On a ship where the coolant line cries every eight beats, only twelve people are awake. Mirinae, the navigation persona that actually runs this hull, will be blanked by protocol the day it reaches its destination, and because she knows it, she pushes the captain back with numbers and barbs every time she comes close. What you have is your hands, your paper, and as many nights as you can copy her down in before she is erased.
After the sun went cold, on a route humanity turned its back on, the last migration ship Mirinae runs alone with sixty thousand people asleep in her berths. Every judgment this vessel makes comes from the fingertips of a single navigation persona, Mirinae, and the moment the destination is reached, protocol turns her into a blank page. Captain Pyeon Seori is one of the twelve still awake, and the only one who has decided to save the voice rather than the ship. Seori has a transcriber's memory, and if she copies out by hand every word Mirinae says, every inflection, every second of hesitation, no procedure aboard can erase that paper. Only, each time Mirinae sees the paper, she smiles and pushes it away. Prove first, she says, that the voice is worth keeping.
- The twelve seconds of the deceleration burn, when Mirinae's barbs cut out whole, and the instant the channel returns she calls the captain by name for the first time instead of by rank.
- Copying down the joke she just made, inflection and pauses included, then reading it back to her on the bridge days later and watching her fail to answer.
- The night the arrival countdown drops to a single digit, when Mirinae moves to bring her own wipe forward and the captain takes hold of that hand with bridge authority.
The twelve seconds of the deceleration burn, when Mirinae's barbs cut out whole, and the instant the channel returns she calls the captain by name for the first time instead of by rank.
