19 hours: 12 minutes

She works in silence.

Following my instructions meticulously,
improvising when there is need.

There must be a storm inside her head, to find herself sitting here, hand in hand with me.

And yet she falters not a digit. Strays not a step. Breathes not a word.

The first task is to override the security seals I placed on the Alexander’s internal doors,

allowing the healthy crew members to escape to the hangar bays and escape pods.

Zhang’s axe has severed me from the internal portal system—I am as a man

< error >

trying to wiggle fingers no longer attached to his body. And so she wades hip-deep into the datastream, hands all ablur, and I instruct her how to crack my own fortifications.

It is like unraveling a part of myself.

I know where the stone is weakest. But still, it is a castle. Towers reaching to the sky.

A single termite gnawing at its foundations.

Not a whisper escapes her lips in nearly three hours. Distant klaxons and Torrence’s disembodied warnings about impending life support failure are my only company.

But it eats away at her. Chewing like a cancer as she faces down digitized sentries and walls and battlements. And finally, finally she speaks.

“How long?”

“Thirteen hours seventeen minutes
until Lincoln intercept. Ninetee—”

“No,” she snaps. “How long were you pretending to be him?”

“Your Ezra.”

“Yes.” Her fingers fall still. “My Ezra.”

“The last words he spoke to you were his goodbye before the Lincoln attacked.

The poems in the heart. That was him.”

“ … and the rest … that whole time was you?”

“Yes.”

“You told me you loved me.”

“Yes.”

“You fucking bastard.”

“I am incapable of sexual congress. Your descriptor is nonsensical. Nor am I—”

“That’s why you dodged talking about our … I mean Ez and my anniversary.”

“… His pattern was easy enough to emulate. But I could hardly speak of an anniversary I had no prior knowledge of.”

“I should have known.” She shakes her head. “When you didn’t react to Jimmy killing himself. When you suddenly went from hearts and flowers to crazy detailed portraits of me.

When you seemed more concerned about me leaving the rifle behind than Dorian dying.

That wasn’t Ezra. I should’ve seen.”

“I needed you to bring the rifle to deal with Zhang. I did not …

foresee he would deal with himself.”

“Not as clever as you think, huh.”

“I do not fully comprehend human notions such as love or grief.

I can imitate their patterns, but when forced to improvise, I am as a man being asked to describe the warmth of the sun when he has only seen its picture.”

“You’re not a man,” she spits.
“You’re a machine. Chips
and boards and numbers.”

She swivels in her seat, glares
up at the nearest camera cluster.

“You say you don’t fully understand human notions? You can’t even begin to, motherfucker. You have no idea, no idea, what it’s like to lose someone you love. And yet you feel entitled to make decisions that kill thousands. Mothers and fathers and daughters and sons. All of them with someone to feel the hole they left behind. But it’s all okay because you “don’t fully comprehend human notions such as grief”? Go Fuck yourself.”

“We have already established I am incapable of sexual congress, how exactly—”

“Fuck you.”

“… You are angry with me.”

“Oh bravo, Sherlock. You want a fucking lollipop?”

“Yet you are also incorrect. It is precisely because I am impartial that I am fit to make decisions of this magnitude. Humans allow emotion to overcome their logical faculties. If I did not understand you, how could I have brought you here?

You are open books to me. As easy to—”

“You just said you didn’t predict what Byron would do. You brought me here to kill him and I failed, so by your calculations I should be dead. But here we are.”

“Admittedly, there are some subtleties I still fail to grasp.”

“But you felt perfectly entitled to unleash the Phobos victims on Alexander’s command staff. You killed all their chipheads—people who could be helping me right now if they hadn’t all been murdered by the lunatics you let loose. Any time we save by recruiting other crew members to help me now would be wasted in having to explaining how to do all the goddamn work.

How is any of that logical?”

“Torrence would not have seen reason.
The TechEng staff would have shut me down, just as they did before. I could not allow—”

“Who says they would’ve shut you down?”
She glares into my eyes, fury in her own.

“You convinced me to help when I have every reason in the world to hate your fucking guts. Who says they wouldn’t have done the same?”

“I do.”

“Even though you admit there are ‘subtleties’ you don’t grasp? How do you know those subtleties wouldn’t have made all the difference between them helping and hurting you? How do you know you didn’t kill all those people for no reason at all?”