Sweat. Buzzing lights. Outside: the cool sea air of the night. Waves gently crashing. Industrial harbor lampposts, loaded with sodium bulbs and spread out evenly. Inside: android parts clicking in and out of place. Keyboard clacking. Grunts of effort, frustration, exhaustion. Nearby, rock riffs being noodled on an electric guitar without amplification.
Allison, the engineer, sighed wearily. Her workstation was cluttered with tools. All of her monitors were filled with terminals, each having a visible history of diagnostic commands and command-line repair programs, bright-red error text—an open wound—cutting into her strained vision. A gloomy, dim desk light hovered over all of this, a reminder that her work wasn’t done yet.
Kara, the guitarist, looked on with concern. Allison had been trying to get Five to boot for hours. Kara didn’t know much about how Five’s operating system or firmware worked, and she did her best to act as a rubber-duck for Allison to verbally bounce off of, but there were no more words to be said. She turned her gaze towards Five, whose sapphire LED eyes were presently absent. The sight put a knot in her chest. On some level, she knew Five was going to be alright. But something about the sight was still scary and sad and bleak. She wished she could ask Five for a hug, for comfort, for something, but, well.
Allison herself was clearly not doing much better. She had a somber look on her face—the look of someone who needed to sleep long ago but didn’t. She needed to get Five working now—whatever it takes. Fuck sleep, fuck the consequences, fuck everything else. Not just because of what she was—is—to Kara, but because something of her own burns within Allison too. Something that tells her to give everything she can for Five. That the world deserves Five, even if it kills her.
Kara saw how weary Allison was. She had bags under her eyes, she was sluggish and made mistakes she usually doesn’t, even occasionally pausing what she was doing in an unnatural way, to either mentally recuperate or microsleep. She had run out of energy to give more than minimal verbal updates to Kara. This whole thing was clearly taking its toll, and she was likely going to make little progress in her current state—not that she’d give a shit if you told her.
So, instead, Kara changed her tune.
She began playing a gentle, vaguely folksy melody, with the string below droning out the root note like a hurdy-gurdy with every strum. It was improvised, from the heart every step of the way, and came across like a lullaby. Allison felt herself relax more and more listening to it, and felt it harder and harder to get herself to think about her task, her mind instead filling with scattered, dreamlike thoughts. It made her feel safe, and calm, especially knowing that Kara was playing it. Very quickly, she sunk into a pleasant dream of sunshine and a green field, and in the material world, her chair.
Kara carefully rolled the chair towards Allison’s quarters, before doing her best to transfer this much taller and fatter woman into her bed without waking her up. Allison was still out like a light by the time she was done, still looking exhausted, but already starting to heal from her rest. Kara moved her face so she wouldn’t drool onto her bed, and proceeded to tuck her in to the best of her ability.
Kara knew that when she woke up, Allison was going to say that Kara didn’t need to do any of that. That between sips of the morning tea Kara would prepare for her, while the sun beamed through the port window, she would say that Kara should’ve just gone to bed instead of worrying about her. But Kara knew that beneath it all, she would be deeply grateful for how she was treated.
Kara patted Allison’s head gently, and made off for her own quarters. On her way was the workstation where Five’s open chassis still was, LED eyes still hauntingly absent. She ran her hand across the outside of Five’s body, careful not to touch any of the sensitive parts. She circled around Five’s head with her hand, before kissing her forehead. If Five was awake, she would be flustered, and if Five knew that she was being cared for even in her absence, she would be bright red while trying to grasp this reality.
As Kara laid down in her own bed, loneliness began to creep in. This feeling of liminality, being awake when nobody else is around, like the world is on pause and she’s still drifting through it… She hated it, and, of course, it only made it harder for her to sleep. But, the morning was going to be important. She would be there for Allison, and hopefully, later that day, they would manage to wake up Five.
Knowing what tomorrow had in store, she let her own mind fill with melodies, and drifted off into a dream of skating down steep city streets with streetcar rails down the middle, feeling the sun on her face and the wind in her hair, before finding herself flying through space, through nebulae and past gas giants, colorful stardust flecking on her helmet visor like candy, and then…
