by Zen DiPietro
A weight on my chest forces the air out of my lungs and I find myself struggling to breathe.
No. No. I can’t.
I feel for the wall and put my back to it. Using it for support, I slide my way back through the doorway and into the corridor. As the clank of silverware against dishes recedes, air gradually fills my lungs.
I close my eyes, trying to get a grip. Dr. Ramalama versed me well in many techniques for managing panic attacks. I begin mentally plotting a normal distribution. Within minutes, my terror recedes and my heartbeat slows to normal. I can’t go back into that dining room, though. Yet, I’m hungry.
A Pinky sandwich is what I need. Nobody uses forks in a pub. But it won’t be open this early.
A steward approaches with a look of concern. “Sir, can I be of assistance? Are you lost?”
“No. I was just…” being an anxiety-ridden redshirt. But I can’t say that. “When does the pub open?”
“It never closes.”
“It doesn’t?”
The steward nods, looking pleased. “Given that we sometimes have nocturnal passengers, we pride ourselves on providing round-the-clock services.”
“That wasn’t in the brochures.”
That takes the pleased look off my host’s face. Oops. I didn’t mean it to sound like a complaint. Damn my lack of finesse.
“Not to argue, sir, but the third click-through of the brochure, second paragraph up, reads, ‘Unlimited time limit is permitted for drinking.’”
Uhm. Right. How stupid of me to have overlooked that very obvious wording for “all-day bar.”
“I must have missed that part. I’m sorry to trouble you.”
The steward regains the look of pride that seems better suited for a war hero or something, but apparently, the attendants of the Second Chance take their jobs very seriously. “It’s never any trouble at all. We’re always glad to help. Do you need assistance getting to the pub?”
“No, thank you, I know the way.”
“Very good sir.” With a tiny bow, my host departs.
After that exchange, I alter my breakfast plans to include a drink.
As soon as I step into the bar, I see Pinky. She’s hard to miss.
“Didn’t expect to see you here,” I say. “I thought you’d be up late last night.”
“I was. I don’t need much sleep.”
“What’s that like?” I ask.
Pinky stops wiping the bar and gives me her full attention. “Mostly fine. Boring sometimes. I like being around people, and that’s tough when most of them spend a third of their time sleeping.”
“Makes sense. How much do you sleep?”
“About an hour a day.” She studies me. “You hungry?”
I consider my response carefully in relation to her idea of portion sizes. “Just a little. I could use a small snack.”
Pinky nods knowingly. “I’m not that into breakfast, either. I know just the thing.” She retreats to the drink-prep area where she also orders food for her guests.
She returns a few moments later with a tall, skinny glass full of a clear beverage. After the previous night’s colors, I’m a little disappointed. But when she sets it in front of me, she drops in a clear, round ice cube and the drink immediately turns a deep blue.
“Morning Wakeup.” Her eyes are fixed on the glass.
It occurs to me that she isn’t going to move until I taste it. “Mm. Like tart blueberries, but crisp and refreshing.”
She seems satisfied by that. “It has more kick than you’d think. I’ve flattened more than one rude asshole with a couple of ‘on the house’ Morning Wakeups. That’s why I gave you a small glass.”
Pinky’s free food and drinks do not always come from a place of generosity, then. That somehow makes her more interesting to me and I wonder what her life is like. “It’s delicious. Thanks.”
She seems to ignore that, but I know she heard it because she no longer stands there frozen. She wheels away to mix some drinks, which are promptly whisked away on a tray by a porter. Room service, I suppose. Or maybe people in the dining room. I imagine them all getting drunk and going into a stabby fork frenzy.
A shiver goes down my spine and I take a gulp of my Wakeup.
A porter with a tray arrives and, rather than accept it, Pinky points her chin toward me.
“Here you are, sir.” The porter sets the tray in front of me.
I’m relieved to see a normal-sized sandwich and a small pile of tater tots. Just like that, I start to fall for Pinky. Not in a romantic way, but in a deeper she-gets-me kind of way. Four years of therapy with Dr. Ramalama, and she never came close to really getting me, but in less than one day, Pinky has my full confidence. I’ll have to give that some serious thought.
I don’t know what’s in the sandwich, but it’s peppery, chewy, and delicious. “Are tater tots common in the Mebdar system?” I ask. I always thought they were an Earth thing.
Pinky looks at me like I’m a silly child. “Mebdarians invented tater tots.”
I’m not sure that’s true, but I nod agreeably. “I’ve always loved them.”
Pinky nods back, like we’re part of some secret club. “Fried potato and salt. What’s not to love?” She holds up her hand in a stop gesture and I stare at her stupidly until I realize what she wants. I toss her a tot. She catches it easily and pops it into her mouth. “That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout.”
I’ve never had this. Never sat at a pub, never threw food at people. Never felt like a truly normal person. I’ve always kept myself carefully one degree away from everything around me, for the sake of self-preservation. I have a sudden and liberating feeling of freedom. I never want to leave this pub.
The tater tot that chooses that particular moment to lodge itself into my throat and begin trying to murder me should not come as a surprise. My air supply cuts off and I try to alert Pinky but I only manage to make a quiet, pathetic honk.
She’s on it, though. Maybe it’s a hallucination due to panic and oxygen deprivation, but all seven feet of glorious Pinky vault over the bar and she grabs me like I’m a kitten. One quick squeeze that feels like I’ve been stepped on by an elephant and that tot flies across the pub and hits the bulkhead.
Pinky lowers me to the ground and sits next to me, gently patting my back as I cough and gasp and my eyes water and my nose runs.
Which of course is when I notice Ms. Greta Saltz watching in horror.
“Fuck! That tater tot tried to kill Kenny!” Her eyes are wide with shock and, strangely, admiration. Garbdorians must emote admiration differently than humans do.
I cough one last time. “Charlie,” I correct her. “My last name’s Kenny.”
“Right. Sorry.” Greta looks chagrined. “I tend to forget which planets do the family-name-first thing.”
“That’s okay,” I say, wiping my face and pretending that she hasn’t just witnessed my near-death at the potatoey hands of a tiny fried blob, even as Pinky gently sits me back on my stool.
Greta’s a champ though, because she pretends right along with me. She asks Pinky for a lushfruit muffin and a glass of yak milk, straight up.
“Just one,” Pinky says to her warningly. “You know how you get.”
I really want to know how she gets, but am not brave enough to ask.
I eyeball my tater tots. Not eating them would be uncool, as it would ruin my pretending-my-horrible-almost-death-never-happened mystique, which I feel is working for me. But while I’d enjoyed them before, I’m now engaged in a death match against them. In this corner, a pile of starchy little murderers, and in the other corner, Charlie Kenny, master of the unlikely. Well, not the master. If I were the master, I wouldn’t have to worry about this kind of crap.
Whatever. I tear a tot in two, dunk it in the orange sauce, and carefully chew. Hah. Take that, tater.
The night before, Greta had been casually friendly. Now, however, she seems…well, interested. Which is the opposite of how my encounters with wo
men usually go, and understandably makes me question everything in my life up to this point.
She turns chatty. As she tears the top off her muffin then pulls off little bits to poke into her mouth, she asks me questions about life on Earth, my work, my background, and so forth. Being a polite conversationalist, I ask similar things of her, and learn quite a lot about her. Which I don’t mind at all.
“What about school?” she asks, veering away from questions about my family, which inevitably result in ghastly answers. I’m not sure if she turns from the topic of my family for my sake or hers, but the change of pace is refreshing. Sort of.
“Oh, you know,” I say airily. “Explosions in chemistry class, taking the elevator instead of the stairs, and always making sure I sit near an exit.”
“Why?” she asks, fascinated.
“Well, it’s a risk,” I admit. “If a rabid boar comes barreling into the room, I’m right there within chomping distance. But it’s more likely that something will happen inside the room. An earthquake, for example. And access to the exit becomes a critical thing.”
“So there was never a rabid boar.” She smiles, seeming charmed by the idea.
“No, there was. But it got electrocuted by a loose wire in the doorway so it worked out.”
The smile freezes on her face. “Damn.”
“Yeah. Two negatives made a positive.” As soon as I say it, I mentally kick myself. Math jokes are not the way to impress girls.
But she laughs. “I guess it did.”
“What about you?” I ask. “What was school like?”
But she made a dismissive gesture. “Nothing interesting. The same old stuff. Valedictorian. Prom queen. Blah blah blah.”
“What about university?” I ask.
“I only went for a year, then it closed down due to a goat infestation.”
Now that sounds like my kind of luck. Maybe we have something in common after all. “How does a university get a goat infestation?”
Her eyes widen and she shakes her head. “It was the strangest thing. One day we were in class and the next, goats had taken over the school. I don’t know if you’re familiar with goats, but once they’ve decided to be somewhere, it’s really hard to convince them otherwise.”
I, in fact, have no familiarity with goats. I have no regrets about that. “So then what?”
“I went to a jai-alai tournament the next day, and someone was taking video. An executive at Spark Cola saw it and noticed me in the crowd. A couple of messages and one meeting later, I was their new brand ambassador.”
That sounds exceedingly against the odds to me. “How many people were at the tournament?”
“Ten thousand or so.”
Jai-alai must be way more popular where she’s from than it is on Earth. But I have trouble even beginning to compute the odds of someone picking her out of a crowd of ten thousand and tracking her down to give her a job. A job that thousands of people would have eagerly auditioned for. But no. Greta Saltz got the job without even trying.
Apparently, she’s just one of those people that fortune smiles upon. The opposite of me. That first job with Spark Cola had started Greta on her life of travel and adventure.
It sounds positively fascinating to me, but she seems bored by it all. “What about your work? Any natural disasters or hostage situations?”
Her avid interest in my foibles makes me wonder if she’s ridiculing me. But Pinky looks on curiously, and I don’t think she’d allow someone to be that kind of mean in her pub.
As we talk, Greta tears the bottom portion of her muffin into pieces and spreads them across her plate. Her process of eating fascinates me. Does she always obliterate her food this way? She cut that sandwich last night into pieces, but I’d thought at the time that was merely a matter of handling the size issue. Perhaps not.
“What’s your destination, Charlie?” she asks. “I’m headed for Mebdar III.”
I’m not sorry to move the conversation away from the disasters in my life. “I’m going to the end of the line—Mebdar IV.”
Greta’s brow furrows. “The retirement planet? Did you take a job there or something?”
Man, I really wish I could say yes to that. “No, I can work remotely from pretty much anywhere.”
“Oh, you’re visiting someone?”
I suppress a sigh. “No. I’m moving there.”
Yep, there it is. The look I’m used to getting from people who see me holding onto a staircase railing for dear life, or refusing to cross a busy road.
“Why?”
Time to give her the big truth, which will surely have her recoiling like a frightened turtle. Though perhaps she already suspects, given our conversation. “I’m a—” my voice catches. Probably a residual piece of tater tot. I clear my throat. “I’m a redshirt.”
I don’t think I’ve ever said the words out loud before, except during therapy. People like me don’t advertise our genetic heritage. Not surprisingly, it scares the shit out of people to be near someone who has a one-hundred percent chance of dying in a terrible and unlikely way—and perhaps taking some innocent bystanders with him.
But when I chance a look at Greta, she seems fascinated. A peek at Pinky reveals a total lack of concern. If anything, she looks bored. But then, what does she have to worry about? The woman could probably eat the Second Chance if she wanted to, and complain that it didn’t have enough salt.
“Wow,” Greta says. “I’ve never met one before.”
I have no answer for that. She said it like being a redshirt was interesting somehow, not a death sentence. Sudden doubt about her intelligence makes me squint at her.
“I mean, I’m sure it sucks,” she says quickly.
“You could say that. My nana’s a cyborg.”
She clicks her tongue in commiseration. “Ah, and cyborg cookies are total rubbish, aren’t they?”
“Yeah.”
Silence falls over us. We had both stopped eating and I feel uncomfortable. Exposed. I wish I’d never said anything about my history. I could have been anyone before all this, as far as they knew. Now I’m just…a redshirt.
I stand. “If you’ll excuse me, I have some work to do in my cabin.” It isn’t a lie, but Greta and Pinky surely know I just want to get out of there. They play along, though, and I thank Pinky again for the breakfast and for the life-saving.
She shrugs both off. “Come back for lunch. I’ll make sure you get something really good that won’t kill you.”
I have no intention of that. I know they’ll see a redshirt every time they look at me from now on. “I’ll have to see if I get done in time,” I hedge.
Pinky gives me a sad look and nods. I don’t even look at Greta as I make my getaway.
Back in my cabin, I heave a sigh. It had been nice, pretending to be a normal person. For a minute there, I was even happy. I thought maybe my luck would hold for a little longer, that maybe I could get a glimpse of a normal life.
I sit and turn on the lightstream. It will have to be my companion for the rest of this trip. I’ll start on the statistics work tomorrow.
It’s almost worse, really, to have had such a good start to this trip. It raised my hopes, making the fall back to my reality hard to take.
After falling asleep to an old robot western on the lightstream, I wake up to a banging sound. Falling to the floor in a tangle of sheets, sure that doom has arrived, is not the best way to start a day. But I’ve begun enough days that way to be able to pick myself up with relative equanimity.
“Open up, Charlie, we’ve arrived at Posytin!” Greta’s unmistakable voice reaches me before I even make it to the door.
My shoulders sag. Why has Greta sought me out? Does she want to make sure I didn’t choke to death on my own saliva while I slept?
When the door opens, she stands there, looking excited and pretty. The sight of her happiness has me swallowing my words—which amount to a polite way of saying, Buzz off.
She wedges her bright person
ality right into my doorway, preventing me from closing the door or telling her I want to be alone. “Come on, grab whatever you need and let’s go! You’re going to love Posytin. We have three hours of stopover before we get underway again.”
My mouth is too full of my suddenly gigantic tongue to get any words out. I suspect a rift in the space-time continuum. Or entry into a parallel dimension. Sure, the odds of those are infinitesimal, but either possibility seems more likely than Greta Saltz wanting to go day tripping with a guy who’d nearly gotten killed by a piece of potato the day before. I run the numbers in my head and decide it must be a parallel dimension.
“You’re still in your jammies?” She looks at me with incredulity. “Come on, there are things to see!” She takes a step closer to me and grasps the hem of my shirt as if to shuck it up over my head.
I find the ability to speak. Sort of. “Blaahg!” I say.
I’d like to tell you that this is a Garbdorian word for please remove your hands from my clothing, but I’d be lying. At least I’d managed to become verbal. I back away from her. Not far, given the lack of space in my cabin, but her arms fall to her sides.
“Should I give you a minute?” she asks.
“Uh, yeah. Is there a package from the laundry out there?”
She goes back into the corridor and checks the delivery bin. “Yes.” She returns holding a clothing bag.
I take it from her awkwardly. “Right. I guess I’ll get dressed then.”
We stare at each other for about three and a half seconds, then she takes a step backward, into the corridor. “I’ll be waiting right here.” She points to the deck plate below her feet.
I close the door in her pretty golden face. Which is rude, and I’m immediately sorry for it, but I’m so thrown for a loop that I barely know my ass from an exhaust pipe.
I put on my clothes and stuff my pajamas into the clothing bag to send it out for laundering. Taking a deep breath, I open the door.
“What do you want with me?” I ask. Again, rude. I know. Like I said—ass versus exhaust pipe.
Rather than being put off by my lack of manners, she smiles. “It’s your first trip away from Earth, right?”