A Complicated Love Story Set in Space - Shaun David Hutchinson Page 0,1

that I should avoid at any cost.

I quietly repeated Mrs. Blum’s macaron recipe until the sick, dizzy sensation subsided enough that I could open my eyes. Nothing had changed. The stars were still there; I was still outside the ship. It was time to remedy that. I grabbed hold of the tether and pulled myself along it hand over hand.

Despite the stars, most of the useful light was coming from lamps on my suit, and those did little more than create a weak bubble of illumination that extended about a meter around me. I could see the hull of the ship as I passed it, but I couldn’t see the entire ship. I didn’t even know what the other end of the tether was connected to.

“This is ridiculous. Who the hell wakes up in space?” I’d heard of waking up in Vegas, and once, the year my mom sent me to summer camp, Danny Forge woke up in the middle of Stonecana Reservoir in a canoe, but no one ever woke up in space. Except that I had. My brain kept trying to point out that it was impossible that I’d gone to bed in Seattle and woken up in space, but I couldn’t deny what I was seeing with my own eyes.

“This is how people lose their minds, isn’t it?” I said aloud. Talking helped keep my stomach calm. “You have to consider the possibility that you’re actually sitting on the forty-four bus in your jammies, mumbling to yourself, and that a bunch of strangers are filming you so they can post it online for the likes.”

That scenario seemed more likely than me being in space, but I had to assume that this was real until I had proof that it wasn’t, or I’d spend all my time questioning everything.

Ahead of me, pale orange lights bloomed around an open hatch that I prayed was an airlock. The tether was connected to the hull on the side of the opening. I pulled as quickly as I could in the suit. It wasn’t as bulky as movies had led me to believe it should be, but it was still awkward to move in.

Gentle blue lights filled the airlock as I floated inside. The moment my boots touched the floor, a notification appeared on my hud. Lithos Inc. Mag Boots have engaged. I shifted from leg to leg, grateful to no longer feel that I was going to spin off into the dark nothing. I detached my tether and watched as it was slurped up by a mechanism outside and disappeared.

The airlock was about the size of a small elevator, but I’d take its cramped confines over the endless expanse of space any day. I just needed to figure out how to shut the door and fill the room with oxygen so that I could get out of the suit, which was growing more claustrophobic by the second. I spied a palm-size touchscreen built into the wall that looked promising. I tapped it with my finger to wake it.

Cycle airlock?

I had never wanted anything more in my life. I was going to get out of the suit and breathe air that didn’t smell and taste faintly of tin and sweat. I was going to get on my hands and knees and kiss the floor. I didn’t know if there was gravity in the ship, but if there was, I was going to jump up just so that I could fall back down. Sure, zero-G sounds fun in theory, but the reality sucked and I wanted off the ride.

I reached out to tap the button that would affirm my deeply held desire to cycle the airlock when a voice spoke to me in a soothing Southern accent. “Uh, hello? Is anyone out there?”

I turned my head, trying to pinpoint the voice’s source.

“Anyway, my name’s DJ. I don’t know how I got on this ship—at least, I think it’s a ship—but I’m pretty sure it’s going to blow up.”

TWO

IT WASN’T ENOUGH THAT I’D woken up on a ship. I’d woken up on a ship that was going to explode.

“Hello?” I said. “Can you hear me? Where are you?”

“I can hear you!”

This time when DJ’s voice came through, I realized it was inside my helmet. Because, of course it was. Where else would it have been coming from? Any embarrassment I felt over not realizing it sooner was overwhelmed by the visceral sense of relief that flooded through me. I didn’t know who DJ was,