The Hair of Cathrine Byrne and other future tales

By Linda Six

Four short science fiction stories, all with a female lead. The different stories explore four different possibilites from the female leads perspective, and how they deal with their own reality.

Helena Orm: a dystpoian setting with a strong segregation in society. A woman struggling to nagivate this, and encounter a large organisation that deprive her of her freedom. She tries to figure out what they want with her, and try to find her own will to live. But the struggle against the military organisation which captivated her is a struggle no one has won so far.

Flowers in the sand: a crippled woman undergoe a surgery that will cure her and make her walk again, but it will also make her part machine. This create a distance between her and her step-father, the only father she ever had. And the death of her mother is a great pain in her life, a pain which shadow everything else. We follow her as Mars slowly bloom, and how she slowly open up to herself and to the rest of the world.

The Hair of Cathrine Byrne: a poetic story about a girl who lives in a world where people change the colour of their skin as we change clothes. How you look and how colourfull you are is everything. But Cathrine refuses this and stand out as grey feather in a rainbow.

Goddamn it! : a women narrates her day, a day of a modern women in a modern city. This world is a forced utopia, where happiness is mandatory and reeducation is for the overweight, asexuals and intolerants. She let us now exactly what she thinkgs about it, and as the story goes on we follow her descent into madness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linda Six
• Release date: Nov 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311451842

Linda Six

I have always been what you might call a bookworm, always my nose down a book. I spent a lot of my child hood and teenage years hiding in the school library, reading and reading. One of my all-time favourite is the fantastic comic Linda and Valentine by Jean-Claude Mézières and Pierre Christin. I urge every sci-fi fan to read these beatiful comic-books. This, thogheter with many hours reading Jules Verne, created a early interest in science-fiction. This is a bit of a paradox, I grew up on a farm in the country side, far from any kind of city. The entire forest was my playground, and since I grew up in the northern hemisphere, I spent many sleepless winternight ́s watching the stars and northen lights. I liked the thought that the universe is infinite, that the stars was so very far away. The thought came early in my life that I would like to see that infinity, all the possibillities that is waiting out there for us. I always though of science-fiction as a experiment for thought. You make a set of rules, fantastic or not, and the trough people in it. How would they react? What would happend? I always have a great deal of fun when thinking out a new universe to a book. Today I live with my dog, I spend a lot of time out-doors, admiring the nature of our beutiful world. I once saw a documentery about aliens or something, and a man said something very deep. "If we are alone in the universe it says something. It tells ut that life is rare, and precious."

Book preview

Helena Orm

Helena felt nauseas. Around her in the cold autumn air movements stirred up odors, like a junkyards perfume of dust, urine, sweat and concrete.

As it often was, it was quiet when the masses waited for the morning train that would carry them to the City. Helena swallowed the impulse to vomit. If she would throw up in this position it would be placed on the back of the person in front of her, and it would probably not be appreciated. For a thing like that, there would be problems, and she didn’t need any more of those.

The train rattled its way into the station, and the train assistants pushed in as many as possible in the rusty sorrow they called a train. The City financed these trains and the large ghettos. They had been built during the war to house the many immigrants. The City screamed for more workers at the time, and the workers came. It was better then get in the way of the war, and the long and expansive propaganda had convinced them that they would live in a dream. And now they lived in worn down concrete buildings in the Happiness, the Dream and Serenity, something the City insisted was to be called homes.

But decades passed and the war that screamed for workers ended, at least officially. These days the Happiness was a worn down ghetto where the descendents of the immigrants lived, poor and starving.

At Helena’s foot where she stood squeezed in between others in the train, right at the heel of her foot, the rust had eaten its way through the floor. Helena had to strain her calf to prevent the leg to go down through the hole. She closed her eyes to let the darkness within her provide a sort of peace.

The man was overweight, something you never saw in the Happiness. Pearls of sweat crowned his forehead like a king’s crown in the pasty light, and his clothing was decorated by large stains.

He was the boss at the restaurant where Helena had worked until two days ago, when stomach flu had forced her to stay home. She knew well that she had lost her job. That was what happened if you got sick. There were many to take her place since the workers where many and the economy was at the bottom of the drain. So the cost for illness was your job.

The man had yelled at her and screamed at her. And when he was done with that he came with the suggestion that he could arrange a job for her in exchange for certain… services. Helena got up without a word and left the room as the man yelled behind her.

Trainrat! May the rail take your soul! In the Happiness you were a trainrat when you rode the rusty sorrows for trains each day. It did happen that people fell down on the rail and got overrun, and sometimes they jumped, and that could delay traffic for hours. The clean up was messy, and it required a large amount of black plastic bags. It did happen though that the driver simply was too stressed, or tired, to wait for the cleanup crew, so he or she would simply drive through it, making the mess even messier.

May the rail take your soul! It was a curse; may you die in the sorrow in which you dwell!

Helena passed the kitchen and stole some bread before she left. The bread was tough and settled like a brick in her stomach. When she came to the employment office she had to sit for a rest on the stairs. It was large and wide as the building itself and lead the way up to what once was a proud alley of pillars. Her stomach cramped violently and before she could move on she had to sit for a while. Everywhere pigeons flocked, dirty and filthy with feet disfigured by the cold. A man was urinating against one of the magnificent pillars, and a guard quickly chased him away. Helena knew he would not let her sit there for long, he was keeping a close eye on her. He started to walk towards her, she had littered the place with her presence long enough. Helena got up and started to slowly work her way up the mighty stairs.

Once inside the employment office a dried up, tiny old lady sat in the counter at the long and worn out desk. The pace was fairly fast this morning, only one hour in line before it was her turn. Helena reached her card over the counter without a word and the lady took it in silence. Not one of them said a word as her file was controlled. Everything was in the central register, all data traffic, all files and registers and every transaction that was done. Helena’s working file was controlled and she was given a list of jobs she was qualified for. Helena left the building without having uttered a single word.

When she left the interview she leaned against the wall with a hand tightly clasped over her mouth. Her head was spinning and her stomach started to scream and cramp again.

It couldn’t be true! It couldn’t be true!

Sense disrupters!

She had never eaten any medicines in her entire life. The only time she ever even met a real doctor was at the four year health control every kid got.

But it was true, it said so in the register, so it was true. She would never get a job, not when it said in her file that she took sense disrupters! It disrupted and distorted the mind they said. And they were for the weak who couldn’t cope with reality they said. A sound and healthy citizen do not eat sense disruptors!

That was the mantra and propaganda the society had learned, psychological illness was not allowed. A citizen has to be healthy enough to work and fulfill his responsibilities to the community! Especially if you were at the bottom of it, the small but very rich elite and large middle-class demanded services and needed to be provided for. Build a house and a richer man will live in it. Make food, and a fat women with jewelry will eat it. Work until you drop dead, and you will never ever be rewarded. Sleep with the richer man that demanded that you would do so, and then he bought satin clothes for his fat wife. May the rail take you soul!

Helena saw her own reflection in a window. She was not healthy and sound, at least not enough. The last days of illness had taken its toll on her, and she was thinner than ever. The cheekbones was a little bit sharper, and on her thin and long body ribs and hipbones were sticking out, visible under her pale skin and her five-sizes-too-big clothing. She really wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t a well fed beauty that she sometimes served at the restaurants where she worked. Well fed with a soft and inviting body, with shiny and pretty hair.

No, she was a ghost.

A ghost barely getting by, waiting for… well, what really? To die? It was possible that so was the case, she had never had time to ponder it more deeply. She was far too busy to care for herself and her mother.

She didn’t know what to do. All her options for work were destroyed. The only thing she could think of was to get back to the employment office.

This time the old lady in the counter actually spoke. With an open mouth full of yellow and cracked teeth she stared from her screen to Helena, then to her screen again. She closed her ugly mouth just to open it again a few times before she spoke.

I don’t know what to say! she said. It says here you take sense disruptors-

I have never taken them! Helena hissed at her. I have never taken a pill in my entire life, I don’t think I even know how they´re suppose to look!

But it says in the central register that you-

Well, then the central register is wrong! she yelled. The voice echoed in the large hall and everyone was looking at her. She lowered her voice and repeated what she said.

Don’t yell!

Be quiet, be nice, keep your head down and they might not notice you!

Don’t