I didn’t want to move to the Golden Planet in the first place. Sure, the Jersey Space Station was cramped and had lots of mechanical issues, but it was home. We had a view of the Ocean Galaxies through our windows all day, every day. Granted, those windows were scratched and dirty from age, but the Ocean Galaxies were magnificent even through fingerprints. The faulty temperature regulation system made it feel like we had seasons, like on a planet. Sometimes the Atria were even covered in fake snow, which falls from the sky on some planets.

Traveling between JSS and Calif was expensive and time-consuming, but when Mom got some low-level tech job at a big name rocket repair factory, we packed up our meager belongings and hopped on the next ship to Calif, otherwise known as the Golden Planet on account of the two suns that assured temperate-to-hot weather all year long on the whole planet. Something my mom reminded me of at least a billion times on our journey to the planet’s surface, along with the rumor that the most of the residents of Calif had golden tanned skin and sun-streaked blonde hair. They didn’t have to rely on sun lights or Vitamin D enhancements. Apparently, natural sunlight was irreplaceable, no matter how hard the space station engineers tried.

“We’ll have so much space,” my mom reminded me for the umpteenth time as the shuttle took us from the port to our new house. “Our own kitchen and community space for just the two of us.” I mumbled something about how two people didn’t make enough of a community to garner their own space. Ma gave me the side eye but continued talking. “And no more Atria. Just real nature.”

“I like the Atria, Ma,” I argued. Because everything was bioengineered or synthetic, the Atria could have palm trees next to cacti next to roses next to pine trees. There were no seasons or different biomes to limit the greenery we could have. There were daily community classes in the Atria, too, where I’d met most of my friends. Friends that would move on and forget about me.  

“Oh, you like flickering sun lights? You like having just one lawn for everyone?”

There was no reasoning with her when she was like this.

We finally got to our building, so I helped unload our stuff onto the ground so we could carry it in. Even though it cost extra, my mom had let me bring along my old-fashioned bike. It didn’t have an engine, just pedals so you moved the wheels on their own. They weren’t common anymore, but a few people on JSS still had some from their planet-bound ancestors. There was not enough energy to filter air from autobike exhaust or to charge electricycles, so they were the only types of bikes on the station.

Opening the gate into Reseda Complex confirmed my suspicions—rickety stairs led to several floors of tiny rooms with attached tiny community spaces. The elevator was blocked off with an “Under Maintenance” sign that, judging from the rust and fading letters, had been there for a while. The Atrium, which was called the Free Space, was barely an Atrium—the trees and plants were half-dead, brown and crumbling. The air felt soupy and heavy, immediately making my skin sticky. Inside, our personal community space was grim—shabby couch and screen and wobbly kitchen table. The appliances, though meant only for the two of us, were rusted and barely working. Were we supposed to eat alone, just the two of us? Where was the nearest food dispensary? The amount of machines in the space indicated that we would have to do a lot of work to prepare our own food.

We lived in Space 5B, which was basically just a family compartment in poor condition and housed in a building with the other compartments rather than a space station quadrant.

As I hauled in my mom’s clothes and my bike, my anger built up into a kick at the gate to the Free Space. “Hai-ya!” I shouted, my foot connecting with the metal, throwing both unlocked gates flying inward.

“Oof!” I heard someone cry out as I pushed through the gate.

“Oh my stars, I’m so sorry!” I said, grabbing the victim’s hand and pulling them up.

“It’s okay! I’m Fern. Space 3A. You must be the new family in 5B!” Fern was a short, stocky, and dark-haired masculine person with a friendly smile. They insisted on helping me carry in the bag full of my mom’s clothes, leading me up the stairs to 5B.

“What was that kick?” Fern asked, setting the bag down by the door to 5B. “Some kind of self-defense?”

“Yeong Bin-son,” I answered, though technically the planet’s gravity made that untrue. The Eastern Earthen Countries had a self-defense technique called “karate” and the Western Earthen Countries had one called “boxing,” and Bin-son was a mix of the two. Yeong Bin-son was the same training in zero or near-zero gravity.

“Cool!” Fern continued to jabber about everything and nothing—the end of Q3 school break, volleyball team, the crazy lady in 4B. As I looked up and typed in 5B’s door code, Fern convinced me to join them in a gathering at the shore that night. I’d only ever seen pictures of shores, so it didn’t take much convincing.  

“Make sure you find the Fixer before you leave,” my mom said, pointing to our stuttering air filtration system. It was spitting out stale air at odd intervals.

When I found the Fixer’s space, there was no answer to my knock on the door, so I typed a maintenance request and greeting onto his door’s touchscreen message board and met Fern at the gates. They led me through wide pathways full of concrete and brick buildings in drab colors until the horizon suddenly expanded beyond anything I’d ever seen. Kilometers of white sand in both directions. Endless sparkling blue water that made a soft crashing sound. It was like a giant, undulating topaz gem.

The suns’ heat beat down on me with a force I’d never felt. Why had Fern told me to bring a sweatshirt? I was beginning to think that every day on Calif would involve sweating through my clothes. When the warming system malfunctioned on JSS, it got downright freezing. There there had never been a danger of too much warmth.

I didn’t have much time to think about that. A deluge of names were thrown at me as I met all of Fern’s friends, and then we launched into a game of sand volleyball. I was used to playing on a solid surface with less gravity, but I adjusted quickly to how my feet slid and sunk into the sand. It was a fun afternoon, even though my skin burned until it was bright pink. I didn’t know you had to reapply sunscreen for it to continue working. I also made the mistake of jumping into the water with my eyes open, because I didn’t know the sea’s water was salty and would sting. No one made fun of me for it, though. They just helped me cover my shoulders and wash the salt out of my eyes.  

A few meters away was a group of fellow school-aged people with stereotypical Calif looks—blonde and tan and in swimsuits that couldn’t possibly be for speed in the water. They all had expensive alterations, like the small metal implants near their eyes for enhanced vision, identification chips in their wrists, and probably one of those invisible health alterations that monitored vitals and administered some medicines. One girl in particular, with blonde curls pulled back into a ponytail and a smattering of freckles on her nose, caught my eye. Her only alteration was a wrist ID chip and sparkly earrings that could have had a purpose or just been for looks.

Soon the sky was dark, the familiar stars now reflected on the water. The breeze coming from the sea was cool enough that I needed the jacket.

Another first for me that night: bonfires. We gathered around the flames, the smokeless logs making it easier for us to sit in a full circle without anyone being in a worse spot. Real fires weren’t allowed on JSS, for obvious reasons, but sometimes the screens in community spaces would project a fake fire during holidays.

The freckled girl and I made eye contact, and Fern leaned over, “Think she likes you?”

“Nah, no way,” I said, staring into the fire.

With a sly smile, Fern pointed behind me, where the freckled girl was approaching. “Hey,” she said to me. “You’re new, aren’t you?”

“Could you tell by how pale I am?” I joked lamely. I was the palest person there by a long shot, courtesy of living in deep space my entire life.

The girl giggled like I’d actually said something funny. “I’m Hannah. With an ‘h.’”

“I’m Slim… with an ‘m.’” A common enough name on JSS, but her raised eyebrows made me think it was not as normal on Calif.

All of a sudden, Fern began hitting my arm. “Dude, careful. Look who’s coming.” Everyone else in the group stiffened uncomfortably, whispering to themselves. The girl spun around and quickly tried to distance herself from me, but not before a group of “tough guys” marched over, a tall blond guy in the lead. His left hand was completely robotic, or at least encased in metal, and all of them had some sort of similar flashy alteration with no real purpose except to show off.

“What’s going on here, Hannah?” Blonde Robotic Hand Guy said, getting up into Hannah’s face.

“Nothing, Johnny. Just leave me alone,” she spat back at him. She brought her fist out of her pocket and tossed some sort of powder into the fire and it flared up green right behind Johnny. The flames licked his jacket without it catching on fire, but the small defiance had already done its job.

Johnny snatched a water bottle out of one of his friends’ hands and doused the flames. They went out with a hiss and sizzle.

“Hey!” she shoved him, and he shoved back.

I stood up to keep Hannah from stumbling over her feet and offered, “You can join us if you want.”

“Who the hell are you?” Johnny turned his attention to me, flexing his metallic hand while chucking the water bottle to the ground with his other one.

“Come on, use your Bin-son!” Fern cheered at me.

Stars, I swore in my head. I only knew Yeong Bin-son, and the very basics at that. Gravity made a difference in, like, everything to do with self-defense. JSS didn’t have a lot, but it did have a good anti-gravity chamber. I found myself wishing that we’d had better temperature control or air filtration rather than that one fancy room. Yeong Bin-son was pointless now that humans had no reason to go out into space and fight. Just a relic of the past, really. But now I was expected to use it to fight this guy with a literal iron fist.

Well, it was probably titanium, if I really thought about…

Not the point, I reminded myself, rolling up the sleeves of my jacket. Deep breath, center balance, find where your opponent is located relative to you in space, and—

Pow! Blinding pain exploded on my jaw. My head whipped around so fast I felt my neck crack. I slammed chest-first into the ground, the soft sand now like a slab of solid metal. As I lay on the ground, listening to the gasps and jeers, I closed my eyes, pretended I was floating and that my clothes were an anti-gravity jumpsuit, and tried to feel where my opponent was located in space relative to me. The sand shifted just like the air.

I sprang up from the ground and launched my body at Johnny’s, my fist connecting solidly with his nose. But I was used to the ricochet that came from colliding with something in a vacuum, leaving me off balance enough for Johnny to kick up, his heavy boot smashing my jaw in the same spot. So hard that when I hit the ground again, I couldn’t get up. I groaned, ignoring the derisive comments of Fern’s friends and the jeers of Johnny’s goons, listening only to the person who crouched next to me.

“Are you okay?” Hannah asked.

“I’m fine,” I groaned, embarrassed, my face still pressed to the sand.

I heard one of her friends convince her to leave and waited until everyone had abandoned the shore to drag myself to my feet and back to the compartment my mom and I now called home. Ma was already asleep when I got back, and I managed to hit the sweet spot between her departure for her new job and my departure for school, thus avoiding the interrogation about the dark purple and gray splotches on my jaw. The bruises stood out even more because my skin was so pale. I hooked a medical mask around my ears, hoping to pass off my “I feel shitty” vibe as a mild illness.

On my way out the door, I came face to face with an older man holding out a hand to knock on the door. A toolbox sat at his feet and a new filter sheet leaned against it. “Are you the Fixer?” I said, my hand flying to my now pounding chest.

The man nodded. The hair left on his head was mostly gray with some sparse black strands. He was short with a small gut, but he was still as tan as everyone else on Calif.

“Okay,” I said after an awkward moment of silence. “I’ll leave it open for you, then.”

“Thank you,” the Fixer said gruffly as I stepped back to open the door for him. As he entered and flicked the light back on, the Fixer glanced toward the table in our community area, where I’d left the Yeong Bin-son brochure from the JSS community class. It was open to a page on kicks; I’d wanted to see if I could find something like what Johnny had used on me the day before.

With a little too much perceptiveness, the Fixer gestured toward my jaw. “What happened there?”

I knew he would probably talk to my mom about the air filtration system if there was something wrong, so I tried to come up with a quick and believable lie. “Uh, I ran into the doorframe in the dark last night.”

He nodded again with an uninterpretable grunt, but I got the sense he didn’t believe my story. Especially after he said, “Good thing you were looking up, so you didn’t hit your temple and faint.”

How did this random guy suss my lie out so quickly? My head would have to have been tilted at a weird angle to get a bruise on the bottom of my face. “Yeah, I guess so,” I mumbled. The door swung shut behind me and I hurried down to the Free Space to unlock my bike.

When I rode onto the school campus, I was out of breath from the hill I’d ridden up. Space station pathways were always flat; the burning in my calves was a new sensation.

I quickly realized that my old-fashioned bike was not going to be the point of pride it had been on JSS. On a planet, even a small one like Calif, there was room for everyone to have their own transport. The cheapest mode of transport I saw was an autobike—mine was ancient compared to even those.

“Hey, it’s the Bin-son Boy!” someone called, and when I looked over, who did I see dismounting the shiniest, slimmest, and quietist electricycles? Johnny and his gang. It shouldn’t have surprised me that he was trained to fight. No one could kick like he had if they hadn’t been taught.

The goons took the opportunity to tease me, trying to rile me up as I locked my bike in by the autobikes. They didn’t have to lock theirs up, because electricycles used ID chips to start them up.

I couldn’t keep my hands from shaking but managed to withstand their bullying words until I made it inside and yanked the mask down to breath more easily.

I ran smack dab into Hannah. Just my luck. But hey, after getting punched out and bullied without fully losing it, I was due for some good luck, right? So I smiled and greeted her after we steadied ourselves. “Hey!”

She sucked her teeth and reached out her fingers toward my face as if she wanted to touch my jaw. “That looks painful.”

“It looks worse than it feels,” I lied, shifting the mask so it covered the bruise again.

“Good, because it looks bad,” she laughed. Hannah peeked at my class schedule and led me to my first lecture hall, warning me about which teachers would be difficult, which would let you eat in class, and which would give you extra time on assignments if you asked. As the first warning tone sounded through the hallway, Hannah put a hand on my arm. “So I’ll see you at lunch?”

I smiled, unable to stop my mouth from twitching at the sharp pain. “Sure thing.”

When I made it to the Lunchroom after an overwhelming first half of the day, Hannah immediately spotted me and waved. I raised my hand to wave back but was shoved aside into the doorframe, as if in punishment for my earlier lie. But it wasn’t karma. It was an egotistical asshole.

“Oh, man, I saw right through you. You’re like a ghost.” Johnny feigned concern before sauntering off to join his crew with a proud smile on his face.

My jaw clenched. The pain made me angrier. Then my eyes wandered back to Hannah. Her own jaw was clenched, hand frozen in the air. Despite my better judgment, I joined Hannah with my meager lunch. Though, to be honest, it was only meager compared to everyone else’s. The fruits on my plate were so colorful, and the meat on the plate was delicate and almost salty and had little tiny bones I had to pick out of my mouth. Hannah informed me that it was not meat at all, but fish. I’d never eaten fish. I’d never seen a fish.

When I admitted this to Hannah, her eyes bugged out. “You don’t have fish on the JSS?”

I looked up from my inspection of the light-colored dessert that smelled like a lemon. “How do you know where I’m from?”

She smiled boldly, no hint of embarrassment. “I asked around.” And then she dropped the bomb I’d been dreading. She confirmed that Johnny was her ex. Clearly no one had told Johnny—he was staring at us with murder in his eyes. Still, I made it through the next couple weeks with no other physical encounters with Johnny and his goons. Just verbal bullying, graffiti on my bike that I could easily scrape off, and one incident in which an “accidentally” dropped plate splattered dark brown sauce all over my shirt.

Unlike the astute Fixer, my mom bought the story about my jaw, responding simply by telling me to be more careful. I felt a little bad about the lie until she revealed that she had lied to me, too. It turned out that only a few days into her new job, Ma had “quit”—which I assumed meant she’d gotten fired for lack of knowledge—and now worked a worse-paying job selling used tablets. She only admitted it to me when she had to bring me there after school one day, but I did get a free tablet out of it to use for school.

Across the street from Moses’ Used Tablets was a Community Center—a whole building of just community space. The directory on the wall inside listed what each room in the building housed, and I was delighted to see Bin-son Boxing on the list. I wandered down the hallway, marveling at how low the ceiling was. Yeong Bin-son was done in a vast chamber. What was the home of its gravity-bound alternative?

My hands cupped around my face, I peered through the window into a two-story high room with puffy red mats on the floor. The students wore facsimiles of Yeong Bin-son anti-gravity suits with the tell-tale colored armbands that marked their level of expertise. Everyone in the room had at least a brown or black armband, the top two levels. They were lined up in rows like the soldiers in pictures from the Wars of Lost Faiths, which had ended a decade before I was born.

On the wall in big, bold black letters were the words: “Hit hard. Kick harder. Don’t let the enemy rebound.”

The instructor called for attention and invited a student up to lead a punching exercise. As the class bowed, both the teacher and the student were revealed. The teacher looked like a soldier—buzz cut, muscly, old-fashioned alterations, spine erect, hard glare. But it was the student’s face that scared me the most. Bowing in front of the class was none other than Johnny. He locked eyes with me and smiled that evil smile.

My heart dropped straight into my stomach. Why couldn’t I escape that guy?

I straightened up and beelined for the door. I would rather hang out at my mom’s lame job than there. I’d been doing some exercises from my community class brochure just in case Johnny tried to come at me again, but I’d never anticipated using the skills to actually fight someone. With Johnny around every corner, that was becoming more and more likely.

My sour mood continued through until the next day, the only bright spot being that the next day was the weekend, which meant I didn’t have to be on high alert for two whole days. The end of the day couldn’t come fast enough.

“Hey, Slim!” Hannah sidled up next to me in the hallway as classes let out and everyone headed for their transport home. Her blonde curls were pulled up into two high pigtails held by purple scrunchies, revealing a small birth mark behind her ear. I smiled at her despite my mood, and even though I was glad to see her, I couldn’t help but glance around for Johnny. “I’ve been looking for you all day,” she said.

“Oh?” We exited the building and stepped to the side, out of the way of the horde of students charging headfirst into the weekend.

“Yeah,” she said, leaning against the lockers and biting her lip nervously. “I was thinking, since you haven’t really seen any fish besides the ones you’ve eaten, we should check out the aquarium.” I tilted my head to indicate I didn’t know what the word meant. “It’s like a zoo for fish.”

“A zoo?” I couldn’t guess what that meant even with context clues.

Hannah laughed like my ignorance of Calif slang was endearing. “So… do you want to go see some fish? Tonight?”

Now that I understood. That sounded like a date. “Sure, sounds great.”

She tapped on the ID chip in her wrist and held it out to me. If I’d had my own ID chip, she could have tapped hers to mine and immediately transferred her information—name, address, citizen number, contact code. Instead, I retrieved my tablet from where I’d tucked it underneath my arm and she tapped that with her wrist instead. “Pick me up around 20:00?” 

“See you then,” I agreed, wondering if she would be okay with public transport. I wasn’t nearly deft enough on my bike to have a second person on it. Still, my heart felt lighter than it had since school started. At least not everything was going wrong.

Aw, crap. When I turned around to head for my bike, Johnny and his goons were unlocking their own bikes, looking at me with enough dislike that I knew they’d heard our entire conversation. My previously light heart was now pounding, and my pulse threatened to run away entirely. I scratched the itchy skin that was peeling off on my arm—apparently a side effect of sunburns, one that was irritating and kind of gross—and acted casual, like I wasn’t afraid of them at all.

As I rode home, my legs pedaling faster than usual to burn off my nervous energy, I tried not to think about the retaliation that awaited me on Monday, and instead wondered what I should wear to a place that sounded like a fish museum. Was it just a walled off part of the sea? Were the fish on display dead or alive? Did they make cages for fish?

I was too preoccupied to notice my surroundings, navigating home on autopilot. Three nearly silent electricycles easily snuck up behind me. One darted in front of me, one stayed behind me, and the other sidled up next to me, boxing me in.  

“Hey! Let up!” I shouted, tires wobbling as the electricycle in front of me jerked to an impossibly fast stop at the same time the one on my side boxed me in, pushing my bike closer to the side of the hill. The sudden stop and jerk of my bike to the left threw me off the bike, over the handles, and off the path. Time seemed to slow down as I flew through the air. Even though their tinted shades hid their faces, the electricyclists’ helmets were the same ones I saw Johnny and his goons wearing every single day. They were whooping and high fiving, speeding away faster than any transport I’d ever ridden.

My body slammed into the dirt with just as hard of an impact as on the sand. My body bounced off the ground like a volleyball bouncing off a hitter’s fist. Once, twice, three times. I tumbled down the hill, trying to curl up into as small of a ball as possible. No opportunity for my lungs to replace any of the breath that had been forced out on initial impact. My head hit a rock at some point, sending black spots through the greens and browns and grays of Calif that whirled around me. Would this hill ever end?

TO BE CONTINUED…

-Ryn PB

*This story is a retelling of The Karate Kid (1984).*

Note: I decided to keep the name Johnny from the original film because I love the name. I think it fits the character so well.