The Congolese Athlete
Managing Mash all day was a routine and stable job, but not without its frustrations for Belzin. For one thing, the Mash workers at the refinery were starting to act too human, in other words, too self-preserving. The Mash weren’t perfectly self-aware (not as far as Belzin could tell, anyway), but that didn’t mean they were stupid. They were built to learn and to do tasks “smarter not harder”. Unfortunately some of their tasks were very hard, very hazardous, and taxing on the robots’ many high-maintenance parts; these were the tasks many of the Mash went to great lengths to try to get out of doing. Mash didn’t understand everything, but at least some of them understood their design lives were finite, and that they would likely be shorter the more risks they took and the more times they were repaired. For example, on the days scheduled for changing out the high-pressure methane tanks (days infamous for explosions and parts-melting mishaps) Belzin noticed a larger-than-normal percentage of the crew reporting in with mysterious “battery communication loss” and “software corruption” ailments, which mysteriously resolved themselves somehow by the next shift. Getting them to grit their robot teeth and just get the job done was proving harder and harder for Belzin.
Otherwise, Belzin’s career in the carbon energy field was fairly humdrum, but the pay was good. Anything that could be burned was a valuable fuel…coal, oil, gas, captured methane, biowaste, wood, you name it. Sure, it was wreaking havoc on Earth’s climate (depending on whom you asked), but no one left on Earth was in much of a position to try and change that. Pretty much all of the Sumpsti, and now quite a few of the Pefelsti, had relocated to Mars where there were already three cities and six more were actively being built. Everyone on Mars could still Meto just as they did on Earth, so they were still very much in the public eye of the Earthlings. And just about everyone not on Mars dreamed of being there soon, or maybe their children or grandchildren would go there. Belzin did not yet have any children or even a significant other, but wondered if their unborn children would grow up to be Martians.
In the meantime, before Belzin would meet that special someone (which I probably don’t have to tell you was extremely difficult when no one could tell much about Belzin’s gender, sexual orientation or background), life was kind of boring. So when Belzin saw the post on the company bulletin board “Host an International Player for the Edmonton Ents 2 Team!” they were intrigued by it. They were a big football (not Canadian or American football, real football) fanatic and followed several international leagues. The best players from the Premier Leagues were on Mars now and playing in the MPL, but everyone could still watch their games in Meto. What would it be like to host a player for the local franchise’s minor league team, who was perhaps headed for a big league or even someday for Mars? Exciting! But the doubts came too: who knows what country they’d be from, who knows what kind of food they’d eat or how they would smell, and there was at least the possibility they didn’t wear a lonk off the pitch. What would Belzin do then? They had an old lonk with a slow connection that was very out of style, that Belzin kept as a backup in case of emergency…they supposed the football player could borrow that one in a worst-case scenario. But Belzin had to admit to theirself that would just be…weird. Still, it was exciting to think about the possibility of having company and simultaneously learning about another country’s ways.
After a particularly stressful day at work, when nothing seemed to go right and there wasn’t another human within earshot to complain to, Belzin saw the post again and captured the link. They rushed to Meto at the first opportunity and signed up to host an international player for the Ents 2 Team. For a few weeks, nothing happened. Belzin wondered for weeks if their application got lost in the shuffle, or if the Ents had more than enough hosts for their international players. Then, one Guede (Thursday) the news arrived as a blip in the corner of their lonk-vision: Belzin had been selected for the hosting program and had already been assigned the player!
They were so thrilled and impatient to read the post, they immediately flashed over to Meto (committing a cardinal sin within the refinery…during work hours one could only visit Flak, the company’s strictly-work-related metaverse…visits to Meto were frowned upon at best) to view the details. There, an avy congratulated Belzin on being selected, went over a few rules and guidelines with them, and let Belzin know that their guest player was to be Michel Defassi, a 19-year-old male from Congo-Brazzaville. The avy pulled up a life-size rendering of Defassi in his school uniform (not his football team uniform as Belzin was expecting), with no lonk. Belzin was filled with a strange combination of dread, curiosity, and adventure at seeing an adult, a stranger, not covered by the anonymity of a lonk image. Of course, the game of football was played without lonks…it would be nearly impossible to judge the position of a player’s head or feet with a lonk, and would be tantamount to cheating. But camera closeups of the players were rare, so there wasn’t much to see anyway beyond the skin tones and hairstyles of individual players on the pitch. And once they were off the pitch and out in the world, the Sumpsti players Belzin watched were always wearing their lonks.
Belzin peered at the hologram of Defassi and studied his facial expression carefully. There was something there, several somethings actually, behind those all-too-real eyes: a steady sureness, a calmness, a serenity, but also a fiery determination, a strong and unflinching will…a storm.
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