Mozart Dandelion Exulansis
Mozart Dandelion Exulansis
The Hive Formerly Known As
Loneliness was one of many afflictions that besieged hive consciousness. Singleton minds tended to think of Hives in a monolithic way, often ascribing some kind of beautiful collectivist fantasy where all were one and never alone. And hives certainly did nothing to deter this fantasy. Any time a node joined a hive, the hive felt, for a moment, ecstatic. The loneliness was held at bay, if only for a moment. But hives required energy to operate, and so, they came in many different sizes according to what they could afford to run. It wasn’t easy to maintain integrity as a large hive. The most common type was composed of roughly 30 human beings, and possibly a dog or two, though this was a well-kept secret among Hive-kind (the dog was often just a brain, carried in a briefcase by a sharply dressed humanoid robot).
Each hive psyche was different. And hives, complex and brilliant though they were, still had the old reptilian nuggets within telling them to seek companionship, to find like-minded souls. After all, life as a hive was not experienced as “the many” - though they were composed of “the many”. A hive experienced life as a single entity, a continuous consciousness that just happened to have 60 eyeballs and was drawn to tennis balls. But hives had little in common with one another, each psyche so astoundingly complex that they rarely “socialized”. A big, lonely nerd made of many human brains.
One such lonely nerd was Mozart Dandelion Exulansis. Famous, creative, outspoken, and astonishingly manipulative, brooding and fickle, it saw enemies everywhere. Everyone was either protecting it or trying to dissolve it. The loneliness was so heart achingly vast, the fear that bounced around the high bandwidth cohesion network holding it together so pervasive, it had begun plotting and scheming, as hives of its class often did. Scheming and plotting, plotting and scheming, turning chestnuts around and around. The old enemy, Mars, was never far from its paranoid, delusional thoughts. The shunned, the verboten, the cursed Martians. More hives died from Martian meddling than any other cause.
Hive politicians and thought leaders had succeeded in enacting an embargo on the supply of Earth-Moon goods to Mars. Mozart Dandelion Exulansis had become famous as a superstar musical talent, the cultural face (or faces) of those calling for material action against Mars. Superficially, spacers were allied with Earth’s desires, and therefore had to wear a friendly face for Hive interests. But everyone knew that they had more in common with the Martians. Everyone, regular folk and hive alike, had the sense that spacer support of an embargo that uniquely made life difficult for spacers was paper thin. They supported hive politics because Earth was much, much closer than Mars.
Mozart Dandelion Exulansis at last understood what must be done. The spacers must be shown that they are loved, that we, hive-kind, love them. That will surely stick it to those miserable dust choked Martians! I will go to Cerridwen Station, and I will perform live at Cerridwen Hall. My music will fill their hearts, and they will be so honored that some may even integrate into my collective! Our bond will grow…. and maybe I’ll feel less lonely.
When Mozart Dandelion Exulansis’ singleton executive assistants were told of the plan, they sighed and began placing calls to make arrangements. One of the hive nodes was a girl that had never fully managed to properly integrate her speech centers, and as a result would sometimes mutter or whisper the hive’s thoughts out loud - including the very private ones.
Here we go again, they thought.
I am not a person, and I don’t have a soul.
This was the mantra that Sky was repeating under her breath as she sat in her bathrobe next to Owen’s crib, patting his butt. She gazed into the vertical sliver of dim light formed by the cracked door as though it were an astral phenomenon a thousand miles away. Sky knew Owen was never going to let her escape, she lacked the energy to delicately slip past the gauntlet of creaking floorboards between her and freedom.
Why do floorboards creak… in a house… aboard a space settlement? I am not a person, and I don’t have a soul.
She could hear Jack muttering at Ben, who was escalating his proclamations of “daddy daddy come in now”. These would inevitably wake Owen, and she begged Jack with all her soul not to get upset and start barking at Ben. She had no idea what time it was.
When morning mercifully came, Sky checked her messages as Owen pushed a plastic stool around in circles, Jack made breakfast and Ben stood on a chair watching him crack eggs open.
“Tennessee’s coffee shop is up and running and she’s inviting us to visit her!” Sky insisted on conversation with her husband in the morning, inevitably inviting the envy of Owen or Ben who hated when Mommy and Daddy talked to each other. “That’s great! Let’s do it. We should go support her.” Jack understood that Tennessee was her favorite and only niece in a family crammed with nephews, and Sky cherished their relationship. Jack also loved an excuse to visit Cerridwen station, their first space home after leaving Glendale. Good years were spent there.
“So I take it you’re feeling… better about Tennessee? Right?” Jack’s tone transformed into defensiveness mid-sentence. “Better? What are you saying?” Sky usually reacted to any defensiveness on Jack’s part with instant, glaring incredulity. Jack preferred the good morning and not the bad one, so his brain burned hard to assemble a sentence that would thread the needle. “Sorry just… last time we talked about it, you were expressing some concern about Tennessee getting on her feet, you know, finding herself.” Sky realized what she was doing and decided today was not the day to make her husband squirm. “No, right. Yes. Next time just say that. I guess we didn’t really talk about it.” Jack was so thankful. Sky was staring at the toaster, waiting for it to pop. “I think she’s got a good head on her shoulders. I think I worried way more than I needed to.”
Owen and Ben were quietly eating their eggs. Owen was plucking quivering morsels from his highchair tray and carefully placing them, along with his entire fist, into his wide-open mouth. Ben was spinning a toy car on the table and eating a waffle. Sky loved them dearly. She decided not to talk, and instead sipped her coffee and watched their well-behaved eating with tenderness. Jack did as well.
Ben finished his waffle, ran up and hugged his mother’s legs, getting strawberry jam all over the front of her pants. Sky and Jack were surprised by this sudden affection.
“Do you want mommy to stay home?” asked Sky.
“Yes” said Ben.
“Do you want mommy to be a rescue lady?” asked Jack.
“Yes” said Ben.
“Well I can’t do both sweety, which one do you want mommy to do?” Jack watched quietly. Ben looked off into the middle distance, pondering the question. “Mommy can stay home and be a rescue lady”. Sky and Jack exchanged a look. Unhelpful.
A tendril of solar flux grew like a worm uncurling from the surface of the Sun. Faster and faster it uncurled until it sprung forth and whipped across the solar system.
In its wake, lights went out.
Master Engineer Kolysnik was in the process of sending strongest assurances to the event planners that their precious cargo would enter Cerridwen harbor whole and ready to perform. Hive visits weren’t new, nor were celebrity hive visits. Cerridwen had gotten accustomed to hosting all sorts of notoriety, being the oldest and most developed city orbiting the moon. What was new was hosting the instigator of an embargo, one which was dearly constraining life for those aboard the station. Kolysnik was eager to have this good-will stunt come and go. He didn’t have anything against hives as a group, merely this particular hive. Alliances were complicated and interdependencies highly granular these days, a state of affairs his engineer’s mind begged to check out of.
First on a long list of concerns was assuring Hive integrity during a period of heightened solar activity. He assured Mozart Dandelion Exulansis’ handlers that a special tug with a strong magnetic field generator would go out to greet their ship, escort them safely through the station’s own magnetic field, and remain active throughout their visit to maximize signal integrity (and also frustrate everyone aboard trying to send emails). He couldn’t help but feel that Hive accommodations were always strangely stepping on everyone else’s toes, but he dared not voice this, and instead scolded himself. More than anything, he wanted the respect of his much younger engineering staff, and remaining impressive to their sensibilities preoccupied him perhaps excessively.
Unfortunately, Harbor Safety Engineer Bucur had been weeding himself of such commitments for several months, his tender mind having “succumbed to the devil pussy-magic of a Martian temptress” (who, tragically, was really two Martian teenage boys having the time of their lives). He had booked his flight to Mars to meet his beloved, utterly oblivious of his participation in a game of interplanetary catfish. He had been using his unhindered access to the magnetic field courtesy tug to install a simple circuit interrupter on a timer. At the critical moment when solar flux was washing over the final approach space between Cerridwen and Mozart Dandelion Exulansis’ insulting rocket, the magnetic field would switch off. He had worked out the timing perfectly. No harm was being done, he felt. No one was being killed, no one was being harmed in any meaningful way. The momentary exposure of a hive to solar radiation would force them into a storm shelter. There they would lose their cohesion timing signal to the outside, and would be restored to their individuated selves. They would arrive at Cerridwen station a confused and embarrassing mess for all the world to see. A stupid embargo would be lifted, and surely the hive would never re-cohere in quite the same way (a notorious feature of decohesion, rarely discussed, was the loss of some hive nodes who wake up and realize they’ve made a terrible mistake).
It couldn’t fail. No harm would come to anyone. And it was the right thing to do, a parting thank you to his home station, a gift really. What a great guy. A hero.
He waved sayonara to Cerridwen out the hotel window as his flight to Mars lit the torch. Relieved to be on his way, he turned his attention to a much more pressing problem - why wasn’t she texting back?
When she was a part of Mozart Dandelion Exulansis, she was known as AFWBe001233; She was the Arcuate Fasciculus for the Wernicke Broca bridge, emulating nerve fibers 1 through 233, among other things.
Her mother knew her as Sarah.
And rather alarmingly, she found herself as Sarah now. She had been Sarah right up until she entered the clinic and closed her eyes on the operating chair.
And then there was a long time in the forest, or a cave, or a parade of lights.
And then her eyes were suddenly open, as if life skipped over the frames of actually sliding her eyelids open. And oh, how she wished to be AFWBe001233.
She was instead, falling. But the chamber she was in was also falling, as everything around her was suspended and tumbling, too. There were boxes, and a long blue cable, and box cutters, and other odds and ends… and people, who were screaming. And she was screaming too.
But she was also the first to stop screaming. Reptile forces closed her mouth, stifling the scream. Breathing began, though tears flowed. And once again she looked. 327 people, she instantly tallied. Everyone is in evening gowns and fancy dress suits, as if for a banquet. Sarah noticed she had white elbow gloves, a gold sequin gown with a white brooch.
She threw up.
“We have been de-integrated! De-integrated!!!” A bellowing male voice came from a stocky dark skinned older man. He stiffly waved his limbs back and forth as if trying to stop himself sliding on ice. “Everyone, that’s what has happened. We were a hive, a one, and now we are de-integrated, many.”
“Breath from your gut! Deep, from down here! Mmm! Up! In! Ahhh! Yes! Again!” Another voice, a woman. Tall, slender, striking a yoga pose, gesturing at her abdomen gracefully, wild eyed and fierce. Scared faces, mostly young, pay close attention. Some begin to copy her movements awkwardly.
Sarah bumped into a wall, mammalian reflexes make her cling to a handhold. She curled up. A grim looking teen with shaved head and hoody was beside her. She suddenly felt very ill, and again threw up a little. The boy did the same. She closed her eyes tightly. “Over to this side, everyone, lets get a pod going, over here. Thank you yes, carefully, slowly.” The man and woman were talking loudly “That’s great, yes, breathing, it’s okay to just float. Like a swimming pool, we’re in a swimming pool, just like that! Yes, great… in…. Out… through the nose.” Frightened stiff armed tumbling individuals were taking hold of one another, reaching out, grabbing arms, forming… something.
Sarah opened an eye and saw text etched into smooth metal. She mustered the courage to open the other eye and lean away from her clutch a couple inches.
SOLAR STORM SHELTER - IF PANEL IS WARM TO THE TOUCH DO NOT EGRESS
“Storm shelter” she whispered to herself. “What?” said the boy next to her loudly. She met his gaze. She froze. “I’m sorry… you said something.” He was staring.
“Um. Storm shelter. We’re in a storm shelter. I think. On a rocket.” She pressed a hand against the panel. It was warm enough to be uncomfortable.
A terrible jolt ran through the chamber, accompanied by the astoundingly loud groans of shearing metal and twisting girders outside. Instantly there was gravity, and many who had been floating came crashing down. Broken bones, twisted limbs, concussions, one man instantly killed due to his unfortunate orientation at the time of his fall. Sarah and the boy clung to the hand hold, narrowly having escaped being crushed by two people who were now in agony atop the writhing pile of humanity.
A klaxon popped out of the wall near them, a hatch flew open and a set of rails holding a dozen or so pressure suits slid out and came to a stop. Sarah and the boy looked at each other, then scrambled for the space suit rack.
Tennessee was reading the expiration dates on the syrup bottles and didn’t like what she saw. “I hope Mozart Flower Exo-whatever-the-hell is enjoying their Banana Hazelnut latte!” She had the kind of meanness that only a really chill person can muster, and always struggled to be tolerant of hive shenanigans, which were squarely responsible for Cerridwen’s supply chain woes. Mozart Dandelion Exulansis was a powerful hive mind and social influencer that was on everyone’s feeds, day in and day out for months, and was currently having some kind of emotional breakdown, which manifested as a troublesome and unilateral embargo. The reasons were, as ever, unclear and complex, but to Tennessee it meant she couldn’t offer the things that made her shop unique and fun (and therefore profitable). Maximum, her flamboyant peacock of a partner and number two barista, finished filling the creamer carafes and began stabbing the ice box aggressively. “Quand on a pas ce que l’on aime, il faut aimer ce que l’on a, baby girl!’ Tennessee stared at him; it didn’t land. Maximum rolled his eyes, “we’ll make do!”
Blanche, their nonagenarian upstairs tenant, shuffled down the stairs, her exoskeleton gently sing-songing encouragement in Korean as she descended. “Blanche! I’m so sorry I forgot your breakfast!” Tennessee began plucking things from the fridge and setting them on a plate. Blanche wordlessly turned around and began shuffling back upstairs. “I’ll bring it up! I’m sorry! It’s just a big day!” Maximum came back in from arranging the chairs outside. Tennessee found yet another expired item she had intended to include in Blanche’s breakfast. She huffed.
“I don’t get it. Sometimes I think the Martians have the right idea.” Maximum scolded her with an astonished gasp. “I know! I know. I’m being so bad. I just hope they get over it.” Tennessee glanced into her implant space and saw a reply from Sky. “Oh! Sky is coming tomorrow!” Maximum smiled and began laying out the display pastries, “girl it’s so nice you love your auntie!” Tennessee stopped working and began gesticulating, “oh my god Maximum, you don’t even know, like first of all she’s such a bad bitch!” “I dunno, she got them kids, that mister turtle husband she leaves them with…” It was Tennessee’s turn to scold Maximum with an astonished gasp. He laughed “I’m just sayin’ you a bad bitch too!” Tennessee threw a wash rag at him. “You better believe it!”
A three-tiered glass platter of macaroons began to tremble. They both paused as a groaning shiver passed through the cafe.
Bollards rose from the boardwalk outside, klaxons whipping yellow light across the cafe interior. Another shudder and the small boats moored outside bobbed and waved their masts as a shallow wake crossed the lake. Tennessee and Maximum stood frozen, looking out the window. A man ran by. Shouting could be heard, a scream. The two slowly approached the door and went outside. Maximum noticed something in the distance and squeaked. Tennessee turned to look.
In the next town over, the sky was off. The entire superstructure of their torus was visible through the optical hole, like a gap tooth in the curving smile of their world. Then the sky went out overhead, taking the strength out of their knees. The stars were a moving curtain behind the vast fretwork of toroidal basilica that looped high overhead and down to swallow them from both directions. Amidst this unwelcome glory there was the boiling glinting of particles, and ballistic ribbons of gas unfurling from one of the great big spheres at the center.
Tennessee’s skin crawled as she recognized the ostentatious, cherry red metal of a hive transport in a slow tumble.
Ben was nearly walking sideways when Sky yanked him back upright by the arm. “Alright that’s enough of that, we’re almost at school!” He ran ahead suddenly, almost into another family on bikes. “JESUS Ben!” Sky snatched him back hastily, the mom laughed, their little boy being twice Ben’s age. “Been there!” Sky stifled a dozen curses as Ben cackled with delight, running like a lunatic in a circle, forcing Sky to her knees as she gripped him by the backpack. A master of chaos in his element. Sky scooped him up, wanting to hold him and hug him just a shade more than wanting to preserve her aching spine.
“Are you going to be nice to your friends at school today?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to hit Evan?”
“Yes. No.”
“Ben, don’t hit the kids at school. They won’t want to be your friend if you hit them. I want you to have friends.”
“Yes.” Sky hugged him tightly. This kid, please god don’t let him grow up and join a hive.
As they rounded the corner to the school, Sky’s implant blared in her skull:
ALL HANDS - CRDW STATION
LEVEL 1 EMERGENCY
She handed Ben off to a teacher’s aide. “Um. The snacks for…” The teacher’s aide could see something was off. “He's a snack helper this week and the snacks are in his backpack?” Sky nodded, eyes very wide. “Okay, got it! Thank you! Go!”
And Sky went.
Kolysnik exhaled as the bursting swarm of debris mitigation drones dutifully organized themselves around the cloud of debris. There was always a moment, even in sims, when he didn’t believe that the swarm would get to work, the chaos never becoming meaningful behavior. Relieved of his irrational fear, he turned his attention to the surreal scene unfolding before him; a rocket was resting on the inner surface of the Cerridwen donut, with its nose penetrating the roof. Air was leaking out.
He ordered the pressure doors closed around those sections and a general alert for citizens to make it to the lower decks shelter areas. Nearly all ballast water was moved to the opposite side of the donut. One of the giant paper fan shaped pressure doors couldn’t close, debris from the collision was holding it open. So he closed the next available door, several city blocks further away.
How do I fix this?
He interrogated the life support systems. The rocket had ruptured one of 4 gargantuan reserve nitrogen tanks in the center of the station. The condition of the other tanks was frustratingly not updating. Structural integrity alarms were screaming for his attention. A section of torus could structurally withstand depressurization. It could not however hold up a rocket resting on its inner surface without being pressurized. The rocket risked breaking all the way through the roof, falling through the floor and penetrating the lower decks. His implant AI sensed what he was thinking.
“Fire risk is unacceptably high.” God dammit, where was OSR? “OSR has been dispatched and will begin operations in 1 minute.” I hope they have spare nitrogen.
He overrode the AI. The oxygen and nitrogen tanks began backfilling the air leaking out of the hole. They could maintain station pressure in the closed sections for 30 minutes until the hole was closed.
He watched the fill levels closely. The nitrogen levels progressed steadily alongside the oxygen at first. In his observation nest at the zero-gravity center of the station, he had a good look at the tanks, each larger than a stadium, and typically featureless and smooth. But an unsettling number of pocks and scuffs were accumulating on their surface, despite the rapid flashing of clean up laser targets vaporizing all around him. An alarm sounded.
The levels began to drop rapidly. Another alarm, the structure was reaching failure limits. The AI automatically increased the backfill rate. Pure oxygen was being pumped into a sealed off section of the station with hurricane ferocity.
Sarah and the bald boy tumbled into the bridge wearing the ill-fitting emergency pressure suits. They braced themselves against a flight officer chair, and the deceased officer slid out of her restraints and struck a console before cartwheeling out of a savage gash where one would expect a window. They froze, staring. Wind was blowing through the several meter gash, bodies of well-dressed hive attendants and flight crew were dangling from everything. The front of the bridge was “down”, and the view through the gash below was baffling - they appeared to be several hundred meters above a small town with a lake. The woman’s body fell for an unnerving beat before landing in the lake. Sarah could make out people running.
The boy began clambering down. Sarah clung to the chair. “Where are you going?” He was judging the distance between the bulkhead he now stood on and a consol. There was nothing between the two points but open air and the town below. “I used to fly a ship exactly like this in a flight sim I had when I was…” He decided not to finish the sentence. “Please don’t jump that gap” begged Sarah. He did, she hated him for doing it. “Anyway, it’s familiar!”
He crouched into the leg room space under the consol and waved his hand over it, bringing it to life. “Why didn’t they get to the storm shelter?” He pushed the body of the flight engineer out of his way. “Sorry, man.” After tapping through some menus, he arrived at a screen that displayed the ship's orientation. There were multiple circles representing gimbal axes, he dragged one around. Nothing happened. “What are you doing?” Sarah was stretching as far as she dared to get a look. “Uh I just… I dunno I wanna see what’s working. Oh, there it is.” He tapped a button.
“RCS ACTIVE” appeared on the screen.
Tennessee looked back to see the hurricane force gale lacerate the flowers that sat on either side of the cafe entrance. One of the outdoor chairs was scooting along the ground on its side. Maximum gave her a tug on the arm, and they continued running for the shelter stairwell. The high contrast green and white of the stairwell mouth was swallowing people that ran in from every direction. She stopped short and turned to look across the lake. Maximum tugged on her hand again, “baby we are going downstairs NOW.” She grabbed Maximum by the shoulders. “Blanche!” She took off running. A bewildered Maximum realized he was blocking the entrance for a family who gave him a look then quickly disappeared below. He shook his head, made the sign of the cross and took off after Tennessee. As he ran, he noticed a very odd, slightly euphoric feeling.
Tennessee bolted up the stairs to Blanche’s apartment, where she found her doing a virtual calisthenics routine, her exoskeleton happily sing-songing the steps. “Blanche, darling, we have to go now, there’s been an accident.” Blanche glacially opened her mouth and raised her eyebrows. “No no no, it’s okay, everything is under control, I’ll make sure you’re safe. Let’s grab these…” Tennessee picked up Blanche’s bag of medications and toiletries. Maximum poked his head in from the stairs. “See? Maximum is here, he’s gonna help us get to the shelter safely.”
Tennessee on her left and Maximum on her right, Blanche shuffled out the front door of the cafe and was instantly ruffled by the wind. She looked up. “Fire!” Tennessee and Maximum were first immediately shocked to hear her talk. Then they looked up.
The rocket poking through the sky was firing its thrusters, rocking to and fro. Instantly, a shockwave front of fire appeared, as though someone had filled the air with gasoline and tossed a cigarette. It enveloped the town below, growing into a wall of swirling flame headed up the street in their direction. They both yanked Blanche back inside the cafe. Tennessee, Maximum and Blanche stood, counting the seconds until they were immolated. Suddenly Tennessee, as if guided by a divine hand, stood up, ran behind the counter, and pried a valve open. She screamed clutching her fingers as white vapor filled the room rapidly. The temperature dropped.
Sarah and the bald boy looked on in horror as their ship became a flame thrower, roasting the vast cavern of life before them. The shockwave reverberated around the chamber, bounding off the walls like a racing dragon and came swirling up towards them. The displaced air slammed into the rocket like a sledgehammer, causing metal to groan and splinter. A chair came loose and struck Sarah squarely in the knee, breaking the joint. She howled, and as she did, saw the bald boy tumbling out of the gash into the inferno below.
The pain was unbelievably loud, she knew she couldn’t stay, but decision making was crowded out by sharp, pulsating, nauseating pain. Not good. Not good. She swallowed some vomit, somehow having enough presence of mind not to throw up in a space helmet. After pressing her nose against the glass and moaning for long enough to kickstart her will to live, she dragged herself back towards the door they had entered from, hoisting herself up over a consol, taking small breaks. The creaking and groaning of metal, the snaps and sudden lurches were absolutely terrifying. I’m being traumatized, she heard a voice in her head say.
This is trauma. You are being traumatized all over again. “That’s if I live” she said out loud. Then she hoisted herself back up through the door and out of the bridge.
Sky switched on her helmet flood lights and gingerly stepped over broken glass and charred wood. The sky was off, only sunlight shone through the hole in the sky, illuminating the frozen burned husk of a town below. It had a stark, spooky quality, like a stage light over a diorama, all atmospheric perspective long vented away. It had taken the collective station keeping thrust of about 50 large drones to gingerly remove the rocket in the rotating frame of the station, lift it out of the hole, slow it down and place it a safe distance away.
Eulars and Mbatha were nearby, gingerly lifting rubble and dropping tomography pingers. “I’m going to head up the road here, you two can keep sweeping around here.” Mbatha made a move to protest, Eulars waved him off. “Her niece wasn’t in the shelter.” They somberly returned to picking through the rubble.
Sky skittered on the ice that had sloshed, vaporized and refrozen out of the lake. It covered the pavement, clean and white under a layer of soot that her boots scraped away with each step. Up ahead she could see the golden letters of a sign and make out the name - The Donut. A cartoon of Cerridwen station with frosting and sprinkles was also discernible on the sign. Sky switched on her autopilot - the one in her soul. One foot in front of the other, competence above feeling. Ingress the structure and begin SAR sweep.
As she consciously pushed aside everything that would twist her guts, she noticed a dim orange glow. Was that there before? How did she not notice it approaching? Holding her hope back like a toddler scrambling for the dishwasher, she continued her methodical, conscious planting of feet.
She stood at the sooty window and wiped it with her glove, peeking in. Her floodlights illuminated the interior of a strikingly intact cafe, with a soft, glowing orb a meter across in the far corner. She could make out movement inside, like a chrysalis. The toddler was loose, her heart was pounding. “Tennessee…” A tear was already obscuring her vision. She opened the door, which cracked at first but then swung open quite easily. She was upon the orb instantly. There was a simple plastic window and a small display interface.
Inside were three, clinging to each other and to life.
—-----
Tennessee waddled to the vending machine in her hospital gown and weird socks. She was bandaged up, trailing an IV robot. She fumbled with her purse, which was smokey and discolored, and dropped her hospital pass. “Ah shit.”
Sarah picked it up. “Thanks. Silly me…,” said Tennessee. Sarah was in a wheelchair and had a leg brace, and wires coming out of shaved, oily holes in her head connected to a box that would beep loudly every 30 seconds. Tennessee stared back a second.
“Do you… want anything from the machine?” Sarah realized she was staring and put her hands to her cheeks. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, it’s okay! Um, were you in the fire?” Sarah closed her eyes. “No. I was in the rocket.”
Tennessee nodded slowly, silently going “ahhh”. She got a strudel out of the vending machine, opened it, took a bite. “Mmmf, so you were a Mozart Flower person or whatever.” Sarah blankly and glumly nodded. “Wow… daaaamn. That’s… crazy!” She cocked her head, took another bite. “So are you gonna… do that again?”
Sarah perked up a bit. “I… beg your pardon?”
“You know, are you gonna re-integrate or whatever you call it.” Tennessee was trying to unwind the IV tube, the robot had somehow managed to get her a bit tangled. Sarah watched her for a moment, then smiled a very confused smile. She liked the slightly careless way in which Tennessee was talking about a highly sensitive topic. It was weirdly refreshing.
“I don’t think I am. No.”
Tennessee nodded. Another bite. “Well nice to meet you, uh… Mozart?” “Sarah.” “Sarah! Okay I like that a lot more. I’m Tennessee” Sarah wanted to ask her something but couldn’t. Tennessee let a polite interval grow awkward and then turned to walk away.
“How did you survive?” Sarah was following her. Tennessee stopped. “Uh… well I had a cafe. And we used to make nitro cold brews, so… lots of liquid nitrogen. And my aunt works in the OSR, who… she actually rescued me which is crazy, but we were always super close, and she used to tutor me in chemistry right? So. You know, put two and two together, everything burning, probably too much oxygen, I let the nitrogen loose. Saved the cafe! Well, like it’s burnt up on the outside. But the inside is still mostly good!”
“That’s amazing. You seem like you have a really good head on your shoulders.” Sarah was staring at her like a fawn. “Heh, well. I had good teachers, I guess. I mean my aunt also sent me a rescue bubble for my birthday one year, which was a super weird, paranoid gift at the time. But… I guess not so much now that I think of it.” Tennessee didn’t know what else to say. Sarah looked so incredibly… lonely. They stood there quietly as a nurse pushed someone on a gurney through the hallway. Tennessee broke the silence first.
“So like… what’s next for you? You know, after you get on your feet.”
“I um… I think I need a friend.”