Weakling

Okay, so I'm a bit of a weakling, and I should have left her long ago, and she probably only stays with me for the fringe benefits, but I can't exactly get away from her. The mission lasts six years and there's no jumping off in dead space.

That's what we call it, because it isn't the "space" we learned about in grade school. It isn't full of photo-perfect stars and planets and asteroids. That kinda stuff is for cheap science fiction magazines where ships can travel faster than the speed of light and we all know how impossible that is. We travel through the domain of the wormholes, jumping from one to the next through the junction boxes that the engineers maintain.

The walls of a wormhole, if you can call them walls, block out everything: light, sound, time, your own freakin' sanity. It's no wonder that Lissy and I are barely speaking to each other. We've both been starved of basic human needs for far too long.

Except for you know. We make time for that whenever we can. She's "fixed" so we don't have to worry about the future, and believe me, it could be a lot nicer with more affection blown into the mix. But a guy's gotta live, you know? And there isn't anything else to do. The ship flies itself. The wormholes direct it straight ahead. Whenever we come to a junction, there's a bit of work to do, o'course. Setting orthogonals and paying tolls and such, but at most we get a day's worth of entertainment out of a reroute.

This latest wormhole's been over two years long. Our relationship turned sour about eight months ago. I'd give anything to download intellishrink software. Have a session or two, or fifty, to get some animosity out into the open. But every day is the same. She sits in the co-pilot seat and hums to herself while she types random drivel into the computer. She says she's "writing" but she won't show me any of it. I bet she's typing: "I hate the bastard!" over and over again. I don't believe for a minute she could be thinking words as fast as she's typing them out.

"Wayne?"

"Yes, Lissy?"

"I'm finished."

"Finished what?"

"The novel. Wanna read it?"