"The Bombmakers" by Michael Latella

As the hopper rose in elevation, past the treeless hills that banked marshlands in waiting, past the serrated black mountains of shale and iron, and finally, past the planet’s newly self-regulating atmosphere, Corrine double-checked her notes. Her Cress-issued electronic notebook had new soil and silt caught in its seams and screw holes. Ruby sunlight cut through the cabin at a hard angle, lighting the fine golden dust that suffused the air and coated every surface. Now Corrine could only read through the small portion where her thumb had been scrolling. She paused to wipe dust off of the screen with her forearm and continued typing,  finalizing the ground crew’s order for the bombmaker.

• 33oW, 5oN through 26oE, 12oN: Meso Standard

• 56oW, 8oS through 41oW, 3oN: Michigan, Deciduous Plus

• 15oE, 16oS through 38oE, 25oN: Saltwater Group E. Note: Temperature now fluctuating along expected patterns (see table 7a). Strait is ideal for Category A Migratories, but Categories B and C would also be compatible. Ask Em about concentrate supplies.

• 55oE, 20oS through 64oE, 13oN: Temperate Mixed. Note: Secondary habitat regions. Likely only needs six drops to establish canopy before arrivals.

Corrine finished typing this last note when a thudding noise broke her concentration. Nikoletta had removed her boots and lobbed them over her shoulder toward the airlock at the rear of the hopper. They bounced and knocked against the door. The amber soil that dried thickly around the boots cracked away on impact. One landed upright, the other on its side. 

Corrine looked up from her notes and said, “It looks like you’re playing craps. We should put marks on your boots and place bets.”

Nikoletta let out an exaggerated guttural sigh. Corrine caught Nik’s eyes, saw Nik’s open mouth, slack and vacant in exhaustion. Nik’s face broke off from the act, her mouth cracking involuntarily, and she and Corrine laughed the same aching laugh.

“Hell yes,” Nik said. “Can’t wait to win stacks of dried noodle flavor packets.”

“Would be the only way to scare up the spicy shrimp ones,” Corrine said. She powered off the notebook and stretched as dramatically as her seat’s harness would allow. “I’m still convinced Alain is hoarding them.”

Nikoletta called toward the front of the hopper, “Alex, when’s the last time you’ve seen a spicy shrimp?”

Alex remained facing forward, one hand on the yoke, one dangled behind him. He exhaled hard. “I dunno,” he answered. “I dunno, who cares?”

Both women loudly booed. Corrine pulled off one of her own mud-covered boots and launched it toward him. It sailed wide right and hit a small handful of toggles on the console in front of Alex. The interior lights shut off instantly and were replaced by the red backup bulbs. The women booed louder, fighting against their own spontaneous laughter. They couldn’t see his face, but Alex’s body was shaking as well, delirious in the red light. He reached over and manually triggered the fire alarm. The two biologists and the chemist pilot spent a minute cracking up underneath bursts of crisp, clinical beeps, stunningly loud and just below the threshold of pain. The three were still gasping and bent against their harnesses as Alex punched the settings back to normal.

Now several kilometers above a cloudline that was brewed in strategic, violent jolts six standard Earth years ago, the Queen became nakedly visible, a matte silhouette in three segments. Over time, this cresting view became commonplace for the ground crew, though they still caught occasional pangs of disbelieving awe. The Queen steadily dwarfed the approaching hopper until its impossible hovering mass consumed the whole of their vision. This sensation was staggering yet brief, hopelessly entangled with the opposing sensations of imprisonment and obligation. The Queen had been their home, their workplace, their employer for thirty-two months now, and their reverence toward it could only extend so far.

As they approached, Alex toggled in a series of commands, and the familiar grind and click of landing gear in motion could be heard and felt throughout the hopper. Upon reaching the heaving gray vessel, external observation lights flooded the cabin with a harsh cleansing white, bathing the crew’s squinting faces, catching thousands of airborne dust particles in slow motion. Alex pulled up unexpectedly, positioned the hopper over the Queen’s thorax, and began a slow descent.

Still recovering from a laughing fit, Alex asked in his best monotone, “So where do you two want me to drop you off? Is this okay?”

Nik punctuated the words of her yelled response by stomping her bootless feet. “I! Am! Going! To! Stab you!”

“Alex!” Corrine cried. “I haven’t seen a real bathroom in two months. In ten seconds, I am going to use you as a toilet.”

Struggling to keep a composed tone, Alex replied, “That sure will make for an interesting incident report. Now it looks like there’s an exhaust duct to your right that might get you inside, would it be okay to land–”

The electronic notebook connected with Alex’s shoulder blade, jerking the arm that held the yoke. The hopper went cockeyed. One of its landing wheels made contact with the dense steel of the Queen’s exterior. The three burst into laughter again. Nikoletta let out a long, groaning yell.

Alex pulled the hopper forward to the docking entrance within the Queen’s open mandible. They connected with the outer airlock, and Alex made a single loud clap at the moment of repressurization. The muddy airlock door at the back of the hopper opened to reveal a steel-white paneled hallway. This first interstitial space within the Queen functioned as a makeshift mud room, a space for hiking boots, for duffels and coveralls, a demarcation between the dirty hands-on business of terraformation and its clean, computational counterpart. A four year contract would be a long time for the crew of six, and the cleanliness of the bridge quickly became a self-evident priority.

Having already undone their harnesses during the docking procedure, the two biologists ran out. Corrine, the supervisor of the team’s ground expeditions, was still wearing her left boot. She kicked it hard against the hopper’s airlock then took off, making a crooked half-run toward the apartments in the Queen’s thorax, yelling the whole way. Alex was spent but still smiling as he heard Corrine’s voice trail off into the steel halls. He stretched and entered slowly, hearing the crew’s laughter underneath wordless, repetitive music as he approached the common area. He found that Nikoletta had already joined the rest of the crew in the loungers near the bridge.

Demetrius, the Queen’s pilot and comms tech, raised a short glass of amber liquor upon seeing Alex. 

“Welcome, welcome, welcome!” Demetrius said. His eyes were wide, flickering with a puzzling excitement as he held the drink.

Alex knew Demetrius and the rest of the Queen’s permanent crew to greet the ground team warmly upon their returns, but those receptions were routine. They were sincere but tired. This felt new, Alex thought. It felt off.

“They won’t tell me,” Nikoletta complained while accepting a similar drink from Emily the bombmaker.

“We have news,” Em said smiling, dragging out the last syllable into a long “ooh” sound. Alain, the Queen’s engineer, was looking at the floor and laughing to himself between sips from his own glass. “Where’s Corrine?” Em continued. “We need all of you in here.”

“She’s running errands,” Alex said while heading toward their bar, a rolling stainless steel surgical cart the crew took from the med bay. “Picking up dry cleaning, stopping by the deli.”

Em interrupted him, “No, no, no, we’re making the drinks. That’s part of the deal.” She and Demetrius cast each other a wordless glance. 

Corrine walked in wearing clean sneakers. She offered a sweet but exhausted greeting and curled up at one end of a lounger. “What news?” she asked.

“One second,” Em said, jumping up to make drinks. With her back to everyone, she called out, “No peeking.” She returned and handed identical short glasses filled with the same amber cocktail to Corrine and Alex.

“What news?” Corrine asked again.

Demetrius held out the drink in his left hand then gestured to it with a flourish of his right. “First you must drink,” he said. Alain still hadn’t made eye contact with any of the ground crew and was rocking slightly now, laughing to himself.

“Oh, simply out of the question,” Nik said. The three members of the ground crew each took heavy swallows then looked expectantly to the Queen dwellers.

Demetrius pulled out a remote, and the six of them watched as the central eight-foot by ten-foot viewport became a digital display screen. Demetrius gave a hearty, “Ta-da!” as a large legal document filled the display. In all-caps, bold at the top of the page, comically oversized on the vessel’s largest screen, read the words “NOTICE OF CONTRACT TERMINATION.”

It took just a moment to sink in before Alex exclaimed, “What!” He stood up and started running laps around the loungers with his head down, lurching at a dangerous forward angle, cracking up. Corrine threw back her head and cackled. 

Nikoletta put down her drink, started clapping, and shouted, “Yes! Yes, of course! Of course! Why not! Yes!”

Em broke in, “Dem, pull up the news story. Everything about this is beautiful.”

The central display shifted to a business report posted in Axis Capital detailing the outright buyout of Cress-Intractiv by the LinneFabar Group. The ground crew cheered. Nikoletta kicked her feet as Demetrius highlighted text within the news story. He read aloud, “LinneFabar plans to dissolve most of the business arms within Cress-Intractiv, with the exception of its entertainment division Truant Bloc and its streaming provider Haptic, both of which will see extensive restructuring in the coming months. The CEO and founder of Cress-Intractiv, Nicolas Olivér, was unavailable for comment regarding the sale of his company in time for this article’s publication. As part of this sale, he has been granted a seat on LinneFabar’s board. At present, it is unclear if he will be given a further role within the company.”

“Olivér!” the ground crew shouted simultaneously. Alex jogged over to the bridge console and turned the music up louder.

Demetrius switched back to the legal document and scrolled down a few pages before highlighting a section titled “Effective Date.” He read, “As of DATE–which is this morning,” he said as an aside, “all present and future terraforming operations will cease. This includes projects that are currently en route to new terraforming sites. Terraforming projects that are in process, regardless of the project’s phase, are to immediately cease all activity. In addition, terraforming projects related to the regular maintenance of previous sites are to immediately cease all activity.” Corrine howled.

“Wait, wait, this is the best part,” Em called out. She read, “All terraforming teams must return all materials to COMPANY at the earliest possible convenience. All vessels, including any vehicles, provided technology, and tools therein, must be returned to COMPANY at the earliest possible convenience.”

“Wait!” Nik said, still laughing. “Okay, okay, wait. Okay, so we all just got fired. But!” She had to pause to catch her breath.

“Yes,” Demetrius answered, nodding a wide, red-cheeked smile. “Yes, exactly.”

“We all just got fired,” Nik continued, “Hundreds of millions of miles away, two and a half years years into building a new Olivér rock, and they are literally asking us–”

“Yep,” Demetrius said.

Alex broke in while making himself a second drink. “Hey, if you could bring all of our stuff back, that would be really great. Please? Yeah, yeah, you’re definitely super fired, but all of our stuff, could you bring it back? Please?”

Em waltzed over to the surgical cart and took the drink from Alex’s hand. “Trust me, I’ll get it.” Alex watched her, mildly stunned. Had she ever spoken so close to his ear before? 

“Hold on, hold on,” Corrine said. “Like, we are right now, as we sit here, currently fired? Contract over? We are, right now, making zero dollars? Are we even getting paid for the return trip?”

Demetrius gave a closed smile and answered, “Yes to fired, yes to zero dollars, sort-of-kind-of to the return trip.” Alain started rocking in place again. Demetrius continued, “LinneFabar is only willing to pay quarter-time while we’re in cryo, and then they’re dangling a small payment based on the condition of the ships and the concentrates. We get paid after an inspection.” Alex smiled wide and started jogging in place with his head thrown back. Corrine and Nikoletta cheered.

“Oh my God,” Corrine said laughing. “But then what can they actually do to us out here, other than withhold the saddest little payout in history? There’s no one remotely close. Are they gonna shell out for an escort? Call the cops on us?”

“The next letter is gonna be really mean,” Em said. “They’re gonna underline stuff. Hold on, let me make y’all another round.” She turned back to the surgical cart and began mixing a new batch of cocktails.

“Yeah, this is what, whisky ginger and what else?” Nik asked, rotating in the lounger to look at Em, who only answered with a suggestive shrug. Nik turned back and said, “Right, if they can’t touch us from this far out, we’re kind of in a position to demand more money.”

Demetrius said, “Thought of that, too. It’s early, and there’s still plenty of shuffling going on, but if LinneFabar never takes up any of the terraforming projects, and it sure looks like they won’t, we have nothing to bargain with. I think they’d be happy to let us rot out here.”

“Jesus, that’s definitely true,” Nik said. “I still wonder if we could wait them out, for a bit anyway. There aren’t many applications for concentrates outside of terraforming. If LinneFabar isn’t planning on taking up the projects themselves, I imagine they’re at least looking for a buyer to offload all of that inventory.”

“We could literally just finish the job and live here if we wanted,” Corrine said.

“Or we could start chugging redwood and marlin juice,” Alex called, slowing from a jog to a trot. Alain burst into a new peal of nervous laughter. Emily the bombmaker returned with a tray of fresh drinks. Alex continued, breathless as he sat down, “Or start making freakish and forbidden mistakes of science. They can’t fire us twice.” He grabbed a new drink.

Corrine said, “I’m only half-joking. I could learn to build log cabins now that I have a hold on a studio I can no longer pay for.” She took a long sip from the fresh cocktail.

“Even if I could pay for my hold, the building doesn’t even exist right now,” Em said laughing. “It literally won’t be there if we head back now.”

Corrine leaned forward, elbows resting on her knees, glass held at an angle. “We could just live here until our fuel runs out in, what, a decade? Start working remote clickjobs from the console.”

“Cool if my Dad moves into the spare apartment then?” Nikoletta asked. She let out a long groan. “That’ll be a real fun conversation. So, you know how I’ve been paying your rent? Well, funny story…”

“Finally time for me to meet a nice widow,” Alex said, “one who’s rakishly beautiful and cursed with a terrible secret and rich in square footage.”

“Make sure to ask if she’s cool to adopt five dead-broke twenty-somethings,” Corrine said before finishing her second glass. “Yeah, I’m still confused. We don’t work for Cress, because Cress doesn’t exist anymore. We also don’t work for LinneFabar, but LinneFabar still expects us to return Cress’s terraforming ships and concentrate tanks. But also LinneFabar has no plans to continue terraforming. Did I get all that? Yeah, Em what’s in this? What’s the secret?”

Em and Demetrius grinned toward each other. Alain finally looked up and spoke. “Okay, so, nobody get mad.”

Corrine’s eyes widened. Nikoletta looked backwards and studied the surgical cart for the first time since returning to the Queen. Nothing jumped out as she took an inventory from left to right: the nearly empty fifth of whisky, a just-opened identical bottle, the long-expired grenadine, two open cans of ginger ale, the bitters, the soda water, the still-untouched handle of gin that no one liked, a glass of water, the half-full scotch, and the plastic jug of vodka with maybe two shots left. For a few seconds, the only sound was music.

Alain continued, “You know how we keep concentrates for a few dozen spore genuses?”

Corrine slammed her palm into the lounger and looked to the keeper of the concentrates. “Em, you didn’t.”

“Yes I did,” Em sang, adding a touch of vibrato as she held out the last syllable.

Alex went to the speakers and cranked the humid, stomping music, his head knocked back in laughter. Nik started clapping then put a hand to her mouth. Corrine started slapping the lounger with increasing force, calling, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Em. Em! Alex, holy shit, turn that down. Em! How much psilocybin did I just ingest? You guys dosed us? Em, what am I on right now?”

Hearing real distress, Alex turned the music off. Em’s face dropped to match the sudden shift in tone. “It is so, so little,” she said. “I dissolved 150 milligrams into three liters of water. You’ve had maybe a shot and a half, barely anything at all. Not even four milligrams.”

Nikoletta looked back and clocked the glass of water on the surgical cart. Corrine’s breathing was audible as the crew went silent for a moment. She placed her glass on the low steel table between them and asked, “What else was in it?”

“Nothing else from the concentrates,” Em said. “Just whiskey and ginger ale. Sorry, I absolutely didn’t mean to freak you out. It is such a small amount.”

Corrine exhaled, her focus darting between Em and the empty glass on the table in front of her. No one was comfortable holding eye contact with anyone for longer than a moment. Corrine felt the expectant weight of the crew accumulating by the second.

“Okay. Okay, sorry guys. I was just surprised,” Crorrine finally said. She paused for another moment and picked up her glass. “Jesus, Em, you scared me. So, I’m assuming this didn’t get recorded in the log?”

Demetrius leaned back into the lounger, tension cautiously leaving his body. “To quote our dear friend and chemist Alexander, ‘They can’t fire us twice.’”

Corrine’s shoulders relaxed. She rested against the back of the lounger as well, taking the cue from Demetrius, wanting to show that she was a good sport. With slow relief, she said, “It’s cool. Sorry, I just need a minute to digest those and see how I’m doing.” She looked around at five hesitant faces and offered a full, obliging smile. “What the hell is this? Please don’t let me stop you.”

Alex beamed, fell into a rolling chair, then launched himself toward the loungers with a single hard kick against the bridge’s console. “Do y’all have any idea how long I’ve wanted to break into those tanks?” He asked. “We have so many options.”

Em sensed it was safe to smile again. “Believe me, I’ve been building a menu ever since the notice showed up this morning.”

Nikoletta tip-toed to the surgical cart, downed the rest of her glass, and made a new drink with equal parts vodka and dissolved psilocybin. She sipped it, then turned to the crew. “You know, if we want to make proper cocktails, this mushroom juice needs to be much stronger. I have no interest in a drink that’s half water.”

“Heard!” Alex called before locking eyes with Em. He felt a shiver and asked, “You’d be cool with that?”

“Obviously,” Em said, leaning in.

Alex kicked his way toward the left-side hallway that led to the Queen’s abdomen. He braked with his feet, changed directions, and said, “One quick second.” He rolled back toward the console, turned the music back on, then ditched the chair. He and Em took off down the hall together.

Nikoletta made a face and chuckled after trying another sip of her watery test cocktail.

Corrine looked up and said, “Jesus, I forgot about your Dad, Nik. I guess the sooner we get back–”

“No, no, no,” Nik interrupted. She joined Corrine on the lounger. “That’s for tomorrow. I think we deserve to worry about nothing for a nice long moment. I don’t know, I’m still in shock, but it’s starting to feel nice, you know? I don’t think I’ve been truly relaxed since our contract started.”

“Fair,” Corrine said. She let her head fall onto Nik’s shoulder and was now eye-level with the watery vodka cocktail. “That as good as it looks?” Corrine asked.

Nik laughed, “I feel bad wasting it.”

Demetrius finished his own cocktail and said, “I think Em only used a percent of a percent of barely anything to make that. We effectively have an infinite amount of psilocybin. I cannot imagine our new overlords would even notice or care how much was missing. I feel like we are more than entitled to it at this point.”

Nik put the glass down and rested her head on Corrine’s. “I’ll wait for those two idiots to come back with a proper mixer.” She glanced down conspiratorially to Corrine, then to Demetrius. “Anyone else pick something up there?”

Alain grabbed Nik’s abandoned cocktail, downed it, and let out an exaggerated, “Blegh!” He fell back against the lounger and started laughing again. “This is incredible.” He closed his eyes and bent his head at painful angles from side to side. “Of course. Of course this is happening. It’s perfect.”

Corrine raised her eyebrows toward him and asked, “You okay, Alain?”

Alex and Em were giddy as they passed by the apartments and reached the code access airlock at the end of the thorax. This code requirement was an irritating security precaution that Demetrius and Alain tried and failed to dismantle every few months. It was especially hopeless now, as overriding code access-only doors required authorization from someone within a company that, as of this morning, no longer existed. However, as the keeper of the concentrates, Em secretly preferred this slight hindrance, disliking the idea of the entrance remaining propped open to everyone at all hours. 

Em punched in the code without looking, and the airlock door swung out to reveal the Queen’s abdomen, a vast multi-level chamber whose arched steel hull stretched back more than a kilometer, whose avenues of densely packed black tanks revealed themselves hundreds of meters at a time above and below them as the cool lights of this cathedral snapped on in series. At the distant click of the final lights, they could just make out the compressed gas tanks at the end of the abdomen, towering and impossible with light glinting off their reflective white surfaces, the perfect grinning teeth of a monster.

Alex had only been in the abdomen a handful of times, as Alain acted as assistant to Em when it was time to pack concentrates into individual bombs. Made from a thick green biodegradable canvas and stacked high as flat sheets, the bombs assembled like origami, folding along crease lines to create the shape of pointed diamonds. Each bomb yielded the interior storage capacity of a refrigerator. The crew would first place an upside down pyramid weight inside to keep the bombs oriented in freefall, then they would pack in combinations of concentrates, synthetic fertilizers, and a simple remote trigger. 

These bombs would drop out of the back and fall toward the surfaces of worlds in waiting before a precision mid-air whip-crack implosion would spit organic material hundreds of kilometers wide, raining down the ingredients for life or the embryos of life itself. The crew could further determine the moment of detonation within hundred-meter windows above the surface to adjust the density of these downpours. Each moment of contact marked the meeting of strangers, materials that were biological aliens to each other, and after several years of predictably unpredictable growth, these budding planets, wild and unknown, would receive a visit from a different Queen and a surface investigation conducted by a different ground crew. In this way, new destinations would be molded in increments, sculpted by figurative and literal degrees. In only a few decades, human colonies could land and find familiar crops ready to harvest. 

Em jumped into the driver’s side of the electric two-seater and turned to Alex. “Grab a clean tray of erlenmeyers,” she said, pointing back to the shelves of glassware by the door. Alex gave a quick salute and pulled out a tray of sixteen erlenmeyer flasks, each safely spaced apart by thick blue foam. “Alright, spores first,” Em continued as she flicked on the car.

Alex fell in next to her and yelled, “Wait!” He leaned over the side and pulled out the charging adapter. “Okay, spores first and then–”

Em took off, racing down narrow ramps and avenues, driving deep into the abdomen at a reckless speed. The labels for each level and section were written in over two dozen languages, and they were moving too fast to read any. Em accelerated into the lower decks, taking turns at too-comfortable speeds before stopping in front of a series of black tanks indistinguishable from the others, each ten feet in diameter and fifteen feet high. Without having to double-check, Em reached out of the vehicle and smacked open a nozzle on the outside of one of the tanks. A viscous line of homogenous gray syrup inched out in slow heaves. Em caught it in a flask that she whipped around with her other hand. Alex watched as the spore concentrate rose to meet the black 200 ml line when Em closed the nozzle, waited for the stubborn final drops, then handed the flask back to him.

With fifteen more flasks waiting empty in his lap, Alex gave a healthy, cavernous clap and asked, “Alright, where are the fertilizers?”

The sound of pumping dance music grew as Em and Alex traveled back through the thorax. In the bridge, they found Nikoletta, Corrine, and Alain dancing, taking turns looking as purposely idiotic as they could near the console’s speakers. They had dragged the loungers and table off to one side to create an impromptu dancefloor. The Notice of Termination flashed joyously behind them on the central display screen. Evidently, Demetrius had created a quick program that showed the document cycling through a series of bright, celebratory colors. He was still absorbed in something on the bridge’s computer, typing one-handed in bursts and stutters while taking sips from a glass in his other hand.

Alex was pushing a second surgical cart loaded with diluted concentrates, and Em called out with an exaggerated, “Yoo-hoo!” Unspoken and with a single mind, the crew all decided to theatrically tip-toe in the direction of the surgical carts, each trying to look as classically sneaky and guilty as possible, shushing each other very few feet. Em noticed that Corrine had a new drink in her hand, thank God.

“There’s a few different strains here,” Em said. “Couldn’t tell you how each one is different, but you’re only gonna need a couple drops this time.” The beakers of clear liquid each had their own dropper and were labeled with a bit of torn blue tape. Alex demonstrated by pouring two fingers of scotch into his glass followed by a few drops from a beaker simply labeled “B.”

“Voila,” he said before taking an ambitious sip and coughing. “A very generous gift from Daddy Olivér.” 

The rest of the crew made themselves new cocktails. They made a beautiful toast to their fallen executive and began to dance again. The six of them were in love, reveling in this surreal unity, in the sudden derailment of having no work to do while confined to a space that allowed no other way to earn money, in the absurdity of simply being where they were, comically and incalculably far from another living human for no reason at all now. They kicked their legs, made faces, and got down to the serious business of looking as stupid as possible.

Demetrius was the first to break off. He jogged back to the computer and was joined by Nikoletta a few songs later. 

“Whatcha’ reading, Demmy?” Nik asked. “Are we all hired again?”

“It is so much better than that,” Demetrius said, not looking up from the screen. “I managed to find LinneFabar’s entire organizational tree. I also just, totally by chance mind you, happened to find Nicolas Olivér’s new direct messaging account at LinneFabar.”

Nik steadied herself with both hands on the desk as she tried to read over Demetrius’s shoulder. The words on the screen weren’t quite staying in place. “Not sure I’m following, Dem.”

“I wrote a code that will send him an inter-company message every week from a different low-level employee,” Demetrius said. “Middle managers, product photographers, the people that copy and paste ad text on their website’s backend. They’ll all be sending a private message that looks like this.” 

The bridge’s giant central display changed from the legal document disco lights to a coding program, and Demetrius highlighted a short paragraph at its center. 

Wow! Can you believe little Caddie is alreay 2? Welp it’s true! Her party is happening this Sunday at Funky Dunks same place as last year. The caterer fell through so we’re all pitching in with a covered dish. Most dishes are spoken for but we still need someone to bring potato salad easy enough for you to handle I’m sure! Thanks Again and see you there!

“Dem, you are an idiot, and I love you,” Nik said. “And you misspelled the word ‘already.’”

“I did?” He asked, squinting. “Huh.” Instead of correcting it, he added an additional error to the next sentence so that it read, “Welp it’s is true!” He gave the screen a ponderous look before asking Nik, “Too try-hard?”

Nik laughed, “A touch, yeah. Leave the first one though. It plays, I think.”

“It absolutely plays,” Demetrius said while hitting the backspace key. “So yeah, the name of the kid and the covered dish also cycle through a dataset, so there’ll be different ones for each message.”

Em called out from the dancefloor, “Dem, you left your signature on, you know that, right?” Demtrius looked back, not understanding. Em pointed to the corner of the central display, to Demetrius’s full government name and Cress employee ID at the bottom of the coding program. She kept dancing with her pointed arm stretched out. “Your signature is still on. Was it on when you pulled all that proprietary and private LinneFabar data?” Em put extra stress on the plosives, lining them up to the music’s kick drum.

Demetrius’s eyebrows rose in cartoonish surprise. He laughed, downed the rest of his cocktail, and looked from Em to Nik. He knocked the base of the empty glass against his head, and with a long exaggerated “h” sound, called out, “Whoops!”

“Looks like it’s lawsuit o’clock for you, Demmy boy,” Em said, laughing and making circles with her pointed hand in time with the music.

Corrine was marching in place and making wild takeoff and landing signals with her arms. She was winded and chanting every few steps, “Let me! Represent you! In court! You ding dong!”

“God, you’re an idiot,” Nik said before making clumsy, mischievous motions back to the dancefloor. She slipped in a puddle of someone’s spilled cocktail, falling sideways and bracing herself with a flexed forearm. Alain stopped mid-plié and ran over to help her off the floor. Unharmed, she laughed and thanked him as he pulled her up by both hands. Alain responded by dropping to the floor and doing military push-ups directly above the offending puddle. He clapped in mid-air each time before his hands landed with heavy smacks back into the spilled cocktail again. He managed an even ten before returning to his stuttering approximation of ballet.

Alex took a break from his increasingly hazardous side-shuffling, and he risked leaning into Em’s ear. She responded with sharp, smiling nods. The two took off toward the abdomen with purpose, Alex dragging a couple fingers along the steel-paneled wall as they disappeared down the hallway.

Just inside the abdomen’s entrance, solutions of ephedra sinica, zinc oxide, tetra amine, iodine, hydriodic acid, hypophosphorous acid, and red and white phosphorus were in a line where Em and Alex left them. They had left all of the solutions open save for the white phosphorus, which they stoppered to control its odor, an overwhelming rancidity that set off alarms deep inside their lizard brains. The two fumbled with goggles and gloves. Alex was eye-level with the solutions and kept leaning in and out, giggling silently to himself.

“Funny to wear these when we’ll be drinking this stuff in a minute,” Em said after snapping on the second rubber glove. She snapped it against the inside of her wrist a few more times with increasing force, noting the ripples of sensation, the wake that traveled outward from one nerve to the next, curious to know if she could document the termination of this signal, the last nerve to receive it, the first nerve to refuse the order to carry it further. Or perhaps a ghost of this sensation reached all of them, registering in ever-shrinking fractions at the ends of her toes, doubling back from that outer bank to return in increments to the source on her wrist, subliminal now, a covert movement undetected by her nervous system at large but unmistakable to the individual gatekeepers, counted as only a handful of electrons now, present in the most literal definition, in its mere refusal to be nothing.

“This is normally smoked, right?” Alex asked as he began mixing hydriodic acid and red phosphorus. 

“Drinking should be safer. Greater control over the dose, won’t peak all at once,” Em answered as she started making a competing cocktail with iodine and hypophosphorous acid. “Same concept as the mushrooms, ingesting it gives you a gradual arc, a less severe comedown. We gotta do something with the white, if only for the effect, right?”

“Obviously.” Alex began mixing a third batch. Seeing how quickly Em worked, Alex sped up his own dropping and measuring, anxious to show how capable an assistant he could be. The two breathed through their mouths after he exposed white phosphorus to the air. “How have you never invited me to do this before?”

“This?” Em laughed as she added distilled water. “Making low-dose meth with company property?”

“Well, yes, exactly that. But I mean any of it,” Alex said.

“Dummy,” Em said, and she bumped her shoulder into his. “Job descriptions, I guess. And I don’t know, I’m probably a little overprotective of this space. Too precious with it. I’ve gotten attached over the years.”

Alex returned the shoulder bump, causing Em to spill half a dropper of zinc oxide on the counter. They laughed, then choked on the smell of white phosphorus. “You’re the mother hen,”  he coughed out as they backed away from their work, “laying and hatching eggs.”

“No, Alex,” she said, making hard eye contact and pointing with another dropper full of iodine. “I am the Queen herself.”

Returning to the bridge, Em and Alex found the rest of the crew split off into two crying couples. Dense, sweaty music was still pouring out of the console’s speakers.

“That’s exactly the thing, that’s exactly it,” Nikoletta was saying, heavy tears ready to fall down her face. “He wants to act like it never happened, and like–” She made wide gestures with her arms. 

Demetrius was nodding and leaning at a severe angle against the left observation panel, his forehead a mess of wrinkles. His own eyes were swollen and wet as words fell out. “It’s gotta be hard to–and I’m speaking, if I’m speaking out of turn, you know? If I’m speaking out of turn, stop–let me know. To reach a sense of, of closure here–here being the, you know, the situation in itself, of itself, but here in the literal sense, of being in this space–literal environment I mean, and, and, and–”

Corrine and Alain were embracing across the room. Alain pulled away and wiped his eyes with long drags of his arm.

“You’re right,” Corrine was saying, “but it’s not like there are these specific, correct words you can say.”

“I’m just so scared to wade back into it at all,” Alain said before giving way to a new burst of tears. “I know there aren’t any objective, magic words. I know that. But trying to say anything at all could just cause even more…” Alain couldn’t finish the sentence. His face was a map of red distress, and Corrine embraced him again. Pummeling and ecstatic dance music was playing to an empty dancefloor.

From the bridge’s entrance, Em filled her lungs with as much air as they allowed.

“Absolutely not!” Em bellowed. “What on earth! No, no, no, unacceptable.” She skipped over to the console and had trouble finding the volume dial. Her eyes achieved focus, and she turned the music down to conversation level, then switched it to the earnestly inspirational classical piece they liked to play as a joke during chess matches.

Alex was pushing a cart that had someone’s comforter draped over it. He consolidated the bar detritus and found that most of the alcohol was gone. The cans of ginger ale and soda water were empty, and the gin had finally been opened. The crew collected themselves, ran hands through their hair, took steadying breaths, then made their way toward the surgical carts.

The change in music recharged the air and softly reset the stifled interior. Once the crew was gathered, still a bit raw and reluctant, Alex said, “So, I would just like to start by saying I love all of you deeply and would happily murder your enemies with no hesitation. Your attention, cutie pies.” The crew seemed to soften, and Alex assumed the role of a crackpot presenter from a centuries-old World’s Fair. “I present to you– oh, Em, the lights. Aha, yes, very good, yes this is just right. Ladies and gentleman, I dare you to resist looking away as I present…” 

Alex pulled back the comforter. In the now-darkened bridge, six vials glowed a faint yellow and white. They floated in the middle of the room, the only visible lights. 

“Awful, terrible, stinky glow shots,” Alex announced. One vial seemed to travel into the air as Alex picked it up. “No idea what’s going on in here,” he continued, breaking character, “but one of you sweet, beautiful gifts from heaven is gonna take this with me.”

Corrine, her voice arriving from nowhere, asked, “Didn’t exposure to that make people lose their jaws?”

“Forever forever ago,” replied Demetrius as he picked up a vial in the darkness, “after years of breathing it in for fifteen hours a day with no ventilation and zero dental care.” He held it close to his face, his eyes just becoming illuminated, hovering, widening.

“Sure,” Corrine answered. “Isn’t it also literally an actual forreal chemical weapon?”

“Jesus, it smells,” Nikoletta said. “Can we cut this with something?”

“Vile vials,” Demetrius spoke in a grave tone as he brought the glowing chemical solution close to his open right eye, nearly making contact. “Vile vials.” The edge of his closed, peculiar smile was faintly visible.

“No, ma’am, what you’ve got here is a down-the-hatch situation,” Alex said. 

Em jumped in, “There’s only just enough white phosphorus to make it glow. It’s pretty harmless.” 

“We made some much less scary ones if you want,” Alex said. “You won’t hurt our feelings.”

Alain wordlessly grabbed a glowing vial and downed it. He hollered and pounded a single heavy fist against the floor. “Yep, yep, yep,” he said, beginning to laugh, then interrupting his laughter to howl again. “Yep, that’s what you want. God, I need something else immediately.” Alain groped around one of the surgical carts and filled the now-empty vial with gin. He swallowed all of it.

The remaining vials floated around the room as Alex handed them out. Demetrius counted down from three and the white phosphorus methamphetamine cocktails disappeared down the throats of the crew, with the exception of one. After a minute of convulsive wailing, Em hit the lights and passed around the handle of gin. Demetrius approached Corrine, the vile vial still untouched in her hand.

“Look, I’m not trying to be a downer,” Corrine said to Demetrius, anticipating the conversation. The rest of the crew was choreographing an interpretive dance to their classical chess soundtrack. “Believe me, I’m okay with the…” Corrine paused. The passage into Demtrius’s right ear began to widen as her vision of his face cracked. “With the concept. I’m just already pretty fucked up. And this is literal poison, right?” It grew to the width of his head, an open black punch bowl. His face was folding.

“What I’ve learned from all of this,” Demetrius said, making a non-committal gesture toward the bridge with his arm, “is that life is hardy. It’s sticky. You probably know even more than I do, seeing it on the surface. Grows anywhere, everywhere, where we do want it, where we don’t want it, where we weren’t even trying. Humans especially. Despite our best efforts, we can’t seem to rid the universe of ourselves. Staying alive, proliferating, multiplying in spite of. Life is sticky, you know?” His eyes caught focus on a seam where two steel-white panels met on the wall behind Corrine’s head. How exacting is that seam? What was the spacing tolerance used by the ship’s planners? And why did they find this music funny? It was gorgeous. The panel seam responded to his focus by layering itself, fanning out, a stack of steel-white envelopes. His teeth were crushed foil.

Corrine exhaled as she fell onto the edge of a lounger and said, “Dem, I’m not quite sure that’s…” It wasn’t a punch bowl. Something was making a nest in the side of his head, a nest of charcoal and dustmotes. They were gathering, living on a perpendicular axis of gravity.

“Here, I’ll make you something less scary.” He took the white phosphorus shot from Corrine and shuffled off, returning with a glass of clear liquid. “No phosphorus in this one. In fact, I think this one contains zinc oxide, a natural antiseptic. Gets used in skin creams.” He no longer felt individual teeth, but two unbroken rolls of metal foil, crushing against each other, compacting.

Corrine sniffed the glass and laughed. “Sure, I’ll drink your skin cream. I always drink skin cream. Perfect snack at the cinema.”

“Exactly,” Demetrius said as Corrine started drinking. “A tub of it that you have to eat with a cupped hand.”

“A bear paw,” Corrine corrected. The babies were hatching.

Alain was whooping for the feel of it, unloading the contents of his lungs, disconnected from the beat of the music. He danced by slamming his weight into the deck with one steel-toed boot over and over, his head slamming down with it, a human jackhammer. The floor was a bent sheet, a pure sine wave. It lacked a third dimension. His body was a needle against it, dragging across the hills and valleys but never piercing the surface. A soft-focus halo of neon pulsed with every heavy step, rippling outward from his stomping foot. A neon halo radiated from each of the crew now, a slurred glow under the cabin’s can lights. He left briefly to vomit behind the console, then returned.

Alex understood hands now. He watched and understood that hands were always correcting themselves. He was dancing in and out of people. Inside and outside of them. Their hands were in a constant state of reevaluation. Their hands. His hands. Even settled, they would only ever adjust their course in time. Em was in front of him more often than not. The gin appeared and shrank and was gone. He was in front of Em more often than not. Corrine was doing that mom dance with her hands that he loved. Finger guns, hopelessly unreliable, they were constantly adjusting themselves, their muscles tensing and relaxing. Reevaluating, always. Couldn’t trust their aim in a crisis. 

Demetrius brought over two armloads of clear chemical solutions. Some glasses had labels that no longer held meaning. Most remained naked. Nik grabbed one and downed it like it was water. She may have thought it was water, Demetrius thought. He should have clarified. Someone should get water. Someone’s heel knocked over one of the solutions, and Demetrius dropped to the floor and began licking it up, kicking his legs. He was their lifeguard. The crew created a dance circle around him and cheered as he followed the moving puddle with his mouth. The cheer became a yell, the yell became a chorus of full-body screams, a playground test. As a unit, they bowed over him with praying hands. Nik’s hands could not come apart, and they never would again. She accepted this new reality, was hopeful for its future.

Back on his feet, Demetrius spent a long minute putting the legal document disco lights back on the big screen. Corrine vomited moments after its flashing colors reappeared. The whole crew, Corrine included, repeated “Ooh no!” in an identical falsetto. They each took a few steps to the left. Nik was spinning Alain, Alain was spinning Nik. Both would pause to curtsy to the other, seeing how low and respectful they could get, a game of genteel modesty as brinkmanship. Alain’s head was a spilt handful of ball bearings, wet and glowing from the blood of cracked glowsticks. They were lapping hard against his skull, sinking down the drain of his throat now. His hair flushed down along with it. Alongside it, not on top, not following after. He was becoming one. The solutions were running low.

Alex and Em were back in the abdomen. Alex picked up half-full solutions from their previous batch. The remainders, hanging dividends, the dividers. Dividends. No, not dividends. Remnants, waiting to be factored in again. Remainders. Left to be dealt with later, and later was now. Each gloveless hand held a few flasks, and Alex was swirling them, at first clockwise in his left and counter in his right. It was wrong. Not like that, not against, not in conflict. He had to switch, counter in his left now, clockwise in his right. The reversal caused the solutions to splash over their glass tops. The liquid met in mid-air, no longer strangers, falling into the flasks of their neighbors, falling onto Alex’s moving hands. In concert now, in harmony. Always reevaluating. He watched his hands become blurred circles, multiplied and indistinct. Multiples. Dividends. No, not dividends.

“Memorized,” Em said, preparing her own phalanx of leftover erlenmeyer flasks. “I’ve it memorized. I’ve it mem’rized.” She wasn’t using droppers, but instead leaned in to eyeball the concentrates as they slid into different solutions. As a test, she let her eyes close while viscous, pencil-thick lines fell toward the counter. “Mem’rized.”

“Who’s it?” Alex kept asking, his eyes stuck to his own blurred hands. “Who’s it? Who’s it?”

Em clapped and squinted at the sensation. She tried again, her hands horizontal this time, then back to vertical. Alex wasn’t helping, she saw. “Done, done, done,” she said, gathering up her new babies.

The colors of Alex’s blurred hands were lost traces of white, thrown silver, a glowing and teeming ruby. The ruby was the blood inside his hands, he knew, visible through his skin. Blood through his skin, barely contained. He couldn’t believe how fragile he was, how paper-thin, how even when his hands were in motion, he could see the pink blood inside them. Should he stop to slap the backs of them? Bring the blood even closer to the surface? Amplify their signal, their saturation? Where did Em go? He was suddenly alone in the abdomen. Tears grew in his eyes, and his hands slowed down. He understood where he was again and took deep, steadying breaths. He’ll make it up to her. He can do that. He’ll make something new. 

In the bridge, Em found the crew sitting on top of and underneath the console. They had switched the music back to classical.

Demetrius was speaking slowly, his back draped over a panel of black knobs, “You know how often people try to overdose and fail? It's nearly impossible. Especially with us. We’re still young. Immune systems in full swing.”

“We're trying to overdose?” Nik asked from the shadows below the console. Seated even farther behind her in the recessed and dusty dark was Corrine, cross-legged, her head ducked down, silent for a minute now.

“No,” Demetrius laughed. “I'm just saying that as… a… an… example.”

Em caught the end of this conversation and jumped in. “We're being smart about it,” she said, dropping off a new set of unmarked flasks. She placed their foam blue carrier on the floor in front of Nik. “I do this every day. I mean, not this. No, yes this. We’re doing this correctly, I mean. This is the way to do it correctly, carefully measuring single drops at a time, ingesting slowly, letting it take effect in a nice, slow arc. We’re being smart about it.”

Alain was lying on his stomach across the console, his face red and dangling over the front edge. His shirt pocket caught on a metal toggle as he tried to slide his head closer to the new flasks. Nik cracked up at the sight of his pathetic upside-down head, at his sweaty hair pointing toward the floor. 

“Poor dumb baby,” Nik said. She picked up one of the new flasks and tried to gently pour it into his smiling, inverted mouth. Some made it in, some ran past and inside of his nostrils. He coughed, then inhaled as hard as he could through his nose. From deep underneath the console, Corrine made clicking insect noises.

“This is good,” Alain said, getting dizzier. “This is doing correctly.” He reached a tentative arm over the edge of the console to take the flask from Nik. He made a mess trying to return the favor, spilling the solution over Nik’s chin and down her shirt before making it to her lips.

“Life is sticky,” Demetrius said, his eyes tilting back, looking through the observation window toward the screwed-up pin-lights of distant stars.

Corrine’s body was against the floor now. She was trying to sneak around Nik, who was making out with Alain’s upside-down head. Corrine paused when one ear made contact with the plated ground, and she listened to the living organs of the Queen, a body in as much internal motion as her own. Corrine continued sliding out from underneath the console in slow, deliberate silence until she reached the collection of new flasks on the floor. Her mouth was stuck open and inhaling dust. She picked out a flask for herself.

Alex was in the med bay, under the counter. In the counter. He was looking for something, wasn’t he? Held by charred wooden arms, it was peaceful. How did it get so quiet? That’s right, he walked in here to find… He turned to look out from the womb and saw a trash can. He walked in here, and the first door, “door number one” he called it, roar of applause, was the trash. Traded places with it. Codeine. He would have to leave home to search through more drawers, wave goodbye to Mother and Father. The glass doors normally slide open but they could be pulled too, I bet. Alex’s bloody hands searched through the thin boxes of pills and dripping medicines that were packed in wide, wide shelves. Standing on handfuls of cracked glass, he found the correct blisterpacks by their shape. He and Em will fix the glass tomorrow. Kintsugi, it will be better than before, a work of real art. They’ll blow powdered gold across the fresh-repaired cracks. Alex could no longer read. He defecated where he stood with glass underneath and inside of his boots.

The two-seater crashed into a white tank that held compressed carbon dioxide. Why would he be here if he didn’t need carbon dioxide? What was it, codeine and… codeine and… the tank was glowing white, it grew taller, stretched the length of the ceiling. Cold blue lights cleared a path for it. Gasoline. Codeine and an accelerant, red phosphorus, iodine, hydrochloric acid. Grocery list. Fuel for the bombs was near the compressed air tanks. “Overfloweth,” he whispered as gasoline ran over the lip of a flask and down his bleeding arm. “Overfloweth,” as he leaned in to inhale the running tap. Gross realist. He held out his tongue.

The crew was fucking on the crooked pile of loungers. Alain’s pants never made it over his steel-toes. Shocked by the flashing colors on the central display, Alex gagged on stomach acid. “Hey,” he tried, standing next to them and holding out a pitcher of cloudy pink liquid. “Hey.” Em, undressed and much too pale, took Alex’s belt buckle in her fist and pulled him in. She isn’t this pale, he thought, and she needs to be taken to a hospital. 

Alex found a way to set his pitcher on the low metal table near the loungers while his clothes disappeared. Vomited blood landed next to and inside of this new cocktail. With each beat of the electronic music, the ceiling took a deep breath, remade itself from concave to convex, closer to their heads each time. What was he sweating? Alex’s hands were leaving smeared red trails over Em’s white and blue body. She was one of the ceiling lights from the ship’s abdomen, that’s all. No hospital, that’s alright. She took his bleeding fingers into her mouth.

Alain fell backwards off of Demetrius and onto his bare ass. He tried to reach his bootlaces and wept heavy tears. Shuffling back to the table on his knees, he took sips from the pitcher of cloudy pink liquid without using his hands. Shit ran down his leg. Corrine saw him struggling, helped to tip the pitcher into his mouth, then climbed on top of him. Nikoletta began to cry once she saw Alain’s tears, then laughed hoarsely as the lounger that held her and Demetrius tipped over. The floor didn’t matter, and they didn’t need it. She would remove it with her hands. She would force her fingers into every seam and remove the floor with her hands. An excavator, another builder in the family. An un-builder like her father, it’s genetic. A laid-off excavator waiting one hundred entire forevers away. The tears came back.

“God, I need water,” Demetrius said, and he made uneasy steps toward the irregular collection of clear liquids lined up under the console. He drained one and sat cross-legged, his eyes refusing to cooperate. The world had less color before this. Nik’s body seemed tinted, exaggerated as he watched her scratch into the floor. Flooded skintones, flooding past their own borders, too much color somehow. “Might run out soon,” he called to no one, and the bridge shook with each syllable. He’ll be more careful next time. It wasn’t safe anymore. He crawled over and stroked Nik’s back. “Wanna make something with me?” he whispered as he helped her to her feet. Nik smiled and nodded, her eyes open too wide, too overcrowded with veins.

“How hard could it be?” Demetrius asked as he, Nik, and Alain looked out into the abdomen, toward the endless sentry of black tanks. 

Alain was now wearing a t-shirt and nothing else. He sat on the floor next to the electric two-seater, stood up, sat back down. “I will roll two dice,” he spoke into the distance, holding out a hand that held nothing. “The first will tell us the level. The second will tell us the aisle. Wait. I will roll three dice.” He looked down at his empty hand. “The third dice is for which tank in the aisle.” He looked up at Nik and Demetrius. “Ok, ready?”

Corrine was dripping through the Queen. She was lying down in the middle of the dancefloor, her ear pressed against the surface again. Her wet skin was welded to the deck, and the groans of the vessel were her own. The ons and the offs of the circulators, the heavings of great, distant machines were her lungs now, were her beating heart. She was out of reach forever, certain that she would never breathe again. The Queen was distributing her body, her lifeforce, throughout its lower decks, and she was helpless to stop it.

In the dusty underneath, in the black pitch that kept secrets, a layout not of rooms and walls, but of unseen machines, of gray cable snake pits, of crates of duplicate parts that tarnished just the same as they waited their turn in absolute darkness, enduring the tragedy that is their incorruptible dream of one day serving the only purpose for their existence. This was the industrial landscape that held the wisps of Corrine’s dissolving body. Her trace and indefinable remains shared space with the solemn and roaming dustmotes, the tangled gossamer of charcoal mist, defying gravity with the lights out, moving upright and tree-limbed, varicose, traveling in somnambulist waltz through the cold and unlit space. They float in silence, dragging a short train of dust against the floor behind them, languid and unseen, while she is further dissolved and scattered. She lives now as pistons loosed into shallow mist, as gearboxes kicked and spilled out, as spares and glass outcomes.

  Corrine pressed her ear harder against the floor but could no longer pick out her heartbeat from the series of patternless hums and clicks below. She was truly lost now, parceled. Held apart. In a moment, she will drip clear through the bottom, through and into the airless pull. She will become distant nothing.

“Hey, Corrine, have you tried this?” Alex asked. Seated on the floor, he shuffled over to her, bearing the pitcher of pink krokodil. He took a heavy swallow from it before placing it next to Corrine’s eyes, black and unblinking. Her hands stayed where they were, flat against her side, but they would move soon enough. He picked up the pitcher and swallowed hard. Hands were reevaluating.

“You can leave her,” Em said. “I think the others are in the abdomen.” Em knew everyone had the airlock code, but couldn’t they have asked her first? They just waltzed in there on their own. How could she be alone in this, in understanding the disrespect of their being in the abdomen without her? “Alex, we should find them. Leave her, she’ll be fine.”

Alex took a departing drink from the pitcher and left it next to Corrine’s rising and falling body. Corrine was alone on the dancefloor now, hearing arpeggiated swells of mannered violins. Unhearing. Her eyes stared straight through a liquid pink mist, a slow motion storm moving on top of itself. Catching, resetting, catching against itself. She was famished.

Em and Alex found the rest of the crew after minutes of chasing laughter that folded in waves inside the endless cathedral hull of the abdomen. Nik and Alain had their heads cocked back, both steadying a dropper over one eye. Demetrius was trying to whistle. He kept falling back into one of the tanks, first on accident and then on purpose. He noticed Em and Alex and turned his head slowly, playing the villain.

“We think it’s tilapia,” Demetrius said, narrowing his eyes and grinning. “We’re playing the tilapia challenge.”

“Your face is,” Em started to say. Nik and Alain emptied the droppers into their eyes. Their bodies were crushed wastepaper. They buckled and fell to their knees. Both were cackling on the ground. “You’re making a face like you expect me to be upset,” Em finished. Demetrius’s face split as Em’s eyes unfocused. She couldn’t make it whole again. Someone else’s face and body grew like a plant in its place, a seventh crew member whose mouth opened to the floor, past the floor. It was the heavy black door that led to the break room in the foundry where her father worked. How long had it been since she last had one of those automatic hot chocolates?

Corrine found plenty of water to drink, but she didn’t know how to find food. She kept hitting buttons and toggles on the console with a closed fist, would occasionally hear a new, distant noise, but no food would appear. After hitting one of the buttons, the light of the central digital display screen shut off, revealing the hanging black absence outside, but that wasn’t enough. Why was the Queen keeping food from her? She had to eat, too. Running out of buttons, she slumped to the ground, her back resting against the side of the console. Her head fell forward, and, appearing as a miracle, noodles materialized in front of her. Dried noodles. A blessing. Exactly what she needed. An actual miracle. Exactly when she needed them.

“Ferns! Ferns! Ferns!” The echoes of the cheering crew in the Queen’s abdomen were physically overwhelming Em as she forced down 50 ml of straight concentrate. She was topless again. The beaker shattered after she dropped it to steady herself against a tank. She took a risk on a burp and put both fists in the air.

“Ferns!” Em cried, tears in her eyes, victorious. The cheers were horrifying. Her legs were caught against the floor. Stapled. She would have to remove the staples by hand, wrench them out through her boots, through the middle of both feet.

Only moments apart from each other, Nik and Alain stopped clapping and gagged hard. Lurching, spasmodic movement inside their necks whipped them into violent seizures. The concentrate had traveled from their eye sockets and into their sinuses. Now it dripped down the back of their throats.

As Demetrius watched, unsure how to move, colors were escaping from the laws that bound them in his vision. Nik and Alain looked like thrown paint as they shook against the ground. The entire ship had the look of heavy brushwork, globbed and piled into a third dimension. Wherever he looked, an overflow of excess paint was congealing and dripping down into a puddle somewhere that Demetrius did not want to find. Em leaned over the railing and watched as her bloody vomit grew smaller, reoriented itself in mid-air, separated into a chain of islands, then gathered back together as it was caught by the avenue below, a new red unity. 

Seeing Nik and Alain locked in twin body spasms, Alex knew this was the crisis. He made finger guns. No, that wasn’t it. Where were they? He flicked on the two-seater. He thought he was speaking words, but no one seemed to react. It must be the same as reading. He suspected that spoken language was beyond him, too. He tried again to confirm this hunch, but this time everyone responded by piling onto the vehicle. That must have been what he asked for. Someone’s body was shaking against his own, digging into his upper back. They were staring into the glinting white teeth of a leviathan. He heard someone else’s speaking voice. He wondered if he could respond.

“Air tanks,” Em said. “You have to turn around.” She looked down at her hands as they were holding Nik’s convulsing body. When did she become a ghost, a translucent blue ghost that was somehow able to hold on to Nik’s shaking green army jacket?

Demetrius was running the sink in the med bay and delivering water to Nik and Alain, both relatively stable now on the same bed. Identical yellow vomit was pooled on the floor on either side of them. No one could find the med bay’s trash can. Demetrius filled up another pitcher of water for himself. He had held onto a small erlenmeyer flask of what he thought was tilapia concentrate. He watched it slide into the pitcher of water.

Alex found Corrine sitting in the middle of the dancefloor, still listening to their chess soundtrack, alone and unmoving. He saw that Corrine painted her face while they were in the ship’s abdomen. 

Alex joined her on the floor and said, “I think we’re all drinking water now. Do you want some?” It wasn’t face paint, Alex realized, but blood from her scalp. Portions of Corrine’s hair were missing. Corrine’s mouth curled slightly. She nodded yes. Alex left and found a pitcher of water in the med bay. He drank some himself before carefully administering it to Corrine. 

As they sat, the bodies of Em, Nik, and Alain appeared around them. Nik sensed alarm upon seeing Alex and Corrine on the floor, but she couldn’t categorize it. A pulsing hell grew behind her eyes and roundly rejected all incoming concerns. She sat down beside them, and that simple motion tore a patterned lattice of pain deeper inside her head, a new and unknown geometric framework that constricted and shredded through nerves, segmenting the meat in her skull into strict, acute angles that continued into the back of her neck. Breakers of white bile swelled without warning, and it required incredible will for Nik to turn her head away from her friends before the mass choked its way through her throat and poured onto the dancefloor. Her head still turned, clear acid shining around her mouth, one of her hands found Corrine. Nik rested it on Corrine’s leg.

 Demetrius was counting the glasses of chemical solutions lined up underneath the console. “That’ll,” he said. “That will. That is. That’ll.” His eyelids were the tin beaks of birds of prey, and they were snapping shut around his eyes. The talons of weaker birds were trying to escape through his iris. He couldn’t let the tin beaks around his eyes stay open too long. The smaller birds might escape.

Nik and Em both accepted glasses from Demetrius. Em danced to the classical music as if it were the bass-heavy electronic from earlier. She spread puddles with her shoes. Her lungs were hot. Alain, still pantsless, rolled across the floor toward the console and picked up a half-full glass of solution. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a silver packet of spicy shrimp flavoring. He dumped the whole thing in.

Alex asked Corrine if she’d be okay, and he left her sitting with Nik and the pitcher of water. He had to make a call, and he knew his list of contacts was behind one of these steel-white wall panels. A memory came back to him of writing out a list of numbers longhand in case of a personal comms malfunction. Grows reel lisp. He sensed that the list was behind the panel that was neither the most nor the least tarnished, the wall panel that was at the precise midpoint of discoloration. He found it near the hallway that led to the thorax. 

What Alex sensed next was the presence of a thin blade, a skewer, a letter opener spanning the distance between his right temple and a point above his left ear canal. The sound of its dull tip dragging across bone and scratching into the inside of his skull resonated throughout his body, blocking out all other sound. It was doing something better than scratching. It was engraving. It was engraving capital letters. He was locked in place with an arm stretched toward the half-tarnished wall panel as he waited for the blade to finish engraving these words: GROATS SURREY LIFTS. Of course, he thought. It was always going to be this message, a message appearing as a miracle. An incorruptible purpose forever engraved inside of his skull. He was certain now. This would be the rock on which he would build his church.

The pain inside his head was incandescent, a cascade of ruptured glass vacuum tubes, glass darts by the thousands firing past his eyes and down his neck. His arm wanted to reach the wall to balance himself, but it wouldn’t connect. The pad of his index finger, its ridges and canyons, its vibrating and busy interior, would approach and retreat from the steel wall one slow millimeter at a time. It’s cold, isn’t it. It’ll be cold, I bet.

Em was yelling words of encouragement to Alain, who opened up the back of the console and was pulling out bundled groups of thin cables as far as he could without breaking them. The cables broke anyway. He must have found the surgical stapler in the med bay and was attempting to staple exposed cables to the walls of the bridge. The staples had trouble piercing through steel, so he climbed barefoot on top of the console to try and staple them to the ceiling, which was made of a more giving polymer.

This was serious work, and Alain muttered to himself as he fired staples. “System. Nervous. System,” he said. His toe caught an array of metal toggles, and he fell face first into the console. “Nervous.”

Em told him to keep trying, enjoying the sensation of pulling her feet away from the increasingly sticky deck as she danced. Nik managed to assign focus to Corrine’s face, to the drying blood diluted by sweat, to the white residue collecting around her mouth. She held Corrine by both shoulders and said, “Up, poor baby. Up.” Corrine managed to get one foot on the floor, but she couldn’t sort out her second step. Nik looked to a dancing Em for assistance. Has Em always been so pale? In the blur of motion, her white and blue arms were flightless wings. The last thing Nik saw was the pitcher that Corrine held, its contents a dark and cloudy gray, the suggestion of a slow clockwise whirlpool inside. Then Nik saw nothing as the stone weights tied around her eyes dropped over the side of the dock, pulling her eyes deep inside until they drowned, drowned, drowned.

With loose wiring in one hand and a surgical stapler in the other, Alain bumped into Alex, who seemed distressed in his movements. Distressed in his absence of movement. Alex’s outstretched hand held a mess of cracked and drying blood, and the lids of his eyes visibly spasmed. Alain got on his knees to find the least invasive part of Alex’s body, a point of minimal injury. This had to be a loving act, a kindness for a friend in trouble. Alain chose a point at the center of Alex’s right calf. He used two fingers to hold a yellow wire taught against Alex’s pant leg, and with his other hand, he pulled the stapler’s trigger.

“It’s automated,” Em said to Demetrius. The two were crouched in front of one of the computers, and she was helping him read. The chairs were missing. 

“Right, it’s automated, but it’s real, isn’t it?” Demetrius asked.

Em scrolled through the new legal document, then had to look away from the motion blur and throbbing white light of the monitor. She stopped scrolling and was relieved to see the end of the document. “It’s real. I’m pretty sure. You probably tripped something.”

“That… was… fast,” Demetrius spoke, struggling to hold the weight of his head. “Fabar men. Fabar men. Linney Fabar men in suits. Men in suits are waiting for me.” Demetrius laughed a single laugh.

Em caught something that threatened to climb up her esophagus. “Can’t they drain your account from here? If you don’t respond in ‘x’ amount of days or whatever?”

“Well, let us just take a look-see at this here decree,” Demetrius said, his head falling to the opposite angle. His hands opened and closed around nothing at involuntary intervals.

Em squinted at the monitor and answered, “No.”

“Or consider,” said Demetrius.

“Or consider,” said Em.

“Or consider,” said Demetrius.

“Or consider,” said Em.

“Or consider,” said Demetrius.

“Or consider,” said Em.

Nik kissed Corrine’s shoulder. She had a sunken memory of someone’s blanket thrown to one side, and she found the comforter after a minute of casting around with outstretched arms. She wrapped Corrine in the drier side of the comforter. Nik rested her chin on Corrine’s shoulder. She whispered something and received no response. Nik then took careful, glacial steps away from the voices in the bridge, met the cold touch of a steel wall panel, and, aching and eyeless, found her way to her apartment.

Inside, Nik had to pause every few steps to endure columns of pain. In creeping increments, by the edge of a braided rug, by the back of a chair, by the chipped corner of a composite desk, she finally reached the personal comms hub in her apartment. She still retained the muscle memory of powering on the machine, and, now hearing its familiar soft-static hum, she found the contacts dial and felt it click three times.

“Good morning,” Nik spoke into the hub’s onboard microphone. Had she ever started a call this way before? Those greetings held little meaning here, orbiting a planet with nineteen hour and twenty-two minute days. She fought through a temporary paralysis that rose as scaffolding from between her shoulder blades. “I am starting over. Hey, Dad. I will be back sooner than we– than I thought. We. Than anyone. I am sorry. I do not understand. I love you. The account,” she said, wincing through the sensation of rebar dragging through half-congealed concrete behind her forehead. Her nails scratched farther into the chipped corner of the desk. “Is against. Yet. I will fix it. I’m sorry. I'm seeing you sooner. Love you.”

Nik was unable to see the screen, unable to read the error message reporting that all outgoing comms would be saved and retained within the vessel until connection was restored. Outbound signals were severed. Cables that were crucial to their transmission were no longer inside the bridge’s console. Some were knotted under a lounger. Some dangled from the ceiling. One was stapled to Alex’s leg.

Demetrius was having trouble writing new code. Em’s arm typed over his shoulder, and she smiled in approval. “Obvious,” she kept saying. “Obviously,” he would respond. The tin beaks around his eyes were snapping shut with increasing force. 

Nik was back in the bridge and sitting with Corrine on the dancefloor. Both were inside of the comforter, and they held each other close. Corrine kept spitting up.

Alex had trouble breathing through the drain in the floor. He imagined the holes in the metal growing wider. The drain was inhaling the cloudy pink solution that he mixed earlier. The solution was leaving his body through the back of his leg. Where was that pitcher now? He couldn’t breathe through the drain while it was drinking codeine, gasoline, and red phosphorus. He needed to make more for himself. Immediately. Watching the drain drink from his leg, he felt his face with a wet, pruning hand, and he found that his whole body wept for this loss. Of course it was. Why didn’t he have it? Why can’t I drink it right now? This is the saddest I have ever been in my entire life.

Slow, deliberate, Alain dragged a shoulder along the wall that led to the showers. He found Alex sitting underneath a running shower head with both legs outstretched, fully clothed and soaked through. Next to him, half underneath the falling water, was a scuffed gray trash can ready to overflow. Single-use gloves and wads of swollen used facial tissue floated inside. Shower water flowed freely past and inside of Alex’s open mouth. His eyes were glass. The regular rising of his stomach was the only visible movement, his concave chest collecting and releasing shallow pools of water. Collecting, releasing.

“Hey, we’re leaving,” Alain spoke softly, afraid of interrupting his friend. “You should come with us if you want.”

The stream of water running down Alex’s face broke around his mouth as it tried to speak. All it could do was part, reshape, close again. He saw that one of Alain’s eyes was a red mess of burst capillaries, a codeine blisterpack.

“Yeah,” Alain said, the weight of his body on one shoulder.

Alex found it odd to be a passenger in the hopper, found it odd to see it so crowded. Demetrius held the controls, his body falling toward one side. Demetrius flinched in and out of unconsciousness, waking each time to the crack of a snapped tongue depressor, the sound originating from somewhere inside himself.

Em placed her hands on Alex’s headrest for balance. Alex didn’t notice until she spoke. “We wanted to watch it,” Em said close to his ear. She chose to stand for this trip. Alex wondered why Em didn’t think to invite him, wondered if she would have left without him.

Alex turned to see Nikoletta and Corrine slumped in their harnesses, their heads facing their bare feet. Alain’s eyes were stuck to a window as the hopper descended and broke the manufactured cloudline. The ruby light of a foreign sun reflected on Alain’s face. None of his muscles reacted. 

“Did you bring it?” Alex asked Em, his mouth impossibly dry. Corrine began hacking, her body a violent stutter against her seat harness. Em didn’t answer. Alex would ask Demetrius. It was somewhere in the hopper. Piles and piles of hair exited Corrine’s mouth and collected at her feet. The wet accumulation was clotted and iridescent, crude oil black and moving between her toes.

As they approached the planet’s surface, Alex heard the familiar sub-bass grinding of landing gear in motion. It was unmistakable, and it was wrong. The wrong grinding, the clicks arriving out of place. Demetrius de-accelerated as they reached a level clearing along an unnamed coastline. Alex remembered too late that he left the hopper’s wheels out when he last docked into the Queen. Demetrius wasn’t familiar with the hopper’s controls, and he hadn’t noticed either when he toggled the landing command. The wheels were fully retracted back inside now. With force and with purpose, the hopper planted itself deep into fresh, waiting silt. Em’s kneecap met the corrugated floor first, then the rest of her. Unfastened tools and supply packs spilled out and littered the cabin. The scuffed gray trash can tipped easily, spilling soaked garbage and shower water down the length of the hopper.

“We’re okay. We’re okay,” Demetrius said, slowly swiveling to see the crew. “Yeah. We’re okay.” It was dark in the hopper. The planet’s surface reached halfway up the observation windows.

Alex and Demetrius spent a minute struggling to open the roof’s emergency hatch. They helped the crew out of their harnesses and pulled them through the roof one at a time. Nik, awoken by the landing, kept asking for Corrine, but Corrine remained silent. The two found each other on the roof and sat cross-legged together with their hands clasped. 

It was only a short jump from the roof to the dirt. Demetrius slid down the side of the hopper, and, for the first time, he made contact with this planet. He staggered and tripped in the direction of the freshwater lake. It lapped softly in the distance with an easy consistency that suggested it had always been, that it had always moved with this certain, solemn rhythm, giving no indication that only recently did it escape from ice caps in stages of intentional greenhousing. The peaks of its brief and countless waves gave the impression of a rose gold vanity mirror in a state of perpetual cracking and refracting. Turning his head, Demetrius fell in the direction of the jagged black mountain range, mountains with edges yet to be dulled by erosion, their finer splintered details kept secret behind fallen curtains of delicate amber fog, a powdered gold blown across the sky. The tin beaks around his eyes were open wide.

They never told me, Demetrius thought as he stepped his first step into glinting pink water, a lake like a jewel case, blushing under this curious ruby sky. The view of his submerged bare feet in ruddy sand remained perfect, disrupted only by the natural distortion of light through clean unfrozen water. How could a place be so untouched? It is past beauty. New terms are needed, a new scale that we must never know. To even know the words is to ruin this place. To even observe it is to ruin this place. It is pure of import. It has yet to arrive at meaning, and it must never arrive. Nobody can know these valleys and these oceans lay waiting. They remain meaningless, unchartable, unutterable, objects of literal perfection so long as the human mind is forbidden from assigning consequence, forbidden from hanging weight and expectation. 

A warm breeze traveled across the cracked and refracting rose gold vanity mirror and met Demetrius’s waist-deep body. He allowed himself to be held in its breath. Looking down to the clean image of his toes buried in silt, salty tears fell fast and easy from the tin beaks around his eyes. I must never assign thought to this world. It is past purity. Perfection in meaninglessness. How absurd is it for my body to hold space in this world? How presumptuous for me to breathe and exchange its air? My lungs are a corrupting presence, an engine of slow despoilment that can only unbalance this land, can only drag it further from an unknowable purity. Not to mention the violence of my arrival, the intrusion of steel and propellant. Unacceptable. Too ashamed to turn and look at the hopper that I know must lie behind me still. Even the trace wake of my skin and hair is a pollution. The salt from my tears landing in this freshwater is an arrogance. This is a world on a knife’s edge. Too fragile to look upon, a planet built by vast and accumulated circumstance, alive only in paper-thin margins, a miracle existing within the smallest window of potential physical manifestation, and I dare ask it to tolerate the foreign virus of my walking body, my sweat and my breath, an intruder who can do nothing to improve upon this purity, who can only sully it with every shedding cell? 

Far above, a heavy striation of bruised charcoal clouds parted to reveal an unknown sun, and in the moments before the sky collected itself over again, the lake that surrounded him glowed the color of thin honey and rose petal from the inside out. They never told me.

Alex watched Demetrius stumble farther away from the hopper and into the water. Em’s head was tilted back as she watched the movement of dense cloud figures. She was propped back against her arms, her useless and swelling leg hanging over the hopper’s edge. Alex saw that the skin around her gashed knee had turned purple and black. If Em felt it, she gave no indication.

Alain was scrambled behind the eyes. The world dimmed behind numerics and cracked neons, speeding figures set against a hanging black absence. The characters eluded coherence, and he tried and failed to slow the images. They persisted, kept racing whether his eyes were open or closed. He sensed an acceleration in his vision, a ruby light singeing through his optic nerves, through his sense of balance. And yet, words untethered swam in a countercurrent, undaunted, appearing as a miracle, a spawning against the motion blur. These words broke the surface of heavy glowing traffic and drew breath, and for their effort, Alain resolved to speak them aloud.

“Life is sticky.”

They registered as pure phonetics, thudding, sinking immediately to the drowned bottom. He could not solve them, they were a subliminal reflex that carried no meaning. Though he knew he must have fathered these words, he could not claim them. His sense of gravity and orientation, of his proportion and plotting within the world’s grid, was beyond him now. Speeding cracked neon was the whole of his sensation. He could not claim his own body as it slid headfirst, inching in slow heaves back into the emergency roof hatch.

“Okay,” Em said, her eyes on the mass of clouds that held steady above their wrecked hopper. “In a minute, I think.” Corrine was watching the sky now, too. She weakly pounded an open palm onto the roof.

Alex expected a flock of birds. But they didn’t do birds. They do pollinators. Birds arrive with colonies. A portion of the bruised charcoal clouds grew brighter. Corrine pounded the roof again, and Nik squeezed Corrine’s other hand tighter.

“Hey,” Corrine said, watching the area of glowing clouds. As the brightness increased, the portion of lit clouds narrowed in diameter. “Hey,” Corrine said, pounding faster with her open palm. Nik put both arms around her and wept through unseeing eyes. Something crept through Em’s throat, and she coughed black tar down her shirt.

The glowing portion of clouds tightened and grew brighter, grew hotter until it reached a fiery white point. Alex watched as the Queen burst through the cloudline, kilometers above their heads, every one of its observation lights set to full brightness. 

It was falling at an angle, abdomen-first. Its size was wrong. The space it occupied was wrong. Why was he seeing the Queen like this, with his body exposed to it, his skin sharing the same air as the vessel’s screaming exterior? It kept growing larger, but how? Nothing should ever be so large. Alex found it impossible to understand it as a vehicle, as a vessel. It read as pure architecture, as acres of unknowable heaving structure. It was an entire site unmoored, plucked up whole and flung from deep nowhere, lit for dead midnight and growing larger still. Somehow it was falling in silence, an endless moment of pure, helpless sight. Senseless. It should be crying. Wailing. Its array of alarms should be coughing and gasping as it sensed its own weight against the rushing atmosphere. He should hear its screaming. Senseless for it to keep growing like this. It read as a singular, private apocalypse. No one is supposed to see this. Somehow, it was still advancing, accelerating, filling more and more of the sky with an unyielding steel gray and dragging dozens of gashed white light trails behind.

Em’s eyes widened, black bile dripping off the point of her upturned chin. It would be landing much closer to the hopper than she expected. Alex fell into the emergency hatch while Corrine’s pounding turned frantic. “Hey. Hey.”

Alain was in the pilot’s seat, his unbreathing body draped over the yoke. Alex smacked on the engine toggles. The hopper sparked to life with the yoke already pulled to a hard angle under Alain’s weight. The hopper stuttered and groaned against porous dirt, digging itself deeper into the earth. Corrine was screaming now as Alex tried to pull Alain’s body out of the pilot seat.

The surface around the hopper brightened far beyond daylight as the Queen grew improbably closer, seeming ready to make contact where they sat. Not exactly where they sat, Em knew. It will touch down a few hundred yards along the coast. She saw that Demetrius found the water, was shoulder-deep now. She looked farther down to the black vomit syrup on her shirt. This is valid, Em thought. I can use this. Hydrochloric acid, stomach tissue, organic plant material. I can separate it, use all of it. Easy. She studied the material closer. It was a liquid, and yet it was swimming. A black liquid swimming back up her shirt. Strange for a liquid to swim, for a substance to move against its own state.

The crew was divided by shrapnel. The Queen’s ruptured air tanks fired concentrates into the planet’s surface at hundreds of kilometers per second and blanketed the coast with concussive waves of black smoke, of hydrogen and methane, of carbon dioxide and oxygen, of helium and nitrogen. Organic material climbed into the clouds. Some concentrates fell back promptly as viscous storms, landing onto the surface in sheets. Some concentrates were captured by the atmosphere, traveling far afield before returning as rain. This world took a hard, deep breath and inhaled all of it. In time, this site would become a paradise that its creators could never enjoy. The crew’s rescuers would find a planet no longer suitable for human life, but ideal for someone else.

Hundreds of millions of miles away, Nicolas Olivér was standing in a bare office. He was directing a picture-hanger and pointing to a spot on the cream-white wall above where his redwood desk might go. As he side-stepped to a point on the carpet where his chair would sit, he received a notification. Seeing the automated emergency message, he was reminded that he needs to ask Lynval to remove him from the terraforming operations list. Nicolas deleted the notification, then received a stranger message. When he sees Terry later that day, he’ll ask how normal it is for LinneFabar board members to attend birthday parties for the children of warehouse inventory specialists.