by Medron Pryde
Jack cleared his throat and looked away to see that Emily was standing in front of an open hatch. He wondered how long she’d been standing there, and how long they’d all been filling the corridor. She smiled at his confusion and motioned for him to enter. He followed her request and stepped into a small robotics bay with a single table in the middle. An androgynous android lay on it, waiting to be completed for the intelligence that would fill it.
“You don’t need to continue,” Natalie said, shaking her head.
“Yes I do,” Jack corrected and looked back to her. “I saw the wave of water rip the front of our house apart. We were still on the stairs when it hit us and shoved us into the cellar. I broke some bones but I remained conscious.” Natalie nodded once more. “So I was awake to see my dad take his last breath. And then…over the next few days I watched my mom die a piece at a time, because she just couldn’t imagine life without the man she loved.” Natalie blinked and Jack nodded. “She went to sleep one night and just never woke up.”
“The coma,” Natalie whispered. “It wasn’t because of physical wounds?”
“No. It wasn’t,” Jack affirmed. “And she’s never coming back. They can keep that body alive as long as they want to, but she’s gone. She doesn’t want to live without him, and as much as I’d like to I can’t blame her for that.”
“But you did.”
Jack looked over at Betty and she just smiled at him, a calming presence in the whirlwind of his memories. “Yeah. I did. I screamed at her. I shouted horrible words. I think part of me wanted her to wake up so she could wash my mouth out with soap.” He laughed with a dark humor and shook his head again. “I did not have a good bedside manner.”
“You were stressed,” Natalie said.
Jack shook his head. “I was broken. Just like you feel right now. The doctors were ready to call the shrinks on me, but a couple friends took me away and put me back together again.”
“T&J?” she asked.
“Julie and Alex,” Jack corrected with a wry smile. “I knew them long before they used that name.”
Natalie nodded very slowly. “So you really are their Jack?”
Jack’s cheek twitched. “I don’t belong to anyone,” he answered reflexively. He sighed in response to Natalie’s raised eyebrows and brought a hand up to rub his forehead. She was right of course. A part of him would always belong to them. “But yeah, I’m that Jack,” he moderated.
“And what are they to you?” Natalie asked, the seriousness of her question filling her tone with compassion.
Jack set his jaw against the flood of emotions and just breathed in and out. Then he cleared his throat, removing the lump from it so he could talk again. “They’re the friends that saved my life,” he said, dodging the deeper question she’d asked. She gave him a look that said she knew he was dodging and he continued before she could ask again. “They cut their tour short to do some benefit concerts and picked me up along the way. They forced food into me when I didn’t want to eat. They forced me to put on clothes and walk around like a human being.” He chuckled at the memory. “They even forced me to get up on stage and sing with them a few times.” Jack stopped and looked at Betty again. She held his gaze and nodded very slowly. He swallowed, feeling the shame of what he’d done again. “And they did the single greatest kindness they ever did me.”
“What?” Natalie asked.
Jack turned to meet Natalie’s gaze with a sad smile, and admitted to doing one of the few things in his life he truly regretted. “They didn’t believe me when I said I hated them. When I shouted at them to leave me alone.”
Natalie’s eyes opened wide and he nodded.
“I’ve been about as low as a man can be and still stand back up again. I thought I lost everything that mattered. In a way, I did.” He shrugged. “I lost myself. But they didn’t let me go through it alone. And I won’t let you go it alone either. I’ll walk beside you if you let me. And I’ll carry you if you can’t walk,” he finished with a fervor he hadn’t realized he felt.
Natalie smiled. “I’ve read that poem, you know. It’s beautiful.”
“Yes, it is,” Jack answered and smiled at her. “It was about a beach; of course I had to learn it.”
She was silent for several seconds, and Jack wondered what could possibly be holding her attention for that long. Her mind ran at the next best thing to lightspeed, using distributed processing that allowed her thousands of thoughts at once, and yet here she was, thinking in silence. It had to be big. Finally she opened her mouth.
“Would he really do that for me?” Her lips actually quivered, and he felt the need to comfort her as the enormity of her question hit home.
“I’m not the best person to ask,” Jack answered with a shake of his head. “I haven’t done the whole religion thing in a long time.”
“But you used to,” she asked with pleading eyes. “Didn’t you have an answer then?”
Jack shook his head. “I had more questions when I was done than when I started. I’m sorry.”
Natalie place a hand over her heart and aimed an anguished look at him. “I’ve calculated every possibility I can think of, and all I see is pain and loss ahead of me. If you want me to try this, you need to give me something more.”
Jack met her tear-filled eyes, and knew there was nothing he could say to stop her. He just wasn’t the right person for this. And for a moment, he felt profoundly guilty about that. He shook his head to tell her that he had nothing.
“Jesus loves the little children,” were the words that came out of his lips. He frowned in surprise but for the first time in a long time he thought about that song. And then he recognized the message in it.
“What?” Natalie asked in confusion.
Jack smiled, realizing that maybe he did have the right words for her after all. “It’s a song I learned as a kid.”
Natalie cocked her head to the side in thought. “Yes. I know the song now. Why do you quote it?”
“Red, brown, yellow, black, and white,” Jack recited carefully, meeting her questioning gaze. “They are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the worlds,” he finished with a smile.
“I am no child,” Natalie mused.
Jack rubbed his jaw. “True,” he admitted with a shrug. “But Christianity is chock full of allusions and round about ways to say things.”
“True,” Natalie echoed. “So what does it mean to you?”
Jack pulled in a long breath as he considered the words again. He was pretty certain his first feeling was right. “The original song came from long ago, back when races of man were divided by skin colors. Back when my nation still used some of them as slaves in fact.”
“Oh,” Natalie whispered and frowned in thought.
“Exactly,” Jack said with a smile. “We’ve forgotten colors now, but we have new racisms. Terran. Peloran. Shang. Cyber. But we are all human. Isn’t that what you always preach?”
“Yes,” Natalie said very slowly.
Jack nodded. “I read the whole Bible from beginning to end when I was young, and from what I read I think God would agree.”
“But you don’t believe,” Natalie whispered, her tone asking why it should make a difference.
“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” Jack corrected with a shake of his head. “But if he’s real then he loves you. And that’s the best answer to your question I can give.”
“If,” Natalie said with a shake of her head. “That’s a big word to spend a life on.”
“People have spent a life on less than that,” Jack returned and shrugged.
“I just don’t know if I can.” Natalie said after a few seconds.
“Neither do I,” Jack returned, his tone frank. Natalie blinked at him in surprise. “Life is strange,” he continued with a smile. “Some people become stronger under pressure, under questions that shake the very foundations of life we believe in. Some people fall apart.” Jack shrugged, indicating himself. “I didn’t cover myse
lf in glory there. Jasmine stood up and did good though,” he added and Jasmine flickered into existence to the side so she could nod towards Natalie.
“I don’t know if I can follow that path,” Natalie whispered.
“Neither did I,” Jasmine returned before Jack could come up with a response. “But Drew made me promise to try. Did Louis ever talk to you about it?”
“No,” Natalie answered. Her lips quivered before she said another word. “He was going to live forever,” she added with a helpless shrug and half a sob.
Jack looked at Betty and they exchanged a long look. He knew that feeling well. Wanting to live forever was a powerful wish for someone that didn’t age.
“You knew him better than any of us,” Jasmine continued, a melancholy inflection in her words. “Would he have wanted you to live or die?”
Natalie let out a long breath before answering. “He wanted me to live.”
Jasmine smiled at the other cyber. “Then there it is. You owe it to him to try. At least give it a shot.”
Natalie shook her head. “But I don’t know how.”
Jasmine turned back to Jack and smiled. “I took it one day at a time,” she whispered and her raised eyebrows told Jack it was his turn to rejoin the conversation.
Jack reached inside his shirt and pulled the dog tags out to look at them. A small holo of his face snapped into being over them, his service number, name, and rank scrolling beneath it. His full name, not the shortened version he’d earned over the years. Jonathan Michael Christensen. A name he didn’t know if he could ever live up to. But if the name could do some good, maybe that would help. He took the dog tags off and met Natalie’s eyes. “Will you take these?”
She frowned at the chips of electronic metal and silicon. “Why?”
“Because in our darkest hours we all need a reminder that other people care about us,” he said, looking deep into her eyes so she would know he spoke the truth. “Maybe this can be that for you. It won’t stop you from shutting down. Hell, I’ll hold your hand as you go if you choose that route in the end. All I ask is that you give these back to me first.”
“You mean, all you ask is that I face you and tell you I’m giving up?” she asked, a faint note of accusation in her voice.
“Well, I wouldn’t put it like that,” Jack said and cleared his throat.
She smiled, letting him know that she’d caught his evasion. Then he saw power flooding through her holoform and felt his uniform’s holoemitters flicker as she shifted her programming into Recovery’s systems. The ship’s more powerful emitters gave her substance to match her form and she reached out to take the dog tags from his hand. “That would be a very hard thing to do I think,” she said very slowly.
“Harder than living?” Jack asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she answered truthfully. “But I think I want to find out.” Then she looked towards the hatch. “Now get out of here. I don’t want you gawking at my new body. At least not until I decide what I’m going to wear,” she added with fragile humor.
It was humor though. She was trying. “Yes, Ma’am,” Jack said to Natalie, cleared his throat of what most certainly could not have been a sob of relief trying to escape, and gave her his best debonair bow. Then he waved a determinedly gallant arm towards Betty and Jasmine, a questioning look in his eyes. “Shall we?” he asked.
They smiled in unison.
“Excellent,” he continued and raised an eyebrow towards Emily. “Might I take a tour of your beautiful ship, my lady?”
“Of course. Follow me,” Emily said with a smile as a holoform split away from her android avatar.
“Yes, Ma’am,” Jack answered and followed the holoform through the hatch, Betty and Jasmine on either side of him. It wasn’t precisely a good day. Too many people had died for that. But they’d survived and saved many lives along the way. He would take that over the alternative any day of the week.
They followed Emily down the corridor and through another hatch. Jack stopped in his tracks upon seeing the far bulkhead.
“I thought you might like the view,” Emily said in a satisfied tone.
“Shiny,” Jack whispered back without taking his eyes from the sight. Hyperspace covered the entire outer bulkhead, rainbow rivers twisting and turning all around them. He could see the American warships ahead of them, moving towards a much larger torrent of energy. He watched Los Angeles dive into the raging gravitic current, followed by the other American ships. Jack sucked in a deep breath as Recovery and her destroyer escorts dove into the Epsilon Reticuli-Serenity Run. Gravity parted around them, they kicked up their proverbial skirts, and began to accelerate towards the distant Serenity star system.
They’d gotten away.