No One Ever Does

This is one of those chapters that opens with me writing, and you talking to me. I’m not sure how we ended up with this format. Like, is that something I want or need? Is it something you want? Do we like doing it together?

You say whatever you think. Or, you know, you remain silent.

I get to a part where I say something. I say, “I just read this thing that says Nazis thought Alpha Tauri was the home of the Aryan race. What a fucking joke.”

You may not know what I mean, so I go on, saying, “I’m from there, you know. Alpha Tauri … Well, my family is. My mother's family. There aren’t any Nazis or Aryans there.”

You say that you didn’t realize there were any habitable planets near Aldebaran.

“Y’all don’t know about them yet, no. But they’re there. And by the Thirty-Second Century you all will have known about it for a while. Can’t remember when exactly. I kina suck at history and timelines.”

Perhaps you’re a sparky bee and say that you thought I was from Mars.

“That's a previous life,” I say. “Not this one, remember?”

Probably you do, but even if you didn’t, you can play it off like you do, mostly because I don’t really care.

You might ask what brought my mother’s family here.

“Same shit that brings anyone anywhere. War. The opportunity for a better life.”

If you’re curious about the war part, you can ask, but I really don’t know.

“That was from, like, my grandfather's time or earlier.”

You can ask if knew my grandfather.

“Yeah,” I will say. “I knew him. He died when I was, like, twenty-nine. So I knew him pretty well.”

You ask if we got along, if I liked him.

“Well he was an alcoholic, as many Taurans are. So that was difficult. But somewhere around when I turned eighteen or nineteen, he promised to stop drinking around me, and that made things much better between us. I lent him my copy of Slaughterhouse-Five once.”

You ask what he thought of it.

“He said, ‘It’s weird stuff, Tracy. Good, but very, very weird.’ Which I thought was kina funny. It's not thay weird, which means he would have thought I was next level weird had he gotten to know me fully.”

So he never did? you ask.

“Naw,” I say and close the folio. “No one ever does.”

Play procedures

• How well do you feel like you know me? Do I know much about you? And what of people you interact with every day? What do you really know about each other?
• You can now travel to the Alpha Tauri system, provided you have the means to get there. As you will see upon arrival, there are no Nazis or Aryans there, only Taurans and ambassadors from other worlds.
• Have you read Slaughterhouse-Five? Does it have any similarities to our story?