Hopestar: Voyage

CHAPTER 1: RIN

The can shot out of the vending machine and dropped into the receptacle with a soft sound. Rin managed to pull at it with two fingers, and it popped out into his hand. He returned to the small waiting area that was hidden from the main Departures lobby by what clearly used to be a back wall of a small cafe and that passengers and see-offs kept missing. It was empty and exactly the way Rin wanted it to be.

He sat down on the window alcove, which was probably not meant for sitting, but there was no one to tell him off. Behind the glass the least scenic part of the Bogota space port stretched to the horizon. A long laser fence, a huge parking lot for staff, and empty fields the rest of the way, partially paved. The city, the rail line, and the highway were in the opposite direction and unseen from here, so it felt like there was nothing but isolated and abandoned desert.

Rin felt like it mirrored his soul right now.

He turned the can in his hands and brought it a bit closer to read the small text. (He could've scanned the code and read it on his interface, but that felt like too much effort.) "MARS ATTACK" read the name followed by an eye-roll-inducing description of how it contained 20% natural components grown in the sunny Martian fields. Not only the translation into Far-Galactic was made with mistakes, but Rin was sure there were no fields on the surface of Mars: everything was either underground or covered by dome shells, which weren't transparent as far as he knew. As he opened the can and took a sip, all claims of "natural components" were also disproved. It was foolish to expect anything else from the cheapest of overpriced drinks from a vending machine in a space port.

Rin wasn't sure why he was here. This morning it made sense to head to the port, right until his 9:35 appointment. Then his whole life changed. Seven years of Flight Academy, additional licenses for small atmospheric crafts, for semi-automatic shuttles and for instrument flight on personal hoppers, and a partial degree in XXVth century literature (he had free Fridays in the last semester) meant nothing anymore. He may have passed all the main exams with top grades, but everything everyone would see now was the red stamp in his ID file.

Technically, the red stamp didn't mean he was banned from applying to jobs or couldn't be hired and work just like everyone else. It, of course, was only informational, an important side note as mundane as gender, date of birth and blood type. In reality, it made him a second class citizen.

"The Demographic Problem" has been the main focus of the Earth government for the past two centuries. It was hard to settle the innumerable planets of the galaxy without people. There was not nearly enough to equal the ambition humanity had. What is twenty billion individuals on the galactic scale? Half of those were living on Earth: the main magnet for money and resources in the human sphere of influence. How to stimulate the current population to procreate more? For the last century and a half, the solution was the threat of a red stamp. It started as an attempt to inform a citizen that they may accidentally form a family with an infertile individual and therefore have no children. But almost immediately the application enveloped the child-free movement (which many admitted was an overkill, those people were just confused, after all), religious celibates (another attack on the freedom of religion!), and sexual deviants (no, this one actually made sense). The actual repercussions for having the red stamp in the ID soon followed.

Rin got his stamp this morning after the full medical scan he had to go through as part of completing his education. Infertility. The doctor was kind enough to go through possible treatment options that could lead to a successful recovery and the stamp being revoked, but Rin was too shocked to listen to him.

Red stamp meant he was a deviant.

Red stamp meant no one would want to hire him. It also meant he couldn't apply for universal income, despite being a citizen of Earth.