“So you’re like a Green Lantern?” I say.
“No. Not at all like that. Absolutely nothing like it.” Xyzo stares daggers at me.
“A space cop, then”
“Space…journalist, let’s say. We never intervene. Just observe and record.”
“Oh, like The Wa?—“
“—If I wasn’t currently atrophied, I would choke you with one of my tentacles.” Xyzo seethes.
I grin. “That’s not the threat you think it is.”
She closes her eyes, or at least the membranes that cover them slide across the smooth black surface. “So, Lucy, are you going to help me, or are you going to let me turn into a desiccated husk?”
I stare at Xyzo. This is a bad idea, and a girl like me attracts enough unwanted attention without carting around a six foot tall squid, but, there’s something in her eyes that pleads with me. That needs me. And, in the same way, girls like me like to feel like we’re needed.
“I guess, uh, what do you need from me?” I say.
“I need a computer…” Xyzo looks to the ground and then back up at me, a little worry in her eyes. “And, I need to hope that in the last five years they haven’t changed the emergency extraction protocols.”
“I can help you with one part of that at least. It’s a shitty computer, but, we have pretty fast internet.”
“Perfect.”
---
“Fuck.” Xyzo says, starting at the computer.
“What?” I look at the screen, but it’s useless for me to try to interpret it. The moment she touched the computer with her long tentacle, the screen flickered into patterns that looked both jagged and smooth at once, glittering colors that my brain is hardly able to process at all.
“Well, the protocols haven’t changed, but, the nearest extraction ship is four hundred lightyears away.” Xyzo rolls her eyes as if this is a repeated annoyance.
“Do you mean they’re not going to get here for more than four hundred years?”
“No, god…sorry.” Xyzo spins around to face me, leaning against the desk. “I forget that you all think that light is the fastest thing in the universe.”
“It’s not?”
“No, it’s like the fiftieth, but, I can’t deal with explaining the transit properties of…” Xyzo says something, but the sound doesn’t even resemble language, and my brain aches to even consider what it means.
“Ok, ok, so how long, in earth time, before they can get here?”
“Tomorrow, probably by noon or so.”
“You could have just said that.” I say.
“I know.”
“So…where is it going to be?”
“About a hundred fifty miles down the coast…sorry…” She winces.
“I don’t have anywhere to be tomorrow…could be fun.” I smile.
CHAPTER 5
I closethe hotel room door, and after what seems like an hour without doing so, I take a breath. Hotels when you’re a trans girl are always a weird thing. Even though, yes, my ID says Lucy and my gender marker reads a proud ‘F’, something about the way the hotel clerk looked at me gave me a weird ick. Maybe it’s just my own perception, but their eyes lingered a bit longer than they should, and they stared at my ID for a moment too long.
