Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

30. Reaching for Orion

Lars had relinquished full control of the body back to Null who was walking through the settlement toward the shuttle bay at a brisk pace. Whoever spotted her approach made way immediately. She was silent behind the veil, but he knew that she was majorly pissed off. For some reason, he found her behavior highly amusing.

Null, I-

Are you completely insane?! Null suddenly yelled inside their mind. We could have killed him!

It was just a kiss on the cheek. I don't understand why you're so upset, he remarked, trying his best not to sound like he was grinning.

Widow's kiss?! Ring any bells? The last person we kissed-

That was different, he cut her off. He suppressed the memories of the events she was referring to before they could flare back to live vividly around him. It should be okay as long as he doesn't get it on his lips and ingests it. And it will wear off completely eventually, even Leah said so, remember?

Null didn't answer. She hadn't been happy about telling Leah about the poison, but she had continued to bug them about their blood test results, liver parameters and all the other things the poison had damaged in their body. Leah had probably known that this was no coincidence, she was a doctor after all. As expected, she had given them a good scolding, but they both knew that she had been right in calling them reckless, so it was well-deserved.

He will misunderstand, Null said after a while.

What is there to misunderstand?

Cyril will think that I- you know. He doesn't know that it was you, and –

You could have stopped me, Lars remarked with a smirk.

I tried to! she snapped.

Not hard enough, apparently.

She groaned, and a passerby cast her a confused glance.

I'll have to kill him, she concluded. After telling him all that about us, and now this... I will simply have to kill him.

Okay Null, let's be realistic here for a moment. Even if he wasn't the only neuro-cyberneticist left in known space...

She stopped in her tracks so abruptly that even Lars was surprised. He could feel a sense of realization well up inside, like a surge that washed over him. Before he could grasp what it was all about, Null seemed to pull the surge back to her side of their mind, leaving him behind confused.

I almost forgot, she said. I got so distracted that I-

What? What's wrong?

Nothing's wrong. I just need to think, she said, and retreated behind the veil.

~ ~ ~

New Elysium was a makeshift city, consisting mostly of container houses and refurbished or re-purposed parts of space stations and other modular building units. In the past year, people had also begun to build new houses from scratch. It gave the whole settlement a very patchwork-like appearance, but it was in no way rundown or chaotic. It wasn't a shanty town like the Town on Six.

There was order to the way the buildings had been placed, and order to the way in which new ones were constructed. Strict rules and laws governed the assignment of living quarters, jobs and other responsibilities. Everybody in this place had their role to fulfill, like tiny cogwheels in a big machine.

And it all worked surprisingly well. Despite the constant influx of new refugees, there was enough living space, enough to eat, well enough to survive. Life on New Elysium was not exactly paradise on earth, but it was overall quite comfortable and most of all, safe. The entire planet was so far out at the edges of known space that nobody who didn't know about it would find it.