The Expansion

18 thousand years ago, Venus:

Taking hold of a glass of beer with both hands, I observed the bubbles of beer like stars in the sky. I had always felt indebted to the person who brewed it for the first time, although I didn't know who he was! Drinking beer made me fat, yet it was the only way to drown my sorrows for a while. My problem is I'm ceaselessly a bundle of nerves. I'm always obsessed with doing something new. The monotony of life frustrates me. Whenever I'm in the middle of something, the thought of the job I'm planning to do next springs to my mind. And, worst of all, never have I brought any tasks to an end. I would get through the task as long as it generated excitement, but when the end of the task was right under my nose, I would start doing something else.

I have always been after a job whose end is unclear for everyone. I even dropped out of college two years into studying sociology. I felt it was waste of time! I had a guilty conscience about the time spent studying. Since then, I have had three employers over the last year. I didn't find anything that could satisfy me. I was staring at the barman inadvertently. He was mixing a paste. With a grin on his face and a satisfactory look, one might have thought he had been waiting for that moment for years! I couldn't stand still and mix too much stuff even for a while!

My glass was half empty. I liked to keep dawdling with the glass. The further the glass being emptied out, the more slowly I sipped at the beer, as if I was a thirsty man who feared for his bottle of water coming to an end. Sometimes I felt like drinking several glasses of beer without anxiety, but it was bad for my health. Finally, I finished it up after a while. I didn't smoke, but I had a craving for a cigarette that night. I pulled a cigarette out of a packet Thomas had left on the counter and lit it with a lighter next to it, blowing a long puff at it. That large volume of smoke made me cough. My friends burst into laughter, and Madison said, "O brother, be careful not to be suffocated by smoke." I answered with a faint grin and raised my hand to tell them I was OK.

I usually joined my friends at the café for drinking and chatting, then everybody went home. We often talked about business and methods of generating further income. Sometimes we held a discussion about parties or the buddies bragged about their antics.

I'd broken up with my girlfriend a month or so before. From then on, I didn't enter into the discussions.

Sara was a good, cute girl. We were classmates at the university. She used to care about me, and she expected me to do likewise and cater for her, but I was always impatient, as she claimed, which would have been irritating her by the time she suggested that we should break up. Beloved as she was, I accepted her suggestion, as I couldn't become the one she wanted.

The buddies were planning to find a girlfriend who was as bad-tempered as me and they were roaring with laughter. I preferred not to talk too much. I pretended that I wasn't listening to them. Leaning back in my chair, I was fantasizing and enjoying the puff on my cigarette.

A small television screwed onto the ceiling with a strange stand was on. The café was so noisy we could barely hear the sound of the TV. Nobody took it seriously until Thomas pointed at its screen. The guys stopped talking and they turned their heads to watch the TV. They had turned the volume down, but the footage and subtitle indicated that a "firestorm" had swept through the tropical regions.

As far as I can remember, the tropics had become a place of exile for its scorching heat. Criminals and those who committed a terrible wrong would be sent to the so-called hell, being left out there to die of heat and starvation as a lesson for other would-be wrongdoers; save for the wrongdoers, the hell was devoid of life and all people and animals had migrated to heaven, or the polar regions of Venus. From then on, whenever a storm hit the tropics, the weather in the pole turned inhospitable a day later, and all inhabitants must forcedly stay at home.