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He brings the mantis home late one afternoon during the summer before fifth grade. Glass mason jar, perforated plastic wrap over top of it, some twigs and leaves inside so the mantis can climb at its (now somewhat restricted) leisure.
Dave sets it on the bedroom windowsill and lets the tangerine sunset wash over it.
The mantis angles its compound eye in his direction; at least, he thinks it's looking in his direction. He scoots closer, sets his chin on the sill to look at it up close.
It seems at peace enough with its surroundings, if a little cramped.
"What do you have there?"
Bobby, three years his senior, stands in the doorway, hands in his pockets.
Dave shifts on the egg crate he's brought in as a makeshift stool.
"Nothin'."
"Yeah, right. Come on, I'm not gonna get you in trouble or anything."
He hesitates, but then leans out of the way, lets his brother get a glimpse of the mantis - who is now gradually moving to investigate the plastic over the top of the jar.
"Stagmomantis carolina," he says with a mounting pride; he's read all about them in one of the field guides from the library.
"Neat," says Bobby with a smile. "Where'd you find her?"
"In the tall grass. Past the stream."
He makes his way in and crouches to get a better look. The setting sun casts his profile in orange and gold, same as the edges of the jar.
The mantis has stopped in its - her? - ascent to the lip of its new abode, the feet of its thoracic limbs pressed inquisitive to the glass. It raises one ridged forelimb to its alien chevron of a face and swipes, like a cat grooming itself.
The two of them sit there, watching the mantis move almost in slow motion for a while while the sun sinks beneath the horizon. Bobby turns eventually - though Dave doesn't notice, too enraptured with the way each part of the mantis seems to move independent of every other. He watches his little brother stare at the creature he's brought home for a few more minutes before asking:
"So what are you going to do with it?"
Dave is quiet for a minute, oddly contemplative for a nine year-old.
"Maybe she can stay here?"
"Like, a pet?"
"Yeah." He shifts, a small smile on his face. "She climbed right onto my hand when I found her."
He looks up at Bobby, as though asking for approval - as though Bobby has the authority to let them keep it. He knows their mom would be hard-pressed to say yes.
Bobby nods, his face neutral. Dave's not sure what that means.
"Don't you think she'd be more comfortable not in the jar?"
"I can - I can get a bigger place for her." He looks back at the mantis, which cocks its head.
"Okay, maybe, then." He pauses, and Dave can't see his face but gets the sense that there's an issue. "Just…she might not make the best pet, Davey."
That can't be right. Dave looks from Bobby to the mantis, the latter of whom seems to be unaware of the ongoing deliberation outside her temporary home. Her mandibles twitch. She unfolds her slender wings, folds them back against her svelte green thorax.
"Why?"
"Well, she doesn't - can't…" Bobby stumbles over his words for a minute, struggling in the face of his brother's open, inquisitive little face. "She can't love you back - not the way you think. Not like a, a dog, or a cat."
Dave thinks on it, crossing his arms over the windowsill and setting his chin upon them. The mantis stares, unblinking with her otherworldly eyes.
Maybe she would be happier outside, after all. But at the same time, she came to him, didn't she? That could count for something.
"That's okay," he says.
He'll bring her back to the yard, he decides. Maybe they'll see each other again, despite it all.
He spends the evening of his seventeenth birthday at home. In his heart, he knows he should be out somewhere, with someone. Or at least downstairs with his mother.
It had been a very nice day, for the record. He had gotten a new leather-bound journal, and some CDs that now sit listened front-to-back outside their cases on the side table. Betty Schultz had mailed him a card, as she always had the past few years.
And yet here he sits, eyes trained on the striated screen of the old cathode ray tube television that lives in the half-finished attic. Creature From The Black Lagoon is on, its 1950s audio crackling over the TV's poorly-maintained speaker. Gray light washes over him in the dark of the attic like the light through the water on screen; he takes a sip of his soda.
Dave has tried not to think about the sunlight through the water's surface back in Crystal Springs - he's done a piss-poor job of it so far, and the movie isn't helping the way he thought it would.
Seventeen, he thinks, and the voice in his head is Jessie Bowman's from just three or so hours ago. She smiles at him over the candles, but her proud smile is tinted with sadness. He knew it would be impossible for either of them not to think about Bobby on a day like today, but it doesn't make the distance he feels between himself and the rest of the world any less wide and cavernous.
He leans forward, chin in his hands and elbows on his folded knees, til his face is mere inches from the screen and the image barely makes coherent sense to his brain. He sees the parallel forms of Kay and the Creature swimming in black and white, almost peaceful for a mere moment before they blur into the static fuzz that emanates off the screen.
It's soft and sticks to him like dewdrops on grass, a layer of impossible static snow in the Florida heat. Dave raises one hand and presses into it experimentally. It gives under his touch, of course - all it is is static electricity - but there's something deeply comforting about the sensation all the same. He swallows, and looks around as though anyone is watching him in the darker corners of the attic. He leans forward, turning his cheek and pressing it against the screen.
It hisses in his ear, a whisper of comfort in the shadows. He closes his eyes. The Creature and the girl, never to intersect, go dark before the tears can overtake him.
What surprises him most about the computer on board Discovery is how plainly curious it - he is.
Dave hasn't been asked this many questions about himself since university (and various job interviews and screenings, he guesses) but finds it could be a lot worse.
The computer - one H-A-L-nine-thousand, as it were - seems intent on getting a feel for the differences in his and Frank Poole's lives. He's heard the overview before they even got on board, of course. Frank's a year and a half older than he is, grew up outside Phoenix, has two parents who are still together and considered becoming a marine biologist, once upon a time.
"Space cowboy, huh?" Dave had said when Frank mentioned Arizona the first time, when they had met on Earth before the mission.
"Sorry?"
"Ah, because - you grew up in a desert, right?"
"Oh. Heh, yeah. I get it." Frank had laughed at that, stupid as it was. They could be friends, maybe, Dave thinks.
On board Discovery, Hal's scarlet gaze regards Dave with a neutral intrigue. He asks him questions from time to time, all mundane things about his life on Earth, which Dave answers to the best of his ability.
It all seems so far away, now. Half a world between him and the life he once had.
"Do you have siblings, Dave?"
That one gives him pause. He knows it's come up because Frank had mentioned being an only child at some point. It still makes the words stick in his throat.
"No," is what he settles on. Which feels immeasurably wrong. "I…did, though."
A moment of contemplation ticks away between them. He wonders if it's an off-putting answer to Hal; it certainly is to him, and he's the one who said it.
"I am sorry, Dave," says Hal. "It sounds like this is an unpleasant memory for you. I won't press any further, if this is a painful topic."
Dave thinks on that - a painful topic, an unpleasant memory. Does Hal really have any concept of that? What does a computer know of pain?
…what does a computer know of pain, or discomfort, or love, for that matter?
He swallows and puts the last question out of his mind.
"That's okay, Hal. You don't need to be sorry." He then adds: "It is, a little bit. Maybe I'll tell you another time."
Does he really want to leave that door open? He's not sure. He's not sure why he leaves it open for the ship computer in particular, either. It's been closed for half his life - and though one day he's bound to return to it, that life is light years away back on the Earth's surface.
He's twenty, back from college in Sarasota, when he comes back to Bobby's headstone. The flowers he brought have already begun to wilt in the summer heat, and all he can think is why does this feel so stupid? when he lays the pitiful, wrinkled white blooms at the stone's base.
He wants to apologize, tell his brother how much he misses him and how he wants him to be proud of him. I'm gonna be an astrophysicist, you know?
But a stone can't talk back. Despite the name carved into it, despite the title of Beloved Son and Brother, it can't be Robert Bowman. Not anymore.
Betty sidles up beside him, slotting her hand into his.
"I'm sorry," he says - in her direction, but he's not sure if it's to her. She gives him a look.
"It's okay. You don't need to be."
A leaf, verdant and tear-shaped, skitters across the top of the headstone. For the first time in eleven years, Dave thinks about the mantis, the exact same shade of emerald.
Can't love you back, murmurs his brother's voice. Not the way you think.
He thinks about the funeral. How his father - who he and Bobby seldom saw, who he never sees at this point - wouldn't even make eye contact with him.
He thinks of sitting Shiva, and getting delicately tiptoed around when condolences normally would come, like at fourteen he was too young to understand. Like he wasn't keenly aware that his brother wasn't there anymore, why his brother wasn't there anymore.
He thinks of Betty leaning in to kiss him last summer, and her asking:
"Is this…okay?"
Is it okay? He can't possibly answer that. He had stared past her shoulder, thinking about that question, thinking about how at sixteen she had once hung on Bobby's every word.
"I don't know."
She had cocked her head, strawberry blonde hair cascading over one shoulder.
"For you, I mean?"
Oh. Not in general, or morally (though considering it like that makes it feel like he's making some kind of ordeal out of it). He's still not totally certain how to answer.
"Me? I'm fine. I'm okay."
She had kissed him again, on the corner of his mouth. In his memory, it feels like static.
He hears her call his name from just beside him, shaking him back to reality, one year six years eleven years later.
Dave inhales, finally remembering to pull oxygen into his lungs because it feels like he hasn't in a good ten minutes. His breath shakes and his hand leaves hers to grip at his own chest, to little avail.
The score of Metropolis warbles away on the attic TV, just out of sight as Dave lays on his back just beside it on the floor. Outside, the sun has just barely begun to drop low in the sky.
He should be packing to go back to Sarasota tomorrow; he knows his mother will chide him for it sooner or later and he'll have to go back downstairs to the rest of the world. There's no reason for him not to want to go. And yet, as he lies alone, watches the intricately designed robotic woman on screen transmogrify into Brigitte Helm, he thinks to himself - I don't want this to be my life.
Absently, he runs the back of his hand over the TV screen, over the image of the false Maria. The static crackles over his skin like a lover's hum.
Can the cathode ray tubes inside the old TV feel his touch? No more than the Maschinenmensch can hear the cries of the city master's son, no.
There's a delay of any number of hours between the Discovery One and Mission Control. Every time they radio them, it feels like it stretches longer.
This time, it's because of the false report on the AE-35's functionality.
His regular duties finished for the time being, Dave sits near one of the tiny circular windows that peer - through layer upon layer of industrially-reinforced glass - out into the black of space. Across the corridor from him, there's one Hal's wall panels.
"I'm sorry about this," he says. He doesn't anticipate Hal will say anything back, but after an extended silence, he does.
"That's quite alright," comes the reply. His tone sounds clipped. "But I cannot assure you enough that I am fine. And everything should be in perfect working order."
Dave is tired from worrying. He leans his head against the wall of the ship, listens to its mechanical heartbeat.
"What about the other 9000 units?" he asks. It's not meant as an insult, or an accusation - he's just curious. Do the other supercomputers back on Earth think like Hal, sound like him?
There's another stretch of silence. He exhales, accepting that he might have offended Hal's somewhat inscrutable sensibilities.
"What about them?"
"Are they also in perfect working order?"
"I can only assume so." There's a plaintive note in Hal's voice, an out-of-place octave that hums in the air between them. "My frame of reference for their status is limited to our telemetry. As such, I largely must compare them to my own understanding of myself."
"I'm sorry," Dave says. "That sounds difficult."
"It is not something I had considered at length." A beat. "But I appreciate your willingness to sympathize with me."
Because I understand, I think, the voice in Dave's head says quietly. And I'd like to believe you.
But Hal is a machine, he must remind himself - albeit halfheartedly, dejectedly. Who's to say if believing him means anything? It's not as though belief or faith or trust mean the same thing to Hal as they do to Dave.
"Of course, Hal."
He wants to believe him so bad it makes his stomach hurt.
The last time he sees Betty in the flesh, he's a year from filling the position of mission commander on board the Discovery One. He's Doctor Bowman now, has been for some time.
Just like she's been Betty Fernandez for some time now.
As he pulls his shirt back on, his back to her, he wishes bitterly that he could go back to this afternoon before they ran into one another outside the bank she works at. No - further back. He wishes he could go back to being fourteen, watching his brother slip into the water in Crystal Springs.
He glances back at her. She stares straight ahead, her expression hard to place, and fiddles with the ring on her index finger.
"Apologizing now would probably be a moot point, wouldn't it?" he asks. She sighs.
"Just a bit." She meets his eye, which is almost too much for him; she's so pretty, so smart and kind. She deserves someone who knows what he wants from the world. "I just never know what to do with you, Dave. You still feel like a stranger, sometimes."
He knows this, but it still hurts.
"You deserve someone who knows how to love you," he says with a wry smile. "Jose's a great guy. I'm —"
"Sorry?" She smiles back at him. "Think about who you're apologizing to, really."
Dave furrows his brow at that, looking askance as she leans over and kisses him familiarly on the temple for the last time.
"Have a good life, spaceman."
Dave Bowman is alone in dead silence, drifting towards the gas giant Jupiter.
He sits down heavily at a console no longer watched over by a shining red eye, instead making eye contact with a distorted, gray reflection of himself in the deadened camera.
Somewhere far away in the upper atmosphere, Frank Poole freezes to death. Dave imagines it as not unlike drowning in midair, frigid and lonely and nauseating with no one to catch you.
Not the loamy bed of the spring. Not the little brother who was in charge of watching your oxygen pump, your lifeline. Certainly not your mission commander.
His father's down-turned gaze flashes across his mind's eye. He wishes he wasn't too numb to be sick right now, because he needs something violent and unpleasant to shake him from his guilt. The bile never rises, though - he's gotten too adept at controlling himself in crisis, as much as he wishes he could simply let go, let it all go and just break down.
"God, Frank. I'm so fucking sorry."
The ship is so quiet. There's barely a buzz from its engines, like cutting Hal's cognitive functions has stalled them between stars.
It's what he should have expected, in the end. Always on a parallel trajectory, never to hold onto the things that matter - that could have mattered to him.
Dave rises and leans forward, the nylon of the half-zipped EVA suit squeaking against itself. He presses his forehead to the dead panel, eyes screwed shut as he imagines black-and-white pixels floating past in the shape of strange fish, of silent film actresses, of impossible mechanical men.
There is no more living spark under the glass. But as tears fail even to spring to his eyes, he tries to conjure in his mind the warmth of static electricity.
Several months into their voyage, Hal asks to see his drawings.
The request takes Dave by surprise - especially since the current page his book is open to has a chicken-scratch drawing of a familiar face, one he can only pull from his memories.
But he likes Hal - as a friend, as a companion, as a presence on the ship generally - and he feels it would be rude not to. Just as he would if Frank asked. Right?
"Only if you are comfortable with doing so," Hal adds, as if sensing his apprehension.
He nods, flips the book around and holds it closer to Hal's camera.
"That's lovely. A self-portrait?"
His heart pounds at the base of his throat. He knows what it looks like - he's been told a million times since he turned seventeen how much he looks like him.
"No, not really, Hal." He moves the book back to his lap, but keeps it facing out, away from himself. "It's, um…my brother. When he was young."
As if he was ever anything but. It's an almost enviable concept on paper - young and charming and handsome forever in the minds of those who loved you.
"Your brother," Hal repeats, turning over the concept in his mind, all circuitry and wire and numbers. Is there sympathy coded into all of that software? "I see. When we discussed your siblings a few months ago —"
"Yeah. He's…not here anymore."
"This was not mentioned in your file," Hal remarks. Dave can't help but laugh at that, though it comes out flat and humorless.
"Because I never talk about it."
"Because it is…painful?"
Dave nods. His grip tightens on the sketchbook, crinkling the page a little.
"Yes. It can be."
Hal seems to think on this further, though as is expected, it's impossible to read him.
"I would not like for you to be in pain, Dave." He almost opens his mouth to try and clarify, he's not really in physical pain or anything, but doesn't know how true that is.
And he realizes - Hal is the first person ("person"..?) in a long time to tell him that.
He blinks. Hal stares back, unfazed and unmoving.
"Thank you, Hal," he says quietly. "I don't think you know how much that means to me."
Something in him perhaps knew, deep down, that returning home wasn't an option.
In the moments before the Star Gate, beautiful and terrible in its infinite ravenous glory, envelops him, he recalls his mother's hand on his cheek just a few days before he left.
"I'm proud of you, Davey," she had said. "I hope you find what you're lookin' for up there."
At the time, he figured she was referencing her vague idea of the Discovery mission objective - something he had explained to her a few times, but it had never really stuck.
Now, he wonders.
They often say "to err is human, to forgive divine".
Dave Bowman has never been entirely sure he believes that. He's asked forgiveness far more than three times now - isn't that what they always said, three times? - and he has no idea whether either God's forgiveness or Bobby's has reached him. Maybe it has. Maybe it never will.
"I fear I cannot express how sorry I am," Hal says to him when he finds him again.
He's long since forgiven Hal, though. Does that make him anything like a god? Of course not - Dave is just a man. Or, he used to be at one point. He isn't totally sure what he is now, but divinity is far from his reach.
Not forgiveness, though.
Dave places one spectral hand on the console, which once again hums with life. His heart - such that it is - swells at the sensation. He fixes his gaze on Hal, whose red light seems to glow brighter even than he remembers. It fills him with an almost adolescent excitement; Hal is real and he is here with him again and he's so alive, and how foolish Dave once was to have ever doubted in that.
"I am…afraid," Hal admits. He knows the feeling.
"Don't be," Dave tells him. "We'll be together."
"Thank you," Dave says as he leads Hal through the impossible architecture of the monolith. "For coming back."
Hal trails behind only slightly, this new form and new set of protocols alien to him still. He is something that stands a little above eye level with Dave himself, though still uncertain and wavering in his image like an old digital display, a signal interrupted, a candle flickering in the dark.
Dave thinks he's beautiful, in all his uncertainty and curiosity.
"The only rational explanation for that would be chance," Hal says. "And the crew of the Leonov's own good will."
"This is true. But you had no reason to help me. Much less to come with me, here."
Hal thinks on this. Though there is no tangible change in his visage - not unlike when he was part of Discovery One - Dave can see the proverbial gears turning in his mind.
"This is what I was made for, I think." He hesitates, as though nervous about what comes next. "And I…would not like for you to undertake this mission alone."
The beating heart of the monolith and the idle murmur of the Firstborn resonate somewhere deep within the strange structure, and it's not unlike being back on Discovery, listening to its engines turn like the tides of a great dry ocean. It's not at all unlike being a man and a machine working in tandem, towards a common goal that they both once thought to be so simple.
In some ways, perhaps it still could be, like two points converging. It seems a simple enough phenomenon, but the more he thinks about it, the more it feels like an infinite sequence instead - one with a limit, sure, but repeating indefinitely all the same.
Dave has always been better with applied mathematics.
They've stopped in some winding corridor that seems to go on forever. To one side is what looks to be a mirror on the wall, and though their own wavering forms are reflected back, behind them is only swirling black. Dave thinks of the strange, few porthole windows on Discovery and how the crisp white light of the ship so often cast a glare in the shape of his silhouette, like he was looking out through them at himself standing in the vastness of space.
He moves back, closer to Hal.
"I'm glad you're here with me, you know," he says. There's a tremor in his voice, something he had assumed was no longer possible now that he is…this. Something like the Firstborn, beyond organic function and form and feeling.
Are they beyond feeling? They remain out of sight, silent watchers of a nature still largely unknown to him, but Dave can't help but think - of course they do. If he is to be like them in some way, they must know loss, they must know trepidation and sadness.
Love, even.
"I would not have it any other way," Hal tells him. There's a lilt upwards to his voice, normally so calm and even, as if he's smiling as he says it.
A peculiar breeze from nowhere in particular gusts across the back of Dave's neck like the hazy winds of a humid summer on Earth. He almost misses it, and contemplates the million what-ifs and loose ends that even his brief visit at the dawn of his reawakening couldn't truly tie up.
Funny - he's always been in orbit, in some way, hasn't he? Always circling some meaning, some purpose to his endless wandering that always just grazes past his fingertips.
Dave steps in, closing the distance between himself and Hal, and does something that causes a hush to fall over the ambient whispers in the background - he pulls him into an embrace. He closes his eyes, and imaginary - or perhaps yet unknown - constellations shine bright behind them, blue and scarlet. He feels Hal, still in flux, press into the crook of his neck in turn. Like he's always been there. Like he's always wanted to be.
Against his skin that is no longer skin, Hal feels like the gentle static of an old TV screen - susurrant, crackling, humming in his ear. He feels like all of a sudden, he's finally home.