Digital Galaxies

The rush to move everything over was frantic and stressful. We ended up just tying a bunch of crates to a line and then hurling them out the airlock to save time. I got the food processor thing out through a hole I made in the hull of our doomed ship, then Turshie took it in through one of several cargo holds on the new ship.

After that, I made a quick detour into the vents to get my den stuff, and when I came out I was confronted with something alarming. A robot, one I hadn’t seen before, was carrying some of our stuff down a hallway.

It looked like some sort of four-legged crab, with a flat surface on the top that it was using to carry a few crates.

“Um, hello?” I asked nervously. I wasn’t in bundit at that point, so I felt pretty vulnerable.

The strange looking quadruped bot stopped and turned to look at me. Turshie’s cheerful voice came out of it. “Hello! I found some porter bots! It’s helping us make some rather remarkable time with the evacuation!”

“O-oh,” I said, shuffling my feet. The robot was between me and bundit, and thus it was thwarting my escape.

The robot stood there too, both of us stuck in an awkward game of chicken. Finally, one of the manipulators on the arms carefully disengaged from holding its cargo and pointed to the duffel bag I was clutching to my chest. “I can carry that, if you’d like. I mean, unless you want to carry it. Goodness, this is very much an interesting interaction. Are you okay?”

“I-I can carry it,” I said quietly.

The arm went back to holding the bot’s cargo. “Ah, in that case, I’ll just… well this bot needs to go past you, and so if it’s all okay with you I would… you know, uh… like to shuffle past.”

I nodded and moved to the side, watching bemusedly as Turshie piloted the robot down the hallway.

After that minor weirdness, I shifted to moving all my tools and spare parts and shit. God, I'd have loved to tear all the perfectly functional systems out of the ship. It seemed like such a waste.

A knock on the door of my machine shop caused me to turn, and I found David smiling at me from the doorway.

"Hey there, need any help?" he asked.

I shook my head automatically, but considering I was inside bundit, he couldn't hope to see it. The slip up gave me time to realise that I could definitely do with his help.

“That would be helpful,” I said in a small voice.

I was a bit anxious around him these days, since I hadn’t heard anything about the drama with Ed since it had happened. I knew David still liked me, but he was dating Ed and… well, I didn’t know what to think.

Nodding, David entered the machine shop and began to look around. He wore a space suit with lifting actuators that would allow him to carry heavier stuff, so I pointed one of bundit’s hands to a hastily packed crate.

“That one,” I said. “It’s got my hand tools in it.”

“Alright,” he nodded, picking it up carefully. He didn’t leave though, instead glancing around at the rest of the stuff. “I can take more.”

I considered the pile of stuff I was getting ready and tugged on one of my fluffy ears in thought. “Probably… that one there.”

He nodded again and lifted the second crate I’d indicated. Then he was off again, and so was I, pulling a big trolley laden with stuff behind me. Bundit was so useful.

A few trips later and David was back in my machine shop. Time was getting tight, but with Turshie’s help we had moved almost everything important. Everything except my massive stockpile of random spare parts. The others were busy getting other non-essentials over while I worked.

“Time’s running short,” he commented, looking around at everything that still needed to be moved.

“I know, I know,” I mumbled absently, concentrating on stacking things up.

“You okay?” he asked, coming up beside bundit. He rang his knuckles off my hull. “I feel like I see you inside this thing more than out of it.”

Bundit’s arms paused as the neural link was suddenly left without instructions. Staring at David through one of the cameras, I tried to gauge what he was thinking. Had he gone over to Ed’s way of thinking?

“It’s safer inside here,” I told him, continuing with the packing.

He let out a grunt. “Why?”

I stopped again and turned bundit to glare at him. “Because I have an entire life of abuse and trauma behind me. Because I was born funny and now I have a ton of neuro-atypicalities that mean it’s hard to exist in normal society.”

Seeing his jaw drop open did nothing to quell the frustration that was welling up out of me like a badly drilled oil well.

I went back to shifting things onto the trolley, but now there was visible anger in the way bundit’s arms moved. “Look, David. I’m so fucking broken inside that it’s impossible for me to function under the rules of society. I don’t even know where to begin to explain every granular little detail of the agony that was pretending to be a real boy. It’s everything, it’s absolutely everything about that experience.”

“I’m listening,” he said gently, reaching out to place a palm to my hull. “I promise.”

“Listen and help me move things, then,” I grumbled, shoving a pile of steel piping into his arms. “I’ll open a private channel.”

Once we were speaking over comms rather than just blasting noise at each other, I tried to order my thoughts into something coherent. I failed.

“My mother and father were both door slammers,” I began, giving him a cord to tie the pipes together with. “I’d say about eighty percent of the time they wouldn’t directly confront me about why they were angry. They’d just smash and crash around the house, making as much noise as possible so that everyone within earshot knew that they were mad. Then you were expected to go and ask what was wrong so that they felt comfortable screaming at you, since you’re the one who raised the issue.”

“I’m familiar with the type,” he muttered, more to himself than to me.

“Yeah, now imagine that your brain is naturally wired to be far more perceptive of every signal it’s getting than normal, and shutting out unnecessary information is very difficult. Now add a mild simmering panic to that mix, so that your whole conscious self is being slow cooked under those conditions,” I explained, trying to stop myself from feeling all of that at the same time as I asked him to imagine it.

“Your whole body is in a perpetual state of fight or flight. It’s funneling every single little noise it hears and vibration it feels through the floor, right into your brain. It’s a storm of neurological alarms and each one could be the harbinger of more pain.” I paused to see if he was listening and found him just staring at me, waiting for my next words.

“That is all one small aspect of what is wrong with me,” I said. My willingness to go into even more detail had fled. I was saved by the fact we were now making the transfer over to the new ship and we had to concentrate and coordinate.

Safely over within my new machine shop, I turned to him. “Doors slamming, it scares the shit out of me. Raised voices too. Discordant noise with no rhythm is bad too. It’s just… god, there’s so much shit to explain. The whole point about being super sensitive to everything, that’s its own deal. There’s just a lot.”

“Yeah, it seems like it,” he said wearily. “I hope you know that I’m always willing to listen, though. Okay? I might be like, the most mentally normal and boring dude on the planet, but I’m willing to try and learn.”

Tears sprung up unbidden and I had to relinquish control of bundit before I accidentally broke something. “It’s like… it’s like those superhero stories with the mind readers. You know? How they go mad if they don’t learn to block out the voices. Imagine it’s that but with noise. That’s what it’s like.”

“Alia,” he said, and I could hear his hands shifting over bundit’s armour. “Damn it, how do I open this thing. Please come out?”

Mindlessly, I pressed the button to crack the doors. They slid open with a hiss, but David didn’t wait for them to finish moving before he scooped me up out of the pilot’s chair and into his arms.

“Sorry,” he said softly. “I’m sorry for bringing it all up.”

I shook my head wordlessly and tried to speak, but nothing came out. Almost second nature now, my follow up text message was quick, It’s okay. I’m just… I’m…

Setting me down without letting me go, I was pulled gently into a proper hug. “I know. Look, I wanted to talk to you about Ed. I think he’s coming around. If he tries to talk to you… just hear him out, okay? It’ll be an apology.”

“Really?” I blubbered, trying to rub tears out of my eyes.

“Yeah. I think he feels bad for his reaction but doesn’t know how to go about apologising,” David said, gently patting my back. “At least, that’s what I gather. The subject has been sort of taboo between us.”

“Okay well… thank you,” I snuffled, getting myself under control. “I have more stuff to move though…”

Letting me go with a groan, he arched his back into a stretch. “Alright, let’s get back to it then. If you’re okay, that is.”

“I’m okay,” I giggled. When he gave me a funny look, I clarified, “That’s pretty much what happens every time I explain why I’m so fucked in the head. Instant waterworks.”

“Think you can solve our water issues we might have with that party trick?” he joked, grinning at me from within his helmet.

“Oh my god,” I laughed. “Go pick up something heavy.”