My Ship, third part: Asphyxiate

by Deb H

Thursday 29 December 3003

My parents own the California Nebula Spa and Lagoon. Anybody who knows them would be able to tell instantly. The architecture is nice, but not wretchedly excessive. Move in closer, though, and that's when you see where the money really went.

Banisters of the most delicate design, one is afraid to rest a hand upon them. Mirrors framed in bronze that, upon inspection, turn out to be smart mirrors that hide the viewer's blemishes whilst highlighting the attractive features.

And the doorknobs.

No two alike, their ornate design seems to blend in so well with their surroundings that it can be some time before the mind says to itself, "Hey, wait a minute. Nobody uses doorknobs any more." Some seem to be constructed of little metallic flowers, others of spare robot parts, others still of hematite rocks plucked from the basins of Mars.

BW touched its hand to a spherical doorknob with swirling greenish-blue clouds reminiscent of a gas giant, and the door to room 1119 slid open. BW's luggage was already scattered around the room, so I dropped my bag in one corner.

BW aksed me, "What do you think?"

Whenever BW talked, I couldn't avoid thinking of its original identity, Bethany. When she had surgery to become genderless, there was one thing she didn't have changed.

I replied, "You kept your voice the same. That's convenient."

It gave a pleased smile and said, "I was talking about the room, but yeah, I like my voice as it is."

"You don't think it's too girly?"

"Being a little girly's unavoidable. I mean, I started out as a girl. Why? Do you think it's too girly?" It picked up a pillow from the couch and began to jab me with it. "Is that what you think, Miss Pretty in Pink? Is it?" it teased.

After a few more pokes, it sat down on the couch and aksed, "So are you tired? You want to go to bed?"

I should have been tired. I'd been up the whole day. At that time it would have been about 06:00 New New York time on Xmas morning. But I didn't want to go to bed. Instead...

"You want to play Sheravone?" I aksed.

BW said, "Yeah, but I'm too tired now. Are you going to play now?"

"I don't know."

"Well, I'll take a nap now. Go and do whatever, and then we'll play when I get up."

"Okay."

I took my baggage into the bedroom as BW settled on the couch. Even when she was female, she preferred to sleep on couches over beds.

I connected up my VR suit, the one the Professor had designed. It was so much more comfortable than anything else I'd tried, and it was free.

Sheravone was gradually growing in popularity. It was one of the many one on one combat games, with some new weapon types that took a long time to master. Hence, matches between experts could be quite thrilling to watch, as they attempted to curl their bullets or flying discs around obstacles.

I fought battle after battle, routinely getting my ass kicked. I'd set my skill level a couple of notches higher than I actually was. I wonder if subconsciously I wanted to give myself a savage virtual beating, as penance for my horrible mistakes over the past couple of weeks.

Bethany entered from time to time, and she kicked my ass with equal adroitness as my anonymous opponents.

I continued to fight on, my severed body parts reassembling after each humiliation. I'm pretty sure I won at least a couple in there. I must have. In the state I was in, though, how much was I really going to remember?

I opened my eyes. The bright, sterile lights stabbed at my brain.

A figure moved into view and began talking. "Amy! Hey! How you feeling?"

I answered him, "Fry? Is that you?" My throat didn't produce the kind of volume I'd hoped for.

He said, "Yeah, it's me. You got whanged on the head pretty bad. You might have had some hallucinations."

"What do you mean?"

"I gave you some saltarisone. It's used to treat concussions. It usually gets people out of a comatose state, but it can create some pretty vivid hallucinations in the process."

My eyes had just finished their calibration process and were now focussing on the far wall. I sat up sharply.

I was in the medbay on the Planet Express ship.

The Turanga Leela.

Fry put a hand on my shoulder and gently pushed me back down onto the table.

I said, "How did we get here?"

"Don't move," he said. "Just lie there for a while. You might still be a little disoriented."

"Where are we?"

He told me, "We're coming back from Canopus 5. You've been out for, I don't know, an hour."

Gradually my mind was clearing, and I couldn't fit any of this together. Nervously, I aksed him another question. "What... what's today?"

"Monday."

"Monday? You said I was out an hour!"

"You were. It's about 20:30 now."

"No, no, hold it." I shook my head and held up a finger. "Monday the what?"

"The twelfth," he responded.

"The twelfth? Of January?"

"Nooo, December," he said, perplexed. Then his face suddenly cleared. He murmured, "Your hallucination," and then he looked down at me. "Man, Amy, you must have had a hell of a hallucination. It's the twelfth of December, 3003. We just made that delivery to Canopus 5. You fell down the stairs and hit your head."

A voice behind my head said, "Hey, Amy. How are you feeling?"

I turned around.

And went slack jawed.

Leela placed her hand on my forehead. I reached up and touched her hand. Then I grabbed it in both of mine and stared up at her.

I said, "L... Le... y... you... I th... oh my god... you... you're alive."

She looked uncertainly at Fry. He got up and came over next to me, lightly pushing Leela aside.

He held my hand firmly and looked down at me. "Amy, did you... did you think Leela was dead?"

I nodded.

He gripped my hand a little tighter. "It was a hallucination, Amy. Nothing more. Leela's right here. She's fine, see?"

I turned to her and aksed, "But... what about that guy?"

She told me, "I got away from him. He wasn't going to kill me anyway. But when I came over to the stairs, I saw you unconscious. I figured you'd tripped and fallen down after I called for your help."

Fry added, "Yeah, and then when I got back, I carried you in here and treated you while Leela took off. Actually," he continued with a little amused smile, "we almost took off without Bender. I was here with you, so I didn't realise he was gone."

I looked back at him. "Wait, you've been treating me?"

"Yeah. I've got a little bit of experience dealing with coma victims," he said as he turned toward Leela. She ran her hand through his hair and kissed his cheek.

He resumed, "Anyway, just stay there for a while, Amy. It'll be a little while before the chemistry in your brain equili... evens out again."

The two of them sat on the table opposite me, and Leela, with an arm around Fry, said to him, "Fry, now that Amy seems to be okay, there was something I wanted to talk to you about."

He said, "What's that?"

She looked away at the wall behind me and nervously answered, "That thing I said on the way out. You know."

He nodded glumly.

I thought back to my argument with Leela on our way to Canopus 5. Fry had walked in just as Leela said "I am so sick of this fucking relationship!"

He hadn't responded too well.

Leela sighed and continued, "What I meant was that part of me was denying the obvious and refusing to accept you. I mean, there were some things that I expected my ideal man to be."

"And I'm none of them," Fry said, his gaze directed at the floor.

"Not at first. But you've been so responsible lately. You know, walking Nibbler these past few days, decorating my apartment, taking care of Amy now..."

He shrugged. "Any decent person would do that."

"No, Fry, any decent person wouldn't do that. Only you would. It's... well... I've been thinking a lot lately. About that argument you and I always have."

"What argument?"

"You know, about whether our lives are defined by what we do or by what happens to us."

I blinked. I tried to imagine a philosophical debate with Fry. All I could think of was pounding my fist against the wall in frustration.

She said, "Well, I still think that if you'd fallen next to the freezer, or if your boss had seen through that crank call, or if I'd taken New Year's Eve off like I wanted, I'd still be at that shitblow job, never visiting any other planets... never finding my parents... never... never falling in love."

She was looking right into Fry's eyes as she said that last part.

She went on, "So that's why I... well... ah whatever, I'll just say it. Fry, I love the shit out of you. I've seen what it would be like to have you taken away, and I don't want that. I want you with me everywhere. I want... well..." She looked down at her hands. "I don't have it with me, and, you know, this isn't the way people usually do it, but I don't care. You and I, we always seem to do everything backward anyway."

Fry shook his head slowly. "I don't know what you're saying, Leela. Do you want to move in together, or what?"

She smiled as she grasped his hand. She held the palm of his left hand in the palm of hers. Her right hand reached around the fingers of his left hand. She continued to hold his hand that way and finally looked up at him.

"Fry. Will you marry me?"

He seemed stunned.

I couldn't blame him.

Finally he said, "You really mean it?"

She nodded.

He breathed deeply. "Big step."

Her gaze fell – undoubtedly she was bracing herself for rejection. But knowing Fry as I did, I was sure of what would happen next.

I wasn't quite right, it turned out.

Their hands still wrapped together, Fry guided Leela's left hand into the pocket on the right side of his jacket. Her hand emerged with a tiny little black box in it.

Nuh-uh, I thought to myself in amazement.

He said, ever so softly, "I wanted to surprise you. You beat me to it."

His fingers fumbled with the box as he hinged it open. When it was open wide, so was Leela's eye.

She started to speak, then stopped. This repeated a couple more times.

Fry said to her, "I know what you're thinking. And you're right. It's not a millionth as beautiful as you are."

She answered, "Actually, what I was thinking was, Bender must have stolen it for you. There's no way you can afford this."

"Shhh," he whispered. He pulled the ring out and slid it onto her finger, and I finally got a look at it.

It was a narrow silver band around her finger, with circular purple gemstones spaced equally around the circumference. A big spherical diamond sat atop the ring. From my vantage point I couldn't tell just how big the diamond was, but a good estimate would be Madison Cube Garden.

Leela looked like she could have stared at the ring all day, but when Fry pulled her close, she grabbed his lips in hers. After some time, Fry finally broke away from the kiss and aksed, "So, was I supposed to tell you my answer?"

"I think I figured it out."

And that's about when the ship blew up.

An immense crash sent me flying into space. The screams of Fry and Leela receded into the distance, in opposite directions. Around me I could see the wreckage of the ship.

Along with a series of rocket propelled blenders and coffee machines.

I had enough time to think How can I hear them? when a blender flew right past me.

Everything stopped abruptly when I jerked my head up.

A wall appeared in front of me. Then a floor below me, and a ceiling above me. Boxes and various objects on walls appeared one by one.

In front of me, some text hovered.

PAUSED
PUSH TO RESUME

A green circle was underneath those words.

I put my hands to my head and felt something I couldn't see.

So I lifted the VR helmet off my head and found myself lying on the floor of the bedroom in the resort.

I stayed there for a bit before I got it. I'd been playing Sheravone, right? But it must have detected five minutes of inactivity from the user. Then, it did what any computer would do in such a circumstance.

I'd fallen asleep inside a screen saver.

The photons flooded into my eyes as I stumbled into the living room of our suite. The bedroom had been in darkness, illuminated only by the eyepieces from the VR suit. So once the door opened, I had to slam my eyes shut right away.

It didn't stop my head from throbbing though. The pain immediately gave me something else to think about: was I now dreaming?

This had been the first time I'd been unsure about reality since... well, since ever.

I had those dreams the first few nights after Leela died. But in those dreams, I knew that I was dreaming. Likewise, when I woke up, I knew I was back in reality.

But standing there in the suite, I actually began to wonder. What if I was imagining all this? Could I really be unconscious in the medbay of the Leela – no, it would just be the Planet Express ship – being looked over by Fry and being flown home by a very much alive Leela?

I know the answer now, of course. But at the moment, well, disorientation doesn't do it justice.

"Hey. You're up."

I opened my right eye a little bit. I had to squint with this room so much more brightly lit.

"Spaz girl? You okay?"

As I opened my other eye, I felt BW's arms on my left arm. It pulled me over to my side and sat me down.

I sat there for a moment and said, "Aw, shit, my head." I rubbed my eyes with the bottoms of my palms, succeeding only in making things blurry.

As things came into focus, I could see that BW was seated on the couch to my left. It replied, "You want something? You must be, like, starving."

I was. I felt as though I hadn't eaten in...

"What's today?" I aksed.

The answer caught me completely off guard. BW told me, "It's Tuesday."

My confusion only deepened. I issued my next question very slowly, as though my sanity depended upon the answer. And I'm not entirely sure that it didn't.

"Tuesday... the what?"

It rested a hand on my shoulder and looked at me nervously as it said, "The twenty seventh."

"The twenty seventh," I repeated.

I think that was when I knew for sure that I wasn't dreaming. I knew that we'd gotten there on Xmas morning – already two days ago? – having destroyed the robot Santa the day before. That had come at the end of a weeklong vigil at the north pole of Neptune, before which Fry and I had been cleaning out an apartment. We had also made a couple of visits to the sewers underneath New New York, the result of me running down the steps and watching a fight and then firing a gun and watching them fall and running up to her and then trying to drag her away and then listening to her say –

My wild thoughts were interrupted when I felt a hand on my cheek. BW was wiping her thumb – its thumb, if I can ever stop doing that – up the side of my face. When it got to my eye, I felt moisture. She'd been erasing a tear that had been running down.

"Something's bothering you," BW said.

It wasn't aksing me; it was telling me. It continued, "Something besides having played Sheravone for 36 straight hours and then sleeping for 24 straight, I mean."

"I slept a whole day?"

"Yeah. You've still got carpet lines on your face."

"I do?" I looked around for a mirror.

"Come on," it said as it stood up and dragged me into the bathroom. I looked at our reflections in the mirror. I leaned in over the sink and inspected myself more closely.

"I don't see anything," I said.

BW was looking back and forth between the mirror and me. It answered, "Oh, right. It's a smart mirror." It touched a button in the corner of the mirror, and my appearance changed.

I had looked exactly as normal, but abruptly the mirror showed me something different.

My sweat suit had creases all over. The cuffs and the waist seemed to be pressed firmly into my skin, and when I loosened one cuff, I detected a corresponding indentation in my wrist. I had the most historic case of helmet hair, with some parts hanging straight down and other parts sticking straight up. My eyes were in good condition, at least, something you'd expect from a full day's sleep.

Only after looking at all that did I finally see the carpet lines that BW had mentioned. They were on the left side of my face, from next to my eye down past my mouth. They were fairly noticeable, but not nearly as deep as the line on my wrist.

I turned to BW and aksed, "I really slept an entire day?"

"Yeah. And you need some food."

"I sure do," I told it. For a brief moment, I had a mental image of my stomach's fuel gauge, little lines marked between E on the left and F on the right. The needle was way to the left side, about where –½ would be. "I could eat an entire buggalo."

BW smiled and responded, "We almost have an entire buggalo in the refrigerator."

I was working my way through a plate of lasagna with rhinoceros beef when the doorbell rang. BW, with a muffin in its hand, got up to answer the door.

The door was opened just a crack, and through it I faintly heard, "Hi. Is, um, is Amy Wong here?"

"Who are you?" BW aksed.

"It's Fry!" I called out.

"Who?" BW responded.

I jumped up and hopped over to the door. When I let him in, I grabbed him in a tight hug. He embraced me in return and stroked my back, whispering in my ear, "You kinda ran off on us."

"Yeah. I know. I shouldn't have left you like that."

"It's okay. You probably needed some time to yourself."

We released the hug and stood facing one another.

There was darkness underneath Fry's eyes, which weren't even open all the way. His hair was folded back at an even more ridiculous angle than normal. He looked like he might fall over and go to sleep at any moment.

He said to me, "Man, Amy. You look like you were run over by a truck."

I answered back, "You look like you were driving it."

"Yeah. I've been pretty busy these last couple of days." He turned around and said, "Fry."

BW looked at the hand he was holding out, and then turned around and looked back toward the kitchen.

I sighed and said, "Fr'uh! That's his name!"

"Oh, I gotcha. BW." They shook hands.

"So, um, can I aks something?" Fry murmured.

BW gave an amused smile. "What's that?"

"This is probably gonna sound stupid, but, umm, well, actually I'm probably going to offend you, so maybe I'll just –"

"You're going to aks what gender I am, aren't you?"

"Yeah, I'm sorry. See, where I come from, I just, well, you know, people look more like... you know..."

"I'm neither."

"Really? Cool! You know, I always wondered if there were people like that. I figured there weren't, because like, when they make robots, they always make guybots and fembots, even though they, you know, they don't reproduce like that, or maybe they do, you know, like maybe they have robots that can reproduce like that, but like, that would be a real tricky engineering problem I'd think, so, like, maybe Amy would know how to do it, but maybe they don't sell well because everyone wants their robots to have a gender because they don't know how to deal with people who don't have a gender, but if that's what people are like, they'd just be big fat hypocrites because they're, like, supposed to be accepting of other ethnic groups and species and stuff, and, you know, maybe there are intelligent species where some people don't have genders, and maybe there are some where nobody has a gender and they just reproduce asexually, or maybe they live so long that they don't need to reproduce, but then how did there get to be so many of them?"

During all this BW stared at him in growing fascination. I told it, "He's always like that."

"Unless I run out," he responded. "Anyway, Bender told me you were here, and so I just wanted to drop by, see how you were."

I was caught by surprise. "How did Bender know where I was?"

"He was playing Sheravone against you, and he looked up where your signal was coming from, or something. However that stuff works."

"I don't remember playing against him."

BW said to me, "You were playing for a day and a half. You must have played, like, five hundred different people."

"A day and a half? Like, all at once?" Fry aksed.

"Yep," BW told him.

"No kidding?"

"Seriously," BW continued. "We got here at about six on Xmas morning. Spaz girl went straight online, I went in and played her a couple of times, and then when I go in at about eighteen yesterday, she's asleep on the floor. Still plugged in."

BW seemed amused, but Fry was looking at me in increasing seriousness.

He didn't seem to want to press the issue. Instead, he just said, "So Amy, how long were you planning on staying here?"

"Actually, I think I'm ready to go back now. Can I come with you?"

"Of course you can."

Fry carried my bag for me. As we left the building, I said, "How'd you get here?"

He told me, "I took the ship, of course."

"The Leela? Who flew?"

"I did."

I stopped and looked at him. "You have a license?"

He reached into his pocket and withdrew his wallet. Along with some money – evidently Bender had stayed behind – were his various cards and probably some pictures. He pulled out his pilot's license. It was a Class 4 license, the same kind I had. It meant we could fly anything up to 250,000 kilograms; the Leela had a dry mass of 120,000 kilograms. Below his ID number, his name, his address, his photograph (slightly less hideous than mine), and his birth date (over a thousand years ago), I saw this notation.

PRIMARY VESSEL: PLANET EXPRESS SHIP N9009231808CUI [3]
ISSUED: DEC 09 3003 EXPIRES: DEC 09 3005

The three in brackets meant he was registered as third in command. The issue date meant...

"You just got it?"

He showed me a sheepish smile. "I wanted to surprise Leela."

"Well, you surprised me, at least."

In the parking garage, the Leela stood along the wall opposite us. We walked past ships of all shapes and sizes, but I reflected that it would be difficult for me to find a helm at which I'd feel more comfortable. Of course, I didn't know enough physics to understand what made her run, but splitting four years between the captain's chair and the engine room had shown me not only what problems could crop up and what to do about them, but also how each kind of problem affected her performance.

And what I'd learned was that not many problems affected her performance greatly.

Fry suddenly pulled me to one side, interrupting my thoughts. He pointed at a column and informed me, "You were about to walk right into that."

"Really?"

"You must really be tired."

"No, I was just thinking about how hard it is to put that ship out of commission," I said as I pointed up to the Leela, which we had now reached.

Fry added, "Just like her namesake."

I looked down at my boots as I felt the tears accumulate.

Leela had led us to so many narrow escapes that perhaps Fry and I had started to feel, subconsciously, that she was unstoppable. Anything the Omicronians or the Trisolians could throw at her was laughably trivial compared to her childhood. An army of ten thousand? I faced that many stupid jokes about my eye between report cards. You think any weapon you're carrying is gonna hurt me worse than that? Fucking bring it.

And what killed her?

Friendly fire.

Some friend I was.

As all this was going through my head, I felt Fry's arms around me. It must have been getting easier and easier to read my moods, not that I had a whole lot of moods to choose from lately.

So, standing there in the shadow of the Leela, I clung to him as tightly as I could.

The Leela had a tiny shower stall in the bathroom. I washed off in there on the way back, trying not to think about the mess I found myself in.

The only child of Martian cattle tycoons, I had a quiet childhood and went on to my hometown college. But it wasn't until I took that internship at Planet Express that I finally felt like I was living my own life. I'd just been freeloading off my parents' money, until I started to make my own bread with my own skills.

More than that, though, I felt like I fit in. For a little bit at first, I was that rich chick from Mars, but once I learned my way around the ship, I discovered that I could solve just about every problem that cropped up. And let's face it, with Fry and Bender around, we were bound to see more and weirder problems than even the most acid-induced engineer could dream up.

And once I established my usefulness, they started to think of me as one of the group. Where else did I ever have even a remote chance of fitting in? In a sorority house with my family's name on the door? In a ranch house so lavishly ornamented that you couldn't even touch anything for fear that it would shrivel up, or implode, or at least get smudged up?

I loved the work, the environment, the city, the company. I'd found a home.

I'd found a life.

And now it was gone.

I continued with such thoughts for quite a while, when suddenly the water turned frigid. With a yelp, I reached around and turned the water off. As I reached for my towel, I ran the other hand through my hair and discovered that it was still all sudsy. I groaned as I held the stall door open and leaned in to rinse my hair out.

Naturally, I was hoping to restrict the ice cold waters to my hair, but it didn't work out that way. When the water hit my hair, it slid down the back of my head, around my neck, down across my nipples, and along my legs before it made a mess on the floor. Finally I shut off the water again, my arms shivering so violently that I could barely manage to dry myself off.

I reached down for my clothes, thought The hell with it, and just put on my big fuzzy bathrobe as I made my way up to the bridge.

Fry looked up sharply at me as the door opened. "Hey."

"Hey Fry."

I looked over to my left, at Bender's console, which I also used from time to time. On my right was Fry's console. The couch was to forward. And Fry was at the captain's console.

I tried to pick someplace to sit, but I ended up sitting on the deck next to Fry's seat. As I rested my arm on his right leg and then my head on top of my arm, he said, "So did you run out of hot water?"

"Mm-hmm. Did you hear me yelling all the way up here?"

"No," he told me. "I just noticed you'd been in there a while, and then I saw that."

I looked up to see where he was pointing. Over on his console, a display showed that the hot water tank was at empty.

I aksed him, "How long was I in there?"

"More than an hour," he answered. "We're getting pretty close now."

"How much longer?"

"Half an hour, maybe."

I rested my head on his lap again. He reached through my hair with one hand and started to scratch the back of my head.

I murmured, "So what were you doing when I was away?"

"Making deliveries."

"You were?"

"Yeah. A lot."

"On Xmas?"

"Yeah. Isn't that the single biggest day for a package delivery company?"

"I guess," I said. "With Bender?"

"Yep."

"Where's he now?"

Fry said, "I dropped him off when we got back. He's helping a friend move."

"When did you guys get back?"

"This afternoon."

I puzzled over that. "What time is it now?"

"21:10," he replied.

"Lower?"

There was a pause. "What?"

I clarified, "Could you scratch lower?"

"Oh, yeah. Like that?"

"No no, my lower. Like toward my neck."

"Oh. Right. Like that?"

"Yeah," I said. I let him scratch a bit more, and then I said, "How many packages did you guys deliver?"

"Two hundred eighteen," he answered ruefully.

I sat up, dislodging his hand. I turned around to face him, and he looked down at me, smiled, and shrugged.

"Two hundred eighteen," I repeated in astonishment.

"Yeah."

"But that's, like... I don't know... four every hour?"

He shrugged again. "It was a lot."

I continued, "But we've never made more than, what, ten deliveries in a day? How could we even get that much business?"

"Hermes said they were all supposed to be delivered last week."

Now it made sense. We hadn't made any shipments the previous week. Of course we'd get backed up.

Well, it made a little sense. I aksed Fry, "Did Hermes make you deliver them all at once?"

"Yeah," he told me. "He called me the morning after the party. Got me out of bed, made me come in early, and then I had to fly all across the galaxy delivering those stupid things. I mean, I had to leave Bender in control half the time. I just couldn't keep going that long, you know?"

I nodded. I put my arms back on Fry's leg and rested my head there, again getting a scratch from Fry.

"Man, that stupid Rastafarian bureaucrat," I said, only partly to myself. "He should know you can't make that many deliveries that fast. I'm talking to him tomorrow."

Fry didn't say anything. In the meantime I sank further into his lap.

"Heard you broke up with Kif."

"Yeah."

"Must have been tough for you."

"Yeah. It was."

"Must have been tough for him."

"Yeah. Have you seen him?"

"No."

"Hope I didn't break his heart. I mean, he can be really sweet. It's just, he can also be such a jerk."

"I know."

I lifted up my weary head and looked at him. He was still staring ahead, flying the ship. I said, "You do? How do you know that?"

He told me, "Remember when Bender and I were in the military?"

"Yeah."

"I was assigned to him for a while. He was just a fucking bastard. I mean, he was all like 'Scrub that tile again, dammit! I still see ten parts per million of contaminants on there!' And then ten minutes later, 'Why the hell didn't you scrub that tile, soldier?' And I'd be like, 'I did scrub it, sir!' And he'd be all like, 'No, not that one! Anyone can see that tile's clean already!'"

"That's a good Kif impersonation. Can you do anybody else?"

"I didn't even know I could do Kif."

"Hm. You know, I always liked people who could do voices like that."

There was silence for a couple of minutes, and then I broke it. "So do you think I should have?"

"Should have what?"

"Broken up with him?"

"I dunno. Were you happy with him?"

"I was."

"You mean until you met his unpleasant side?"

I gave a tiny little snorting laugh. "Such euphemisms. 'Unpleasant side'. Yeah, I just hate when I don't get treated with respect."

"Me too. That's why I like it here."

"Yeah. So do I," I answered, finding it odd how the conversation was now turning exactly where my thoughts had been going when I was in the shower.

But it stopped there, with both of us seemingly too tired to continue. In a few minutes he roused me and said, "We're here."

I stood up and stumbled a couple of steps toward the door. Fry told me, "Don't forget your bag."

I looked down at my bag. It was open, which confused me until I remembered that my clothes were still back in the bathroom. I said, "Yeah, I gotta go change too."

He left the ship, and once I'd changed and put my bathrobe away, I exited as well and found him at the conference table. Without a word, he stood up and escorted me out of the building – which appeared to be empty. Except for the Professor, of course, who was undoubtedly snoring away somewhere on the floors above us.

When we got to the street corner, he looked to the west, toward his apartment, and I looked to the south, toward mine. Then we looked back at each other.

He put a hand on my shoulder. "Well, sleep tight."

"Yeah, you too."

He started to shuffle off. I called out, "Hey."

He turned around.

"Don't fall asleep in the tube on your way back."

He smiled. "Can't guarantee that."

The doorbell rang.

"Hey sis," Leela said as I let her in.

"Hey yourself. Let me get that." I plucked the carton of ice cream from her hand and hit the button on the side. With a bzap, the container froze the ice cream, chilling right in my hand.

"Anything on?" she aksed.

"Nope. Unless you want to see The Morbo Life."

She groaned. "God. That's just unwatchable."

She settled on the couch as I went to the kitchen to grab a pair of spoons.

"Get me a big spoon."

I came back and tossed her a soup spoon. It bounced off her thumb and then her shoulder before it slipped behind the couch.

"Goddammit." She climbed up onto the couch and reached behind it. "Aw, where the fuck..."

"Let me get another one."

"No, it's down here somewhere. Just need... here." She handed it to me, and I took it back to wash it off.

"Thank you," she said as I gave it back. "So what's new?"

"Broke up with Kif."

"Yeah. Didn't see that coming."

"After the way he treated me? You had to."

"No, I mean what he was doing to you. I didn't know he could be like that."

"Fry did, apparently."

"That's right, they served together. How is he?"

"Kif?"

"Fry."

I slipped another spoonful of rocky road into my mouth. It wasn't my favourite, but Leela liked the richer flavours.

I answered, "Don't know. He seems like he's doing okay. Better than me."

"You sure?"

"Hm?"

She pointed her spoon at me. "Keep an eye on him. He's always reluctant to show his feelings."

"Like you?"

"Exactly. All this may be harder on him than he lets on."

"You think so?"

"Yeah. I mean, I know him better than anyone, except maybe Bender. And now you're starting to feel for him, too."

"It's that obvious?"

"You're not hiding it very well."

I didn't answer. I just went back to the ice cream.

She continued, "You've got to give him time. You two could be happy together, but let him recover first. Wait until he's ready."

"Yeah, but when will that be?"

She shrugged. "I'unno."

We pulled a couple more spoonfuls from the ice cream.

"Leela."

"Yeah?"

"Were you really going to propose to him?"

"Like in your other dream?"

"Mm-hmm."

She licked off her spoon and examined it for a couple of minutes, turning it around and around in her hand.

"I... don't know. I'm pretty sure that he was thinking about it. I didn't want to just jump in, though. I thought I'd have plenty of time to decide." She laughed dryly. "Wrong, wrong, wrong."

"And you're telling me to wait?"

"Yeah. I'm such a hypocrite, am I not?"

I reclined on the couch, not saying anything to that.

She sighed. "I, well, I don't want you to make the same mistakes I did. The game's changed now, though. You're playing under different rules. So, you know, listening to me might not help."

Then she stood up and took my hands, pulling me to my feet. "You'll have to figure it all out on your own, I guess."

She turned away toward the door, but then she turned back. "You know where to find me if you need me, right?"

"In my dreams?"

"Yeah." She kissed my cheek, turned, and left.

I woke up really early, around seven. Usually when I'm up that early, I stay in bed for a while and don't do anything.

Nonetheless, I did crawl out of bed. In a moment I found myself in front of the pile of stuff we'd collected when we cleaned out Leela's apartment.

Damn, that had been a trying day.

I had more available space, so apart from a few things that clearly belonged with Fry or with her parents, most everything was stacked up here. The clothes were going to go to charity, and we planned to keep what little else there was. Just looking through her place was eye opening.

Sorry. That was a lousy choice of words.

Anyway, she had always kept a little bit of herself hidden from everyone else. For instance, I'd been kind of amused to discover her small collection of about ten porn films. Each had a slip attached to it, wherein she had apparently rated them in categories like exoticness, nastiness, and humour. They were now in one box in the corner, with a couple of sex toys that were in exceptional condition. Either she made infrequent use of them, or she routinely cleaned them.

Knowing her, I was prepared to entertain either possibility.

I spotted something else I'd taken notice of earlier, a fairly old, ratty teddy bear. It was one of those static teddy bears, not like the dynamic ones they make today that are actually robots with cuddly exteriors. You couldn't talk to it, have a tea party with it, or program it to say dirty words. About all you could do was hug it.

I hugged it. I hugged it like there was nothing else in the Universe to hug.

I brought it back to my bed, casting my gaze at its one unique feature.

This teddy bear had only one eye.

I'd had a teddy bear with one eye, but that's because the other one fell off. This one was made with one eye, and as I lay down on my bed, I wondered, just as I had when I found it in her closet, where and how she'd acquired it. These days, you could have just about anything custom made, but it didn't strike me that she would be likely to request something like that. She didn't usually want to call anyone's attention to her distinguishing feature, not even her own attention.

To me it seemed more likely that it was a gift. Not from Fry – I aksed him. He admitted that he could be insensitive, but not that insensitive. His exact words were, "I don't generally like having large boots striking my chin at high speeds."

I must have spent five hours lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling, because when Fry called, it was just past noon.

Anybody else, and I wouldn't have answered.

"Hey Fry."

"Hey Amy. Whatcha doing?"

"Nothing."

"Plans for tonight?"

"No."

"Well, the Turangas invited us over for dinner tonight. Are you up for that?"

"Sure," I answered. "That sounds good."

"Okay. What time do you want?"

"I don't really care."

"Early? Late? In between?"

"Around, like, seventeen?"

"Okay. I'll tell them. Want me to come get you?"

"No, I'll meet you down there."

"Do you know where they live?"

"It's in my wrist."

"Really?" he aksed.

"Yeah. It saves my movements over the past few weeks, so I can have it show me the route we took last time."

"Wow. You know," he said, "at first I thought I'd never get used to the future. Then I figured I would eventually. Now I think I was right in the first place."

I smiled but didn't answer.

"Well, anyway, I'll see you tonight."

"Yep. Bye."

"Bye Amy."

I hit the buzzer at Hermes's office, but when the door opened up, he was nowhere to be seen.

So I meandered around the building, eventually making my way down to the hangar floor.

"Amy! How was your vacation?"

I looked up and saw the Professor in his laboratory. I called up to him, "Okay."

"Well, good. Do you have a few minutes?"

"Actually, have you seen Hermes?"

"No. I don't think he's coming in today. Anyway, would you mind coming up here? I'd like to spend some time chatting with you like the caring employer that I am, for reasons completely unrelated to this remarkable device I just invented that needs some guinea pig to test it."

I sighed. "Fine."

"And on your way up, could you get that jar of Zoidberg's urine sample from the kitchen?"

Eeeeeeuugh.

I trudged up the steps, lugging the three kilogram jar of nastiness. When I reached the lab, Professor Farnsworth looked over from the bench.

"Good lord, Amy! What the devil is that foul container?"

"Zoidberg's urine sample? Spr'uh! Where do you want it?"

"What? I don't want that horrible sludge! Throw it out!"

I groaned. This was one problem I frequently ran into in my dealings with the Professor.

He continued, "Anyway, I've called you up here so you could see this."

I looked over at the thing he was pointing to. It looked like a long wire with some sort of probe at one end, like maybe a digital pH meter.

As I walked over to examine it more closely, he said, "Go ahead. Try it out."

I looked over at him quizzically. "How? Better question, what the hell is it?"

"Well, you remember that program you wrote that characterises someone's brainwave patterns?"

I nodded. A couple of years ago, he had me write some code that would generate a model of someone's personality and memory contents based upon brainwaves. I'd assumed it wouldn't come to anything.

Actually, at the moment, I was still assuming that.

The Professor went on, "This device is the collector for the brainwave patterns. You stick it in your ear, and then a bunch of nanobots run out, detect the brainwaves in various strategic locations throughout the brain, and then run back and report the results. Think of it as a bunch of nanobots running out, detecting the brainwaves in various strategic locations throughout the brain, and then running back and reporting the results."

"So? Brainwave detectors have been around a long time."

"Ah, but that's only part of the story!" His eyes would probably be glimmering right now were it not for the thick glasses that stood guard in front of them. "Once the brainwave patterns are read, they're transferred to that computer over there, where your program runs. Then, you can save the resulting brain model into an AI engine, which instantiates a new instance of that brain model."

I stood there for a bit, digesting this information. "You mean... you can clone someone's brain?"

"What? Who said anything about cloning? There's no cloning going on here! That all happens over there!" He waved his hand at the tank that Cubert had come out of.

"So... if you're not cloning, what do you do with the model?"

"Confound it Amy, I don't have time to explain every little detail to your cute, misunderstanding ears!"

"Yes you do."

"Oh my, yes, that's right. I always forget that I'm absent minded. Anyway, this process creates a strictly software based model of someone's brain. You could run it on any computer anywhere, plug it into the Internet, and it would behave exactly like you. Care to try it out?"

The whole idea weirded me out. Regardless of what the Professor said, it did sound like cloning to me. You could actually interact with a completely identical copy of yourself, at least online.

So why did I then plug myself in and create a model of myself?

Yes, it was creepy, but I was also quite intrigued. What would happen if you were running yourself on a PC? Wouldn't you run much faster than the human brain nominally runs? Or would the added complexity of the computations slow you down? I'd taken a class on AI, but that was a long time ago. I had to figure, at least, that it would be able to access much, much more information than a normal human brain, at ridiculous speeds.

I saved it, but I didn't run it. I just encrypted it with three different schemes, including a megabit scheme that I don't think even the DOOP government had.

Hey, I'm not stupid. I won't trust just anyone with my brain.

Before I left, the Professor interrogated me about its workings. Are you still alive? Yes. Excruciating pain? No. Dream sequences? No. Can I see the results? Hell no.

"Five. Can you believe that? Five times. You probably never knew that, did you?"

I looked around and nearly couldn't believe my eyes.

My route to the Turangas' house took me past the lakeshore where Leela's funeral was held.

Shit. Leela's funeral.

Just writing those two words together tears me apart.

Anyway, the place looked different, and not because it was packed with folding chairs last time. There were other changes.

The ridge where the casket had been now held a low brick wall, about a metre high. Flowers, newspapers, cards, and even a couple of balloons were placed along its length. None of the flowers seemed more than a few days old.

At one end of the wall, a sign stood.

Future site of
TURANGA LEELA
MEMORIAL PARK

There was some sort of sketch of the completed park underneath, but I instead turned my attention to the waterfront, or the sewagefront I guess. That was where I saw Fry.

He was sitting a good distance from the water, because of its mutagenic properties, and he had his arms folded on his knees.

He continued, "But it's true. There were five times when I came back home, sat on my bed, and told myself I'd leave you alone for good. And once, I actually did for, like, two months. You remember that?"

He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "You're probably wondering about my hand, aren't you?"

I tried to see over his shoulder, but I didn't want to get too close and disturb him. I couldn't see his hand.

"I, well, I punched out a window earlier today."

I stood up on an impulse, but then I sat down again and tried to keep quiet.

I listened to him say, "I've just, you know, I've just been so mad about the way everything happened. Like how I kept chasing after you, and how I'd always do something incredibly romantic by accident, and then when I tried to do something romantic, I'd always mess it up and then you'd be even more repulsed at me.

"And then, of course, we finally get together, you know, and it's... it's... well... I can't think of the right word. All I can think of is unreal. Because, you know, I had so many dreams about waking up next to you, and then when I actually did wake up next to you, I almost didn't know how to react. It was like I was watching myself on TV, or on the What-If machine, or something.

"And then after that, well, you know what happened after that."

He sniffled, and when he started to talk again, his voice was weak and scratchy.

"You know what was really hard? Today I was saying to myself, 'Why did Amy have to go and ruin everything?'

"I mean, it's not her fault. It's not. Seems like she thinks it is, and I want to tell her not to be so hard on herself, but I don't want to press it either. Because I know it's really hard for her to talk about it.

"Actually, it's really hard for me to talk about it too. I've talked to Bender some. He's taking it especially hard, because, you know, because he... hm... I guess I don't know why. I mean, you never seemed that close to him."

He fell silent for a little longer.

Then he cleared his throat and said, "And you know what else? I think now Amy's got a thing for me again."

I thought, Damn, does everybody know now?

"She broke up with Kif," he added. "You know how sometimes he can just be overbearing and impatient?

"Actually, maybe you don't. He was like that to me when we were in the military. And then Amy just saw him like that for the first time. That was when we were on your mission."

I was kind of feeling guilty spying on Fry like this, but there wasn't really anything else for me to do while I waited for him. And I have to admit that I was curious to hear what he said when he thought nobody was around.

"Anyway, I might just be misinterpreting the way she's been acting around me, but... I don't know. I mean, if she is falling for me, what do I do?"

He paused again. "I... I can't love her. I love you. I always will. I mean, you were... you were everything. You were the reason I got up in the morning, you were the one who never looked down on me because of where I came from, you were the one I'd scratch dirty limericks about into the walls of bathrooms..."

He trailed off.

I briefly wondered which of us was shedding more tears.

Then he stood up, still facing the water. I saw that one hand had a cluster of flowers.

He spoke again, a bit louder. "These are for you." He hurled them out into the lake and out of sight.

"I know, they're not nearly as beautiful as you are. They'll have to do."

He turned around and saw me. He held up a hand as he walked over, and then he pulled me to my feet and gave me a hug in one motion.

"Hey Fry."

"Hey Amy. What did you do all day?"

I shrugged. "Not much. Cried my eyes out."

He shrugged. "Me too. You just get here?"

"Yeah," I lied.

He looked down at the ground, where I'd placed the bottle of wine I brought. He picked it up, and I saw what he was talking about. He had a bandage wrapped around the knuckles of his right hand, with little red spots on each finger.

I touched his hand. "You okay?"

"Yeah, just a little accident at home today." He read from the label, "Alpha Draconis Hyperchardonnay, 2866. Any good?"

"The first kind I ever had."

"Really?"

"Yep. When I was fifteen." As he giggled, I added, "Don't tell my parents."

When Mr Turanga let us in, he naturally wasn't as jovial as the previous time. Inside, their house looked much the same. One difference was what appeared to be a pile of papers in the corner. Closer inspection showed that they were condolence cards.

As I knelt down to examine them, Mrs Turanga said, "I swear, we must have gotten one of those from everyone in this sewer."

I turned to her and aksed, "So how many people are there down here?"

She turned to Mr Turanga. "What did they say at the last census? Ten thousand?"

"Around eleven thousand, I thought," Mr Turanga responded.

For some reason I'd expected more than that. Above the surface, New New York's population was pushing a hundred million. That meant...

Fry said, "So for every person in the New New York sewers, there's, like, ten thousand on the surface?"

"Something like that, yeah," said Mrs Turanga.

"Why's the population so low? Is there just not enough food or fresh water?"

Mrs Turanga sat on the side of the couch. "No, that's not a problem." She pointed a tentacle toward the kitchen and aksed, "Morris, check the grill, would you?"

I said, "So what are we having?"

"Barbecued pork."

"You can get that down here?"

"Of course. We get it from South Carolina," she told me. "Those truck drivers aren't afraid to go into the sewers, like New New Yorkers are."

From the next room, Mr Turanga called, "That's because some of those truck drivers fit right in down here!" He started to laugh, and Fry joined in. I even laughed a little bit at his joke.

For a few hours, at least, I was able to put my sadness away.

It seems counterintuitive, right? If you wanted to avoid having to think about Leela, would you go to her parents' house?

But it worked. I listened with rising interest as Fry queried the Turangas about living in the sewers, the people they knew, the community's history, and the other cities that had mutant populations in their sewers – NeoKyoto and Madrid also had sizeable communities, though not as large as New New York's.

Later, after they brought out the chocolates, Fry aksed a question that had bothered me from time to time during the evening. "We talked earlier about the size of the population."

"Right," Mrs Turanga responded.

"So... why is the population so low? Couldn't a lot more people live down here?"

Mr Turanga told us, "Yeah, at a lecture I went to a couple of weeks ago, one of the profs said that the sewers could support at least a million people. Maybe more if we dug ourselves some new tunnels."

"Well then, what is keeping the population down? Do people just not want to have kids?"

Mrs Turanga replied, "No, trust me, everyone wants to have kids."

Fry looked at me. When he saw that I was just as confused, he shook his head. "I don't get it. It doesn't seem to add up."

Hesitatingly, Mrs Turanga said, "Well, you see, there's ..."

The whole time I'd been looking out the window, toward Lake Mutagenic. Suddenly I got it. "Is it sterility?"

"That's part of it," she agreed. "Something like fifty percent of the population down here is sterile."

Fry and I stared, wide eyed. He spoke first, expressing my thoughts precisely: "Fifty percent?!"

I continued from there. "So, wait. That means the fertile couples have to have four kids each just to maintain a steady state?"

Mrs Turanga added, "And that's not the whole story. It's hard even for fertile people to have kids."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, assume you can actually get to conception," she said. "Then you have a zygote that's carrying a mix of chromosomes from the parents, right?"

We nodded. It seemed even Fry knew enough biology to follow along.

"Well, there's no guarantee that that genome will actually result in a viable person, even for normal humans. But for us, we already have such unlikely genomes that we're barely able to survive, if you want to think of it like that. So you mix up the parents' DNA, and you may end up with a combination that's so abnormal it won't even have a chance."

Mr Turanga nodded. "Munda and I tried for about two years."

His wife carried on, "The gynecologists say there's no telling how many embryos die and get flushed out while they're still microscopic. There are so many stillborn kids, and then infant mortality rates are so high in the first year or so, because even with the mutations, it's so hard to adjust to the environment down here."

Mr Turanga continued, "And once a kid is born, you have to go through and make a list of the mutations you can see, and then keep watch for others that may show up later in life. There are so many strange things that can just crop up out of nowhere. Like... you know Raoul?"

I didn't, but Fry said, "He's the guy with..." and raised his arm up to the side of his head.

"Yeah," Mr Turanga nodded. Then I remembered him. He was the guy with a third arm instead of a right ear that I'd seen at the funeral.

"Anyway, he's the first one we'd ever seen like that. Not his parents, or his grandparents, or anyone. I mean, you never know what your kids are going to look like."

He trailed off into silence, and Fry and I looked at one another again.

Fry echoed my thoughts once more. "So then, that's why... when you had..."

He pointed his thumb upward, toward the surface.

Mr and Mrs Turanga nodded slowly, synchronously.

"We had the chance of a lifetime," Mrs Turanga said. "We weren't going to let it pass."

"So did you see the plans for the park?"

"No, what's it like?"

As we left for home, Fry led me back to the place that I was now starting to think of as Leela's gravesite. I took a moment to inspect the artist's rendering of the completed park.

"Damn," I said.

"Pretty impressive, isn't it?" Fry responded.

The wall that the sign adjoined was going to be part of some kind of fountain. It looked as though water would cascade down the side of the wall and then flow down the ridge in a narrow pool. The picture displayed a few mutant kids splashing around in it.

The open space further inland, where the chairs had been set up, was apparently going to become a blernsball field. The players looked like high schoolers – the Turangas had mentioned that there were two high schools down here. Amongst the variously shaped players, I could identify at least two women, one in left field and one of the blernrunners. The bleachers were packed, and various pennants were in the spectators' hands. From the picture's perspective, viewing from behind the outfield fence toward the lake, a black rectangle stood behind the fence. Presumably the other side was the scoreboard.

It was no Central Park, naturally. But it was the most advanced piece of architecture I'd seen down here. The sign named the designers and the builders, names of mutants I didn't recognise, at the bottom.

I turned my attention back to the most obvious feature of the park, and it was exactly what you'd expect to see in a place called Turanga Leela Memorial Park.

It looked like bronze, maybe a bit larger than life sized. It stood in the centre of the square pool at the end of the wall, with water collecting around a platform on which the boots stood.

I ran my finger across the picture and settled next to the statue. "I like the pose."

"It does look like her, doesn't it?"

She had her hands at the back of her hips, fingers pointing down, thumbs around her sides. She was standing up straight, or perhaps leaning forward a little, and she had a narrowed eye and a smile that was confident, bordering on threatening.

I aksed, "They're going to have sewer water flowing in that fountain?"

"I guess so," he said. "They're mutants. The hell do they care?"

"I care."

He shrugged.

When I got home that night, it was already past 22:00. As I settled on the bed, I read through a couple of news items. Then, when I reached over to my wrist again, I found something else next to me: the cyclopic teddy bear.

At that time I finally pieced it together. It was a gift from her parents. Why else would she keep it around for so long?

I thought back to the first time Leela and I had gone out together. As the ship landed late one Friday, Fry and Bender raced down the steps and out the door. That was a couple of months after the three of them joined the company, a little after Fry moved into Bender's closet and they started going to parties and stuff together.

Leela trailed after, heading over to her locker. "Hey Amy."

"Hey Leela. How'd it go?"

She gave a noncommittal grunt. "Been ready for this weekend for a long time."

"Got anything going on tonight?"

She pulled her green jacket out of the locker. "There's a billiard hall that just opened up near my place. Thought I might check it out."

"Mind if I come?"

She looked over at me. "You play?"

"Sort of."

"Sure, why not."

She let me pick dinner. As we came back from the buffet line at whatever Chinese place it was – I think it's closed down now – I aksed her, "So what about Fry? He really likes you."

She rolled her eye. "Yeah, but he's so dense. I mean, today he opened a pressurised can of whoopass on the bridge. It just got everywhere. I had to pull over for an hour while he cleaned off the windshield. And then he got streaks all over it, so I had to squeegee it again."

"Bl'eesh, Leela. Cut him some slack. I mean, they didn't even have spaceships in his time."

"Yeah they did."

"They did?"

"Yes," she sighed, clearly nettled at my ignorance. "He was born, like, five years after the first person landed on the Moon. He grew up wanting to be an astronaut. He says that all the freaking time. Hasn't he mentioned that to you?"

I shook my head.

She put down the egg roll and continued, "It's not like he's stupid. I mean, sometimes, he can be really thoughtful. It's more that... he doesn't always think things through, you know?"

"Well, I think that's kinda cute."

"Ugh. Cute isn't the word I'd use."

"You don't think he's cute?"

"Well, he is that, but in more of a fifteen-year-old-crush sort of way, you know? I mean, I'm twenty four. I want the sort of relationship that can actually progress beyond the stage of making out in the janitor's closet."

I started to giggle. I actually imagined making out in the janitor's closet with Fry right then. I could picture him looking over my shoulder and whispering, "Not so loud! They'll hear us!"

I said to her, "There's something to be said for making out in the janitor's closet."

"Anyway, it still wouldn't work. We're different species."

"Really? What are you?"

She looked out the window. "I don't know."

"Whaddya mean you don't know? How can you not know your own species?"

Her voice had dropped down to a faint whisper. "I was left on the steps of an orphanarium at birth. There was a note, but nobody could even figure out what language it was in." She looked down at a piece of sweet and sour pork in her chopsticks and growled, "I could be from anywhere in the fucking universe."

After that she changed the subject. Not wanting to press her, I just told her about Mars U and some of the classes I was taking that term. Then we went on to the billiard hall, a tiny place called Capital T Which Rhymes with P. Neither of us really got that.

Inside, there was row upon row of tables. Hazy smoke filled the air, though we couldn't actually see anyone smoking. Leela said something about a law that said pool halls had to have smoke generators.

We picked a table in the back corner, and after she'd beaten me a couple of times, I said to her, "Wow, you're pretty good with angles and stuff."

She glared at me and responded, "So?"

"Well, I mean, it's just, I wouldn't have expected that, because of..."

"Because of what? My eye?"

"Well... yeah."

I handed her the cue ball, and as she walked past, she whacked me on the side of my head with her cue stick. I bent down over the table, shouting, "Owwww! Watch it, Leela!"

"Oh, I'm sorry. It must be my depth perception," she said deliberately. "I do have problems with it."

"All right, I'm sorry, okay! Geez! Where'd you learn to make friends? Brooklyn?"

She looked over at me, sighed, and hung her head. Before she could say anything to me, I heard someone behind us say, "Hey there, sweetcheeks."

There was a guy, about my age and a little shorter than Leela, leering at me. Two other guys were with him. Frat boys, I thought.

The first one turned to Leela and gawked for a moment before he said, "Exotic. I like that. So what are a couple of foxy chicks like yourselves doing playing with yourselves?" The other two laughed at his eighth grade humour.

Leela cast an irritated glance at him. "You saying we should play you instead?"

One of his wingmen, who had spiked hair, said, "Yeah. You'll love playing with him."

I shot back, "How would you know about playing with him?"

The first and third guys started to laugh at the second guy. Leela told them, "Nah, I don't think it'll be that interesting. Unless you'd like to make it interesting."

The first guy said, "Like how?"

"Tell you what," she answered. "Two of you guys against us two. If you win, you" – she pointed at the first one, with the gap in his teeth – "can kiss anybody you want. If we win, I get to kiss anybody I want." She finished with a pointed glance at the third guy, who had his obviously dyed purple hair in a moptop.

"You got it," Gaptooth said. He handed Spike a cue as Fuchsia leaned up against the wall.

I took Leela aside and whispered up at her, "The hell are you doing?"

She whispered back, "Just go with me." Leela gave Gaptooth the cue ball. "Why don't you guys break."

Gaptooth didn't sink any on the break, leaving Leela with a couple of good shots. She potted a stripe that had been sitting in front of one of the corner pockets, and then she called a combo, pointing to the nine and fifteen which were both sitting along the side. She gave it a solid shot, with the fifteen in and the nine chasing in after it.

She missed her next shot, and then Spike sank a solid. Then when he scratched, getting a ribbing from his cohorts, I was up.

Most of our stripes were along the back, so with the cue ball at the other end, there wasn't much I could do. I hit at one of them and brought it back toward one of the side pockets.

I stood next to Leela. "Couldn't do anything."

She nodded. "Freed them up. That's all you needed to do."

Gaptooth put in another one, but when he missed on the next one, Leela had a clear look at the ball I'd just freed from the end. She sank it and let the cue ball carry to the back, where our other three were still lined up. As she walked past, she held a fist out, and I tapped it with mine.

For this one, the cue ball was between two of ours. She could try to combo the last ball off one, or put in the other. Either way, she'd have to have her cue stick at an angle to avoid the other ball.

She stood at one corner of the table and leaned over the pair. With a thumb standing precariously next to the other ball, she rested her cue on her hand and pushed it down. The ball skipped off each side of the pocket but didn't go in.

She stood with her arms crossed, her cue under one elbow. "Crap."

I held a fist out. "Freed them up."

As she tapped my fist, Spike looked over his situation. His best look was the seven, sitting in the middle of the table. He went for the far corner but missed.

So I had the cue ball at one corner, a ball sitting by the other corner, and two more on the adjacent wall. I had to go for the one at the corner.

Leela said, "Go for the middle." When I looked up at her, she was holding her hands out, her fingertips meeting at an angle.

I went for the middle – right between the ball and the wall – and hit it in. The cue ball carried toward the pocket but came to rest just outside.

As I came around the table, I found the other two balls right in line with the pocket.

"Combo," I called as I lined it up. I didn't want to hit it too hard and have the cue ball carry in, but I didn't want to try to apply backspin either. In the end I just hit it and let the ball go where it must.

The cue hit the first, which then slammed into the second. That ball went in, with the other two still chasing behind it. The cue caught up with the remaining ball again and nudged it into the pocket, with the cue deflecting a bit to the left and to the wall.

So then it was just me and the eight.

The eight ball was on the far side of the table, still on the right half, but too far from the wall to go for the pocket in that corner. I pointed to the corner opposite me but just hit the eight straight on to avoid the scratch.

We tapped fists again. "Good stuff Amy. We got them now."

Gaptooth put in two, and when he missed his next one, the cue was left behind the eight, with both right on the line down the middle of the table. Leela could go for either corner, and chose the left one. She gave a light touch, and the eight rolled slowly toward the pocket. With seemingly its last electron volt of energy, it rolled off the edge into the pocket.

Meanwhile, the cue ball rolled just as slowly toward the other pocket. But it caromed off one wall and settled in front of the other.

"Okay, so who are you gonna kiss?" Gaptooth aksed resignedly.

Fuchsia looked up at Leela and then shyly away. She looked at him, and then back toward the other two. I could tell she liked making a show of it.

I was about to turn away so I wouldn't have to watch her kiss Fuchsia, but she suddenly grabbed me between my legs and lifted me up. As she kissed me, I tried to say, "Leela, get the hell off me!" But it sounded more like, "Meimuh, mimm mhh mmm... mm..."

I could hear one of the frat boys saying, "Dude, that's fucking awesome."

That wasn't the first time I'd kissed a girl. But it was the first time with someone I really cared about.

I mean, even then I could tell that we would end up best friends. And for one short moment, at least, I wondered if we might go beyond that.

I gripped her breasts through her tank top as she opened her mouth and extended her tongue. We let our tongues wrap around one another before she put me down. She picked up her jacket and led me out of there, arm in arm.

As we left, I heard someone say, "Told you this was a gay pool hall."

Leela started to snigger as we walked out, but when we turned the corner, she howled with laughter. "Oh, man! That was hilarious! Did you see that idiot's face?"

"No, I wasn't looking."

"Damn. I wasn't either. I was hoping you saw." She leaned up against the wall and tried to collect her breath.

I said, kind of to myself, "Yeah, that was great."

Leela looked over at me, the mirth slowly disappearing from her face. She straightened up and looked at me quizzically. Then her eye opened up, and she put a hand to her mouth, saying, "Oh, shit. Shit, Amy, I didn't think about... I didn't realise you were a lesbian. Because I'm not. I mean, it's okay if you are, but... I don't want you to think I was... I just wanted to show up those jerks. I wasn't..."

She trailed off and looked down at the ground. I was about to reply before she started to talk again.

"Shit. I'm sorry, Amy. I... I..." She shook her head and started to turn away. "Maybe I should just..."

"Leela, it's okay," I said to her. "I don't mind. It was hilarious."

"You don't mind?"

"It's okay, really. And I am straight."

"Oh. Well, maybe then I shouldn't tell you that I actually kind of liked it."

"So did I."

"You did? Really?"

I nodded.

She leaned in toward me, and we kissed again.

Then we looked at one another.

"I didn't feel it that time," she told me.

"No, nothing," I answered.

Just then, my wrist rang, snapping me back to reality. With my arm still around the teddy bear, I checked my wrist. Again, I wouldn't have answered for anyone else.

"Fry. Hey."

"Hey. Can I talk to you?"

"Of course you can. What's on your mind?"

"Nothing, really. I was about to get mutated."

"Mutated? What do you mean?"

"I was just gonna jump into Lake Mutagenic."

I sat up sharply. "You what?!"

He answered calmly, as though he'd already thought it through. "You know, so I can be a mutant."

"What the hell are you talking about, Fry?" I shouted. "You don't want to be one of those fucked up freak jobs!"

There was silence.

"Fry? You there?"

He answered, softly, "Why not? I married one."

"Fry, where are you?"

"I'm standing on a pier down here. I'm looking into the water right now."

Oh shit, I thought in a panic. Don't say anything stupid.

I cleared my throat. "Fry. Don't."

He answered back, "Why?"

"Well, for one thing, what if you mutate into something that can't swim?"

"I'm prepared for that eventuality."

"Okay, well, what if you do survive? You won't be able to live on the surface. What will you do?"

"I'll live down here, of course."

"And do what?"

"Amy, this is where I belong."

"You belong up here!"

"I don't belong up there. It's not my world. I came to the future by mistake."

"Of course you belong up here, Fry. What about your job?"

He scoffed, "My job? I'm a delivery boy. The easiest fucking job there is, and I can't even do that right."

"What about your friends?"

"What friends? I never see Bender any more. It's like he doesn't know what to do with himself."

"Well... what about me?"

He said, "It's not about you, Amy. This is something I have to do."

I took a deep breath. "No, Fry. You don't have to do it."

"Give me one good reason why not."

I was right about to talk when I realised where he was coming from. I couldn't come up with a good reason why not. Except...

Through a dry throat, I said, "Me."

"What about you?"

I hesitated again before I said to him, "Fry, look. I need you around. My life is a mess right now. If you leave, I'll... I'll..."

He interrupted. "Amy, quit fooling yourself. I'm not that important to you. You've got other friends."

"No, I don't."

"Sure you do. What about that androgyne you ran off with?"

"I didn't run off with BW. I just, you know, I had to get away for a little bit."

When he didn't answer, I went on, "But Fry, you know when I first made a real friend?"

"When?"

"When you showed up. I know everyone always thinks of me as some rich bitch who cares more about cars and jewels than about people.

"But I hated the way my parents live. I was growing up in a place I couldn't stand, just waiting until I became old enough to get away from them. And then when you and Bender and Leela joined the company, I... well, I liked you guys. It seemed like you were just like me.

"You know, you came from someplace you hated, just hoping that eventually you'd find somewhere you could act normal, and nobody would judge you. You'd just be, you know, just someone. Instead of some weird freak that everyone would stare at and make you all nervous and self conscious.

"And Fry, if you jump into the lake now, yeah, you'll be a mutant, but you won't be one of them. You know?

"Because I know you. You love flying in space. I mean, you always stare down at Earth as it recedes away, and then you keep on staring out the window as stars and clusters and stuff go by. And when we arrive at a planet, you're always enraptured by the approach in. You always look to see how many moons the planet has, right? Whether it has rings? Whether it has a thick or a thin atmosphere? If there are a lot of clouds? Whether it has ice caps? Whether it has a lot of large cities? What kind of traffic patterns it has? You know?"

I hadn't intended to keep on talking like that. But when I started to tell him about how I felt, I kind of forgot that he was a half second away from jumping into the water and becoming who knows what.

He said, slowly, "I guess, but... what am I supposed to do?"

"Why don't you come to my place?"

"Your place?"

"Yeah. It'll be fun. We'll make pancakes and everything."

There was another long pause before I heard him say, "All right. I'll see you in a little bit."

"Wait, Fry."

"What?"

"Don't hang up."

So we kept talking as he made his way back to the surface and then to my building. When he came to the door, I stared at him for a moment.

"What?" he aksed.

"Just wanted to make sure you haven't mutated." I pulled him into an embrace and rested my forehead on his shoulder. "God, Fry, don't scare me like that again."

"I'll try not to."

I let him pour the mix onto the griddle, which explains how we ended up with rectangular pancakes.

We scraped them onto our plates and moseyed over to the living room, where I turned on the television set. "Want to see if All My Circuits is on?"

He shook his head. "I just can't watch that any more. You know? I feel like I'm living it."

"Hmm. Yeah, I sorta know what you mean."

We looked through the channels, but we couldn't find anything interesting. I switched off.

"Amy, can I aks you something?"

"You know you can."

"You remember the day... you know."

I nodded. There was only one day he could be talking about. The day Leela died.

"You remember before, when you and I were talking in my cabin?"

"Yeah."

"You said something about if she didn't love me, she was a hypocrite."

"Yeah."

"What did you mean?"

"She ever tell you what she was looking for in a man?"

He seemed to shrink into himself. "Yeah. Like, the complete opposite of me." He ticked them off on his fingers. "Adventurous, self confident, snappy dresser. I guess I'm adventurous, at least. When I'm not stuffing my craw or zoned out on the couch."

"No, no. I mean besides that."

"Besides that?"

"You know. Didn't she ever talk about how she wanted someone who'd accept her as she was?"

"Yeah, but she was just talking generally, not about boyfriends."

"No, look. There were plenty of times when she'd be frustrated at her lack of progress dating. She'd always be like, 'Why can't they get used to me and move on?' And I'd always tell her that there was one guy who'd already gotten used to her and moved on."

He stared at me, not understanding. "Who's that?"

I groaned. "You, dumbass. I mean, you were right there the whole time, but for so long she was too full of herself to give you a chance. She thought you weren't good enough for her."

"Yeah. I know I wasn't. But I tried. I tried so damn hard."

"Well, you did it eventually."

"Yeah, and look at what kind of reward I got. I just hate the way everything turned out. One week! One fucking week, Amy!" He jumped to his feet. "That's not what was supposed to happen! We should have had everything! A house, a family, stupid arguments about whose turn it was to do the dishes, all of that. And what happens?"

He sat down again, head in his hands. I put an arm over his shoulders, not knowing what else I could do.

He sat there silently for some time. He wasn't even crying or anything, just staring down at the floor.

As I held Fry, I reached up with my other hand and tried to smooth down his hair. One side was flattened back, the other curling down by his ear. His pompadour seemed to be a little flatter today.

He didn't respond, so I just got up and took the plates back to the kitchen.

I have a dishwasher, but I washed them off by hand. I cleaned the griddle manually as well. I think I just needed something to do.

I dried off the spatula with a dishrag as I turned toward the living room, nearly bumping into Fry. He aksed, "Want a hand?"

"No, just finished."

"Okay. I guess I'll go home then."

"You gonna be okay by yourself?"

He smiled sadly. "I'm not gonna be okay either way."

"Well, you can stay here for the night if you want."

"Yeah, maybe. I am pretty tired."

"You should be. I mean, it's... hm."

"What?"

I was looking at my wrist. It showed me two interesting things. "It's 02:13. And I have a message."

"You do? From when?"

I shrugged and hit play.

Beep. "Hi, Amy. Dis is Hermes, calling at 23:53 on Wednesday. I'm calling to let you know dat we're having an important all hands meeting tomorrow morning at eight. Dere's some important things to talk about, and we need to have everyone dere. So, I'll see you den." Beep.

Fry and I looked at each other.

"You gonna go?"

"I have to."

"Well, let me know how it turns out."

"You're skipping it?"

"Come on, Amy. There's no way I'll be functional tomorrow morning. I mean, I'm about to fall over right now. Speaking of which, can I crash here tonight?"

"Yeah. Of course you can," I answered, surprised that he even felt that he had to aks.

"Thanks." He walked out into the living room and spread out on the couch. When he looked up at me, he noticed my amused smile. "What?"

"I have a bed you can sleep on, you know."

"No, you take it."

I sighed and led him into one of the other bedrooms. As I went to the closet to retrieve the sheets, he stood staring.

"You have a spare bedroom?"

"I have three spare bedrooms."

He helped me deploy the sheets. "Three spare bedrooms? How much does all this cost?"

"Too much. I'm thinking of moving out."

"Why? What do you mean it's too much? Are your parents cutting you off?"

"No. I think they like paying for all my stuff. I want to cut them off, actually. I mean, I'm twenty three. I've got a college degree, and a job, and my own money. I don't want to keep living off my parents."

"Well, at least you have that option."

I looked up at him and saw his head bowed, looking away.

"Sorry," I muttered.

He sat down on the bed and said, "Well, what I mean is, don't turn down chances like that. You're a Wong. Why not take advantage of it?"

I snorted in disgust. "That's the way my mother talks." I put one hand on my hip and pointed the other at him, adopting her accent that made such a mess of the English language: "'You a Wong! You must leeve like Wong!' Fuck. I mean, who cares what I must do. I'll do what I feel like."

"Mm-hmm," he responded. I saw him leaning back on the bed drowsily.

I took that as my cue to leave. "Well, good night."

As he slipped off his shoes, I reached over to the light switch. Before I flipped it, he said, "Amy. Thanks."

I smiled and turned off the light.

And I still couldn't get to sleep.

And right now, it's 05:48. In a couple of hours I have to leave for that meeting.

I haven't been able to sleep tonight, which gave me an opportunity to write some more in here.

It doesn't make sense. There's so much that's happened these past few days since our Xmas party, and yet I'm still lost as to what to do about Fry. Seeing him at Leela's gravesite, talking to her almost as though he could hear her responding, made me consider if he's still in denial.

But what really shocked me was that he was about to jump into the lake and let himself become a mutant.

Nothing about it adds up.

Was he suicidal? I don't think he was, and besides, suicide booths are much more efficient for that purpose.

Was he envious of the mutant lifestyle? I couldn't see a whole lot to be envious of.

Was he trying to emulate Leela? That's the most likely possibility I can come up with right now.

I feel like I have to watch over him, to make sure that he doesn't try to do anything like that again. But maybe that will just make things worse, because I'll just remind him of her. She always treated his safety as her own responsibility, and for a while he resented that. Although he got used to it in her case, I don't think he'd trust me that much.

And he knows how I feel about him. I was hoping maybe he wouldn't find out until he was ready. But now I've only made things harder for him, and for the moment, I'll have to wait for him to show interest in me first.

And if he never does?

Objectively, I can understand that. But I hope he will.

I thought Fry was handling this so well. On Neptune, or coming back from the resort, or eulogising Leela, I would look at him and be amazed. I knew I couldn't handle it the way he was.

With him around, though, at least I would try.

And tonight – last night, I suppose – I found out that he was faking it. He was hiding his fears. And when they caught up with him, they might have killed him.

I just can't let that happen.

My life kind of feels like the way they always say the Universe will end. All the galaxies drifting further and further apart, and generation after generation of stars dying out until finally the faintest of the M stars drag their nuclear engines to a halt, and the Universe is nothing more than a huge junkyard of discarded stellar husks. Cold. Empty. Meaningless.

That's what my universe feels like.

Except for Fry.

He's the one star that's still burning, still keeping me alive.

I'm not sure that's the right metaphor to use, because that implies that one day, when there's nothing more for him to do, he'll just burn out and fade away. Or go supernova, whatever that would mean.

And I don't know what I'd do if he did burn out.

So that's what I'd tell him, if I could. I'd tell him that I need to keep him safe. That I need someone to keep me safe.

That I need him.