A story about galaxies far, far away (and one closer to home)
by Liz Shannon Miller
“Seriously, why are you watching that?” the disembodied voice of Jerrold snapped, just loud enough to be heard over the movie’s soundtrack.
His timing couldn’t have been worse—”You make it so difficult sometimes,” Princess Leia was snarling at Han Solo. But I took off my headset anyway, figuring that as he technically counted as my boss, I should probably pay attention to him.
The lights of the common area, as low as they were, took a moment to get used to; I’d been immersed for over three hours, I realized, though it hadn’t felt that long.
It never did.
To counterbalance the very attractive squinting I knew I was doing, I gave him my best grin. “What makes you think you know what I’m watching, exactly? Bold move to start judging my viewing choices without having any idea—”
“Kay, it’s always the same thing. Some permutation of the same thing, anyway. And it’s just weird.”
“What is so weird about me enjoying a vintage screen classic like Star Wars?”
“You live in space.”
That wasn’t technically accurate: I didn’t live in space.
I worked in space.
Space hadn’t even been my intention when I got into engineering—I’d just wanted to learn a profession that had a reasonably solid chance of not going extinct on me. That was the bitch of the 22nd century, never knowing what previously secure line of work would suddenly be made obsolete by some new form of technology. I figured being the person making the technology felt like a safe bet.
And when asteroid mining became a more and more viable industry, I found myself with just the right skillset to serve as a mid-level technician on a top-of-the-line station, just a hop, skip, and hypersleep away from home. The work was steady—three months on the rig, one month on Earth, repeat. Not exactly a great schedule for maintaining any sort of relationship, but the pay was great, and so I tended to treat myself to whatever goodies I could, when I could.
I wasn’t spending the money on anyone else, after all.
That’s what these specific files were—a treat. I’d spent an entire day of my last shift planetside tracking them down: well, half a day went towards finding a contact who could hook me up, and then there was the six-hour roundtrip journey, a few days later, to a hole-in-the-wall diner to meet said contact. I had driven to New Jersey for this moment. New freaking Jersey. Being interrupted was infuriating.
“I’m not the on-call tech right now,” I told Jerrold, ignoring any comments about my choice in downtime activities. “Which is why I was offline.”
(That, and being online posed a risk of triggering copyright protection bots; my new New Jersey friend had explicitly suggested I disable any connection before loading my purchase into the headset.)
“Yes, but Marco is literally vomiting up dinner right now, and I don’t think the part of the station that’s about to explode can wait for him to feel better.”
“Shit,” I say, standing up and dropping my headset onto the padded seat. Han and Leia would be there when I was done.
It was a ten-minute walk to the control room—Jerrold and I ran it in less than five. “Don’t you find it annoying?” he said, regular sessions on the treadmill making conversation at a sprint easy for him. “All the stuff those movies get wrong?”
“I don’t watch Star Wars for the scientific accuracy,” I told him, trying not to huff too hard.
“So for what then, the romance? Because I don’t remember there being any of that.”
“Shut up.”
“Also, the ending was rubbish.”
“What ending?”
“The last movie?”
“Star Wars is more than those first nine movies.”
“Then why are those the ones you rewatch?”
“Not all of them.” Jerrold and I disagreed on a lot of things, but not on the ninth Star Wars film.
In the control room, there was a lot of beeping going on, and the AI tech looked bewildered—as bewildered as their robotic features would allow, that is. “I performed a maintenance check,” the almost-human voice said. (The face and the voice were the only parts of Theta-3 that attempted to mimic humanity, as the rest of their design was almost spider-like, for ultimate efficiency and effectiveness.) “I do not know what is wrong, though. Where have you been?”
“I had to pull her away from another Star Wars rewatch,” Jerrold said, sliding into one of the open seats at the console.
“Those movies are bigoted,” Theta said immediately.
“You always say that,” I sigh.
“You keep watching them.”
Same damn argument every time, and honestly, I was sick of it. “They were made one hundred and fifty years ago! Of course they’re old-fashioned when it comes to artificial—”
The frantic beeping evolved into full-fledged sirens. “Focus, Kay,” Jerrold said. “Ideally, before the station blows up.”
I didn’t want to acknowledge he was probably right about that, so I slid into the other available seat, scanning the latest reports from the sensors to see if that would reveal the problem.
Sure enough, there it was: After boring through iridium for the last several hours, the drill had hit a gas pocket—what kind of gas, I couldn’t be sure about right away, but it was very likely flammable, and any of the moving metal pieces currently digging their way into the meteorite could spark it. That would normally be all right since there’s a ventilator embedded in the drill mechanism for just this sort of situation, except the drill itself is now stuck for some reason, and…
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I said to myself.
Jerrold snorted. “What does that actually mean?”
“I think we’ve got about five minutes before we’re looking at a real problem here,” I told him.
“As opposed to the peace and tranquility currently underway?” he snapped, raising his voice to be heard over the din.
I did my best to tune him out as I stared at the console in front of me. One hundred and six people are currently on board this station. All of them with families back home, except for Heinrich in waste removal. And, well, me.
Just a little pressure. Fortunately, I knew the solution and was already powering up a repair drone, one of the dozen stationed at the top of the drill shaft. The drill wasn’t my design, but the repair drones were. This was the first time I’d been able to take one out to solve a real issue.
“It might be better if I piloted the drone,” Theta said as we all watched its descent into the shaft, through the camera now serving as my eyes. “Less room for human error.”
“Shut up, Theta,” I said, now even more determined to execute this maneuver.
“You could maybe go a little faster,” Jerrold muttered. “How many minutes did you say we had again?”
“Shut up, Jerrold.”
But I did pick up the pace a bit, accelerating further downward until arriving just a meter away from the sticking point, so to speak. As I inched the drone closer, the problem became much clearer—a piece of the drill bit had come loose, somehow snared in its own works. (Again, I did not design the drill.)
While the drone wasn’t broadcasting audio, it didn’t need to—the malfunctioning equipment’s on-screen vibrations were beginning to rumble more and more under our feet, and I could hear a few voices in the halls outside starting to rise in volume. Just when the situation couldn’t be worse, we were about to add a panicky mob to the mix. Super.
I looked at the controls in front of me, knowing that the smart thing to do would be to hand things over to Theta—to not take any chances with my next move. But I also knew we were running out of seconds, and any moment could be the last…
With no time to do any calculations and no time to double-check my work… I closed my eyes. I exhaled once. Listened to my breath. And then, my eyes snapped open, my grip on the controls tightened up—and my drone and I leaped into action.
It was over before I realized it. One sharp swipe from the drone arm, and the drill was working properly again. The vibrations stopped; my little buddy returned to his charging station. Peace, not sirens, echoed in the room.
And Jerrold was staring at me.
“How did you—”
“How did I what?” I thought about getting out of the chair for a moment, then realized there was still a lot of adrenaline in my system, shaking its way out. Staying seated for a little longer sounded like a much better idea.
“It was like— I’ve never seen anything like that.” Jerrold frowned, an expression I always thought made him his most handsome. “What’s… that thing from Star Wars?”
“Star Wars has a lot of things in it.”
“The Fight? I can’t remember what it was called. The Push? Was that it? Did you do… that?”
I laughed like I finally had permission to do so. “The Force, and no. I used meditation techniques to shut down my higher mental functions and allowed my subconscious mind to come up with the correct calculations needed to solve the problem. Or, to put it another way, I went with my gut.”
The laugh had done me a lot of good; I felt ready to stand up and walk past the living quarters of so many sleeping people, who hopefully had no idea how bad things almost got for a second there. “Unless you need me for anything else, I’m gonna get back to my thing.”
“I’ll walk you back,” Jerrold said, surprising me.
“Don’t you need to keep supervising the situation here?”
“Nah, Theta’s got it. Right Theta?”
“It is my pleasure, Jerrold,” Theta said.
“Theta’s much nicer to you than me,” I grumbled as we left the room.
“That’s because I don’t spend my downtime watching racist fiction.” On a different day, his words would have pissed me off, but there was something about the way he said it just then, like he was trying to…
I decided just to ignore that thought and focus on the quiet echoes of our footsteps. This was my favorite shift of the cycle to be awake for; it had a calm others didn’t.
“They’re the only movies I’ve ever seen that really capture the smell, you know?” I said after a long moment. “Not even those 6-D flicks, with that odor tech, really nail it. And I like that space isn’t a big deal to most of the characters. It’s just their home. I feel like I can relate.”
“No Wookies, though.”
“You can’t remember The Force, but you can remember Wookies?”
“Of course I can remember Wookies. The little teddy bears, yeah?”
I couldn’t be sure if he was getting it wrong on purpose or on accident. But I was now sure that he was flirting with me a bit.
And perhaps that’s why I went ahead and spilled my secret: “I’m watching the pre-Purge versions.”
Jerrold literally stopped in his tracks. “You have— How?”
“I have my ways,” I said, because that sounded a lot cooler than talking about a road trip to New Jersey. “And it’s not like they’re illegal anymore. Just hard to find.”
Way before I was born—okay, at least five years before—a certain element had gotten back into power, leading to yet another wild swing back into fascistic morality. And the media conglomerates, always too happy to roll over for the government, had gone along with the extreme censorship demands of the new administration, wholesale deleting anything even slightly erotic from their vast libraries of content.
I was around the age of five when common sense returned to the land, but the damage was done: one hundred and fifty years of screen stories, now gone forever or vandalized beyond recognition. There were data specialists working all the time to recover what was lost, archivists who would make the news after discovering a moldy box of century-old DVDs. And, of course, the Purged versions of the classics did still exist—according to film scholars, classic musicals like Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz and Tom Hooper’s Cats remained relatively unchanged.
And there was a particular type of person nowadays who made a big thing of saying that they liked the Purged version of Star Wars better. I’d never heard Jerrold say as much, but I really hoped he wasn’t one of those.
“So what are they like so far?” he asked, eager enough to make me think that was the case.
“Oh, great. I really don’t miss the cards.” (Purged movies would often insert title cards to help explain what was missing due to cut scenes. Whoever originally wrote them had a limited and specific vocabulary: the words “sinful fornication” were used frequently.) “But it’s also not my first time watching them like this. My parents had the original series on Silica Disc, and an un-networked player. Their whole SD collection would be worth tens of thousands today, except for—”
“The fire?” He said it so gently. When had I told him about the fire? Must have been during my first shift station-side, probably during some dumb ice-breaker game. Never expected him to remember anything about it, though.
“Yeah,” I confirmed. I didn’t want to dwell any further on that. “Point is, in answer to your question, they’re so much better—especially the middle movies. Han Solo’s barely in the Purged versions. Literally too hot for the screen.”
“That actor was good-looking.” Jerrold sounded a little bitter about it, but he was missing the point.
“That’s not it. Well, mostly. The thing with Han Solo is, the first time you look at that guy, you know he’s had sex. And that’s the thing a lot of sci-fi in general never gets right: Very few people ever seem to fuck in space.”
Jerrold coughed. “That hasn’t been my experience.”
“In real life, sure. That’s why the company has all those regulations.” You get a very thorough briefing on what’s cool and what isn’t before you blast off Earth—and pretty much everything is cool these days, assuming that everyone involved is giving “enthusiastic consent” (an expression I’m sure my great-great-grandmother used, back in the day). You just have to fill out some paperwork and maybe change supervisors, especially if your current supervisor is really hot and has just finished walking you back to the common area. Because the reality of living in space is the same as living on planet Earth, which is to say the portion of the population that’s not ace or grey has… urges. And, of course, they want to deal with them.
From the look on Jerrold’s face, I might not be the only one thinking about these things. “Are they just filled with sex, then? The non-Purged versions? Because the lack of sex in space never struck me as being the issue.”
I couldn’t help it. I had to laugh. “They’re really not. But they’re movies about people. They should have been.”
I’d honestly been following Jerrold as we walked; still a little dazed from the adrenaline rush of the last thirty minutes, I wasn’t sure why he’d brought me back where he found me. Until, that is, he picked up the headset I’d abandoned, handing it to me. I’d totally forgotten that I’d left it behind.
“Thanks for your help,” he said.
I let the headset swing a little awkwardly from my fingers, still feeling… well, a lot of things. “You mean, thanks for keeping the station from blowing up and killing us all.”
“Yes, that. I’ll make sure you’re credited for double-time, since you weren’t on call.”
“That’s great, I really appreciate it.”
I waited for him to say something else. But he didn’t. He just stood there, close-cropped hair, cheekbones, and deep rich eyes looking at me.
My instincts were pushing me toward the same place they always do… back to my quarters, alone. I’ve been listening to those instincts for almost twenty-five years now, ever since the fire. There’s a safety in solitude, after all. I’ve always prided myself on knowing when it’s time to retreat, relax, recuperate—
“When is your shift over?” I asked.
I surprised him with that; he took at least a second to blink at the question. “Another two hours or so.”
“Come to my quarters afterwards. I’ll restart A New Hope for you.”
He quirked a smile at that—a smile I could spend hours analyzing. “As long as that’s not the last film, it’s a plan.”
“It’s the fourth one,” I said. “Trust me, it’s the right place to start.”
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