A Complicated Love Story Set in Space

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  “Everything’s fresher in a Freshie,” Jenny sang. When she caught me and DJ staring at her, she said, “What? It says that every time you walk inside. Every. Single. Time. It’s stuck in my head now and forever.”

  We didn’t talk while we ate. The only noises were the scraping of forks and the happy sounds Jenny made each time she took a bite. There was a kind of normality to the meal that was relaxing until reality reminded me that we were on a spaceship.

  “Seeing as we’re all together,” I said, “I guess we should discuss what happens next.”

  “Then we’re not going to talk about how you spent a week stewing in your own sweat and depression?” Jenny asked.

  “Not if you want me to continue cooking,” I replied.

  “Hey now,” she said. “I’m the reason you’ve got clean clothes to wear.”

  “You cracked the locks on the crew storage containers?”

  Jenny beamed. “It wasn’t even that hard.”

  “Clearly, you two have been busy.”

  DJ quickly said, “Well, we were trying to learn what we could about Qriosity, though we weren’t going to do anything without discussing it with you first.”

  “Definitely not,” Jenny added with her mouth full.

  I understood that I’d made an ass of myself, and DJ and Jenny were tiptoeing around to make sure they didn’t set me off again, but I was embarrassed enough as it was and just wanted to skip past the awkwardness.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Did you learn anything?”

  DJ set his fork down and pushed his plate aside. “Here’s where we stand: communications work, but there’s no one out there. Someone, somewhere, might get our messages eventually, but since Qriosity only sticks around one place for nineteen hours—”

  “It’s useless to us,” I finished.

  DJ nodded reluctantly.

  “Sorry about it,” Jenny muttered.

  “We also found a small shuttle that looks like it was designed for short-range travel,” DJ said.

  I snorted. “Too bad we don’t have a pilot on board.”

  Jenny raised her hand. “Actually…”

  “You can fly a spaceship?”

  “No,” she said. “A Cessna 172. My mom was teaching me how to fly. I looked at the shuttle’s controls, and I think I might be able to figure them out. Maybe. I won’t know until I try.”

  Learning that Jenny knew how to fly a plane and maybe Qriosity’s shuttle definitely came as a shock, though maybe that said more about me than about Jenny. Either way, I wasn’t sure how useful flying would be since we didn’t have anywhere to fly to.

  “The rest of the ship seems to be working,” DJ said. “Except for navigation.”

  DJ and Jenny were passing a look between them that I couldn’t translate. But whatever was going on, it was making DJ anxious.

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “Is that why we’re jumping all over the place?”

  DJ nodded. “Think of it like Qriosity’s version of GPS. It’s trying to map us a way home, but it can’t do that until it figures out where we are.”

  I wanted to call DJ out for explaining it like I was five, but it was actually helpful. “So if we fix it, we can go home?”

  “Theoretically,” DJ said. I expected him to be a little more excited, but he looked like he was going to vomit.

  “What?” I asked. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Jenny threw up her hands, looking at DJ in disgust. “It’s outside the ship,” she said. “You have to go outside to fix it. It’s a two-person job, and there’s no way you’re getting me into one of those spacesuits. It will never, ever happen. Which means that you have to do it. You and DJ. But DJ’s been afraid to tell you because of what happened last time. He even tried to go out there by himself, but I stopped him.”

  DJ scowled at her. “She put laxatives in my morning smoothie. I don’t even know where she got them from.”

  Jenny laughed so hard she spit pancake. “Kept you out of the airlock, didn’t it?”

  “Because I couldn’t leave the bathroom for longer than ten minutes!”

  While Jenny and DJ argued like siblings, I sat with my hands folded on the table and tried not to panic. The mere suggestion that I go outside the ship again made my stomach clench. The pancakes I’d eaten might as well have been hot needles. I had nightmares about what I’d been through in space, but I hadn’t thought I’d ever need to go out there again. That was silly, of course. The longer we remained on Qriosity, the more likely it was that systems were going to malfunction. Systems like the coolant conduit that could only be repaired from the outside. I’d been a fool to think I’d never have to leave the ship.

  But how could I? How could I put on a suit and step out of the airlock? I literally died last time. I stopped breathing and my heart stopped beating and my brain starved for oxygen. If DJ hadn’t rescued me, my body would still be floating among the stars. So how could they ask me to go out there again? How could I consider doing it?

  Because I only had two options. The first was to help DJ fix the navigational array. The second was to return to the rec room, put on another episode of Murder Your Darlings, and remain on the couch until I pickled in my own juices.

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  DJ stopped speaking mid-sentence and turned to face me. “You don’t have to. We’ll find another way.”

  I had a fist-size lump in my throat as I spoke. “If we fix the navigation thing, will it tell us where we are?”

  “It should.” I didn’t care for the uncertainty in DJ’s voice, and he must have realized it because he said, “Nothing’s a sure thing, Noa, but it should work.”

  It wasn’t the reassuring optimism that I was looking for, but if DJ had believed strongly enough it would work that he’d been willing to attempt to repair it alone, then it would have to do.

  “Good enough,” I said. “We should get started.” I pushed back my chair and stood.

  “What?” DJ asked. “Now?”

  “Why not?”

  “Zero-G on a stomach full of pancakes?”

  “Yeah,” Jenny added. “That seems like a bad idea.”

  DJ and Jenny were probably right, but I didn’t want to wait. I couldn’t wait. Already, a voice in the back of my mind was whispering that this was a mistake and that I was going to die if I left the ship. The longer I listened, the more likely it was that I would lose my nerve.

  “We do this now or not at all.”

  DJ shrugged with his hands and gave me a weak smile. “Yeah, Noa, okay. It’s your call.”

  * * *

  The antechamber where the spacesuits were stored was shaped like an octagon with a locker in four alternating faces. But I couldn’t stop staring at the inner airlock door. It was shaped like an iris, round like a camera’s shutter. I imagined it opening, the air inside the room blasting out at the speed of sound, dragging me and DJ with it.

  “Something wrong with the hatch?” DJ asked.

  I had to tear my eyes away. “I’ve never seen it from this side.”

  “Oh.”

  I wished I hadn’t mentioned it. DJ was treating me the way my mom treated the Christmas china, looking at me like a sneeze could shatter me. I appreciated his concern, but it was making me more anxious instead of less. Finally, he lowered a bench from the wall and pulled off his sneakers.

  I opened the nearest locker. Each piece of the suit was secured to the inside, and there was a gray stretch garment hanging on the back of the door.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I asked. DJ looked at me, confused, so I added, “I woke up in the last one, but I don’t remember putting it on.”

  “Oh,” DJ said. “Yeah, right.” He pointed at the door. “The bodysuit goes on first, then the bottom section, top, boots, gloves, helmet. In that order. I can help you with the chest piece since it’s a little complicated.”

  I frowned skeptically at the stretch suit, which looked like it was sized for a small child. Wh
en I turned to ask DJ how I was supposed to fit into it, he was standing in his underwear.

  “Wow,” I said. “You are white. Are you sure you’re from Florida?” I hadn’t meant to catch DJ undressed, and it flustered me a bit. DJ was built like a Greek statue, with a broad chest, thick muscles, and a little pudge around his belly. He had a scar that ran along the bottom of his ribs on the left side.

  DJ tried to climb into his bodysuit so quickly that he stumbled into the wall. “I don’t tan,” he mumbled. “I burn and peel.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It slipped out. You have a very nice body. Not that I was looking. I mean, obviously I looked—I do have eyes—but I wasn’t ogling you. Not purposely. I’ll shut up now.”

  DJ kept his gaze lowered as he zipped up his suit. “You should get undressed,” he said. “Dressed. You should get into your suit.”

  “Are you trying to get me out of my clothes? You figure I’ve seen you, so now you should get to see me?” A memory surfaced, and I snorted. “Except, you’ve already seen me out of my clothes.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Someone undressed me and lifted me onto that table in the med suite.”

  “You were dead,” DJ said. “I wasn’t thinking about that stuff.” Whatever embarrassment he’d felt before evaporated. “Come on. The faster we do this, the faster it’s done.”

  I nodded, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the video. Seeing myself. My body. Dead. DJ trying to pump my heart. “I really hope I come back alive this time.”

  I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but I had, and DJ had heard it.

  “Me too,” he said.

  THREE

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE’RE not using the tether?” I stood on the hull, outside the airlock, with my hands on my hips, studiously avoiding looking out there.

  “You don’t have to yell,” DJ said. “I can hear you just fine.” He tapped the side of his helmet.

  I kept forgetting that DJ couldn’t see my facial expressions. How would he know that I wasn’t joking around if he couldn’t see the utter terror in my eyes? We’d managed the first time, when I initially woke up in the suit, and I was sure we’d figure it out again, but it wasn’t easy.

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  DJ made a motion in the air, and an image of Qriosity, complete with a blinking green dot at the rear and a red dot at the front, appeared on my hud. “The green dot’s us,” he said. “The red dot’s where we have to go. The tether isn’t long enough.”

  “But—”

  DJ patted his belt. “When we reach the navigational array, I have tethers for us to use while we work. Our boots will keep us secure while we’re walking.”

  “Yeah.” I laughed derisively. “My mag boots kept me real secure last time.”

  “That was a fluke.”

  “But what if it happens again?”

  “It won’t.”

  “But it might!” I said.

  DJ rested his gloved hand on my shoulder. I could only feel the subtle weight of it through my suit, but it helped. “I swear on my life that I won’t let anything happen to you, Noa.”

  The boy was a mystery to me. Protecting me wasn’t his job. Rescuing me wasn’t his job. Yet he treated both like they were. When he said he wouldn’t let me come to harm, I believed that he would throw himself into danger, no matter what it was, to keep that promise. And I didn’t know why. But I was grateful for it.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go. But if I get blown into space again, I’m taking you with me.”

  DJ unspooled the tether on his belt and attached it to me. A length of a couple of meters hung between us. When he was done, he said, “Where one of us goes, we both go.”

  Walking was a slow, laborious process, and I was happy to let DJ lead the way so that I didn’t have to worry about him seeing me struggle. DJ didn’t seem to have any problem, but I was huffing and breathing heavy after only a couple of minutes. I did a lot of walking back home, seeing as Mom wouldn’t let me drive, but this was like trudging through mud.

  “Thank you for doing this,” DJ said. “It can’t be easy for you being out here after you died last time.”

  “It’s not, and I’d appreciate talking about literally anything else.” I kept my head focused on DJ’s back so that I didn’t have to look at the stars, but that didn’t stop me from knowing that they were out there waiting to kill me.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Did you learn anything else about Qriosity while I was researching the murder mysteries of Anastasia Darling?”

  DJ snorted. “Is that what we’re calling what you spent the last week doing?”

  “Yes.”

  The mics in DJ’s helmet were sensitive enough that they picked up his laughter despite him trying to hide it. “It seems like Qriosity was meant to have a crew of at least twelve. That’s how many storage containers Jenny and I counted.”

  “I wonder where they are.”

  “Jenny’s got a couple of theories about that,” DJ said. “She took an inventory of the ship’s supplies, and she said there were at least four spacesuits missing.”

  “Missing?”

  DJ’s helmet moved a little, and I figured he was shaking his head, though I couldn’t be sure from the back. “She thinks some crew might’ve been in their suits when whatever catastrophe happened to us occurred.” DJ held out his hands. “But that’s just speculation. We still don’t know anything more about what happened to us or why we’re here than we did a week ago.”

  It was too much to hope that DJ and Jenny had unearthed the secrets to everything while I sat on the couch and wallowed in self-pity. “What do you do all day?”

  “I don’t know what Jenny does,” DJ said. “But I’ve been using my time to study Qriosity.”

  “And?” I asked. “What have you discovered so far?”

  “It’s a ship.”

  I laughed loudly and then slapped my helmet while trying to cover my mouth. Wearing it took some getting used to.

  “I wish I had more to tell you,” DJ went on. “But it’s like every scrap of information that might help us is gone. Qriosity’s entertainment library is full of programs starring Jenny Perez, and the database has repair manuals for every system on the ship, but anything relating to the crew or their mission is gone. And not just gone, but deleted. I can see the holes where those files are supposed to be.”

  I wished that surprised me. It seemed we’d been given everything we needed to survive but not much else. “What about cameras? When I asked MediQwik how I’d died, it pulled up video of you performing CPR on me in the airlock. Maybe there are some earlier recordings.”

  “The recordings begin the moment we woke up,” DJ said.

  “Figures.”

  I wanted to scream. Our past was hidden from us; our future was on autopilot. Even trying to fix the navigational array felt futile because I was sure that, even if we succeeded, we’d run into another complication. And then another, on and on forever.

  “I’m glad you stopped being sad,” DJ said. “Jenny really is an awful cook. She tried making lasagna, and it somehow came out raw and charred at the same time.”

  Jenny’s voice piped into my helmet. “You know I can hear you, right?”

  “Now I do,” DJ said. “But you have to admit that lasagna was a crime against humanity.”

  “Fine,” Jenny said grudgingly. “It was terrible. But, in my defense, I warned you that it would be. If you need someone to beat a difficult level in a video game, I can do that. If our lives depend on answering trivia about aquatic mammals, obscure anime, or eighteenth-century Russian history, you’ll want me on your side.”

  “Don’t forget your unexpected lock-picking abilities,” I said. “Without which, I would still be stuck wearing a onesie that didn’t fit.”

  “That was luck,” Jenny said. “And boredom.”

  I happened to look up and caught an eyeful of stars. A sea o
f lights out there waiting to swallow me. An inky ocean, vast and hungry. I wavered, and my heart rate alarm went off.

  “Hey, Noa. What do you think you’d be doing right now if you were back on Earth?” DJ’s voice cut through the terror and nausea. It pulled me back from the abyss.

  My voice was shaky when I replied. “What time is it?”

  “A little after ten,” DJ said. At the same time, Jenny said, “Does it matter? The way we measure time is a construct. A fiction that we agreed to share.”

  “Uh, sure,” DJ said. “But how about for the sake of the discussion, we pretend it’s ten in the morning?”

  Jenny sucked in a breath like she was definitely going to argue the point, so I quickly said, “I guess I’d be in Mrs. Ahmed’s class for AP English.”

  “Of course you’re an English nerd,” Jenny said.

  “Stories put me to sleep,” DJ said. “Math on the other hand—”

  “I can’t do math,” I said. “The numbers get jumbled in my brain.”

  “Dyscalculia.”

  “What?” Jenny and I said at the same time.

  DJ cleared his throat. “Dyscalculia. It’s like dyslexia, but for numbers.”

  I’d never heard of it before. “My teachers have always blamed it on me being lazy.”

  “You’re not lazy,” DJ said. “Your brain just functions differently. There are tricks you can learn to make it easier to work with numbers. I can show you a couple sometime.”

  “Thanks.” In all the years I’d struggled with math, DJ was the first person to suggest that the problem was something other than me not trying hard enough. “What about you? What are you awful at?”

  “Singing,” Jenny blurted out, which made me laugh. When DJ tried to argue, she added, “I can hear you when you’re in the shower.”

  “I’m not that bad,” DJ said.

  “I hate to agree with Jenny…”

  “Wow,” DJ said. “You’ve only been out of the rec room for a few hours, and you’re already ganging up on me.”

  “You brought this on yourself,” I said.

  “Speaking of ganging up on something,” Jenny said. “Unless you need me, I’m going to go gang up on the rest of those pancakes.”