He could feel the footsteps inside of him; they were drawing nearer to him. No, not inside of him. How had he began? So much was gone. He wanted to cry out but his voice was the screech of metal; his voice was numbers and radiation and endless, frozen void. So much was gone. Where was he? They sat together, in their tiny efficiency unit that had been nestled on the top of an apartment building in some forgotten appeal to new tenants. Some decades after the building had been abandoned, the roof had collapsed, and the closet sized unit had fallen into the basement, crushing everything between it and the foundation floor. That was where Nick and Jay had found it, still waiting for new tenant application codes. The old efficiency units were like that; they’d been designed in the late 22nd century as part of an initiative to provide housing that totally freed the tenant from any economic obligation. While the units had ultimately proved too cramped for comfort and too expensive to produce en masse, they were functionally successful. Each unit had built in nano recycling and extracting technology that ultimately provided for food, waste and even powered a small electricity outlet. They were virtually indestructible to anything save a proprietary acid compound that had been produced by SpiroCo, the makers of the pods. Since SpiroCo had gone out of business on Vega 5 some decades ago, the pods didn’t seem to be going anywhere. There was enough space to comfortably sleep one adult; finding the pod together had been like a promise that they could make their separate lives into one whole. Nick had had to spend weeks finding an appropriate code, but the payoff was worth the effort; the pod gave them a core of self-sufficiency that they would use to find a better place to live. Indeed, it would be the first step to a new life and for the past few years, they’d been working hard to save enough credit to leave for somewhere that hadn’t been stripped of it’s useful resources and largely abandoned. Despite their oppressive environment, they were going to live, and they would do it together. They sat together, arguing. “You fly now, I’ll be stuck here. I’ll burn up if I gotta do this alone.” Nick said. He was getting more frantic with each word, having realized that the decision to leave the planet had been made without him. “I don’t know how else to parse it and it’s been shot besides. This time in three cycles we’ll both be settled in on Meritz Station” Jay retorted; he, too, was clearly struggling to remain calm. “You don’t get it. I worked hard for this just as much as you did; I even sold my fucking lungs. Now that’s all gone because you were too fucking selfish to wait. Fuck you.” Nick looked sick with anguish; he seemed almost feral. Jay was starting to think that he wouldn’t be able to understand the decision after all; that this was a time when the risk was necessary. The offer of transport and a temporary genius grant was too good to pass up; with the money he’d make while the genius grant was active, Jay would make more than enough to both buy them a domed hab or station quarters and bring Nick there. Waiting and saving small bits would take them another 5 years, at the very least. The genius grant was a temporary operation, with a relatively short duration of effect. Jay would easily be back to normal by the time Nick arrived at their new home. There were the rumors, too, that a genius grant often left some of the gifts imparted when it wore off; some people might retain singular mathematics skills, others, the fluency with multiple languages. Jay could admit to himself that he wouldn’t mind that; who wouldn’t want special talents? Nick may not understand now, but he would come to, Jay decided. When the pickup message reached Nick in a few months time, with the transport itself not far behind, Nick would see that he’d been wrong, and they’d be safe and happy together not long after that. “Look, I have to go down to Brocks and tell him I won’t be around to keep him connected anymore. Will you come with me? Please?” Jay asked Nick layed down on the thermal blankets they’d shared for the past few years. “If you’re going to leave, just leave.” “I’ll be back for you, I promise. You know I will.” The only response was silence. He sat alone, disoriented. Why was his overlay red? The information nestled in the corner of his vision couldn’t be right; he’d elected to take a single birth cryo ship, and it shouldn’t have awakened him for another three weeks. Maybe...there; he saw it. There had been a battery failure. Why it had run out of power was largely moot at the moment; what mattered was how much was left. At least, that’s what the overlay was telling him. He was more than competent with the digital interface, if not the actual ship itself. A few more minutes and he’d managed to both reorient himself and assess the extent of the crisis. One of the batteries had been pierced by some particularly malicious piece of space debris; upon explosion it had taken at least three others with it. The power that his ship still retained was less than half of what he’d need to make it to Meritz Station. There were light years between him and the station that he had no way of crossing. Space felt very empty at that moment; so did he. There was nothing he could imagine that would allow him to survive. His mode of transport employed the bare minimum of safety precautions; he had, in effect, been packed into a cryo support sized bullet and launched across the galaxy. The pilot controls were virtually non-existent. The ship held a powerful radio transmitter and a signal flare that would automatically enact once the ship had come to a full stop. The brake rockets were automated and would stop him just short of slamming into the planet. The ship wasn’t designed for full human life support; the passenger was supposed to stay frozen until they were safely docked in the station. Without enough power to employ the brake rockets, the ship would automatically self destruct when it neared the braking zone; a ship slamming into the planet would cause far more destruction than the simple auto immolation of the ship. There was nothing he could do. Nick had been right. Nick. They’d made a few cursory apologies before Jay had left, but Nick had obviously been deeply wounded. When Jay failed to return, his hurt would turn to anger. Nick had carried too much anger for too long; in him it could become a monstrous, roaring thing, and it was aimed inward more often than not. Jay knew then that they would both die in agony because he had been impulsive in his decision to expedite their future. The utter, clawing desperation he felt began to eat at him, deeply bruising every thought that it touched. He could feel himself begin to lose himself; everything in his life had been destroyed by his own hand and his mind could not bear the strain of it. A screaming began, and he answered. He’d failed; Nick deserved someone smarter, someone better. Through the screams, something tugged at his mind; The genius grant. He’d been given the nanos for it before he’d left. The grants were really very simple; the nanos would build an infrastructure in his anatomy, centered around the brain, that would in ffect, give him superhuman computational power and creativity. The infrastructure was designed to last two or three months; after their predetermined lifespan, they would destroy the host. Given the right signal from the SpiroCo, however, and they would instead end their cycle by returning the host to normal and disintegrating harmlessly out of the body. They were largely used to help settle new habitat or mining colonies, where human ingenuity was in short supply. Jay didn’t have two or three months; he didn’t have two or three days. The genius grant might allow him to figure out a way to survive and make it to the station. It was a petty option, but it was his only option. Fuck it, he decided. Let’s get it shot. He released the nanos and his world surged. A few months after Jay had left, Nick knew; he was dead. Before they’d said their goodbyes, Nick had snuck a nano transmitter into the meal they’d been sharing. It was designed as a simple tracker; to tell whomever it was transmitting to where the plantee was. If Jay was lying and intended to abandon him, Nick would know the second he turned away from his course to the Maritz Station. The only way it would stop is if the host endured the kind of violence that would totally destroy the body. It had stopped transmitting. He had expected to be angry at the loss of the love of his life; he had instead, felt hollow. He hadn’t been betrayed, but he’d still lost the most important thing in his life. He spent many months wallowing in grief, only leaving the efficiency pod if he needed work to pay for clothes or oxygen sets. Eventually, though, Nick began to return to a semblance of the life they had shared together. He stayed in the efficiency pod but resumed finding work in digital kaizen. With nothing else to hold him, he sunk into his work. He became, if not happy, functional. He did not, however, find another partner to share the pod with. Jay had been the brightest part of his life; without him, there didn’t seem to be much worth being invested in. After a few years of shuffling through life, Nick came to a decision; he didn’t want to be alone any more. He’d saved a few of the things Jay had neglected to take with him; one of them had been a preserved piece of the heart Jay had needed replaced after a childhood accident. They’d planned to have children sometime after they’d left; Jay had even stated that he would prefer to have their child in the arcane way, by simply using a mix both of their genetics to fertilize an egg that had been randomly selected from the birth-bank. Nick made the trip to the birth-bank and spent gestation week thinking about Jay and about how he would want their child to be reared. When the nurse at the birth-bank messaged Nick to tell him that his son was ready, he felt, for the first time in years, alive. When Nick arrived, the boy toddled out to him; the boy looked for all the world like a young Jay. Remembering the countless nights of love and promise they’d shared, Nick realized he’d made himself a promise; that he would be with this child always. That he would keep the child safe, in the way the he could not keep Jay safe. He would dedicate himself to the happiness and safety to this new child, who seemed a form of solidarity and love incarnate. Prodded by the bank nurse, the child todded up to Nick. Leaning down to make eye contact with his new son, Nick asked “Who are you? What would you like to be called?” “The lady said you’d have my name. What is it?” the toddler asked “Don’t you want to decide your name?” “Want Daddy to” the child, looking and sounding so much like Jay, told Nick “How does Jay sound?” Nick offered “Im Jay?” “Yes, you’’ll be Jay” And so, Nick and Jay returned to the efficiency habitat to start a new life together. He sat, alone. Sitting is the wrong word; he hung, alone. Meritz Station had turned him back on threat of utter destruction. They didn’t even recognize what had once been one of their own capsule ships. Jay could still feel the gaze of their defense system, ready to obliterate him at the slightest notice. He had no choice; he’d had to land on the nearest lithium asteroid to refuel. It was getting harder to remember why he’d been heading to the Station in the first place. He did remember Nick; he knew that if he abandoned Nick, they would both die. After what he’d already lost, and the bit that he’d gained, he wouldn’t let that happen. After landing and refueling the makeshift batteries he’d created for himself, he realized that he’d never be able to make the return journey in a reasonable amount of time; Jay would have grown old and died by the time he returned on anything less than close to lightspeed travel. He’d have to find a larger ship to attach to, one that was headed toward Vega 5. Luckily, he’d been able to convert the built in transmitter to a receiver; with little effort he found a light hugger headed for Vega 5 to pick up a shipment of some precious metal or other. Using parts of the now defunct cryo-chamber, Jay refitted them to be used as clamps that could hold him to another ship at the just-sub-lightspeed required to make the journey to Vega 5. After a few months of waiting, of fading in and out of dreams of Nick, he picked up a signal from a ship that would be suitable to carry him back to Vega 5. Once it got close, he lifted off the asteroid and latched on. Normally, he’d be crushed by speed of light travel without proper protection, but that stopped being an issue some months ago. He’d done it; he was on his way home to Nick. They sat together, watching. It was a rare event for a light hugger to visit Vega 5. There hadn’t been any reason for anyone to visit in what seemed centuries. Rumor said they were here to pickup a hidden deuterium cache, but that meant nothing to either Nick or Jay. They simply sat to watch something they would likely never get another chance to see. The hugger was huge; big enough to see from the planet even though it remained in orbit. Nick hadn’t expected it to look like much, but he couldn’t bear to crush young Jays hopes; Jay was expecting something grand and sleek. “Is that it, daddy?” Jay asked his father “That’s it, Jay. Doesn’t look like much, does it?” Jay gently asked his son “No, it’s ugly. I thought it would be more...interesting. It’s just a big gray lump with a tail.” “I know, son. But look at how big it is; if we can see it, that means it’s bigger than our whole city, maybe as big as the third moon!” Nick said, trying to rekindle some of his sons enthusiasm. Jay was too absorbed in watching the sky to hear Nicks attempt at engagement. “Daddy, what’s that?” He asked. “What do you mean? Oh, I see it!” Nick shouted with feigned enthusiasm. It was probably just a probe or a discarded part of the chaff armor. “What is it, daddy?” Jay repeated. “I don’t know, maybe it’s a passenger pod or a mining pod. They might be sending someone wn here to look for something.” Nick told him. He wondered though; was it wrong to lie to his son just to keep him excited for a few more minutes? There was so little for a child to be excited about on Vega 5. A little more interest couldn’t hurt. “It looks like it’s landing” It did, too; it even appeared to be heading for the landing port that was within rail distance from their efficiency pod. “You know, little bear, it does. Do you want to go see it?” “Please! Maybe there’s new people there! Maybe they have animals!” Jay had never seen an animal, and the few people left on Vega 5 were getting fewer by the day. In fact, his interest in animal life was budding into an obsession. Nick had attached many monikers to his son, with little bear being one of many different animal related names. “Don’t get your hopes up too high. But yeah, let’s burn down there and get a look.” Maybe this would be an opportunity for Jay to learn something new, after all. Hopefully, Nick took his son by the hand and began the trek to the port the ship looked to be docking at. He was here; he was home. Nick was here, somewhere. The nanotracker that Jay had discovered after he’d taken the genius grant still worked, and it worked both ways. He could feel Nick, down there. Sacrificing yet more of the original structure of the ship to create a functional landing rocket and foot, he readied himself. He would return to Nick; they would be together. Jay saw the ship first; it had landed at the port they had expected it. It looked strange; most ships were deeply aerodynamic, either to enable them to burrow through atmosphere or to minimize their profile to avoid debris during space travel. The ship in front of them, however, was neither. Nick could not, despite his best efforts at searching the planet-web, find anything at all resembling what had landed. It looked almost organic, in a makeshift way. Like an AI program still in its infancy had tried to approximate certain anatomical shapes but had quite thoroughly failed. A few other residents of their slum had come to see what had landed, but largely seemed disappointed in the lack of definable purpose in the ship. Many of them considered that it was probably a mangled probe ship that had tried to land for repairs. The crowd seemed to have largely disbursed, allowing Nick and Jay a good view of the strange ship. “Daddy, can we go up and see it?” Jay asked pleadingly “I don’t know, Jay, it seems a little...strange.” Nick told his son. “I’ve never seen a ship like that before. Maybe you shouldn’t get any closer.” It was, however, too late for the suggestion; Jay had already moved up to the ship and was about to touch it. Before Nick could call out to his son, the ship seemed to....shudder. Frozen with millisecond of terror, Nick watched his son reach up and touch the oddly organic ship. Nothing happened. Still deeply worried, Nick rushed over to pull Jay to safety. Before he’d gotten a hand on the boy, a horrifyingly familiar voice seemed to seethe from the air around them. “Nick.” What the fuck was that, Nick thought. How the fuck would it know my name? Was it some kind of fucking alien? Those didn’t, couldn’t exist. And how would it know to use that voice? A voice he hadn’t heard in over 20 years. “Nick. I’m home.” He had finally grabbed Jay; he pulled him close and covered his ears. This is impossible, Nick thought. He could feel his mind straining away from the logical answer. “Who the fuck are you? How the fuck are you talking to me?” Nick shouted into the sky, not knowing where to direct his confusion. A hissing sound; a piece of the ship wall...slid away. Not in any mechanical motion, but reminiscent of the nictating membrane of a lizard slipping into the recesses of its skull. “Nick, please. I never meant to be gone for so long. I love you.” Sudden realization hammered into place. Realization and shortly after, a vivid horror that edged on sheer terror. “Jay, go to Brocks. Now.” “Daddy what’s happen…” “Jay, NOW.” Nick had only ever shouted at the boy twice before; once to keep him from being crushed by a rail car and once when the boy had accidentally destroyed a months worth of food. Jay knew that shouting brooked no argument. Taking off at a full sprint, he headed out, away from the port pad. The voice seemed to come from inside his skull this time. “Nick, please. I’ve missed you so much” Nick was almost gibbering at this point. “I don’t know what the fuck you are, but you aren’t him. He’s dead. The real death!” he yammered “Nick, I can explain where I’ve been. Please don’t hate me. I tried to get back to you sooner!” the voice sobbed. “Just step inside and you’ll understand. “Why don’t you come out and talk? I know you’re not him.” Nick asked, almost pleadingly “Please, just come in. I won’t hurt you; I love you. You’re my new heart; you know that.” The words made Nick's blood freeze; Jay had called him his “New Heart” ever since Nick had found out about the replacement he’d needed as a child. “You can’t be him. Please.” “Come inside and I’ll explain everything” Eyeing the almost organically shaped hole in the ship, Nick climbed in.