by Ellen Mint
“There,” Nolan announced, drawing my attention to the console that reappeared with my childish squiggles masquerading as math. “All fixed.”
It’d been wonderful these past few…waking and sleeping shifts. I couldn’t call them days since there was no clock or sun. But for three of those unmeasured turns, I’d spend as much time as I could hunched over the desk cursing myself. Then Nolan would appear to whisk me off to food or if he wanted to show off a passing comet or nebula.
Or when he had to teach me how to use his shower. Much like the coffee, the water beaded up in a basin and required a delicate hand to smooth over the skin. He’d been more than happy to help me reach every corner of my body.
All in all, the perfect sci-fi vacation. Flying through space with a hot guy, gasping in excitement at astronomical phenomena I’d only ever seen artistic mockups of. And holy shit, the sex! That alone made this perfect.
But here I had to go and ruin it all.
“Nolan,” I said before he vanished out the door to resume his flight charts and other bounty hunter things. Space taxes, maybe?
He didn’t just linger in the doorway, he leaned his hip on the frame and crossed his arms. A dirty trick to get me to stare all along his muscled body. Even with a shirt on, there was little left to the imagination. Space people apparently liked their clothing tight and shiny. The middle of his shirt glinted like polished silver, while black mesh lined the sides to let his lats breathe. Blue stripes gave it a hint of color and flare across the stomach. And, in his pose, the blue hem pointed my eyes right to his bulge.
What are you doing, Trini? Just give it a few more days Look at that man! Do you want to walk away from all of this?
“I don’t know if I can solve this,” I voiced the words that’d been dogging me since day one.
“Do you need me to cheer you on? Give me a T…” he said, raising his clenched fist as if to get the crowd going.
“It’s not that,” I said, even while knowing how deep in the gutter my self-esteem slummed it. I waved a hand over my desk. “Without my original data, I can’t continue. I thought to begin I’d put it all down, but I’m running around in circles. How can a complex problem be solved with a simple solution? The very idea sounds…”
“Silly? As silly as an intergalactic bounty hunter stocking his spaceship with pie?”
I snickered at that. But even as I bent my head down, my hair falling around to shield my blush, I said, “Sillier. How did you even…? How did you find me? Or the Kirkan?”
Sure, I’d posted about my attempts online for a while, but lots of people were trying to crack this. What made two aliens so dead certain I’d solve it that they’d both infiltrated my lab?
“Oh, I didn’t show you my Oracle,” Nolan said. He extended his hand to me, and together we walked the short hallway to the bridge. It’d changed in the last time I saw it, the consoles once again rearranged so one and four were out. One had a soft blue glow and no obvious numbers while four was covered in green squiggles.
Hard to know if that was a bad sign or not. How long would it take someone like me to figure out how to fly a starship? Would that even matter? I was going home after this, of course.
“This,” Nolan said, shaking me from my foolish daydream of becoming a space pirate, “is the one tool no bounty hunter goes without.” He cupped his hands around an object hidden inside the console and turned.
A crystal ball about a foot in length rested in his grip. I stared at it, waiting for the laugh, but Nolan looked dead serious. “But that’s just a…”
Clouds rolled over the ball, and not metaphorical fog either. Actual, tiny puffs of cumulonimbus appeared, then miniature oceans. I saw tiny waves swelling and crashing below the ball’s surface. A green dot swerved around the ocean until landing smack dab in the middle of nowhere.
Text I recognized as alien and nothing more appeared above the dot, but I understood what the ball said. “Oolon female to discover transplant of coral — fifty-four percent.”
“What does that mean? What is it?”
Nolan smiled while showing off his toy. “The Oracle scans everything, all data in the universe, all the time. Using that, it predicts where it believes a person will have a scientific breakthrough. If you pay for the better model it’ll also predict how much that knowledge can be worth. Coral transplant is valued at a diner.”
“Do you mean a dinar—?”
“No, an actual diner with a sassy waitress named Anne. Though, as you can probably guess by the percentages, it’s not a guarantee. There’s a forty-six percent likelihood the Oolon won’t determine coral transplanting.”
Wow. That’s…that’s impossible. It’d have to take on enormous amounts of data and be crunching it constantly. Billions of billions of people all across the universe, uncertain if and when they’ll discover the secrets of life. I mean, the server space alone would have to…
“Yes,” Nolan nodded as if he could read my thoughts, “there’s an entire planet devoted to holding only the data of the Oracle. I imagine you once made a post or an email about your work. The Oracle spotted it and, using various algorithms I’m not allowed to know about, it determined you would solve the question of if P can ever equal NP.”
Okay. That’s… I stopped from calling him a liar. Of accusing the man that flew a spaceship and saved me from a squid inside a robot of making it all up. “What was the percentage for me? It must have been pretty high if you were willing to spend six months on Earth.”
“Ah.” Nolan slipped the Oracle onto its stand where it continued to show off other worlds and scientific breakthroughs. “Funny story. Sort of. When I first saw your data it was predicted at…thirty-six percent.”
Any sense that I stood a chance at this cracked in half. No doubt my face fell as Nolan swept his arms around my shoulders. He began to rub against my skin as if my greatest problem in life was the cold. “But, I put a pin in it. I watched every day as the number kept rising. Slowly but steadily until it reached seventy percent. Not many hunters would put in so much work on a low chance, but I had faith.”
“And…” My stomach rolled in knots at the joy in his face, as if I’d done anything worth getting excited about. “What’s it at now?”
He frowned deep. “That’s harder to say thanks to the Kirkan entering the fray.”
“Meaning?”
“Fifty-fifty, a dead heat between the two of you.”
It was only going to get worse. I knew it in my heart. “Nolan, I want to help you, to help me I mean, but without my old data I don’t know if…”
“Of course,” he said. “I’m such an idiot.” Releasing me, he dashed off to the blue console and lit it up yellow. The hovering data extended clear out across the bridge as if forming a three-dimensional map.
“What? Do you have a time machine so I can go back and take the data from myself before the Kirkan does?”
“As I don’t want to run the risk of accidentally killing my own grandfather, no,” Nolan said, lightening the dread in my stomach. “But I know an even better solution. Though, it depends on if they’ll agree to see us.”
“They? They who?”
Nolan flew his hands through the air, scattering a dozen yellow points into the walls. As they went, I felt the ship shift and increase in speed. “The smartest minds this galaxy has ever known. If anyone can help you puzzle through the last of this, it’s the Think Tank.”
The smartest minds in the galaxy…? It would be like an ant asking God for a favor.
“Hm.” Nolan’s gaze drifted from my shoulders clear down to my bare feet. “Come with me,” he said, taking my hand.
My cheeks lit red as he guided me to his lofty bedroom. There was no blanket to toss to the floor, and the pillow seemed to be bolted in place, but I couldn’t stop staring at the rumpled bed. After our last few days, it should be steaming, and I shivered at the idea of leaping back in for more.
But at the middle of the room, Nolan paused on his tug. Want
ing to not always be the shrinking violet star, I cupped Nolan’s cheeks and sprung up on my toes for a kiss. His hard stance melted, his hands caressing down the small of my back where the zipper on my dress started to separate.
“Wait.” He shifted away, breaking the kiss and leaving me falling to my flat feet. “I brought you here to get you dressed not…” His gaze crossed over my shoulders and dipped straight down the cleavage. “The Tank requires a professional outfit to attend.”
Damn it. I didn’t need to glance at the shiny walls to know my entire torso and face turned red. There was enough heat of embarrassment I could power a dwarf star.
Nolan stumbled for one of the few pieces of furniture in the bedroom. Aside from the bed, there were three in total. Two eight feet tall squares with enough floor space to hold one person. The other was like the rest of the counters always rising and vanishing in the various rooms.
He pressed his palm to one of the two tall sci-fi chifforobes and turned to the fool that nearly threw herself at his feet. My head hung in a stinging shame of rejection, singing the continual reminder that I can’t read people, when I caught the obvious rise in his spiffy jumpsuit. It wasn’t even subtle, the alien fabric practically shrink-wrapped around him. Did aliens not believe in underwear? Had to be awkward at family dinners.
“This is…a clothes dispenser. From it, you can pick any style, cut, fabric, and size of clothing you’d like.”
I yanked my eyes away from the proud prow of his crotch to try and take in the computer screen. Even with the bug in my DNA translating the words, I couldn’t quite make out the garbled text. On occasion, a word or handful of letters would appear, only to scramble back to lines. But I did understand the image floating in the air. One top and one bottom, both exchanged out with a flick of a finger.
In an instant, I was taken back to the coloring fashion plates Ava kept hidden from me. She said that since I got the microscope for Christmas, I had no right to play with hers and why would I even want to. I scrolled through the options, shirts cut in every conceivable form flying past. Sometimes the top and bottom would be replaced by a single dress-like style. Though even that was alien from what I’d find at home. Waists rose and dropped like the tide. Cuts were made across the bodice that would send my breasts spilling out. One skirt had wide hoops sewn into the hemline that circled up like a train climbing a mountain.
Every permutation of fashion to ever exist or would exist was in here.
“I already narrowed it down to those that would accommodate your form,” Nolan said, a smile rising as he licked the edge of his mouth. “And would be acceptable for the Think Tank Forum.”
“There’s a forum now?” I sighed as if that wasn’t the biggest problem facing me. Literally, the entire galaxy’s worth of fashion was at my fingertips and I had no idea what to pick. Flinging it faster, I tried the old ‘Spin it, then slam your finger down’ trick.
Instead of winding up in the Indian ocean, I found myself staring at a lumpy jumpsuit with hard spheres placed down the chest, at the stomach, and directly over the thighs. It looked like a french mime was attacked by an army of giant grapes.
“Hm,” Nolan whispered behind my ear. His hands curled around my shoulders, the thumbs gliding across my collarbone and under the dress straps. “That is considered the highest of fashion for the Alish.”
I craned my head around to stare at him. “You’re kidding?”
“Most save for years to be wed in one made from prismatic crystals.”
I tried to picture myself walking down the aisle with bulbous lesions prodding from my chest and back. My mother would rise from the pew just to faint dead on the floor. Ava would quickly join her while Diego filmed me in black and white like I was a tragic figure pleading for pity donations.
My stomach churned at the entire gross idea and I tried to wipe it away. But before it vanished, I caught sight of the groom standing patiently at the altar and his starry eyes.
“Why don’t you pick?” I said, abandoning the entire endeavor. “You know what this forum requires. And you’re the…the spaceman.” Oh my shit, stop talking!
Nolan took it all in stride, completely unaware that my diseased fantasy world suddenly declared “Hey, why not love him for the rest of your life?”
Because I don’t know him at all. We’d only been rolling around in the sheets for a few days. And, he’s a freaking space traveling…not alien but not fully human. Am I even human anymore? Did the bug in my brain mean I carried alien DNA? Then again, some scientists believe that the very building blocks of life came from space. So one could argue we all have alien DNA.
Not important!
“Here you go,” Nolan said. He turned to find me in mid-panic, all ten of my fingers splayed out across my chest and knocking against it. I yanked my hands behind my back when he presented a cream-white bundle of clothing to me.
I stared at it in confusion until my brain screamed at me to pick it up. As I grabbed the shoulders, the entire thing unfolded to land with a whoomph on the floor. “It’s very…” I said, before remembering this was to impress important aliens. Knotting it up, I said, “Blinding. Do I put it on in there?”
With my head leading, I turned to the other tall wardrobe in the room. It stood on the opposite wall, looking nearly the same as the magical fashion one save the lack of a panel. Not wanting to sound more like a rube than I already did, I took a step for it, when Nolan grabbed my arm.
“No! No, no. That’s not a…it’s something else entirely.”
“What?” My curiosity could never be satiated and I leaned closer.
Nolan spun me away and toward the flatter dresser. “Later. This is where you pick the colors of your outfit.” His jangled voice dipped lower, and he whispered so close his lips glanced against my neck. “A soft green would look divine on you.”
“I don’t really…” I said, licking my lips. My wardrobe at home was a combo of blacks and browns, all the easier to keep clean. Even the red dress that couldn’t support my on-the-go space exploration was a gift from Ava. “Sure,” I agreed with him without a second’s pause. “Do I place it here?”
“Yes,” Nolan smiled. “You’re getting the hang of this. Select the colors and the opacity here.” He lifted some simple slider bars so easy even a ten-year-old could understand it.
As I placed my fingers along the bars, a virtual image of the outfit he picked for me appeared. Ugh, that combo was terrible. I swept my fingers around, trying to find an acceptable color, when Nolan swept his hand from the top of my back down. As it caressed across my waist, he placed his chin on my shoulder.
“When that’s finished,” he said, brushing away my hair, “I can help you slip into it…after.”
“After—?”
He interrupted and answered with a hot kiss.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I WAS THE globe-trotting librarian crossing into a long-forgotten tomb. The sharp archeologist with a panache for whips slipping into a secret society’s orgy masquerade. The frizzy-haired mathematician bumbling into a massive space station paying no attention to where she walked.
“Watch it!” a voice shouted, and five sets of eyes on bright red stalks swiveled in my face.
I froze, my mouth drying out as the top half of the creature orbited in a full circle to face me. It did that without shifting its legs. Person. That’s a person.
“Do you mind?” it said, three of the always waving eyes darting down to my foot.
I followed suit to find my sandal firmly planted on the diaphanous robes that probably left nothing to the imagination. It was hard to say as the entire body was covered in long, crimson fur.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said, shuffling my foot to the side.
It snorted, “Tourists,” and resumed the long walk down the massive entranceway.
Pillars ten feet in width and easily four or five stories high filled the entire endless foyer. Brass braziers sat perched at the base of every one, but the fires blazing in them s
hifted colors. I tried to see if they used a special fuel, but Nolan kept us following the horde.
We’d fallen in behind them at the space hatch doors after disembarking and had been trailing ever since. Heat rampaged through the space citadel, if not from the braziers then the thousands of alien bodies pressing in around us. At first, I couldn’t stop looking around, lost in the diversity of what evolution could invent across the cosmos. But as the slow march across the mile to the forum continued on without break, I stopped noticing when a man had a trunk for ears or a woman would raise her skirt and a hundred tiny multi-legged children ran free.
It was the pillars that drew my renewed attention. At a distance, they looked as polished white as the Roman coliseum the way the Renaissance viewed it. While I couldn’t find any flecks of garish paint long since erased from history, I did spot lines carved up and down the entirety of the pillars.
For the first couple hundred feet, that was all I saw. But something caught my eye. Just like on Nolan’s ship, the squiggles started to shift. They’d almost jump into a coherent phrase or word, but if I stared too long it’d turn back into nonsense. Placing a hand over my right eye, I sidled through the heaving bodies leaking every manner of odor.
A pair of lines cut like railroad tracks began to shiver. I tried narrowing my vision, but the harder I stared the more my eye teared up. Exhausted, my sight drifted past the lines and in an instant, an equation appeared. C=2Rπ
Yes!
“Trini?”
“That’s the circumference of a circle,” I said, excitedly jabbing a finger at it like a child that just spotted a zebra.
Nolan glanced at it like the weary teacher aware the zebra was currently fertilizing the grass. “We need to keep moving,” he said instead of pointing out the obvious. Taking my arm as if I was some wayward princess he was tasked with keeping an eye on, Nolan directed us back into the horde. But I kept staring up at the pillars, universal math equations popping free from what had once been a mystery.
