I glanced over at Gonzales once more, vastly confused by that statement. From what I could tell, she was a brave, fearless, intelligent, beautiful woman with a banging paycheck. People should have been lining up across the cosmos for her. “How is that possible?”
“How’s what possible?”
“That you’ve been single for so long if you don’t want to be.”
She shrugged. “You know how it is, a lot of people want their honey to be on the same planet as them. They want nightly snuggles, and a girl with long flowing hair who doesn’t beat the crap out of punching bags when she’s angry.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? I can see the need to not want your lover lightyears away, facing unknown dangers and possibly never returning.”
I shrugged. “I guess so. I just wasn’t aware love was so conditional.”
“Everyone has a right to be picky with what relationships they choose to settle into.”
“Fair.” Finally, we reached the engineering room and all the complicated talk of romantic entanglements fell away.
“Hey, guys!” Gonzales said, practically vaulting into the room. “How are my favorite twins?”
Only Ciangi was visible at first, dressed in what looked like a soft summer dress that might have once been a pale lilac but was so spattered with different engineering liquids that it was now somewhere around gray. Her thick curls were pulled into what looked like attempts at pigtails, but looked more like tightly coiled buns.
“We’ve got a good plan in place. I think it’s promising. Right, Bahn?”
In a weird sense of déjà vu, the taller of the twins rolled out from under a console. Did he just like to live under technical spaces or did I just have uncanny timing?
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But I am…hopeful.”
“Wanna let us in on what has you both thinking positively?”
“We just think we’re going to be able to rewire this to some spare crystals we synthesized to boost the power enough to search for Mimic’s genetic makeup. We’ve taken several samples from her which are currently being deconstructed by the analyzer, and Bahn set up a program that should be able to auto-generate much of the algorithms needed for the scanner.”
“That’s fantastic! So once this is all done, you’ll be able to scan whole chunks of space for anything like Mimi?”
“That’s the plan.”
I smiled and nodded, feeling like we were finally progressing. “Awesome. Anything that I can help with?”
“Yes, actually. There are about seven hundred and twenty different wires we need to either remove, repurpose, or reroute, so I was wondering if you wanted a bit of a crash course.”
My eyes went wide and I couldn’t help but notice the satisfied smirk on Gonzales’s face. “S-sure. If you think I’d be useful.”
“You’re always useful, Higgens. Now grab a data log, you’re gonna want to write some of this down.”
Progress is Progress
I had read plenty of novels on the net in my time and I was always aware of the trope of the narration summarizing highly technical or monotonous endeavors as to not bore the readers. As I cut wire after wire, then dutifully did the readings that the twins needed after every move, I found myself wishing that someone would do that to my own life.
At first, I had been so nervous, terrified of doing something wrong. But after the initial dozen or so cuts, it went right into the mundane.
Mimic sat by dutifully, however, asking questions and listening whenever I grew too bored, and then Ciangi and Bahn both would stop by occasionally to make sure I was on track and didn’t need any help. Our days blended into a bit of a routine, and not an unpleasant one at that, which left me looking less at the calendar and more toward space.
I supposed I should have kept an eye on the alerts just in case Giomatti managed to catch up with us, but that was near impossible. Even if he had somehow convinced his crew to take off after us, they didn’t have the supplies or the means to do anything to the massive mining ship. It wasn’t like they had the advantage of surprise or a shapeshifter like my group had, not to mention that the engineers had taken the time to boost the defenses of the mining ship when they weren’t busy working on the scanner.
“What are you thinking about?”
I finished cutting the wire I had between my fingers before I looked at Mimic. She was wearing a large, baggy shirt courtesy of Bahn, and tight, synthetic leggings from Gonzales’s collection with the ankles rolled up. I kind of missed her in my oversized jumpsuit, but it seemed I was the only one who liked the thick, durable fabric.
“Nothing important,” I said, handing her the wire then taking the power-cap she handed to me.
“I think everything you worry about is important.”
“That’s because you’re still very new to this whole bipedal, human-esque thing. Everything is fascinating to you. Even things that are not.”
“Perhaps. Or maybe you all have just become too numb to the wonder of…well, everything.”
I laughed lightly. “I guess there’s no way we’ll ever know.”
“Perhaps not,” she murmured. “But I would still like to know your thoughts.”
“Just thinking about Giomatti and how mad he must be.”
She smiled at that, her small face taking on a mischievous expression. “Certainly very angry. He was not a nice man.”
“No, he was not.”
“Higgens?”
“Mimi?” I replied, raising my eyebrow at her.
“We have been friends a good while now, yes? And have survived many things together.”
“Yes, I would say that’s accurate.”
“Then you would answer a question honestly, even if it was uncomfortable?”
“Mimi, what are you getting at?”
“I just…” For the first time in a long while, she seemed at a loss for words. “I’ve read many amazing things on the net interface your kind created. But I have also read many terrible things. Things I still do not want to believe. Wars, and explosions, and murder of millions. I thought perhaps those were just rare tragedies that were not to be expected.
“But then, that man, Giomatti. He was cruel. He wanted to ruin me for profit. He felt absolutely no remorse for the death of my family. He didn’t even seem to realize we were a people, even if we were so different from his own kind. “
I looked to her earnestly, giving her my full attention. I still didn’t know where she was going with this, but I wanted to listen. It sounded like it was important to her, whatever she was formulating. “I think you’re right.”
“Thank you. But that affirmation is not what I need. I know Giomatti is a selfish man. A myopic one, even. And I know you are a good man. Incredible, even. You were willing to give up everything to help me, a stranger, what might have even looked like a monster to you when we first found each other.” I blushed a bit at the praise, but she continued. “But what I need to know is if most humans are like you, or are most humans like him?”
Oh.
Oh.
That was a question indeed, and one that I hadn’t been anticipating. “I… That’s really hard to say. I’ve been told my whole life about how I’m weird, but I don’t know if that’s what makes me kind, or if it’s something else.”
“I understand if you cannot answer with resolute conviction, but I want to know your opinion. I have always valued it and always will, even when I didn’t know enough of your language to communicate that to you.”
“Right. Well, uh, I guess I would say that the majority of people are average. Not necessarily good, not necessarily bad. Just people, doing their best to get by and that’s it. They have the capacity to do great things, but most likely they will not. And then, a much smaller fraction is like Giomatti. They tend to cling to power and do terrible, horrible things in the name of progressing their own means. Then, there’s people like me. We’re not particularly special either, but when we see someone hurt, or when we know that someone needs help, we do everything in our power to aid them. It’s like a scale, where the three of us all balance each other out.”