Debatable Space

Flanagan

I am training with Alliea and Brandon. I do a star jump, touch the ceiling, Alliea fires a stun gun which hits me in the chest, and I fall like a stone, but recover and land on my feet. And then I do another star jump.

One! Two! Three! Four! Five! star jumps, each one accompanied by a direct stun blast in the upper body. Five of these and I’m ready to die.

Alliea is a good forty years younger than me – she’s fifty-six. She’s kept herself in great shape and has had her face, hips, vagina, teeth and spinal column replaced. She’s like whipcord, and she never seems to get tired. I, by contrast, am starting to feel my age. I get aches and pains in my old bones, and I have trouble getting out of bed in the mornings. And my hair and beard are grey – I’ve never opted to have them re-vivified. As a result, I look and sound like a grizzled old-timer, and I like it that way. It gives me, I feel, a certain gravitas.

My legs, however, are brand-new, state-of-the-art, and genetically enhanced. Hence the star jumps. I have extraordinary power, when it comes to jumping high, and running away.

Brandon puts on his boxing gloves and we step in the ring. We trade a few punches then he comes at me fast and furious. My punches have power, but I can’t throw so many of them. He wears me down with sheer dogged persistence. Eventually I throw in the towel. Enough is enough.

Alliea steps in the ring, and she and Brandon box. Alliea, of course, trained with Rob. She’s a boxing artist. She wipes the floor with my hapless astrophysicist. At the end of the bout, Brandon’s jaw is hanging loose, and his nose is broken. He bears the pain with equanimity. But I know it will take him several days under the autodoc to heal these injuries.

I start lifting weights. It’s crude, but for sheer power nothing can replace free weights. But I vary the workout to prevent muscle-boundness. I lift two hundred kilos of weights on a barbell up on to my shoulders; then I shrug and throw the barbell in the air. Then I wait patiently, looking straight ahead, and catch it as it falls, hard, on my shoulders. It feels as if the roof has crashed in. Great training for storming a ship, or taking a blaster shot directly on the body armour.

Hup, throw, wait, CRASH. Hup, throw, wait, CRASH.

Alliea picks up a sword and tries to cut off Brandon’s head. His head bobs and weaves, he ducks and kinks, as he brilliantly eludes the sword’s sharp blade. It’s great speed training, but it’s dangerous. Once, in a training session, Brandon’s head was cut clean off. He claims you can still see the scar on his throat where the head was sewn back on… But of course, he’s just being fanciful. The stitches are micro-sewn, and quite invisible to the naked eye.

Then we shower together. We’re all too old, too seasoned, to have any shyness about communal bathing or showering. But there’s no sexual element to it. Brandon is predominantly homosexual, and finds his sexual pleasures on week long binges in the Free Ports. And Alliea is still in mourning for Rob; the possibility of me sexually desiring her or her sexually desiring me would be an affront to etiquette.

And as for me – well, I’m a gnarly old man with scars up and down my body and grey pubic hair. No one on the ship regards me as a sexual being any more. And, goddamn it, it’s been at least two years since I had a decent fuck. So maybe they’re right to write me out of the equation.

I find it comforting, to be naked with people I love. People I care for. People I would be happy to die for.

My people.