⚒️ Goldilocks In A Winter Coat

⚒️ Goldilocks Winter Coat

by Joel Glover

1 week after 1st exploration of New Heilongjiang

“She’s in the Goldilocks zone,” Ted Nyguyen announced to the Board, in that famous Texan drawl, “but blondie had better button up her winter coat.”

The projected image of the planet rotated on the screen before them and on the screens of masked executives who stayed at home. A marble, almost the cerulean blue of the company’s branding, girdled with massive equatorial mountain ranges. 

Data scrolled across the bottom: Gravity 0.98 Earth Standard. Average surface temperature 17॰ Fahrenheit. Day length, 23 hours, 11 minutes, 4 seconds. Year length 337 days. Oxygen saturation 22.8%.

“Rare Earth metals will remain just that,” he went on, “but the days of scarcity will come to an end once our mining operations are up and running. Yup, this is a glory hole, boys and girls.”

The planet and data were replaced by financial forecasts. The profitability line climbed as precipitously as the mountains which they had supplanted on the screen. The assembled group noted the figures were given in platinum, not any fiat currency.

Ten years after New Heilongjiang planetfall

“It breaks my heart to see him like this.” She did not know her son was listening, behind the door, feigning sleep.

“Just bad luck,” her husband said. “Young men everywhere have always made bad, bold decisions trying to show how brave they are. And that extra one percent of oxygen in the atmosphere makes you feel invincible.”

Ken did not need to see his mother’s face, he had seen disbelief before.

“How else do you think I got the courage to ask you on a date?” his father asked. It was an old joke between them. “Then of course, there is the cold. Danny took a poorly calculated risk, and has paid the ultimate price for it. All we can do is be there for Ken. Nothing we can do to make the air less rich or the planet less cold.”

“I know,” his mother agreed. “But I can’t help thinking of Danny, all alone, at the end.”

“It would have been quick,” his father reassured her, “at that temperature you wouldn’t know it was happening.”

In his bed, staring at the ceiling, Ken made a promise to Danny that he would do something.

Eighty-seven years after New Heilongjiang planetfall

His father had farmed rice, and his father before him. For generation upon generation, the Choongs farmed rice in the Yangtze River Basin. Ken might have travelled as far as a man could, but he still farmed rice. He worked steadily through the field, pulling one in three plants and letting them fall into the silt beneath the water. For him, and for Jean-Michel working beside him, this practice was foreign. But you farm in the way the owner instructs, so they did as they were asked. Left the plants to rot beneath the surface.

Fish teemed around his boots, trying to get traction with their mouths on the synthetic rubber. Failing. Behind him Dominique, Jean-Michel’s niece, dragged a net through the weeds, catching the largest of the fish and trapping them in a bucket for later. There would be satay sauce, made fresh by Swee Lan with peanuts grown on the roofs of their prefab houses.

He had lived here his whole life. His children had been born here, his grandchildren too. He saw the bemusement on their faces when he talked about the old days. When he had his glasses on, at least. 

“Gung Gung, what are you doing out here? Without your coat on, too!”

His favourite, Eva. She worried about him.

“And don’t give me your stories about how ‘you don’t know what cold is, Eva, this would have been the warmest day of the year when I was a boy’!”

It would, though. He thought back to the day he and Danny had run from end to end of the complex, outdoors, with no coats. Thought about how he had never told anyone that it was his idea. Thought about the agonising wait, in the dark corridor, for Danny. Who never came back.

Here he sat, with no coat on, on his veranda, beneath an alien sun that was all he had ever known. Eva handed him a bowl of congee and a spoon, flaked white fish mixed through the rice. The spiced peanut oil which topped the dish warmed his tongue, just enough for him to sweat. It was his mother’s recipe.