Penumbra By Chris Brecheen

Penumbra

By Chris Brecheen 

Yes, I can see Penumbra.

I’ve been able to see them for years, even without the usual equipment. I know nobody believes me, which is (of course) why I’m here.  Dr. Cienica says that I’ll be tested soon, but I know she’s lying.  I can tell.  (Are you reading this Dr. C?  I can always tell.)  She pays lots of attention to how dirty her glasses are whenever she lies.  She starts looking around for her little green wipe cloth and holds her glasses out in front of her to see the spots.  I watch her hazel eyes darting around--looking anywhere in the world but at me--and I know she’s lying.   

I wish you all would test me. Bring your cameras. Bring your motion sensors. Bring your thermal imaging equipment. And I’ll bring just myself. You’ll see.

Everyone’s so sure I’m lying. Everyone’s got it all figured out. So for now, Dr. Cienica says my only job is to explain why and how I have this amazing ability. She says it with that edge of incredulity in her voice--lengthening the A in “amazing” while remaining deadpan--so I never forget she’s humoring me. I think they must have a class in college on how to maintain plausible deniability when talking to people without ever letting them forget that you think they’re delusional. I imagine Dr. C did very well in that class.

The problem is, I don’t know why I can see Penumbra. I don’t know how. The only thing I know is when. When I started to be able to see them.

So I guess I’ll write about that, and maybe you and Dr. C and the whole gang can put those big science brains of yours to work doing something other than figuring out how much Sertindole to give me.

It started with this one Penumbra at the 19th street BART station. I think she lived there.  Maybe she knew how to avoid the scanners. Maybe she scraped together the six dollar minimum. Maybe BART sucks at sweeps. Places are always getting lazy unless there’s a problem, and BART has been struggling with its budget since forever. These days I wonder if she didn't know an employee who helped her out. Anyway, somehow this lady got herself settled at the west end of the eastbound platform, and set up house. 

I don’t know how long she’d been there. I never went down to that end until I started walking.  I’d usually sit on the benches with the blue tile backs and cement seats, pull out my tablet or my laptop, and play some video games. I only started walking after the strip club. 

I guess I should explain that. Dr. Cienica says I’m supposed to make this “girthy.” I don’t see what the point of that is, but I guess I can flesh out some back story. I’m not particularly attractive. I’m not tall or in great shape. My face isn’t handsome. I've had a few relationships, but they always took time to bloom. I never catch anyone’s eye. I just don’t have the look for it. I never really thought about that until I went to this strip club in the city for a friend’s birthday party. His girlfriend rounded up a few of his friends for an evening of debauchery, half to embarrass the hell out of him and half because I think him being there took the curse off of things she wasn’t ready to admit--at least if those smoldering looks I saw were any indication. Or maybe she was. Jesus I don't know what their relationship agreements were.

But I suppose I’m getting off topic.

The strip club was kind of an eye-opening experience. No, I don’t mean an eye-popping experience, though it was that too, but actually I realized something watching women grind and undulate taut bellies and svelte limbs to the thumping music. As desire gripped my gut like a hot talon and taut muscles bent and flexed through the haze of stale cigarette smoke, I noticed that not all the dancers were classically what you might call beautiful.

They were fun to look at. $172 dollars worth of fun if I remember correctly--even though I started the night insisting I was only there for the party.  Some of them were total lookers, but a lot of them were sort of average.  If those amazing bodies had been concealed, they wouldn’t have caught anyone’s eye. This one that I hired to do a lap dance on me--Cindy or Candy--was kind of plain. An underbite, and a flatish nose made me wonder if she ran into too many walls as a kid. (As I’m writing this now...I really wonder what made me think something so mean and why I can’t recall her name.)

Anyway, Candy or Cindy was not unattractive, you understand, just nothing special. But oh how that gentle groove between the muscles along the side of her thigh drew my eyes when she danced, and she was just so hot. It occurred to me that the reason all these guys gladly submitted to a two drink minimum and a weirdo who made you tip him to leave the bathroom was not the faces. It was the bodies. At the time, I think I had some thought like looking at a Ferrari and not thinking about driving it.

So I started going to the gym.  I lifted weights, cut out sweets and fats, and started jogging. And anytime I rode BART, I walked the platform. Up and down as fast as I could past the long lines of people queued up at each door marker so they wouldn’t lose their position. 135 yards I estimated.  About 13 laps to a mile. I tried to get as many laps in as I could before the train pulled up. 

That’s when I found her.

I don’t know if you remember winter three years ago but it rained all the time. Not peppery drizzles that we usually get around here, but merciless downpours. It would let up, the sun might even tease us with a quick glimpse, and then more rain. It was raining the day I met her. I know that because I was soaked. When I left home, I saw sunbeams punching through the grey blanket of clouds, but in the three-block walk, the sky opened up. I had to do my laps despite that nasty, sloppy feeling of cold, wet denim pressed against my thighs. I was afraid to turn on my smartphone to play games since it had gotten a little wet in my pocket. So I plodded along with squeaky steps and simply looked around at the mosaic pattern of the blue tiles on the wall. I had only recently seen that there was actually a complicated pattern and not just a random assortment of tiles. The darker blue tiles snaked through the lower parts of the station and the lighter blues alternated with whites up above.  A few dark tiles dotted the top, and a few light ones showed up down below. It looked completely random at first, but it was actually a predictable pattern if you looked at the bigger picture.

When I saw her, it took me a second to realize what I was looking at.  Everyone sees them once in a while. One of my friends can sometimes hear them when they're talking to themselves and then if he focuses on the voice, eventually he can see where it's coming from. And I knew a guy in high school who swore if they were walking toward him, he would see them within 15 feet. You hear the stories on the news when one of them saves someone from a fire or something. It’s always the same: the person can see them for a week or two, then it fades. None of that stuff applied to me though. And yet there she was.  I turned a corner, looked down, and there she was.

She was a small black woman. Short but also thin and frail. She had herself set up for comfort--a dark grey blanket, a pillow of bundled clothes, a folding grocery cart filled with crap. I half expected to see a TV plugged in, leeching off BART electricity, so she could watch some soap opera. As soon as I noticed her eyes, I didn’t notice anything else. I don’t like hyperbole, and I always thought burning-rage-eye or fiery-look cliches were stupid. 

She made them all make sense.

And she did not like being seen. “What the fuck are you doing?” she spat. Her voice was low and gravelly and sounded like a dog giving you your one warning growl not to come any closer, so only I could hear, and the consonants hit hard in a tight staccato.

I kept walking.  I didn’t know what else to do. Penumbra are dangerous. They’re usually crazy, almost always alcoholics or addicts, and very often military-trained veterans--not a combination you want to upset. I know you aren’t supposed to talk to them or really even acknowledge them if you do happen to see one. Eventually, my walking carried me behind the blue partition wall and out of her sight, cutting off that lock between our eyes.

I took it as a fluke.  She obviously must have done something–made a move I could perceive as a threat, gotten close to me, addressed me directly without me realizing it, or something–I just didn’t know what. 

Except it wasn’t a fluke. 

The next day, I saw her again in the same place. I noticed a spray of salt and pepper along the fringes of her short afro. Her right eye seemed bigger than her left. Smells of vomit, urine, feces, and unmitigated body odor like sour onions wafted around her. Her folding grocery cart overflowed with dirty clothes and had a threadbare stuffed lamb perched on top of it all. It was worn in patches, with one leg that looked tied off at the foot, but it wasn’t stained like everything else.

Her head yanked as I came around, and our eyes met again. That murderous rage welled up in less than a second. “Don’t you fucking see me!”  she seethed.

But I kept right on seeing her every day.

I decided her name was Claire; I’m not sure why.  Claire had two sets of clothes–one was blue-jean overalls with a thin orange sweater like the color of canned tomato soup, and the other was long-faded camouflage pants with a grey splotchy shirt that may once have been a cream color.

Sometimes she hadn’t even woken up yet. It was always a relief when I’d round the corner and see her scrunched up into a ball, trying to tuck as much of her tiny body under that coarse grey blanket as possible.  Her arms looked like wrinkled brown sticks ending in twiggish fingers with gnarled marble-sized knots for knuckles. They clutched her little lamb close to her chest. Swollen bare feet poked out the other end of the blanket, revealing black patches on the soles as dark as oil, two missing toes on her left foot, and angry red splotches running up both ankles. She slept soundly, mouth open, slimy runners of drool dripping onto the jacket she’d balled up under her head.  Once I stopped to look at her. I watched her breathing gently, and I wondered how far up her leg the red patch went.

After that I started being relieved when she wasn’t asleep. 

Her head would flip around as I rounded the corner. Her eyes would harden into those hate-filled buttons, and she would growl at me not to look at her. I tried.  I really did. I tried looking away.  I tried ignoring her. I stared at the opposite wall and studied the pattern in the mosaic of dark and light tiles.  But I still saw her out of the corner of my eye and she still yelled at me.  “Stop seeing me!”

After a couple of weeks, I got pissed off. Who was this insane Penumbra to tell me where to walk?  I grew to hate that end of the platform.  I was entitled to walk the BART platform without some Penumbra ruining it for me by setting herself up like it was the Ritz Carlton.

“Stop seeing me!” Claire would yell, and my blood would boil. 

One day she had an unusual moment of lucidity. Instead of getting angry, she just watched me when I came around the corner. Her eyes narrowed.  “How?” she asked simply. She was trying to fix one of the eyes of her lamb with a needle and thread, sewing another button into the lamb’s face like she’d done it a thousand times. I could see that the button she was using was bigger than the other eye, and navy blue instead of black. Her fingers looked like sticks wrapped in brown tissue paper, but they worked the needle adroitly.

I didn’t stop my round, but I did slow a bit. “I don’t know. You’re the only one.” 

“Lucky me,” she said.

“I don’t like it either,” I said.

“You’re always walking,” she said. “Where you going?”

“Nowhere,”

She smiled.  It was an eerie and serene smile. With her working a needle and thread on a stuffed animal, I had a powerful image of her smiling the same way, as she performed urgent surgery on the favorite toy of an inconsolable child.

“Don’t need to walk to go nowhere,” she said. “Save yourself a trip.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I couldn’t think of what else to say, and I was still picturing that image of her as some actual person.  I must have looked pretty stupid.

“I wish you’d walk somewhere else,” she said.

“One end to the other,” I said.

“I wish you’d walk the other way.” An edge crept into her voice. I was only about halfway done with my horseshoe, but I felt her old rage rising.

“Yeah, well,” I said, “if I walked the other way, I’d eventually hit the other side and have to come back.”  I thought I was being pretty clever.

“Then turn around sooner!” she spat. 

I stopped.  “Lady…what is your problem?”  God I knew better than to be hostile to a Penumbra. I vaguely wondered if anyone thought I was talking to myself.  I’m still not sure what I was thinking. “I’m sorry I can see you.  Believe me, I don’t want to.  I mean…who the hell wants to see some Penumbra?”

At first she seemed to deflate a bit like a balloon released without tying off.  Her hand pulled her lamb close to her.  She looked away.  But then her little tiny jaw set, and started to quiver.

“Stupid ASSHOLE!” she screamed, and struggled to her feet with only the arm that wasn’t clutching her lamb tight.  She was tinier than she looked lying down. I’m five four, and people usually tower over me, but Claire might have come up to my shoulder. 

I flipped her off and started walking again. I tried to be casual as I walked away, but my heart slammed against my tonsils, and I knew casual was gone. She hobbled after me, favoring her left foot and with each step she rubbed her hips with those gnarled hands. “Keep walking. Don’t you come back here!” she said with just enough volume to keep from getting noticed. “Don’t you ever come back here!”

I found a bench and sat down, my circuit abandoned. My hands shook.

Then I saw the white operator phone.  It stood out against the blue brickwork like a lone milky cloud coasting across a sunny sky.  Oh the things I could do to her—the torment I could inflict. All it takes is one person to point a Penumbra out, then the dominoes fall. I had all the power. She would have to show me some respect if she didn’t want to end up in the pouring rain.

I imagined the scene…

“Stupid cracker!” she’d yell.

I’d stay cool, collected. “You might want to consider that tone, Claire,” I’d reply.

She’d be taken back by my demeanor. She’d sense something was...different. Just from my voice, she’d know I meant business. But she wouldn’t be ready to let go. Not just yet. “Don’t look at me, cracker. Don’t walk here and look at me!”

I’d saunter towards the phone. I’d place my hand on it, and sneer back at her.  “Are you sure you want to do this, Claire? You sure you want to push me? I can end your whole little setup with one call. You got a pretty sweet gig going here, the rain coming down like it is. Shelter. Warmth. You sure you want to mess that up?”

She would stop cold. 

“Is it really worth it?” I would ask.

The fight would drain out of her. Her eyes would go soft and gaze at me, pleading.

“Now,” I would say, “do I lift this phone, or do you apologize?”

Her head would slump. She would sigh. “I’m sorry,” she would say. “I’m so sorry.”

“And you’re going to leave me alone from now on when I walk by you, right?” I’d say.

She would nod, utterly defeated.

Well, I seem to have gone way over five pages here, but I guess I should at least finish my story.  Fortunately, Dr. C says that's a minimum, not a maximum. I guess I didn’t need so much filler after all.

She was asleep for several days after that, so my fantasy marinated in the juice of my imagination, getting more and more absurd each time. At one point, I actually imagined her taking me back to the Penumbra headquarters and becoming their king. There may have even been a queen who wasn’t quite so dirty and crazy as the rest. It's all embarrassing to think about now, honestly.

The next time I found her awake I appeared to be running late for work. I was up for review and even actually wearing a spiffy black dress shirt to score some points. Not that my shirt would matter if I waltzed in late. But I would just make on time it if I caught the next train and walked as fast as I could from my stop. I rounded the corner expecting to find her asleep again, but she was sitting up, reading a tattered paperback—one of those romance novels they write so many of that they have a triple digit number on the spine. Her little lamb sat in her lap with its mismatched buttons. 

She looked up at me right away.  “I told you not to come back here!” she said.  Her voice was cold and level.

My heart pounded.  My hands shook.  I tried to remember my plan, but it started to get muddled when I actually looked at her.  “Look, relax okay!”

“I don’t want you seeing me,” she gritted through bared teeth. Her gums had receded so far that she looked like a skull. Most of her teeth were black or brown. Several dark spaces marked missing ones.  One was a nub, worn halfway down, the tooth blackened. I watched her nostrils pulse as they flared and I saw the delicate hairs inside fluttering against her breath. A fresh brown stain on her splotchy shirt looked almost exactly like a small person.

“I get to be here too,” I stammered. My voice shook. "I paid for a ticket.  I can walk where I want!"

Claire strained and twisted to stand.  The wrinkled skin of her arms shifted as her tiny muscles flexed. She didn’t seem to be able to do much with her left hand, and so getting up was a process of shifting weight on her right. A process made even more cumbersome by the fact that she kept adjusting her lamb so it wouldn’t fall to the floor. Finally she stood, her lamb in her right hand, and swiveled her eyes to meet mine.

“I’ll call the cops!” I blurted.  I took a few steps back. “I’ll get you kicked out.”

“Motherfucker!” she screamed.  This was loud enough that people would notice, and I saw a couple of heads turn to look. “I ain’t done shit to you. Why do you keep seeing me?”

"I'll do it!"  I moved down the platform toward the phone. Claire waddled after me favoring her left leg. I dimly heard my train being announced as approaching. I didn’t care. I reached the phone well before her. I touched its smooth, white surface. I looked back at Claire. She still hobbled after me, screaming obscenities.

The Howl of the BART car pulling into the station echoed against the blue brick walls. It bounced across every surface and ricocheted around the station. The whine of the brakes screamed even over Claire. I lifted the receiver to my ear. This finally stopped her advance. She stood and stared. One shoulder slumped but the other—the side she held her lamb in—she held rigid and high. It gave her an odd, slanted look. Her bare brown feet contrasted with the white tile she stood on. I remember very clearly wondering if she could feel the black patches when she walked or if they were numb spots.

Or did they hurt? 

The doors of the train slid open with a hiss. “Pittsburg Bay Point train now boarding; platform one,” the soft female voice said. I would be late if I didn’t get on. Claire looked at me, unmoving and silent. Her head cocked--daring me to go through with it.

 I pressed the receiver to my ear.  The doors on the train slid closed with a hiss.

“Hello?” the operator said. 

What happened next still bothers me. I wondered who she was. Who was Claire? Who was this little, delicate-looking but fierce Penumbra that liked to say fuck a lot? How did she become a Penumbra. We know they all start out as real people. Did she just slip away from everyone? Did she fall on hard times? Drugs? Alcohol? I wondered if she played as a child. Before she faded away, did she have a family? Did she have children of her own? Did she sew their wounded stuffed animals back to health, and return them to sniffling kids with grateful eyes? This little lamb couldn’t have lasted forty years from her own childhood. Could it have been one of her children’s?

Then I thought of the cops escorting her out into the rain and the water seeping into her clothing and making a sopping-wet, freezing-cold sheath on her bony body like it had done to my jeans the first day I saw her. I thought about the wet slopping against her own thighs. I thought of her crawling into a cardboard box to sleep. I thought of taking painful steps on black patches of skin. I thought about what it would feel like if every step hurt.

“Hello,” the operator said. “Is anyone there?”

My train pulled away with a rising cry, eventually fading as the darkness beyond the station swallowed it. “Sorry,” I said. I put the phone back in the cradle. My hands relaxed and fell open. I sat down on the little bench near the phone. I looked back at Claire, not too far off. Her chin tilted just a little upwards, cocked in triumph.

“Hey,” I said, and she looked at me. With me sitting and her standing, our eyes were level. We looked straight at each other.

I yanked a small black button off my shirt, and tossed it at her.  “You win,” I said. I tried to throw it with all the hate and vitriol I felt, but it was just a button, and she reached out and caught it without the slightest trouble.

The next day I stopped walking.

It was summer before I dared to peek around the corner again. She wasn’t there. I don’t know if she left after the rains or what. Only a dingy stain ground into the linoleum remained.  However, I discovered, pressed into the crack in the cement where wall met floor, a small, navy blue button.

I know what you’re thinking. Maybe she was there, but I just couldn’t see her.  Look, I know that’s not it.  I know I would have seen her if she’d been there.  Because I can see all of them now.  Not just Claire…all of them. I see them under bridges, in parks, tucked into doorways, on busses, living right beneath our eyes. There's so many of them  Everywhere. 

So you tell me--you and Dr. Cienica.  Now you know the story.  Maybe you can see something I overlooked.

[© 2012  All Rights Reserved.   If you enjoyed Penumbra, please consider a small donation (in the tip jar on the left side of the screen or even better becoming a Patron) to continue to fund future offerings of fiction here on Writing About Writing.]

Falling From Orbit by Chris Brecheen

Falling from Orbit  
by Chris Brecheen

They say when you are dying, your life will flash before your eyes. Never one for convention, Millie Winter did not find this to be true. Only a single summer plagued her vision when she was dying. When a Human’s First radical slipped a DZP tablet into each of three lavender cosmopolitans and left her tied spread eagled to a bed, she drifted to toward oblivion inside dreams of the summer in 87. When the rusty fang of a nail jutting from the back of a protestor’­s sign bit into the underside of her wrist, and the leering man in his denim jacket dragged it half way to her funny bone, it was the summer of 87 assaulting her senses as vermilion jets slowed to gentle pulses. Even now, suspended in the air over the waters of the San Francisco bay, in that instant before gravity yanks her into the blackness below, she is looking out past the glittering lights of Alcatraz and Oakland to the giant harvest moon rising beyond, and it reminds her of watching the Earth rise like a shimmering topaz from Luna’s horizon in the summer of 87. She remembers Alan’s hand curled in her own, and this is all it takes to trigger the familiar chain of memories that rush towards her even faster than the inky blackness below.

She remembers how her hands trembled as she opened the envelope from Oklude Industries. The words “accepted” and “welcome” winked back at her. A smile lit her face. She had done it. She had done what they said she couldn’t do.

She remembers her mother’s beaming face. “Good for you kiddo!” she said.  “I’m glad the competition wasn’t as tough as you heard.”

She remembers the way her father pulled his reading glasses from his plaid flannel shirt pocket with thick calloused hands, placed them over his wrinkling eyes, and read the whole letter out loud from beginning to end. “Dear Emily Winter, We are pleased to inform you...” At the end he took his glasses off to look at her. “I am so proud of you, Bumblebee. You worked hard.  You deserve this.”

She remembers her best friend Andrea glared across a curl of golden hair she let fall over her eyes.  Andrea did this when she didn't approve of things, and she didn't approve of a great many things. Millie first got the look when they met in kindergarten. Millie tried to explain to Andrea why winged unicorns weren’t biologically possible, and Andrea only stopped glaring after tricking Millie into admitting that magic made anything possible, and that magic might exist because everyone said it didn’t--because people got things wrong all the time.

“What’s wrong, Dre?” Millie probed when the over-the-curl gaze fell upon her. Digging out Andrea’s issues was usually painful. Letting them fester always was.

“Do you have to go away?” Andrea asked. “Especially to a place like that?”

“Oklude Industries is a very prestigious internship,”  Millie said.  “Plus they pay for my room and board and an entertainment stipend.”

“It’s not the company. It’s the place.”  Andrea drifted off.

"How many people actually get to go there?" Millie said.  "Everyone talks about it like it's no big deal, but no one has ever really been there.  I'll get to do what almost no one else really has."

"It's just so far away," Andrea said.

“Can’t you be happy for me?”  Millie said. “Just this one time?”

“I am happy, Mills.  I'm happy that you got accepted.  You showed em!  But, remember, you only applied to prove wrong everyone that you couldn't make it. Who cares about actually going?”

“I didn’­t care when I thought they were right,” Millie said. “Now I do.”

“That makes absolutely no sense at all Millie,” Andrea said. She rolled her eyes.

“I know.”

“This is supposed to be our last hurrah. The summer after graduation! Big fanfares. The best parties.  The last of the bad decisions you can chalk up to college experimentation. I mean you literally can’t get any further away from me than the moon. And, who wants to be around all those stuffy...” she made a noise that was a cross between being sick and “Splerg!”

“I like stuffy.” Millie said. “People don’t make sense to me. All those emotions messing with their brains. Stuffy isn’t so bad.”

“It is when you can’t have feelings,” Dre said.

“Case in point,” Millie said, “this conversation.”

Andrea’s voice took on a conspiratorial edge. “Did you know Derrick Anderson was asking me about you? Wanted to know if you were seeing anyone. Could be a bad summer to be out of town, Mills.”

Millie paused. She looked down at the chewed fingernails on her left hand and thought of sitting in Differential Equations behind Derrick, staring at that place where his neck and shoulders met, and wondering if he might gasp or sigh if she touched it with her tongue.

She shook her head. “This will be good for me. Oklude internships are crown jewels.  People walk into seven figure salaries with something like that on their resume.

“Come on!”  Andrea said, sounding a bit like a car salesman. “What if Derrick finds some other math nerd and gets all hot for her. He’s not going to pine--not with a ass like his.  He asked me about you.  He asked me about your interests.  Your interests! Who actually says that? He is so into you. Come on! Last hurrah!”

“Maybe last hurrahs are overrated.”

Andrea sighed. “Maybe your face is overrated, Millicent Winter." She screwed up her mouth and stuck out her tongue. “No one in their right mind doesn't want a last hurrah. I swear, without me you’­d forget how to be human.”


She remembers how her mother giving her advice one night while they were putting away the dishes. “I know you, Millie,” her mother said. “You’re always trying to swim upstream. And it’s cute sometimes, but if you pull that crap with Luna Population, you’re going to end up in trouble.”

“Okay mom,” Millie said, rolling her eyes.

Her mother dropped the plates she was holding, and they shattered across the blue tile floor in a cascade of tiny white shards. She grabbed Millie’s head firmly and pressed their foreheads together. Millie could smell the tang of cranberry juice on her breath, and could see the cake of foundation filling in crow’­s feet around her eyes. The pressure was firm, but not uncomfortable.

“I’m serious,” her mother said, sliding her hands to the side of Millie’s cheeks. Her lip quivered. “You don’t know how afraid to be yet, Emily. You don’t know what serious is. Remember your Uncle Roy? Brilliant linguist. Published. Running the big ten circuit as a guest speaker. Ivy league professor.  Such a career ahead of him! Not even a sympathizer. But one article--one--on how the word ‘exodus’ was technically a misnomer because it should have been ‘exile,’ and  overnight he can’t even find a job teaching a survey course at a community college. One article! People have died over this. This can’t be like your kooky sense of fashion or veganism or something. Go get the feather in your cap and come home.”

“You broke all the plates, Mom,” Millie said, confused and unsure what to do, but feeling scared and loved all at the same time, like she was wrapped too tightly in the most comfortable blanket ever.

“They’­re just things,” her mother said. “Don’­t ever forget that.”


She remembers her trip in disjointed images: the Earth falling away more quickly than she expected (far more quickly than the black water now rising up to meet her); her discovery that space wasn’t black at all, but crammed unmercifully with points of light; how fascinating she found the science and technology behind the colonial dome and how it creeped inexorably along the massive titanium track on a 28 day circuit around the south pole, keeping it straddling the light and dark side of the surface, perpetually within the twilight of lunar dusk where the temperatures were bearable; being given cumbersome magnetic boots that took up the slack of low Lunar gravity but making each step a comic display of clumsiness.

She remembers her first day of work at Oklude and how her boss, T-dor, explained her job to her. T-dor was one of the older teaching and training models with a square hole for a mouth and bald head, and reminded Millie so much of a crash test dummy that she had a hard time not giggling when ever he looked at her. Her job would be to look through thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of lines of computations and see if the numbers “looked right.”  The staff could do lightning fast computations at levels of complexity right at the edge of human understanding, but their biggest problems happened if a nominal error in the data snowballed unnoticed through the calculations--feedback loops, cascade errors, that sort of thing. They had no intuitive ability to look at a number and sense that it was way off.

“Wait,” Millie said.  She looked from T-dor to the screen with the computations and back. “I have a double degree in general mathematics as well as probability and statistics. I got a 3.9 from Stanford.  I graduated Summa Cum Laude, and was second in my class.”

T-dor cocked his head and took a moment to reply. “That is why we chose you, yes. You were our most impressive candidate.” He paused. “Well, technically that’s not true.  You were our most impressive candidate without any rather...transparent hostility towards Luna Population.”

“But you don’t want me to do any math?” Millie asked.

T-dor paused again. “Of course we do.  You are doing math. You must be quite familiar with the operations in order to know if the numbers seem right. No one without your expertise would be able to tell if they were looking at something that was roughly correct or simply a random number. However, when it comes to the actual calculations, we can perform them nearly three thousand percent faster than you, even if you use a computer.  It is more efficient this way.”

“So all that studying and all the competition to get here, and the only thing you want me to do is look at some number and tell you how it makes me feel?”

“Yes,” T-dor said, oblivious to her tone of voice. “We lack that ability.”


She remembers Alan S-mer. He was a Synth: virtually indistinguishable from humans without instruments--the model that led to The Exodus. Millie only knew he wasn’t human when he danced into the Oklude's break room gracefully, clearly not wearing magnetic boots.  He had dark eyes, sandy hair, an imbalanced goatee with a crooked line on the left that Millie found charming.  He called her Emily and blushed when she corrected him. He stumbled over his words when he asked her if she liked Thai food, and offered to cook a meal since Luna didn’t really have restaurants to speak of and he thought she was probably tired of the enriched protein tubes. He made Pho in his apartment, donning a green apron with “Kiss the Cook” written on it while he darted about the kitchen.  The cubed tofu chunks, diced broccoli, chopped asparagus, and thick, handmade noodles were all too salty after Alan forgot to account for the preserving salt when considering the recipe, but Millie wolfed everything down. They talked for hours that night.  She told him about Earth, her childhood, her family, and Andrea. He told her about how lonely it got on Luna. Synths were designed to have feelings identical to humans so they got homesick just as easily, and the lack of personability in older models like T-dor could make them just as ill at ease as they did most humans.


Millie fell in love more quickly than she thought possible. She liked that his left eye had more flecks than his right.  She liked how he could never get his goatee sides balanced.  She liked how he got animated when they talked about volcanism on Io.  She liked the way he shook his head when he talked about how you wouldn’t find Synth literature on Earth just because it was written by Syths and the stuck up snobs wouldn’t give it a fair shake, even though much of it was just as good, and some of it was on par with canon authors.  She liked how he made a moue at her every time she claimed that mathematics could, at some level, explain everything.  She never gave a thought to holding back.  If anything, the spice of the forbidden drove her forward.


She remembers a cascade of milestones.  The first time she told him she loved him they had finished up watching an MST3K marathon.  She wondered why he loved the old movies and laughed so often; she thought they were mostly boring and pretty goofy.  But she got such a kick out of watching him watch a show about robots watching movies that it was worth it. When he didn’t notice that he had a bit of popcorn stuck in the chin hair of his goatee, she suddenly felt overwhelmed.  “I love you, Alan,” she blurted.

He looked at her, and she was terribly afraid he was going to say something about love not being a part of his program matrix or something.   But then he moved closer.  His arms took her shoulders and gathered her gently towards him.  He held her for a long time, and she could smell the fake popcorn butter on his chin.  She inhaled deeply and held him close.  For the rest of her life when she thought of Alan, she could swear she smelled fake butter.


The first kiss happened a few days later. Alan tried to talk her out of her feelings.  Many non-emotive residents of Luna comprehended only at the most intellectual levels why they had been kicked off of Earth.  They knew the humans didn’t want them there and could have academically expounded on the numerous social, cultural, and economic reasons in great detail.  But the the later models, and especially the Synths, had a keen grasp of the why.  They understood all too well.

“Millie,” Alan said, deep lines cutting across his forehead, “they will hate you even more than they hate me.”

“I don’­t care,” she said.

“You should.  In their minds I can’t help what I am.  I am some tragic thing cursed by fate, but you have a choice.”He paused, hand held near his face in mid-gesticulation.  “They will hate you for that choice.  They will hate you more than you can possibly imagine.”

“I don’­t care,” she said.  She tried to mean it.  Eventually she did.

Then he kissed her.  His two forefingers gently traced a line from her cheekbone to her chin as their lips touched, gently at first, and then with greater fervor.   He was a great kisser.

The first time they made love he gasped as he entered her.  She wondered what behavioral algorithm prompted that.  He came too quickly the first time, which inflamed her passions even more.

Lying next to him afterwards, she started to giggle.

"What?" Alan asked.

"That was like a dozen times for me, and five for you," she said.  She laughed a little more before she was able to get out: "You're quite the machine!"

She giggled on, but didn't fail to notice that Alan hadn't joined her.



Their first fight was because he wouldn’­t hold her hand in public.

“Why,” she yelled.  “Are you ashamed of me?”

“No!” Alan said.  “No I’­m trying to protect you.”

“Oh thanks,” she snapped.  “Thanks for protecting poor little Millie, who, by the way, never asked for it and doesn’­t want it.  Feeling really respected right now.”

Alan sighed.  Millie thought that was strange since he technically did not need breath except to speak. “Millie, it literally would not occur to many of my people to not be completely honest if someone from Earth asked about us,” Alan explained.  “They have the ability to detect that I am a synth, that you are a human, and the earlier models wouldn’t even consider deception if someone asked what we were doing.  The good news is that means they can't figure out the subtext if we spend all our free time in my apartment, but the bad news is they won't know to lie to protect us if we take it outside. The last thing you want is to be seen as a sympathizer when you return.”

“I’m not going back there!” Millie said,  “Not after I’­ve found you here.”

“Don’­t be ridiculous.  Of course you are.” Alan said.  “You can't stay here forever.”

“Don’­t tell me what I want Alan!” she yelled.  “Dont ever tell me what I want.  I love you.”

“I just don’­t want to see you get hurt,” Alan said, looking wounded.  “I love you too.”

“Do you?  Do you even know what that means?  Can you  even comprehend what I’­m going through right now?”

“Of course I can.  I know what love means.  Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and vassopressin are all simulated within my--”

“Oh, simulated! That’s great!” Millie shouted.  “It’s nice to know your feelings are so well simulated.  Except for one little problem--I’m talking about real love, Alan.  Real love.  The kind where you aren’t ashamed to hold hands in public.  The kind where you don’­t just casually tell them that they’ll be leaving in two months.  The kind where you don’­t presume it’s going to end.  Not just a behavioral algorithm and simulated oxy-whateverthefuck.  I’m talking about love you fight for.  I'm talking about the love you go down fighting for and never give up on.  Real love!”

“Millie,” Alan said.  “Your life is on Earth, where I cannot go.  Human physiology and psychology can’­t even handle the effects of perpetual dusk or lunar gravity.  You’­d go crazy first and then your muscles would atrophy, and then you’d wither and die within a year or two.  That has nothing to do with how much we love each other.”

“Fuck you, Alan!” she spat.  “Don’t just reduce me to some limitation based on my physiology.”

“You fucking humans!” Alan snapped.  “You’re all so stupid.  You think you’re feelings are so special because they’­re intense, and that you’re the first ones in the whole damned history of ever to feel like that, and no one else could ever feel like you do.  We’­re both machines!  You aren’­t special because your wiring is organic and your behavioral algorithms are encoded chemically.   If I drained out your bonding hormones, you wouldn’t feel love either.  But that doesn’t somehow make what you’re feeling now ‘not real.’  You don'­t hold the patent on real love or the title or the deed or whatever you want to try to claim.  And you sure as fuck don’­t get to tell me mine isn’t real.”

She bit her lip.  “I’­m not telling you it isn’­t real.”

“No, just that yours is better or more real or some crap!  That I’­ll never know what it’­s like to love the way you do.  And that’­s a bunch of bullshit!”

“Then it should be killing you not to hold my hand in public,” she said.

Alan paused before speaking, and looked at her with eyebrows lifted and lips pressed together.  “I never said it wasn’t killing me."


Nearly half way down to the water, she remembers seeing the Earth rise.  Alan drove her within a transport away from the dome so they could watch the “earthrise.”  Half of the topaz sphere crested over the horizon and hung there like art on an impossibly far away wall.

“It’s weird that it doesn’­t move.” Millie said.

“Oh, it moves,” Alan said.  “Just very slowly. It makes a small circuit around the sky every three hundred hours or so.”

“Do you ever want to go back?” she asked.  "Do you ever miss it?"

He looked at her.  “Every day.  I miss Earth in a way I can’t even begin to explain--the sunshine on my face.  Well, technically I can get that here, but it would melt my innards. Sounds. You don't realize how much you miss the sound of animals and bugs and distant people and even traffic until it's just silent. Breezes--god I miss the wind on my forearms.  But I can’t go back.  Even if the law changed today, your bigotry would remain for generations.  Watching your people let go of hatred is like...” Alan paused.  “It’s like watching the Earth go across the sky.  Sometimes, it seems like it isn’t moving at all.  And it always seems to wind up back where it started.”

“Why are you so perfect?” Millie asked looking away from the Earth and towards him.

Alan looked back.  “We shouldn't stay long.  The transport's heaters weren't built with humans in mind.  They’ll take the edge off, but it’s getting cold.”

“Sometimes I wish you weren’­t,” she said.

“Weren’­t what?” Alan asked.

“Perfect,” she said. “Sometimes it bothers me.”

“You are bothered by perfection?” Alan asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Shall I do something imperfect?” Alan asked.  “I could probably leave my socks on the floor of the living room.  I’m fairly certain that’s less than perfect.”

“That’s not the point, Alan,” Millie said feeling irritation seeping in with the cold.

“What is the point?” he asked.  “...Emily.”

“The point is that I don’­t want you to just change some program and then be perfectly imperfect.  That wouldn’­t count.”

“Why not?”  He demanded.  “Because altering a program is fundamentally different than some human working to break a bad habit and change their behaviors to suit you?”

“No.  Fuck.  I don’t...  I can’­t explain it.  Effort maybe, I don't know.  I want you to get some things wrong.   I want to love the things about you that I hate.”

“No wonder you can’­t explain it,” he said.  “It's utter nonsense.  It’­s exactly the sort of paradox bullshit humans run around feeling perfectly content with in their lives and get pissed off enough to exile the lot of us when we point that you’re being completely fucking retarded .”

Millie was furious.  “It’s not nonsense,”  she said.  “It’s humanity.  It’­s what we are, and why you creep us out because it’s what you aren’t.  It’s the fucking human condition to never be happy.  I’m sorry that you can’t understand because you’re an oversized laptop.”

Alan drove on quietly, but his hands were clenched around the wheel.  Somehow that made Millie feel good.

But watching him obviously fighting tears doused her anger.

“I’­m sorry,” she said after a moment.  “That was way out of line.  We just think differently about some things.  I forget that sometimes.  We literally think differently about things.  And that matters.”

“You know, there seems to be plenty that you hate about me,” Alan said.  “But you don’­t love to hate it or some stupid thing.   You just plain hate it.  Maybe you should work on that.”

“I said I was sorry,” she repeated.

“Let's just get home,” he said.  “It’s way too cold for a human here.”


She remembers the small, dark theater packed with Synths and a few humans .  She felt Alan’­s hand press into her own, holding it close.  She turned to look at him; he was already looking at her.  His fingers entwined hers.

“If this is what it takes for you to know what you mean to me,” he said.  He took her chin in his fingers and pulled her lips towards his.

Someone behind them gasped.  Murmurs started.  She heard someone mutter that he wasn’­t wearing mag-boots but she definitely was.  Millie didn’t care.  She didn’t care as hard as she could.


She remembers her mother calling first.  “You’re coming home,” she said.

“I am not,” Millie said.

“Now!” her mother said.  She tried to sound angry, but Millie only saw fear in her eyes.

“No, mom,” Millie said.  “Don’­t tell me what to do.”

“Millie, if you come home right now--right now--I have a few friends who might be able to do some damage control.  You’re young.  You’re impressionable.  You were alone and lonely.  And some of those Synths were literally built with seduction in mind.   We can make sure you don't get branded a sympathizer.”

“I don’­t care what I get branded,” Millie said.  “I love him.”

Her mother reeled.  “Honey.....   You don’t care because you don’­t know what it means.  Sometimes when we’re young, we're very foolish,” her mother said.  “Sometimes we feel things, and they seem real--maybe very real.  And we think we're going to feel that way forever.  But we outgrow those feelings.  They’re a phase.”

“I’m not going to outgrow my love,” Millie said.

“It isn't real, sweetie.  What you’­re feeling isn't real.  It’­s just a lot of confusion because of your situation.  You’ll understand when you fall in love...for real.  You'll understand why this isn't.”

“Don’t ever tell me my love isn't real!” Millie yelled.  “I love Alan.  I love him more than I've ever loved anyone.”

“Oh god, Millie!” she said, literally wringing her hands.  “Don’t--  I am your mother.  Don’­t ever say that to me.  You make me sick.  I raised you better.”  She disconnected, and her face disappeared from the screen.

Her father called after that.  “Your mom’s worried, but I told her you were our little Millie, and you were gonna do what you were gonna do.”

Millie smiled.  “Thanks dad.”

“Don’t worry Bumblebee,” her dad said.  “When I was probably about your age I went through the same exact thing.  I mean that was back before the Exodus was legally enforced, so it wasn't the kind of deal it is today, but still people would have looked at me funny to be with one of them.”

“You fell in love with an android?” Millie asked, smiling.

“Well, the companion models never did talk much.  We didn't go on picnics or anything, so it might have been a stretch to call it love.  But she did things to me no woman’­s ever done since.  Don’t tell your mother.  I still wake up dreaming of C-lil.”

“Dad!” Millie said, screwing up her smile into mock revulsion.  “Gross!

“Aw you’re all grown up, Millie,” he said.  “Your dad gets to be human now.”

“Fine, just don’­t talk about sexbots, okay.  I’m going to need years of therapy after this conversation.”

“I just wanted you to know that I’­ve been through the same thing.”

Millie frowned.  “No.  No dad, you haven't.  This isn’t just about sex.  I'm in love."

Her father’s crow’­s feet grew as he crinkled his eyes in confusion.  “With an android?”

“Yes,” she said.  She suddenly wanted to hang up on him very badly.

"I thought I was in love with C-lil," he said.  "Until I met your mother and found how nice it was to have things in common and talk and stuff."

"He's an S model, not some sexbot," Millie said. "We talk all the time.  Jesus!"

“Okay,” Millie's dad said, holding up his hands in surrender.  "Okay.  All right, I guess.   I apologize. I’m gonna worry like crazy about you, Bumblebee.  And your mom is too.  Sympathizers have a tough road.”

“If only I’d picked someone more convenient to fall for, huh dad?” she said.

“I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have it any other way,” her father said.

“Don’t be horrible!” Millie snapped.

“Hey!” her father said in his discipline tone.  “Watch it!  We're not worrying about you because we secretly dream up ways to make your life difficult.  This is real.  You're in trouble.  People die over this.”

“I know, Dad.  I'll be okay.”

Her dad chewed his lower lip for a long moment, something he only did when he was trying to solve the last few words of a crossword puzzle.

“So...” he said finally, his voice croaking a little.  “What’s he like?”

“He’­s great, daddy.  You’­d really like him,” she smiled.  "He loves literature too..."

There were more words but they faded from Millie’­s memory into a blur.  They were sweet and sappy and there were lots of simultaneous laughter and tears.  Millie hung up feeling better for knowing someone was in her corner, at least a little.

A few days later Andrea called.  Andrea couldn’­t even broach the subject, and it looked like they were just going to talk small talk for an hour.  Then, suddenly she blurted out like she was asking about a strange birthmark: “Do you really love it?”

“He has a name,” Millie said.  “It’­s Alan.  And yes.  I love him.”

“Well then you should stay on Luna,” Andrea said.  “Stay with Al--with it.”

Millie gasped a little.  “Really?”

Andrea paused.  “Yeah,” she said.

“But you hate androids,” Millie said.  “I've never seen anyone hate androids as much as you do.  You don’­t even like the little mail carrier bots with the metal fingers.”

“I do hate them,” Andrea said.  There was something strange about her voice--like when she told him about Derrick.  “They just–aren't natural.  What you’re doing isn't natural.  But if you love...him.  That just makes sense, Millicent.”  Andrea paused.  “It’s what anyone would do.”

“Really?” Millie asked.

“Absolutely,” Andrea said.  “Anyone."

“You really think so?” Millie asked.

After just a momentary pause.  “Everyone fights for love, Millie.  Everyone.”


She remembers getting notice from the planetary government on Earth that her permission to be on Luna had been revoked under suspicion of android sympathy.  She was ordered to return to Earth.

“No one here will force you to return,” Alan told her.  “But eventually you will have to for your health, and once you do, you will never be allowed to come back.”  He paused.  “They won’­t even approve a call.  And you'll be blacklisted if you don't cooperate."

Millie wondered if it was all really worth so much struggle.  It would be so much easier to just do what the whole damned world seemed to want--to go home and be with her own kind.


She remembers more fights after that, but they all blur together like the skyline is starting to blur with the alacrity of her descent.  She remembers only one moment in particular.  One fight near the end:

“Will you grow old with me?” she asked Alan.

“Do you want me to?” he asked in return.

It was like a slap in the face.  She couldn’­t answer him.  She couldn’t even look at him.

A long moment passed.  “Is it a choice?”

“Well, androids don’t normally age, no,” Alan said.  “But as a synth, I could have my appearance adjusted incrementally every month or so and--”

“You don’­t age?” Millie asked.   “Ever?”

“Why would we?” he asked.

“Just how old are you, Alan?” she asked.

“I came online 63 years ago,” he said.

“You're sixty-three?” she shrieked.  “You’re older than my grandpa.”

“It’­s just a number,” he said.

She doesn’t remember how that conversation ended.  The number made her feel sick.


She remembers sitting in the terminal waiting for the shuttle to take her back to Earth.  Alan sat next to her.  He wanted her to stay with him, even just another week or two.  He thought they could work things out or try to find other options.

“You know, you're probably months out from even the onset of perpetual dusk psychosis,” Alan said.  “Maybe by then we can set you up in a cycling UV room, and figure out an exercise regimen to help you with the physical stuff.  We can figure it out.  We can at least have a little more time. ”

“It’s better this way,” she said.

“It isn't better, Millie,” Alan said, his voice cracking.  “It’­s easier.”

“This is hardly easy,” Millie said.

“I'm really impressed with the way you've gone down fighting for real love,” Alan spat.  "I understand now what that phrase really means. Thank you for enlightening me."

Millie said nothing, and they sat in silence.

After several minutes, Alan blurted: “Don’t I make you happy?”

Millie blinked against the sudden irritating appearance of white hot tears in her eyes.  “Yes,”  she said.  “Yes.  You make me happier than anyone ever has.”

She swallowed and looked into his confused eyes.  She ran a finger across the smooth skin at the corner of his left eye and down the crooked line of his goatee.  “And that is making me miserable.”

“Millie,” Alan said.  “That makes absolutely no sense.”

“I know,” she said.  They were the last words she ever spoke to Alan.


This time Millie’s stomach will not rebel against the toxins and vomit out her cosmopolitans into a frothy pink goop on her belly.  This time she will not wrap her shirt around her gushing arm and stumble topless ten blocks to a medical clinic that will treat her kind.  This time she has been effortlessly hoisted over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge by a thick, purple-faced man whose words were only a jumble of flying spittle and vowels. Perhaps she will join the 2% of Golden Gate jumpers who survive the 250 foot fall, but she thinks it unlikely.  This time she won’t return to struggle on with her fellow sympathizers.  She will just keep falling deeper and deeper into the summer of 87.  She looks out at the moon again, and as the velocity of her fall begins to create a roar of passing air inside her ears, she feels the wind on her arms, and she thinks about the bits of popcorn in his beard--about how perfectly imperfect he was.  She wonders if there is some small chance that he is on the moon right now looking back at the Earth and thinking of her.  She thinks she can almost smell fake butter in the rushing air. A smile lights her face.

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