This story is part of the Himal Fiction Fest 2025, a showcase of original Southasian speculative fiction.
Dr Arif signed his name onto the 100th press release that had to be sent out from his office. With each signature he was becoming increasingly convinced of his stance: the explosion of the latest PureOxygen shipment was not his fault. Just because he invented the science of oxygen transportation and export did not mean he should be held responsible each time an intergalactic human was dumb enough to not follow instructions. It was demeaning that Earth-based humanity should pay for an intergalactic human’s errors. His father would always tell him that the big scientists couldn’t digest the fact that an Earthling did what Arif did, and especially couldn’t digest that a Pakistani-origin human did so. Arif always shrugged this off – nationality was so archaic – but he couldn’t shake the Earth and intergalactic rivalry.
Each time he tried to go to the great scientific centres of intergalactic civilisation, they would make travel more and more difficult. Intergalactic humanity had built a dome around Earth, saying that everything and everyone coming from Earth had to travel through the dome and be cleansed of its earthliness. The intergalactics had lived in space for so long that they had lost their tolerance for earthly germs; heck, they couldn’t even tolerate breathing a speck of earthly dust. First it was just the dome, but then they released a long list of required vaccinations, and demanded zero-gravity training for everyone originating from Earth. So Arif had to be hologrammed over into intergalactic meetings, speaking from his home. He could never tell if they were listening to him, but he had no other intergalactic experiences to compare his speaking experience to. Their email correspondence certainly felt cold – but scientists everywhere were pretty bad at communicating, after all.