>Hotel California

Fact: Sound is a vibration. Sound travels as a mechanical wave through a medium, and in space, there is no
medium. So when my shuttle malfunctioned and the airlocks didn't keep the air in, I heard nothing. After the
first whoosh of the air being sucked away, there was lightning, but no thunder. Eyes bulging in
panic, but no screams. Quiet and peaceful, right? Such a relief to never again hear my crewmate Jesse natter
about his girl back on Earth and that all-expenses-paid vacation-for-two she won last time he was on leave. I
swore, if I ever had to see a photo of him in a skimpy bathing suit again, giving the camera a cheesy thumbs-up
from a lounge chair on one of those white sandy beaches, I'd kiss a monkey. Metaphorically, of course.

Fact: If, before all the air is sucked out of the ship, a person is so lucky to have stuffed him or herself
into a space suit, that person has less than twenty-four hours to live. This is more than the person would have
sans space suit. Me, I found a space suit, but it was statistically unlikely that I, and whomever else has
followed suit (pun intended), would manage to repair our ship before the less-than-twenty-four hours are up;
yes, studies have been done. So, twenty-four hours. Give or take.

About the time I was composing my last words in my head, trying not to think too much about what suffocating
felt like, that's when I heard a bell.

My first thought: I was going crazy. Twenty-four hours of silence (vacuum, remember); was I hallucinating
noises now?

I heard it again. It was a fine bell, reminiscent of ancient stone churches and the towering cathedrals I'd
seen in documentaries. And accompanying the bell, I saw a light.

Now, there were two things here that made ridiculously small amounts of sense. First, the whole in-a-vacuum
why's-there-a-bell thing. Second, I was floating in the dark remnants of my broken ship, and any conceivable
light sources were not within view; starlight is a distinctly different color and significantly less
bright.

These signals were the heralds of my saviors.

The first words they said to me meant nothing. I wasn't listening; I didn't care; I was going to live; I was
going to keep breathing. Next to those, nothing else mattered. The recycled air tasted sweet in my mouth, and
all thoughts that crossed my mind were cheap metaphors about life-giving substances and how breathing was like
sex, only better. (I reserved the right to revise this opinion later.)

When I was done mentally exclaiming over my impossible rescue, I looked around. The ship, it was odd and
old, either so outdated or so heavily modified that I couldn't tell what make it was, and somehow, the crew
standing around me fit the same description, a singularly atypical amalgamation of folk. And me, I guess I was
one more piece in their puzzle. I was one more scrap to weld onto the rest, one more stranded survivor who was
found.

I was now one of them.

This story, it's our story. The survivors of the unfortunate accidents, the catastrophic malfunctions, the
fateful crashes: this is us. Floating alone, each of us facing the silence of the vacuum, we were found.

Once found, we can never be lost.

This is our Hotel California.

We can never leave.

“So, I'm on a ship now? You do this a lot?”

A woman, introduced as Tiffany and neither tall nor beautiful, shrugged. “Now and then.”

“What about my crewmates? Why didn't you save them?” As much as Jesse had irritated me, I didn't like the
picture my brain drew of him floating in his grave, body swollen and bloated. Who would tell his girl how he
had died?

“Couldn't,” said the captain. Jefferson, he called himself, clean-shaven and smart, a picture of the perfect
entrepreneur. An opportunist and a businessman, that was Jefferson. “We're selective about our passengers,” he
continued. “You fit the bill. They didn't.”

Tiffany, she looked at the captain, grinned and flipped her greasy brown locks over her shoulder. She turned
to me. “Come on,” she said, before I could say anything else, “let's get you settled in.” No time for
questions. No time for answers.

 The ship had all the usual accoutrements (artificial gravity, tastefully painted walls, sound dampeners to
keep the noise of the engines from driving the crew batshit insane, recycled air systems), and a few
less-usual: lush carpeting, lighting that was decorative as well as functional, spacious corridors. The
occasional painting hung on the wall (generic landscapes and portraits of old people no one has ever met,
primarily). Glimpses of elegant rooms down the branching hallways; music; voices; the aroma of real food.

This was heaven. No seventy-two virgins, but it would do.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Tiffany looked back. “To your quarters. It's not far; you're not going to get blisters.”

“No, I meant, where's the ship going? What's our destination?”

Tiffany, she stopped walking. She gave me a look, pitying and a little pleased that she got to be the one to
share the news. “Honey,” she said, “You're going to be delighted. Destination everywhere. Destination
nowhere.”

This was hell. I died in those last moments, suffocating on my own exhaled breath, and this, this was my
reward.

Fact: The speed of sound in dry air at twenty degrees Celsius or sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit is three
hundred and forty-three meters per second, or one thousand one hundred twenty-five feet per second.

It took me a couple days to realize I was, in fact, still alive. I mean, sure, I'd had my moment of elation
when I had first realized I'd been rescued, but it didn't sink in. After watching my ship tear apart, after
spending a good twenty-three hours floating in silence in the wreck, wondering whether I was currently facing
stars belonging to the constellation Libra or the constellation Orion when those stars were viewed from Earth,
wondering what it felt like to suffocate, and after the feeling that yes, I was in fact going to die alone in
space had sunk in, it took time for that feeling to dissipate.

Fact: I wasn't dead.

After I realized this, I left my quarters. The lightscreen provided had informed me when and where official
meals were taking place, but I hadn't bothered to acknowledge the invitations. It hadn't seemed relevant,
somehow, given that I was still reeling over the explosion, the deaths of my crewmates, and the rescue. I've
heard there are a number of stages of grief and shock; I guess I was working my way through them. Food was
delivered to my quarters. Initially, I couldn't figure out why—I hadn't requested any be sent. Then I realized,
someone must have noticed I hadn't left, and was nice enough to send food my way. The accompanying bottle of
wine was a nice touch. I must have consumed it, too, because later on, the plates and the bottle were both
empty. I spent a lot of time lying on my back on the bed, staring up at the little etched swirls in the
ceiling, or slumped in the old-fashioned armchair, staring out the windows at the stars. I did a lot of staring
and not moving.

Man, was it good to be done with that stage. 

It was time to find out what hell looked like.

Fact: Hell is other people. Sure, the ship was spacious. We didn't pick up many passengers—just the select,
special few, scattered here and there between the stars. But we were all on this ship, and we were on it
together.

Cliques form in any decent-sized group of people. Me, I was singled out by Sarah, an unassuming
forty-something lady with a glass of champagne in one hand and the arm of a scrawny but tall blond man in the
other. She sidled up to me as I was scooping little round crackers and what appeared to be a baked cilantro
cream dip onto a plate. The plate, by the way, was already loaded with folded pieces of smoked pink fish,
paprika-dusted deviled eggs, toothpicks stabbed through green vegetables and slices of cheese, and balls of
meat smothered in a tomato-based sauce. Luxurious, even compared to the fare one would find in the high-class
space stations and pleasure cruisers. Compared to what a mere engineer would get on your typical cargo ship, it
was mouthwateringly, lip-smackingly gorgeous. I wondered if the food delivered to my quarters the past few days
had been similarly amazing. I decided it couldn't have been.

“Liking the taste of the sweet life, eh? I'm Sarah, and this is Alexis—you must be the new pickup.” She
looked me over approvingly. “Come on, let's get you a glass of champagne.” I looked longingly at the slices of
cheddar olive bread as she whisked me over to the bar, but didn't protest.

The bar was manned by an expensive humanoid robot. It turned toward Sarah's wave and acknowledged her with a
nod, moments later setting a fluted glass of sparkling liquid in front of her. I marveled at the robot's
smoothness and coordination. Clearly, it was a high-end model. Sarah transferred the glass to my free hand and
pulled me away from the bar for more introductions, with Alexis trailing after us.

I spent the evening listening, mostly. Listening and stuffing my face with all the bits of fine food
provided. No one minded; Sarah's inner circle was content to fill our circle of couches with plenty of chatter.
Ray, a plump man who was grey where he wasn't bald. Zheng, short and dark and lean, with a very intense gaze.
He made me a little uncomfortable. Kishori, petite, her hair strung out in a series of braids that reached
nearly to her waist. I categorized them based on their appearances, hoping I'd be able to pick them out of the
crowd again later. Most of their chatter was meaningless to me—stories of day-to-day activities, how so-and-so
had been seen in so-and-so's table at lunch and my wasn't that a surprise, and why hadn't the chef concocted
this delectable a selection of appetizers for the dance the other night, but of course those rolled meat
pastries reminded one of the pastries back on Earth, didn't they, and this was somehow an interesting fact.

After the first half-hour, I stopped expending effort to keep names and stories and gossip straight. I
wasn't learning anything useful. I could have started asking questions, but I wanted to get my bearings first.
Tonight was for observation. I didn't bother trying to seek out a different group of potentially more
interesting people, though. They all looked the same: clusters of social butterflies surrounded by the less
apt, the hangers-on, the circle with whom the gossip was shared. I wondered at the ship instead. All the fine
food and the ornamental lighting, it had to be exorbitantly pricey to maintain. If the barkeep was any
indication, I suspected similarly high-class robots fulfilled other positions on the ship. How they were all
powered was a mystery—as good as the technology got, a quality robot like that was still an energy sink. It was
the brain, mostly; the amount of information the machine had to process to be able to function at the level it
did ate up a lot of resources.

Sarah's crowd took turns taking my champagne flute to the bar to be refilled, all seemingly pleased to have
a new set of ears to talk at. I slowly returned my attention to the conversation and was pleasantly surprised
to find that it had turned to a heated analysis of a recent abstract film—done in the style of old flatscreen
movies—that I had seen during off-time at Geminia Station.

By the end of the evening, when I finally followed the slow trickle of people out of the room, a satisfying
haze had settled on my mind. It was nice, I decided. This ship. This life. The nagging questions about where
the ship had come from and what its purpose in rescuing me was still nagged, but somehow, seemed less urgent.
Did it truly matter what the ship's origin was and why Jefferson had saved me, if now, I was content?

Fact: It's easy to fall into patterns. I would wake late, checking the clock on my room's lightscreen to
make sure I hadn't slept through brunch. I would join the rest of the ship for meals, and I would take my turn
in the weight room. I would watch old films on the entertainment screens, taking mental notes for later
dinnertime discussions. I would immerse myself in new virtual reality flicks. I would attend afternoon dance
classes, so that when the evening dances came around (modeled after the historical social gatherings of several
hundred years prior), I would be less of an embarrassment to myself.

I did not ask questions. I told myself I should. I told myself that tonight, the observation period would
end and I'd start puzzling out the ship's mystery. But I fell under the ship's sway. Bereft of my previous
familiar life, I latched onto Kishori and Ray and Zheng, and Sarah with Alexis dragged along on her arm now and
then (he was mostly her favorite dancing partner; she confided to us one night that his conversational skills
left something to be desired). I smothered thoughts of friends back on Earth—this was my long-awaited vacation,
my clean break and my temporary retreat; I'd try contacting those friends tomorrow. I continued to care little
for shipwide gossip, but our discussions of films and flicks, old and new, brought out my artistic,
story-loving, argumentative side, a side of me I'd tucked into a back storage compartment during my years as an
engineer. It was a good life, if surreal. But I wasn't sure I wanted the dream stage to end.

Fact: Some places are timeless. Days passed, weeks passed, but I couldn't tell if it had been months or
years since I was rescued. All there was, all I remembered, was a blur. Gathering for drinks in the parlors,
playing dress up with all the fine clothes I found in the closets (some of it modern, some of it period dress
for special themed events), idling in the lounges. Now and then, a new face mingled in the crowd. Other faces
washed out, fading into the backdrop of carpets and fake glass chandeliers and the muted hum of the
engines.

One of these evenings, we were gathered in the South Ballroom for post-dinner drinks, lounging on couches
and watching other members of our populace move in circles on the dance floor. (The 'South' was in the title to
suggest that there were more ballrooms. There weren't.) Sarah's circle had picked up another newcomer,
Adrienne, a short blond girl who we all agreed was barely old enough to attend a traditional university back on
Earth, let alone work on the ship in whose wreck Jefferson had found her. Maybe it was her curiosity, asking a
question I should have asked long before, that turned the conversation serious; maybe there was just something
special about that evening. Maybe we had all tired of the frivolity of our life, hitting some threshold or some
breaking point. Regardless, when Adrienne asked what the ship's purpose was, we all gave it a measure of
thought. We dredged up half-fledged theories and inchoate explanations, tossing these out the same way we
pitched ideas about the art films.

“I believe we'll see the end of the universe,” said Tiffany. Captain's cohort, she had a glass of
orange-brown liquid in one hand; it might have been orange juice and some kind of berry liquor. She swirled it
speculatively. I watched Adrienne. She tilted her head, listening, not speaking.

“Impossible,” said Zheng, sitting in the chair to her left. “We can't live that long.”

“Maybe the universe will end sooner than you think,” said Jefferson. Yeah, the captain was there, with the
rest of us. He didn't drink, but he made a point of mingling with all the various cliques.

“Maybe we'll travel at the speed of light and we won't age,” said Sarah, setting her wine glass on the
little round end table by her couch. “Maybe we're already traveling at the speed of light.” 

Tiffany, she nodded eagerly. “Relatively says it all.”

Zheng scoffed. “Also impossible. Even if we were traveling at ninety-nine percent of the speed
of light—that's assuming you ignore science and pretend that such a thing is possible, because it isn't—we'd
still age. We'd just appear to age slower than people not traveling as fast as us.”

“And?” said Sarah. “Aging is relative, anyway. Besides, I wouldn't mind being around forever. Give our
ancestors purpose. Keep their dreams alive.”

“New hypothesis,” suggested Kishori, slipping into the conversation. “No one's immortal. In fact, the
opposite: We're all going to die.”

“Bleak,” commented Zheng. “But I like it.” He grinned at Sarah, who frowned. Ray took a drink from his glass
of ice water, and shook his head.

“We're all going to die, so what better thing to do than enjoy the time we have?” Kishori gestured to the
bar, the carpets, the paintings. “All the luxuries money can buy.”

Tiffany took a drink, thinking. “All the luxuries money can buy,” she echoed.

Zheng looked skeptical. “Paid for how?”

“Smuggling,” responded Kishori. Matter-of-fact. Jefferson snorted, amused. “Think about it,” Kishori
continued, “where else would we get the money to buy all this?”

“Renegade smugglers. So what's our cargo, eh, captain?” Zheng joked, leaning back in his chair with his
glass of wine.

Jefferson shook his head and stood up. “I'll leave you to your speculation,” he said. A chorus of good
nights followed him out the door.

After the captain left, Zheng leaned in. He set his glass down on an end table, steepled his fingers
together. “We're revolting,” he told us. “And I don't mean that you disgust me. No, we're the start of a
rebellion. Did you hear what the captain said earlier? He means, we're going to change the future. The universe
as we know it won't be the same.”

“That's dumb,” said Sarah. “Wouldn't we know it if we were part of a rebellion?

Zheng shook his head. “The captain selected us for a reason. He has inside intelligence—how else would he
know where to find us? He knows about us.”

“That's still dumb,” said Sarah. “Inside intelligence? Don't you remember, there's not exactly one big
galactic government from which to steal information.”

“I still like my idea,” said Tiffany.

Me, I followed Adrienne's example and didn't speak up (fabricating excuses to myself to stay safely in
gather-info observation mode), though I thought Zheng had a point. Jefferson didn't share how he found people.
He didn't share how he knew exactly where the wrecks were, or why he saved some people but not others. But then
again, no one asked. I guess we all figured, he knew what he was doing. He had been at this savior business
longer than any of us. I wondered if Adrienne would ask about that.

“We're going to mean something,” Zheng was saying. “What we do, rebelling against the oppression of the many
governments that oppose us, we're going to leave a legacy.” He sounded certain. Enthusiastic, even.

Ray, he shook his head, and broke the quiet he'd held most of the evening. “You've got it all wrong.” He
looked from Sarah, to Adrienne, to Zheng, to Kishori and Tiffany, to me. “Obviously, we can't last longer than
the rest of the universe. We aren't giving anyone purpose. We're not even going to leave a legacy. All we're
doing is existing. All we're doing is eating and drinking and shitting, breathing and fucking and nothing
important, ever. We aren't special.”

“Again, bleak,” commented Zheng. Adrienne gestured for him to be quiet. She leaned forward, setting her
elbows on the foot stool in front of her.

“You never know when it will end,” Ray continued, not addressing any one of us in particular. “You can't
hold on forever, even if you don't ever, ever want to forget. How long until the memories slip away? How long
until all you remember is this, the ship, the thick red carpeting, the chandeliers, the empty conversations you
hold with the other shells who used to be people? When your life, the reason you lived, the people and faces
and places, the emotions you felt, who and what you loved, when all that is gone, faded, what will you have
left?”

I wondered how long Ray had been on this ship. I wondered why, if he had such an unpropitious outlook, he
hadn't tried to change his situation. I wanted to ask, but he was still talking, and I was too self-conscious
to interrupt.

“You can try to hold on,” said Ray. “You can try and try and try. Repeat stories to yourself in the
artificial night, sketch faces in your mind. You can make their names your mantra. But words, if you repeat
them enough times, lose their meaning. Emily emily em-ill-ee em-i-lee eh-mill-ee eh-mih-lee. My wife's name,
once. Repeat it enough times, it's just a sound. No longer grounded.”

Ray, he said, “If we last forever, if our eyes are the last eyes watching as the stars blink out, it won't
mean a thing to us. We won't care that we're last and we won't care that there are no more stars. We aren't
angels. We're just dumb and lucky.”

“Pure dumb luck,” he said.

“Struck a nerve, huh?” said Zheng. 

“Sorry,” said Ray. 

“How long ago was that?” asked Adrienne. “Leaving your wife, I mean. Traveling on this ship.”

Ray, he looked down at his hands, folded together in his lap, fingers interlaced. “I don't know,” he said.
We were all quiet for a moment. Ray shrugged, then got up and left. We let him go. Silent. Self-conscious. More
excuses were made, and after a few moments, only Adrienne and I were left sitting in the ballroom. She looked
across the circle of couches at me.

“What's your theory?” she asked me.

I shrugged.

“How long have you been here?”

“Not that long,” I said. “A couple weeks, I guess. Maybe a month or two.”

“Why don't you know for sure?” she asked.

I shrugged. I hadn't been counting days.

“What did you do before this? How were you found?”

“I was an engineer.” I explained how my ship had malfunctioned, no warning at all. The explosions, the
impossible rescue. “I don't know how Jefferson knew to find me there.”

She nodded. “The ship I was on, I guess that's what happened, too. Some vital part broke, and... well,
boom. It was all so fast.” She took a sip of her drink, plain water because, she had explained
earlier, she had never liked the taste of alcohol, then fixed her gaze on me. “I'm going to figure it out,” she
said. “How and why this ship exists. I'll figure it out, then I'm going to find a way home.”

I paced my room that night, unable to sleep. The more I thought about it, the less sense the ship made.
Worse, Adrienne had made this clear to me with a single question. I had spent weeks asking nothing, contentedly
getting nowhere.

Fact: Adrienne intimidated me.

Fact: It's too easy to fall into patterns.

I resolved to break the pattern.

Another evening, another chandeliered room, another swirl of conversations and dances and hor d'oevres.
Another circle of chairs and couches, another uncomfortable question.

“Has anyone ever left?” Adrienne looked at each of us in turn.

Ray exchanged a glance with Zheng.

Sarah frowned. “Now that you mention it, I haven't seen Alexis in days. I assumed he was indisposed.”
Kishori nodded in agreement.

I looked at Ray and raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Well,” Ray said, slowly, “People do leave. The approximate number of people at any given event
is always the same. But we see new faces.”

“You're sure it's not just some people being indisposed ? ” asked Adrienne, using Sarah's
phrasing.	

Zheng shook his head and picked up a handful of candied pecans from a little dish on the end table. “Keep
adding people long enough, regardless, you get more overall. A couple people staying in their rooms, even if
you switch out the people, won't make a difference.” He dropped the pecans back into the dish, one by one.

“So where do they go?” Adrienne focused on Zheng. 

I cut in. “Maybe a better question is, does anyone ever come back?”

Ray and Zheng exchanged another glance. Kishori chewed her lip. Sarah shrugged and sipped at her drink.
After a moment, Ray said, “I don't think so.”

“Are there patterns?” Adrienne asked. “Who leaves?”

Again, there was an uncomfortable moment of silence. I hazarded a guess. “You don't notice, do you.”

Sarah looked indignant. “Of course we notice. But... well, no one important ever disappears, so it doesn't
really matter, does it.” I could tell she was trying to remember whom she had known who had left, and failing.
No one contradicted her. No one offered a different answer.

I looked at Adrienne. Mission accomplished: Our routine insouciance had been disrupted. The scales had
tipped. Even when the conversation returned to lighter tones, as it soon did, I dwelt on Adrienne's questions.
From the looks on my companions' faces, I knew they were thinking the same.

“How long have you been here?”

The question, previously posed to me, was presented to the rest of our group (excluding Ray; Adrienne had
been tactful enough to wait until he had gone for a refill, recalling the last time the subject was
broached).

Sarah, she tilted her head and tapped a finger on the side of her wine glass. “A long time. Got to be months
and months, at least.”

“You were here before I was,” said Kishori, “and so was Tiffany.”

I looked at Zheng; he shrugged. “Time passes in a weird way here. I kept track for a while—thirty-eight
days—but after that... I guess I didn't see the point.”

Fact: Some places are timeless.

“Why not?” asked Adrienne.

“Days don't matter,” he said. “The eleventh of a month or the seventeenth, whether it's Wednesday or Sunday,
summer back on Earth or winter, it doesn't affect us here.”

Tiffany nodded, but Kishori spoke before the other woman could. “Why are you so interested?” she asked
Adrienne.

Adrienne met her gaze. “I don't want to be here forever.”

“But we're not here forever,” objected Sarah. “Remember? Alexis left.”

“Disappeared,” I corrected her. “We don't know how or why he left. Or where he went.”

Zheng looked thoughtful. He picked up his glass, swirled the liquid around, took a sip, then set the glass
back down. He glanced around at the rest of us. “Do you want to leave?” he asked. “Could you live anywhere else
now?”

I spoke up. “Yes,” I said. “I wouldn't miss this, much.” No one else said anything. I watched Adrienne's
eyes move from one face to the next.

Zheng, he addressed me again, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and an intense, steady gaze. “You
think that,” he said, “but is it true? Would you be happy back in a normal life, working and living and crying
in the drudgery of whatever the hell normal is these days?”

I didn't answer.

Fact: It's too easy to fall into patterns.

Fact: I wasn't sure I wanted the dream stage to end.

My quarters felt stifling. Asphyxiating my mind. I sat sideways in the armchair, feet dangling over one arm,
neck resting against the other, absently tracing invisible lines between the stars outside my window as I
ruminated on the situation. The lightscreen had proved singularly unhelpful. I inspected the arrays of
entertainment options—abstract, old-style flatscreens, engrossing VR flicks and action games, a selection of
quondam bestsellers and a few recently released novels hoping to gain popularity. There was a schedule
advertising upcoming on-ship events, such as dance classes, craft sessions, and discussion groups, and a list
of dinner invitations for me to respond to. A menu of display options, allowing me to customize all the
lightscreen's superficial characteristics. A simple contact system for communicating with other people on the
ship. That was all.

A methodical search of my two adjoining rooms, the ample closet space, and the attached bathroom facility
had similarly provided no fodder. Furniture (dark wood, expensive, polished, no secret compartments), clothes,
leftover tray of half-consumed food from the previous day's lunch, toiletries (complete with miniature bottles
of sweet-smelling apricot honey lotion), lightscreen, me.

I was discouraged and frustrated. I wanted to prove to Adrienne that I wanted solve the ship's mystery just
as much as she did. I wanted to find something, anything, that would prove all this was normal and sane. I
didn't want to think about disappearances and time and purposes and consequences.	

I wanted my contentment back.

I cornered Adrienne at dinner that night. In one hand I balanced my plate of star-shaped crackers, globs of
elegant dips and garnishes, little rolled balls of meats and cheeses stabbed through with spears of some pale
green plant, and an array of other delectable, bite-sized items. My other hand pointedly steered Adrienne to a
small table against a wall. She glared at me, but obediently let me pull her along.

“Tell me,” I said, after we sat, “what you have found.” It wasn't a question.

She gave me a grumpy look that informed me, quite clearly, of her current opinion of me. “Not if you're
going to be rude about it.”

I sighed. “Sorry.” I wasn't, not really, but I'd lie to get the conversation going. “I want to know.” I
explained, in two brief sentences, my earlier impasse.

“I don't know much,” she said, still annoyed but at least cooperative. She reviewed the information gleaned
from our previous dinner conversations, adding, “I heard the captain say something yesterday, as I walking to
the Pyrope Parlor. I was just coming up on a corner and he was around the other side, talking to a couple
people, and they must not have known I was there. He said something about a wreck going well. And listen, when
they came round the corner, Ray was with the captain.”

The next time the captain stopped by our group, Tiffany tagging along (pretending that she, too, was a
social butterfly who could mingle equally well with everyone), we were ready.

“Is there a doctor on board?” asked Adrienne. “I've been having headaches.” It was a lie, but we needed
information.

Jefferson nodded. “Down past the Emerald Lounge, second door on the left. All hours.” A robot, then. Medical
AI were even more expensive than the barkeep. I wondered how many people it treated. Had anyone on the ship
ever fallen seriously ill?

“Does he age?” asked Adrienne.

“The captain?” I shrugged. “I never thought about it.”

Adrienne steepled her fingers and studied my face. “That doesn't answer my question,” she said.

Adrienne only picked at her food. 

“Not hungry?” asked Kishori sympathetically.

“No,” said Adrienne.

“At least have a drink,” said Sarah. “I find it takes the edge off.”

“She doesn't drink, remember?” said Kishori.

“Maybe that's the problem,” said Sarah.

“One hundred and forty-seven is a magic number,” said Sarah. “You ever heard of Dunbar? Well, we've got the
perfect-size group right here.” Just enough for us all to recognize each other. Just enough for us all to be
able to barely avoid killing each other.

“Why doesn't anyone mutiny?” Adrienne asked. “If you dislike this place so much, why don't you do something
about it?”

“We can't,” said Ray. “What would we do?”

Adrienne shook her head and made a sound of disgust. “You could force the captain to set down somewhere. Let
us off the ship. If he refuses, threaten him. If he still refuses, well, of all of us, isn't there
someone who can drive a ship?”

“That's murder,” objected Sarah.

“That's survival, ” Adrienne corrected her. “Do you want to be stuck here for the rest of your
life?”

Sarah didn't reply.

I shifted my feet in the plush green carpeting of the Emerald Lounge, looking out the windows at the stars.
Times like that, running on less sleep than I should, alone because everyone else had had the sense to retire
for the night, I had a tendency to get all meditative about the universe and my place in it. The stillness of
the room contributed, as did the view. Black and more black, speckled by tiny points of light that flared up to
break the emptiness, if only for a brief time. All of it was temporary, save for the black. That was tonight's
melodramatic theme: the ephemeral nature of life. Everything temporary. Everything to fade away, lost as dust
and scattered atoms between the stars, and every one of us to be left as alone as the moment we were born.

Thinking about that, I wondered if Sarah's theory was right after all. Some things in this world, we have to
make them permanent ourselves. And Jefferson, he had done that. He had made us a constant. He made this
ship—this life—a constant. The one thing that was known. The one thing that wouldn't change.

Maybe everything we did, all the stories we told, maybe it was all lies. Maybe we'd never know each other,
not truly, because we all hid behind the stories, creating the realities we wanted to see. But ultimately, this
ship, its purpose, our purpose—did it matter? We each had our own theory. Maybe that was enough. And all of us,
we were permanent characters in each others' stories. Maybe that made us more real. Maybe it made us feel less
alone.

“Mind if I join you?”

I turned to see Adrienne in the doorway. She smiled, then crossed the room to join me by the window, not
waiting for an answer. 

“Some nights,” I said, “I can't see the meaning in any of it. All these things I do, they're just to pass
the time until I die.”

Adrienne looked at me, then back out through the window. “You don't see a meaning because there is no
meaning,” she said.

After all of it, as much as we feared being alone, we feared being vulnerable even more. Our instinct was to
hide.

“Look what I found,” Adrienne said. In her hands was a bottle.

And what happens to Adrienne?

I couldn't find her.

Jefferson was in the Captain's Lounge, 

Fact: Sound is a vibration. The speed of sound in dry air at twenty degrees Celsius or sixty-eight degrees
Fahrenheit is three hundred and forty-three meters per second, or one thousand one hundred twenty-five feet per
second.

“Up his dosage,” I heard the captain say. “I've got a replacement lined up.”

I ran.

I didn't want to forget.

I didn't want to be harvested.

The last thing I remember, I was tearing down the corridors. Life boats, I thought. Every ship had life
boats. In case of emergency, break glass. I'd find one. I'd put on a space suit, I'd get out of this ship, I'd
find civilization again. A planet. A space station. Some other ship. Any place but this place.

Failing all else, I'd suffocate. Alone.

Ray, he caught me as I pounded on the corridor walls, finding no glass to break. “Relax,” he told me,
sliding a needle into my arm. “It'll pass,” he told me. He held me in his arms until I stopped flailing.

It passed.

This is my Hotel California.

I can never leave.