Venus Forms

Shannon heard it on her way home from school, anxiously walking along the sidewalk. Today's exam was grueling.

School was so important; Dad would be--Forgotten.

"Who said that?"

She walked around the block in desperate pursuit. The voice repeated, Forgotten. Forgotten. She sprinted home in a panic.

That was later, before Sundays changed--Sunday was their day, no schoolwork, no chores. With such long hours during the week, Dad told the shop never to call on 'Daughterday.' They watched sports on the Beam, ate, and talked about boys or whatever. She loved Sundays.

He stood up once to grab a beer during an extra point, whispered something, grabbed his arm, and fell. He hit the ground and his head went through the small plate glass door of the credenza.

A strip of broken glass slipped through his carotid artery. He bled to death in minutes--on the living room rug--on Daughterday. The cheers of the crowd from the game pounded echoes on the walls of the new mausoleum.

A week later, Dad's boss sent the police to the house. They tried calling on the phone, or someone had, because it hadn't stopped ringing. Dad was stiff and pale on the living room rug, his eyes dried open. An officer found Shannon in the attic curled into a tight ball. Ring.

As the voice began to speak with more frequency, she called it The Whisper. It sounded like Dad the few times she could remember him ever being mad, but this was harsher, darker.

As time went on, the reality of her old life slowly melted away as if she was waking from a charming dream. Imaginings of what happened inside her head and what others saw and heard were not easily separated. It was hard for her to explain things to people. They were quick to pass her by on the street as she was trying to tell them things, things The Whisper told her to say.

Disruption engulfed her. She forgot to take her medications, and when she did remember, she took too much or too little. She pulled at her hair until it fell away in clumps. Her teeth always hurt and she would find broken bits of enamel on her pillow in the morning. As time flowed, she realized that while everything always changed, The Whisper remained constant, always telling her the wrong things to say, to do.

She threw everything away that reminded her of Dad: books, his clothes, and all their pictures. She kept one from the family trip to Newport in 2381. She was just ten and her mom was still alive. Shannon stared at the faces in the old picture, especially her mother glaring back into the camera lens so many years ago. Shannon wondered if this was how things were supposed to turn out. Maybe God makes mistakes. Maybe she was just a mistake. You are, end this.

She put the picture under her dirty, uncovered mattress. Eventually, she stopped being able to picture Dad's face without it.

She considered herself lucky. She didn't have lucid visualizations. Mostly, there was no evil man behind her in the bathroom mirror or standing over her at night, but she was still afraid all the time. You should be.

She tried to maintain a positive outward appearance when she went out. This was not easy. Her grades were fair in school, and Dad would have been proud, considering. She stopped going to school and took classes on the Beam; she rarely left home.

When she did, the two-hour regimen began. She had to stare at the front stoop out of the kitchen window to make sure no one was there to rape her, because they will soon. She brushed the tangled knots out of her hair, smelled for poison in the toothpaste, and looked under the bed again and again and again, waiting, hiding. She always left the house with a steak knife in her purse, just in case.

She majored in Environmental Science and, like everyone, applied to the Company when she graduated. Options were limited. The Company had their hands in everything from plastics and agriculture to mining and space exploration. If you wanted a job, you applied at the Company.

She needed to work. In addition to lots of books and pictures, her father had left her a 30-year mortgage and no savings or life insurance. The Beam said they hired many folks like her, people with different ways of thinking. She wasn't in a wheelchair. She looked normal.

The man had a smile as wide as the large ingress to the corporate building itself. He took the old paper application from behind the reception desk with a comforting nod. He set up her interview immediately. His voice was mild but authoritative. "You will be a good fit," he paused, "somewhere."

The next week during her interview, few words slipped from her cracked, dry lips. The water in the bathroom sink looked foggy this week, someone was trying to kill her, and she hadn't had anything to drink in days.

The Company Rep. stared at her chewed, red-to-the-bone fingernails and smiled. "Second floor, data entry, report Tuesday. You can call Jody at Human Resources tomorrow; we'll see if anything opens in Environmental Science one day. Be patient."

She went home with more confidence and vigor than she'd ever felt. Maybe things weren't so bad after all. Did she deserve to be happy? You deserve nothing.

She quivered with excitement. Things would be different now. She promised to be more focused, more attentive. Never leaving the house was the problem. She had to get away from the phone, RING, because it rang all the time, even after she unplugged it and flushed the lithium battery down the toilet. She never answered it, always a dial tone. Some kid's prank probably. RING. Who would call anyway? She had no one.

Monday came. Shannon sat at home twirling a knotted strand of her hair, and watching some men in suits yelling at each other on a Beamcast. Hours before she began watching the stoop, the doorbell rang.

Jody from Human Resources stood outside the door. The bell instantly sounded different, real. Terrified, Shannon let Jody stand nervously on the stoop as she peaked through the blinds to be sure this was really happening. It had been years since anyone had been in her house. Shannon, of course, had forgotten to call.

Jody entered with careful, determined purpose. She walked around the mountain of empty pizza boxes and trash by the front door. There was some medical coverage paperwork for Shannon to sign. Jody's auburn hair was tied in a tight bun of vocational professionalism that read, "I'm leaving at 8:20 from this strange place."

To Shannon's surprise, Jody dropped off new medications. There were large bottles of green oval pills and a lot of small blue ones too. At Jody's urging, Shannon took some right away, chewing and swallowing them dry. Jody was nice but left quickly, smiling and packing an excuse of apology with the newly signed paperwork Shannon hadn't even read.

The next day, Shannon dressed and got ready to leave the house. She suddenly didn't feel the need to watch the stoop today. Jody said without a job, she couldn't keep her insurance or her new medicine. Jody said that would not be a good idea.

She missed the transit bus and was late for work on her first day. She rushed through the front door and crashed into a Company Deputy in the large lobby of the 188-story building. Unlike the receptionist from last week, his smile was guarded. He was pleasant enough but kept his distance.

After a swift ride up an elevator, and a faster tour of some offices, Shannon was placed in front of a computer, showed how to access the local network, and left alone. No one approached her desk to welcome her or say hello.

After lunch, she heard it. Soft initially, and then slowing rising to a jarring shout--screaming from within--The Whisper wailed on her brain like the swing of a baseball bat. Who do you think you're fooling?

She wished she could take one of her new pills, but she left them at home. She tried to tune The Whisper out, but it wouldn't stop. Eventually she found an empty bathroom. She screamed at it, asking it to please stop. SHUT UP, SHUT UP. You're worthless.

She smashed her fist into the tile wall. Stop, stop, please stop. Not on her first day. Not now. What was she going to do? She couldn't go back to her desk with her hands and blouse streaked with blood.

She slipped out of a custodial exit, climbed down the endless flights of stairs and then she walked the twenty miles home, crying and screaming the entire way.

The next day at work, no one said anything about her absence.

The final break, the last straw, in what was left of her old self, occurred on the transit bus two weeks later. Headed for work, it went right past her stop. The driver missed it, again. She couldn't be late today; she'd already come in past lunchtime three times this week. Her supervisor, whom she'd finally met, was understanding, but she had to get it together. She pulled at her hair. The bus whipped by the stop as she yanked the cord. A chunk of hair drifted slowly to the grooved metallic floor at her feet. You're going to lose it all.

She yelled repeatedly for the bus driver to pull over. He ignored her like she was crazy. She yelled. The new medicine was making her more assertive. She liked that, but he still ignored her.

He finished doing that when she walked to the front of the bus and slipped a steak knife into his right ear. He would hear better now. He opened his mouth to say something but then she cut his stupid fat throat and blood rained in slow motion onto his starch hard, bright white AATA transit uniform. It turned red from collar to cuffs in a mythic cloud of seconds. Now, you've done it.

The bus careened into oncoming traffic and a crosswalk teeming with pedestrians. She killed twenty-four people that day.

Sitting in the holding cell alone that night was sweet relief. The Whisper was gone. She sat quietly with her head between her knees weeping with joy and praying for this moment of peace to last forever.

She spent the last eleven hours waiting in a ten by ten room with only a chair and a toilet. A large octagon projector clung to the ceiling like a giant spider waiting to ignite the web of light. Every ten minutes Shannon squirmed in her seat as the repeating automated message asked her to continue to be patient, her case would soon be called. The judges were busy.

After another hour, the Beam illuminated but it was just a hologram telling her the case was being reviewed; more time was needed. She was allowed a ten-minute break in the hallway.

Her cell adjoined with hundreds of others and she exited, exchanging cold pleasantries with a security guard. Many defendants seemed to be mingling in the hall and Shannon tried to keep her eyes to the ground, but when the barred door of the cell next to her slid open and he stepped out, the long hallway disappeared around her.

Austin and Shannon's eyes met and, like the blind cured by evangelistic miracle, she saw everything clearly for the first time.

"You innocent?" he whispered.

"No."

"I am, these morons put this on me."

Austin was charged with stealing high-grade tantalite from a Company warehouse. Stealing precious metal was a felony. Coltan, tantalite, anything that could hold large amounts of charge were being mined around the solar system in large space stations owned by the Company. They powered everything. Austin faced hard time.

Shannon believed Austin's lies when she looked in his eyes, but his large rough hands, marked with scars and self-made tattoos, told the truth: he was a crook. Like many Americans today, he stole because he needed to eat. He said he studied engineering for a time but dropped out when he ran out of money.

During her trial in the same small room, alone, evidence was presented to her as hologram lawyers argued, but her court-appointed lawyer seemed distracted and offered her little advice, but none of it mattered.

Shannon was oblivious to the chatter. She could only think of Austin. They began talking more during courtroom breaks, eating together in the cell block's mess and exchanging glances as their lines passed in transit throughout the day.

"Where you from, sugar?" he asked one afternoon at lunch.

"Here, Detroit."

"I'm from back east," he boasted, "If I was locked up back there, my boys would have busted me out of this rat hole by now."

He talked a lot and she liked that. With all the chatter in her head, she'd learned not to say much. After dinner, they were allowed 30 minutes in the courtyard. She shuffled her feet and shyly looked down as he talked and talked. Guilty or not, she was the only prisoner who wished her interment lasted forever. She was in love.

Her death sentence was eventually handed down in an open and shut case, but she was glad the wheels of justice still ground slowly. She feared death only in that it would take her from Austin. If she had not met him, she would happily join Dad in death, but now things were different. She had a reason to live.

On the first day of her third month in prison, a Company Rep. came during visiting hours. She guessed it was a paperwork issue. They were cutting ties officially. Sign here, you're done, but he hadn't come for that. He had an offer, impossible to believe.

The Company wanted her to lead a team on the planet Venus. They had been slowly terraforming the surface for decades and as time went on, replacements were needed. Would she go?

"A lifetime on another world or the death sentence?"

"Exactly,"

"How many other crew members?"

"One, maybe two, we're still looking into our needs. We may need an engineer if the purifier runs into trouble."

"A one-way trip?"

"If I recall from your file, you were an Environmental Sciences major in school?

"Yes" Yes. She was going to Venus.

It was a big job and they said they chose her out of many. They were going to make Venus habitable some day; it would take hundreds of years. A pumping station was already set up and they needed someone to monitor toxicity levels and air quality. Could they trust her with that? Yes, they could, she said. She would be apart from Austin, but at least she'd be alive. They could talk on the Beam with good behavior.

For the next month, she went through intense launch preparations. It was the hardest thing she had ever done. Her strength and endurance were tested and retested, but she studied and applied herself. Dad would have been proud.

Launch day arrived. When she entered the ship for takeoff, she was terrified. The Company suit was hot and stiff. There was so much to remember, but eureka erupted into a flow of tears at seeing Austin talking with two techs as they prepared one of the cryo-tubes for ice sleep. His smile was bright as they embraced. The techs gave each other quizzical stares. The Company needed an engineer after all.

The takeoff, a waking jolt from sleep, and touch down were a detached and hazy memory. Such happiness. Her life of pain slipped away.

She sat at the observation desk and looked out at her "view" of the landscape. There was nothing to see. The swirling tracks and grooves of clouds were thick enough on Venus that Shannon could grab them with her hands. She was jealous of other mission captains. At least they had a view of the planets and stars. She was in cave. Sometimes the clouds broke for a few seconds and she caught a glimpse of Venus' immense pancake mountains, but rarely. Magnetic storms surged and pounded the surface, wind speeds in the hundreds. Austin entered from the hanger.

"Did you see her again, crazy lady?"

"Stop."

"Well, did you?"

"No, not today."

For the past several weeks, Shannon could swear she saw forms in the dense mist. A face, a form of a beautiful woman, but only for a second and then gone. Her primary care doctor over the Beam said she suffered from a schizoaffective disorder, but with their weekly talks and the new medication, Shannon was a new person. Zyprexa, Geodon, Abilify, Seroquel, she took them all. The Whisper vanished.

The ship landed four months ago. It was a simple dome with wings, but with the most sophisticated ion engine in creation. She monitored the atmospheric levels and Austin maintained the Purifier to ensure it continued to work around the clock.

There had been no first steps or giant leaps of mankind on Venus. The ship that carried them here was their home. Save the Sun, Venus is the hottest object in the solar system with temperatures near 900 degrees. She wasn't going anywhere. There were lead coldsuits in case of emergency but with Company tech, the rovers and bots did all the work. She didn't anticipate ever having to visit the Purifier in person. She didn't mind staying put in the least.

Billions of years ago, Venus had water and life, but now it was a hell. Streams and flows of sulfuric lava poured over the surface, making and remaking the landscape. There was nowhere for the carbon dioxide to go and the greenhouse effect ran wild, with a surface pressure ninety-two times that of Earth.

The Purifier was a thirteen-story tall monolith pumping station with more platinum pipes and coolant fans than all the bioreactors in the system combined. A giant silo towered over the structure as the machine pounded an efficient rhythmic fist into the ground. The vibrations could be felt throughout the ship and after a time, Shannon got used to seeing large circular ripples in her coffee each morning.

How had this all been set up without a single human being on the ground? The Company robotics team was amazing. Under the Purifier, they had already drilled a fifty-foot wide chasm that dropped eleven miles into the mantle of Venus. It pulled toxins from the atmosphere through a series of filters. Rovers and drill-bots heaved huge rocks and broken lava down the hole to lock them in.

The results had been mixed so far. Acid content in the air was down, but the CO2 was too abundant. With the extreme heat and pressure, the mission objective of terra-form was a puzzle to her.

She noted the team's progress in the weekly updates to Company Control. She always expected a tech to respond in frustration. The data wave always returned saying everything was fine; she was doing a superb job.

Shannon found it difficult to delineate the thousands of hues in the patterns of dense silt of surface dust that floated past. Veins of green, bright yellow, and purple pushed their weight of crystallized metamorphic rock on the other side of the bay window. The human eye can only interpret so much color at once. Thunder and lightning bellowed. The scalding cloud cover created chaos over the burned slag and ash of new and ancient lava flows.

She did her best work here. She wouldn't dare risk what she had with Austin. She sat at the command console day and night checking the data stream, making sure there were no mishaps. She rarely made time for herself, never took days off. She usually took her meals in the command chair.

As it turned out, Austin was an excellent cook. He actually enjoyed cutting and dicing the stuff the Company called food that came in transit docking pods once a month. His recipes were divine.

Walking through Command, Austin dropped a bag of coffee filters. He was always puttering around the ship with his protective headphones on, cleaning and tidying up for lack of anything better to do. She tossed a crumpled napkin at his head. He lowered his headphones.

"How's everything in engineering today?"

"Ask the robots."

"They're not as cute as you."

The Company controlled everything from Earth. A huge facility called Company Control, watched over all the space missions from a centralized location, a walled section of Chicago, a city in itself 20 miles wide. Company Control was a technological utopia.

When the coasts went under water a century ago, cities like Chicago became even bigger and the empty shell of Detroit became the second largest metropolis in North America. The people of Detroit made the robots and rovers that scoured the solar system for the rare metals needed in all pads and phones that kept civilization functioning.

For the Company, Venus was a pot of gold. Scouting robots showed there was as much rare metal under the surface as any body in the solar system. She watched the monitors as docking pods landed and launched constantly from within the deep hollow under the Purifier, shooting out like cannon balls into the atmosphere. She suspected the Company already had found a vein of coltan or tantalite deep within Venus' mantle and was testing samples for conductivity.

With this, she felt even greater pressure. So much depended on her. Yesterday, she saw the woman in the swirling clouds again. Her face clear in the bay window for a second and then was gone. Austin kept her under control, checked her dosage, and ensured she took her meds correctly. Without him, she would have been lost.

When she woke, he was not in bed. She rose up to her elbows and inhaled deeply. He wasn't making coffee.

She looked everywhere. He'd just vanished. She called on the intercom at first and eventually ran through the ship screaming his name. He's here. The sound of The Whisper itself was enough to stop her in her tracks. It had been quiet for so long.

It turned out she had passed him a dozen times. He caught the corner of her eye as she ran through the pod-docking hangar. He was in the airlock. He stood inside the double sealed doors looking at the floor. His face was still, as if he was waiting for something to happen. The thick glass door to the airlock and hatch outside were shut tight. Only the person inside could punch in the release code.

Was he sleepwalking? There was no other explanation. She slammed her hand on the thick glass to get his attention, to wake him up, anything.

"Austin!"

His gaze slowly ascended to her. He was stolid, eyes reminding her of the men she imagined on the stoop outside back home. He raised his hand, held it over the release button to the hatch, and pressed it.

Shannon clawed at the hard glass trying to pry it open. The outer door slid open quickly and out he strolled, disappearing into the dark Venusian wind.

She cried out while waiting for the hatch door to close, the large fan above the airlock quickly hummed to cool the temperature. There was no time to put on a coldsuit; she had seconds, not minutes. She needed to act immediately and did.

Attached to the wall in every station room was a hose loaded with sealant foam ready to stop the spread of fire or a breach leak. She rapidly tied the hose around her waist and slammed her hand on the airlock's door release. The seconds it took for the first door to slide open was an eternity.

Inside she punched in the override code on the keypad. When the outer hatch opened, she burst out into the oven of hot gas and wind, choking her lungs and burning her eyes.

She knew this was suicide. She needed to find him immediately, grab hold, and try to drag them back into the ship using the hose. They would burn alive, the air pressure too intense, but if she acted quickly... she ran.

She stopped just short of tumbling over him. He was lying on the ground only ten meters from the hatch door. She went to grab his arms and was thrown down by a thousand pounds of pressure, the weight of an elephant.

As she fell onto Austin, he simply vanished. She screamed his name, but he was gone.

She knew the truth now, a thunderclap of enlightenment. He hadn't vanished because he was never there at all. Ever.

Her body pressed under a pancake of pressure and heat, as her skin boiled off the bone. Smoke rose and swirled from her hair. Just before her eyes melted into tiny white pools, Shannon looked up.

The most beautiful woman she had ever seen formed in the thick mist before her. The gas goddess of the planet Venus stood fifteen feet tall, her red hair played in protracted vaporous harmony with the air around her, a face of twisting and ebbing streaks and steaming color. She languidly reached out her long, slender arms toward Shannon with a look of reassuring contentment. They looked at each other for a moment, content partners in the covenant that would come next.

Something took hold of Shannon's body and instantaneously tore it apart. Pieces of her arms and legs ripped away, chunks of flesh, teeth, and bone floated up through the clouds in a slow wisp, and disappeared into the goddesses' gaseous form. The giant grew stronger as Shannon disintegrated. Red-haired Venus flashed with the intense brightness of a nova and then faded into the clouds as a whisper.

What was left of Shannon pulled away swiftly in a hardy gale of hot dust. She landed onto a heap of other bones, left before and long forgotten. The hatch of the ship closed and the engines ignited, setting systems for takeoff. The ship waited patiently for orders from Command Control on Earth, and when it would return for the next listener, another whose body and soul would feed the hungry here, the proprietor of this dark, angry place of lava and lightning, trading her land for man, and still whispering, as Venus forms.

THE END

Bio: Mr. Ball is a teacher in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is married with two children.

E-mail: Brian W. Ball

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