Spectrum_03_2022

ANIMAE LIBERAE
Text und Illustration Mara Wehofsky
2112 - The colony
verything and everybody is synthetic
E here: only the richest of the rich could
afford to leave the dying earth behind. Everything
here had to be built, and everything
needed had to be brought. But everything is
not enough anymore, for nobody here.
The flat and soil-red buildings are our new
home now. Everybody knows everybody.
For some, the arrival on this red stone flying
through space was difficult, they had been
used to glamor and glory, but life here is better
described as hard and boring. Money as
a concept has been abandoned.
Everybody here is a scientist. We harvest
our vegetables, grains, and fruit inside of big,
perfectly round holes filled with bright white
synthetic soil; every single item looks the
same, nothing has a smell. Well, that is not
true. Smell has become something foreign
to us, as the breathable air inside our station
stinks because of the filtering chemicals
used to make it breathable. To put it better,
everything stinks of metal and oil.
Everybody needs to work, everybody contributes
to keeping us alive, and every breath
taken by anybody is a fight against the sheer
emptiness surrounding us. We fight against
an atmosphere so deadly to us it becomes
ironic at times. But laughing is something
people here hardly do. We are supposed to
laugh when we are finished building a place
we could call home.
At night we sit together. The dark sparkly
sky is something everybody has memorized
here, and we look up to find earth, small as
any other star. Together we admire her, in
silence.
Everybody here knows the painful truth.
And we all feel it, inside of us, as we deeply
drown in loneliness, all together. Humanity
thought that this would be our start as
an intergalactic force, conquering the cosmos,
victory after victory. Humanity never
thought it might be like this, trying to live
inside of death itself. Humanity thought it
would be easy, and prestigious. But in reality,
we humans are overcoming what it once
meant to be human. We must build our new
heaven, in this red and dry world, but it will
always stink of metal and oil.
Because we thought that going away would
be easy. We are infants who lost their mother.
We chose it to be this way.
The colony is our last chance. P
26 spectrum 05.22