A Complicated Love Story Set in Space

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  I didn’t know what she meant by “cancel,” but I had a few guesses.

  “Can’t you delete her?” Jenny asked DJ.

  “Silly children,” Jenny Perez said. “You have no control here. Your lives are ours. Your ship is ours. You can’t even turn off the lights without Production’s permission.”

  I looked to DJ for confirmation, and he clenched his jaw and nodded.

  Jenny had been wrong. We didn’t always have a choice. At least, we didn’t always have a good choice. Either we submitted or Production would force us to submit.

  “We would also like Ty returned to us,” Jenny Perez said.

  “Can we…” I glanced at DJ and Jenny. They looked as unsure as I felt. “Can we have some time to discuss it?”

  Jenny Perez seemed to give it a moment’s thought. “Qriosity engages the Trinity Labs Quantum Fold Drive in seventeen hours. Production will be awaiting you at your destination and will expect your compliance at that time.” She pulled her magnifying glass out of her pocket. “Don’t try anything silly because we are always watching you. And yes, that does include in the showers.”

  “I knew it!” I said.

  The hologram scattered, leaving us alone. But we weren’t really alone, and I couldn’t forget that. Someone was always observing us, expecting us to perform. Every joke, every fight, every kiss would feel scripted for someone else’s pleasure and consumption. Production and the audience probably knew more about me than I knew about myself.

  “Jenny Perez is officially my nemesis,” Jenny said. “They better change the name of this program to Jenny’s Gonna Cut a Bitch, because I swear to God that when I find Jenny Perez, I am going to cut that bitch.”

  It was difficult to put my conflicted feelings for DJ aside, but we had some decisions to make. “Does this mean Jenny Perez is in charge?”

  DJ wrinkled his nose and furrowed his brow, looking uncertain. “I don’t even think she’s real. She might think she’s real, but I think she’s a computer program. Maybe a digital reconstruction of an actress named Jenny Perez who might have been real at one time.”

  “Are you serious?” Jenny said.

  “Why not?” I said. “After space schools and time loops and aliens, a fake Jenny Perez makes total sense.” I turned back to DJ. “So if Jenny Perez isn’t in charge, who is?”

  “Production,” DJ said.

  “And they are?”

  DJ hesitated, then spread his hands. “I don’t know.”

  Jenny leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest. “They’re not taking my memories. They’re mine, I made them, and I’m not giving them up.”

  “Same.” Everything that occurred before I opened my eyes in the spacesuit outside Qriosity might have been fake or might have belonged to someone else, but the memories I’d made from that moment forward were real. Those memories, not the ones from before, told me who I was and who I wanted to be. Eventually, I was going to have to reconcile the stolen memories with the memories I had created, but I refused to let Production take anything else from me.

  DJ’s eyes motioned toward the ceiling. “What can we do? The only weapon we have is Ty’s pistol, and no matter what we come up with, Production will be ready for it.”

  “Actually,” I said, thinking about Ty’s weapon, “I might know a way we can talk privately. But we’re going to need warm coats.”

  FOUR

  A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, DJ, Ty, Jenny, and I were sitting in the back of the shuttle, floating a few hundred meters off the port bow of Qriosity. Jenny had cut power to all systems, including heat, and the temperature was dropping rapidly.

  Ty held the phone-shaped device he’d used to stop the Teachers at Beta Cephei High. “Are you certain about this?” He’d been surprised when we’d asked him to help, but not quite as surprised as DJ and Jenny had been when I’d suggested the plan.

  “Why’re you looking at me?” I asked, pulling my jacket tighter around my shoulders.

  Jenny smacked my arm. “Because it was your idea!”

  “Do it,” DJ said. “The shuttle’s powered down, so the EMP will only fry equipment that’s still on, which includes anything Production is using to monitor us.” He quickly added, “But we’ve only got about forty minutes of oxygen—”

  “How do you know?” Ty asked.

  “The cubic meters of the inside of the shuttle converted to liters of air, divided by the number of liters we each consume per minute—”

  “It’s math,” I said. “Trust him.” I was less worried about suffocating than I was about freezing, and I was already wearing two coats.

  Ty activated his device, but nothing seemed to happen. It was kind of disappointing. He set it aside and rubbed his wrists where the restraints had cut into his skin. He looked uncomfortable sitting between the person he had shot and the person he meant to shoot, and I almost felt bad for him.

  “Did it work?” I asked.

  Jenny pinched Ty’s arm and twisted the skin. “It better have.”

  “It did!” he yelped.

  DJ cleared his throat. “This is your show, Noa. What’s your plan?”

  “Uh, this was it.” I glanced at them. “Get to the shuttle, where we could talk without being watched. I was hoping one of you could come up with a way to keep us from having to submit to Production’s memory-rewrite thing.”

  “Oh,” DJ said. “I just thought you might’ve—”

  Ty interrupted. “Are you certain JP said they intended to dissect me?”

  With Ty’s usefulness ended, I ignored him. Jenny did too. “We have to do something,” she said. “I’d rather die again than let them poke around in my brain.”

  “Was Jenny Perez serious about us having no control over the ship?” It was difficult talking to DJ, working with him, and not acting like I wanted to hug him and hold his hand and hear him tell me we were going to solve this problem. In a way, it was like Production had already reverted us to versions of ourselves who didn’t know each other.

  DJ nodded solemnly. “I’ve been trying this whole time to crack the hold they have over Qriosity, but I haven’t made any real progress because there’s nowhere on the ship they’re not watching.”

  “Which is gross, by the way,” Jenny said. “And illegal. Isn’t it illegal for them to watch us shower and go to the bathroom?”

  Ty rolled his eyes. “It hardly matters. Production isn’t people.” When I looked at him blankly, he said, “You do understand that, right? Production is an algorithm, or an artificial intelligence, if that makes it easier to comprehend. The point is that Production isn’t having a wank watching you lather up in the shower.”

  “We’re being held captive by a computer program?” Jenny asked.

  “That actually makes sense,” DJ said.

  Jenny threw up her hands. “On what planet?”

  The shuttle was cooling off far quicker than I expected it to, and a shiver shook my body. “Can we please focus? I’m freezing.”

  “Maybe we can hack MediQwik,” DJ said. “That’s what they’ll use to rewrite our memories. If we can make it fake the memory procedure, it might buy us some time.”

  “Can you do that?” I asked, shifting my gaze between Ty and DJ.

  Ty shook his head. “I can disassemble MediQwik, but I haven’t the faintest idea how to reprogram it.”

  “I could,” DJ said. “Maybe. Fifteen hours isn’t very long, though.” Even though it was his idea, he did not sound optimistic.

  “Is there any part of the ship that we do control?” Jenny asked. She dug a Nutreesh bar from her pocket.

  “You’re not seriously going to eat that, are you?” Ty wore a look of horror as he watched Jenny unwrap the Nutreesh.

  “Is it roaches?” I asked. “I tried telling her it was probably roaches. Is it worse than roaches? It’s people, isn’t it?”

  “Nutreesh isn’t made from roaches,” Ty said. “Or people. At least, not that I’m aware of. But Gleeson Foods is your program
’s biggest sponsor. Every one of those that you eat is more free advertising for them.”

  DJ cleared his throat to regain our attention. “Every system is controlled and monitored by Production. Navigation, communications, the reactor, Mind’s Eye. Even the equipment in the kitchen. You couldn’t bake a cake if Production didn’t want you to.”

  I laughed bitterly as a thought occurred to me that I felt foolish for not realizing sooner. “We’re not skipping randomly through space, are we? We’re not lost.”

  “No,” DJ said.

  “What about the shuttle?” Jenny asked. “We turned off the power. Doesn’t that indicate that we have control over it?”

  I looked expectantly at DJ. “Well?”

  “Sure,” DJ said. “But the shuttle isn’t connected to the ship, so I’m not sure how helpful it’s going to be. It doesn’t have a fold drive like Qriosity does; even if we stole it, we’d die long before we reached the nearest habitable planet.”

  “So we’re screwed,” I said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  Jenny shivered. Ty slipped out of his jacket and hung it over her shoulders, which wasn’t nearly as surprising as her letting him do it.

  We sat in that cold, dark shuttle in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I kept hoping that inspiration would fill the cramped space with its light, that someone would conceive of a brilliant plan to save us from the fate that we seemed on an unavoidable collision course with. But our silence only filled the shuttle with the stench of defeat.

  “Nothing?” I asked, looking around. “Seriously?”

  “I’m sorry, Noa,” DJ said. “I’m so sorry.”

  FIVE

  I DIDN’T WANT TO SPEAK to DJ, but I also desperately wanted to talk to him. So I was both annoyed and grateful when he peeked his head into the galley, saw the absolute disaster I was standing in the middle of, and didn’t immediately run away.

  “Noa?”

  DJ’s distorted reflection in the chrome cabinet doors was a misshapen blob staring back at me. “I’m not interested in shouting at you from across the room.”

  He turned to leave.

  “What do you want, DJ?”

  DJ trudged into the kitchen, his hands shoved in his pockets, his shoulders rolled forward. “You’ve been busy.” He wasn’t wrong. I’d been baking since we’d returned from the shuttle, and there wasn’t a square centimeter of counter space that wasn’t covered with chocolate splatter or flour or wasn’t stacked with mixing bowls.

  “Baking calms my nerves.”

  “Nothing about this kitchen says calm.” DJ’s eyes slid over everything but me. “It looks like a bomb detonated.”

  “Under the circumstances, I’m not sure what you were expecting.” I was busy folding ground almonds and powdered sugar into the meringue I’d finished whipping moments before DJ had shown up. “But I suppose baking is only a coping mechanism because Production decided it should be. They chose the recipes that are rattling around in my brain.”

  “I told you,” DJ said. “Production doesn’t invent the memories. They remix them from the memories harvested from others. Everything you experienced happened to someone.”

  “You know that makes it worse, right?” Folding the batter was a delicate process. I had to be careful not to knock the air out of the meringue. It was probably the only reason I wasn’t shouting and throwing things. “These memories belong to someone who doesn’t know they’re missing but probably still feels their loss. What memories am I missing, DJ? What did Production steal from me? What else are they going to steal from me?”

  DJ approached the worktable from the other side. He didn’t speak while I worked, slowly and gently folding the batter to the right consistency.

  “What’re you working on?” he asked.

  “Macarons.”

  “Aren’t they difficult to make?”

  “Not really,” I said. “They only contain four ingredients: powdered sugar, ground almonds, egg whites, and white sugar. But they’re delicate and can be fussy. If one side of the oven is a degree or two hotter than the other, it could ruin the batch. If you over-fold or under-fold the batter, they won’t come out properly. If you don’t let them sit long enough, or if you let them sit too long…” I shrugged. “Okay, I guess they are difficult. But they’re worth it.”

  DJ craned his neck to peer into the bowl where the violet mixture was just about the consistency of lava. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a macaron before.”

  I laughed. “Neither have I. My brain only thinks I have.” I handed DJ a piping bag to hold open so that I could spoon the batter in. Then I squeezed out little macaron blobs into the waiting trays. The first time I banged the pan on the counter, DJ gave me a strange look. “You have to do this to force the air bubbles to rise to the surface. Otherwise they’ll expand in the cookie and ruin it.” I motioned at the other tray.

  The violence of the act was satisfying. I didn’t have to be careful with this part. DJ was smiling too. After a few good bangs, I leaned over and pricked any errant bubbles with a toothpick.

  “Done,” I said. My back ached from bending, but the batter was smooth, the color vibrant, and they hadn’t spread much after I’d piped them. Mrs. Blum would have been proud.

  “You’re not putting them in the oven?” DJ asked.

  “They need time to form a skin.” I untied my apron and hung it on the hook before leaning against the counter.

  DJ stood less than a meter away, watching me. Staring at me. His eyes were glassy with tears that wouldn’t fall. “I did what I did for us,” he said.

  “You lied to me. Kept secrets from me.”

  “Only to protect you.” DJ inched closer, and I had nowhere to go. “I have never lied about my feelings for you.”

  I laughed bitterly. “Only about everything else.” But since learning the truth, I’d thought back over my time on Qriosity, I’d scrutinized every decision DJ had made, and I’d found nothing I would have done differently if our positions had been reversed.

  “I can’t go back,” I said. “I’m not sure about my past, but all I have is who I am right now. I won’t let them take that from me.”

  DJ chewed on his thumbnail. “There’s one other thing I haven’t told you.”

  “Seriously?”

  My incredulity tore into DJ, but he was prepared for the blow. “It’s something Jenny Perez showed me when she was threatening to lobotomize you.”

  DJ paused, but I was done with secrets. “Get on with it,” I said.

  “The Arcas wasn’t the first time we’d met. We were on two other programs before that one—a musical crime show and an apocalyptic private school drama. We were only background characters, created to die tragically; we didn’t even have names. But we found each other. We met and we fell in love.”

  The implications of what DJ was saying were potentially huge, and I couldn’t wrap my brain around them. How many times had we done this? How many times had we been created and killed? How many lives had we lived?

  “Jenny Perez told me about our previous lives because she thought knowing she’d separated us over and over would hurt me, but it did the opposite, Noa. It proved to me how powerful we are together. It showed me that no matter what our names are or whose memories we have or where we are or what’s trying to kill us, we will find each other.” DJ had nearly closed the space between us.

  “Do you think… do you think we knew each other before?” I asked. “Back on Earth?”

  DJ nodded. “I do. I think I’ve always known you. I always will.”

  “What if Production separates us?”

  “They won’t,” he said. “We’re ratings gold.” DJ smirked and my knees wobbled. He moved to touch me.

  I pressed my hand against his chest. Pushed him away. “I can’t, DJ. Not right now.”

  “Noa—”

  “I don’t know how to get past this, DJ,” I said. “Living on Qriosity has proven that, given enough time, anything strange can bec
ome normal. So I could eventually get used to a head full of memories that aren’t mine or the knowledge that I’m on some weird program. But you lied to me, DJ. How do I get over that?”

  DJ raked his hands through his hair. He was so perfectly disheveled and broken. “I made you a promise to never leave you, and I kept it. I won’t apologize for that, Noa.”

  “It’s just—”

  “What do you want me to do?” DJ asked. “Do you want me to get in the shuttle and give myself up to Production? If you tell me to do it, I will.”

  I rolled my eyes. “What? No. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I would trade my life a thousand times for yours, Noa.”

  “What if I don’t want you to?” I said, raising my voice. “How is that fair to me? You go off and die heroically, leaving me alone. Leaving me to live the rest of my life without you. I don’t want that, DJ. I don’t ever want to live without you.” The words poured out of me, and I couldn’t stop them. I didn’t try.

  “You’re the one who jumped in front of a laser blast,” DJ shot back. “How is it fair that you get to risk your life for me but I can’t do it for you?”

  “It’s not,” I said. “Deal with it.”

  DJ moved toward me again, and this time I didn’t push him away. “I love you, Noa. I understand if you can’t forgive me, and I understand if you don’t feel the same way anymore. But I will never stop being in love with you. Our story never ends; our story is always just beginning.”

  Production had intended to punish DJ by making me bitter. By making me the boy who was born with a broken heart. By making me afraid to trust. Afraid to love and be loved. My entire history was designed to ensure that I never fell in love with DJ. And yet, I did. Against all odds, I fell in love with him, and those feelings might have been the only ones I could trust. I didn’t know who I’d been, but I wanted to be the person DJ saw when he looked at me.

  DJ ran his finger along my cheek and down the curve of my jaw. “I love you, Noa.”

  I took DJ’s hand and pressed it to my heart. I let go of my anger, I let go of my fear. I let go of everything that wasn’t DJ.