Pizza and Contemplation

In one month Earth time, they would be sitting in a booth in a pizzeria in Chicago stuffing their faces with cheese and dough and soda, Jacob would be nowhere to be seen, the Cubs would be winning, Emily would have a big old square car with too many cylinders, they would be waiting for their next mission in cloudy contentment, their flight jackets studded with patches and medals, their schedules stuffed with press conferences and speeches and hearings. Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker would have written a book with a dramatic title and only part of her name on the cover because the rest wouldn’t fit, and everything would be golden, shiny, rose-tinted and brutally, endlessly, gloriously boring. Cypris would hate it, Kareem and Reyes and Emily would hate it, Conrad would be alright because he quit to open a brewery with his copious hazard pay, Evie would hate it, Tyler would hate it, but would otherwise be alright because he was more or less dating Evie, Henry would have quit also, to be a bartender at Conrad’s brewery and re-grow his accent. 

At least that’s what Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker hoped, as she lay awake in the brilliant glare of the star, which the sheet of transparent orange plastic she had found beneath her bunk was doing little to abate. At present, they were still unimaginably far from any pizzeria, much less a Chicago pizzeria. Although, somewhat comfortingly, there was little comparative distance between the two kinds of pizzeria, and Cypris was confident that if they had the means to reach one kind of pizzeria, reaching whatever kind they wanted would be a relative cinch. As the hours passed, Cypris amended the Theory of Relativity, because it didn’t seem to have anything to do with relativity; her version went like this: Compared to space, everything is easy and safe. She kicked around a version that had pizza in it somewhere, too, but never quite found the words to formulate it. She was sure, though, that if she found the words to such a Pizza Theorem, that the support of the scientific community would follow swiftly. 

Nevertheless, and despite the danger and creeping despair, a lingering feeling hung heavy on Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker’s shoulders, a feeling of happiness, if not satisfaction, and for the first time in her life, she realized that the two things were not dependent on one another, and might even have been mutually exclusive. They were for her, at least: She had achieved one of her childhood goals by marrying Jacob, and been confused and often miserable while she was married; she had achieved her other goal by getting a job at A.C.R.O.N.Y.M., and that was frustrating and limiting and grey for the majority of it. But here, beyond limitation and regulation and communication and familiarity, in this blank, black void with its strange hideous star and new constellations and opposing view of the Milky Way, Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker no longer felt that her sense of isolation, a sense that most humans share, in fact, one of the few things most humans share, was out of place or unwarranted. And with every passing “day”, she was closer to her crew and farther from her troubles. Jacob had ceased to irritate her, though his personality hadn’t changed in the slightest. 

Everything and nothing was riding on repairing the FTL Stuffpusher, finding out where the hell they were, and riding home with their fingers crossed. If they succeeded, they would have their whole entire lives back, and if they failed, they would die, and their parents would be heartbroken and their friends would be distraught and Jonathan Griggs would have to do lots of paperwork. Ultimately, the second version didn’t matter in the slightest to Cypris Marcela Alta Cranford-Tracker, who knew that, being dead, she wouldn’t be able to care about what her parents were feeling; and she would still get a month or more sitting around the kitchen table with her best friends in the solar system (to be fair, they were her best friends in the galaxy, seeing as they were her only friends in the solar system), talking about nothing important and nothing in particular before they boiled slowly in the heat of an alien sun; and she really didn’t care whether Jonathan Griggs had to do a lot of paperwork; in fact, Griggs having to do lots of paperwork was one of the few consolatory things about being dead. They did lots of talking about nothing important and nothing in particular during that time, because they were doing lots of experiments and math, and had to wait long overlapped periods while fungus grew, chemicals reacted, stars shifted, and data complied methodically.

Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker felt strangely attuned to the possibility, the inevitability, and the pointlessness of her death. Because it lurked ever out of reach, like tomorrow, or Free Pizza Day, she began to garner the impression that it would never come, or that when it did, time would slow, as it does near a black hole, until it was almost completely stopped, but not entirely; dividing and dividing, but never ever reaching zero. Sadly, Reyes reminded her that death was a function of subtraction, not division, Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker would not be cut in half endlessly until she was reduced to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of herself, she would be removed, cancelled out, erased. 

“Take one Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker, and remove one Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker, and you have zero Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Trackers.”  Reyes said, in the back of her mind. 

But that version wasn’t correct either. Her atoms and energy would carry on comparatively unabated, it would just be her that was gone. Take one Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker, and remove one Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker, and you have a lot of very tiny pieces of Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker serenely observing the passage of time. 

Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker retreated into her room at 5:00 and didn’t return until 4:00, every single “day”, and was lost in thought for much of the time she wasn’t in her room. She was moody, inconsistent, and erratic. But that was normal. She pondered the challenges before them, and came up permanently blank. She simply didn’t know enough useful things to be helpful at fixing something nobody on the ship understood. If only we had somebody who did understand, she thought, but couldn’t think of how to get anyone who did or talk to them, and wasn’t even sure that anyone did understand. Conrad was increasingly convinced that the FTL Stuffpusher was the work of aliens, or was at the very least a product of a highly specialized team of highly specialized geniuses. They didn’t need one person who completely understood it because he couldn’t exist, he told Cypris once, when she raved about needing outside help, they needed several people who mostly understood it. But, while they were somewhere to be found, there was absolutly no way of bringing any of them, much less enough of them, to where they needed to be.

Wherever that was. 

Happiness was much closer than home. And nobody was miserably lonely. And somehow they had all managed to keep from bickering, whether that was due to their extreme circumstances, or because the crew worked well together, or because everyone was good at hiding their irritation, or some mixture of the previous. Cypris wasn’t sure what it might be, and didn’t much care one way or the other or the other or the last thing, just so long as nobody was getting in shouting matches about the underwhelming breakfast “cereal” or the FTL Stuffpusher (a favorite topic) or baseball or sleeping arrangements or any number of idiotic topics the crew could be chewing each other up about, but weren’t. 

Happiness, though, like love, is hard to explain. And fickle. It’s found in the strangest places, and often doesn’t belong there, and often doesn’t stay for any length of time; to catch it, you have to chase it; to chase it, you have to be ready to leap forward on instinct and whim alone, and never ever let up. The best you’ll get otherwise is contentment, a paltry and ultimately unsatisfying substitute. Contentment is like Stevia, paltry and ultimately unsatisfying. Contentment, unlike Stevia, can lead to complacence; Stevia merely leads to boredom and disinterest regarding food, something Emily thought should be a crime, or at least a punishable offense. Consequently, Emily thought Stevia should be a crime. Conrad, Reyes, and Kareem agreed with her, and by extension, so did Steven, though he was impartial to forming opinions usually, especially where food was concerned. Apathy about food was considered Steven’s greatest fault by his creators; the ability to operate FTL drives was considered his greatest fault by everybody else. 

Steven said their chance of survival was 23.957183%, but Cypris was reasonably sure he was lying; the number couldn’t possibly be that large. The chances of them figuring out their location more than roughly were slim to start with, their chances of repairing the Stuffpusher were slimmer. If there were a way of confronting an insurmountable problem and overcoming it without the knowledge to do so, it was possible that Steven’s reasoning was sound. Otherwise, there was nothing but waiting. Not that Cypris would tell the crew that. In fact, she’d been holed up in her room primarily for the purpose of deciding what exactly she would tell the crew, and had filled half her binder with possible speeches, soundbites, mottoes, and statements, written in her half-legible cursive. But there was nothing immediately useful and appropriate that sprung to mind. There was nothing useful, even, that could be dredged from the darker recesses of Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker’s usually fecund imagination. She sat and spent more time fantasizing about survival than actually planning to manage it. All the while, her crew bustled autonomously. 

She turned it over in her head for a while. They had to survive by accident. 

And had Tyler heard Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker think that, he might have been sure of Steven’s accounting; they were good at accidents.