Chapter Eighteen Arma
After a while of thinking about what she and Five had talked about, Arma decides she’ll see Sy about earning her keep at SSS. She’s not a child and he’s not her father either. Five was right, that she can’t be bumming around anymore. She was right about her naturally being a protective person too. It’s more or less what she’s been doing this whole time anyway, keeping a watch over everyone. After all that happened before, she wasn’t about to settle in and let her guard down.
Maybe being a pilot and a mission commander of sorts would be a good fit for her. She feels confident in being the one to make sure anyone under her wings makes it through whatever comes their way. Valerie was right too, that she’s still young to the world, but her instincts aren’t. They’ve always been there.
The first thing she does is start looking for something proper to wear. If she wants Sy to take her seriously, she’s going to have to show that she’s taking him seriously. She hates the feeling of being conformed, but it’s something she’s working on. She wants to be a part of SSS now, so that’s what she’s going to do.
On her side of the closet, which is much emptier than Five’s, she pills her guard gear across the rail on its hanger and turns it around on its hook so that it faces her. She has her entire combat outfit all set up on one single hanger. She did it that way in case the alarms went off and everyone were called into action. When she pulls the suit out and holds it up against her chest, it still feels like she’s betraying herself. She was never going to wear the damn thing just because everyone else wants her to.
In the other room, she lays everything out on her bed and starts putting things on. It always feels weird putting socks on, but she knows it’s what she’s supposed to do. One at a time, she pulls the legs of her red and black flight suit up, punches her arms thought the sleeves, and then zips it all the way up the front. It feels weird, like having another dry baggy skin wrapped around her. Her nose wrinkles up at the thought of it. She supposes it’s better than worrying about scuffing herself up though.
When she looks at herself in her and Five’s body mirror, she feels like she looks a little nerdy. She takes her long orange hair off, tosses it onto her bed, rolls her sleeves up, and then drops the front zipper back down to half way. Her eyebrows scrunch together as she gives herself a more approving nod. She looks dangerous. When she puts her boots on, she tucks the ankles in the tall tops of them and laces them up tight. She doesn’t understand why people wear socks inside their boots. She keeps wriggling her toes because they feel fuzzy.
To finish off her suit, she cinches the heavy black nylon belt around her waist and hangs her knife off of it in the heavy leather thigh sheathe Marek made for her. She considers that Sy might not like her showing back up in his office with a knife again, but she has to. It looks so damn good, she can’t not take it. Besides, she’s going to have her handgun in her chest rig like everyone else anyway. The last thing she does before heading out the door is stuff the automatic home in its holster and put both spare mags in their pouches. As she walks down the grate steel catwalk, she notices the sound of her boots and the weight of her gear. Strangely, she finds herself liking it. She imagines it’s how Aaron feels, unstoppable.
On her way up to the main floor, she considers she should’ve probably thought a little more about what she’s going to say. She knows she can’t simply expect him to give her a job just because she wants one all of a sudden. She can’t look like she’s begging for a chance either. He doesn’t owe her anything, and she doesn’t owe him anything, but maybe they can agree that she’ll make good on his investment.
When she buzzes the intercom on the elevator to his office, she watches him walk over to the edge of the glass wall and look down at her. He doesn’t look all that enthusiastic.
“Where is Five Arma? I don’t see her down there with you.”
“She’s not with me Sy. I need to talk with you, and I promise I’ll be nice. It’s about work.”
“Uh huh. How come you’re all strapped this time?”
She sighs. “C’mon man, don’t give me a hard time. I’m tryin to turn over a new leaf here.”
It takes him a moment, but he does finally buzz her into the elevator. As she crosses the short hallway to his door, she can hear him on his wrist communicator with Vaun, telling him to get his ass up there. Inside the office, he waits till after she sits down before going ahead and doing the same himself. It appears he’s still a little apprehensive after their last talk. His eyes dart to her every move, even when she merely folds one leg over the other.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you all geared up like this since, what, your first week here?”
“Look, I wasn’t going to mock you any, so, can we try’n keep this formal. I’m here to work for you Sy. I’m here to work for Space Security Services. I’m not just looking for a job though, you understand? I’m going to contribute from now on. After thinking about it for a while, I feel like this is what I want to be a part of, for the long haul. This is not something I would say on a whim Sy.”
He did not see this coming, and not so sincerely. He sits back, impressed with her. “That’s all I could’ve ever asked of you, for you to have your heart in it. You have my attention this time.”
She holds back her smile and leans forward with her elbows on her knees. “I know I don’t have much of a track record, but I’m pretty sure you know I’m not a dud, ok. Throw the hardest shit you’ve got at me and I will prove myself. I am a machine, and I can best anyone you’ve got. I’m gonna prove that to you. I’m gonna prove that to everyone. I will show you what the Five-Series is all about.”
It’s not a laughing matter, but he almost chuckles at her overt sincerity. “Well, for one, I’m not nevessarily an optimist Arma. I’m very much a realist. First of all, I can’t imagine what exactly I can trust you with right now. There’s nothing we do here that doesn’t put someone’s life on the line. You’re still pretty much at week one here.”
As much as she is actually willing to scrape right now, because that’s what she gets, she still didn’t come to him to be fucked around with. “I want to train as a shuttle pilot.”
“A pilot! Ha. Give me a break! You don’t even know hardly anything about, well, anything. Me, Vaun, and Don are the only pilots, and for a reason. We bear the weight of everything, every time we go up. It’s a burden we have yet to ever share. Aaron… Aaron has proven to be undeniably capable, and even then, it makes me nervous as hell. You want me to hand this whole company over to you, just like that? One fuck up out there could destroy us, all of us.”
“I’m not some random-ass girl that happens to have been honed into a killer by circumstance. I look out for my family, and I have their backs through anything. That is who I am. Look at Five, and what she’s made of herself already. My mind is just as powerful. I can learn faster than anyone you’ve got, by a long shot. That’s what I am. Shit, just this morning, Valerie accosted me for being less than three years old, yet I put her in her place.”
He levels with her a little bit. “Five told me how she used to look up to you. She still does, you know. She was terrified of everything when you were taken from her. She said you were, like her guardian. She never had to be afraid when you were there.”
She turns her eyes from him, not wanting him to see her vulnerable. Five never told her that, and hearing it really pulls at her heart. She steels herself again, before looking back up at him sternly. “I need something I can be proud of Sy. I’m not crazy ok. It’s just that when I was told that I was made from a human, I couldn’t accept it. I hated people so so much. I was supposed to be a robot.” Her posture stiffens, and she wraps her hands together tightly in a fist. “They told me I was nothing but a machine my whole life, and I was happy thet that way, because then I at least wasn’t a rotten pice of shit like them. It takes me a while to trust anyone. So when I say that I trust you, and everyone here, I’m saying that you can trust me too, all the same as Five does.”
He settles way down into his seat and loosely folds his arms in front of himself. “Well… the other two have certainly proven themselves. Maybe it’s cause they’re robots, maybe it’s not. But… this one’s not my choice to make alone.”
Before she asks him who she has to kill, Vaun barges into the office. She notices the hammer strap on his holster has already been popped loose, but she’s not going to say anything about it. When she looks up at him, she can still see Sy out of the corner of her eye. He’s motioning with his hands that things are ok.
Vaun slowly sidesteps over to the chair next to her and sits down with an inquisitive look on his face. He’s still leaning away from her a little defensively. He’s been looking to see if she’s got anything else on her other than her knife and pistol. While she holds her tongue, Sy condescendingly explains her aspirations to him.
When Sy is finished, he looks her over again and then focuses on her face. She doesn’t look delusional, and is clearly serious. She’s challenging them like Aaron did. She’s got that same dangerous and confident look to her too. It didn’t take long for the machine of a man to outmatch him in every way, and he’s not narcissistic enough to think she won’t do the same. He knows she can, and he won’t settle for less either.
Without taking his eyes away from hers, he addresses Sy. “I’ll run it by Don myself. I want her to start tomorrow, when Aaron starts on that shuttle.”
Sy’s mouth hangs open. “Just like that! You’re gonna throw a ship at her? It’s your ass then. If you wanna piss into the wind, you’re gonna be the one to get wet. Hey, I’m only the face of the company right? You know more about this stuff than I do anymore.”
Vaun rolls his eyes and plops back in his chair. “Oh for crying out loud, don’t forget how head over heels you were before she even got here. You know damn well she’s a grade-a ass kicker. She sticks a knife in your desk and you get all whipped over it.”
Sy gets all defensive. “She dropped out of training after like two weeks!”
Vaun suspects she needed a faster pace to keep her going, like Aaron wanted. “Arma, why don’t you do a mag change for Sy, like we did in class, you know, space style. Right here.”
Before Vaun can even say “Go” she draws her pistol from her chest holster. One handed, with her long fingers over the top of the slide, she pulls it back, ejecting the round that’s already chambered. At the same time, she’s already reaching for the next mag with her other hand. Pie-eyed, Sy watches the gold case flip through the air, where she catches it in her lips like a cigarette. Faster than he’s even seen Aaron do it, she drops the magazine out, slams the new one home, and catches the old one mid-air before it even falls in her lap.
She’s good enough at it, she doesn’t even need to look while she does it anymore. Her defiant eyes stay on Sy the whole time. With her elbow on the arm of the plush studded leather chair, she keeps the barrel pointed at the ceiling and finally let’s go of the slide, chambering the first round from the new clip. Casually, she pulls the bullet from between her plush lips and presses it back into the old mag before slipping it into the empty pouch. She has nothing to say.
Pretending it didn’t startle him, Sy goes for the lighter in his shirt pocket and re-lights the cigar he was smoking before she came upstairs. “So you were paying attention the whole time. Ok, that’s fine. You already told me your story, but Arma, from now on, you need to be honest, and let us know this kind of stuff.”
She gets up out of her seat, about to head for the door. “I won’t let you guys down.”
Vaun only tilts his head in her direction. “Alright, but you’ve got a hell of a lot to catch up on. I’d get on the computer and learn everything you can about being a rocket jockey. Don is going to give me sooo much shit if he has to explain the basics to you. Don’t even get me started with the other techs. They’re gonna be sore about us letting you jump the line like this. Fair warning.”
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When she pulls the hallway door open, she turns back to them, considering how Five had helped her. She can at least put a good word in for her.
“Would you believe me if I told you Five can beat my best time? Not with the trick handwork, but she still beats me.”
After Arma leaves, Sy gawks at Vaun in serious surprise. “How’d you know she was gonna pull that off?”
He lies to Sy “I didn’t.” He wouldn’t give her and Five up like that. He’s seen the two of them practicing mag dumps in front of their TV for hours at night all the time. He supposes it’s one of the perks of their never having to sleep. He suspects she’ll be up for the next twelve hours straight, learning everything she can about space stuff for sure.
As soon as Arma is clear from Sy or Vaun being able to see her from their office windows, she sprints down the hall to the elevator, and then all the way around the balcony to Aaron’s apartment. When she opens his door, it’s not him there. Instead, Valerie and Alexis are both sitting on the floor together. When they turn to see who it is, a small animal pops out from behind them. “Oh my god Arma, look what I found! There was a litter of kittens born in the hanger!” She’s never seen such a smile on Valerie’s face ever.
She has heard about animals being “cute” before, but never quite understood it until now. She scoops the little fuzzy little thing up in her hands when it runs over to her and holds it up to look at it. It lets out a quiet squeak, bearing its many tiny needle-sharp teeth, and clings onto her skin with its diabolical clingy little claws. She looks back at the two of them in such wonder and confusion. The thing is so absolutely adorable, but yet so ferocious.
She can’t quite peel it off of herself when it clings to her chest, so she holds it there and gently runs her hand over unfathomably soft fur. It’s so soft, she can hardly even feel it. “Um… it’s vibrating.”
Both Valerie and Alexis laugh, almost rolling on the floor. “Aw. He likes you. We named him Tom. Some of the others guards took in the others too.”
She holds the kitten out in front of herself again and looks it over. It’s almost all white except for two black patches at the base of its ears, and three more round black spots on its back. When it starts meowing again, she quickly sets it down, hoping she didn’t somehow hurt it. It felt so delicate. When she lets Tom go, he scampers back over to Valerie and pounces into her lap.
She doesn’t want to ask where Aaron is in front of Valerie, so she lies. “Yeah, I heard there were kittens, so…” She awkwardly steps back out of the door. “He’s super cute.”
When she calls Aaron up on his combat com, he doesn’t answer, but only looks down into its screen at her. He looks like he’s in a bit of trouble. He’s in the back of the machine shop, sitting in his spot on the machine shop floor again. When she finds him, he’s got his backpack in his lap and is hunched over with his arms wrapped around it. His charging cord is plugged into the workbench outlet, and is hanging over the edge, leading to his neck. His eyes are closed, but she can see his jaw clench when she comes over to him. He looks really stressed this time.
She figures now might not be the best time for exciting news. Quietly, she sits down at his side and wraps her arm around his back. She swipes her thumb across his skin under the collar of his shirt a few times to get his attention. When he opens his eyes and focusses on her, the distress on his face lifts away, as if it had been nothing. He looks up at her with a small compassionate smile, reaches his hand up over his shoulder, and lays it over top of hers.
“As long as we have each other, everything’s gonna be alright.”
She stands up and reaches a hand down to pull him up off the floor. “Hey, guess what? I’m gonna be a space pilot.”
He looks at her with a raised eyebrow. “What… no way. That’s incredible!”
“Yeah. They just approved me. Vaun says I start out tomorrow.” Her own eyes get big again, hearing it said aloud for herself.
With a big grin, he gives her a huge hug. “You have no idea what that means to me. I was really starting to dread all of this.”
“All of what?”
“I thought I was going to be the only one.” He doesn’t tell her that they were surely going to use him up until he broke. He imagined they’d probably make a new one of him each time, being none the wiser. “We’ll be able to look out for one another, and that’s what matters.”
She grimaces a little. “Well… I really talked myself up this time. Vaun said I’d better not ask any stupid questions in front of Don tomorrow. Think you can help me figure out what it takes to be an astronaut by the morning? I promised I’d impress em.”
He smiles sheepishly at her. “Heh, yeah, sure, lets do it. I’m no expert, but I suppose we can figure it out. My ship arrived this morning! Well, except it’s not exactly a ship yet.” He sighs. “I guess they want me to build the whole damn thing myself. It’s kind of supposed to be a rite of passage. We aint flyin anywhere anytime soon, so we’ll have a little bit of time to play catch-up.”
Already fairly understanding of space travel in general, Aaron figures he can at least get her squared away on the basics. The hard part though, is figuring out exactly where to start with her. She and Five are so well socially adapted, he sometimes forgets that they’re still fairly green to the world around them.
After they go over and sit at the shop computers, he starts things off with a general search of the words “history of space exploration”, and then looks over at her. There is so much of the world that he takes for granted, it is hard to consider what concepts she does or doesn’t know. He imagines how he would explain it to a woman from the dark ages, as if he went back in time.
“You remember, out at Ray’s, when we looked up at the stars at night?”
“Yeah, you said that all those tiny little dots were all bigger than the entire world we live on, that some of them were clusters of millions of worlds.”
“Right, so do you know what I mean by our world, our planet, Earth?”
“Not really. I remember Five saying that here, outside, is way bigger than we could’ve imagined, but that was a while ago. She said that there’s hundreds, if not thousands of places like Welan City out there.”
He opens up another window on the computer and displays it on the holograph projector. It’s the live global satellite map. At the moment, it’s automatically zoomed into their location, showing most of Welan City before fading out. He zooms in a little bit more to show her the completely black square that appears to have been snipped out of the map. It’s the SSS building.
“Remember those lights that were slowly crossing the sky? Those are actually machines way way up high in the sky that can look down at us. That’s what we’re doing right now. One of them is looking at us, and we can see what it sees.”
“Woah, that’s incredible. Look how high up it is!”
“Mmm, it’s a bit higher than you think. Right now, it’s zoomed in, like when you look through the scope on the standard rifle.”
Slowly, he starts zooming out, till Welan city is rather small. She keeps looking back and forth between him and the projector in bewilderment. He keeps going until the coastline shows up and a good amount of the ocean is shown.
“What the heck is that? Out there, that dark blue boundary. Is that space?”
“Nope, that’s all water, you’ve been shown this on a map before right? Did Valerie teach the two of you anything about our world?”
She only shakes her head, a little embarrassed. “Mmm Mmm”
“Oh… well, ok. So remember the pool of water, at the waterfall? Think of that pool being the size of Welan City.
“Woah.” She looks at the map again. “But wait, that blue is like a hundred times the size of Welan city. How is that possible?”
He grins at her excitedly. “Eh, hold onto your pants, cause this is going to get a lot wilder.”
He watches her eyes as he slowly zooms farther and farther out, until the oceans consume the land, and then more. He pauses when the world turns out to be a perfect circle all by itself, in the middle of black nothing. Then he spins it around a little bit, so she can see that its round.
“Holy… shit.” She looks up at him, shaking her head again. “We’re on, like, a ball?”
“Yep. The ball, our planet, is what we call Earth. This one is ours, and we call it Earth. He zooms back in a little bit and rolls the globe a little more as he points out the other continents. “That’s Asia, and that’s Africa. We don’t like them, and they don’t like us. It’s kind of like we’re all on opposite teams, but we want to kill each other.”
She looks at him, a bit overwhelmed. “We?”
“Yeah, well… our continent. We call it America, all of it. He circles his finger all the way around the long stretch of land between the white poles. It used to be a whole bunch of smaller teams, or countries, but not anymore.” He zooms back in and pans around to show her how there are thousands of cities like Welan spread everywhere. “We are definitely not alone. We have a huge team.”
“I can’t believe how far away it is. The thing that’s watching us. That’s where you went the other day? That’s where I told Sy and Vaun I’d be going?” She sounds like she’s regretting what she’s done. Like she’s might even be a little scared.
He lets out a deep breath. “I know that what I just showed you is a lot to take in, but there’s a whole lot more than even all of this Arma. Earth is… it’s nothing, it’s tiny. We are but a speck of dust out on the highway.” He switches the program over to the galactic map, which is only a live simulation, but looks plenty real.
When he shows her the moon, her mouth starts to hang open. “Vaun, n Sy, n Don said they were on the moon. I guess it doesn’t look all that far away.” It’s hard for her to really understand the distances when the farthest she’s ever travelled is about a hundred miles.
He continues zooming out until she doesn’t quite understand his point. The earth has become so small, she’s almost lost track of where it was. She almost relents to his point that, yeah, the moon is really far, but then she notices some new dots show up out on the edges of the map. They’re so far away, they might as well not matter, but she still wants to know what they are. When the Sun comes into view, her eyebrows bunch up in disbelief of the size of it. It has to be a prank. By the time he reaches the outer solar system, her hands are on her face.
While she remains quiet, he continues to zoom out until she gives up on trying to keep track of any reference. Eventually, he stops where the universe looks like a big sparkly swirl of tiny tiny lights all stirred together. She’s a little in shock, not sure of what she can even ask him. It’s not that her existence has been completely nullified, but it humbles her in a way she could never have considered.
“How come no one is going out there? I heard Vaun say one time that everyone that made it to Mars died. I saw Mars go by, like way back, right after the moon. Why is everything that big if we can’t even make it to Mars?”
“Cause Arma, the universe was not made FOR us. The existence of humanity is an immeasurably tiny spark of nothing compared to the universe. By the time all humans will have long since died, it’ll have been such a short amount of time, it might as well not have happened. He pushes his fingertip to the floor and picks up a single speck of dust, to hold it out in front of her eyes. “That there, is our entire Galaxy Arma, if Welan city were the universe.” He blows it off his finger, making it disappear into the air, and then points out in what he thinks is the direction of the highway. “The next nearest galaxy to us is probably as far as Ray’s house.”
“Bullshit! That’s just stupid! Why would it be that far away? That makes no sense. There’s no way in hell we could get there. It would take years!”
“We don’t get there Arma. We never will. It’d take billions of years, and that’s if we could somehow figure out how to go thousands of times faster than we can now. So yeah, it sucks huh. Everyone thinks we’re all so damn important, but we’re not. We’re fuckin nuthin.”
She’s struggling with believing him. She’s sitting sideways in her chair now, propping her head up with an elbow on the arm. She wishes he didn’t tell her. It’s all a sick joke.
She has a sour expression on her face now. “Why do we even bother? The moon is stupid, and mars is stupid.”
Her eyes are starting to glisten. She thought that maybe her life did matter, but it’s turned out to be pathetically small anyway. It’s like there’s no point to anything at all. Even if they all live ten times over, it still won’t mean a damn thing. It hurts to learn that the universe is so vastly indifferent and pretty much neglectful.
Her voice is resigned and sad. “I wanted to see it all Aaron.”
He puts his hand on her shoulder. “Hey, at least you’re a robot, huh. If you were still a person, you’d maybe make it to mars, and then you’d die in a month or so. You’d never get to come back home. Talk about shattered dreams.” He switches the universal map off and puts up their search again. She still looks upset. “Don’t let it get you down love. I know there’s a lot out there, but we really do have the best spot in all of it. Would you imagine the odds of that? Makes us pretty lucky doesn’t it?”
She looks up, realizing he called her love. “What, what do we have?”
“We have life, we have you and me, and all of us. We’re the only ones in the whole universe we’ll ever know of. Kinda makes you consider what it is to kill someone doesn’t it? It’s like cutting off your fingers. We don’t exactly have very many.”
She wraps her arms around him. “There’s no one else out there, in all of that? Are you sure?”
“Well, there is, I’m sure of it, but they’re so far away, we’ll never get to find out. This planet, our sun, all of it will have long since grown old and died before anyone ever knows we were even here.” He gets down on his haunches next to her and looks in her eyes. “And as big as the universe is, it’s as equally small too. That speck of dust, it was the size of a planet compared to the smallest things we know about. And things keep getting smaller from there. So, were not all that small really.” That gets her to smile a little. “Alright, now to the crazy stuff.” He smirks, watching the look on her face abruptly change.
The first technical thing he introduces her to is the concept of gravity. He finds it rather weird having to explain such a thing to a grown woman, but it puts things into perspective for himself as well. He finds a pair of magnets on the side of a toolbox and hands them to her, to play with while they talk. Throughout the rest of the afternoon and night, he works his way up to the spiteful rocket equation, how radiation is pretty much an inescapable plague ravaging all of space, and how the periodic table is almost too small to be worth a damn. The only thing they seem to have going for themselves is that their lives are at least not a straight sprint into the grave anymore.
The prospect of becoming a pilot doesn’t look like much fun to either of them anymore, but one thing is for sure, the two of them are the only ones that can pull any of it off. Anyone else would simply die trying. Even with being immortal, the time they calculate taking to do pretty much anything has them a bit discouraged. He and Arma may be patient people, but they’re not that patient.
“What’re we gonna do when we’re stuck in a stupid little pop-can for months on end?” She catches him accidentally look right down the front of her unzipped flight suit and then back up to her eyes. It feels like something in her chest moves when she thinks about it. “I suppose we’ll figure something out.”