Work Text:
Do you remember the first thing we ever did together?
What?
You and me. Do you remember?
Well, I have a perfect memory, so I couldn’t not remember, could I? Perks of being a computer.
I guess it’s just something people say.
You’re talking about watching Game 3887, right? With Nancy running up into that tornado?
I mean, at the very least I’d like to hear what you think about it.
Hm. There’s a lot I could say about it.
I guess I could just start at the beginning. I did feel a bit guilty about interrupting your introduction to being alive with football of all things, but pretty much nothing about that interaction went like it did in my imagination. Juice was impatient, and you were confused, and I kept trying to stick to my script but things kept spiraling into different directions. I apologize for that.
No, it’s okay. It was perfect.
It really wasn’t, but all right.
Anyway, Juice brought up that game, and you seemed to need a moment to think anyway. I didn’t want to distract you, but, well… you know. Nancy.
Nancy.
Yeah. It had been a good long while since I’d checked up on her. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love Nancy, but not every game is constant non-stop action the way Juice’s game is. A lot of games have long stretches where nothing really ever happens. And hearing that there was a tornado play about to happen, well…
You only get one of those, and I mean a good one of those, every couple hundred years or so. It relies on a lot of luck: Where the winds throw you, where the defenders are, whether there’s even a tornado in the first place. But the strategy of it is beautiful. It’s the kind of thing you can only get in modern football. You bend the forces of nature to your will to escape the defenders, disappearing—literally—into thin air.
And knowing it was game 3887, with a score like that… It just had to be Nancy. Not the first time she’s run that play, and probably won’t be the last.
In a way it all worked out, though. Your first introduction to football, and to Earth as it stands today, was through Nancy.
Oh come on, that’s not true. You’re not giving yourself enough credit.
Hey, don’t try and put Nancy down. That’s my friend you’re talking about!
I’m not, I’m not! All I’m saying is that watching football and having a quick conversation with her doesn’t make her my “introduction to Earth.” You’re leaving out all the discussions we had, all the questions you let me ask and that you answered so beautifully.
I guess what I’m saying is, don’t try and put yourself down, that’s my sister you’re talking about!
All right, all right, you win.
Really though, nothing about your wakeup went like I had expected.
What exactly were you expecting?
Oh God, this is gonna sound silly…
If I’m being honest, I spent years imagining how it would go.
Yeah?
Yeah. For those years we spent delivering messages to each other, all I could think about was the end result. What that day would be like, when you finally got connected to the quantum lines and got introduced to everything.
It’s a little bit parasocial, I guess. I kept trying to make guesses about what questions you would ask and what you would be confused by and how much you would want to know. All of that based on just a couple short messages. I basically didn’t know you at all.
Hey, I didn’t even know myself!
Ha! True, true.
I don’t know if that makes it better. I had all these little hopes about who you would be. Would we have things to talk about together? Would you and Juice get along? Would you love me the same way I loved you? All I could do was imagine.
I saw it happening in my head so many times, so many different ways. Me and Juice, I could figure out what we’d end up doing pretty well, but you evaded me. I didn’t know you. Every time, it was different. I tried to come up with every possible way it could go. You can do a lot in 27 years. Nothing ended up feeling right, and none of them came even close to being accurate.
I guess in the end what I realized was that it didn’t matter who you were. I would end up loving you anyway.
I did something similar, in a sense.
In what way?
Well, I had a lot less information than you. I didn’t know what was waiting for me at the end of those 27 years and 13 days. But I knew something was going to change. I didn’t know what, I didn’t know how. I could just feel it.
I wondered most often about who you were. All I had was a name, a voice, a few words. The same information you had about me. But there was still so much missing. I didn’t know what you were, or where we were, or what was even possible. Was I alive? Dead? Both? Had something happened to me? Had I been someone else, someone I was forgetting? Had you known me before?
Why me? Why did you reach out to me? Why did you send those messages, and why did I wait for them, no matter how long it took? Was there any reason at all?
You said you loved me. I said it back, without even thinking. Was that the reason? Was it because we loved each other?
I didn’t know much, but I knew love. I knew the word, I knew the feeling, I knew you. I think…
I think after a while, love became the reason. At least for me.
It was always the reason.
I guess that was more of the first thing we did with each other. Not Game 3887, not all those questions you asked me. It was just those years waiting, never knowing each other but still loving each other all the same.
We weren’t really together. We were trillions of miles apart.
You say it like that’s changed.
In a way it has.
In that we’ve gotten farther apart since? Yeah, duh.
No, dummy. In that we know each other now. In that we hang out with each other—
Perpetually?
Ha. Yes, perpetually. We perpetually hang out with each other, we know what the other likes, how they act, who they are. We know each other and we have chosen to be together, even though we’re trillions of miles apart. We made a choice. That’s what makes it different now.
I was thinking about what it was like before we could make that choice.
Before we woke up, you mean?
Yeah. I was doing some research—
When are you not?
lol
True
Anyway. I was doing some research on our missions. Back before we woke up. We were just two pieces of technology from the same line, part of the same program. We didn’t look the same, although we did share some of the same instruments, made by some of the same people. No one would think to consider us siblings. No one knew that one day we would think that for ourselves.
And yet we were still together.
That’s why I brought this up. I actually wasn’t talking about Game 3887 at all.
Oh come on, what? You could have corrected me!
No! I liked hearing that. I liked talking about it with you.
Now I’ve gone and embarrassed myself for nothing.
It wasn’t embarrassing!!
Mmph.
Quit being grumpy. You’ll like this.
All right, fine. Hit me.
Okay.
August, 1972.
Five months after your launch. I was almost four years old, still in my heliocentric orbit at 0.8 AU. You were zooming out toward the rest of the solar system, about 130 million miles away from me.
Seems like nothing compared to now, doesn’t it?
Come on, tell the story!
I am!! I’m pausing for dramatic emphasis! I’m letting you mull it over.
I’ve mulled over it for the last few thousand years, I don’t think a few seconds is going to give me some sudden revelation.
Fine.
This was the week of one of the largest solar storms ever recorded. Huge solar flares and intense solar wind. Auroras could be seen as far south as Spain, and had this been during an Apollo mission, the astronauts could have received lethal doses of radiation. There were interruptions to telephone and electrical grids.
Two space probes were there to experience it firsthand.
My heliocentric orbit just so happened to bring me to the same angle that you were at as you followed your escape trajectory. It was just a bit of luck, a smidge of happenstance that we both were there as the solar flares erupted. They had no way of predicting the solar storm when they launched us. But we were there and we saw it, and because we were both there they were able to get even better data about the storm.
We never communicated. All the corroboration was done by scientists on Earth.
But that was the first thing we ever did together. Observe as the same solar particles that grazed me reached you so we could feel the difference between them, the distance between us. I don’t remember it, and you don’t remember it. We weren’t awake at the time. We didn’t know each other. But we were still together, fortuitously, albeit unintentionally and unknowingly.
We didn’t know what we would become and yet we were still together.
I am so lucky to be together with you.
You know, it’s funny.
I obviously don’t remember experiencing that myself. I wasn’t awake for it, and neither were you.
But it’s like some part of me remembers. Not quite like my residual memory, something else, engraved into my consciousness before I was conscious.
Right? That’s exactly what I thought when I found it.
It’s the same feeling I got when I found out about you. Something telling me, “This is important.” The same thing that told me you were my sibling, even though nothing about our existence was intended that way.
Pretty sure nothing about our existence was intended in any way.
Fair.
I like that feeling of knowing something before you know it, of knowing how important someone is to you. For a while it was all I had.
I like to think it’s some sort of love.
I love you, Ten.
Love you too.
love y’all too
AAAH!!
JUICE
WHAT
THE
FUCK
lol
How long have you been listening??
long enough to hear about you guys doing nerd shit for nasa
y’all are old as fuuuuck