Young Writers Society

Somehow, in the year-plus-several-months that Ellipse had spent incognito, as well as in the years before that, a plan had been born. In a daze, Ellipse traipsed up into the Ink, not paying attention to her surroundings beyond the layout of the walls. She pulled Tejal’s spare wheelchair out without even paying attention to its fine welding and sturdy axles, and rolled it to the dock floor, still lost in thought.
How had she not known the depth of this plan? Ellipse would not call herself unobservant, and sure, her older sibling had been acting funny before she was sent away, but judging by this Mi Na Park’s messages, everything had been in the works for at least two years before that awful first day on the earthling fold monitor. And now, things were even more complicated.
As Tejal clambered into the chair, Ellipse looked up at the ceiling, worrying her brow and biting her lips. She wished the boys had already managed to put a network of pinpoint generators in place. Then she would not have been slapped with an influx of messages from Earth; she would have just gotten all of them as they were sent.
“You doing okay?” Tejal asked. He looked up at her, one eyebrow piqued in concern. “You’ve been weird since we landed.”
“It has been like two minutes,” Ellipse fired back, only halfway feeling up to a bickering match.
“It’s been at least fifteen. You spent a long time just hanging out on the ship.”
Okay, he had a point. Shrugging, Ellipse trudged back into the Conics’s cargo hold to pick up their duffle bags, and then toward the great garage door that lead to the rest of the station. She punched the big red ‘open door’ button and hunched over to wait while the door rolled up. The boys joined her, and she noticed with a twinge of embarrassment that they were quietly looking at her, as if they expected her to explain her behavior right away.
She pinched her lips together and glanced at her watch. “You two have a meeting with an earthling think tank, right? What time in Eastern Daylight is that scheduled for?”
Tejal fidgeted with the tablet in his lap, and Mouthbot resumed translating.
“Well,” Focci started, “we break atmosphere at about, oh, eight in the morning? I am not the best with your time notation, but I believe that is fairly early.”
“Yep,” Ellipse replied.
“And then we make it to New York City at about nine. We will drop everything off at the hotel, see if there are any local messages from our crews, and then Tejal and I are meeting with Wellspring Incorporated over an eleven-thirty lunch at a fancy restaurant in… how do you say it? The center island.”
“Manhattan,” Tejal supplied in English, which was not helpful. He tapped on the tablet a few more times and picked up where Focci left off. “After that, we’ll have about an hour to get to Queens, wherever that is, and then we’ll meet the representatives from Inter-Tech.”
Focci flopped forwards, through the now-opened garage door, and peered down the long hallway. “Court is out at five in the evening, so we will go to say hello, and then all three of us will have dinner.”
Adjusting the duffle bags so that the handles stretched around her shoulders, Ellipse followed after Focci, and Tejal rolled along at her side.
“The judge will decide the fines on the second day we are planetside, right?” she asked, glancing around at the ISS’s interior. It was decorated in the newest earthling architectural trend, which Ellipse heard was something like an Arts and Crafts revival. Intricate, geometric details were carved into the cement walls, and every surface had been painted or plated in color. Straight lines of white shot down the hall, creating a perfect one-point perspective.
Ellipse had been under the impression that decoration was not the main focus of Arts and Crafts, but she liked the colors. Small windows in the floor, placed in long rows and columns, provided a long panorama of the starry sky outside the station, and Ellipse allowed herself to get lost in staring, watching as her feet floated over empty space.
They reached the planetside shuttle wing too soon. The boys headed for a gate that already had a line of people snaking out into the walkway, and Ellipse trudged after them, legs feeling heavier the closer she got to that gate. It was like the artificial gravity had increased only for her.
“What should I do while you two are at your meetings?” she asked, careful to keep her voice neutral. “I do not think I should join you; I cannot contribute anything.” She took a small step forward to keep with the slug-like line, and watched as a tall earthling with green hair stepped in line behind her.
Focci looked up at her, and his gills fluttered slowly, in that I-do-not-think-you-know-what-you-are-doing way that they sometimes did when Ellipse flew the ship too fast, but he kept quiet.
Tejal bit his lip. “You’ve never been to Earth before, right? I say if you don’t want to come with us, you should take the chance to explore a bit. New York is a big place. There’s a lot to see.”
Humming in thought, Ellipse glanced at her watch again. Randi’s friend might have mentioned being based in New York. They could meet up somewhere famous like the Met or Central Park, and Ellipse could do touristy things while bullying Mi Na Park into explaining the boatload of messages that had bombarded Ellipse’s watch when she entered Earth’s orbit.
When the line scootched forward again, Ellipse stayed in place, allowing the boys to get in front of her completely. She stretched her mouth into a thin line and brought up both hands to tap out a reply on her watch. Her message was short—just a time and a place—but hopefully Mi Na Park would be there. Ellipse took another step forward, and her gaze blurred. Her stomach sloshed and twisted, warning her of what her answer implied. About what her interactions with the boys and their machine and Spec Corp implied.
She was involved in big things, probably had been from the start. And she was finally going to act like it.

The crew dashed through the shipping sector, with Crane in the lead, snarling and leaping and scaring people out of their path. Somewhere in the mayhem, Ellipse had shoved Focci and one duffle bag into Tejal’s lap. Crane gripped the other in his jaw.
They reached the dock quickly. Ellipse had guessed right about its proximity. With a long, exhilarating drift (Tejal’s wheels needed better steering, seriously), the kids crashed into the large dock holding both the Conics and the Ink and scrambled to pick themselves off the metal floor. Crane, with all of his feline grace, had made the turn and stop with much less fanfare, and already had unlocked the Ink and begun lowering the boarding ramp.
Ellipse leapt back into action the moment the ramp hit the ground. She rolled Focci back onto his stomach and shoved Tejal up the ramp, breaths coming in great heaves and too-short exhalations. Her muscles burned.
Crane helped Focci up the ramp with a bit of nipping and growling, and the moment the siren collapsed into the Ink’s body, a white streak zipped into the dock, alone. Shell’s tail whirled, and he yowled something that Ellipse guessed was a warning.
Grimacing, Tejal dumped his duffle bag on the floor. “The earthling bounty hunter went back to his ship. We might be looking at a dogfight.”
“What did he say?” Focci asked, gills flapping about in search of water.
“Aerial combat might be a thing that happens today,” Ellipse told him. She watched as Shell pressed a green button to close the ramp and Crane disappeared into a further chamber of the ship.
Focci propped himself up immediately. “Ask Tejal about the piloting system on this ship.”
The boys really ought to have brought out the tablet, but Ellipse figured she could translate for a bit. She raised her voice as the dock’s main doors rumbled shut and relayed Focci’s question to Tejal.
“Huh?” Tejal squinted for a moment, and then his face cleared. Ellipse heard the hiss of air draining from their dock and felt her feet lift almost imperceptibly from the floor. “Oh! Oh, I see. It’s set up for my parents, but I have a lot of the Conics’s operating system backed up. We could definitely pull this off.”
Clueless about the understanding that had just been reached, Ellipse translated directly as best she could.
Focci grinned, all his sharp canines showing, and whacked his tail on the floor, propelling him forwards and up, through the doorway where Crane had gone earlier. Tejal followed soon after, jumping from his chair and fishing his magnetic mini-grappling-hook out from his pockets. After a short moment spent grimacing at the mess they had all left—someone would need to strap down the floating wheelchair eventually—Ellipse figured she might as well join them and see what they were up to. She pushed off the floor and dove through the doorway.
The Ink was a tight ship. She was built like a sports car, with wide-grained blue wood from some conifer-like species on Mao placed tastefully over the interior surfaces. Chrome mouldings joined the floor and wall. Ellipse felt almost bad for touching anything, but she had to for the sake of propulsion.
A small hole had been cut into the hall on either wall, and each led into a cramped room with a bed. Ellipse assumed Tejal slept in the room with the green-on-black binary-code-print comforter. She liked the Ink. It was not nearly as spacious or colorful as the Conics, but the Mao wood lent an alien hominess that Ellipse knew she would not have appreciated had she not come here of her own volition.
She found everyone else in the cockpit, at the end of the short hallway. Focci’s tail swished back and forth above the doorway, and Tejal floated by the ceiling with a halo of tools and wires, already snapping off the back panel of his tablet.
“What is happening?” Ellipse asked.
“We’re loading your pilot interface into the Ink in case we need to do something reckless,” Tejal replied. He snapped a wire onto something inside of his tablet.
Surely Tejal’s parents were better pilots. Scrunching her face, Ellipse glanced over at the dashboard.
The dash looked much like the rest of the ship’s interior, all smooth, carved wood and clean metal. The lights glittered in a consistent pastel blue, and Ellipse wondered if Focci saw them all as different shades, or if they really were all the same. She could not remember exactly how gato eyes worked, but they were not the cone system that earthlings and sirens had.
Crane and Shell hovered over the dash, paws and tails constantly running over and flicking switches. They partially blocked the view out of the large, glass window beyond, but Ellipse could still see the space station against the backdrop of stars and black, empty space. Brightly colored dots, probably other ships, zipped to and fro around the station’s exterior.
She noticed a blindingly orange dot that grew larger the longer she looked at it. Was it coming for them, or was the ship just headed past them?
A low snarl ripped through the cockpit, and Ellipse flinched. She pulled back into the doorway to watched as Crane leaned towards the window. His tail curled down and wrapped around the handle of the joystick, and Ellipse felt her stomach turn as the view dropped toward earth.
“Get on the dashboard, Ellipse” Tejal said. He passed the tablet to Focci, who jumped right into coding. “We’re about ready to switch interfaces.”
Shrinking further into the doorway, Ellipse sent him a suspicious glare. “Why exactly am I going to pilot us?”
“Because you don’t have good flying habits. Now scoot. I think that other ship has grapplers.” No one had guns in space except militaries and unlicensed ships. Besides, no bounty hunter would shoot down someone they were supposed to bring in alive.
“What do good flying habits have to do with anything?” Ellipse grumbled. She inserted herself between the gato and took a closer look at the dashboard. All the buttons had everything written in the pictorial gato script, and Ellipse figured she could guess well enough what all of them were for. A large screen in the center showed the view from the back of the ship, and yes, the orange ship was trailing after them.
Shell purred something.
“The plan is to fly by the ISS and weave around all the incoming and outgoing ships,” Tejal said. He prodded at an exposed wire in the open panel. “You’ll stay on the joystick until we get through the asteroid field.”
“Ugh. I was really hoping this drop-off business would be cleaner,” Ellipse groaned.
Focci’s tail flicked. “We all did, Ellie.”

After the first week, which Ellipse spent sore with the effort of readjusting, the days blurred together, turning first to weeks, then to a few months. Even the occasional blips, like updates from the boys or jam sessions with Andra, were buried under the monotony of preparing for her debut. She wrote music, learned dances, got coached in stage presence, and fell asleep every night buzzing with achy muscles, a wrung-out brain, and a growling stomach.
She was halfway through her morning composition time, lips numb from playing descant after descant, when Andra slipped in. It was a stud day, though Ellipse could hardly tell. Andra wore his hair down that day, to showcase how the bright red dye bled neatly into black roots.
“Hey.” Andra interrupted, “have I heard this one before?”
No. The trumpet piece was not for Andra’s next album.
“I thought you were scheduled for tomorrow,” Ellipse said, trying not to sound accusatory. They still had not reconciled over their clashing plans. Jam sessions were only that—professional music making.
“I had some free time, so I thought I would check in with you. Am I going to learn whatever you were just playing?”
The music studio was too small. Its walls, covered in acoustic panelling, squeezed in every time someone else walked into the room. With the keyboard on one end and a series of music stands and instruments scattered around the floor around the keyboard bench, there was hardly enough room for a second person.
“Did you want to check in about something other than music?” Ellipse asked.
Andra wrinkled his brow and pursed his lips. He took a moment to sigh, perhaps lamenting his younger sister’s petulance or finding the right words. Ellipse just stared him down.
“Yes,” he finally admitted, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Look, I get that I should have included you from the start. Trying to keep you safe was no excuse for keeping you in the dark.”
At least Andra understood that part now, Ellipse thought. She allowed herself to relax and readjusted her grip on her trumpet.
“Do you really have to stay here though?” His face drooped, the corners of his mouth pulling down into a frown both pleading and worried. “Did you think I would not notice what this place is doing to you?”
Ellipse almost missed the raggedness in his voice. Andra had been trained to sound clear and open at all times, just as she had, but now the truth of his worry slipped through. He sounded hoarse, more like Tejal than Andra.
Suddenly feeling a little silly, Ellipse looked down at her lap and fiddled with the trumpet keys. “I can handle it for a while. I know what else is out there now, remember?”
“Still.” Andra paused. “I worry. You can at least let me do that, right?”
Ellipse bit her lip. Of course she could not ban worrying. If anything, hearing Andra say out loud that he worried gave her the same warm fuzzies that she got every time Tejal and Focci closed their update messages with little notes about missing her.
She shook her head. “You can worry. Just try not to let it get in the way of things.”
“About that.” Andra bent over to move a tenor saxophone and its stand out of the center of the room. “I will continue my plan. With you writing again, the stock jump will be huge after the release next month, and I intend to capitalize on it. I mean it when I say I want to get us out of here.”
Ellipse felt her face scrunch.
“Look, you know that no matter what, Andra-Media is going to fall. People will get hurt by that, whether it comes from my way or doing things or yours. But I promise not to get in your way, okay? Consider my plan a kind of backup.” Crossing his arms, Andra tilted his head and offered a smile. “I am sorry for letting you think you were all alone. Let me be your big sib again?”
A tiny quirk of a smile found its way onto Ellipse’s face. “Sure. I guess.” She glanced at the trumpet still sitting in her hands and then sent Andra a scowl. “Now get out. I am working.”
With a stuttering laugh, he backpeddaled out of the studio and closed the door quietly. The moment the handle clicked, Ellipse brought up her trumpet and let out a long, deep sigh. The break had been nice. She had been getting stuck on what siren words would fit into the chord progression she had already matched to the melody.
Tapping on the keys, she racked her brain for every possible word that fit. Maybe she had gone too long without hearing Trade Siren used in conversation. “Ugh stupid sevenths,” she muttered. “Too limited.” But she needed the seventh chord for the main melody. It created tension and resolution, drama and emotion. Earthlings, avians, and saur all used it as a strong component of music.
She let out a grumble and buzzed out a fart noise through the trumpet. The boys’ last report had said they were preparing to place the last prototype near the tyran home planet. She needed to finish writing this darn song so she could record and edit and write her statement by the time they were ready to tell the universe her story.
Slumping over in her chair, Ellipse squeezed her eyes shut and hummed out a few possibilities. The abundance of colloquialisms in Trade Siren made for endless poetic metaphors, which helped with making equivalent statements between languages, but nothing felt quite right this time.
Ellipse’s fingers ran through the fingerings of an old Beatle’s descant, probably “Penny Lane” or something, entirely of their own accord, and Ellipse tried to shove the tune out of her head. “Just focus!” she hissed at herself. “Come on!”
Her watch dinged, and Ellipse almost cursed the boys for interrupting her thoughts. But she held back; they could hardly know what she was up to at the moment.
She tapped the screen to navigate to their message and skimmed over the words. They had just finished setting up the last generator prototype and would conduct a few tests and time trials next. They hoped she was alright, and they loved her, and-
Wait. Sirens had all kinds of words for love, rather like the Greeks with their agape and storge and what-have-you, but their most straightforward, all-encompassing term was one stolen from Focci’s native language. It was a staccato series of notes, all close together, which sat right on the seventh note of the key. She had forgotten that she could just say things plainly.
That section of the descant needed a bit of reworking now, but syntax always rested around the more common notes. She had this in the bag now.

The last few weeks were a flurry. Ellipse’s arms ached from playing the drum beats of her solo song over and over, until she had a series of sounds she could actually synthesize from on the computer. Her throat hurt from singing her voice raw, and her lips buzzed unpleasantly from the trumpet. Now if she could just get into the recording studio without anyone noticing.
The opulent decor of the satellite surrounded her on all sides, still glittering with inlays and well-shined carvings. Ellipse strode confidently, her face set in the same stern frown she wore when inspiration hit for a new song. People walking around the satellite knew that face by now, and knew better than to bother her when she wore it.
It was best not to interrupt the genius while profiting off of her.
The lights were dimmed, glowing dark red to provide light without interfering with people’s sleep cycles. Ellipse felt sluggish, and her eyes kept threatening to droop, but she had a short window in which to do this, and she needed the element of surprise. If she was not expected in the recording studio, the monitoring on file exports and deletions from the servers would be lighter.
Not sparing a glance over her shoulder, Ellipse slipped into the studio. It was roomier than the music rooms, with a soundproof box for the computers and boards and a large, open space for bands and singers and microphones. The walls had been covered up with wood and spongy acoustic panels to help with the sound quality, since metal made everything sound tinny.
Ellipse darted into the computer room and locked the door behind her. She zeroed in on her usual computer, its screen black but its lights blinking rapidly, and raced to wake it up. Her fingers shook as she typed in her password, and as the welcome screen slid away, on came her still-open sound editor. The export to an mp3 had a tiny sliver of time left, and so she opened the obligatory word processor. She brought up her statement, read it over once, and let out a short breath.
The song finished exporting. Everything was ready.
In the black room, lit up only by the computers and their flickering lights, Ellipse opened the satellite-wide email server and attached her song and statement, then sent it to herself. It popped up on her watch a moment later, only milliseconds after she turned on the tiny watch screen.
A bright yellow warning notice lit up the computer screen, but Ellipse ignored it. She forwarded the email through Tejal and Focci’s pinpoint fold generator on the Ink and waited, breath held, as the tiny loading circle on her watch spun around and around.
And then it disappeared, and a tiny window confirmed that the message had sent. The deed was done. The information on Andra-Media’s treatment of her was out in the universe now, away from the satellite’s databases. In minutes, the boys would have her story on every inhabited planet and moon and man-made-space-place in the known universe.
As her eyes flicked up to the yellow warning screen, Ellipse considered the math. Her statement was to be leaked to news outlets in addition to its original postings, and the journalists needed time to write. Once the story was passed around on Earth, it could be another few hours, even a day or so, before someone arrived at the Andra-Media headquarters to investigate.
With a heavy exhale, Ellipse glanced around the dark computer room. She had no reason to play innocent here. In fact, the more torture she could undergo before someone from Earth showed up, the better. She needed every bit of evidence she could get her hands on.
Ellipse tapped the computer screen to make the warning go away and figured if she was going out, she might as well do it with a bang. She pressed play on the mp3 of her song and turned up the volume as loud as it would go.
Immediately, a low thrum echoed through the room as drum beats layered in one on top of the other. A quiet trumpet drifted in, and then came her own voice.
Sirens demonstrated sincerity through the clearness of their singing, with perfect jumps between notes and open, bell-like tones, and though earthling singers sometimes went for raggedness or breaks to get across their most powerful emotions, Ellipse went full siren for this one. Her voice, crystalline and airy, bellowed through the speakers in an undulating melody that rose and fell like waves.
Supposedly, this one was for her debut. It was supposed to be a powerful, soulful opener to a long and successful idol career, with the idea that Ellipse would cater to more solemn tastes while Andra continued to put out bops and bangers and cheerful dance tunes. And in truth, Ellipse did write something soulful; the lyrics in both English and Trade Siren told a story of breaking chains and the gift of freedom. But Ellipse had no desire to be crafted into a star. She would write music again, but not for Andra-Media.
She span in her chair just as the song entered the bridge, smiling as the trumpet descant she had struggled with fluttered above the drums. Then she blew a raspberry and imagined the looks on people’s faces when they walked in to find her. Her guard would probably be flustered, concerned about her whereabouts. The rest of security would remain emotionless behind dark glasses, but Ellipse would take pride in getting one or two mouths to drop open.
The lady in white would probably startle at first, and then settle into her normal threatening voice. That would be less fun.
Ellipse stopped the chair when she faced the door and slumped into the cushions like she owned the place. Spreading her knees to give the impression of confidence, she crossed her arms and took a few deep breaths. She would be fine.
The door burst open right as her song restarted, and Ellipse thought it quite fitting. The rumbling bass drums and timpani provided excellent accompaniment to stomping guards. They filtered in, two by two, and arced the room, leaving space for the lady in white to stand in the doorway.
As Ellipse had predicted, she stiffened when she spotted Ellipse.
“Elliott,” the lady said, her nasal voice cold, “what is going on?”
“Ahh, nothing,” Ellipse replied. She forced herself to sound airy and unconcerned. “I think you will find out in about six days? Give or take one or two, of course. It takes time to get across the solar system.”
The lady stepped forward, her slippers slapping on the ground. “Repeat that again for me.”
“It takes time to get across the solar system.” Ellipse gave the lady a pitying pout. “Everyone knows that… Penelope.” That was her name, right?
“Not. That.”
Ellipse arched an eyebrow and pulled her mouth into a straight line. “I leaked that song you wanted to use for my debut. Whoops. It was never for your use anyways.”
“You are under contract,” the woman hissed. “Any music you produce belongs to Andra-Media.”
Spinning the chair in a slow circle, Ellipse shrugged. “Oh, I do not mind facing a civil court case. Especially not if the Andra-Media corporation is going to international court for violating child labor agreements. By the way, I know Titan keeps track of the military spacecraft. Does anyone know if one of the UN ships is nearby?””
The guards shifted uneasily, their dark outfits just barely visible under the lights from the computers. The lady in white trembled, and the blue lights cast long shadows over her angry snarl.
“I know the Bellevue hangs around Titan, especially since the citizen database attacks,” Ellipse mused. “If she comes, that would mean, oh, maybe an hour for the story to go to the UN, and then maybe another hour to decide to send someone to check around, and then another hour and a half to send a transmission to the Bellevue, and then they would be here within the day.”
“So go ahead,” Ellipse finished, coming back to face the lady, “punish me.”
“It takes almost two hours for any signal from this satellite to reach Earth,” the lady said. She sounded confident again, except for the little quiver at the end of her sentence. Ellipse’s change in attitude must have thrown her off. “It has to travel from-
“Here to Titan to Earth,” Ellipse finished, “and be approved by the people manning the servers and transmissions. I know. Let us just call it my extensive, universe-altering, little secret, shall we?” She stood up and presented her wrists, pressed together and ready to be bound. “Do your worst. I will always be ahead of you.”
With a frustrated breath, the lady pivoted and rushed out the door. “Bring her to her room,” she ordered.
Ellipse allowed the guards to take her and kept her chin up high.

I thought, like any teenager who watches too many action movies, that when Shell told me we would ask Elliott about her situation, we would conduct an interrogation. And really, that’s where everything went wrong.
Or maybe that’s where everything went right. I think, no matter what, Andra-Media would have lost. The Independent Titan attacks and Andra’s use of them to set everything in motion created a gap in Andra-Media’s defenses by setting a witness loose in the universe. So for Ellie, I think every option was similar; eventually she would be out from under Andra-Media’s thumb.
She could have stayed hidden until Andra’s plan went into effect. She could have spilled everything to Crane and Shell the moment they let her know they would not let her suffer. No matter what, someone would have exposed Andra-Media’s treatment of their workers.
The moment I attacked her on the earthling fold monitor, I saw the pseudo fire that every teenager has in their eyes, that blend of snark and disillusionment native to adolescence, turn into real fire. In that moment when capture was imminent, she made the choice to remain free.
My family pursued her, of course. At this point, my parents’ enjoyment of the hunt kicked in, but the real reason we kept after her was because Ellipse’s mysterious words caught our curiosities. I remember feeling a distant and jarring shock as she slipped away into the mess of metal and cement and bodies that made up the fold monitor. Elliott Bei had never existed? That was preposterous. Tabloids mentioned her birthday every year, and everyone knew Andra had a little sister. Even people on Titan, who had known the siblings before their fame, confirmed the existence of an Elliott Bei.
We stopped by the citizenship database to confirm her words and found her correct, which made my parents even more interested in her, especially when we found that Andra Bei had reregistered very shortly after Independent Titan’s bombings. It seemed odd that the siblings would not go together. The man who helped us frowned when he noticed this as well, his angular face crinkling in confusion. I only just made out his expression; the desks were quite tall at the citizenship database, and Crane and Shell had to prop themselves up on the desktops with their paws in order to see.
Shipping destinations are made public, which helps both pirates and protective forces locate ships. My parents and I trailed the Conics to Planet Five, and at the time, I thought this was really where things went sour.
Ellie seemed to make friends quickly. The moment my parents prowled up to the tyran and specifus on the crew and asked about her, the Conics crew went on the defensive. Or at least, that is how my parents related the story to me. They asked me to locate Ellie upon noticing that she was not with the ship and rest of the crew.
Again, I mistook locating for subduing, which was probably stupid on my part. I have no excuses for that. I distinctly remember chasing her through the station, with snowy, crystalline Planet Five hanging in the background. That was the sorest my arms had gotten in a while; every subsequent chase involving Ellie also involved her pushing me, thankfully. I once wound up with bruises all over from holding Focci in my lap though.
And then I saw my parents being led away, and I knew somewhere, we had screwed up.
For all that I lived with bounty hunters, I was unfamiliar with the courts. I remember rolling up to Ellie and Focci, the two of them already discussing their course of action, astounded at the open space in front of them.
I felt inferior as Ellie talked to me after that. She explained the legal system, which I immediately marked as suspicious, but had no way of acting on at the time, and then sang to Focci, keeping me out of the conversation. Once I joined Crane and Shell, I had never been kept out of a conversation before, or at least not so blatantly. It hurt to have our positions switched, with Ellie in power and me a subject of her whims.
But then, as she turned to walk away, she shot me a grin, one that crinkled her eyes just enough to be kind, and invited me along.
I did not ask her why she invited me on board the Conics until later, after Focci and I came out of our famous lawsuit with Spec Corp decades ago, when I realized that Focci and I would never have gotten far enough to warrant a lawsuit against a real universal tech giant without Ellie’s help. We probably would not have even been friends. But when I asked her, Ellie gave me a funny look.
“It was Focci’s decision,” she told me. The two of us sat on a Sirena dock, while Focci splashed in the water below us. She kicked her legs in the ocean, and I looked immediately to Focci, who had popped his head up from the tiny waves.
In my shaky voice, I asked him if Ellipse was telling the truth, that Focci had been the one to instigate everything.
He laughed, sounding remarkably dolphin-like, and clapped his webbed hands together. “We all did something important, no? I turned us into a team, and you brought the fold generator idea, and Ellie did the corporate parts. It was a team effort.”
“You are such a big brother,” Ellie complained immediately after. “Stop taking credit for making us all get along. Tejal and I figured it out eventually.”
“I caught you bickering about those little white stringy vegetables just yesterday.”
Ellie and I fought about bean sprouts, yes. We fought about food a lot, and she always won.
“Bickering over trivial things is an earthling test of friendship,” I said, though when Ellie and Focci both laughed at me, I realized I had mis-sung the word for ‘bickering’ and said something like ‘murdering fish.’
Still, for all that Focci smoothed things over, I like to think that all of us meeting was like fate. So many choices led to our meeting, and even more to our staying together, and when we all began making our own big choices, we changed the universe.

Ellipse was in the bathroom when the announcement came, loud and calm and tame, despite the subject matter. A deep voice echoed over the satellite-wide intercom, beginning with the usual drivel about everyone having a good day, which Ellipse ignored. She did not think Andra-Media had any right to ask if she was having a nice day, though if she ever met the announcer, she was sure he was probably a nice man.
“Please be courteous to the visitors who will be touring the satellite today,” the announcer continued, “we may be under investigation by the crew of the UNS Bellevue.”
Ooh, sweet.
“Continue business as usual, unless you have been given other instructions,” the announcer said, an uptick in pitch revealing his doubts about anyone having other instructions. “Have a good day.”
The people who worked directly with Ellipse and Andra probably had to change their behaviors for the day. Maybe the next time Ellipse used the bathroom today, her guard would not be forced to follow her into the stall. It was silly and extremely embarrassing; no way could Ellipse finagle her way out of someone’s surveillance while in a bathroom stall.
Admittedly, she had considered plugging the toilet once during her house arrest, just to see if she could start up some confusion and slip away for a few minutes.
She flushed the toilet and tapped the guard’s shoulder. “What is happening?” she asked.
The guard shoved open the stall door and sent Ellipse an exhausted look. “I know nothing. All I get told is where you should be and when. And also when I get bathroom breaks.”
“Wow, you really are low on the pecking order,” Ellipse observed. She strolled to the sinks and whistled a siren poem about guppy sirens gnawing on coral.
“I think I liked quiet Elliott better than whatever you are now.”
Ellipse shrugged and lathered her hands in soap. “Your loss. I am much more entertaining like this.”
The bathroom was quiet as Ellipse finished washing up. She splashed a bit of water on her face and looked in the mirror. She still looked too thin, but she thought her eyes popped a little more now. Hopefully trials on Earth would not make her revert back to being dull and tired.
Ellipse dried her hands on her pants and skipped out of the beautifully tiled bathroom. The guard followed after, fast-walking to keep up, and Ellipse headed for the satellite’s docks. With strangers around, no way would she get manhandled into following a schedule.
She sped through the hallways, enjoying the clip clop of her shoes and the guard’s boots as they hit the floor. Her feet carried her through turn after turn, until she ran straight into the visiting party, in the open atrium right outside the docks. The lady in white was there, with a handful of guards in black, and with her were a trio of men in military garb. They stood stark against the walls, all clean lines and solid colors against grey surfaces carved with curves and patterns.
The lady in white stood at the front of the group, right next to a giant man, just as imposing as the ship, in a clean, perfectly pressed military uniform. He gave Ellipse a friendly smile, and the lady in white immediately followed suit.
“Elliott!” she exclaimed, motherly and singsong. “Did you come to say hello to the Bellevue crew?”
Ellipse turned right to the man in the suit and offered a hand. She felt no inclination to respond to someone who confused kindness for acting like Ellipse was five. “Hi, my name is Ellie. I assume you came because of the leak?”
Immediately, the man dropped his smile. He took Ellipse’s hand and gave a firm handshake. “Indeed. I’m Lieutenant Jackson, the psychologist on the Bellevue. Given the news on Earth, I assume you know why I’m here.”
“Yes, sir,” Ellipse replied.
“Excellent.” He turned to the lady in white. “We will take her for preliminary interviews. Normally, the UN wouldn’t get involved in this sort of thing, but Andra-Media is such a big company, and the Titan problems create some issues with sending US officials out here. And I won’t lie. We’re also here to investigate foul play in global stock exchanges and other violations of international worker’s rights laws.”
The woman scoffed. “Elliott is a performer, not an administrator. She has no information in those aspects.”
“And we have to start a list of witnesses somewhere. Might as well begin with someone who has clearly and publicly stated their position.” The lieutenant met Ellipse’s eyes, stepped to the side, and gestured for her to join him. He offered a weak smile and then pointed at the Bellevue. “It’s already been agreed upon that you shouldn’t be on the satellite during the interview process. That’s the procedure, after all. If we decide, and I say this so we have our bases covered, that you aren’t in any danger here, then you will be returned.”
“Okay,” Ellipse said. That all sounded right.
“Right then,” the lieutenant agreed. “Let’s go.” His two men turned in perfect sync, and they marched in a perfect rhythm as they followed Ellipse and the lieutenant into the docking bay.
The Bellevue filled the bay, looming large and almost touching the walls. Well, compared to the Ink she looked like she was about to touch the dock walls. She was a giant vessel, almost the size of a barge, with a clean, sharp prow and seafaring ship windows. Her engines projected from the far end of the ship in two massive, shiny cylinders, and large rectangles were set into the hull, probably places where short range dogfighting vehicles docked.
Ellipse wondered if Tejal had ever been on a military spacecraft. His biological parents had been ambassadors, after all.
She followed the lieutenant up a thin gangplank that arced into a small opening in the hull, and glanced one more time at the dock. Hopefully she never saw it again.

Since the day she boarded the Bellevue, Ellipse had been in a nonstop cycle of eating, sleeping, and talking. She had given names, answers to questions she had never thought of, and infinite repetitions of the same story, again and again. She had stayed a week aboard the Bellevue, then was escorted onto another ship heading back to Earth, and then led through the bumpy shuttles and planes and trains that took her to the Netherlands.
Ellipse hated court. The vaulted wooden ceiling, with its abundant coffers, and the wooden rows of seats behind the lawyer’s benches were all very nice; the place was exquisite in its materials and elegance. But she was surrounded by lawyers and adults and stuffy old people all the time, who argued over minutiae and semantics and loopholes. It was so boring.
One time, a member of the defense team had questioned her on whether her experiences really constituted as serious abuse, and Ellipse had wanted to jump from the stand and strangle the man and steal his probably-very-nice cuff links.
“Sorry,” she had said instead, “but I’m pretty sure that grooming a child to give away work for little to no pay and regular deprivation of food count as abuse? You can bring a dictionary to court, if it helps.”
And then someone had to point out that contracts signing away rights to money in exchange for indefinite work were banned, having been considered a form of slavery. So, it was boring, and Ellipse wanted people to just see sense and be done with it. And then, one day, in the monotony of sitting in that wood-lined court room, with a hundred spectators eager to see the results, the judge made the decision.
Ellipse almost missed it. The judge spoke in monotone,