Chapter Text
The bathroom at Frank’s Diner smelled like fry oil. It was a single, with checkerboard tiles and a light with a motion sensor. Any sorry fool who wound up there had to wave their arms every 30 seconds or piss in the dark. Fine. Whatever. Aura dropped a small gym bag into the sink and changed. Boy shorts, sports bra, plain white blouse (ugh), plain black pencil skirt (gag), flesh panty hose (revolting). Aura pulled her fine dark hair into a bun tight enough to give herself traction alopecia. She could do her makeup later. Her glasses case squealed as it opened and she retrieved the nerdiest frames the optometrist in Clearlake, California had on offer.
“Congratulations,” Aura said to her reflection. “You almost pass as a professional, so long as you keep your mouth shut.”
At the counter she knocked back her cup of sludgy black coffee, housed her Two Eggs Any Way You Want ‘Em and paid in cash. She scribbled her number on her receipt for a waitress with a cherry tattoo and gauges. It wasn’t going to happen, but, well. Shots, shots, shots.
Five minutes later Aura was in a cracked parking lot, squinting into the peach morning light. The rental car unlocked with a chirp like some kind of tiny fat bird. If her brother were here, he would say it sounded like ‘the boobie-breasted trucknut’ or something, then get offended when Aura laughed. Unbeknownst to her, the boobie-breasted trucknut was a majestic and critically endangered passerine, here’s a Save The Trucknuts petition.
Aura had half a cats-eye drawn on her eyelid when her phone started blaring Whats Up? by 4 Non Blondes. She swiped at the screen with her pinky knuckle.
“ Oi, are you dead? ” Simon’s consonants were rounded by the tinny phone speakers even more than by his stupid half-accent.
“Yes, I’m answering the phone from gay hell.”
“ Mom was worried. I suspect you may be the favorite child.”
“Of course I’m the favorite, I’m the brains of the operation. You can tell her I made it to Pasadena without getting into a high speed accident. Though it was tempting.”
Normally her brother would give her guff for that, but he just sighed. “ Ok. Well. Good luck.”
Aura lifted her chin and traced her lash line with holo lavender. “What's wrong with you today?”
“ I’m tired. I had a shift yesterday and a paper for AP World due in… about an hour and a half.”
“Slay.”
“ I should go. Try not to yell at any recruiters this time .”
“Recruiters should watch their mouths if they don’t want to get yelled at.” Again, Simon just sighed. “You should go back to furniture delivery. Warehouse fulfillment is sucking you dry.”
“ Oh, I wish. I should put my manager on her knees and get my money's worth. ”
“Hey, I don’t want to hear that teen boy macho crap from you,” Aura snapped. “You want to be a big man? Act like a big man. I know you never even filed for unemployment when you got laid off from the delivery gig because oooh, the department of labor website is sooo confusing . You just let that money swirl down the drain because it was too scawy. ”
“ …It was a joke.”
“Either that or you were fired for cause and won’t admit it. Or you just quit. Which is it?”
Simon was quiet for so long, Aura thought he had hung up on her. Then he released a long, windy exhale. "W hatever.”
“Bye, idiot. Good luck on your paper.”
By the time Aura crossed the quad of the California Institute of Technology, her rayon blouse was damp and her noose-tight sports bra was rubbing a sweat rash into her underboob. In the center of the quad stood a neoclassical monstrosity with a banner over the colonnade. It read, Welcome to the 15th annual Aeronautics Cosmonautics and Engineering Conference .
“Don’t do me dirty, ACE Con,” Aura muttered. “Mama Aura needs a goddamn job.”
For a few hours, ACE Con was like every other hiring fair Aura had been to. Which was to say, it was as corrosive to one’s faith in humanity as a glossy jpeg of the Pacific Garbage Patch. The convention center was migraine-bright and smelled like feet. Lines of wobbly folding tables with corporate swag snaked through the space like intestines. True to form, the farther Aura waded into the frothing mass of nerds, the more she felt like crap. She got asked every question she hated. Where do you see yourself five years from now? Why is there a gap in your resume? Aren’t you too pretty to be an engineer? Are you married? Where are you from? No, where are you really from?
Yes, ACE Con did Aura dirty. By noon she gave herself one more table before she either abandoned society or got tacos from the food truck, whichever was more convenient. At first the GYAXA Cosmos Space Center table seemed like it was a bust. Business casual hopefuls clustered around GYAXA’s corporate representatives— some old Sean Connery wannabe in a valor-stealing coat, and a gym bro with a red mullet and a pec-hugging GYAXA tee. Aura pretended to shuffle through her messenger bag and review her resume as if she wasn’t getting sidelined and this wasn’t a huge waste of time.
And then, Aura became aware of a presence to her left. Another woman, around 30, hovering by the table, looking for a way in. She had a light haori over a navy jumpsuit, a face mask, and a ponytail down to her hips. She leaned over the side of the table, pulling her elbows in to take up less space. “Director Cosmos? Mr. Starbuck?” She repeated herself twice. They were oblivious to her. “Ah… Okay.”
And then, the woman became aware of Aura. They just looked at each other. The woman sighed, a bit demonstratively. Aura smirked, and the mystery woman's doe-eyes crinkled a bit as if under her mask, she was smiling too.
“Apologies,” she said, “all the aeronautics folk have flocked to Mr. Starbuck.” Mystery woman shrugged, and let her arms flop against herself a little pathetically. The motion jostled a lanyard with a GYAXA Staff ID card from behind her collar. “Once he gets going about space…” She gestured around her temples.
“His head’s in the Oort cloud?” Aura offered. Mystery woman- the GYAXA rep- pressed her fingers into her mask, like she was stifling a laugh that couldn’t have been heard anyway. “Well, I’m more into robots than rockets.”
“You’re a robotics engineer?” When Aura nodded, the rep clapped her hands together. “Oh, that's wonderful! I can fetch Director Cosmos, I’ve been asking him about expanding the Robotics department—”
“Let me show you what I’ve been working on.” Aura blurted. The lady GYAXA rep froze up. She glanced over at the director, like she was at the end of her script and he was missing his cue. “Just watch, it’ll only take a minute.”
Aura got down on one knee and plonked the bag on the ground. She crammed her resume into her bag. She produced three pieces of literally hacked-together actual garbage, and began assembling them.
“It’s recycled materials, mostly— I did model a few components in Blender and 3D printed them at the library. And I stole some parts from my little brother's Bionicles, but don’t tell him that.” With a final screw and the flip of a switch, there stood a janky little robot, a foot tall and with so many parts sticking out it looked like a failed game of tetris. Aura stood and tossed a toy ball to the floor. “It’s not a looker but it’s got spunk, I promise.” She made a ring with her thumbs and forefingers facing the robot. “Tricksy? Hoops.”
The robot chimed in response. Aura turned her hands so the hand-hoop was parallel with the floor. The three lenses jutting out of Tricksy’s ‘head’ dilated and swiveled. It rotated its midsection to face Aura and raised the ball over its head. Tricksy’s spring-loaded torso popped up as it shot the ball into Aura’s finger hoop.
“ Swish ,” Tricksy beeped. It retrieved the ball and rolled back to its starting position.
The rep tapped her steepled fingers together. “I see.”
“Round two.” Aura flashed her finger hoop towards Tricksy for confirmation. “Wanna run interference?”
“What?”
“Block the goal.”
The rep fiddled with her face mask, molding it more firmly around her nose. At length, she held the sleeve of her haori in front of the hoop. Tricksy’s lenses focused and unfocused. Abruptly it strafed sideways between the rep’s ankles, and before she could twist around and block the other side Tricksy’s torso sprung up and the ball arced through Aura’s fingers.
“ Swish .”
Aura smirked. “And they say nimble isn’t a good feat.”
The rep tapped her chin and cocked her head. “My, my… quick as a lizard.”
Aura’s eyes drifted up. A memory flashed through her head of standing in an abandoned gas station parking lot as grade-school Simon in shredded cargo pants squatted next to a blue-belly. It was so still, Aura thought it was a toy. Simon poked it and suddenly it was gone.
Mystery woman was watching Aura. Just when Aura thought she had pushed her luck too far, she said, “round three?”
By round six, they had lost track of the score. By round nine, they had lost count of the rounds. Aura began demoing different modes— volleyball, golf, soccer. Touchdown mode was problematic; every time Tricksy threw the mini football it bounced it off the far wall, and Aura had to flail around to catch it. The rep was testing the limits of Tricksy’s motion-tracking by jerking her finger-goal around when Tricksy missed. The ball glanced off the rep’s forehead, wove between Aura’s hands and fell directly into her shirt.
Aura stared down at the fun-size Minions-branded football wedged between her own tits and thought, well that's just peak professionalism right there. She slowly looked up from her cleavage and caught her mystery woman doing the same thing. They gazed at each other for far too long. A strangled snort caught in Aura’s throat, and they both erupted into hysterics.
Aura slapped her own knees. Mystery woman wheezed and shook. When Aura pulled the football from her own shirt, mystery woman worked very hard to say, “touchdown?”
“It’s an own-goal,” Aura squeaked back, and they both lost it again.
As they came down from their mutual meltdown, the rep wiped tears from her face. “Ooh, I- I need to breathe.” She fanned herself by tugging the collar of her haori. “Would you- if you haven’t eaten, I’d love to hear more about your project, miss— oh, I didn’t… ask…because robots.”
“Robots is a good reason. Aura Blackquill.”
She nodded at Aura, then turned and waved both hands at her fellow GYAXA reps to get their attention. It wasn’t necessary. Red mullet and Red October were already gaping at them like they’d never seen their own coworker laugh before. Skill issue. She pointed towards herself then towards the food truck area. The older rep was collected enough to offer an imperious nod, before returning to the gaggle of engineers thronged around the table. Eventually the younger rep offered a baffled thumbs up.
Aura leaned over. “I also didn’t ask. Because robots.”
Her name was Metis Cykes.
On that sweaty Thursday, Aura couldn’t know what awaited them both, only that a dam was breaking. Cykes’s gestures relaxed as they spoke. She took off her face-mask to eat from a neurotic little bento, and Aura was normal about it. When she shrugged off her haori to reveal her sleeveless jumpsuit and decolletage of light freckles, Aura was very normal about that. As Cykes bit into a plum, she furled her lips and sucked on its flesh in a failed attempt to keep a winedark dribble from sliding down her chin. Aura was so normal about that , she got a stomach cramp.
By some miracle Aura scrolled through work in progress photos of Tricksy without encountering any nudes. In turn, Cykes flicked through photos of the Experimental Robotics Team’s most recent build.
“Our budget has withered these last few years, so the intern and I are still upgrading the quadrupedal military robot GYAXA got at liquidation from when I was an intern.”
“I thought it looked kinda like BigDog,” Aura managed to say around a mouthful of fish taco. “But like, DARPA shelved that years ago?”
“Yes, yes— I was loath to involve DOD in any way, but beggars and choosers and plowshares…”
“Oh, my.”
“They were just sitting in a warehouse, Blackquill, isn’t that tragic?”
Aura was nodding, “Yeah, no, totally—” when Cykes swiped to a photo of a child with a mop of ginger hair riding the robot sidesaddle like a princess.
“That’s my daughter, Athena, for scale.” Cykes’s smile was warm. Aura’s hands went cold. “She’s very fond of all our robots. She doesn’t understand that they're not her toys.”
“Are you married?” As soon as the words left Aura’s mouth, she wanted to cave her own skull in. Cykes’ face dimmed like a reflective hazard sign on the highway as headlights turned away.
“Not anymore.”
“Oh. Good. No, I mean, it’s fine. Um. Anyway, I-K solvers.”
“Inverse kinematics,” Cykes agreed, clicking her phone off, and the conversation returned to shallow waters.
When Cykes was finally called back to the GYAXA table she apologized, and handed Aura a business card. Aura offered a crumpled resume in return.
“Never mind that— give me your card.” Cykes slid it into her lanyard behind her ID. “Snug. I couldn’t lose it if I tried.”
“You wouldn’t get rid of me that easily.”
“Thank god. You have no idea how badly I need your skill set.”
Later as Aura slumped over the steering wheel, soaking up some AC before her red-eye drive back to Clearlake, she turned Metis Cykes’ card back and forth. The last shafts of golden hour caught the phone number written by a parched ballpoint pen. She twirled the card and the writing plunged into shadow. The front of the card buoyed into the light. Robotic Interactions Designer. Cosmos Space Center Experimental Robotics Lab - 06 Andromeda Plaza. [email protected].
. . .
Even though it was a month closer to summer, the air was cool when Aura called Simon from a room with a balcony just outside Pasadena. The evening breeze stirring the curtain smelled like mooncakes from the Chinese bakery downstairs and forest fires from down south.
“Hey, buttface.” Aura took a drag from a pre-rolled joint. “Guess what.”
On the other end of the line, Simon grunted. Given the time, he was probably face-down on the sofa with his work polo either dropped on the floor next to him or still caught on his wrist.
“I said, guess what.”
“ Hrrng. What.”
“Use context clues, Herlock Sholmes. Why would I be calling you right now?”
The microphone picked up the sound of pillows shifting around. “ You got it? ”
“I start in two weeks.”
There was a pause. “ Not… in the summer? ”
“I’m going to stay out here and find an apartment. I need you to pack my things and send them to me. I’ll pay for shipping.”
Simon took a sharp inhale through his teeth. “ I’m not going through all of your crap just so you can ditch us.”
“Not all my crap. I just need some clothes and computer things. I’ll come back up on memorial day to get the rest.”
“ That’s not the issue! You told me not to drop out! You said—”
“Unbust your nuts, Simon, you and mom are coming too.”
“… What?”
“Just finish high school this spring and I’ll get you both down here by August. UCLA and Ivy U have pilot programs that practically pay you to study law. There's teenage attorneys running wild around here, you know.” On the other end of the line, Aura heard Simon churning on the sofa. His fussing would only draw his bony ass deeper into the couch cushions. “No whining. You only need three years of instruction to graduate anyway.”
Simon groaned as he flopped onto his back “ I’d need to add a science and an art or world language to my schedule, on top of taking care of mom.”
“Just take rocks for jocks with Dr. Moh and drama with Mr. Salomé— he’s been teaching since I was in high school and all he ever did was theater games.”
“And Shakespeare.”
Aura picked at sequin cherries embroidered into the curtain. “Good thing your crush on Laurence Olivier changed your brain chemistry. You probably have Hamlet memorized.”
“I don’t have a crush on Laurence Olivier.”
“Not anymore you don’t, now it's Toshiro Mifune.”
“Sure. Whatever.”
“I said I was getting us out and I meant it.” Aura pushed the curtain aside. Some Tech company’s headquarters loomed on the skyline. It glittered with lit windows where a chosen few whiled away, coding for the new American Oligarchs. They get rich, the rest get poor, and then everyone becomes worm-dirt. No, worse— everyone gets embalmed and the earth gets stuffed with unrottable corpses in cheap dress shoes. “I get it. Your life's gonna suck for another couple of months, but that’s it. Then you go to college, go full Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , graduate and do your bird law environmentalist thing.”
“ Oh, I didn’t realize drugs and alcohol were on the table. I cannot wait to fathom the bowls.”
“Come on, do it for the… you know.” Aura snapped a few times. “What is it? That bird.”
“ Do I even want to know?”
“Yeah, you know, the stupid-looking one with the dumb name. Sorry, that’s all of them. The one that looks like a cyclops? The… the dick in a box?”
“ …The cock-of-the-rock. ” Simon sounded miserable. Aura barked and slapped the window frame. “Stop laughing. It’s the national bird of Peru. ”
“So sorry, I didn’t mean to mock the solemn dignity of your rock-hard-cock.”
“ I hate you so much. ”
“I know. I’m the devil and your goddamn savior.”
Like all devils, Aura kept her promises. At the cusp of their first and one true summer— the kind promised to children, a magical land where the streets were paved with ice cream and there were beach parties around every corner— they stuffed their whole lives in a cargo trailer and drove. Their mother rode shotgun and slept, far enough from chemo that she nearly had a pixie cut. Duffels and boxes crowded Simon in the back seat. When he stuck his head out of the moon roof, letting the wind whip his hair back as he drowned in sunlight, Aura grinned. They both knew he owed her in ways he could never fully repay. And while she would never say it out loud, surely he had to have known that she felt the same.