Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer

My name is Verity. I am senior columnist for the Moonville Daily Star. My name means truth.

I’ve a friend, she’s obviously not. If she were then I wouldn’t be sticking pins into the pools of her cartoon fawn-like eyes. Oh, but I do it to protect her, you see, from herself. To pick the fragments of delusion from her ever-clouding vitreous.

I don’t intend to condescend, but I will. She’s fucking adorable. It’s as if that cat from Shrek and a baby seal fucked on a rug and had a kid.

She makes daisy-chains while the lunar colonies starve, but we’re close.

We eat noodles, reconstituted faeces 3D printed as bricks of lily-white Ramen and sometimes I’m taken to dip my labia into a pool of Faux-bean infused steaming resolve, as I sit across from her staggering ignorance.

But we’re not close-close.

Nonetheless, she suckles my minutes and I show her my huge throbbing Phone and explain how easy, even for one as daisy-brained as she, it is to fathom what has to be done.

“Surely, you can understand JUST how imperative it is that you understand?”, I say, trying to do back-flips up the actually very few stairs of our friendship.

I’m walking her down a pathway or maybe up it, whatever the case, I look down and I see a mess. A quivering demented thing – the future if we don’t act, and I want her to see it.

But — she will not.

“Oh, I decided not to eat them…”she says, casting her eyes to her feet.

My throat thickens. And then, she starts. So animated, this meek and mild lacer of flowers. Like a God on a mount or something mounting a God —sweat foaming into beads and streaming from her lip.

She speaks and I listen, but of coarse I don’t, and the black mould of my preconceptions finger out of my brain hole and dirties up the roof of my skull.

Food systems/// critical failure//

Children cannot reproduce = They cannot service and run this colony. Earth is dead. Their sacrifice will be noted.

She’s so beguiling.

I’ve seen it before, this obstinate flicker. My elderly father searching the web because he couldn’t grasp this moment, that arrogant fuck that’s fucking my sister who will not ‘eat’ them because no-one tells him what to do.

But she —

She always reminded me of goodness. When I was down, her goofy wisdom picked me up.

Who was it? Who tongued through her phone and into her ear and ruined all that was good?

So keen as they pull the fragile daisy-chain and radicalise the kindest of our souls and cast it down into Conspiracy Gulch.

I’m mad, won’t lie. A floodlight rage that could illuminate the illuminatus themselves… My fury, honed and thrust at those who would prey on the simple…

Mental weakness it is a chocolate font for so many. I feel that she’s a tiny wet kitten wedged in the teeth of a storm-drain grate and I cant get her out.

She thinks she’s trying to help. Tweaking the error in my ways — Her soul is good.

Bless.

Dumb bitch has data. But it’s not like mine. Hers is forged from a foetid digital crusade of untruths.

“How can I tell her it’s delusion? It’s so real to her”.

They pull her love for life out, ply it back in and loop and ply again.

I draw in a long steady breath and feel it skirt the roof of my mouth and then transform as it trickles down into my stomach and it screams.

“Fear is an endless hole with no form”, she weeps.

“Time for a refill”, I say and my lips dip again down and into the sooty foam.