Anika took a sip of protein gel. It didn’t taste like much, but it did the job of nourishing her. And all she cared about was Billy, anyway. Getting as much of him as she could before he had to go away again.
She was hungry for the human contact, for the simple pleasure of talking to somebody. But it was more than that. This was Billy, the man who populated her secret dreams and kept her company in her memories. As Roberto faded away, Billy became more vivid, and she held on to him like a talisman, like a soldier’s good-luck charm.
Never mind that he had the Murphy backwards luck he mentioned. She wanted all of him: that lopsided smile, that incandescent stare that made the rest of the universe disappear. It sounded idiotic, but she wanted to protect him. And if she couldn’t protect him by staying away from him, she wanted to give him a place of sanctuary, where he could let go of the banter, let go of the war, and find a peaceful garden to lay his head.
But it wasn’t that simple.
Anika put these thoughts away. Here with Billy, she was Annie, not Anika, and for the moment she could leave the beleaguered scientist behind, and be Annie, Billy’s girl, at least for a single night.
“So how did you get from the Jobs Prize to planet AlphaZed3?”
She sighed and leaned back against the cot, feeling the heat of his arm all along her side, even though they didn’t touch. “I don’t know how I ended up here, really,” she said, wrenching herself away from the tangled mess of her thoughts to look at him, in the flesh, next to her. “But making this planet habitable means big money for FortuneCorp,” she said.
“You wanna know how I found you out here? I knew you and Roberto worked for FortuneCorp, first off. And that aside from all your science, you love growing things. So I thought to myself – ‘Self, what would a scientist who loves growing things do for FortuneCorp?’ Grow new worlds, of course. After that, I hacked into the employee database of off-world employees, tapped into a few contacts, and I was hot on your trail.”
Annie’s dinner congealed into a hard, cold pit in her stomach. “Nice little felony you committed there, Murph. And don’t you realize they have a whole sheriff’s division at FortuneCorp that’ll trace your virtual tracks and hunt you down in the meatworld?”
Billy’s smile got small and quiet and dangerous. “It was worth it, Annie. I found out who killed Roberto in the database, too – the information was right in his dossier. In yours.”
The silence thundered between them.
“Don’t worry about me. I have my ways of getting in and out of virtual space alive. My contacts. My brothers.”
Annie nodded at him, numb to her bones. “So you know who killed him.”
“You want to know.”
“I’m not so sure. What can I do about it, even if I do know?”
Billy didn’t answer her. Instead, he guzzled the rest of his own protein gel and crushed the titanium can between his fingers. He kept crushing it into a tiny cube, as Annie watched.
“Once I found out where you were and who killed Roberto, I had to find you,” he said.
“So here I am, you found me,” she said, a little waver in her voice. “Growing this ball of ice into something habitable.”
Billy turned his head to look at the flimsy synthwood door to the hut, and Annie knew he could look right through it with his modified eyes. “That Bowman eco-drive is incredible. No other worldcorp has technology anything like it, not yet anyway. You grew a whole world.”
“Well, a few hundred square meters worth. But we have to make it more than a few kliks wide for a colony to settle here and get to work. The precious metals frozen inside the ice are worth trillions. Once it’s habitable, we can extract that ore and conquer the whole quadrant. We can use this as a regional base.”
She still spoke of “we”: what she and FortuneCorp could do together. It was a habit she had, maybe a bad one, but she wanted to belong to something – anything that was bigger than her and her fears.
Billy kept staring at the door, and didn’t look away even when Annie dared to touch his shoulder. When he didn’t respond to her, she squinted at the door as if she could see through it too, through sheer orneriness.
Nope.
Before she could say anything, Billy whispered directly into her mind: What’s that?
Those two little words sparked the shakes in her, from deep inside, working out to the tips of her fingers, to the ends of her hair. For two reasons.
One, Billy spoke directly into her mind. How did he do that? She wasn’t genmod in any way. Not even Roberto could do it, whisper into her soul. And he had tried.
So, what just happened?
The other reason was that Billy seemed to have seen something lurking in the jungle she’d grown, outside the perimeter of her research hut. But she hadn’t introduced any fauna to her flora, not yet.
So, what the bloody hell was out there?
Billy must have picked up on her fear, for he rose silently to his feet, and put her behind him. He took a blaster out of his boot (so that was where it was) and walked to the door, step by soundless step.
Once he reached the frame, he motioned Annie back, and she decided not to argue. Before she could take cover behind her desk, Billy reached forward lightning fast, and swung the door open.
In a flash, Annie saw the hummingbird-fast metal wings and screamed, “Don’t shoot!”
Billy reached forward and pinched Violet out of the air and into one of his big, square palms. Violet squeaked, and the gears ground audibly in the joints of her translucent wings.
“That’s my lab assistant,” Annie said, shaking so hard she reached for the top of her desk to keep from toppling over. “Violet. That’s what I call her.”
Billy brought the wriggling AI to her desk, opened the roll-top with an elbow, and pinned its metallic little body against the realwood surface.
“Looks like a killer drone to me,” Billy growled.
“Violet’s FortuneCorp-issued. And yes, they make the drones. But her directive is to assist me. She does growth measurements around the dome’s perimeter, to see how permeable the dome membrane is at the edges. To see if we can extend the geodome biosphere. I should’ve warned you about her. Sorry, I’m such a ninny.”
Billy snorted at that, sighed, and let Violet go. She buzzed on her back for a minute, like a metallic dragonfly, and then she found her footing and swung onto her furry-looking titanium feet.
“What’s that?” Violet asked in her high-pitched, buzzing voice.
Annie restrained a sigh. “This is my old friend, Billy Murphy. He was, erm, in the neighborhood, and decided to stop by and say hello.”
Violet’s compound eyes took in Billy and Annie in a single glance. And for the first time, those jeweled, all-seeing eyes unnerved her.
They seemed to see right through her. Seemed to know who killed Roberto. And why.
But Annie’s dangerous days were done. She was a frontier gardener now, she wanted to tell Violet.
And that’s all she wanted to be.
Violet joined them for the rest of their little picnic. Billy no longer looked at Annie or said much of anything. He just watched Violet. And Violet watched Annie.
“I need to return to my monitoring duties,” Violet finally announced. “Are you sure you are okay here, boss?”
Annie smiled at her. Oh, she knew Violet was programmed, and didn’t grow spontaneously out of carbon-based life, but she’d never cared. Violet knew an endless supply of silly jokes, entertained her and diverted her through long days of data analysis, eco-development, and heat generation under the geodome. Violet distracted her, on long, lonely, dark nights balanced on the edge of forever.