THE FUTURE IS CANCELLED — an extract

Chapter 1

The gym was full of kids when Charlotte showed up to her fitness intervention session. There were always other kids there, training harder, going further. They looked like they knew what they were doing. They looked ready for space, ready to find a new home for humanity. She wished they couldn't see her as she worked the punching bag. 

      Left, right, left, she punched until her wrists ached, trying to channel her anger as she had been taught to, but her frustration stayed strong. Her heartbeat was pounding in her ears, reminding her of when she was young, and she thought that sound would never stop. Her father had caught his tears on her finger. He had pressed his hand to her chest and said,

      'Don't worry. It will stop. One day, you will get to rest. Once you've played your part in our next step, they will lay you down in Nirvana, and you will dream forever. Your heart will be still and quiet.'

      As the session wore on, the numbers in the gym thinned. Charlotte's small band was sweating on the treadmills and the only others were a couple flirting against the leg press. Those two beautiful, exemplary recruits kept glancing at each other, and themselves, in the floor-length mirror. Charlotte wondered if anyone would ever look at her like that.

      She wondered if she could ever look at herself like that.

      'Keep pushing,' Coach Mole barked.

      Coach Mole was in her fifties, but she wore a crop top that showed off her six-pack. Rumour was that Mole had loved a fig girl in Albion and she had to leave her love behind when she failed the academic portion of her exams. She had to become a trainer and now she took out all her rage on the intervention kids. She especially hated the smart ones.

      'This is ridiculous. You're barely even trying.'

      Charlotte glanced to her left and saw that Josh and Henry were both walking, close to dropping. They were so drenched in sweat they looked as if they'd fallen into the sea. Josh had turned bright pink and the same redness was pushing its way through Henry's darker complexion.

      Coach Mole roared at them to keep going.

      Charlotte increased her speed despite the stabbing pain building in her side. She focused her gaze on the SAD lamp overhead. It was meant to help with the lack of sunlight, but its brightness gave her a headache.

      'Ok, dismissed,' said the coach as Charlotte was approaching five kilometres. She wanted to keep going for completeness, but Coach Mole switched off the treadmills and then switched off all the lights, starting at the far end of the room.

      'Every little helps,' she said.

      The track slowed gradually beneath Charlotte's feet, so she stepped off and shuffled after the others as they limped towards the changing room.

      Josh let Henry enter first and turned back to face Charlotte.

      'Walk you to the lagoon?' he asked between sharp breaths.

      Charlotte shook her head. She was headed, as always, to the pool.

      'Gotta get in a couple of laps and cool off.'

      Josh nodded and went to shower. 'See you at school.'

      'You'll see me before then,' she called after him. He gave her a thumbs-up without looking back.

      Coach Mole had already switched off the lights in the stands when Charlotte lowered herself into the water, but the light directly above the pool was still on. In that big, empty space that light felt like the only light in the world. Or rather, the pool felt like all the world there was.

      Shrinking the world like that made it feel so much bigger. The dark was ripe with potential. When she emerged from the water, she might be anywhere — far from this tiny city that floated in the middle of the sea.

      She'd lived here all her life. She'd never known anything else, but she knew Hydrangea wasn't big enough for her. It wasn't big enough for anyone. Wherever you walked, you stood over the waves before long. There was no escaping them. They were there when you looked from any window, in any direction, more waves.

      She felt the waves lurching through her every day, right at the pit of her stomach. The only thing that stopped that feeling was to accept the water, to sink completely.

      At the deep end of the pool, she let out all her breath and sank.

      Down at the bottom of the pool, Charlotte felt held, wrapped in the pressure as if it were one of the weighted anxiety blankets in the nurse's office. The lights above came to look like a portal that would let her escape, a portal to a world of sunlight and space, a place like Albion, but real.

      If she could only let go, she could be there. If she could give up on that urge to breathe that burnt in the back of her throat, the portal would open for her. No more intervention sessions. No more waves.

      But she couldn't. Every time she kicked to the surface with the same fury. She panted at the pool's edge as stars burned through her vision. So full of light it was if the portal was inside her, right there in her eyes and never coming closer.

      In the showers, she ran her hands over her head. She found bristles where she expected a long tangle of blonde. The water running off her chin made the ghost of a beard and poured down over the body that would never be good enough to take her to space, over her fatty rolls.

      She poked and prodded at herself. She didn't hate those rolls. She couldn't. They were a part of her, but she hated being made to feel like she should hate them. They weren't Coach Mole's sculpted abs, but they were still beautiful — like stones in a mountain stream, shining and smooth.

      "The Future is Fitness,” said the billboard on the outside of the training centre. It showed children there sprinting straight into the starry sky, never mind that they would suffocate. All the other children in the school were so healthy and toned, they lived up to this expected ideal that was pushed on them and then there was Charlotte, with her fitness intervention sessions every night.

      With her eyes closed on a bench in the empty changing room, she remembered drying in the clear air of Albion the previous evening. She had pitched her yurt and washed in the stream nearby. The day's grind had been long. Josh and Arthur had been obsessed with raiding crypts, delving for hidden knowledge, running deeper into the ruins for the sake of running, hoping some long-buried evil would come chasing after them, anything to trigger a new quest.

      The dust of crumbled pages had clogged Charlotte's throat, but after she had washed in the stream and laid down in the grass, the world felt still, fragrant, perfect. The sun's warmth had been kind on her skin in the late afternoon. And that body, her other body, always felt right.

      If she could open her eyes in the right way, she knew she could be there, in Albion, in that body. No headset required. The portal was inside her.

      The barrier between the two worlds felt so thin inside her head, both worlds were held in memories of a single day, but when she opened her eyes again there was only the glare of SAD lamps overhead, only the low ceiling of the changing room, the lingering smell of feet, no meadow aroma.

      She heard voices approaching and hurried to get dressed. She didn't need the cleaners commiserating with her, telling her their lives weren't so bad.

      'We all play our part in building the future,' they would say as they pulled clumps of hair from the drains.

      At Housing Hub One, the elevators were down. Charlotte had to climb up nine stories of service stairs to her apartment. Coach Mole would be happy. Sweat beaded on Charlotte's back, despite the draft coming from the spaces where the wall panels didn't fit together. Emerging from the dingy stairway, she leaned against the window to catch her breath. From here she had a view over the whole city.

      Hydrangea was split into three mountain-like housing hubs that surrounded a central lagoon. The three hubs were perfectly balanced to allow the floating city to bob across the waves. From the window, the other two housing hubs loomed before her, scattered with fewer lights than she remembered. They seemed further away. Without lights, the central lagoon was a dark hole. It could have been more ocean, that same nothing-stuff that stretched out behind the housing hubs and away forever in all directions. 

      Hydrangea was darker every day, blending into the stars. To switch off the remaining lights would be an easier way to reach out into the dark of space — the city's one expressed purpose, the future she was training for. All their problems could be solved in the flick of a switch, nothing but stars all around them.

      If only it was that simple.

      Her mother was asleep on the sofa when Charlotte came home. Charlotte shuffled past her to turn off the blaring media centre. It was playing a talk show from the Eastern Union of America. The red-faced host was yelling at a prim academic that it was a civic responsibility to fit your house gates with automated turrets, flinging his arms around and screaming that we all had a duty to preserve polite society.

      And then he wasn't. The screen retreated into the wall. It seemed like people from her mother's home country were always shouting. That explained a lot about her, but seeing her lying there so vulnerable, her mother was almost cute.

      Charlotte tucked a pillow under her mother's head. Her breath was rank with vodka. Charlotte's sympathy vanished as she shoved the unconscious woman onto her side, and threw down her mother's discarded jumper to protect the carpet. She left the light on. 

      As she walked past the kitchen, Charlotte fought off thoughts of seitan dumplings in the fridge. 

      The routine was the same as ever. Dad wasn't due back from the moon for another three weeks. That meant twenty-one nights alone with her mother, twenty-one nights of vodka breath, twenty-one nights flinching any time a call came in and every night the same nightmare where her father was Up There, floating loose with no one to catch him.

      Charlotte went up to her room and immediately booted up her system. She paced by the window while it whirred into action, fighting off thoughts of the dumplings' sweet filling oozing out — that sticky hoisin sauce coating the fake meat.

      She focused her attention on the few spots of light out on the waves. Maintenance ships drifted over the city's skirt of nets, fixing all the holes for a good haul of plastic or fish. She already had dinner at the academy, but swimming made her feel hollowed out, like the weight of all that darkness beyond the window might crumple her; like the waves would crush her flat.

      She was reaching for the door handle when the familiar welcome tone called her back to her desk. Her headset filled the room with a warm amber glow. She scanned her messages on the wall screen and saw that Dad had sent her a video message where he just read the standard update, but he called her Grizzly Bear at the end and said he couldn't wait until she joined the mission. His eyes sparkled when he said it.

      'You'll be the one to take us to our new home. I know it.'

      She would graduate from the academy at the end of the year, a month after her eighteenth birthday, but she had no hope of passing the physical exam to get to the moonbase, no matter how many dumplings she resisted. She wasn't made for it. The preliminary sprint trials had left her retching. She hadn't even left the ground when she tried the rope climb. The memory had her cheeks burning.

      What would happen if she failed her exams didn't bear thinking about. Her family was already under threat of eviction. Surely that would be the last straw. She would have to find shelter in one of the abandoned apartments in Hub Three and find work as a cleaner or a mechanic and she would never be allowed back into Albion.

      Charlotte fluffed up her pillow and settled the headset against her temples. The cold metal brought on a shiver of anticipation, a motion all the way up her spine. The intranet was still loading. Every day it felt slower, more agonizing. Charlotte lay on top of her covers and stared at the blank ceiling for a few moments, trying to shut out thoughts of the future.

      The ceiling was oppressively white.

      Not even white; close to white, but with a hint of green, faint enough that you doubted the green was really there. Once noticed, it was impossible to ignore. She glared into the green and imagined the workman who had painted this room. She imagined him mixing in that green tinge just so that his pointless work couldn't go unnoticed.

      Her pulse began to race so she forced herself to breathe deeply and counted out the rhythm of her breath. One, two, three, the hint of green. Four, five, the dumplings. Six, the waves outside the window. The memories of the preliminary tests, the threat of the humiliation to come, it all broke over her in waves.

      It was always waves.

      She brought herself back to the count. The slow breathing did its work with time. The waves became breaths and the breaths shrank into the back of her mind. For a moment, she was grateful simply to lay her body down. She could imagine slipping into a dreamless sleep.

      Then the music blared inside her head. Keening pipes and rippling harps promised a green land that stretched as far as the eye could see. Again, her pulse rose. This time it was the pleasant surge of anticipation. She had the momentary cognitive dissonance of hearing music, but not feeling the vibrations against her eardrums. The off-white ceiling faded to black before her open eyes, then: Albion. The word burned into the blackness and peeled away to verdant hills rolling beneath her. Something like waves but solid, so solid, timeless. She fell in.