Maria

Maria’s morning routine on this particular floorday begins as it always does: she checks to make sure she didn’t have any nocturnal reintegrations. This is, as always, a hell of a way to start the morning: bleary, unkempt, no caffeine (in Maria’s case that means no Oolong tea, which she prefers to the high-impact, very black coffee that most Sphere-dwellers have taken to inexplicably—perhaps out of some sense of austerity), searching for possibly oblique little glitches in her memory at a moment when it’s still hard to keep her memories straight from her dreams.

But it pretty much has to be done first thing in the morning: drinking tea and eating breakfast and passing entirely into the realm of the waking will overwrite any sense of incongruity that her mind hasn’t already papered over while she sleeps. This is why Maria keeps her notebook on her bedside dresser, so she can consult it immediately without even getting up. (It’s movement, and especially walking, that fully shunts the mind into the world of the living.) She picks up the notebook with as listless and dreamlike a gesture as she can manage, and flips to yesterday’s entry.

The entry is, of course, pretty fragmentary: getting herself to write anything down after a fight is pretty hard, although she always manages to hew to her own rule of writing something down. In this case, it’s nothing more than a few scribbled words: strong field, went down easy, concentration tactics seem to be working (??). This is all pretty much useless, since the post-fight reintegration would have re-synched all these features anyway. What would be useful would be some details from the moments between the end of the fight and passing out, but that’s a stretch of time that always seems to be uniquely unremarkable: stumbling, escorted, through the same old corridors, typically lit with the dim ambience of Sphere halls at floornight, opening the door to her quarters, lying face down on the bed, instant deep sleep. This time she slept for 18 hours, which is actually pretty short for a post-fight rest.

She wrote a bit more before the fight, none of it especially remarkable. The latest heteropneum had come in without warning, so there’s no pre-fight stress: just some scattered notes about who she had talked to yesterday (Janelle, at lunch; Miranda, briefly and unexpectedly, in a hallway in the dormitory wing). All of these details check out.

Maria considers the first step of her routine done, and allows herself to begin steeping her tea and turn on the TV. Entertainment choices in the Sphere are a complicated matter. The same deep-submergence vehicle that each month brings food and supplies from the surface, and official reports to the surface, also brings a hard drive full of whatever media the Sphere denizens have determined most desirable by popular vote, but there’s only so much space in the DSV and this is the least mission-critical of anything it brings. The Sphere-dwellers who prefer to read get spoiled in this arrangement, because text takes up so little space on digital media; they can get thousands of novels per month, if they want, and basically none of their desires go unsatisfied. Maria likes a good book but finds the unmoving quality of words on a (virtual) page a little lonely and isolating, and increasingly spends her leisure hours immersed in episodic TV.

This is not, in itself, at all unusual among Sphere-dwellers. But the more social among the Sphere-dwellers have noticed the pretty obvious fact that agreeing collectively to fixate on a small number of shows is far preferable to each going with their individual heart’s desires, for two reasons: first, because if everyone watches the shows then everyone’s got a default topic to talk about—something that can easily become a problem down here, where there’s rarely any news that isn’t either terrifying or forbiddingly technical or both—and second, because their pooled votes can get them a whole bunch of episodes of each show, where otherwise everyone might be left watching a single episode of their favorite show for a month, over and over, by the end interested more in the production errors and the extras in the background of each shot than in the plot or characters.

Maria, on the other hand, has resolutely avoided joining any of the coalitions in favor of the latest comedy (laden with pop culture jokes no one in the Sphere can sincerely pretend to understand) or high-gloss, theme-laden historical drama or grim fantasy epic. She alone requests her favorite shows, which no one else watches, and gets what she wants because she’s got an arrangement with Miranda, who cooks the books every month. Neither of them feel like there’s anything wrong with this, since after all Maria has a skill set that’s as irreplaceably useful as anyone’s on the Sphere, except maybe for Cept’s. So Maria gets her soap operas.

This is what Maria watches: a number of soap operas, from a number of the kind of countries that have soap opera addictions, with titles like Life Flows Like A River and My Crush Is The Prime Minister! and Cruel Love By Fate. The deal with these shows is that Maria doesn’t really think they’re very good at all, not just in the sense of being a bit embarrassed to talk about watching them, but in the sense that she doesn’t really think that what she’s getting out of them is what the target audience is meant to get out of them.

For example, this morning (no one uses the neologism “floorning” anymore, thank God), as she sips her first sips of Oolong and watches the opening of Episode 67 of Cruel Love By Fate, she is not surprised at all by the resolution of the cliffhanger set up in Episode 66. She would be wondering what the writers were thinking, setting up the protagonist for seemingly certain death when without a protagonist they wouldn’t have a show, but she’s seen this kind of thing far too many times to take it without perfect equanimity.

What Maria likes about these shows is entirely their sense of constant flux without real change, the way they drag on and on, elaborating themselves—the way that, although they throw out high-dramatic situation after high-dramatic situation, you can jump ahead, if you want, by 10 or 20 or (if applicable) 100 episodes and see the same characters, the same basic issues, the same dramas being played out again, formulaically. There’s an almost religious, ritualistic sort of feeling to it. The same dramas, played out again and again, remind her: this has not disappeared; this is still here; these people are still here; nothing ever changes; this show is an Elysian field, a summer that does not end.

Maria’s submarine can play TV on its viewscreen, and these kinds of shows are a lifesaver on long and lonely and eerie scouting missions of the sort that often last for more than 24 hours at a time—although of course there is something uniquely odd about seeing a candlelit romantic scene interrupted by the sudden information that a ravenous heteropneum, churning with alien Boltzmen, is headed straight for you.

Being able to guess by now pretty much how the next five minutes of Episode 67 are going to go, Maria is able to devote her attention to her email, which is mostly unremarkable, but does contain the expected gem, a follow-up message on the fight from Miranda, which contains the delightful detail that Miranda’s named the heteropneum “Nice Try.” Miranda’s appreciation makes her smile, though in general it’s hard for Maria to feel as proud after a fight as some people seem to feel of her, mostly because fights are essentially impossible for the pilot to remember, in any ordinary sense of the word “remember.” It’s like trying to remember a sports game in which you were all of the players at once. Many, many things happened, or “happened,” and it all added up, according to the ineffable calculus of pneuma, to a dead heteropneum and a victorious Maria. Good pilot. Job well done. We’re proud of you. All of you.

The “ineffable calculus of pneuma” is something Maria has a personal interest in for several distinct though related reasons (she thinks, remembering the locked chest in her closet in which the Summer Diary sits), and she’s had a long and mostly unsuccessful history of trying to wrest out of the scientists any kind of personally relevant interpretation of the equations they spend their days wrangling with. The basic problem here is that Maria finds Cept terrifying and unapproachable, Ratio and Cecelia glib and insensitive, and the rest of the scientists unhelpful. Most of them are just symbol-pushers who can manipulate the terms of Soul Coherence well enough but roll their eyes when asked what it all means, which is of no help to Maria. Ratio’s the one she’s made the most progress with when it comes to philosophical interpretation, but he’s distractible and frankly obnoxious and has a nasty habit of directing every conversation back to asking if he can mooch any of the Go-Pills they give her to keep her awake on long missions. (Maria keeps telling him that if they give them to her they might give them to him, too, and he should just bring the topic up discreetly with Miranda, but apparently that’s somehow outside of Ratio’s radius of socially possible behaviors, even though badgering Maria about it apparently isn’t.)

So she talks to Ratio when she feels up to it, and he babbles as he tends to, and she learns something, sometimes, about the branches of pneuma. Ratio gets very excited, in an abstract way, to hear about her own experience as a branching soul, because a lot of Ratio’s research apparently focuses on exactly what the implications of the “unreal” branches are for the “real” branch. But the basic and obvious incompatibility between Maria and Ratio, as people, along with the perpetual incompleteness of Ratio’s research, limits the extent and value of these conversations, and Maria finds herself willing to go back to that well less and less as time goes on. (Which makes her heart sink with the opposite of hope. Closet, chest, Summer Diary.)

The other topic of Miranda’s email is something completely new: apparently some clusterfuck up on the surface has forced some poor 17-year-old kid down into the Sphere, and as always with any newcomer, she’s gotta do the whole pneuma bond thing with him. She groans; she’s groggy, barely even here, after the fight and her 18-hour rest, and she’s been looking forward to a floorday of binging Cruel Love By Fate and not thinking one bit about the ineffable calculus of pneuma.

But this is her job, and so she brews and chugs another cup of Oolong and scarfs down some cereal and takes a shower (she, like anyone who’s been in the Sphere for a while, is an expert at getting the electrode paste out of her hair) and puts on some real clothes and gets herself ready to blow this poor kid’s mind.

In the corridor, past the dormitory wing, in the little cul-de-sac where the Free Pneumase Usage Rooms are kept, she unexpectedly runs into Miranda, her brown hair tumbling down in an apparently unwashed tangle. Miranda smiles her characteristic smile upon seeing her, which is the sort of professional’s smile which has a reserve that can always be interpreted—if one is so inclined—as mischievousness.

“Maria!” she says and gives her a hug—a gangly hug, given to someone a lot shorter than her, imbued with the un-hideable stiffness of the chronically overworked. Maria trembles a little against her will.

“God, you did so well out there,” Miranda says. “I know you have work to do now. We’ll talk later.” And she reaches down and kisses Maria on the cheek.

Maria and Miranda part ways, both a little quickly, a little stiffly.

And Maria finds the door to Free Pneumase Usage Room 5, and pauses a moment, just to collect herself.

There is a sudden far off shrieking and a sudden laughter in her mind, many voices, gibbering, in and out, back and forth. She shudders. “It’s just the Boltzmen from the ceiling lamp,” she tells herself. “Or from the wires in the wall. I’m too close to the wall. Or to the door. There are pneumases in there. They run experiments in these rooms all the time.” But she knows that’s not it. The Boltzmen whose thoughts are edging into her mind are Boltzmen from her very own pneuma. Just like usual.

And then of course she remembers walking through the corridor and hugging Miranda and talking to Miranda and Miranda kissing her on the cheek, and also walking through the corridor and not running into anyone at all. And as always one of these is true and one is not, and it’s up to her to figure out which. But she has a sense of the logic of these things—a sense she wonders if the scientists know, if Ratio can recognize somewhere in his equations—and she knows that Miranda has probably, in all likelihood, never been in this hallway this morning at all.