Page 35 of Cloverleaf Station

Kieron couldn’t bear to do it. He just couldn’t. If the price of keeping himself as sharp as he knew he needed to be was damaging Catalina’s mind in the process, then he would have to resign himself to dullness. He wasn’t going to be that person, the one who made Catalina doubt herself, who stole her sense of self-worth and the comforting shield of love and affection she was wrapped in. If he did, he’d be no better than his own mother.

All you can do is your best. And if his best wasn’t good enough, Kieron would pay that price for the rest of his life, but he wouldn’t push his fear of failure onto Catalina. He just couldn’t.

He washed off and walked slowly back to the hangar, where Elenus and Catalina were working. Or, well, Elenus was working—Catalina was humming songs with fifteen layers of harmony, each one accompanied by a hologram of a dancer spinning across a stage.

The dancers were dinosaurs in tutus. They were officially her favorite thing now.

“Keeeeeerooon!” She’d been working hard at upgrading her vocalizations. Elenus had explained over and over that it, “Isn’t necessary, we can read, you know, you can project right into our implants, and we can just read it there, and don’t look at me like that, Kieron will have his implant back in soon, and you won’t have to use his tab, I know you think it’s clunky and—did you just sass me? Sassing your father? Have we skipped from five to fifteen, all of a sudden?”

Needless to say, Catalina wasn’t willing to wait for Kieron to get his implant back to talk to him. She sounded like nothing he’d ever heard before, neither feminine nor masculine nor anything in between. Her voice was totally unique, just like her.

“Hi, Catie,” he said, ignoring Elenus’s groan at his use of the nickname that Catalina was becoming fond of, and that Elenus loathed. “I liked that song; did you make it up on your own?”

“With Baaaaa—aaa—ack!”

“She used an ancient Earth concerto by a composer named Bach as the basis for it,” Elenus translated. “I don’t know why she went so far back; there are hundreds of years’ worth of Ganian composers to pull from.”

“I liiiiike Baaaaaaa-aaack!”

“I do, too, but you don’t see me limiting myself to music that didn’t even have the simplest synthesizers to help it along!” Elenus retorted.

Kieron sat down next to Catalina and watched the dinosaurs dance across their insubstantial stages, feeling … content. Still sad, still angry at himself for not doing more, but right now, in the company of two people he loved, he could handle those feelings without letting them sweep him away. It was nice, he—

Wait.

What?

He what?

He couldn’t. No. That was … love? Impossible.

Kieron started to sweat, his mind carrying him down a dangerously emotional spiral as his heart began to race. Love them? How could he? He barely knew them! They were transitory, not going to stick around, little more than phantoms in the gray void of his existence! He couldn’t fall in love with them, that was the height of self-destructiveness. He might be pathetic by his mother’s standards, but he wasn’t that undisciplined … was he?

“Ha! Got it!”

Elenus’s self-congratulations broke through the painful monologue happening in Kieron’s head. “Lizzie has accepted the code!” he continued, looking done in but satisfied as he stared at the screens he’d laid out in a semicircle around him. “It’s working, the connection is up, it’s time to bring her home. Catalina!” He turned to look at his child. “How do you feel about bringing Lizzie back now?”

“Lizzzzzzeeeeee,” Catalina hummed. “Miss herrrrrr.”

“Me too. Let’s go get her, huh?” Elenus turned to Kieron and winked. “Want to stick around and watch my baby being awesome?”

Kieron nodded helplessly because of course, he did. Elenus’s eyes narrowed for a moment, but he didn’t ask Kieron anything else, just patted the seat beside him. “Then let’s get this show going.”

Kieron sat down beside him, looked out over the code that was a tiny fraction of the complexity of Catalina’s brilliant mind, and fell a little deeper into the abyss of affection he felt for them.

Too deep, and he knew he’d never be able to climb out again.

Be careful. If you give too much, you’ll lose too much when they leave.

Kieron worried that he’d already given more than he could afford.

***

It was fascinating to watch the Lizzie’s rescue unfold. Lizzie was an extremely modern ship, on the cutting edge of AI technology, but between the damage from the radiation and the labyrinthine circumstances Kieron had left her in, her computer simply hadn’t been up to bringing her back on its own. If Kieron hadn’t understood how far ahead of the competition Catalina was before this moment, he certainly would have after watching things now.

The new programming that Elenus had just barely been able to shove into Lizzie’s AI from a distance wasn’t meant to modify her code to be smarter—it modified her to allow Catalina a back door through her numerous firewalls and automatic lockdowns and viral defenses. Essentially, it kept the Lizzie from bricking herself in when Catalina exerted outside control over her systems.

Kieron and Elenus watched through Catalina’s own optical array, projected as a hologram for them right there in the hangar, as Catalina brought her sister home.