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Thanks to Malady for his help editing and for ideas.

Cover image from Unsplash

2.7

It was a couple of days later that I entered Marc’s lab.

“Whatcha want, Rose?” he asked, keeping lots of distance between us. I assumed he didn’t want my sister to know he’d been talking to me.

“She’s still mad at us?” I asked.

“I’m on probation. I’m not supposed to help you with anything right now.”

“So I suppose I should go talk to Daddy then?”

He chuckled and relaxed. “I love Paula more than anything, but I know she’s wrong here. I want to support her, but I guess I have to do what’s good for everyone. Whaddya need?”

I explained to him what I’d been thinking about. Partway through our conversation, Paula walked in. Marc looked cautious, but he stoically refused to back down. My sister moved a chair to a point forming a triangle with Marc and me. I hoped she wasn’t thinking that we were fighting over him.

As I was explaining, she seemed to be paying close attention to me. Finally, when I finished, she asked a couple of questions relating to material she’d missed before she entered the lab. I answered as best I could, and she looked to Marc. He nodded in agreement, and she turned back to me.

“How do you think this would help?”

At least she’s talking to me, I thought. “If we can communicate to the bots as easily as to one another, getting their cooperation should be much easier.”

“I’m afraid speaking doesn’t always convey meaning very well.”

“Not always, but it’s easier for us,” I argued.

“Do you think ‘easy for us’ means it’s better?” Paula asked.

Here we go again, I thought. She’s just not gonna be easy to get along with, is she?

“Let’s see. We don’t have to have a seance to talk to them. Everyone who is present can talk to them. I think that’s better,” I told her.

I looked at Marc, hoping for agreement, but he held up his hands. “I’m not going to get into this,” he said. I couldn’t really blame him.

Paula stared at Marc for a moment, then at me. “I suppose we have a majority on this, don’t we?”

“Do we really have to make this a political thing?” I groaned.

“I think we do,” she said. “This is something that could conceivably endanger all of us.”

“How?” I challenged. “We communicate with the bots anyway. We trust them to keep us alive. Even to think!”

“We have to!” she snapped.

“And there’s no way back!” I retorted.

“There are other uses for it also,” Marc said quietly.

Paula’s jaw set, and she slowly turned to face her husband. I knew he had just stepped in it, but I figured that was his decision, not mine.

“And what are they?” Paula asked.

“How about a hologram of someone that you’re able to interact with?” he asked.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but we can do that anyway.”

“Well, yes we can, but this might allow better control of such a hologram. Perhaps a connection where you’re not acting out everything at your own end.”

“What do you mean?” Paula asked.

Marc took a deep breath. This could piss off his wife even more than she was at the moment, but he had to point out the benefits. “Consider the situation John is in right now. He can’t communicate with us except through Rose. However, if he could control a hologram here, he’d be able to interact with us without saying or doing anything where he is.”

“Or,” I said as I started to see what Marc was driving at, “he wouldn’t have had to go downstairs physically. He could have sent a hologram down there to do the job.”

She whirled on me. “We were gonna do that anyway!”

“No,” I exploded. “We weren’t! We would have programmed a hologram, but we wouldn’t have had any real control of it. We could have monitored it, but with John down there, hidden by a holographic field, he has direct control!”

I stepped forward and squared off with her. “Look!” I almost shouted into her face. “You wanna get mad, fine. Just consider this! It’s my husband down there. I don’t want that! But I realize that it needed to be done. So you got left out of the loop. Big deal! I’m the one who could lose her husband!”

Paula stepped back, her face contorting as if she’d been slapped. I knew I’d pushed her hard – She’d lost Fred to that thing downstairs, so she had to know I was hurting through this. I might need her help if something happened to John, and if she kept acting like this, I wouldn’t be able to get it.

The surge of adrenaline I’d spent shouting at her ended almost immediately, and with it gone, I backed up and collapsed into the chair I’d been sitting in before she came in. I felt weak, and I dropped my face into my hands, and started to sob. I needed her strength to help me. Now that she knew, I wanted her on my side. Not taking every opportunity to wound me.

I suppose she could have taken my emotions as me acting again, but I was through with that. I was being completely honest now. I had no desire to pretend, and I think she realized that. She sat down beside me and wrapped her arms around me. I was grateful and then I completely lost it.

Very quietly, I heard her murmur, “I understand.”

-=#=-

It wasn’t long before Daddy was convinced by Mama that accepting what John, Marc, and I had done was the better course of action, and he forgave us for not including him.

A few days after Paula and my reconciliation, Daddy suggested that we rebuild Heaven’s Rose. “Maybe it will keep you from worrying about your husband,” he told me.

While I wasn’t sure that anything would accomplish that, I did feel that reopening the restaurant would be beneficial. For now, I was simply waiting. There was very little I was able to do regarding our people downstairs. The best thing I could do right now was perhaps be a ‘morale officer’ to those upstairs.

We were still moving toward the center of the galaxy relative to Earth. We had turned around, as had the downstairs section, but now we were sliding sideways as our ship continued slowing. It was like skidding around a corner in a car. The back wheels are spinning, trying to get you moving forward, but your inertia keeps you moving sideways. The remnants of the ship that had been the joints to the transparent outer ring had moved away from us, continuing their journey toward the center of the Milky Way and whatever awaited them there.

Marc built a new generator for his “bots” and they began rebuilding what we’d lost, which included Heaven’s Rose. Since we had lost much of the matter that joined the sections when we explosively ejected downstairs, it was decided that we would modify the actual ring, or rather, the “U” tubes that connected us to it. When we exploded the tubes to separate, our half of them were destroyed.

The old restaurant had been in the transparent “U” tube connecting our bay to the ring. Thus, the explosion destroyed it.

But now, since we were connected through the photonicly repaired center “U” tubes, Marc used his solid photons to create a temporary connection to the outer ring, and sent his bots down to the lower half of the tubes. They cannibalized its material, reforming them as smaller versions. The excess material was used to make new, smaller tubes on our side of the ring. Once each tube was done, the bots built a new restaurant in the ring rather than the tube.

Then I enlisted the help of some of the people who had helped remove my equipment from the kitchen, and we moved it to the new restaurant site.

-=#=-

The new site was roughly the same size as the old one, so we were able to use all the dining room furniture that was available.

I hadn’t cooked for so many people in a long time, but the people I had trained were happy to return to their jobs, and before long, we had a grand opening mapped out.

As we were preparing the meal, Mamma came to the kitchen. “That smells wonderful!” she said as she entered.

“Thanks!” I said, smiling.

“It’s interesting that you’re doing your grand opening today, Rosie,” she told me.

“Why?”

“Don’t you realize what today is?”

I answered, “Today is New Years Day, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Well, it’s a perfect time, then,” I told her.

We talked about the menu for a bit, and Mama asked, “Why are you doing barbecue pork?”

“Because I don’t have enough pigs to bury and make Kahlua Pork,” I answered.

“Is there something…” Mama stopped as she looked toward my assistant. She abruptly turned on her heel and left.

I got back to work, seasoning pork, and I eventually started making potatoes. My assistant looked at me strangely when he saw me making some french fries.

“I thought those were John’s favorite, but you didn’t make them for anyone else?” he asked.

I stared at what I was doing. “I guess it’s just force of habit,” I told him. “I guess I’ll put these in the freezer,” I continued.

Only the command staff and Mamma knew that John was downstairs. The rest of the people thought that John was dead. “I like them too,” I told my assistant, but he didn’t look convinced.

I took the potatoes to the freezer, and put them inside a stasis field. The word freezer was really a leftover from years gone by. We actually stored things in stasis, so when we removed them, they were as fresh as when we put them in. Well, sort of. Something happened if we “froze” them completely, and the flavor was messed up, so we had to almost freeze them.

We allowed a very small amount of entropy to occur. John had explained to me that, in effect, we were slowing time to a crawl. It had something to do with our understanding of gravity and it’s relationship to time, and the folding of space. It wasn’t something that I was terribly interested in, and thus, I hadn’t bothered to try to understand it. I listened only because he was explaining.

-=#=-

We served the meal at seven PM, and people seemed surprised at the menu. I really didn’t care what they thought, however. I had a special reason for making what I did, and he entered the dining room at seven oh five.

John was leading a small, very white man by a leash and collar. Amos!

Amos’s arms were held behind his back in the same way mine had been while I was a pony downstairs. It was very obvious that he didn’t want to enter the dining room, but he had no choice as John led him over to a table. He made Amos sit down, and then came over to where I was standing.

I threw my arms around him, and he welcomed a passionate kiss from me. When our lips parted, he whispered, “I’ve missed you,” in my ear.

“I think we’re making a scene,” I whispered back.

“So?” he asked, then he gave me another kiss. This one was even longer than the last, and I gasped when we separated.

“Touching,” Amos said with a sneer and a loud voice.

John whirled on him. “Remember what I said about a gag, brother?”

Amos shut his mouth, and the sneer completely disappeared. Had he not been completely white anyway, I think every bit of color would have drained from his face. John never told me what he said to Amos, and now I wanted to know what scared him so badly.

I looked around the dining room at the patrons, and they all seemed to be alternately staring at John and Amos. It was as if they didn’t know which was more shocking. I held tight to John’s arm. I did not intend to let him leave me like this again.

Marc stepped up to my husband and said simply, “You got him.”

John grinned at him. “Did you doubt I would?”

“Well, no. I didn’t.”

“We should probably get him to a cell,” I told John. “I’m not sure people will have an appetite with him sitting here.”

“No?” he asked, surprised. “This is a barbecue, and January first. I would think capturing Amos would be time for a great celebration.”

I nodded, thinking about it. “I’m not sure it’s proper having a prisoner here while we celebrate. It sort of feels like the Philistines and Samson.”

John cocked his head while he looked at me. He nodded. “I can see what you mean.” Turning to talk to my sister, he asked, “If I turn him over to you, will you promise me not to ‘accidentally murder him on purpose’ on the way to a cell?”

“No,” Paula answered, quite honestly. “I have every intention of killing him.” She seemed to think about it for a bit then said. “No, I won’t accidentally murder him on the way to a cell. I want him to suffer for what he’s done. He killed Fred and Kari, and he made Carla do things that she would never do.” She walked over to Amos and looked down at him. “Death’s too good for him.”

She grabbed Amos’s arms and lifted him to his feet. Amos screamed as his arms were pulled up. I saw the left one slip out of joint, and he screamed louder.

I then remembered that his bots weren’t working very hard to heal him anymore. Ours had showed them what he was doing to people. Once they knew, they decided to keep him alive, but that was it. He would be hurting for awhile.

I wanted to feel sorry for him, but I didn’t. Anyone else, I would have, but not him. I couldn’t. I wanted him to feel everything he’d done to people. Real, living people who didn’t deserve what he’d done to them.

It was silent as Paula, Marc, and at least twenty more people from security who had stood up from their tables, led the monster out of the dining room. Then, someone erupted into cheers for John. Very quickly, the entire room was cheering. I couldn’t have been happier, but I was planning on cheering in my own way, later that night.