Oshee Galaxy, 114 Meters Vex of Null091
Log Entry 2AP86: Space Audity
Tina paced down the length of her pod, stopping periodically to refit the sheets on her bunk, to reorganize the lab notes and journals on her desk, and to worry that she might wear a hole into her station-issued boots.
She couldn’t just march in there like she wanted. There were protocols. Procedures.
“But does decontamination really take that long?” Tina asked her poster of a syentul she received as a gift from Planet 045.
The syentul did not answer, just stared back at her with eight unblinking eyes and a two-meter smile. The symmetry and size of the species usually fascinated Tina, but for now the frozen image of a cephalopod-like creature only mocked her with its indifference.
In the grand scheme of things, it had already been six cycles in the Oshee Galaxy since Tina last saw Jimmy Jr. in his stiff, unyielding troop uniform, the garish colors signifying he belonged to Pesto’s platoon. She told him not to worry, he’d break it in, and maybe the belts wouldn’t feel so tight after a while.
She should have worried more.
For three of those cycles, Jimmy Jr. was missing in action, presumed LIS, which usually also meant presumed… dead.
Hope unbowed, Tina clung to the rumors that he left a note for his younger brothers. They never so much as hinted at any validity to the claims—despite her not so proud moments of begging—but it made sense. Abandoning a post in the galactic army could be considered a serious crime if they catch any suspicion of treason to the union’s mission.
But Jimmy Jr. wouldn’t threaten peace. He was a dancer, not a fighter.
That was why he never should have been enlisted in the first place, and why Tina convinced herself he wasn’t gone. Just hiding. Just lost. Somewhere, out there, in the wide expanse of a seemingly endless universe.
The Belcher Explorer had just docked on what was thought to be an abandoned trading post planet. They tended to end up on glorified scrap-hunting and data confirmation missions, and this one seemed no different. Louise searched for treasure, Mom and Gene manned the home ship, Dad picked through the flora, and Tina looked for signs of fauna. They would report back to the union that the planet was exactly as they suspected—neat but abandoned.
All of those plans came to a screeching halt when Louise radioed in to inform them she found Tina’s lost package and would be bringing him back to base.
After swiping the operating communicator from Gene (possibly injuring him in the process, but Tina called that dramatics) and needling Louise to stop playing coy, the youngest finally confirmed that she had Jimmy Jr. in the cargo hold of her Scouter.
Tina’s attempts at persuasion to skip the cleansing protocols were squashed in an instant. Everyone remembered the time Bob snuck a lagarxi melon past the scanners and ended up down for the count, shaking with lack of immunity to foreign bacteria. And no, the blue-ringed melon would not have tasted any different if it had gone through the disinfectant bath, no matter what her dad said.
So now she waited, stuck in a routine of organizing and reorganizing.
Endless. Painstaking. Boring. Routine.
It had already been six long cycles, she tried to convince herself. Surely, she could wait a few more minutes.
Something inside her snapped, and Tina marched to the doors of her room with renewed purpose.
Automatically sensing her approach, the entrance split down the middle with a clean whoosh, and the two sides of the door seamlessly melted into the wall, ready to spring back out once she exited.
Tina didn’t get that far.
Instead, her feet magnetized to the floor as she stared straight at Jimmy Jr., his fist raised to knock on steel but meeting air.
“Oh,” he parroted. Jimmy Jr. cleared his throat. “It’s been a while,” he said. He meant it casually though it felt anything but.
Tucking a bang that had grown too long behind her ear (not long enough, as it fell back in front of her eyes moments later), Tina nodded.
They continued to stare in shocked silence.
Had he always been that tall? Certainly not that skinny, the slight hollowness to his cheeks put a rock in her stomach. And his hair had grown way past his comfort length, but maybe he liked it long and scraggly like this now? No, Louise warned her she picked him up in tatters, that probably meant a haircut hadn’t been high on the list of his priorities.
The borrowed station uniform hung loose off his shoulder, but it had to have been more comfortable. That settled her stomach. They would bring him back to life.
His eyes though. They spoke of a survivor’s will and courage, the spark in them roaring as he took her in.
“You…” Tina started but lost the words to finish.
Jimmy Jr.’s fist opened from the knocking pose, and he brought both of his arms up halfway then faltered, looking suddenly nervous, before trying again to open his arms and move towards her.
Her brain felt like it was on a delay, and if she looked up she’d find the spinning wheel of a buffering signal above her head.
He finally touched her shoulders, and that knocked sense into her.
She went to hug him back but startled, like his new sharp angles were a hot stove. They were going straight to the mess hall after this.
Or maybe to roll him around in a bottle of his old cologne.
“You smell like SudsZero,” she commented, her nose crinkling at the heavy detergent wafting off of him.
“Yeah, your mom doesn’t mess around with decontamination. I think she used those robot arms to find places I didn’t know I had.”
Hm. No, mess hall first, then they’d work on his smell. Until that point, she clung to him tighter and promised silently that she’d fix it.
“Uh- Tina? Too tigh- I can’t-”
“Sorry!” She released him from what had accidentally become a bone-crushing hold and led him into her room. “Here, sit. Or stand. Whatever you- what do you want? Stand or sit?”
Stomping a panel on the ground, a set of hidden blocks materialized to form a chair that floated completely still. She gestured to offer him the seat or maybe her bunk, but maybe that would be too forward and would scare him? Her hands flailed about as she second-guessed herself.
He took the chair with a nod of thanks, the anti-gravity frequencies wavering for a moment under his mass and then stabilizing as he settled.
With a frantic glance, she tried to see what else she could offer him, but her room was sparse. Only the necessities and her research ended up travelling the cosmos with them. And a few sentimentals here and there, but those… it wasn’t the right time for those.
The weight of his presence finally knocked her back to sit on her bunk, facing him in an awed slump.
“It’s a long story,” he said with a weary smile.
“I’ve got time,” she reassured.
He stuck to the facts, quick and dry and nothing like the calls they used to have, like the ones that killed her communicator’s battery.
For the first two cycles, Jimmy Jr. planet-hopped, first on a “borrowed” 93X Stealther, then trading his way through other crafts. He took odd and anonymous jobs, not of his own volition but of necessity. Maybe some other time he would tell her all about them. One such job, the only one he gave more details on, was a suicide mission collecting asteroid algae.
He crashed here, about a quarter of a cycle ago, and thought he was living off the land. Turned out, the “abandoned” planet contained hidden lifeforms, an advanced mole people. Jimmy Jr. believed they were trying to domesticate him with trails of food and makeshift shelters left for him to find, but they couldn’t understand that he was neither nocturnal or able to breathe through dirt (so wouldn’t eventually join them in their tunnels).
When he first heard the whir of Louise’s craft, he assumed the worst and tried to hide from his old platoon. She was just a far better scouter than he gave her credit for.
“There’s no sneaking by Louise when she’s piloting,”
“There’s really not,” Jimmy Jr. agreed but didn’t meet Tina’s eyes.
She had a hunch about why.
He expected her to ask why he ran in the first place, why he abandoned his post as the eldest son of a renowned military sponsor, but to Tina? It was clear as the crystalline features of a sphinx-eyed gnoat.
She wished for a lot that didn’t happen, so when Jimmy Jr. ended his tale with another quip about how ruthless Linda is with a remote-controlled scrub brush, she let him.
“So that’s… that’s me,” he said, fidgeting on his seat, his legs just a little too long for the height she set.
“Do you want to know what I’ve been up to?” Tina asked, throwing him a bone.
His shoulders dropped in relief, and he nodded. “That would be great.”
Placing her hand against the steel wall, she prompted the room’s biometric scanner to unlock her computer, a glowing keyboard shooting out from an unseen slot and allowing her to type in her secondary password and commands. The board rotated ninety degrees and unmade itself, clicking and unlatching until it had split apart completely so that the two pieces of former keyboard shaped themselves into what looked like pixelated gloves.
Tina slipped her hands into the gloves, pointed at the ceiling and brought her holo projector out. At once, the room filled with the soft green glow of her files digitally projected in the space above their heads.
“Sorry,” she said with a bashful grimace as she swiped the holograms this way and that to form piles along the edge of her pod then dismissing them from view altogether. “If I had known- I would have cleaned up a little.”
Finally finding the folder she meant for him to see, she pinched the air and expanded her fingers so that it opened roughly two hundred and ten files of her findings in the past five cycles of her life as a space organisms specialist.
“I got my last certification from Hux’el a little while after you, uh, left. The licensing is pretty far-reaching, so I’ve been able to explore on planets that a Watsiff degree just won’t grant you access to. You wouldn’t believe the kinds of beings that inhabit these places.”
“I might have an idea,” he said, half-smiling as he alluded to his years on the run across the quadrants.
“Keep going, I want to know more.”
God, his voice sounded so good to her ears.
With his encouragement, she clicked on her files from Tanreah and zooming into a 3D projection running in place, stopping, and looking around before looping again to its run cycle.
“Can you guess what this is?”
“But look…” and she shifted the hologram to the side, revealing a third pair of limbs tucked to its body and a segmented thorax unseen from frontal view.
“Bug squirrel. It’s at most twelve centimeters tall. Isn’t it amazing that something so like a creature on Earth evolved out here? The Tanreah atmosphere operates almost antithetical to ours. And yet, they have golden pigs that can mimic speech. Goats with quadruple butts. And wings!”
This was always the easiest planet to start with when she spoke with anyone from Earth, or who classified themselves as human, at least. There were reference points to equate the creatures to, and none were that overwhelming in comprehension… like the screaming psychic lake of fire the size of Jupiter’s twenty-sixth moon.
Jimmy Jr. seemed to handle these farm-like beings fine, asking questions and letting her distract him for a little while. He tucked his legs under him and relaxed further into the seat, enthralled by her explanations.
She decided to ramp up the case studies.
Swiping down on Tanreah, she loaded Planet 01100001 and the slideshow that went along with it. Robotic whimsy filled their visions with pictures of Tina playing alongside some well-built bots. And butts. Bots with butts.
As she clicked through the many photos of androids, she spoke with reverence, the twitch Jimmy Jr. developed unnoticed.
“And then look at these. They appear to be automatons but with no discernible original programmer. Completely inorganic and sentient. I wish I had more time with them. See,” Tina pulled up a picture of her and her robotic friend on a beach made of brass sand and cobalt waves. “There was one, Wrenit, they were great, and it really felt like we were starting to crack the logic and emotion barrier, but… well, the money moved elsewhere, so we did too.”
She flipped through the photos taken with Wrenit, fondly admiring the shots from when their extender arm stretched to catch the sunhat that had flown off her head, perfectly showcasing both fully articulated joints and the understanding of attachment.
“Oh. That’s too bad,” Jimmy Jr. said, though he didn’t seem all that sincere. “Are there more specimens? Like Wreckit?”
“Wrenit, and oh yeah. Tons. Every planet we go to it feels like I get to meet a new organism with an even more fascinating body. I’m talking to one right now, his name is Anthrun. He’s a centaur. Well, obviously they don’t call themselves that, but it’s the closest translation from our mythologies.”
Jimmy Jr. hummed, or was that a huff?, and she took it as a sign that he didn’t understand. Switching to typing mode, her gloves clicked at intangible keys that lit up circular rings in the air until Tina’s search yielded results.
“Tada,” though her monotone failed to capture as much of the awe that she felt.
Rippling muscles led from a human torso to the long, taut barrel of an equine-like body. Anthrun had braided his mane for this particular photo, and the camera captured the exact moment the wind whipped his hair out in a glorious display. The more well-kept a bindolon looked, with mane ornaments and tight lines accentuating strength, the more valued in society they were. Anthrun had asked for a copy of this particular photo, and she didn’t blame him.
Didn’t blame him At. All., she thought as her eyes wandered down his frame again.
A throat cleared, and Tina clicked onto the next slide with her cheeks warming.
“Oh, this was really special. Typically, only bonded beings are allowed on each other’s back, but Anthrun was gracious enough to let me ride h-”
“Isn’t it unethical for a scientist to be THIS close to her subjects?” Jimmy Jr. interrupted suddenly.
“You have to get close to study them. Otherwise, you might miss something,” she said slowly, like speaking to a toddler.
He scoffed and turned to the wall with a shrug.
“I’m sorry, it’s just a lot to take in your horse boyfriend.”
“My boy- what? No, I’m not dating Anthrun.”
“Seemed pretty close to me,” he said with a jerk of his thumb at the display. “Might as well be giving me the details about their reproductive cycles with how this is going.”
Her eyebrows furrowed as she tried to make sense of his sudden moodiness.
“The chromosomes don’t actually- no. We do have similar DNA sequences, but their chromosome seven is joined end-to-end twice over. Then they have a few inverted sequences of genes, plus the anatomy of it would- woof. Reproduction between a human and a bindolon isn’t possible.”
She usually studied habitat, behaviors, and ecological impact, but in some cases, like these, when Tina’s interest was very piqued, she went deeper into the biology. Hopefully, this little tidbit would calm his nerves.
“Tina, do you think I’m actually worried you’re going to have a horse baby?” Jimmy Jr. asked, exasperated.
“I mean, now I am, but I wasn’t before! Just how many alien guys have you been seeing?”
In the silence, Tina minimized her other files on bindolon—most scientific, a few erotic musings. Something she clearly saw wouldn’t go over well with her guest. Unless maybe he had already guessed from her cipher that’s what those gigabyte-heavy documents were.
“Do you actually want to hear about it?”
His mouth opened once, then closed again, seemingly at war with himself. Finally, he nodded.
“Yeah. I just want to know what’s so juicy about them?”
Sighing, Tina drummed her fingers before remembering that she still wore her cybernetic gloves and accidentally opened four different programs by doing so. She closed them, then, after a second thought, reopened one. He asked to know, so that meant she should tell him.
If someone didn’t want to know something, they wouldn’t ask. That made sense to her.
“This is Javikah. He wasn’t a boyfriend really, but we uhhh hung out.”
A moving image of a towering, four-armed, blue-skinned aquatician filled their visions, the size of the photo stretching as far as the walls of her pod would allow. He flexed for the camera.
Even in the dim light, Jimmy Jr. looked pale.
“We lost touch when we left the Ceruphe Galaxy, but you wanted to know.”
More for her own sake, she flipped to the next photo. They sat outside in this one, and Javikah and Tina clinked their snow cones together in a silly cheers.
“Are you eating bluezin ice?” Jimmy Jr. demanded, pointing at the cup in two-dimensional Tina’s hands. “But you like strawberry??”
“How long did you expect me to stay faithful to strawberry when birthday cake was lost in space?” She snapped back.
There it was, the unspoken thread he kept tugging at under the guise of curiosity.
It hurt more to say than she thought possible, and she wished she could eat the words.
They hadn’t… been official or anything. Sort of. Kinda. The undefined nature of Tina and Jimmy Jr. only made it all the more difficult to navigate the years apart. She mourned him like a lover, hollowed out a chunk in her chest where he should go like a best friend, and dug her claws into hope like he was a dream.
Slumping over with his elbows on his knees, Jimmy Jr.’s hands disappeared into his shaggy hair, shielding him from observation.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled through the loose strands. “I want to know, and I don’t. It doesn’t make sense.”
He groaned, tugging the skin and elongating his face, and finally asked, “Would you mind putting Javikah away?”
With a nod he couldn’t see, Tina clapped the base of her palms together twice. The projections disappeared, the gloves became a keyboard in the wall again, and she could finally see Jimmy Jr. in an honest light.
“All that time… I never knew if I was going to see you again. I didn’t really… I didn’t really think about what happened after.”
“What do you mean,” she asked softly, battling the urge to hug him better, as if that was possible.
“The changes.” His hands fell away from his face as he crossed his arms. Head lolling back, he stared at the now blank ceiling and sighed. “I don’t know what I expected. An hour ago, I was fighting a mammalian tree for the last shred of my pants. Now, I’m here, with you, but it’s different.”
Jimmy Jr. pauses, collecting his thoughts but speaking as though faraway.
“I want to know about you. The idea of us being strangers now, it- it hurts. I want to fix it. At the same time, I wish…” He stopped again, scratching his forearm to rid himself of an intangible itch. “I wish I had left you in a glass case. Everything’s preserved just right. Your hair is shorter, and you’re buried under crumpled up balls of paper. Stressed about an exam. And, if anyone said they knew you better than me, I’d laugh.”
He sighed. “But that’s not true anymore, is it?”
“No,” Tina answered honestly. “A lot’s happened since then. But you’re not exactly the same either.” Before he could jump to conclusions, she pointed to his neck where his platoon dog tags used to rest.
To her surprise, he fished out the chain hidden underneath clothes that shouldn’t be that baggy on him.
The platoon tag IS missing, but the charms he used to tuck behind it are still there: the pair of silver socks his brothers got him as a joke and then a dulled, yellow piece of plastic. Her mouth fell open in a small oh.
“Yeah. It chipped a little when a plorm swallowed it, but, uh, I got it back. Maybe just don’t put it too close to your mouth or nose.”
“No promises,” she joked, voice as flat as ever, but Jimmy Jr. still picked up on it and smiled.
She wanted him to keep smiling so bad.
Standing fast enough that it startled him into sitting up straight, Tina swept past Jimmy Jr. to her desk.
Without the frills of cybernetic gloves or sleek tech to aid her, Tina simply opened her desk drawer. Just a few sentimentals to shuffle through, she easily located a flat rectangle that moved with her to and from every star quadrant they visited.
Her fingertips grazed his palm as she passed him the trinket, and she shivered at the feel of his cool skin. Was he cold? Why didn’t he say anything? She didn’t have time to ask as he gasped.
“Wood Chuck!” Jimmy Jr. laughed and felt along the sanded wooden edges. “Oh man, I can’t believe you still have this.”
“You asked me to take care of him. And look, he still has those same googly eyes.” Quietly, she added, “Maybe a little new glue here and there, but-” Tina cleared her throat and tapped the small plank in his hands. “I just thought maybe you would want to see some things don’t change.”
“Thank you,” he said in earnest. He pushed off the floating chair to stand with her, setting Chuck upright on her desk so that it looked like he was taking part in their conversation. With his hands free, he tucked a bang that had fallen in front of Tina’s face again behind her ear.
“It’s a lot to get used to, but you make it easier.”
She nudged his hand so that it held her cheek for a moment. “I can try. It still feels like I’m getting used to everything too. It’s… a lot.”
“No kidding. I mean, look at this,” Jimmy Jr. took his hand away—much to her chagrin—and used it to gesture out to the rest of the ship. “The Belchers with their own Explorer?”
“An upgrade from the hunk of junk food truck you saw us in last time, huh?”
“For sure. I almost told Louise she was going in the wrong direction because this is way too nice of a ship.”
Tina snorted at the well-intentioned but backhanded compliment.
“Don’t get too excited. It’s an outdated model, and we’re still a glorified burger restaurant at the end of the day. We just have a few missions helping us cushion the bills every now and then.” It dawned on her suddenly that he was probably unaware of the reason they visited Null091 in the first place.
“Ha, do you know why we’re even out here?”
“You mean it’s not to save me?” Jimmy Jr. joked. Tina shook her head, another laugh escaping her in what felt like a hungover hysterical fit.
“We were just here to confirm data for the union. It’s an audit.”
He let out one short guffaw, and they took a second to bask in the awe of chance and the universe. And fate, Tina added silently, because it’s great. Neither could really communicate the gravity of it, but they understood.
This time, no hesitancy pulled them back as they embraced again. They melded into each other in an instant, her head on his chest and his hands on her back, begging to be closer together. A sigh escaped them both in sync. Under the layers of galactic-strength soap, she detected her Jimmy Jr. hiding there, same as he’d ever been. This, by far, had been the explorer’s best find yet.
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