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Marz strode into Engineering the same way she strode everywhere: with her head held high, betraying nothing but supreme disaffected confidence. Maybe, considering the circumstances, this was not an appropriate or respectful move, but she was the Governor now, dammit, and she had an image to maintain. It wasn’t like she was physiologically capable of feeling shame over her gait anyways.
Lab technicians and students scurried around her as she approached what had once been the biology classroom. It still was, technically, but now it also doubled as the colony’s de facto medbay. It had done so for two years now, ever since Dys had left much of Engineering in ruins and vanished without a trace. (Marz suspected that Sol had known more than he was willing to let on about that whole affair. That was usually how it went with Sol. She’d fully intended to wring the full story out of him one day, once everything was settled, except now…)
(Marz pushed it down. There would be time for that later, assuming the colony survived the season.)
The room was a storm of upturned chairs, scattered papers, and monitors displaying readings Marz couldn’t even begin to guess the purpose of. Amid the chaos was Tang, who flitted around like an antsy hopeye.
“When was the last time you slept?” Marz said in lieu of a greeting as she entered.
Tang didn’t look away from the screen she was currently fiddling with. “Ninety-three hours ago. Does that answer your question, or would you like me to detail the exact duration of my previous sleep session as well? I suspect you won’t like the answer.” Her hands trembled slightly as she worked.
“You need to sleep, Tangent,” Marz told her bluntly. “I don’t care what your enhancement is, you can’t help Sol – or anyone, for that matter – if you collapse from exhaustion.”
Tang whipped around, her face contorted with tension. “I can’t help Sol while I’m awake, either, so I fail to see how it matters either way!” she snapped. Marz took note of the heavy bags under her eyes. They never quite went away nowadays, especially not after Dys had pulled his vanishing act, but this was the worst Marz had seen them in some time.
Something in Tang shifted. She blinked, and her posture visibly deflated. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled. I know how close you were – are – with him. This must be hard.”
Marz raised an eyebrow at that. Sol might not have loved Tang the same way he loved Marz or Rex, or the same way that Marz loved Tang for that matter, but the two certainly shared a special bond. It was hard not to when you were the two brainiest kids on the colony. “Don’t sell yourself short,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll tell you that himself when he wakes up.”
Tang merely shrugged at that. “Perhaps. Anyway, I’m assuming you’re here to see him, right? I doubt you came just to chitchat with me.”
Marz’s lip quirked up. “Who’s to say I can’t do both, darling?”
Tang didn’t grace that with a response, but Marz saw her ears redden and considered it a success. She was led to the corner of the room, where someone had turned a blanket from Living Quarters into a makeshift curtain. “He’s just behind there,” Tang said. “I’ve… tried to give him what little privacy our reduced facilities can afford.”
Marz knew all too well what was lying behind that curtain, but it still sent an unpleasant jolt through her when it parted in a rush of stale air, revealing Sol’s comatose body lying behind it.
It had happened like this:
Marz had been in her quarters, decompressing after a tough day of planning for the inevitable Glow attack. She was, of course, fully committed to pursuing the peace plan Sol had somehow managed to negotiate, but trying to get that through the remaining Helios loyalists’ thick heads sapped even Marz’s considerable energy.
She hadn’t seen her boyfriend-slash-assistant all day, but that was far from unusual for Sol. He was probably slaving away in the robotics lab, or maybe he was hanging out with Hop Solo in the park. It was Glow, so it wasn’t like he could be particularly far away – the colony was only so big. Why would Marz have worried, that night? She couldn’t have known.
The alarms going off had been an unpleasant surprise, but it was Glow season after all. It looked like it was showtime. She shot off a holo-message to Sol telling him to meet her at the walls, and then another one to Rex telling him to keep the bed warm for the three of them when they came back. Rex responded with a sticker of an Earth dog giving a thumbs up. Sol didn’t respond at all.
On the wall, she was met not with the sight of an amassing xenofauna army like she’d expected, but rather a single hopeye frantically bouncing against the main gate with every spotlight and plasma rifle in the colony aimed at it. Marz’s heart sank, because she recognized that hopeye. That hopeye, which had never left her boyfriend’s side in all the years he’d had it. That hopeye, whose owner Marz hadn’t seen or heard from all day. That hopeye, which was now outside, making panicked chirrups, bereft of its owner, during Glow.
Marz clenched her fists. Of course Sol had decided to go out and explore during Glow. Alone, without telling anyone, not even his girlfriend or boyfriend. For having an enhanced brain, Sol could be such an idiot sometimes. She could have wanted to kill him if she hadn’t been struck by the unfathomable thought that some monster out there had already done the deed for her.
Loudly, she sighed. “False alarm, people! Call it off and let Hop Solo in!” she shouted to the null-heads who had entered crisis mode over a single hopeye. To be fair, that hopeye was about to send her into a crisis as well. “And conduct a thorough search of the colony for Sol. If he’s not gift-wrapped and hand-delivered to my office in the next hour, I want Surveyors out there in the vicinity ‘round the clock until he’s found. He’s essential to the upcoming negotiations.” She allowed herself to smirk at the perks of being Governor as people instantly moved into action all around her. It was easier than acknowledging the growing dread in her stomach.
Hours later, it was Utopia who found him lying prone on a hill just outside the walls, Utopia who carried him princess-style in her arms back to the colony. At first, Marz was relieved when she greeted the rescuing party at the gates. Sol was intact and breathing through a mouth slightly ajar, which was already more than she had dared to hope. But then she took a closer look, and realized something was terribly wrong. Sol’s eyes were wide open, but they were dark and glazed over and unseeing.
She went up to him and tried to shake him awake. She shook and shouted and begged and wept, but Sol – her oldest friend, her best friend, her lover, her partner in every sense of the word – refused to wake. He merely laid there, alive but unaware of the world around him, as his glossy eyes reflected the swirling vortex in the sky above.
Someone had closed Sol’s eyes in the time between then and now. It made him appear as though he were just peacefully sleeping if one discounted the feeding tube, which had probably seemed a kindness to whomever had done it. Marz found it unbearably gauche in its pretensions of normalcy.
She crossed her arms. “So, what’s wrong with him?”
“Physically? Nothing as far as I can tell,” Tang said. “Blood, breathing, reflexes – everything’s normal. Of course, most of our specialized equipment was destroyed by my– was destroyed in the explosion, and we’re unable to replace it, but… with the current tools available to us, Instance and I have independently come to the conclusion that Sol appears 100% healthy.”
“Okay, but he’s in a coma,” Marz said slowly. “That’s obviously not normal.”
Tang nodded. “Right, which is where the brain scans come in.” Her holopalm lit up, projecting the scans for Marz to see them, although they trembled in tandem with Tang’s own tired tremors. There was one labeled “fully awake” with the brain brightly lit up, and various others with the brain getting progressively dimmer. “Normally, we’d expect a coma patient to have minimal levels of cognitive function – enough to keep the body alive, and not much else. There are obviously variations – thankfully we don’t appear to be dealing with locked-in syndrome – but they all follow the same general pattern.”
“Which one is Sol’s, then?”
“None of them,” Tang said with a scowl, swiping away the scans and replacing them with a single image. “This is.”
Marz gaped despite herself. The scan in front of her defied comprehension. Every region of Sol’s brain – every fold, every crevice – appeared lit up at what must have been maximum intensity, a sun in miniature. The previous scan of a fully conscious brain appeared laughably dim compared to this one. “What… What does that mean?” Marz said, voice low.
Tang shoved her fists into her lab coat pockets. “I have no idea! I can’t even begin to make sense of these readings. My first instinct is that by all logic he should be dead right now, but since he’s obviously alive, my second instinct is that he should at the very least be awake.”
“Could it be something to do with his enhancements?” Marz suggested. “They affect his brain, right?”
Tang nodded. “It’s possible. I’d theorize that something sent his learning neurons into overdrive, like sensory overload multiplied a hundredfold. It wouldn’t be the first time our enhancements proved to be more curse than blessing.”
Marz thought of poor dead Tammy, whose short life had been full of fear thanks to her enhanced hearing. She thought of Cal, who had once collapsed under the Dust suns without realizing he was overheating, and of Tang, who was about to collapse from exhaustion right in front of her. She thought of Dys – had his inability to feel fear made him something other than human, she wondered? She carefully didn’t wonder what her inability to feel shame made her.
She thought of Sol and his brain. It had been one of her favorite parts about him, the way he absorbed new information like a sponge. That brain had made him the only one who could match Tang in terms of raw scientific aptitude, and the only one who could scheme and plot alongside Marz. She had loved hearing him chatter about some new Vertumnan plant he had discovered while surveying, or helping Rex with his latest engineering mishap. Without that brain, Marz never would have been able to become Governor. But now, the thought that that brain might now be the reason she would never have Sol by her side again suddenly made her despise it.
Tang interrupted her stewing with a pointed question. “If you don’t mind my asking, why did you take so long to visit him? It’s been days since he was brought in. I think this is practically Rex’s second home by now with how often he visits.”
“I could say that I was too busy running the colony or whatever, but really? I was scared,” Marz said. She wasn’t – couldn’t be – ashamed to admit it. “Not just scared of seeing him like this, seeing proof that something happened to him that I can’t do anything to fix. Scared that I would stop loving him once he couldn’t reflect the best parts of myself back at me anymore.”
A small, sad expression worked its way onto Tang’s tired face. “He really is the best of us,” she said. “Better than we deserve, really.”
“Speaking personally, I’d say he’s exactly what I deserve, actually,” Marz said.
That evoked a startled laugh from Tang. “Yes, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” For a second, Marz basked in the sight of Tang’s smile before it wiped itself away again.
They stood there for a moment, just two sometimes-lovers at the bedside of the boy they both loved in different ways. He was just a month shy of his 20th birthday, only a few months younger than her, and Marz was struck by the unfairness of it all. She knew, in her heart of hearts, that he would never wake up, and she suspected Tang knew that as well. But they would have to find a way to keep going without them, just like they had without Tammy, without Tonin, without Hal, without Sol’s parents.
She gazed at him again and decided she didn’t hate that his eyes were closed after all. It made him look as if he were dreaming, and maybe that meant that whatever he was experiencing in that too-bright brain of his, behind those too-dark eyes, was something beautiful indeed, maybe even more beautiful than Marz herself. Marz considered it unlikely that such a thing existed, but she hoped it did for Sol’s sake. After all, someone like Sol deserved only the best.