I was going to touch this up but I wasn’t actually ever going to get around to it, so in the best interests of posting it while it’s mostly fresh I’m going to… well… post it. While it’s mostly fresh. This is partly fanfic, partly speculation, partly analysis. Spoilers for the ending of the Aria series. Enjoy!

“I’m just a little happy,” says Akari, smiling benignly at her new apprentice. It’s an echo of a line cited years before by Alicia, back when Akari was a new arrival on Mars. When Alicia said it, it was a lie: she was more than a little happy. She was nervous, she was excited, she was worried, she was thrilled; the prospect of handling Akari was the biggest challenge Alicia had ever faced and she was unsure how to go about it. She would remain uncertain in her methods throughout Akari’s training, finally crying at her retirement ceremony at the sight of Akari accepting her oar. What she saw in that moment of serenity was more than Akari’s gratitude: it was gratification.

I succeeded, she thought, I met my biggest challenge and I succeeded.

Alicia retires happily, and Akari takes up all the tasks her mentor left her. The task of opening the shade and welcoming a new day. The task of becoming the number-one gondolier in New Venice. The task of pleasing customers while gently sculling across a town composed entirely of smiles (what’s behind them? Cats?). The task of training a successor to the Aria Company.

The task of lying.

“I’m just a little happy,” says Akari, and, just as it was when Alicia said it, it’s a lie. It’s not a lie for the same reason, however. It’s a lie because Akari is more than a little happy.

She’s very happy, and she deserves it.

You’ve flown too far from the Sun; let me take you back to Earth.

It’s a dark world. Pollution has permeated the mantle. Rivers flow slow and purple with sludge. Domed cities like those the Avenger creators thought might dominate Mars instead form the mainstays of civilization on what the Martians call ‘Manhome.’ Earth isn’t truly home to anything, anymore. It’s a husk on life support, a test-case for the technologies that enabled the terraforming of Mars, and also a reason why the terraforming of Mars was so necessary. A fake sky akin to that of a Macross is all that an Earth girl knows.

She grows up with picture books, though the pictures are drawn from pictures from pictures. No one remembers a cat. No one remembers a dog.

A girl knows only a few things: that her parents are at work, that she must do her best in school in order to go to work someday, and that she can never leave her domed Tokyo save for the occasional luxury vacation to Mars. One day, her fourth-grade class takes a field trip to Kyoto. The students obediently pile into a train with no windows and the train chugs silently along a desolate landscape of blurry green and brown hues. The train arrives. The students flood out onto the streets of another dome. A few remnants of 21st-century Kyoto impress the young ones, but mostly the city is the same as their native Tokyo. A girl yawns; she sees the same fake sky. She’s seen more realistic skies in holographic form: travel brochures for various cities on Mars.

New San Francisco.

Newer Orleans.

New Venice.

Tokyo 4-C meets with Kyoto 4-C. Students exchange formal greetings. Teachers and chaperones aren’t too concerned about friendship; this is a leftover tradition, in any case, and the students are unlikely to see each other ever again. Nevertheless they encourage interaction. This is your chance to meet another culture.

“We’re all Japanese,” whines one kid.

“Your parents are backward.” The teacher is blunt. “Every dome is its own community.”

The students nod in obeisance.

There is no sense of solidarity among the students. There is nothing but an awkward agreement that fourth grade is irrelevant later in life. A girl is disinterested. She doesn’t talk. But maybe she looked kinda cute, or maybe he didn’t have any friends among his own peers… a boy addresses her.

“Um…”

“Eh?”

“Hi, I’m … … nice to meet you.”

“I’m Mizunashi Akari; nice to meet you.”

She has little to say but he’s persistent. Eventually he mentions family…

“Do you have any siblings?”

“No.”

“I do! I have an older sister. She works in New Venice as a gondolier.”

“Eh?”

A girl blinks. Work, in New Venice? New Venice was on Mars. You go to Mars to work? A girl returns from her field trip, sees her father that night. Work on Mars, she asks? He laughs dismissively. Mars is a slow place for the dregs of society. True hard workers remain on Earth. They don’t escape to a paradise of idiots. They stick together and try to make the most out of what they’re given.

Daddy, Mars is out there for a reason right? It was given to us.

No, he responds, we stole it.

A girl doesn’t understand, but she doesn’t bring it up again. She has an e-mail address, though, so she contacts the boy in Kyoto. They become pen pals, exchanging letters once or twice a week.

Both boy and girl grew and changed over the years. He succeeded in school, getting good grades, heading toward a career that would suck up most of his time. She faltered in school, barely keeping up when she did and failing to frequently. The fast pace of the Tokyo dome was too much for her. She wanted to stop and enjoy things — not that there was much to enjoy.

She would e-mail her pen pal, “how is your sister doing?”

She dreamed of New Venice. She dreamed of water that didn’t sting, of an atmosphere she could breathe. A city that would be more of a home than the steel-plated womb of Tokyo.

“Slacking off,” her pen pal would respond, often with a derisive emoticon or two.

“Sounds nice,” she’d muse.

“Hardly. Stay focused.”

The year she turns fourteen, the big decision comes. Is she going to try for high school, and advance her education from there? She’s barely surviving already in the strenuous middle school environment. Her father has worked himself to death in a water treatment facility. Her mother works twice as hard now, and is never home: she sleeps at work and sends her paychecks to Akari, who buys her own food and sets her own hours.

Akari doesn’t want to stay in Tokyo.

Tokyo is sad, for her: her father died here. Her classmates ridiculed her performance here. Her mother is somewhere here, but never here here. She wants to get away. She considers Kyoto: she could visit her pen pal. Maybe they could work something better out for both of them. But she knows she’ll just get in his way. Cornered by an incompatibility with an Earth lifestyle and a lack of friends, with nothing but the Tokyo International Spaceport behind her, she turns and looks upward.

For the first time, she sees more than pixelated clouds and an inauthentic glossy sky. She sees far beyond, thousands of kilometers into the deep black, and she sees freedom.

“Hey, do you have any info on the gondola market?” A frantic e-mail to her pen pal.

“Umm… I can ask my bum sister, I guess.”

“Please.”

“She says there are always new openings at some company or another for apprentices. I’ve attached a few flyers that my sister sent. She also says, ‘I hope Akari-chan can visit me in New Venice!’”

A girl examines the glamorous hiring materials. The top three companies seem to be Himeya, Orange Planet, and Aria. Akari likes the blues and whites on the Aria material, and the oddly-shaped animal that the stunning blonde gondolier is holding. Is that a dog or a cat?

She decides to apply. She has nothing else. She doesn’t even tell her mother: her pen pal and his sister feel more like family to her at this point. She downloads the training software — there are no canals or gondolas left on Earth — and she prepares for her trip to Mars.

It’s a gamble.

It’s a chance at salvation from the cruel pace of a dying planet.

She gazes off into space, lost in a holographic representation of New Venice. She’s fifteen now, and this spring she departs for her ‘paradise of idiots.’ She’s thrilled by the prospects. Living without cars, without machines. Folding her own laundry. Preparing her own food. Breathing clean air. Touching grass, and water. Cloud-gazing. She could gain everything…

… but if she failed, she’d be penniless, alone, an orphan not only in another city but on another planet entirely.

She wishes desperately for happiness.

She cries at the possibility thereof.

She’s nervous, excited, worried, thrilled. The prospect of apprenticing herself to Alicia is the biggest challenge she has ever faced with all her heart, and she is unsure how to go about it. She practices her smile in the mirror, and laughs at herself. I… I hope this works out.

Things rarely go as planned.

As if by some fairy magic, Mars opens its heart to Akari.

Years later, Alicia has retired and Akari is the sole member of the Aria Company. She examines the applications, flipping through them until she comes across a young girl from Earth. She smiles at the girl’s photo: uncertain smile, messy hair. Cute eyes. The application screams “hesitant.” That’s all Akari needs.

“I’d like to offer you a position … ”

She gets off the phone, blinking back joy.

A couple weeks later, the first morning with her new apprentice.

“Why are you staring at me?” asks the girl, not sure if she is supposed to begin eating.

“I’m just a little happy,” says Akari, smiling benignly.