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This is how you end a show.

All I'd really ever dreamed of was violence and flying and it turned out I couldn't be satisfied with just one. Every playacted daydream I'd had in my old bedroom I'd been the captured hero, struggling against her bonds before freeing herself with subterfuge, cunning or raw strength. There weren't a lot of things worth vigilanteing against so I did the next best thing: built a moonbase and a reputation.

The captain. [words, Caroline]

Come to Undiscovered Countries, 1/18!

#flygirl #concept art #sketch #undiscovered countries #bizarre bushwick #collaboration #trans women #sci fi #girlfriends being gross on tumblr

FLYGIRL

an illustrated short story

coming to the program insert of UNDISCOVERED COUNTRIES, 1/18!

I had so much fun writing/drawing this with Caroline, and if you’re in NYC I hope you can come to the show, ‘cause there’s gonna be so much good stuff happening there! We’re gonna be posting some early concept art and words from the story here. Stay tuned!

Too much trash, too many prisoners: two birds one stone by the US Empire when it launched compressed landfills into space to serve as satellite penal colonies. Even with the population drain though, most people still had no jobs, now that robots did most unpleasant labor better and with fewer complaints than humans. Popular protests by the disaffected unemployed merged with lunar riots, and soon the capitalistic US empire was overwhelmed.

The subsequent socialist government established a universal basic income, and with people freed from the need to labor, hobbyist sciences flourished. In particular, recent advances in prostheses led to an explosion of artificial wings. Soon seedy wing joints crammed into the bodymod districts of every city (usually conveniently located right next to the meatpacking districts where they got most of their flesh--most meat was cultured from stem cells in vats, cities had taken over the pastures and actually raising and butchering an animal was seen as a decadent barbarism, and once you got used to the spongy texture the fatty homogeneity of vat-grown meat was quite comforting). The finest wings merged bone, muscle, and electrical wire to give features like increased stamina or electrolocation (generation of a weak electrical field to sense in the dark or deflect tasers). Though even in these enlightened times you had to be pretty careful to find a good wingmodder--nothing makes you more cautious than a slowly necrosing gangrenous limb dangling off your scapula.

Prisons had of course been abolished, and most prisoners had been flown from the trash moons back to earth. But a few enterprising individuals longed still for closeness to the interstellar void (or the absence of any kind of law or order or biotic life) and were willing to brave carcinogenic dust storms for it. Life on the trash moon was difficult: the styrofoam ground doesn't exactly nourish food, so your extraterrestrial potatoes had to be all hydroponics, and now that the US had officially withdrawn from "foreign entanglements," your best bet at supplies came from bribing rogue space captains from lawless petrostates of Scandanavia. Wings were actually the preferred means of travel in the low gravity on the moon, especially since all road infrastructure had been stripped out by rioters and wings were harder to steal than a vehicle anyway. The thin air meant that the best flykids coasted on the high winds on giant albatross-like wings; those flashy hoverfly hummingbird wings, so useful for darting around earth city skyscrapers, were pretty pathetic here. People who were attached to material things, objected to having to wear masks except in a few isolated safe bubbles, or had a family history of cancer--they weren't well-served by the moons. Still, it's a place where a flygirl with an electric baton and not a lot to lose could make a name for herself.

COME TO UNDISCOVERED COUNTRIES, 1/18!