Mickey fell facefirst out of the cell-refluxination pod and left a great wet himself-shaped patch in the tatty yellow carpet. There was a loose bolt or something in its door that he’d been begging Sophie to fix for months, and for months she’d been distracted by the various other broken things that filled Alliance Base 17 to the brim.
He took a moment to collect himself. His cells weren’t fully refluxed quite yet, which meant that his upper tendrils were very slowly sublimating into a warm, carbonous gas.
That was the exact second that he realised it was a Grouscycle. He groaned into the floor: ‘I hate Grouscycles.’
Grous was the second face of the twin-god Rani-Grous, namesake of Mickey’s home planet and of whom Mickey had been a zealously casual sort-of worshipper for his entire life. Grous’ spheres included hard work, resolve, selflessness, unpaid overtime, bureaucracy, and neckties.
Nobody liked Grous. Not even the priests. Not even Mickey, who liked basically everyone and everything, and felt guilty when he didn’t.
He stood up and ran a grasper over his head and felt them dissolve away under his touch. Well, that was OK. They were getting unkempt, anyways.
Most rooms felt cramped to Mickey, who was huge, even for his own distinctly huge species (‘structurally extreme’, as the Alliance censuses called them). His bedroom was no different. Technically, it was two bedrooms. A wall had been knocked down between them, because the size of a single standard Alliance bedroom was about the size of a somewhat large Rangirousian coffin. He had felt guilty about the whole thing, and still felt guilty about it to that day. He sometimes panickedly wondered if the maintenance men who had knocked that wall down hated him.
It was cluttered, and he couldn’t move around in it without shoving something, or knocking something over. He had the essentials–the hulking grey refluxination pod; the atmospheric alternator that spewed a mineral gas nearly equivalent to the one that made up the atmosphere of Ranigrous except for being slightly harder on his scentskin; his table, his cabinet, his shelf, stuff all made from neutral grey polymers, manufactured automatically in unmanned factories. He had, also, what he fondly called ‘a bunch of crap.’
Glass bottles or bottle-like containers that he had collected from all across the galaxy that he displayed on the shelf, and wherever they could fit. Green ones, red ones, twisting complex ones, rotund ones, ones sculpted to resemble the forms of alien animals. He was in love with them. He was in love with most people, most societies, most cultures. He was in love with the strangeness of the galaxy, of the great variety of forms life took, with how almost everyone had some kind of handshake, some kind of hug. He was in love with most things, and the bottles reminded him of them, which was why he desperately fended off Beth’s attempts to get the bottles recycled at a recycling station for a sum of money you could buy a pack of chips with.
He had other collected things here and there, too. It was mostly stuff that you’d find in a dumpster. Small tokens, a scrap of paper with text he couldn’t fathom, a phial of a gas that turned pink when he was happy and green when he was hungry, a gleaming clinking mechanism he couldn’t for the life of him figure out and which he had been meaning to hand over to Sophie.
He had the other stuff that built up when you were the kind of person who never wanted to ever part with any of your belongings–lumpy pillows, a broken chair, a dumbbell (he couldn’t even use dumbbells. He didn’t have muscles), a set of extremely fragile painted plates.
His beautiful children lived on his desk, in a mass of piled up books and papers. Every morning he approached them, a great grin on his face, his scentskin prickling with delight. They bobbed around inside their jar. One of them bumped into another. Another one floated from the top of the jar to the bottom. It settled silently on the floor. He tapped the jar. They did not respond at all. They resembled tiny green puffs of moss.
His ventricles swelled with pride.
‘Good morning, everyone,’ he said, trying not to cry tears of joy.
Maybe this Grouscycle would be a good one.
‘Well, hey, Mickey,’ said Jo-Hatties from the ceiling, clutching an upside down mug of reverse-gravitational coffee.
‘Hey, Joe,’ said Mickey.
‘Heyo, Mickey,’ said Grustlefunst from the dark crack in the wall that was her office. Mickey had only ever seen her eyes.
‘Hey, Grus.’
‘Hey Mickey! Hey Mickey! Hey Mickey! Hey Mickey!’ chorussed Threeheads Yolands, who existed sideways to linear time and as such ended up being perceived as a group of fourteen copies of himself, awkwardly shuffling everywhere they went, filling up rooms and halls.
‘Hey, Yolands.’
He passed into the common room where he had a small breakfast of five bowls of toasted Devohossian tail-extrusions in blat sauce and slipped into HQ proper. The chorus of greetings continued the whole time.
The HQ entrance doors were colossal and automatic. They were designed with accessibility in mind first, to allow convenient passage for any number of body types and life-forms. Despite that, Mickey’s head always bumped the top of the doorframe.
He walked through the entrance doors, bumping his head on the doorframe.
It was one of those office spaces that managers liked to call ‘open plan’. A wide variety of computing devices sat in clumped, irregular groups–lumpy monitors flickering blue for the people who perceived electromagnetic waves; ovoid sniffcomms for folks who prefered chemoreception; atom view-alternators for people who perceived causality; and autosimilificators specifically for the Furl-Atraxonites, who only perceived metaphors. It was the kind of place that had cushions and bean bags lying arbitrarily around, and every nook and cranny seemed to have somebody’s lost pen.
There was a huge window right by those entrance doors. It spanned across the entire wall.
‘Hey, Mickey,’ said Hold Do, who was a Reuggenite who photosynthesised starlight and who spent all his time attached to that window by his suckers, doing admin work.
‘Hey, Hold.’
Staphas gleamed outside the window shrouded with cold, still stars. Choleric yellow clouds swirled over the planet’s body and made ominous craggy shapes, parted and reformed. The stars seemed embedded in a great black cloth. It was cold and dead and unreal out there.
As he watched, a fat trader ship drew itself across the distance, spouting a steaming contrail. It was a rickety, ungainly thing that spun in a great awkward arc and turned down towards the surface of Staphas.
‘Mickey!’
Mickey yelped, jumped, bumped his already raw head on the ceiling.
‘Hey–Beth.’
‘Me and Sophie stole a bunch of muffins from the recsquad common room. You want one?’ They held one out with one hand and devoured another using their other. They bit into it, plastic wrapper and all, scarfed it down in two huge bites. Their teeth were uncannily sharp.
Beth was part human and looked a whole lot like Sophie–a kind of worm with four appendages, two for walking, two for grabbing, stealing, flipping off, et al, and a central neural hub at the top where most of the sensory stuff was processed. They were taller than Sophie, however, and cleaner, and bonier.
Beth’s other half was a mystery. Rumours encircled it, rose up and died down. They were part Rocattian one week, part Alaesian sand-dog the next, part Fullerton Asteroid-Archipelago Gobbleform the next. The fact that Beth was the origin of more than half of these rumours didn’t help.
The only answer Mickey had ever gotten from them was:
‘The gender’s got nothing to do with it!’
Which didn’t narrow things down much.
‘Sure. Thanks,’ Mickey replied. He took the muffin, unwrapped it, gave the plastic wrapper to Beth, who swallowed it in one bite. Beth was always ravenous, and Mickey was fairly sure that was a part of their not-human half. Sophie was pretty ravenous, too, but in a way that at least seemed relatively proportional to the size of her stomach. Every time Mickey looked at them they seemed to be in the process of eating something else. He didn’t know where it all went. He’d seen them eat whole pieces of furniture, unscathed.
They began to head to the segment of the office that their team had unofficially claimed.
‘Were we doing the, uh, Zafraxans today?’ Beth asked.
‘Zafraxans?’ said Mickey. ‘What’s that?’
‘Oh. Nevermind. I really thought we had the Zafraxan thing today.’
‘What’s a Zafraxan?’
‘Nevermind that, Mickey!’ Beth wailed, grasping him by his sides and trying to shake him. ‘What were we doing today?’
Mickey wrapped a grasper around Beth’s face and gently pushed them aside, and then sloughed into his own chair. He took a moment to really think about what they were meant to be doing.
‘I have to do… oh. Wow.’
‘I knew it was that stupid Zafraxan thing,’ Beth moaned.
‘The Ruskin-Carvers, Bethany.’
Mickey and Beth both froze. Robyn’s voice was dreary and mechanical, like something that would come out of a rusty pipe.
Robyn was a Humform from the Coldspar-Ring. Her body was made from the vibrations of atmospheric gases. What this meant was that in the local atmosphere of Alliance Base 17, which, despite its diversity and strivings for common accessibility, still dealt mostly in carbon-based individuals, she would disperse very promptly into thin nothingness and end up stuck in a bunch of dusty crevices around the place and freak out the custodial staff.
She wore a solidsuit instead, a tall and boxy thing somewhere between a refrigerator and a vending machine with six wavy, accordion like limbs. She stood straight-backed on two of them, with the four others tucked neatly to her sides. It made her look more professional. An array of sensors and empty lenses covered the upper ‘head’ section of the solidsuit. They always looked judgemental, somehow.
‘If you had even tried keeping up to date with our memos, you might have known this. I’m sure that–’ at this point she looked right at Mickey and clicked and hummed and perfectly pronounced Mickey’s real, full name in his own language, down to his own dialect. He was always supremely uncomfortable when she did that. ‘–would be able to explain to you the gist of the situation we have been tasked with.’
‘Yeah. Uhm. Yeah, I can do that. And I will.’ Faint ammonic gases nervously sublimated from his scentskin. He shook his head. ‘A small group of Ruskin-Carvers from the New-Rus Asteroid Colony are still undergoing mitochondric decontamination after their powerplant meltdown a month ago. Er. I needed to make a nutrition plan for them.’
Beth slipped as professionally into their beanbag chair as they could under Robyn’s gaze. ‘Wow. Uh. Yeah. That all sounds good.’
‘It isn’t “good”, Bethany,’ Robyn explained coolly. ‘This is a serious situation. And it warrants you taking it seriously. And stop eating for one second.’
Beth coughed out the pencil they had been devouring, gave a wild-eyed grin and a thumbs up. ‘Yeah. Full seriousness from me. Don’t even worry about it.’
‘Of course,’ said Robyn, completely unimpressed. She glanced at Mickey. ‘And you just keep at it. I have more forms to sign.’
Robyn always seemed to have forms to sign. She always had a pen in one of her actuators–on busy days she had two, and, once, Mickey had seen her wielding four separate pens. She placed herself behind a great table with a giant stack of papers and had gone at them like a rabid samurai.
‘Er. Always!’ Mickey exclaimed. ‘Have a good cycle, Robyn!’
‘You too.’
A cold and hard atmospheric pressure always seemed to follow Robyn around and even when she left it hung over Mickey and Beth, who sat in awkward silence and glanced at each other.
‘Uhm,’ said Mickey, finally, looking away from his sniffcomm: ‘Do you have any idea what their actual nutrient requirements are? It says on this file they need a daily supplement of cyanogen gas, but I’m fairly sure they’re carbon-based. That’s deadly for basically any carbon-based lifeform, isn’t it?’
‘Mmph?’ said Beth. Administrative work was one of the only things that could ever hold their attention. They looked up from their monitor and around like a baffled fish. They took this opportunity to have a short snack, reached into a pocket, pulled out a phial labelled CYANOGEN GAS DO NOT TOUCH, and took a huge bite out of it. The gas pooled and swirled around their lips.
‘Nevermind,’ said Mickey, going back to his sniffcomm.
‘Micks. Mickey. My man. My boy. Micks. Mickey. Miiiick. Michael.’
Mickey looked up suddenly. He had been silently absorbed in his work but for the last few minutes could have sworn that something was chipping at his attention. Like a tiny, invisible voice, calling his name. What a strange thing to imagine.
Maybe he was going crazy, finally. This was it. This was the Grouscycle to finally get him. He was terrified, suddenly. He scanned the room, scanned the ceiling, scanned Beth (they looked up from their work and scanned him right back.)
‘MICKEY!’
Mickey scanned frantically over the room and his eyes landed on the top of his sniffcomm.
‘Steve! It’s so good to see you,’ Mickey said in a breathy panicked voice. ‘I’m hearing voices. I think I’m finally going crazy. You need to help me.’
‘Mick. That was me. My man. That was my voice.’
Mickey breathed for a moment. He nodded. ‘Wow. Sorry. I’m really sorry.’
Stepannus-Coft-Agonnus was a Thriftite from the Glow-Oceans on Coagulus-Eleventh. He was sleek, black, and shiny, and about the size of a human pinky finger. He had a comm unit installed on his back, wired into his brain, (which technically encompassed his whole body). It was a little grey lump of metal that he kept as nicely polished as he could. He moved by contracting tiny muscles on the inside of his body outwards, inwards, outwards, inwards, and went at a pace comparable to a planetary speeder with all its engines turned off grinding down a very slight slope.
Steve thought he was sweet as hell. He called people things like ‘bud’ and ‘pal’, but only when he couldn’t remember their names. He enjoyed going to bars and getting blastedly drunk off droplets of alcohol and theoretically picking up chicks.
Actually, he hadn’t picked up one chick in his entire life.
‘Heyyyyyy Steeeeeeeeeve,’ said Beth, looking up from their monitor and sinking their chin into their hand. They fluttered their eyelids and began arranging their hair.
‘Aaaaaaaaaah, heyyy, Beth. Haha. Hey there.’ Tiny drops of sweat formed over Steve’s body. He subtly moved for shelter behind Mickey’s sniffcomm.
‘So… howsit, Mick?’ he asked, after a moment, trying to ignore Beth.
‘So boring without you,’ Beth said huskily.
‘Yeah,’ Mickey agreed. ‘Grouscycles, right?’
‘You say that sometimes, Mick, and I don’t know what it even means. I don’t get your measurements of time.’
‘It’s like that comic,’ Beth piped up. ‘The one with the fat Yluttan-scopscagger and his owner. It hated Subsegment Temporal Measurement 1 but loved eating Rubadian phosphoro-cake.’
‘Braffield,’ said Steve. He chuckled. ‘Gawd. What a classic. I love that comic. Gets me every time.’
‘Really?!’ said Beth. They leaned in. ‘I love it, too. I love it. Love. It.’
Steve sweated more. ‘Haha. I bet! Hah. Hem.’ He looked to Mickey. ‘I need you for a sec, Mick. The transport’s acting funky and I need a bit of help. And grasping appendages.’
‘You should get Sophie. She’s really good with that sort of stuff. At mechanics and at grasping with her appendages.’
‘“Get Sophie”,’ Steve echoed. ‘Cripes, Mick. I’d needa find her first, then I’d needa drag her off from whatever she’s decided she wants to work on, hope she’s not already chatting up that girlfriend of her’s first cause you know she’s not gonna do crap if she’s on the line–’
‘Abigail isn’t, technically, her girlfriend,’ Mickey said. He didn’t entirely understand the particular set of mating rituals that Sophie and Abigail were undertaking (they seemed incredibly inefficient, to his mind), but he understood that part.
‘She basically is,’ said Beth and Steve at the exact same time, at which point Beth smiled at him and said: ‘Wow… we’re so in tune.’
Steve ignored her and continued: ‘You’ve studied medicine on artificial silicon lifeforms, right?’
‘Yes. Well. It’s been a while–’
‘Good!’ said Steve. ‘It’s the same thing, I swear. Except the ship complains and bleeds less. C’mon. I just need a second opinion. And the appendages.’
Mickey smiled and pushed away from his sniffcomm. He looked darkly at the nutritional table he had been making. It lulled him quietly, boredly, towards sleep. ‘I would love to.’
Beth leaned over, smiling faintly. ‘Can I come?’
‘Well–’ Steve said. ‘I don’t know if, if, you have the expertise.’
‘We’d love you there, Beth,’ said Mickey, blithely overjoyed at the idea of being around two of his friends, at once. It would be like a small party, and he loved parties.
Steve sweated. ‘Yeah. We’d love you there.’
Steve turned and began leading them for the ship bay. He crawled, slowly, down the side of the sniffcomm. He crawled, slowly, along Mickey’s table. He gasped, huffed, and hopped off a table leg, to the floor.
He crawled slowly along the floor.
Mickey eventually picked him up with a grasper.
‘Gawd, thanks, Mick. I was just gonna ask.’
‘I could carry you if you want,’ Beth suggested. They fluttered their eyelids again. ‘If you get tired, Mickey, I could carry him.’
‘Thanks Beth. I appreciate it.’ Mickey smiled at Beth’s unexpected, apropos of nothing burst of uncharacteristic helpfulness.
‘No, nah, no, Mickey’s a professional. At this. It’s all good,’ said Steve.
They detoured briefly to the equipment room to get ahold of an artificial-silicon-lifeform medical kit. It was, in contents, nearly indistinguishable from any particularly well-equipped toolbox. It differed essentially in aesthetic (white and clean) and smell (minty and dry). Beth tried picking it up, placed their hands on its handle, leant back and grunted awkwardly for a while.
Mickey hoisted it easily into the air.
They went through the offices, through a hallway, through another hallway, and another, and another. There was always a potted plant somewhere, or a water cooler.
There was art, sometimes. The products of cultural exchange, a determination to both increase internal diversity and beautify the place. The artworks stood out as blatant as holes in the walls, blaring and distinct and sudden against all the carefully measured whiteness.
There was a Vitruxian unself portrait that depicted technically everything, represented it all in maddening swirls of red, yellow, blue, white, green, the smell of apricot, a thrumming warmth like that from a resting bird. There was a Garhandle Yuntus candle-garden that sprouted twisting and waxy from the wall and glimmered off a lumpy white bench with faint green luminescent fires. There was a Raxton dumpheap that gleamed lights in electromagnetic spectrums Mickey couldn’t even perceive–shifting, sliding, hard, knifelike, like the edges of stars. They passed a pillar of Jupian hardlight, a Magellanian-Fieldic wave-box, a Clukuggunaite slip-projector.
Mickey stopped at each and every one in order to appreciate them as art should be appreciated. He looked at their crevices, at the lights on their sides, up and down. He breathed slowly and closed his eyes and reopened them. He took as much time as he could until Steve inevitably complained, and then they hurried on.
They kept the hardier art pieces closer to the ship bays, where the corridors were wider and dirtier and stunk a fruity, greasy rainbow stink of fuels and cleaning agents. The walls had scratches here and there–huge rattling garages glared out at them.
Their team transport laid in ship bay 37. It was a huge grey dusty room with long shadows around the ponderous ceilings. There were always people in there yelling, always something driving, groaning, beeping. It smelled like things burning, things melting. Ships of endlessly varying designs sat docked, one after another. They were organised, generally, according to whatever atmospheric gasses they would be filled with–their ship was at the far end of the bay, where the oxygen-containing ships were parked. They passed hydrogen-containing ships, arsenic-containing ships, covered their eyes and grimaced as they passed the plasma-containing ships that looked like screaming blazing flames.
The Alliance Relief Ship Assistance Impressing was a Ratite Dwarf Scream-Lifter. It had been designed with function and efficacy over all else which meant that it resembled something between a giant brick and a mound of spaghetti. The cockpit was a fat square room jutting from its front, while the rest of its body flared out around it in rigid, rectangular form. There were no wings and its thrusters were fat and round and could rotate with almost total freedom. It was not designed for movement in a planetary atmosphere–it drifted lazily like a fat UFO under the effects of gravity and air resistance. It had a great thick shell painted the bright orange of the Alliance, but revealed grey piping, wiring, and other such ugly inner workings at its joints, its thrusters, at points on its underside. Its lower edges were smattered with dents and scratches.
Steve thought the name ‘Assistance Impressing’ was lame as hell. He preferred to call it ‘The ARS Knife-Edge’.
‘My sweet ship. My sweet baby. My only love,’ Steve said. ‘It stings, fellas, to see her hurting like this.’
‘I’m sure your ship can’t be your only love,’ Beth murmured. ‘You can love a lot of things.’
Steve pretended to not hear that: ‘Alright. We gotta get to the storeroom.’
The innards of the Assistance Impressing were cramped and smelled like oily metal and fast food, which Steve seemed to subsist almost entirely on.
‘It’s a cultural thing,’ Steve explained as they brushed past a small mound of crumpled paper bags and empty paper cups.
Mickey’s head brushed against hanging wires and exposed piping, and it took a few moments of effort each time to squeeze through each door.
They came to the ship storeroom, a dark, dry space, where shelves were lined with boxes of half-eaten cereal and plastic packets of toilet paper. Steve directed them to a panel in a corner heavy with cobwebs and dust that revealed a spidery series of old pipes. They groaned and shuddered. Arbitrary dials and knobs jutted. It was ominous and complex. Mickey clutched the medical kit and shuddered a little. He clasped and unclasped a grasper. It was a serious job ahead, no doubt.
‘These are the controls for the ship’s audio systems,’ Steve said. He crept along one of Mickey’s tendrils and gazed over it. ‘I can’t figure out why, but it just won’t connect to the playlist on my comms.’
Mickey suddenly loosened all at once. ‘I thought it was something dangerous,’ he said.
‘You kidding me?’ Steve spun around and thrust himself angrily upwards. ‘How am I meant to work this joke-job without my slick beats? My thrifty tunes? It’s like asking a Vexanian to go without moisture, or a Quirrel-Baskan to go without ray-tholen particles.’
‘But you won’t die. Right?’
‘Die?’ Steve crept closer for dramatic affect. Everybody waited patiently for him. Beth bit their fingernails.
‘It’s a fate worse than death, to be without my hefty songs. You don’t get it! You’re not from the Glow-Oceans, pal!’
Mickey nodded quickly, not wanting to start a scene. ‘Of course. I understand. I didn’t realise it meant so much to you. I’m sorry.’ He opened his medical kit and began examining the mass of twisting coagulating pipes and tubes. He took a dusty handful of dark wires. He held up a blowtorch. He glanced between them. ‘I’ll need to use all my graspers for this, I think. Beth, can you hold Steve?’
‘Of course,’ they said, snatching Steve from Mickey’s tendril and clasping him gently, like a treasure. ‘This must be so hard for you, Steve. Do you need a hug? A really long one?’
Steve inched to the end of their hand and curled up. ‘No. Ah. I’ll be alright. I can be strong.’
Robyn was on the hunt.
Her team was the noisiest group of wailing incompetents she had ever met, and, yet, they were somehow also the sneakiest. They vanished frequently. They ended up places. It was always where she least expected.
She was in a hurry and loped through the corridors on all six limbs like a furious spider. She was checking all the places she would least expect. She checked the chemical waste incineration room. She checked the brig. She checked the mollusc storage plant. She was checking everywhere except for the Assistance Impressing, because that was exactly where she needed them to be and, hence, was exactly where they wouldn’t be. She had a mental compass where the Assistance Impressing sat in the centre. A radius bloomed around it and the farther away from the Assistance Impressing she was the more likely, scientifically, she would find them. She rang up each team member on her comms one after another, and none of them picked up.
They never picked up.
She needed someone. Anyone. Anyone.
‘Well, no. I didn’t just go and sniff it. I had thought of it and–’
Robyn locked eyes with Sophie and Sophie locked eyes with Robyn.
Robyn wanted anyone else. Beth, Steve, Mickey, anyone.
‘Hi, Rob,’ Sophie said, suddenly smiling again. She held her comms in her hand. It was ugly, practical, and bricklike, and it was supposed to be only for work purposes. ‘Is there a… thing?’
Robyn sniffed. ‘What makes you think there is a “thing” happening?’
‘You have the look on your face. The thing look.’
Robyn vented hot air from her suit. Sophie drove her crazy. Sophie drove her crazy because she was an idiot and because she was a genius. The line between sarcasm and incompetence with Sophie was thin, and Robyn was certain she walked it purposefully. She did it with the deliberate intent of making her life a pain.
Sophie drove her crazy because she always knew what she was doing when she needed to, and never ever when Robyn needed her to. She was effortless. She knew things. She made things occur. Everything was a struggle, for Robyn. She strained her brain so hard that thinking felt like she was twisting her neurons into knots. Everything was easy, for Sophie. Robyn didn’t think she’d ever had a thought in her whole life–that everything she’d ever done was instinctual, reactive, like the growth of a plant.
If she applied herself for a second, she would be more competent than Robyn had ever been in her entire career. If she grew even a smidgen of ambition, she would outrank Robyn within the week. She could crush Robyn into the dust and leave her utterly obliterated if she ever set her mind to it.
It terrified Robyn, more than anything else, that she didn’t seem to care.
‘Did you fix the vulxibert stabilisers?’
Sophie was baffled. ‘Wait, do you mean the wibble-things? The wobbly-wibble-things?’
Robyn vented more hot air. ‘Yes. They do wobble.’
‘Oh. Yeah! That was easy. So was there a thing?’
Robyn turned around. ‘Yes. There was a thing. Since you have completed your current assignment with flying success, come with me.’
‘Of course! That sounds good. Whatever you say. I really trust you.’
Robyn turned around suddenly, shocked at this sudden burst of respect.
Sophie was talking into her comms. She grinned for a bit, and then chortled. She looked at Robyn and the smile vanished off her face.
‘Uhhh. I gotta go, Abi. Yeah. It’s a thing. OK. Love you. I love you more. No, I love you more. No, I love you–’ she looked at Robyn again. ‘Uh, right, yeah, I gotta go, love you, bye.’
She stood to attention with her hands in her pockets and nodded at Robyn. ‘What did you need?’
‘Just follow me,’ Robyn grumbled.
The situation was this: one of the famous flipping mountains on Zafraxas-117, Zaxes Major, had flipped weeks before it was expected to. It was an infrastructural disaster. Nobody had died yet except for a touring Yggratian, which was fine, because death was a completely natural and undramatic aspect of the Yggratian lifespan and he rebirthed himself just a few hours later with only a few extra grey hairs.
They needed assistance, and they needed it immediately, and Robyn’s team had been one of the Alliance crews called over.
She was, however, as far as she knew, the only one who ever actually checked her emails.
‘I check my emails,’ Sophie argued.
‘No you don’t,’ said Robyn with such rock-hard certainty that the entire conversation died on the spot, just like that. Sophie, silently, glanced at her emails on her comms, grimaced in pain at the number of unread messages, and closed it as quietly as she could.
They walked in an intense, cold silence, except when Sophie wanted to comment on something, or when a thought came into her head, or when she felt like the silence had grown somewhat too awkward.
‘Where were we going?’ she asked, suddenly.
‘We’re looking for the rest of the crew. We have an assignment and I can’t find them.’
‘Did you try calling them?’ Sophie asked, tapping at her comms and holding it to her ear.
Robyn vented hot air. ‘Yes. I tried calling them.’
‘Drat. No-one ever answers their comms,’ Sophie complained, stuffing it into a pocket. ‘Have you checked the ship?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Have you checked the ship.’
‘And why would I check the ship?’
Sophie shrugged exaggeratedly. ‘Maybe they’re… there?’
Robyn swayed exasperatedly. ‘Now, why would they all just happen to be on the ship? How convenient that would be.’
‘Well, if we go by the principle of looking for them where we’d expect them least (which is almost always where everyone ends up being), the ship is the last place I’d expect to find them. It might be worth a try, is all.’
Robyn deflated. She misstepped, stumbled a little. Where she would least expect–where she would least expect–it echoed in her mind.
She was right! She was right! She always was! But it made no sense. There was no logic to it–why would they be in the ship at all?
But then, did it make any more sense to search for the vague “where she would least expect them”? There was no scientific basis to that, of course–what is ‘least expected’ in scientific terms? What relation did it have to bodies of atomic mass, inertial forces, placement in spacetime et al? Why was the ship any less or more feasible as a location for her crew?
Her search process had been flawed from the very beginning! It was all crumbling in front of her! Her own incompetence flashed and blared like a bright light.
Why did nobody ever check their comms?
‘Okay, ah. Well, I’m gonna go check the ship. Now.’ Sophie shuffled by Robyn, who had completely shut down in the middle of the hallway and was running her actuators across her face, muttering.
Sophie stepped ahead a bit farther, then stopped, and turned around. ‘Robynnn?’
‘I’m fine. I’m fine,’ Robyn lied. ‘Let’s just find them already.’
‘No, y’see, this is one’ve his new releases. Complete crap. I don’t even know why I added it to my playlist. I’ll get rid of it.’ Whenever Steve used his comms, he wiggled his whole body. You could tell exactly what he was doing by what type of wiggle it was.
He wiggled to delete a song and skip to the next one. He had done this on repeat for the last half hour.
Mickey wasn’t even that much of a fan of Trinitanian theoretical sub-hop–he just wanted to either hear a song, or hear nothing. Being kept on the precipice was driving him to madness.
‘Yeah. Total crap,’ Beth agreed. They were draped over a chair like a towel, fiddling lazily with a battery they had found. They were in the Assistance Impressing cockpit, which had two rows of chairs and enough room for an entire team of trained and competent experts. It was also the least cramped room in the ship, other than the toilet.
‘Are we meant to be doing something?’ Mickey asked suddenly. Beth looked tiredly up at him. Steve wiggled furiously. ‘I just have this feeling we’re supposed to be doing something.’
‘Aaaaah, you know. It’s not even worth worrying about. Don’t even worry about it,’ said Beth. They ate the battery.
The cockpit doors burst open and Beth coughed the battery right out, fell off the chair and flailed on the floor.
Robyn stood in the open doorway. The ship lights were a lifeless white on her solidsuit. Her gaze pierced them one by one as she looked over them. Sophie emerged from the doorway behind her.
‘Hi guys!’ she said.
Mickey rocketed towards her and wrapped her in a hug. ‘Hey, Sophie!’
‘Mmmi, Mffkey,’ Sophie mumbled into Mickey’s body.
‘Turn your music off,’ Robyn hissed at Steve, who wiggled in terror and shut his playlist right down.
‘That was, ah, a crap song, too, I gotta agree–’
‘Please, Steve, shut up.’ Robyn stepped forwards once more and sighed. ‘Now, if you had all checked your comms, you would know what this was about.’
Everyone looked at each other. Mickey glanced at Sophie for help. Sophie grimaced and nodded her head towards Robyn.
‘Zaxfraxas!’ wailed Beth, checking their comms. ‘I knew it!’
‘Wow,’ said Steve.
Mickey checked his comms and his heart sank.
‘You’re all lucky I got here as fast as I did.’
‘And me too,’ Sophie murmured.
‘We’re only three vibrosegments late,’ said Beth, grabbing the chair and pulling themself up. Robyn gave them a look so intense that the chair slipped right out of their hand and they fell right back to the floor.
‘That’s fifty Etraxan time-cycles,’ Robyn hissed. ‘And seventeen-hundred Ristik-Council dilation moments. And so on. We can’t be late again! I can’t have that black mark on my–our–records again!’
There was a low buzzing energy hanging in the cockpit. Nobody really knew what to do, or where to start.
‘Let’s go!’ Sophie yelled, and the room erupted in a clambering frantic crawling mess. Everybody stepped on Steve at least once before Mickey scooped him up and deposited him on the steering wheel. One by one they fell into their seats in the cockpit. Steve wiggled to the neural interface plug coming out of the side of the steering wheel and batted it against his comms until Mickey reached over, took the plug, and plugged it into him.
‘I could have done that,’ Steve argued.
‘Quiet. Let’s go,’ Robyn hissed.
Steve wiggled and the Assistance Impressing started rumbling all at once. A feeling of overwhelming stickiness and floatiness arose from the floor as the anti-inertial thrusters thrummed on. The ship bay stretched ahead of them through the cockpit window, the endless rows of other ships, of gleaming metal and oil spills. They arose. Steve’s untouched trash shifted around, bumped against walls. They hovered slowly above the other ships, towards the atmospheric force-lock. It hummed with a rattling blue energy.
It was transparent, slightly. You could see stars wheeling by through it.
‘Check, check, check,’ Steve mumbled, wiggling.
Beth and Sophie had opened up consoles to their sides. ‘Check, check, cheeeck, check,’ they sung, too.
‘Cleeearance, we have clearance,’ said Beth.
Mickey and Robyn sat in silence. Mickey knew almost nothing about spaceships except how to connect ship’s audio systems to somebody’s playlist. Robyn knew practically everything, but was supposed to focus on things more important, more white collar, than starting up their ship. Movement sparked all around them, fast forwarded. They were in the epicentre of a kind of cyclone. They were trained professionals who thrived on being useful who were, at the moment, useless.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t check my comms,’ said Mickey. ‘I just get lots of messages. Constantly. And ads. I really should check it more, but, well–sorry.’
Robyn was rigid with fury in her seat. She shifted slightly to look at Mickey.
Mickey shrivelled up slightly.
‘You can’t get that many messages.’
There was no venom in the question. She was genuinely curious. She didn’t seem as interested in tearing him limb from limb as he assumed she would have been.
‘I get a lot,’ Mickey said, coiling and uncoiling a tendril awkwardly. ‘I don’t like to… read them and ignore them. Because it’d be so rude. But if I replied to all of them all the time I’d never get anything done.’ He looked aside. ‘And I always talk too long, I think.’
Robyn shifted in her seat. She didn’t look at him. ‘And, so, you wait until you’re not busy? Then reply to them all?’
Mickey nodded. ‘It’s nice. It’s easier for me than most people I think because I have two brains.’
‘Sounds like work,’ said Robyn. ‘At least I get paid for responding to things.’
‘I like it.’ Mickey considered getting paid for talking to people. He would be a very rich, very happy man. ‘I get a lot of messages. But I like all of them.’
‘I don’t get non work related messages,’ said Robyn.
‘Oh,’ said Mickey.
‘I would probably ignore my comms were I in your circumstances,’ she continued.
They sat in silence again and the cyclone buffeted around them. Sophie stretched across Mickey, grunting, and passed a cord to Beth.
‘Must be boring,’ Mickey suggested.
‘Yeah.’
‘Um.’
‘Hokay! We’re good!’ Sophie suddenly yelled, stepping between them.
‘We’re always good,’ Steve replied, glancing over his own monitors and wiggling.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Beth. ‘You are always good.’
The force-lock vibrated and then suddenly vanished, and they drifted out of the bay. They drifted into space. Mickey could see forever. Everything laid out in front of them.
They blasted towards the Staphas jump-station, spirally dangerously, but still, technically, legally (so Steve argued to Robyn) around the other waiting ships, and halted right before the jump-ring.
‘Zafraxas, Z-A-F-R-A-X-E-S,’ said Beth, entering it into their monitor.
‘X-A-S,’ Robyn corrected tiredly.
They waited, agonisingly, for the jump-ring to authorise their trip. There was a gentle ding, and the monitor turned green.
Steve wiggled, and the entire ship began to rattle. Metal banged against metal. A mug fell off a table somewhere and shattered. ‘Errrr.’
‘Don’t think the jump shutters are on,’ Beth said. The rattling grew louder. Metal stretched and warped.
‘Eh?’ said Steve.
‘The jump shutters might not be on,’ Sophie said, looking at her console.
‘That’s what I said,’ Beth said. Sophie looked at them and cupped her ear with a hand.
‘Huh?’
‘That’s what I said,’ said Beth.
‘What did they say?’ said Steve.
‘”That”,’ explained Sophie.
‘Just go!’ Robyn wailed. Steve wiggled in terror and everything outside of the window flashed out of existence.
Jump-ring transferral felt like being pulled furiously through a thin, dry hole. Mickey wanted to tell somebody to cut it out. He elongated, he squelched. The electromagnetic spectrum had shattered–the only light he could perceive had been stretched into long thin bands of blinding incandescence. He groaned, and the groan vibrated agonisingly out of his mouth, thrummed like something from an acoustic guitar, hung around all sticky in the air until they suddenly stopped.
Steve went flying, was caught in the air by his plug, swung brutally down like a tiny hammer into the dashboard. Mickey’s weight was too much for his chair–it snapped, he blasted forwards and fell facefirst into the dashboard right next to Steve, the chair wrapped around his rear end, pointing into the air. Robyn, Beth, and Sophie were an entangled mess.
‘Who’s shoulder is this?’ Beth asked, immediately squeezing it.
‘That’s my thigh,’ Sophie answered.
‘Oh. Really? Then who’s thigh is this?’ Beth asked, immediately squeezing it.
‘Stop squeezing my shoulder!’ Robyn yelled. ‘Why are you squeezing us? Why do you squeeze when you take hold of a bodypart?’
‘Uh. Instinct?’
‘We didn’t have the shutters on,’ Steve wept, flattened on the dashboard. ‘Why didn’t no-one tell me we didn’t have the shutters on?’
‘I told you,’ said Beth and Sophie at the same time.
Nobody wanted them on Zafraxas.
Alliance craft stuffed the Zafraxas jump-station like sardines. The Assistance Impressing went cockpit-to-tail with the ARS Magrok-Grock the very instant it landed, and was then just as instantly trapped in from behind by the ARS Nukehead!!. They watched, baffled and helpless, as more and more Alliance craft dissolved out of the jump-ring and shuffled down awkwardly out of the air to park.
‘Oh… my sweet Knife-Edge…’ Steve moaned, as another ship landed behind the Nukehead!! and nudged its cockpit right into the Assistance Impressing’s back.
After a long series of calls, broken apart by lengthy and obnoxious spurts of hold music, Robyn explained the situation:
They really didn’t need anybody on Zafraxas-117. Zaxes Major was more of a large hill than it was a mountain, and the Alliance craft, the ARS Vibe City, had swept in early with much celebration and glory and had been an essential help in cleaning up after the already successful rescue efforts of the local authorities.
And then the Alliance ships piled up.
It had been a communication oversight, somewhere. Robyn was vaguely aware of the fact that somewhere, somebody had either been fired or promoted. The jump-station was at a standstill. There wasn’t anything worth doing.
‘I hear they’ve got nice beaches here,’ Beth said, lounging on the floor. ‘Carbon friendly oceans and like.’
Mickey’s scentskin wriggled in the salt breeze.
Zafraxas-117’s atmosphere had a concentration of argon that was grating in an oddly comfortable sense, like something rough rubbing gently on his ventricles whenever he inhaled, whenever the air moved.
The landscape was marked by great irregular pillars of silicon. The argon wind got caught in their folds, slipped through tiny holes all over them, made gentle whistling noises. They quivered, hummed, puffed heavy clouds of some carbonous substance that Mickey assumed might have been spores. They even jutted out of the ocean. Salt encrusted their sides, water dripped.
There were no clouds, but some atmospheric phenomenon–some interplay of electrons in the high atmosphere–gave the skies a crystalline, iridescent sheen. Colours moved up there, shifted suddenly, violently. Red faded into green into yellow into purple. Transports made from a grey-brown claylike material with designs like great rotund bottles, round at one end and narrowing to a point, drifted.
Sometimes, something Mickey thought had been a rock or a slab of slime mould opened a beady, judgemental eye at him. Slime moulds coated the stony earth, dried and hard with patches of jagged stems that rustled.
It was a carbon-friendly planet, ultimately, which meant that for all its outward alienness, all Mickey noticed was the convenient supply of breathable air, the minerals in the soil that didn’t melt his skin, the distinct separation between the physical states of air, gas, liquid. He might have found it weird in his earliest cycles with the Alliance. Now, it was comfortable.
Tiny sniffing animals lived in the water with transparent skin and feathery limbs. They came by in flocks and swept curiously around Mickey, poking him, philosophising briefly about him, until, suddenly, all at once, like some great machine turning on, he moved, watched them wriggle frantically away.
He felt the water lap his sides. Cold, crystalline. He sunk into it, sighed.
Sophie was drowning again.
‘Sobphie’s drgownbing ‘gain,’ blubbered Beth, who wasn’t much better of a swimmer.
Panic ratchetted through Mickey anew. Dark snippets of horrible universes filled with drowned Sophies launched through his mind. This was the fourth time that day, actually. Mickey was as terrified as he had been the first time.
Mickey’s body was better suited for movement through higher-viscosity masses than those of Beth or Sophie. He sliced through the water, blasted aside clouds of sand, hoisted up Sophie and spun right around.
‘Hllp me also,’ Beth said, flailing.
Mickey rocketed over to them, too, grabbed them, and began to swim back to shore.
‘Mick! Help! I can’t fend ‘em off forever!’ Steve screamed, surrounded by those sniffing animals, headbutting one of them and wiggling helplessly for freedom.
So Mickey blasted his way at Steve, too, scooped him up, and looked around.
‘Is there anyone else?!’ he asked.
Sophie coughed up water in response, Beth shrugged, and Steve wiggled.
‘Where’s Robyn?!’ asked Mickey.
Sophie coughed up more water, Beth shrugged, Steve wiggled.
Mickey deposited them back at the shore and after a few seconds of coughing up water and desperately breathing, Sophie headed right back to the water.
‘Are you sure you should be going back in? So soon?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I think I’ve got it, this time.’
‘Don’t even worry, Mick,’ said Steve. ‘It’s all covered.’ And he began slowly inching through the sand, back for the water.
‘He’s so brave,’ said Beth, in awe. They had returned to the deck chair they had brought out of a dark corner of the ship’s storeroom and nearly immediately slipped into a somnambulistic state in it. Their sunglasses draped over their eyes. They limply bit into one of the croissants they and Sophie had stolen from an Alliance Base breakroom before they had left.
‘Where is Robyn?’ Mickey asked. Convincing her to come to the beach at all had been a long enough process, and she had pretty clearly only really done it to get everyone to shut up.
‘She’s got Robyn stuff to do. Signing forms or something. Shouting at kids. Reminding me of my mum. Yakknow.’
Mickey gazed over the shoreline. It curled around the end of the continent in a gleaming white crescent, and the pillars dotted it up and down. ‘I guess,’ he said. He hung around that beach a while longer, watched the skies colours drift and crackle, watched the flocking transparent sea-animals. He watched Sophie, who was constantly on the verge of drowning. Robyn’s non-presence tugged at him.
Mickey stood up and drifted away.
Where was Robyn?
He wandered back up to the shuttle-stop, a lonely and scratched landing pad next to a rickety bench that creaked in the wind. It hunkered up there. Mickey shivered. It was getting colder. There wasn’t much of anything anywhere. The pillars thickened into a kind of hardy, puffing forest. The slime mould stalks rubbed against each other, muttered and hummed. The only sign of a nearby town were the lazy drifting ships, rumbling in the air, leaving it quaking.
Mickey wandered aimlessly ahead, kicked something metal, and tripped over.
‘Mickey,’ said Robyn.
‘I’m so, so sorry,’ Mickey sputtered. ‘This isn’t an assault. I swear.’
‘Mickey.’
‘I wasn’t thinking. Do you need medical help? I have my kit–’
‘Mickey. Get off me.’
Mickey pulled himself together, untangled his tendrils, closed his flaps, shut his ventricles, and flung himself upright. ‘I was wondering where you were!’ he said. ‘I was. Er. Worried.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Robyn. She was splayed out in the mould stems, limbs dangling, gazing at the sky. Her sensors moved around disinterestedly.
‘So, hello. How’s the mould?’
‘Here.’
‘That’s… good.’ Mickey sat down. ‘Are you feeling OK?’ he asked.
Robyn looked right into his eyes and said: ‘Yes, Mickey. After every great personal embarassment I like to cool off by lying alone in patches of mould on backwater nowhere-planets stewing in the chain of collected failures I think of as my life and career.’
‘Oh, thank goodness.’ Mickey’s mind was swift, and he caught the sarcasm nearly instantly. ‘Oh. I’m so sorry.’
Robyn grunted in response.
‘I’m sure it can’t be that bad.’
‘It is.’
Mickey scratched himself. He shivered again. ‘Do you want a backrub? Beth and Steve say I do them the best. I could–’
‘If you touch me I will tear off your tendrils. No offence.’
Mickey looked at a mould stem. It was thin and smooth until a point at its top, where it formed a kind of scrunched up knot. ‘Sorry. None taken.’
Robyn groaned loudly. ‘I’m sorry. That was unnecessary. But please do not touch me.’
Mickey was terrified of things he couldn’t fix, and the only things he could fix were broken bodies, torn skin, shattered bones. Medical work seemed to be the only thing he was good for. It was the only place he could look over a situation afterwards and say: yes, I helped, me.
He wanted to help Robyn.
He curled up into himself on the mould and glanced in arbitrary directions. Sentences kept rolling over in his head and dissipating. There was a code, he was sure, a series of words he could say that would sort it all out. He knew this. A perfect sentence somewhere. He drilled for it.
‘What are you trying to achieve?’ Robyn asked, suddenly.
Mickey jumped. ‘Um?’
‘You want to fix me, right now. Right?’
‘Um.’
Robyn snickered cruelly. Mickey had never heard her snicker before. It made him shiver. ‘What a medic. You can’t. At least, you cannot do it with a backrub. Or compliments.’ She paused for a moment, then sighed. In a softer voice, she said: ‘Sorry, again. Is this why everyone likes you? You do things like this?’
Mickey sweated. ‘What was I doing?’
‘Asking people how they’re doing, offering them backrubs, etcetera. Is that why?’
Mickey’s brains were fizzling with activity. ‘I’m not sure.’
Robyn gave him that cold look she gave people when she knew they were talking bullshit. ‘You must have some theory at least.’
‘People like me?’ Mickey said, baffled.
‘People like you!’ Robyn said, also baffled.
‘I guess they do. I don’t think about it much.’
‘Every time you walk through the base, Mickey, you are greeted by everyone. You are greeted by people I didn’t even realise could speak at all. You are the only person I have ever known who Sophie listens to. You get… messages.’
Mickey felt her words sink into him slowly, squelching. He didn’t know why it surprised him so much. He rolled words uselessly around in his mouth.
‘Nobody likes me, Mickey. People who rank under me resent me and people who rank above me are afraid of me. At best, I am acknowledged and put up with.’ She spoke calmly, almost cheerfully. ‘I don’t blame anyone. I am a bureaucrat. I have chosen this life. I can accept the responsibility for this.’
She stretched on the ground, vented hot air. She sat up and looked sincerely at Mickey. ‘How do I make people like me? How do I alter myself?’
Sentences rolled through Mickey’s head. He was useless. He glared at a mould stem on the ground. He felt like he was being squeezed. He looked suddenly back at Robyn. He needed to say something.
‘I don’t know any of them that well.’
They were both silent for a moment.
‘What do you mean?’
Mickey shrugged. ‘Just that. I don’t know anyone that well. Nobody knows me that well. Except Sophie.’ He coiled and uncoiled a tendril. ‘I talk to a lot of people but I don’t talk talk to them.’
Robyn was silent, now. She vented air quietly. Her servos thrummed.
‘I put in a lot of effort. People ask for my help a lot, and I always help them. People remember me a lot but they forget me a lot, too. I don’t know if it’s worth it, sometimes.’ Mickey scratched himself. ‘I just like it when everyone’s happy.’
‘There has to be something I can do,’ Robyn said, after a long pause.
‘You keep distant sometimes,’ Mickey said, carefully. ‘I like you. I don’t know about the others, but I think they–erm–like you, too. In their own ways. You shouldn’t try to change yourself. You shouldn’t do things to make you uncomfortable, either. But–’
A chorus of bassy meowing sounds, so loud as to sound distorted, erupted from one of Mickey’s pockets. It sounded like an earthquake on a planet made entirely of cats. He tore out his comms, tapped its screen, and held it to his earholes.
He looked at Robyn and grinned proudly. ‘I keep it turned on now, see?’
A series of movements ran across Robyn’s sensors that resembled, as close as her solidsuit could wear, a grin right back.
Sophie’s voice, too loud, roared from the comms: ‘Mickey! Where are you? Hello? Is anyone there?’
‘Hey, Soph–’
‘Is anyone the–hey Mickey! Where are you?’
‘I’m in a place,’ he answered.
‘Good,’ replied Sophie. ‘Listen: do you remember that chess thing?’
‘Chess?’ said Mickey. He glanced at Robyn, who perked up.
‘Yeah. Remember, we read about it a while ago and we wanted to play it?’
‘The game from Earth? It was like pinball but more boring?’
Robyn huffed, folded her arms and muttered: ‘Pinball but boring…’
‘Yeah, yeah, that. Steve found a holoboard for it in his comms. Do you wanna do that competition now?’
Mickey nodded his head very hastily. ‘Do you want to lose?’
‘Do you want your arse kicked?’
‘I don’t have one of those, and if I did, you would never be able to kick it.’
‘Well, it’s settled!’ Sophie exclaimed. ‘Uh. Yeah. So get over here.’
Mickey turned to look at Robyn. She was lying on the ground again, and smiled peacefully at him, and waved him back towards the shore.
‘Hey! Where’s Robyn? Do you know? We’ve been trying to find her but Beth’s voice is hoarse from shouting her name into the open ocean, now.’
‘I’ll find her. See you in a second.’ Mickey shut off his comms and turned to Robyn once more. ‘Do you know how to play chess?’
Robyn laid on the ground and looked at all the iridescence in the sky, the wide gleaming loneliness. The wind sighed. The slime mould prickled her back. She stood up and wiped sand and dirt from her solidsuit.
‘Yes. I know about many cultural boardgames, including chess.’
‘The knight is only supposed to be able to move in an L shape,’ Robyn said, covering her sensors in horror.
‘L shape,’ Mickey repeated, nodding. He locked eyes with Sophie. Beth tried whispering something in Sophie’s ear, and everyone heard their voice, barely hushed, say:
‘…just cheat, he won’t even realise if you just swap your guy there…’
‘Mick,’ said Steve, voice booming with leadership and responsibility right into Mickey’s earhole. ‘The essential element, other than surprise, is fear. Trust me on this. If they’re afraid of you they won’t even fight back. I broke all the windows in in this clown’s house once…’
Mickey’s head was racing with tactics. He rolled Robyn’s advice through his head.
‘L shape!’ he screamed, grabbing his bishop and swinging it over the board in the shape of an L, knocking one of Sophie’s rooks right off the board and sending a series of pawns scattering.
‘The face! The face!’ Beth hissed into Sophie’s ear. ‘His eyes! Get his eyes!’
‘Good move, Mick,’ said Steve. ‘Now, go for their kneecaps.’
‘That is not how you play chess,’ Robyn wailed.
‘I used the L shape!’ Mickey said, looking desperately at Robyn, pouting.
‘Checkmate!’ Sophie exclaimed.
‘It isn’t a checkmate!’ Robyn yelled back. ‘You cannot just shout that at random.’
‘Drat,’ said Sophie. ‘I thought I’d get it that time.’
Beth nodded sadly, looked over the board, a tragic mess of fallen and mismatched pieces, analysed the situation up and down. ‘It’s time to use the Dark Rain Technique,’ they said.
Steve leant in again: ‘If I know how they work, Mick, Sophie’s about to use the “Dark Rain Technique”.’
‘What’s the Dark Rain Technique?’ Mickey, Sophie, and Robyn all said at once.
‘Looks like I need to take over,’ Beth said direly, placing themself in Sophie’s chair and ruthlessly shoving her aside.
‘It’s clear my talent is needed,’ Steve said, slowly yet dramatically inching his way down one of Mickey’s tendrils towards the board.
‘Dark! Rain!’ Beth howled.
‘No! Mick! Stop them!’ Steve howled, inching as fast as he could. ‘The Dark Rain Technique hasn’t been used in eons!’
‘What?’ said Mickey, as Beth grabbed the holoboard and threw it into the air. Holographic chess pieces spun through the air, rolled and glitched in the sand. They were vibrant crackling blue, luminescent, faintly, in the grey evening light.
‘I’m pretty sure that’s what you’re supposed to do,’ said Beth, standing awkwardly behind the pieces raining to the ground, trying to convince themself as much as everyone else about their own grasp on the rules of chess.
A cold, hard atomospheric pressure came over everyone, suddenly. They were all silent. They looked at Robyn. She was slowly venting air. She looked over the fallen pieces, over their contorted faces. She looked at Mickey.
When Robyn laughed, she snorted. She was desperate for air. She hiccupped, coughed, breathed. She had to clutch herself.
‘You have his king,’ she said, between snorts, pointing a quivering actuator at the fallen black king, glitching in and out of a tuft of mould in the sand, surrounded by white pawns. ‘In checkmate.’
‘So I lose?!’ Mickey said.
‘Y-yes,’ Robyn said, rattling with laughter.
‘Another one for Sophie,’ Sophie said, squeezing against Beth for space on their chair and flexing victoriously.
‘I hate Grouscycles,’ Mickey moaned.
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