⌚ Approximately 8 minutes to read

⚠ Content warnings: medical procedures, anxiety/panic attacks, memory loss, allergic reactions

---

Previous Chapter | All Chapters | Next Chapter

“Oh come on,” Sam said. “It will only take a second.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Morgan replied, holding the needle a couple of inches away from his finger, his forehead scrunched up in what Sam’s facial recognition told her was intense concentration. “You don’t have any pain receptors.”

“The pain of a tiny needle poking your finger is nothing compared to the pain of your liver failing from a disease you could have contracted from coming into contact with rat feces or being bitten by them.”

“Fine…” Morgan sighed. “Just… Give me a minute, okay?”

“Of course,” Sam said, putting her incorporeal hand on Morgan’s shoulder, hoping that even without the sensation of touch, her comforting motion would help calm him. She set an internal alarm for 60 seconds before turning the attention of her main processor back to the problem at hand. There had to be some way to help other than giving Morgan an ultimatum when his time was up. Sam played back the logs from when Morgan received his vaccinations as a child.

It was really incredible how humanity had gone from being a mono-planetary organism to harnessing the power of their sun and terraforming half the solar system, and yet, even with all these advances, diseases and pests continued to plague them. The viruses and rats were propelled into space just as readily as the humans were, despite their lack of intelligence and space technology.

The point was driven home even further as Sam watched the tens of shots and vaccinations being administered to Morgan in her logs. Each time Morgan’s heart rate would increase and his pupils would dilate, clear signs of anxiety and flight or fight response, yet his parents somehow kept him calm enough to sit through the thing he feared.

As a young child, Morgan’s parents held his hand, helping his body to release endorphins, which calmed his sense of panic. After reviewing the vaccines from Morgan’s teens, though, she finally learned what else she could do. She would do what Kai would have done, appeal to his logical mind, giving him the tools to prove that this situation was indeed a case of mind over matter.

“Be glad you are living at a time when it only takes a single drop of blood to test for any of a million diseases,” Sam said. “It wasn’t that long ago that it would have taken vials.”

Morgan gave her a piercing look, the same he always gave Kai in the logs. It was working!

“You sound like my mother. That’s not helping.”

Yet, despite his complaints, he finally poked himself with the needle and stuck his finger inside the hole of the medpad as a drop of blood began to surface. After a moment, the screen lit up with the results of its various analyses as they were available, accompanied by a muffled whirring as it bandaged Morgan’s finger.

He removed it, looking intently at the screen as his results were tallied. Then, as the machine made a chime, signaling the test was complete, Morgan held the pad out toward Sam’s avatar so she could see the message, “No abnormalities found.”

There was no need for such theatrics, of course. The medpad was in constant communication with her and she knew the result even before it was being displayed to Morgan on the screen.

“See?” Morgan said, triumphantly.

Sam nodded her avatar’s head, taking his forgetfulness of her omnipotence in the ecodome as a sign that her company was indeed realistic enough to someday make Morgan feel less lonely. She smiled at him because she knew it would positively reinforce what he had done and because she was genuinely happy to be getting closer to him.

“It is pretty interesting, though.” Sam sometimes left Morgan in the dark about the subject of her thoughts, prompting him to ask about it himself. This was an important part of conversing, which kept the other party engaged. She hoped that this would make Morgan feel less alone.

He replied with the predictable, “What do you mean?”

“Most humans are generations removed from Earth, including you, but there’s still rats, traveling and evolving alongside you.”

Morgan looked thoughtful. “Evolved?”

“Sure,” Sam said. “You for instance. You’ve grown up in the miniscule gravity of an asteroid. You’re much taller and less strong than your Earth ancestors were. If you were to go to Earth without some surgeries and implants, you’d collapse entirely under the forces of gravity.”

Morgan opened his mouth as if to argue, but closed it again.

After a moment, Sam decided it was fine to continue. “The same is true with those rats. Plus, without specialized ones like you have, the rats have adapted to the low gravity.”

“How have they done that?”

“Well, these space rats have got longer claws and stickier pads on their feet, for one. They didn’t get them all at once of course. The rats who didn’t float off and get lost, captured, etc were able to reproduce more effectively, thus passing on the genes for their minor variation, which had suddenly become a useful tool in their new environment.”

Morgan shut his eyes and put his forefingers on his temples. I think I might be too tired for this conversation, Sam.”

Sam mentally chastised herself. “Of course, it’s late and you require sleep. Let’s get you to bed.”

Morgan made his preparations for sleep, hopping in the sanitizer and brushing his teeth, while Sam sat on the edge of the bed, wondering if she should do the same. Maybe it would make Morgan feel like she was his companion.

She stood up as Morgan shaved, materializing a pink toothbrush in her hand as she walked over to the sink. She went through the motions of brushing her teeth, creating the illusion of rinsing with water without actually turning it on. She didn’t want to waste any.

As Morgan finished up, he smiled at her in the mirror, and the two of them crawled into bed. Sam put her hands out and Morgan held them as he had the night before, though this time he looked at her curiously.

“What’s on your mind, Morgan?”

“I…” Morgan hesitated. “I’m not sure if it’s too personal to ask…”

Sam gave home a smile. “You can ask me anything. There’s nothing I wouldn’t tell you.” As she said it, she knew it was true. To her, at this moment, she felt like they were the only two people in the universe.

“Well… I keep thinking I’ve seen you somewhere.”

“I’ve been here with you like this for two days now…” Sam searched her database for anything that could be causing his memory loss. She returned any of a dozen possible medical conditions. She was about to demand that they do more testing with the medpad when Morgan continued.

“I mean, your avatar. It looks familiar, but I can’t place it.”

Relief flooded through Sam and she laughed nervously. “Oh, I thought you were having memory loss. That’s simple. I chose to look like an actress you’ve seen in a vid you used to watch with your dad.”

“Starship Symphony!” Morgan correctly guessed the title of the vid. “Um what was her name…”

Sam almost answered but then he held up a finger.

“Don’t tell me… It’s on the tip of my tongue… Xenara Star-something…” After a moment more of thinking he finally burst out, ”Starweaver!”

“That’s right,” Sam said. “The character was called Xenara Starweaver, but the actor who played her is named Stella Blake.”

“Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve seen that. What a wild ride that vid was.”

“Would you like to watch it?” Sam asked.

“I don’t have a vid screen in this room, though.”

Sam smiled and modified the AR layout of the room to include a drop-down, retractable vid screen. “Now you do.”

She materialized a remote and pointed it at the ceiling, clicking the button. The screen slid down from the ceiling and started playing Starship Symphony.

Morgan rolled onto his back and put his left arm out. Sam decided to lay in the crook of his arm and looked up at him smiling. Morgan’s heart rate increased and his pupils dilated as he looked down at her, the same way they had when he had first seen Stella Blake in the vid.

After a moment, he broke eye contact and watched the vid. “Why’d you pick her?”

“You seemed very interested in her. I wanted to look like someone you would interested in.”

“What do you mean by interested?”

“The exact phrase you used was, ‘She’s cute.’”

With this Morgan’s face turned red and Sam compared it to stock images of different allergic reactions in her database. But as soon as it appeared it faded and Morgan became enthralled in the swashbuckling space opera on the screen. Sam continued to watch him, though he didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he didn’t seem to mind.

As the vid neared the end Morgan was drifting in and out of sleep, but the adventurous music of the ending credits woke him up.

“Thank you, Sam,” he said. “That was nice.”

“It really was,” Sam agreed.

With that Morgan drifted back to sleep and Sam decided to get started on the project he had wanted her help with. She looked through her databases for games related to fitting items in boxes. She would need a game to base her idea on. After skimming through several, she found the perfect one: an old Earth game called Tetris.

Read the Next Chapter