Please humor my impulses.
She screamed at the end. A long, loud, piercing shrill that sent shivers down his spine. The air was thick and moist in the dimly lit room, and as she lay below him, he studied the shapes of her face - the warm glow of the monitors playing with her sharp features. She had a fierce, proud chin and thin lips that were pulled up into a smile, with long black hair that lay spread out across the pillow like so many small tendrils. He laughed and she echoed it with a small giggle as he rolled off of her, slipping from her embrace to prostrate himself on the bed. The air was hot, and he was sweating.
"You're in a good mood today" she chided him, flashing an intelligent smile from across the chasm between the pillows.
He nodded and let fly a small smile attached to a sigh. "The deal with DecoDyne went through. We're going to get the contract."
She nodded knowingly. He had been working on that deal for six months. It wasn't her business, she was an artist, but Venusian trading was a lucrative business for the two of them. Often it was her art he was pitching to off-world investors.
"I don't want to talk about work, though." He smiled and reached out to her, clasping her hand in his. She returned his smile, and they watched each other's eyes for a moment.
"I don't either..." she loved him. He knew that. He wanted to propose, he was just waiting for the right moment. Maybe this was it...?
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!
A mechanical scream clanged off the walls of the dimly lit flight deck. His eyes fluttered awake, and he was back in the present. Quickly, he checked the status screens - it was just a timer he had set to tell him...something bull****. It didn't ****ing matter.
Coping with depression on a starship is a serious issue. Much more so than one would have you believe. It was easy to lose oneself in the endless monotony, and forget that the past was gone and...
'God I miss that woman.' he thought to himself.
"God I hope she doesn't find me." he said aloud to no one in particular. It was twelve days in to his three week journey. Two years since they had ended their relationship on less than exemplary grounds. They had checked in to the hospital together. He had left before her, able to pull through some of the worst of it...she...hadn't.
The doctors said she was improving, but he knew her better. He saw in her eyes a hatred that couldn't be expressed in words. Something had...happened to her, and the last thing she told him was that he would die by her hands. Their friends thought she was kidding, but she...she hated him, and he did not know why. Sure, it had been rocky, but...
Beep-beep!
A comm signal from one of the drones. It was trying to dock on the rear deck and couldn't get the hatch open. He flipped open the window and a small barrage of data greeted him; status reports, scan results, a general "the weather is nice". Phillipe (not many people allowed their hardware to develop full personalities, but he was so lonely these days - a cat just wasn't enough, though the one he had did help) was a bit of an eccentric, for a construct. He had a propensity for flying way too fast, and was often so lost in thought on some seemingly great discovery that he would get distracted and not think things through. The keyboard felt obtrusive and unnecessarily vocal as he calmly tapped out a message.
"Phillipe. Rear cargo hatch is down for maintenance. Data was downloaded this morning - check your systems logs."
The response was quick.
"Checking, sorry, knew that, on my way to forward dock, tell Rose I said hi, again, apologies, found interesting anamaly, stellar, want to reinterface, please be there on forward deck, talk soon, goodbye! bye! byebyebyebye :DDDD XD"
He rolled his eyes and shoved himself back from the piloting console where he had fallen asleep. His chair glided smoothly along it's bearings and thunked to a stop at the opposite end. There was no snubbing Phillipe when he was this excited; if he said he was too busy - **** it. You just have to roll with these things. He clambered down the stairs, and had just gotten around to convincing himself that maybe the cat was enough, and he didn't need to talk to a hyperactive computer to be happy, and maybe being twenty eight and single wasn't such a bad thing, because, you know, you could just live your life and be free, like this move...
His thoughts were interrupted when he reached the bottom of the staircase and was greeted by a pop-up window on his headset. There was Phillipe's construct, seemingly floating in space in front of him - a cheerful mish-mash of color, emoticons, and Internet pictures.
"Look, look, I found! I found this!"
His construct avatar dissipated and reformed into a star chart. There was Earth, Venus, the trajectory - one or two other ships, too far away to be of any interest, and Phillipe's flight path. He was annoyed.
"Did you have to bring me down here to look at this?"
Phillipe reformed and began to babble excitedly.
"But I found some remnants of a cosmic filament - and we're close enough to study it! I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were busy, I just thought - oh and look! I made some modifications to the flight body!"
Phillipe was clearly excited, but his audience wasn't enthused.
"You can do whatever you want Phillipe. I'm going back upstairs."
The construct reappeared, in grey-blue hues this time. A puzzled emoticon came up, followed by a .GIF of some cat attempting to open a jar of mayonnaise.
"Are you ok, John?"
For a second, he hesitated. He could lie, but...why bother. "Just had a dream about her again, that's all. It's probably a good thing you brought me down here to be honest. I get in there and I get all cooped up in my own head."
Phillipe reappeared, this time as some stock image from a web search of a doctor in a white labcoat. Then another .GIF of a dog happily chewing on a bone.
"I know bud. The filament wasn't the only reason I brought you down here. I had the ship's printers build some modifications to your aircraft for the Venusian atmosphere. I wanted you to take a look at them - I think it'll cheer you up some."
John smiled. Now that did sound like a good distraction.
...that's all I got for now. Peace. Hope someone actually reads it lol.
