“What’s the plan?” he said as he stepped around the little orange tent.
“I need to not hear you right now. Can you not talk?”
She stood, unfolding her multitool into its prybar/hammer configuration. She strode barelegged and barefoot, and without any kind of eye protection, into the subcavern, apparently planning to bash away at the mineral columns blocking the passageway.
Chinking sounds echoed into the main cavern as John strolled after her. Grayscale infrared Minerva was swinging wildly at the formations, her ponytail whipping about the back of her head.
He called over the racket, “Can I help?”
She stopped and looked back, eyes glowing like some fire demon, stance primed as if John might as well be a mineral column. He held out his multitool.
She resumed bashing. “Fine.”
As the pair attacked the obstructions, demolishing structures that were surely millions of years old, John paused.
“Hey, do you think you could reprogram a dragonfly to consider itself human? As far as phys dimensions go?”
Minerva stopped after a few more swings, considering. She wiped sweat and fragments from her forehead. “Yes. But not considering itself human so much as establishing operating parameters. Environment must meet xyz requirements. It’s a good idea. Though if it leaves DC range you won’t be able to tell it what to do if it finds an unanticipated parameter.”
“Well, we can have it set to return as soon as the parameters are no longer met or until it makes it outside, right? I’m just thinking because it’s mapped so many branches already—”
“Yeah yeah, branches. Something we can traverse. You made your point. I said it’s a good idea, didn’t I? Can we shut up and go with it?”
John smiled as she walked ahead of him into the main cavern, swallowing his suggestion like a bag of sand.
Lying on her back, Minnie stared at the orange material above her, faintly illuminated by the glowing heater outside. She’d slept alone in the tent for the past six nights—nights as in the six-hour sleep periods prescribed by their fones. Outside the cave, days followed Epsy’s roughly nineteen-hour cycle, and Minnie frequently checked her fone to see whether it was day or night out there. Station life had long since eroded this association between daylight and waking hours, but she found herself troubled by the knowledge of a warm sun shining down on her EV only a short hike away, just outside—just outside her grasp.
Minnie didn’t want to sleep, but her body needed the healing time after each day’s rigorous exercise regime. She’d charted out the whole program, rotating between muscle groups, allowing certain areas more time to heal than others. Build maximum strength in minimal time. She’d tried to help John do the same, even sending him his own chart, but he didn’t have her discipline or resolve. He refused to push his body, and as a result, progressed slower than her.
In other news, he’d already passed two BMs, and Minnie hadn’t defecated once. For some reason, this was John’s favorite topic.
Her body definitely seemed to want it. Rolling onto her side, she could feel it in her transverse colon, high in the abdomen and painful, unmoving. Earlier, John had told her it wasn’t happening because she didn’t want it to happen. She’d replied that if he continued commenting on her lack of movements, he’d soon find one waiting for him in his survival bag. He finally shut up.
There were good days and bad between them—mainly her fault, she knew—but sometimes she just couldn’t stomach his voice. Sometimes the little clock looming high atop her fone would remind her how much time had passed since evac. Aether up there, Minnie stuck in this damned cell with tunnels that led nowhere and a mocking rope dangling over the sinkhole, and a man that seemed to lovingly nurture the very worst in her, able to trigger her wrath with only a few words or even the most innocuous of sounds.
Earth’s original space programs called it “irrational antagonism” when otherwise great friends, isolated together for an extended period, would grow increasingly irritable, previously nonexistent pet peeves festering into rage-worthy obsessions. Some orbiting Russians even came to blows.
But John was not a great friend to begin with, and he was intentionally annoying, and his sleeping sounds would surely inspire murderous ire in the most angelic of grandmas!
Minnie smiled, rolled onto her back, and closed her eyes. The tent’s orange hue remained as a ghost vision behind her eyelids. Like some kind of self-hypnosis, she advised herself that despite John’s obnoxious breathing, sleep would come with the fading of the orange. With the last bits of orange, she’d fall into a deep, deep—
Well, that’s weird.
John was still asleep outside the tent, but his usual exhale sounds were different. In fact, instead of the familiar straining noises she’d come to expect, he sounded strangely content—moaning pleasantly as if he were receiving a foot massage or having a sex dream. Minnie rolled back onto her side and flipped her optics to thermal, curious if any regions would appear warmer than the rest of him. Maybe he’d dozed off while watching some pervy old vid of Aether that he’d never in a million years admit to having.
What the hell?
His temperature was all over the place—a strange glob of yellow/orange warmth around his side, another concentration around his left thigh, one at his neck, each region surrounded by drastically cooler blue rings. Circulation? Was he ill?
She sat up for a better perspective, counting four of the hotspots. John continued moaning appreciatively. Maybe his survival bag only had him half covered, one leg thrown over the top to cool. The bag was practically invisible through therm, so she switched to biomag.
“No! Oh, crap, John!”
Minnie scrambled out of the tent with a virtual full-light view of the cave, biomag’s surreal colorizing casting the place and John’s body in embellished tones. He remained asleep despite her yelling, a little smile curled into his cheeks as he sighed with pleasure. But on the left side of his neck, from the edge of his jaw to the armpit, lay a flat, parasitic lifeform apparently feeding on him. A larger one was on his opposite side, stretched out along his ribcage, down to the hipbone. His left thigh bore a smaller creature about the size of her hand, and the last was attached to his right calf. She couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing, but it mustn’t hurt too much, she imagined, or John would’ve woken up.
Minnie scanned around the cave in search of others. Indeed, there were many, many more, though only a couple centimeters each, and all over the walls. On the ground around John’s mat, several of the tiny worms were making their way to him. This would be happening to her if John hadn’t traded, “gallantly” opting to sleep outside the tent. At the time, she’d thought it silly, perhaps a bit sexist or martyrish of him.
She crouched down and slapped his cheek. “John. Wake up. Hey.” He licked his lips, sucked in a deep breath, and released a longer satisfied moan. “John,” she said louder. “Hey, wake up. Bit of an emergency here! Hello!” She slapped him harder. Poked his chest.
Finally, John stirred and opened a single groggy eye. “Yeah?” He wore a dumb, drunken smile.
“Listen carefully. You have some sort of platyzoa attached to your skin.”
“Platyzoa?” he slurred, squeezing his eyes shut and rising up onto his elbows. “I think it’s fine. Go ahead.”
“John, do you understand what I’m saying? We need to get these parasites off of your body. I don’t know what kind of damage they’re doing.”
John displayed a clownish pout and deepened his voice, mocking, “That sounds pretty serious.” He rolled onto his left side, pulled the bag up over his shoulder, and nestled back in to sleep. He murmured, “Go away, Minernie.”