As the Monet drifts through the expanse of deep space, several light years from any functional colonies, its two pilots decide to climb back into the cockpit, one last time. 

Laska takes advantage of the disabled gravity to pull herself over the panel of buttons that control the Monet, landing on the darkened windows of the cockpit. She recoils when her palms make contact. Despite being several layers thick, the plexiglass is ice-cold from the chill of space. 

Elaine, for her part, looks at something familiar: the console. She skims her fingers over the controls until she finds the Pilot Eject button and flips its plastic covering. “You reckon this still works?”

“The captain said he would keep the power on until tomorrow.”

“Huh. You remember how our instructors acted like you’d die if you pressed this?”

“Typically, you would.” Laska glances at her friend. The cockpit is dim, and the only things that are really visible are the illuminated levers and dials on the console. “Through explosive depressurization.”

Elaine strokes the button contemplatively before relatching the plastic casing. It seals with a click. 

“Isn’t it strange?” she says after a moment.

“What is?”

“I’m still scared of pressing it.”

“You aren’t in a seat right now.”

“I could be. All I have to do is sit down.”

“Do you want to?”

“No, not really. Hey, you know what else can we do in here?” Elaine says playfully. “I could change the color of the dashboard lights. Or I could turn on the window display. Or send an outgoing call to Home.” 

Elaine doesn’t say it, but Laska hears it anyway: Outgoing, but not incoming. The Monet isn’t close enough to any colonies, let alone Hometown, to establish a two-way link. 

“If you want to do something with the windows, we might as well make them transparent,” Laska suggests. The windows automatically shifted from transparent to an opaque black with a digital overlay when the Monet entered the solar system. It’s meant to shield pilots from the solar radiation poisoning, but there is a switch in the cockpit to manually restore visibility. Somewhere. “I’ll keep track of how long we can withstand the light before we start suffering the undignified effects of radiation.” 

“Oh, yeah! Then we’ll have a view of the sun. Where’s the lever?”

“Um…try under the console.”

Elaine dives. Laska hears a few things rattle, hears a couple things click; a dull thud; Elaine swears, then pokes her head back up.

“S’not there,” she says. “Any other ideas?”

“No, nothing. Sorry.”

“Oh well,” Elaine shrugs. 

Laska tentatively sets her hands on the plexiglass again, this time anticipating the cold. She sits on the windows, perpendicular to the floor and studies the tiny, familiar room. Despite years of piloting the Monet, she has never touched this part of the cockpit. It’s shocking how small this room seems when she views it from a different angle. 

An hour after they enter the cockpit, during a spell of silence, Elaine taps her feet. She’s sitting on the edge of the console, precariously close to actually pressing some inputs, and her feet are on her chair. 

“I didn’t know you did that,” Laska remarks. She’s discovered that the steel ribbing which quarters the windows has the exact same texture as the brushed chrome faucets in the bathroom of her old apartment. “You’re normally so still when we pilot together.”

“What?” Elaine looks up. “Yeah, I don’t, usually. Our instructors drilled it out of me at the academy because it’s distracting or whatever. God, it’s been so long since we’ve been in school.”

“Not long enough for you to forget a bad habit, though?”

Elaine knocks her heels together. “I guess I’m letting loose.”

“Well, good for you.” Laska nods at Elaine’s feet, soles grinding into the creases of her chair. “You know, you’re probably getting dirt all over your seat.”

“Worried on behalf of the cleaning crew?” 

“I’m worried on behalf of the backside of your pants,” Laska says dryly.

“Nice to know you’ve been thinking about my ass.” 

Laska swats at her co-pilot halfheartedly. “Shut up. Hey, why do you have so much crap crusted in your boots? There’s not exactly a lot of dirt onboard to begin with.”

“Oh, I never told you? These are from Hometown. I don’t know if you ever went, but they had really nice faux redwoods in the East Point sector, so I used to wear these to go hiking.”

“And you didn’t consider washing them before bringing them onboard?” 

“Nope.”

“…That’s kind of nice.” 

“What?”

“Yeah. I wish I’d brought something like that. I have a set of very old print photos.” 

“Well, those photos are of more sentimental value than my boots,” Elaine says sincerely.

“Really?” Laska thinks of six or seven faded polaroids she keeps in her medicine cabinet. They’re hardly what she would call valuable. “Why?”

“Print photos are useless.”

“Thanks.”

“No, I mean I brought my boots over to wear, so they’re more of a tool than a keepsake. I think it’s nice that you cared enough to bring your photos, even if they’re not, y’know, useful.”

“Sure, but photos are less costly to bring. You could have brought a nice jacket instead of your boots, but there’s really nothing I could have swapped for my photos.” 

“Maybe.”

“Would you have?”

“Hm?”

“Would you have replaced your boots with something?”

“Erm…” Elaine wrinkles her nose. “No, I can’t think of anything, to be honest. Besides, what’s done is done. No point dwelling on it, especially now.” 

Laska frowns, dissatisfied. She suddenly thinks she feels a cold draft of air at the back of her neck and irrationally wonders if the window seals have sprung a leak, the way her faucet was fond of doing at 2:00 AM in her old apartment. But it would be obvious if that happened. 

Three hours after they entered the cockpit, while Elaine is speculating what Earth has become–did the remaining people of the planet manage to reverse the climate crisis after the colonists left, or did the world finally, irreversibly burn up under the demands of its inhabitants?–Laska drifts into a wall and clips her shoulder on a switch.

She jerks away and grabs one of the wall handles to check what she pressed. 

Elaine, who is experimenting with sitting sideways on the headrest of her chair, flinches so badly she nearly throws herself upright. “What was that?” 

“Um.” Laska pulls herself closer to the wall to examine the misflipped lever. 

“You better not have pressed the self-destruct button,” Elaine says, only half-joking.

Laska squints at the label. An orange light lands on the side of her hands.

“…Oh.” Elaine says softly. 

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t shine a light in my face so I can read,” Laska says.

“What? No, look!”

Laska turns her head in time to see the opaque black color finish draining from the windows, restoring them to transparency. 

Elaine pushes herself off her chair. It’s the first natural light the two of them have seen after months in space–warm, orange, and bright enough to illuminate the whole cockpit. Bright enough to deal fatal levels of radiation within a few hours of direct exposure. 

“Wow.” Elaine says with awe. 

Laska feels the side of her face. Her cheeks are already warming up. 

Eight hours in, the two of them have drifted into their normal pilot seats. They’re taking turns spinning each other’s chairs in directions they weren’t designed to turn. Laska’s head is developing the faint feeling of somebody rhythmically hitting it with a sledgehammer, Elaine’s eyes have red rims, and the air tastes stale. 

Laska, sometime between the chair’s fourth and fifth revolution, presses her fingertips to her eyes and takes a deep breath. She’s revolving slowly because they broke the physical connection between the seats and the legs to allow for spinning in the first place, so if they spin too fast they might simply drift away, but she still feels dizzy.

“Are you going to sleep?” Elaine asks. She, who has better balance and can therefore control her center of gravity better than Laska, is fine with spinning about twice as fast. 

“I’m just relaxing. I have a headache.”

“Well, I’d rather you didn’t waste time, seeing how little we have left.”

“I know, Elaine.”

“Can you get your head up, then?”

Laska scowls. “What’s the point?” 

“What’s gotten into you all of a sudden?” Elaine tries to look at Laska, which looks kind of stupid when she’s on the spinning chair. It makes Laska want to laugh or maybe cry.

“Nothing. I’m reacting appropriately.”

“To what?”

“To what?” Laska leans backward. It tilts the chair precariously, but she can’t bring herself to care. “How about the fact that some idiot blew up the Monet’s engine two weeks ago and now we’re stuck in the middle of nowhere with a dwindling oxygen supply? How about the fact that our lives are worth less than the resources Hometown would need to rescue us so now we’re on a timeline that is measurable by days?” 

“Well, we’ve been here for two weeks, so it’s not exactly new information.” Elaine drops her feet to slow her chair to a stop. “And there’s nothing we can do about it–besides, it’s a bit late to think about that now, isn’t it?”

“Did you know that I had it all planned out? I was going to quit piloting. I have enough savings from high-risk expeditions to survive unemployment for five years, and with my record, I could’ve easily landed a job in low-stakes local transport.” 

The last fifteen years of her life are coming back to her. Gray aluminum alloys and endless recycled protein paste–sometimes Elaine joked, to annoy the captain, If we don’t get some better catering here, I might end up crashing the ship to protest. So many minutes wondering, Is this really it? And now, she has her answer: yes, it is. 

“You aren’t listening to me.”

“I can’t believe I spent so many hours of my life in this shitty cockpit,” Laska puts her head in her hands. The slow revolutions of the chair really are making her dizzy. “And then you decided we should die in it!”

“That was a joint decision.” Elaine leans forward and grabs Laska’s chair, forcing it to a halt. “Listen, if you really had it planned out, why didn’t you do it?” 

“What?” Laska looks up. Elaine’s eyes are bloodshot and a vein is starting to pulse near her left eyebrow. 

“I mean, really, were you waiting for a sign or something?” 

“Waiting? I wasn’t–I mean, I guess I was, but I thought I’d have more time!”

“And how long would you have thought that? A year? Two years? Another fifteen? Until you developed cancer? Until one of us fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into an asteroid? Think about it! Something like this was going to happen sooner or later!”

Laska throws her hands up. “So what, we should hurry up and kill ourselves now?”

“I’m saying, what’s the point of dying mad?”

“What’s the point of anything? Are you satisfied with your life?”

“Of course not! But I didn’t crawl in here just so I could spend the last hour of it in a fight with you about how meaningful it was!” 

“Then what? Why bother getting in here at all?”

“Because–I mean, look. I don’t feel great about my life either. You once told me you joined just because your family expected it of you. I joined because I was fourteen and desperate and homeless and I couldn’t imagine I’d live long enough for an 85% ship failure rate to matter. But I did and now it does.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So we wasted our lives. But we can’t redo what’s already been done, and anyways, we’re going to die pretty soon.”

Laska groans. 

“No, I mean, there’s nothing but the here and now. And honestly, I don’t think there ever was–we were only ever living in the moment. This is no different than that, really; it’s just that now we don’t have the option of doing otherwise.”

Laska opens her mouth and closes it. She sinks into her chair. 

Elaine relents. “Look, say you did quit. Would you have been happy?”

“I don’t know. At least I would’ve tried.”

“But that future you hoped for might never have existed even if we weren’t about to die. Seriously, why not enjoy what’s left?”

Laska sighs. 

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah, I see your point. But I still feel terrible.”

“Hey, you know what, me too. We’re suffering in solidarity.” Elaine playfully punches Laska in the shoulder. “Suppose this is what it’s like to stare down the barrel of a gun?” Despite herself, Laska grins. 

“Maybe, although I’d probably guess it has more in common with the early symptoms of radiation poisoning,” Laska says dryly. 

“Oh, right,” Elaine stands up. “How long have we got before that gets painful?”

Laska turns her head slightly. When the sun is to Laska’s side, she can see the space behind Elaine, through the window. “Another eight hours at this distance.” 

Elaine smiles. 

Laska looks at her. “What?” In the darkness behind the glass, distant galaxies flicker in a river of lights and trace the unlit half of Elaine’s silhouette. For a moment, Laska forgets where she is–it’s breathtaking. For a moment, she believes her co-pilot. Maybe this is enough, just being here together for a little while. 

“That’s plenty of time.”