Hanna
This story contains mature content and is intended for adult readers.
The station was designated HRS-05274, but he called her Hanna. He talked to her as he crabbed through maintenance shafts and crawl spaces, while he scrubbed shunts, and in the endless hours when there wasn’t a goddamned thing to do.
Each remote tachyon relay station in the network was staffed by a single engineer assigned to supervise automated maintenance. Every cycle a transport would dock at the station to deliver supplies. A psychiatrist was also delivered to evaluate the maintenance engineer.
“Do you have disturbing thoughts?” the Company shrink asks him, stylus poised over her tablet.
“I just imagined you naked.” He rubs his face with a palm. “That was disturbing.”
Some people thrived in the solitude of deep space, while others flayed themselves and wrote poetry with their blood and feces on the walls. It was difficult to anticipate which way an engineer would go, and the insurance payouts to next-of-kin were astronomical.
One of his predecessors had scratched the words “Beware, for I am fearless; and therefore powerful” into the glass of a viewport before slowly and methodically immolating herself with a fusion torch. They were never able to completely buff the words out of the glass, or remove the bits of her that had fused with the deck.
The psychiatrist makes a note on her tablet. “Do you ever hear voices?”
“Only my own.”
“The audio logs record you talking to someone...” She checks her notes. “Hanna, I believe you call her.”
“It passes the time.”
“Who’s Hanna?”
“This station. The machinery. It’s nothing. Just an engineer thing.”
“Why do you call her ‘Hanna’?”
He called her Hanna because that’s what she told him her name was, but he just shrugs. “Seemed to fit better than Bethany or Delores.”
“Your conversations are quite... intimate at times. Is Hanna real?”
“What, like an invisible friend? That’d be crazy.”
“We don’t use that word, Mr. Thomas. Being alone so long can blur the line between reality and imagination. Am I a figment of your imagination?”
“I sure as fuck hope not.“ He shrugs. “Figments of my imagination are usually hotter than you.”
“Is Hanna ‘hot’?”
In an awkward all knees-and-elbows geek-girl way, sure.
“She’s a relay station,” he says instead.
“How long have you been working at this station?”
“Five cycles. You know that.”
“When was your last leave?”
“Two cycles. I have another one coming up next cycle. You know that too.”
“How do you intend on spending it?”
“I’m getting a penthouse suite for a week and three hookers—not synthetics, mind you—and a few bottles of whiskey. The real stuff.”
“That’ll be expensive.”
“I’ll have three cycles of pay due. What else should I spend my money on? Wise investments? Feeding the poor?”
More scribbling.
“Do you take these evaluations seriously?” she asks.
“Not really. Do you?”
“The Company cares about its employees.”
“Bullshit. The Company cares that the relay stations stay online. The Company cares about insurance premiums. Aside from that, it doesn’t give a shit if its engineers are found hanging in shafts strangled by their own entrails.”
She makes more notes.
He shifts in his chair. “Are we done here?”
You‘re a pig and an asshole, but you’re not my problem, is what she obviously wants to say. Instead she gives him a thin smile. “Yes, we’re done.”
“Good.” He stands to leave, pauses, then looks her up and down. “You know, you’re prettier when you smile.”
The thin smile grows thinner and she makes a final note before shoving her tablet into a bag. “Good day, Mr. Thomas. I look forward to seeing you again next cycle.”
“Like cancer,” he mutters as he walks away, trailing his hand along the cool metal of the passageway.
The transport undocks and pulls away from the station, slowly becoming just another point of light in the blackness of deep space as he leans his head against the glass.
“Three hookers?” a soft voice asks behind him.
“Why not?” he asks the stars.
“You could make a girl jealous.”
“Nothing to be jealous about.” He turns from the viewport. “You’re my girl.”
The woman standing behind him isn’t what he’d call a knockout in the traditional sense, but she has a pretty face and enough of the right assets in enough of the right places.
She crosses her arms and frowns, holding up one finger.
“Fine,” he says. “One hooker. Happy?”
Her smile is all wrinkled nose and crooked lips.
“Ball-breaker,” he says without conviction.
She shrugs and walks away down an unlit corridor while his eyes follow her. It isn’t an unpleasant view, even in her frumpy engineer’s uniform.
Maybe especially in it.
When Hanna began speaking to him near the end of his first cycle on the station, he wondered if he was heading down the path that led to profane graffiti with bodily fluids, but decided not to mention it to the psychiatrist at the time. It was a good gig with plenty of free time. It paid very, very well. He saw no reason to fuck that up.
His rationalization was that Hanna wasn’t a symptom of insanity, but a manifestation of the heart and soul of the station. A ghost in the machine.
But during his second cycle when she started appearing to him… that was harder to rationalize.
He’d spent the better part of a week crawling through conduits with a scanner, looking for a projection source. He checked the holoprojectors, the emergency display systems, even the goddamn fire suppression optics. Nothing. The station had no way to generate what he was seeing, which left two possibilities: either something was on the station with him, or something was wrong with him.
And he knew he wasn’t defective, because if he was hallucinating she’d be much more... exotic; Hanna was about as far from exotic as a girl could get. Eventually he stopped questioning it. And, he admitted, she’d grown on him after all these cycles alone with her, wrinkled-nose smile and all. He might even say he loved her, in his way.
So, he wasn’t insane.
What was driving him crazy was he couldn’t touch her. Three cycles between leaves was a damn long time to be alone with nothing but a box of tissues and a VR headset.
He’s sitting below the observation dome, talking to Hanna about nothing in particular, when she awkwardly unzips her coveralls and pulls them down to her waist. The dusting of freckles across her breasts mirrors the dusting of stars outside the dome.
She kneels in front of him, shivering.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I want… to watch you.”
“Watch me?”
“I want to watch you do what you do with those stupid VR goggles on. But I want you to look at me while you’re doing it.”
He’d never been the blushing sort, but he blushes anyway. “You’ve been watching me?” He coughs. “This is awkward.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” Her voice softens. “Imagine you’re making love to me.”
“But… I always do...” He traces his finger around the shimmering outline of her face. “God, Hanna, I wish I could touch you.”
“So do I.”
After, she sits beside him and hugs her knees. “One,” her voice whispers under the stars. “But she has to look like me.”
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