“Is that a Star Trek pillowcase?” Mireille leans forward into her own screen, squinting.
After they’d spoken on the day of the Weilai 3 tragedy, Mireille messaged to apologize for how she’d acted (“The bread knife thing was pretty dumb, thanks for being nice about it”) and then a third time because she wanted his opinion about a new kind of psychoactive medication. He’s not meant to be speaking with her at all, but apparently getting the family members to open up about their experience has proved difficult, and as long as Luke records any “sessions” he has with Mireille, Ransom and Kyrah, the Kane family liaison, have okayed the communication, with strict guidelines.
“Of course it’s a Star Trek pillowcase.” Luke smiles and whips the pillow out from behind his back, holds it up. His pod chair would seem a more classically appropriate and professional piece of furniture to conduct a session from, but there is no way to position his screen from the chair that would not include displaying his bed in the background, and that seemed unprofessional. So he is sitting on his bed, and Mireille can only see the wall and part of the window. He had forgotten about the pillowcase. At some point in the conversation he must have pulled it up behind him for comfort. “It was a gift from my Secret Winter Solstice Fairy,” Luke says. “But it’s a way better quality fabric than my own. I wish I had the whole Star Trek sheet set, to be honest.”
“Right. So I’m guessing you don’t do a whole lot of home entertaining. Or perhaps Star Trek bed linen is the Prime equivalent of black satin sheets.” Mireille gives him one of her professional-grade looks, straight out of an old black-and-white movie, one eyebrow raised, lips slightly pursed. He can’t tell if she’s being provocative or making fun of someone who is trying to be provocative. Either way, he’s provoked. He needs to be very careful. Mireille really does need someone to talk to, but it would be better if she talked to Kyrah, who presumably does not have thoughts about the shape of Mireille’s mouth.
“It’s the Prime equivalent of white cotton.” He can delete this section, later, from the transcript running on the side of his screen, and from the recording itself. Luke can also, if he chooses, erase the entire thing and claim that the software on his personal screen failed to record the session. There is so much going on with the crew right now, Ransom wouldn’t notice.
They have lost audio feed into the Lav of Red Dawn. They never had video in there, and the audio got knocked out sometime between the last inspection before launch from Mars, when it was operational, and two days ago, when it went silent.
Two days ago Sergei asked Yoshi and Helen for assistance in the Lav and the crew had all squeezed themselves in there and stayed in there, all three of them, for twenty-three minutes.
It was possibly Sergei who had knocked the audio out, and the why of that might be connected to the fact that Sergei’s vitals during the launch of Red Dawn from Mars had been nothing like his vitals during the launch of Primitus. And now all three of the astronauts were spiking in new ways.
Something, in short, was up.
“So, anyway, we’re approaching the part of the mission when the crew is at risk for what we call ‘third-quarter effect.’” Luke puts the pillow behind his back. “It’s the period of time when—traditionally—a kind of lethargy or apathy sets in. The greatest event is in the past, and the next thing to look forward to feels pretty distant. It doesn’t have to do with number of days so much as perception of time. We’d like to try to avoid the three-quarter effect as much as we can.”
“I love when people come up with these special psychological terms and descriptions for ordinary life things.” Mireille talks with her hands, air-sculpting her sentences, giving them geography. “The other day, one of my clients asked if I could turn up the heat on the electric blanket because he had ‘temperature sensitivity.’ I was like, ‘You’re cold. You don’t have some kind of special condition.’ I didn’t say that, of course.” Mireille sweeps her hair from one side to the other. It’s several shades lighter than her mother’s and falls in waves, as opposed to Helen’s frizzy curls. “I know it’s hard to imagine, but when I’m at work I have this whole nurturing vibe. I talk like this—” She can change her entire physiognomy in an instant. “Oh of course, Mr. Smith, let me adjust that for you.”
He can see more of Mireille’s kitchen now. It’s crowded with things: a blue shelf with a collection of antique cups and tins, pictures he can’t quite make out taped to the refrigerator, a birdcage populated by tiny fabric birds.
“How’s work going, by the way?” he asks. He needs to stop talking about the crew, get the focus back on Mireille. It’s unfortunate that the effort not to flirt with her is making him sound like a robot.
“You mean the spa? I’ve hardly been there.” Mireille leans back in her chair and stretches. “I keep having to get my shifts covered because I’m booking all these games.”
“That’s fantastic.” Luke wonders if any of the characters Mireille is providing motion capture or voice-over for will end up looking like Mireille in the animation. What would it be like to “play” Mireille in a game?
“But I cut you off.” Mireille gives him one of her rare, entirely natural smiles. “Third-quarter effect. The thing that happens after the big thing we were waiting for is over and the next big thing is far away.”
“You got it.”