Nico’s Secrets

“Don’t tell me you’re already overthinking after one date,” Tori says as she slips her hands under the Instant Nails scanner. We’re in her room, in real life, laying across her furniture like wet towels as we try to cool down from the hot summer air outside. Her parents are gone a lot, since they handle interplanetary supply shipments—an important part of building the colony—so we usually find ourselves at her place.

“What do you mean?” Zach says with a grin. “That’s exactly what I’d expect from Petra.” He’s playing some gaming livestream aloud on his holo, the sound of the background music and player chatter adding white noise to our conversation.

“C’mon, guys. You have to admit that it’s kind of weird how much he seems to like me…”

“Nah, it’s a vacay romance,” Zach says. “I’ve read about them before. They always move fast cause vacations have end dates.”

I wave off Zach’s comments. He’s not someone I trust for any type of dating advice, but for some reason, Nico’s words are still haunting me. I’m a Mars citizen now; my mother and I gave up our Earth citizenship completely to fully commit to joining the Mars Colony at its inception. Visas aren’t easy to come by. To maintain population balance across the system, they’re handed out strategically and sparingly upon request. But if I married Sol, we could both be dual citizens—even if we got divorced later.

But it’s not like I’m going to marry Sol! I just met him.

“And it’s not weird,” Tori says. “You’re, like, really cute. If you’d have given anyone any attention in school, you could’ve had like three boyfriends by now. Or girlfriends,” she adds pointedly.

“I’m not ‘really cute.’ I’m ‘average cute.’”

“Oh, so you think you’re cute?” Zach shoots back, his eyes still locked on his screen, even as he grins cheekily.

Tori pulls her hands out of the scanner, her nails now fully done and a flawless iridescent white. She bounds over and wraps her arms around me, hugging me tight. “You’re the cutest, Pet. You really are.” She gives the top of my head an affectionate kiss.

My Linx pings. Anonymous495823 is calling to VR video chat. I sigh.

Tori looks down at me, smoothing out my hair. “What?”

“Nico’s calling.”

They both perk up at that. “Answer! Answer!” Zach exclaims, his eyes bright as he finally tears them away from the livestream.

“Yeah,” Tori adds, just as excited. “Then tell us what he does!”

I roll my eyes. “He’s not that interesting, guys.” And I don’t want to talk to that jerk. But I know if I don’t answer, he’ll probably just show up here and haunt me like some kind of holographic ghost. So I answer.

And… I don’t know where we are. I mean, we’re definitely somewhere on Mars—that much is clear. The rolling red landscape stretches out before me, and Nico is planted right in front of it, sitting cross-legged at the very edge of whichever public atmosphere this is, buried in the long grass. He’s tapping along the forcefield softly, watching as it glows a weak purple wherever he touches it.

“You answered,” he says. His attitude from earlier is gone. No sassy remarks, no mean grins, nothing. He’s not even looking at me.

“Of course I answered,” I say stiffly. “We need to reschedule, right?” I walk over to where he’s sitting and try to figure out what he’s staring at. But there’s nothing out there but red sand blowing in the wind.

This is… weird.

His dark hair covers his face, so I can’t see his expression, but he does nod. “How’s right now? We could just do an hour of review. Then you’d only have forty-nine hours left to do.”

I watch his fingers as he taps along absentmindedly. His black nail polish is splintered a bit, chipped—he doesn’t use a scanner; he paints them himself. Interesting. “Do you really care about my volunteer hours?” I ask.

Then he looks at me finally, and his hand stills. His face is unreadable, but it’s clear my simple question has sent a flurry of thoughts through his head from the way his eyes pan across my face. “No, not really,” he says finally. “But you do, right?”

“So… you care because I care?”

He huffs. “I don’t care. I just said that.”

Maybe it’s because Tori and Zach are eager for some Nico tea, or maybe it’s because the nice end to my date with Sol has given me a burst of social confidence, but for whatever reason, instead of leaving, instead of writing him off, I decide to ask, “Where are we, Nico?”

He pauses in his tapping. “Public Atmosphere 1.”

Really? I look around curiously. This is where the labs are, where the scientists work on enriching the soil and testing potential plant and animal life for habitation. I’ve never been here before. No construction kid has.

It’s off limits.

Behind us are a smattering of default colony buildings with blacked out windows. They’re all white adobe—an older material that suits the desert landscape—much like the first buildings on Mars. Actually, some of these might be the first buildings on Mars. A few look older, a little scuffed up around the edges, the windows painted with dust. But the weaving sidewalks are empty of traffic, only the occasional cactus creating the illusion of a human silhouette.

“Why here?” I ask.

But then he moves us—and now we’re in his server. Just like that. An imitation of his home, no doubt, a carbon copy of mine but mirrored, and he’s no longer sitting in the grass but at the wooden dining room table, looking up at me. “Is this better?”

After a moment of pause, I sit down across from him. Though his eyes look as lifeless as always, I realize that I find them less unnerving now. I guess I’m getting used to him. “You really want to do an hour of tutoring? Right now? I was just hanging out with my friends.”

He makes a small noise, like a scoff.

“What?”

He waves his hand dismissively. “You know… friends.”

“...Right.” He doesn’t have any. I guess I figured that already, but to state it aloud almost feels cruel. “Well… we weren’t doing much of anything, so I guess I can take an hour.” Get it out of the way, I remind myself. Though I’m not sure that’s why I’m agreeing.

He just seems so… sad. Not making snippy jokes at me, not calling me names. He’s just sitting there.

I start adding textbooks to the table, one for each subject, some notebooks, pens, highlighters. Holographic blue grids, cyan nets of light, map out the polygons for each item before they solidify into tangible objects. He doesn’t say anything as I work, so I don’t say anything until it’s all set up. Then I look at him, and wonder why I’m not mad.

He seems to read my mind. “Why aren’t you mad at me? You should be.”

I just shrug.

“I tried to ruin your date.”

I shake my head hesitantly. “You didn’t ruin it.”

“I tried to. So why aren’t you mad?”

I sigh. “I don’t know. I’m trying to figure that out myself. Maybe I’m just tired.”

He grabs one of the textbooks, the one for music, and pulls it closer to him. “It’s because you pity me,” he says.

I want to deny it, say that I don’t care enough to pity him, but when he says it so bluntly, so matter-of-factly, just like that, I realize it might be true.

Because he was sitting alone in Public Atmosphere 1, staring out at the oxygen-less expanse of Mars, like he wanted to walk out there just to see what would happen.

And I felt sorry for him.

“Why don’t you talk to anyone, Nico?”

He opens the textbook, right in the middle, looking at the notes across the page, black dots splattered against lines and bars and stanzas. “They don’t talk to me.”

“I’m sure someone’s tried to talk to you at least once.”

His eyes flick up to mine and he glares. “Are you trying to tell me what my life is like?”

“I…” My mouth falls open at the surprise aggression, then I feel my own anger spike in response. “You don’t get to crash my date, call me out of the blue while I’m doing something else, and then give me attitude. I’m just trying to have a conversation.”

“I don’t want to be your friend,” he says coldly. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Wha—? You called me, remember?”

“Yes, well that was a mistake. Clearly.”

I’m about to snap back at him when the sound of a man and woman talking makes me freeze. “Is someone else here?”

He looks up at something behind me, watching quietly, and when I turn, I see there are two people. A couple. His foster parents? I quickly look away and back at him. “Are we in your actual kitchen?” I hiss. “You’re… you’re holoing us into a real place? Why?”

Something’s wrong. I know a real place from a server, or at least I’d like to think I do. And this… this doesn’t feel real.

He doesn’t respond to me, his eyes locked on the two people as they putter around behind me, clinking glasses and talking. The smell of coffee fills the room, and I begin to pick out what they’re saying.

“Are you going to take Nico to school?” the woman says softly.

“We’re going to take him to school today?” the man replies. “I thought we were going to… you know.”

“You don’t need to mince words. He’s in his room.”

“Are we doing the test today or not, Mara?”

The woman sighs. “Fine. We’ll do it today. But you’re too eager. I think we should wait.”

“We’ve waited for a year. I think we’ve got this.” I hear the ruffle of clothes, and I dare a glance behind me. Oh god. They’re kissing.

I turn back around, flushing. “This is an invasion of their privacy,” I whisper to Nico, still not understanding why he’s doing this—why we’re here right now.

“No, it’s not,” Nico says simply. I look up at him, confused, but he’s still watching them, a strange look on his face.

“Oh, Nico!” the woman coos in a baby voice. I stiffen. She can see us? But when I turn to look at them again, what I see sends a wave of unease through my body. A little boy is running up to her. He’s got messy black hair, blue eyes, a happy smile on his face. Nico? That’s… Nico? “We need to fix your hair, silly boy,” Nico’s mother says. Now that I’m looking at her, really looking at her, I see it. She has long black hair, straight as a needle, and pretty brown eyes that twinkle as she lifts up toddler Nico with a big smile. His hair, his nose, his mouth. That’s not his foster mother. That’s his… “You wanna help Mommy and Daddy with work today?” she asks.

This isn’t his foster parents’ house. This is a memory. His memory. I turn back to Nico, my bottom lip quivering. I shouldn’t be here. These people are dead. “What are you doing?” I whisper to him. “Why are we here?”

He blinks at me, like he’s just now registering that I’m here too. “It’s fine. They’ll leave and then we can use the freeze frame to study.” His eyes wander back over to the scene.

“No,” I hear myself say. I put my hand on his wrist, jolting him back to the present. “This is bad. This isn’t normal.”

“People go through old memories all the time,” he says defensively, but the look on his face tells me that he knows I’m right. Old memories are fine, but memories of dead loved ones? That’s how people get VR immobility sickness. Everyone knows that. You get stuck in the past, stuck in VR, and then your body starts to die, and you never go back to it.

When VR was first made free for the public through Linx implementation, there were so many issues with VR immobility sickness that Universal Healthcare had to adjust the amount of free non-trauma therapy from compulsory monthly sessions to compulsory monthly sessions plus optional weekly sessions, requiring them for anyone found by AI moderation to be visiting memories of dead relatives more than once a month. It happened before I was born, but is still hotly contested to this day by those who claim “memory mourning” is its own kind of therapy.

But the numbers don’t lie.

An eerie feeling passes over me. I don’t want to be here—I don’t like this.

“It’s not healthy,” I whisper frantically, trying to block out the sound of Nico’s dead parents talking to the little kid version of him behind me. “Studies have shown that—”

He pulls his hand away from me and glowers. “It’s not a big deal. But if it bothers you so much, then you can go.”

“What?” My eyes meet his, and I’m struck again by how sad he looks—his downturned lips, his heavy brow, the quiet defeat in his eyes—and I feel sorry for him again.

I feel so sorry for him.

Because my dad may not be here, but at least he’s still alive.

I’m sorry.

I open my mouth to say more—

And then I’m back in Tori’s room. He kicked me out. Tori and Zach are both crowded around me, standing weirdly close and peering down at me with worried looks on their faces.

I stare up at them, confused over their little claustrophobic display, and try to wave them away from me. “What are you guys doing?”

Zach lets out a sigh of relief and steps back, running a hand through his hair. Tori, however, reaches out and touches my cheek gently, collecting a stray tear. “You were crying,” she says softly. “You just… started crying.”