A Complicated Love Story Set in Space

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  “DJ, I—”

  “Just so you know, I don’t regret saving you, and I’d do it again.” DJ left to finish searching the ship, and it was a long time before I followed.

  FOUR

  I WAS THINKING THAT DJ and I had made a mistake preventing Qriosity from exploding, and then we found the galley. I loved it so much that I considered dragging in a mattress from the crew quarters and sleeping there. There were two massive ovens, an induction stovetop, and wide, expansive counters where I could spread out while I baked and never worry about not having enough space. And it was outfitted with every piece of equipment I could possibly need, including some whose function was a mystery but that I desperately wanted to play with.

  On the other side of a half wall was a dining area that was dominated by an oval table surrounded by six chairs. Unlike in other rooms, the scruffy, ramshackle quality of the mismatched chairs and the table’s chipped paint gave the galley a warm, homey, comfortable vibe. Whoever had crewed Qriosity before us had congregated here. I could practically smell the meals that had been cooked and hear the laughter that had soaked into the walls.

  For a moment, I nearly forgot that I was stranded on a ship far from home. But only for a moment.

  Jenny found me and DJ in the galley not long after we’d arrived, and we decided it was as good a place as any to sit down and share what we’d discovered.

  “There’s a recreation room with couches and some type of game system called Mind’s Eye,” Jenny was saying. I was only partly listening because I was busy watching DJ tear the wrapper off a meal replacement bar he’d found.

  “You’re not going to eat that, are you?” I asked, interrupting Jenny.

  DJ froze like he’d been caught with his hand in a stranger’s pocket. He tilted the bar he was holding so that I could see the word “Nutreesh” written on the metallic wrapper in an eager serif font. The bar itself looked like a hamster turd. “Yes?”

  “You have no idea what it’s made from,” I said.

  DJ sniffed it and shrugged. “Put some in you.”

  “I’d rather put cyanide in me.” I watched DJ bite off the end, and figured it was a good sign when he didn’t immediately drop dead.

  “Well?” Jenny asked. “Is it any good? I’m hungry.”

  “Depends.” DJ finished chewing, swallowed, and chased it with a gulp of water. “Have you ever eaten paper?”

  “No,” Jenny said.

  “Want to?” DJ held up a second bar and waved it in the air.

  “Hell no,” I said at the same time as Jenny said, “Why not?”

  The horror I felt must have been plain on my face as DJ slid the Nutreesh bar across to Jenny because he said, “What? We’ve got to eat something, and this is technically food.”

  “I don’t want to eat food that looks like it might have once been roaches.”

  Jenny, who’d barely gotten the wrapper off before taking her first bite, licked the crumbs from her lips. “Definitely not roaches.”

  I suppressed a shudder. “I seriously don’t want to know how you know that.”

  “It’s got a nutty flavor,” she said, ignoring me. “With a hint of ginger.” Jenny touched the tip of her tongue to the uneaten portion of the bar. “Cinnamon, too. And something else I can’t quite place.”

  “Roaches,” I said again. “Either way, I’m not eating it.”

  DJ finished his Nutreesh and folded the crinkly wrapper into a tight square before slipping it into his pocket. “You might have to.”

  “I’ll barbecue and eat one of you before I eat whatever that crap is.” I had been trying to avoid thinking about how long we were going to be stuck on Qriosity. While it might have been possible there was someone hiding on the ship who could help us, there was as much chance of that as there was of Nutreesh not being roaches.

  “You should eat me first,” Jenny said with her mouth full. “DJ looks like he’d be tough, and you barely have any meat on you at all.”

  “If you’re volunteering—”

  DJ looked horrified. “Maybe we could talk about something other than who we’re gonna eat first.”

  “I was joking.” I threw a mournful glance at the galley. “None of the equipment works anyway. Apparently, it’s all non-essential.”

  “Anyone want to talk about why we’re here?” Jenny asked. “Who kidnapped us? What do they want with us?” She shoved the last bite of Nutreesh into her mouth. “I bet we’ve been kidnapped by aliens to be part of their intergalactic zoo.”

  “It’s not aliens,” I said.

  “It might be,” Jenny said. “They might want to study us or cut us open and see what our insides look like.”

  I threw up my hands. “Why does it always have to be extermination or gruesome experiments when it comes to aliens? Why can’t the aliens ever want to hang out and smoke a bowl?”

  DJ said, “I’m with Noa,” and offered me a supportive smile. “Besides, why would aliens abduct us and give us a ship?”

  Jenny twisted her hair around her finger. “Maybe the aliens saw that Earth was going to be hit by an asteroid capable of obliterating humanity, so they kidnapped us to give us a chance to find a habitable planet to settle on where we could repopulate the species.”

  “No offense, Jenny,” I said, “but I’m not having babies with you.”

  “I wasn’t offering.” Jenny motioned at DJ. “But the flirty eyes DJ’s been giving you since I got out of the toilet tells me he might be willing to give it a shot.”

  DJ’s face was strawberry red to the tips of his ears, and he kept stumbling over his words, trying to get them out. “Could we please stop talking about anyone getting anyone else pregnant?”

  “We’re talking about saving the human race,” Jenny said. “And your babies would be so pretty.”

  “They really would be, as long as they don’t get my ears.” I shrugged at DJ. “I’m willing to give it a go if you are. You know, for humanity or whatever.”

  I kept my face straight for as long as I could before I lost it laughing, and Jenny joined in, making a noise that sounded like what I imagined a baby elephant being tickled might make. DJ was the only one not laughing, and I wouldn’t have believed it was possible for anyone’s face to get that red if I hadn’t seen it myself. He looked like he was going to have a stroke.

  “Ha ha,” DJ said, cutting through our giggles. “But now that we’ve saved Qriosity from blowing up and searched it from top to bottom, what’s our next step?”

  I raised my hand. “I vote we figure out how the ship works, turn it back on, and go home.”

  “You heard Jenny Perez,” DJ said. “We can’t.”

  “Have you tried?” I fixed him with an unblinking stare, all the laughter and mirth from before now gone.

  DJ wore a wounded expression, like it pained him just to look at me. “There’s still so much we don’t know, Noa. Like, how long have we even been on Qriosity?”

  “The hologram that stole my name said our memory loss shouldn’t go back more than a week, so we can’t have been here longer than that.” Jenny looked back and forth from me to DJ. “Right?”

  DJ pursed his lips. “It takes at least three days to reach the moon, between five and ten months to get to Mars. I’m willing to bet we’re not in our own solar system anymore, so…”

  He let the thought trail off, but he didn’t need to finish it. If he was right, we might have been gone months, possibly years. I imagined those first few days when I didn’t come home. My mom would’ve gone off the rails with worry. Posting flyers up and down 45th, checking in with Becca and Enzo and anyone she thought I might have talked to, to see if they’d heard from me. I pictured her having to go back to work after a month even though she didn’t want to. Coming home at the end of her shift, rushing right to my room to see if I was there, her hope crushed each time she saw my empty bed, still unmade the way I’d left it. Her heart breaking into smaller pieces every night when she sat down to eat dinner alone.

&nbs
p; Even if we could have turned Qriosity around and returned to Earth that second, everyone we knew might’ve already been gone.

  DJ rested his hand on mine. His skin was warm and soft. “Hey,” he said. “We’ll get home.”

  “It’s not even about going home.” My voice was low, almost a whisper. “I mean, it is, but it’s also that we don’t belong here, DJ. I’m not just going to accept that this is my life now and make the best of it. I can’t.”

  Even as I said it, something about DJ tugged at me, and I wanted to give in to the moment we were in rather than holding on to the past. I wanted to stop fighting and embrace my new normal. It would have made my life so much easier.

  I pulled my hand out from under DJ’s and dropped it into my lap, watching as he folded in on himself, as he grew smaller right before my eyes. I kept hurting him. He’d put himself out there, tried to be nice to me, and I’d fashioned his good intentions into weapons and wounded him with them.

  “We never should have shut down the reactor,” I said.

  “What’s stopping us from turning the reactor on again?” Jenny asked.

  I didn’t have an answer, but it was a good question. I looked to DJ to get his opinion and, instead, saw a swarm of organized twinkles flowing from the vents and assembling on one side of the table into the hologram of Jenny Perez.

  “Not again,” I said. Apparently, the ship had heard Jenny’s question and decided to respond. It was creepy to think that Qriosity was listening to every word we said. An invasion of privacy, no matter how helpful it tried to be.

  “Hi! I’m your host, Jenny Perez, whom you probably remember as the precocious kid detective and bestselling author Anastasia Darling on the award-winning mystery entertainment program Murder Your Darlings. If you’re seeing this holographic message, then that means you’ve asked about restarting the Cordova Exotic Particle Reactor.”

  “Does she have to say that every time?” I muttered. “We know who she is.”

  “The answer is yes!” the hologram said. “I’m contractually obligated to repeat the standard greeting each time I’m initiated. Sorry about it!”

  Jenny unwrapped another Nutreesh bar. “Well, that’s silly.”

  I agreed, but I didn’t want to get sidetracked. “How do we restart the Cordova reactor thing?”

  “I would advise not shutting down the Cordova Exotic Particle Reactor,” Jenny Perez said in a painfully cheery tone.

  “Too late,” I said at the same time as DJ said, “We didn’t have a choice.”

  “That’s a shame,” Jenny Perez said. “It really would have been better if you hadn’t shut it down.”

  I threw my hands in the air. “Okay, but we did, so can you tell us how to turn it back on or what?”

  Jenny was busy putting more Nutreesh in her, but I caught DJ looking at me, and when I did, he said, “Try not to get so worked up. You were dead only a couple of hours ago.”

  I understood that DJ was trying to help, but if there was ever a time to get upset, it was now. It bothered me that DJ and Jenny were still so calm. I wanted to throw things while they were chatting with a hologram and eating their roach bars.

  “I don’t need you to look after me. I can take care of myself.”

  Jenny was motioning at us with her half-eaten Nutreesh. “I’m sensing some serious sexual tension here.”

  Gritting my teeth to keep from saying something I might regret later, I gave the hologram my full attention. “Just tell us how to restart the damn reactor, okay?”

  Jenny Perez flickered momentarily. “So you want to restart the Cordova Exotic Particle Reactor.” She paused and smiled like she was trying to get us to sign her petition to save the snails or to join her cult that she promised totally wasn’t a cult. “Reinitializing the Cordova Exotic Particle Reactor after an unplanned shutdown requires rebooting Qriosity’s main computer, a Nexus Systems Quantum Cluster Advanced Logic Engine—whew! That’s a mouthful!—a bleeding-edge system designed specifically for use aboard Qriosity. Capable of performing the one hundred sextillion simultaneous calculations required by the Trinity Labs Quantum Fold Drive for instantaneous travel through space, the Nexus Systems Quantum Cluster Advanced Logic Engine should only be rebooted by a qualified Nexus Systems technician.”

  I clenched my fists and stood. “Do holograms feel pain?” I was seriously considering trying to strangle it. I felt like it was taunting us when all I wanted was a simple answer. The more Jenny Perez droned on, the angrier I became.

  DJ gently tugged on my sleeve, pulling me back to my seat. “We don’t have a Nexus technician,” he said to the hologram. “We’re still in high school.”

  “That sounds even stranger when you say it out loud,” Jenny said, mostly to herself. She wasn’t wrong, though. I should have been in class, sleeping through Mr. Wilkes’s lecture on the French Revolution, not sitting on a ship, listening to a lecture about reactors and computers from a hologram. It was surreal in a way that I hadn’t had time to process yet. I felt like I was on a roller coaster that had taken off before I’d gotten strapped in, and it was whipping around corkscrews and flipping upside down, and I was barely managing to hold on. If I loosened my grip for even a second, I would plummet to my death.

  But Jenny Perez didn’t seem to care how old we were. “In the event that your Nexus Systems technician is missing, incapacitated, or dead, and a reboot of the Nexus Systems Quantum Cluster Advanced Logic Engine is absolutely necessary, please be advised that there is a one-in-five-million-three-hundred-fifty-thousand chance that the quantum states within the computer will collapse, irrevocably damaging the system and leading to the total loss of Qriosity and everyone on board.”

  “That would be bad,” I said.

  “Very bad,” DJ agreed.

  “There’s a fractionally higher possibility,” Jenny Perez continued, “that rebooting the Nexus Systems Quantum Cluster Advanced Logic Engine will result in the system reverting to its default operating parameters. However, the likeliest scenario is that the Nexus Systems Quantum Cluster Advanced Logic Engine will reboot without issue, allowing you to reinitialize your Cordova Exotic Particle Reactor.”

  Finally. I waved my hand dismissively at the hologram. “Good. Go away.” Only, Jenny Perez didn’t disperse. She remained standing at the table with her hands on her hips like she was waiting for one of us to ask her for an autograph.

  “Did either of you understand anything she said?” Jenny asked. “I consider myself an extremely intelligent person, and that was like, ‘What are you even saying?’ ”

  “It means we can restart the reactor.” I looked at DJ, who was drawing on the table with his finger. “Right, DJ?”

  DJ coughed nervously. “Well, I mean, she also said rebooting the computer could break it and the ship.”

  “But the odds were like one-in-five-million-something. That’s a really low percent, right?” I held out my hand, palm up. “Who’s got a calculator?”

  “Point-zero-zero-zero-zero-one-eight-six-nine percent,” DJ said.

  My eyes grew wide. “Did you do that in your head?”

  DJ shrugged. “Told you I was good at math.”

  I was impressed, seeing as I could barely do simple multiplication without help. “The point is that the chance is small.”

  “But it’s not zero,” DJ said, surprising me.

  “Wait, you’re saying we shouldn’t reboot the computer?” I thought I had to have misunderstood him because there was no way that could be what he’d meant.

  “I know you want hot water and food that isn’t bar-shaped,” DJ said. “But if there’s a chance rebooting Qriosity’s computer could kill us, I don’t think we should risk it.”

  “You’re actually serious,” I said. I turned to Jenny. “What about you?”

  Jenny said, “I’m way too invested in finding out who did this to us—so that I can slowly torture and then brutally murder them—to die for a hot shower.”

  “Who cares about the shower?!”
I yelled. “I’m talking about going home! We reboot the computer, get the reactor online, and then figure out a way to return to Earth!” I felt like they were pranking me. Like this was an elaborate hoax they were playing. This decision should have been easy, and I didn’t understand why they were making it so difficult.

  DJ folded his hands on the table, his voice calm and diplomatic like he was debating with a toddler. “Right now, we’re safe. We’ve got air and water and food—”

  “Nutreesh isn’t food!”

  “And we shouldn’t risk doing anything to jeopardize that.”

  Jenny chimed in, making me feel like they were ganging up on me. “We literally woke up on this ship a few hours ago, and before that I didn’t even know ships like this existed. I want to go home as badly as you do, but I don’t want to die in the process because I was messing with stuff I didn’t understand.”

  It wasn’t even about going home. Mom was back home, and Mrs. Blum and Becca. But Billy was there too, and I didn’t care if I ever saw him again. It was that I refused to sit on Qriosity, where I’d been brought against my will, and accept my fate. I had to do something, and I was baffled by how easily Jenny and DJ were willing to give up.

  “You think if we do nothing that we’ll be safe?” I asked. “Bad things happen all the time. We could do everything we’ve been told to do, sit around and wait for rescue, and we still might die because of some danger we never anticipated.”

  “Exactly,” DJ said. “So why risk making the situation worse by messing with stuff we don’t understand?”

  “Jenny?” I said, pleading with her. “Come on. Nothing bad is going to happen. Your odds of being killed by a shark are one in four million. Being killed by a tornado, one in five million.”

  “What about a shark in a tornado?” Jenny asked.

  “I don’t know, but it’s still probably more likely than the odds that rebooting the computer will fry it.”

  For a second, I thought I was getting through to her. I could see the wheels turning behind her hazel eyes, and I thought she was finally willing to listen to reason. But then she said, “The only thing I know about computers is that they can catch fire if too much cat hair gets trapped inside them, so…” She shrugged. “Sorry, Noa.”