Steal the Stars

by Mac Rogers

  “Yes. I know what Mad Libs are! It was one of the first apps I can remember getting on my—”

  I groaned like an air raid siren. “Oh my God! Yours was an app?”

  “What was yours, on paper?” you asked, like it was the weirdest thing.

  “Yes, it was on paper! Jesus! Does it even let you put dirty words on the app version?”

  “I don’t remember. I think we might’ve just put silly stuff.”

  “Ugh. If you never put ‘cockfart’ in a Mad Libs you haven’t lived a life.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  I’d almost found it: a position as natural and knotty as the one I had a minute ago.

  “What I’m saying is: do I have stories? Yeah. Do you have stories? I’m sure you do.” I kept my voice low. “I bet we even have the same stories even though we were in different parts of the world. We just put different words in the blanks. ‘One second blank was there, and then blank was gone.’ ‘I kept looking at blank for like thirty seconds after blank got hit, ’cause my brain couldn’t figure out why blank looked different.’ ‘The IED went off and blank kept walking around even though blank didn’t have a stomach anymore because blank hadn’t figured out that he was dead yet.’ ‘Actually, we killed blank before we were even in hostile territory, we accidentally blanked over him with the blank when the driver wasn’t looking.’ ‘Blank killed herself with a blank. The whole day leading up to it she was fine.’ ‘We were in one of the Zones, and blank made one mistake, literally one, one tiny mistake, like anybody could’ve made, and twenty seconds later her whole face was running sores.’” Although our bodies pressed together, I suddenly felt very cold. I shivered.

  “Jesus,” you whispered. Out of disgust? Out of commiseration? I wasn’t sure.

  “How many does that cover?” I asked, trying to warm myself up again.

  “It covers a lot,” you replied and kissed my shoulder. “It covers a lot.”

  “I have at least two of each,” I said distantly. “More of some.”

  “I have at least one.” Kissing my shoulder again. “But are you saying … because they keep happening the same way they don’t matter?”

  They all mattered. But what the fuck can be done with that? What can be done with everything mattering? It just turns into some giant pulsing cloud of mattering. It’s too much, you can’t react, there’s no next thing to do. At a certain point you just have to decide only something matters. If just something matters … then you know what to do next.

  I let the question hang there for a minute, for a day, for a year. I was suddenly aware of the scars all over both our bodies. My own felt as if they’d taken on weight—each one laid heavily, tightly against my bones. Then I said, “Let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow I gotta talk to Rachel Lesser.”

  * * *

  SAY WHAT you want about Quill Marine, at least they don’t make us rent our parking spots by the month. 9Source does that to its employees and that’s a real dick move, if you ask me. It’s basically just another chunk of change out of every damn paycheck—not only that, should an industrious person come along and try to find out which specific parking spot is yours and where they can find your car, that info is just there, waiting to be plucked off the tree of knowledge like a juicy little apple.

  It was a silver Honda Civic sedan, practically anonymous, close to a decade old already, but in respectable shape. Roomy in back, decent upholstery, all of which was appreciated since I’d been hiding there for about ninety minutes before she clip-clopped her way to her car. I could hear her approach from what felt like miles away. I mean, seriously, she was a reporter, a glorified blogger, why the hell did she need to wear heels to her office (an office that didn’t value her enough to even treat her to a tiny square of concrete)? Yet another question about civilian life I was glad to leave unanswered.

  She unlocked her car remotely—the beep echoed through the lot with a plaintive loneliness—and in a few minutes she was inside. As soon as she pulled her door shut, I pressed the muzzle of my automatic against her ear.

  “IF YOU TURN AROUND I’LL KILL YOU.”

  “Jesus Christ!” she gulped in a terrified whisper.

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP. DO YOU FEEL THIS?”

  She whimpered, but that wasn’t an answer. I pressed the muzzle harder against her skull. “ANSWER ME: DO YOU FEEL THIS?”

  “Y-yes.”

  I had a hoodie pulled up over my head, so, along with the mask (and, hell, my stockier build) she most likely didn’t know if I was a man or a woman. I must have seemed, well, not to put too fine a point on it, rather alien. I didn’t want her doing anything stupid or potentially destructive. This was meant purely to be a recon-type mission. She’d know why soon enough.

  I pressed my weapon against her skull just a tiny bit harder. A micro-nod.

  “WHAT THIS MEANS IS: DON’T SAY ANYTHING UNTIL I SAY YOU CAN. NOW TAKE A REAL DEEP BREATH. DO IT.” I tried as best as I could to make my voice sound patient and accommodating—no small task given how inhuman the filter made it sound. I waited until she breathed, ragged and staccato, and I felt her head move against the barrel of the gun. “NOW ANOTHER.” She breathed, a little more confidently this time. “NOW ANOTHER.” I let her breathe two more times, deep, cleansing breaths. While she did so, I studied her—really studied her—in the rearview mirror.

  Something was amiss.

  “NOW HERE’S SOMETHING TO KNOW. THE GUN ISN’T LOADED.”

  I could have said it three more times in the moment it took her to compute what had just been said.

  “W-what?”

  “I CAN STILL KILL YOU, I CAN KILL YOU WITH YOUR OWN SEATBELT IF I NEED TO, BUT THAT’S NOT MY GOAL HERE. THE GUN WAS TO KEEP YOU FROM LEAVING THE CAR UNTIL YOU WERE CURIOUS ENOUGH TO TALK TO ME.”

  “Curious about what?”

  I took the automatic away from her skull.

  “WELL, HERE’S THE PROBLEM. I WAS EXPECTING RACHEL LESSER TO GET IN THIS CAR. YOU’RE NOT RACHEL LESSER.”

  “S-SHE DOESN’T work here anymore, she…” The woman trailed off, swallowed.

  “AND YOU’RE JUST NOW REALIZING YOU SHOULD’VE SAID ‘I CAN GO GET HER FOR YOU,’ RIGHT?” I gave a short, dry chuckle. It sounded like a computer trying to learn how to hiccup. “WHY DOESN’T SHE WORK HERE ANYMORE?”

  “She had an affair. With her editor. They’re both gone.”

  I computer-hiccupped again. “HA.” It figures they’d use something like that.

  “What?”

  “WHO ARE YOU?”

  She didn’t respond—not fast enough for my liking, at least. “IT WOULD BE NOTHING FOR ME TO GET YOUR ID OUT OF YOUR BAG. YOUR NAME AND ADDRESS. OR WE COULD JUST TALK.” The threat came out in a low, inhuman monotone. I liked it. She didn’t.

  “M-Monica Sears.”

  “YOU TOOK RACHEL’S OLD JOB?”

  “More like her parking space.”

  “WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?”

  “Her job doesn’t really exist anymore. We’re not doing longform deep-dive stuff anymore. I’m more in the ‘GIF-after-every-paragraph’ business.”

  “AND YOU WORK BY THE POST, RIGHT? 1099, NO BENEFITS?”

  “I mean, that’s pretty much any job in the field. To get on a masthead these days you have to—”

  “DELIVER SOMETHING HUGE, RIGHT?”

  It really is amazing how, when you give someone the opportunity to first complain about their job and then dangle a promotion in front of their eyes, you could literally be a hooded monotone space assassin who just held a gun to the back of their head but still the mood will thaw just a little bit.

  “You wanted Rachel, not me. It’s something on one of her stories, right?”

  “BIG FAT HINT: A FACILITY SHE THOUGHT WAS A COVER FOR DEVELOPING ILLEGAL WEAPONS.”

  The journalist gasped, not as privately as she probably hoped. “She was right?”

  “I CAN’T FIND YOUR AD RATES ONLINE.”

  “It’s a whole customized sca
le, based on a consolidated score, targeted across platforms—”

  “LET’S PRETEND IT’S A DOLLAR PER UNIQUE VIEW.”

  “Okay…”

  “HOW MUCH WOULD A HUNDRED MILLION UNIQUE VIEWS BE WORTH TO YOU?”

  “Um…”

  “SAY, TEN MILLION? LIKE A TEN PERCENT COMMISSION?”

  “It doesn’t exactly work like ‘commission’—”

  “WOULD YOU PAY OR NOT?”

  “For something that would get those numbers? Yeah, I bet they would. But nothing would get those numbers. The president screwing a cat wouldn’t get those numbers.”

  “TALK TO YOUR PEOPLE. CONFIRM THEY’D PAY. THEN—”

  “You want me to have a completely hypothetical conversation?!”

  “THEN. IF YOU WANT TO SEE INDISPUTABLE PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE, PARK THIS CAR…” I passed her a tiny slip of paper over the seat. She took it. Her hands weren’t shaking. I took that as an excellent sign. “… HERE. ON THIS DATE.”

  “Proof of extrat—?”

  “IF YOUR INSTINCTS ARE WORTH ANYTHING, ASK YOURSELF IF I’M A CRANK.” I let that sink in. “IF IT’S NOT PROOF, YOU DON’T PAY. GOT THE ADDRESS MEMORIZED?”

  “Um … yeah.”

  “BE VERY SURE.”

  “Yes.”

  “THEN GIVE IT BACK.”

  She did. I tore it up and put the pieces into my pocket to be burned later.

  “MONICA.”

  “Yes?”

  “NOT TO BE TOO PRECIOUS ABOUT IT? BUT YOU BETTER COME ALONE. BECAUSE I DEFINITELY WON’T BE.”

  I slipped out of the car and disappeared into the parking garage.

  14

  WE DIDN’T talk as we hurried down the hallway. We were entering an incredibly reckless phase of the plan and any unnecessary talking might make either one of us realize just how insane we were being.

  But it turned out Haydon had given us a small gift, in his own, shitty, indirect way. Since the announcement of our new mandate, Lloyd had been spending every chance he had in Object E, like it was a relative in hospice or something. Which meant we had a pretty clear shot to do what we had to do.

  “Which one’s his?” you whispered.

  “End of the hall.”

  In between Lauren’s security station and the freight-elevator doors that took you down the long tracheal tract of the Big Bug, the walkway actually split off into two directions, which led to other areas aboveground in Quill.

  There were all sorts of high-tech goodies to be found. Sound labs, isolation booths, rooms full of different light sensors and spectra—as expansive a playground as a person could wish to run any and all sorts of tests on the various data collected from Object E.

  The senior scientific staff also all had their own private, windowless offices.

  At some point between my leaving you alone with Lloyd and us all gathering in Conference Hall for Harrison’s rather devastating news, you’d managed to get from Lloyd that he kept the raw footage used for making his holograms on a green laptop somewhere in his private office. I could only imagine what the inside of that office looked like: I pictured cascades of paper and boxes and toys, his own mad scientist filing system making it impossible to find anything. I dreaded it. But with Lloyd currently indisposed in Object E, this was our only real option. The footage was certainly also on the company-wide server, but how would I ever explain why I was making a copy? We were being insane. We weren’t being stupid.

  We had to move fast. Not so much because of the cameras (thanks to Harrison I could screw with the footage later), but because neither of us had a really good reason to be here. And if we were caught here together? Curtains.

  At last, we reached it: a flat metal door with the nameplate “DR. LLOYD SIMON, Director of Marine Biology.” To the very end, aboveground, we kept up appearances. But there was no way to look into or out of these offices—to either the outside or to the hallways. Maximum security, maximum isolation.

  “Okay,” you said as you settled yourself by the door.

  “You remember your line?”

  “‘I’m just waiting for Lloyd,’” you said innocently. “You got the drive?”

  I nodded, held my breath, and slipped in.

  * * *

  LLOYD’S OFFICE was almost completely sterile and pristine. A few random grace notes on a bookshelf here and there—a troll doll on his desk, a coffee mug that said, “[Ah!] The Element of Surprise” on a bookshelf—but no sense of this being the office of some great eccentric genius.

  Lloyd lives more in his head than in the world around him, I realized.

  We kept the door cracked open so I could hear what was happening in the corridor. I began opening drawers and doors at random, looking for the green laptop.

  A few breathless seconds later I heard someone walk by and offer you a greeting.

  “Everything okay?” the voice asked.

  I held my breath and my position.

  “Yeah, just meeting Lloyd,” you replied.

  The voice laughed. “Yikes. Better you than me.”

  Then footsteps walking jauntily away.

  Within a few heartbeats I’d found stacks of paper, a vast array of drives and discs, a framed photo of a golden retriever, and more than a few tattered paperback novels with all sorts of aliens and weirdos on their covers. Lloyd liked his sci-fi, it seemed. I’d found at least three laptops, as well, but none of them were green. I was preparing myself to scroll through each of them when I looked up and noticed one last place to check: a container unit hanging on the wall. A small plastic alien figurine that looked surprisingly like a baby Moss sat on top.

  I pulled out the drawer of the unit and inside was a green laptop.

  I quickly, quietly removed the laptop (careful not to disturb baby Moss from its place of honor), put it on Lloyd’s desk, booted it up, and hooked up the drive I’d carried in.

  Our computers at Quill were top of the line, powered for unimpeachable efficiency … yet even then the amount of time it took to recognize the drive, read the drive, open up windows for their exploration … it felt like trying to make a getaway riding on a tortoise.

  I watched the progress bar move across the window and thought:

  I bet if he were here right now Lloyd would be explaining to me the theory of relativity and how it applied to how slow time felt right n—

  Another voice from the hallway:

  “New Fish?”

  “Oh,” you said. “… Hey, Patty.”

  Holy Christ.

  Can stomachs perform a belly flop? Mine did.

  “Just … hangin’ out?” Patty asked.

  “Yeah, uh—”

  “Just hangin’ out … in the Moss Team wing … nowhere near the Hangar.”

  I inched my way closer to the door so I could hear better, so I could react to whatever I was going to need to react to.

  “Yeah,” you were saying in your best casual voice. “Chief was like, as long as I’m not on rotation, could I go be nice to Lloyd for a couple minutes.”

  “Be nice? Isn’t he in Object E right now?”

  You dropped your volume a little: a secret. “I guess she’s a little worried about where he is … y’know, mentally?”

  Inside the room, the computer gave a (blessedly tiny) beep. Copying was done. I went over, ejected the drives, and re-filed the green laptop back in its drawer as quietly as could be.

  But fucking now what? It’s not like I can just stroll out while—

  “Okay, so,” Patty was intoning. “Dak’s worried about Lloyd’s mental state … which somehow puts you in the Moss Team wing … standing in front of a door.”

  “Oh—I’m not—sorry, I’m not trying to like stand in front of it, I was just watching for Lloyd. Do you need to get in?”

  Fuck what are you doing be careful with her.

  “I kinda think I do wanna go in, actually,” she challenged.

  “Go for it,” you shrugged. I began assessing my options—do
I hide do I try to knock Patty out do I come out first and make something up—but then I heard you ask, “Do you mind if I say something first?”

  Patty chuffed. “I don’t have to wait ’til you’re done before I do things.”

  “Of course you don’t,” you replied, casually, dangerously unimpressed. “You way outrank me. That’s why I said, ‘Do you mind.’”

  Holy Hell, you’re playing with fire here.

  But Patty considered. I could practically hear her crossing her arms in front of her chest and cocking her head. Her ponytail would be bobbing like the pendulum of a doomclock.

  “Okay. What?”

  “Dak’s your friend,” you said. Another lower-toned secret. “I’m not trying to take her from you.”

  Are you out of your goddamn mind?! I screamed internally.

  “Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Patty asked.

  “It’s weird. It’s weird for me to say it,” you conceded.

  Patty’s fangs were coming out. “Yeah, I’d say it is.”

  “Things are different with me and her since the Harp thing. Like they would be with anybody. It’s like a tour, it’s like a firefight, like any of the Things. So sometimes she drops me a quiet little line, like, ‘Go look after Lloyd,’ but that’s all it is. I’m not, like, after your spot. No one but you should have that spot. You and Dak are more than tight, you guys are partners.”

  I could hear Patty sucking on her teeth, trying to figure out if she was being played. “That was some awful shit with the Harp.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Decent outfit woulda sent her on a six-week leave.”

  “Right?”

  “Messed up thing is: I don’t even know if she’d have accepted it,” Patty snorted, a weirdly sentimental sound. “But they should at least give her the fuckin’…”

  “I’m with you, I agree.”

  “’Cause I feel like it’s … I feel like she’s…”

  “Look,” you said to her, “do I have a field crush on the chief? Of course I do—who doesn’t?” I could picture the smile you were wearing: deprecating, remorseful, charming. We all fuck up sometimes, that smile said. Who am I to judge? As if you weren’t perfect.