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9S tried not to think of himself as the kind of android who got into trouble often. The operative word in that sentence being tried. He did not succeed, because everybody on the Bunker, himself included, knew full well that he was indeed the kind of android who got in trouble often.
It wasn’t his fault this time. He tried to tell himself that the same way he told himself that he wasn’t the kind of android who got into trouble often and had marginally more success with it. This time, he’d been talked into it.
6O tried not to think of herself as the kind of android who got into trouble often, and unlike 9S, often succeeded. After all, she spent most of her time chained to her desk (metaphorically, of course, at least for the time being), unlike 9S, who spent most of his time gallivanting around on Earth. It was more accurate to say that she was the kind of android who got into trouble at the earliest possible opportunity.
It wasn’t her fault this time. It was easy for her to tell herself that. After all, this time, 9S had talked her into it, and if there was one thing 9S was good at, it was talking (he and 6O had that in common).
As chatty as the two of them were, everything they said in their defense fell on deaf ears in front of the Commander. It wasn’t that the Commander was a bad listener or had any sort of problem with her audio sensors. It was that years (anywhere from fifty to two hundred; she wouldn’t say and nobody was brave enough to find out) of experience in leadership positions throughout the army’s ranks had given her a keen intuition for knowing exactly when to stop listening to people, and for 6O and 9S, that intuition had kicked in about six seconds after they had opened their mouths.
The Commander let them talk, though, even though she wasn’t listening to a word they said, and even interjected phrases like “yes,” “I see,” and “do go on” at strategic intervals to make them think she was listening and keep them going. This was because unbeknownst to 9S and 6O, she was counting the words and giving them each an extra minute of disciplinary probation for every one.
She let them explain themselves, occasionally asking them to repeat themselves or clarify a point they’d made at random, until the combined word count between the two of them had sentenced them to roughly twenty hours of drudgery.
“…So, you see, Commander,” 9S concluded, catching his breath, feeling oddly heartened that she had shown so much engagement in his breathless plea for clemency, “it wasn’t my fault at all. Sure, 6O and I got carried away, but it wasn’t our fault we lost those flight units. Uh, I mean, that those flight units were lost. Not by us.”
“And we really had no idea that 11O would take things so seriously,” 6O added, frantically bobbing her head as though the sheer enthusiasm in her body language could force the Commander to agree with her. “Anyway, what happened because of that was all on her, wasn’t it?”
“It was just something we did,” 9S said, “that would have been totally harmless if everything had worked out.”
“All the bad things that happened were totally out of our control, ma’am,” 6O added, nervously tugging on one of her golden plaits.
The Commander crossed her arms. “Is that all?”
9S nodded. 6O nodded and hastily let both hands fall to her sides to make herself look more serious to the Commander.
“Very well, then. Thank you for explanation. I understand everything now.”
9S sighed in relief.
“So we’re not in—”
The Commander added the last ninety-eight words to the two androids’ combined sentence. “Twenty hours and eight minutes of disciplinary probation, to be served over the next week, starting tonight.”
6O gasped. Fortunately for her, it did not add to her word count.
“Twenty hours?” 9S sputtered, aghast at the thought of having to balance that many hours of detention with all of the work he had to do. She’d have him running himself ragged in between his missions with 2B on Earth and whatever he’d be punished with on the Bunker? “But Commander, I—This is totally unfair! We just explained the whole situation to you, I mean—Weren’t you listening? We didn’t do—Okay, so we did some things wrong, but it all snowballed out from there in ways we had nothing to do with!”
“Of course I was listening, 9S,” the Commander answered, her voice terse and tone curt. “Twenty hours and fifty-five minutes.”
If 6O’s face could have fallen any farther, it would have ended up on the surface of the Earth. The idea of twenty hours of whatever drudgery the Commander had planned for her was utterly terrifying. What did she have in mind? Cleaning all the windows on the Bunker from the outside? Scrubbing the soot from the incinerators? Realigning all the solar panels by hand? “But Commander, you just said—”
“Twenty-one hours on the dot.”
9S, always quicker on the uptake than 6O, reached out and put a hand over her mouth before she could say anything else, and with a frantic nod and a stiff thumbs-up tried as best he could to nonverbally indicate to the Commander that the two of them both understood.
“Good,” the Commander said. “You will serve the first four hours in my office tonight at 2200 hours.”
9S checked his internal chronometer. It was 2150 hours.
“But Commander,” 6O blurted out in spite of herself, “that’s in ten minutes!”
Mortified, 9S waited with bated breath to hear the Commander add six more minutes to their sentence. She didn’t, so after a few seconds of silence he presumed it was safe to talk now. “What do you want us to do, ma’am?”
“One of our server nodes crashed the other day. We have fifty terabytes of geological survey data that wasn’t backed up. We believe all of the files are intact, but the filesystem metadata has been destroyed. You two will sift through the raw data until you’ve found every relevant file and made a tally of how much of it has been corrupted…”
“You expect us to do that for twenty-one hours?” 6O asked, incredulous, imagining how tedious it would be to go through so much data at such a painstakingly slow pace. Though she wasn’t exactly incompetent, data analysis was not her wheelhouse in the first place.
“You expect us to do that for twenty-one hours?” 9S asked at the exact same time, equally incredulous, wondering how such an easy task could possibly take that long. All he would have to do was gather the data in question, run a scan for file headers, and sit back and relax. He could have it done by the end of the day today if he set his mind to it.
Knowing exactly what he was thinking, the Commander added, “…Manually.”
Taken aback, all 9S could do was meekly parrot, “…Manually?”
“By hand,” the Commander clarified. “No direct interfacing with the data.”
9S wanted to shout that sifting through fifty terabytes of data without so much as a map or a compass using only a manual keyboard interface for nearly a whole day was practically torture, especially for a Scanner, but was smart enough to hold his tongue.
“Okay,” he said instead.
The work was exactly as tedious as 9S had expected. Staring at a screen for so long was starting to wear on his optical sensors. He didn’t know how 6O and the other Operators could spend eight to twelve hours every day sitting at a desk and tapping with their fingers on an analog keyboard and looking with their eyes at an analog monitor. It had something to do with security in Ops, but that didn’t mean he had to think it was a good idea. As a Scanner used to zipping through digital landscapes with the greatest of ease, all he could think about while he plugged away at his drudgery was how much more efficient everything would be if everyone just used direct AI-to-machine interfaces.
6O, at least, was used to plodding through reams of data the manual way, although the type of data she usually had to sift through was infinitely more comprehensible than the gibberish the Commander had set in front of her. To make matters worse, she had something else on her mind that was keeping her from focusing on her work.
“2300 hours,” she commented, gazing up wistfully from her terminal.
“Don’t count the hours; they’ll go by slower,” 9S muttered.
“We’re gonna miss Xmas.”
Xmas. 9S had told 6O all about Xmas. In all the excitement, or rather, all the terror, he’d completely forgotten it was tomorrow.
Well, sort of. Apparently, humans celebrated the holiday twice, but only sometimes. The ancient human literature 9S had found a few months ago had specified “Xmas in July,” which he assumed was some rare occurrence of the winter solstice celebration in the middle of summer.
He wondered why it was called Xmas. Was the X a special symbol to humans? What did it mean? Many humans used X as a default variable in algebraic equations. Perhaps it was a special holiday to mathematicians. Perhaps it celebrated the birth of the person who had invented algebra, or at least the date on which they’d published their findings. Maybe those were two separate dates. Maybe that was why one of the Xmases was in July.
At any rate, it really sounded like a great holiday for androids.
With a pit forming in his stomach, 9S remembered that 6O had been really keen on celebrating at least one Xmas this year.
Strings of hexadecimal gobbeldygook flowed past 6O’s eyes in a river of data as she sat on her side of the Commander’s desk and daydreamed wistfully about Xmas. About trees adorned with twinkling lights and socks hung festively over fires and something called “egg nog.” How nice it would be to do what humans did on Xmas eve and leave out baked treats for a mysterious gift-giving entity named “the Sanity Clause.”
It would have been nice to celebrate Xmas with friends. 6O, 21O, 9S, and 2B all gathered around the tree singing songs. Apparently, presents were involved, too, but the greatest gift of all was universally regarded to be friendship and togetherness, so the presents were actually optional. Which was good, since there weren’t many opportunities for gift-giving on the Bunker.
Of course, both 6O and 9S knew that neither 21O nor 2B were much for singing or gift-giving. But still, a girl could dream, and as long as she was dreaming, 6O decided she would go all out. Maybe she and 2B could “accidentally” find themselves standing under a sprig of mistletoe, as was tradition, and unless 9S had mistranslated something, 6O was pretty sure standing under mistletoe was some form of legally binding human marriage rite.
Human marrying 2B on Xmas eve…
6O sighed more wistfully than she’d expected.
“Sorry for ruining Xmas for you, 6O,” 9S said, wondering what he could do to make things right. He’d been pretty adamant for these past few hours that the incident earlier today hadn’t been his fault, but as the clock ticked closer to midnight, he was finding it harder and harder to absolve himself of all responsibility. He kind of had ruined 6O’s day. And the rest of her week. And on Xmas eve, no less. What kind of a friend was he?
“It’s okay,” 6O moped, sniffling. “There’s always December.” She was starting to tear up. That wasn’t exactly unusual for her; she cried so freely and so often that someone who didn’t know her well might suspect that she did it either for attention or to manipulate people. Anybody who did know her, though, knew that she was completely and utterly guileless and didn’t even know the meaning of the phrase “crocodile tears,” which she assumed had something to do with crocodiles getting poked in the eye by those little birds that picked food out from between their teeth. Sometimes she wished she could sway people into doing what she wanted by crying; if she had any skill at manipulation, she probably wouldn’t have had so many ex-girlfriends.
“Yeah, I guess,” 9S answered.
“I wonder why humans celebrated it twice. Do you think they still celebrate it, up there on the colony?”
“Can’t see why not. Seems like it was pretty important to them.”
“Yeah.”
The minutes passed in slow silence as 9S and 6O continued their Sisyphean torment. Every half hour or so, the door slid open and the Commander poked her head through to make sure they were still working. 9S wondered why she didn’t just keep an eye on the security camera footage from the comfort of her own quarters. Maybe her office didn’t have a security camera, though.
And that gave 9S an idea. Actually, it gave him several ideas.
“Hey, 6O,” he said after the Commander had left and the coast was clear.
“Yeah?”
“I think I know how we can still celebrate Xmas.”
6O’s eyes lit up. She leaped to her feet and pounded her fists on the desk. “What? How?”
“Well…” 9S leaned back and balanced his chair on two legs, a smug smirk on his face. When 9S got a smug smirk on his face, it tended to be a harbinger of trouble, but it also tended to be the moment he got a really good idea, so he purposefully ignored all the times things didn’t work out. “Let’s just say…” He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, though he wasn’t sure why. “I figured out how to digitize organic matter.”
YoRHa androids had the ability to convert matter into data and store it digitally. This was typically used to store weapons, tools, and other supplies. Plants were tricky. Software safeguards had been put into place to stop people from digitizing plants and animals, since most attempts to do so ended up producing tumorous balls of sludge when you tried to un-digitize them. 6O had learned this the hard way when she’d begged 2B to bring her a bouquet of rare flowers from Earth. Now those flowers were even rarer, because there was one less of each of them in the world. The stench of rotting plant matter had clung to 6O’s quarters for over a day.
9S looked around, made sure the coast was clear, and got up out of his chair. He headed for the corner of the office and sifted through his inventory. He’d found just the right tree about a week ago while out on a mission with 2B. Getting the tree chopped down and digitized before either she or 21O could scold him had been a challenge, but he’d managed to do it without arousing too much suspicion.
Now was the moment of truth. He’d see if he could pull a whole Xmas tree out of his pocket. Worst case scenario, he’d end up with a pile of rank-smelling slime oozing its way out of the corner of the office and onto his boots.
6O stayed in her seat, but waited with bated breath nevertheless. She couldn’t deny that she was excited, though she couldn’t help but half-expect a repeat of the bouquet incident.
9S held his breath, closed his eyes, and summoned the tree.
The tree popped into existence in the corner of the office just as he’d hoped. Unfortunately, he’d overestimated how much space it took up and found himself promptly thrown against the desk as the tree’s spiny branches whipped around and unfurled.
9S winced, blinking away the staticky stars fluttering before his eyes as 6O helped him to his feet.
“It’s beautiful,” she gasped. Her eyes, still misty, glittered and glistened like aquamarine as she beheld the humble Xmas tree.
Either it was bigger than 9S had expected, or the Commander’s office was smaller than he’d expected. A proud, needly conifer with its branches spilling out in the shape of a layered cone, it called to mind an elegant, if bristly, green gown. It stooped like a giant in a house made for men, imposing on the little office with its tip snapped off and dangling where it had collided with the ceiling.
Sap dripped from splintered wood and loose needles littered the floor; a sharp, sweet, brisk scent filled the air. Both taking deep breaths and letting the aroma fill their nostrils, 9S and 6O took in the enchanting aroma. Despite its earthy hints, there was a quality to the scent that was somehow clean. To 9S, and especially to 6O, who had never left the Bunker once in her entire short life, clean was an antiseptic, sterile, ethanol-heavy smell that filled the nose with a heady, stinging vapor. This was a different kind of clean. The kind of clean that only a dirty stowaway from Earth could be. A clean that was warm and inviting, a clean that was like a hug.
It was beautiful.
But 6O couldn’t help but feel it was missing something.
“Hey, 9S?” she asked.
“Yeah?” 9S asked, still fixated on the tree. It had looked like just another tree to him back on Earth when it had been surrounded by dozens of other trees that were more or less the same, but here it looked completely different. It stood alone, standing proudly and even defiantly in an environment it most certainly wouldn’t survive in. It had gravitas. It had pathos. It reminded him of 2B, and not just because she too was beautiful, wore an elegant dress, and was prickly.
“Do you feel like the tree’s… missing something?” 6O asked.
“Looks beautiful 2B. I mean, to me.”
6O stroked one of her braids thoughtfully, recalling some of the documents she’d read about Xmas. People didn’t just leave naked trees in their house, they dressed them up. Dressed them, in fact, to the nines, which was a little bit of wordplay that struck her as so clever that she couldn’t help but giggle a little to herself as she thought of it.
“Well,” she said, “don’t humans put this stuff called ‘tinsel’ on the tree?”
“Oh, yeah. I think I remember that,” 9S said. “What’s tinsel?”
“I dunno.”
“Some kind of aluminum foil, maybe?”
“Got any of that?”
9S checked his inventory.
“Oh! Humans would put an angel at the top.”
“What’s an angel?”
“It’s, uh… a beautiful person in a white gown with wings,” 6O said, imagining 2B in a white gown with wings.
9S looked up at the decapitated tree, its tip dangling by splintery sinews from the rest of the trunk. He was also imagining 2B in a white gown with wings. “I don’t think we can fit a whole person up there, 6O.”
“No, I mean, it was a little tiny person. Like a doll.”
“I don’t think we can fit one of those up there, either.”
“Ornaments, too. This tree could really use some ornaments.”
The door slid open.
Humans called it adrenaline. 9S called it survival instinct programming. In the span of a fraction of a second, he went from so terrified that he couldn’t move to so terrified that his programming suffered an integer overflow error and he couldn’t do anything but move. He rushed to the tree and quickly re-digitized it, then stood bolt-upright as the tree dissolved into a shower of amber sparks.
The Commander poked her head into the room, glaring at its two occupants. 9S felt his knees quiver. 6O, who wasn’t gifted with 9S’s survival instinct programming, was seconds away from all of her systems shutting down out of sheer fright.
“What was that?” the Commander asked 9S, her voice sharp. She smelled a rat. More literally, she smelled something that didn’t belong on the Bunker, though it had been so long since she’d left the Bunker that she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.
“What was what?” 9S asked, trying to feign ignorance.
“That flash of light.”
“Oh, that,” 9S said. “That was…”
“Aurora borealis,” 6O offered.
“A faulty ceiling light,” 9S said at the exact same time, more loudly. “It’s been flickering for the past hour.”
The Commander frowned. “And the smell?”
“Air freshener,” 9S said.
“I spilled a bottle of perfume,” 6O said. “Clumsy me! You know…”
The Commander, who did in fact know how clumsy 6O was, nodded, though the stern, suspicious frown etched into her face did not change. “Don’t you use floral perfumes?”
“Who says I can’t try anything new?” 6O shot back, very nervously laughing and trying (and failing) to sound like she wasn’t nervous at all.
“I see. Why aren’t you at your seats working?”
“We needed to stretch our legs,” 9S said.
“No you didn’t,” the Commander replied, knowing full well that androids didn’t need to stretch their anything, let alone their legs. She also knew full well that she was being made a fool of but was unable to directly ascertain how.
“A break every now and then makes us more efficient?” 6O offered.
“Hmm. I suppose it does. But keep them short. Get back to work.”
9S and 6O both saluted. “Yes, ma’am!”
Satisfied, the Commander withdrew and let the door slide shut, leaving 9S and 6O alone once again. She would have to start checking on them more often, she decided, and at more irregular intervals.
That was the problem with disciplining these overgrown children. You couldn’t just set them to work and go back to your own duties. Keeping an eye on them was a full-time job.
“You know,” 6O said, admiring the tree once the danger had passed and 9S had put it back up, “it really doesn’t need tinsel or ornaments. It’s a really pretty tree.”
“Yeah, it is pretty,” 9S said, nodding in agreement.
“I wish 2B and 21O were here to see this.”
Part of 9S agreed, but knowing those two, they wouldn’t stand one bit for this flagrant disregard of the rules. They were sticks in the proverbial mud. It was a shame, really. They didn’t know what they were missing.
Then again, neither 2B nor 21O had detention right now, so in a way, they were the winners here.
But on the other hand, they really didn’t know what they were missing.
6O checked the time. It was almost midnight and almost Xmas day. She sighed. “You know what would make this night complete?”
“What?”
“Toast,” she said.
“I don’t remember bread having anything to do with Xmas,” 9S said. “Besides, I’m positive there isn’t any around here. Who needs to make bread, anyway?”
“No, the other toast. You know.”
9S furrowed his brow. “The… other toast?”
“The kind you drink.”
“Oh, a toast.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think there are any drinks here either, 6O.”
6O shook her head, the seed of an idea germinating in the fertile ground that was her head. “I heard that the Commander has a bottle of champagne in her room…”
“Uh… what?”
“You know, it’s bubbly and fizzes up with you pull the cork out of the bottle.”
“Oh, you mean sham-paggin?”
It was 6O’s turn to furrow her brow. “It’s pronounced ‘champagne,’ 9S.”
Mortified and feeling his cheeks light on fire, 9S sputtered, “You look at how that word is spelled and tell me you don’t pronounce it sham-paggin! Anyway, you can’t be serious. We can’t raid the Commander’s quarters!”
“But it’s Xmas, 9S!”
“She’d kill us!”
“Only if she caught us!”
“We can’t leave this room!”
6O sighed, flopped onto her chair, and rested her hands on her cheeks. “But Xmas only comes but once a year,” she pouted. That was one thing she had in common with the holiday. “Er, twice,” she corrected.
9S returned to the desk and pulled up his terminal. “C’mon. Let’s get to work.”
They both returned to the drudgery of sifting through the data, their fingers quietly tapping on their keyboards. 9S could feel his getting sore and wondered how 6O did this every day. The tree loomed over them like a silent protector. Its mere presence made the Commander’s office feel oddly homey.
“So,” 6O said, “if you had to steal that champagne, how would you pull it off?”
“I’m not stealing the Commander’s champagne, 6O,” he answered.
“Just hypothetically,” she said, knowing that 9S liked nothing more than a good brain-teaser. (That wasn’t actually true. 9S did like something more than a good brain-teaser, and that was 2B.)
“Well, I guess I’d start by hacking into the corridor security system and splicing a loop into the audiovisual feed so no one could see us.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then we’d split up and cause a distraction to get the Commander out of her quarters.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d have to take point on searching her room,” 9S said, “since I have a lot more experience looking for things.”
“Sounds about right.”
“And you’d have to cause the distraction.”
6O nodded. “What kind of a distraction?”
“Well, it’d have to be something that attracts the Commander’s attention. Also, she can’t know that you’ve left the office.” 9S racked his brain for ideas. “I guess if you got into a terminal and trigger a priority one alarm, only she could turn it off, so she’d have to leave. You could just run back to the office as soon as you trigger the alarm and wait for me to get back. You’d have to be quick, though, and you’d have to be really stealthy about it. You couldn’t let anyone see you.”
“I see.” 6O stroked her chin and gazed up thoughtfully at the Xmas tree as she ran through 9S’s plan in her head. “But wouldn’t me accessing the terminal leave something in the system that could be traced back to me?”
“You’re right. You’d have to hack into it and use a reverse-encoded metadata deletion algorithm to make sure you didn’t leave anything incriminating behind.”
“So you’d have to set the alarm, and I’d have to search the Commander’s quarters.”
“Yup. Sounds about right.”
The two of them went back to work, the soft taps of their fingers on the keyboards as the only thing to break the silence for a while.
“Ten minutes to midnight,” 6O said after an interminable wait. She liked chatter. Quiet rooms made her feel like she was losing her mind.
“Ten minutes, huh.”
“Think we could steal that champagne before then?”
9S looked up from his monitor. His eyes met 6O’s.
“Ten minutes?”
“Yeah.”
He smiled. “I think we can do it in five.”
This was by far the dumbest thing 9S had ever been talked into doing. And he’d been talked into doing a lot of dumb things.
The priority one alarm blared incessantly, bathing the Bunker’s corridors in flashing red lights. His work done, 9S raced back to the Commander’s office, nearly tripping over his own feet. Now, as long as 6O did her part and pulled it off without a hitch, this plan would be a success. But what if the Commander hadn’t left her quarters as soon as the alarm went off? What if she’d taken a roundabout path down the hall to the terminal and run straight into 6O? What if she ran straight into him? Or both?
“9S, what are you doing out here?”
9S screamed and leaped nearly half a meter into the air. He could swear the tip of his head grazed the ceiling. He whirled around, half-expecting to see the Commander looming behind him.
It was 21O.
He shoved his terrified scream back down his throat, then realized that getting caught by 21O, the unofficial mom of everyone in the Bunker, wasn’t much better than getting caught by the Commander herself. How many times had she scolded him in the past week alone?
Sensing his unease, 21O raised a suspicious eyebrow. “You shouldn’t be wandering the corridors during a Priority One alert,” she said. “People will think you’re…”
9S tried very hard not to look as scared as he felt.
“…up to something.”
“Me? Up to something? No,” he said in the tone of voice that made it painfully obvious that he was up to something. “I was, uh, stretching my legs when the alarm went off. I was on my way back to my room, actually. Right now.”
21O turned her head and glanced over her shoulder down the hall. “Your quarters are that way, 9S,” she sighed, exasperated, desperately hoping that maybe this time 9S would develop a permanent sense of direction. Without 2B and his pod at his side, and without her checking in on him, he really was hopeless.
“I’m taking the scenic route,” he said.
“Do you want me to take you back to your quarters?” 21O asked.
“Uh, no, no, no, th-that’s fine,” 9S said, backing away. “I got it. Thanks, though.”
21O shrugged and gave up.
“Anyway, what are you doing wandering the corridors during a Priority One alert?” 9S asked. “Don’t you think people will think you’re… up to something?”
“I was stretching my legs when the alarm went off,” 21O said. She reached out and tousled his hair. “Take care, 9S.”
“Will do. Thanks, 21O.” 9S took off down the corridor just as the red light stopped flashing and the klaxon stopped blaring.
He skidded to a halt at the door to the Commander’s office, nearly running straight into 6O as she doubled over, panting, her hands resting on her knees and her frayed golden braids swaying like pendulums. She didn’t have the champagne with her.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped through ragged, air-starved breaths. “I couldn’t find the champagne—I looked everywhere…”
“It’s okay.” 9S grabbed her and pulled her back into the office with him, hastily shutting the door behind the two of them. The Xmas tree welcomed them both home with just as much warmth and friendliness, completely unaware of their attempted robbery.
“I’m sorry,” 6O repeated. “I really couldn’t find it anywhere, and her quarters are such a mess… it was like digging through the garbage before trash day…”
The Commander’s quarters, as the rumors said (and 6O had just confirmed) were a pigsty in just about every sense of the word. Rumpled, sweat-encrusted clothes covered the floor. The shower stall had dust in it. How the Commander could go on for so long without bathing and not reek of stale lubricant and motor oil 24/7 was one of the universe’s greatest and most enduring mysteries. It was no wonder 6O hadn’t been able to find what she’d been looking for in five minutes. It was a wonder the Commander herself was able to find anything at all in there. She really was the biggest slob in the universe.
“Well,” 9S said, consoling 6O, “the important thing is that we tried. And we still have the tree. Merry Xmas, 6O.”
6O smiled through her tears. “I did find something to put on the tree, though,” she said, pulling out one of the gold-plated hairclips the Commander wore and placing it on one of the branches. “There! Now it’s a real Xmas tree. Merry Xmas, 9S.”
Jackass’ and Anemone’s bright, grease-stained faces lit up the videoconferencing screen projected into the Commander’s quarters. “C’mon, White,” Jackass pouted, jostling her canteen of rocket-fuel booze impatiently. “It’s almost time. We have to do the toast.”
The Commander rifled through her dirty laundry. “Where is it?” she muttered, overturning the same pallid, ash-gray pairs of once-white socks for what felt like the fiftieth time. “Where the hell has my champagne gone?”
21O quietly, calmly, and efficiently popped the cork of the champagne bottle, not even flinching as the loud sound echoed through her quarters and a spray of fizzy foam shot into the air. Without missing a beat, she lowered the bottle and poured the bubbling golden liquid into a tall, thin champagne flute she held in her other hand and handed it off to her guest.
2B took the champagne, holding the rim to her lips and letting the rich and flavorful bouquet of scents fill her nostrils. It was a flowery, subtle, complex aroma, one that seemed to shift and transform just as it was on the cusp of being identified. The effervescent bubbles tickled her nose.
Whoever had made that diversion, she would have to thank them later. She’d have never been able to sneak into the Commander’s quarters without it. She still felt a jittery rush filling her body from tip to toe. Was this what 9S felt like whenever he did something stupid?
21O poured her own glass and set the bottle down, then joined 2B on the side of her bed, looked out through the window into the vast and star-speckled void of space, and raised her glass as her internal chronometer rolled over from 2359 to 0000. “Merry Xmas, 2B.”
2B nodded and raised her glass in turn. “Merry Xmas, 21O,” she repeated, briskly tapping the side of the glass against 21O’s to produce a crystalline, harmonic chime.
It was a shame 9S and 6O weren’t here to enjoy this, but it was their fault for getting themselves in trouble.
Or rather, it was their fault for getting caught.