Lily Hoang - Unfinished - stories finished by Lily Hoang

The younger says, “Yes, it’s time. We have to do something.”

But the older is out of practice. When she leaps to the ceiling, she cannot hold herself up. When she catapults to a light fixture, gravity weighs her down until she is fully earthbound.

And the younger is so slight now the older cannot hide behind her. She can no longer offer protection.

So the two sisters grasp onto each other, telling the other how pretty she is, and the cobalt haze lifts its skirt, inviting the two sisters in.

PART ONE: Day 417 of 1463-day Mars Colony Simulation Mission: The Story

1. Yes.

2. I’ve been awake for 17 minutes.

3. Pass urine, also known as take a piss.

What have you done this morning?

I know. I know. You can’t answer me. Or you won’t answer me. Whatever. No harm in trying. One of these days, right?

4. Consume hydrogenated algae drink. What I really want though is some orange juice. From real oranges.

5. Day 417 of projected 1463-day mission.

6. Ready to proceed.

7. No problems.

8. Male.

9. 35.

10. Brown.

11. Hazel, although I suspect the left one is growing more brown than green. I’d never say green or brown though.

12. Unmarried.

13. Newark, DE.

14. Two. One sister: older. One brother: younger.

15. 43 years, although my father’s probably been cheating the whole time. Who knows about my mother.

16. University of Delaware (BS, Biology); University of Angola (MS, Microbiology); Yale University (Ph.D., Astrobiology; Biochemistry); Brunei Systems Propulsion Lab (Post-doc).

17. “Theses on the Possibility of Artificial Neural Networks Applied to Star Clusters: A Comparative Analysis.” Distinction.

18. Possibly seeing my mother lift me from a kiddie pool with the sun flat like a chrome disk behind her. Also: what kind of fucking question is that? I’ve answered it for 417 days. Never known the purpose. You’re not going to answer. You’re probably not even a you.

Or: seeing my parents screw. My dad’s hairy back, my mom’s bush.

19. Alice in Wonderland (video); Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (paperback); Songs of a Dead Dreamer, DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid (audio).

20. Reading. Cooking. Point of clarification: none of which I can do here.

21. The way white asparagus seems to melt into clarified butter.

22. A steel-reinforced square space — 35’ x 35’ — with light partitions for three not-uncomfortable bunks. The rest of the space is open but divided into three zones: hygiene, cooking, lounge.

This space hasn’t changed in 417 days. Do you really have to continue asking this question?

23. One computer. All it can do is answer this chat questionnaire from control. But you know that already because you’re the one asking the questions.

No other ability to send communication outward.

Also, a joke: how many engineers does it take to make a computer do more than it ought to be capable of doing?

There’s no answer, but we’re still trying.

24. We know because we receive this message: “Today’s questionnaire submitted successfully.”

Also, you keep asking questions.

25. N/A. We’ve never been unsuccessful, unless the others are hiding something from me.

26. There seems to be no continuity to these questions, but the fractal pattern along the lower third of the wall opposite my bunk is flawed in its fifty-third iterative spiral.

27. Jack, star cartographer and system analyst; Jane, environmental theoretician.

Don’t you know this by now?

28. Attractive. One more than the other. Sometimes, the other more than the one. That doesn’t happen often though.

29. We masturbate. Sometimes with each other.

30. How would I know? The Kennedy Assassination, Watergate, the implosion of the Twin Towers as a correction to the binary code?

31. 1–4 times per day. Never touching.

32. We’re professional. Things remain platonic.

33. I stopped brushing my teeth 29 days ago, but I use the dull edge of a plastic knife as a tongue scraper.

Point of clarification: This wasn’t an active choice on my part but one of necessity. I don’t know what happened to my toothbrush. I tried using my pointer finger to mimic a toothbrush but it wasn’t the same. Better to forget the whole thing. So I decided the tongue scraper was the way to go.

Another point of clarification: Either Jane does the same thing or she stole my toothbrush.

34. The backbone of a superhighway expressed in the lines of her forehead.

What kind of fucking question was that?

(Not that I’m trying to be rude.)

35. “Death don’t have no mercy in this land,” the Reverend Gary Davis (blind).

36. Earthrise.

37. A blue frown cracking against the sea of impossible stars.

The only color beyond darkness: water.

38. Coca-Cola’s Five-Note pneumonic meets the intersection of my sternum by way of alarm clock.

39. The notes often run through my mind as I wake. I envision the jingle as a treble clef — the notes as treble clef instead of actual notes, moving along the score — writhing like a snake over my prone body. The notes/clef proceed to tickle me — only because I’m ticklish and any movement along my body is almost unbearable — usually concluding on the sternum. Then, I look out my window to see if Earth is visible. It usually isn’t.

40. Not since day 403. We broke orbit some days earlier.

41. An annex room just off the main space containing: 57 earthworms, 10 guinea pigs, 15 naked mole rats, 2 black mambas, 1 giant tortoise (Oliver Wendell Blackbeard), and an uncountable number of molds, ergot, fungi.

Note: numbers have changed since yesterday.

42. The interstices of a ventilation system that could easily output carbon dioxide.

43. Nim Chimsky III, mission monkey.

44. No. Maybe.

45. Day 372.

46. He died at the “hands” of Oliver Wendell Blackbeard.

47. According to the Supreme Court: amphibian. I didn’t know the Supreme Court made decisions like this, but apparently, they do.

48. It was a not-unwelcome accident. Fortuitous, one might say.

49. I had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t even in the room.

50. Nim was undedicated to mission directives.

51. Entropic ending to our Chinese Checkers tournament.

52. We get creative up here.

53. Behavior changed after day 391: last daily orbit of earth/moon system.

54. No longer interested in hand-clapping games. Refusal to clean his own fur.

55. Lolita -inspired reading of ape that drew bars of its own cage. Very influenced by Nabokov.

56. 204 years old. Handlers claim Blackbeard was born during the Civil War.

We don’t believe everything we hear, but tortoises are supposed to live a very long time.

57. With that name, I imagine he was raised in the North.

58. $3.5 million. Promised payment at the close of project. No money in advance, other than salary, which is not included in $3.5 million.

59. You know it’s a dangerous mission. Why else would they pay that kind of money?

Is that really an appropriate question?

60. Your questions change slightly each day. Some days, they’re out of order. Some days, your phrasing shifts. Most of these questions are inane enough that no machine would write them.

61. We’re given the authority to put anyone to “sleep” if there’s danger to the mission.

62. Rayon as regenerated cullulosic fiber, suggestive of semi-synthetic psychedelic drugs of the ergoline family.

63. I assume they have considered killing me.