A Complicated Love Story Set in Space

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but what the actual—”

  DJ waved me quiet. “Hush.”

  “Don’t hush me.”

  “If you’re seeing this holographic message, then something’s gone horribly wrong aboard Qriosity. Is it murder? Sabotage? A mysterious illness? I don’t know; I’m a hologram, silly. But on the bright side, Qriosity’s emergency beacon will have initiated the moment the ship detected you were in trouble, and a rescue team is probably on the way.”

  Only about a third of what came out of the hologram’s mouth made sense, and I was having trouble processing even that. “Probably?” I said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “When will rescue arrive?” DJ asked, glossing over the whole “probably” part.

  Initially, I thought the hologram was a recording and wouldn’t answer, but it stuttered after DJ asked his question and then said, “Due to the current limitations of space travel, rescue may arrive in six to nine months. Sorry about it!”

  Six to nine months couldn’t be right. There was no way I was going to accept being trapped on a rundown spaceship, or any ship for that matter, for that long. I was, apparently, not the only one.

  “Nine months my ass,” Jenny said. “I don’t know what the hell is happening, but I want to go home right now!”

  The hologram waved her finger in the air. “A good junior detective never uses profanity. Let’s see if we can come up with a better word together.”

  Jenny snorted. “I’ve got a couple of words for you.”

  I buried my face in my hands. How was I supposed to survive six months in space when I hadn’t survived the first hour? Space was going to find a way to kill us, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. This was a nightmare wrapped in a disaster glazed with a catastrophe.

  DJ, who seemed to be taking the news of our extended captivity relatively well, cleared his throat loudly enough that Jenny stopped harassing Jenny Perez. “We had to shut down the reactor to keep Qriosity from blowing up. Will we be okay without it?”

  Jenny Perez paused to think, or whatever holograms do, before answering. “In the event that you’ve been forced to shut down the Cordova Exotic Particle Reactor, Qriosity’s Quazar High-Density Batteries will continue to power essential ship’s systems for up to twelve months. Essential systems include basic life support, obviously, Qriosity’s oxygen farm, your Freshie Stasis Fridge, and me! Your Emergency Jenny Perez Holographic Help System. Lucky you!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Lucky us.”

  “However,” the hologram continued, “all non-essential systems will remain offline to conserve power until the Cordova Exotic Particle Reactor is reactivated. Non-essential systems include: environmental comfort controls, hot water, and galley prep stations. Better get used to cold showers! But don’t worry about food because Qriosity is stocked with enough Nutreesh meal replacement bars to feed the entire crew for a full ten years. Nutreesh! Put some in you!”

  Jenny had sunk to the floor during the hologram’s speech and was sitting cross-legged, staring blankly into space. “I preferred being locked in the toilet.”

  “We’re in hell, aren’t we?” I looked from DJ to Jenny to Jenny Perez, waiting for one of them to answer me. “Right? This has to be hell.”

  While Jenny was basically catatonic, and I was on the verge of snapping, DJ had managed to remain calm. He’d done the same thing when I’d been blown into space. Maybe that was his superpower. It was impressive, but also kind of annoying.

  “Where’s the crew?” DJ asked. “Why’re we here?”

  “How come I can’t remember how I got here?” I threw out there, not actually expecting an answer. I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.

  “There is a teeny, tiny chance that you may be experiencing short-term memory loss due to the use of your Trinity Labs Quantum Fold Drive,” Jenny Perez said. “That’s perfectly normal and should be temporary. However, if any member of the crew experiences memory loss concerning events further back than seven days, recurring jamais vu, cryptomnesia, rectal bleeding, onycholysis, overactive reflexes, loss of fingerprints, or the unusual secretion of milk, please consult a Trinity Labs medical advisor immediately. But don’t panic; I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  Jenny’s head jerked up. “Did she say ‘rectal bleeding’?”

  This was not happening. I refused to believe that we were going to be trapped on this spaceship for six months, and that we wouldn’t even have hot showers. Honestly, I was surprised I’d held it together as long as I had. “What are we supposed to do now?!” I shouted at Jenny Perez.

  DJ reached for my arm. “Noa…”

  I almost allowed him to calm me down. Even though we’d only just met, DJ didn’t feel like a stranger, except that he was. And the moment he touched me, I jerked away. I didn’t want to be calm. I didn’t want to listen to reason. I wanted to go home, and if I couldn’t have that, then I wanted to yell. “How are we supposed to survive? I can’t do this! I can’t!”

  “All evidence tells me that you can do it!” Jenny Perez said. “And you’ll be back on Earth in six to nine months. Twelve at the most. Unless you’ve suffered an unforeseen calamity, have resorted to cannibalism, or have gone mad due to boredom and murdered each other. But that’s only happened on one other ship, so I’m sure you have nothing to worry about.”

  Jenny Perez pulled a magnifying glass from her pocket and held it in front of her eye. “Be good, junior detectives. I’ll be watching you!” The hologram exploded in a burst of light and disappeared.

  THREE

  DJ SHOULD HAVE LET ME die in space.

  I didn’t mean that. Mostly.

  Fine, there was a part of me that meant it, but it was the part that was tired of wedgies and wearing someone else’s clothes, and wasn’t looking forward to six months on a spaceship with two strangers and no hot showers.

  “It could be worse,” DJ said.

  Jenny fixed him with a murderous glare. “How?” she demanded. “How could this possibly be worse?”

  DJ shrugged. “I was signed up to take the SATs on Saturday. Dodged a bullet there.” He looked from me to Jenny and then back to me. “Did you really have anything that exciting happening on Earth anyway?”

  Maybe DJ had a point. It wasn’t like I’d been happy. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been dreaming of stealing a car and driving to a city where no one knew me. I would’ve had to learn how to drive first, but that was a minor detail. Still, my mom had to be worried sick about me, and Mrs. Blum had gotten an order the day before I disappeared for two hundred fondant fancies for a bridal shower that she would never finish on time without my help. I couldn’t just shrug off being in space and forget about them. And I didn’t understand how DJ could either.

  Jenny huffed. “Sorry if I’m a little bothered by the fact that I’m stuck on a dirty rocketship with two strange boys, one of whom may or may not have roofied me and locked me in a toilet.”

  “No one roofied you!” I said.

  “Someone might’ve,” DJ said. “They might’ve roofied us all.”

  Jenny stuck her tongue out at me. “At least I put up a fight.” She held out her sleeve to show us the blood staining her cuff.

  Unable to remain still, I stood and paced around the cramped room. Ops might have been designed for three people, but it still felt too small. “What do we do now?” I asked. “I’m not giving up on home just because a sassy hologram said to.”

  “We should search the ship,” DJ said.

  Jenny tapped her nose and then pointed at him. “There might be people imprisoned like I was.”

  “But were you really imprisoned?” I asked. “Imprisoned is such a harsh word. Maybe the lock got jammed. You went in to take care of your business, and the lock malfunctioned and you were trapped. It happens.”

  “To who?” Jenny asked.

  “People.”

  “Has it ever happened to you?”

  This was getting us nowhere. “Well, no, but—” Bes
ides, searching the ship was probably a good idea. “Fine, let’s go exploring.”

  Jenny hopped to her feet, energized now that she had a mission. “Great! We should split up. I’ll start at the top and work my way toward the middle.”

  I was shaking my head before she reached the door. “No way. Splitting up never ends well. Don’t you watch horror movies?”

  DJ frowned. “I can’t stand horror flicks.”

  But Jenny smiled sweetly. “The only thing you should be afraid of on this ship is me.”

  “I am,” I said. “And we’re still not splitting up.”

  Jenny tilted her head to the side like she was thinking and then said, “Right. You’re not the boss of me, and I don’t have to do what you say. You boys can stick together if you’d like, but I’m going. Scream like you’re being murdered if you find anything. Or, I suppose, if you’re actually being murdered.”

  “I’m not—” I began to say, but Jenny was already gone. I couldn’t decide whether I liked Jenny or not, but I did kind of admire her.

  “I guess we should go?” DJ was standing by the door with his hands in his pockets, waiting for me to make up my mind. This day had been awful enough, and I was reluctant to do anything that might make it worse. But I also couldn’t sit in Ops while DJ and Jenny explored the ship without me.

  “Fine.” I brushed past DJ as I left.

  DJ and I roamed around Qriosity until we reached the lower levels, but all we found down there were service tunnels, a cargo bay with no cargo in it, and the massive water storage tanks.

  “Hey,” DJ said. “Wanna hear a joke?” It was the first time he’d spoken since we’d left Ops, and his voice was jarring in the silence.

  “Not really.” I was still annoyed by Jenny Perez refusing to give us any actual answers, and at Jenny for taking off on her own.

  “Oh.”

  “We’re the joke,” I said. “Three teenagers wake up on a spaceship.” I frowned. “Or are we the punch line?” I shook my head and walked to the end of the corridor. I stood by the ladder leading to the next level and waited for DJ to finish searching each room. “I thought this was a good plan, but maybe it’s a waste of time.”

  “I don’t know,” DJ said. “We might not find the crew, but we could still stumble across something that might help us survive out here.”

  “Or the ship might be full of clever traps designed to kill us like the murder hotel of H. H. Holmes.”

  DJ’s optimistic smile slipped. “Uh, yeah. I guess it could be that, too.”

  I grabbed the nearest rung to pull myself up, stopped, and turned to DJ. “How are you so calm about what’s going on?” I didn’t give him the opportunity to reply before going off again. “I mean, here we are in space—in space—and you’re just rolling with it like, whatever. Are you a robot or something? You look like the type of person who punches things when he gets pissed off. Or do you break things? Why aren’t you throwing things across the room or smashing stuff with your giant fists?”

  It felt good to blow up. If I hadn’t let out a bit of the pressure that had been building inside me, the explosion later would have been so much worse. At the same time, I felt like a jerk. DJ hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d saved my life. I should have been kissing his ass and massaging his feet.

  DJ lowered his eyes, and his chin dipped to his chest. “It’s just… you’re messed up about what we’re going through, and I don’t know what Jenny’s deal is, but she doesn’t seem real stable, so I figure one of us has got to keep it together. Might as well be me.”

  “Well, isn’t that responsible of you,” I said. “For the record, I don’t need you to look after me. I’m usually pretty okay at looking after myself.” DJ opened his mouth, but I already knew what he was going to say. “Yes, fine, I did almost die earlier, but that wasn’t really my fault, was it?”

  When I finally shut up long enough for DJ to speak, he either had nothing to say or chose to keep whatever he was thinking to himself. I didn’t know what I was hoping would happen. That he’d argue with me? That he’d yell so that I could yell back and we could really go at it? For him to sling his arm around my shoulder and tell me he had a plan to get us home and that everything was going to be okay? Hell, maybe he was waiting for me to reassure him. He would be waiting a long time if that was the case.

  Eventually, the moment passed, and we climbed the ladder to the next level. We kept the talking to a minimum as we continued our pointless search. Deck two was slightly more interesting than deck one had been. We found a couple of rooms containing what appeared to be lab instruments, a machine shop that DJ said was probably for repairing and fabricating parts for the ship, and a gym with workout equipment that looked older than me. But no people. Nothing to indicate that there had ever been people on Qriosity other than us. I was ready to give up when I found a room marked “Storage.” DJ was investigating a locked door at the end of the corridor, so I went in without him.

  The storage room was filled with shipping containers each about the size of a steamer trunk and labeled across the front with a barcode and a name.

  “DJ! Check this out!” While I waited for DJ, I attempted to pry open the container belonging to J. Winters, but it was sealed tight, and I didn’t see a slot for a key or a pad to enter a code into.

  DJ was breathless when he dashed into the room, and his cheeks were flaming red. “What’s wrong?”

  “I think I found the crew’s personal belongings.” I stood aside so he could see the container in front of me.

  “Really?” he asked. “Are you going to open it?”

  “Nah. I thought I’d caress it gently and sing it a lullaby.” I rolled my eyes. “It’s locked.”

  “Oh.”

  I looked around the room and read off the names on the other containers. “A. London, C. Dietrich, P. Stamper, R. Douglass, A. Sass, K. Jackson, C. Roehrig. These must belong to the crew—”

  “But then where’s the crew?”

  I ignored the question and focused my attention on the chest. “Why won’t you open?” I slammed my fist on the lid and swore when it resisted my attempts to break into it.

  DJ cleared his throat. “Maybe we should leave them be. Besides, they might be full of personal stuff.”

  “So what? Were you a Boy Scout or something?”

  “Well, yeah,” DJ said. “But I don’t see how—”

  I stood and posed for DJ with my arms held out. “Do you see this outfit? I look like I’m about to service your car, and I’m wearing underwear with someone else’s skid marks in them. So if there are better, cleaner clothes in these trunks, I’m going to get to them one way or another.”

  “I get it,” DJ said. “I think you look fine. Good. I mean, you look nice.” He was blushing hard, and he wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Besides, we’re probably all of us wearing someone else’s underpants. I woke up wearing boxers, and I hate boxers.”

  I covertly pinched my arm to keep from imagining DJ in nothing but boxers, but the more I tried to avoid the mental image, the more detailed it became. “Whatever. I just want to wear something that doesn’t smell like my grandparents’ bathroom. Is that too much to ask?”

  DJ cocked his head and flashed those dimples at me. “How about we finish searching the ship, and then we’ll come back and figure out how to crack these open?”

  I shoved my hands in my pockets. “Fine.”

  “Hey, I promise, okay? I keep my promises, remember?”

  I should have been grateful, but DJ’s patience only got on my nerves. “Why are you so nice to me?”

  DJ shrugged. “I guess because I’ve got no reason not to be.”

  “I saw what you did,” I said. “That MediQwik thing showed me how you saved my life.”

  “CPR’s easy—”

  “No, I saw everything. You put on a suit and jumped out of the airlock to rescue me. You don’t even know me and you risked your life to save mine, which means you’re either a superhero or a super fre
ak.”

  “I only did what needed to be done.” DJ’s shoulders bowed inward like he was trying to make himself small. “Besides, you wouldn’t have needed saving if I’d waited for you to get into the airlock before shutting down the reactor.”

  “I said it was okay. I don’t blame you, and you shouldn’t blame yourself.” The last thing I needed was DJ following me around like a puppy, trying to make up for some imagined wrong.

  “It’s not a big deal,” DJ said. “And you would’ve done the same.”

  I lashed out with a trenchant laugh. “I most definitely would not have.”

  DJ glanced up at me through his lashes. “When you’re in the moment, you find yourself doing things you never thought you could. I think you’re capable of more than you know.”

  “Maybe that’s true,” I said. “But I still wouldn’t have jumped out of the ship to save you or Jenny or anyone.” DJ couldn’t hide the hurt on his face. Every word was a knife wound, and I hated hurting him, but I couldn’t stop. “It’s got nothing to do with you. You’re cute and sweet, and if I saw you sitting alone in a bookstore, I’d maybe engineer some way to accidentally run into you so that we could talk and exchange numbers and go out…” I stopped and coughed. “I guess what I’m saying is that I like you well enough, it’s just that I like me more.”

  It was an awful thing to say, especially to someone who had leaped into danger to rescue me, and I didn’t know why I felt the need to tell him. I convinced myself that DJ deserved the truth and that he had a right to know where he stood, but I think it was just easier to push him away than to admit that there was a small part of me that was maybe glad I’d woken up in space. That, dying aside, meeting DJ was probably the most alive I’d felt in a long time.

  I expected DJ to hate me. I expected him to call me selfish, to storm off, to even take a swing at me, despite his claim that he was a pacifist. I wouldn’t have blamed him. It would have hurt, but he would’ve been justified. What he did was so much worse, though. He nodded slowly, looked at me, smiled, and said, “It’s cool; I get it.”