Breathe In/Out

So this was it.  I was finally desperate enough to respond to the advert, the to-good-to-be-true advert.  I knew what the catch was, I wasn’t stupid.  I was just desperate.

My heart was hammering as I picked up the phone.

Don’t do it I kept thinking, there must be another way.

But there wasn’t another way.  I’d spend weeks going over and over my meagre income and my substantial debts, and there was no way the two would ever work out.  Not unless I sold my body, the most lucrative thing I owned.

Someone picked up.  I was so distracted I barely heard her greeting.  Somehow, I pulled myself together when it was my turn to speak.

“I’m calling regarding your advert,” I said, only a slight hesitation in my voice. 

The advert was circled in the newspaper I clutched to myself.  Breathe in/out, it said.  £500/£250 per breath.  Easy money.

I got the job, not that there was ever any question about it.  The interview would have been less of a joke if they’d just held a mirror up to my face and waited to see if it fogged up or not. 

There were ten of us starting together that day.  Most of us seemed to be about the same age, my age, mid-twenties.  A few were older.  One girl looked to be about sixteen.  The road that lead her here was built from the tracks on her arms.

Half an hour of training.  The guy was manically cheerful, grinning his head off, telling us all how lucky we were to be here.  How fortunate we were to have this chance.  How we were going to make ‘a wad’. 

That afternoon we were lined up outside in our safety gear, waiting for our chance to hop on and join in.  I fidgeted as I waited, taking in the amazing sight.  The breeze – it was always blowy here – rustled my hair.

I’d heard of it, of course – who hadn’t?  Even seen pictures.  But to see it up close like this was something else entirely.  The sheer size of it; the way its body stretched over the horizon.  I’d have been awestruck if I wasn’t also paying attention to how shattered my new co-workers looked as they walked past us, heading home after a brutal shift.

Shifts were twelve hours long.  Twelve hours of hard, back-breaking work.  If you fell off, you didn’t get paid, not a penny for the entire shift.  Not even if it was the eleventh hour when you slipped.   Four shifts per week, twelve on, twelve off.

I came to the front of the line, watching the little teenager hop on ahead of me.  That was the official terminology, “hopping on”.  What she actually did was more like an undignified shuffle, climbing across people until she reached her space.

Then it was my turn.  I climbed up into the space recently vacated by another worked, the weak link in the chain.  I hooked my limbs around the people around me, holding myself in place.  Then I braced myself.  My core muscles were aching within the first ten minutes, but I had no choice but to hold on, now I’d committed myself.

Just think of the money, I thought to myself, trying desperately to distract myself.  The money.  £500 to breathe in.  £250 to breathe out.

I had plenty of time to think over those twelve hours.  What I thought about most was it.  The giant thing I was performing CPR on.

I wondered what the aliens had been playing at.  It was five years ago now, when they’d first arrived, dragging it behind their spaceships like one of those giant balloons you used to see at parades.  It’s as big as a mountain range.

The transcript of the conversation is available online.  I tried to remember it, line for line, as I braced myself there in a mesh of other people.

Our ruler is dying they had said, in their strange language, full of beeps and boops.

If you do not save our glorious leader they added we will raze your planet and revive benevolent with the blood of your species.

Then they had left, leaving their ruler behind them.  But not without first destroying Australia, just to prove they could.

And that brings you to me, and to all my co-workers hanging beside me.  They were right when they said their ruler was dying.  The world’s best doctors – within those first, frantic, 24 hours – realised that he needed CPR.  And that was exactly what we were doing.  Over and over.  Breathe in, breathe out.

Each of the giant alien’s breaths took 5-8 hours and you’re paid based on how many of those happen in each of your shifts.  A lucrative shift might get three – one right at the beginning, one halfway through, and one right at the end - while the next rota would only manage one.  It was a lottery. 

A few times, over the years, we’d tried building a machine to replicate the task we were performing by hand, but none of them had worked.  After the last disaster had culminated with the Glorious Ruler almost dying it had been decreed that the wages would be doubled.  It was hard, tiring, back-breaking work.  There was no respect and no joy.  But the money was good.

Every time the breaths slow down beyond one every ten years, every world leader is lit up by a red spotlight.  The same red spotlight which heralded the destruction of Australia.

Sometimes, they try a different approach.  Sometimes, when the breaths slow down, they light up a billion or so people instead of the world leaders.  One in every seven or eight.  It’s never been me, but once it was my mother.  It’s a lot scarier when the person destroyed might be you or your family than when it’s happening to a stranger halfway around the word.

So we breathe.  Or we die.  Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference.