young astronauts in love

kirk israel

chapter 1	space... the... frontier
not the final frontier, probably. but it's a frontier and it's pretty big	i'm an astronaut. always had been.
the academy was... pretty great actually	i got my degree, and my first assignment
i'm a federation technician, first class	my first assignment was on GHIBAL 3
GHIBAL 3 is the famous home of the ghibal anomaly	and ghibal city, set up for the scientists to study the anomaly and the corporations hoping to cash in.
it was even more of a happening place back then!	it was a long journey there
you can only ionski a few hundred times before it gets old	finally we were there!
unfortunately my assignment wasn't the city	or the suburbs
or that area surrounding the suburbs
	it was an outpost. scanner outpost gamma-222.
a monitoring station, for technical reasons as far as possible from the city and the anomaly, the anomalyobverse.	little glitches were happening all the time.
that's why i was there! one of the most qualified technoplumbers in the history of humanity	i had a few small rooms, 'net connection, coffee maker, a GIANT PILE of spare parts...
it was lonely, but with minibreaks to the city and holocoms with old classmates, not too bad.
chapter 2	The setup on GHIBAL 3 was kind of odd
There was so much we didn't know about the anomaly, it really kept the scientists busy, and some of the lawyers	sometimes they had to do research the outposts. there was a minilab for them, with its own coffee maker.
then, one day...	lydia showed up
lydia was one of the lab-scouts. THE fastest jetter i had ever seen	the scientist-scouts were the elite of the elite.
and lydia in the lab... her specialty was this unspace stuff i could just barely get the outlines of	didn't stop me from trying though!
techs are supposed to ask questions, and she was pretty patient	and so it rolled on... lab-scouts came and lab-scouts went.
my own work was pretty interesting, and i had a few side projects	for a while i had a theory she was showing up more often than her research demanded
it was tough to tell. her stuff was pretty obstruse. and it wasn't like i was the only lab she stopped at.	probably i was just projecting
women! or maybe just people.	compared to them, circuits were cake.
maybe her research was about the kind of complexity i'm thinking of	circuits:on, off, mu. you don't understand something, you set up testcases, you can isolate your assumptions and test them...
i've always been pretty easy to read	one time it was near the holiday break. we were talking schedules.
"had you noticed how often i'm here? i've virtually had to make up a new branch of anomaly wave dynamic to justify my trips here."	"i'll bet you say that to all the techs!" i said
no, she hadn't
chapter 3	those were some great times
we figured out how to schedule leave time together	cities look better when you're with someone
something about the bigness, the aspiration, even a medium university / corporate / federation city like this one.	i mean, small change compared to what humanity was aiming for with the ghibal anomaly
but like the old wisdom says, "the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."	but it's the little things. knowing where to get a good raspberry lime rickey
touching hands at the theater	hanging out with friends as a couple
even the shamelessly goofy stuff. thanks to the anomaly, we were able to watch the sunset every direction at once	still, there was a lot of work to do. the anomaly obverse beckoned!
it was a long drive back. luckily, neither of us needed to actually drive...	time passed. she had to make her rounds, but gamma-222 was really becoming her base-away-from-base.
and my side project was coming along	actually, in retrospect, i think the project helped catch Lydia's eye, the months before
nothing too ground-breaking but I was proud of it...	it was looking to be the most advanced 'bot on GHIBAL 3, all made from my giant pile of parts,
finally it was time for the full AI/body connection and powerup...	something wasn't quite right...
"RUN!" I shouted.	luckily, lydia didn't need to run
back at the minilab there was a universal kill switch	guess i know why fed regs require the cutoff circuit... no one thinks they're building a frankenstein!
later the post-mortem revealed it was "anomalous" radiation and the virtual synapses.	actually, years after that lydia wrote her dissertation on the interaction.
chapter 4	but just then the robot incident had left us a bit shaken
and quite a bit turned on	i kept making "robot buddies", but kept them dumb-ish, below the critical synaptic threshold
and lydia's research was deeper than ever.	for her birthday, i made her a robot pet UFO
i think she liked it	a lot. it followed her constantly!
her birthday gift to me was kind of harder to explain...	it was kind of a combination anomaly/holo of the two of us
it's unique, in a strict use of that word. i'm not sure you could make it anywhere besides the anomaly obverse!	during minibreaks, she showed me how to enjoy the planetside... nature stuff i'd never really looked at
at these times, i was happiest.	as far as i can tell, so was she.
but nothing gold can stay	she got her orders. assignment at tylon academy. the big leagues!
we took one last trip to the city	at the sodashop, we had a talk
"i don't know, jake... maybe it's the difference between you and everyone else."	"...the astronaut thing is so temporary for them..."
	now, we still write and holo sometimes. she hasn't found anyone new.
so there's still a little hope. not a ton.	she left, but deployments in the federation are funny things, and the anomaly still has some unplumbed depths.
i'll say this, i learned more from lydia than all the other lab-scouts put together.
BONUS PANELS
Preliminary Test Sketch	Coloring Test