Somebody Up There Likes Me

They landed in one of the bubbles. Just like that. Nobody died. Nothing exploded. "Nobody died," Stella said, "And nothing exploded."

"Nope." Bob stood up. As he stretched, the door to the... cabin? Rocket? Opened. "I'll go first so I can help you walk down the stairs. One moment."

"No." Stella tripped on the way down the stairs. Since she was a former weapon of war, this didn't physically harm her, but emotionally, she was a mess. How could she have forgotten that the moon had a fraction of the Earth's gravity? No, scratch that. The cabin rocket thing clearly had some sort of device to keep them sitting instead of floating, so why wasn't the moon the same? What kind of dystopia was this?

"Stella?"

"No." Bob had rushed down the stairs to help, but Stella stood up by herself. She dusted her skirt as though there were anything in it. "Say nothing of this. Let's continue with our mission."

He watched her walk for a moment, as if deciding what to do. They'd landed on a dark, isolated chamber which lead to a slightly less dark but equally isolated hallway, which Stella stomped across. At the end, a door opened. It was almost the exact same color as the walls and barely stood out, so Stella jumped a bit. "Stella, right?" Asked the man who spontaneously tore through the wall (kind of.) "Where's Fuyukawa?"

"Here," Bob replied. For a human, he'd sure had caught up to her quickly. He hadn't even lost his breath. It made sense; now that they stood side by side, Stella realized that she didn't even reach his shoulder. "What's up, Sam? I assume you read my report already."

"Sup. Yeah, I did." They exchanged a mystifying, avant-garde handshake. Immediately, the man flinched, then leered at them both. "Were you smoking in the rocket again?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Bob replied.

"Christ almighty..."

Wasn't it a fire hazard of cataclysmic proportions to even have cigarettes inside a closed system like this, likely containing vast amounts of oxygen? If one of them went off at the wrong place and time...

...but Sam the doorman did not mention this, nor did he tell Bob to stop self-destructing. "Oh, whatever. They'll confiscate them soon anyway."

Though Stella supposed it didn't matter, since Bob only had one. Unless he'd lied.

The man left the door open when he left. Stella followed. Bob closed it behind them.

Another hallway. This one had paintings. A few bulletin boards. But not glowy white screens? Several lasers pointed at them from tiny dots on the roof, but Bob remained unbothered by this. Stella pretended to do the same. She would've walked with her hands in her pockets, too, but her skirt didn't have them.

At the end of the slightly less dreary hallway, Sam walked through another barely visible door, whose black screen suddenly flashed green. Stella hid behind Bob without thinking. "Oh, good," said Bob. "All green. It means we passed the initial screening." A bit louder, he added, "See, Sam? No cigarettes."

So the lasers had been... analyzing them? And he had no cigarette box anymore, or a lighter? Where had he... "Oh," Stella mumbled. "They're back in the rocket, aren't they?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Bob replied.

"That's too dangerous!"

"I still don't know what you're talking about." Discreetly, he fished out what used to be a box of cigarettes from his pockets, now crumpled into a ball. It was so compact, that to the eye of a blissfully unaware individual, it could easily be a paper. 

Bob was scary. Had he crushed the lighter into a ball with his bare hands, too? Could he do that to anything? Did society know about such a menace? As he slipped the ball back into his spacetime-defying pockets, he continued, "Now, after we get through this door, we'll be at the main station. They'll run a second round of tests. We'll have some time to kill while the results come out, so you can grab something to eat for the meantime, then we get sterilized and then... we're done. We'll officially be in the aquarium, as you put it."

Stella did not care too much about sterilization since she couldn't bear children in the first place, but it seemed too cruel a fate for Bob, unless he didn't mind ending 3.8 billion years of lineage. Then again, with how potentially dangerous genes that enabled crushing metal into mini black holes were, this might actually be for the best.

"We'll take a cab to the neighborhood I showed you earlier, and then... well, usually it's a real estate agent showing clients around, but..."

He gestured at her, nodding.

The second round of tests seemed far more standard to Stella, though they separated her and Bob into mechanical and biological rooms, respectively. Also, the android attending her was baffled as to how to even run a test check on her. 

Stella sat on a hospital bed, swinging her legs, as the android spoke on the phone. Had they truly built an android wellness check resembling a hospital room? Yes, they had. Absolutely deranged and worrisome.

In the end, after several people, both androids and humans, paraded into the room, they let Stella go without so much as a system check. Bob was already outside on a bench, playing games on his phone next to a kid doing the exact same. Neither of them seemed to know what the other was doing.

As for the station itself, with how much it resembled an airport from two centuries ago, Stella didn't find much to see other than a strangely inhuman android giving tickets at a booth nearby. Where most of the ones Stella had seen had, at least, articifial skin and hair, this one was silver metal through and though, square and wiry, with two lights for eyes and a 'mouth' that neither opened nor closed, just flickered as the android spoke.

None of the humans seemed to care. Once it was their turn on the line, they'd talk to the android for a moment, get their ticket, and leave.

Stella glanced at Bob and the kid, then at the robot. "I'll be right..." But Bob and the kid were too engrossed in their activities. Using old software (hopefully not forbidden, unlike the dormant weapons inside her), she 'traced' a path from them to the robot so as to not get lost, then stood in line.

Several humans glanced at her. Very few cared about proper etiquette, which was to not stare at the ears. Some things never changed, did they? And then it finally was her turn, so she told the robot, "Hello."

"Hello. Which department are you going to?"

"None. Just wanted to say hi."

"Oh," said the robot. "Well. I'm afraid I can't chat. We're never supposed to exceed a five minute wait time."

"But I thought androids were free now?"

"We are."

"Then why are you doing this?"

"It's my job. I chose to do this. Sorry, miss, but I must attend the next person."

So Stella stepped out of the line. She watched, baffled, as the robot subjected itself to the task of asking people what queue they headed to, thus giving them a ticket, over and over again for several hours a day, for most days of the week, and presumably for many, many years to come. And it chose to do that.

Stella held back the urge to make a victory fist bump. Still, she couldn't hold back the grin as she skipped back to the bench, only to find Bob was no longer there, but the kid was, so she asked him, "Where's the man with a fungal infection in his hair?"

"Huh?" The kid looked up. "...whoa. Can I touch your ears?" Stella leaned down so he could pet her ears. He giggled. "It's the first time a catgirl lets me do this."

Stella held back a sneeze. She neither liked nor disliked it, but it made the kid happy. "Where's the man with a fungal infection in his hair?"

"If you're talking about the big guy, he went back to the doctor thingies and then he came back out and was looking for someone I think. For you? Wait! No..."

Stella had to stand up. "I see," she replied. "Thank you for your help."

Fortunately, with the leftover smell of nicotine, it was easy to trace him. He was talking to the robot, whose voice denoted irritation, or maybe sadness or happiness. "There you are!" Both Bob and the robot exclaimed, exactly at the same time. After that, the robot went back to its job.

"Bob," Stella said, but he looked kind of annoyed, so she had to de-escalate the situation. "No... Fu... yu... ka... wa... Shi... gu... re. Can I also get a job?"

Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't. "...huh?"