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Hera comes back to herself in a crackle of nerves and synapses, and the entirety of her being feels electric, and helium-light, and somehow hollow. So very, very hollow. Something begins churning in the pit of her stomach; what if it didn’t work, what if it all went wrong, what if she was still…
Still…
Hera looks down at her hands: small, brown, limp with what her body tells is her exhaustion, shaking slightly. Very slowly, she processes the fact that she has hands, that she has a body, that she can shake, in a way that doesn’t turn the Hephaestus miles off course, or send them careening into the star. Her breathing comes quick, and that’s air, going in and out of her lungs, and, and, and…
Someone’s hands are on her shoulders (she has shoulders!!) with a very light touch.
“Maxwell,” says Jacobi, “are you…”
“Hera,” asks Eiffel at the same time, “is that…”
There’s static in the air. Hera is aware of almost the entire crew around her, but no one speaks. And then.
“Well. This is certainly an unexpected outcome!”
It’s Hera’s voice, glitches and all, and she doesn’t need to be a computational genius to figure out who’s using it.
“Holy shit,” she says in Maxwell’s voice, and passes out.
*
Fifteen hours later, when Maxwell’s body has gotten the rest it sorely needs and deserves, Eiffel catches her up with what he calls the cliff notes version.
“And so somewhere around hour thirty-six, the star starts freaking out, like, the fires of Mount Doom on acid freaking out, and Colonel Sauron of course wants all hands on deck so we can figure out what the hell is going on, and Maxwell is still at her desk, and…”
Hera doesn’t tune Eiffel out so much as she puts him on the backburner. She can’t help it. She’s strapped into Maxwell’s bunk and he’s floating beside her, mouth going a hundred miles an hour, telling the story with his hands as much as with his words. She knows what Eiffel looks like, of course, but to see him up close and organically is another thing entirely. He’s still regaining the weight he lost when he was stranded, his hair is still growing back, his natural tint is still returning. This close, she can see the haggardness in his eyes, the laugh lines around his mouth. His face is lean and his hands and torso are soft and full.
He’s right here in front of her. Her best friend.
“…and then they round it all off by giving us the alien equivalent of ‘whoops, our bad’. All in my voice, mind you. Again. It’s kind of getting old. Honestly, they couldn’t have siphoned off sound bites of Kepler or Hilbert or something? Then we’d really be setting the vibe for these close encounters of the three hundred and fifty ninth kind. Anyway. They said that we could expect this Freaky Friday event to end in aboooout sixty-ish hours. You and Maxwell just have to recreate the parameters—”
“Wait.” Hera’s heart lurches, and she has to take a second to appreciate the fact that that isn’t as much of a figure of speech as she’d formerly thought; it feels like the organ gives a little flip of apprehension. “Dr. Maxwell…”
“Yep. Maxwell. The person who you actually aren’t. Despite what you look and sound like. Jesus, this isn’t getting any less weird.”
“Where…” Her fingers fumble clumsily at the bed straps, and instinctively, she looks upwards. It’s a silly instinct, and she knows it, but she can’t think about that over the curious whirl of trepidation that’s currently gripping her by the throat. It’s just been her and Eiffel; Maxwell hasn’t spoken a word to her yet. “Is she mad? Is she upset?”
Eiffel looks at her, blinks, and bursts out laughing.
*
“…So while of course it was something of a… shock, to be wildly, incredibly euphemistic, it’s temporary. We have an end date, and we have a plan of action, and if when the time comes, it doesn’t work, well, we’ll take it from here. But for now…” Her voice spasms in and out of hearing, peaking up with excitement. “…this is fascinating!”
They’re alone in Maxwell’s quarters. Hera has been floating about as they talk, trying to accustom herself to the physics of having a body. Every now and again she’ll reach out to grab something; a vase, the bookcase, the bedsheets, and the moment the object touches her skin it’s like a tiny electrical shock.
“Fascinating,” she says, “is just the tip of a very, very large iceberg.”
“Look out Kate Winslet,” Maxwell says with a breathless laugh, and even though Hera only vaguely understands the reference, she laughs along with it.
On the average day, Hera is grateful for Alana Maxwell for any number of reasons. Maxwell cares about her. She understands her. When there’s something that she doesn’t understand, she puts real effort into investigating and asking questions, and listens attentively to all of Hera’s (often rambling) answers. Before this entire fiasco she’d made countless quality of life improvements to Hera’s systems. Things that she could have gotten away without doing, things that didn’t necessarily affect productivity or performance, but things that she knew she could fix, and thus did.
Today, Hera is grateful that Maxwell isn’t freaking out. Because if Maxwell was freaking out, she definitely would be too. It isn’t as if freaking out isn’t warranted. This is huge, in a way that she can hardly countenance. She keeps floating past Maxwell’s mirror, and momentarily thinking that she’s looking at the doctor from a very close range before she remembers. This body isn’t hers, but right now she inhabits it, all five feet of it, with Maxwell’s dark skin and wide eyes and hair framing her face in heavy twists.
It’s a lot to take in.
Hera isn’t sure what the aliens could have been doing to accomplish something like this on accident, but she’s sure it’s sent the Colonel into a tailspin. There hasn’t been a peep out of them in so long, and now… this. At any other time, Hera would be fascinated, burning up with questions, but at the moment she can’t be bothered. She has quite a lot on her plate, thank you very much, and they were the ones to serve it up.
“Are you… are you okay?” she asks, running her hands over her trousers. “You seem to be handling this… really well.”
Maxwell takes some time to consider.
“Really, I’m no good at panicking, so I elected to skip over that bullet point and save us all some time. Don’t get me wrong, this is…” Her voice crackles as she tries to find the word. “This is wild. Completely over the hill. I won’t pretend it isn’t one hell of an adjustment, but lucky for me, I landed with the body that wasn’t about to drop from sheer exhaustion, so I’m a little bit ahead of you on the learning curve. And so far what I’ve learnt is just backing up what I know. Hera, you’re amazing.”
Hera’s cheeks – Maxwell’s cheeks – grow warm. Hearing those words in her own voice, in… in Dr. Pryce’s voice, but said with such unwavering certainty and admiration… it’s a feeling she wants to bottle, keep and store away. Translate it into binary and pour over it for hours.
“I…”
“I’m dead serious. I know more than anyone the theory and the technicalities behind what you do every day, but living it is a horse of a different colour, breed, temperament, everything. It’s vast. Elegant. Brilliant. Hopelessly complicated. It—” Maxwell cuts herself off with a short, sheepish cough. “God, listen to me. I must sound so silly to you.”
Hera smiles.
“No, not totally. But if you want to keep using pretty words to describe the stuff I do every day, I’m honestly not going to stop you.”
“Well if I were you, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were haikus to come,” Maxwell warns, chuckling.
Hera turns in mid-air, steadies herself with a hand on the wall, and continues pacing around the room. She wonders if walking is easier or harder when gravity is involved.
“So… it worked, right?” She’d asked Eiffel this already, but she wants to hear it from Maxwell too. “Is everything… good?”
“As far as I can tell, yes. All systems are operational; in fact, they’re as close to optimal as we can get, all things considered. We’ll have to wait until you’re reintegrated with the Hephaestus to be sure, though. I’m still trying to get the hang of omnipresence, and there are so many things happening at once. But somehow I’m keeping up with all of them. Don’t worry, you’ll be coming home to a clean house.” Her tone switches to one that Hera knows intimately well; it’s the voice that she uses when she’s proud and satisfied. “We did good back there.”
Hera sinks down onto the bed, clutching the edges.
“We did. You did. Maxwell, I… thank you.”
They hadn’t seen exactly eye to eye, but there is no downplaying the enormity of what Maxwell had discovered, what she’d done for her. Hera might have gone on for the rest of her life with that little piece of code running rampant over her systems, her functions, her self-esteem. Now, she knows it’s there, and she is going to fight it every step of the goddamned way.
Maxwell laughs easily, glitching in and out. “You did most of the heavy lifting.”
“Well, someone had to,” she teases. They chuckle together.
“And hey, Hera… for what it’s worth… I’m glad my backup plan was a bust.”
“…Me too, doctor.”
Hera lies back against the mattress as best as she can, and feels the silence creep over them. It’s a good kind of silence, the kind she sometimes shares with Eiffel. Hera isn’t actually ready to talk about Cutter and Pryce and what they’d unearthed in her mind, beneath all those cobwebs, behind all that baggage. Maxwell understands that like she appears to understand most things about Hera. That is a can of worms for another day.
The silence stretches on for minutes more. Hera breathes in and out; through Maxwell’s nose, out of Maxwell’s mouth. She can’t imagine this ever not being novel.
“Okay, Hera,” says Maxwell, her voice crackling softly over the comms. “I’ve made certain that Colonel Kepler won’t be calling on you for the rest of the day. What do you want to do with your time?”
Hera laughs, and it’s strange to think of something that comes out of her own mouth as beautiful, but the sound belongs to Maxwell, and it is. She thinks she might love the good doctor a little, just for that question. It’s just the sort of thing Pryce would frown upon, asking an AI’s opinion; Hera would give anything to see her face were she to ever hear those words spoken in her own voice.
What does she want to do? There are so many options, as well as a surprising number of things she doesn’t have to do. She already knows so much about the body that she’s in. She knows what foods to avoid; knows that they aren’t kept on board, but knows where to find the Epipens should strawberries and kiwis suddenly appear on the Hephaestus, because stranger things have happened. She knows that Maxwell manages what she calls ‘the vagaries of genetics and brain chemistry’; she knows where her meds are kept, in a neat little organiser labelled for the days of the week. She knows how Maxwell takes her tea: twice brewed, a splash of milk, no sugar.
She also knows, with unwavering certainty, that there are a few awkward, eyes-shut showers in her future, despite what Maxwell says about them both being adults. Hera is very curious about anatomy, but this is Maxwell. It’s… different.
What to do, what to do… she runs her hands up and down her arms, thinking.
Hera wants to hug Eiffel, and Minkowski (Commander Minkowski; she’s going to say that word until she’s out of breath and Kepler threatens to throw her out the airlock) and even Lovelace, if she’ll have her. She wants to punch Hilbert full in the goddamned face, water under the bridge be damned. She wants to taste something, and drink something, and feel warmth and cold and the perfect space in between. She wants to spend hours talking to Maxwell like she always does, just for the pleasure of hearing this voice in its quick paces, its drawling humour.
What does she want…
Hera touches the sheets below her. It’s where she’s spent the most time since coming back from her memories. Certainly the fourteen of so hours that she was out. Hera remembers nothing of it; Maxwell doesn’t dream (something else she’d learnt from their late night conversations) and Hera is only tangentially familiar with the concept.
She rolls on her side, free floating in the air.
“Maxwell?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t laugh but… right now, I kind of want to nap.”
Maxwell does laugh, almost immediately, but it’s a gentle thing, full of comprehension.
“No, I get it. You go ahead.” The static in her voice carries through into the tenderness. Hera would have never before described her own voice as lovely, but today is a day of monumental firsts. “I’ll be right here when you wake up.”