Every time Sion started to feel like this world, that was supposed to know who she was and what she needed, was downgrading her instead… every time Sion felt lonesome and terrible… D-Mei was there with another really bad idea that would get them in a lot of trouble.
Sion’s dad asked her once, “If D-Mei asked you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”
Sion just rolled her eyes. “You were the one who taught me hypothetical questions are a waste of time, Dad. D-Mei’s never asked me to jump off a bridge. She only asks me to do things that are fun and awesome. Quit with the counterfactuals.” Her dad was always startled when she talked smartypants, and it was the best way to shut him up. Plus she actually had thought a lot about the ‘jump off a bridge’ scenario, truth be told, and this was what she’d decided in the end.
Breaking free of Earth’s gravity made Sion feel sicker than the worst hangover, and it took forever. Like that time when she was at the Sex Lab and the glitter spray had turned superdense due to a nanotech fail—except times one billion. She thought she was going to die, and she reached out for D-Mei’s hand across the aisle, except that D-Mei was putting a nozzle inside one nostril and closing the other, just as the pressure hit blackout levels and Sion thought she would never see again. Sion let out a tiny cry of pain and topsy-turvy nausea, and then she felt D-Mei’s fingers and chunky rings against her own. Then they swung, like a crazy roller-coaster, and Sion finally blew floating chunks into the compostable barf bag, right before the curve of the Earth came into view, a blue neon stripe separating two kinds of darkness.
And then they caught sight of the Advance, a great floating walnut made out of steel and radiation-resistant fiberglass cladding. Forced perspective made the Advance look almost as big as the Earth, but it really was humongous: a mile wide and a mile and a half long, although the habitable areas were much smaller because all that bulk protected everyone from cosmic radiation. As they grew closer, the walnut shape revealed a million tiny openings, plus an array of bulky attachments on the front that would fire lasers off into space and enable the ship to reach unthinkable velocities.
As they approached, Sion came to see this massive starship as the embodiment of her higher self. Ugly, perfect, a boast shouted into the void. She vowed to live up to it, somehow.
That ‘X’ on Sion’s hand was the key to a whole new version of herself—a Sion who was incredibly awkward and unable to navigate any social situations at all. She started to realize after an hour or two on board the Advance that maybe setting off on board a massive interstellar ship, full of weird situations, wobbly gravity and Space Bros might not have been the best moment to try and reinvent herself completely. But she kept going, as she and D-Mei got whisked through a series of staterooms and lounges, with themes like Jungle Safari and Garden of Delights. “You’re already in space, why would you want to fantasize about being in a jungle?” Sion wondered aloud—much too loud, causing several people to give her the stink-eye. But then there were actual wonders, like a Secondary Control Center where Raymond Burger himself was holding court flanked by swimsuit models, which included a 3-D holographic representation of the ship’s journey out of the solar system. (“No pause ’til the motherfucking heliopause” was the official party chant of the Advance.) Sion ran her fingers through the space between Jupiter and its moons, but then men in pinstriped onesies kept coming up to her and asking her if she liked stuff that everybody likes, like dancing, or music, or puppies. She just wasn’t drunk enough for this. Raymond Burger looked like a debt-auction host: gleaming smile, white sideburns, fashionable rooster pompadour. And then they ran into Choppy, the navigator, and he took them past the fancy lounge areas, into the inner workings of the ship.
Soon Sion was standing in a gleaming space, as wide as an interstate highway, looking at a huge drum, around which a dozen men and women were checking holographic readouts and adjusting things. The drum had spokes coming off it, going up into the ceiling, and each of those spokes was connected to a massive prong that was aiming into the vacuum of space.
“It’s based on the vacuum-to-antimatter-rocket thing,” said Choppy with a huge grin. “We fire these lasers into space and they create particles of antimatter, which we harvest and use to power an antimatter engine. It’s a beautiful thang.”
Sion was gobsmacked—this was everything they were supposed to have, everything the failed Singularity had robbed them of. She felt her heart opening up and she tried to think of a smart way to express her awe, that wouldn’t make her sound like a goony moron. But just then, someone shouted, “Get down from there!” and Sion realized D-Mei was trying to climb the big drum.
“I just wanted to see the lasers up close,” D-Mei whined. “What’s the point of a laser show if you can’t dance with them?”
“I’m sorry about my friend,” Sion mouthed, but they were already getting escorted back to the passenger lounges.
“Shots!” D-Mei yelled. This turned into body shots, which turned into a whole other thing with a couple of Raymond Berger’s investor friends.
Sion was starting to get that caving-in feeling, different than when her mom went away. Different, even, than when her father gave up on her ever amounting to anything. She had this thought in the back of her head that maybe she had outgrown her best friend at some point, and hadn’t noticed until now because of the drugs and booze. This was too horrible to allow into the front of her mind.
The ship was actually not that big on the inside—the main part of that walnut was engines and a ton of shielding to protect you from cosmic radiation. The passenger areas had been engineered to have Earth gravity (almost), so they were basically a big ring that spun around and around. That cute engineer, Daryl, showed D-Mei the handful of accessible areas where the gravity was weaker or non-existent, and this meant one thing: zero-G beer pong!
Sion was sharing a cabin with D-Mei but realized with a start that she hadn’t actually seen her friend in a whole ship’s day. She also noticed they hadn’t gotten even close to the Moon yet, which was odd if they were going to reach another star system in a couple of weeks.
Once they were far enough from Earth, the ship deployed its massive solar array, and everybody stood on the observation lounge watching the one huge 180-degree viewport. From this perspective, it looked like the starship Advance shrugged off a huge black cloak, dramatically, like a dancer. These massive solar panels would power the lasers that would generate the antimatter that would enable the ship to reach half-light speed, after which the computer would do the judo equations.
Sion found herself sitting with Tamika, who had won some kind of science competition to get to be on board this ship, and the two of them were talking about lasers and antimatter and howfuckingcool, when D-Mei came up and whispered, “This guy named Randy knows where we can get some of the nitrous from the ship’s emergency fuel supplies, plus he thinks you’re hot. We gotta go meet him right now.”
“Dude,” Sion whispered back, “The lasers are going to fire any minute. Some of us are interested in science, OK?”
D-Mei just looked at her, with this crushed expression on her face. Then she took the vodka-cran in her left hand and just splashed it on Sion’s shirt. Only a little, a few pink drops here and there. “Fine, whatever.” She put on a bored expression and stalked away.
“Hey.” Choppy came up to Sion as she was still trying to get the pink out of her white shirt. “So the A.I. can meet you now if you’re still interested.”