by Juniper Gray
“Dry,” he told the little display. After some experience of the process and a working knowledge of what was coming next, he screwed his eyes tight shut in anticipation.
The twin blasts of hot air hit him like a scouring desert wind, and would have knocked him from his feet had they not been in directly opposing orientations. The experience was thoroughly unpleasant—not as unpleasant as when he'd done it the first time with his eyes open—but at least he was more-or-less completely dry in a couple of seconds. The furnace vents shut off and retracted back into the wall, and Therse stepped from the cubicle onto the soft tactile rubber floor.
His reflection stared back at him from the room's field mirror, looking every bit as exhausted as he felt. He ran a hand through his short, unruly hair and pushed it halfheartedly into some sort of order, inspected his chin and decided a bit of stubble never did anyone any harm.
The bedroom was spacious and simple, the only things in the room a large bed and a sturdy-looking desk he would never use. He and Genham had both chosen what probably amounted to Officer's quarters, which they'd agreed they were entitled to, given that they were the highest ranks aboard the vessel, and because it was unlikely they'd be visited by a Captain or higher with nothing better to do than climb aboard the good-ship Middle of Nowhere.
The wallscreen opposite the bed flickered lazily to life as he walked towards it and popped the wall storage open, grabbing out a new shirt and fatigues. He watched the screen again for a couple of minutes as he dressed, only paying attention to the worst of the news headlines and feeling the dawning realization he was incredibly hungry.
* * * *
The Officers’ mess was a sizable cafeteria supplied by a number of auto-service units situated in a cluster off to one side—the only ones they really used being the hot drinks machine and one that produced food resembling hot noodle soup. Nothing that came out of the other units seemed even remotely palatable, though the ship claimed the products were both edible and nutritious.
Therse picked his way through the maze of tables and chairs to the unit where his crew-mate was standing. Genham smirked at him across the light, open space. Therse ignored him, sidling past and picking up the cold coffee the man had been so kind to have the machine produce for him, tipping it away down a vacuum port.
“I went to all that effort, and you let it get cold.”
Therse said nothing. He glanced across at the comms unit in the nearby wall the man had used to contact him and wondered if there was a way to disable it, but in all honesty if he did that he'd have to disable every point on the ship. He rinsed the cup out and replaced it under the machine's nozzle, selecting a new black coffee. A stream of hot brown liquid dispensed into it, filling the air with that invigorating scent.
“You get your miles in?”
Therse shot Genham a glare. He'd seated himself with one foot up on the table and was rocking back in his chair like a mischievous child, signature grin plastered over his face.
Therse turned back to his coffee, picking the mug up and inhaling the aromas. He took a sip. If you squinted, it almost tasted good.
He pulled out a seat opposite Genham and sat down, placing his coffee on the table a safe distance from Genham's foot.
Genham leaned forward, scrutinizing his expression in mock concern. “Are you still sulking?”
Therse took another emphatic sip of his bad coffee as Genham took a bite of something. He supposed he should eat too, though it seemed like far too much effort when everything tasted of nothing. He glanced at Genham, eyes going wide and jaw dropping as he realized what it was exactly that the other man was eating. Juice was running down his chin from the bite he'd left in it.
The tomato was more red and sweet-looking than anything Therse had ever seen in his life.
“Where the hell did you get that?” he asked in astonishment, fixated on the soft, bright fruit.
“Oh, you're talking to me now?” Genham showed him the contents of his other hand. Another tomato. He tossed it to Therse, who caught it as if it had been a tiny red baby. He smudged a thumb over it, feeling the soft skin ripple. It was perfectly ripe.
He looked over at Genham, almost expecting this to be some trick. The man was sucking on his fingers. Therse was salivating like a hungry dog. “How does it taste?”
The blond-haired man just smiled back at him. A rare, genuine smile. Therse parted his lips and bit into the tomato, his mouth flooding with flavor. It was incredible. He smiled despite himself, the irritation of earlier suddenly forgiven. “That'sh good,” he said through a mouthful, pushing the rest of it inside and filling his cheeks. “Are zhere mo?”
“There's a biohab,” Genham told him.
Therse's jaw stopped working, and he just stared, unable to comment with a face-full of juicy tomato. He chewed the rest quickly with reluctance and swallowed, wiping his chin off on the back of his hand then sucking on it. “Where? How did you find it?”
“When the ship gave us a tour of the facilities it forgot to mention three entire floors,” Genham replied, stretching his arms up above his head.
“Why would it leave something like that out? We've been living on crap from the vendors for weeks. And I can't even remember the last time I saw a tomato.” He looked down at his fingers, where some of the juice still remained. “What's the hab like?”
Genham shrugged. “Like any other really. All hydroponics and plants and stuff. Big enough to supply this ship's oxygen and then some though, I reckon.”
“Hmm,” Therse said, scratching his chin. “These seven weeks might not be so bad after all.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“Means you've been irritating the shit out of me, is what it means.”
Genham snorted and folded his arms across his broad chest. “Like I said, doing the shuttle awake was your choice, not mine.”
“Yeah, I didn't think it would be just us. I didn't think I would have to suffer seven weeks of nothing but air-foils and craft engineering and you,” Therse complained. “I thought there would at least be some other normal personnel around as well.”
“I like how you're insinuating that you'd be one of them.”
A glare. Therse looked him over. “You should get back into training again, we're going to need to be fit for the next detail.”
Genham fidgeted in his chair and straightened up, tugging his white t-shirt straight across his chest. “Look, I just don't care about it as much as you do. I'll start when we're nearly there or something.”
Therse sat up, suddenly full of seriousness. “No, you need to start now. The atmosphere's going to be lower in oxygen than we're used to. I've already asked the ship to decrease the oxygen concentration of our atmosphere accordingly so we can get accustomed to it.”
“When the fuck were you going to tell me?” Genham said, affronted.
“Now, I guess.” Therse shrugged as he licked the last of the tomato juice from his fingers.
“You can't make decisions that affect me without my consent.”
“Don't be a jackass,” Therse told him, fixing his gaze. “You know it makes sense.”
“I'm the jackass? I'm not the one making decisions without telling anybody when we're the same damn rank. Anything else you want to tell me?” Genham glared at him. “There is, isn't there?”
Therse met his eye guiltily. “The planet's gravity is higher, too,” he muttered, picking up his mug and blowing on its contents.
“Oh great,” Genham said, waving his arms wide. “Thanks for the notification, sir.”
Therse snorted into his coffee, and the facade collapsed. Genham folded his arms and tipped his head to the side, jutting out his chin in annoyance. “Not a damn thing's been changed, has it?”
“Nope,” Therse said, swallowing and trying not to let victory show on his features. “Conditions on the next planet are almost exactly what we're already accustomed to.”
Genham shot him a look like he was a total jerk, but conceded that
had been well-played. He rose from his chair and turned towards one set of large double doors to the mess, glancing over his shoulder and grinning as he went, Therse having reminded him that they were equally matched.
“If you need me for anything, I'll be in the sim bay,” he said.
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* * *
2: VISITING HOURS
He was running. Pounding through the dark jungle, slipping on the dense vegetation beneath his boots, grabbing at anything his hands could reach. The rain soaked him to his skin, torrential and endless, turning the ground into a twisted mass of black, slicked mud. He caught his foot on a root, and it brought him crashing down, sprawling over and over in the undergrowth. The mud stuck to him like engine lubricant, dragging on him, holding him as he reached desperately for safety.
He realized in his panicked struggle that the mud was alive; swarming creatures writhing around him, crawling across his body, pushing him under. He opened his mouth to scream, and the mud rushed inside.
Therse awoke with a start, lurching forward, hand immediately to his mouth. But there was no mud. No jungle, no rain, no mud-creatures. Only the empty room and the bed, sheets tangled around his legs. He was still breathing heavily from the shock of it, putting a hand against his bare chest to feel his heart racing.
He swung his legs off the bed and shielded his eyes when the room lights came on automatically, reminding himself to change the lighting program later. He sat for a moment until the sweating and the shakes died down.
He'd dreamed about it for the second night in a row.
Kicking the sheets off, he got up, pulled on his clothes, and went for a run, just like he always did.
* * * *
“Did you miss me this morning?”
Therse had been deep in thought and started a little at the sound of Gen's voice in the quiet mess hall. It brought him back to reality. He slid his cup under the dispenser and selected coffee, wondering how long he'd been standing there before Gen's interruption.
The recurring nightmare wasn't the only thing on his mind. Therse had also been thinking about the little pocket-screen stowed in his bedside drawer. He'd received a letter that morning—an important letter that could change everything.
He needed to talk to Gen about it, but didn't know how or where to begin. So he avoided beginning altogether. “No, but I appreciate you not being a dick today. Wait, that's not like you, what's wrong?”
“Ass.” Gen folded his arms and was silent for a moment. “Don't you think you're taking this whole thing a little too seriously?”
“What?”
“I dunno, life, in general. You never take any time to just...relax. We've got the perfect opportunity here, and all you seem to want to do is work.”
Therse shrugged and leant back against the counter. “Look, I like to keep my mind busy, okay?”
“No one's going to judge you if you take a little ‘r and r'.”
“I don't give a shit about people judging me,” Therse snorted, taking a sip of too-hot coffee.
“That's bullshit,” Gen said, making a lopsided grin and shaking his head. “You've always been the same. You never stop. You're always doing something, some project or other.” He wagged a finger at Therse. “You know, Mal and Byrn always had you down as the one most likely to burn out through over-work.”
Two of their closest friends from the military academy. Nice to know what they'd really thought of him. “So I like to be productive. All I'm doing is getting back into shape.”
“You're in shape anyway.” Gen's eyes drifted over him from foot to head. Therse raised his cup to take another sip and hide the spreading blush on his cheeks. “You're such an over-achiever.”
Therse scowled. It was like they were back in the academy again. He wanted to point out that that wasn't true, and that he probably only seemed like an over-achiever to Gen because Gen was pretty much the antithesis, but he bit his tongue. “Oh, and what do you suggest I do with my time instead?”
“I have an idea,” Gen replied, grinning mischievously.
* * * *
The room was a vast, open space with strange angular gray-blue walls, dotted periodically with small black pits and circles. Therse looked down at the ridiculous artifacts that had been clamped uncomfortably around his wrists, ankles, waist and neck in the name of fun. He shot a flat look over at Gen through the overly-large and cumbersome visor screen covering his face.
Gen was smiling at him and hopping excitedly from foot to foot. “Don't give me that,” he said, barely able to contain his glee that he had actually managed to persuade Therse into this nonsense. “Just wait ‘til it starts, you'll see.”
Therse looked back to the room, his feet planted flat on the ground, hands hanging by his sides, and waited unenthusiastically for whatever was supposed to happen to start happening.
And then it was as if another world had switched on.
The walls were replaced by a great white dome, broad and smooth above them. Therse wanted to go and touch the walls, to see if he could feel the real version through the fake. He spun around and the door had vanished too. Losing such an important bearing was incredibly disconcerting to him, but apparently of no concern to Gen, whose only opinion on their situation was, “Cool, huh?” Therse was yet to be convinced.
This was by no means his first experience of a sim. He'd been in them countless times in the leisure facilities of docking stations and larger carrier craft, been thrilled and entertained (and sometimes titillated) by their interactive scenarios—he knew them well. They were the newer breed; the next generation of holos—all-absorbing, with far gentler introduction to the experience than this version's apparent ‘on/off’ control, and most importantly, no need for paraphernalia.
All the sims he'd been in before had been direct retina-broadcast. Judging from the dark pits he'd seen in the walls and the absence of a tell-tale core in his visor above each eye, this sim was a real-world overlay. Inefficient tech long rendered obsolete. He couldn't quite understand why his crew-mate enjoyed it so much.
Gen was about ten feet away off to his side, looking pensively at a drop-down menu Therse couldn't read from that distance or angle, but guessed it was a selection of games. He felt himself smile a little at how ridiculous Gen looked, how he held himself without an iota of self-consciousness. He'd always been that way, and Therse was a tad envious.
Gen made a choice and the menu evaporated. He started jigging about again as though they were preparing for a ten kilometer run. Therse really hoped that wasn't what he'd picked. Then he noticed the sound of Gen's feet had changed from a dull patter to a sharp squeaking with each impact, like steps taken on a polished wood floor. He looked down and realized why.
The floor was no longer a dull gray acrylic. It had been transformed into a light-colored, gleaming wood that seemed to stretch for hundreds of meters. Therse nudged at it with his toe, and got the same sharp noise he could remember such floors making in the posh private boy's school he and his friends had once broken into, where they'd played all night and overslept on the soft matting. It had almost been worth the beating his father had given him afterwards.
The only thing missing was the smell of polish.
He noticed that Gen had something in his hand—a long, tapered stick that was wider at the end farthest away from him. He was holding it out, inspecting it. Gen noticed Therse looking and flipped it over in his hand.
Therse frowned. “Where did you get that?”
“Same place you got yours.”
Sure enough, a similar-looking piece was in Therse's right hand. He stared at it, bemused. It certainly felt real—he squeezed his fingers around it and felt the grain of the ‘wood’ in relief under his fingertips and palm. This sim felt oddly intrusive—he was used to the holos that slowly eased you in to something, that let you select and pick up your own equipment before you used it—but there was something refreshing about this immediacy. As he was trying to figure out h
ow it was doing all this, he became aware of a certain focused heat on the back of his neck, where the collar met his skin.
“Wait, is this a fucking neural induction sim?”
“Yup!”
“Shit, these were banned years ago for being a goddamn health hazard!”
“That was only in cases of prolonged use. Don't be such a spoil-sport.”
But Therse was already pulling at his collar. “There are regulations for a reason. Evidence of long-term neural damage—”
“Jeez, this is just one time. You'll be fine; man the fuck up. The ship wouldn't let us use it if it was really dangerous. Probably.” Gen looked up as circles of different colors, sizes and shades began to appear over the dome. “It's too late now anyway.”
The warm feeling was still bothering Therse, but he let it go, watching the pastel circles as they sailed and shifted about, some flowing over one another, some merging and changing shade, some disappearing abruptly and then reappearing somewhere else. Each circle carried a number, never higher than twenty. Their values, Therse assumed. “What are the rules?”
“You get points for each circle you hit with the ball. The numbers tell you how much one's worth—the smaller they are, the more you get for hitting them. They move, they change points value, teleport. There's only one ball. You touch it with anything other than the play,” he held up the tapered stick and wagged it at Therse in illustration, “that's an automatic five-point deduction. If you want to pick up and hold the ball, you press the play with your index finger when you go to hit it; release it by releasing that finger. Hold for longer than two seconds and it's a ten-point penalty. First to fifty wins a mark. A game has three marks, so it's best-of-three.”
Two small squares appeared on the surface of the court, spaced about fifteen meters apart. Gen stepped into one and Therse did the same of the other, watching him cautiously. He'd definitely done this before. A field sprang up around their squares, shimmering blue and displaying a ten-second countdown. Therse gave it a poke. It was warm and tingly, but unyielding. A barrier.
