Day Two
(age twenty-four)
Rowan found her in the study, hours later, scrolling through one file after another and nearly crying with frustration.
She was so overwhelmed that she couldn’t even focus on the text of a story anymore, couldn’t stand the visual and auditory stimulation of a video, but something in her mind had fixed on the stories anyway.
The result was that she kept clicking back and forth frantically, unsure what she was even looking for.
There was something that she wanted very badly to understand, but it wasn’t here—or else it was too big for her mind to take in.
“Morning,” Rowan said, poking his head into the study. “You okay?”
“No, I’m not okay!” Kelli gestured to the stuttering display screen. ”Look at this! I was trying to look at more of your media—you wanted me to do that, right? You must have wanted me to do it or you wouldn’t have left me in here all night without password protecting it.”
Rowan looked carefully neutral, the way he got sometimes when he was still trying to figure out what had upset her. “Yeah, I figured you’d want to snoop.”
“But none of the rest of it is like that other video! All of the rest of it’s awful, and your file system is so stupid that I can’t find anything! It’s just a jumble of little folders with cross-references that I don’t understand, and half of it’s pornography.”
“Not technically half. More like a quarter.”
Kelli had clicked on Seduced by the Spear-Wielding Amazons early on, out of morbid curiosity, and managed about five pages of it before she found herself flushing furiously, disgusted and horrified and embarrassed with herself, and hastily clicking back out.
But then books and videos that didn’t even have titles like that kept turning out to be about sex.
Inspiration’s language model was carefully fine-tuned not to ever write about sex. Sex was private.
“And then half the rest of it doesn’t even make sense, or it’s other kinds of awful.
Look at this video here—it starts off with a horrible axe man murdering people!
Right on the screen!” That one had been animated like an AdventureVerse show, which was a mercy, because at least Kelli didn’t have to wonder if anyone had chopped up their actors with an axe for real, but there had still been animated blood and severed limbs in amounts that were going to haunt her nightmares.
Sex and violence weren’t the only problems she had encountered.
In school and at university, Kelli had learned simple rules for good storytelling.
A clear hero, who was nice, and villain, who was cruel.
Explanations to make it clear what was going on whenever a viewer might have questions.
A happy ending. She’d been taught to supervise ScriptGen’s output and ensure that it followed these rules.
But half of what she’d found in Rowan’s files didn’t follow them.
We’re Okay Now hadn’t, either. It was a chaos, an anarchy of stories—and she didn’t know how she felt about that.
The axe man was easier to complain about. She knew exactly how she felt about the axe man.
“Oh, that one,” said Rowan poker-faced. “That’s called a slasher. It was a big genre around the turn of the millennium. The main character eventually gets away from the axe man, don’t worry.”
“And then,” Kelli plowed on, “I found a folder that was all Ship of Fools fanfiction.”
“Oh, no,” Rowan muttered under his breath.
“Half of it’s about sex, too! With pairs of characters who wouldn’t even do that; they don’t like each other that way. Some of it isn’t even consensual sex! Who would write that? And then, look, look at this subfolder, the one that says it’s about a kraken—”
“Okay, maybe don’t look at that folder.”
Rowan reached to lightly tug the display screen out of her hands, and she tugged back, resisting him. “Who would do that?” she demanded. “Even if you wanted to write about awful sex for some reason, make up your own! Don’t use people who are mine!”
“Are they yours?” Rowan bit back.
Kelli froze up a little.
Not that it mattered. Okay, so technically, Orlando belonged to Inspiration, just like every other character from every other story.
Technically, anything Kelli wrote about him had to be done with ScriptGen and had to meet Inspiration’s approval.
That didn’t mean he was Rowan’s. And he definitely didn’t belong to the person who’d written about him and the kraken.
Kelli had never imagined putting tentacles to that particular use, and she wished she could go back to not imagining it.
Kelli didn’t even know what she was doing, ranting like this.
She couldn’t articulate why she’d gone snooping in here in the first place.
It wasn’t just because it was what Orlando would do.
She’d thought maybe she was hunting down Rowan’s dirtiest secrets so she could list them all in triumph when she busted his smuggling ring, but she didn’t actually need to do that.
If she wanted to take down his smuggling ring—which she still hadn’t decided about, actually—then the fact that his media violated copyright was already enough.
But she’d felt compelled to snoop and read and watch it anyway.
She didn’t even know what the reason was, what she’d been hoping to see.
“Random question,” Rowan said at last. “When was the last time you ate anything?”
“Um, lunch yesterday. No, wait.” She’d spent her lunch break going to the shopping concourse. She’d planned to grab something quick when she got back to the office, but then she’d been half an hour late, and she’d been so flustered. . . . “Breakfast, actually.”
“Yeah, so it’s been twenty-four hours. Want something?”
Kelli usually ate on a schedule for precisely this reason.
Her interoception was not the best ever.
If she didn’t eat precisely at mealtime, she would forget that she still needed to do it, until it was too late and she’d gotten all bent out of shape and hangry without realizing.
She was also flying through space on an illegal-media-smuggling mission with her ex from high school, so it wasn’t like food was the only problem here, but food probably wasn’t helping.
She’d forgotten to exercise, come to think of it, and that was dangerous too. Daily exercise was mandatory on a low-grav world like Callisto, from infancy on, so that people’s muscles didn’t waste away and their bones didn’t crumble to nothing.
“What have you got?” she asked suspiciously. The last thing she wanted to do right now was eat a weird rehydrated aberration that tasted wrong.
“Oh, a bunch of stuff. I always keep about a month of food for emergencies, and I like to mix it up or I’ll get too bored to eat any. I think I squirreled away a few favorites just for you. Do you still like bacon pizza?”
“I do,” said Kelli, still suspicious.
“Here.” He plucked something off of the wall. “Genuine bacon pizza. Ready to eat, you just heat this one up.”
When she nodded, he stuck the package into a little heating cubby. It glowed a cheerful red for a moment, then went ding; he took the package out, split the foil open, and handed it to her.
It was not, in fact, genuine bacon pizza.
Pizza came in triangular slices cut out of a circular pie.
This was a rectangular prism—like if bacon pizza had been compressed down into a dense little brick so that it could be eaten from a foil packet in zero-grav without crumbling up and floating everywhere.
It smelled just about like bacon pizza, though, with an herbed crust and melty-soft cheese, and her stomach growled.
She took a bite, and her whole mouth and stomach zinged to life. Okay, yes, she’d been hungry.
Rowan made some breakfast for himself, too—rehydrated eggs.
Kelli watched that process with fascination: the capsule of yellow flakes that he emptied into a small jar; the unidentifiable appliance he stuck the jar into, which trickled water into the jar, spinning it slowly to distribute the moisture, and made the flakes grow into a larger, fluffy, more recognizably egg-like mess.
The egg mess ended up filling most of the jar, sticking to the sides, at which point Rowan opened it and dug in with a plastic fork.
By the time that was done, Kelli had eaten most of her pizza brick and calmed down a little.
Food here wasn’t normal, but it stuck close enough to the neighborhood of normal to be a comfort to her.
She had her sugar beans, too, she belatedly remembered.
With his month of stored food, Rowan probably had all kinds of snacks.
There was a porthole next to the table, not as big as the window in the cockpit, but when Kelli looked out of it, she could see stars. Out here, there were so many of them.
“I’m sorry,” she said at length. “I’m being terrible. I was hungrier than I thought, but that’s not an excuse.”
Rowan gestured vaguely with his fork. “Apology accepted. You are a famously sensitive creature of structure and routine, and I just yanked you into an overloading space trip on really short notice, so I’m gonna call it even.”
“I agreed to go,” said Kelli. “It’s not fair to agree and then complain about it.”
“It’s fair to have mixed feelings. Can I ask you a question?”
“Uh huh?”
“Why’d you agree?”
Kelli paused, feeling unaccountably guilty. She’d been asking herself the same question.
“I feel sorry for you,” she said at last, focusing fiercely on the half eaten, unnaturally crumb-free crust of her pizza.
“I understand why you live like this. Nobody in the respectable world would let you transition, so you found someone who would, and it came with strings attached. Of course you said yes. This is life and death for some people—you know I know that. I can’t blame you, even if it’s awful. ”
“That’s not it,” said Rowan, looking weirdly dismayed.
“It isn’t?” said Kelli.