The junker, my sweet, beaten-up piece of shit ship, was a sight for my sore eyes. The olive green, scuffed and chipped from years of use, its paint having been chipped for longer than I had been alive, the Junker a venerable elder, a rallying call, and the starting pistol I needed to just start sprinting towards its form in the distance.

I started sprinting on my wobbly legs, my brain barely firing fast enough to carry my legs forward in time to not slip and smash myself face first lethally into the ground.

I kept my eyes on the ground and in front of me to make sure I wouldn’t trip over any roots or run into a tree and splat like a bug on a windshield.

Its safety, and seemingly not of fire or destroyed silhouette, told me that it was undamaged, unlike my late bike.

“Rest in peace, bike; I will miss the jank you brought to my life,” said out loud as I hurled myself towards my getaway.

“Your habit of talking too yourself aside… You should probably slow down a little. You’re liable to smash into the ship at 60 mph, and I would rather not see you reduced to strawberry jam on the side of your ship,” she said.

I hadn’t even realized how fast I was going, but I adjusted my speed, slowing my springy stride down so I could more easily stop when I got there.

“What? You can't reconstitute me from red paste? What good is a copy of my consciousness if you can't bring me back from the dead? Also, a side note: what the hell is strawberry jam? What kind of berry is a straw berry?”

“No, I can't,” she told me pointedly, “well… I can’t right now… It takes a lot of equipment, it is just… Not good, you know? You would be body-jacking a random clone. Imagine what you would feel like if I took total control over your body and just left you stuck in your own head. And what the hell do you mean, what is strawberry jam? That’s the most popular jam, at least, the most popular that I know of.”

If that wasn’t enough to give a normal person whiplash, I didn’t know what would. But in a moment of insight, I let the first chunk get worked on in the background and let my motor mouth go after the second.

It was a bit subpar, letting me do the work of breaking that information down while also paying attention to my speed and thinking about the other part, but it was better than derailing everything into ethics, which only ever seemed to go round and round.

“Strayberry sounds like some kind of artisanal jam. I’ve always liked redberry jam; it goes well on almost everything. And it’s super cheap, and it lasts for, like, forever. I don’t know what they put in it, but it gets cranked out of a bioreactor, so it can't be that bad,” my voice spoke, giving Lilly my dubious answer.

Lilly was outraged at my lack of quality, but as the minutes went on, we got closer and closer to my final destination.

I could be practically itching to get into the junker, the first place that felt safe on this god-forsaken planet. It grew larger as I sped towards it like a rocket, legs numb and buzzy from the crawl and burning from exertion, my heart unable to carry air fast enough with my ragged breath. It took about five minutes of back and forth to get there.

But when I did, we were arguing about how stupid the name strawberry was.

“Listen, Listen. It’s not my fault that some idiot named a berry after chaff, ok? Redberry is descriptive, what would a strawberry even taste like based on its name?” I argued.

“Like a red berry!” she shouted, “Redberry is just a conglomeration of redberry flavours! You like strawberries, you just don’t know it because you’re eating food that’s made using industrial levels of flavour compounds and microplastic! Also, we’re here, so stop arguing with me and just get your plastic-filled meat suit in your deathtrap so you can die exploding as you leave orbit in this boat instead of down here.”

I huffed, “Damn straight. If I’m going to die, it will be by my own hand as my ship explodes from my failure to maintain it, and not by aliens that might take me alive on a haunted planet that should be glassed as soon as possible,” I told her as I came within the clearing, slowing down step by step until I was down to walking speed.

There were a lot of weak points, stretched at odd angles and centring on a point above the door of my ship as if it were a mouth.

“There’s a direct way in, right? I don’t need to breach a weak point. Because I would rather not, as… pleasant as it was, I have no way of knowing where any of them go.”

“There is a gap around that panel thing on the side… The other side of the ship. You will need to get on top of the ship and kind of slip over.”

I moved over to the other side, and about half of it was pressed through a gaping wound. A wall of bruised space and scabbed-over goo seemed to cut the wing down to the belly of the boat off. The second I looked into the Junker, I was met with nothing, the desolate gravel wasteland stretching out beyond where you would expect the insides of the boat to be.

“That is… Trippy… Well, I guess I'll get to it then. Give me a boost, yeh? I need to get up.”

I moved and hopped up onto the nose, the black glass reflecting my image back to me and making me quiver in revulsion at my image. Two tones of brown instead of black, one darker one lighter, tan skin instead of pale, the wrong eyes, thick proportions that gave me a round shape instead of my sharp, lean frame.

It made me want to hurl, but I looked away instead and made my way up and around, Lilly pinging over and over to guide me to a tiny sliver. I shimmied in foot first before holding the edge before dropping in, landing in a crouch before I made my way in, checking my watch and dialling the time in for the code and crossing my fingers that it was right.

Then, I updated the code a few times until I found the right one.

My watch had been off by twenty minutes, which stressed me a little, but I had gotten here far faster than I had expected to.

The door clanked down, the clock ticked on, and I scrabbled in, shutting the door behind me before I ran my ass up to the chair.

I stripped as fast as possible, only to be met with the issue of my suit not fitting, so I threw it on because I didn’t need it unless I lost pressure, and I would rather lose pressure and die than remain down here.

I threw my clothes back on and made my way up to the cockpit, and the first thing I did was wake the engines up.

There was an audible growing complaint, the Junker letting out a hum growl of anger that rumbled through the metal frame and into the compartments.

Then, I did my pre-flight, going down the checklist.

Lilly complained when I pulled out a slide ruler and started doing a bit of math on how fast I had to fly, and she almost gagged at the “barbaric calculator,” but I did it anyway.

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I knew where I was, and I knew where I came from and found the travel time at my top speed.

Forty-five minutes, ten more to get up, and ten more to get to orbit. I didn’t know if that was right or if I was going to stick to the schedule, but that was what I was working with.

I started planning it out while I finished getting the old sour boat ready to fly, and then I started taking off.

I felt an ever-increasing level of nerves as I lifted off, watching to ensure I didn’t pitch back into the trees and die horribly because my hands were twitching.

Landing gear came in, and I punched it the second I got above the treetops, cutting the engines as junker picked up speed and caught air underwing, pushing the throttle up and up as I made my way to the heading I had come in at, and crossing my fingers… I let the junker do the work, the treetops flying by under us.

“Sometimes, I wish I had a button that would make me feel like I was doing something,” I said without thinking about it.

“You could pass the time with me now that it’s mostly out of your hands,” she pointed out.

“That. Does not help,” I pointed out to her.

“Are you sure?” she asked leadingly.

Stupidly, I took the bait.

“YES! I hate not having control over what I’m doing. I don’t like letting the universe take the wheel if I can take it, but talking doesn’t help me regain control of the situation.”

“Jokes on you. I know you don’t like losing control, but now you're bickering with me anyway. Now, you are losing control of the conversation. Come on, come on and fight me verbally, C- Coward.”

She said it with enough sincerity that I could kiss her right up until she stuttered, which made me want to kiss and bully her in equal measure. Not harshly, mostly just teasing her a little. What could I say? The little idiot was growing on me.

“Are you challenging me… To make me feel better? Is this some kind of Gremlin reverse psychology nonsense?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“Are you gaslighting me?”

“NO. I’m not gaslighting you… I’m just gaining ground.”

I watched our location, plotting out how I was going to do this, half letting myself answer automatically and half putting a little effort into it.

And as much as it solved nothing, bickering helped a little. It was something to keep my mind off of it for the better part of thirty minutes, it was something that I could do beyond holding us on course. And all the while, the orbital engines continued to warm up, their rumble of displeasure, an ever-present drone in the background of the ship.

“Lilly, we're getting close to the point where we're about to go up.”

“Yes. Yes, we are, I can see that... I don’t actually know that. I don’t have eyes, but I’ll take you at your word.”

“Ok. So, can you tap into the radios?”

“Yes? I certainly think I can. Why?”

“Can you use them? Because if you can, I need you to figure out if we’re lined up with the exit, and incase the collector is outside waiting to kill us. I would rather know and take my chances.”

“You’re starting to freak me out, Jacalyn.”

I watched as we got to the point where we needed to start climbing, and I reached out and laid my hand on the throttle for the surface to orbit thrusters.

“Yeh… Well. This ship is older than my parents, and I’ve only ever done this like… once? So this is like a 50/50 of we explode and die, or were good.”

“We should be able to climb… Right? We can just climb until we reach high orbit, sure-”

“And a one and a t-” I cut her off, not even finishing two before I angled up and pushed the thrust all the way into the red.

There was a ticking click click click like a barbeque igniter before there was a cacophonous whoomph that was three parts feeling, and one part all the air draining from my lungs.

I barely locked the steering before I was hurled into the chair.

I could barely breathe as the bottom half of my ship screamed and screamed. In the distance, the tremulous clouds above the forest whipped into place from thin air as I drew further and further from the surface. They swirled from whisps to thunderous clouds to a nebula of crackling lightning that blotted out the light.

Lilly was making confused stutter noises and panicking and trying to explain gravity to me or something, but I was too busy focusing on forcing air into my lungs to focus on anything else.

The ship glittered, and I could hear the complaint of metal screaming from the stress all the way up in the cockpit. I could imagine the engine, its old bolts juddering and crying from the strain of keeping the engine from blasting up into the ship.

I couldn’t quite put the effort of crossing my fingers into action, but I could wheeze, “Lilly… Radio,” before I went back to breathing.

And then we slammed up into the clouds, and the ships screaming picked up pace, an orange glow forming around the nose of the Junker.

The spread as we shot up through the cloud, spreading like some kind of fungus over a wet pipe, glowing from radiation or some awful, unremembered chemical spill. Twenty seconds into the cloud, the fire had covered the entire front of the ship.

Forty and the nose was reddening, sixty and the metal was red hot, and I sat by and breathed and acclimatized to it.

Thirty seconds later, when the metal of the cockpit was starting to get warm, the fire snuffed out, and I was face to face with an approaching wall of light so bright it was blinding and metal that I could barely see, and with Lilly, a ping that told me to change direction.

I thrust my hands out and unlocked the controls, grappling the wheel and holding on with all my might, pulling the wheel as best as I could, lining myself up with the beep as best as I could, blind to everything, blinking the spots out of my eyes.

The darker objects came into more focus, the blink of the spinning lights visible, as was what appeared to be the ship aimed at a dark spot with a shrinking ring of light around it.

I lined my ship up as best as I could while Lilly panicked and told me that everything was clear and I held the wheel as the junker screamed at full blast up, up and through the hole. The only note that told me we had made it was the shrieking of metal, so loud it left me deaf for a moment before suddenly ending, leaving only a light ring in the hull and a sudden lack of oomph as presumably whatever part of the junker that was torn away killed the engine.

I closed my eyes and held every part of my body tense. Waiting for the cold vacuum of the void to pour in and smother me like a crewman on the Titanica.

But it never came.

I opened my eyes, and I was met with… Not death.

We had made it.

We were free of the confines of the planet, in the clear, and in the vast vacuum of space. I had done it. I had dived out of the coffin moments before it slammed shut and left me to die from horrifying nightmares on the surface.

The lightness of my body was almost more comfortable than my body. The foe weight sensation of my magnetic shoes that held my feet down was more familiar than the weight of a planet the size of The Throne had exerted, and it was freeing.

“I love it up here. And fuck that god-forsaken hell hole. In fact, I’m just going to say it right now: I am never, ever, going back down there ever again, not for any reason,” I told Lilly.

“I can honestly say that I agree with you on that, I would much rather be up here. It's very… I don’t know, stuffy? It's radio silent, just a lot of noise and junk. Up here is much better, especially with the receivers on your ship,” she said, metaphorically and somewhat literally taking a large breath of fresh air.

We sat there for what had to have been twenty million years, but was by my watch twenty minutes, filled with idle chatter as we just drifted through the void of outside. The main engine silenced as the sub engines on a low warmup hum, hoping that they still worked and I wasn’t a sitting duck, waiting for rescue while also waiting for some forgotten bulkhead I hadn’t checked in a few months to blow out and kill me, but it never happened.

The normal engines hummed, though it was wobbly; the main engine was dead. I would have to check it, but it was not responding.

“So…” I asked her, my head pounding from my racing heart, “What's next? I mean, I don’t really have anything beyond escape to think about, and I don’t have much to do, not in the immediate sense. I feel a bit lost,”

“Well,” Lilly hedged, “We could start with getting you back to normal, I’m sure that would help a little. And you are in a safe… It is a safe-ish, familiar place, so it's not like it would throw you off now, and it's not like it would kill you any more to change. If anything, you could get back in your suit so you can not die immediately.”

Her words brought to mind the very immediate and uncomfortable feeling of my current body, how it felt like it wasn’t me. The tingle of unease it brought to me at the very thought of my form. I was stuck in the wrong form, and it was itching far more than I thought it should.

“God, yes, please. I want that; I can’t stand this flabby body. How quickly can I get back like that right now… and what will that be like? Getting back to normal… You said it would be quick, right?”

“Yes, it is almost instantaneous. It just requires a lot of energy, which you have now that you’ve been not spending it on running or shooting and whatnot,” she told me.

“Okay then… I guess… Let’s get this on the road then. Bring my old body back, Lilly. At least with that done, I can check the boat and maybe lower the pressure.”

“OK. In three… Two… One… Stttt- fuck it, you know what I’m doing.”

And, in a flash of light, everything changed, and my body and brain were mine again, and I had a very sudden and terribly uncomfortable realization that I had not been quite myself.