Sable — Rosemary McLean

 Tiny plastic cases flip under the force of your fingers, each revealing a delicate metal button beneath. Across a blinking board of hundreds above your head, you effortlessly press an arcane pattern. To you, this routine is as natural as a nursery rhyme—third from the top, fifth position, eighth down, third position. What took minutes cross-referencing a manual three years or so ago can now be done without looking. In seconds, your rig is drifting forwards without your input. 

You take your hand from the wheel, undo the buckles across your chest, and rise carefully from your cushioned seat. The slightest push against the windshield sends you floating back, weightless, until your boots catch you against the wall of your sleeper cab. Though the row of lights above you still glows with the orange UV of midday, you yawn—the first yawn of many. Checking the watch at your wrist, you look past the large “168:36:45,” that number which looms, ever-decreasing, over your journey, and instead focus on the smaller number below: “11:16:02.” You sigh. Eleven hours until your next allotted stop. You swipe the screen of your watch and its blue display smoothly transitions to green. Proudly displayed in the center is a new number: “USD 42,240.33” Still on track for full pay, at least.

Normally, you might settle into your cabin for a while, boot up a video game about virtual farming to kill the time. But you’re delivering to the upper quarter, this time, sun-side of the asteroid belt, and you’re stealing minutes before you’re in the red zone for space debris. Opening the metal tray of your refrigerator, you withdraw a small silver bag that crinkles within your fingers. Drawing its straw to your mouth, you taste the acrid buzz of sugary carbonation. You’ve been trying to cut down, but you know you’ll need the energy.

An alert sounds from the control board across the cabin. You furrow your brow and kick off again, soaring back to the front of your rig. “Okay, Martin,” you call out as you pull yourself over the arm of your chair. An electric boop sounds, awaiting a question. You oblige: “What are we picking up?”

“Searching,” the voice of a British man replies through your speakers. After a few seconds, it continues: “A company distress signal is ahead. Code seven. Abandoned load.” Your fingers swipe across the screen in the center of your console. The screen jitters, fighting your inputs, but you have learned how to overcome the quirks it has acquired in its age. In time, you convince it to display the map of your trajectory, now including a small blinking dot along the path.

“It’s pretty close,” you mutter aloud. Your finger hesitates above the chunky red button beside your radio. Salvaging lost loads can be a lot of hassle, but you’d make fifteen percent commission. Besides, you’ve been looking for a chance to stretch your legs.“Eh, fuck it.” You press down the button—a satisfying buzz follows—and you raise the padded headset over your left ear.

“Operator, this is HD73QF requesting some add-time. I’m picking up a signal thirty-two hundred miles out along my path, model… JRT IX, registration code is AR6945. Reading an abandoned load. Recovery? Over.” Your finger raises from the button, and you watch the red display screen above slowly count down the light-seconds until your message reaches the nearest relay and returns. After about ten seconds, a reply crackles through your headset. It’s a woman’s voice, human. Or at least, you think, it’s a lot better at sounding human than your Martin is.

“Acknowledged. Once you reach the vessel you’ll have thirteen minutes to secure the load and get back on the path before your pay is docked. I’m wiring over the keys and your add-time now. Over.” Surely enough, a chime vibrates against your wrist, and a new number appears, suspended along your watch screen. “+ 00:13:00.” The signal is less than two minutes out, now. It’s going to be close.

Your hands get to work at once, flipping switches and pulling levers across the console. You feel the difference as your rear thrusters power down, but your stomach doesn’t start to really churn until the reverse jets begin to power up. On the speedometer to your left, the numbers plummet—40k miles an hour become 30k, then 20k, then 10k. You ask Martin to help guide in your approach, but you know you’ll have to handle most of it yourself.

The way you don your pressure suit is a feat of acrobatics, flipping head over foot as you wriggle your limbs into their loose, rubbery sleeves. The nylon cowl pulls over your head a little easier, and you’re soon looking into the cabin with amber-shielded eyes. The suit droops loosely and bouncily around you, like you’re swimming in a water balloon, until you exhale forcefully and slap the button at your chest. The vent against your back roars as vacuum tubes suck at your skin, and soon the suit is tightly sealed to your form, conforming to every groove like a flexible glove. You adjust and pick at yourself to smooth out the last few wrinkles, and it’s a few motions later before the suit seems to disappear around you. The one thing in this rig that works, and you bought it yourself.

Less than a minute later, your hand holds tightly against the bar beside your bay door. The airlock hisses closed behind you, and an artificial voice speaks into your helmet. “You have reached your destination.” 

“Thanks, Martin,” you reply, and the white door in front of you disappears. The rush of air behind you nearly pushes you into the black, but you catch yourself with the bar and bounce silently against the side of your rig. After a second, you’ve gathered your bearings, and loop a metal tether through the hoop hanging from your back. You look to your watch. The deep blue of your main screen, along with its number, disappears. In its place, a pale blue screen displays “00:13:00” and, almost instantly after, “00:12:59.” You draw in a deep, cold breath, and look out.

Black, so dark that you feel like it's pressing against the glass of your face shield, surrounds you. Tiny pinpricks of light center you, like air holes in a shipping crate. The other rig is easy to spot, only forty or so feet away and shining white like a headlight. Your feet push off hard against the metal behind you, and you’re soon sailing through the cosmos towards the beacon. The second you exit the shadow of your own rig you’re bleached white, too, and you feel your cooling system kick up to compensate. You look over your shoulder towards the distant sun. Its rays stretch out towards you like electric fingers that sting tears into your eyes even through your thick, tinted glass.

As you draw towards it, you can make out more about the rig. It’s a lot like yours—a bit newer, a bit bigger, but the same where it matters. It’s a boxy mess of white and grey with black solar panels and a folded up docking bridge and a nose that tapers to a tip. Shipping crates of all sizes cover the last forty feet of it or so like barnacles, haphazardly stuck against its magnetic trailer. 

Your jump was pretty close, only off by a yard or so, and the air valves along your sides get you the last few feet of the way. You loop around one of the rig’s handles and, by pulling yourself along its edges like a jungle gym, crawl to the exterior panel beside the hitch. You withdraw the ‘keys’ from your hip-pouch—actually a screwdriver-sized metal tube that slots into the hitch’s round port. You have to hit the side of the device a few times before it actually takes, allowing you access to the rig’s controls. A few swipes on the screen later and you’ve deactivated the electro-magnet; the trailer’s humming dies down, and the crates along its thorax detach, floating lazily into the space around the rig. 

You spend the next several minutes hopping back and forth between the rigs, ferrying crates from one trailer to another. It’s more than ten feet away before you feel your own ship’s magnet pulling at the crate in your hands and you release it, where it zips away to clang tight against the side of your hull. When you lift and fly with the larger crates, some up to fifteen feet long in each dimension, you feel like Superman.

Your watch reads “00:06:46” by the time you’ve gotten all the crates that your junker can carry, and you lay your back against the other rig to rest. A year ago, this much cargo would have taken you more than the thirteen minutes you were allotted. Now, you’ve actually earned a little break for your troubles. You look back to your rig above you, then back to the strange rig you’ve pressed yourself against. You flip onto your belly and crawl along to the nearest window, a face-sized hole of glass within the angular metal of the spacecraft. You produce a flashlight from your pouch and, within, its light falls upon a tidy cabin, devoid of any signs of stress or disarray. Steadying yourself against the ship’s walls, you run a new tether through your hoop, then hook your own tether against this ship. Pressing the keys into the rig’s wall, you part its bay doors and step within.

A hand-wide screen beside the airlock displays the ship’s vital information—all firmly and safely within the green. Once the doors seal behind you, you double-tap the small button on the center of your chest and release the pressure in your suit. When you slide the shield from your face, you’re greeted with the atmosphere of a different rig than your own. The first thing you notice is the smell, the vaguest hint of aerosolized perfume. Some kind of flower, you think, maybe cherry blossom. It brings back the echo of a memory, but nothing lingers. Your hand traces over the cabinets and door handles along the way to the control panel, whereon a watch like your own screams out a displeased tune. You lift it by the tail and hold it before you with two fingers, and its screen flashes an angry red. It reads “-13:23:32”, and a swipe to the right reveals “USD -23,000” and counting. You grimace, and look to your own watch. Its yellowing screen displays “00:05:12.” 

“Hey Martin,” you say aloud, to no reply. “Cherry?” You think of older models, and blurt out: “Okay, Siri. Google?” No reply to either. You plumb your thoughts, and find yourself asking: “Kiki?” A bubbly voice pipes up through the speakers in response.

“Hello! I’m Kiki, a virtual assistant. I don’t believe we’ve met!” You have never heard this voice before, in person or over the scroll of pre-recorded advertisements that interrupt every half hour of your television time. Yet, somehow you knew to ask for her. A question comes into your mind, and out of your mouth just as quickly.

“What’s your pilot’s handle?” 

Kiki replies, and her answer flings you backwards through time past months and years strapped into the cushioned seat of your rig to a rest stop at the edge of the inhabited system, and, earlier still, to your first days sailing the endless black. To messages sent from your CB radio, to your console’s lonely red screen counting down the light minutes since transmission until a buzz finally replied in your headset, a voice crackled over the line. Your first friend out here, your first companion among the stars. 

The hours passed much more quickly with company. They were funny, much funnier than you, and brilliant, if a little strange. The delay between transmissions made your time together less of a conversation and more of an exchange of letters, the wait-time filled with excitement. You told them about your life—the ups-and-downs, tragedies and lucky breaks that led you this far from Earth—and they told you about theirs. They had been driving a rig longer than you had, and more successfully, though they had more than their share of complaints about the work. They had replaced their virtual assistant with one that they had repurposed and designed themself, a program they named Kiki. They were older than you, just a few years, and had graduated from college with high honors before they went space-side.

“How did you end up here? Over.” you asked, incredulous. Space isn’t a place for people with futures, you thought, especially this far from those cushioned bubble-towns on Mars where outrageously rich people play pioneer. Their reply started with a little laugh, probably at the surprise in your voice.

“You know how things are on Earth,” they paused, “I got my degree studying frogs and, well, there’s not really any left to study these days. I didn’t have a lot to stick around for. Over.” 

“What about your family? Over,” you asked, forgetting to include enough to your message to make the wait time bearable.

“I’ve got family on Earth, sure. In Tennessee, in the United States,” their voice was meditative. “Before I bought my tickets off-world, we had kind of a fight. Things bubbled over that had been stewing a long time, you know? I said some things that… I don’t know how I would approach reconnecting with them,” they paused, but the transmission continued, “But who knows? I’m young. I might end up in that area someday. Over.” 

“How is it? Tennessee, I mean,” you replied, narrowly forgetting to add a quick “Over.”

“About like any other place, probably. A bit rustier than most, I guess. There was a time,” their voice grew wistful, contemplative, “at my aunt and uncle’s house—they had a bit of land in the mountains—where I played tag with my cousins. It was about halfway into winter, so it was already damn cold, but we were running around barefoot freezing our toes off in the dirt. I got cornered by the woods, but I was always really competitive, so I scampered up a tree that was behind me. The bark scraped up the bottoms of my feet, but I made it some thirty feet up and sat on a branch. None of the other kids were brave enough to come up after me, so I just waited them out. 

“After a while I got bored of looking down at them and I turned around to look out at the rest of the woods and just… I was stunned. There were trees as far as I could see in every direction. These beautiful dark reds and bright oranges, just swelling with the wind. Beyond that was this lake, shimmering like crystals. I’d never seen anything like that. It took my breath away. I guess when I miss Earth I’m really missing that. Over.”

As the timbre of their voice hummed through your headset, you leaned your forehead against the small port-hole window of your cabin. You were traveling tens of thousands of miles an hours, crossing distances that no one on Earth could imagine, but the stars that looked back at you didn’t even seem to move. A pain gripped your chest then—and now, remembering it—like a bird looking out of a wire-frame cage in a sterile apartment, a tile ceiling between you and the skies you used to fly.

It would be three months of correspondence like this before you finally met in person, in a steel and plastic maze of a rest stop on the surface of an icy moon. You remember clanking your way down a grate-floored hallway—magnetic boots were a poor imitation of the proper weight of gravity, but were still, you’d learned, far better than the ‘moon-jumping’ alternative. Industrial fans yelled from their spacings along the walls, keeping a constant, cool flow of air into the stop’s tight corridors.

They waited for you right where they said they would, leaned against a railing by a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the moon. A landscape of white, cracked ice stretched out in every direction, interrupted only by low veins of clay-red mineral. Across the horizon, small geysers of steam occasionally burst through the surface sending cascades of frigid crystals into the atmosphere. The sky was brilliant, with shades of purple swirling from violet to nearly black, illuminated by the distant pinprick of the sun. Jupiter’s massive form loomed above it all, its surface spiralling with storms of oil like a Van Gogh painting. Their thin silhouette was nearly black against the light of the window. You trudged your way forward, the metal on your feet removing any form of subtlety from your approach.

“Hey,” was the first thing that came to your mind, and you said it as you did so often. Their face turned to greet you, and a weak smile crossed it. They didn’t look anything like the image you had created in your mind; where their messages had been boisterous and full of life, they looked frail and calm. Their naturally tan skin was paling, and their arms wrapped around themself for warmth. They were taller than you, and their short-cropped head of fox red hair still bore the depressions of a pressure suit. You noticed they smelled faintly of flowers. Maybe cherry blossoms. They eyed you over at the same time, likely studying the differences between your voice and body the same. Suddenly nervous, you held out a foamy glass of alcohol. “Oh, I got this for you!”

They squinted. “It’s not rum, is it? Rum makes me shit myself.” You stammered until a smile grew across their face, and you erupted into laughter. It was them. Your friend. The next few hours passed like minutes together. You had almost forgotten how nice it was to have ground beneath your feet, to drink something without a straw, to talk and laugh in the physical presence of someone with a pulse. You told them that you couldn’t believe you finally made it out here—Europa, basically the edge of the universe, more than a year’s flight from any port on Earth—and they laughed. 

“You know,” they said, “I’m not so surprised.” They smiled, but you could see the melancholy beneath their words. After your drink wore away the last of your inhibitions, you asked if they were alright. They took a slow, lingering sip before replying. 

“Just cold,” they shuddered, “and damn sick of this job.” You nodded, leaning against the rail. In your periphery, you saw their head turn to look at you. “Would you like to come to my rig for a while? I’ve got some fighting games I’ve been playing against the CPU.” They smiled. “Would be nice to beat up on a real person for a change.” You held up your watch. Its light blue screen counted down from “00:54:42.” You sighed.

“I probably shouldn’t. I’ve got to get back to work soon.” They huffed out a frustrated laugh, then leaned back against the rail. You turned to face them. “I mean, I’ve got bills. You know?”

“How long are you going to watch the seconds of your life tick away, just waiting for your company to tell you that you can live it?” 

The words lingered on their lips like a long-brewed poison. You were speechless more than surprised, barely able to form a ‘what?’ in response. They shook their head, and looked down into their empty drink. 

“You’ve been working here longer than me. You have to get what I mean,” you finally managed to form. They looked back at you, disappointed, then made a show of rolling up the polyester sleeve over their right arm and presenting their thin wrist. Their watch screen was a warning-yellow, displaying “00:00:16.” Your eyebrows twisted into a confused frown, and you adjusted in your stance. 

They watched the numbers on their wrist count down like the final seconds before the New Year, and the red screen lit up their face just as brightly, you thought, as any firework show would have. The display switched to another red screen, where “USD 12,850.56” began to spin down, losing cents first, then dollars. Your hand reached to their arm, but they pulled it away.

“You really can’t see? It doesn’t matter. There’s more to life than,” they gestured around the entire corridor, “fucking this. What is the money for? So we have more entertainment to spend the time while our lives pass us by? So we can buy treatments for the health issues we’re going to get from floating around out here, or to buy replacements for the low-quality equipment they’re giving us?” They fidgeted, trying to regain their cool. “No matter how much we do for them, they won’t care about us.” 

You looked back at your own watch, as if proximity to theirs would make your own pay decrease. They shook their head and took a few, clanging steps backwards. “It was nice to see you.” 

“Wait,” you said, beginning to follow as they stepped away. “Hey,” you yelled after, “Sable, wait!” 

Sable. The handle runs over your tongue like an old secret, one you’d nearly forgotten. You look back to the watch blinking red atop the console. They finally did it. They finally walked away.

“Hey, Kiki,” you say, as if in a trance. “Why is the rig out here? Where did Sable go?”

“The rig is here because this is the closest to Earth we could fly while remaining safely outside of the planet’s ablation cascade,” the voice chirped back helpfully, “From here, Sable launched one of the rig’s life shuttles. Designed for rough reentry, the shuttle should offer ample protection on their route to the planet.” You lean, weightless, against the wall behind you. 

A vibration against your wrist pulls you out of the fugue. Raising it, you read “00:00:00,” and then “USD 42,240.32.” A robotic, British voice sounds through your helmet.

“Proceed to the route.” 

Cents slowly crawl away, then dollars.

“Proceed to the route.”

Staring into your watch as hours worth of work slip from your account, you shake your head. Raising your finger to your ear, you send your reply: “Fuck yourself, Martin.”

You turn to the console again, your eyes scanning across its rows of buttons, switches, and displays. “Kiki,” you ask, “you said one of the rig’s life shuttles, didn’t you? That means you have more?”

“Correct,” she pips back, “we have one other life shuttle that is currently operational and stocked for a journey.” You smile. Your motions are manic as you enter a few preparatory commands into the control panel.

“Kiki,” you ask, “do you think you can get me back to Earth?”

“Of course,” she replies, “I can help you with that.”

As the airlock hisses and hums open behind you, you look one final time to your watch. “USD 38,018.98.” You unfasten the watch and place it down against the counter, gently, so it doesn’t float away. Its red screen faces that of the other watch—soon, one distress signal will scream into the face of another. It’s the last thing you think about as you climb into the pod. When the countdown ends, the rigs disappear from sight in an instant, whisked away to the rest of the black and the stars around you. 

You’ll spend the next two weeks eating protein bars in a hamster wheel the size of a port-o-potty that, unfortunately, also doubles as your port-o-potty. But you know that someday, before too long, you’ll feel century-old satellites shatter against the bottom of your steel hull, and flame will wreathe your shell, and the parachute above your head will fill with wind and, for the first time in a decade, your feet will support the full weight of your body. When that happens, you have no idea where you’ll land. But you hope it’ll be somewhere in the mountains.