Tom: An inextinguishable light of positivity. If anyone was keeping score, you’re surely responsible for more laughs bursting from my mouth than any single person ever. You’re a hundred times smarter and more capable than you give yourself credit for. Lucky to have known you.
Qin: I loved our every argument. And even though I clearly won 98% of the time (OK, fine, 96%), I’ll now confess that you often got in my head, continuing to present your cases long after I’d ever admit. I may have actually been swayed once or twice, or once. I’ll also, painfully, concede that you’re smarter than me… in a couple of trivial areas. Wink.
Angela: You’re a bad ass. Watching you in training and our first couple years made me a stronger, more confident person. In reality, John has you to thank for me making his life miserable. Ha ha. I always loved how you owned what you know and said “how the hell should I know?” to what you didn’t. Also, I could never tire of the banter between you and Tom. Heart.
Pablo: You know how much I love WYSIWYG, and that has always been you. It’s super weird to have one of my best friends doing my OBG checks, but you skillfully made them seem like a haircut. Also, you give great haircuts. No idea why I think of OBG and haircuts first, but I guess I feel so close to you that it doesn’t matter. You’d laugh and shrug. Wish you could’ve bought me that first beer.
Ish: You’re super cute. (Wanted to say something nice. I’ll save my other thoughts for when I find you, you silly, irrational, selfish, daffy, murderous bitch.)
John: You’re less than 50m from me right now, and hurt so badly. But somehow talking to you, real talk, seems like the scariest thing imaginable. Maybe it’s because, as much as I’ve always resisted and denied, you really are like a father to me. This is especially rough for me to swallow, given each other’s past and present relationship statuses. Combine that with your enviable logic, problem-solving, insanely broad knowledgebase, and impenetrable calm, one can see why the psych analytics threw red flags about us from the start. I’ve often wondered why you went to bat for me to keep me on in training, and whether you later regretted it. And if so, because you’re a better person than me, I know that you’d never say so. I couldn’t possibly explain it, but I am so thankful to have you with me right now. We’re surely the last human beings each other will ever see—the sole remaining connections to our own humanity, because if someone else isn’t there to see it, are we still human? I believe I’ll disappear. Since we both know I’d never say it aloud: I love you, John.
Aether: I wish we’d met sooner; I could have loved you longer.
1.9
Beep… beep… beep… beep…
How long had it been going off? Was it a wake-up alarm? Someone needed to turn it off. Would someone turn it off?
Beep… beep… beep… beep…
Minnie felt her warm breath reflecting off something just in front of her face. Her whole head lay in a snug cocoon of enchanting warmth.
Beep… beep… beep… beep…
The sound echoed in the cave.
In the cave, Minnie repeated in her head.
Good grief someone needed to shut that thing off. But who else was there but her?
John.
Could John get up? Was he still hurt? How long had he been healing? Five days? Ten? Thirty? Time felt so inestimable—intangible.
Beep… beep… beep… beep…
She wished she could snooze it. Just five more minutes, Dad. Five more minutes of sleep was all she needed. Could she wirelessly connect to whatever it was? That would be the ideal. Not leaving the tent—no—that would be the absolute worst-case scenario. No leaving the tent just yet.
A list of available devices popped up in her fone’s basic standby interface. Two MWs, one MS, the heater’s diagnostics interface, John’s suit, Minnie’s suit. An orange dot flashed beside John’s suit, indicating it was low on power and in powersave mode. He certainly hadn’t been moving enough to provide any significant charging. Next to Minnie’s suit, the blinking red dot revealed that it was the source of the alert sound. Almost dead power cells? How could she have less power than John? She connected to it and silenced the alarm.
About to disconnect, she reread the alert.
ENVIRONMENTAL ALERT – Advise close visor, seal suit.
Minnie sat up, bare arms instantly chilled by the frigid air outside her covers. She didn’t even remember taking off the suit the night before.
Wait, what time is it?
She fully activated her fone and the usual border of icons filled the top and bottom of her view. It was almost sundown—32 hours had passed since she’d left the message on the supply pod. Something was very wrong. She’d never been able to sleep more than seven hours. And what about urination? Had she gone in the tent? She felt the mat beneath her and it was dry. Her stomach, too, didn’t hurt, despite the fact that she still hadn’t had her first movement. And why was the suit advising about seals?
Eyes still heavy, a soothing voice encouraged her to relax, to just be glad the beeping had ceased, to go back to sleep for just a little while, that she deserved it. Minnie fought the temptation and connected to the multisensor somewhere in the dark outside the tent. She had it run a new environment analysis. At sea level, oxygen was always lower on Epsy than it was on Earth, but in the cave it had apparently gone down 3% over the past two weeks, simulating an extreme rise in altitude. Stranger still, it wasn’t replaced by nitrogen or carbon dioxide.
O2: 12.2%
N: 66.8%
CO2: 4.6%
Ar: 1.04
Oth: 15.36
Well that’s a whole lot of “other,” Minnie thought, still struggling to focus. What the hell is it?
She expanded the “other” line to see what they’d been breathing, but didn’t recognize the mixture. Whatever it was, she guessed it was toxic. After downloading the values, she switched to the med app and dropped the gas mixture into a typimale of John’s height, weight, and age. It sped through simulations: 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 4 hours, 24 hours, 1 week. It didn’t even have to go that far. Right away she grasped that, for humans, the gas mixture would be received as a potent anesthetic.
I wonder…
The warmth and peace of her bag calling to her, she drove on, running through the list and selecting each compound to pull up the details. Nitrous oxide, propofol, several others without names that would surely have some sort of medical significance back on Earth. She blinked slowly. So much of the past two weeks suddenly seemed to make sense. Maybe. Or maybe this was a dream. Some fresh air would be nice. Some cool outside air… but it was so far. Maybe after a little more rest.
Cripes… of course!
She violently slapped her face, unzipped the door, and staggered out of the tent, clumsily pulling on her suit. It was like untangling a hundred cables tied up in fishing net. Eventually, feet found their way to boots, hands made it through sleeves, and her helmet surrendered to her sealing efforts.
After only a few deep breaths, her muddy head already began clearing. And after a few more, some of the “other” elements struck her as familiar, after all. She pulled up the acid slime sample she’d taken from one of John’s parasitic worms and compared the elements. The substance contained many more compounds than the air—more than two dozen—but all six of the unknowns in the cave air existed in the slime.