The High Five

Meltdown

When Tayen entered the women's triad, the room she shared with Vivian and Jess, it looked like a slow-motion tornado. Clothes and toiletries tumbled aimlessly through the air, ricocheting off the walls. Amid them were glistening droplets of moisture.

"Go away!" Vivian threw a pillow at her, but it was tethered to the bed and didn't go far. Scrunched up in the corner of the sleeping cubby, she was having a proper meltdown complete with overflowing eyes, splotchy face, and trembling lips. Tayen had never seen her like this before. Vivian in real life was just a lower key version of her on-stream persona. She wasn't the kind to sulk or wallow. When something upset her, she would have a quick outburst and soon be back to her perky, positive self again.

The pillow may have missed, but a no-spill cup clocked Tayen in the head. It stung. Even though objects were weightless in space, they still had momentum. That was a lesson you learned fast.

Navigating the debris, Tayen made her way over to Vivian's sleeping cubby. When she got there, she wasn't sure how to position herself in the narrow, two-and-a-half feet deep by three feet high space. She didn't want to crowd Vivian. There was a pullout bench, but she needed to do something about the domestic asteroid field first. She unhooked a laundry bag and set about fishing things out of the air. Once clear, she pulled out the bench and pulled a grav-band over her lap. Meanwhile, the delay had given Vivian a chance to pull herself together.

"Want to tell me what happened in the sesh today?" Tayen broached.

The question triggered Vivian anew. Her face screwed up in anger and her green eyes flared. "Those... those... fuckers!"

The profanity was jarring coming from Vivian. In the entire year they had spent training together, Tayen had never once heard her use the f-word. The closest she had come was when the docu-stream got cancelled. Vivian had gone into a scathing and hilarious rant, calling the would-be producers "tightwad jerkolators and rancid nanny-farts," that had the rest of the crew cheering and sharing bitter laughs. "Where I come from, we called them idjits," Tayen said.

There was a break in Vivian's expression, a glimmer of irony. "Idjits then. Fucking idjits."

"Fucking idjits," Tayen repeated. She reached out to give her a comforting touch, but the gesture turned awkward without a place to land. Vivian had no legs to speak of, and Tayen couldn't reach her arm without leaning way in. She smoothed down the edge of the blanket and withdrew. "Do you want something else to throw?"

Vivian gave a weak smile. "Something that shatters. Everything in this place is unbreakable. Do you have any idea how unsatisfying that is?"

"If there's one thing a synth-arm is good at," Tayen said, "it's breaking things. I keep an extra supply of electric toothbrushes."

Gradually, the emotion drained from Vivian's face and her breathing became more regular. "Why do I keep opening myself up like that?" she said at last, her voice raspy from crying. "It's like I'm painting this big target on my heart and saying, Aim right here! I keep telling myself it will be different this time. I'll make them see what it's like to be born with a deformity, and then they'll have to respect me. Ha! Just give it up, Vee. Never going to happen. When will you ever learn?"

Not knowing what to say, Tayen tried to make a sympathetic face, hoping it wouldn't come off as a parody.

"Did you ever see my coming out clip?" Vivian said abruptly. "I don't know how you could have missed it. It was plastered all over the Vorld."

Vivian didn't have to explain which clip she was referring to. The moment teen-queen Vee-Vee outed herself as physically disabled in front of millions of live viewers was now part of Vorld lore. In hundreds of previous streams, she had never shown herself from the waist down. Flame-haired, well-bosomed, and with a face that was a canvas for bright emotions, she was a Vorld poster child. After spending the better part of forty minutes going on about creative uses for candy wrappers—one of her micro-tips to help save the planet—she paused unexpectedly and looked straight into the camera. Her green eyes were piercing and unguarded. She wet her lips, swallowed, and spoke in barely a whisper. "You know what, I'm tired of hiding the real Vee-Vee. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and I think it's time I shared my deepest secret with you." With one hand, she reached out and guided the camera toward her lower body. With her other hand, she raised up her skirt. But instead of titillating panties, the camera focused in on a padded undergarment resembling a diaper. Poking out the bottom were not legs but short, twisted flippers like those on a seal, except with pale skin and pink toenails. "This is the real me. Now you know."

Tayen had been serving guard duty when she watched that clip for the first time, only a few weeks before the incident that would leave half of her own body scorched and mutilated. She remembered feeling a mixture of revulsion, pity, and even some measure of just desserts. Stupid girl. What was she thinking? You didn't have to be an expert naturalist to know that exposing weakness made you easy prey—and humans still had the instincts of pack predators. Later, lying in a hospital bed covered in regenerative gauze with the weight of her cowardice and shame pressing in on her, Tayen couldn't get that scene out of her head. How would she ever face the world again? Dreading the monster she would find when the bandages came off, she dreamed of staying a mummy and retreating to a catacomb.

"I'd been thinking about doing it for a while," Vivian said. "Obsessing over it really. I had a little speech prepared. 'Hello World, I'm Vee-Vee, and I have a congenital condition, sirenomelia. Like being a mermaid except without all the perks like being able to lure handsome sailors to their deaths.' But then, when it happened, it was just like, 'this is the right time.' And right then and there I did it. I turned off auto-crop, pointed the camera, wriggled my little legs, and said a few words off the cuff.

"I don't know what I was expecting would happen next," she went on. "An outpouring of support maybe? I knew the Vorld could be cruel, but I thought my fanbase would rally around me like a legion of angels. By showing my true self, I thought it would encourage others to open up about their own problems."

But that's not what happened, is it? Tayen didn't need to ask.

"A core group stuck by me through it all," Vivian said. "I'm grateful for them, I really am. But so many turned away, just evaporated—poof! I lost half my subscribers overnight. And some—more than I ever imagined—began to attack me, as if I were somehow to blame. That was the biggest shock. They said the most vicious things..."

"It's okay. I know." But Tayen really didn't know. With barely any presence in the Vorld, she had never been the target of online hate herself. But she didn't want to put Vivian through the pain of rehashing it again.

"Someone made a spoof of me as a mermaid," Vivian said anyway. "They put a diaper on me and added bubble farts. While mermaid-me is talking, a little fish and lobster keep popping up to say mocking or obscene things. At one point, the lobster tries to hump my tail. It was so..." For once, she was at a loss for words.

"Degrading," Tayen filled in.

"Degrading," Vivian repeated. "What kind of sickos do that? I was so naïve, so... stupid. By coming out, I thought I would be doing all the disabled people of the world a favor. 'Look at me! If you just hang in there and have a little faith, you can be fun and popular too!' Wow, did I really got a lesson on what it means to be part of an out-group. I thought this mission would be a way to silence the haters—wrong again! I must be the queen of wishful thinking. The haters will never stop." Vivian was sobbing now, but the rage had run its course. Tears collected like dewdrops on her lashes. Blinking sprayed them into the air.

"What happened in today's Q-and-A sesh?" Tayen thought it was finally time to revisit the subject.

Vivian dabbed at her eyes with the blanket. "I could see the questions rolling in and getting upticked in real time. The nasty stuff gets scrubbed out, but this one slipped past the filters. The AI probably didn't know what to make of it. It wasn't just the question but all the upticks it was getting. It shot straight to the top of the list. It was like this wave of spite."

"What was the question?"

Vivian curled in on herself, clutching her fists protectively to her chest. "It said, Why do we need flipping mermaids on the moon anyway?"

Tayen's own anger welled up in response. Without thinking, she released the grav-band and pushed herself over to Vivian. She wrapped her natural arm over her shoulder and put her synth-hand up to cradle the side of her face. Vivian's skin felt butter-smooth. Her pulse thrummed like an underground river. "I'll tell you why." She stared into her green eyes, which were shiny and glossed in tears. "To show all those fucking idjits down on Earth that you don't need two arms or legs to be a badass astronaut."

Vivian smiled and leaned into her. "I couldn't have said it any better myself."