The first day Arch didn’t talk to Ana, they didn’t know it was the first day.[1] From the moment Arch awoke they were filled with anxiety and hopelessness, but this was normal first thing in the morning, so they didn’t think much of it. Arch called this feeling “morning dread.” In keeping with their typical morning routine, they tucked their head under the covers and tried to pretend other people didn’t exist, and that they themselves didn’t exist, and that the whole universe and all the dread being created by all the living beings existing inside it, didn’t exist. Nothingness. Nothingness. Nothingness. Peace.
Unfortunately, this was a Tuesday,[2] so their roommate’s blaring alarm went off on the wall across the room just a few minutes later. If they had glanced out of their covers, they would have seen the notification hovering above their roommate’s [3] as she efficiently stretched in preparation for her day. Arch had disabled the default alarm system that woke them up in time for their classes every day, but their roommate had not done the same. So, on days when their roommate also had an early class, Arch had no choice but to be on time.
They knew the morning dread tended to dissipate a few minutes after they got up, but that never made it any easier. Arch reflected on the irony: they were able to modify their screen to suit their needs, they could hack the instance of the school’s AI that was running locally in their room as their butler/PC, and they could get about any other device they encountered to do what they wanted as well, but their brain’s proprietary software remained mostly uncrackable. Makes you think, they mentally muttered to themselves.
After a minor battle with the aforementioned software, they threw off the covers and forced themselves upright. "I'm in," they wearily yawned.
~ ~ ~
It was always unpredictable how close Centaurian station[4] would be orbiting relative to Arch’s dorm, so there ended up being 20 extra minutes of flight time. Arch wasn’t worried; most of their class was on the shuttle with them, so they wouldn’t have to be the only one late. Instead of interacting with anyone in their class, they got a planetside window and watched Alexandria go by, the nighttime half of its surface bristling with nodes of light, its outer crust of satellites and residence stations slowly revolving around it in waves and ripples.[5]
After class Arch bummed around Centaurian for the day, with Gem intermittently joining them, until the two of them eventually took the shuttle service back from their last classes. Gem, who had noticed Arch staggering slightly as they disembarked, took this opportunity to drag Arch to their first meal of the day. After their dinner—or whatever meal it technically was—Arch returned to the room with much steadier legs, only to have Elizabeth ask them to get dinner. They were grateful they had already eaten. It was only then that Arch assumed their customary position hunched over their screen in bed, and realized they hadn’t heard from Ana all day.
Cooling off from the fight, they guessed. They tried to imagine what they would do with their life if they really did go to Pluto. Instead of going back down to the planet after college, they would live in artificial environments their whole life, without a real biome in reach for decades. They tried to imagine being with Ana in person; watching her make scarily intense expressions while writing a paper, pace around while she went on a rant, rub her temples as she stared into space thinking hard about something… These were all things they had watched her do over their interstellar video link with its tinny audiovisual interference, but now it would all be in person, right in front of them where they could reach out and touch her. She would have that type of presence that only comes from the mass and density of another human being exuding warmth and light amounts of radioactivity right next to you, rather than lightyears away.
Then they tried to imagine being apart from Gem. Having to schedule times to talk online after coordinating their classes with hers from high school all the way through college. Only hearing Gem’s brash Outer Ring accent through an interstellar connection, and only seeing her frenetic fidgeting on a screen instead of being driven crazy by it happening right next to them. No cooking with Gem, no borrowing Gem’s weird pretentious paper books, no stealing Gem’s sugary food at meals. Gem wouldn’t be able to break into their room to forcibly hang out with them when their depression got really bad, and Arch wouldn’t be able to go over to Gem’s place to do chores for her when her knuckles were bleeding from overwashing her hands.
Ana had been right about Arch not having any life plans on Alexandria, though. It didn’t ultimately matter if they made plans, since their parents could and would get them a job at their province’s megacorp right out of college--in a respectable department, like sales, the military, or legal. As always, resistance to these plans would ultimately be futile. On Pluto, Arch might not know what to do with their life, but at least they wouldn’t have to follow a plan that had been laid out for them when they were in utero.[6] But what could they do with their life on a second-class planet populated only with soldiers and scientists?
“How are your classes going?” Elizabeth, sitting primly straight in front of her tablet across the room, had a way of breaking into Arch’s thoughts at the moment they needed to escape making a decision the most. It almost made up for how she always spoke to them in a loud, enunciatory voice that made Arch think she might think they were deaf, or a child.
Arch poked their head out of their blanket cave. “I don’t really care.”
“I see. I wish I had your…laidback attitude.” Elizabeth visibly forced herself to keep trying. It was like an older relative trying to humor a kid telling them about some annoying make-believe game, not wanting to squash the child’s confidence (and potentially their development of crucial spatial and social reasoning skills) by not playing along.
There was a pause from Elizabeth's side of the room. “Is something funny?” The question had a brittle civility, implying Arch had done something inappropriate that she was going to politely ignore. At this moment there was a basis to ths tone, since Arch was just staring at her instead of continuing their conversation.
“No.” Arch made a show of retreating back into their blankets. They were pretty sure Elizabeth was unoffended, and secretly relieved, by their social rejection, since it meant she could stop trying and go back to whatever she was doing. They guessed even Elizabeth couldn't be "on" in recruit-Arch-to-club mode all the time.
As the decisive patter of Elizabeth’s typing resumed across the room, Arch read over their conversation with Ana from the previous night. Talk to me when you’ve decided. Arch was certain she couldn’t have meant it. After all, Ana would have known how isolated Arch would be without her, but she also would have known that Arch knew that she would be even more isolated. Ana was one of two people Arch was close with, but for Ana, Arch was one of one. They had to give Ana credit for being so suicidally stubborn as to take the power in a situation where she had absolutely no strategic advantage.
Or maybe Ana just knew that in a standoff Arch would be more than likely to give up their advantage just to be done with the conflict. She was probably at her computer right now, calmly doing her schoolwork, or maybe her self-assigned work that she actually wrote up syllabuses for, waiting for Arch to message her. She would be counting on Arch's squishy, illogical feelings (which she never had, oh no, not Ana Kepler, proud owner of the only objective perspective in the universe) to give her victory by default.
It wasn’t just that she was right. It was how smug that implied she was about it. Arch signed off of their messenger program. Time to sleep for fourteen hours.
~
After the first week Arch didn’t talk to Ana, they finally began to give credence to the pot of apprehension that had been bubbling in their stomach since The Conversation. They lay awake hours every night replaying their last messages with Ana in their head, or sometimes taking out their screen and rereading it over and over. Their morning dread had escalated until they were waking up every day feeling hungover. One morning they actually tried to puke after waking up, but it didn’t work. Elizabeth called a med drone on them though, but since it made them skip class for the day the whole thing actually worked out fine. They did end up spending literally the whole day staring at the same spot on their ceiling, though.
They came to realize their usual routine was really pathetic and sad without constant conversation and commentary from Ana. They became aware of every second passing as they sat looking into their screen, or listening to Elizabeth practice her presentations for whatever Poli-Biz[7] bullshit she was working on, or tuning out the “discussion” in their classes as their classmates just repeated whatever they had heard in the latest EM’s propaganda.[8] Every day they looked forward to going to bed, when they wouldn’t have to be thinking about how long it had been since they talked to Ana. But they were becoming increasingly unable to sleep.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
By the second week Arch didn’t talk to Ana, they had finished the book they were reading, and had finished or grown tired of the shows they had been watching as well. For a couple days they lingered on the last pages, put off watching the finales, because they didn’t want to think about what it meant that it had been that long since their fight. They saw Ana come online and go offline at her usual times of day, and she was seeing them do the same. It was like making eye contact with someone across a room but not acknowledging them at all.
Finally, they decided to rewatch all of Toxic, because it made them feel connected to her again to watch their favorite show, and also because it was so long there was no way they could finish all 15 extant seasons of it without Ana’s silence being broken. They wouldn’t have to think about the significance of both starting and finishing a piece of EM without talking to Ana once.
They made all these decisions without making them, in a place in the back of their mind, where their thoughts didn’t form into words. When they hung out with Gem they avoided the subject, and even lied in response to direct questions about Ana. They scrolled all Ana’s sparse social media accounts without thinking the words, “I am stalking my girlfriend, who may not be my girlfriend anymore.” They knew the steps of this coping mechanism by heart, could have told themselves it was what they would do in this situation. But the thing about coping mechanisms, just like with dreams, is if you think too hard about them you can’t immerse yourself in them in peace. You feel obligated to wake up.
The third week Arch didn’t talk to Ana, they mainly just played Toxic in one window on their screen, while rereading their conversations with Ana in another. They read all the way back to high school, hearing her voice perfectly in their head—Ana typed exactly how she talked. They became increasingly frustrated at not being able to replay their video chats with her; they wanted to watch the night in her library when they had seen her for the first time.
They remembered the shaky camera as she carried her screen through the shelves. Drives, disc cases, media players, and once a shelf of paper books that Ana said had all been brought from Old Earth itself, their pages made from the pulp of plants that drew their nourishment from Sol and put down roots in the planet where humanity grew up. In hindsight, Arch supposed she had taken that route through the library on purpose, nonchalantly holding her screen just so to ensure Arch would catch a glimpse and ask about them.
When they had gone through all the chat conversations, Arch began reading Ana’s blog posts; there were no recent ones, because Ana had been submitting her essays to “respectable journals” the past year or so in an attempt to legitimize herself with an academia that didn’t conduct itself solely through fan websites. Arch read back to Ana’s childhood; they imagined the young Ana who had taken it upon herself to write a scholarly critique of the interactive VR sexual education series provided by her boarding school; at this point they were imagining an Ana of some sort at every moment of the day.
The fourth week Arch didn’t talk to Ana, they broke down and called her in between classes; they called her on audio only; they didn’t want to start crying over video. It seemed like they could barely remember what it was like to call Ana every day; they usually had a message from her waiting every time they checked a device; being on the internet at all had felt like being with her, even if they weren’t actually talking. Arch called her but of course she didn’t pick up; Arch hadn’t expected her to. They left a message asking if she was okay anyway; they just wanted to talk; they loved her; they hadn’t ever wanted to hurt her; they hung up and cried in the empty classroom for a while; back in their room Elizabeth was practicing a speech for her public relations class; Arch was lying on their bed staring at the ceiling; they couldn’t even think out counterpoints to Elizabeth’s propaganda; they couldn’t really think at all; when they tried the thoughts just slipped away half finished; eventually Elizabeth asked to turn off the light; they said “go for it” but didn’t look at her; then the room was black but Arch was still staring at the ceiling.
The fifth week Arch didn’t talk to Ana, they missed the intra-station train to their next class; they would be late for sure but it was too far on foot; the next train was due in five minutes; something blew a fuse in their head; it was just one thing too far; the stubbing of a toe on top of a lost limb; the last straw that broke the camel's back; they didn’t wait for the train; they took the stairs; they knew they could make it if they ran; so they did; they threw themselves into it; they couldn’t remember the last time they exercised; they couldn’t remember the last time something had felt this important; they had only gone up a few flights before they started to feel lightheaded; soon they were more falling forwards than climbing; they wouldn’t stop though; they knew they could do it; they had to do it; they just needed to climb faster; they could hear themselves crying but didn’t feel it somehow; they couldn’t see where they were running; they were sobbing too hard to run; they were on their knees; their hands were shaking; they didn’t know how long they stayed there; they could barely make it back to their room; after that they stopped going to class.
Footnotes
1 I know what you’re thinking: how are these two on the same day/night schedules if Arch is in the Middle Ring, and Ana is 10 ly Solward, in the Inner Ring? Well: since the earliest space stations that orbited Earth, people living in space have gone by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). That means, if you’re on a space station, or anywhere else without a natural planetary day/night cycle, your time is synced up with everyone else in space, everywhere. That's true whether you're in the Inner Ring, 10 ly away from Earth, or the Middle Ring, 20 ly away, or even the Outer Ring, 35 ly away and beyond. On Earth it was kind of silly because UTC was the same thing as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), with a different name. Now, Greenwich is a burned out husk on a dead planet, but UTC has remained.[return to text]
2 What do you mean, “why is there still Tuesday in the year 3434?” Humanity has had more important things to think about for the past thousand years than coming up with some kind of Space Calendar for its colonies to use. A species that has just been violently uprooted from its home needs something familiar to cling to as it flings itself into the unknown. Sometimes, that something is Tuesday.[return to text]
3 And before you ask, no, the walls in this room are not all one screen, with notifications that pop up right next to you wherever you are. That would be one of the worst possible ways to build a room. Have you ever cracked your phone? Can you imagine having your entire home be made of that material? You would destroy the whole place in days.[return to text]
Literally just think about that idea for five seconds. Maybe you’d suggest having the glass be thicker, but the thing is, genius, you wouldn’t be able to use the walls as a touchscreen if the glass was thicker because the whole point of touchscreens is that the heat from your hands needs to be able to get through the glass and into the sensors in the phone.
Maybe you would say the screens could be made of diamond, which you probably mean sapphire because you’re probably thinking of how the iPhone 6 was going to have a sapphire screen for a while. Well, then the sapphire would then have to encase the entire room, meaning that literally each individual room in every apartment everywhere would have to be covered in sapphire. And synthetically made sapphire also wouldn’t work, because while sapphire can withstand huge amounts of heat, it is actually more fragile than glass and would break your apartment even more. That's why the iPhone 6 didn’t actually have a sapphire screen.
And you might say, what about super-strong future glass that can both be thin and not break (not even bothering to think about how that would work; you just lazily toss out the random idea of super-strong future glass), but even if that was a thing, which it’s not, then you still have to deal with the problem of actually erecting four giant screens per room and running electricity through those screen-walls. Feel like paying for ten TV’s worth of electricity bills just so you can get texts on your walls?
I'm just saying, it's a stupid idea. Here, there are conveniently placed, public wall screens, usually tablet-size, all over the school, including on the walls next to each student’s bed. These serve as alarm clocks and as a medium for school-wide announcements, among other things.
4At Alexandria University, like most colleges, classes and housing are located in separate places.[return to text]
5Due to the disaster known as The Bug, Alexandria has unprecedented levels of orbital housing to accomodate the populations that would have inhabited the other two planned colonies of the Middle Ring. Some people consider the “Bug Belt” of residence stations an eyesore, but some see beauty in it, like an LA sunset on Old Earth.[return to text]
6The in utero part isn’t a joke; Arch was selected out of many potential zygotes due to a range of genetic factors. One major trauma of Arch’s childhood was being presented as evidence in court during their parents’ malpractice lawsuit against the company that did their genetic engineering.[return to text]
7Political Business, the major for anyone who intends to be anyone.[return to text]
8Entertainment Media. Both a thing people consume, and the other major for anyone who intends to be anyone.[return to text]