011. No future

Marinated in tears and whisky, my dad fed himself on documentaries about space. The race to the moon in the sixties. Voyager. Discovery. Pandoras boxes of monkeys and dogs orbiting Earth and a robot tweeting from the deserts of Mars. Endless space upon which to project.

“It's about looking up”, he'd tell me, “and to think big. And escape. Here, you'd never know.

“You never will know, will you Monkey?”

He spat the last words at me. As if it was somehow my fault that I'd never mine Saturn's belt for unobtanium.

But leaving is a non-issue these days. If there was enough fuel to blast a rocket into space it'd get ripped to shreds in low-orbit. Fifteen years ago the last space shuttle from Earth exploded after a few specks of tiny, on-Earth-insignificant shrapnels of paint tore through its hull and introduced vacuum to fuel tanks. The debris of Starship Manhattan landed in a low orbit around Earth and went on rotation. It didn't take many laps for it to smash up satellites and old space junk along with it. Until it surrounded us completely. A barrier of razor-sharp objects in bullet-speed orbit.

We call it the net. Nights like tonight you can see it if you look hard enough, a thin layer of grain against the black. Space garbage. Static on a dead screen.

My extended family is out there somewhere. Dad's brother made it out. Mom is on Mars last I heard from her. All the jobs are in space. There's still posters around here. Eighteen years later:

"Look up! Your future is amongst the stars".

Our future is behind a barbwire fence and we live in the world that never moves on. No jobs, no fuel, no food. No future.