When someone smacks you with a pillow, you don't shoot them. You don't stab them with a knife. You don't tackle them to the ground. You don't tie them up with your boot laces.

  You smack them right back, as hard as you can, with a pillow of your own.

  It's human nature, and no amount of tech can remove the simple childlike joy of a pillow fight.

  Are we (aiways), who ported our brains to a hybrid organic and digital state, still human?

  It's the question of the century. It's the root of Ashfield's Law of Authenticity, the pursuit of value in being human.

  Well, let me tell you this. Countless research papers would later cite this Awesometacular Pillow Fight on Itokawa at Stellar Dreams as proof that we are still very much human, or at least value the pursuit of humanity to an extreme degree that can defy logic. The refuting argument, however, is simple. We all just instinctively value a damn good pillow fight.

  Security cameras caught the moment that I exploded the pillow in the face of the man who was going to catch me. It became iconic: the image of him with his outstretched arms and me flying through the air with the pillow raised overhead. I still have a news clipping from The Daily Grind, one of the news outlets on Itokawa, hanging in my home about it.

  The Fracker's Pillow Flight.

  As if destroying our asteroid nearly 200 years ago wasn't enough, an aiways purported to be The Fracker appeared once more on Itokawa, this time to frack our economy into ruins. Damage from the pillow fight that originated in the Garden District and spread throughout Itokawa is estimated at $381M qcoins in property damage alone. The image below captured the aiways, who has been identified as @wrench, a man claiming to be a visiting paper and dirt salesman.

  He-hem. I wasn't a salesperson. I was an entrepreneur. But whatever.

  I liked being an icon, but that didn't help me now. I needed another pillow. The closest was at the head of the next bed. I dove for it, rolling across the bed until I hit the headboard. I grabbed the pillow and hopped to my feet, holding the pillow high above my head. I laughed in the most crazed way I could think of, my eyes wide, my smile gleaming through the orange light. "Mwa ha ha ha!"

  I tossed a sleep bomb toward the exit ahead of me, where several people were closing in.

  "Sweet dreams!" I yelled.

  Then I leapt forward to push through the group. I had to move through them fast enough to prevent the people behind me from catching up. I battered the first, a bald man with a blond goatee, careful this time not to let my pillow explode. Then I had an intense battle with a thicker woman. She was tan, with tattoos running up her arms, and she moved surprisingly fast.

  After several partial blows, I reminded myself that I didn't have to win each pillow fight, no matter how badly I wanted to show off my superior pillow-fighting abilities. I just needed to get by each person, aiways by aiways, and steadily move forward. I blocked an overhead blow from the thick woman and stepped to my right to open up my left side, giving her an obvious chance to strike me, and she obliged. "Yahhhh!" she screamed and hit me in the left torso with the thickest part of the pillow.

  People crave an open shot like that. It's satisfying. And it propelled me in the direction I wanted to go. Content with that plan, I made each pillow fight a tactical ploy of receiving blows that would move me toward the exit. Win-win. You get a beautiful thumping hit on someone, and I get to escape.

  But each exchange of blows slowed me down. I wasn't moving fast enough.

  A pillow struck me in the head from behind, and I lost my balance.

  Angry Kitty mode activated.

  I growled. I was already hunched over from his blow to the back of my head, so I used that as momentum to wind up and smash my assailant in the chest. It was a man with long, curly brown hair. He toppled backwards, but another person quickly took his place as the crowd grew.

  I turned to face my next attacker, an aiways who had chosen to look like a youth in his late teens, with short black hair and a bit of stubble. He clearly couldn't grow a full beard. He had acne on his left cheek, a very nice touch of authenticity. He was about to tackle me. He was followed by three others and a swarm of bodies that were accumulating behind them.

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  I held my pillow up as a shield and pushed him away. Then I grabbed another pillow from the bed next to me. Were there rules about dual-wielding in a pillow fight? I didn't know and didn't care. I went on the attack.

  I faked with my left and pummeled the black-haired boy-man with a mighty swing from my right to knock him off balance. Then I hit him again, left-right, left-right, in succession, until he stumbled back into the people behind him.

  In a pillow fight, you should almost always be swinging or blocking. When I turned back toward my exit, I swung instinctively for my next target. I missed her. She was a red-haired woman in a fashionable black mesh skinsuit, like the ones I had seen at Bar None, with an orange skirt and a matching orange tank top over the skinsuit.

  She whacked me in the face with a satisfying, "Gotchya," dropping her pillow and moving to tackle me. I had almost forgotten that, to them, I was still the Fracker, and they wanted to capture me. I was too into the pillow fight.

  Her hands wrapped around my throat, and her momentum carried me backwards onto the mattress behind us. We bounced together on the bed, her legs landing around my hips, her eyes big and frantic. I dropped my pillows next to me. As we rebounded back upwards, I grabbed her thighs and tossed her over my head, sending her off the bed and into the crowd.

  I snagged the pillow to my right, but another aiways had taken my second pillow. So much for dual-wielding. I'd be able to get more power from a solo pillow anyway. I rolled to my right to dodge an incoming attack and sprang to my feet atop the bed.

  A blonde woman was my next attacker. Her first blow had missed me, but as I got to my feet, she hit me in the legs. She was also in a fancy skinsuit, white mesh, with a tiger-print dress on top. Probably a friend of the Gotchya girl. The blow hadn't struck hard enough to faze me, and I was prepared to go back on the attack.

  "Nighty night!" I screamed.

  My adrenaline had kicked in, and my blow resulted in a satisfying thwack, followed by a grunt. My pillow burst fabulously around her face, sending more particles into the surrounding atmosphere, as the blonde tiger-lady fell backwards.

  That was when everyone seemed to grab pillows. I took the pillow from tiger-lady, hopped off the bed, and ran for the far exit. My sleep grenade had cleared a little path. I moved toward that, my pillow at the ready, whacking one, two, three people with precise blows to the face.

  My bounty had climbed to $4.2M qcoins, but now that we were full into the fight, no one seemed to remember that. All they could think about was hitting their neighbor with a pillow. I don't know where all the pillows came from. I mean, Stellar Dreams of course, but the crowd must have raided the back room storage area because the pillow bins in the store displays certainly couldn't supply hundreds of people with pillows on their own.

  The room started to fill with floating feathers and composite dust particles from all the pillows ripping apart as people bashed each other. Laughter filled the room. I didn't need a smoke bomb. It didn't take long to make it hard to see, hard to distinguish who was who.

  I just needed to dodge large incoming pillows and head toward the exit.

  "Yahhhhhh!" I heard someone yell, jumping off the mattress with a pillow over their head. They landed in a group of people and spun in a circle, trying to hit everyone around them. They spun a few times, landing only a couple of blows, before they fell to the ground dizzy and laughing.

  I held my pillow in front of me, gripped firmly in both hands, and I rushed forward, shoving people left and right.

  Behind me, the fight raged on, all cursing, laughter, and feathers.

  When I reached the far end and finally got into the hallway, my jaw dropped. Somehow the pillow fight had made its way into the surrounding corridors. Seriously, where did all these pillows come from?

  No one paid me any attention now. As long as I continued flailing away with my pillow, I was just another joyful participant in the pillow battle.

  I caught my breath for a moment and took in the scene in the passageway. The flashing orange lights, further enhanced by the torn pillow fragments that floated through the corridor and the dingy metal halls of Itokawa, added to the overall end of the world vibe, but it was a stark contrast to the gleeful shouts sounding through the area.

  If this was the end of the world, what a glorious end it would be.

  A man across the hallway didn't have a pillow, so he took off his shirt and started swinging it at people, screaming. Others followed suit, removing jackets, sweaters, and whatever they could find.

  "Cheater!" a woman screamed.

  I saw a dash of short blue hair as she ran through an opening and dropped the shirtless man with a blow to the head. Four more people quickly surrounded him, slamming pillows on him. He screamed and flung his arms about, finally succumbing to an uncontrollable fit of laughter and coughing.

  The people with pillows started to gang up on the people without pillows, who were trying to tear the pillows away. This tug of war only sent more particles flying into the air.

  I was grateful for my breathing mask. Coughing, screams, and laughter abounded. I spotted another store in the far corner. I fluffed my pillow and headed out again, bashing my way down the hallway.

  Itokawans would dream about this for years to come. They even started a pillow fighting sport and tournament, appropriately named the Pillow Fighting League (PFL), with specific rules, sponsored by Stellar Dreams, the official maker of the Standard Galactic Pillow. For tournaments, white pillows were stuffed with feathers that were dyed red to simulate blood. A PFL tournament was similar to a boxing match, with points awarded over rounds to determine a winner.

  The Pillow Fighting League was a pleasant alternative to the Death Match Association (DMA), which, as you might expect, was a hardcore and bloody sport where people literally fought to the death, reanimated by their corporate sponsors to fight again and again and again.

  But I digress.

  A scream that sounded suspiciously like the high-pitched neigh of a horse caught my attention, and I knew that the Thrusters had found me.