Michael Siemsen - Exigency

He arched his back, white belly on full display for an overdue rub n’ scratch. Minnie smiled and obliged.

Noodle raised his head and gazed at Minnie, remorseful. “We thought maybe… like maybe you were punishing us.”

“We?” Emilie sneered.

“No, no.” Minnie cradled his head in both hands and scratched his cheeks with her thumbs. “Nothing like that—I’d never. Just some bad days at work. You missed me?”

“To put it mildly,” Noodle said as Minnie etched circles into his tummy fur. “Ferrets are highly social creatures. This girl,” he nodded to Emilie, “can’t be bothered. I wanted to play chess.”

“Takes too long,” Emilie said without opening her eyes. “And you’re terrible at it. I don’t even have to cheat.”

Minnie smiled and turned on the tube. The media options appeared in the air between the sofas. “What do you guys want to watch?”

Emilie ignored her.

“Whatever you want,” Noodle said as he spun around on her lap, tail whipping across her arm.

Minnie let the tube pick. A semi-recent series played from her archive. All presumably famous actors she’d never seen or heard of.

Noodle cleared his throat like a person. “I know you can watch and scratch at the same time.”

Minnie loved her pets. Maybe she’d adopt a few more. But why? To fill the emptiness? Why not get a mate like others? A kid or two? Even Aether had a husband and daughter in her game. Oliver and Trista. Minnie had never met them—never wanted to. Whatever Aether had gotten from them were clearly things Minnie couldn’t provide. Plus, they’d been around long before Minnie had come into the picture. Maybe even before John?

John.

She’d come here to escape from him, and yet here he was. What to think of this return module situation? If they could make it across this continent, build a boat, get to Threck Country, and make it another year, they could actually go home. They’d sleep the whole way, so the time would pass like nothing. Probably dock in Earth orbit, deal with some company folks—debriefs and whatnot, take a shuttle down to the surface. See her dad again. He’d be, what, a spry young 85? She’d probably travel the world, give speeches, plant roots somewhere, and be a professor. The idea of going back wasn’t entirely unappealing, but she’d spent so long disassociating from Earth, knowing she’d never go back, knowing that the game would forever be her sole experience of her former home. The game, and actual human interaction. Her friends.

Oh, how she hoped they didn’t suffer. Hoped they weren’t scared. Hoped that Aether, as she drifted into the black, didn’t only try to be a mom to Qin. She better not have waited for the painful, suffocating, dehydrated end. They would’ve had ample meds and access to the air mixture so as to avoid inevitable agony.

Meds.

John again.

Had he tried to kill himself, or had it been an accident? He was too stubborn, too sure of himself for suicide. Then again, being disabled, no longer able to take care of himself—what did that sort of thing do to a proud, bigheaded personality like his?

Minnie looked down at Noodle, writhing in delight as she absentmindedly pet him from neck to belly. “I gotta go, guys.”

Noodle was outraged. “What? No!”

“I was just about to go over there,” Emilie said, stretching her back. “I don’t mind if you pet me now. If you want.”

Minnie grinned. “I love you two. I’ll be back.”

She closed the game and opened her eyes. The inside of Ish’s EV was still illuminated from the two portholes above. She’d been gone less than 30 minutes. A thermag glance through the wall revealed a still-idle John in the cave. His temp appeared normal, heart rate fine. He wouldn’t be truly lucid for a few hours. In the meantime…

Minnie plucked Ish’s fone from her pocket. A quick thrice-over with a few wetwipes. She held the device up before her, facing the optics toward her, “eye to eye.” Ish’s familiar pale yellow-brown iris, or rather, a reproduction of it. Up close, one could detect a fone’s lack of ridges and canyons, the replica iris and surrounding white sclera were merely a convex disc bonded to the inner casing. The optics orifice contained several lens layers behind a tinted concealer, without which someone could see inside. Minnie preferred to think of the data within the device before her, not the bio organ it resembled, the person it represented, the body from which it’d been extracted.

She set the fone on a console, reached into the medkit at her feet, pulling out the extractor—a simple, silicoated tool that looked like a warped eyelash curler—and turned to face her reflection in a shiny black display.

She opened her fone’s manual command interface. One of a few functions that had to be manually sight-typed for safety and security.

Shutdown.

ALERTS: FONE - Confirm full shutdown.

Yes.

Shutting down…

Blackout. Her ear module emit a tiny crack as it too powered down.

Stereovision gone. Optics gone. No HUD, no alerts, no apps, no access. She was cut off and helpless—in shock at the reality of being truly disconnected . It felt quiet, dull, unnatural, wrong . What the hell did people do before fones?

Focus on task. Get it over with.

She spread her lids wide, held her breath, and slid in the two circular ends, one on top and one beneath her fone. A gentle, scissoring squeeze, and she tilted her head back while steadily moving the extractor away. The gross (though not all that painful) final popping sensation shot a quick shiver down her spine. She moved the orb in front of her bio eye, giving it a brief inspection. Not too much film built up on the back, but she’d give it a thorough cleaning before reinstalling.

Ish’s fone drew in with the usual slorp Minnie had never grown used to. Her top eyelid folded in with the device and she had to pinch and pull out the flap. Preboot had begun upon contact with her housing, but it halted as expected a few seconds later with a white passcode prompt on a black background. Even with a mated housing, this was a standard safeguard.

Minnie hoped that one of the root accounts would’ve been set on their fones as part of exigency protocols.

?4rT~2 3eQ|p8

Nope.

She tried all of the others she knew. No access. All she could see in Ish’s fone was station time and batt level. 2% and slowly rising, Minnie’s electrolytes trickling in through her housing.

Such easy access would’ve been nice, albeit unexpected. On to Plan B.

John moaned. His cheeks tightened. It appeared his dreams were unpleasant. Minnie nudged him again.

“Hey, just wake up for a second. One question and you can go back to sleep.”

His chin constricted, mouth set into a grumpy toddler frown. A more assertive protest groan.

She poked his shoulder repeatedly. “I’m not going anywhere, John! One question! It’s your ticket back to dreamland. Wake up. You don’t even have to open your eyes. Okay?”

A quivering sniff like he was going to cry. Finally, a scratchy “What?”

“What’s Ish’s fone passcode?”

“Dunno.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No.”

“Yes. Tell me now. I’ll enter it right in and you go back to sweet, sweet, comforting sleep.”

One eye opened—his bio eye. It wobbled and blinked and found her. “You… you took her fone?”

Minnie smiled and widened her lids around the unmatched fone, cocking her head right for him to catch a glimpse.

Fog appearing to lift, he tried to sit up.

She pressed down on his shoulder. “No, no, no, relax. You’ll hurt yourself. Just give me the passcode. Once I’m in, I’ll dump it all to the EV system and we can both pull it off of there.”