Work Text:
Shortly after turning twelve years old, following a solid two months of work and a few years of reading opaque manuals, you are finally able to activate the long range communicator. At the time, you’re young enough that you have to grit your teeth to avoid doing something stupid, like tearing up with satisfaction or whooping with victory.
It’s just a terminal and a screen and a keyboard, nothing fancy. For all you know, the world outside is full of the kinds of technology that make system-to-system communication a decently streamlined experience. Whatever purpose this mining station served, it was not the height of advancement.
Still, it’s more than you’ve had.
You look down at the keyboard, well aware that anybody could be at the other end. Reflexively, you’re already taking your mobile communicator from your pocket to contact Roxy.
TT: It works.
TG: :O
TG: DIRK I’M SO FUCKING PROUD!!!
TG: lookit u go
TG: fixin terminals
TG: you are a fuckin WIZARD with these terminals
TG: <|B)
TG: thas u as a wizard!!!!
Even at twelve, compliments are a mixed bag.
TT: Thanks. Not a big deal, really.
TT: But do you think it’s safe?
TG: lol NO who are we kiddin
TG: but
TG: maybe its worth it?
TG: we dont know who else is out there
TG: and may b they r just as lonely as us?
TG: seems improbable but its true
TT: I see your point.
TG: i think u should do it
TG: fucked up but true
TG: hell i think sometimes
TG: roxy whats the WORST thing that could happen if u hit up the fourth address
TG: BEFORE YOU STRIDER LECTURE ME IM NOT GONNA
TT: Don’t.
TT: It’s the definition of not worth it. At least whoever’s positioned at this one seems as isolated as we are.
TT: I’d call it a calculated risk.
TT: Considering the circumstances, I highly doubt your mom would have directed me to anything less safe than everything else out there, but sending a message right into the hands of the Condesce is a step too far.
TG: yeah i said i didnt need a lecture
TG: but i also prob should have guessed that it would not have stoppedt u <3
TG: good luck dirk and lmk how it goes
TG: DIRECT ME TO THEM i need someone to talk to who isnt a chess guy or halfway into a fatherly lecture @ all times
TG: looooooooove u
You have known Roxy for as long as she has been able to operate a subspace communicator, which is when she learned to read and input the meticulous location codes left to her by her mother, under the category of trustworthy contacts.
You have also known Roxy for long enough to have come to trust that nothing of what she says is a lie. Your bro and her mom really did work together; they did, against all odds, collaborate to oppose – and die opposing – the Skaian Federation’s pro-Condescension leadership, and eventually Her Condescension herself. Roxy’s mother did leave her a list of location codes, instructions for contacting – somebody. You, and two somebody elses.
You assume that the contacts list is entirely composed of your guardians’ potential collaborators. No names are listed, but your list of potential candidates is headed by Jade English, founder of Skaianet, who’d been one of the only figures with enough social power to speak out against the takeover as it happened. She had also all but disappeared six years prior to the present.
Roxy says she had assumed, when she was old enough to know what the location codes were but still too young to know the right search terms, get into the right locked places to know the history, that your bro – she had called him by his first name, a too-naive, not-naive-enough girl typing out yo is this dave – would be on the other side of her screen.
These days, she and you hold no such illusions. The other collaborators’ locations, if they were even that, could either contain anybody or nobody at all. One, apparently, lands you on the Federation homeworld - not safe enough, no matter what protocols Roxy has promised to take. You, at any rate, have never texted it.
You think Roxy would tell you if she had, but you’re not quite sure. She’s joked about it a bit too often.
The other, with the hardware each of you had access to, was too far away. Until now.
The floor of the station’s control room hums slightly beneath you, cold and metallic; the angle of the terminal makes a sharp, straight angle against your half-curved back. The computer attached to the long-range terminal is downloading Pesterchum; dated technology, but still safer than anything else you’ve got access to.
Above you, through the viewport, the stars blink. Mocking. Warning. The stripped-down mining planet this station orbits isn’t visible through this window right now, and this is almost worth regretting. You’d rather stare at a miserable little shell of a planet than endless, empty void, filled with people who may or may not know or care that you exist.
It is not a nice space station. The planet below is a mining outpost, stripped bare; it does not support life of any kind. This station was where the technicians worked; ready to hone in on and beam up any machinery that was functioning improperly. It is likely that its transporter was not even calculated for human use. Even if the planet, then, did support human life, there would be no point in trying. (You have at times continued anyway.)
Six-month shifts, you’d read in its introductory materials; it had been considered a tough job. Sometimes this functions as a pretty great joke.
In the way of entertainment, there are archived versions of what was apparently a crowdsourced encyclopedia widely used by the Federation; an extended variety of ebooks and audiobooks from several cultures; several religious texts. A half-broken holodeck. Two communicators; one short-range, for planets within the system, which you had used to contact Roxy. And one, which. Well.
TT: Hello.
TT: This is a memo dedicated to determining the holder of these coordinates.
TT: Please respond if at all possible.
It only takes a few moments.
GT: Oh my.
GT: Is this perchance a mysterious message from the distant reaches of space?
GT: Holy mackerel THIS is an event ive been looking forward to for a long time.
Considering how this is more-or-less the opposite of how you responded when Roxy contacted you (a chatlog you hope has been lost to history on both ends), this is a surprise. You wonder if GT had your coordinates; you wonder if they, too, had been unable to contact you. The small odds that Jade English was alive and hiding somewhere, and that you still had access to her location, feels significantly smaller. This is not an old woman’s typing style.
Of course, you lack almost all of the facts. There’s no need to eliminate possibilities yet.
TT: Are you saying you’ve been expecting me to contact you?
GT: I wasnt.
GT: Not you specifically anyway but a man cant just assume hes marooned in space for the rest of time can he?
GT: You have to believe theres SOMEONE on the other end of these gazillion computers who knows who you are even a little! Believing otherwise could drive even the bravest and boldest among us off the deep end.
This approach had not occurred to you; the person on the other end of this conversation is almost definitely not Jade English.
Your correspondent is typing again, and the text makes you cringe a little.
GT: So who ARE you?
GT: Are you an agent of her condescension or perhaps an unattended lady stranded on an outpost of her own?
TT: Not a lady, dude, sorry to disappoint you.
TT: Though the latter assessment is accurate aside from that point.
TT: Who are you?
TT: I don’t think an agent of Her Condescension would start a conversation this laughable, so I’m reducing that likelihood on your end.
GT: Im jake!
GT: Lone resident of planetary outpost number im not telling you mister until you prove yourself an honorable confidante.
TT: I’m Dirk, then, “Jake”.
TT: I guess I’m on outpost number I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours and we both have verifiable ways of proving each other’s trustworthiness.
GT: Well not alls lost! Surely theres some other tantalizing identityhints that two lone ranger space gentlemen can dangle in front of each other.
TT: I guess there are.
TT: Listen, I’ll get back to you in a bit. I have to run a few tests with a friend, see if either of our safeties are being compromised.
TT: Your use of ‘agent of her condescension’ acts as a subtle hint that you are not presenting yourself as such.
TT: I want to trust you, but if you really do oppose the Condesce, I think you understand the importance of caution.
GT: Yeah of course. It would be a positively dunderheaded move to speak man to man without ensuring were both trustworthy first.
GT: Its like my grandma always used to say.
GT: Well she said a lot of things actually im not the kind of gollumpus whod boil a lady of many talents down to a singular catchphrase! But among her many nuggets of elderly wisdom were a whole lot of top notch tips for surviving life under her condescensions federation.
GT: Nothing comes in as useful as a good survival tip don’t mind if i tell you haha.
GT: But im getting ahead of myself.
GT: Youll come back?
TT: Sure, bro.
TT: I’m not exactly rich in company either.
Later that night, you’ll be verifying the originating address as a decade-old computer, Skaianet model, no longer in production; wondering if you are even important enough to be worrying about the Empire’s designs or lack of designs on you; wondering whether you will ever stop being the object of an elaborate cosmic joke.
Rereading the log against your will, you will make a face at the last line, which will strike you as far too honest.
-
Your second conversation presents a question you should have expected.
GT: Hi dirk.
GT: Before we can verbally jaunce about like the best of bros i do have a few questions ive cooked up.
GT: How did you know how to contact me for instance?
GT: Im not immune to a little mano a mano in the old earth culture discussion forums or even debating holoprograms if im feeling improvisational.
GT: But i certainly dont give people this handle.
TT: ...It’s complicated.
TT: Is the connection safe on your end?
GT: The frigging height of safety. Im offended youd even ask.
TT: It certainly seems that way, if my sense of your connections is right.
TT: Are you or were you in contact with Jade English?
For the half hour that follows, there is no response.
You wish you had routed this terminal to your handheld in advance; at least that way you’d be able to fiddle with something, lie down and stare at the screen and wait for a response. Instead, you are pacing around an empty operations room with your hands empty and your mouth sour at the prospect of losing the second real person-to-person communication you’ve experienced in your life. There is no real Internet connection here, not on a mining outpost; just old-fashioned subspace communication and the archives that got saved here as reading material. Standardized. Federation-wide literature, but really a good two parts Earth and its outposts, one part Carapacian, one part everything else.
The cultural bias of this should have bothered you. But if you had been born in a world with no Alternian Empire and no Skaian Federation, it’s Earth you would have been born on. This literature you would have read; come in contact with.
You have read through a million histories of the Federation’s expansion. First contact with the Carapacians; the organization of a unified power in the form of the Skaian Federation, named after the star their homeworlds orbit. It has not slipped your mind in all of the flowery language contained in the Federation Constitution about intergalactic collaboration, in all its fervid celebrations of democracy, there is not a single mention of the expansionist empire next door, or any hypothetical safety that would come from uniting several smaller forces into a rival power.
Texts are like this; laden with under-meaning and over-meaning. Text and subtext and, most of all, context . You are to figure this out yourself or give up.
As you remember this, your hands begin to go still. You are reciting the words of the Federation Constitution to yourself, holding text and subtext and context in your head. You exist in a sea of words you cannot respond to. Whining about it when a chance to respond disappears is for fucking idiots.
It therefore catches you off-guard when Jake’s responded, in a series of fast-connected texts.
GT: Im not trying to be rude or break up whatever sterling repartee you and had going.
GT: But that doesnt seem like something you just ask a man right off the bat.
You retype your answer few times before having the guts to hit send.
TT: I’m sorry.
TT: That’s not something you’ll hear me say often.
What you would say, if you wanted to lose him altogether: I am very clever, and the way I achieve most things is through being clever, but there is nothing that drawing conclusions and balancing anticipations does for contacting someone in the middle of goddamn nowhere with any kind of sensitivity.
Instead, you explain. About you and Roxy, about her mom and your bro, about the location codes. You don’t mention the length of time you’ve stared at Jake’s code and imagined what could be on the other end.
GT: Then maybe you figured it out already what the connection is.
GT: Jade english was my grandma and shes dead.
GT: Thats pretty much all there is to say on the matter!
GT: Not so different from you and your bro from what you tell me.
GT: We are just a pair of guys whose living relatives have been wiped off the planet or the devilforsaken empty space station i guess. Just like in the first ten minutes of a movie. Thats what were in right now i guess but the good part will come around one day!
TT: That is sure as fuck one way to put it.
You wonder about the whiplash in tone. It would be far more cruel than you’re capable of to ask him how she’d died, and why, and whether he ever knew her or if, like you, Jake’s earliest memories are equivalent to your endless, empty steel hallways and the expanse of space outside of the viewpoint.
GT: You know if youd told me you were texting me as part of an authenticity-certified intragalactic mystery then you could have just told me.
GT: I would have gotten it a lot faster trust me!
TT: I don’t know if I’d call it a mystery.
TT: But I will keep that in mind.
TT: Or I would if I had anyone else to message. The last address is smack in the middle of Federation territory. Not outskirts like ours and Roxy’s.
TT: I’ll direct you to Roxy, incidentally.
GT: Jeepers. *smooths collar*
GT: You are a hell of a gentleman for that one.
GT: Two sparkling conversation partners in one day and you know what if im honest who knows if i can handle that sort of deplorably large choice of who im talking to and when.
GT: Its almost too much to think about.
GT: That is to say it would be for a lesser man than i.
TT: I think you’ll handle it fine.
TT: But you know where to find me if you choose to call for help.
-
A few weeks out from that first conversation, as you and Jake have casually navigated the entry-level waters of conversation, you learn from Roxy that Jake’s conversation with her does, indeed, go well. At the very least, she thinks he’s a total sweetheart lmao imagine if u had the range!
It is possible that she does not know this comment affects you at all. It is possible that she has not considered you as something with feelings to hurt, considering the degree to which you yourself hurt her on a semi-regular basis. This state of affairs is, in general, for the best.
All of a sudden, though, the prospect of sharing Jake and Roxy with each other makes its practical downsides eminently clear. It has not escaped you that your appeal to Roxy – unwelcome as it is – is a product of limited choice rather than genuine likeability. Your appeal to Jake – if it even exists at all – even moreso.
But there is no point in getting ahead of yourself. Remember the Federation Constitution or any other number of remembered texts. The worst that can happen is a return to the base state that you had already existed in.
Still, you text Jake.
TT: Roxy said the two of you met.
TT: Guess you didn’t need to call for help for all.
GT: I appreciated the offer bro though i cant imagine youd get there in time if i did.
GT: These here monsters can make quick work out of the bravest of adventurers.
TT: Monsters?
GT: Oh yeah i guess i didnt share that part!
GT: The thing there is to say about monsters...
GT: The thing there is to say about monsters is that there are a lot of them and you know what im no wet behind the ears newbie to the monster scene! And im as big a fan as any self-respecting film enjoyer of the movie moment where the sleek leading man mows them down with his fuck off enormous gun.
GT: But from a practical perspective the thing about that scene is that if it goes wrong it only needs to happen once.
GT: And im sure that what with your terminalfixing youd have found a quick tech solution to navigating this place and my grandma certainly would have.
GT: As it is well ive got my nice room and my gazillion backup computers and one day im sure ill figure out how to navigate this place or get somewhere else! No sweat about it.
Your fingers hover over the keyboard. You don’t know how to articulate what you’re feeling right now; not pity , that would be unfair. If Jake pitied you, you would hate this; instead, he is treating the two of you as equals. It is a violation to read any kind of fear into his texts because if it were you, you would resent any offer of help, because this would be yours to deal with, and nobody else’s –
He’s not you, though.
TT: Fixin’ a terminal or two isn’t the same isn’t the same as dealing with an island full of monsters.
TT: Figuring out hardware stuff isn’t that difficult. Anyone can do it.
TT: I’ll think about what you could do.
GT: Youre just gonna waltz into this chatlog and offer help three weeks into our storied acquaintance?
GT: Hubris is the greatest of all evils mr strider i dont see how you can figure that out from halfway across the galaxy.
TT: Is it really hubris? Or is the greatest of all evils making assumptions with insufficient evidence?
GT: Well just have to wait and see whos right.
He does this, now; injects your dialogue with little barbs that make you smile. In your first conversation, you had not thought him capable of it. Roxy’s estimation that Jake is a fucking sweetheart is not strictly inaccurate, but it is incomplete.
You like talking to him. You like it, after three weeks, a little bit more than you’d care to admit. The knowledge that, all this time, where you’ve assumed he was in a better place than you – the ability to navigate a breathable planet, the ability to step outside his room, the ability to look at anything other than terminals and emptiness and old, old web encyclopedia pages – he has been the same as you. Trapped in an enclosed space.
The two of you, enclosed. Separated. You wonder where he gets his belief that this can change.
You wonder why hearing him believe it makes you feel better.
-
TG: were fuckin POWER LESS dirk like thats not exactly hot off the presses breaking news
TG: no use worriying about being fuckin powerless if ur always gonna b fuckin powerless
TG: if i were my mom then like maybe wed have some kind of leg 2 stand on or i would
TG: as it is well
TG: whatever happens happens right lmao
There is not a single front on which you disagree with her on the hopelessness of your present situation, but you wonder why this kind of nihilism makes her feel better. She acts as if giving into this hopelessness is some kind of choice, that the uncontrollable nature of the universe is anything but a crushing inevitability.
You also wish that, after a conversation earlier today in which Jake described at length the Skaianet spaceship he knows is falling apart somewhere in the forest – the one he says he could learn to fix up one day if he tried really hard and believed in himself! – this conversation did not make you feel worse.
You don’t ignore texts, though; Roxy has as good as told you that the concept of being ignored at length makes her skin crawl. You can’t blame her, exactly. You might have even been there, once or twice.
TT: That is the nature of being twelve years old in an uncaring universe, yes.
TT: Roxy, is it okay if I step out for a bit?
TG: yea whatevs
TG: i got wizardfics to write
TG: chess guys to befriend
TG: oh i was a total bitch just now huh
TG: just in general actually supersonic levels of bitchiness are happening
TG: dirk im sorry :(
TT: You’re fine.
TT: You didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.
TT: We don’t exactly get to have good moods to ruin.
TG: idk if thats true
TG: thats not what i meant at all
TG: i have you n jake at least
TT: Yeah.
TT: Talk to you later, Roxy.
You put the portable communicator away. Your Jake-contacting terminal has been, thankfully, connected to it. There’s a part of you that wants to reread your earlier conversation, or text him again. Any conversation starter you put down on that page, though, will inevitably look desperate from your perspective.
You think of the long-preserved Wikipedia page for Mikhail Bakhtin. Earth theorist, early 20th century, Russian Formalist. Wrote The Dialogic Imagination .
You care more for comprehensiveness than depth; your core mission is to be informed and not to be bored, and jumping from idea to idea is far more engaging than an in-depth study into a man who had died hundreds of years ago. Still, though, some things resonate more than others. Even if Jake and Roxy cared about these things, you know deep down that you are not about to impress them by listing off philosophers, and privately, you can admit that this one has stuck.
You remember the Federation Constitution. In the world of language you have made for yourself, it is up to you to decide who is responding to whom, and what kinds of under-meaning you are missing.
You pick up the communicator. So much for having decided you wouldn’t.
TT: There’s this 20th-century Earth theorist named Mikhail Bakhtin who wrote at several points in his life that no speech act is made in isolation. Everything that we say or write is responding to something else we’ve heard, or addressing an audience that isn’t there in the moment but will be someday, and respond to what we’ve said sometime or someplace else.
TT: I’m sure that was true once, but from my perspective it’s bullshit. Does it count as a dialogue at all if you’re not contributing coherently to anything? If anything you’re responding to is, at best, decades out of date, can it count as a dialogue if no one can fucking hear you?
You hit send on both texts without thinking about it, which is not something you tend to do. Looking over it, it also wasn’t what you meant to tell him at all. Experimentally, you start typing again.
Which is to say, not to sound really fuckin’ maudlin, but it’s pretty cool to have somebody who *can* hear me. Which is you, in this case. Well, you and Roxy.
You stare at that message, typed out, for two seconds; then you delete it instantly. Jesus fucking christ. Who were you kidding?
Jake doesn’t text back. For a boy with an alleged 10,000 computers in his room, he sure is allegedly prone to disappearing entirely. So then it’s just you and the stars and the viewport, and you remembering what he’s told you of the monsters in his forest, for no fucking reason. As if Jake, without you to hear from occasionally, would forget he’s surrounded by things that want to kill him.
The human brain is a flawed thing.
-
GT: Mr strider.
GT: Apologies for not getting back to you on the dialogagism bakhtinundrum you were working out i was a tad preoccupied i guess.
GT: Well not really that busy but you know how it goes sometimes you see a text and you MEAN to answer it but youve got other stuff on the brain like a lot of stuff and it kind of…
GT: That is to say i was watching an absolute winner of a movie and i just forgot!
GT: It was a very interesting bit of philosobabble. Though i hope im not remiss in gently contributing that youve got ME to talk to old chap!
This explanation is hard not to be a bit unfairly annoyed by. After all, you think bitterly, what is the goddamn point of wanting to be alone if, as far as you understand (and you understand quite far, far to cover an entire deceptively empty galaxy), you are alone all the time.
But if Jake has come up with easier ways to deal with solitude than you, it’s not exactly rocket science that you should be happy for him. Hell, you should ask him to teach you a few tricks. You shouldn’t, that’d be fucking stupid. But you could. If you wanted to be fucking stupid and prove a point to yourself about the unfairness of resenting late responses.
TT: Yeah, you're good.
TT: What movie was it?
GT: Avatar! From 2009.
A paragraph-long pitch for Avatar ( from 2009!) follows. You are impressed despite yourself by Jake’s unending patience for this era’s cultural artifacts.
GT: And that neytiri. What a woman am i right.
TT: Alien women not too unfortunate of a topic for you, after everything that’s happened to the world lately?
GT: Dirk dont be a fucking xenophobe.
GT: Plenty of troll girls are just as oppressed by the troll girl in charge of them all as we are if not you know moreso because we are hanging out as kings on our empty planets and they have to participate in the whole hemocastism bullshit.
TT: Speaking of which, I’ve always wondered, what attracts you so much to that era of movies?
GT: Well i guess its protagonist is a pretty compelling archetype! Endearingly clueless adventure guy prone to a bit of blundering around but ultimately open to change through the power of love and whatnot. Who cant relate.
GT: Plus i love watching pre-first contact movies about any kind of aliens. Its nice to know weve been wrong about things right from the very start but also right about some things like that we WOULD sometimes end up showing up on nice jungle planets and nicely saying hey could we do some mining here and in exchange you can join our federation.
GT: Which really is not that different from her condescension’s whole schtick except she didnt ask nicely so i guess that makes a lot of difference?
TT: That... is very astute, Jake.
TT: You got all this from Avatar?
GT: Well i am capable of thinking about things sometimes even if i have never heard of a russian formalist.
GT: Anyway aside from formalisms whats been new in stridertown while weve both been partaking in hearty cultural enrichment through historical media?
TT: I’m trying to fix this holodeck.
You haven’t been inside here in ages, not since you’d broken it a year ago.
It had been your only-ever physical expression of anger, embarrassing as soon as you’d completed it. But you’d come into into what had once been your favorite place – the place that, realistically speaking, had been the only reason you’ve survived as long as you did – and realized the hollow falsehood of it all, light and alchemiters working at top speed to help you pretend you were anywhere other than where you were.
Worse had been remembering the holos your bro had made of himself speaking. Telling you he had left you here for the sake of your safety, and he expected to be back, but if you were watching this, he wasn’t, and he was sorry, and a whole lot of one-day-you’ll-understand adjacent bullshit, which you’d thought was laughable even as a kid. You understand perfectly well, and always have.
For a moment, the combined disillusionment and memory had infuriated you just the right amount. The hinge on the wall snapped open easily to reveal the engine that powered it, and you had precisely snipped at wire after key wire until the lights behind you flickered and died, and all that was left was another blank metal room in a maze of blank metal rooms.
Now you’re fixing it. For something to do, maybe. Or maybe because, at this point, the darkness of space and the metallic sameness of this station has begun to hurt your eyes.
GT: By gum i didnt even know you had a holodeck! Im not one to complain but i cant imagine how much one of the old things would brighten up my life.
GT: Swashbuckling adventure in REAL LIFE? Sign me up buster!
GT: Instead its all these quaint little “films” which do not get me wrong i think are fucking great.
GT: But it would be fun to just get to pretend to be a hero.
GT: Not that i need to pretend considering the realo-authentico jungle boy experience im having out here.
GT: But its nice to have options.
GT: Plus it would be nice to engage in a glorious round of fisticuffs or two with someone! Like real heroes do you know. Exploration era starship captains and the like.
GT: Theres the monsters but i dont know if they count considering they keep trying to kill me.
TT: No, that’s probably not ideal.
TT: I loved the holodeck as a kid. My bro left a few recordings of himself there and everything. And there’s some pure-scenery holos that taught me a lot. Based on the landscapes of Earth, Derse, Prospit, Alternia Prime, the works.
TT: Then I realized how far from real it was, and it all kind of lost its shine.
GT: Id not mind another thing thats not real.
GT: The whole point of holodecks is that you get to believe youre somewhere else for a bit! Its not different from a movie in that regard. Give you something to strive toward you know the deal.
GT: And if you cant believe it you get something else to look at at least.
TT: Yeah.
TT: I guess breaking it was a pretty stupid thing to do. It’s not really like me.
TT: In my defense, it was very old, and barely functional anyway.
TT: Didn’t take a lot of effort.
GT: Well im sure you can fix it up even better than before then!
GT: I believe in you.
TT: Huh.
TT: Thank you?
GT: No question about it bro.
-
GT: So why the transporter? Seems like a kind of unnecessary fixture if im being honest but i am no fancy space technician i will admit that.
Far before you’re done with the holodeck, it turns out the transporter had broken down all on its own. Every time you try to zero in on something on the planet’s surface, the metal disintegrates down below but doesn’t manifest up here.
Another bit of hardware to fix, then. No sweat.
Your bro had left you a room full of stuff - extra books, child-appropriate holoprograms, huge reader-friendly archives of Internet stuff the mining guys hadn’t preserved - in case the worst happened, you suppose, though most of the time it feels like nothing less than the fulfilment of a huge, shitty prophecy. (Leaving your broson a roomful of items he’d need in the event of your death feels a whole lot like saying your death is near-inevitable.)
The point is, the station itself, though he may not have meant it to be that way, seems like its own kind of “here, kid, twiddle your thumbs.”
It helps if you break your own holodecks, of course. But it’s fine. As you’ve asserted before, you like a project. Speaking of which – the text from Jake.
TT: I like a project.
TT: The more involved, the better.
TT: As a kid I used to break hardware just to fix it.
GT: Yeah that makes sense! What else is there to do i suppose.
GT: My grandma taught me a bit back in the day.
GT: So i know my way around assembling your occasional gizmo but i dont know how you do it with all those fiddly bits dirk thats a bit of brilliance right there.
TT: Again, it’s just the product of being incredibly bored, all the time, in a place where there isn’t much else to do.
TT: I read and I fuck with things.
TT: If I’d grown up around actual people, I’d still read and fuck with things, but possibly a more normal amount.
GT: If i had grown up around actual people id have seen just as many movies.
GT: Wed just have watched them together.
TT: Bro, your movies are shit.
GT: Oh man.
GT: The guy who thinks foucaults wikipedia page is entertaining has logged on to explain fun. Everyone watch out!
GT: Personally i think youd watch a few shitty movies if you were with me right now.
Jesus, Jake. The big guns for no reason. Let a man have his dignity.
All the shitty movies in the world, yeah, says a voice at the back of your head, where there is sometimes no dignity to be had.
TT: After some pretty expensive convincing, maybe you’d get me to go down that dark path.
TT: I’d wake up in the morning the next day, regretting it deeply. What have I done, I’ll be wondering. I can’t come back from this one.
GT: Youll never be able to that is true.
GT: You will forever be only human after this. A mere mortal who watches GREAT movies and doesnt complain about them or pick them apart.
GT: I bet youre the kind of guy who watches movies and says hey why are they running away from that rock in a straight line instead of sideways.
GT: Sitting there like a cinema savante pointing out little logical errors and then making a little ding each time cause youre counting them like a coin machine.
TT: Do we even still have those?
TT: Sometimes I think you were born in the wrong century.
GT: Yeah bro so both of us are.
GT: I think it would be super nice to be born in a century where a fish alien doesnt kill our poor innocent guardians.
TT: Our guardians participated in armed rebellion against an imperial power.
GT: Yeah but someone needed to do it right?
TT: Yeah.
TT: Someone needed to.
So the months go on. You and Jake prod at each other; make each other laugh, you hope. You learn what movies he watches in this span of time; always Earth in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If you were to try to analyze this, you’d wonder if something about that era reminds him of his grandmother, or if eschewing the allegedly brilliant highs of troll and Carapacian cinema indicates the desire to escape to an Earth neither of you could have ever lived on.
You and Roxy talk hardware and hacking, recall details of your ancestors to each other like a mantra. There are times when she comes on late at what passes as night for you, while you’re staying up to work, and says too much. In turn it is met with you saying too little, or the things she doesn’t want to hear, in return. Sometimes you want to shut off the communicator for just an hour; you never do.
Silence would be untenable. No matter what else it is, what you and Roxy have is vital for the access to dialogue that it provides. No matter what else you and she do to each other, you will not deny her the tiny, inadequate place in that world you can offer her.
The holodeck starts working again, though sometimes it flashes bright lights in your face when you test it, or corrupts the images in front of you into a garbled mess. The transporter is fixed; its designated room becomes littered with the dated mining robots you’ve beamed up and taken apart for parts.
Your conversations with Jake about fisticuffs and fiddly bits gives you an idea, which is useless until you research long-range transporters.
Your research brings you to the revelation that, last you heard of it, prototyped Imperial technology had developed the capacity to transport objects far enough for it to suit your purposes. It only works within a certain tiny mass ratio, but that fits your purposes.
You try it on Roxy first.
TT: Did you get it?
TG: yea a shitty piece of metal
TG: guess ur surrounded by them so it wont be missed
TG: can i ask what the point was
TG: are you outsourcin this shit
TG: like
TG: sendin out dumb little chunks of metal one by one to clear up the space in your space station
TG: SPRING CLEANING!!!
TG: everything MUST go!
TT: Yeah. Something like that.
It is not like that.
TG: is your shitty piece of metal supposed 2 b twisted beyond all human recognition btw
TT: No.
TT: Let me try that again in a few days.
It takes a bit more than a few days. You work on the sketches in the meantime. Jake asks what the latest project is; you are evasive. It does not do to build up to things before you are sure you can deliver on them. That would be fucking unconscionable.
It’s a month before it happens.
TG: the day has come d-stri
TG: your shitty piece of metal
TG: is mother
TG: fucking
TG: IN TACT :D
You do not whoop. But you do let your mouth quirk up a little bit as you text Jake.
TT: Bro.
TT: Delivery incoming.
-
The robot parts come in to Jake’s end piece by piece.
Months go on. You fiddle with the holodeck; it stops flashing on and off in bursts of light that would hurt your eyes if you didn’t have shades on, but it doesn’t stop occasionally glitching into bizarre patterns.
You’re working on the Brobot’s lower torso right now. Not the cleverest title, but it made both you and Jake laugh over glitchy, unsafe video chat the first time he connected the hinges of its arms under your instruction. He’d asked you earnest questions and you had watched his hands through the feed's shitty quality.
Even in the light of new instruction, they’d been steady. More sure than you think he knows, even though this is your area, not his. His grandma really has taught him some about assembly, though he doesn’t talk about her much except for when mentioning some brilliant little tidbit she’d imparted to him. You wonder what it’s like to be able to talk about your guardian in so positive, uncomplicated a way.
Maybe it’s not fair to say Jake is uncomplicated, but he certainly seems free, unlike you, from the constant inhibitions that hover over everything you say.
There’s a fucking reason you don’t run your mouth, though. As a kid, you had read the histories of the great starship captains; your bro hadn’t been Starfleet, as far as you know, but Jade English had, in her youth. Lately, you have sometimes caught yourself imagining being born in those days, serving as chief engineer and first officer to Jake’s dashing captain or some other impressive fit of stupidity.
So, yeah, you’re glad you can’t say small things. Say a small thing, and it could spiral into spilling that kind of shit, the shit you feel embarrassed for thinking on forty-eight hours of no sleep.
The two of you have agreed to only do the calls when he’s got a new piece to add; even with the assumed security of your transmissions, it feels too risky. You are not going to lie and say it doesn’t make you work faster, though precisely; it is essential that every piece works, as the test run will be entirely out of your control. (The thought makes your hands itch with discomfort.)
Calling him is strange. It’s as if a part of you had not believed he was real enough to call, real enough to leave a pixelated moving image and a distance-distorted voice.
You adjust a wire and pick your communicator back up.
GT: As exciting as the assemblage has been thus far you still havent told me why youve decided to build this guy.
TT: Well, I started to think about him when we were talking about holodecks.
TT: You remember you mentioned fisticuffs?
GT: How could i forget bro! Scrums and whatnot.
TT: Yeah.
TT: Exactly how I would put it, down to the word.
GT: Bro i can tell youre making fun of me but consider this: quit lying to yourself.
GT: You like the funny way i speak it makes you laugh.
TT: Jury’s out.
TT: Anyway.
TT: I figured the brobot could partly function for that.
TT: Like a fight training holodeck, but more old-timey.
TT: Then you’d get to practice combat, and also get stronger without actually risking death.
TT: And I guess it would also be programmed to fight monsters with you, if you wouldn’t see this as an imposition of some kind.
TT: You know, on your adventuring territory.
GT: I guess i could put up with a sidekick.
GT: This is really fucking thoughtful of you bro im not going to lie.
GT: Like kind of insanely thoughtful actually.
You imagine a bizarro fantasy-world in which you could type, “Do you mean, like, too much?”
TT: I don’t know.
TT: I guess I figured you deserved something to do, besides a medium that we don’t even use as our primary source of entertainment anymore.
GT: Well again.
GT: I think you have a jolly fucking brilliant brain dirk.
GT: Just a top notch head on your shoulders.
GT: Why if we were born in the age of exploration i bet you would be the coolheaded and collected captain of your own ship and i would be the brawny first mate who would leap into action to defend you from danger if necessary.
GT: And your brobot can be our guy who is discovering the virtues and vices of humanity from an outside perspective movies LOVE that character.
GT: Unless you want that to be you?
TT: You think you’re hilarious.
GT: Ive made you laugh at least once.
TT: I can concede that.
TT: Once or twice.
-
The months go by until they’ve trickled into what would have been November on the old Earth calendar, which is what you and Jake have both set all of your calendars to. Roxy calls this mad cultural bias and hella nostalgia but who can blame u guys; she is probably correct. All parts of the brobot are sent to Jake piece by piece over the months that follow; starship fantasies are kept in check, though mainly by your own force of will.
You write several unreadably dense essays that nobody will ever get to look at. You sketch out and begin working on the brobot’s head. You scrap the prototype because it does not look enough like you, then scrap another when the resemblance is too strong.
It nears completion, appropriately enough, on November 28th Earth time, a few days before Jake’s birthday. A year is coming up on when you met.
TT: I’ll have the robot head to you in a few days, probably.
TT: Gotta run some tests, but I’m nearly done.
TT: We might be able to make it a birthday present.
You’ve been working in the holodeck lately. It’s a shitty artificial sky above you and shitty artificial scenery around you, but you’ve fixed the specialized fans and alchemizers that make the breeze and its scents feel almost real.
It’s one of the oldest ones you have, you think. The North American tallgrass prairie on Earth, which is nearly wiped out in today’s day and age as per the specifications of those archived Wikipedia entries. The grass is multicolored, of varied shapes and textures, and stretches out towards an artificial horizon. Nothing but flatness for miles. It’s an enormity you hadn’t thought you’d like, but there’s a lot to be said for the light-and-replicator illusion of standing on solid ground.
GT: Bro i cant believe it.
GT: Its been nearly a year since you started im excited to see mr dirkbot in action.
GT: Its still just nuts that you did this for me really.
TT: I told you, dude.
TT: I like a project.
TT: It’s this or trying to write sonnets.
GT: You write sonnets?
TT: God, no.
TT: What the fuck would I write about?
TT: Only so many words can be devoted to how space looks from your viewport.
TT: Or to the shitty fake scenery generated by your barely-functional holodeck.
GT: Or to a nice conversation with a good friend!
GT: That could be quite a lot of words.
TT: Yeah, I guess it could be.
GT: I dont want to compromise our smashingly successful bro code here but i do want you to know i appreciate what youve done for me.
GT: And i dont just mean the robot!
GT: I mean i was alone and doing pretty grand for a boy on his island having a great old adventure but its nice to be able to hear from people.
GT: And talk back even if its about something stupid.
TT: ...Yeah, I guess you’re right.
TT: That’s actually. Hm.
TT: I meant to tell you something like that, a while back.
TT: I don’t know if you remember that screed I sent you about dialogues.
TT: That was what I meant to say. What you just said, I mean.
Instead of watching the screen raptly and waiting for a reply, you close your communicator and lie down in the artificial grass until you hear Jake’s answering chirp. Clouds move above you; grasses swing, real-looking enough to cast shadows on your face. A metal replica of your own head lies to one side of you; you push it away, gently so as not to damage it, and put the communicator down there instead. Then you close your eyes.
In another world, you could have lain in this field, or one much like it, on the real ground under a real sky. Instead of a communicator by your side, it could have been Jake himself. You could have grown up together. Been best friends out of the kind of Boy’s Book Of 100 Things To Do that Jake seems to have raised himself on. Roxy could have gone to school with you guys; the mysterious fourth person whom you cannot contact could have been there, too, for all you know. You like to imagine you’d have been good friends.
You can almost do it. Maybe it’s his capacity for belief in what is not only impossible but artificial, but you can almost imagine that, at the very least, the distance between the two of you thins for a moment.
Of course, it is only a pixel sky. It is only a temporary and ridiculous ability to tell something like the truth. It is only a mobile communicator chirping out Jake’s responses.
Still, it is something more than what you had.
-
Across several star systems, your name is Jake English.
A robot, complete all but for a head, stands on the other side of a room you cannot leave, the walls of which are papered with Skaianet papers and movie posters.
The Skaianet-brand laptop open beside you where you’re sprawled on the bed dings with a communique from your best friend, Dirk Strider.
TT: That was what I meant to say. What you just said, I mean.
You do, in fact, remember the Bakhtin rant, partly because you hadn’t been sure what to say in turn. In fact, you’d thought about the right thing to say in response for long enough that this turned into ignoring the text.
Sometimes this happens to you. So caught up in not fucking this whole thing up, in coming across as anything less than a blundering idiot, that you end up saying nothing at all. Which had been fine, really, because to you the whole thing had read as a somewhat bungled insult, much less any kind of compliment.
You will never understand exactly what Dirk Strider wants from you.
GT: Thats very nice of you to say bro.
GT: Not that you actually said it back then or just now but it was nice of you to cryptically hint at it too!
There’s a text you regret! Hopefully – hopefully – it passes off as playful banter between two bros and not, for instance, a desperate request for affection from a man on another end of the galaxy who sure as all hell can’t give it to you.
Talking to people, for all that Dirk’s Russian philosophers seem to claim the world is structured around it, can be a hell of a headache.
TT: Oh.
TT: Yeah.
TT: Well, I think I wouldn’t have made a fucking robot for you if I didn’t like talking to you.
You said you liked a project, you would say if you felt like belaboring the point like some kind of wet blanket. What am I to say that you won’t build me a holodeck and a new television and a, a fucking robot grandma to replace the old one, and then move on to the next guy.
You are not going to say that.
GT: Haha good point.
GT: You have to understand not everyone can be sharp as a pointy anime sword twenty four seven day in day out.
GT: Some of us are mere mortals who just like good movies and adventure and having a good time and not analyzing everything and the kitchen sink through seven layers of old earth philosophy.
You are nearly thirteen years old and you like movies, texting your friends, and opening up your window for a taste of the fresh air, and venturing within a ten-foot radius of your house, and remembering your grandmother, when you can stand to.
You do not like a project, and you just have to believe that Dirk sees you as something more than one. You just have to believe that you’ll see him and Roxy and whoever else, one day. Walk through this jungle like a pre-First Contact Earth movie explorer or a starship captain venturing out towards the final frontier. Fix the spaceship buried somewhere in this jungle like Dirk fixes twelve holodecks a day, then find a pathway to something – anything – better.
(The old phrase, rooting back to Starfleet recruitment campaigns, is a laugh and a half. The final frontier is precisely where you are located, and there is nothing particularly final about it.)
TT: Don’t undersell yourself, bro.
TT: Analyzing everything and the kitchen sink through seven layers of shitty movies is a pretty vital skill, too.
GT: You’re making a fellow blush over here.
This, or at least the emotional effect it implies, is not entirely a lie. It is maybe pathetic, the reliability with which you remember every vaguely kind thing that anybody has ever said to you.
As for the fact that this is a kind of, well, gay thing to say – it’s the twenty-fifth century, isn’t it? There is no reason you should be wondering whether this is the normal, the interesting, the engaging, the less-stupid text to send him. It shouldn’t matter. For everyone else in the world, you are positive, for emotionally-removed Dirk and his perfectly punctuated texts, it has never mattered at all.
TT: Careful, there, dude.
TT: What if I figure out a way to come over and see if you’re just flatterin’ a guy when you say shit like that?
GT: Hi my name is dirk strider i am very serious and thats why sometimes i take on a light cowboy affect and carefully affix a shitty little apostrophe to my deliberately dropped gs just to make sure nobody questions my punctuationary dominance.
TT: ...Nice job trying to own me.
TT: My robot is going to kick your ass.
GT: If you want a job done you should do it yourself.
GT: Make good on the threats and find a way over here.
It’s a forward thing to say, and a stupid thing, too. You can tell Dirk is in a good mood, because he has been entertaining this kind of discussion instead of shutting it down under what you suspect is an assumption of naive false hope. It is an underlying theme in his conversations sometimes: what is the point of believing in something incredibly unlikely if, chances are, all you’re going to be is disappointed?
You understand this perspective, actually. You watched your own grandmother’s corpse burn to ashes; you are well aware that some fake things stay fake no matter how long or how intensely you believe in them.
It is not impossible that you will meet, though. That you will get out of here, someday, somehow. It cannot always go on like this. You believed once that you would not be alone forever; and now you aren’t. Some hope is necessary for survival.
The sliver of sky you can see through the trees outside your window gears up for a storm; wind rattles the branches and something terrible lets out a howl. Your thirteenth birthday creeps up on you, and nothing has changed, really, from the ones before it, except that you have functional evidence, outside of people on the Internet without names or faces, that you are not the only person in the entire goddamn universe.
The chat window pings. The response is, by Dirk standards, almost unsettlingly optimistic.
TT: Maybe one day.