A Complicated Love Story Set in Space

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  I felt embarrassed. Jenny and DJ were going through the same thing I was, but they had kept moving forward, despite their pain, while I’d watched TV.

  “What do I do?” I asked. “You’ve got your mystery and DJ’s got me, I guess. What should I do?”

  “Hell if I know. Maybe you should ask the hologram.” Before I could stop her, Jenny said, “Hey, Jenny Perez, get out here. Noa’s got a question for you.”

  As the sparkling photons gathered into the form of Jenny Perez, Jenny stood and took off.

  “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. What can I help you with today?”

  I was about to tell her to go away, but I stopped. I sat up on the couch and pulled my legs under me. Jenny Perez stood in front of the screen wearing a hopeful, slightly devious expression that I’d grown familiar with over a hundred episodes of her award-winning mystery entertainment program. I’d spent more time with her since waking up on Qriosity than with DJ or Jenny.

  “If you have a problem,” she said, “I would love for you to give me a clue so that we can solve it together.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Here’s one. How do I go on when everything seems hopeless?”

  I didn’t expect an answer from Jenny Perez. She was, after all, a hologram. So I was surprised when she sat down on the ottoman in front of a leather chair, sighed heavily, and said, “It wasn’t always easy growing up in front of an audience the way I did. Some days I thought about setting fire to my entire life and walking away.”

  “But you didn’t,” I said.

  Jenny Perez shook her head. “No, I did not. Why is a long story. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got the time.”

  THE BODY IN THE GALLEY

  ONE

  I SAT IN FRONT OF the viewport in Ops and stared at the stars. I was so close to the glass that I could touch it, but I kept my hands in my lap. There were a million million million stars out there. Some had planets around them. A few of those planets probably supported life. Maybe one of them had intelligent life sufficiently advanced enough to help us. But they would never know we existed. Even if someone looking through a powerful telescope happened to see us, we’d be nothing more than a blip to them. There and gone again.

  “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

  DJ’s smiling face was reflected in the viewport, and I waved perfunctorily but kept my eyes trained on the stars. “I’m engaging in a kind of exposure therapy.”

  “Exposure to what?”

  “Space,” I said. “This is as close as I can get to it without suiting up, and I am not doing that again anytime soon.”

  DJ grunted and sat at his station. I say his station because it was the one he spent most of his time at, but each of the consoles had access to the same systems. DJ was a creature of habit, I’d come to learn. He thrived on routine and order. He ate the same thing for breakfast each morning, jogged around Qriosity immediately after waking up, and dropped by Ops to check if the computer had somehow managed to calculate our coordinates while he slept. It never did.

  “Wait,” I said. “Is it morning?”

  “Have you been here all night?”

  I turned around and leaned against the viewport. “I guess I have.”

  “Noa…”

  “Don’t start.”

  This was part of DJ’s routine too. Make sure Noa gets enough sleep, make sure Noa is eating, make sure Noa isn’t slipping into a debilitating depression from which he will never escape.

  “I’m just looking out for you,” he said. “If you want to stay up all night looking at the stars, I can’t stop you, but I don’t think it’s healthy.”

  “You should be happy I’m not watching Murder Your Darlings.” I was, in fact, still watching the show. I’d seen every episode and was working my way through it for the second time. But DJ didn’t need to know that.

  “I am,” he said. “But—”

  “I’m trying, DJ.”

  DJ’s stern expression softened. “I know you are. I just wish you didn’t have to try so hard.”

  “You and me both.” I hugged my knees to my chest. My exhaustion was starting to catch up to me. I could’ve shut my eyes right there and fallen asleep. “It’s a struggle, you know? I had no idea what I was doing with my life on Earth, but I was surrounded by people who had their own ideas, and I could let them tell me what to do.”

  “If you need someone to tell you what to do,” DJ said, “I’ve got a list of repairs—”

  “That’s not enough, DJ, and you know it.”

  “It might have to be.”

  Maybe he was right. If nothing changed, Qriosity could be my entire universe for the rest of my life. I could die here without setting foot on a planet or seeing another living soul other than DJ or Jenny. And, somehow, I was going to have to make peace with that. I just didn’t know how.

  DJ was looking at me, a curious expression on his face. “What?” I asked.

  “You remind me of someone.”

  “Who?”

  DJ shook his head. “No one. It doesn’t matter.”

  “How come you never talk about home?” I asked. Usually when the conversation turned to home, DJ got quiet or suddenly had somewhere else to be. He probably thought I hadn’t noticed.

  “What’s the point of talking about a home we can’t go back to?” he asked. “My life is here, with you and Jenny. Everything else is just someplace I’ll never see again.”

  “You don’t believe we’ll ever get back to Earth?”

  DJ took a moment to answer. I liked that about him. I liked that he didn’t fire off the first words that popped into his brain the way I often did. “We might,” he said. “I hope we do, Noa. Honest. But that’s tomorrow, and I’ve got to live in today.”

  “I wish I was as strong as you.”

  “You are,” he said. “You’re stronger.”

  That was a load of crap if I ever heard it, and I was about to say so when Jenny’s voice crackled over the comms. “DJ? Noa? Anyone? I think you’d better come to the galley. I’ve got a real emergency here.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Ten bucks says the emergency is that she ate the last of the croissants I baked yesterday.”

  DJ laughed. “No way I’m taking that bet.” He raised his voice. “We’re on our way, Jenny.”

  “Hurry,” she said. “There’s been a murder.”

  TWO

  THE BODY LAY SPRAWLED FACEUP on the floor of the galley in front of the table.

  Jenny paced around the body babbling, and DJ tried to calm her down enough for her to explain what happened. I couldn’t take my eyes off the body, its blue lips and its wide-open eyes, staring into nothing. Off the jumpsuit that looked like the one I’d been wearing when I woke up. The one with someone else’s name on it. The name on her suit was Kayla. It looked like it fit better than mine had.

  “I already told you!” Jenny said. “I was eating a croissant and reading when the aft door opened and this girl came stumbling in. As soon as she saw me, she reached out and tried to speak.”

  “What’d she say?” DJ asked.

  I looked up in time to see Jenny shake her head. “I don’t know. She collapsed right where you see her and died.”

  I knelt beside the body and pressed my fingers to her neck the way I’d been taught in my CPR class. Her skin was still warm, but there was definitely no pulse.

  “Why do you think she was murdered?” I asked.

  Jenny glared at me like she couldn’t believe I was asking such a ridiculous question. “Because people don’t just drop dead.”

  “Sometimes they do,” I muttered, but Jenny ignored me.

  “Where’d she come from?” DJ asked. “We searched every room and crawlspace on Qriosity.”

  “Obviously, we missed something,” Jenny fired back.

>   I felt like we were missing something now. And then it hit me. “MediQwik.”

  Jenny and DJ turned to look at me. “What?” DJ asked.

  “MediQwik!” I grabbed the body’s arms. “Come on! We have to get to medical!”

  “What’re you doing, Noa?” Jenny asked. “She’s dead.”

  I started trying to drag the body toward the door, but it was heavy and I had the kind of muscles that came from lifting books and burritos. “So was I, and MediQwik brought me back!” They kept looking at me like I was speaking a language they didn’t understand. “Damn it! Someone help me!”

  Finally, DJ grabbed the body’s legs, and we carried her through the ship. When we reached medical, I was completely winded and my arms felt like jelly. Without needing to be asked, Jenny stepped in and helped DJ lift the body onto the table, while I fitted the MediQwik cuff around her arm. The lights in the room dimmed briefly.

  “Thank you for choosing the MediQwik Portable Medical Diagnostician and Care Appliance. This patient appears to be suffering from death. Would you like me to attempt emergency revival?”

  “Yes!” I said.

  “Attempting emergency revival. There is a thirty-nine percent chance of success. MediQwik, health redefined. MediQwik is a trademark of Prestwich Enterprises, a subsidiary of Gleeson Foods.”

  We stood around the table in silence. I wasn’t sure if I could call her “the body” anymore. Not when MediQwik was attempting to heal her. Her name might not have been Kayla any more than my name had been Nico, but I didn’t know what else to call her. She looked about our age, and she seemed like the kind of person who had smiled a lot when she was alive.

  “I can’t sit here,” Jenny said.

  “Where are you going?” DJ asked.

  “To figure out where she came from.” Jenny marched out of the room like she was on a mission. I didn’t know whether she’d left because she needed to learn where Kayla had been hiding or because she couldn’t stand to be so near to death.

  I walked around and hopped up on the other table. DJ paced the room, chewing on his thumbnail.

  “You don’t have to stay,” I said. “You can help Jenny if you want.”

  DJ shook his head. “It’s not that. It’s just that this reminds me…”

  “Oh.”

  The last time DJ had been in the med suite had been when he’d carried my lifeless body from the airlock. Only, he’d had to carry me alone.

  “What percentage did MediQwik give me for revival?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “Noa—”

  “I’m alive. What’s the big deal?”

  DJ looked at Kayla and then at the floor. “Thirty-three percent,” he said. “But only a twelve percent chance that you would be revived without permanent brain damage.”

  A shiver ran through me. I’d done everything I could to avoid thinking about being dead since MediQwik had fixed me, but I hadn’t been able to escape knowing that I had died. I just hadn’t realized how close I’d come to remaining dead.

  “What was it like?” DJ asked.

  “What was what like?”

  “Death.” As soon as he said it, he caught my eye and added, “Forget it. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  Part of me was glad he had asked, though. I’d avoided thinking about it, not because I didn’t want to face it, but because I didn’t want to face it alone. Talking about it with DJ made it less scary.

  “There was nothing,” I said. “It was like I didn’t exist in the moments between when I died and when I was revived.”

  DJ touched the wall, and a bench folded down for him to sit on. “Nothing at all? Maybe you just don’t remember.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t think so. There was… nothing.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “My mom worked in a hospital, in the ICU, so she dealt with death a lot. We weren’t religious or anything, and one time I asked her what happened to the people who died. She told me about the law of conservation of energy and how energy can’t be created or destroyed, so the energy that makes us who we are has to go somewhere.”

  DJ frowned out of one side of his mouth. “I don’t mean to disrespect your mom, but I don’t think it works like that.”

  “Obviously,” I said. “She totally made it up so that I wouldn’t be scared of death. I think when we die, we just die.”

  “That’s it?” DJ said. “We just stop being anything?”

  “Yeah. I mean, if there’s something else after this life, I sure as hell didn’t see it. And if this is all there is, then nothing we do matters, does it?”

  DJ furrowed his brow, looking confused. “Of course it does. Everything we do matters.”

  I felt myself slipping again. If MediQwik hadn’t revived me, the universe wouldn’t have cared. Life would have gone on without me. DJ and Jenny would have continued without me. Everyone I knew and loved on Earth was moving forward without me. Even Becca. Even my mom. They would be sad, they might struggle, but they would keep living, and eventually no one would remember that I had existed.

  I slid off the table. “I have to go.”

  “Noa—”

  “You stay with the body,” I said. “I’m going to help Jenny.” DJ called my name again, but I was already out the door and gone.

  THREE

  I HEARD JENNY BEFORE I saw her, and I thought, at first, that she was arguing with herself.

  “But why can’t I see a map of the entire ship?”

  “Because such a map doesn’t exist, silly.”

  “You mean to tell me that there are no schematics or drawings of Qriosity anywhere in its library?”

  “That is exactly what I’m saying. You catch on quick, which makes you my number one junior detective.”

  “I hate you so much.”

  There was only one person on the ship who could provoke that kind of anger in Jenny. As soon as I turned the corner, I spotted the hologram of Jenny Perez standing in the corridor. She was smiling like a psychopath, and Jenny looked like she was going to claw the hologram’s eyes out.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  If my sudden appearance had startled Jenny, she didn’t show it. She stood with her hands on her hips and turned to look at me with the contempt she’d been directing at Jenny Perez. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Looking for you.”

  Jenny’s expression softened. “Is she…”

  I shook my head. “MediQwik is still working.”

  It might have been none of my business, but I was curious what I’d walked in on. “What were you and the precocious kid detective and bestselling author Anastasia Darling from the award-winning mystery entertainment program Murder Your Darlings talking about?”

  Jenny Perez beamed when I mentioned her. Jenny looked less thrilled. “Sometimes I use her to bounce ideas off of. Plus, she helps me interact with Qriosity’s computer. I can’t figure out the operating system, so I just get her to do it.”

  I hadn’t known that was something we could do, and I was kind of impressed Jenny had figured it out. Though I wasn’t sure the tradeoff was worth it, seeing as it meant having to listen to Jenny Perez.

  “Why were you asking about a map of the ship?”

  Jenny pointed at a door off the corridor. It wasn’t labeled, but it looked like every other door on the ship. “Scuff marks,” she said. “That girl had been limping, so I followed the scuff marks left by her boots from the galley to here. Thankfully, Qriosity’s cleaning bots hadn’t gotten to them yet.”

  Qriosity’s fleet of rarely seen cleaning robots kept the ship from getting too gross, though they refused to pick up my clothes off the floor of my quarters, which made them kind of useless to me.

  “What’s inside?” I asked.

  “That’s the second problem,” Jenny said. “The door is locked.”

  “What’s the first problem?”

  “I would swear this door wasn’t here yesterday.”


  “Seriously?” I asked. Jenny didn’t look like she was joking, but her sense of humor was often bizarre.

  Jenny said, “Yes!” and fired off an exasperated sigh. “My quarters are one deck up, and I walk this way to reach the garden at least once a day.”

  “Maybe you never noticed it before.”

  But Jenny glared at me and said, “I notice everything. There are two labs, three empty crew quarters, a storage closet, and three service tunnel access doors between my room and the oxygen garden. This door was not here yesterday.”

  Jenny seemed so certain that I found it difficult to doubt her. If I’d learned one thing in our time together, it was that Jenny had a good memory. She could remember things I’d said to her that even I’d forgotten. But it didn’t make sense that a door to a room appeared out of nowhere, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

  “I’m sorry, but this door was here,” Jenny Perez said. “It has always been here.”

  “Then show it to me on a map!” Before Jenny Perez could answer, Jenny said, “I know, I know. You don’t have a map. Because you’re useless. Go away now.”

  The figure of Jenny Perez burst into a swarm of dazzling lights and vanished into the vents.

  I stood in front of the door and pulled on the latch, but it didn’t budge. When I turned around, Jenny was watching me.

  “All the doors on this ship can be locked from the inside,” she said, and I knew it was true from experience. If I hadn’t been able to lock the door to my quarters, I never would have been able to keep DJ or Jenny out. “But they can also be locked and unlocked by voice command.”

  “They can?”

  Jenny nodded. “If you lock a door, you’re the only person who can unlock it.” She must have seen the confusion in my eyes because she added, “You spend a few hours locked in a toilet and see if it doesn’t make you obsessed with finding out how the door locks work.”

  “Fair point,” I said. “But if the scuff marks led you here—”