Young Writers Society

Three weeks after leaving Hub Titan and flying through empty space, when the Conics was docking in a tiny hole in a corner of Un Station’s massive network of rings and hallways, Ellipse noticed a little ‘new email’ notification on her watch.

She stood at the edge of the cargo bay floor, where the ramp began its descent, with her hand damp with the sweat she had literally just wiped off her forehead, staring at her watch like it had grown legs. No one used regular email unless both parties were known to live on the same planet, and she had not received an email since the day she originally flitted off Titan. That had been over a year ago.

“Something wrong?” Tejal shouted at her. His hands rested on the wheels of his chair, already gripping the sides so he could get a move on.

Ellipse shook her head. “No,” she called. “I am good. I think my watch’s purposeful obsolescence is kicking in is all.”

Rolling his eyes, Tejal snorted and smiled. “You know Focci and I could fix it up for you, right?”

“No way.” Ellipse started down the ramp and shoved her hands in her pockets. “You would stick one of your little fold generators inside of it, and Focci would rewrite the whole operating system. I do not need that.”

“We wouldn’t stick a generator in your watch,” Tejal said, laughing. He rolled forwards a few centimeters and drummed his fingers along his wheels. “I already installed one inside the Conics, and we attached the other to a changing room on Hub Titan.”

Ellipse almost tripped. “You did what?”

“There’s a miniature fold generator hooked up to the Conics,” Tejal said, swiveling to face Ellipse again. “Now come on. Focci says he found a bathroom.”

She sauntered off the ramp and reached over to ruffle Tejal’s hair. “I still do not think that will work again,” she said.

“Well, if it doesn’t,” Tejal said, shrugging and pushing himself after her, “then we’ll just come up with a new strategy for finding Max.” He beamed, and his countenance was so joyful that his hair actually bounced.

Okay, too much excitement. Grimacing, Ellipse scratched her neck and slouched over. “I think we should go back to that little detail where you installed an explosive, space-time-transcendent sliver of metal inside our ship,” she grumbled. She opened the person-sized docking bay door, gestured for Tejal to go ahead of her, and then followed after him.

“It’s not like we had it turned on when we passed through the fold,” Tejal said. “That’s what caused the Impending to explode.”

“But I thought the little generators were unstable to begin with,” Ellipse pointed out.

Tejal cringed. “Uh. I mean, Focci and I aren’t even sure if our generators are working.” He gave himself one particularly hard push and gazed up at the curved, cement ceiling. “I can’t put something that uses a lot of energy in a phone or watch, so I tried to design a generator that would only cut maybe an hour max off of regular battery life. And well, I had to pretend that the properties of space-time are really convenient in order to do that.”

“Convenient how?” Ellipse asked. She brought up her watch and tried to pinpoint Focci’s location in the labyrinth of circles and short, straight stretches.

“You know the graph of x-cubed?”

Ellipse nodded. She was not entirely ignorant to math and science.

“I’m kind of hoping that the graph relating energy consumption to fold size looks like that, only shifted over a little.”

That sort of made sense, except for the fact that size could not be negative, so the graph would presumably cut off at x-equals-zero. Still holding up her watch hand, Ellipse glanced around the station to look for the next turn.

Every station in the Un system was designed for hydrogen floaters, not for any of the other species, who all either required tall, open hallways to fly, or nice flooring on which to walk. Un Station’s unfinished metal floors looked grubby in the white, too-close lighting, and walking through the halls felt like being trapped in a hospital basement. Everything was cramped and small, and the slightly lowered gravity made the halls feel still smaller.

Ellipse led Tejal down an even tighter hallway next, watching as the red dot that represented her on her watch’s map crept closer to Focci’s blue dot. She dodged a gaggle of hydrogen floaters’ tentacles as she walked past, and then shooed a crowd of saur away from Tejal’s path so he would not run over any of them.

When at last, after too many turns and backtracks, Ellipse and Tejal met up with Focci, both earthlings gave the scene around them a long look of disbelief.

“This is not a bathroom,” Ellipse sang, gesturing at the open pipe next to her. It looked like one of those ‘lazy river’ swimming pool attractions, only with metal instead of white plaster.

“I would use it as a bathroom,” Focci said. Of course he would. He did not have to pee, and sirens had community bathrooms so that they could more effectively get rid of waste while underwater. “A gato would use it as a bathroom.”

Gato prefered private squat toilets, and everyone in the universe knew that.

“There is nowhere to hide here!” Ellipse argued. “Max would not keep away from bounty hunters by hanging out by a pipe where everyone can see them.”

Focci’s gills flared. “Maybe you should have known that this station does not have earthling style bathrooms.”

As Ellipse fumed, trying to come up with a reply, Tejal rolled in between them and put his hands up, placating.

“Guys,” he said, “it’s okay. We’ll keep looking elsewhere. And even if we don’t find Max, there’s still Ami out there.”

“I knew this would not work,” Ellipse muttered, crossing her arms.

The boys gave her twin, disappointed, are-you-serious looks.

“Okay, fine.” She threw up her hands and brought her watch to her face. “We will give ourselves two hours to comb this station from top to bottom. It looks like the largest room in this place is the floating garden, so we will go there and then divvy up the halls, finish our searches, and then return to the garden. Sound good?”

“Sounds good,” Tejal said. After a few moments of Mouthbot singing with exactly the tone of Ellipse’s trumpet, Focci agreed too.

“Right,” Ellipse said. She pivoted on her toes, examined her watch again, and began to march.