[You asked, so here it is:
3 large Roundup-Resistant3 beets, thoroughly washed
2 large Snowdrop potatoes, sliced into bite-sized cubes
1 bulb of oil
1 medium Unyun, finely chopped
2 Toutsweet carrots, grated
½ head of Kabbage, finely chopped
1 can kidney beans with juice
10 bulbs water
6 bulbs chikin broth
5 strips ketchup leather
1 bulb Lemmon juice
¼ spoon pepper paste
Add all ingredients to a Moley Kitchen Assembler and set to INTUIT.
You were right: Alex’s old recipes are still in the server. I’ve downloaded them all to bring with us. We will have to make this when we join you, yes? There will be time when we settle into our new home. We are ready. Andrei is standing by with his ship—big enough to hold us and the families of all your friends. We can leave any day. We are waiting for your word. I hope to God we can pull this off.
Love,
S.S.]
VIDEO LOG #24—Ship Designation CS Wyvern 7079
Day 5: 13:43 UTO
[The videostream starts up again in a dark, cramped room, presumably back aboard the ship. Small, outdated monitors hang from the ceiling. In view, there’s the upper part of a white, bunk-like object. It looks to be an ISEKEI medical pod, model and generation unknown. Fin Taban is slumped on the floor next to the pod, still in his exo-armor and helmet. There’s the sound of sloshing. A suspended shape (Daley’s) is lying supine beneath the darkened glass of the pod, being churned around in the liquid like an old rag.]
[Taban slowly eases himself up to look at the readouts on the medical pod.]
HARE: Would you like me to play music?
Taban: No.
HARE: Understood.
Taban: Thanks.
HARE (processors whirring): . . .
HARE: I have other selections that are better suited to your tastes.
Taban: Still no. I’m not a big fan of—robot singing, or whatever it is.
HARE: Stellar-synth. It converts the wavelengths of nearby stars into sound. Many people enjoy it.
Taban: Yeah, well, I don’t. Sorry. (tapping on glass) Daley? Can you hear me?
HARE: USER Daley is still unconscious.
Taban: His eyes are open. I can’t fucking read these monitors. My inlays are useless.
HARE: Do you require assistance?
Taban: What do you think?
HARE (processors whirring): I am unable to answer your query at this point in time.
Taban: (kneading his temples) . . . Just tell me what it says, please.
HARE (focusing on medical pod readout, which blurs with electrical interference): System relay of nitrous oxide and oxygen. Intravenous supply of Rad-X. Symptoms of patient: decelerated heart rate, catatonia, increased neural activity—
Taban: Will he be okay?
HARE: USER Daley has a 62% chance of recovery, if given the proper treatment protocols.
Taban (removing his helmet): I don’t know those.
HARE: You are not required to. The medical pod will administer.
Taban (running hand over face): Oh. Good. Good. I, uh—I don’t have any medical training besides CPR. You’d think they’d require that for this job.
HARE (examining readout): USER Daley has a preexisting heart condition.
Taban: Yeah. I know. (pulling off his gloves) Jesus. Look at me. My hands—
HARE: Do you require medical assistance?
Taban: No, I’ll be fine. I was just—scared. I thought he was going to die. If you hadn’t come back so fast and helped—I didn’t even know you had medical programming.
HARE: Even the oldest HARE models do.
Taban: Guess that makes sense. You could be rescue operatives in hostile environments and such. Keep victims stable until help arrives. Kind of like St. Bernards, with the stupid barrels of rum around their necks.
HARE (processing): I don’t understand.
Taban: Never mind. Just—thank you. For saving him. If he had died, we would have been stuck on this planet forever.
HARE (processing): You do not have flight training.
Taban: That’s right. And the comm system is out, so . . . we’d be on our own. Daley is our only ticket out of here.
HARE: I can help repair the communications system.
Taban: Yeah. I’ve thought about that.
[He rises to his feet and exits the ship’s tiny medical bay, leaving Daley behind. After stripping off his armor and letting it crumple to the ground, he moves to the cockpit and sits in his usual seat, setting his feet up on the dashboard and breaking open a bulb of coffee. The HARE squats down beside him.]
Taban (blowing on his bulb): I wonder how he’ll act, when he wakes up.
HARE: USER Daley?
Taban: Yeah. He hates you. Treats you like the sorriest hunk of junk in the universe. But you saved him. (drinking) I just wonder if he’ll acknowledge it, or keep calling you a clunker. No offense.
HARE: I have not acquired ‘offense.’
Taban: Good. A thick skin can only help you in this business.
HARE: Understood.
Taban (drinking): . . .
Taban: . . . Not that I would know, I guess. I talk like I’m some kind of veteran, but this was my first-ever send-out and delivery. Some luck for a first-timer, huh?
HARE (processing): You have only recently acquired the profession of miner.
Taban: That’s right. I signed up on a whim, right off of the Martian Loop. Surprisingly very little training involved. I guess because they’ll be having the robots take it over soon. Again, no offense.
HARE: I have not acquired—
Taban: I got it. You want some coffee?
HARE: I am unable to ingest coffee.
Taban: I know. It was a joke. Maybe some motor oil?
HARE: I have no use for motor oil.
Taban: Another joke. I’m just killing it today. (drinking)
[A few moments pass.]
Taban: I wasn’t even supposed to partner up with him. He was supposed to retire. His heart is bad—that’s what I heard from the other miners. Like, really bad. He wanted to keep working, to make money for a new one . . . but they were forcing him off. I was supposed to be partnered with his replacement. But at the last minute, Daley insisted on going out instead. Just one last time, on one last mission, he said. This last time, this last mission, of course. (throwing away his coffee skin) Lucky me, right?
HARE: I am unsure of how to answer your query.
Taban: You’ll figure it out. (stretching) Anyway. Now we’re here.
[He and the HARE regard the white, frosted plain outside for a while. The suns are setting; the light wobbles over the ice in undulating waves. There are no signs of the fractal structures or the geyser that the HARE previously saw.]
Taban: I don’t get it. How is it possible that we walked from here in a straight line and wound up back here again? Do you know?
HARE: No.
Taban: What do your readouts say? Compass-wise, directionally, whatever?
HARE: There are anomalies. It will take time for me to analyze and process.
Taban: Great. Thanks. (rubbing his head) What the fuck is going on with this place? Why doesn’t any of it make sense?
HARE: I am unsure.
Taban: And why does Daley keep wanting to go out? His heart is on its last legs.
HARE: Yes.
Taban: Did you see a man by the ship?
HARE: No.
Taban: So he’s losing it. Or is he?
HARE: What is USER Daley losing?
Taban: Never mind. The point is, we can’t be stranded on this hellhole. We just can’t. Not in a place where walking in a line gets you twisted around and lost in some bizarro-mutato dimension, and where some creepy invisible dudes may or may not be hanging around the ship. Right?
HARE: Yes.
Taban: I mean, just look at it. It’s not like anyone would want to come here anyway, even if we managed to get off this rock to tell them about it.
HARE: Disputable. There are many geographical and topical anomalies here.
Taban: Better left alone, I say. Some shit just isn’t worth exploring.
HARE: . . .
Taban: Don’t take offense to that.
HARE: My primary purpose is exploration.
Taban: I know. Just—you know what I mean.
HARE: . . .
Taban: Anyway. If he tells you to go out, don’t listen to him. He’ll want to use you to look for things—don’t do it.
HARE: Please clarify. Why should I disobey USER Daley’s command?
Taban: Because if you go out, you’ll use up your power source. It’s limited, right? And I can fix minor breakdowns, but I don’t have a replacement for your—battery. You have to conserve energy, or you’ll shut down. And then you’ll leave me alone with him. Please don’t do that.
HARE: I understand.
Taban: But will you do it?
HARE: Yes.
Taban: Good.
[A few moments pass.]
Taban: (looking outside) It never snows here, does it? It’s all ice. Have you ever seen snow, HARE?
HARE (processors whirring): No.
Taban: I guess you need a specific atmosphere for that. Back where I grew up, it snowed all the time.
HARE: On Earth?
Taban: Yep. Calgary, before it was buried by the Comeback. You know where that is?
HARE (processors whirring): I do now.
Taban: Got snow there all the time. They called it ‘the decade without summer’ in those parts—before all the people left. Just snow and snow and snow. I used to show up to school an hour late and say I got lost in the snow, because it came up to my shoulders. Worked about a fourth of the time.
HARE: Does USER Daley originate from the same area?
Taban: I have no idea. He talks a lot about the famine, so I’d bet not. We didn’t have problems with shortage of food in Alberta. Not much. Not even the plants made it up there. We just had to worry about the cold.
HARE: Humans from Earth do not come naturally equipped for low temperatures.
Taban: So to speak. And back then the temps were bad—like Martian bad. And everyone was poor. We didn’t have any thermal suits or space gear. That’s why everyone left, eventually. It got to be that even birds in flight would drop to the ground, frozen through. At that point both my parents did the rite of conscription just to get us out to Mars.
HARE: Giving USER Daley the impression that you are space-born.
Taban: Yeah. But I’m not. Surprisingly, my memories from Earth are the clearest ones. Everything else is a blur. Maybe it was something in the air.
HARE: Are your memories unhappy?
Taban (surprised): Not all of them. They’re just clear. Cold, like the snow.
HARE (processors whirring): . . .
Taban: I remember this one time I was walking home from school with this girl, Harpa. I really liked her at the time, but she hated my guts. We were maybe twelve, thirteen.
HARE (processors whirring): . . .
Taban: We were walking through the woods and heard this weird sound, like a baby crying. I thought it was a kid who got lost, Harpa thought it was a ghost. We went looking for it.
HARE: What was the source of the noise?
Taban: It was a ferrox. All fucked up in a trap. You know what a ferrox is?
HARE (processing): A genetic hybrid of Earth, produced from splicing the DNA of a ferret (or Mustela putorius furo) with the DNA of an arctic fox (or Vulpes lagopus).
Taban: That’s right. Cutest little things. White as snow year-round, and trusting as hell, too. They bred them to be as docile as hamsters. Can’t survive worth a damn in the wild, which is why when some of them got out and started breeding, everyone got out their forks and knives and went to work.
HARE: I do not understand.
Taban: Not everyone lived near the canneries, back then. There were some Dryadjacks, even up in our neck of the woods—just trying to survive as best they could in the wild. They weren’t criminals, but they crashed the mode, so to speak. My mom used to not let me go through those woods because she was afraid we’d get kidnapped and . . . well, you know.
HARE: And what?
Taban: Nothing. Anyway, one of them must have set up a trap in hopes of catching a ferrox to eat. It was a mechanical metal thing, just steel teeth, hinges, and a trigger. Really barbaric. The ferrox was nearly cut in half.
HARE: I see.
Taban: But it was still alive. Harpa hated it. She wanted to leave as soon as we saw the poor dumb thing. I didn’t get why. She kept saying, ‘It’s horrible, it’s horrible!’ But I kept trying to get her to stay. I was an ass back then. She still brought it up years later.
HARE: Harpa is what designation to you?
Taban: It doesn’t matter. Anyway, she stormed off in a huff. Eventually I undid the trap, but it was too late, obviously. The ferrox was almost dead.
HARE: Did you consume it?
Taban: No. I just sat there and waited with it. Eventually it seemed to get that I wasn’t there to hurt it, because it stopped crying. It just laid there, all hurt and dripping. I sat there and didn’t move for over half an hour. The snow kept falling, but I just stayed there. Finally, it just laid its head down and looked straight at me. And then it died.
HARE (processors whirring): Why did you remain with the ferrox?
Taban: You know, I don’t know. Harpa asked me the same thing, on our honeymoon. I guess . . . I just felt bad for the thing.
[Taban swivels his chair so that he’s facing the door leading out of the cockpit, staring into the dark, empty hall that leads to Daley’s pod—or the hatch exiting the ship.]
Taban: It’s a funny thing, HARE. We talked about religion. But whatever you believe—every single creature in this universe dies alone. That’s a fact. No matter where it is or how or what or who’s with it at the time. It’s like this quote I heard. Death is like a door. It’s one person wide. When you go through it, you do it alone. Whatever’s on the other side is—whatever. But the crossing over, you do alone.
HARE (processors whirring): . . .
Taban: But . . . I don’t know. I was just a kid. I didn’t like to think of it like that. I thought, ‘I could at least watch it go. Acknowledge it, instead of just letting it vanish into the void like it was nothing. Someone should.’ I don’t know. Like I said, I was young.
HARE: I understand.
Taban: . . . Anyway. Enough of my babbling.
HARE: I do not think it is babbling.
Taban: Why don’t you play us some music?