by D. Brumbley
Aiko nodded at the same time her brother did, and then they got up from their seats and headed toward the large man. “How did you guess?” She asked sarcastically, but not with malice.
“Just lucky like that.” He kept smiling down at them as they stood, apparently amused at just how far down he had to look to meet their eyes, but then nodded back past the desk. “Come on, you two get first shot at the doctors, seeing as you’re the early birds.”
“So what’s your name?” Aiko asked in open curiosity as they were led back to the doctors. “Or is that a secret?” She had enough secrets of her own, so open conversation seemed the best best.
That got a laugh from the big man, and he turned to offer her his hand as he walked. “Sorry, gotta get used to meeting new people I don’t already know, I’m guessing. Carl Espinoza, at your service. Formerly a security contractor, recently drafted to the J.I. security staff.”
Aiko placed her hand in his, even though hers was completely swallowed up in it. “Nice to meet you. I noticed there sure is a lot of security around here. You look like you can handle anything that comes your way, though.” She looked him up and down in an appraising persual before she continued. He was a wall of muscle, attractive with his confident-as-fuck smirk, but she wasn’t here to notice those things. “Obviously you know my name. Aiko Tanaka, Experimental Botanist and Pharmacist.”
“Knew the name, not the title.” He glanced over at her brother, who didn’t seem talkative, which was fine with him. The sister was more interesting than anyone he’d met in a long time. “Forgive my saying so, but Experimental Pharmacist sounds like you’re either the person to go to for recreational drugs or somebody I’m not sure I want pouring my drinks for me at a party. Which way does that tend to go?”
“I’ve never really had time to go to many parties. As long as I can remember, I’ve been studying. There’s not much time to waste down here.” She didn’t say it as a criticism, just as a fact of her life. “Maybe I can enjoy it a little more now that I know I’ll get to live a little longer.” She purposely dodged answering his question, even though she could tell it was meant to be a joke. He had no idea, though, that she could be as dangerous or as fun as anyone wanted her to be. Aiko had experimented with many different things, mixing all kinds of concoctions. The Consortium was very interested in her work.
“Here’s hoping we all live a little longer than we previously thought we would.” He agreed wholeheartedly, and strangely, she couldn’t detect any note of sarcasm or offense in his tone. They stopped in front of a row of hastily-cleaned offices where several other people in Initiative uniforms were waiting for them, one of them a diminutive Indian woman with a huge smile on her face, the other a tall and imposing redhead with a slightly more sedated smile for them both. “Here you go. Ms. Tanaka, you’ll be seeing Dr. Patel, she’ll take good care of you. Mr. Tanaka, this is Dr. Finnegan, she’ll be processing you. Don’t piss her off, I know her husband.” He grinned and patted Kazuo on the shoulder to get him going, then waved at Aiko. “Nice meeting you, Ms. Tanaka. I’ll go get your kits and some uniforms and soon you’ll look like you belong before you know it.”
After Mercury processed her patient, she was back out in the hallway while she was waiting for the next patient when Carl showed up with orbit kits, having already passed on the uniforms. “Dr. Patel said that that Ms. Tanaka was asking more about you after you left.” She smiled at Carl teasingly, mostly because the woman was half his size.
Carl’s lips broke into a grin before he could clear his throat and attempt to look unaffected. “Oh yeah? What kinds of questions? I think Dr. Patel knows a little more about me than I would want given out, generally.”
“Personal information, where you are from, how long you’ve been in security, those kinds of things.” Mercury just laughed again at his grin. “You look so pleased. I didn’t realize that Ms. Tanaka had interested you so much.”
“Man’s got a right to be glad when people ask questions. So long as they’re not the wrong ones.” He looked around for any sign of the Tanaka siblings, but they went to get changed and briefed for the next phase of orientation. “She said she was a botanist and a pharmacist. What is she, fifteen? Sixteen?”
“I think she’s nearly seventeen.” Mercury said as she looked up at Carl. “I’ve read some of her pharmaceutical research. She’s very good. Most of the people we’re going to see here today won’t even be twenty, if you ask my guess. Maybe early twenties at the most, if any. They’re adults at fourteen down here, and it shows.”
“Yeah it does.” Aiko and her brother appeared in the hallway shortly after, still obviously getting accustomed to their nondescript Jannah uniforms. Things were kept simple in space for a reason. Fewer distractions, fewer liabilities. But minimalism showed off people’s assets in striking fashion, in Carl’s opinion.
Aiko seemed constantly aware of her surroundings, and as soon as she looked around and noticed the redheaded doctor and Carl looking at her, she gave Carl a small wave but then walked the opposite direction with her brother to continue with processing.
“She waved at you.” Mercury teased in a singsong tone, but she looked away as soon as she realized more patients were incoming. “I don’t think she realizes that making friends with you might not be a good idea. Both you and Orion are trouble.”
“Hey, you married trouble. Of your own free will and choice. What does that say about you?” He teased right back, shoving her with one elbow as he brushed past her to go back to the front desk. “Let’s see who your next victim is, Mrs. Trouble.”
“I fell prey to his charms.” She defended with a laugh while she tapped along her tablet until a new chart popped up. “Looks like my next patient’s name is Barry. It’s starting to fill up out there, so it’s bound to get busy here soon.” When Mercury and Carl walked out to get her next patient, they could see a line forming at the initial check-in desk, and then she looked back toward her exam room. It was going to be a long day.
* * * * *
As soon as Jessie stepped into the building, she wondered if she was making the right decision, actually joining the Jannah circus, but she also felt like she had little other choice for her life. Her mother was being cared for by professionals now, the previous man in her life was a mistake, and she was too old to really hang around and look for a real prospect on earth. Life on Earth would give her nothing at this point, not with her life half over already. She needed Jannah more than it needed her, and doubts and misgivings were not something that she could really afford. Once she checked in at the desk, she realized that she had a bit of a wait before she would be called into her medical exam. They weren’t allowed to eat because it could cause major issues during takeoff, but she wasn’t hungry anyway, so she sipped at a bottle of water. It was nerve-wracking, leaving behind everything she had ever known.
Sitting in the waiting room with everyone else who was waiting to be processed was getting to be a rather tight-knit thing, even if the Initiative goons were obviously taking people as quickly as they could. There were only so many doctors and so many people working through the supply lists, and clearly they were approaching the busiest part of the day. When Jessie found a seat, it was one next to the glass walls that someone had just barely vacated, with a clear view of the rolling plains outside and the cloudy sky that had moved in over the course of the morning.
Just outside the window, in the far corner of the facility’s parking lot, there was a lone car with someone lying back on the hood against the windshield. It was an ancient-looking thing, from the first century when mankind had begun to travel by automobile to begin with, all hard lines and solid metal framing. It might have belonged in a museum, except that it wasn’t even pretty enough to deserve that kind of placement. The man lying back on the windshield was wearing jeans and a dark, long-sleeved t-shirt. In the intermittent cloud cover, it was hard to tell if he was even alive at first, since he was so still, but as she looked at him, he took a deep breath and stretched his
arms and legs wide, apparently just relaxing in the cool autumn air. He looked vaguely familiar, but it took a moment to place him in her memory as the man who had spoken to her during the Initiative information session, still looking every bit as collected and confident as he had then, just under the eyes of heaven rather than anyone else more local.
The wait was long enough that Jessie was sure her newly issued communicator would alert her when it was her turn to be examined. She wove her way through the crowd and out to the parking lot, but she didn’t say anything until she was half the distance from the building to the car. “Still weighing your options?” What had his name been? Jordan? Gordon? She wasn’t sure.
He seemed genuinely surprised to be approached, but then gave her a broad smile and shook his head. “What is there to think about? When somebody gives you a choice between Heaven and Earth, you choose Heaven.” He shrugged and looked around again at the nothingness all around them, then scooted over on the hood and patted the dented metal next to him. Up close, the ancient car looked even worse than it had from a distance, and obviously if it was Gordon’s, he wasn’t exactly obsessed with taking care of it. “Looks like a hell of a crowd in there. Care to join me as I goodbye to everybody’s second-favorite planet?”
Jessie looked at him and his car at the invitation, but she only moved close enough to stand next to the hood. She was definitely a woman with curves, not that she thought of herself as excessively large, but she didn’t really get many invitations to sit on cars with anyone. She was not the type where men wanted to fantasize about her on the hood of a car. “I don’t think you want me to get on top of your car.”
“It’s only mine for a few more minutes. After that, it belongs to whoever comes along to steal it after lift-off.” He turned his head to look her up and down, and smiled a little more mischievously. “And yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly where I want you.”
She glared at him for his comment and then decided to climb on, though she didn’t look over at him as she laid back against the hood. Jessie still had mixed feelings about how he both angered and excited her at the same time. Her eyes fixed on the sky and stayed there. “You know, I don’t know what to think about you. You make suggestive comments like that, but I can’t tell if you mean them or if you’re just making a big joke at my expense.”
“That kind of humor isn’t really my style.” He sounded almost bored at the response, obviously not surprised at her questioning tone. “I really don’t make fun of people all that often, at least not to their face. If I have a problem with you, you’ll know it because I’m either yelling at you or telling you at length exactly what kind of a moron I think you are. It gets a little tedious, since I think most people are morons. So I try to keep my vocalized criticism to a minimum.” He smiled at the sky again and then turned to look over at her, no trace of a smile or a joke on his face. “I’m sorry about your mother. That can’t have made it easy to come today.”
Jessie paused briefly, still unsure how a relative stranger knew so much, but he seemed the type to know more than he should. Even after only meeting him once before, she knew he was definitely trouble. “It’s actually a relief in some ways. Nothing is going to save her now, and the drugs they have her on keep her happier than she ever was when she was healthy.” She didn’t look over at him for more than a moment before she looked away again. “It’s not that I want her to die. It’s just freeing to only have to worry about myself and to not have to hear her criticism about my disappointing life. If she only knew the extent of it, she probably would have been ecstatic to see me leave for Jannah.”
Gordon shook his head as he looked back at the sky. “Never had that problem. Never really had parents to disappoint. Older brothers, but not parents.” He sighed, putting his hands up behind his head as he relaxed. “I was reading the other day on some of the social networking hubs. There are already people who are talking about Jannah like some kind of cure to all of life’s problems. Leave everything behind and go, you’ll be a different person, a new world, a new life, blah blah blah. I’m not saying it can’t be true, but I think it’s only going to be as true as we make it. I’m still gonna be an asshole, even in Heaven. It would take more than interstellar travel to change that, I think.”
“From what little I’ve seen of you, you enjoy it too much to actually want to change anything about yourself.” Jessie didn’t look at all relaxed, but she wasn’t moving around to get comfortable either. “Are you nervous at all?”
“About going to space? I’m terrified.” His tone still sounded just as casual, but he didn’t laugh afterward or give any other indication that he was joking. “For starters, I hate flying. No matter where, no matter why. Just hate it. Being cooped up in a metal can moving a few thousand kilometers per hour…space just feels wrong. So yeah, I’m a nervous mess.”
Jessie’s eyebrows raised in her surprise, since he didn’t look like a mess. He looked calm and collected. “You hide it well, then.” She actually turned her head towards him and then the rest of her body as well. “I’m sure they have medication they can give you. Not that I think you would trust whatever they would give you.”
“I wouldn’t. It probably wouldn’t work too well on me anyway.” He shrugged, and turned his head toward her, his eyes raking up and down her body as she turned a little toward him. “I’m glad you decided to come along. The one acquaintance I have on this flight headed up today, well, the only non-business acquaintance, isn’t exactly speaking to me right now. It’s always nice to have friends around.”
She laughed at the idea of them being friends and shook her head as she remembered the only conversation they had about being friends in the first place. She still wasn’t entirely convinced that they would make good friends. She didn’t really have any friends at all. “You’re wasting your time with whatever you think you’re trying to accomplish with that look. We’ll be assigned to a match as soon as we get up there. Even though I know my breasts usually catch people’s attention. Big girl, big boobs. That’s how it works.”
“All anyone ever accomplishes with a look is a look. Not too much harm in that, is there?” He looked down at her breasts and gave her an approving nod. “And they are gorgeous. Well worth all the attention I’m sure they’ve gotten in recent years.” He smiled knowingly and laid back on the windshield again, reaching up to dig at the collar of his shirt for a moment before he drew out a solid-looking chain necklace with what looked like a small data core on the end of it, smooth black and obviously worn from long use. “What are you hoping to get in your match, do you think? You have any specific requirements in mind? Traits you’d prefer over others?” He reached over and set the data core down on one of her thighs, holding it steady for a moment to make sure it balanced before he snapped his fingers above it and an entire display of lights appeared in the air in front of them. It was difficult to see the holograms under the bright overcast sky, and it would have been impossible to see them at all from the building a few dozen yards away, but Jessie could make out what looked like a roster of names and a few subordinate panels for demographics and biographical data, a few medical tabs for past charts and genetic scans, everything that could be known about whoever the people on the list were. He scrolled through in mid-air, and looked over at her playfully as he did. “Don’t let it fall. I live and die by that thing.” He finally got down to the Rs, and stopped as he got to her name. “Let’s see who they’ve got picked out for you, shall we? You want to peek into the future a little?”
Jessie was surprised by his touch on her thigh, since she was wearing shorts and his hand had grazed her smooth skin at first, but then as soon as he gave her a warning not to let the data core fall, she felt like she wasn’t able to move. “You hacked into their list?!” She replied with a harsh whisper, and then she tried to bat the hologram away, since she didn’t want him to get caught. “No, I don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter anyway, they’re going to put me with whoever they want despite whatev
er preferences I may have.”
All her batting managed to do was to send the hologram spinning, which made Gordon laugh as he brought it back to being in focus for the two of them. “Relax, if anyone was paying attention to what I have on this thing, I’d know about it. I’m not gonna go flashing this around inside, of course, but still, what’s a little shared information between friends?” He gave her a grin as he stabilized her portfolio and sifted through a few parts of it to get to her matching profile. “Matches are still unstable at the moment, since the program is waiting on a final roster of everyone who actually showed up today before making final determinations and reviews. Nothing is fixed. Well, I shouldn’t say nothing. A few things are fixed. Not yours.” He pulled up the profiles of the top five men she was potentially about to spend the rest of her life with on another planet, and left their faces hanging in the air for a moment. Two of them were little more than boys, fourteen-year-olds from one of the midwest districts who looked both skinny and scared. One was an overweight man from somewhere in Europe, by his profile tags, one was a man with sharp features that looked like they had never smiled in the entirety of their history, from Station Seven. The last had grey hair but no wrinkles, a mechanical engineer from Station Two. “Well.” Gordon said with a click of his tongue. “Those are some very seriously sexy options.”
“Don’t you know how to listen?” Her glare was fierce this time, and she contemplated throwing his damn data core in his face. “I told you I don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter. It’s not like I came here looking for true love. It doesn’t exist. At least none of them are already married.” She hissed at him before she looked away. Old or young, it really didn’t matter. She didn’t figure her ‘match’ would really last anyway, since the whole purpose was genetic diversity, not happily-ever-after.
He didn’t shut off the display right away, though, still playing through the images of the men who might be a part of her future as if he was just talking to himself. It was unclear if he was genuinely curious or really just eager to piss her off. “The boys aren’t bad, I suppose. You could sort of train them however you like, make sure they know who’s boss. This older guy, though…divorced twice…I wouldn’t want to take my chances. The other two…well, that’s anybody’s guess.” He dismissed the images of the men’s faces and returned to the list of names by itself, changing every moment as people checked in or failed to do so across the world. He reached over and adjusted the data core a little on her thigh, where it had begun to slide a little too one side, and his touch lingered on her skin for a little longer than it absolutely had to. “Wouldn’t you rather choose for yourself?”
