Public Display of Affection

            “You seem surprised,” John said, putting an arm around Sandra.  “I told you I worked here, didn’t I?”

            Sandra squirmed uncomfortably in her seat, her eyes gazing past the massive, glassy window in front of John’s control console towards the endless ocean of stars that lay beyond it.  “I know,” she said, still a little light-headed after the elevator ride, thoroughly enraptured with the countless points of light dotting the inky black.  “But I sort of thought you were the janitor or something.”

            “Hah!” John puffed up his chest, as though Sandra would be able to appreciate his forty-year-old flab with the infinity of space stretching out before her.  “I guess I sort of am a janitor.  They don’t send anybody up here but the professionally trained gun operators, so I do most of my own cleaning.  Generally,” he added as an afterthought, “I’m not supposed to bring guests up here, either.”

            Sandra hoped he had simply forgotten to clean before bringing her up here—there was a brown ring that smelled faintly of caffeine on the dash of the console that looked like it wasn’t going anywhere, and the floor was littered with hot pocket wrappers—but she didn’t bring it up.  She was giving this online dating thing her best shot, even if John was much flabbier than his profile pictures suggested.  The brashness was still there, though, but Sandra didn’t mind.  For now, it was charming, but she was always wary of dates passing the “ex-husband threshold.”

            “Have you ever been to the PDA before?” John asked.

            “No,” Sandra said, “which is funny, seeing as how it was all my parents ever seemed to talk about.  They worked at GE when the contracting started.”

            “Oh! So they helped build this!” John grinned, casually propping his feet up on the dash.  “Well, now I have two reasons to thank them.”

            “I’ll pass it on,” Sandra said.

            “See, the first reason is because they had—“

            “Is the application process hard?” Sandra said, a little too loudly.  “To become a gunner, I mean.  The recruitment fliers always said they only took the top one percent of the top one percent.”

            “Oh.” It took John a second for his mind to shift from “witty” praise mode into cool job mode, but eventually all the gears realigned and he transitioned.  “Well, that is technically true.  What they don’t say is that the pool of applicants is typically somewhere between zero and one.”

            Sandra wasn’t terribly surprised—the last interstellar war had ended over fifteen years ago, and things had been quiet since then—but anything was better than listening to a compliment that hinged on the idea of her parents having sex.  “Planetary Defense Atomizer.  If that name doesn’t get every boy in the world excited, I don’t know what would.”

            “Oh, everybody wants to work here when they’re kids,” John agreed.  The PDA was the biggest, most complicated toy humankind had ever built; a massive construct that resembled a revolver, with office buildings and power stations near its chambers and a carbon-nanotube barrel stretching to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere.  The bullet, a cocktail of quantum technobabble the size of a skyscraper, could teleport through alternate universes to hit a target from any angle.  The force required to shoot the gun had a non-zero chance of shoving Earth out of its orbit, necessitating a second gun in the Indian Ocean that existed solely to offset the recoil of the first.  John’s office, a control room on the inside edge of a massive, planetarium-esque translucent bubble, was on the revolver’s sights, and could only be reached by an elevator that travelled at high-speeds along the barrel, mimicking the path a projectile would take.  It was like something out of a comic book. 

“But when you grow up,” John said,  “you start looking at what the job actually entails, and the answer to that is mostly drills, all-nighters, maintenance checks, and going stir-crazy.  The pay isn’t that great, either, so we only get applicants when the old guy quits.”

“Then why did you take this job?”

“Well,” John chuckled, pulling Sandra closer, “the view’s pretty good.”

The view was very good.  They sat there for a moment, lost in the cosmos.

“So,” John said, breaking the silence, “how’s about I wriggle out of these pants and—“

He was interrupted by the simultaneous arrival of an alien armada, and the hideously loud, blaring alarm that presumably meant the arrival of an alien armada.

“Shit shit shit SHIT SHIT SHIT!” John, sheet-white and hyperventilating, lunged for his controls, rapidly keying in variables as he started keying commands to control; apparently all those drills hadn’t been wasted on him.  “Cannon to control, cannon to control? I’m looking at four, four point five—“ a notification popped up, informing him that he’d missed a decimal point.  “I’m looking at four thousand enemy vessels.  Please fucking advise.”

Sandra found herself in a rare situation for her: she was somewhere that she definitely was never, ever supposed to be.  All the open space she’d been gazing at was now a wall of death, hovering and waiting for the moment to fire.  She wanted to leave the now-claustrophobic room, to get back to Earth, but it hit her that Earth was exactly the same as this room.  She fought the urge to vomit.

Control finally popped up to advise.  The transmission was a cacophony of voices, shouts and screams and eerily-calm numerical readings, but eventually somebody actually started speaking into the microphone.  “Henderson, you are to ready the PDA to fire.  Do not fire yet, do you hear me? Do not fire yet.”

John sagged back in his chair.  “For once, I’m ahead on my workload,” he said weakly.

“Is…is that the button?” Sandra pointed at a fat, red button, blinking ominously.

“No, that’s the button that speed-dials the pizza delivery guys.”

“You’re lying.”

John didn’t answer at first.  “Sandra, this is my sole job,” he whispered.  “I was literally put here only to do this and I think I shat myself a little bit.”

“It’s okay,” Sandra said.  “I—“

“Henderson!” whoever had the microphone was speaking again, very quickly, “you can’t see it from your angle, but one of the ships is moving towards Earth.  The others remain motionless.  Our staff and the logistics computers can’t determine what’s going on.  It’s your call, son.”

“Don’t do it,” Sandra said, as the comms link cut out.  “We wiped out the Traxis Empire at the end of the war, so these guys aren’t them, and those cruisers all have the range to attack without moving closer to the planet.  If one is moving closer, it’s probably for communication purposes, and shooting that would definitely start a war.  If I’m wrong, they probably have some kind of weapon we can’t even understand, and then we’re dead even if you fire the gun.”

John blinked.  “Where did you say you worked, again?”

“You never asked,” Sandra said, “but I’m a therapist.  A lot of clients worked on cruisers during the war.”

John nodded.  His hands were clenched firmly at his sides.  Sandra grabbed one of them with her own.  It was cold and clammy with sweat and it was the best feeling in the entire world; she clutched his hand as though it was the only thing preventing her from floating away, where she was within reach of four thousand strangers.  She wondered which of the ships was moving.  She wondered if it could see the two of them, shaking and scared, hand in hand.