Selected Future Tales From Agony Script

Clayton
Clayton looked at the array of switches and toggles, gages and displays that sat dirty and flashing in front of his face. He thought about all the moments in his life for which this had been the unfaltering, docile scenery; all the times he had spilt things or dropped crumbs through the gaps in its faces. These crumbs and tiny dried puddles of drink now sat deep inside this thing, in still, intimate coitus with its insides. He thought about all the times he had fallen asleep on its faces - alone - its flashing displays gently shaping the tone of his dreams.

Then he thought of his dreams of Alison, and the time he kissed her against its faces, half-lit by its flashing displays. Her right thigh had incidentally flipped the combination of toggles and switches that opened the airlock, and typed ‘asdfgh’ into the terminal, this was the last thing Alison or her thigh ever said. She shot away from Clayton, down the hallway and out into the darkness of space. Clayton was alright - his outfit had got caught round a switch. But he didn’t feel alright, after that.


Sooty (part 1)
Sooty sipped on a carton of Lilo Sustain; an airy drink designed to supply sustenance and abate the sickness and strange feelings of low gravity. Sooty’s craft was a Sleep Station and so lacked a gravity system. It also lacked any hard surfaces; the interior of the spacecraft was as soft and relenting as the fragrant, formulated air that filled it. Sooty let the carton float away and reached for a sucking sweet designed to augment and deepen dreams. She didn’t know that the things she ate and drank stimulated and subdued this and that, she hardly knew anything about the craft at all, or of the Dreamers that once occupied it.

Sooty was the result of a dreamt romance between one Dreamer, known as Florian, and their fantasy of another; Caelan. Unlike this romance that never blossomed past a yearning, Sooty was undeniably real. She appeared one sleep cycle among dreams, to then remain when the dreamers awoke for dinner and discussion. Florian’s yearnings for Caelan were so thorough and acute that through the fog of deep sleep and deep space they had rendered a reality. The dreamers, and those they dreamt up, raised Sooty mainly among dreams; a childhood spent roaming abstract scapes of feeling and playing sleeping lions on the taints of giants.

Florian’s ability to unintentionally give their yearning corporeal form spooked many of the dreamers as it raised the possibility that they to could realise other, more troubling thoughts and feelings. Not long after Sooty was dreamt to life this scenario transpired and one after the other the dreamers all helplessly dreamt themselves to death leaving one year old sooty alone in deep space.


Alan
Long before the domes, there was a daily afternoon that'd reliably fade in and fade out all on its own. And among these loose and un-laminated days, as pretty yellows leached through the blinds of a lonely flat, Alan spent his afternoons inside arranging figurines of spacemen, sourced a few at a time. Alan had 17 spacemen, he used to have less, later he’d have more, and later than that it’d hardly matter to anyone.

Alan had let his life settle and subside; he had found himself in cosy stasis, love lost or hardly found. He had down-sized what he looked for out of life, and found suitably down sized, lifeless companions for it. He was content among these tiny likenesses of future argonauts; he did not love them, yet he stored his love inside them, where it was safe, and the risks were as low as the gains.

Alan was too uptight to arrange the spacemen into a scene. Instead he’d group similar figures in sets, to then rearrange them so dissimilar stood alongside dissimilar to display the range of figures he had. After this he’d arrange only his favourite figurines as a group, and yearn after the rare variants he had not yet been able to find; the gaps in his set.

Here and there an arrangement almost talked of a scene; an incidental gaze shared between a few plastic faces. In these moments, Alan's mind could drift to daydreams of the spaceman lifestyle; He’d sit, lay, and stand around inside as the times of day danced outside his flat. Occasionally he’d daydream of other things; about flirting through a gap in his blinds with a passer by. Initially they’d flirt through a series of speaking looks he thought. He’d then open his top window a crack to allow for flowing conversation; he didn’t usually open the window incase he forgot to close it if he left the room. The room grew musty in a way he couldn’t tell.

By Autumn Alan had acquired another 10 spacemen, and a little after that he died after he fell out of his window whilst trying to realign the blinds. It was the first time he’d left the house in 3 weeks, and the most thrilling thing to happen to him for years. His body was found four days later by a woman that would often walk that way.

Sally
Sally reached for a comb. She knocked over a pallid statuette of two faceless lovers fused in a kiss. The statuette floated off and through the hatch to hallway. Her nudge had unfixed the fixative that held the duo-figurine to the sill aside the airlock. She saw it settle by a picture of a park she had put up in the living space. She cried about the lack of living that was going on anywhere in this spacecraft, and for how long she had longed to stroll around such a park holding hands and pointing at geese. She’d never seen a geese, or another set of hands other than her own. She’d never seen anything of another person, all she had for reference was herself and the statuette. Some days she took their creamy, integrated form as a side affect of the sort of affection they displayed, other days she took it simply as a representation of this affection. She was into it in any case.

She kept crying, The tears would soon slip off her face and float around. She reached limply to her left & flipped a switch, setting off a Hoover fitted into the sideboard designed to prevent loose fluids finding their way into the spacecraft's insides. A few tears slid off her face and into the vent. She yearned to take care of other fluids. The stale hum of the Hoover had her thinking of the park, of the shallow howling of the wind as it ran its fingers through the tree’s branches and leaves; as if a lover playing with their lover’s hair, she thought. She pictured the geese kissing in the trees as the rain gathered and spat the faint residue of their musk of fervour onto Sally and her lover’s tryst. Sally cried in this dense daze until the park got dark and her and her lover sat on a damp bench labelled with a stranger’s name. They talked about how great it was that rain heads straight for the ground rather than floating around aimlessly in the air, and she kissed her lover on the face and with her lips felt it was wet with rain. The Hoover stuttered as it struggled to inhale some of Sally’s hair that had slipped into the vent. She spent four hours untangling her hair and then watched someone unclogged forest drains online.