I look at the doctor. My lips part. It’s a simple question. I’ve been answering it for as long as I could speak. I don’t even think about it as I answer…
And then I… don’t?
To my surprise, there’s a blank where I used to be. My lips move, as if they’re going to form the word. But nothing comes out. I search my mind. It remains blank.
“I need your name,” he says. “You’re not in trouble.”
“Why would I be in trouble?”
“You’re not. You couldn’t be. Now tell me your name.”
I try again. I fail again. I feel my face crumple as the realization hits me.
“I don’t know.”
Three years later…
I never did remember what my name was. I got discharged from the hospital a few weeks later after they figured they’d done all they could for me. I knew how to function, could talk, knew what year it was, which corporate states were in charge. What I couldn’t tell them was who I was, why I was there, what had happened before I was found in the street.
Fortunately, I landed in New New York, which is Zeal territory, and Zeal is probably one of the better corporate states to wake up in as an amnesiac. I got a starter pack, a little money, referrals for a few jobs, things of that nature.
The people in the hospital looked at me with pity, because all I knew about myself is that I was somewhere in my early to mid-twenties, with brown hair, brown eyes, and according to the night charge nurse, a bad attitude.
But when you forget everything about yourself, you can be anything.
I choose to be a problem.
I’ve made a life for myself, or a living, anyway.
It’s early in the morning, probably two or maybe three a.m., and the bass in Club Eclipse is throbbing through me, making me tingle all the way to the parts of my body that I haven’t used in living memory.
I am wearing a cute little pink skirt made out of a rubbery material; it has pleats and swings out around my thighs. My legs are clad in flat-soled boots that match the skirt, but lace up along the outsides. I have a black tank top on, with my little pink bandoliers crisscrossed over it. They look like they’re just for fashion, but they’re not. And there’s a little body bag too, that’s black because I want it to be harder to see.
My hair is tied up in two high pigtails, and my makeup is on point. I like to wear a lot because it makes me harder to recognize out of it. My brows are drawn on pretty dramatically, and I have a lot of liner and a thick pink slash of shadow that flares out to a white smoke effect. My lips are bubblegum pink and I have glitter everywhere you can put glitter and have it look good, all down my arms so I sparkle when I dance.
It looks like I’m here to have fun, but this is my work outfit, because my name is… who even knows, and I’m an amnesiac.
I like to think that at some stage I had skills I could use to be employed, but I don’t know what they were. The assistance from Zeal ran out pretty quick and I had to find ways to support myself.
This is how I do it. There’s a fun irony to it, too. I need money, but I have no memory, so I sell people things that help them forget. I’ve got several little doses of different pills on me in little clear plastic containers slipped into the bandoliers that I’mwearing across my chest. About half of them are already gone, but I’ve got plenty more to sell. There’re a whole lot more in the cute bag I’m wearing around my waist.
This is Eclipse, one of the biggest clubs in New New York City, NNYC for short. It’s the best place to sell. Some of the girls are wearing cute little booty shorts with NNYC across the cheeks. They’re proud to be from this place, and if they’re not from here, they’re even more proud to be here.
The city orbits what’s left of Earth. It’s about the size of Old Manhattan, and it is falling, always falling toward the ground at exactly the same rate as the curvature of the Earth, so it never crashes.
Flying cities, they call them, though they’re more like massive satellites. Cities used to be built down on the world below, but certain events made it more or less uninhabitable down there. There are still millions of people down on Earth, but they don’t really count as actual humans, not to those of us who live in these floating cities, quite literally above all the drama of the ruined planet below.
Most of the clientele at Eclipse are men. I’d say a good seventy percent. Most of the girls here are working in one capacity or other, either for the club itself, or as freelancers. Women are in short supply in this corner of the world. Many are kept at home by their families, and others are living their very best lives off-world.
We lost a lot of women when the aliens first came, so I’ve learned. Overnight, millions of women were scooped up and taken away in what was called the first rapture. We don’t know what happened to them. Maybe there’s a planet out there populated entirely with Earth women. Maybe they got spreadacross the stars. Maybe they were served with nibbles and dips. Everyone’s got an opinion, and nobody really knows for sure.
Then we got more advanced, and found ways to stop the aliens just stealing us, theoretically. The Earth has an ionized barrier of some kind that stops people from just being snatched. Don’t really know how much or how well it works, but you have to trust it because otherwise you’ll spend your days wearing a tin foil broad-brimmed hat. There’re also rumors that some of the corporates got where they are now, all the tech and stuff that makes the cities fly, by trading with alien civilizations, and that they paid for that tech with women.
The official law is that women cannot be sold. Humans aren’t allowed to be commodified. It’s very strictly enforced, allegedly, but that doesn’t stop women going ‘missing’ from time to time. I think it’s probably human males doing the disappearing given the ratio of women to men is like 80:20 at this point.
From what I’ve been told, mostly by men who are high out of their fucking gourds, the demand for human females in various planets and colonies cannot be overstated. Every woman in here is worth a million at least on the alien black market.
For all those reasons and a couple more, the dancing girls at Club Eclipse are locked down. Literally. There are chains wrapped around some of their ankles. They look very pretty. They’re elegant little things inexorably connected to the platforms they’re dancing on. There are barcodes on the anklets. A man can swipe his chip on them and rent them for thirty minutes, an hour, half a day, or a week. The club owners keep girls up there no matter what. As soon as one is checked out, the platform descends for a minute or two, then slides back up through the floor with a new smiling dancing girl.
