NOVEL NEXT Chapter 7: Q-Net Call
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Marie: Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be a badger? I think I'd like being a badger.
Gordon: You literally live in a hole in the ground.
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Saturday, November 9th, 2091, about 2:00 am MST, Montana City, Gordon's Suite
Gordon remembered one of the first conversations he'd ever had with Marie, back when everything felt lighter:
"You live on MARS. I can't even imagine the sorts of things you've gotten to see and experience. What could you possibly be grousing about?"
"You wouldn't understand."
"Try me."
"You'll make fun of me."
"I promise, your dignity is safe with me—my lady."
"Fine."
"..."
"... Okay, so, the lander lands, and when the dust clears, there's this whole shining metal city ready for its first humans, right?"
"I'm with you so far. Robots made robots, which made the base, right?"
"Right. So, you're moving into a habitat—a 'hab'—think 'apartment', what do you need to bring with you that isn't metal?"
"..."
"Hello?"
"..."
"Did we get cut off?"
"Sorry, I just got all of that at once. Okay, so you're talking about blankets and sheets, clothing, mattress, food, toilet paper?"
"Right. They said to bring the essentials for colonizing space, but we'd have habitats built already. And it's sort of true, but the best the robots can manage for 'fabric' is spun metal, so everything's cold and hard and we basically sleep on metal hammocks stretched over a metal frame—it's like a drum, it makes noise getting in and out of bed, and the mesh grips the sheets and wrinkles it in weird ways and it's just weird. They had to cut a lot of corners with creature comforts to get things manufactured within the robot's limitations."
"Oooh. I hadn't thought of that."
"Also, aquaponics—plants aren't required to make oxygen, but they still remove carbon dioxide—so they brought algae. Great vats of it, and put it in the tanks which were premade for that, and now we have so much algae. And—in the early years—not much else with a smell. So everything smells vaguely of algae by default unless we perfume it, so we import scent oils and herbs, and spices, so everything smells of algae and herbs and scent oils."
"Gross. What do you even eat?"
"I did say spices. It isn't bad. Just... working with the algae, you can pick the scent out."
"Sounds like an anti-perk."
"I have perks. I can make anything I want out of aluminum as long as it doesn't need to be bigger than a cubic foot."
"That's not a huge perk."
"Oh yeah, Mr. Corporate America, tell me about your perks," she challenged him.
"I have a sports car that sometimes starts," he 'bragged'.
"I am impressed," she said.
"I can tell my sisters' secretaries whether they get to write in cursive or print."
"Fabulous."
"I get to pick out my own ink pens."
"You're trying to be lame."
"Yes."
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Somehow, his memories of conversations with her always skipped the awkward waits between sentences as the words burned their way digitally across the vast gulf of space. Her melodic voice lived in his mind without the delays, without the reminder of just how far apart they really were. The Q-link was practically instant when aligned, but the periods of borderline connection were laggy, the three-way handshake that ensured quality video requiring excess processing and buffering.
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His fingers played with the fringe of fabric on his pillow as he lay in the silence, waiting for her to hear him. These conversations were their lifeline—the thing that kept the inevitable darkness at bay. He'd seen the research, knew what happened to couples like them over time. The distance wore people down, made them forget why they'd fallen for each other in the first place. But talking—really talking, like this—it pushed back that creeping sense of disconnection. For now.
"I'm sorry," he'd said. "I don't even remember falling asleep."
Which was true.
She'd sent him a quiet recording from her bed, voice soft under her covers. Telling him about her frustrating day with tank 12, how she missed their usual chat, how the hallways felt especially empty tonight. Just... missing him. It'd been days since they'd really talked, and he could hear the strain in her voice—that brittle quality that meant she was fighting off the loneliness again.
He'd slept right through his alarm.
The trouble with dating a girl on Mars was that the Martian day was a different length than an Earth day. Over the nearly nine months they'd been dating, their local times had gone from synchronous, to entirely opposite, and back—about once a month. Right now, they were six hours apart. It wouldn't be long before they'd practically share a local time, and everything would be easier again. It was just one of those things they had to endure.
"You're lovely," he told her. He'd woken up, still late in the night—habit, from all the nocturnal talks, perhaps—and played her video over and over. "I wish you were here too."
His bed was velvety and inviting, a warm body-shaped divot already worn into it by his earlier sleep—but he had a feeling it was important to stay awake, at least for the moment. Important to be present for her, to give her something to hold onto. He sat up slightly while waiting for her to respond, the better to keep himself awake. The screens above his bed were playing a photo collage screensaver, clouds driven before a storm. He waited and watched it.
The wait between comments didn't mean anything. It was just the distance, just the limitations of technology. Thirty seconds of silence between each response and its arrival. It wasn't rejection—even if his hindbrain sometimes thought it was before he squashed it down. It wasn't even that long a wait. But he knew these silences were getting harder for both of them, each pause a reminder of all the space between them.
"Nobody lovely like you should be alone," he tried, the line feeling a bit pithy but hopefully having the right amount of over-the-top pickup-line quality to it to stir her sense of humor. Humor helped. It always helped. The connection was too poor for video, her heart-shaped face frozen in greeting, hovering over his wrist, a telling artifact of its quality.
"I'd almost given up on hearing your voice tonight," her voice finally said, smooth and warm like spiced wine. Her speaking voice was usually higher when her energy was up, but tonight Marie seemed to be at a low ebb. "If I'd been there, I'd have woken you myself."
The yearning in her voice made his heart ache. She was so far away—but sounded close, if he closed his eyes. It was always like this—he was her private place, her sanctuary amid the lack of privacy enforced by her cramped quarters and overbearing parents. She poured out her intimate secrets and bared the depths of her beautiful soul to him, without embarrassment or reservation. It was what made her special. It was also what made him so afraid of losing her to the slow erosion of distance.
"I'm glad I'm getting to," he told her. "I haven't been sleeping well, and my brain just decided it was catch-up time."
This was the truth: after an hour in-game, he'd had to log off, too tired to keep his eyes open. Staying up till four was a bad pattern to set, no matter how hard at work he was. But the work was important—more important than sleep, if it meant giving her something real to hold onto.
"I know you're overworking yourself," she told him. "You don't have to put in this much effort. I'll like you just the same, I swear."
But would she? Gordon knew the statistics on long-distance relationships. Knew how the brain adapted to absence, how feelings could fade without regular reinforcement. He was making her the perfect boyfriend avatar, since he couldn't adventure with her in person. Yet. He'd been burning the midnight oil to make it happen, creating something that could be there for her when the distance got too heavy, when his voice wasn't enough anymore.
The four metal walls of her room were like a coffin, she'd told him. Under the VR headset, she could at least pretend to see blue sky, hear birds, and feel a breeze. But she was lonely—or rather, overwhelmed at the idea of adventuring with her overbearing parents or their coworkers. So he was giving her himself, as much as he could manage it. A digital companion that could hold her when he couldn't, that could be present in ways he never could be.
"I feel guilty," he told her. "You can brighten my day with so little effort—a quick video, the occasional text. Sometimes it feels like I can't return the favor. Not like you can. I don't have your way with words, and it doesn't seem equal to just trust that you know what I mean—you know what I mean anyway, so that's hardly giving you a gift at all."
Silence.
"That's why I'm making him," Gordon continued. "So you'll have something to remember me by when you're feeling lonely, just for now, for while we're stuck so far apart." Before the distance wins, he didn't say. Before we start forgetting why this matters. He'd given her the broadest of hints to set up a trade; at times, like now, he wished it'd just stayed a strict surprise.
More silence stretched, but it didn't feel tense. Gordon's eyelids began to fall again, and he popped his neck to have something to do to keep himself awake.
"You wouldn't feel guilty if you didn't care," she reminded him at length, though her voice wavered slightly. "And I'm not complaining. I just miss you horribly, even if we've never touched—It's strange, isn't it? How you can ache for something you've never even had? Sometimes it scares me."
The fear in her voice was what he dreaded most. Not anger, not irritation—fear. Fear of what they were doing to themselves, maintaining this impossible connection across impossible distance. Fear that the ache would eventually become too much to bear.
"Me too," he told her gently. "You've never been here in my bed, but I've fallen asleep listening to your voice so often it feels wrong to wake up alone. I even," he hesitated, then pressed on, "I even got a body pillow."
Her laughter after the quiet made him smile so fiercely that his jaw hurt. "Don't..." she gasped, "don't tell me it has my face on it!"
The laughter had been genuine, and that made him feel better. One more crisis averted. The weight of her loneliness lifted for another night, the conversation buying them both a little more time before the inevitable questions started: Is this worth it? Can we really keep doing this?
His pillow sat there, inoffensively innocent, with a fringed trim and brown-grey patterned case.
"I couldn't do that," he said, picturing her sweet smile. "I'd never be able to get out of bed again."
"I'm blushing," she told him, a secret delight in her words. "But I'll hold you to that sometime."
As always, the conversation lingered late into the night, until Gordon's eyes were simply too heavy and Marie gently ended the call with whispered kisses, each falling straight to sleep, alone but somehow less lonely than they'd been hours before. For now, it was enough. It had to be.