpose. They clutched at the tales of accelerated expansion of the universe that caused all the stars to move away from each other and out of sight, much like the pre-glacial doomsday prophets repeatedly made excuses for the world keeping on going past their selected dates.

And it kept going indeed, through the wars, through the biodiversity collapse, through the climate catastrophe and the resulting ice age. Qyo couldn’t really blame the people for seeking hope – be it in the stars, in ancient scriptures or in the 330 million or so different deities. Some were even better humans for it. But Qyo herself trusted in technology. Technology carved out the habitable zones for them. Technology allowed them to produce food from the few preserved organic cells. Technology read with full certainty that beyond the black sky there was only a couple more planets, some smaller rocks, and a whole lot of floating manmade junk. Nothing else to detect.

One of the Sniffer’s minions snapped Qyo out of her thoughts, shoving her towards their master with no time to waste.

The Sniffer unzipped the bag and, without even looking inside, took a long, greedy inhale. Qyo held her breath instead, waiting to hear if she’ll finally eat tonight.

“Eight hundred seventy-four terabytes,” whizzed the Sniffer, still on the inhale. He then chucked the bag away. Qyo had no choice but to grab it and scoot before the minions chased her away.

Her last hope was the mojo bazaar. Not a place Qyo enjoyed visiting, but one where anything could be sold as a talisman of one sort or another.

Qyo set up near an alleyway offering quick exit should one of the customers try to technocurse her. She started going through the mouldering banknotes, trying to figure out the most enticing arrangement of the twenty thousand American dollars. Same denominations together? Piles with one of each type? She wasn’t sure what the mojo perverts where into.

“How much for the star maps?” someone asked, but Qyo was too busy counting the tens. “Did you say star maps?” asked someone else. “Oh, I see. The red crosses – do they match the star names?”

More and more patrons started gathering around Qyo’s stall. “Ah, this must be the Lemon Squeezy constellation. I heard it’s the gateway to enlightenment,” assessed one of them. “And is this how you get there? How does the map apply to outer space?”

“Girl! How much for the star atlas?!” a bald woman with snakes around her neck jabbed her finger into Qyo’s palm.

Qyo inhaled sharply, snapping out of it, and that’s when she smelled it. Suddenly, she smelled it so clearly.

“One hundred terabytes. In storage units only,” she proclaimed. “For lessons in stellar scripture and navigating the star maps. Meetings every Thursday, previous registration required.”

She observed the long queue forming, everyone in it counting the hard drives in their pockets. She took another long, greedy inhale. It must have been what the Sniffer smelled every time.