For Immediate Release — J. Taylor — 6/16/79
Starcaptain First Class Joanne “Jo” Taylor died on June 13th, 2079, of a sudden and unexpected neurological complication. Taylor was unable to complete her mission aboard the Firebird spacecraft, StarXL’s first long-term Earth-orbiting vessel. Currently in its twelfth year of orbit, Firebird is scheduled to touch down next spring on May 20th. Taylor is survived by her wife of fourteen years, First Starlieutenant Mara Blankman, second-in-command aboard the two-person vessel. E.L. Charleston, CEO of StarXL, was “saddened and aggrieved” by this unforeseen loss.
Commander Charleston rubbed his eyes with his finger pads. He stood up and stretched his arms behind his head, belly pushing out toward the desk. “My bad. Late night last night.”
“Yes,” said Arnold Walsh, Charleston’s Chief of Staff at StarXL. “I saw your post on the socials.” He had already brought in the Commander’s bagel, coffee, and schedule for the day, plus a copy of the coroner’s diagnostic, which Walsh knew with certainty he hadn’t read.
Charleston smiled as he dropped his arms. “Five hundred million followers can’t be wrong.” He struck the same pose from his profile picture, the one of him in front of the space station with his wife Anya, his son Z19, and his daughter Lamborghini.
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay.” Charleston grunted, grabbed the bagel, and took a bite, scattering poppyseeds all over his desk. “What was this about again?”
“The press release, sir?” Walsh asked.
“I saw it, yeah.” Charleston looked up at Walsh, his eyes narrowing. “How in the hell did we not catch this?”
“It was a ruptured brain aneurysm,” Walsh said, repeating verbatim the report summary they’d both been given. “No possibility of detection. The body’s been prepared to ship back to Earth, but we’ve received a message from Blankman. She wants to keep it aboard in cryo.”
Charleston went in for another violent bite of bagel but kept eye contact with Walsh, manicured eyebrows knit in confusion. “Um?”
“Blankman, sir. She wants to keep Taylor’s body in cryo until the Firebird returns in May.” He paused, knowing he alone had the power to ask the question most of the country wanted answered. “Unless… you’re choosing to end the mission early?”
Charleston’s face turned to stone. “Did she ask to end the mission early?”
“No, sir.”
“Did she ask to come back home?”
“No,” Walsh said, even quicker.
Charleston relaxed, and it was as if the tension never existed. He leaned down and chomped another bite out of his breakfast. “Good,” he mumbled around cream cheese.
Walsh nodded. “So… the body? Does she have permission, sir?”
“Oh right. The body can stay.” Charleston waved his hand in the air, but it froze there as soon as the question came to his mind. “I mean… it can, right? Nothing will, like… happen to it?”
“It will be fully preserved in cryo,” Walsh said, focused on keeping any condescension out of his voice. He was well acquainted with Charleston’s response for those who talked down to him.
“Well, then, yeah. If she wants to keep it, by all means. She hasn’t asked to come home, though, right?”
“No, sir.”
“Good.” Charleston laughed and shook his head. “I gotta say, it couldn’t have gone any better. The media eats up this sad lesbian shit.”
“Yes, sir,” said Walsh. He maintained his stature just long enough to put a button on their conversation and left Charleston with his shredded bagel.
Day 4,450
Dear Jo,
I woke up in the middle of the night again, my hand surprised to find your side of the bed empty, but my eyes already filled with tears. It’s like I start to cry before I even wake up, knowing you won’t be there. And if that’s so, how is it I’m still shocked when I touch the cold sheets and don’t find you? Once, I heard someone say, “My head knows the truth, but my heart is lying to me.” I feel the opposite; my heart knows, but my head won’t catch up.
They have me on standby with my questions. I’ve managed to do the bare minimum to keep them off my back. The same way you taught me to do when we needed a break but we weren’t allowed to take it. Just coast. Keep the lights on. Sometimes, I wonder if it would be different anywhere else, but then, I think, if I worked in a sandwich shop, some dickhole would still need his sandwiches, so I’d have to come in and make them, even though all I want to do is melt into nothing.
I’ve got you safe for now. I’m not ready to part with you. And truthfully, there’s no way I could imagine this ship without you on it.
Sorry. Tear stains. I hate it. Sometimes, it feels less like I’m crying and more like I’m leaking. I just sit and keep the lights on and leak.
At some point, I’m sure, I’ll have to stop writing to you. But I don’t think anyone reads this stupid mission journal, and all I want to do is talk to you. But when I talk out loud, there’s an echo.
All I really know is that I can’t think straight, and I can only move myself around enough to keep things humming. Then, I go back to sleep.
Do you remember the night we decided we would do this? Your hair was so long. You asked me if I thought I could stand being stuck with you for thirteen years and I said it wasn’t as long as forever and I’d already agreed to that.
We didn’t quite make it, did we?
To any of it.
I’m tired again. I should probably lie down.
I’ll say the same thing I’ve said the last few nights, baby, and then I’ll close my eyes.
I love you love you love you.
I miss you miss you miss you.
Yours,
Mara
“This could be a golden opportunity, one we may never see the likes of again. That we would have this happen, organically, under these conditions is unprecedented.”
Walsh listened to the sound of rustling papers on the other end of the line. He paused, wondering if the woman the voice belonged to had glasses and a scientist updo. He’d never met Dr. Freemont in person, but they all kinda looked like that.
“What exactly are you trying to tell me?” he asked. He glanced at his computer. No new messages.
The voice on the phone grew frosty. “I’m telling you that we know the ways grief affects the body and the mind. But we don’t know how that might be different in space.”
“She has an in-depth physical and mental assessment scheduled for her return date. We can learn more then.”
“That’s nearly a year from now. It’ll be different. We’ve lost two weeks already.”
“Right.” Walsh paused. “So, what is it exactly that you want to do?”
“We want Blankman to complete physical assessments now, more than the regular checks. And we want her to attend daily telemedical sessions with a licensed therapist.”
Walsh scratched his jaw. “I’ll run it up the flagpole.”
“With all due respect,” the voice told him, “you’re the finial ball.”
He hung up with a grin and shifted back in his chair to think about how he would spin it. The doctor’s sheer derision wasn’t lost on Walsh, but he couldn’t help enjoying the words themselves. He was, after all, the pinnacle, right where the flag was flown at the very top of the company ladder. And Commander Charleston would probably find the thought of himself as a long, gleaming shaft flattering enough not to consider the implication any further.
As it happened, Charleston’s face lit up when Walsh told him the Science Divish wanted to study Blankman’s mental state more closely, but not for the reason Walsh expected. “Why don’t we try out that guy we made?” he asked. “Get him to do the tests.”
Walsh hesitated. “Do you mean JACE?”
“Yeah!” Charleston said. “He can ask her some questions, show her some pictures of smudges or… whatever. And you know, she’s probably pretty lonely up there.”
Walsh stared at his boss. “Sir?”
“She’s a lonely lady. Maybe she’ll…” Charleston made a universal gesture with his hands, laughed, and went back to browsing social media on his phone.
So, Walsh floated the concept to the engineers and the AI guys and the data bros, painting it as an opportunity to feed two birds with one scone. Test Blankman and test JACE. The bot could administer medical as well as psychological evaluations. Among other things, as Charleston winkingly implied every time he sat in on a call.
They all signed on. Mostly because, now, everyone wanted an answer to the question: Would she, or wouldn’t she? JACE had been built to do a lot of things, after all.
A message came up from Mission Control ordering her to the small wellness space containing two chairs, an artificial fern, and a holographic water feature that emanated a bubbling noise Mara Blankman found neither soothing nor realistic. Jo hadn’t liked it either. Now, the only reason she might have had for coming here was the near total lack of painful memories the place evoked.
“Good evening, Lieutenant Blankman.”
Mara continued to stare until she decided it wasn’t a dream. Strange to say the least. A man on her two-woman-manned ship. Now one-woman-manned. Or one-woman-one-man-manned.
But no. He wasn’t a man. He was the bot prototype they’d brought on board with them, awake – active – after more than a decade in storage and looking at her gently. He blinked, breathed even, his broad chest moving up and down as he awaited her reply. There was a dusting of freckles across his nose.
“Good evening, JACE,” she murmured.
“Would you take a seat, please?” he asked, his voice soft and patient, and on autopilot, she did.
JACE said, “In the light of recent events, and due to concerns at headquarters about your psychological and physiological health, I’ve been activated to assess your well-being with additional tests and to provide you with the approximation of much needed human contact.”
She had nothing to say to that.
Once the tests (consisting mostly of the same specimens she always gave and a perfunctory psychological exam) were over, JACE switched gears. “Lieutenant,” he asked, “is there anything I can do for you?”
Mara blinked. “Such as what?”
“I can provide whatever you need, but my primary purpose is a form of companionship. Should you and Starcaptain Taylor have required it, I could have been brought in to offer an additional semblance of community, connection, and comfort.”
She ignored the alliteration, and the mention of her dead wife’s name. “You want to… comfort me?”
“I am fully equipped to provide comfort in all forms, including but not limited to unstructured conversation, attentiveness during memory recollection, and, if desired, an array of physical interactions beginning with sympathetic hand-holding.”
She laughed, her first laugh since Jo had died, and it immediately broke in her throat. It sounded like a bubble popping, but in her head, it was loud and tinny and wrong.
To lessen any social awkwardness while she composed herself, JACE considerately broke eye contact and logged into the ship’s secondary communications network, sending a connect request to her informal personal account.
“Perhaps this is not the time,” he said, “but I will provide a complete program of my socialization capabilities. You can review them and see if anything would appeal. They cover a most comprehensive range of subjects and activities at a variety of proficiency levels.”
“Good to know,” Mara said, her voice hollow yet under her control once more.
Dr. Alyssa Freemont felt stymied. Blankman continued to comply with the assessments, providing blood, saliva, and urine samples so they could check everything from her hormones to her electrolytes to her neurotransmitters. All of that checked out. It was the other stuff she really wanted to understand. But Dr. Freemont was a biomedical research scientist, not a psychiatrist.
When Blankman sat down with JACE for their daily therapy sessions, she gave strange answers that only got stranger. Mostly, she kept things monosyllabic, but every once in a while, she talked about leaking and leveraging and other words that didn’t sound like feelings. Once, she quoted an old funk song Freemont only recognized when she searched the lyrics. Some of the employees guessed the answers were in code, but not many bothered trying to decrypt it, and those who started gave up. It was a lot of extra work on top of the important jobs they already had.
Dr. Freemont was the only one who continually tried to decipher what Blankman told JACE. She kept the work to herself, though, and reserved her judgements. Alone in her apartment at the end of the day, she told herself the one thing she could, the one thing that felt real: Grief makes us weird.
“She isn’t really talking,” she told Walsh after a week of this. “We’re supposed to be evaluating her, and we’re getting nothing.”
They were still just voices on the phone to each other, even after working at StarXL together for over ten years. She felt stonier than before, if that was possible, when she heard his flat and nasally voice.
“She’s complying with all the tests,” Walsh replied.
“Barely,” she bit back. “And if we’d done it the way I suggested, a licensed therapist could’ve gotten her to open up by now. This is a total fucking disaster.”
“It wasn’t my call,” Walsh said. He sounded happy to remove the blame but sad to admit the truth.
Several seconds of silence passed. Dr. Freemont swirled the ice cubes in her glass of whisky, listening to them clink, then finally asked, “Why did he decide to wake the bot?”
“You know the Commander,” Walsh said. “He’s a genius.”
Dr. Freemont hung up in frustration. Grief makes us weird, she told herself. Then, she thought about what she’d been hearing around the water cooler, the way people talked about Blankman and JACE and what if and could you imagine… and wondered what their excuse was.
After the infamous Comfort Talk, anyone who didn’t know what JACE was capable of got an immediate debriefing. Engineering even started a betting pool that spilled into AI and finally made it to HR. They had “Blankman fucks the robot” 3 to 1.
When it finally happened, Walsh found out the next morning as he rode up in the elevator and some data entry rando asked, “So… didya win any money?” Those with the brass cajones to do it approached Walsh throughout the day, asking how the Commander had known it would happen. Squaring his shoulders, Walsh did the same thing he did in every interview when he was asked a question he couldn’t answer and, in every bar, when some girl wanted to know what it was like to work for StarXL: he told them Charleston was a genius and moved on.
It was hard to find a conversation at StarXL Headquarters over the next few weeks that wasn’t about Blankman and JACE. The widowed lieutenant and her robot buddy had been doing it on the regular without signs of slowing. Of course, on most occasions, Blankman brought him to the shower – the only place without a camera – but sometimes, they did it in her bed, which was equipped with a forehead-level minicam and sleep sensor to monitor breathing and heart rate. The video was grainy, and the mic had stopped working a long time ago, but it was definitely worth the watch. Most employees were able to catch the show at least once a day. Everyone was surprised by their stamina. Well, hers, anyway.
Commander Charleston agreed to keep it from the public after Walsh and the rest of his staff begged him to. In his opinion, however, it was a triumph and ought to be shared. “Every housewife is gonna want one of these,” he said, his chest puffing with pride.
A few employees wondered why Blankman was so quick to hop in bed with JACE, the decidedly male robot. “Wasn’t she a lesbian?” they asked. Although no one could find anything in her file about being bisexual, “When in orbit above Rome…” jokes cropped up in direct messages, quickly giving way to the new SpaceXL Employee Joke of the Year: In space, no one can hear you scream, “Yes, yes, YES!”
Their sexual marathon used up quite a lot of JACE’s battery life, so Blankman began rerouting power from the ship to charge him several times a day. No one worried much about the extra lift this was imposing on the Firebird’s own battery.
“She can take it,” one of the engineers was overheard saying. “And so can the ship!”
The few employees who had refused to take part in the discussions – out of respect for the dead as well as the living – became a quiet minority at SpaceXL, if they weren’t already. Dr. Freemont asked herself, if Blankman knew everyone was talking, why didn’t she stop?
Is it that hard, she thought, twirling a pen around her still-smooth, still-young hand, to lose?
Mara stared at the report and tried to make herself focus on it. Things had been blurrier but also hard as steel for the past week or two. She wasn’t sure how long it had been since she and JACE had begun… but it had kept her upright, kept the lights on inside her.
Staying alive had meant doing something that felt like being alive. But as most things in that category do, it seemed to be shortening the trip.
After deciphering the report, she closed her eyes. Behind her lids, she saw flashes of every mandatory battery check she’d rushed through, every vaguely threatening “Are you sure?” message she’d clicked past in the last few weeks, her mind in a state of drone and hum. But everything felt clear now.
It’s all so fragile, she thought. How fucking stupid. When she opened her eyes, they were dry.
Walsh read the report again, looking to see if something, anything, could’ve been missed. Evidently, it already had.
JACE’s charging sessions had left the Firebird’s battery at 12% capacity. There was supposed to be a failsafe where the team would be notified if it got to 30%, but apparently the coding for that was fucked. Evidently, some tech had botched his programming way back when. The guy wasn’t with StarXL anymore, so they couldn’t even fire him (not that the company needed the world to know how prone to error their work actually was).
In this sort of situation, the solar panels should’ve already kicked in, but with Blankman distracted she hadn’t been charting properly and the Firebird was already creeping out of the planet’s terminator zone for its “winter season”, away from the sun’s direct light.
Checking the report again, Walsh found the recommendations. Blankman was to cease all unnecessary activity that required battery power, rechart for an accelerated orbit, and hold on until the Firebird moved within solar charging distance. Should she fail to comply, her manual control of the ship would be revoked.
They couldn’t lose her.
She was the most expensive vessel on the high starry seas.
Walsh smiled at his own private joke, but lost his enthusiasm when he read the part about how Blankman had received an identical report the night before and had yet to respond.
It seemed impossible. Would she really be willing to let the greatest achievement of all of their lives go black in the middle of empty, goddamn space so she could keep boning that robot?
“Crazy bitch,” he said to himself.
“Lieutenant,” JACE said in the dark. Mara didn’t roll over, just stared at the ceiling. She liked him calling her that. It had become a sort of pet name.
“Yeah, J.”
“The report from this morning is a cause for concern. Have you read it?”
“I have.”
“To continue this would be unwise. It will also likely affect your psychiatric evaluation and your future at StarXL. Not to mention your reputation.”
She smiled and finally turned to face him. It had been creepy at first, but now, she liked the way his eyes glowed orange in the dark. “Did they program you to say things like that?” she asked. “To threaten a person’s reputation… mine?”
“They did.”
After a short silence, she asked, “Do you know what that means? Are they talking about how I’ll look like a big roboslut or like I’ve gone completely bananaballs? Or that it’ll seem like I never loved her in the first place…”
“I don’t know,” JACE said. “There isn’t a definition.”
Mara snorted. “Makes sense.”
“If you defy orders, they’ll take command back at headquarters.”
Ever notice how quick they are to tell you you don’t have a choice when they’re scared you’ll make one? “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“If you override their authority and continue as you have, you’ll die.”
“Thought about that one already,” she said softly. “Try again.”
“Sir,” Walsh said in his best contrite voice, “there was a mistake. We don’t know exactly what’s happened, but we must pull rank to make sure the Firebird gets back to safety.”
Maybe he explained it too succinctly. But it was often difficult to keep the Commander’s attention with a long debriefing. When he finished, Charleston stared in silence, blue eyes gleaming. There was a rumor they used to be brown, that he’d gotten them artificially pigmented, but all the pictures of him online (even that one of him as a boy dressed as an astronaut one Halloween) had piercingly blue eyes.
Finally, the Commander turned toward the large window behind his desk. “This,” he said, “is fantastic.”
Walsh felt his mouth drain of its saliva. “…sir?”
“Do you know how amazing this’ll be?” He stood, rounding on Walsh. “How amazing for us? She loses her mind, lets the ship get to the brink of disaster, and we step in at the very last moment, snatching her from the jaws of death?” He snapped his meaty fingers and let out a peal of high, childish laughter. “Oh! Oh, wait. Even better! We just… let her go.”
Walsh stared at him, all sense of control lost. “What?”
“We let her go. Eventually, we send another crew up to get the Firebird. We’ll need to do some fundraising to get another one off the ground so quickly, but that won’t be hard. We’ll have them bring back the bodies all draped in black for a waiting public and—” he slammed his palm on his desk “—done deal! They’ll write about us for a year! And… oh, and. They’ll finally do it. Make a movie.” He grinned and muttered the name of a handsome actor, one with whom he shared no resemblance.
“Sir—”
“Don’t you see?” he asked. “This is our chance to tell the greatest story ever told. The one about me.”
Walsh stumbled back to his desk, distress messages continuing to chirp at him as he sat in silence. It could’ve been an hour or more later before he finally moved, but he didn’t waste time checking. He’d already decided what he was going to do.
When the screen popped back to life, he requested the override codes be administered, that command of the Firebird be returned to headquarters. He stated these orders had come straight from the Commander, although he was ready to tell the truth when the moment was best.
It was obviously the right thing to do, after all.
As he sat back in his chair, he wondered who would play him in the movie.
“JACE.”
“Yes, Lieutenant."
“If I ask you to do something for me, will you do it?”
“I will comply if it’s not in direct opposition to my protocol.”
“Okay. I want… I want you to erase this time we’ve shared together.”
“Although possible, I’m required not to follow this command.”
“Right.”
“I’m sorry.”
She laughed at him again, but this time it was a sound Mara understood, something she could connect to her past. “Did they program you to apologize, too?”
“Yes.”
She took a deep breath, and though her teeth were chattering, she pulled her hair up into a bun to expose the nape of her neck. “I’d like you to remember something for me, then. If you can’t erase me.”
“Yes, I can do that.”
“I’d like you to remember this story I’m about to tell you. About when I first met Jo. We were both at this bar. I was there with a friend. She was wearing a yellow dress, and she smiled at me from across the room. I felt this kind of… tickling in the back of my neck. I’ve felt it since I was a kid, but it had always been a warning about bad things before. Storms or arguments or the realization something I’d done was going to come back to bite me. But when I saw her smile, I felt that tickly thing, and I knew it was because she was it. She was the one.
“After we got together, I started to get that tickle all the time. Sometimes good things, sometimes bad. It let me know if something important was going to happen. I think it was because, from the moment I met her, every sunrise or breakfast or future I saw was with her, and that made it special. I had a life where special things happened all the time. Because of her.
“I don’t get that tickle anymore. Instead, I feel like there’s something bouncing around the hollow of me, and sometimes I feel it, but mostly I don’t. Mostly, I think about who it is I used to be, because… this girl, now, I don’t even know her.” Mara looked to see if JACE understood, but his face remained neutral. Her lips formed the words before she even had a chance to question the question.
“Are you scared?” she asked.
“No, Lieutenant. I haven’t been programmed for that.”
“Oh.”
“Are you?”
“I don’t get scared anymore.” She watched her breaths come up as tendrils of smoke in the rapidly cooling room. “You know how some people believe that… when you die, you get to… do it all over? Like, but… different?”
“Reincarnation.”
“Yeah.” Mara smiled. Words were coming harder now. “I think… maybe… the only way it would be worth it… is if you get to do it again with the same people. I think… otherwise… I’d rather just… not.”
It wasn’t their mission, baby, she thought. It was ours.
No one could figure out what exactly she’d done. Had she rerouted the power grid? Cracked the encryption on the override? Smashed the main control panel with a hammer? It didn’t matter. They’d eventually determine the method she’d used to take the Firebird down with her.
That was, once they’d sent another ship up to fish it out of the cosmos. But investors were suddenly hard to come by. Everyone demanded they bring the dead girls back, but nobody wanted to pony up the dough.
Upon the Lieutenant’s death, JACE managed to uncover his protocol for the event: Salvage what can be salvaged, and wait for instructions. He took this as an order to place her body in cryo, along with Starcaptain First Class Joanne Taylor’s, and to memorize the ship’s journals for safe keeping. Afterward, he transmitted several Standing By notices but received no response.
As his battery life dwindled, he sat in the cockpit, awaiting orders and replaying Lieutenant Blankman’s responses to his evaluations, their late-night conversations, and their other activities. In the end, though, he mostly turned over the later recordings in the ship’s journals, after the Starcaptain’s death and before his activation. One part in particular skipped like a flattened stone over the wires within him, echoing inside his chest like his simulated heartbeat.
I love you love you love you.
I miss you miss you miss you.
