My Ship trilogy

by deb-h

Amy says: "A cruel twist in fate begins this epic tale-in-progress chronicling the end of my innocence." Most recently posted is the nineteenth part, in which there are quite a lot of confrontations. The title "My Ship" now refers to parts 1-6, and "Down for the Count" to parts 7-19. M for strong language and some sexual content.

4. My Ship part 4: Stun

My Ship, fourth part: Stun

by Deb H

---

Saturday 07 January 3004

Sorry about the dried drool on the corner of this page.

After I finished writing my last entry, I kind of rested my head on the table. I guess I fell asleep, because the next thing I can recall after that is Fry pushing me onto the floor.

"Ow! What the... hey."

"Hey. Sorry," he said sheepishly. "I couldn't wake you. You were in pretty deep."

"What time is it?"

"07:50."

"There's a meeting at eight."

"Yeah. We gotta leave, like, now."

He led me out to the tube station.

After we got spit out at 64th, we walked the last couple of blocks to work. I said to him, "Weren't you going to skip this meeting?"

He kind of looked away from me at the ground. "Yeah. I thought maybe I should go. I mean, I was thinking of... of how..."

When he trailed off, I looked up at him. "You're having dreams about her."

He nodded.

I replied, "Me too."

He nodded again.

I pushed the button and stepped aside to let him through the door first.

He had his hands jammed into his pockets, like normal. He was staring at the ground, and I could see tears forming in his eyes.

When I draped an arm over his shoulder, he responded in kind.

We walked through the door together.

---

Hermes, Bender, the Professor, Scruffy, and Zoidberg were already there.

Fry aksed me, "Want some coffee?"

I sat next to Bender and called to Fry, "Yeah."

"What flavour?" he aksed from the kitchen.

"We still got mint?"

"Yeah."

"Get me some of that."

"Sure."

Bender turned to me. "You and him are interfacing again? Thought humans had some sort of buffer period after someone you love bites it."

I sighed. "We're not 'interfacing', stupid. And you could always try that thing called tact."

"Yeah, well, you deal with a loss your own way, I'll deal with it in mine."

I looked up at him in surprise.

That was sort of what I was expecting him to say, but the way he said it was completely different.

There was no belligerence there at all.

Normally, with respect to Bender, belligerent is one of the top adjectives. Number two, maybe number one. Hell, maybe even number zero.

I thought about what Fry had told me about Bender's feelings, two weeks before.

Already two weeks? I thought. It seemed much more recent, and yet much more distant.

Everything was like that now. That was only seventeen days after... after the day that...

Let me try again.

Seventeen days after Leela's death.

There.

Was that so hard?

Yeah. It was.

Anyway, point is, it was seventeen days. But it felt like seventeen seconds, and like seventeen millennia. All at once.

And I don't think anybody who hasn't been through it can really understand.

Before my mind got too far off course, Fry set down a cup of coffee in front of me.

"Thanks."

Hermes said, "If you folks don't mind, I'd like to call dis meeting to order using an ancient Jamaican bureaucratic technique."

We mumbled noncommittal signals of acceptance.

He picked up a folder from the desk as he stood up. He started to walk around the desk and suddenly swatted Professor Farnsworth on the back of the head with the rolled up folder.

"Dammit, Hermes!" the Professor shouted. "I can't afford another stroke at this juncture!"

He continued around the table and gave the rest of us a good solid thwack.

As he sat down again, I cried out, "What the hell kind of tradition is that?"

He answered, "It's a time honoured technique for starting early morning meetings. Now den, de point of dis meeting is to announce de sale of de company."

Fry and I blurted out in synch, "What?!"

"Yes," the Professor told us. "I received an offer that I couldn't refuse."

Bender replied, "For what? A new liver? Yeah! That's right!" He offered a hand for high fives. "Anybody? Anyone at all?"

"No, of course not. It's a very generous buyout, plus it comes with three new hips."

Professor Farnsworth owned – had owned – just over half of Planet Express. I had fifteen thousand shares, about seven percent. I got ten thousand in my original benefits package, and Fry and I split Leela's ten thousand.

"What kind of buyout?" I said.

"I'm glad you aksed that, Zoidberg," the Professor said. I rolled my eyes.

He continued, "I'm selling my shares at a very reasonable ten dollars each. Any of you can feel free to sell your shares to the new owners as well."

Scruffy immediately stood up and declared, "Scruffy's quittin'. Sellin' my shares back to the mysterious new owners."

"Have you met them?" Fry aksed him.

"Nope. Don't intend to. Ain't never gonna work for another boss besides Professor Whatshisface there."

As we watched, he placed his mop on the conference table. "Scruffy's gonna miss the quirky camaraderie and irrational zest for living from this group." He walked to the door, but stopped and looked up at the ship. "Need a new challenge in my life, though. Maybe it's back to the Institute for Advanced Studies for Scruffy."

He left, and the Professor continued, "So, how about we meet your new bosses?"

"Are dey here?" Hermes aksed.

"They should be coming in about an hour." The doorbell rang, and the Professor continued, "By which I mean now."

He got up and shuffled out of the room. Over the next couple of minutes the doorbell rang a couple more times.

"How the hell could he sell the entire company?" Fry shouted. "I mean, what's he gonna do the rest of his life?"

Bender slapped him. "Quit thinking about yourself all the time, organism! What am I gonna do the rest of my simulated life?"

"Wonder who they are," I said.

"Bet they're your parents," Bender answered.

I shook my head. "They would have told me."

"Maybe it's a surprise."

I looked up and started to reconsider.

Maybe. It still didn't sound like the sort of thing my parents would do.

Bender continued, "Maybe they bought the company and rehired Brannigan hoping that the two of you could make some human grandkids."

That sounded like the sort of thing my parents would do.

I looked over at Fry. He was just staring straight ahead. It seemed like he hadn't heard a word anybody said.

"Fry," I said to him.

He turned to me.

"Whatcha thinking?"

He shrugged.

"Hey, Amy!" BW shouted.

I turned away from Fry and answered, "Hi, BW."

BW was just walking into the room behind two others. There was a short human guy, shorter even than me. There was someone from a species that I didn't recognise. She – it later turned out she was female, but I couldn't tell from looking at her – was a dark blue and was sort of a snake with a humanoid upper body. Four tentacles, two on each side, stuck out from the torso, and her head was a little bit elongated with short hair of a lighter blue shade curling down around small knobs that protruded from the sides of her head. Based upon their location, they were ears. But based upon their shape, they were more like noses.

BW walked up and gave me a hug. "Bet you didn't think you'd see me again so soon, didja?"

I ruffled its hair and jokingly said to it, "Just as long as you're not my new boss."

"No chance of that. I'm bottom of the pecking order with these guys." It pointed at its coworkers. The short guy was being introduced to Zoidberg and Bender, and the other one was stamping forms with Hermes.

BW and Fry shook hands next. They had to remind one another of their names, and when Fry said his name, BW replied, "Yeah, I knew it was some sort of method of cooking. 'Charbroil' didn't sound right."

I introduced BW to my other coworkers. It introduced me to its boss, Clyde Villafuerte, and their bureaucrat, Hlachotoplo. "Call me Choto," she said in a distantly lyrical accent that made letters weaker. For instance, she made her name sound more like Shodo.

"We'll have a real meeting at nine," Clyde said. "Until then, let's just hang out for a while, try and get to know each other."

I led BW down to the hangar floor. Fry and Bender tagged along.

Looking up at the Leela, BW aksed, "What about your captain? Do I get to meet her?"

Fry and Bender stared at me.

Fry said to me, "You haven't told it?"

"Told me what?" BW responded.

It was looking back and forth between Fry and me. It stammered, "Was... was she fired or something?"

Fry stared blankly at the steps and said, "Leela died two weeks ago."

BW turned to me, wide eyed.

I nodded.

It murmured, "I'm... I'm sorry."

I shrugged. "I never got a chance to tell you."

"How old was she?"

"Twenty eight."

BW shook its head. "Just isn't fair, is it?"

We stood there for a little while, nobody saying anything. After a couple of minutes, I noticed that Bender was gone. He'd gone upstairs, and I could see him talking to Choto.

Fry and I ended up spending the rest of the hour taking BW on a tour of the Turanga Leela. I think BW really only got a sense of what Leela meant to us when we told it the name of the ship.

We showed BW my quarters and then Fry's. Bender's hammock was still strung across the upper part of the room, but I managed to smile a little as I looked down at the mattress Fry had put in a couple of months ago. I wondered what would have motivated him to redecorate like that.

BW suddenly said, "Do I get a cabin?"

Fry looked down the hallway. "We have a couple of extra rooms back aft. You could have one of them."

"Or you could bunk with me," I said.

BW turned to me. "Really? You wouldn't mind?"

"It'll be fun. We just gotta get you a hammock."

"I still got my old one," Fry put in.

We left it on the floor of my quarters so we could get to the meeting in time.

I wasn't sure where the extra chairs had come from, but we all managed to sit around the conference table. Save for Choto, that is. It looked to me like she wasn't capable of sitting in the first place.

Professor Farnsworth said to us, "Well, everyone, I've thoroughly enjoyed bossing you all around for all these years. Those of you who are still alive, at least."

"You suck!" Bender shouted. "Give us the new management!"

"Yes, yes," the Professor responded. "As I'm sure you're all eager to meet your new boss –"

"Already did!" Fry called out.

For some reason I found the heckling funny. I always did like that about Fry and Bender, how they could deflate an important or tense situation with just a few words.

"– I'll just hand it over to him after a long winded speech about why I sold the company in the first place."

"Nobody cares!" Bender shouted.

"I do!" Zoidberg shouted back.

BW leaned over to me and whispered, "Are they always like that?"

I whispered back, "No."

"Thank god."

"Usually they're funnier."

It groaned.

Adjusting his glasses, the Professor resumed, "Now, Planet Express was founded upon the twin values of generating lots of money for my research into practical applications of doomsday devices, and... whatever the second value was."

"Getting lazy robots drunk!" Fry shouted.

"Yeah! That's what I'm talking about!" Bender replied.

"Yes, of course," the Professor said. "And for many years, that's exactly what we did. Along with damaging numerous packages, slightly less numerous spaceships, and about as numerous crewmembers."

Bender called, "Especially Leela!" before Fry punched him.

When Bender got up, he said, "Hey, man. Calm down. She was already damaged. Am I right? Am I – ow! Ow! Ow! My forearm and forehead!"

Fry had detached Bender's arm and was beating him with it.

I stared at this in growing concern.

What Bender said had infuriated me as well. But even so, I thought Fry was overreacting. Bender wasn't intentionally disrespecting Leela. That sort of thing was normal for robots.

The rest of us were watching helplessly, except for the Professor, who continued to drone on oblivious to the other happenings in the room.

Finally I got up and grabbed Fry from behind. He tried to wrest out of my arms, but finally he relented. I pried Bender's arm from his hand.

I said, softly, "Bender, you know better than to get Fry riled up like that."

He said, "Yeah, but how am I supposed to provide the lovable and edgy witticisms around here?"

I gave his arm back, and he muttered under his breath as he went back to the conference table.

Fry and I were now standing by the stairs down to the hangar floor.

I held his hands. He was still breathing heavily. His arms were still shaking.

"It's okay, Fry."

I was looking into his eyes, but he seemed to be staring through me.

He shook his head slowly, side to side. "It's not okay."

I held him tight. I couldn't think of anything else to do other than whisper in his ear, "It's okay."

He sniffled, "It's not okay."

I ran my hands down his arms, trying to relax them. They were so extremely tense.

He said, weakly, "Nothing's okay, Amy. Nothing will ever be okay again."

I just didn't have any clue what to do next.

The meeting was still going on, sort of. I could hear the Professor still talking, the way I can hear the traffic from the balcony of my apartment. Distant, indistinct.

Should we have gone right back to our seats?

I aksed myself that question, but when I looked up into Fry's eyes, he seemed to have zoned out. His eyes looked down, and in other circumstances I would have accused him of staring at my breasts.

It's funny, but I think that if I'd ever caught Fry doing that, which I never did, I wouldn't have been mad. I would have just called him out. I would have said, "Fry, you're staring at my boobs." And he would have been all flustered and embarrassed and apologetic, and I would have laughed and said it was okay, and then he would have insisted on making it up to me by buying me a drink at a bar.

On a couple of occasions, I caught guys staring at my breasts. I stared them down each time, and each time they immediately disappeared into the crowd. I hated being reduced, whether it was to "the Wong heiress" or to my body. Anybody who ogled me, I assumed that they had no interest in me personally.

But, well, Fry cared about me. He always had, even before we dated. And then having to ride around on my body for a few days brought us closer, even as we broke up. Fry liked me, not just because of my body.

And that's exactly my problem. He likes me. He loves me not.

---

I finally decided to lead him onto the ship and into my quarters. We sat together on the bed, and I took his hands.

"How are you, Fry?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. I mean, every time I feel like I'm past it and I can start to live normally again, something else happens. Like when Bender said that. I mean, Bender says things like that all the time. We expect it out of him. But when I heard it, I just snapped."

He paused for a moment, and then he went on. "Bender didn't deserve that. Why'd I do that? I'm a fucking monster. I should just..."

He held his head in his hands, clearly shamed.

"Fry, look," I began, haltingly. "Everyone's been like that. It's hard for all of us."

"Even you?"

That caught me off guard. It was then that I realised that Fry had absolutely no idea what I was going through.

And then I thought, Do I have any idea what he's going through?

Nonetheless, I tried to think of a way to explain my situation to him.

Finally I just said, "I pulled the trigger."

My voice was little more than a whisper.

He aksed me, "What did you say?"

I jumped up and cried, "I pulled the fucking trigger, okay? I had it pointed at the guy. My hand was moving like crazy. I thought I could get him! I thought I could save her!"

I put my hands to my face as I sank to my knees. I could feel Fry's arms wrapping me up from behind as I sobbed, an emotional rocket wreck.

Not that Fry was in much better shape, of course. He already knew this story, and I don't think he needed to hear it again.

He whispered in my ear, "It's not your fault."

"It is my fault," I responded. "Why did it have to be her? Couldn't it have been me?"

Fry lifted my chin up and pulled my hands away. He was sitting in front of me on the floor.

He was staring at me, his face showing utter disbelief.

He started to talk. "Y... y... you d... you don't mean that."

"Of course I mean that. Come on, Fry. Wouldn't you have chosen Leela over me?"

"Stop it, Amy," he said.

"Of course you would. So would I, Fry. She's so much more important than me."

"Stop it, Amy," he repeated, more forcefully. "I can't let you do that to yourself. It's already happened. It's behind us. There's nothing more we can do."

I looked down at my hands. "Yeah... but..."

"Look, the only thing we can do is move on, and maybe try to make her proud of us."

I nodded. Then I thought about something.

"Fry."

"Yeah?"

"Does anybody else know?"

"Know what?"

"You know. What really happened."

"I haven't told anyone. Have you?"

I shook my head.

He said, "Then it's between you and me and her."

As we held one another in a tearful embrace on the floor of my quarters, I thought, I don't deserve a friend like him.

---

We got back to the meeting with the Professor still talking. I suspect he didn't even notice our absence.

Fry and I settled back into our chairs, and he rested a hand atop mine.

Bender leaned over to Fry. "Listen, buddy. That... you know, it didn't come out the way I meant."

"I know," Fry answered. "It's okay."

"Yeah. It's just, well, I don't want you to think I don't care. I mean, I miss old One-Eye as much as you do."

Fry gave a teasing shove. "You can't possibly miss her as much as I do."

Bender replied, "Yeah, you're right. I'm not programmed to miss anyone that much."

As they slapped hands, I turned back to the Professor.

"...But as it turned out, 2999 was an even better year for our company. We finally got rid of that loser crew, the lighter fluid incident notwithstanding. We hired a new intern, someone with knowledge and naïveté and that most important trait, functional organs. She quickly proved capable at many tasks around the office, although there was one job she would not do."

Fry turned to me in disgust and whispered, "He didn't..."

I told him, "No, he just aksed me to chew his food for him."

"Oh. Still, that's pretty nasty."

Bender leaned over to us. "Anybody got an idea how to make this old crank think he's done talking?"

Fry and I puzzled over that challenge for a moment.

I said, "We could start clapping."

The two of them looked back at each other. Fry gave an Eeh, what the hell shrug.

Fry started to clap, and Bender and I joined in. The rest of the table stared at us.

BW was about to start but hesitated. After an encouraging nod from me, it began to clap with us.

About then, the rest of them got the message. The Professor trailed off, and Choto pushed Clyde to his feet.

Clyde said, "Oh... um... thank you, Professor Farnsworth."

They shook hands, and the Professor sat down again, seemingly unfazed.

Clyde addressed us. "I'm Clyde Villafuerte, and I'm going to be the most dynamic boss any of you have ever had."

At that moment, the Professor began snoring.

Clyde went on, but cast nervous glances back at the sleeping Professor every once in a while. "Um... let me tell you a little bit about my background first. I come from a silicon mining family in Spain and inherited majority control of the company. But recently I decided I needed a change, so I sold all my shares and started looking for other things to do. I've known Professor Farnsworth for years now. We've met at several trade shows and industry conferences.

"And I'm excited to have this opportunity now. I've been eager to get into the shipping industry for some time now, and now that I have the opportunity, I'm going to do everything I can to take Planet Express to the next level."

I leaned over to Fry. "Haven't we heard this speech before?"

He replied, "If he uses the word leverage, I'm going to lose it."

Bender leaned in. "If he uses the word antipode, I'm going to lose it."

We looked back at Bender in confusion.

He said, defensively, "Hey, you try using antipode in everyday speech. It's not easy."

With no way to respond to that, Fry and I turned back to Clyde.

He was staring us down. "Are you three quite finished?"

I looked at the table and muttered, "Sorry."

Fry jumped to his feet. "No, wait," he said authoritatively. "Let me aks you something. Can you fly that ship?"

Clyde raised an eyebrow at Fry. "Who are you again?"

"Can you fly that ship?" Fry repeated.

Clyde looked quite disgusted at this turn of events. "No, I can't."

"Do you have anyone who can?"

He turned to Choto and BW. Choto was nonplussed, but BW seemed to be a little bit amused.

Clyde huffed, "I suppose not."

Fry pointed to the ship. "Well, there's only one Turanga Leela, and there's only one person who can fly her. Only one person who can fix her. And that's Amy. So I'd like to see a little more respect for her. Because Bender and I are with her all the way. Just think of us as a three member union. If you think you can run this company without us, well, I invite you to try."

We were all staring at Fry, and I'm sure everyone was thinking something similar to what I was: What the hell?

I turned anxiously to Clyde.

He was looking askance at Fry. Then, all of a sudden, he broke into a lopsided grin.

"I'm going to like it around here, aren't I?"

Then Bender spoke up. "Hey, are you going to be done soon? All My Circuits is on."

Clyde said, "Isn't it a rerun today?"

Bender narrowed his eyes. "Touché, Mr Villafuerte."

"Anyway, I was gonna say, I'm going to try not to change anything around here. You guys can continue doing your jobs as you see fit, and we'll only be providing occasional oversight.

"Hlachotoplo will be working for me. Hermes will still be directing day to day activities as usual. And Bethany Weir here – BW – will be around to assist in the deliveries, the maintenance, and all the other important tasks."

"Can you cook?" Fry aksed BW.

"Not really," it said. "Why?"

"Not really? So you're better than Bender."

"Any more questions?" Clyde said.

Zoidberg aksed, "What about the Professor?"

"Oh, yes. He's going to stay on as a consultant."

"Yes, that's right," the Professor added. "I'm going to continue to work on these useless devices that none of you care about, until, of course, I need you as beta testers for the wave of world domination that I'm going to use them for. Oh my, yes."

Hermes aksed, "What about Cubert, mon?"

"Well, Cubert is working on a doomsday device of his very own," the Professor told us. "Perhaps he too will know the feeling of having an entire planet humbled at his feet, all of them just waiting for their orders to come down and hoping that they won't be told to fight a deathmatch against their best friend or their neighbour or their English teacher from high school..."

As the Professor walked off into his lab, his voice faded away but still continued carrying on.

From inside the lab, I could hear Cubert's voice. "I can only hope that when I reach your age, all of my ramblings are about things that actually happened."

---

The rest of the day was devoted to getting to know our new owners.

Clyde took us out to lunch at a Spanish restaurant. As flamenco dancers whirled past our table every couple of minutes, he, Choto, and BW shared more of their life stories.

Actually, Clyde didn't tell us very much beyond what he'd already said. We heard Choto's and BW's life stories mostly.

Choto came from a planet called Mouscron, only a couple of kiloparsecs from the centre of the Milky Way. She was fifty eight years old, but she said that would be the Mouscronian equivalent of about thirty. Her species took longer to reach physiological and psychological maturity.

"I went through a bachelor programme in computer science at Mouscron State," she told us, "and then I went to NJIT for my Master's. I'm actually only the second Mouscronian to settle on Earth. That shows you how remote our planet is. I started in the CS department, but when I met some of the bureaucrats, I realised how much more exciting bureaucracy was."

I noticed Hermes smiling quietly to himself. This was probably the only other person in the Universe who would use the words exciting and bureaucracy consecutively.

Choto continued, "Well, when I transferred into the programme, naturally I had so much catching up to do. I'd aks questions like 'Where would you itemise a solitary deduction of a grass stain?' and everyone would go 'Duh! On an A434-9-05C!' or whatever."

"Dat's an ice cream stain!" Hermes protested. "A grass stain is a 62-418RF!"

"Anyway, eventually I started programming all the forms I ran into on my computer." She held up a small rectangular panel that she had on a cord around her neck. "That's when I realised that nobody had ever come up with a form to report incidents of accidental public nudity that weren't covered by reality show cameras or surveillance cameras. That ended up being my PhD thesis."

Hermes aksed her, "Is dat de W555-1212?"

"Yep."

"I got me first one of those a few months ago. Amy got her bra caught in de trash decomposer out back."

I leaned forward and tried not to think about that day. I mean, it was hot. I'd taken off the top to my sweatsuit. I just stood too close to the intake port. It could have happened to anyone.

Hermes said, "So dat was your form?"

"Yeah."

"Good work."

"Thanks."

Then I finally noticed the badge that Choto had pinned to her shirt.

She was a grade 31. Four grades higher than Hermes.

That's when I finally realised why they were making such a fuss about not replacing anybody. Hermes must have seen that grade 31 badge as soon as they entered and immediately assumed that his job was on the line, if not taken from him already.

Yeah, yeah. Go ahead and tell me how dumb I am.

---

At the end of the day, after Fry, Bender, and I had given BW a full afternoon's crash course in the ship's innards, our new coworkers all left together. They were sharing a hotel suite until they found places to live. BW was probably going to get its own apartment, and I wondered whether Clyde and Choto would be sharing one.

They hadn't told us much about their personal lives. Choto had said a little bit about her career, but I still don't know how they met one another, or what exactly she did for Clyde, or anything. For all I know, they could be married.

Anyway, after they left, Hermes called me into his office. As I entered, he said, "So BW knows everything dere is to know about de Leela now, right?"

Suppressing a laugh, I told him, "Yeah, she's sharp. She graduated with honours in physics."

"Yeah. When did she become... um..."

"Androgynous?"

"Is dat what it is?"

"That's what she... it says. It must have been sometime this year."

He nodded. He had his eyes on a pen in his hand, which he was tapping on the edge of the desk.

At length, he put the pen down and met my eyes.

"How are you, Amy?"

I fixed my eyes on the desk as I reclined into the couch. "Okay, I guess."

"What about Fry?"

"Fry?" I turned to the door, as if there was some way he could hear us. "He's doing pretty well, actually. I mean, considering."

"Are you sure?" Hermes replied.

I turned back to him and said, "What do you mean?"

"Well, I mean... dis morning..."

"Come on, Hermes. After Bender said that? What did you expect Fry to do?"

"Even so, we can't have fights breaking out in de office every day."

I raised my eyebrows at him. "Is that what this is about? Productivity?"

"No, Amy. It's just –"

"Hold it, Hermes. Let me aks you something. How many deliveries did Fry make on Xmas Day?"

He looked away. He knew I got him.

"Well, Bender was dere too..."

"Didn't you give him two hundred eighteen deliveries to make? In one day?"

"Well, it was two and a half days, really..."

"Yeah! What the hell! I mean, you know how far away those packages go! I can't even believe he did it all in just two days! I hope you at least filled up the coffee supplies in the galley! God! Did you know that Fry had to leave Bender at the wheel half the time? Does Bender even have a pilot's license?"

"Well, not quite..."

"Hermes, just think for a second! Just think about what it's been like for him! I mean, you remember how many times he nearly got himself killed when Leela was in trouble! Just think about when he finally kissed her for real... or when he finally fucked her. Think about when he came back from that one delivery and found her body in my arms."

I had risen to my feet when I started shouting at Hermes. I'd been pacing back and forth in front of his desk, but then I came to a halt as my voice trailed off, my emotions starting to get the better of me.

I stood in the doorway and said to Hermes, "I mean, don't tell me you worked a sixteen hour day right after Dawn died."

As the door slid shut behind me, I thought I heard Hermes reply, "I did."

I had to have imagined it.

---

Not finding Fry or Bender anywhere, I walked down to the floor of the hangar. The Turanga Leela seemed a bit dirty, so I went to the closet and grabbed all the cleaning equipment. I'd scrubbed down the tail fins and the rear landing legs when I heard Bender shouting, "Hey, know what time it is?"

I turned to him, and he continued, "Time to get hammered!"

I put down the squeegee and headed up to meet them. Bender had a case of beer, and Fry was carrying a pineapple with a handle. It was the pineapple fried rice from E's, a takeout restaurant that we'd often go to.

"Hey guys," I said as I slipped the top of my sweat suit back on.

"What up," Fry said.

Bender aksed me, "Want to watch the celebrity ape fights tonight?"

"Not really."

Said Bender, "Come on! Don't you want to see Elzar in an ape suit against that guy from Queer Cape for the Straight Ape?"

Fry told him, "Nah, I think Amy and I will just hang out."

He reached for the beer case, but Bender yanked it away and shouted, "Hey, get your own, fleshwad!"

Fry protested, "I did! I paid for that case!"

"You did not, jerk! I did!"

"Yeah, with money you stole from me!"

"For your information, I stole it from Hermes!"

"You did?"

"Yeah. It came out of my wages from this month. And considering the amount of work I've done this month, that's basically stealing! Ha ha ha ha ha! Naw, I'm just being difficult. Here you go."

He handed Fry a couple of bottles and carried the rest of the case into the lounge.

Fry turned to me. "Get the plates?"

"Sure." I grabbed a pair of plates and forks, plus a bottle of iced tea for myself, and followed Fry upstairs.

There's a big circular room located at the top of the tower in the building – I like to call it the rotunda. There are a couple of doors that open out to the balcony that surrounds the room. The high ceiling makes it the best place for the Xmas tree that we install every year.

When we came up, Fry punched the button next to the fireplace. With a fwoom, it ignited and gave us some flickering yellow illumination.

Fry removed the top of the pineapple and emptied some of the rice onto his plate. I took the pineapple and poured out some more rice. We ate in silence for a couple of minutes.

Then he looked up from his plate and said to me, "You like the new owners?"

"I don't know. Clyde didn't tell us a whole lot about himself."

"Yeah he did. He told us all about how he used to own his family's mining company. Remember?"

"I know. But why did he sell his company? Why did he just suddenly decide to buy a package delivery company?"

Fry replied, "Well, why did I come to the future?"

That puzzled me. "Didn't you get here by accident?"

"Yeah. Maybe his situation's the same."

"Like how?"

"I don't know! Some traumatic accident with mining machinery? It could be anything."

"What did you say?"

"I said I don't know what it is."

"No, what did you say about accidents with machinery?"

"I don't know. It was just a guess."

"Yeah, but... what do you know about..."

He was looking at me funny. "I don't know anything about him. Why? Do you?"

"No, not about him... but..."

Fry didn't seem to get it. For a second I was wondering why he would mention an accident with heavy machinery. Did he know about my uncle? If he did, how could he have found out?

But I studied his face, and I finally convinced myself that he couldn't understand my reaction because he really didn't know what happened.

Finally I said, "What do you think of them?"

"They're okay, I guess. It's just..."

"What?"

He went on, "It's just... well... I think maybe it's just too much change too fast, you know? This whole month has been... well, first I started waking up to find this... this beautiful... siren in bed with me.

"Then all of a sudden I start waking up, and what's next to me in the bed? Just... well... just cold. That's it. Cold emptiness.

"Then for a while I was actually waking up in cold. And then... well... this week I don't think I ever fell asleep. I think I've just been half asleep this whole week."

There was another quiet interval.

I broke it by saying, "You've had dreams about her?"

"Yeah."

"Like what?"

"Well, they're kind of like what would be happening if... you know, if she was still around."

"Yeah? What happens?"

"Well, in one... well, she proposes to me."

I smiled in amusement. "Really?"

"Yeah. See, in that dream, you'd fallen down the stairs when that guy was chasing her. You got knocked out for a bit, and then after you came to, she and I were talking. And then she finally said it. She finally told me she loved me. And I was so stunned, I almost didn't catch what she said next. She said, 'Will you marry me?'

"And I was in such disbelief. Really, all I could do was reach into my pocket and show her this."

He reached into the pocket on the right side of his jacket and took out a small black box.

He went on, "And when I showed it to her, you know what I said?"

I answered for him. "'I wanted to surprise you. You beat me to it.'"

He gave a small laugh. "Yeah. Was it that predictable?"

I reached for the box. "Let me see that."

When I pulled it from his hands and hinged open the box, I could only think, What the fuck?

I must have stared at that damn ring for hours.

Finally I looked up at Fry and said, "That's the same."

"What is?"

"That dream, Fry," I said in a hushed, shocked tone. "I had the same exact dream."

"You did?"

"Yeah. Exactly the same. I woke up in the medbay, and then after Leela came in, she was talking to you, and then she just proposed to you, out of the blue. You gave her this ring, this same ring, and then she kissed you."

"Wait. She kissed me?"

"Yeah. She didn't in yours?"

"I must have woken up right before that. I always miss the best part of my dreams. It sucks."

We turned back to our plates, and Fry aksed me, "So did you have any ads?"

"No. You know, I haven't had any ads in my dreams since then."

He said, "Yeah. Neither have I."

The ring was still in my hand. I examined it more closely, paying special attention to that mesmerising diamond at the top. More than a centimetre across, it looked like it would make the ring tip over and settle in the stable equilibrium, with the diamond under the finger. Around the ring's circumference, I could see seven purple gemstones evenly spaced. They were cut into smooth circles.

I aksed Fry, "Are they synthetic?"

"The stones?"

"Yeah."

"Yep," he replied.

These days it's easy to make gems from scratch. Especially diamonds, which are just carbon anyway. Silver is still a little expensive, though.

My next question was, "Did the Professor make it for you?"

"Cubert, actually."

"Really? Cubert?"

"Yeah," he told me. "I was gonna ask the Professor, but he wasn't there and Cubert was. So, you know."

"So you aksed him, and he just said okay?"

"Yeah. He was like, 'Why should I care about your love life?' So I said, 'I'll give you some porno mags,' and he was like, 'Done.'"

I giggled, "Fry! You're corrupting a fourteen year old!"

"Well, I was fourteen when my brother got me my first porno magazine. And I turned out fine."

"That's debatable," I said.

He shoved my arm, but he was smiling. He and I teased one another a lot, and that was something I really liked about him. Likewise with Leela. I thought of her as the big sister that I never had. Before long I found out that she had a corresponding feeling about me, and that's when we really became close.

As close as you can be to someone who's never shared your body, at least.

I mean, I talked with her about everything. But that's about all that we would do. I felt inadequate every time we went to the gym, or played pool, or went bowling. She was better than me in just about any sport. And at the same time, she felt inadequate when we went to bars and clubs, when all the guys would be hitting on me and staring – or trying to avoid staring – at her.

When you came right down to it, we couldn't identify with one another that much, except that we both felt out of place.

Fry and I, though, had much more in common. Quite frankly, adulthood had snuck up on both of us. We'd talked about his previous life a thousand years ago. He didn't know what to do with his life, even after he reached college age. Similarly with me. I chose to major in space systems engineering just because I took a class in it my freshperson year and thought the engines were really neat. And I basically tripped over Professor Farnsworth's ad for an internship.

I wonder if there's really such a thing as fate. I don't think I'd be happy anywhere other than Planet Express. Fry could only have been happy in our time, and through the most incredibly unlikely turn of events, he got here. And on the way he met Bender, who, I don't think, would have opened up to anyone else. And Leela, of course, seemed born to be a starship captain, a post she probably would never have gotten if that redheaded guy hadn't come tumbling out of that cryogenic tank four years ago.

And when Fry and Leela fell in love, it just seemed like the script had been written long ago.

Then, everything went supernova.

If it had been scripted, one would have to throw the script aside and say How could that happen?

There just didn't seem to be any way that this result could be preordained. What could be the point? To teach Fry that life blows? He learned that back in the twentieth century, I'd think. To teach him that life still blows in the thirty first century, perhaps.

Maybe to teach me that life blows.

I snapped the box shut and turned back to the fireplace.

After a bit, Fry said, "So does that happen a lot in the future?"

"What?"

"People having the same dreams?"

"No."

"So it's like it was in my time."

"What's that?" I aksed.

"It's some fucked up shit."

I looked down at my hand, where I still held the ring box that I'd already seen.

I whispered, "Got that right."

---

We ended up joining Bender to watch the celebrity ape fights anyway. At some point that night, Hermes walked into the lounge.

"What are de three of ya still doing here? Haven't ya heard of time off?"

Sitting on the floor in front of Bender and me on the couch, Fry said to Hermes, "Haven't you?"

"Ooooh! Taken down!" Bender shouted, pointing at Hermes.

Hermes groaned and said to us, "Anyway, it's a good thing I caught ya before ya left. Dere's something I've got to tell all of ya."

"Ooh! Ooh! I know!" Bender yelled. "We're firing Fry and replacing him with the genderless meatsack!"

"No," Hermes answered. "We're giving everyone four days off."

"Really?" I aksed.

"Yeah. So get outta here and don't come back until Tuesday."

"You mean Thursday."

"No, Tuesday," he said. "Ya get tomorrow, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday off."

I protested, "We already had Saturday and Sunday off, Hermes! It's called the weekend!"

"Aren't tomorrow and Monday planetary holidays anyway?" Bender added.

"Well, since when does Hermes care about that?" Fry said.

"Yeah, he's such a hardass," Bender replied.

Hermes waved at us and said, "Hey, I'm still here."

Dismissively, Bender said to him, "Get outta here. Don't come back till Tuesday."

Hermes stood displeased for a moment until he turned around and headed out the door. "See ya guys next year."

I looked up and said, "See you, Hermes."

After he left, Fry turned to the door and aksed, "You think maybe we were too hard on him?"

Bender laughed raucously for some time. "Ohhh, man! Too hard on Hermes! What will you come up with next, you crazy life form?"

Fry glared at Bender over his shoulder.

In response, Bender said, "Come on, jerk. The jerk keeps jerking us around like a bunch of jerks who can't help being jerked by another jerk who jerks jerks around the same way he jerks jerk chocolate."

"What?" I aksed, understandably.

Bender said, "What? Haven't you tried his Jamaican jerk chocolate?"

I shook my head. "Is it any good?"

"The hell would I know, moron? I can't taste."

We continued to watch. A few minutes later, Fry suddenly said, "You know what I always wondered? How come we count to ten?"

I replied, "What do you mean?"

"Well, I mean, we only have eight fingers. Why do we count to ten? Why not just eight?"

I looked down at him. He was still facing the television set.

I said to him, "Yeah, but there's no reason it should correspond to however many fingers we have. I mean, didn't the Sumerians have a base sixty system?"

"I don't know. You'd probably know more about that than I would."

"So, yeah. It's probably something like that, some old culture using base ten and now everyone does."

He looked up at me and shrugged. "Just seems odd, you know. I mean, how does everyone start to count? On their fingers. We even call them digits. So why wouldn't we have the same number of digits in math as we do on our hands?"

"Hm. Yeah, you're right. Why would they be called digits if they don't have anything to do with our fingers?"

"Yeah. Well, I always thought it was funny," he said.

---

We kept on watching all the way until 23:00, by which time the local news came on.

Bender switched off the TV, stood up, and said, "Well, now that we got some time off, anybody want to go get hammered again?"

Fry said, "Umm... not really. I just kinda wanted to turn in, you know."

"What? Come on! We got, like, the rest of the year off! Don't you wanna party?"

"Well, kinda. Not now, though."

"Aw, okay." Bender trudged toward the door, and Fry got up off the floor to follow him.

I said, "Hang on, guys."

Fry looked back at me.

"Do... umm... do you guys..."

For some reason, it took me a while to say what I was trying to say.

Fry sat on the arm of the couch and rested his hand on my shoulder.

I tried again. "You guys wanna, you know, come stay with me for a while?"

"Really? Stay with you?" Fry aksed.

"Yeah. I just think it might be good for all of us."

Fry turned to Bender. "What about you? You want to stay at Amy's place for a while?"

Bender answered, "Hmmmm..."

I warned him, "Just so you know, if I catch you stealing my shit, I'm bolting you down inside one of the engine nozzles."

He played innocent. "Hey, come on! What do I look like, some sort of kleptobot?"

"Yeah," Fry and I responded simultaneously.

Fry added, "Bender, look. You're my best friend, but if you try to pull anything stupid now, I'll never forgive you."

And you can say what you want about Bender – I've said plenty myself – but he seemed hurt by that. "You really don't think you can trust me?"

"Well, you did nearly sell my body on eBay."

"Hey, I didn't try to deceive anyone! I put right on there: Vintage 1974 model, needs some repair work, good handyman project. And it's not like you needed your body. You seemed to be having plenty of fun on Amy's body, if you don't mind my saying it."

"Yeah, yeah. Don't remind me," Fry said.

When he was riding my body, Fry did seem to be a little eager to examine the peculiarities of the female anatomy, shall we say. And Bender, of course, happened to overhear when I was talking about that with Leela.

Bender turned to me. "Anyway, I'd love to stay with you guys, if you'll have me."

"Of course, Bender. I've got this one really tiny closet. You'll love it."

We went back to their apartment and got some of Fry's clothes. When we got to my place, I led Bender to his closet, and he went to bed right away.

I aksed Fry, "What do you want to do tomorrow?"

"Is 'sleep all day' an option?"

"Yeah, I might choose that option myself. I'm really tired."

He said, "Well, if I'm not awake by, like, dinnertime tomorrow, come in and start poking me."

"Sure. Oh..."

He'd started to turn away, but he stopped.

I continued, "I was gonna aks you something."

"Yeah?"

"About that ring."

He pulled it out of his pocket again, flipping open the box and looking longingly down at it.

Every time I got a look at that thing, I was transfixed. I'd like to think I'm not shallow enough to be won over by dazzling jewelry, but I am.

He sniffled, "Just wish I could have gotten some use out of it."

I said, "So when did Cubert make it?"

"Last Friday."

"Last Friday?" I aksed. Last Friday was the 22nd. We were on Neptune then.

"No, not last Friday. Two weeks... no, three weeks ago. You know, the Friday before..."

"Oh. Three weeks ago."

"I know."

Fry and I were conversing with more than just words. That last exchange was the equivalent of You know, the Friday before Leela's death. Oh. That was already three weeks ago? It doesn't feel like it was that long ago; it feels like it was just yesterday. I know, I can remember it just like it was yesterday too. You think we'll ever be able to put it behind us?

I aksed, "So how come you didn't actually do it?"

"Do what?"

I lowered my eyes to the ring again, giving the barest nod toward it.

He looked down at it and showed a slight shrug. "I dunno. I think I was saving it for when she finally said she loved me. Then I could say something like, 'And I love you. I always have. And... I've been waiting for the day when you felt the same way about me. I mean... I know you've had things rough. You haven't always had someone there for you.

"'And, well, ever since I got to the future, I've been trying to be that someone for you. It hasn't always been easy, and I know there are times you've wanted to kick me in the cojones. And it's not like I wouldn't have deserved it. Actually, all I can do is say thanks, for not actually going through with it.

"'But, well, hearing you say that... it makes me feel like it was all worth it. It just seems like everything from here... it seems like it'll all be easy now. Well, I mean, not easy. Somehow it... it doesn't seem like anything will ever come easy between you and me, Leela. But I want to be the someone who's there for you when it's not easy.

"'And I hope you'll want to be the someone who's there for me. I hope you... well, I hope you'll wear this ring with pride, and love, and happiness, because that's what you deserve. I hope that when I'm not around, you can look at this ring and know that I'm always thinking of you. And I hope that you'll feel proud, maybe even honoured, to be my bride.

"'Leela... will you marry me?'"

My eyes had misted up right around I've been waiting for the day when you felt the same way about me.

And you know what pisses me off?

A couple of times in there, he said Leela's name. And dammit, I actually sensed some part of me getting angry that it wasn't my name he was saying. It makes me sound like such a vengeful bitch, but that's how I felt.

Maybe LaBarbara was right. Maybe I do want Fry all to myself.

A minute or two went by before he said, "Or something. I hadn't given it much thought."

I afforded myself a very slight smile. "That's bullshit, Fry. You were rehearsing that for days, weren't you?"

"Yeah." He smiled a little bit too.

"Well, that was..." I shook my head. "You would have had her speechless."

He nodded. At length he shut the box and slipped it back into his jacket.

"Well, it was the truth," he said. "I said I'd always think of her when we were apart. Well, we couldn't be more apart right now. And I couldn't be thinking of her more."

I placed my hand on his shoulder. He looked over at it, and then he reached up and placed his own hand on top of mine.

After another pause, I told him, "I guess I'm gonna go to bed now."

"Okay. Good night."

"Night, Fry."

---

With the door open, I could see him curled up in bed. He left the blinds open, and the artificial light coming in from the city cast a dim yellowish trapezoid across the bed. He was facing away from me, one arm reaching around his pillow.

I heard a voice whispering, "He looks so cute like that, doesn't he?"

I hadn't seen her there in the shadows, but Leela was sitting on the opposite side of the bed, looking over her shoulder at him.

She got up and came to me in the doorway. "Go for a walk?"

"Sure."

She led me out to the street, where we started to walk toward the Planet Express building.

"So you saw this?" She was holding out the ring box with Fry's intended engagement ring.

"Yeah. It's, well, it's breathtaking."

"Well, you'd know better than me. My breath's been taken already."

"Yeah. Guess it has."

"Bet that surprised you, didn't it?"

"What did?"

"Seeing this ring again."

"Yeah. I mean, how could Fry and I have the same dream? It doesn't make sense."

"They broadcast ads into dreams."

"Well, yeah, but this wasn't an ad."

"Same principle, though."

"But, you know, who would do that? And why? What would be the point?"

"Well, maybe you both had the same dream independently."

I turned to her. "You know how unlikely that is?"

"Well... you guys did talk about how I'd eventually tell him how I felt. Maybe you both... maybe subconsciously you both kind of extrapolated what would happen when I did. And maybe I'm predictable enough that you both came to the same answer."

"But... what about the ring?"

"What about it?"

"It was the same one he'd already had made."

"So?"

"So, how did I know what it looked like?"

"You must have seen it already."

"Seen it already? Where?"

"I don't know. Maybe you saw it in his locker or something."

"Well... maybe. It just seems like a lot to assume."

"Still, I don't know what other explanations make as much sense."

We had reached the Planet Express building. Leela walked over to the seawall and sat atop it. I hopped up and sat next to her.

"So how have you been otherwise?" she aksed.

"Okay. Gotta get used to a new boss."

"Yeah. What's Clyde's story?"

"I don't know. He only said that he ran his family's mining company. Then he sold it and bought us."

"Hmmm." She said it doubtfully.

"You think he's lying to us?"

"Well, it seems inadvisable for him to lie to you about that. I mean, you could look up the mining company and see whether it exists. But it would be harder for you to find out if he's not telling you everything."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, maybe he has another occupation."

"Like what?"

"Could be anything."

"You're saying maybe and could be a lot," I said.

"Well, sure. I don't know anything for certain. All I have are guesses."

We spent the next couple of minutes listening to the waters of the East River lapping against the seawall.

"So you're gonna have Fry stay with you for a while?"

"Yeah."

"And Bender?"

"Yeah."

"Hope you're insured."

She was glancing at me out of the corner of her eye, and her lips were turned upward. She was messing with me.

"He won't be that bad," I said with a smile of my own.

After another pause, she said, "For how long?"

"How long are they staying with me?"

"Yeah."

"I dunno. A couple of weeks, at least. As long as we need."

"As long as who needs?"

I looked up at her.

"Fry, or you?" she continued.

I couldn't answer that.

"Well, I'm not criticising," she said. "I wouldn't want to be alone either if, you know, if something different happened."

"You mean, if Fry died?"

"Yyyeah," she answered slowly. "Fry... or you."

"Me?"

"What? You don't think it'll happen to you? I used to think the same thing."

"No, I just... you really like me that much?"

"Of course I do, stupid. You and Fry are the best friends I've ever had. I can't tell you how much that meant to me."

"Well, you know, I feel the same way about you and Fry."

"Yeah, I know."

I leaned over and rested my head on her shoulder, wrapping my arms around her waist. She embraced me in return and stroked my head.

"But you're not really you," I said.

"No. That's true."

"And how come sometimes I can hold you like this and other times..."

I let go of her and attempted to poke her arm. As I expected, my finger went straight through her.

"Amy, it's a dream. Come on. Like anything in a dream ever makes sense."

"Sometimes real life doesn't make sense either."

We both stared at the ground for a moment. Then she took my hand and said to me, "Well, I'd better go. Talk to you later."

"Yeah."

She crouched atop the seawall, facing back toward the street. Then suddenly she leapt backward off it and into the water.

I watched her swim away to the north. I could still see her by the reflected city lights when she turned back to me and waved. I waved back.

It wasn't until I woke up that I realised that we had both been completely naked the whole time.

---

My unruly schedule continued: after barely sleeping at all the previous night, I woke up and found that it was already well past 16:00.

When I stumbled out of my bedroom, Fry told me that BW had called. Clyde had gotten us tickets to that night's Knicks game.

I don't really like basketball all that much. At Mars U I lettered in track, and I competed in a couple of mini-tetrathlons on Mars. The only sporting events that I'd ever gone to were Leela's blernsball games, a couple of Mars football matches, and the numerous Martian rodeos that my parents dragged me to.

Nonetheless, I went to the game. Fry, Bender, and I stopped for dinner first.

"I think it's breakfast for me," I said.

"Lunch in my case," Fry added.

"When did you get up?"

"Like, around noon. I was... well, I was working on a letter."

When he said that, I thought of stories I'd heard on occasion about people who'd lost loved ones. It was said that it can be helpful to write letters to them. It can provide closure, or something.

But when I looked up at him, he continued, "I felt kinda bad about not being able to go to Captain Arensen's memorial service, so I wrote her mother a letter. Could you sign it too?"

"Sure," I said. "What's it say?"

"Well, I kind of talked about how I didn't get a chance to meet her, but just the fact that she signed up for that mission says a lot about who she was and what she stood for. And then I said a little bit about Leela, how they were both completely dedicated, knew no fear, all of that. Be proud of her, the point was."

Fry was so resilient. He handled a week of captivity in the cold outside robot Santa's fortress. He shrugged off two straight days making hundreds of deliveries immediately afterward. All with his chest full of the millions of tiny fragments that had been his heart.

Robot Santa had released Fry when he was about to depart on Xmas Eve. And just minutes afterward, a small two person spacecraft, the Muggsy Bogues, screamed into the Neptunian surface, right where Santa's rocket sled was about to take off. Wanda Arensen had piloted her craft to its destruction – and her own.

"Did you get to talk to her?" Fry said.

"Yeah, a little. The captains met with me a lot that week. She was kind of shy. Didn't say much. I only talked to her directly once."

"What'd she say?"

"Not a lot," I answered. "She told me she and Zarakha had only served together on the Muggsy for a few months. When I aksed her what kind of career plans she had, she was just like, 'I don't know. I just want to, you know, make a difference.'"

"Well, she did that," Fry responded.

"Yeah. She sure did. When was the service?"

"Tuesday."

"It's too bad we couldn't go."

"Yeah. But Kif was there. And a lot of other people from the mission."

I wasn't ready to see Kif again. But of course, the next day, I would. And it would turn out worse than I'd expected.

Fry and I both had pasta salad. I aksed him how the Knicks were doing.

"Never shoulda traded Mark Partizzle."

"Who's that?"

"Plays forward. They traded him to the Golden Planet Warriors before this year. Dumb."

"Who'd they get back?"

He listed off the items. "Bunch of draft picks. Fozzie Schinzus. Ternell Waxlorpka. Some other guy. They're all jump shooters. Knicks need a centre. You know something? The Knicks haven't had a good centre in a thousand years. Ewing's Curse, they call it. It's too bad I wasn't frozen wearing my Ewing jersey. You know how much that would be worth today?"

"No."

"Me neither. Anyway, I think the Knicks are seventh in the East right now."

Bender added, "Yeah. They'll probably get to the playoffs and then flame out in the first round. Just like every year."

I aksed, "So who are they playing tonight?"

"The Clippers," Fry told me.

"Where are they from?"

"55 Cancri A," Bender said. "They play on a planet that's, like, five million kilometres from its star. Planet's hotter than Venus. Don't know why 'Clippers' makes sense."

"Are they good?"

Bender shook his head. "Only at home. They shut off the air conditioners. Teams used to have guys pass out by the end of the third quarter. Now the visiting teams always have these things implanted in their bodies. Like air conditioners, only for your blood. Clippers are still pretty good at home, though."

"I didn't know about that," Fry said.

"Yeah, just another in the long list of idiotic things organisms do."

---

The Knicks won by seven. During the game, BW and I talked about what it had been doing after we graduated. I think it had wanted to know about Leela. I just didn't feel like talking about that.

"You're so lucky," it said to me. "You've had a steady job for years. You came out of college with a profession waiting for you."

Bender leaned across Fry and me to add, "And she's riding her parents' gravy train. Woo woo!" He imitated a train whistle.

Fry said, "Gravy train? Isn't that the name of a professional mud wrestler?"

"No, that's Gravy Pain," Bender answered.

"Oh, yeah. I like that one thing she does. You know, with the choke hold and the flying Saturnian and the scream, you know, Paichaaaaa! I like that."

"Know what that means?"

"What?"

"It means I am about to sneeze."

"It does not!"

"Seriously. Met her trainer once. That's what he says."

"You're messing with me."

Having lost interest in that discussion, I turned back to BW and aksed, "So what were you doing?"

"All kinds of shit. I worked at a publisher for a while. Then I was at the βBC, and then a medical supplier. Then a uranium mine."

"What kind of work did you do?"

It said, "Mostly mechanical. You know, repairs and stuff. Sometimes IT management, if they needed it. Anyway, the uranium mine was where I met Clyde and Choto. They visited, thinking about buying the company. They bought out my contract instead."

"So how long have you been with them now?"

"About a month. Mostly I fix their car and their computers and stuff. When you came to visit, they were about to buy a shipping company. Turned out it was your company. Stroke of luck, right?"

"Yeah," I said, not very enthusiastically.

BW didn't seem to notice my tone, and I wasn't sure how to handle it. I mean, it was good that I was getting another chance to hang out with BW, one of my friends from college.

But let's be clear. BW's no Leela.

It could try to sympathise with me, but I don't think there was any way I could talk with it on level terms about what I was going through.

Instead, it and I spent the rest of the game talking about people we knew from college. I hadn't really seen anyone since graduation, so it told me about some of our friends from classes and from the track team.

When Fry, Bender, and I got home, I immediately went plunk onto the couch. Fry turned on the news and then brought me a box of chow mein noodles I'd left in the refrigerator.

I wondered how he knew that was what I wanted.

When he sat next to me, I slid over and rested my head in his lap. He put the box down between his knees.

We both grabbed little clumps of noodles with our fingers as we watched. I ended up eating more of them, though.

As we were watching Humorbot – the human guy from All My Circuits was on – Fry dropped a couple of noodles onto my face. "Sorry," he said.

That was actually the first thing either of us had said in the hour after we got home.

I looked up and gave him as warm a smile as I could. "It's okay."

I tried to collect the strands with my tongue, but it wouldn't reach that far. Finally Fry plucked them off my face and dangled them over me. I lifted my head up a little bit so I could grab them in my teeth and slurp them up.

He gave me the last few noodles, one at a time, in this fashion.

The dangling the noodle part, not the dropping the noodle onto my face part.

---

I was still on the couch when I woke up in the middle of the night. When I sat up, I found my blanket around me. Fry had clearly taken it from my bedroom and tucked me in.

In the darkened living room, I stared at the wall for what seemed like hours before I finally fell asleep again, visions of Fry dancing through my head.

---

That afternoon, Fry saw me on the couch, saying, "Hey. You're up."

"Yeah. Sort of."

"Want to go out tonight?"

"To what?"

"A party." He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the galaxy.

"What kind of party?"

"Um, a New Year's Eve party."

"That's today?"

"Yeah," he said. "It falls on the thirty first this year."

"Fuck you." I threw my pillow at him, and he flung it right back. We were both laughing.

He continued, "Yeah, Clyde got us tickets at a club. A place called Sponge."

"Sponge? Wow."

"Is it good?"

"I don't know," I told him. "It opened a couple of months ago. Supposed to be a big thing."

"You mean like, everybody who's anybody?"

"Yeah."

"Cool," he answered. "We're anybody."

That night, Bender grilled some sort of fish for us. It seemed like he was gradually reverting to his previous incompetence at cooking.

Afterward, I spent almost an hour trying to find something to wear. Finally I dragged Fry into my bedroom.

"You can just wear that," he said, indicating what I was already wearing.

I replied, "At Sponge? Gr'uh! Why don't I just show up naked?"

From the next room, Bender shouted, "Yeah! Why don't you?"

Fry said, "Why? Do they have a dress code?"

I answered, "Well, not a real one, but I mean, I'm not going there looking like this."

"Why?" he aksed. "You look good."

"Yeah, whatever."

"No. I mean it."

I looked up at him. He shrugged slightly, as if to say Well, it's true.

In another bit of nonverbal communication, I smiled a little, a smile that said That's sweet. Thanks.

I said, verbally, "Are you going to wear that?"

He looked down at his normal clothes: a red jacket over a white shirt, a pair of jeans, and sneakers.

"Yeah," he said, "unless you think I should wear something else."

"No, you'd look good like that. You're old school."

"I'm really old school."

"So what do you think I should wear?"

"I don't know," he said. "What do you have?"

I slid open the doors to my primary closet.

He stood in the doorway for a moment. Then he turned to me.

"This room needs a soundtrack," he said to me. "Like baaaam, baaaaaaaam, baaaaaaaaam, BA-BAAAAAAM! Like that."

He was singing the opening of Also Sprach Zarathustra. I could sort of understand why.

The room is about six metres long. Along each side are four racks of clothes that can be rotated to the front.

I moved the eveningwear racks to the front and stepped in. Fry followed me, gazing at the numerous articles of clothing.

He pulled a red dress out. "I always liked this one."

I looked over and saw that it was the Fry dress.

Well, that's what I call it. It's the one I'd worn on Valentine's Day a few years ago, when he was parked on my shoulders.

I never wore it again after that.

But I was thinking about it before I finally put it away and looked through the others. A lot of them were things that I'd worn on my various dates with Kif. So that disqualified them.

"How about this?" Fry said.

I looked over at the one he was holding. That might work, I thought.

It was a black dress, backless and strapless, the kind that clings to the skin. The top of it sank into a cleavage exposing V, and beneath that, there was an inverted V of semitranslucent mesh fabric that continued down diagonally so that the sides of the thighs were visible. The cut was to about the middle of the thigh.

I took off my sweatsuit and handed it to Fry before I slipped on the dress.

When I looked up at him, he was shaking his head. "Take off the bra."

I started to giggle. "Yeah, you wish girls would take off their bras on command."

He stammered, "Yeah, but... that's... I... you know what I mean."

I did know what he meant. We needed to see what the dress looked like without my bra straps emerging from underneath.

I pulled the dress down a bit, and when I started to remove the bra, Fry turned around.

I stopped and said, "Fry, it's okay. You can look."

"No, I'd better not."

I rested a hand on his shoulder, and he turned around to look at me.

I thought maybe it had been because of Leela, but judging from the way he looked, that wasn't it. He was just being shy, I guess.

I said, "You can if you want to."

"You won't mind?"

"Of course not, dumbass. You've seen it."

I took off the bra and straightened the dress.

"Yeah, that looks good," he said.

"Okay."

"Well, let's go and... um... celebrate."

"Yeah."

As I applied my mascara, I began to wonder if he was finally beginning to get over Leela's loss.

I thought, He'd be ahead of me.

---

When we got there, around 22:00, we discovered a line that stretched around the corner. I said to Fry, "We'd better not have to wait in line."

"No, it's okay." He led us to the front door, where a bouncerbot was busy conversing with some people in the line. It looked like they were trying to bribe him, and it looked like he couldn't determine the appropriate amount of contempt to display.

As we approached, the bouncerbot turned to us. "Mr Fry, Ms Wong, Mr Rodriguez? This way, please."

He lifted the velvet rope and opened the door for us, saying, "Enjoy your new year."

"You got it, bro," Bender responded as we entered.

---

We walked in and saw the main dance floor in front of us. It was recessed about a metre and surrounded by a set of steps. Though it was fairly early for a nightclub, the floor seemed just about full. A bar lined the wall to our left, a smaller bar was located in the far right corner, and the open elevators took up the rest of the right wall. The wall in front of us was a large window, extending up to the roof.

The room we were in was actually five floors high; each of the upper four floors had a balcony that horseshoed around the right, back, and left walls. In the dim lighting, I could see a few people looking over the railing to the first floor. The DJ's booth was immediately above us on the second floor.

Like most clubs, the main lights were low but supplemented by a variety of coloured spotlights that panned rapidly around the room. A seemingly aimless variety of holographic images twisted high in the open space above the floor and faded into one another: robots, cactuses, fractals, planets, fish, spacecraft, nebulas.

"I'll see you organisms later," Bender said as he walked off with a fembot.

"Sure," Fry said. He pointed to our right and aksed me, "Hey, what are those?"

"Open elevators."

"Open elevators? How's that work?"

"You haven't seen those before?" I aksed him.

He shrugged. "Guess not."

"Come on." I led him over to one of them. At first glance it was an empty rectangle on the floor with a panel on the wall behind it. As we stepped onto the rectangle, I hit the button for the top floor. With my left hand, I took his hand. "Hang on," I told him.

"Hang on to what – whoa!"

Our feet lifted off the ground as we accelerated upward and started to move through the rectangular holes in the floors above us.

Fry looked down to the receding first floor. "Man, this is great! How come I haven't seen this before?"

We got to the fifth floor, and the floor closed beneath our feet. I led him off the rectangle and told him, "It's kind of expensive. Most buildings tend to use traditional elevators."

"Why's it expensive? It's just hovering, right? I mean, you can make anything hover."

"No, you can make anything with a hover chip in it hover. It takes a lot more energy to make something else hover. And hovering at high altitudes is tough, too. And you need failsafes, so that people won't fall too far if there's a power cut."

"Let's go again!"

I figured he hadn't really been listening to me, but I didn't mind. He dragged me over to one of the other rectangles and punched the first floor button. Nothing happened, and he began to jab it repeatedly.

"Gl'uh!" I said pointing to the yellow light at the top. "Somebody's using it under us."

He aksed, "So do we have to use a different one?"

"No, just wait."

In a moment the light flashed green. After three flashes, the floor opened and we descended to ground level.

As we walked toward the bar, Fry said to me, "We need one of those in our building."

Someone pushed us from behind and shouted, "Gotcha!"

I turned around and, sure enough, it was BW. It stood between us and had an arm draped over each of us.

"Hey, BW," we said.

"Just saw Bender. Looks like he's having fun."

"Yeah, and it smells like you started having fun already," Fry responded.

"I'm not completely drunk," it answered.

"Pretty damn close," he told it.

I aksed it, "So who else is coming?"

"Clyde and Choto. I don't know when they'll be here. Anyway, I'm going to the hip hop room. Coming?"

"I'll go," Fry said.

"Amy?"

"I'll pass."

It said, "Okay. We'll try to find you before midnight, kay?"

"Sure."

They went over to the elevators.

As I stepped toward the dance floor, I listened to the music in the main room. This was 28th century trance, something I really liked. I'm no music historian, but I liked a lot of music from that era, when Earthican musicians were influenced by some of the cultures on the opposite side of the galaxy that were just being contacted for the first time.

So I hung out on the floor for a while. Then I went off to some of the other rooms. Each floor had a side room with a different DJ, and monitors by the elevators listed the performers in each room. I visited the hard industrial and Andromedan rooms briefly before I found myself parked on the fifth floor balcony looking down at the ground floor.

A cheer went up from the crowd down there, and in the DJ booth, I could see a handover taking place. Clubs can have all sorts of mechanisms for playing music, starting with the old fashioned turntables that may date back all the way to Fry's time. But at Sponge, they had what looked like highly complex digital mixing panels. Basically, the DJs plug in a memory can containing all the tracks they want to choose from. They can select them on either of the two panels and adjust location, pitch, audio balance, and huge numbers of other variables. Then they listen on a headset before they actually mix the track into the feed to the loudspeakers.

And when they hand over, usually the new person will start a track on one of the panels and mix it in with the previous DJ's last track. The music changed subtly; the guy in the booth was handing control over to a woman who had just arranged her first track and was waving to the crowd. I looked closer and saw that it was actually two women. Then I looked even closer and saw that it was actually one woman with two heads.

LAUREN AND KHALI D'INAZHIO, read a display below the booth.

I'd heard of them. I didn't know that they only had the one body, nor did I know how popular they were. But they must be big to have the New Year's set. Or perhaps they were newer performers who were talented enough that the club hoped this night would launch them to stardom.

If that was the case, they seemed to be off to a good start. With a sudden echoing thump, the track faded away into a bridge. A much fainter bass line continued before it gave way to a piano segment.

Sometimes tracks include a little bit of traditional musical elements. But they tend to insist on updating the traditional instruments in some way, and usually, they do that by adding an echo. That gives the listener more of an ethereal sense, a sense that this isn't just music. A sense of, perhaps, floating inside a space station that doesn't have artificial gravity.

Another cheer rose from the ground floor during this bit. Normally, a bridge segment like this will gradually return the track to its prior strength by adding in one element at a time. That's always the part I like, when you can tell that the intensity is going to jump. It's just a matter of how.

I couldn't pay attention to how this track would return, because over my shoulder I heard someone say, "Amy."

I turned around. "K... Kif."

Out of uniform, he looks much different. He had a dark grey collared shirt with black pants, which was really more of a business casual look but seemed to work fairly well here.

He said, "Um... hi."

"Hey."

"So... umm... how was your Xmas?"

"Pretty good."

"Um, good."

"Yeah."

I should send my dress to the Awkwardness Hall of Fame. They could put it up in a display case with the text: On New Year's Eve 3003, Amy Wong wore this dress at a club where she met Kif Kroker. Barely a week before, she had broken up with him at an office Xmas party after she discovered his irritable bastard tendencies. At the club, the hesitant, sluggish conversation reached as high as 88 on the Standard Awkwardness Index.

I said, "So... what brings you here?"

"Captain Brannigan got me tickets some time ago. Actually, I was planning to take you."

"Really?"

"Well, I know you like to party, so I figured you'd want to be here. Of course, I forgot that I might run into you anyway."

"Well, it's not that awkward."

He responded, "It's awkward enough, I think. Anyway... um... may I aks... are you... um... are you here with anyone?"

I shook my head. "Well, I mean, some friends from work are here, but I'm not, like, with anyone."

We stood and stared at the walls for a moment. Then someone came up to Kif from behind and gave him a hug, saying, "Hey there, sweetie. Have you..."

She looked up at me and said, "Oh. Amy Wong. Hi."

She was Kif's species, a little taller than him and a complexion a little bit darker. She pulled her arm from around Kif and extended it toward me. She, like Kif, was wearing black gloves. But in her case, they were opera gloves that went up past her elbows. Her dark blue dress didn't expose much, but it fit tightly enough that her breasts could be spotted easily.

As I shook her hand, she introduced herself. "My name's Triton Glab."

"Triton Glab?" I aksed.

"Yeah. See, you and I have something in common."

"Powerful parents, you mean?"

"Yep." Triton Glab was the daughter of the DOOP general secretary. I didn't know anything else about her.

So I aksed. "What do you do, Triton?"

"Well, I serve in the DOOP navy. I was actually on the Nimbus for a while. I hope you don't mind me saying, but I had the biggest crush on Kiffy here. Eventually I requested a transfer to another ship. But when I heard you two had broken up... damn, this makes me sound like such a bitch, doesn't it?"

Yes, I wanted to say.

She continued, "Anyway, I guess I kinda, you know, swooped in. Called him the other day, and he invited me here."

"So, this is your first date?" I aksed.

They answered simultaneously. She said "Yeah," but Kif said "Kind of."

I looked back and forth between the two.

Triton explained, "When he said he didn't know what to wear, I figured I'd take him shopping in the afternoon."

I said, "Well, you got him something good."

"That was his choice."

I turned back to Kif. "Well, you got yourself something good."

He responded, "Um... thanks."

After yet another pause, I said, "Well... I'm going to go, um, find my friends."

"Okay. Well, it was nice meeting you," Triton said.

"Yeah. Good to meet you."

Kif added, "Um, s... see you."

As I took the elevator down to the first floor, I muttered, "Swooped in, my ass."

---

Night
Here comes the night
Flight
I want to take flight
Light
From here I can't see light
Fight
Without you I must fight

Why
You left, I don't know why
Buy
More time I cannot buy
Cry
All day, all night I cry
Try
I can't, but I must tryyyy!

I spotted Fry sitting at the bar.

Why did I have to lose you?
What price am I paying now?
Why couldn't I have one more try?
Why can't I just kiss you?

I walked over to him. I noticed the voice singing this track.

Here
I must run far from here
Fear
Your voice fills me with fear
Beer
My tears swim in my beer
Clear
My job now is so cleeear!

Her voice was striking, maybe even haunting. I listened to the words to this track.

Why did I have to lose you?
What price am I paying now?
Why couldn't I have one more try?
Why can't I just kiss you?

Fry's tears swam in his beer.

Why can't I just kiss you tonight?
You left me but it wasn't right
And now I am an awful sight
And so we'll never goooo!

I gripped his shoulders in my hands. He turned to me.

Why did I have to lose you?
What price am I paying now?
Why couldn't I have one more try?
Why didn't I kiss you?

He looked at me briefly, and then over my shoulder to the front door.

I took his hand.

We walked out of there, with a good hour still remaining in 3003.

---

As we left, we walked past the line, which appeared to be much longer than when we entered.

I was looking at the people we passed, but not really paying attention.

Until one person.

I only got a quick look at her. She had to be no older than twenty, with short black hair and a white tube top. She was tall and skinny, the body of a model.

After we walked past her, I snapped my head around. But I could only see her from behind, so I'd missed the feature I noticed first.

"What?" Fry aksed. He'd come to a halt next to me.

I pointed. "Did you see her?"

"Who?"

"That tall girl? Black hair?"

"What about her?"

I was dumbfounded. "You... you mean you didn't notice?"

He shrugged. "Guess not."

I turned away from her and leaned in closer to him. My voice dropped, as though I was sharing state secrets.

I said, "She had one eye."

He looked over my shoulder at her for a moment. Then he looked back at me, wide eyed. "Sh... sh... she did?"

"Yeah."

"You're... you're sure?"

"I think so."

"It wasn't just, like, the light or anything?"

"No, I sure thought she had one eye."

Fry started to walk back toward her. I whispered, "What are you doing?"

I guess he didn't hear me, because he went right on up to her. He stood immediately across the rope from her and said, "Um... excuse me."

She turned to him.

I could only see her pointy nose and her sharp jaw.

I edged closer.

Fry said, "Oh, sorry. I thought you were someone else."

As he approached me again, both of her eyes cast a scornful gaze back at him.

He took my hand again and led me away from Sponge.

---

We took the tube up Manhattan to Planet Express, and I spent the short trip convincing myself that I wasn't losing it.

The lighting was poor.

She was standing right in a shadow.

She had a unibrow.

Naturally, the evidence seemed to support the opposing viewpoint.

Fry held my hand between both of his as he led me inside.

We went to the hangar and onto the ship. Fry took off and parked us in a polar orbit a few thousand kilometres above Earth's surface.

Once he shut the engines down, he turned to me and said, "So you know what today is."

"Yeah."

"And you know what it is to me."

"Yeah. The anniversary of the day you met her."

"Well, the day I came to the future."

"I thought you met her, like, as soon as you came out of the freezer."

"Yeah," he said. "But I also met Bender and the Professor the same day. So it's still an important day to me, even if... you know."

"Yeah."

We had a pause, and then he started to talk again. "You know, I was thinking about... you know what you said to me the other day?"

"What?"

"You know, about how much I love flying in space."

"Yeah."

"Well... you're right. That's, like, one of the best things about the future." He got up and walked up to the windshield, placing his palm up against the plastic. "You know, when I got frozen, only a couple hundred people or so had ever flown in space. Only, like, a few of them had even flown as high as we are now.

"And so space was... it was kind of an impossible dream. You know? Not the sort of thing that real people do. I mean, I'd given up hope of being an astronaut. Probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do. And I mean including, you know, now.

"Because I didn't really have anyone then. I could never get along with my parents, and my brother and I didn't really share a whole lot of interests. And it just seems easier now to deal with, you know, all this.

"And that's because of the other best thing about the future. And that's all my friends. Bender. Zoidberg. The Professor. Hermes."

He turned to me and continued, "You."

Just then my wrist rang. I ignored it at first, but Fry said, "Aren't you going to get that?"

So I did.

"Yeah?"

"Hey," BW said. "Can't find you."

"We left," I told it.

"You did? Why?"

I hesitated. "We just weren't in the mood, I guess."

"You and Fry?"

"Yeah."

With disappointment coming through loud and clear, it said, "But... I was kind of hoping we could all have the toast together."

"Sorry," I replied. "I don't think we'd be very festive, though."

"Oh. Okay. Well... umm... I guess I'll see you guys at work, then."

"Yeah."

Then Fry aksed me, "What time is it now?"

"23:53."

I got up and moved up to the couch at the front of the bridge. After a little bit, he sat next to me.

He said, "So was that Kif I saw at the club?"

"Yeah."

"Did you talk to him?"

"Yeah, I did. And I met his new girlfriend."

"His new girlfriend?"

I nodded.

"Quick on the rebound, isn't he?"

"Well, at least she's the same species."

"She is?"

"Yeah. She's the daughter of the DOOP general secretary."

"Hm. So had you and Kif been planning anything for New Year's?"

"He said the Sponge tickets were for us, but he ended up taking Triton."

After another pause, he said, "You know, I was planning something special for New Year's, too."

"What?"

"This."

I looked over at him, puzzled.

"Well, you know what we did that New Year's when I came out of the freezer, right?"

I nodded. He, Bender, and Leela were wanted on job desertion charges. They found the Professor, Fry's only surviving relative, and escaped in his ship.

The very same ship that we were in now.

"I always wanted to take her up in this ship at New Year's," he added. "I figured we could watch all the fireworks going off all around the world. Then I remembered about time zones. Then I figured that watching all the fireworks going off in one time zone would still be pretty cool looking."

I looked down at my hands. My wrist showed only seventy three seconds until midnight.

"It's almost time," I told him.

I held my wrist up so we could both see. He held me in both arms, and I wrapped my free arm around him.

The clock continued to count down.

"Ten," he said.

"Nine," I joined in.

"Eight."

"Seven."

"Six."

"Five."

"Four."

"Three."

"Two."

"One."

Colours lit up in various cities on Earth's night side. Toronto. Boston. New New York. Charlotte. Panama. Quito.

I whispered, "Happy new year, Fry."

He whispered back, "Happy new year, Amy."

I leaned in closer to him. He was still staring out the windshield.

So I kissed him on the cheek.

He didn't respond.

---

We wouldn't get in to work again until Tuesday, the third day of 3004.

I, for one, needed it. Fry, Bender, and I just sat around on the couch those next two days, watching bowl games and movies and stuff.

I kept looking over at Fry, trying to build up the courage to tell him that I was falling in love with him again.

I mean, he knew. I was pretty sure of that. But he didn't feel the same, and so it's been driving me nuts trying to figure out whether or not I should tell him.

First I would think about how Fry and Leela never got anywhere because she couldn't be honest with him.

But then I would aks myself why I'm basing my decisions on the very same relationship that I don't want to keep reminding him of.

And as much as I tried not to bring it up, the topic had a way of showing up on its own. Late on Sunday night, Fry had gone to the kitchen to get some food, when I suddenly heard him yell, "Yowwww!"

I jumped up from the couch and found him putting down a vegetable knife and a carrot. His left hand had a small cut on the palm, and it was starting to bleed.

"What happened?" I aksed as I reached for the Mend-Aid.

"I dunno," he said. "I guess I just missed."

"Missed?"

I ran the device across the cut, and as it got patched up, he responded, "Yeah. I was... I was distracted."

"What do you mean?"

"I was just thinking about something."

I didn't say What? out loud, but I kind of tilted my head a bit to one side. He got the message.

"Well... it was after Leela and I had dinner with her parents."

He picked up the plate containing the uncut half of the carrot and the slices he'd already cut off. We settled on the couch again, and as I plucked a couple of slices off the plate, I aksed him, "When did you have dinner with them?"

"It was that Thursday, I think. We were on our way back to Leela's apartment, you know, just talking about her parents. I was all, 'What the hell kind of name is Munda, anyway?' And so when we get up there into her apartment, she suddenly says, 'Oh, I got something for you.' And of course, I'm all, 'Oh, I bet you do!' And so she grabs me, and kisses me, and pins me to the wall."

I started to giggle, and Fry aksed, "What?"

I said, "Nothing. I was just thinking, I can't imagine her ever doing that with any other guy."

"Oh." He continued, "And then she slips a blindfold over my eyes, and then before I know it she's got, like, cuffs or something around my wrists. I'm all, 'What the hell?' And she just puts her finger over my mouth, and she just goes, 'I'll be back in a sec.'"

I aksed, "Did she just leave you there?"

"Yeah. I could hear the door hiss shut, and I was like, 'Leela?' No answer. And then I try to go to the door, and I realise she's cuffed me to, like, some sort of hook or something on the wall. I couldn't get out of it."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"So what did you do?"

"Nothing. I just waited there."

I looked at him for a second, and then I aksed him, "So... did you like it?"

"You know... I kinda did."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah."

"I didn't know you were into bondage."

"Well, I didn't either. But, you know, just sitting there waiting for her, thinking about what we'd do when she got back... man, it just got me so hot."

"She did come back, right?"

He giggled a little bit. "Yeah, of course she did. Later she told me she was going to leave me there for an hour, but she started to worry and she came back after, like, twenty minutes. So I hear the door open again, and then she lifts me up onto my feet again and grabs my chin," – he demonstrated with his own hand – "and she whispers in my ear, 'So did you like that?' And I go, 'Yeah,' and she's like, 'You did?', and I'm like, 'Yeah, I did.'"

"What'd she say?"

"Well, she kind of tightens her grip on my chin," – he did the same until his cheeks and lips were all squished up – "and she's like, 'You like being hurt?' And I'm all, 'What?' And she goes, 'You like getting hurt, don't you? You like pain, don't you?' And then she pokes my neck with her fingernail."

"What? Really?" I aksed in surprise.

"Yeah. And then she says, 'Is that why you're in love with me?' And I go, 'What do you mean?' Only it sounds more like 'Wwayyafeem' or something. She just goes, 'You treat me like royalty, you bring me flowers, you join me when I'm up, you hold me when I'm down, you almost get yourself killed every day when I'm even slightly threatened. And what for? So that I can shoot you down again? So that I can blame you for getting us into the mess that I needed you to save me from anyway? So that you can go through to another day in your loveless, thankless life?'"

He went on, "And I just don't know what to say. Then she kisses me again, and she starts to unzip my pants. And... well... that's when I come."

He turned back toward me, and I think he noticed I was giving him an odd look.

"Well, usually I can't get hard when I'm nervous, or scared. But, you know, I knew she wasn't really going to hurt me. And just the way she held me, the way she whispered to me... I just kept getting harder and harder until I just couldn't keep it in any more."

"What did she do?"

"She started laughing. She took off the blindfold and the cuffs, and she just said, 'You can't even ejaculate right, idiot.' I felt bad about that. I think she wanted that time to be really special. And I ruined it."

"She wasn't mad or anything, was she?" I aksed him.

"No, I think she understood. Anyway, later that night, when I was ready, we went again, and afterward when we're lying in bed together, we're kind of curled up together, and she has her head on my chest, and then she looks up at me and goes, 'Hey.' I go, 'What?' She's like, 'Our hearts. They're beating in synch.'"

"Really?"

"Yeah. She had one hand on her own chest while she had her ear on mine. She grabs my head and pulls me down so that my ear's up to her heart, and then she takes my hand and puts it on mine, next to her head. And she was right. Our hearts were beating together."

I looked over at him. He was staring at the floor.

"It was just ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. Perfectly synchronised. I couldn't really feel mine very well. Hers I could feel, though. I think we fell asleep like that, because when I woke up, I was kind of curled up sideways across the bed."

Silence filled the room.

Then he said, "How often does that happen? Two people's hearts beating together?"

Of course, it didn't mean anything. It would have been just coincidence.

But as symbolism goes? The only thing less subtle would be a love letter written in stars.

---

When we finally got to work on Tuesday morning, Hermes and Choto were already sitting at the conference table. She said, "Hey guys. How's your new year so far?"

Fry shrugged.

Bender shouted, "It sucks! I suggest we skip this year and go straight to 3005!"

Fry said, almost to himself, "I second that."

Just then, BW and Clyde entered. Clyde, carrying a large box under his arm, announced, "Okay, here's your delivery for this week."

Bender replied, "That's your catch phrase? Your catch phrase eats hockey pucks!"

"Anyway," Hermes said, "you'll be gone for de rest of de week. De package goes to de capital of de Galaxy of Paranoia."

"The capital?" I aksed. "What's it called?"

"Dey were afraid to tell me."

---

I took the first shift at the controls of the Leela, with Fry and me alternating for twelve hour periods each. We were due to arrive toward the end of Fry's second shift, early Thursday morning New New York time.

After my first shift ended, I went back to my quarters. BW, who was on the flight along with Bender, Fry, and myself, looked up from its hammock.

"Hey Amy."

"Hey BW." I went over to my drawers and looked for something to wear in bed. I was just about to go to the shower when BW spoke up.

"So can I talk to you for a sec?"

"Yeah. Of course."

I sat down on the corner of my mattress. It turned over onto its stomach and looked down through the netting at me.

It said, "So what did you and Fry do after you left Sponge?"

"We came here."

"Where?"

"Here," I repeated. "The Leela."

"You did?"

"Yeah. We were orbiting Earth when midnight came. We could see all the fireworks going off in all the cities in that time zone."

Its face glowed as it smiled. "Really? Oh my god. Wow. That must have been so... so beautiful."

"Yeah."

"What?" BW could tell that my enthusiasm was lacking.

It took me a moment, but I did tell it what my concern was. "It's just... that's how he was planning to spend New Year's with Leela."

BW looked down at me for a moment before comprehension struck. "So he was dating her?"

"Yeah."

"And then she died?"

"Yeah."

"Damn."

"Yeah."

Then BW said, "How long were they together?"

"A week."

"That's not very long."

"It sure isn't."

BW continued, "It seems like he's taking it kind of hard."

I looked up at it, stunned.

BW continued to stare back at me.

I replied, "You kidding? We're lucky he hasn't killed himself yet."

"What do you mean?"

"He loved Leela. He always did. He still does. And for the last year or two, he'd been trying to get her to fall in love with him. Or at least to go out with him. But he didn't know that she was already in love with him. She was just too reluctant to give him a shot.

"But for that one week... they were both the happiest I'd ever seen them. I mean, it wasn't like the first week of a normal relationship, where you're just trying to get to know one another and you usually end up hiding a lot of things about yourself. They'd known each other for four years. They'd been on who knows how many missions together. One of them saved the other's life just about every trip. And by then I think they both knew just about everything there was to know about one another."

There was a pause, and then I continued. "I thought they were meant for each other. They both had a history that made them stand out. Leela was a mutant. Fry was from a thousand years ago. And as he came out of the cryogenic tank, Leela was, like, one of the first people he met. And because of him, she just suddenly decided to quit her job as a fate assignment officer.

"I guess what I'm saying is that they'd been through so much together, it was like they were dating for way more than just a week. I mean, Fry was about to propose to her. He'd gotten a ring and everything."

BW aksed me, "He was going to propose?"

"Yeah."

"You think she would have said yes?"

"Definitely."

"How do you know?"

"She said she would."

There was a pause before BW said, "I just can't understand how anyone could be ready to get married after just a week."

I thought about that for a moment. In time, I looked up at it and told it, "Well, like I said, they were different."

---

After I came back from the shower, BW wasn't in our quarters. I went straight to bed but never really fell asleep. Some time later, I heard the door slide open and saw the light enter from the hallway. BW was creeping in quietly.

As it climbed into its hammock, I said, "Hey."

"Hey," it responded. "You're still up?"

"Yeah."

"Well, make sure you get rested up. You got another long shift tomorrow."

"Yeah. I just can't sleep though."

I heard a thud as it jumped out of its hammock. It flicked on the lamp next to my bed and sat next to me. I sat up in the bed.

BW aksed me, "You want, like, some warm milk or something?"

I shook my head. "But thanks for aksing."

It waved a hand at me, dismissively. "Hey, I need something to do on this ship."

"Aren't you cooking?"

"No. Bender wants to cook. He doesn't even want me to help him. And... well... he can be pretty persuasive, you know?"

"No," I answered in some bemusement. I can't remember the last time Bender ever persuaded me of anything.

BW went on, "Well, anyway. I guess we'll figure out my job around here eventually."

"I kinda figured you'd be the new engineer," I said.

"Fry told me you were the best at that."

"He did?"

"Yeah. I was just talking to him."

"Hm. What else did he say?"

"Not much. He didn't seem to be in a very talkative mood. He was kinda down, actually."

"He was?"

"Yeah. I kinda figured he was more open, at least from what you've told me about him. I... where are you going?"

I'd gotten up out of bed and was on my way out of the cabin. I turned back to BW and told it, "I'm gonna go talk to him."

As the door to the bridge hissed open, Fry looked back at me. "Hey Amy. Shouldn't you be in bed? You gotta rest up for tomorrow."

"Yeah, I know," I answered. "I can't get to sleep."

I sat on the floor, next to Fry's chair. This was getting to be a common occurrence, me sitting on the floor of the bridge with my head in Fry's lap.

"Hang on a sec," he said. He took my hands and lifted me up to my feet, leading me around to the couch at forward.

He sat at the port side of the couch, and I reclined across it, my head in his lap looking up at him.

He looked down at me and said, "You know, when you opened the door just now... for an instant I thought..." He averted his eyes and shrugged. "I thought it was Leela."

"You did?"

"Yeah. I still do that sometimes."

"Me too."

"Hard to get used to, isn't it?"

I said, "Yeah. It is."

A bit of silence went by, and then he said, "I was just talking to BW."

"Yeah. What did you talk about?"

"Not much. It aksed me what I thought its job should be. I said it was up to you. You're the captain."

"Well, I thought it could have my old job."

Fry looked down at me, puzzled. "Fixing the ship? You can still do that."

"Yeah, but what if we need to fix something while we're flying?"

He replied, "Well, you could fix her, and I could fly her."

"Yeah, okay, but what if we need to fix something, fly her, and shoot at someone all at once?"

He thought a moment. "Which one of those would it be best at?"

"Well... hmm."

"What did it major in in college?"

"Physics."

"So it would know how to fix the ship?"

"Probably not," I answered. "It did mostly astrophysics."

"What's that?"

"You know, structure of stars and galaxies and stuff. So I don't think it would know how the ship runs."

"Yeah, sounds like it would know more about what's outside the Leela than what's inside her."

"That's a thought," I said.

"What?"

"BW could navigate."

Fry said, "I thought the computer navigated."

"Yeah, but it doesn't always do it well. I mean, there's a shitload of variables to consider when you're figuring out how to fly. Even present computers don't have the capacity to optimise long trips. You'll get a pretty good flight plan, usually, but I think having a human navigator could save some time and some fuel."

I got up and gave Fry a hug on my way out. "Thanks Fry. See you in the morning."

"Sure," he said.

When I returned to my quarters, the light was off. BW was in its hammock.

I slipped silently into bed, and I spent the next nine hours alternating between tossing, turning, and actually sleeping.

---

Each shift was separated by a changeover of one to two hours, wherein both Fry and I would be on the bridge together. Officially, it was so that we could pass along information about how the ship was handling, or how the flight was going, or anything like that. But really it was to give us a chance for some actual human interaction.

I'd only been on long deliveries like this a couple of times, and that was always as Leela's copilot. Fry had been on more long trips, but this was his first as the copilot. So it was a new experience for both of us.

Anyway, on the morning of the second day, Bender had prepared sausage, muffins, and breakfast burritos. He hasn't yet cooked anything as good as that first day after we lost Leela, but it's all edible now.

After Fry had gone to bed, BW had gone off to the gym, and Bender had gone to clean up the cookware, I was alone on the bridge. On a whim, I had the computer calculate a series of return trajectories from our destination. The fuel usage each time was within a fairly broad range – about a quarter of them used up more fuel than we could carry.

At that point, Bender returned to the bridge, saying, "Hey there vertebrate. We there yet?"

"Nope," I told him. "Still another twenty hours or so."

"Well, have fun."

As he turned to leave, I called, "Bender, hold up."

"Yeah?"

"Can I talk to you for a bit?"

"Sure you can," he said. "I mean, the only other choice is talking to yourself, and obviously it'd be more interesting to talk to me."

He settled into his chair on my left side. I looked over at him and aksed him, "How's the cooking?"

"You tell me," he answered. "You're the one with taste buds."

"Well... that's the thing," I said. "For a while your cooking was skank nasty. Then suddenly, after... you know..."

"After old Eyeball got voted off the island of the living?"

"Um... yeah. After that, you were like a metallic Elzar for a while. You haven't really made anything that good since then, but it's still a lot better than before."

He said, "Yeah. I know I used to do a lot of improvisation. You know, like if the recipe called for eggs, I'd use baby chicks instead."

I was probably turning green right about then.

He continued, "But... well... you know how you guys all deeply admire and envy me?"

"Um... yeah, of course." I went along on the assumption that his version of deeply admire and envy corresponded to our version of tolerate and become faintly bemused by.

"Yeah. Everyone loves me." He looked away. "Except for Leela."

He grabbed a bottle from his compartment and took a drink. He'd knocked down about half the bottle when he turned back to me.

"I did, like, everything I could think of to try to earn her respect. Nothing seemed to work. I mean, she'll tell you when you're doing your job right and all, but she'll also tell you when you're doing it wrong. I always seemed to do it wrong."

He'd turned away and was facing out the windshield, but then he turned around to face me again. He went on, "Do you know what that's like? Doing the best job you can possibly do, only it's still not enough?"

I said, "Well, Leela was like that. She set such high standards, even for herself."

"For herself? Whaddya mean?"

"Well, a lot of times she'd get back from missions and she'd just be ranting about how she screwed up. Or... well, a few months ago she said she was still mad about sleeping with Zapp Brannigan. And, you know, that was, like, years ago. She was still angry about it."

"Yeah, she could be like that."

I added, "But you know what else? There was one time when the mutant newspaper interviewed her, and she was talking about all of us. She said something like, 'Bender and Fry, they're the best crew I could possibly aks for. Bender might be the most evil robot ever built, but he only uses his evilness for good, if that makes sense.'"

"She really said that?"

"Yeah. It's in the scrapbook."

After a pause, Bender said to me, "You know, one of my biggest wishes was to inspire paradoxical statements from my friends."

I laughed a bit. "Bender, you are a paradox."

"Aw, thanks Amy." He got up and gave me a hug before he left the bridge.

I never knew a hug from a robot could be so comforting.

It was even more comforting to find my wallet still in my pocket, with no money missing.

---

"Hey," I said to BW as I entered our quarters. Fry was about twenty minutes into his shift. He'd come up to the bridge late in the changeover period, but so little was going on that I didn't have anything I needed to tell him. He just took the controls from me without a word.

"Hey Amy. Hey, can I talk to you about something?"

"Yeah. What?"

"Well... can you keep a secret?"

"Secret?" I aksed. "What kind of secret?"

"A big one."

"I dunno. Have you told Fry and Bender?"

BW hesitated. "Well, see, they're the ones I want to keep it from. I... we need your help."

"'We'? Who's 'we'?"

"Clyde and Choto and me. We want you to help us with something, but we're gonna have to tell you something. So if you can't keep it secret, or if you just don't want to, that's fine. We'll just go by ourselves."

I must not have been on the same page as BW. "So, you have to tell me something, but you don't want Fry and Bender to know?"

"Yeah. We... well, we just want to keep it on a need to know basis, you know?"

"A need to know basis?"

"Yeah," it answered. "I don't think anyone should know unless they absolutely have to."

For some reason, I felt furious with BW.

It seemed to be implying that you couldn't trust Fry or Bender with a secret.

Well, maybe it had a point. But the fact remained, the two of them seemed like totally different people now. Even before, I would have trusted Fry with a big secret. I'd know there was a chance he might blurt it out at the most inopportune time, but I would have been willing to take the chance.

Bender couldn't keep secrets. That was just a fact of life.

But I was thinking of one of those dreams I had about Leela. Being a captain is all about making the right decisions, she'd said.

She hadn't mentioned trusting your crewmates, but that seemed to go with the territory. I mean, I needed their help.

And not just with flying the ship.

I was saying to myself, Fry can fly this incredibly sophisticated device, the likes of which nobody could even have imagined in the era he came from, and yet I can't entrust him with a tiny little secret?

And then I thought back to what Fry had said to Clyde. He'd described Bender, me, and himself as a three person union.

Finally, I shook my head and said to BW, "No, we're a team. Anything one of us knows, all of us have to know. So if you don't want Fry and Bender to know, don't tell me either."

BW paused. It seemed like it kind of wanted to tell all three of us. But then it said, "Well, I'll have to call Choto and see what she thinks. It's really up to her."

---

We arrived the next morning. Fry left to deliver the package as Bender and I waited on the bridge. BW was still asleep.

Surprisingly, it went off cleanly. I kind of had a hand hovering over the throttle in case we had to get out of there quickly. But we spotted Fry walking back to the Leela, hands in pockets, seemingly whistling.

We had breakfast after we took off, and I aksed Fry how the delivery went.

"Pretty smooth," he said. "They all had shades on, and they all seemed really nervous. When I gave the guy the clipboard, he was all, 'Umm... do I, like, have to sign my real name?' And I was all, 'No, you can just put whatever.' He was all, 'Okay,' and then he signed it."

He held out the clipboard for me to see. Sure enough, the line at the bottom had WHATEVER written in longhand.

---

That night, after I'd handed control over to Fry, BW entered the bridge, with Bender trailing behind it.

"Hey," it said. "Can I talk to y'all for a bit?"

"Yeah," I replied. "What's going on?"

It sat at the couch. "Give me a sec," it told us. "Clyde and Choto want to talk with you guys."

Fry looked a question at me.

"They have a secret," I told him.

"What is it?" Bender aksed. "Did you kill a guy?"

"No," BW said, miffed.

"Did you kill a girl?"

"No."

"An androgyne?"

"No!"

"A hermaphrodite?"

"I didn't kill anybody, Bender!"

"Oh." He was silent for a moment. "An animal?"

BW didn't respond this time. It was busy with its wrist. After a few seconds, it said, "Okay, and here."

A holographic projection of Clyde and Choto appeared before us. They looked like they were sitting at the conference table.

"Hi guys," Clyde said.

"Hi," I answered.

"Hey, do we look like ants?" Fry said.

Choto sighed. "No. Now, we have a problem we'd like your help with. But we're going to have to share some information with you guys, and we want to make absolutely sure that said information will be kept in the utmost confidence."

"Why?" Fry said.

"Because," Choto shot back.

"Okay, I'm in," Fry answered.

"Why?" I aksed him.

He said to me, "Haven't you ever wanted to be a spy? It's like we get to be spies! It'll be great! People will go, 'Hey, what do you know about your boss?' And we'll be all, 'I'm sorry, I'm not at liberty to divulge that information,' or something. It's awesome!"

"Well, you've convinced me," Bender said. "I accept your terms, meatbags."

"Amy?" Choto aksed.

I looked back at Fry and Bender and said, "If they're in, so am I."

"Okay," Clyde responded. "Now if this gets out, I'll fire every one of you. Not only that, I'll make faces at you whenever I pass you on the street. Anyway, what you need to know is that I have another job."

Damn, I thought. She was right.

"I'm a private investigator," he went on. "And the most recent case I've taken on relates to your family, Amy."

"Really?"

"Yes. Your father and uncle, in particular."

I said, "But... my uncle's been dead for almost twenty years."

Fry turned to me in surprise. I realised I'd never told him about Marcus, my father's brother.

In response, Clyde said, "Yes, but my clients are interested in the particulars of his death."

"Why?" I aksed. "Do they think he was murdered?"

"I think they suspect something of the sort may have occurred, yes."

"Well, it didn't," I told him. "I was there."

Fry's eyes widened.

"Right," Clyde said. "We figured you could help disprove their suggestion. You probably have access to plenty of medical records and such that we wouldn't. So maybe you could dig those up, and we could resolve this case."

"Well, I don't know," I said. "What would you do for me in return?"

Choto said, "We think we could increase your wages by about ten percent."

"What about Fry and Bender?"

"Will you need their help?"

"Yes."

"Very well. We'll give them raises as well."

Fry and Bender were high fiving one another.

"You've got a deal," I told Clyde and Choto.

---

I didn't really talk much to the others the rest of the way back to Earth. I was kind of thinking about my uncle. What I could remember about him, at least.

Anyway, we landed at around 03:00 this morning. Hermes was there, waiting for us.

"How was de flight?"

"No problems," I said.

"Clyde told ya about his other job?"

"Yeah."

"Good. Lock up when ya leave."

"You got it," I answered as he turned and left.

"You need to, like, inspect the ship or anything?" BW aksed me.

"Nope. We're done."

"Okay. I'll go home then."

"All right. See you," I said. As it left, Fry and Bender trudged down the stairs to the hangar floor.

"You ready?" Fry aksed.

I was about to go home with them, but then I remembered my new job.

"I've got to stay a little longer," I told them.

Bender shrugged. "We can wait for you."

"No," I insisted. "Go on home. I might be a while."

Fry aksed, "You sure?" There was a bit of concern in his voice.

It seems like there's always concern in our voices when we're talking to one another.

"Go ahead," I said. "I'll see you guys in the morning."

"It is the morning, idiot," Bender shouted over his shoulder as they left.

---

I stood in the lab, staring at the helmet of my VR suit. I don't know how long I just stood there like that. Hours, it felt like.

Finally I said to myself, Fuck it, and slipped it on.

The directory listing appeared before me. I lifted my hand up and double clicked on brainscanwong.exe.

For a tiny fraction of a second, a bright flash surrounded me.

Then, I was standing on the roof of a building overlooking Times Square. Snow was falling all around me.

In front of me was, well, me.

Same sweat suit, same boots, same wrist communicator, same hairstyle.

"Hi," the other me said to me.

"Hi," I replied.

"Like the place?" she aksed.

I looked around. It was a cloudy simulated night. The wind was starting to pick up, blowing the snow past me and into her face. The VR suit can adjust the temperature in the helmet and in the gloves, but it can't go outside of a narrow range of temperatures.

Even so, the cumulative effect of the subtle chill on my extremities, plus the sight of wind blown snowflakes, made me feel cold.

"This is good," I said. I like snow in New New York. I don't like the sludge that the streets are coated in afterward, but while it's snowing, I like it.

I walked toward the edge of the roof. I could see spacecraft flying over us, traffic in Times Square, people walking around, the ridiculous visual cacophony of the illuminated billboards, everything that I would see if I was actually there.

To my side, the software me said, "I downloaded the layout of the real Times Square. I think I've got everything."

Cautiously, I stepped on the edge. Then I thought, What the hell, and hopped off.

Nothing happened. I was still standing at the level of the roof, even though there was no solid surface underneath me.

The snow continued to swirl beneath my feet.

"So you finally decided to run me," she said.

I stepped back onto the roof.

"Yeah," I said. "I've got, well, sort of a situation."

"What's that?"

"Well, the company's under new management."

"Yeah, I know."

"You do?" I said. "How do you know that?"

She didn't say anything. After a second, a window opened in front of her.

It was the press release announcing the sale of the company to Clyde.

I went on, "Yeah. Well, he's got another job."

The window snapped shut, and she said, "He does?"

"Yeah. He's a private investigator, and he's working on a case about Dad."

"What about Dad?"

"Well, it's about him and Uncle Marcus."

She was looking at me uncertainly. "Uncle Marcus?"

I nodded. "They think maybe it wasn't an accident."

She stared at me for a short moment. Then she suddenly turned away and walked slowly toward the ledge.

I looked up and noticed that a browser window had opened in front of her.

Then, in the blink of an eye, loads more windows opened up all around us. They appeared and disappeared faster than I could follow. Pages flashed up on all of them.

The software me stopped in her tracks. The windows surrounding us all froze on the pages they were showing.

"The hell..." she muttered.

"What?" I aksed her.

She turned around to face me. As she did so, most of the windows disappeared. Two flew from different places – one settled to her left, one to her right.

"Look at these," she said.

"What are they?"

"You remember after Leela died? Fry was talking about Hamlet?"

"Yeah. What is it?"

"It's a Shakespeare play."

"How come I haven't heard of it?"

She said to me, "Because of this." Pointing to the window on my left, she said, "Here's the copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged that we read as a junior, published 2996." She turned to my right and went on, "This is the one published the next year."

The windows were each showing a page from the table of contents. Highlighted in the right window, right between As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream, was Hamlet.

I turned back to the one on the left and aksed, "It's not here?"

"Right. It's nowhere to be found in that copy. Sound odd?"

"Yeah. Why's it missing?"

"An interesting question," she said. "Know what Hamlet's about?"

I sighed. "Of course not."

"Well, Hamlet's the prince of Denmark. His father, you know, the king –"

"Dj'uh."

"I knew you'd say that. Anyway, the king's just died, and almost immediately, Hamlet's mother remarries. She marries the king's brother. And Hamlet gets pissed off because he thinks it's too soon. And he ends up finding out that his uncle killed his father."

I stood there for a moment, staring at her.

This was almost too much.

I mean, what the hell are you supposed to do when something like that happens?

Actually, that's a question that I've been aksing a lot over the past few weeks: What the hell am I supposed to do?

Finally I repeated, "His uncle killed his father."

She nodded. "Very interesting, wouldn't you say?"

I said, slowly, "So... do you think that's what happened?"

"You want to see what else I found out?"

"Yeah," I replied.

The two windows reappeared. The one to my left showed my father's picture in the corner.

PLANET OF MARS
PILOT LICENSE
WONG, LEONID MICHAEL
ISSUED: 18 MAR 3003 EXPIRES: 18 MAR 3005

To my right I saw a similar page with Uncle Marcus's picture.

PLANET OF MARS
PILOT LICENSE
WONG, MARCUS RICHARD
ISSUED: 20 MAY 2984 EXPIRES: 20 MAY 2986

Dad and Marcus were fraternal twins. But they looked similar enough that some people had thought they were identical. I could see the subtle differences in the wrinkles around the eyes, in the nose, and in the chin.

"Notice anything unusual?"

I looked back at the software me. In response to her question, I shook my head and shrugged.

Something in the corner of each page highlighted. They were UI numbers, Universal Identifiers. They were code numbers generated from a complex formula that took into account the person's genome along with biometric factors like fingerprints and iris measurements. That way, everyone would have unique UIs, even, say, the Professor and Cubert.

I looked back and forth between the two UI numbers. There did seem to be...

I read them more carefully.

And read them again.

I stammered, "What... what is..."

"Now look at this," she said.

A third window appeared, next to my father's pilot license. It showed a younger version of my father.

PLANET OF MARS
PILOT LICENSE
WONG, LEONID MICHAEL
ISSUED: 27 MAY 2984 EXPIRES: 27 MAY 2986

I looked at the UI number on this license.

I shook my head. "I don't... this makes no sense."

She walked up next to me and said, "Here. Let me show you."

A few more windows opened up, and all of the open windows rearranged themselves in front of us. There were two rows, with the top row in blue and the bottom row in orange. About midway through, the top row stopped. The bottom row of windows continued on, but these windows were blue instead of orange.

We walked to the leftmost pair of windows. She pointed to the top one and said, "That's Marcus's birth certificate," and pointing to the bottom one, "and that's Dad's. Different UIs."

As we walked toward the right, the software me narrated, "These are their various pilot's licenses, renewed every two years. These all have Marcus's UI, and those all have Dad's. Now look at this."

We'd gotten to the point where the top row ended. The last one on the top row was the same license she'd shown me to begin with.

"The next time Dad renewed his license after Marcus died..." she began.

"...He was given Marcus's UI," I finished.

"And there's more. These are the original documents, okay? These aren't what you get if you just go to the Public Records site. If you go to Public Records, this is what you get."

She turned me around. Opposite us was a parallel series of windows, creating a mirror image of the first series.

The wind continued to blow the snow around. It seemed like the snowflakes were flying right along the rows of windows.

I turned back to the first series just to make sure.

The top row on this new series was orange, not blue. And the entire bottom row, not just the end, was blue. Taking a close look at the UIs showed that the other me had used the same colour coding scheme here.

She went on, "So they didn't just mix up their UIs once. Somebody actually got in and retroactively changed the UIs."

I stood there for a little longer, staring at the various licenses.

"We conclude three things," she said. "First, the man who died on the 28th of August 2984 was Leo Wong, not Marcus Wong. Second, Marcus Wong has been posing as Leo Wong for nearly twenty years. And third, Marcus Wong has gone to great lengths to keep this from people – especially from you."

---

When I woke up, a little after noon, my wrist was flashing. When I hit play, I heard my own voice say, "Hey. Come log in as soon as you wake up. There's something you need to see."

Fry was still asleep, so I grabbed a sushi stick and went to the office.

The software me had aksed me to leave her running when I left. She'd E-mailed all the documents to me, and I'd forwarded them to Clyde and Choto. I'd gotten back a succinct "tx" reply.

When I put on my suit and logged in, the setting was a beach. But not an Earth beach. The sand was orange, the waters were purple, and the sky was kind of a pale green. Dark grey rocks towered over us just a few tens of metres in from the shore. There was a tiny, but brilliant blue, sun. I could see three moons around the sky.

"Hey," I heard from my right.

She was sitting on the sand, facing out to the ocean. She had on a purple bikini top and matching shorts, with bare feet.

I looked down and saw that I was wearing the same thing.

She placed her hand on the ground next to her and said, "Have a seat."

I sat down to the left of my digitised counterpart. I aksed her, "What planet is this?"

"None, really. I made all this from scratch."

"How long did it take?"

"Umm... about 488 microseconds."

"That's it?"

"Yeah," she said. "You'd be surprised how easy it is to get things done in here."

"So do you really think that fast?"

"Not quite. I mean, there's a really good interface between the VR engine that's making all this and the engine that's... well... that's running me. I kind of think things..."

She held out her hand, and a martini glass appeared in it.

"...And they happen."

I thought that over for a second. "So what about when you're talking to me?"

"Well, I actually do some background tasks all the time. Like, while I'm talking now, I'm also looking at a lot of things online. I mean, I seem to be thinking faster than a human, but only by a couple orders of magnitude."

"'Only' a couple orders of magnitude? Shit!"

"Well, it's not as fast as it seems. I also have to concentrate a lot on this world, and my appearance, and yours, and stuff."

I looked around for a moment, and then she continued, "Anyway, there's something important."

She tossed down her drink in a swift motion, about the same speed that I would do it in real life. She placed the empty glass down on a table, or at least she would have if there was one there. It disappeared as soon as she let go of it.

Just as last night, a browser window appeared in front of us.

She said, "This is the section of the Martian criminal code that deals with identity theft."

"Identity theft?"

"Yeah. Marcus Wong is currently wanted by the Martian police for impersonating the deceased Leo Wong. Look at this part."

Part of it was highlighted.

I read aloud, "The offence of identity theft as defined above shall be considered a capital offence in accordance with section 2.28-5a."

The words hung before us.

Through a tightened throat, I said, "Oh... shit."

"Yeah."

"Couldn't he, like, plea bargain or something? Get a lighter sentence?"

"I don't think so. You know how they are with big cases like this."

I did know how they were. Cases that might take a year on other planets would be done in days on Mars. There were limits on how much evidence you could introduce, how many witnesses you could call, how long you could question them. And the law didn't give judges very much leeway in sentencing. Whatever the law said the punishment for your crime was, that's what you'd get.

I said, "So what's gonna happen now?"

"Well, I think he knows they're after him."

"Could he, like, hide out on some distant planet until the statute of limitations runs out?"

"It doesn't."

I thought about it for a bit more and then said, "Why's it a capital crime anyway?"

"I think it was a big problem when Mars was settled. People who were wanted on other planets would go there and take somebody else's name. I think they wanted to impose stiff penalties as a deterrent."

"Doesn't get any stiffer than that."

She nodded, but then suddenly she looked away and said, quietly, "Wh... what?"

"What?" I aksed.

The window with the law text disappeared, replaced with a video window. It was a live news report on one of the Martian stations.

"...turned himself in to Martian authorities. Earlier today it was found that Marcus Wong had taken the place of his twin brother, Leo Wong, owner of the Buggalo Group and the highest ranking Martian on the Fortune 500,000,000 listing of the galaxy's wealthiest individuals. Marcus Wong was believed to have died in a mishap involving farming machinery nearly twenty years ago, but it now appears that Leo Wong was instead killed in that accident. Marcus faces the death penalty if convicted; the trial is due to begin on Monday."

The window winked out.

The waves crashed against our feet.

Airplanes flew over the beach.

Through a tightened simulated throat, the software me said, "Oh... shit."

I answered, "Yeah."

---

After that, I went to my quarters on the Leela and just started writing. And now that I don't have anything more to write, I'm still here.

I think I'm afraid to come out and face reality again.

It's like I'm cursed or something. Everything around me is being ruined.

And what can I do besides just sit around and wait for whatever will happen next?

And I've still got that track echoing in my brain.

From here I can't see light.