Minnie dodged an orange shrub at the last second. She realized her biostat alert was still flashing, obscuring her vision. Real helpful. She tried to shut it off, but it wouldn’t go away. What a stupid design. A few more strides and she realized the thing was also buzzing in her ear.
“Goodnight, fone.” She enabled optical pass-through and the world regained clarity. “You were saying?”
Aether. But I’m not sure you want to know this—
“So help me, I swear I’m gonna turn—”
It was never real.
Minnie continued running, chewing on this. She hopped a decaying epsequoia trunk.
“Expound. Real what? Real for who?”
Her. Of course it was real for you. You loved her with all your heart. Still do.
This line of thought wasn’t entirely new. She’d worried in the beginning, couldn’t believe she’d found real love, couldn’t understand what Aether saw in her, thought she’d come to her senses at any second and say, “Whoa, sorry everybody! John is definitely the love of my life. My mistake!” But Wise Minnie was making it sound like some sort of conspiracy.
Private moments with Aether flashed through Minnie’s head as she skipped left-right-left across an outcropping of round-headed rocks. Aether’s skin and hair and lips and breath. Heady conversations, sore-gut laughter, M’s.
“You’re wrong. It was real.”
Yeah, you’re probably right. Let’s forget about the whole thing.
There was something more. What was she trying to hide?
Nothing. Focus on your footing.
Minnie skidded to a stop and headed back to camp.
Fine! Look, you were doing so well until a couple years back! Remember that review?
She reversed again, resuming south. “Damned John and his stringent BS—”
You started isolating yourself, went all passive-aggressive with quotas…
“Hahah… if I made a quota I was pissed. I think I only hit my water that first month.”
Right, but exercise, game, missed meetings, hygiene, going silent in group…
“Childish, but those were good times. Drove John crazy, I’m sure.”
Not just John. Everybody was worried! You’re the lynchpin of the team! It was bringing down everybody’s morale. Something had to be done.
Minnie slowed to a jog, trying to remember. It hadn’t seemed like others were worried… everything seemed fine otherwise. Only John was gnashing.
When did your behavior change? When did your quotas return to normal?
Minnie felt a pinecone in her throat. She knew exactly when she’d shaped up. Her biweekly one-on-one with Aether. Something was different, from the second Minnie closed the office door. Aether had said—
“I need to tell you something…”
“… and I’m afraid of the consequences…”
“… but I can’t go another day without telling you how I feel.”
“I’ve fought it.”
“I’ve taken meds.”
“She laughed with a little tear forming in her eye and said how she’d consulted with a sim therapist in her game. And I still had no idea where she was going with it.”
She leaned forward in her chair, put one hand on your hand and the other on your cheek.
“That’s when I thought I knew where she was going! But I still couldn’t believe it.”
And then she said…
“I’m madly in love with you.”
Minnie stopped to catch her breath. She was shaking violently.
Don’t stop! Not yet!
“You’re crazy. That was the realest moment of my life.”
I know, hon. Just not the realest in hers. You know that she and John would’ve sacrificed anything for the good of the mission and crew. Remember that time, a week after she moved in—
“In the hall outside John’s office.”
They were so close, his hand in the small of her back, their heads low, sad.
“She told me he was begging her to reconsider.”
Is that what it looked like?
“No.”
Minnie ran.
Something was coming. Thousands of them. She dared not a backward glance. Hynka or cats or the knobby stilt legs of an infinite dali herd, they were chasing her, and she had to speed up.
Warm gusts against nose and lips. Body so cold. Minnie couldn’t feel her legs anymore. She supposed she was through with legs. Used them all up.
A thick drop on her upper lip. It crawled toward her cheek and streamed slowly down. She didn’t know where she was, but the crispy crackles beneath her back felt like a pile of potato chips whenever she moved. Petrified lichen? Snow, but her skin had gone numb?
An awful odor.
The warm puffs brought her cheeks back to life. Suddenly, she actively felt the pain of the cold, no longer in some vague, intangible manner. She was freezing to death. Her body rotated on its own, rolling to the side. Was she doing this? Still couldn’t feel her legs. Was she in motion, rolling and sliding down some hill?
And then she was in motion. No question. She was being carried.
Some body parts were being heated while others suffered against an increasingly frigid wind. Was she on a skimmer?
It didn’t matter.
Body hurt, sick, done. Brain fried.
Let someone else be in charge for once.
She faded out.
Leg cramped, headache, thirsty, weak, suffocating heat, hollow gut. Minnie’s legs were crossed in an awkward sort of twist, one foot pinned beneath something, preventing her from shifting. Her hair and face were soggy, probably from whatever cloth was being dabbed against her face. Not cloth. A water bag? And not being dabbed. She was being moved up to it. The sensations all over her body suddenly made sense. Her back lay atop an arm, her rear cradled in a pair of giant fingers, her arms across her chest and wedged between an immense thumb and her belly. Her face, more wet pressing on her mouth.
The urge to cry, chest quaking with fear of impending agony.
She dared a peek.
Hazy sunlight from somewhere. A blurry shine. Dark cave—some strange, moist nook. The smell! Though lacking firsthand experience, she concluded with certainty that this was the stench found behind an overactive bull’s testicles.
“Rrloch-tss.”
Her host had seen Minnie’s eyes open, felt her body come to life. Another pair of fingers moved near Minnie’s face, like leathery Dobermans with conical claws for heads, and pinched at its wrinkly drapes of armpit skin, pressing it against Minnie’s lips. Thick, gray milk percolated from a hundred lactiferous ducts. The Hynka was trying to nurse her.
Relief flushed through her. She cast aside visions of her own body thrashed about like Ish’s, and turned her fone back on. She couldn’t see anything but purple-black skin, had no idea if she’d been carried into the middle of a bustling village or was still somewhere near her campsite.
Nine hours had passed.
Pressing her lips shut against the increasingly insistent Hynka, Minnie’s fone reacquired GPS and established position 14.4K from John and the campsite.
John! He must be losing it!
Had she brought the medkit into the tent the night before? Would he be able to take his morning dose? Or had Hynka gotten to him, too?
Minnie switched optics and rolled her eyes around. She was in an above-ground burrow set between a mature epsequoia trunk and one felled long ago. At her current angle, she could see no other mobile lifeforms in the area.