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i.
“Hey, Officer Germain, you there?” asks Eiffel, crackly over the speaker. Hera doesn’t know why he always asks. Eiffel can see her through his cameras, track her heat signature or her respiratory rate to see if she’s awake. When she first arrived on the Hephaestus it was a little unnerving–if he couldn’t even tell she was there, what was to stop him from accidentally venting a section of the ship she was in?
He did almost do that once, actually, when his sensors went haywire. But his mics had been offline too, so it wasn’t like asking if she was there would have helped.
“I’m here,” says Hera. She’s exhausted; her chest and throat hurt from coughing up water, and Minkowski’s put her on light duties while her arm recovers from being dislocated. Oh, and she still can’t see, which is just fantastic. Eiffel should be annoying–once she got back on the ship, all Hera wanted to do was get away from Minkowski’s well-meaning concern and Hilbert’s too-cheerful voice. Instead it’s…weirdly comforting.
“You, uh, you okay?”
She snorts. “Why wouldn’t I be? All I did was almost drown in space.”
“Kinda ridiculous, right? I mean, I always figured if any of us died it would be because this thing fell into the star.”
Never mind the comforting thing. Hera pulls a face. “Isn’t your main job to keep us out of the star, Eiffel?”
“Well yeah, but have you seen what I’m working with here? Hell, have you met me? Sweetheart, we’re all lucky to be alive.”
Hera can’t help it. She laughs. It’s a little raw, a little hysterical after everything today, and it ends with a coughing fit that racks her abused lungs–but it feels good. Like someone loosened a pressure valve in her brain. Halfway through Hera realizes Eiffel’s laughing with her.
“Seriously, though,” he says once they’re done, “I’m glad you’re okay. Maybe hold off on the spacewalks for a bit, though.”
Nodding, Hera leans back into her sleeping bag. She really should get some rest, she thinks, even if every brush of hair or puff of wind against her face makes her panic. The water droplets from the cooling system had felt like that at first, just a cool brush against her skin. Then a thought hits her, and she grins. “Hey, Eiffel?”
“Yup?”
“Sweetheart, huh? What happened to your formality protocols?”
She’s almost certain she feels the room heat up, just a bit, and grins to herself.
“Never been a big fan of, yanno, ranks. So I found a way around them. Do you–do you mind?”
An AI that can skirt its protocols like that should be concerning–she’s seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, thanks–but Hera doesn’t really care. It’s Eiffel. He’s an idiot, but there’s not a malicious line in his code. “I don’t mind. But let me know if you plan on calling Minkowski pet names next–I want to see that. Or maybe get footage and watch it far, far away.”
Eiffel chuckles again, but there’s a distinct nervous edge to it. “No, uh–I think I’ll save that one for you.”
ii.
Hera sleeps for twelve straight hours once Eiffel’s back online, and she thinks that’s enough. But Minkowski’s given her another few hours before she has to get back to work. Normally she likes to out-workaholic the commander, but just this once–
“Hey, Eiffel,” she says, “are you there?”
Hera has a vague memory of falling asleep to the autopilot’s voice. His actual voice, this time, not the coldly cheerful tones that told Hera and Minkowski about each new disaster while the station fell apart around them. But part of her, a completely irrational part of her, is afraid he won’t answer.
Eiffel does, though. His voice is a little more glitchy, a little less human, but it’s him. “Hey, sleeping beauty. Good to see you awake.”
Hera blushes. Stupid, she thinks. “Good to have more than thirty minutes of sleep,” she tells him. “How’re you? How’s the commander?”
“Minkowski’s still asleep, Hilbert’s on the bridge–” Hera bristles; she’d be perfectly happy never speaking of Hilbert again, would be happy to throw him out an airlock– “and I have never felt better. Well, no, that’s a lie. Everything hurts and I’m glitching twice as much as I used to. But I’m not lobotomized anymore, so that’s cool.”
Blinking, Hera runs the words through her mind again. She’s really too tired to process Eiffel’s motormouth; a headache presses at her temples. “What do you mean, everything hurts?” She’s heard of AI with pain receptors, but Eiffel doesn’t have those.
He makes a noise, somewhere between a sigh and a burst of static. “It just hurts. Think the good ol’ doc messed up some of my hardware. There’s…feedback, or something.”
If Hera were anyone else, if she was the kind of person who was cool and badass and not afraid of what Minkowski and Eiffel would think of her afterwards, she’d shove Hilbert out the airlock herself. But she’s just Hera Germain, the communications officer who can’t even pull off a jailbreak, much less a murder. So instead she just snarls, “That asshole,” and leans back in her sleeping bag. “Is there anything I can do?”
Eiffel’s quiet for a minute. Then, “Don’t think so. I’m not even sure where exactly the problem is.”
“I just had to drop out of college,” Hera says with a sigh. If she had actually gone on to get her master’s in AI tech, maybe she’d know how to take care of this herself. Maybe she and Minkowski could’ve gotten rid of Hilbert at the start.
“…You dropped out of college?”
Hera blinks. “Isn’t that in my file?”
“Well, yeah, but I didn’t…I mean, it’s—”
She sighs and it turns into a chuckle. In a couple of days, his incompetence won’t be so endearing, but right now it’s just good to have him back. “You’re a computer. How do you not read something in your memory banks?”
“Uhhhh ow crackle my memory! It’s still coming online glitch!” He actually does glitch when he says the word, so points for effort.
Still. Kinda sucks that he had to find out because she told her. “I’m a supergenius who had to drop out of college because my brain couldn’t get it together” is just…sad, as far as backstories go. Add in the criminal record and it’s even worse. “Mmhmm,” Hera says, and with all the subtlety she can muster she asks, “so, has Minkowski caught you up?”
He seems to accept this, but for all Hera knows he’s looking at her file now anyway. Eiffel’s not very good at multitasking—too often she’s gotten fragments of conversations meant for Hilbert or Minkowski—but he can do it. “She told me what happened, but you know Commander Hardass—left out all the juicy details. So what’d I miss?”
Hera takes a deep breath, and starts to tell him.
iii.
“Oh my god Hera I thought you were dead,” says Eiffel as soon as her door shuts, and Hera shakes her head. She’s too tired to laugh.
“I did, too,” Hera admits, and starts to put on her pajamas. The SI-5 crew gave her new ones; they feel amazing, smooth against her raw skin. She hadn’t wanted to talk to them, knew it was all going to go to shit once they got back to the station—but she also wanted to not die.
So.
Here they are.
It’s not like the Hephaestus crew would have survived much longer without them, anyway.
“Are you okay?” Eiffel asks.
“No,” she says immediately. Then, “God, I don’t—I don’t know. I never thought I’d get back here. I never thought I’d be glad to be back here.” Hera lets herself drift so she can rest on the wall next to one of Eiffel’s cameras, and leans her forehead to the side of it. Probably she looks stupid to him, but he’s seen her doing a lot of stupid stuff so she doesn’t worry about it. “I…may have hallucinated you, while I was out there.”
“…Sounds exciting?”
Hera shakes her head, and tries to brush her hair out of the way—force of habit—before she realizes she doesn’t have any. “Not really. Mostly just Lovelace and Minkowski and Hilbert yelling at me not to give up. And then I did, and there was you, telling me it was all going to be okay.” God, she sounds stupid, but she can’t stop running her mouth. “And then the Urania showed up, so I guess you were right. Hallucination-you. I know it wasn’t real.”
“Even if it wasn’t, I’m glad I helped.” Eiffel pauses. “Hallucination-me is wahaaay more positive than I am, though. I guess someone yelling that you were going to die wouldn’t have been really helpful.”
Hera thinks she would’ve been a lot better off with the real Eiffel, not her brain’s imitation, but she doesn’t say so. Instead she just tells him, “I really missed you.” She pauses, and then adds with that Southern twang Eiffel gets sometimes, “darlin’.”
“Ha. HaHA! That’s, uh.” He pauses and there’s a sound like he’s letting out a breath. Hera’s not sure why he does that when he doesn’t need to breathe. Sometimes she wonders if he’s a ghost who found himself haunting a computer bank one day; it would explain a lot. “You should go to sleep. I can tell you’re about to keel over.”
Hera nods because she is, can feel her body shutting down even as she talks to him. “I’ll see you in the morning, Eiffel.”
“See you in the morning,” he says. “I missed you, too.”