by Mac Rogers
* * *
THIRTY MINUTES after that we were back in bed, in my softly glowing bedroom, flipping through each other’s contract. God, divorce that image from its context and we were a normal couple, reading in bed before turning in for the night—not two desperate fools pathetically scouring for a loophole somewhere within the life-binding contracts in which they’d hastily signed their freedom away.
You sounded lost. “I mean, it’s…”
“Yeah.”
“There’s no leeway of any kind. I mean, I’m not a lawyer, but—”
“Did they let you have a lawyer? To review it?”
“… No. That was pretty stupid, right?”
“Yeah, it was. For me, too.”
Finally, you put the pages you were reading down with a frustrated rustle.
“Why would we … my God, why would we—”
“They want lifers,” I said dully. I don’t think I’d ever really appreciated how much advantage they’d taken over vets before. “They want people who already don’t want to go back. Only one way to control secrets in this world: keep the circle small. Ideally we’d be on Moss ’til pasture time.”
“What happens then?”
“I hear about these homes they run,” I said. “Word is they’re nice. Good food. Movie nights.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah.”
I wanted to cry. I wanted you to cry. I wanted something … Instead what I was getting was a tide of numbness washing in over me.
“You know, I thought about quitting,” I reported from that numbness. “Very seriously. Your first day.”
“Really?”
“I mean, if you had fucked up at any point, I was going to have to … well, you know.”
“Yeah … shit…”
“But for some reason, for whatever reason … the thought of doing that to this, this kid, this person I didn’t even know…”
“Would you have?”
“Without a doubt. But I don’t think I would have gone on afterward. It would have broken me. So I had pretty much decided that would be it for me, I’d quit right then and there afterward. Maybe even before Turndown arrived.”
“What would have happened to you then?”
“I have no fucking idea,” I said, in slow, measured tones, as if I were describing a suicide attempt. I guess, in a lot of ways, I was. “Transfer, maybe? Or…” I pictured two bodies occupying one brightly colored box and felt nothing. The tide kept rolling in. “My whole life, I never called a shot. First I was a kid, then I enlisted—seventeen—then they just kept bumping me up. Fancier division every time, and every time I was running things in like eighteen months. But it was always their things. Never mine.”
“You run the units but you don’t get to decide what they’re for in the first place.” You nodded, taking one of my hands in yours and kissing it. Not with lust, with sympathy.
“Best way to trick a person into thinking they have choices: keep putting them in charge of things.” I was staring at how our hands looked together, trying to put any real thoughts into words and finding my mind was just … white.
After a few moments of silence together, you said it. “It could just be sex.”
I nodded. “It could.”
“It gets stale in a month or two and we’re like, ‘Jesus, were we actually looking at each other’s contracts?’”
I chuckled. “That could definitely happen. If I was laying money, that’s where I’d put it.”
“So if it’s just sex it’s logical: we stop.”
“Absolutely. Fuck around with townies, work it out, see what the world looks like with empty balls.”
“See each other at work, smile in that kind of embarrassed way…”
“And then time goes by and we forget what we were even embarrassed about.”
“That is, no doubt, a hundred percent the right thing to do.”
“All you gotta do is put your pants on.”
“Oh, so it’s all on me?”
“Shoulda brought this up when we were at your place. Rookie mistake.”
“Rookie mistake.”
“So do it.”
“I will.”
“Put your pants on.”
“I will.”
Neither one of us had looked at the other during the entire exchange. Neither one had let go of the other’s hand. Neither one of us moved. We just stared straight ahead. Like Andy, I thought fleetingly.
Finally I let go and smoothed out the blanket covering my legs. The numbness left my palms feeling clammy and cold.
“Jesus Christ.” I chuffed. “I feel like, I feel like…”
“What?”
“Like … ‘You hang up first.’”
“‘No, you hang up first,’” you responded in a mocking, thick voice.
I finally looked at you, legitimately surprised.
“God, they still have that? Your generation still knows what that—”
“Oh my God, ‘my generation’?”
We were looking at each other, wide-eyed.
“See? See?” My voice was rising, not in anger but in a desperation half-sincere, half for show: like that play where the guy tries to trap his stepfather with some obviously hoary melodrama. “You should leave.”
You played along. I wonder how sincere. “I should leave.”
“YOU SHOULD LEAVE.”
“SO TELL ME TO LEAVE. KICK ME TO THE CURB.”
“I WILL. I DID.”
“SO DO IT AGAIN.”
“Stay. Please stay.” I began kissing your neck. Your shoulder. Your chest. The numbness was still there, but, fuck it all, I could at least build a home there. With you. “Please stay.”
We rolled into each other, kissing, groping, like we were falling down some dark tunnel and grasping blindly for purchase. I heard our voices, interchangeable.
“Oh no. Oh no no no no no. What’re we gonna do?”
“They’ll catch us.”
“They definitely will.”
“Unless we run.”
“They’ll catch us if we run.”
“You’re right.”
“Unless…”
“We run to one of those places where they can’t catch us.”
You pulled away, just a little, for breath. You had been hearing our voices too. You looked into my eyes. Those lashes, I thought again.
“But … we can’t,” you whispered, and kissed me.
“Why not?” I whispered, kissing you.
“Money. It’s more money than…”
“Yeah.” Quiet. Soft. We were back in space, with not enough oxygen for thought or voice.
That glow.
No. We weren’t in space. And the soft glow that had been subtly illuminating the room wasn’t the mysterious ambient luminescence of the inside of some alien spacecraft. It was the TV I’d completely forgotten was still on, muted. We had grown so used to seeing each other in such low light, I don’t think it crossed either of our minds that the thing was on. A reporter was blathering away, oblivious to this audience’s complete disinterest in anything she was saying. For all we knew she was talking about Sierra. An image floated in the air next to her head on the screen … like a hologram …
“It’s more money than even both of us would ever…”
It was out of my mouth before any thought could intervene. I was a witness to it as much as you were. “We’d have to sell something.”
You kept kissing my lips. It took you a moment to understand what had just changed.
“What?” you asked, kissing. “Sell what?” You kissed again.
But I’d stopped kissing back. That veil of numbness had been ripped away and what was left exposed was raw and pulsating … maybe even alive.
“Matt,” I said, no longer whispering, feeling as loud and resonant as a gun blast. You looked at me, curious, vulnerable, not understanding but receptive—like the day we met. “The footage. We’ll sell Lloyd’s footage of Moss.”
&n
bsp; PART THREE
CONCEPTION
12
JUST AS we’d hoped: a couple days later, with the memory of Haydon and the Sierra situation fading, Lloyd was getting his groove back.
“Mr. Matthew, would you mind, ah, holding the instrument just like this while I make some notations?” His entire demeanor was springy and jovial, ready to bounce into the magic of scientific discovery at a moment’s notice. Exactly what we needed.
You and I were both on duty in the cockpit, on sentry duty while Lloyd set up his measuring devices. You moved closer to help, as requested, and Lloyd’s eyes flicked rapidly back and forth between the tablet and the instrument you held against Moss’s forearm.
“Nine hundred … and … actually two microns,” he mumbled, writing. “Nine hundred and two microns of recession since derma-survey of August eleventh.”
Almost a millimeter; I was right. Well, almost right. Close enough for a layman. I look at you too much, Moss.
“Here’s where I chime in and remind you for the nine trillionth time that you need an assistant, Lloyd,” I cracked.
I was in high spirits. No, more than that. I felt incredible. Not incredible in an exemplary way, but in a perfectly mundane, baseline way. The sort of incredible you only appreciate on, say, your first day of full health after being ill. This is what normal feels like, your body sings, and it’s … incredible.
Because I had an assignment. We had a plan. A mission. Oxygen.
“I don’t want an assistant,” Lloyd whined. “I’d have to talk to them. I wanna talk to you guys!”
“Sierra pays for them, you should use them,” I said.
“Sierra pays for you, too!” Lloyd smiled.
“I don’t mind,” you added, looking very much like the new boyfriend meeting the parents for the first time and being put to work on some chores around the house.
“I mind,” I said, sternly. “You have a job you’re supposed to be doing right now.”
But I didn’t mind. Not one bit. This, all of this, including my disapproval, was all part of the plan.
* * *
WE’D GONE over it the night before in our motel room. More specifically, in the shower.
I’d picked this motel for three equally important reasons: there was no unpleasant smell, they didn’t require ID, and there were places nearby where we could both inconspicuously park our cars overnight. That being said, old habits die hard and old instincts die harder, so we slid the dresser in front of the door before we put ourselves in the loud, isolating shower.
“It has to be you on intel,” I said, while my hands ran over your slick body.
“Don’t you know the base a million times better than I do?”
“At least. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, intel isn’t about maps, it’s about the mark. Lloyd’s our mark. And Lloyd loves shooting his mouth off to awestruck new guys. He’ll be careful with me. Not with you.”
You were getting hard in my hand. You spun me around.
“Okay,” you said, kissing the back of my neck, pressing up behind me, “but I can’t just say, ‘Where on the base do you keep the footage for your holograms?’”
“You’re absolutely right,” I moaned.
“The water’s getting too cold,” you said as you positioned yourself. “Make it hotter.”
* * *
“WELL, LUCKILY for you, Chief, I am almost done with him.” Lloyd finished some notations. “Thank you, Salem, you’re very patient.”
“I don’t know how you can work in here without frying your eyes, Lloyd. You can barely see Moss.”
Something in Lloyd lit up. He smiled, almost as if he had a particularly juicy bit of gossip to pass on. “One of the ongoing mysteries of Object E, isn’t it? Is this the ideal full in-flight lighting? Is this reserve power? Are the lights broken?”
“I can’t even tell exactly what the lights could be,” you said, with just enough aw-shucks-gee-whiz wonder that I wanted to high-five you. That was catnip for Lloyd—and he started rubbing on it immediately.
“Mmhmm! And of course, obviously, it stands to reason that answering that question would not only tell us more about the ship itself, but alsooo…?” He looked at you with giddy anticipation.
“What—me?” You pointed to yourself with incredulity.
“Well, what follows naturally?”
“… Wwwould it also tell us about Moss?” you hazarded, then made a show of looking at me for support. I shrugged, as if to say, “You asked for this, Fish.”
Lloyd pumped his fists in victory. “Precisely! Precisely! See?! This is why I prefer your guys’ company to the assistants’. This stuff is old hat for them, but with security staff, I have the pleasure of watching you experience discovery for the first time! It takes me back to that feeling; it’s rejuvenating!”
You nodded slowly, seriously. “I get it, so like, you’re saying, how much light does Moss need to—or did Moss need to—”
“Exactly! Perhaps this is an overabundance of light for his species. For all we know this could be blinding!”
“He does have really big eyes, maybe that’s—”
Lloyd waved his hands. “Well, well, well, of course obviously ocular cavity capacity doesn’t necessarily indicate—”
“How did you get him so easy to see for the thing?” you asked abruptly, as if the thought had just bumped into you. It was awkward and ill stated and perfect. I wanted to kiss you. No, fuck that, that was the least I wanted to do to you.
“I’m sorry?” Lloyd was puzzled.
“I mean—shit—lemme say it right—how did you get him so brightly lit for the hologram? For when the suits were here?”
Your Andy impression was so good it was kind of unnerving, I thought. So good Lloyd didn’t even realize that you wouldn’t have seen the holograms from the Haydon visit.
“Ah. Well,” Lloyd chuckled, devilishly. “Just between you and me?”
“Oh, yeah, totally.” God, you were so sincere!
Lloyd looked at me, then with a stage whisper, back to you: “I fibbed a bit. Not a lie, precisely, more adjusting the truth.”
I shrugged—don’t hang yourself, Lloyd, the shrug said.
“Adjusting how?” you asked.
“We took all the footage out on the main Hangar floor. I had to make a judgment call, you see. Which is more damaging: to temporarily move Moss out of the environment of the ship? or to bring several pieces of lighting equipment and a complex camera rig onto the ship? These are the judgment calls, my friend, every single day.”
“Wow. That must have been—”
The Guardshift tone rang out. It was time for me to move on—you still had another shift inside the ship. More time to work Lloyd. All moving precisely as we wanted it to.
“Slade should be on his way in,” I said to you both. “Hey, Lloyd? Don’t talk Salem’s head off, all right? He needs it for his job.”
“I think this is valuable!” Lloyd protested, like I told him to go to bed.
You and I risked a look: “It’s all you now,” mine said. You nodded, using fewer microns than the receding moss to do so.
* * *
AFTER ONE shift on the Hangar floor I got three shifts up in Bird’s Eye, where I was able to start on my end of the intel gathering. System access was always monitored, and I never knew exactly what might raise a red flag, so today I was very much rolling the dice. But I felt lucky.
Until Patty walked in.
Fuck me with hedge clippers. I forgot.
Now was when we usually had our daily brief with Harrison. I’d been so excited when Harrison told me he would have to miss today’s brief, giving me so much time by myself, I completely forgot to let Patty know.
Rookie movie, Dak. More disturbingly, the thought came in your voice.
Patty noticed Harrison’s absence right away. “Oh—hey—are we not…?”
“Shit, Patty, that’s my bad, I should’ve messaged you. Harrison’s stuck on a conference call
with D.C. It’s some late-breaking crap so…”
“Uh-oh…”
“I know. But, say a little prayer, it might not involve us.” My weak laugh died on delivery.
Patty had her lunch in her hand: a plastic shopping bag full of jerky and energy bars. She sighed and swirled into a chair dramatically, then began pulling out food. Godfuckingdammit! How could I forget to message her?!
With no Harrison to distract us, the chances of her not addressing our fight the other day seemed remote. The best case scenario was if we just marinated in lukewarm, leftover piss.
“You think they’d come back?” Patty asked about Sierra, unwrapping a bar. “This soon?”
“Who, Sierra?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Harrison thinks so.” I shrugged, trying not to look too intently at what I was doing, but also trying not to look away.
“Yeah, but how good is his read on the D.C. people?”
“Well … that’s always the thing, isn’t it…?”
The thought hung there, long enough for us both to know we knew what we were talking about. How clear was Harrison’s mind at a given time? Whatever call he was on right now, was he on it by himself, or had he snuck the friend he keeps in his desk drawer in to join him?
“Do you ever miss the field?” Patty asked out of fucking nowhere, before taking another bite of her brick-shaped food replacement.
“Do I … what?”
When she finished chewing: “I mean, not the bullets or the blood or the Zones, but like … the clarity? Like, ‘This is the objective. It’ll keep being the objective ’til we get it or die.’ It’s easy to miss that these days, right?” She stood up and started pacing around the room. Not aimlessly—no one with her kind of training moved aimlessly—but with no discernible stopping point. She was curious about what I was doing, but didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.
I sighed. I didn’t like where this topic could go. “I mainly just don’t miss the bullets and blood.” I turned my attention back to my screen.
It was silent for a few minutes, when she asked: “Are you looking up journalists?” I’d been getting ready for that question ever since she stood up. The computer I was on was pretty much right out in the open, and to attempt to hide what I was doing would have looked suspicious as fuck. There was no real way to conceal the browser tabs and internal files I was scrolling through.
