Maysie's Galaxy ONC 2023

Disappointed

They didn't get to go. Ben went out for this day with his sister...and disappeared. Turns out she wasn't his relative, and they fled to New Russia. Given that they would have been there with the couple (or the day after), Maysie would have been a foil for their escape.

It was understandable once Ethan explained what happened. 

Maysie was pacing the living space near the guard's quarters--which had those off-duty politely avoiding her when Ethan sat down at the table and silently watched her as she fumed.

"Why? Was he putting me at risk on purpose?"  Her gestures were wild, full of insecurity deep-rooted in men being dangerous.

"May, sit down. I'll tell you about it."

Maysie didn't even think about it and sat down across from a friend she came to trust as much as her father.

Ethan sighed. "Sometimes I forget how little you understand this place. Maysie--unless it's about your safety, you're not supposed to just blindly follow my commands."

"What? You asked me to sit, I thought it was a good idea, and I like sitting with you anyway."

His mouth tightened again, as he swallowed and looked away before pushing himself to get back to getting her to understand. "No, I did not ask. I made a statement of what I wanted you to do, and you did it without thinking about whether I had the right to. What if I asked you to ride..."

He laughed at himself and shook his head. "You understood that women have no rights but what men gifted them as soon as it was explained to you."

"Alder warned me that it would be like that if civilization fell." Maysie was drawing swirls on the table with her finger. Something about this thought reminded her that she still had not chosen any man--not for Alder's hopes of her having a future, or for getting laid so she could understand what she wanted to offer Talon. It had been over a year, and he was fading into the past while still being her hope for the future, clung to in hopes that this time the machinist would get the parts right so she could start tweaking field stability.

"With exceptional women, at the Boss' encouragement, we realized that we needed to go beyond a gift and sacrifice for those we need to keep safe. Men out there cannot be trusted to keep you safe, and women need autonomy just as much as men.  So, I defer to your needs and I defer to Cleo's--it's part of the contract. We will go out to that sky bar once things settle down but I fear that Ben was willing to sell you to run away from the mess that is New Europe. They've already done a raid on the sky bar."

Maysie's eyes narrowed a bit too shrewdly for Ethan's comfort--he wasn't the one having trouble reading her, after all.  "Exactly where do you defer to Cleo? You two are always arguing."

"You know exactly when and where I defer to her, May."

While Cleo and Ethan were friends, the only time they seems to wholly get along where those days Cleo wore a smile after a particularly good...night. Maysie had assumed too much with them. "I thought you were a couple."

"No," Ethan deadpanned. "The last relationship I had was when our world fell--married young, as some immigrant parents once pushed for. My wife didn't even have a chance to prove she was tough enough for this new world as a building fell on her."

"Do you miss her?"

"I barely knew her." The muscles in his jaw clenched reflexively. "But I remember a woman worthy of putting your faith in. It's a relationship I can't have as Cleo's toy."

Maysie felt bad for both of them and would ask Cleo for her thoughts later. Perhaps she wanted to be someone Ethan could trust. "You have a deeper reason for telling me this, don't you?"

"Honey, I want the world for you. I had doubts when we first brought you in, but Édouard is right. You are someone who could give this world meaning again, give men and women out there a vision of a future, so they can start thinking about equality and not merely existing. But to do that I have to keep you safe, which is why you ought to pick a man that is here, like Cleo did, and forget about the sky bar. The cage you set on yourself is the freedom you'll gift to others. Now, we kept them boys trapped in their rooms for long enough. They're well aware that their energy would just upset you more."

That was the first time Maysie was made aware that her guards hid in their rooms because she was too sensitive. Something he barely mentioned stuck with her far better than his suggestions.

As for Ethan? The Yourban Maniac was still kicking himself for calling her honey the first day they fired up the time dilation field, nearly 6 months later.

~~

The first test for the field held for 5 seconds. The watch set inside it shot out the side as the layers collapsed, but registered a time a few seconds earlier than its abrupt expulsion.

"Well, that was more violent than I expected," Cleo muttered. It was the first time in their working together that she played assistant to Maysie. "Why exactly did it do that?"

Maysie was already restarting the video, so she could see what happened more concisely. "Well, for that to happen, the inner field collapsed first, then cascaded outwards. People forget that time has direction. It was a slow collapse otherwise there would be a modest hole with the molten watch deeply embedded. We are probably only rotating around the sun at about 12 miles a second, but we're going around the galaxy at about 136 miles a second, and we are displacing the time of what ought to be happening to the watch if it was at an earlier time than me."

Maysie paused and enlarged the screen at the point of failure on the projected screen: one of the several physical points of contact from the aperture, a little spindly corkscrew--satellite dish-looking thing straight out of 1950s science fiction. Each layer had several of these things and like the watch, they were all under pressure to be in the right place in time.

Cleo whistled.  "Looks like we are going to need that Nano Tube specialist after all."

"I thought you wanted to avoid him," Maysie muttered.

"Former lover turned hell. Closest I'd been to falling in love when all I want is a good time."

"Poor Ethan."

"It's not me that Ethan is worried about. You figured out what you want to do with those twins?"

Maysie shook her head. Cleo had been right that the amount of time a guy paid attention to you didn't have a thing to do with his interest, at least on a vulgar level. Those hotties in her small college finally noticed her and wanted to fool around sometime. "If had just been one guy, maybe. I'm not ready for running amok."

"You're so adorable." Cleo snorted. "You're pretty safe to do who you want in Longyearbyen. After all, it's not like you even carry a gun around town all day--nobody has since the Polar Bears died out."