Now here he was on Phobos, sent to debug the bore-hole driller on Mars. A recent solar storm had completely fried the drill’s comms systems; Donna insisted it needed a complete overhaul, and two heads were better than one. Marshall couldn’t do the job from home—they’d lose days reprogramming the things on the fly, and the drill bits were in sensitive places. One false move and months of work might collapse around billions of dollars of research, crushing it deep into the red dirt. He needed to be close. After all, he’d written much of the code himself.
This was his first flight.
“I didn’t want to be an astronaut,” he’d told them over the lag, when they first met. “I got into this because I loved robots. That’s all. I had no idea this is where I would wind up. But I’m really grateful to be here. I know it’s a change.”
“If you make a toilet seat joke, we’ll delete your porn,” Song said, now. When they all laughed, she looked around at the crowd. “What’s funny? I’m serious. I didn’t come all the way out here to play out a sitcom.”
Marshall snapped his fingers. “That reminds me.” He rifled through one of the many pouches he’d lugged on board. “Your mom sent this along with me.” He coasted a vial through the air at her. Inside, a small crystal glinted. “That’s your brother’s wedding. And your new nephew’s baptism. Speaking of sitcoms. She told me some stories to tell you. She didn’t want to record them—”
“She’s very nervous about recording anything.”
“—so she told me to tell them to you.”
Song rolled her eyes. “Are they about Uncle Chan-wook?”
Marshall’s pale eyebrows lifted high on his pink forehead. “How’d you guess?”
Again, the room erupted in laughter. Brooklyn laughed the loudest. She was a natural flirt. Her parents had named her after a borough they’d visited only once. In high school, she had self-published a series of homoerotic detective novels set in ancient Greece. The profits financed med school. After that, she hit Parsons for an unconventional residency. She’d worked on the team that designed the exo-suits they now wore. She had already coordinated Marshall’s fitting over the lag. It fit him well. At least, Brooklyn seemed pleased. She was smiling so wide that Khalidah could see the single cavity she’d sustained in all her years of eschewing most refined sugars.
Khalidah rather suspected that Brooklyn had secretly advocated for the macrobiotic study. Chugging a blue algae smoothie every morning seemed like her kind of thing. Khalidah had never asked about it. It was better not to know.
But wasn’t that the larger point of this particular experiment? To see if they could all get along? To see if women—with their lower caloric needs, their lesser weight, their quite literally cheaper labor, in more ways than one—could get the job done on Phobos? Sure, they were there on a planetary protection mission to gather the last remaining soil samples before the first human-oriented missions showed up, thereby ensuring the “chain of evidence” for future DNA experimentation. But they all knew—didn’t they—what this was really about. How the media talked about them. How the internet talked about them. Early on, before departure, Khalidah had seen the memes.
For Brooklyn, Marshall had a single chime. Brooklyn’s mother had sent it to “clear the energy” of the station. During the Cold Lake training mission, she’d sent a Tibetan singing bowl.
For Khalidah, he had all 4,860 games of last year’s regular season. “It’s lossless,” he said. “All 30 teams. Even the crappy ones. One of our guys down at Kennedy, he has a brother-in-law in Orlando, works at ESPN. They got in touch with your dad, and, well …”
“Thank you,” Khalidah said.
“Yeah. Sure.” Marshall cleared his throat. He rocked on his toes, pitched a little too far forward, and wheeled his arms briefly to recover his balance. If possible, he turned even pinker, so the color of his face now matched the color of his ears. “So. Here you go. I don’t know what else is on there, but, um … there it is. Enjoy.”
“Thank you.” Khalidah lifted the vial of media from his hand. Her crystal was darker than Song’s. Denser. It had been etched more often. She stuffed it in the right breast pocket of her suit. If for some reason her heart cut out and the suit had to give her a jolt, the crystal would be safe.
“And for you, Donna. Here’s what we talked about. They gave you double, just in case.”
Donna’s hand was already out. It shook a little as Marshall placed a small bottle in it. The label was easy to see. Easy to read. Big purple letters branded on the stark white sticker. Lethezine. The death drug. The colony of nanomachines that quietly took over the brain, shutting off major functions silently and painlessly. The best, most dignified death possible. The kind you had to ask the government for personally, complete with letters of recommendation from people with advanced degrees that could be revoked if they lied, like it was a grant application or admission to a very prestigious community. Which in fact it was.
“What is that?” Brooklyn asked.
It was a stupid question. Everyone knew exactly what it was. She was just bringing it out into the open. They’d been briefed on that. On making the implicit become explicit. On voicing what had gone unasked. Speaking the unspeakable. It was, in fact, part of the training. There were certain things you were supposed to suppress. And other things that you couldn’t let fester. They had drilled on it, over and over, at Cold Lake and in Mongolia and again and again during role-plays with the station interface.
“Why do you have that?” Brooklyn continued, when Donna didn’t answer. “Why would he give that to you?”
Donna pocketed the bottle before she opened her mouth to speak. When she did, she lifted
