Is it a dream, nightmare, mind escape, or transcendent float in time-space? It takes a fictional moment to fully embody Michael Leung’s many episodes of intergalactic traversal, to regain the potency to enter a boundless performative space. 虛擬不一定是逃脫，反而是全情貫注的為跨界、跨域、跨族類的慾望賦予實質、形骸，以至可在其中遊蕩潛行，延展無邊際的演述空間。
There’s No Need to Add Oil Anymore
A fictional story by Michael Leung 梁志剛
Six hundred and nine hours in outer space, inhaling recycled air that smelled like my Sunday morning breath, I look out the triple-glazed circular window. With a pitch black view, it felt like quarantine rooms in the reopened Central Hospital, only now I have access to every film, book and record ever made.
Solitude allows me to devour books that I never had time to read: The Baron in the Trees and Lake of Heaven. The titles suggest that I crave nature and wild landscapes, but really I just want fresh air and sunlight — the feeling of my earlobes heating up under the sun’s rays and a light summer’s breeze to cool them slightly.
We were informed that the 1,000+ United Nations ships are on auto-pilot but I have no idea of the course, which planet I will walk onto or which orbiting medical centre I will step into. Too many ships left at once. It was too messy that late afternoon at Hong Kong Intergalactic Airport.
Reading Ishimure Michiko I think of all the lost villages that were devastated by urbanisation and the infrastructure installed to keep capitalism running. Much later who would’ve thought that the people protecting the Hambach Forest would be triumphant and spearhead the global fossil fuel ban and village circular economy? We no longer need to say ‘gift’ before ‘economy.’ Everything is now potlatch.
Seven months later it’s a tragedy that we had to leave Earth. For once the planet was habitable. But since the virus outbreak, living off-planet was the only option to guarantee survival of everything that could walk and fly. It seemed that only plants, trees and mushrooms were immune. Mushrooms even made the virus edible and those student scientists in Wuhan were so close to finding a cure. They only needed a few extra days…
Back on the ship, the multilingual tannoy informs everyone that they are in good health and will land soon. Looking out the misty stainless-steel rimmed window I see a meandering river resembling one that I read in one of those books. We had arrived on Neptune, on a 1,650-hectare lion-shaped thriving mountain, that was later appropriately named as Hambi II, after the German forest where land protectors ferociously defended in 2020.
30th January 2020, Dubai
