The Signal Key

The shuttle from the surface took eleven hours and I slept through nine of them, which I counted as a personal victory. My name is Cass, I'm thirty-three, and I design exhibits for a museum back on Earth, which mostly means I spend my weeks arguing with fabricators about font sizes and then flying places to watch them install things anyway. This trip was the traveling exhibit, a whole gallery about deep space mining that we'd been building for two years. Eight months ago I'd ended a six-year relationship, and I had decided somewhere around month three that work trips counted as being good at my life. So far the evidence was thin but I was staying optimistic.

The Arc-Vault Orbital Station is not much to look at from the dock. It's a modular ring bolted around a nickel-iron asteroid, all corrugated panels and warning stripes, like somebody built a storage facility and then remembered people had to live in it. The museum wing is the nicest part, mostly because we paid for the renovation ourselves.

Vivian was waiting for me at the wing's airlock. She's thirty-nine, she runs logistics for the whole station, and I've known her since a museum conference eight years ago where we both got lost in the same parking structure and decided that made us friends. She hugged me hard enough to crunch my jacket.

"You look terrible," she said.

"I look like someone who slept on a shuttle."

"Same thing." She grabbed one of my crates before I could stop her. "Come on, the gallery looks amazing. Your people did good work."

She wasn't wrong. The exhibit had gone up clean, all the panels level, the interactive mining rig actually working for once. I did my walk-through, made four small notes I would never fix, and felt that specific tired satisfaction that comes at the end of a long project. Then Vivian bought me a coffee from the station machine, which tasted like somebody had dissolved a chalkboard in it, and that was when she told me.

"So, small logistics thing," she said, in the exact tone she used when a shipment was going to be late. "The hotel module. I may have double-booked the room."

"Vivian."

"It was a manifest error! The cargo crew came in two days early because of the recalibration schedule and they took the room, and there is exactly one left, and it's got one bed, and I have to sleep in the cargo bay for the next three nights anyway because of the recalibration."

"You're not sleeping in the room either way, that's the part I'm hearing."

"I would give you my room but I literally cannot be in it. The point is, there's a friend of a friend who booked a bunk and got bumped, and he needs the room too, and I thought, you're both adults, the bed is huge, it's four nights."

"Is he a stranger?"

"He's an engineer. Allan. He's up here doing the comms array retrofit. Richie, our maintenance lead, vouches for him, and Richie vouches for everybody so that's honestly not worth much, but he's been here three weeks and nobody has complained once, which on this station is a glowing reference."

I stood there doing the math on whether I could sleep in the gallery. There were benches. Museums have benches for a reason. But the exhibit cases had motion sensors and I knew for a fact the night cycle would flag me as a security event by two in the morning.

"Fine," I said. "One bed, four nights, a stranger. This is a comedy setup and I want it noted that I know that."

"Noted," Vivian said, and handed me a key fob like she was handing me a live grenade.

* * *

The hotel module was down two rings from the museum wing, past the galley and the climbing gym, which I would learn more about later. I knocked, because it felt wrong to walk into a room a stranger was already living in, even if the fob would have let me.

The door slid open on a man kneeling on the floor with a butter knife.

He was maybe thirty-five, dark hair going gray at the temples, sleeves pushed up, completely absorbed in prying at the side of an old typewriter that sat on the desk chair like a patient on an operating table. He looked up, saw me, and did the slow blink of a person whose brain needed a second to load a new file.

"You're not housekeeping," he said.

"You're not Vivian."

"Nobody's ever not Vivian at me before." He stood up, wiped his hands on his jeans, and stuck one out. "Allan. Signal engineer. I'm assuming you're Cass, since you're the only other person on this station with a claim on this room."

"That's me. What's the knife for?"

"The case screws are painted over. Whoever serviced this thing last, decades ago, decided the correct tool was a flathead and then painted the whole seam." He held the butter knife up like evidence. "This is what I had."

I looked at the typewriter properly for the first time. It was a heavy old portable, the kind with the ribbon spools on top, gray-green enamel gone scuffed at the corners. It sat on a folded towel like it mattered. And the keyboard, when I glanced down at it, had a gap.

"You're missing a key," I said.

"The M," he said, with a specific pain in his voice that told me this was not a new topic for him. "It's been gone for years. Whoever had it before me lost it, or it got jammed and snapped off, who knows. Everything else works. I tested every key before I bought the travel case for it. Every single key, and the M is just gone."

"Where did a signal engineer on an orbital station get a typewriter?"

"Found it. In the climbing gym, there's a maintenance closet behind the crash pads, and it's been unlocked since I got here three weeks ago, which bothered me, so one night I looked inside. There's a typewriter and about forty years of spare rope tags. It was just sitting there." He said it the way other people describe finding money on the sidewalk. "Nobody on the crew claimed it. Maintenance signed off on me keeping it. Richie thought it was hilarious."

"Are you planning to type on it?"

"I'm planning to fix it. Whether I type on it after is a separate question." He turned it slightly so I could see the gap in the type basket, the little slot where the M's typebar should have hooked in. "I've been hunting a replacement key for three weeks. There are a few of these things still in circulation on Earth but the sellers want stupid money for a single key, and shipping to orbit costs more than the key."

The room, meanwhile, was small and clean, one bed that did look genuinely wide, one window, a bathroom no bigger than a phone booth. Allan had claimed the desk side and had arranged his tools in neat rows on the desk, which told me something about him before he said another word.

"So the sleeping situation," I said. "Vivian explained?"

"She explained. I offered to take the bunk in maintenance but the recalibration has the whole cargo section running night shifts and Richie says the bunks there are already double-stacked. So." He gestured at the bed like it was a proposal he hadn't made yet. "I can sleep on the floor. The floor is fine. I've slept on worse floors."

"You have not slept on this floor, this floor is metal."

"I've slept on metal floors."

"Where?"

"Vestibule of a ground station in South Whitaker, during a storm, for two nights." He said it flatly, like a fact on a spec sheet. "The bed is fine. I'll take the floor. We can figure out the rest tomorrow."

"Vivian says the bed is huge."

"Vivian says a lot of things. She once told me a cargo pallet would fit through a hatch and it did not fit through the hatch."

That got a laugh out of me, the first real one of the trip, and I saw him register it. I put my bag down on the window side and started unpacking, and he went back to the butter knife, and for a while the only sound in the room was scraping and the hum of the station.

"The exhibit," he said eventually, without looking up. "The mining gallery. I walked past it yesterday. The rig that lets you drive the loader, is that yours?"

"I designed it."

"It's good. The delay on the bucket arm is almost right. Almost. It's a hair too slow on the return."

"Everybody's a critic."

"I'm serious. It's the best thing on this station that isn't a window." He pried the seam another millimeter. "I keep thinking whoever built the delay into that wanted it to feel heavy, not just slow, and that's a design decision, that's somebody who thought about it."

I sat down on the bed and looked at this stranger, kneeling on the floor of a metal room, defending a fake mining arm's timing to the woman who'd specified it, and I thought, well. Maybe the room wouldn't be the worst part of this trip after all.

The next three nights went the way Vivian had promised they would. She slept in the cargo bay on a cot wedged between pallets of packing foam, and she apologized about it roughly four hundred times, and she brought us coffee from the galley at hours that made me question her sanity and mine. Allan and I settled into a rhythm faster than I expected two strangers to. He took the desk until midnight, I took the desk after, and the bed stayed a thing we walked around rather than discussed. He turned out to be a quiet sleeper. I turned out to be a quiet sleeper too, and on the second night I lay there listening to him breathe and decided this was a workable arrangement and did not think about it further, in the way a person decides things at two in the morning.

On the third night he wasn't in the room when I got back from the exhibit floor. I checked the time, felt a little stupid about checking the time, and then found a note on the desk in handwriting that sloped forward like it was in a hurry. Gym. I put my shoes back on.

The climbing gym sat at the junction of two modules, and its window was the biggest thing on the station, a full panel of glass looking down at the asteroid, pitted and gray and lit along its edges by the work floods on the mining barges. The wall inside was covered in colored holds, reds and yellows and a band of green near the top, and the crash pads lay on the floor like they'd been thrown there in a hurry. Allan was halfway up the wall when I came in, and I stopped, because I had not expected that.

He climbed the way he did everything else, which was to say carefully, with his tools arranged first. He'd chalked his hands, checked his knots twice, walked the base of the problem with his head tilted like he was reading a diagram. But once he was on the wall, all of that care turned into something else. He moved slowly and exactly and without any wasted motion, reaching past holds I would have grabbed for, hanging from two fingers on a red crimp while he figured out the next three moves. His dark hair, gray at the temples, was pushed back off his forehead, and the light from the window caught him from below, the asteroid turning slowly under him.

I sat down on a crash pad and watched. I am not going to claim I was neutral about it. I had spent three nights sharing a room with a man who kept his tools in neat rows and defended my design decisions to my face, and watching him hang off a wall with that kind of focus did something to the arithmetic I'd been doing all trip.

He topped out, came down the ladder on the side, and only then noticed me. "Hey. You're up late!"

"So are you." I nodded at the wall. "How long have you been climbing?"

"Since college. Badly, since college. Better since I got up here, because there's nothing else to do after shift." He rubbed chalk off his hands with a rag. "The gravity plating in this module runs a little light. Richie recalibrates it every quarter. It makes the wall feel almost like home gravity, which is to say, hard."

"Can anyone use it?"

"It's open to the whole station. The crew mostly uses it at night because the day crew grinds chalk into everything and complains about it." He looked at me, and there was a question in the look, and I answered it by standing up.

"Show me something easy."

He walked me through the warmup traverse, which was yellow holds along the base of the wall, and I was worse at it than I remembered being, and he did not pretend otherwise, which I appreciated more than encouragement. The asteroid rolled past the window. The air in the gym smelled like chalk dust, dry and mineral, and after a while I stopped thinking about how I looked and started just climbing.

It was on the second traverse that I told him about the breakup. I didn't plan to. It came out sideways, the way those things do, when I shook out a forearm and said, without looking down at him, "My ex would have hated this. He thought hobbies were a scam." And then there it was, sitting in the air, six years of a relationship reduced to one sentence, eight months of being single reduced to a tremor in my grip.

Allan didn't say sorry. He didn't say anything about how I must be doing okay or how time heals. He said, "Then he missed the part where you learn something every time you fall off." And he spotted me while I finished the traverse, hands hovering under my hips without touching, and that was all the pity I got, which turned out to be exactly the right amount.

* * *

The typewriter did its thing two nights later.

I want to be careful how I describe this, because I have gone over it a lot since, and every version sounds either crazier or more ordinary than the last. The facts are these. Allan kept the typewriter on the desk, covered with a towel when he wasn't working on it, because he said dust was the enemy and also because he was a little superstitious about it, which he admitted. That night he was in the shower and I was at the desk with my tablet, working on the exhibit's shipping manifest, when I heard a single keystroke clack. I looked up. The towel was folded back. The carriage had advanced one space.

I did not touch it. I want that stated. I sat there with my hands in my lap and watched the thing type for about ninety seconds, unhurried, the keys rising and falling, the little bell at the end of the line, the carriage sliding back with a sound like a drawer closing. Then it stopped. I got Allan out of the shower and he came in with wet hair and a towel around his neck and read the page over my shoulder.