Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
ELAINA
They had parted ways in the station’s main hall, veering into the directions of their respective cabins.
Elaina realized she’d been thinking about kissing him, on and off, since their lunch date. Mostly off, considering she hadn’t let herself get her hopes up when he said he’d contact her and then proceeded to drop off the face of Earendel.
But now, maybe things could go somewhere. They were on this station together, hunting the same mystery, and… Well, his brain just clicked in all the right ways somehow.
Chill. It’s only a kiss.
Cyan was very likeable, and it seemed like they might want the same things. But Elaina didn’t yet know that they’d want them with each other. She needed more time with him to know that.
And now maybe she’d have her chance to find out.
He said he wanted to live on Gaia eventually. The ancient birthplace of humanity. It was an artifact and had maintained many old traditions for the sake of keeping them. The language would take time to learn.
But Elaina was usually a fast learner .
A wave of fondness came over her. Not thinking twice about it for once, she smiled to herself and subvocalized a message:
I think you’re great.
That wasn’t too forward, was it? Or would it scare him off? She’d said things like that before, but only to people who were safe. Those she’d known would return the sentiment. With Cyan, he was practically a stranger, whose timing was unreliable at best. What if he never even replied? What if she misread him completely, and the rest of their stay on the station would be super awkward? What if she liked him, and he didn’t care much at all?
But maybe the best things just needed a little bit more faith—how would she ever experience them if she didn’t take a chance?
“Send,” she issued the command vocally, her voice defying her second thoughts.
Thankfully, the coffee dispensers at the station’s canteen had not yet been affected by the mysterious virus. Elaina yawned as she picked up her carboform cup of old station grind.
Coffee was possibly Earth’s most cherished export. Sometimes even more so than humanity itself. Elaina sipped, not caring that it burned the tip of her tongue, as she walked in the direction of the primary command center.
“Any news in the diagnostics overnight?” she asked Bor when he answered her chime.
“Seems good for now. None of the systems you repaired yesterday have declined yet, but we still got heat and comms down in parts of the station.”
“I’ll take care of those today,” Elaina said. “When’s the backup tech coming?”
Being the one the entire station relied on to keep its critical systems up and running was a point of pride, but Elaina couldn’t do this indefinitely, especially with back-to-back shifts disorienting her system. She pressed her fingers just below her sternum, massaging away the subtle heaviness there.
“A few sols, they say. Do you know what’s causing it yet?”
“A virus,” she said. “Highly sophisticated and evolv… self-modifying.”
“Shit. Sabotage.”
“I don’t know yet, but it’s something. I’m still gathering data.”
“All right, just get here quick. I’m seeing lots of new red that just appeared on these screens of yours.”
Elaina sighed, cutting the connection. It was going to be a long few sols until her replacement arrived.
In the little debugging and diagnostics room, Elaina settled back in her seat and began her work. Once again, the next time she plugged into an affected system, she found the virus had mutated.
“What are you?” she muttered absently as she excised the affected code. The deeper she went, the more the truth of what Cyan had said sank in, and it unsettled her to her core. She wasn’t just hunting down a virus someone had deployed. She was hunting an entity—an animal all its own.
And she had this off-axis feeling that the animal was toying with her.
Elaina shook her head, batting away the thought. The virus was clever in so far as it was cleverly programmed. To evolve, sure. But software could evolve. Open-ended simulations had been the stuff of theories and experiments for forever, all the way from humanity’s simplistic Gaian origins.
This virus mutated so quickly, ever-learning. And somehow, it knew just how to slip under her defenses. Elaina had debugged thousands of systems in her career, but never like this. She didn’t really want to admit it, but she almost admired it.
“But what do you want…” Elaina muttered at her screen.
“Is it saying anything?”
Elaina jumped at the voice behind her, her focus shattered. The pang of irritation subsided immediately when she saw Cyan at her side, once more with two steaming food boxes.
“No,” Elaina said sheepishly. “I’m just talking to myself.”
“I brought you some lunch.” Cyan set a portion of baked river snake and beans at the desk before her.
Elaina stared at it in confusion.
“I’m a vegetarian,” she said. Again. She’d told him, and yet he kept offering her meat. Why?
“Fuck, I’m sorry. I forgot.”
“It’s all right.” Elaina picked up the fork in the bowl. “The beans look great.”
And the nymph smelled disappointingly delicious. Maybe just a bite?
Vegetarianism wasn’t an uncommon diet, anywhere in the known universe except for some purely carnivorous communities borne out of necessity in locations that had no edible plant life. Gaia certainly was not one of those.
Stop finding issues. Things are crazy around here. It’s an honest mistake.
And just the fact that he even came over with food was considerate.
When a tiny bit of soft nymph meat crumbled off the chunk, she surreptitiously let it fall onto her fork, and subsequently into her mouth.
Priad got the rest.
“I liked your ping,” Cyan said once she was done. “I think you’re great too.”
“Hmm?” Elaina pretended to have forgotten. “Oh! That one.” She focused on her terminal. “Thank you.”
“Do you want to have dinner with me?”
She glanced at the cool, steady silver of his gaze, watching. Waiting. “Yes. What time?”
Cyan drummed his fingers beside her on the desk. They were nice fingers. “I’ve got some stuff to check out here, but I’ll ping you soon, when I know when I’ll be done.”
“Sounds good.” Elaina spotted a red diagnostics line on her screen from the corner of her eye, and already her attention was being drawn back to the virus. Her nemesis. “I hope you learn something we can use.”
He nodded. “Me too. You’ll catch me up on your stuff here?”
“Sure. Thanks for lunch.” Elaina smiled, letting her eyes linger on him for a second before delving back into her debugger.