At seven minutes past dinnertime, his hand terminal chimed. He accepted the connection with his thumb.
“You aren’t coming home for dinner?” his mother asked. Her voice was tinny and small, like air pressed into a straw.
“No,” David replied. “I’ve got to finish my datasets.”
“I thought they gave you the daytime to do that,” she said. On the hand terminal screen, she looked different than in person. Not older or younger, but both. It was like being shrunk down rubbed out all the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, but at the same time it made all the gray show in her hair.
“I had some other stuff I needed to take care of.”
The small screen version of her face went cool and distant. The tightness in David’s shoulders started to feel like a weight.
“Time management is an important skill, David,” she said, as if it were just a random thought. Not anything to do with him.
“I know,” he said.
“I’ll put your meal up for when you get home. Don’t be later than midnight.”
“I won’t.”
The connection dropped, and David turned back to his data, growled, and slammed his fist into the display. The monitor didn’t break. It didn’t even error out. He might as well not have done anything. The next alert came in the middle of the evening when the labs were starting to empty. The voices in the hallways were fainter, almost lost in the drone and drum of music from the construction labs. The maintenance workers were coming through, old men and women with damp mops and desiccant powders. David almost ignored his hand terminal’s tritone chime. It only started to bother him a little, wondering who would have sent a message rather than just opening a connection. He looked over. It was from Leelee, and the header read OPEN WHEN YOU’RE ALONE. David’s concentration broke. His imagination leapt to the sorts of messages that girls sent to boys to be watched in private. He reached over and closed the door to his lab and hunched over the hand terminal.
She was in a dark place, the light catching her from the side. In the background, a rai song was playing, all trumpets and ululating male voices. She licked her lips, her gaze flicked to the terminal’s control display, and then back to him.
“David, I think I’m in trouble,” she said. Her voice shook, her breath pressing into the words. “I need help, okay? I’m going to need help, and I know you like me. And I like you too, and I think you’ll help me out, right? I need to borrow some money. Maybe… maybe kind of a lot. I’ll know soon. Tomorrow maybe. Just send a message back if you can. And don’t talk to Hutch.”
A woman’s voice called from the background, rising over the music, and Leelee surged forward. The display went back to default, and David put in a connection request that timed out with an offer to leave a message instead. Grunting with frustration, he put in another request. Then another. Leelee’s system was off-line. He had the powerful urge to get to the tube station and go to Innis Shallows in person, but he didn’t know where to find her once he was there. Didn’t even know for sure she’d been there when she sent the message. Curiosity and dread spun up a hundred scenarios. Leelee had been caught with some product and had to bribe the police or she’d be jailed. One of Hutch’s enemies had found her and was threatening to kill her if she didn’t tell how to find him so now she needed to get off planet. Or she was pregnant and she had to get to Dhanbad Nova for the abortion. He wondered how much money she’d need. He imagined the smile on her face when he gave it to her. When he saved her from whatever it was.
But first he had to fix his data and get home. No one could know that something was happening. He set the hand terminal to record and placed himself in the center of the image.
“I’ll do whatever I can, Leelee. Just you need to get in touch with me. Tell me what’s going on, and I’ll do whatever you need. Promise.” He felt like there was more. Something else he should add. He didn’t know what. “Whatever it is, we’ll get through it, right? Just call me.”
He set the headers and delivered the message. For the rest of the evening, he waited for the chime of a connection request. It never came.
When he got home, it was near midnight but his father and Aunt Bobbie were still awake. The living room monitor was set to a popular feed with a silver-haired, rugged-faced man talking animatedly. With the sound muted, he seemed to be trying to get their attention. David’s father sat on the couch, the mass of his body commanding the space from armrest to armrest like a king on his throne. Aunt Bobbie leaned against the wall, lifting a thirty-kilo weight with one arm as she spoke, then gently letting it descend.
“That’s how I see it,” she said.
“But it isn’t like that,” his father said. “You are a highly trained professional. How much did Mars invest in you over those years you were in the Corps? The resources that you took up didn’t come from nowhere. Mars gave something up to give you those opportunities, those skill sets.”
It was a tone of voice David had heard all his life, and it tightened his gut. The man on the monitor lifted his hands in outrage over something, then cracked what was meant to be a charming smile.
“And I appreciate that,” Aunt Bobbie said, her voice low and calm in a way that sounded more like shouting than his father’s raised voice. “I’ve served. And those opportunities involved a lot of eighteen-hour days and—”
“No, no, no, no,” his father said, massive hands waving in the air like he was trying to blow away smoke. “You don’t get to complain about the work. Engineering is just as demanding as—”
“—and watching a lot of my friends die in front of me,” Aunt Bobbie finished. The free weight rose and fell in the sudden silence. She shifted it to her other hand. His father’s face was dark with blood, his hands grasping his knees. Aunt Bobbie smiled. Her voice was sad. “You’re thinking about how you can top me on that, aren’t you? Go ahead. Take your time.”
David put his hand terminal down on the kitchen table, the click of plastic on plastic enough to announce him. When they turned to look at him, David could see the family resemblance. For a moment, they were an older brother and a younger sister locked in the same conversation they’d been having since they were children. David nodded to them and looked away, unsettled by the thought and vaguely embarrassed.
“Welcome home,” his father said, rising up from the couch. “How are things at the lab?”
“Fine,” David said. “Mom said she’d put dinner up for me.”
“There’s some curry in the refrigerator.”
David nodded. He didn’t like curry, but he didn’t dislike it. He put a double serving into a self-heating ceramic bowl and set it to warm. He kept his eyes down, wishing that they’d go on with whatever they’d been talking about so they’d forget about him yet dreading listening to them fight if they did. Aunt Bobbie cleared her throat.
“Did they find anything more about the tube thing?” she asked. David could tell from the shift in her tone of voice that she’d put up the white flag. His father took a deep breath, letting it out slowly through his nose. David’s curry tasted more of ginger than usual, and he wondered whether Aunt Bobbie had made it.