“What’s got you so upset, anyway?” Yeung-Sung asked once they crossed onto a main fork. “Annoyed there’s no chauffeur to take you home?”

“Annoyed?” Woo-Yi cocked her head. “Of course I am.”

“Ahh”. Yeung-Sung pushed his hands inside his pockets and strutted alongside her. “You’re missing it, aren’t you?”

“And why the hell wouldn’t I?”

She let out an aggravated sigh that made her appear twice her age. Craning her neck, she ran two fingers forcefully up her spine.

“Music was all I had to worry about it. And I had plenty of help with it, plenty of people depending on my success for their livelihood.”

Seeing his smirk, she pushed Yeung-Sung aside. He almost fell into the wall, but stopped smirking.

“Make no mistake,” she warned him, “Don’t let your jealousy distract you from the fact that being a star on my level is hard fucking work. A different kind of work but…” she stopped to crack her neck again, “Difficult work nonetheless.

“But I do miss it. How things used to be”

Keeping his distance now, Yeung-Sung thought about her position.

“To be honest I don’t mind it here, now.” He stroked the growing fuzz on his chin. “What is it exactly do you miss? The mass poverty? Curfews? Not being able to know your own value to society, just that occasionally it will swing down to a flat zero?”

“Hmm, I don’t see what you mean,” he said, holding his stomach as he laughed. “You were right all along, Woo-Yi; this place isn’t so bad.”

She stooped down as he said those things. She knows I’m right. Get over yourself, it won’t ever be like that again. You have what you have now, enjoy it.

She planted her feet sideways and faced away from the sidewalk, extending her arms out to the road. The empty road that they had been avoiding, that they could have at any time been on instead of the footpath.

It wouldn’t have made a difference, Yeung-Sung pondered, But we stay on the footpath out of habit.

“But I do miss it,” Woo-Yi cried out. “I miss watching cars and buses go by. They’d keep a distance between themselves, and pedestrians wait patiently for the green light. It’s trusting that everyone will give you a little bit of respect I miss -even if it’s fake- I miss passing people from all walks, all stages of life.”

She slumped down on the curb. “I miss getting lost in a crowd, having to wade through if I was in a hurry, with all the polite excuses that comes with that.”

Really? What a thing to be upset about. Yeung-Sung came up beside her, still standing. He lined the toes of his shoes up to the curb’s edge and rocked his body back and forth, but did not sit beside her.

“So you enjoy being reduced to a statistic?”

He loomed over her now, but still felt intimidated when she bashed her eyebrows together at him.

“Yes, actually,” she admitted. “I used to enjoy being insignificant. In lapses, you know. I enjoy not being looked at as a product for a bit before I have to put my lips to a mic again.”

That’s something I doubt I could ever get used to.

She took a slow, meditative breath. “There’s something about that; becoming greater, getting acknowledged for all the effort it took to put myself in that position -I guess that’s what Jordan is trying to harness. He’s said it before -it was the reset speech just before you came- that he views people’s actions as the only thing worthy of being called “currency”.”

Sounds like the sort of crap he’d say. “Yeah?” Yeung-Sung exclaimed, “Go on.”

Woo-Yi picked up chalky fragments of road and tossed it half-heatedly as she continued,

“If someone died, he said, all their achievements should die with them. That it should -how did he put it? Oh, be carted over and seeded out across society, over all common ground.” She made a grandiose flourish like sprinkling salt, wastefully. “To fertilize it. He loves his analogies, that man.”

That man? Weird to hear that -before it was ‘the saviour of humanity’. She’s as impenetrable as ever, but something has changed. Yeung-Sung watched her stone skip pathetically, hardly two feet away. She’s not inspired by these thoughts, even if she respects them.

“But if it’s not,” she said and stopped She put up a finger up and made sure Yeung-Sung was paying attention.

“If all that wealth, that status is inherited, then we acknowledge the fact that we think genetics determines class.”

Woo-Yi swung her knees together and hugged herself tight on the curb. “That breeding is something that we must do, that we are unequal and that we can breed away the impoverished classes.”

Squeezing her mouth tight, Yeung-Sung saw her, heard her swallow down spit but as he reached out, she put out a hand blocking him, saying, “I’m fine. The idea just makes me sick. That we have been harbouring that notion for so long without noticing.”

“I wouldn’t trust anything he says fully.”

“You weren’t there,” she moaned and rested an elbow on her thighs, “I remember when Una stepped in, making her way across the crowd, rubbing her heaving belly…”

His wife was there too. Of course.

“She was amazing, just the way she looked out, it felt like she wanted to mother us all, that inside her was all our hopes for a new world.”

Woo-Yi sighed again and brushed bangs off her cheek, bulbous and crimson. “She told us that she understood; ‘we all want our children to lead happy, safe lives’. But she asked whether it was right for us to not only give them a lavish life in exchange for others’, but also deny those without a wealth on their side a vote on that decision.”

Yeung-Sung had to steady himself not to drop himself beside her.

Woah! No wonder PM are such a zealous bunch; that coupling must have been a political powerhouse.

Woo-Yi looked to him for a reaction with black drips down her face. Instead of saying anything, he just stared at her.

“And I went along with it.”

“Went?” Yeung-Sung repeated, “You’ve changed your mind? You mean you don’t believe that shit anymore?” He came forward, “Was it because of me?”

She laughed shoving away his advances again. Sniffing, she said, “No. I think it would be beautiful, a beautiful idea, but after thinking about it, in reality these issues can’t be solved with science or economics. It goes deeper- If you change the lyrics of a song, it still carries the same tune, you know? It still evokes the same emotions.”

Does it? You’d know better than I.

“I can see you don’t,” Woo-Yi said before obscuring her eyes, “You’re still -like I was- caught up in the spectacle of this place. Like this whole fucking colony! They’ve made you a docile part of their system now, haven’t they?”

“Hey!” Yeung-Sung advanced once more and she punched him, her skinny fist like a wrecking ball against his injuries.

Then she roared. She flung up onto her feet. “You see?” she yelled, brushing the rocky dust off her, “That’s all you do; make a loud, angry-ass noise without any real point -Like a bad pop-punk song”.

She mimed playing bass and knocked him over. Na na-na-na, na-na-na…

“But you’ll forget what you’re fighting for within a week, less even. Now that’s insignificance! That I can’t stand. Oh, and fuck all you goons at the Wick!”

She ended with a stomp and stormed away. For the second time.