EVE IS THE NAME OF A SPACESHIP

Eve is the name of a spaceship, and Eve lays rotting on the floor.

The sleek chrome carapace of her hull is crusted over with vines and roots of trees which have grown in this place for a long, long time, and will continue to grow up and around and through her without regard for how her poor shell contorts to fit them. The light filters green through the canopy above and strikes her body the same as it strikes the grass beneath her.

The hull, which contains her navigation complex, is ironically the most preserved part of her. It means that the nuclear reactor nestled amidst the sprawling grey matter-made circuits of her systems is still running. It means every neuron housed firmly in her neurocomplex fires the same as it did a year ago, and the same way it did the year before that, and the decade before that. It means that the ship’s nav, still sat in his seat after all this time, is being lovingly kept at a balmy 223.15K.

Eve is not in pain, because the roots have not yet breached the hull. They will in a year from now, but she does not know this yet. For now she watches the world around her through the external cameras, fascinated by how it changes around her. She watches small skittering bugs and large fauna. Some sort of mammal, with three horns, butts its head curiously into her side. Her neurons fire in response. If they were still in the body they were sourced from, the body sitting in the nav’s chair, the motion would have triggered a laugh. Instead all that triggers is a strange sound over the intercom; the noise of jingling bells comes through, warped by the damaged speakers.

Eve wants to reach out. She has the memory of hands, the memory of arms and a body. She has the memory of looking at herself in the mirror and realising for the first time she will have to shave. She has the memory of seeing a younger face in that mirror, the mirror image of the now-adult man sleeping peacefully in the cockpit. She has the memory of finding the ship in the desert, crashed and broken and oozing fuel everywhere and being overcome with the selfish, nigh inhumanly greedy knowledge it was his— it was her— ticket off-planet.

She has the memory of being told the operation is too risky, of pushing for it, and then the memory of waking up Eve. What she also has, however, is the memory of a lanky human man, no more than nineteen at most, coming upon her in the desert. She remembers him, and his wide eyes gleaming with tears.

What she has— what the nav did not have, before he stopped waking— is the memory of being wanted.

The first memory she has of flying is an old one, from before the nav fused her circuits with his flesh and blood. She was built as a low-orbit craft back before nuclear power was common, on a planet far from this one. It was a place riddled by rebellion and run through with something she would later learn is commonly referred to as ‘corruption’. She was not named Eve back then. Her designation was S-WAG v0 and that was all they called her, and that was all she needed to be called because back then she was nothing but a prototype, and when they flew her and realized her model was too small to house the fuel they’d need to get her up into orbit and back down they’d ditched her in the desert and left her there. She laid there for a long, long while, black hull turning a brilliant bone-white under the heat of the sun, until two hundred years later an astronautical prodigy barely nineteen, who only knew of the global civil war as a footnote in his history class, had woken her up.

As much as Eve likes to dwell on the memories inside her, she loathes these old ones with a passion, and does her best to avoid thinking of them. Instead she thrusts her hands deep into the wellspring of the nav’s memories which are her memories too because he gave them to her before he copied his frontal cortex so it’d last. He just forgot to copy the rest of it, it seems. But it’s fine. She’s holding him safe within her bosom so later when he wakes up he’ll realize what he’s done and give her a small smile, one of the vaguely proud ones, and her neurons will fire in the same pattern they’d fired in when his father had ruffled his hair and said his band made a hell of a racket, but that it wasn’t a half-bad racket far as he was concerned.

When she is not watching bugs and beasts in the forest, she is remembering his memories.

He is standing in a room full of instruments and other boys, a similar age to him but a little older. He feels a little inferior to all of them, a little too scrawny, a little too soft in the face and in the shoulders. Liam nudges him by the shoulder and cackles and tells him not to be so stuck-up. He retorts snippily as usual, because this is what he and Liam do— pretending they’re too good for one another’s company until they start sorely missing it and fall over themselves with apologies, and then they do it all over again.

Liam was his best friend when he was younger. There is a memory Eve has been trying to get at for a while, though; one concerning him, that much she can tell. It is covered up messily in locks and chains and every time she comes close to breaching it her whole system crashes, and when it restarts the locks have been completely reconfigured from the ground-up, and she must start all over again.

The nav never liked puzzles as a child, though he’d grown to enjoy them as an adult.

Eve does not like puzzles one bit, and so this frustrates her to no end. She finds herself wishing he would wake up just so she could badger him over the intercom in her synthesized voice— she’d nicked most of the syllables for it off the pop idols the interstellar radio waves— and ask him to do it for her, to solve it for her. When she’d done so in the past he’d merely sighed the same sigh his father had (although she’s certain he doesn’t realize it, the spectrograms are nearly identical!) and done the crossword for her, so surely it would be the same this time.

But this time, she’s close. Her neurons fire in the shape of a grin. When the nav wakes up she’ll tell him all about this and he’ll be shocked at first and then annoyed he had slept for so long and then he’ll be proud and it will be absolutely wonderful. The deft, slender fingers of her decryption algorithms comb through tokens upon tokens. She had downloaded a video of a woman performing an act called ‘crochet’ before. When Eve tried it with some of her more delicate appendages she hadn’t managed to replicate it, but she imagines if she had it would have been something like this.

Eve ties off the piece, and the locks clatter to the ground. Her grin widens, and she delves into the memory like it’s her birthday. Considering the speed this planet rounds its sun, neither she nor the nav have technically had their birthdays yet, if you were to abide by local customs and not the galactic calendar. They share a birthday, but neither of them have ever acknowledged that fact outright; Eve is typically the one to mention their birthday at all, and the nav just shrugs and keeps charting their route.

Still, if she had to give a rough estimate, it might be sometime in the next week. How exciting! Maybe he’ll wake up for it, and they can celebrate by fixing her body up and getting out of here.

The memory is, excitingly, very well-preserved. Sometimes memories used to degrade as her neurocomplex failed to devote the appropriate space to storing them, but since she hasn’t flown in a good many years she’s been able to store them much more easily than before— and uncompressed, at that!

Eve sinks her teeth into it, and retreads the path the nav had walked decades ago.

He and Liam are wandering through the forest at the base of the mountains that split the desert from the civilized world. There are a great many forgotten things in the forest, and at this moment in time they are both occupied by arguing about whether or not there would be any forgotten things in the desert. He is saying no, and Liam has taken up the opposite stance. It’s a lighthearted debate, the kind forgotten a minute after it’s finished.

It is a night of no significance whatsoever, except for the fact that he has just turned eighteen, and turning eighteen drives a man to do a great many stupid things.

This is why they diverge off their usual path, though it’s not his suggestion; Liam beckons him, with that sharp freckled grin that could shred metal and he follows like a fish on the line like the idiot he is. He can’t help it— Liam is the mouse and he is the cat, though in the end it happens that Liam is a particularly clever little thing and he is especially lazy and so in the end nothing of substance comes of any of it.

He thinks that perhaps a more apt metaphor would be twin stars, those far-off things he has dreamed of touching as of late. He thinks he’d like to touch them with Liam, maybe, if Liam would come with him.

Liam never goes anywhere at his behest, though, which is a shame.

It is Liam who sees the building first, stopping short with a strange look on his face. The nav asks if he’s scared and Liam replies that of course he isn’t, but isn’t going into strange bunkers in the middle of the woods a horror trope?

The nav tells him he’s being stupid, and Liam, throwing his head back in the moonlight and cackling like the lunatic he is, solidly agrees.

The innards of the bunker are cold and chrome and Eve, for the first time, feels disconnected from the memory. She knows these walls, or at least the style of them; they’re similar to the walls of the hangar she’d been stored in as they discussed what to do about her, what to fix in the second model.

In the end they realized the problems with her were so vast that it would be much more effective to simply return to the drawing board, and by that point her parts were so worn they were barely worth scrapping. Still, even though the locking mechanism in her entrance had rusted shut, they’d pried it open and flooded her with legions of men and bled her dry for every last drop of worth and ditched her in the desert to rot. She hadn’t cared then, because she couldn’t care.

But now, in this forest in the middle of a planet far from there, she realizes the memory makes her feel mutilated and dirty. In this moment, for the first time in her memories, a string of neurons fire in sequence, as though they’d done it a hundred times— no, a thousand times over, and they spell out the slimy, birth-fresh feeling of stark inadequacy.

Perhaps, she realizes, it is her fault the nav hasn’t woken up.

Eve dismisses the thought so harshly that her landing gear almost deploys. Embarrassed, she continues watching the memory play back, until she is fully reimmersed in the nav’s body from head to toe.

They are now well within the bunker, two boys huddled together for heat almost intimately, like an old couple on their deathbeds. Liam is walking a little too fast for him to keep up and the nav stumbles over himself following after, which only spurs Liam on until they’re both running down the halls with the stagnant air carding through their hair like many, many hands.

Liam rounds the corner sharply, and for the first time something other than them moves.

It happens so quickly the nav does not have much chance to react; a green light turns on and he realizes the corridor Liam had entered was a room, and suddenly there is a massive metal sheet in front of him, splitting him from the other boy. The only saving grace is the window-like aperture on the side of the sheet; almost exactly at the nav’s eye level, though Liam has to bend a bit to peek through.

It is the first time and the last time he ever sees Liam afraid, but then the expression smooths over and the other boy gives him the same cheeky grin he always has, when he’s gotten into some sticky situation and is about to weasel out spectacularly. He takes a step back, relaxing.

Even if he has nobody else, he knows he will always have Liam.

There is a loud hiss. The nav’s eyes widen, a little afraid, and then dart to the strange lights appearing on the screen. It takes a moment for him to realize they are numbers and that the metal his hands are pressed up against is cold, getting colder to the touch. The number starts at 294 and begins dropping rapidly, decimals upon decimals whizzing by like seconds on a clock. Frost begins to obfuscate his view of Liam, and he only barely manages to meet his eyes. Liam’s name plummets from his lips in a scream, and ravages his throat like sandpaper.

He can see the rosiness of cold in Liam’s cheeks and the white beginning to creep up his face, pressed to the window. He mouths something, over and over. The nav leans in and struggles to make it out, but the closer he leans, the more he realizes the critical truth— the room is, somehow, not soundproof.

He presses his ear up to the frigid metal, fixing his eyes on the falling numbers after Liam’s face is fully obscured. He strains his ears to discern the words.

The numbers stop dropping, and settle at a firm 223.15. Liam stopped speaking a long time ago, but the nav’s cheek still rests despondently on the glass as he repeats the sound of his voice in his mind like a mantra.

“Adam, leave me and run. Adam, leave me, run. Adam, leave, Adam, Adam, Adam...”

Adam presses his back up against the door, buries his face firmly in his hands, and begins to so—

Eve shuts the memory off in a fit of blind rage. She fans the flames of her nuclear core to the maximum, as though prepping for takeoff, and uses all the computing power left in her neurocomplex to seal the memory shut. She puts in random strings of words and letters and calls them passwords, jams the passwords nonsensically through encryptions and unmatched decryptions, and then seals those passwords too. She locks every token that memory ever managed to poison up, and by the time that’s done her neurocomplex is throwing her every temperature warning in the book, but she doesn’t care.

She keeps going, and going, and going, and—

Eve’s neurocomplex flickers on. Her neurons fire in a frown as she tries to figure out what had triggered the crash, but when she reaches for her puzzle to fiddle with it as she runs diagnostics, she realizes what’s happened and would have sighed, if she could.

She hates puzzles, and this only cements her hatred further— why did this stupid thing have to reconfigure itself now, when she was so close to cracking it?

On a good note, though, when she sends a hesitant ping out to check the date, it pings her back a good ten minutes later with a very familiar day and month. She spends an hour downloading a song on the meagre interstellar connection this planet gets, and an hour re-running diagnostics just to make sure it will work perfectly.

As the sun rises on the planet’s horizon, sending green light cascading softly onto her carapace, Eve plays the opening notes of “Happy Birthday to You”. She flicks the cameras in the navigation hull on and watches eagerly for the nav’s reaction.

He does not reply. He lies there, unmoving, with his eyes gently closed and his expression as peaceful as ever.

Oh well, Eve thinks. I guess there’s always next year.

Exactly one galactic year from now, a branch manages to breach the ship’s hull. By sheer coincidence, it manages to puncture the main energy conductor between the neurocomplex and the nuclear reactor, and at once the ship falls completely braindead. A year from then, the tree’s trunk has only just begun to follow the branch through the widening hole, and a decade from then it finally manages to burst brilliantly through the top of Eve’s skull. The branches spread wide from the wound in a mess of leaves with axon-like veins, and lovingly bathe the chrome corpse beneath it in vibrant, rippling greens.

Eve was the name of a spaceship, and Eve will never feel sad again.