A Complicated Love Story Set in Space

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  I’d met Karen in my third-period class, theoretical atomic, molecular, and chemical physics. She’d been on a supernatural program called Love Craft, about a group of teenage witches who accidentally summon a monstrous deity who offers them immense power in return for the hearts of the lovesick. Karen, who’d been quietly pining over their group’s funny girl, Alethea, died a gruesome death immediately after admitting her feelings to Alethea and discovering the other girl felt the same. Karen was sullen and prone to brooding. She often wiggled her fingers at people and whispered curses at them even after she learned none of what she’d experienced had been real. But we invited her to escape with us because we needed a pilot, and she’d once boasted she knew how to fly.

  The three of us spent another week working out the kinks in our plan. We decided to leave on the night of the Homecoming football game because the students and the majority of the Teachers would be attending the mandatory event. We removed the tracking devices from under our skin and planted them on other students so they would be our unwitting alibis. And then, right after kickoff, I executed the command.

  We nearly escaped. Earlier that day, I’d identified the perfect ship to steal. A little cruiser. It was small, so it would be easier to pilot, and it was close to the entrance, so we could reach it faster. With the Teachers incapacitated, we raced to the ship, got inside, and fired it up. There was one thing we hadn’t anticipated. We couldn’t release the docking clamps from inside the ship. It had to be done from the control room. We weren’t going anywhere.

  The reboot sequence finished while we were still on the ship. Teachers came, took us into custody, and threw Karen into one holding cell and Nico and me into another.

  “You’re bleeding again,” Nico said. One of the Teachers had cut a gash in my upper arm during the struggle. It wasn’t serious, but it was bleeding pretty fiercely.

  “It’s nothing.”

  Nico broke down. “I’m so sorry,” he said, crying into my chest. “This is all my fault.”

  I was scared, but I held Nico as tightly as I could. “They can scoop out chunks of my brain with a spoon, and I will never forget you.”

  “You’re the best thing in my life,” Nico said. “Even if my memories aren’t real, you’re real. You will always be real to me.”

  “I love you, Nico. Forever.”

  Those were the last words I said to Nico before Teachers took him away. I waited alone in the cell for hours or maybe days. I don’t know. When they came for me, I figured they were going to drag me to a room with a creepy medical chair like the one I’d seen in the orientation video. Instead, a Teacher escorted me to a cozy office where I was instructed to sit on a comfortable leather couch and wait. A few minutes later, a familiar woman entered the room.

  “Hi!” she said. “I’m Jenny Perez.” She offered me her hand, which I only shook to make sure she wasn’t a hologram. She looked exactly like I remembered, only she was wearing a pink suit instead of blue. “You have been a naughty young man.”

  Jenny took a seat across from me and poured us each a cup of tea from a ceramic teapot, smiling warmly, as if we were two old friends. “Sugar?” she asked.

  “Two,” I said, though I had no intention of drinking anything she gave me. “What are you going to do to me? Punishment?”

  Jenny Perez slid the cup and saucer across the table, and lifted her own tea to her lips. She closed her eyes as she sipped. All I’d been given since arriving at Fomalhaut had been Nutreesh and Hydrophoria, and the citrus aroma wafting from my teacup was tempting.

  “That depends on you, my little chickadee.”

  “Me?”

  “You very nearly escaped. No student has ever come as close as you did.” Jenny Perez’s smile was tight. “As a result, you have given the other students hope, and we certainly can’t have that, can we?” She continued to sip her tea. “If I must, I will strip out your memories, stuff in a few new ones, and have you reeducated to make you more pliable. But I would rather you be punished in a way that serves as a warning to anyone else imagining they might escape. For that, I need your cooperation.”

  I felt a small surge of pride in knowing that Nico, Karen, and I had nearly outwitted the school. That others at Fomalhaut High knew what we had done, and that our attempt might inspire others to try. “Why would I help you if you’re just going to punish me anyway?”

  Jenny flicked her hand at the wall, and a screen lit up, resolving into a live video stream of Nico. He was in a room like I’d imagined ending up in, strapped to a chair, fighting against his bonds.

  “Every program that’s broadcast has a minder,” Jenny Perez said. “A person, like you, who retains their memories and the knowledge that they’re on a program. Their job is to remain in contact with Production and to steer the narrative when necessary.”

  “Like a spy?” I finally couldn’t resist the tea anymore. I was already at Jenny’s mercy. If she’d wanted to poison or drug me, she wouldn’t have needed to spike my drink. It was a delicate black tea with hints of lemon and orange. It took all my strength not to gulp it.

  Jenny tilted her head to the side. “You could look at it that way if you choose, though a minder’s job is also to protect the others from themselves.”

  “Okay?”

  “Production is working on a new program. A meta reimagining of Murder Your Darlings, the most popular program ever broadcast. The star is a young woman named Jenny—after me, of course—who finds herself aboard a ship named Qriosity.” Jenny spoke about the show with a reverence that was strangely endearing. “Jenny, along with two young men—one her best friend, the other her rival—will travel from world to world, solving small whodunits while attempting to unravel the biggest mystery of all: where they came from and how they get home.

  “Jenny will, obviously, have help in the form of the witty and clever ship’s hologram—me! And each adventure will follow a similar pattern. Jenny will stumble upon a mystery; the three of you will investigate; the best friend, played by Nico, will get hurt; the rival, you, will cause problems; and Jenny will follow the clues to the solution.”

  This sounded like a joke, but Jenny Perez was dead serious. “So my punishment is to watch Nico get hurt over and over?”

  Jenny Perez smiled gleefully. “And to be trapped aboard a spaceship with the love of your life who has no idea who you are, who has no memory of your past together, who doesn’t feel about you the way you feel about him and never, ever will—we’ll make certain of it.”

  The idea of looking into Nico’s eyes and seeing a stranger was unfathomable. It was one thing to be threatened with the erasure of both of our memories, but to remain whole while Nico forgot? I didn’t know if I could survive that.

  “What if I say no?”

  On the screen, two Teachers detached from the walls and closed in on Nico. He struggled harder against the restraints, but he would never break them. Jenny said, “We’re going to rewrite his memory regardless, but if you refuse to play your role, we’ll simply arrange for Nico to die tragically during the first episode—to motivate our heroine, of course—and introduce a different companion to take his place. Nico will be sent to a school far away, and you will never see him again.”

  I didn’t want to cry in front of Jenny Perez, but I couldn’t hold back the tears. I was helpless. If I agreed to her terms, I would lose Nico. But I’d lose him if I told her no too.

  Asking me to choose had always been part of my punishment.

  “Why are you doing this?” I wiped my nose with my sleeve. “All of this? What’s it for?”

  Jenny Perez laughed. “Ratings, silly.”

  * * *

  Our program was called A Complicated Mystery Set in Space. Karen became Jenny Price, teen sleuth, cat fan, and Nutreesh addict whose parents moved frequently when she was a child, making her well suited to a nomadic life in space. Nico was rewritten as Noa North, a Seattle teen who loved baking, hated math, and had trust issues due to a secret trauma from his past
. And I would play DJ Storm, a schemer from Florida who was constantly causing problems, and who screwed things up as often as I fixed them.

  I watched them march Karen and Nico onto Qriosity. Except they weren’t Karen and Nico anymore. They were you—Jenny and Noa. Your lifeless eyes, the way you stared without seeing me. It hurt more than I had imagined it would.

  Production had decided our program would begin in the middle of a crisis. Qriosity would be on the verge of exploding. I would be in Reactor Control, Noa would be in a spacesuit outside the ship, and Jenny would be in Ops, where she would seize control of the situation, tell us each what to do, and save the day.

  The hologram of Jenny Perez stood over me after the Teachers left the ship. “Once Qriosity reaches its destination, you will need to dress Noa in his spacesuit and get him into position outside the ship. Jenny is already in Ops.” She smiled at me like a predator. “I’ll be watching you personally, DJ.”

  I was going to go along with it. Come up with a plan to free us while our program played out. But when I went to the airlock to put Noa into his suit, I realized I couldn’t do it. It was really Production’s fault. They had dressed Noa in an ill-fitting jumpsuit that had Nico’s name on it. Just one of the small ways they meant to punish me. But seeing Nico’s name on Noa’s outfit reminded me that Nico wasn’t really gone. His memories might’ve been gone, but he wasn’t. And maybe there was a way to remind him that he had loved me.

  So I changed the plan.

  I put Noa in the spacesuit, but I posted a note in his hud to prevent him from panicking. I ran to Ops before Jenny woke up, and I dragged her to the head and locked her in. The cut on my arm from our escape attempt started bleeding again, and got on Jenny’s sleeve, but I didn’t have time to find new clothes for her. When I was done, I raced to Reactor Control just as Noa was waking up.

  You lived the rest.

  NOA

  I DIDN’T THINK IT WAS possible to love someone so much, and hate them, all at once. But that’s how I felt about DJ by the time he finished his story. I wanted to kiss him because I did love him and I loved him for what he had done to be with me. But I wanted to kick him for every lie and every deception. He had betrayed me so thoroughly, but he had done so only because he loved me so thoroughly. And he was staring at me, hopeful, waiting for me to tell him that I understood, waiting for me to forgive him. I didn’t have the words, at that moment, for either.

  Ty broke the silence. “How did you get away with it?” he asked. “Surely, Production attempted to stop you.”

  DJ nodded. “They planned to. As soon as the crisis on Qriosity was resolved, Jenny Perez was going to keep her promise to kill Noa. But Jenny Perez was the one who had said everything is about ratings, and ours were the highest for any debut in history. Viewers fell in love with me and Noa. They wanted to watch our story.

  “So Production quickly retitled the program Now Kiss! and let it play out.”

  Ty looked somehow appalled and impressed simultaneously. “You’ve just been doing whatever you want this entire time?”

  “No,” DJ said. “I’d changed the nature of the show, and Production was angry. They let me know they were still in charge by cutting us down to emergency power. They invented the Phone Home protocol that sent us skipping through space to make Jenny and Noa hate me. Every single awful thing that’s happened to us has been arranged by them.”

  “The looping day?” I asked.

  “Best episode by far,” Ty said.

  DJ nodded but then stopped and shook his head. “Kind of. The loop was intended to torture me, but Jenny found the time device before she was meant to, and the nanites that MediQwik used to repair your brain injury after you died protected you from the loop. That’s why you remembered what happened when it reset.”

  “What about Kayla?” I asked. “Did you kill her?”

  “No!” DJ said. “She was the spare companion. The one who would take your place if Production decided to remove you. She escaped on her own. I think Production had her killed somehow.”

  “Is that everything?” I asked. “Are you keeping anything else from us?” The question came out harsh, and DJ flinched.

  “No,” he said. “That’s everything.”

  Jenny had been quiet for a while, which was unusual. In a low voice full of icy rage, she said, “This was supposed to be my story? I really was supposed to be the star, and you hijacked it?”

  “Jenny, I—”

  “You don’t talk, DJ. You don’t get to talk to me at all!”

  But DJ ignored her. “This was important, Jenny! You’ve got to see that.”

  “What I see is that you have been gaslighting me this whole time,” she said. “You changed the results when I did the DNA test so that the blood on my jacket wouldn’t match yours. You’ve been the one erasing the footage from cameras—”

  “Production’s doing that.”

  “With your knowledge!” Jenny yelled. “I get it! I get that you wanted Nico back, but what about me? What about the story you stole from me? Did you even give that a moment’s thought?”

  DJ opened his mouth to answer, closed it, and shook his head.

  Ty cleared his throat. “Sorry for shooting you, Jenny. I’d be happy to shoot DJ if that would make amends.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” she said.

  I looked up and DJ caught my eye. I could feel the questions he was dying to ask, feel the things he needed me to say. Maybe it would have been easier if I had yelled at him the way Jenny had. Gotten the anger out in the open. But I couldn’t. Instead, I simply stood and walked away.

  THE WEIGHT OF THE TRUTH

  ONE

  THE FALSE SUN OF THE oxygen garden warmed my face as I lay by the pond with my eyes shut. If I ignored the subtle vibrations running through Qriosity, I could almost imagine I was stretched out on a blanket at the park on a summer day. That if I opened my eyes, my mom would be sitting beside me reading a book and Becca would be on the other side trying to take the perfect picture. But I wasn’t outside. It wasn’t summer. I wasn’t on Earth. I didn’t even know if Becca and my mom were real. The sun was a lie. Everything was a lie.

  “I’m sorry, Noa.”

  I’d known DJ was there. It couldn’t have been Jenny because she shuffled her feet when she walked, and there was no way DJ would let Ty run free on the ship. I kept my eyes closed because I wasn’t sure if I could look at him.

  “Don’t you mean Nico?”

  “I mean you,” DJ said. He let out a low growl of frustration. “This is so confusing. Nico’s gone, I know that, but he also isn’t. He’s still in you. At the same time, he was never real to begin with. Neither is Noa. The person I’m in love with isn’t Nico or Noa. It’s who you are when everything else is stripped away.”

  I opened my eyes and sat up, still unwilling to look at DJ. “If I’m not Noa, if I’m not real, then who am I?”

  DJ sat across from me, keeping his distance. “Noa’s just a name. Changing it doesn’t change you.” He plucked a blade of grass and held it up. “We could call this a dribble of jelly instead of a blade of grass, but that wouldn’t change what it is.”

  He reached his hand to me, but I ignored it and he slowly pulled back. “None of this is fair, Noa. I get that. I’ve had months to wrestle with these questions and I’m still struggling.”

  The last thing I wanted to hear was how much DJ hurt when his wounds were mostly self-inflicted. “I cried myself to sleep at night, thinking about how worried and scared my mom must have been when I never came home. She’s not real, though. None of them are real! Not Becca or Mrs. Blum or…”

  “Noa—”

  “Christ, DJ! Was what Billy did to me real?” I fought back a sob. “Did Production stick a memory of me being raped into my head because they thought it would make me more interesting?”

  “I know how you feel.”

  “No you don’t!”

  DJ’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Part of my backstory on Arcas, the reas
on I kept away from people and enjoyed fixing things more than socializing, was because I had a head full of memories about older brothers who tortured me. They locked me in a dark closet and left me there for hours. They used me as a practice dummy for tackling. I idolized them and I despised them and I was terrified of them. By the time I got to Arcas, I wanted nothing to do with anyone.”

  I finally looked at DJ. I had no reason to believe him except that I did. “Don’t you see how twisted and cruel that is? We don’t mean anything to Production. We’re just a collection of tragedies the audience gets to watch make out.”

  “We’re more than that, Noa. You’re more.”

  The weight of the truth was too much. I felt like I was collapsing in on myself. “Who we were is who we are,” I said. “Our experiences are the scaffolding for the people we become. If none of my memories are real, then nothing about me is real! Why do I love baking if it isn’t because Mrs. Blum taught me? Why do I love horror movies if it isn’t because my mom and I marathon-watched them every October? Why do I love reading so much if it isn’t because of the summer days I spent on my apartment building’s roof, soaking up the sun with my battered copy of Brown Girl Dreaming?”

  “Those memories are real, Noa. They may not have belonged to you, but they belonged to someone. There is a real Mrs. Blum who owns a bakery. There is a real Billy who deserves to be in jail.” DJ clenched his fists.

  “So what?” I said. “They’re not my memories.”

  “They are now,” DJ countered. “They’re in your head. You’re their caretaker. You have to honor the people those memories were harvested from and the pain they endured creating them.”