FX: WE ARE OUTSIDE, IN A GOAT PASTURE. GOATS ARE MAKING GOAT SOUNDS. BOOTED FEET CRUNCH. THROUGHOUT THIS PIECE, ARKADY IS PERFORMING ALL OF THE STEPS NECESSARY TO FEED A BUNCH OF GOATS.

ARKADY

So, I’ve been thinking about how I got here. I took a spaceship. But you know what I mean. 

I’ve been thinking about every choice I’ve made in the last couple of months, every curveball we were thrown, and how I’d explain all the shit that followed to—I don’t know, who I was at twelve, thirteen. Or hell, eight months ago. Because in June of 2191, my life took a real sharp turn, and it feels like the whole damn universe has been dealing with it since.

Uh, hi, I guess? My name is Arkady. Well, it kinda is and kinda isn’t. Wouldn’t mean a damn to twelve-year-old me. But it’s what I go by now when it comes to the ones I care about, so: close enough. 

I was told I should start journaling. That it’d help me figure out what’s going on in my head if I spend more time thinking about what’s going on in my head. Go goddamn figure. Actually, I was told to do it three months ago, and I’m only getting around to it now. Nobody said to strap a recorder to my chest, but I can’t exactly imagine lying on a bed with my feet kicked up, writing “Dear Diary” in big loopy letters, so here we are. Something to do while I feed the goats, I guess.

Problem is, there’s a whole lot of places you could start this story. You could start it when the owners of Cresswin Landing decided to turn their failed resort planet into a giant prison. You could start it 25 years later, when a race of space aliens known as Dwarnians started a war against all of humanity, or a year after that, when the main human military led a coup and renamed themselves the IGR, claiming the only way we could defeat the Dwarnian threat was if we let our new government do whatever the Hell they wanted.

But this is my story, and I’m gonna start it with a little research ship called Starship Iris, and a woman onboard, a scientist, named Violet Liu.

The crew of the Iris had a mission, to land on an uncharted planet and collect samples. So everyone but Violet leaves in a shuttle for the second round, and then the shuttle explodes. Violet is terrified but she’s also resourceful, and determined, and a lot smarter than she thinks she is, and she manages to connect with a voice in the dark, a woman who calls herself Captain Kay Grisham. This stranger guides Violet through a plan that will let Kay’s crew locate the ship and rescue Violet, but Violet, quick thinker that she is, puts together that something is wrong.

Kay Grisham is not captain of a high priority government-vetted ship. The voice belongs to a conwoman, an experienced tough and hacker who is used to life in the shadowy sectors of space. She’s also me. Future you. Hi.

So Violet doesn’t know all of that but she knows I’m lying. She can’t force me to tell the truth and I can’t force her to take the one path that ends in her survival, but I’ve known enough scientists from my time in prison to gamble on her desire to know more and somehow, thank any god you wanna, it works. She climbs into her makeshift cryo freezer, and the crew of the Rumor speeds by to pick her up.

Who was that crew? A bunch of smugglers, rebels, and weirdos, basically.

There’s me. I was born on Cresswin Landing, child of two prisoners and a student of many more. You know that part. A few years after the revolution on Cresswin, when all the surviving guards got the Hell outta there and we started running things ourselves, we’re gonna leave to go fight in the human-Dwarnian war. Skycorps 77. The usual: we wanted to explore the universe, kick some space alien ass, maybe see a tree if we were lucky. But I took a few bad hits, got shunted off to be a guard on Telemachus, before I went AWOL and jumped with both feet into a life of crime.

Then there’s Jeeter. Uh, Brian Jeeter, a Xenoling grad student if you can believe that. His area of study was medieval Dwarnian poetry, because he’s just that kinda guy. No fighting skills to speak of, could barely heat up a pizza bagel when we met him, but his wells run deep and he’s gotten us outta some real jams. Is he—? No, coast is clear. Brian Jeeter is the smartest man I know. 

Jeeter’s married to Krejjh, a Dwarnian pilot—I know, younger me, I know what you think of the Dwarnians but turns out like most things it’s really goddamn complicated. Case in point, Krejjh fought on the other side of the war until the Dwarnians pulled out and Krejjh saw just how, y’know, sentient and alive we really were. Instead of heading home, Krejjh leapt straight into Jeeter’s arms, so to speak. Krejjh flies like they’ve got something to prove, which I guess they do because the only family of theirs I’ve met was a real asshole. They and Jeeter are so in love it’s hard to look at sometimes. 

Last but never least, our fearless mechanic and captain, Sana Tripathi. Sent to Cresswin in her youth for hot wiring spaceships, she was a hero of the revolution and now she’s a hero just generally. Shit, I miss her.

So Violet meets us, it doesn’t go great at first, but she learns we were out in her part of space because we had a mystery to solve, a secret message we picked up from another guy on her ex-crew, the late Alvy Connors. She spends enough time with us to realize we’re not the scoundrels she’d been led to believe, and that unlike the Regime, we’re not gonna force her to live a lie, and she unbends enoug to serve as our medic, and turns out she’s pretty damn good at it. Plus, she’s got this little smile that is exactly the kind of thing that’s gonna give you a lot of funny feelings in a year or two, twelve-year-old me. Anyway.

With the five of us on the case, we work out that the Regime had sent the Iris to die because they suspected one of the crew was a spy. Plus they wanted to test out some new stolen tech, a sentient swarm of nanobots taken from a Dwarnian named Thasia, who had approached the humans hoping to help, disgusted with the way the Dwarnians were slaughtering the humans. Instead of saying thanks, the good ol’ Regime put Thasia in a tank and reprogrammed those nanobots to serve as a scanner-proof listening device. 

It’s a long story but good news, I guess, is that if you ever wanna relive it, the whole thing’s on record because those nanobots had infected Violet when she was on her original ship, so the Regime had a copy of every damn thing we said for a good long while there. That still creeps me out. Although it was pretty goddamn funny when we realized they were forced to log and investigate any leads in active cases, and we started inventing crimes we’d done. The way Violet’s eyes lit up when she said she was Birdie and the Swansong, it was—

Good news is, nobody’s been able to listen in on our private-ass conversations anymore since we managed to touch down on New Jupiter and return the swarm to factory settings, which we did by setting off an explosion. Ha.

Along the way, we picked up two new passengers, Jin Seon Park and RJ McCabe, two of the government operatives who had been assigned to our case. Park had been tortured by the Regime by then, so he’d turned, and honestly I think McCabe turned because Park turned.

That’s where things get complicated. We connected with a different woman named Violet Liu, who we all call Other Violet because our Violet is the one that counts. Other Violet and Thasia, who was eventually freed from the Regime facility, had become sort of the de facto leaders of our little effort, to uh, do something about the whole unelected military regime assholes running most of human-settled space. 

Did I mention that being exposed to those brainwashed reprogrammed nanobots gave Brian lasting lung damage? His lungs were already shot from his time on Neuzo, the old neutral zone during the first human-Dwarnian war, which was a place with no laws. Pollution you could slice with a knife, but it’d slice back. So yeah, the greedy Neuzo assholes made the first strike, the fascist Regime assholes made the second, and now Brian still has to sleep hooked up to oxygen.

But that’s not even the worst of the Regime’s crimes. Turns out the assholes in question had teamed up with some fringe Dwarnians and were doing their damnedest to restart the human-Dwarnian war. The Regime because longterm they can only hold onto power if they keep the average citizen scared out of their skulls, and the Dwarnian camp I think had economic interests, some boring bullshit like that. 

The agreement, the kickstarting of the war was staging shit so it’d look like the Dwarnians were bombing San Ramos on Telemachus, the biggest human settlement, and the humans were bombing the biggest Dwarnian settlement, Heemdala. Brian managed to decode some stolen audio just in time to realize what was going on and try to spread the word. The attack on Heemdala never materialized, and with some help from Violet’s little sister Juniper, who’s a reporter, a shit ton of people got evacuated from San Ramos.

Unfortunately, not everyone. People got injured. People got trapped. People died. And in the process of holing up with a friend named Campbell, I had a…y’know. Actually, 12-year-old me, you have no idea. My brain kinda. There was a situation. All these bombs were falling, and we couldn’t get out and I couldn’t stop thinking about uh, some stuff that happens when you’re eighteen, nineteen. Stuff during the war. I came onto the surface to gather supplies and Krejjh came up after me and I attacked them. I attacked Krejjh. And I remember how I felt about Dwarnians at 12, I really do, so you’re gonna have to believe me when I say this was, uh. It was— God, the nightmares that gave me—

But I came out of it in time not to murder my friend, and then McCabe pulled a gun and talked me out of running away like a coward. I’m gonna give you some useless advice, twelve-year-old me, and say that if you can avoid having McCabe level a gun at you, you should, because they are one focused human when they wanna be, and their aim is impeccable. But I went back down into shelter before they had to put a bullet in me, and that’s uh, that’s what made me decide to reach out and get help. Professional help.

Pick your jaw off the floor, twelve-year-old me. You were even more skeptical of therapists than you were of the Dwarnians, but between where you are and where I’m at, you learn some shit and you’ve gotta trust me on this one. 

San Ramos was clearly not gonna be okay for a long time, and we decided to split up. Violet stayed, to learn how to be a doctor for real—she’d had some training as a paramedic, and on a ship like ours that was way better than nothing, but she’s so curious and it was really bugging her that she didn’t have all that much experience. Plus, she wanted to log some quality time with her sister Juniper, who’s embedded in San Ramos now as a journalist. Sana stayed to help Campbell organize what was left of the city. And to—they’re dating. He doesn’t even hold it against her that we thought he was a mole for a hot second there. What a guy.

Krejjh is out there somewhere flying missions for our side—especially in the far reaches of space, supply lines are everything. And me, Brian, and McCabe wound up on Mirzakhani, which I guess I never explained and shit, does it need a little explaining. There’s a school there. Yeah, a real school like from books. Desks and everything. It’s run by Max Gavins, a merc who grew a conscience, and his partner Julio, a counselor who burned out so bad on being part of the system that he went right off the grid. 

They used to just scoop up war orphans, kids with nowhere to go but the Regime—raise ‘em, teach ‘em, show ‘em how to work with animals. That’s supposed to be good for the brain, plus the school is also a farm that bribes the nearby community for help by giving away milk and fertilizer. And by fertilizer I do mean goat shit. Let me just…step around that. 

Now we’ve also got all these refugees from San Ramos, including professors. The people need something to do all day, and so besides building out the farm to include chickens, sheep, and bees, we’ve also got almost a college going on, if you can picture a college that’s nothing but traumatized people. Jeeter would say that’s just grad school. But imagine that. You never thought you’d go to university and now you basically live in one. You also are living through another war, which. Yeah, you’d be a lot less surprised. 

The second human-Dwarnian war never got off the ground, thanks to us. But instead, we have the Regime openly bombing any area they can claim is full of dangerous dissenters.

What else do I wanna…Krejjh and Brian got married, before we all split up. I think Krejjh and Brian probably have gotten married a couple times since then, whenever Krejjh is on leave. It’ll never be legal in the lawbooks sense, but why not hold a party if you can, y’know? If you’re both still alive and you can find some stray scrap of cloth that’ll work as a chuppah in a pinch. A chuppah—you know what a chuppah is. 

So yeah, that’s the situation, twelve-year-old me. You do get off Cresswin, and you go through a Hell of a lot of shit, but also, you do get to see a tree, and you’ve even got a long-distance girlfriend. Can you guess who? Yeah, no, it’s Violet. It’s definitely Violet. You don’t get to see her half enough, but when you do see her, it’s—she really—you still can’t believe she likes you back sometimes. Not because of anything she’s—Violet Liu, in addition to being a brilliant scientist, is a damn good girlfriend—but because you’re, y’know. (A BEAT) You don’t know. 

You’ve done a lot of things that have hurt a lot of people. 

That’s a Hell of a thing to tell a kid.

Well, okay. The other thing. So here’s what I’d actually tell you. Actually tell me, at twelve. Is that in a few years, when everyone your age that you know starts talking about wanting to sleep with each other, starts talking about it and clearly thinking about it, all the goddamn time. And meanwhile, you’re still having the kind of crushes it seemed like you all had at twelve, without that physical—that urgency. When it starts to feel like there is some kinda fundamental flaw woven into the machinery of your body—that you’re stunted, or frigid, or somehow not doing what your systems are supposed to be doing—you’re fine. 

You’re fine, and it’s gonna take a long time to feel like that part of you is fine, but even when that makes it harder for you to believe, that doesn’t make it less true. And I’m not gonna say it’ll be easy, because it’s not. And I’m not gonna say that you ever get a body that looks at another body and feels a hunger, because all signs point to that never happening. It is gonna make some things in your life more complicated.

But god, the relief you’re gonna feel, when you talk to your first friend who hears you, really hears you and understands. The joy and, and peace that’s gonna beam out of every pore when it actually sinks in that the person you’re dating is fine with it, that her main concern is that you feel comfortable. It’s, it’s really something. It almost makes up for how it feels like you only ever get to see each other when all the goddamn celestial spheres align, and you don’t know how to go about changing that, how you’d even ask.

Most of your friends live worlds away right now, literally worlds away, and that’s fine because it has to be. You miss them so much, all the time. Sana and Violet and Campbell and Juniper in San Ramos. Krejjh, flying their rounds. You don’t actually know what Park’s up to—probably a need-to-know kinda thing. And there’s a war on, and you’re damn lucky to be out of the blast range, but it’s still carving up your day in a thousand ways all the time, and sometimes your life feels like something out of an opera, and sometimes it feels so dull you wanna scream, but you don’t because that’d scare the kids. The human kids. The goats would not give a shit. Would you, you cloven-footed assholes?

But that’s where you are, and more or less how you got here, and now all you’ve gotta do is find a place to hide this recording where none of the very nosy and resourceful goddamn children of Mirzakhani will find it, which is I guess a side benefit to spending so much of your life smuggling shit. (A BEAT) That, and the people. (A BEAT) Knowing there’s people out there like Sana and Violet and everyone else, that’s what lets you imagine maybe things’ll be different someday. Less out of faith and more sheer contrariness. The universe might not want a place for us, but dammit, we keep making one anyway.

Christ, okay, starting to sound like Sana or something. At least I’ve got the walk back to brainstorm places to hide this.

Uh, Arkady Patel, signing off.

CLOSING CREDITS MUSIC - “ROCKET SCIENCE” by Amber Devereux

JESS

This episode features—

ISHANI

Ishani Kanetkar as Arkady

JESS 

Written by Jessica Best

NEWT

Directed by Newton Schottelkotte

JEFFREY

Sound design by Jeffrey Nils Gardner

ELEANOR

Production coordination by Eleanor Hyde

AMBER

The closing credits music is “Rocket Science” by Amber Devereux of Tin Can Audio