Dr. Amelia Brand pushed herself back from the toilet and ran her fingers through her sweat-slicked hair. It amazed her how quickly her hair was growing here. The rest of her body still struggled in the environment of the new planet. Even though she only drank water filtered through every drug and filter she had, and avoided the vegetation altogether, her head and stomach rebelled against the very atmosphere.
Wiping her mouth, Amelia stepped to the door of the camp to watch the star set over the small "farm" she was cultivating with CASE. She struggled to keep her eyes on the tiny green leaves fluttering in the almost constant breeze of twilight, but as always, her face lifted, as if magnetized, to the sky.
CASE hummed up beside her. "I suppose it's obvious to state that there is an incalculably small chance of any human returning for you." He stated.
She smiled wryly and closed her eyes. "CASE, I know I promised not to touch your personality settings, but you might want to work on your tact."
"It makes no difference to me how you adjust my settings. I have no established personality. It is your own human sentiment that keeps you from it. If my attitude becomes a danger to your mental health, adjustments must be made."
She pushed herself off the doorframe and brushed past him into the tent with a rueful smile. "My 'mental health' is just fine, thank you sir."
"I suppose it would be tactless to point out that you have yet to sleep through a single night without crying out in your sleep," he responded, humming after her. "Or that several times I have found you wandering the camp at night while unconscious: a symptom of acute psychological distress."
"My planet is dead, CASE," she said evenly as she slid a tray of food from a heating unit. "Dead or dying. My father is certainly dead and surrounded by people who are suffocating because of his lack of faith in them. Wolf is buried right outside my door and all of my comrades gave their lives to get me on this planet." She sat down at the table and gazed down at her meal, "I don't know why I keep looking up at the sky. There's no one to come back for me."
CASE observed her for a moment in silence and then remarked, "I have yet to understand how that was supposed to assure me of the stability of your mental state."
Amelia stirred her protein mix briskly, "I'm a scientist. Everyone I love is dead, and every night I have to pay the price for that, but during the day, I'm happy, CASE, I really am. It is in my nature to be eternally curious, and I could never satisfy my curiosity here."
-
Humanity. The warm, bubbling riot of human energy: shouts of laughter and casual contact, banter and pain and screaming and excitement and curiosity and rebellion. She had thought she could live without it, but it swelled up before her like a mirage before she fell asleep at night and blossomed in her mind like a migraine in the day.
She had laughed twice in the past week. Once when she had stumbled across two of the animals she had casually named "Wolf squirrels" squealing in a small bush. Concerned that the ugly little animals were trapped or injured, she had approached to observe more closely and realized that the creatures were mating. For the first time since the landing, she had shouted with laughter, both at her misunderstanding and at her nonsensical embarrassment. The second time was when she found herself quoting Cooper's triumphant "and for our next trick!" after she and Case had unearthed a particularly stubborn boulder in the farm area. Despite the apparent optimism of the Plan B experiment, Cooper might have been the last human she would ever see and her last memory of him involved him throwing himself into a black hole to save her life. The nightmares were understandable.
What felt less understandable was her habit of confusing her memories of Edmunds and Cooper. Both men shared some common personality traits like a sense humor and unflagging hopefulness, but Cooper had an incomparable energy that spilled from his every word and action. She knew that there was a piece of him that had been madly in love with their mission, despite the forced absence from his children and planet. He thrived in the exploration, even the desperation, of their journey and in the ancient privilege of flinging his life into the salvation of his family. Despite their relatively short time spent together, he loomed largely in her memory and, with the passage of time, he began eclipsing many of her memories of time spent with Edmunds.
"It's because I never saw his corpse," she muttered under her breath as she dug in the farm one morning, breaking ground for new Earthly seedlings. Her habit of talking to herself had been cultivated on Earth, but was increasing rapidly in the loneliness of her new planet. "If I had just seen him actually die, or had been able to bury him like I did with Wolf… there are so many theories to suggest that he might still be alive, trapped in some nightmarish reality or in some agonizingly slow death. But somehow just the idea that he could be alive…"
Nothing had come to her from the black hole. Nothing from TARS or Cooper, but there was always the possibility that TARS had spotted the singularity and had been able to beam back the life-saving information to his home base on the planet. The chances, CASE assured her, were "incalculably small" – a phrase he used uncomfortably often for a computing machine, as she often reminded him. Even if TARS had managed to broadcast the information home, given the pliability of time, there was no way of predicting when such information had, or would, reach the planet. Hope for humanity would remain with her alone, and hopefully, with the children to come.
It was the first real sleep she had experienced on the planet. CASE had stood over her for an hour, monitoring her sleep patterns as she sank smoothly, her breathing deep and regular. He watched her smooth brain waves abruptly spike as she reached REM, the deepest level of sleep. A human would have winced as her brain activity jolted up, wondering what horrors she was facing, paralyzed, in the hollows of her eyelids. Her lips fell open in a quick intake of breath and her shoulders jumped in a single, hiccupping spasm and then relaxed again.
CASE did not flinch, but observed her impassively, his readings automatically filed and then broadcast instantly through the outer atmosphere, racing for the wormhole and humanity but eternally springing back and echoing hollowly through the deaf reality of an empty galaxy. There was no human face in the whole of the desert planet to feel curiosity at the mental state of Dr. Amelia Brand, the last of her species, or to express empathy towards a lonely girl fighting demons in the dark. And a knock sounded at her door.
Three sharp raps, and Amelia's brain waves sharply altered course again as she sprang up, dizzy and disoriented, lips and eyes heavy with sleep and memory rich with colorfully edited memories of her past.
She looked straight up at the form of the robot and in a guttural whisper, asked, "Was that… is that real?"
"Something is attempting to enter the camp, Dr. Brand," he replied.
"It's at the door," she whispered back. "How does it know that it's a door? Did it… did it sound like a knock?"
"Do you want me to go look?" he inquired.
She gazed at him in indecision, listening with every aching nerve in her body. "I wish you were still a Marine," she muttered.
"All of my previous, relevant programming has been overridden Dr. Br-"
"I know that!" she hissed, and then cut herself off as the knocks boomed through her quiet shelter again, three low thuds, heavy with life.
"Dr. Brand? Dr. Brand!" Cooper's voice rang through the structure, and Amelia sprang up, taking an automatic step towards the door and then freezing in place, her mind whirring through the impossibility of that voice existing here.
Hands fumbled at the lock outside the door and Cooper's voice dropped to an anxious murmur. "Come on, Amelia, where are you?"
She raced across the floor on silent feet and threw open the door, taking an immediate step back.
Cooper fell back a step as well at the suddenness of the door flying open and his face lit up with boyish delight at the sight of her. He looked incredible, in every sense of the word. Not a single inch of him was credible to her. His face was cleaner and more relaxed than she had ever seen it. That, or something else, had taken years off his face. He wore a green, fitted, almost military looking jumpsuit and a helmet was tucked under one arm.
Cooper stepped forward quickly over the threshold and as he broke her personal space, she fell back another step. "Hey there, Dr. Brand," he said.
"How…" was all she managed, but she had already begun to doubt her sanity.
"We made it through the hole!" He beamed. "Don't even ask me how but They wanted us to and we did. CASE saw the horizon, Dr. Brand, and we managed to beam the information back! When we came out of the hole, the remnants of humanity were there to pick us up! We saw them and they're alive! Come on now, doctor, aren't you the least bit happy to see me?"
Her brain only followed the words to verify the possibility of his story and her arms fled around his neck as if of their own accord and her fingers ran down his back, feeling the imperfect coarseness of his flight suit and the warmth at the back of his neck. He was real. "Your kids?" she asked, yet unable to complete a full sentence.
She felt his fingers tighten on her back as he tensed up. "We lost a lot of years at the hole, both of us did. My kids are gone, but Murph – she saved humanity. I got to talk to her for a while before she passed. She's a hero. They named a space colony after her."
Amelia's eyes widened at the mention of the black hole. The image of this man blasting himself into the singularity to save her came searing back into her memory and she pushed away from him abruptly.
"You killed yourself, Cooper, you arrogant idiot! We were a team! What part of that gives you the right to martyr yourself or to make any other major decision without consulting me?"
"Whoa there, doctor, there was no decision to make! You were the only one with the skill to figure out the details of Plan B. I had no idea how to raise a new colony. I was just the pilot, my job was to get you on planet. Besides, Edmund was here waiting for you."
She flinched in annoyance at him bringing up the name. "You really want to bring that up again? I don't care if you have some misguided idea that I'm too emotional to make rational decisions in a time of crisis! Nothing gives you to the right to decide to be the one to kill yourself and make me live with that!"
To her surprise, he did not snap back at her. Instead he walked over to a counter and put his helmet down heavily. Then he turned around, speaking slowly. "That's why I didn't tell you. This way, you didn't have to live with it. I did trust your judgment, entirely. I knew we could go as many rounds as we liked and we would still come back to the same truth. In every way, it made more sense for you to outlive me. I knew you would see it the same way and you would have to tell me so. That would make you responsible and if it was the last good deed I would do for humanity, I chose to send you off to plant the seeds of new life without that… emotional burden distracting you."
"You think…" Amelia caught her breath slightly, looking down at the floor. "You think you saved me from carrying an emotional burden? I watched you die, Cooper!" she exclaimed, taking a savage step towards him, "I watched you fall… one time and then in every nightmare, every night…"
He stared down at her wide, dilated eyes and his mouth flickered up into an untimely smirk. "I didn't think… I wasn't aware that my life meant that much to you, Dr. Brand. D'ya think, maybe…" He puckered his mouth and looked down at the floor, searching for another smartass remark, but she was on him before he could take a breath. Her lips pressed on his, soft and hot and desperate, and he took one quick, surprised breath and leaned into her, his hands clutching in her short waves of hair. They swayed like that, tangled together, for several minutes, as CASE and TARS remained in their respective corners, politely observing their decency settings in silence. Finally, she pulled back, cheeks glowing and lips slightly swollen.
"I am glad to see you," she murmured.