To Die Among the Stars [In Progress]

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A sixteen year old girl must work undercover with the same people who murdered her mother to avenge her death.

“To Die Among the Stars” is a psychological cyberpunk horror novel exploring themes of imposter syndrome, the fleeting significance of distance as social media becomes more pervasive in daily life, and the limitless depravity that smart technology enables human beings to succumb to.

It is currently a work in progress. There will be more details to come.

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“Mom,” said Jasmine as their mushroom-nosed hovercraft zoomed over the roads, “I keep telling you we need to move out of this shithole country. But you never listen to me. We could die if we don’t. What makes you think we’re special enough to survive?”

“Look, anak ko,” sighed Emilia in the passenger seat of the self-driving vehicle. My child. “I’m at my wits’ end with you. I keep saying the same thing over and over again. We’re not leaving.”

The GPS orb hovered over the driverless steering wheel, showing a holographic rendition of the Google Maps UI. Their current trajectory was highlighted in blue:

> Date: 27 June 2082 (Saturday)

> Time until destination: 5 minutes

> Destination: Olinger’s Evergreen Cemetery

Today would be a day of mourning the Dalisays’ deaths. Of honoring family affairs. No more ruminating on what could be. Jasmine had always preferred the present moment, for the future was void of the three things she craved most in her life. Routine. Order. Predictability. 

But what if the present was void of all those things?

“It’s been months since you lost your job, Mom,” said Jasmine. “Your savings are draining, and it’s getting more and more dangerous living here. What are we gonna do when you finally become broke? Get kicked out of our condo and join all those homeless cities? Get gunned down in another mass shooting? I’m just scared, Mom. You can be suicidal if you want, but why bring me into it?”

“I’m not suicidal,” said Emilia. “Just tired. And when the hell will we ever do things together without you guilt-tripping me? Putting all these fucked up things over my head?”

Dad doesn’t even have a job. We’d be leaving him and my brothers to rot and die a whole ocean away, all the way in Abu Dhabi. Thousands of miles away. They depended on Emilia to provide. 

“The last shooting was just in downtown Arvada,” said Jasmine. “Real close to where we live. I heard the bullets in my sleep. I know you did too. But you seem to be okay with it. When—”

“Stop talking.” Emilia stared out of the bottlenosed Podzol’s tinted windows, around the yellow prairies and the Rocky Mountains, which glared over Denver.

Whether or not Jasmine’s whole family lived or died depended on two things: her mother finding a new job, and both of them staying alive. To live, Jasmine had to convince her mother to leave the United States at all costs—the world’s hotspot of random mass shootings and hate crimes against Asian Americans. The average citizen was already in danger of being the victim of a mass shooting, but Jasmine felt that being Asian American painted big red targets on their backs. It was life or death, not just for her, but for the whole family.

And nobody seemed to acknowledge this except her. 

Jasmine’s mind told her, “If we stay, we will die.”

But her mother’s inaction told her, “I don’t care.”

“I’m staying here for you,” Emilia said as if reading her mind. “Your future is here. Denver Tech Center is literally Little San Francisco now with all the Silicon Valley transplants, ever since the Bay Area sank underwater. And it’s important you get exposed to the highest quality education the world can offer while you can. Colorado is your future, whether you like it or not. We’ll be fine. We won’t die.”

Jasmine closed her eyes. But how do you know that? A voice in her head demanded her to ask, When will you ever understand I have literally no interest in pursuing STEM? But she swallowed that thought. She never had the courage to admit to her mother that their visions for her future never aligned. “What if I become miserable?”

“Jasmine, I lost my job. The country’s in a labor surplus, and nobody is looking to hire any time soon. We’re not leaving the States for a long, long time. That’s final.”

There’s no point in convincing her to leave America now while she’s all mad and combative with me. Thus far, all attempts to persuade her mom to leave the country had thus failed. 

So Jasmine hatched a new scheme. She would use the deaths of the Dalisays—her aunt and cousins—as emotional blackmail. Use their family tragedy as a torch to set aflame the emotional cobwebs that Emilia never dusted out, and incentivize her into action. Take advantage of her mother’s grief as a way to scare her into moving out of the USA once and for all.

Evil, but necessary. Desperate times often required heartless measures. 

She would wait until they arrived at the funeral home to execute her plan. Emilia always broke down when she faced the dead, and Jasmine wanted to isolate her mom at her most vulnerable—when she was the most susceptible to persuasion—while she did weird emotional things, like cry at her sister’s grave. When Emilia was on the defensive like she was now, nothing could be said to sway her mind.

In the ensuing silence, she thought about the recent events that turned Colorado upside down, which the entire world now coined the “Bloodbath State”:

Mass shooting in Thornton King Soopers leaves thirteen dead

—Harvester terrorist hubs found in phyClaves all around downtown Denver, UC Boulder, Lakewood, Westminster—

MSNBC: “… there’s always some kind of mass shooting that happens in every corner of Colorado. Tourists and potential transplants, DON’T COME. Leave Denver and Boulder if you can. Avoid these cities at all costs. Nobody is safe.”

Jasmine recalled a comment she read in a subreddit thread, r/HarvesterStories: “The Harvesters are the Al-Qaeda of fucking wetbacks and leftist sjw communists. They claim to be fighting for all the workers suffering under ‘third-wave neocapitalism’. Sure, overthrow the rich and the exploiters… at the expense of who? The lives of innocent citizens?”

“I’m sorry, nanay,” said Jasmine as she kept her head down. 

“It’s alright,” said Emilia. “Look. From now on, let’s stop arguing, okay? It’s your aunt’s death anniversary. Your tita’s and your cousins. Let’s not disrespect the dead by arguing on their own day. We’ve already seen enough crap in all the past weeks. Hell, we’re even fortunate that we can travel like this.”

The longer Jasmine lived in the USA, the harder it felt to breathe. To travel. To move.

Jasmine did not know how long she could stomach the danger and suffocation—the constant uncertainty, the constant anticipation—until she decided to kill herself. She’d rather have control over her own death than let some crazed person’s Second Amendment-loving hand decide for her.

The Podzol swept over the roads as mother and daughter rode in silence, each picking up on the other’s tension, staring as the grass-green globe rotated and rotated.

A holographic prompt flashed over their heads:

CHECKPOINT IN 1.5 MILES

A voice spoke from the Podzol roof: “Each vehicle passenger must transmit three government-issued identification documents to the first TSA officer.” A raspy male Australian Siri. “Along with an SBP log of your social media activity from the past three years, a birth certificate, proof of citizenship, and employment history—”

“What the hell?” Jasmine said as dread crept through her innards. “They’ve gotten a lot stricter. Why the hell do they need our proof of citizenship? Can’t they just get all that info by running our eSpacio IDs through their… global database thing?”

“Shh!” hushed Emilia. “I got your papers, anak. Don’t worry.” The Podzol approached the checkpoint: a row of toll booths, each with its own cobalt-masked TSA agents. Before them, a black-clad agent holding an orange baton redirected them to an empty spot, through which a Tesla hovercraft had just passed. 

This is literally Mexican border control in suburban America. All we want is to just go from one fucking neighborhood to another. 

The Podzol rolled down its windows once it passed the detection perimeter of this toll booth; bulky Teslas, needle-thin Nissan LEAFs, and other colorful hovercrafts and Apple iCopters lined up behind them. Nobody dared to honk, not especially around these armed agents. These checkpoint TSA agents were much, much more aggressive than the ones at the airports.

Three agents approached either side of the Podzol windows and pointed their assault rifles at Emilia’s and Jasmine’s faces. Neither flinched, for they were much too used to this protocol. Jasmine constricted her throat and maintained a superficial sense of cordiality that could be broken with the slightest utterance of the wrong word. Their family—the Mendozas—had a relatively clean history, so Jasmine saw no reason for them to stall for too long.

“Open your neuroports for records transmission,” barked the officer on Emilia’s side.

“And port 455 of your Google Lens,” said the one leaning against Jasmine’s ear.

Jasmine was a minor, being only sixteen, so she was not allowed to have Internet-on-Demand cyberware installed into her spine or brain. Instead of a hovering personal Androrb or Apple Orb, she opted for smart contact lenses that would project her into augmented reality at will. “Wearable Internet,” they coined such devices.

Jasmine blinked, and a shimmering eSpacio dashboard appeared before her. She opened her local port settings and set the DOCKING PERMISSION value of port 455 to ‘true’. She dropped a zipped copy of her “important_id_docs” folder into port storage, which the TSA agents temporarily locked as they scanned it with their own neuroports. They shuffled through their IDs, logs, and the cybertrails of their digital footprints, sniffing for Harvester involvement using anomaly-scanning AI like canines sniffing for crack cocaine at an airport.

Then it hit her. They can already mine the information they need using our eSpacio IDs. They just want us to give them our documents to find inconsistencies. See if we’re lying. If we’re hiding something.

But the Mendozas had nothing to hide. Besides some family trauma, their family life was boring. Painfully average.

“And what’s the purpose of you passing through I-70?” asked a third agent who spoke through the passenger window.

“We’re going to Olinger’s,” said Emilia. Calm. Even. “My sister and her family died two years ago today. It’s their death anniversary, and we’re just going to mourn them. It’s a tradition.”

“Blessica Dalisay,” said the officer on Jasmine’s side mockingly. “Boys! Look at their chat log here. I’m pulling it up. These girls are telling the truth. But…  Blessica. HA! Some cheeky dumbass named their kid Blessica!” The agents cackled.

“It’s a Filipino name, you xenophobic fucks,” snarled Jasmine.

Emilia turned her head to look at her. Her eyes were so angry that they burned into Jasmine’s skin. Why can’t you just shut up when you need to? they asked. Jasmine immediately regretted her thoughtless words. She wanted to sulk and disappear.

“We can’t let you through,” said the agent on Emilia’s side.

“Why not?” asked Emilia.

A virtual prompt sizzled before them all. It showed a post that Tita Blessica made on Facebook only three years ago:

> Blessica Yuñoz Dalisay

> “I think the Harvesters are doing a good thing. Like… I really don’t like my job. It’s not right what all these CEOs are doing, and they need to learn that we’re humans, not robots. We’re not disposable cows lol.”

Jasmine narrowed her eyes in disbelief. “That’s it?” she spat. “That’s the reason we can’t pass through? Because of a fucking thing my aunt said three years ago? She didn’t mean it. She’s too dumb to even keep up with current affairs. Reread it carefully. She doesn’t know what the hell she’s even saying. She’s the type to follow the crowd.”

“We have a zero-tolerance policy for any display of Harvester sympathies. You’re lucky we did not arrest you by mere association.”

“But my aunt said that, not me or my mom. Who the fuck are you—”

“Jasmine—” Emilia started.

“ —to stop us? All we want is to mourn their damn deaths. This tragedy has fucking torn our family apart from the inside. It’s literally just thirty minutes of visiting them before going back home.”

If we don’t get to the mausoleum, there’s no chance I’ll ever convince Mom to escape this blood-ridden country. 

Jasmine’s heart raced.

I can’t let that happen. I want to stay alive.

“That isn’t our problem.” The assault rifles dug deeper into their faces. A hot searing pain flared through Jasmine’s right cheekbone. “Turn back now, or we will be forced to detain and question you both for alleged Harvester affiliations.”

“This isn’t fair,” said Jasmine.

“Nothing in life is, little girl,” said another cobalt-faced officer, their voice reeking of coal. “Now go back home. Don’t you have homework to do?”

“No,” Jasmine shouted, the rage inside her now at a full boil. “It’s our fucking family. You people have no IDEA—”

“I’m sorry, officers,” said Emilia as she commanded the Podzol to roll up the windows. The GPS globe rotated as it recalculated a new trajectory back home, redirecting them to the nearest exit. “She can get unruly sometimes. I just need to have a word or two with her. I promise this won’t—”

“SHUT UP! WE NEED TO GET TO OLLINGER’S!”

(Jasmine’s voice like that of a buzzing bee)

“—happen again.”

The agent on Jasmine’s side said, “Two females, one adult, one child. Podzol Mini 2076.  License plate: 4TY-04H. Code Gray. Over.”

Jasmine slammed herself against the Podzol’s doors, bruising and beating herself, screaming at the car to open its doors so she could jump out onto the highway. But the car has its own mind. It won’t listen to me if I abuse it. She imagined running to the checkpoints, past the checkpoints, and her own mother would have no choice but to park somewhere and run after her, following her all the way to the mausoleum.

But Emilia had master control of the Podzol’s functionalities, and Jasmine had no power over whether she could leave or enter the vehicle.

And thus, with Emilia’s usual silence that came with these usual bouts of rage, Jasmine simmered down. Defeated. quiet.

“There’s only one thing we can do,” said Emilia. “I know attending their death anniversary virtually isn’t the same, but…”

“…it’s the only choice we got,” said Jasmine, completing her mother’s sentences from habit. Although they irritated the hell out of each other, they both shared a telepathic type of communication that did not exist with anybody else. “But I don’t want to, Mom. We shouldn’t have just let the officers talk to us like that. That was cowardly—”

“That was the only thing we could do, anak. We could’ve been arrested for giving them attitude. We need to go back home—”

“No. Why can’t we find another road?”

“Because the checkpoints are everywhere. Look at Waze. See all those red dots? Those are all checkpoints. They’re swarming all the roads. It’s a TSA beehive out here. And thanks to you, we’ve been Code Grayed. Now we can’t go anywhere.”

Thanks to her photographic memory, Jasmine had remembered what Code Gray meant. She once perused the list of TSA codes that the officers liked randomly assigning to people passing security checkpoints. Code Gray meant that she and her mom were blacklisted from all the checkpoints around the country. 

Fuck. She and her mother couldn’t go anywhere in the USA anymore, thanks to her potty mouth.

“But—” started Jasmine.

“Look. We need to stop arguing. Seriously. Especially on a day like this. Now, it’s thirty minutes back home. I’m not letting something stupid like a checkpoint stop me, okay? I will visit the Dalisays’ graves virtually, with or without you. And you need to learn to be less impulsive, less explosive. Maybe things will actually go the right way if you learn to be calm and keep your mouth shut for once.”

“Fine.” Jasmine could not lose sight of why she wanted to attend the Dalisays’ death anniversary. I don’t really care about them. I never really knew them. So I don’t need to feel guilty for using them to leave this shithole country. “I’ll go with you.”

Silence came between mother and daughter as they logged into the eSpacio homepage of Olinger’s. Using their eyes, they projected a 360-degree virtual reality mesh around them, entering their own private augmented worlds as they authenticated themselves into the Viewing Room of the Deceased.