The Membranes

by Chi Ta-wei

Tomie Ito was Japanese. A regular client of Momo’s, she came to the salon for tune-ups. Tomie was sexy.

Presumably this is a reference to Junji Ito’s Tomie?

It was difficult for late twenty-first-century humanity, living at the bottom of the sea, to imagine life before. The hardest thing to imagine was that some twentieth-century elites actually roasted their skin to the color of burnished copper and considered this hazardous activity a form of leisure!

As humanity labored to carve out a home in the sea, it seemed to fall right back into colonial ways. In the spirit of progress, corporations and nations alike devised ever more ingenious defense systems. As the world’s surface grew increasingly desolate, the various nations deployed standing militias lest anyone seize a piece of their land when they weren’t looking.

Safe under the purple sky of a waterproof and earthquake-proof membrane, deep beneath the ocean, people lived out their days like flowers in a greenhouse.

She’d rather make a poor decision for herself, acting on her own desires, than have it made by someone else.

By then, video conference calls had completely replaced voice calling to streamline effective communication. But even back then little Momo could see how ridiculous this “effective communication” really was. People can’t get close enough to hug, so they invent a “communication” device that can replace hugging. How absurd!