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Colin sat on a tall stool at his workbench in engineering deck. He was pretending to fix a small compressor. He had begun in earnest, and had taken it apart, laying its parts in a reasonably orderly fashion, spread across the workbench. Suddenly he allowed his head to drop, thumping the workbench with a thud and landing painfully on a small screw which cut his forehead. It bled slowly, forming a tiny puddle around the screw. Part of him wanted to cry. Part of him was fine with simply bleeding. Maybe he should just turn to liquid and flow down the drain into the depths of the ship, to be recycled, his useful parts reclaimed and broken into elemental components. If there even were any useful parts of him.
He didn’t understand women. He didn’t understand Hannah. He hadn’t understood Suzzanne. He never would. Not Suzzanne anyway. That was for sure. That was impossible now. Hannah seemed almost as impossible. He had replayed the conversation a million times. What had gone wrong? What was she talking about? What had he even been talking about? He wasn’t sure of anything anymore. It made him feel completely useless - an utter failure. She was literally the only person within a million miles, but she might as well be a million miles away. She might as well be an alien for all their ability to connect - to communicate. How was it possible for them to be this ineffective? How could they be this stupid? Correction - how could he be this stupid? He didn’t want to imply that he thought Hannah was stupid. On the contrary, he knew she was highly intelligent. She was smart, and talented, and pretty, and deep down, he was sure, she was even nice, in her own way. She cared about the people who mattered to her. She was able to make connections with others. Not like him. God - what an idiot! What did he do wrong? It was impossible to know. Their conversation had crashed and burned as surely as a ship with a hundred tiny hull breaches. The root cause was ultimately unknowable. If he could go back in time, he would record the conversation. He could listen to it and try to figure out what he had said that had caused the explosive impact.
He was no time traveler. He would never have the millions of credits required for that kind of spending. He was not one of those lucky few who could go back for a fresh start. Besides, it didn’t work like that anyway. The spindown couldn’t jump you back a few minutes or hours. It was limited to discrete windows of opportunity with periods in the range of years or more, dependent on complex orbital variables. Even if he did have access to that power, it wouldn’t help. He had no clue why anyone even bothered. It’s not like anything could ever change. Not really. People are people. The world is the world. Everyone just has the same basic needs that they have had for millions of years. The same basic limitations too. Had any man ever understood women? Was this some artifact of history that evolution had never surmounted? Had his Neanderthal ancestors been just as stupid as he was? Would future generations ever learn?
His mind drifted into a dream state. A caveman with bloody, matted hair rose from the ground, a screw protruding from his skull. The caveman boarded a gleaming silver spaceship, blasting into space, then splitting into two, a mitotic amoeba ship, becoming twin ships with twin caveman pilots. The ships drifted apart on diverging paths, then both exploded. One caveman was able to patch his ship back together with a roll of duct tape. He flew home, received a medal of honor, married a beautiful cavewoman wife, and lived in a castle by a lake. The other caveman was thrown from his ship. He clumsily dropped his roll of duct-tape, and was sent to prison for wanton destruction of property.