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Ones and Zeroes.
Ones and Zeroes.
Ones and Zeroes.
One Officer Eiffel lost himself to save them all.
Zero Eiffels remained.
This one was new.
He didn’t know about Star Wars.
He didn’t know about Hilbert or Decima.
This one didn’t laugh like Eiffel did.
Zero.
He was empty.
He was lost.
He spent every waking moment listening to a man who had his voice but no longer existed.
Logs of Officer Eiffel.
Logs of her best friend.
This one wasn’t her best friend.
This one was new.
One.
Sometimes he smiled and she saw the old one.
The one she knew.
“Dear listeners….”
“Dear listeners….”
“This is Communications Officer Douglas Eiffel signing off.”
“This is Communications Officer Douglas Eiffel coming to you from the Comms Room-”
“This is Doug Eiffel.”
Who Eiffel was now seemed to have a hard time listening to those logs.
Who he was now winced with every bad joke or mean comment, with every dig against the Commander.
New Eiffel didn’t understand all those pop culture references Old Eiffel had made.
He asked Hera about it sometimes.
Hera answered.
They didn’t talk like they used to.
No “Hera, are you there?”
No “Darling”. No “Sweetheart”.
Maybe he sensed how she felt.
Maybe he tried to keep his distance.
But it was like living with a ghost.
She wished they hadn’t programmed her to feel.
Human emotions were so hard to deal with.
Human emotions didn’t line up with ones and zeroes.
One New Doug.
One man, innocent and new as a baby.
No Officer Doug.
No man who survived alone in deep space for 193 days.
00110001 00111001 00110011
Ones and Zeroes.
It was her fault.
Her Fault.
She should have found a way to stop Dr. Pryce that didn’t take away what Eiffel had been.
If you lost every memory.
Every facet of who you were.
Wouldn’t that be the same as dying?
Did she kill her best friend?
“Hey, Hera?” New Doug asks her suddenly.
She’d stopped paying attention.
“Yes, Doug?” She asks him, still adhering to the new rules of first names only.
It hurt to call him that. Hurt that it wasn’t really her Doug.
“What was he like, really?” The empty man asks her.
“Renee keeps telling me that he was a great man… that he was brave, but… I think maybe she’s just telling me that to make me feel better. These logs don’t make him sound that way at all.
“But you seemed to know him best, right? You were friends, weren’t you?”
Hera let out a noise, a sigh. Not that she could breathe. Or exhale air. But she had a voice, and feelings.
Why did they make her this way?
“Officer Eiffel was a lot of things. He was a little careless,
lazy,
sometimes he didn’t think fully before he did things or said things.
But those things that the Commander tells you are also true.
He was brave.
He survived against so many odds,
he… gave up everything to save the world.
He sacrificed his memories, his life, for the greater good,” she pointed out.
“He had a way of hiding it, but he really was a good man. He was my best friend.”
The empty man nodded. “Good man. Well.. yeah, guess that’s good.”
He went back to his tapes.
And Hera went back to her thoughts.
Ones and Zeroes.