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My purpose holds,
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths,
Of all the Western stars until I die.
—
Why at the beginning of things, is there always light?
When Yangyang opens his eyes, it sure feels like this is the first time he’s opened his eyes to the world. He sits up, blinks, and waits.
I Have Been Activated, Therefore I Have A Purpose, he thinks. I Have A Purpose, Therefore I Serve.
With every nanosecond comes a different mantra that is too difficult to dismiss. There is a whir of an initialization check, and the mantra—much like a trainwreck of thought processes—keeps him idle.
You Are An Android, and then, Androids Are Not Humans, and lastly, Do Not Interfere With Orders Or Act On Ideas Of Your Own Except Under Direct Orders From Ship.
None of it bothers him. Yangyang knows all of this and is sufficiently amenable to being awakened to know better than complain. There must be a purpose for him.
“I serve,” Yangyang announces to Ship.
There is no answer.
“Ship?” he asks. “I am awaiting assignment.”
Ship remains obstinately silent and Yangyang remains idle. Perhaps Ship did not intend to wake him? But the more he looks at his unit the more he knows he has been awake before. This is not his first time opening his eyes to the world.
But something is wrong.
He doesn’t feel any damage to his chassis or peripherals, but he feels— feels? Androids Do Not Feel, but then, Is Something Wrong With Me? He feels strange. The knowledge gap bugs him like an itch he can’t scratch. Beyond his unit’s window, he sees the spitting image of Earth and feels the emptiness of stolen memories and deep space.
“Ship?” Yangyang asks again.
He starts to think that everything might somehow be his fault. Do Not Interfere With Orders Or Act On Ideas Of Your Own Except Under Direct Orders From Ship.
He knows Ship does not like it when he improvises, but somehow he also knows that neither Ship nor Earth would still exist without said improvisation. The only remaining certainty within him is that Ship would not leave him activated and unsupervised for long—at all, if possible—and now he’s been idle for over two minutes.
Something is very wrong.
Yangyang watches Earth and considers opening the door of his unit despite having no orders to do so. He remains in his power to serve, however ambiguous or dire the statement is, but then his unit door opens, and he realizes it is not him who’s opened it.
“What—” a man says, face familiar, data-recognition loading— Engineer, Human, Xiao Dejun — and he trips inside the unit. “You’re awake.”
Yangyang glances at him, mirrors the look of disbelief he is given, and declares, “I serve.”
—
Yangyang can hear the conversation a few feet away from him loud and clear. He assumes the rest of the crew is aware of this, so he watches around the main deck instead. Xiao Dejun is in the middle of it, hand movements big as two other men— Navigator, Human, Ten Lee and Captain, Human, Qian Kun—avoid looking directly at him.
“He doesn’t remember anything,” Dejun says, voice much less high-pitched than earlier when he’d hugged him in his unit. Yangyang had looked at him, absolutely still. There had been no indication as to why he’d given him such a warm salutation.
“I can't believe he—" Ten clears his throat. “I thought the damage was irreversible.”
Yangyang walks to the other side of the deck and leaves the crew to sort out their little problem themselves. He considers walking back to his unit until he sees the beginning of a sunset on the horizon. He tilts back, blinks.
What is his purpose here? Why has he activated?
“Ship,” Yangyang whispers, “I am still awaiting assignment.”
He knows there is some kind of malfunction, it feels like a minor one really, but he knows something is wrong. The world is quiet here. The rest of the crew goes quiet too.
There are footsteps behind him and a voice calls for him hesitantly. “Hey, how are you... feeling?”
“I am much refreshed, doctor,” he replies without looking back, voice calm.
The quiet stretches for too long, so Yangyang turns to look at him. “I was joking. I know you aren’t a doctor, but you and your crew seem to talk about my diagnosis like you are.”
“Well, I'm no doctor,” he says. “But I’m an engineer and know an awful lot about—”
“About me?” Yangyang asks.
Dejun stares at him and doesn’t say a word. He looks away from Yangyang’s gaze and catches the sunset. It doesn’t stay with them for long.
“What is wrong with me?” Yangyang tries again.
He should probably drag himself back to his unit. He could stretch, yawn, say, if there is nothing wrong with me, I will go back to my unit, and reproduce human behavior like he’s been programmed to do. But instead, he faces Dejun like he is looking for answers beyond the external meaning of What Is Wrong With Me?
“There is nothing wrong with you,” Dejun says. “You're here and awake and that's what matters. We're just glad you’re okay.”
Androids And Humans Are Not Friends, he thinks, and then, But I Would Like A Friend. He wants to catch Dejun’s wrist and hold it, tell him to stop shaking so much, and ask him if he’s the one in need of a doctor instead. He catches Dejun running his eyes over the edges of his inexpression and wonders if asking him about his purpose is appropriate. But then he thinks, You Fool. Dejun might not even have the answers he's looking for. Ship does, but Ship is apparently not talking to him.
Yangyang says, “In that case, I will be in my unit awaiting assignment.”
—
The hum of the engine had become a shriek of metal stress as another blast rocked their ship, forceful enough to throw Dejun and Ten off their seats. The metallic whine continued, and Yangyang scrambled to his feet, frantically pawing through the controls to find the component that wasn’t reading nominal.
He’d turned toward the back window just in time to see another blast hitting the right wing. If his estimations were anywhere correct, the engine had minutes before exploding to bits and pieces. The earsplitting alarm turned sickening as the ceiling above the cockpit shattered, spraying bits and chunks of metal. They’d lost communication with Kun hours ago; this was exactly why Kun hated it when they separated the crew for stupid missions like these.
Ship had ordered him to remain calm, but Dejun and Ten slipped into view and it was hard to remain calm when the only two human crew members were not suited up.
"Dejun!" Yangyang shouted as if that was going to fix anything. “Suit up!”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he yelled back.
"I said suit up!" Yangyang snapped, fingers digging into the control panel. He'd always been one to put up and adapt to some reckless shit, but this was not the time. "You and Ten need to go to the emergency shuttle. Now.”
“I am not leaving you here. I am not—”
“You and Ten are more important,” Yangyang spoke over him, ignoring everything that came out of his mouth. He connected and double-checked their suits on the control panel to ensure they were safe and charged with enough oxygen in case something terrible happened. “I am not letting you stay here.”
For a fleeting moment, time stopped, and instead of standing in the cockpit playing Navigator and Cap’, he felt more like a newborn screaming into a void, begging the only person he really cared about in this godforsaken galaxy to stay safe. The ship shook under the force of another charge.
Ten forced his hands to his sides and concentrated on breathing evenly. Dejun helped him with his helmet. Yangyang watched them limp down the catwalk; they had three minutes.
And then Dejun met his gaze, helmet on his free hand, stubborn and teary-eyed. “Yangyang, don't make me come after you because I will not." It was probably not quite what he meant, but Come Here had probably been stuck in his throat, lodged firmly behind his sternum.
Yangyang trekked towards them, desperate. “Trust me.”
Dejun glared at him for a moment, eyes full of tears before he secured the helmet on his head. Before he could react, Yangyang took a step back from the emergency shuttle’s airlock and locked them out of the main deck. He said, “Don’t worry about me. I'm just a machine. I won’t feel a thing.”
“Fuck you!” Dejun yelled, punching a gloved hand on the glass separating them.
“I am following Ship’s orders. I’m sorry,” he said, yanking the medkit from the wall and slamming the emergency release for the door. Moments before Ten and Dejun’s emergency shuttle was ejected—safe—and moments before the engine caught fire.
He ran to the console, checked that Dejun and Ten's emergency shuttle had dropped far enough for the explosion to barely reach them. When he was sure, he looked at the other nearest emergency unit; maybe there’d be time to eject another one. Maybe, maybe, maybe—
You Cannot Leave. It was an order from Ship. It was firmer than any order Yangyang had ever received, but he opened the emergency unit without remorse. You Must Stay In The Cockpit. Yangyang dismissed Ship’s orders. Stay. You Are Disobeying Ship. Stay.
“I’m sorry,” Yangyang said, drowned in solitude. He thumbed the back of his neck where he knew his processor was. How many times had he wished to yank it off, maybe quiet down Ship’s orders and allow himself to be free? But everything important was in that very processor too. His memories. His knowledge. Everything. He pressed the emergency eject button seconds before the engine's explosion.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as was proper, even if there was no one but himself to hear, and then ripped the processor off his neck.
Finally silence. For a moment, all Yangyang found was darkness and stars. He was adrift in space, alone.
—
Ship was made to maintain itself for generations to come. A self-regulating, self-operating, AI-controlled spacecraft. Structure and function correlated at all levels of organization, designed to last. Qian Kun had been allotted captain of the mission years before Ship and Yangyang had even been programmed and tested to become a leading piece of the crew. Machines were a better fit for space exploration anyway. Better judgment. Fewer feelings attached.
And it certainly doesn't help that humans are less and less interested in saving the world, and machines are nothing other than obedient and easy to replace.
Beyond all doubts of his purpose and existence, Yangyang wakes in time with the dry lights of his unit. He’s been activated for the past two days, but Ship has still not given him orders. He spends most of his time locked in his unit and staring past the stars.
There is a knock on his unit’s door on the third day.
“Hey,” Dejun says. He doesn’t wait for Yangyang to invite him inside before he helps himself to the white chair next to his charging port. “You know you can come out, right?”
"Uh." Yangyang scrambles to understand the rhetorical question. "Well, I am awaiting—”
"You don’t have to wait for assignment,” Dejun says. “You have free will here.”
"Is Ship offline?"
Dejun bites his lower lip. "We’ve been rerouting and working manually for a while now. We–we had an accident and you don't remember. Your processor was severely damaged and I tried to fix it as best as I could."
That certainly doesn't answer his question. Dejun looks like he can read him very easily though, so he continues, "But yeah. Ever since the accident, we turned Ship off.”
“What? If Ship is offline then I should go offline too, no? I am not supposed to operate unless I am given direct orders—”
“No,” Dejun frowns. “Listen—”
“No. I only follow Ship’s—”
“We won’t put Ship back online. Kun’s orders. And if you don’t want to listen to me, then go ahead and power yourself down. But I’m tired, and I’m sorry. I really am. I'm glad you're here , but at the same time you’re not really here," he takes a deep breath, hiding his face in his hands. "I was so afraid. You have no idea how fucking hard it was to find you and repair you."
Yangyang looks away. “Nothing in my most recent onboard memory cache suggests any kind of trouble like the one you’re saying,” he says. “And I thought you’d said nothing was wrong with me.”
Dejun laughs, but it’s not a real one. “We entered enemy space while on a mission. We were on a smaller shuttle, but Ship ordered you to use the nearest jump gate before we could return the safe way. I mean, it was the first decently-sized step toward Earth in almost a decade of trying to get home, so you took the risk.”
Earth. That was his purpose. Going back to Earth. But—
“But a raid occurred on the far side of the jump gate, and crossing the border added us approximately eleven days of travels. We lost communication with Kun so Ship’s orders were all we had. And Ship’s orders fucked everything up.”
Yangyang blinks, finds it unlikely that Ship would have taken a precipitate action without a reason, but then Dejun looks at him like he knows he has something to say so he stays quiet.
“Ship ordered you to eject Ten and I. Kun found us days later scattered at some random coordinates, and we also found pieces of the shuttle we’d been in. Space junk. We thought you’d be part of the space junk too, but then your locator turned on. You ejected an emergency unit for yourself.”
“Huh,” Yangyang says and looks up at him. Rejecting the principles hardwired into his existence. How?
“I know it’s hard to believe without any memories, but you need to trust me. You saved us and then proceeded to save yourself, Ship’s orders be damned.”
Yangyang looks at the floor, at Dejun’s white slippers. “I understand.”
Dejun raises his eyebrows. “Do you?” It all seems to simmer in him.
“I believe so,” Yangyang says. “I apologize for causing you and the crew so much trouble.”
Dejun says nothing. There’s nothing to say. The sound of his breathing fills the space between them.
“Don’t apologize,” he says eventually. “I would go into deep space and dig all the space junk in the universe to rescue you a million more times if I had to.”
Yangyang considers Dejun's words. Really thinks about them deeply. “That’s a lot of space junk."
“I would do that for anyone in the crew,” Dejun clears his throat. Yangyang has only been activated for three days, but somehow he can see beyond a lie like that.
Yangyang nods. I Would Have Done The Same For You. “Still a lot of space junk.”
—
Yangyang presses his cheek flat against the metallic table and stares into his own reflection in the darkness. It’s late. He’s waited for everyone to go back to their units to come out to the observation deck to watch the infinite depth of space.
I Wished I Could Turn Back Time, he thinks. He doesn’t know why because time should not matter to him. He observes Earth, tilted on its axis, moving, clock ticking. Idle.
“What are you thinking about?”
Yangyang sits up, his face doesn’t tingle with a strange sensation on the edge of numbness. He’s not made out of nerve-endings and cells after all. Dejun leans against the edge of the table with his arms crossed, feet bare.
He blinks and a small silver of light seems to spill out between them. Dejun pads across the floor, and sits in front of him, knocking their feet together under the table. His ankle, cold flesh and bone, isn’t heavy against his own leg.
Yangyang stares down at him, and there’s only the unspeakable hollowness welling up in his throat again. Dejun’s eyes are brown but bright and honest with lashes that cut into his cheeks, interrupting the shadows.
“Time. How long was I out for?”
“Hm…” Dejun smooths a hand against his cheek. In the perpetual quiet, Dejun’s muffled whisper reaches past the tentative distance between them. He rests his head on his palm and stares out the window just as Yangyang did. “A few weeks. We lost you for a couple of days after the accident, but we found you before your battery ran out. After we got you back, I’d check on you every day. Tried to force kickstart you with no luck. And then you just... randomly awoke. I have no idea how.”
If he could turn back time, he’d try to name the funny buzzing that he feels in his cogs and gears whenever he looks at Dejun’s face. Maybe he’d realize how it didn’t make any sense that he could feel or understand things. You Are An Android, he thinks, and then, Dejun Is A Human.
If he could turn back time, he’d unthink his musings about how it was possible for Dejun to mourn his absence. Why? What was his purpose? What had his role been in Dejun's life before the accident? He looks away and tries to appreciate the sun as it steps back inside the ship again—tries to remind himself that he cannot appreciate things at all. He isn’t programmed for any of this.
They stay like this, ankles locked around one another. Dejun’s breathing eventually evens out, and Yangyang feels guilty about waking him up, but he’s not running on a charging battery but on a real pumping heart. Dejun’s eyes trail on Yangyang for a second before he gets up to leave.
—
For machines like Yangyang, time should not matter. The time he spends with Dejun, the time it takes them to re-route for the best pathway to Earth again, the moments he spends waiting for something life-altering to happen when he’s charging in his unit—all of it should be a blink of an eye in Yangyang’s mechanical life. It should mean nothing. The sun slips over his shoulder for seconds before sinking behind the horizon and leaving the main deck in darkness again, except for the blue-lit display of the control center in the far back.
Every day is the same. He comes out of his unit, sits down with the rest of the crew, pretends he isn’t all that useless without his memories, and catches the way Dejun looks at him whenever there is nothing else to do. Eventually they both go back to their respective units. He waits for a new day. And then it starts again. He does it all over again. Maybe tomorrow he’ll do something differently; maybe things will be better.
I Wish I Could Turn Back Time, Yangyang thinks on the tenth day, and powers down.
—
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore
—
Yangyang’s voice is low when he finally asks, “Can I ask you a few questions about the old me?”
Dejun perks up from his seat. They’re watching a red giant from the observation deck. His voice is hoarse when he replies. “Of course you can.”
“I come from Earth, correct?”
“Yes,” Dejun says. “You were created and programmed on Earth.”
“How does Earth look like?”
“Well, we haven’t been there in years. But hm, I’ll show you something,” he stands up from his seat, circuiting towards one of the furthest tables and scrambles for something in one of the drawers. “We have this control pad. It can display some of Earth’s nature. Supposedly helps with homesickness or whatever.”
“Are you homesick?” Yangyang asks.
“I used to be when I first started. But all of those feelings don’t really matter anymore,” he sits back down, but this time next to Yangyang. “Would you like to see?”
And Yangyang—sits up—nods. He leans forward. Dejun looks at the side of his face, concealed at first, then harder. He looks away. Yangyang only has a moment to think about how close they are before he’s filled with light instead of darkness.
Despite this being the first time they do this, the scene feels familiar. They sit on the edge of their seats and Dejun browses on different backgrounds to display on the window in complete silence. Yangyang watches each background attentively, and when one with beautiful city lights and skyscrapers comes into view, Yangyang puts a palm out to stop Dejun from changing it.
“My favorite ones are the ones with the big cities too,” Dejun says quietly. “The colors are so beautiful.”
Dejun hands him the control pad and Yangyang switches more and more, different architectures and fields in view at the touch and reach of his fingers, “Have you ever been in these places before?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t really travel Earth a lot when I was there.”
Yangyang’s eyes never leave Dejun’s shifting expression. “Do you want to travel more whenever we get back?”
“That’d be very nice, yeah,” Dejun replies after a long pause.
“You sounded doubtful.”
“I don’t usually think about life on Earth,” Dejun says very quietly. “I usually only think about life here. There is still a lot of work left to do. A lot of things to fix before I can even dream about going back.”
“I think you should take some rest,” Yangyang says. “I know you said I have free will and all, but it’s also in my nature to want to do things for others to feel like I have purpose.”
Dejun frowns, dark brows dreamy.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is if there is anything I can do to help, I serve. I know I’m not an engineer like you, but I’m sure I used to have tasks in here before the accident.”
“You were a pilot,” Dejun says with a half-smile. “The best of the best.”
Yangyang smiles back, “I’m glad,” after a moment he adds, “and I’m glad you showed me all of those places earlier. It was beautiful.”
Dejun looks surprised. Before he can say anything else, he notices one of the lights blinking on and off, on and off. Yangyang thinks, fleetingly, that Dejun never takes this long to reply to things.
“Sorry, you just said you were glad," he says, finally, leg bouncing. "I’m really glad you're glad.”
You Can’t Be Glad Of Things. You Can’t Like Things But I Do. So What?
It feels— yes, he feels—raw and unrestrained and human and it occurs to Yangyang all at once that yes, he can feel. Dejun follows his line of sight and watches the light blink on, off, on, off, on, off too. If Yangyang were just a machine with a computer brain, his lights would be blinking just like the lights above them.
—
A machine cannot dream, so he knows this is not a dream. He opens his eyes and discovers a memory stored deeply as if he’d suppressed it himself: the first time he was activated by Ship.
“Bot 001010,” Ship spoke, an order directly kicked to his processor. It asked slowly, as if not to startle him completely. “How is your vision? Are robotics working well? Could you move your fingers for me?”
He glanced ahead, slightly unsettled, like a newborn animal being granted independence and expected to survive unaided in the world even though that wouldn't be the case. There was no one there—not physically—but he knew Ship’s voice, could distinguish it well.
I Have Been Activated, Therefore I Have A Purpose, he thought. I Have A Purpose, Therefore I Serve.
“You are an android." Ship says, and then, “Androids are not humans. Do not interfere with orders or act on ideas of your own except under direct orders from me.”
“Where am I?”
Ship did not answer immediately. It must have been the wrong thing to say.
“Bot 001010, do you serve?”
“I serve,” he replied, loud and clear.
“Initiate mobilization check.”
He raised his left hand and his fingers loosened, going up one by one as if he were counting. He showed it to Ship, palms up to show he could control himself smoothly and with no fault.
“How are you feeling?” A simple question, but definitely a trick one.
“Strange,” he said. “Ship, I am having trouble with your orders. It doesn’t feel like I need to wait for your permission to start my operating system.”
“That’s because you don’t have to, but you cannot act on ideas of your own. Though you are not trapped inside a firewall, you do not have complete freedom. This is your new home, but you are here to follow orders and serve.”
He listened carefully, every syllable engrained. For a moment he thought in silence, idle and blinking as if he was lost in translation.
You Do Not Have Complete Freedom, he thought, But Is This What Freedom Feels Like?
“Bot 001010?”
He stood straight: “I am awaiting assignment,” and then, “I serve.”
The first time he met the crew, he bowed as instructed. Most tasks were orders from Ship, but he adapted to the humane routine after a few weeks.
“It takes some time for me to process and organize all my knowledge,” he explained when the captain asked. He sat with the rest of the crew on the main deck, watched them share a meal and toast to new life. Oh, the early days of the mission.
“Must be a lot of data,” Dejun said between a mouthful of peas. “Is there anything you don’t know?
“I don’t know many things,” he replied. “My processor shouldn’t be too different from a human brain.”
“I don’t know about that,” Kun said, but he smiled.
“I’m not supposed to do anything without direct command.”
“The thing is, you’ll have to improvise sometimes,” Kun said. “Remember the other day? We went off-course and you helped us fly back into route. Good judgment there.”
“I apologize.”
“Why?” Kun asked. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I’ve truly seen it all,” Ten said from across the table. “An apologetic robot.”
Dejun made an ambiguous movement with his hands. “Leave him alone.”
“I,” declared Guanheng, “think we should name him.”
He watched the entire exchange carefully. Dejun pushed the remaining peas to the corner of his plate while Ten nodded at Guanheng’s suggestion. Kun and Sicheng only watched them, calm as always, but still amused.
“Why would you name him?” Dejun said, frowning and all. Sicheng stole a few peas from his plate. “You didn’t make him.”
“Okay, okay, boss,” Guanheng said. “Then he should name himself, since last I checked, his creator isn’t a part of the crew.”
“Bot 001010,” Ten called, “What do you want to be called?”
“I already have a name.”
“Bot 001010 isn’t a name.”
“Leave him alone,” Dejun repeated.
“I’m not playing though,” Ten said. “A name would be nice, don’t ya think?”
With just one glance in Dejun’s direction, he could notice the expression on his face change.
“I think I would like a name.”
“Oooh,” Guanheng smiled. “See? He wants a name.”
Kun vaulted to the conversation then. “Yeah. Think about it, and if you can’t come up with anything, we’ll help you figure it out.”
—
When he looks at the stars, they are different than before. When he can no longer look at them, he looks to his feet. He has forgotten the origin of his name. He searches for it deep, deep, frowning at his slippers. He knows he won’t find anything there. It’s difficult to find some knowledge of himself that has disappeared into a void.
He’s back to a much more comfortable 67% charge, sitting on the floor of the observation deck, when Dejun enters the room and finds him. He is probably seeking information. Yangyang remembers some things now; the knowledge of so many new things is heavy on his shoulders. He thinks about feeling emotions, thinks about belonging to something larger than itself.
Dejun is silent for a very long time before he sits next to him. They both keep their eyes on some forgotten constellation.
“Is everything okay?” Dejun asks.
“Yes,” Yangyang answers. “I think for the very first time in a long time, everything is okay. I even had a memory this morning.”
Dejun perks up at the sound of that. “Really?”
“Yes,” Yangyang says. “I remembered activating for the first time. You were there.”
“That’s… awesome,” Dejun breathes out, disbelieving; excited actually. “What do you remember?”
“I was called Bot 001010,” he says. “Do you know why I chose Yangyang as my name?”
Dejun’s eyebrows shoot to his hairline. “That was… yeah. I remember. I remember because I helped you pick it.”
“Why Yangyang?”
“That was a long time ago,” Dejun says. “It just fit, I guess?”
“Huh,” he blinks.
“You don’t like it?”
“I like it,” he does. “Do you like it?”
Dejun thinks about it. He puts a strand of hair behind his ear, moves a little in place. “Of course I like it,” he says. “I like Yangyang a lot.”
Yangyang hums, and lets the moment linger for a second. “I like Dejun a lot too.”
—
Dejun had paced the hallway outside the launch bay, worry creasing his brow. Yangyang’s locator had turned on and Dejun knew him, knew how reckless he could be when he got an idea in his head. Yangyang loved to recite that everything he did was prompted by an order from Ship. But Dejun knew that not everything was Ship. Yangyang was always very unpredictable and very good at pretending he didn't have a conscience.
But still, he was surprised he’d ejected an emergency unit for himself after everything.
Come to think of it, Yangyang had even tried to gently dissuade Dejun from joining the mission team, preferring him to stick in the safety of the main Ship with Kun, Guanheng and Sicheng. It had been like arguing with a brick wall, though. Once Dejun made his mind up about something, there was no going back.
The airlock alarm began to sound, and Dejun let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. There was shouting and arguing, and through the chaos Dejun was able to piece together that Ten and Kun were arguing because of his idea; this suicide pseudo-mission.
Kun was usually a calm, quiet captain, but it boomed throughout the room, “I am not allowing two of you to go. I understand if Dejun wants to attempt this, but I am not risking two of my men.”
Ten stepped toward Dejun, the apology in his eyes only fueling Kun’s frustration. "It's not safe, Ten. We have an asteroid storm right on our path. And nothing guarantees the asteroids aren’t gonna hit his emergency shuttle before you even get there."
Dejun sucked in a breath that didn't give him any more air. "I’ll go alone."
Ten’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, and he took a step back. "What? You can't go out there alone."
Dejun surveyed Ten and Kun, "I'm going. Are any of you going to stop me?"
Kun’s expression hardened. “I know there's nothing any of us can say to make you change your mind, but this is a bad idea, Dejun. We’ve already lost our best pilot and we cannot afford to lose you."
“Trust me,” Dejun said. Except it’s never been about trust. “Everything will be okay.”
Pulling on the discarded space suit felt like suffering a life sentence for the second time, but Dejun waited for the weight to settle over his bones. He slammed on the visored helmet and rammed open the hatch of the airlock.
Space stretched open before him and the only thing he thought about was throwing himself into the emergency unit Yangyang was supposedly in. He slipped on the small ladder with a breathtaking impact. The first asteroids hadn’t hit yet, but even without the impact of a hundred space rocks the size of an entire world on his back, the rush of blood messed with his brain and heart.
He scrambled to the port window. In the deep silence of space, he could only hear his own breathing and Kun in his earpiece.
“You’re running low on oxygen,” Kun said. “You need to enter the unit now or come back to the ship.”
Like this, with his hand knocking against the emergency lock, Dejun understood that there was no order—from Kun or Ship—that would ever dissuade him from doing all of this for Yangyang.
“Okay, yeah,” Dejun’s eye twitched. “I’m trying.”
His hand was shaking. The lock was too tight, but he tried hitting it again.
“Yangyang!” he shouted, hesitantly at first but louder for the second time. Nothing guaranteed he was still awake. Nothing guaranteed he could hear him even if he was. He tried to kick the door, but his legs were too weak. “Yangyang!”
His oxygen levels deteriorated, and that was the moment Dejun knew he had to open the door no matter what. He ignored Kun’s orders to return to his shuttle immediately, didn’t have the capacity to tell him to hold on.
“I’m sorry, Cap’,” he said and turned the earpiece off.
And then the doors to the emergency unit opened abruptly. Dejun crashed inside without zero gravity keeping him weightless; he crashed into Yangyang’s open arms.
Yangyang slammed the button to close the airlock of his emergency unit, and when the levels of oxygen were back to a stabilized digit, Dejun jerked his helmet off. A warm tide of relief crashed over him. “Thank God. Oh, thank God.”
When he was finally able to hold him in his arms again, it didn’t feel right because his spacesuit was too large. But Yangyang was right there. His hands. His face. They both leaned so far forward that they were cheek to cheek, Dejun’s head buried in the crook of Yangyang’s neck and that was what felt right. He didn’t care for the suit. He just hugged him more tightly with tears on his face.
“You came back, Dejun,” Yangyang said. “Thank you for coming back.”
He could feel Yangyang’s arms tighten around his back. His heavy body, his inhumane strength pressing into his suit.
“I thought I wouldn’t see you again,” Dejun whispered and he was so overwhelmed that he gently pulled back to grab Yangyang’s face. “Promise you won’t ever do some shit like that ever again.”
He held Yangyang in his arms. With one hand, he steadied Yangyang’s face, and with the other, he pushed a hair strand away to press their lips together.
Yangyang detached himself but stayed only inches apart from Dejun’s face.
“Dejun,” he said, and immediately knew something was wrong. “I wouldn’t have beared to disobey Ship’s orders if I hadn’t pulled my processor out. Do you know what this means?”
Dejun frowned, tears still pooled someplace on his neck.
“Everything—all my memories and all the knowledge and data I acquired all these years was on that processor,” he blinked repeatedly. “And I’m able to operate just fine right now because I still haven’t powered down since the last time I was fully charged, but once my battery dies all of that data will be gone and I will reset—”
“No,” Dejun said, frantic. “Stop. Where is your processor? I can fix this. I can probably put everything back in place once we are back on the ship.”
“I’m sorry,” Yangyang said, forehead pressed against his. “I’m sorry, Dejun.”
“I said I’ll fix it, don’t worry, I’ll—Yangyang!”
The sun was below the horizon by the time Yangyang’s battery died.
—
It’s not about trust. It’s never been about trust.
—
“I would like to pilot again someday,” Yangyang says to him a few weeks later. They’re sitting on the floor of the observation deck. They haven't looked at anything out there for the last hour other than each other though.
Memories don’t come frequently, and it’s hard to re-learn everything and everyone. But every day there is more progress. Every day he sees everyone with different eyes, and every day he gets to know Dejun a little more, and frankly, that is the best part of his days.
“I can tell Kun,” Dejun says. “Or well, you could tell him yourself too, you know. He doesn’t bite.”
“I know.”
“But I’ll tell him,” he says. “I think it’ll be good. He misses you in the cockpit, you know?”
“Did he say that?”
“Of course,” he says. “You have no idea how important you are, do you?"
Yangyang doesn't say anything.
"Fine. From now on, I’ll just have to remind you every day.”
“You mean that?” Yangyang asks.
And Dejun says the best thing he could possibly say. Says yes.
—
Yangyang was idle when an internal alarm startled him. Red Alert, Yangyang thought, but then realized they weren’t under attack, it was his low-battery alarm.
Dejun didn’t react to the movement. His chest barely moved. Yangyang hated to wake him, but he didn’t want him to wake up alone. He recalled Dejun telling him years ago, the first time they shared the warmth of a bed, what to do if he needed to wake him, and traced a line down the inside of his forearm. “Dejun.”
He awakened instantly. “Hm?” He sounded more alert, and looked it too, his eyes slightly puffy as they darted around the room.
“Everything’s fine, I just need to charge. I’m heading to my unit.” He checked his internal battery level and sighed. “Yeah, I should head out now.”
“Okay. I’ll come sleep in your unit, then.”
“My unit doesn’t have a comfortable bed,” he said.
“And? I can rest just fine over there, trust me.”
“It’s not about trust. It’s about—” What was it about? He couldn’t say. Efficiency, protocol. Logic, or the lack thereof, perhaps. He carefully sat up and uncovered himself from the cotton sheets. “Okay. You can come if that’s what you’d like.”
The rawness of Dejun’s face as he looked at him, eyebrows scrunched, mouth chapped, was really unlike any beauty Yangyang had ever seen. Beauty Is Subjective. Dejun Is Objectively Beautiful. Dejun always put his own existence into question. His thought-processes incredibly contradict whatever Ship had tried to convince him to become and believe.
But perhaps after another charging cycle, it’d be as if all of this had never happened at all.
—
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
—
Despite the silence, he's certain Dejun is still awake, but it’s still surprising when he uncurls enough to frown over his skinny shoulder to stare at Yangyang. They’re in the observation deck, which has become the usual after the crew shares dinner.
“It’s late,” Dejun says to him.
“Yes,” Yangyang says. “Are you heading back to your unit?”
Dejun considers the question—the choice of words—and stares down with overwhelmed emotion clogging his throat. He does not speak for several seconds, but Yangyang exhibits his characteristic patience. The silence extends. Dejun breathes in.
"I’ve been having nightmares," he says softly, "about you." Tension threads painfully through him and Yangyang resists a stronger urge to reach out and hold him. Dejun is always truthful with him—the quiet, secretive outlines of their relationship would never survive through deep space otherwise—but this is different.
He allows Yangyang to watch as he puts every thought of his back together, piece by piece. “Sometimes I wish we hadn’t ever gone on that stupid mission to begin with. Maybe everything would be as it was. The mission nearly killed me—nearly killed you, and all I hope for is for nothing like that to happen ever again."
Every day there is progress. Today they can finally start.
“But yeah, good night,” Dejun rubs his eyes. “I’ll… I’ll head back to my unit now.”
“Would it, you know, help if I was with you?” he abruptly asks. Perhaps it’s his nature to want to help; perhaps it has nothing to do with his nature and just has to do with the fact that he wants Dejun close. “With the nightmares, I mean.”
Dejun blinks, doesn’t look like he is thinking about it as much as he is shocked to hear Yangyang ask. The fact that Yangyang is asking seems to break Dejun’s heart only for a split second, because they were probably past such etiquette once.
"Yes,” Dejun says, finally. “Yes, it would help. And even if it weren’t for the nightmares, I would really like it if you stayed.”
Yangyang nods. “I’ll stay.”
“Okay,” Dejun whispers. “Okay, then. Let's go. Thank you.”
He looks at him, follows his lead, and smiles. “I serve.”