October 14th, 2472 - Planet Garnatie, Downbon City – Hotel Barnes

She stood in the shadow of the old hotel’s awning, and waited for her next client. The rain was coming down in gentle sheets of sparkling light. She was not alone. Nearly a dozen of them stood under the hotel awning, waiting together in silence, some smoking, others staring blankly into the void. A hover car pulled up. Show time. The tinted windows dropped, and two men and a woman stepped out into the rain, crowding around the window. After a few seconds, the woman and one of the men turned away, and returned to the shadow of the hotel awning, as the lucky man who had been chosen slipped into the half-open car door. The car door clicked shut, and the car silently hovered away, into the dreary night.

It wasn’t always physical; generally the clients, who had wandered down as inconspicuously as they possibly could from the gated community on the other side of the city, truly desired companionship. They required actors: a faithful spouse, a fun-loving friend, a long-lost child—and those standing in the awning were proficient at playing many parts, and wearing many masks. They were as young as eighteen, and as old as seventy. What they all had in common was that they were poor as dirt, and sick of it.

She felt her eyes wandering towards the corner store across the street. A group of children crouched by the roadside, and splashed a set of dice across the dirty pavement. She hoped they would never grow up. Life was terrible, always, but it was still simple for them.

‘What are you doing?’

She looked down. The child had floppy black hair, unkempt and messy, and he was staring up at her with the eyes of a much older man. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was, but something about those eyes sent a shiver down her spine.

‘I’m waiting for a friend’, she replied pleasantly, putting on her best fake smile.

‘How much do your friends pay?’ the child asked, his eyes narrowing.

It was like a thirty year old man was staring up at her. Her voice caught in her throat.

‘You have nice clothes … you aren’t wearing much, like the women who go to parties in this hotel’, the boy continued. ‘People don’t worry about the cold when they have a warm home to return to. You must earn a lot. How can I do that?’

She let out a sigh of disappointment. She was certain that eventually the boy would find out, one day. She figured out what it was that she saw in those eyes … it was ambition, the same kind that she saw every evening in the mirror when she was applying her makeup for the night. She decided to tell the boy something that she wished she’d been told when she was his age.

‘I do earn a lot’, she replied. ‘… but I’ll never earn enough. No matter how much I earn, it won’t change the fact that I stood here tonight. I wish I wasn’t standing here … but I don’t think I have a choice … so for tonight, I’ll make someone else happy, and I’ll earn money for it.’

‘We should have a choice’, the boy said. ‘Don’t we deserve to be happy too?’

He was right. She wished she could tell him that he would be happy one day, but she wasn’t sure that she believed that. All the same, she wanted to try and keep the boy’s life simple, even for just a second longer.

‘That’s what the money’s for’, she told him, flashing her best fake smile. ‘Money can buy happiness, you know.’

December 5th, 2473 - Planet Garnatie, Downbon City - Fools’s Gold Orphanage, Ward B.

‘I’m going to be like Farlorn Norkaza when I grow up!’ Romeo Hargon said, his large, brown eyes filling with pure, shining hope. ‘First thing I’ll do is steal all the money that Mrs. Agatha hordes in the safe downstairs—oh don’t look at me like that Julie, you know she’s supposed to be using it to feed us three times a day, not two—then I’d beat up the foreman, for all those times he left us down in the mine, even though our lamps were running out of battery … then I’d steal a ship from the Spaceport and fly away!’

Ichiro scoffed. Romeo and Julie turned to look down at him from atop the rickety bunkbed. Ichiro swept a mop of floppy hair out of his eyes and sat up, sneering at them.

‘Norkaza was just a pirate … only lucky people make it as pirates, and only stupid people think they can make piracy work forever’, the young child said, the bags under his eyes appearing even darker in the shadows of Planet Garnatie’s twin moons. Green and Violet moonlight mingled, let in by the massive, cracked window through which ice-cold air also crept, and in that moonlight Romeo taught Julie whatever he could. Romeo had been teaching Julie, with her one eye and black eyepatch, how to interpret the funny symbols that lay between the pages of the Illustrated Adventures of Farlorn Norkaza. Ichiro and Romeo were the only children in Ward B of the Fool’s Gold Orphanage who could read.

‘You’re a real pain sometimes Ichiro—hard to be friends with. Can you think of a better way of getting off this—this damned hunk of rock?’ Romeo asked, making use of the phraseology he had learned while carrying out errands in the local tavern a day prior.

‘We’ve only got luck anyway … and it’s not like any of us are that smart’, Julie Avanko argued, sniffling slightly. ‘Except maybe you and Romeo … you guys are pretty smart.’

Ichiro snickered, reclining back into his bedsheets.

‘There’s a woman who used to hang out around the corner shop downtown’, Ichiro began, quietly. ‘I don’t know how she does it … but I see her leave with men, sometimes other women too, to the hotel across the street. When she comes back, she’s got loads of cash. I used to hang around and wait for her to buy me sweets. She always looked tired—sometimes she even had bruises on her legs. One day, she told me that she was leaving. No one leaves Garnatie, so I thought she was lying, but … she had tickets for a flight out, and a passport too. All that money … I’m going to figure out how she does it, and whatever it is, I’m going to do it too’. Ichiro’s eyes grew wide, his smirk confident and demeaning all at once. ‘You’ll see’, he continued. ‘I don’t need luck—I’ll get of this planet with my own wits, and my own skill, and I’ll take you both with me! Just you wait and see.’

June 17th, 2474 - Planet Garnatie, Downbon City - Fools’s Gold Orphanage, Reception.

The receptionist watched him carefully, her eyes filled with sadness … and with fear. The boy stood in the grimy hallway, and scratched at the bandages on his head. He stared for a long time at the sloppily hand-written sign on the noticeboard.

In Loving Memory

of those brave children whose lives were lost when tunnel 14 of the

Downbon Gold Mine Collapsed on June 15th, 2474.

Gran Papiro,

Samuel Var Sanctuary,

El Carko

Hop Var Bungirba

Jessie Kando,

Julie Avanko

and

Romeo Hargon

Ichiro Gorkanja was the only child in ward B who could read, and anyone could see, by the look in his eyes, that he was becoming a man much too quickly. He did not move for some time. Beneath the bandages, a pair of blank, lifeless eyes stared on.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise when, five years later, the boy stopped working in the mines altogether, and then disappeared from the orphanage without a word. Rumour had it that he could occasionally be seen standing in the awning of Hotel Barnes in town. A single year after that, the boy suddenly vanished without a word, and was never seen on Garnatie again.