Tak and Pepper shared a glance. ‘Why?’ Pepper asked.
Sidra found the words, and worked up the courage to say them. Stars, but this was inane. ‘I want to be on the floor with you,’ she said. She laughed and laughed. ‘I’m finally in a ship, and all I want is to be sitting on the floor.’
Tak bloomed blue and green. ‘“Dear Thumhum Is Upside Down”.’
‘What?’ Pepper said.
Sidra had already run the words through the Linkings. ‘It’s a Harmagian children’s story,’ she said. ‘A very old one.’
‘You know it?’ Tak said to Pepper. Pepper shook her head. ‘Thumhum is a child who goes up into zero-g for the first time. You know for Harmagians, falling with their belly exposed makes it difficult for them to flip back over, right? So Thumhum keeps calling for help, because he’s freaking out about being upside down. Doesn’t matter which way they turn him. He’s always upside down.’
‘But . . . he’s in zero-g,’ Pepper said. ‘There is no upside down.’
‘That’s the point,’ Tak said. ‘He’s so focused on being upside down, he misses the fact that he’s already up.’
Sidra laughed, but Pepper did not. ‘No,’ Pepper said. ‘No, I don’t think that’s what this is.’ She folded her hands in her lap, thinking hard. ‘When I first got to the Port, it scared the high holy fuck out of me. It was like stepping out of the factory all over again. I didn’t know what anything was. I didn’t know what the foods were. I didn’t know what people were selling. The scrapyard was hell, but it was a hell I knew. I knew which piles I’d picked over, where the water was, where the dogs slept. I knew how to get back home. Coriol wasn’t home, not at first. It was just a big, loud mess. I hated it. I wanted to leave almost as soon as we got there.’ She turned her eyes to the camera. ‘Take a look at the left-hand side of the pilot’s console. Tell Tak what’s sitting on top of it.’
Sidra zoomed in with the cockpit camera. ‘Figurines,’ she said. ‘Alain, Manjiri, and Pinch.’
Tak went light brown with recognition. ‘Big Bug, right?’
Pepper nodded with a faraway smile. ‘Yup. Owl had one episode in storage. “The Big Bug Crew and the Planetary Puzzle”. I can’t even tell you how many times I played it. I can still tell you every bit of dialogue, word for word. Every story variable, every line in the artwork. I could draw that ship from top to bottom, if I could draw for shit.’ She collected her thoughts. ‘My first morning on Coriol, I left Blue sleeping and went out alone. I wanted to get a handle on things by myself. I was still so angry, and so afraid, and having an audience for that was just too much. Anyway, I wandered the marketplace for a while. I didn’t know what I was doing, but looking back, I was searching for something – anything – familiar. I would’ve eaten dog again, if somebody’d been selling it. I don’t know how long I’d been out there – an hour, maybe two. I stumble on this shop. It’s got all sorts of sim characters painted on the walls. I didn’t know most of them, but right there, smack in the middle, are the Big Bug Crew. And I was just like . . . holy shit, my friends! My friends are here! Stars, I almost cried. I know that sounds stupid—’
‘It doesn’t,’ Tak said.
Pepper gave a small nod. ‘So I go into the shop – it’s a sim shop, obviously – and there’s this Human guy in there. And he’s like, hey, what can I do for you? And I say – well, keep in mind, I’ve got about ten thousand credits to my name, and I woke up in the corner of some modder’s cargo shed. I was broke as broke gets, but I bought a hackjob sim hub off him. He asks me if I want any sims while I’m there, and I say, “Do you have Big Bug Crew?” And he looks at me and says, “Of course, which one?”’ She laughed. ‘“Which one?” I didn’t know there was more than one! He thinks I’m nuts at this point, obviously. He brings up this massive catalogue, and he says, “Friend, they’ve been making Big Bug for over thirty standards.”’
‘How many did you buy?’ Sidra asked.
‘Oh, all of them. I had to go back and explain to Blue why I’d just spent most of our credits on kids’ sims and a busted hub. I didn’t really understand money then. I still don’t.’ Pepper looked to the ceiling, thinking. ‘Since then, I’ve played every single episode at least twice. I can tell you any trivia you want to know. I love Big Bug. I love it dearly. But it will never feel the same as it did when I was a kid. I’m different now. And different is good, but it cuts both ways.’ She reached out and touched the closest circuit junction. ‘You’re different now, too.’
Sidra wasn’t sure if that was a comfort or a concern. ‘The kit has so many limitations, and there’s only so much code I can tweak before I start changing who I am. If I had come back into a ship after only a few days, or a tenday, even, I think I would’ve been fine. But now . . .’ She tried to untangle her pathways. ‘I don’t know what I want.’