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“What’s the time now?” she asked.
The analog watch on her wrist had a full set of twelve numbers, but no hands. She considered the selection edgy and controversial. She was, of course, the on-shift efficiency expert.
Her vivid hair lofted around her head in coils like indigo smoke as she drifted in zero-g aboard the freighter. She thought hats and hairbands were too constraining. I thought she was one intake vent away from calamity. Lights in the cargo bay weren’t too bright; not too dim.
“Is this a test?” I asked in return, clinging to the rack access ladder with a datapad in my left hand, comparing the digital manifest to the storage crates packed on the shelves. Routine work, but important to the captain. I ran this check before loading, at least a couple of times en route from pickup to delivery, and then after unloading.
“Maybe it is,” she replied.
I shrugged. “If I wanted more tests, I would’ve stayed in college. Shouldn’t you be streamlining processes instead of distracting me from my job?”
“I’m bored.”
“Don’t come to the cargo bay for entertainment. We don’t even have a porthole.”
She tilted her head, watching as I continued to reconcile the manifest again. “How did you lose your legs? I keep meaning to ask.”
I could’ve sworn she had asked the question before. Multiple times. But maybe it was someone else. Obviously, it came up a lot. And, you know, I feel certain that I used to have an actual, honest-to-Gorm answer. It felt like it was right there, pushing at some invisible synaptic membrane, trying to birth itself back into my consciousness.
But it never came. My brother called it “psychic constipation.” The captain, as I recall, waggled his fingers and said: “Oooh, stolen memory! Dark and mysterious.”
I couldn’t remember, but I couldn’t go around telling everyone that. So I just told different stories to different people, explaining how I ended up with these prosthetic limbs.
Once, I lost my legs in an honor duel with a Nall. Another time, I stumbled into a sand eel pit on Demaria and narrowly escaped with my life, saved by a brave underclasser. Then there’s the time an acid reservoir burst on Mars, or the hovercab hitting me on Sivad, or the freak Zangali rugby accident.
“You’re not going to tell me?” She actually pouted.
“It’s not easy to talk about,” I said. “Mistakes were made.”
“Oh?” Now she brightened, intrigued.
“Back on Earth, at Agincourt University, my roommate was a Castori who fancied himself a genius inventor. Rigged together a personal teleporter prototype right in the middle of our dorm room. I’d had too much to drink. He told me he wanted to try it out with an organic passenger. Fool that I was, I volunteered. Those guys, you know, they’re, what, three or four feet tall? He hadn’t calibrated the damned thing for a six-foot-tall human. My legs ended up in the hallway. I nearly bled out on the dorm floor.”
Her frown returned. “That can’t be true. You’re messing with me.”
“It’s totally true,” I lied. “As far as you know.”