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Ariane let out a short sigh as she sat in the wooden chair before the Penrose’s scavenged short-range radio transmitter and receiver. She smiled to herself as the machine flicked on with a low hum and she gently turned the dials and knobs to get a clear signal, chuckling to herself once the static cleared up on the other end. She grabbed the microphone and held it in front of her lips as she pressed the talk button, but didn’t say anything, instead merely smiling at the radio.
She let go of the button and less than a second later she heard Elster’s voice over the speakers. “Miss me already, Ari?”
Ariane chuckled to herself as she pressed the talk button again. “No…. just… wanted to see if you’d found anything interesting yet!” she replied coyly.
Elster also chuckled as she let go of the talk button. “Well, got some of those flat, white caps that grow on the sides of dead trees… a couple of those beige wrinkly ones that look like morels… and a new one, it’s dark brown, tall, looks like a king trumpet with a bigger cap,” she explained.
“You made sure it’s edible, right?”
“I saw one of those deer-like creatures eating one. She saw me and ran away, so I got to grab the others left behind.”
Ariane smiled. “Nice… can’t wait to try them…” She paused for a moment with the talk button still held down, drumming her fingertips against the wooden table the radio sat on until she resumed talking. “So… how much longer do you think you’ll be, Ellie?”
Elster chuckled softly through the speaker. “Ah, so you do miss me?” she playfully accused.
“Nuh-uh!” Ariane immediately blurted back. “I’m just… hungry… I…” Ariane stopped again as static unexpectedly began to creep back into the radio feed. She let go of the microphone and it persisted, so she began fiddling with some of the control knobs again, trying to clear up the signal.
“Everything alright, Ari?” Elster’s garbled voice spoke out over the growing static.
Nothing Ariane did seemed to make the static disappear, and she slumped back in her chair with one eyebrow raised. She reached under her shirt and scratched at her lower stomach for a moment as she tried to think before picking the microphone back up.
“I’m getting some kind of… external interference… but… that shouldn’t be possible…”
She put the microphone down again and listened carefully to the static. It wasn’t constant, varying in pitch and volume at regular intervals, but what that meant continued to be a mystery for Ariane as she hummed away to herself.
“Could one of our contraptions be causing it?” Elster asked, her voice barely audible amidst the crackling static.
Ariane shrugged her shoulders as she replied. “I don’t think so…” She paused momentarily as her eyes slowly narrowed. “Unless…”
She quickly put the microphone down and started to re-tune the radio to different frequencies, listening carefully to the static as it waned in and out.
“Ach… ng… a... ung…”
Ariane froze. There was no mistaking it, there was someone, or something else broadcasting. She swallowed nervously as she began to more carefully tune to and clear up the signal on the radio, stopping once she heard a full, clear word.
“Achtung!”
There was still a small amount of static, but the voice was loud and clear. Ariane gulped as she picked up the microphone and slowly pressed the talk button.
“H-Hello…?” she almost whispered into the microphone before letting go.
“...Achtung! Achtung…! This is… Penrose-451… Anyone out there?” a feminine voice called out over the radio
Ariane’s eyes opened wide as she sat in shock at hearing another person’s voice for the first time in well over a Vinetan decade. Eventually, she collected enough of herself to try and offer another response, the microphone almost slipping from her fingers in her excitement.
“Yes! Penrose-451, I hear you!” she replied excitedly, bouncing her feet on the floor. “Are you receiving me, Penrose-451?!”
She let go of the microphone and squirmed in her seat as she waited for a response, eventually fiddling with the controls just a bit more to try and get the signal as clear as possible.
“...Achtung! Achtung!” the voice spoke out on the speakers again.
Ariane’s heart sank for a moment, worrying that the voice she had encountered was just an automated broadcast and that the ship it came from was dead and derelict in space, not unlike they would have been had they not found Liebe.
But, her fears were thankfully short-lived.
“...Yes! Yes! I hear you!”
Ariane leapt from her seat and cheered for a few seconds, stamping her feet to a chorus of, “Yes, yes, yes!” that escaped from her lips before she cleared her throat and sat back down, still barely able to keep her legs still. “Penrose-451, this is Gestalt Officer Ariane Yeong of the Eusan Navy scout ship Penrose-512! If you can hear us, you must be close to the planet we have landed on!”
She tried not to squeal with joy too strongly as she waited for another reply.
“...Yeong? No need to be so formal! I can already tell you’ve also left the Nation behind.”
Silently, Ariane breathed a small sigh of relief. At least that potential conflict would not become an issue. She also noticed that their visitor carried a similar accent to her aunt and uncle, marking them as another resident of Rotfront.
“My name’s Caroline,” she said over the radio. “So, Ariane, how long ago did you discover that planet?”
Ariane couldn’t help but smile her widest as she continued the conversation. “Around eight hundred or so Cycles ago.”
“And I assume it’s liveable?”
“Very. Breathable oxygen and nitrogen atmosphere, doesn’t get too cold or too hot, days are a bit shorter but years and seasons are a bit longer than what you’re probably used to, and our crops are growing very well, we’ve even cultivated a couple of local plants!”
Caroline whistled over the speaker. “Oh, Ariane, you’re a godsend! Our little ship is… well, she’s seen better days, as yours probably has.”
“She got us this far, probably wouldn’t have been much longer… how many Cycles have you been up?”
“By my count? Well over four thousand.”
Ariane whistled this time. “You must be itching to stretch your legs!” she joked.
“And breathe fresh air!” Caroline also joked along.
“And eat some fresh food!” Ariane added, patting her expanded midriff over her shirt at the thought. “Can you tell how far you’re out by the signal quality?”
“Ah! Elsa, er, that’s my LSTR, is figuring that out right now… oh… really…? I’d say about three hours, then!”
Ariane’s heart skipped a beat and she cooed quietly at how Caroline had spoken about her engineer. She exhaled peacefully and lightly tapped the tip of her foot against the ground a few times before she replied.
“We should have a big pot of mushroom stew waiting for you when you arrive, Caroline,” she calmly but joyfully told her.
“I can barely contain my anticipation,” was all she said.
Ariane waited a few more seconds, letting the magnitude of their meeting over the radio wash over her a while longer before she continued. “I’ll be back in a second, just going to tell my Ellie the good news!” she said, making sure to put just a little extra emphasis on the possessive pronoun.
Caroline lightly chuckled over the radio. “Can’t wait to meet the happy couple,” she teased.
Ariane also laughed softly as she tuned the radio back to Elster’s frequency, stopping for a moment once she reached it to figure out how to break the news to her.
“...Oh, Ariane, you are back? Did you figure out whatever was affecting the radio?” Elster eventually asked over it.
Ariane smiled as wide as she could as she replied, “Ellie…? Come back as fast as you can, please…! You’re never going to believe this…!”
…..
Elster did find Ariane’s revelation hard to believe, but she also knew the sheer excitement and joy Ariane put into her words and little shaking fists was not something that could be fabricated.
By sheer coincidence and luck, another of the hundreds of Penrose ships had found their little planet.
Ariane took Elster’s foraged mushrooms and got to work preparing their stew, unable to stop pointing out to herself that they would have guests for dinner, other explorers like themselves.
“Hey, Ellie?” she asked as the two chopped the mushrooms and vegetables for their stew, Ariane slowly and carefully cutting the mushrooms into chunks while Elster’s deft, precise, mechanical hands rapidly diced the celery, carrot, and onion at a rate almost too fast to see with the naked eye. Elster hummed back in acknowledgment, getting Ariane to finish her last chop and lay the knife on its side atop the prep table. “Do you think destroying the communications antennae was the right call?” she asked.
Elster’s knife echoed softly as her chopping froze the next time her steel met the wooden cutting board. She relaxed her shoulders, rolling one of them as she sighed quietly.
“Do you believe that if we had not, more ships might have found us than just this one?” she asked back.
Ariane turned toward Elster, who also laid her knife down on the table. “It’s a possibility, isn’t it?” she said hesitantly.
Elster sighed again as she leaned against the table on her palms. Eventually, she hung her head, and after a deep breath in and out she quietly mouthed back, “Yes, it was… we got lucky.”
Ariane stepped forward and reached up to gently rub Elster’s shoulder, she couldn’t see her face clearly past her arm and her hair falling around her head, but she could tell there was a hint of fear and apprehension behind her words.
“Lucky in what way, Ellie?” she asked.
“Lucky we were not found by loyalists,” Elster replied before she stood back up straight, brushing her synthetic hair out of her eyes. She gently bit her bottom lip between words and raised her far hand to rest atop Ariane’s on her shoulder. “All I wish for is to live here safely, with you, Ari… and I do not want anything or anyone to come in the way of that.”
Ariane nodded and leaned into Elster to share a hug with her. She sighed into Elster’s chest as she rested her head into the crook of her heck.
“Surely so many years alone with only each other would have broken down even the strongest loyalist wills,” Ariane suggested as Elster gently rubbed her back.
“Hmm… we humans have known that war is just senseless slaughter and destruction for hundreds of years… and yet most of us are still willing to participate and propagate it simply because a higher authority tells us it is a noble thing to do.”
Ariane sighed somewhat wearily as she gave Elster one last squeeze. “Yeah… but… it’s nice that we met others who can understand us,” she said before she let go of her wife and took a step back, the two holding hands between them. Elster smiled at Ariane, who smiled back before looking over at all the prep work the two had already done. “Why don’t you go say hi?” she suggested, smiling warmly for her wife. “You helped with the most tedious part, I can take care of the rest,” she explained, reaching up and lightly stroking Elster’s cheek with the back of a hand.
Elster cocked her head slightly to the side for a moment as Ariane flipped her hand around and cupped her cheek, but eventually, she huffed playfully and shrugged her shoulders, simply giving Ariane a quiet peck on the lips before she walked out of the kitchen and toward the tool shed where they kept the radio. Once inside, she sat down at the table, picked up the microphone, and lightly cleared her throat before finding the talk button and holding it down.
“Hello…?” she called out hesitantly through the microphone.
“Ah, you must be Ellie,” a feminine voice replied. Elster surmised that it must have been Caroline.
“How could you tell it was me?” she asked.
“Because I’ve been living with Elsa here for over a decade… and I’d recognize that voice anywhere, probably even in the middle of a blizzard.”
Elster couldn’t help but chuckle. “So, all Replika unit types have the same voice, you say?”
Caroline also laughed through the speaker. “Close enough, really. From my time in the navy, I remember the older serving Stars and Storches tended to have more variance in their cadence than the newer ones… but they were all pretty identifiable.”
Elster raised an eyebrow and let out a silent, “Huh.”
“Another observation? I know most Gestalts have difficulty telling Replika of the same type apart, but you Replika seem to be able to do it pretty naturally… what does it come down to? Subtle body language? Speech patterns? That mysterious, unknown feeling of familiarity?”
“Sadly, I would not know. I have never met any other Replika, let alone other LSTR units… Ariane is the only person I have ever known.”
“...Wow… I… honestly never considered that…” Her voice tapered off slightly as if she leaned away from the microphone to talk to someone else. “Hey, Elsa, you ever met anyone else…? Really…? Wow…”
Elster gave the two a few seconds before she spoke again on the radio. “I’m curious now, though, do I sound very different from your Elster? From Elsa?”
Caroline chuckled briefly. “Here, how about you talk to her and find out?” she suggested, with the speakers cutting out for a few seconds.
“Greetings, Ellie,” a much deeper, but still feminine voice called out to her.
Elster was taken aback for a moment. “Hello, Elsa,” she replied before quickly following up her greeting with a question. “Is my… is our voice really that deep?”
“...You have never listened to a recording of yourself before?”
Elster shook her head briefly before she remembered that she was talking to someone over the radio. “Uh, no, never found the need to.”
“Well… you always sound different to yourself, because of how your voice echoes through your head as you talk,” Elsa explained.
“Hmm, you are right, yeah,” Elster acknowledged.
Both sides of the radio fell silent for a minute. Elster had no idea what to talk about, and it seemed like Elsa didn’t either, at least for a while.
“So, well, what do you and Ariane… like to do together?” she suddenly asked.
Elster smiled. For a moment, she imagined what it would have been like had Ariane been in the room with her while she was trying to talk to their new friends. She probably would have nudged her on the shoulder and given her a topic to bring up, something that seemed plausible for Caroline to do as well.
“We dance, we watch movies together, Ariane paints and I will sometimes write stories based on how her paintings make me feel… we talk a lot, we cuddle, and we have s-” Elster bit her lip to stop talking, having not fully realized that for the first time in her life she was talking to someone who wasn’t her wife. “That is to say, we… explored each other’s bodies…”
There was a long, pregnant pause on the radio before Elsa responded, and at a bare whisper. “We… also…”
Elster coughed. “Well done,” she whispered back.
“Anyway!” Elsa rather loudly barked over the speaker. “Caroline and I… we play a lot of games… card games, board games, she brought a fair number of them aboard the ship.”
Elster smiled. “Ariane has something called a tarot deck, have you heard of that?”
“Yes!” Elsa enthusiastically replied. “It is very interesting… and somewhat eerie on how accurate many of the predictions turn out to be.”
“I am sure Ariane would love to talk to you both about that so much,” Elster said, smiling widely.
There was another momentary pause before the speakers picked up again.
“I am looking forward to getting to meet you both quite a lot,” Elsa said.
Elster nodded at the radio and held the microphone close to her lips. “So am I,” she quietly replied.
…..
As the Penrose-451 made its final approach to Liebe, Ariane and Elster huddled around the radio, getting a play-by-play of every moment as they geared up to land.
“You have a good lock on our signal?” Ariane asked through the microphone.
“The sensors aren’t what they used to be, but we’re close enough to get a pretty accurate reading now,” Caroline replied. “There’s another clearing in the woods about four hundred meters north-northeast from your landing site, we’re going to try and touch down there.”
Elster leaned over Ariane’s shoulder, who turned and looked up at her from her seat in front of the radio and passed the microphone to her. “Have you finished your final approach checklist?”
This time, Elsa spoke back over the radio. “Almost everything is nominal. The landing gear servos are shot, even the explosive bolts did not dislodge them, so we will have to touch down without them.”
“It’ll probably be a rough landing,” Caroline added over the speakers. “But it’s not like we’ll ever expect to take off again in this old hunk of junk.”
Elster passed the microphone back to Ariane, who was once again bouncing her feet in her chair. “You’re going to love it here, both of you,” she said, sharing a smile with Elster as the two briefly looked at each other. “There’s just so much colour! Green, blue, orange, pink, violet, it took a good while for my eyes to get adjusted to it all!”
Caroline laughed over the radio before she responded. “Well, maybe I should start with some of your paintings, Ariane… get myself acclimated before truly stepping into such a brave new world?” she joked.
“We should play a board game together tonight!” Elsa beamed through the speakers. “Finally, we can have an authentic multiplayer experience.”
“We’ll have so many things now!” Ariane added, sharing another excited smile with her wife.
But just then, static began to creep back through the radio. “We’re starting to…the atmosphere… …have… lot… …terference…”
Elster put her hand on Ariane’s shoulder and gently squeezed her. Ariane immediately reached over with her far hand and gave Elster’s hand a squeeze of her own.
“...coming in… too hot… …the pitch… yaw…? …that can’t… Elsa…! …up! Abort…! …got to…”
Ariane felt all the blood drain from her face as the radio finally sputtered out into nothing but static. She looked up at Elster and saw her gulp heavily, her eyes darting all over the place. Slowly, Ariane got out of her chair, but as she stood, Elster suddenly burst out of the shed and looked up in the sky.
“No!”
Ariane quickly followed her outside and covered her mouth with both hands as she shrieked in terror. There was a burning object streaking through the sky, engulfed in flames as it fell toward the ground. They followed the burning ship as it descended out of control, finally impacting the ground a few seconds later, at least a couple of kilometres from their homestead.
Elster wasted no time. She ran back inside the shed, grabbed a first aid kit and ran as fast as she could on her awkward hooves toward where the Penrose-451 had crashed, with Ariane doing her best to follow her through the thick foliage before Elster eventually stopped for a moment to let her climb onto her back, whereupon she carried Ariane the rest of the distance.
Ariane felt her heart lurch again when they finally saw the crashed ship.
The Penrose-451 had plowed into a small hill past some trees at a nearly forty-five-degree angle, the rear third of the ship sticking up from the ground while the front was partially buried in the soil. Still not wasting any time to process the horrific sight before her, Elster quickly climbed up the side of the ship with Ariane still on her back to access the starboard airlock. She didn’t wait for the exterior locks to disengage, instead forcing them open through brute force, and then swinging the airlock open herself. Smoke began to billow out almost immediately after opening the interior airlock door, with Ariane covering her mouth with a sleeve while they carefully traversed through the ship’s familiar-looking interior.
It wasn’t a pretty sight.
The amount of trash bags piled into corners, burnt-out electrical wall panels, and doors left permanently ajar all clued into the ship already being in bad shape before the crash, but now, every light flickered wildly, small fires had been started amidst groups of scattered trash and paper, and the whole ship’s interior groaned under the weight of its own hull. As they entered the main hall, Ariane noticed through the flickering lights that the walls were covered in a massive collage of ascending numbers: Caroline and Elsa had marked off every Cycle they had spent on their journey, and she saw that it went well into the four-thousands.
Ariane gulped hard as they reached the flight deck, but Elster didn’t hesitate. She forced the stuck door open, but after taking two steps inside the cockpit, she finally froze. Ariane slowly crept up behind the motionless Elster, and over her shoulder, she saw an image that struck at the very core of her heart.
Caroline, a pale, Gestalt woman with long, blond hair who looked to be in her early forties, slumped back in her pilot chair while the limp body of an LSTR unit, Elsa, covered her body in an attempt to shield her from the force of the impact. Blood and oxidant pooled around the chair, and Elsa’s left arm only hung onto her body by a single servo and a flap of polyethylene skin.
After a few seconds to finally absorb what had just happened, Elster reached forward with a shaky hand and felt the side of Elsa’s synth skin on her neck. Elster’s body visibly sunk, and Ariane knew what the result was even before she turned toward her and shook her head.
And then Caroline coughed.
Ariane gasped. Elster picked up Elsa’s body as gently as she could and laid her on the copilot’s seat on her side before checking in on Caroline, who continued to cough and sputter.
“Ariane, the medical bay! Quickly!” Elster barked. Ariane rapidly blinked for a fraction of a second before she grabbed Elster’s first aid bag and ran back into the halls to the medical bay, whose doors were partially stuck, the left side wouldn’t budge at about the halfway mark, but she was able to slowly push open the right half, finishing just as Elster arrived with Caroline nearly limp in her arms, turning sideways to squeeze through the partial opening and lay her down on the table inside. “Tension pneumothorax, internal bleeding, multiple fractures…” Elster listed off as she took a moment to look over Caroline’s body before turning toward Ariane. “We need morphine, clotting factor, and see if there are any universal synthetic blood units in the freezer!”
“Right!” Ariane replied before taking off toward the medication shelves. Meanwhile, Elster looked around the mess of scattered implements and topped-over cabinets from the crash until she found it: she pulled a rolling stand with an attached vitals monitor back upright and put the attached pulse oximeter on Caroline’s finger; her heart beat dangerously fast, Elster knew she had to work quickly. She rolled a heavy cabinet onto its side and opened one of the drawers, spilling dozens of individually wrapped items across the metal floor grating. She grabbed one and tore it open to reveal a blank syringe before she returned to Caroline’s side and tore open the side of her uniform as she continued her struggle to breathe. Elster pulled the plunger out from the syringe, getting ready to puncture the side of Caroline’s chest and reinflate her lung, but she weakly grabbed her forearm as she tried to turn her head toward Elster and look at her with her weak, brown eyes.
“E… El… Els…?” she gasped.
Elster blinked and swallowed quickly. “I am sorry,” she apologised in advance before she jabbed the needle into Caroline’s side, causing her to yelp weakly in pain.
“No morphine, but there’s paracetamol and clotting factor!” Ariane said as she approached Elster and handed her a pair of vials. Elster nodded and grabbed two more fresh, wrapped syringes from the floor as Ariane started to look through the medical freezer. Elster started by drawing a syringe full of the clotting factor, as that was the most pressing issue with Caroline looking more and more pale by the second. “Freezer’s been dead for who knows how long, nothing in here is going to be good!” Ariane shouted from the side of the room.
“Scheiße…” Elster muttered as she finished drawing the medication. She then gave the tip a few flicks as she lightly depressed the plunger, making sure there were no air pockets in the syringe before she plunged the needle right between Caroline’s ribs and directly into her heart, hoping that this would get the clotting factor wherever it needed to be the fastest, and then did the same with the analgesic. Ariane returned to stand on the other side of the table across from Elster and squeezed Caroline’s hand hard as they waited and hoped for a turnaround.
“Please… don’t leave us… Elsa… she saved you! So please… stay with us!” Ariane pleaded.
But seconds later Caroline’s eyes began to flutter, and the machine monitoring her vitals began to squeal loudly.
“V-fib!” Elster said aloud as she saw the heart monitor flatline. “Quickly! Where is the defibrillator?!”
They both scanned quickly around the ruined room for a few precious seconds before Ariane found it. “There!” she said, pointing to a machine on its side at the foot of the exam table. Elster quickly grabbed it and put it on the countertop behind her, grabbing the paddles and waiting for the machine to charge as Ariane cut open the top of Caroline’s uniform with a pair of medical shears.
“Schockabgabe in. Drei. Zwei. Ein,” the machine spoke out in a monotone, robotic voice. Elster pressed the paddles to Caroline’s chest and shocked her, but the heart monitor only barely flickered.
“Charging!” Elster shouted as the machine whirred up again.
“Schockabgabe in. Drei. Zwei. Ein.” Again, no response from Caroline.
“Charging!” Elster growled loudly.
Across from her, Ariane clasped her hands in front of her heart and weakly called out to her. “Elster…”
“Schockabgabe in. Drei. Zwei. Ein.” Elster shocked Caroline a third time. Her body lurched, but the flatline persisted.
“Come on!” Elster screamed as the defibrillator charged for a fourth time, only to notice after turning around from increasing the voltage on the machine that Ariane had found the ultrasound, and had the probe pressed against Caroline’s chest. She looked at the image on the machine for a moment and wordlessly turned the screen toward Elster.
Her heart had stopped beating.
Elster’s hands golding the paddles slowly began to shake the longer she looked at the image on the ultrasound. Eventually, she put them down next to the defibrillator and turned the machine off, her breathing picking up in volume with each second. Ariane slowly began to approach Elster from around the side of the exam table, reaching out toward her as she did so.
She stopped and quickly took a step back as Elster wheeled herself toward the wall and screamed as she punched the metal panelling with all her strength, leaving behind a sizable dent. She continued to scream, her anger eventually cracking into tears as she continued to strike at the wall over and over even as it started to wear away at her fingers and knuckles, her pinky finger breaking off completely.
“Elster, stop!” Ariane pleaded as she ran forward and hugged Elster from behind. By now, she was sobbing uncontrollably, and gave the crater she made in the medical bay wall one last tap with her ruined hand before she turned around and fell to her knees, fiercely hugging her as she cried into her chest. Ariane hugged Elster back as tight as she could as she started to cry alongside her.
Neither had words.
Eventually, they decided to bury Caroline and Elsa back at their homestead, so they could at least live together in spirit. They deserved that much, they both agreed.
Ariane replaced Elster’s thoroughly broken right hand with a new one from the Penrose-451’s storage bay, and Elster personally made multiple trips back and forth between their homestead and the crashed ship to retrieve Caroline and Elsa’s bodies, as well as any other supplies and materials that may be useful.
On one such trip, she returned with a crate full of filled-out journals, and a single board game left undamaged by the crash. Neither wanted to look at either much, but they felt that they should when they were ready.
Elster and Ariane took turns digging the graves, and as their friends were laid to rest, Ariane read them a prayer for everlasting life from an old Imperial book of sermons, while Elster honoured them with a three-volley salute from one of the rifles they had aboard their ship.
By the time they finally sat down to have their dinner, mushroom stew, it was cold.
But neither cared.
It wouldn’t have tasted right without them anyway.