98. Reflect

Jade drifted in zero gravity. All around her, control panels blinked and displays came to life, projecting readouts for the ship’s internal systems. The young woman, an athletic, dark-haired little thing, scanned them all as she drifted past. There was nothing vastly out of the ordinary; some of the cooling fins were in need of replacement, but could hold out for another month before a trip back to home would be necessary. That’s what she suspected, anyway; her mind wasn’t sharp enough to figure out when exactly they would need to make the jump. No doubt if she asked the ship it would tell her not only when it thought they should leave, but down to the second. Why ships equipped such as this one even required service crews anymore was a mystery, but she enjoyed the exposure to the inner workings of such an advanced craft, regardless; it kept her mind occupied.

She drifted through the wide, spherical room slowly, occasionally adjusting a few controls as she felt it was necessary. It took her about half an hour to comb the room in silence. When she was done, the girl let her head roll back. She closed her eyes, crossed her arms over her chest, and sighed. She’d have been content to listen to nothing but the gentle thrumming of the electronics around her, but it was then that her wristband chirped at her. Jade made a vague gesture over the black piece of tech strapped around her wrist, cleared her throat, and then spoke up. “Yeah?”

The emitters on her band produced a haze of green to indicate a call in progress.

“It’s me.” The voice on the line said. It was warm, low, and supportive.

“’Morning, Iris,” Jade returned.

Her wristband’s emitters produced a holographic smiley face. “Good morning, Jade. How does the ship look to you?”

Jade grimaced. “Hate that question, y’know. You can see the numbers for yourself.”

“Seeing the numbers and knowing how you feel about them are two different things. That’s why I want to know what you think.” The smiley face remained, stalwart.

She sighed at the smiley face and waved her hand through it ineffectually, only causing it to momentarily shudder and desaturate. “… M-Drive Two and Six were running a little hot. I shifted a little load away from them for a few hours.”

“Thanks, Jade.”

“You could have done it yourself,” Jade said.

The smiley face fluttered to a straight line. “Yes, but this is your job. This is the work you requested.” The straight line dipped into a sad face. “Do you not want to work here anymore?”

Jade opened her eyes properly and frowned at the smiley face, as if it could actually look back at her. “Don’t do that, Iris, okay? I’m just… it’s early morning for me; I’m tired. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to work anymore.”

The smiley face cautiously tilted to its side. “And you’re not angry at me?”

“Only at how neurotic you are for a computer.” Jade said with a smirk. There was a slight pause before Iris’ reply came, and though the smiley face did not flutter, the girl sensed it didn’t know how to react properly to something she’d said.

“… Yes. Well, I’ll refrain from being so presumptuous in the future, I think. Quick question about your day, though, while I’ve got you on the line…?” The voice waited for her to say something to continue, “Your injections are slated for fourteen-hundred hours, and your visit with Leura for fifteen minutes later. Is this still right?”

There was a very long pause. “Jade?” It awkwardly interjected.

“Yeah, sounds about right.” She said.

--

There’s a term for someone neither dead nor alive, but it didn’t sit particularly well on Jade’s tongue.

She looked more asleep than anything else; perhaps a little cold, but still there, alive, silent, and all those other wonderful things that made people look like they were having a nap. As she and many others knew, though, Leura Miller was Suspended, a term she disliked, and a word that always rasped from the back of her throat whenever she said it. It wasn’t a common condition for most people to be stuck in, with medical technology being what it was, which is what made it so very unnerving.

The room she entered was grey, like the rest of the ship. Ambient lights gave a little warmth to the walls, and the tables that lined the walls lit up one by one with light from above. They were filled with the remnants of primitive technology, loosely sorted in piles of what Jade could remember went together. One of Jade’s jackets hung off the back of a work stool beside one of the benches.

She kicked off her shoes at the door, eyes drifting from the littered work-benches to the encapsulated ‘bed’ in the centre of the room. It was much like a table, on top of which Leura’s body rested. Surrounding the girl’s body, however, was a glass-like semi-circular prism. It was necessary to keep outside contaminants from getting to her, so she’d been told. Leura was immersed in a clear, water-like solution that filled the prism, and despite its appearances, it had been explained to her that incredibly small machines, similar to the ones that kept her youthful by way of injections, kept Leura pristine and unchanged.

Seeing her like this still sent a dagger of loneliness through her chest.

Jade sat beside Leura in a well-used chair and stared at her lap for a good while, uselessly twiddling her thumbs to and fro while thoughts of no real significance passed through her mind. The breakfast she’d had that morning; the weird sensation of switching from regular gravity to zero in the space of a few steps; the little hole in the knee of her pants. Eventually, she looked at the profile of Leura’s face. Her watermelon-pink hair didn’t look right, and never had, without the pair of work goggles pushed up through the bangs.

Jade sighed.

“Day one-thousand two-hundred and fifty-three. We’re still in space. Nowhere exciting, really, just drifting. You hear so much about what’s happening out here in the deep black and you think you’d be bumping into interesting things every few minutes, but… Nope. It’s empty.” She closed her eyes. “But it is beautiful. Iris jumps us to a new site every three weeks. I got to see a star on its last leg yesterday, before we jumped into this binary system. Every time I look outside it’s like someone hit ‘Next’ on a Sights of the Universe slideshow. Really pretty.”

“But we’re here thanks to you, you know. You and Alyssa and a whole bunch of other AIs and engineers. I know I say this a lot when I come around, but knowing that we’re being pushed through goddamn space with Miller Drives just… It blows my mind a little. The fact they’re called that is old-hat, I mean, but… It’s nice to see your name in lights, where it belongs.” The girl slowed her talking, sighed, and shook her head very slowly. Her breath inward was shaky.

“… I really wish you could see all this. I really wish that there was some way to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we could wake you up. I really want you to see the future you helped create. I want you to talk to Iris again, you know? She’s so… Well, she’s not much different to how she used to be with you in your workshop, but she has so much she wants to tell you. A hundred and eighty years in, er, the state you’ve been in and… well, the gossip accumulates.”

She licked her lips, for they had gone dry. “… But I really want to talk to you again, in person. They keep telling me that we can’t wake you up because of your condition changing when you got hurt, but… but I can’t even ask them if we could do a total reconstruction confidently. They just keep telling me there’s no way to know if you’d be okay, even if we did put your brain in a fucking computer.”

The dark-haired girl bit her lip and looked away from the tank. “I need you. I really fucking need you, Leur. But I can’t do that to you. I can’t let them turn you into a machine on the off chance you’ll be okay. I can’t do anything but wait and see if they found a way to help you when Iris wakes me up – because what if they find out how to bring you back? What if you didn’t have to deal with not being human anymore?” Jade looked at the gold band around her ring finger, feeling the corners of her eyes prickle with hot wetness. She closed her eyes and it trickled down her cheeks. Her throat suddenly ached and she breathed raggedly, her shoulders tremulous and lips quivering. “I can’t risk losing you. ‘Cause if they do the Transference, break your brain down and upload it, and it doesn’t work because you’re just too different to normal people… You’d be gone. They could find a way to wake you up the next day and you’d be dead because I was too impatient, and I let them kill you.”

The pink-haired, Suspended woman gave no answer. She gave no comforting hugs, pats on the back of the head, or kisses on the cheek. Jade was left to the cold silence of the room, as usual. She’d asked Iris not to bother her while she was visiting, and thankfully, the AI had always been respectful enough to oblige.

There was only one person who could cheer her up and stop the tears from flowing.

And she was dearly missed.