Until that smile, that conversation really, the tension in the car could have choked a bison. It flowed away right then, as the stream became a river, and that river brought the first pieces of trust floating along on its metaphorical surface.
“Did any of your family not suck donkey balls?” Jackson asked.
“My grandfather didn’t. He would have been appalled at how my parents treated me, from what I know of him. I used to have a ring of his, but it disappeared and I don’t know what happened to it. I wish I still had it.” That had bothered me for a long time. I assumed it had gotten lost in one of my many moves, or stolen by a shady roommate. “My sibling is okay, but he doesn’t like to go against my parents and I can’t blame him for that. What about your family? How’d they take you preferring men?”
“My parents have a ranch in Wyoming,” Jackson said. “My father looks like he eats and shits conservative values. When I told him I was gay, I thought he’d lose his mind. Instead, he said, ‘Son, only steers and queers come out of Wyoming, and we’ve got enough steers around here. You tell me if anyone gives you hell over who you love. Me and my shotgun’ll have a talk with them about their damn closed minds.’”
Laughter spilled out of me, a little on the hysterical side but I deserved it. We didn’t have long to go until we pulled in at the Mail Call Mates offices, and I couldn’t help but be sorry we’d arrived. That conversation had only just started.
7AI-AI-OH
A brief wordabout those traditional values I mentioned, before I go on with my story.
We’ve come a long way in the years since my father flipped his biscuits over my sexuality when I was twenty-one. Back then, we’d barely started to understand the population nightmare we’d managed to create by sending the Assigned-Female-At-Birth Brigade to Mars. Conservative shitheels still had the luxury of protesting that it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, and that any same-sex relations would bring about a second Sodom and Gomorrah.
War is cool. Killing people millions of miles from home is fine. Penis does not touch penis or the world ends.
That whole “no homo” thing turned into a bad, bad look as our bigger problems materialized. Problems like a lack of mates that conformed with “Adam and Eve only”. Problems like genetic diversity down the road. LGBTQ+ causes seemed a lot more important, all of a sudden.
It wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t without blood. By then, though, we’d shed plenty of blood on Mars, and no one wanted it back home on Earth.
One of the few positive results of the Martian conflict is that same-sex couples receive a lot more respect and acceptance now. These days, no one blinks when men volunteer to marry men, have genetically engineered children, and live open, happy lives. My parents now look like fossils trapped in a tar pit of outdated morals.
Take that, assholes.
* * *
Back in Elaine Prise’s office. An assistant had spotted us the moment we’d stepped through the doors of the Mail Call Mates building and intercepted us. Elaine met us at the door of her office to greet Jackson and apologize for the mix-up, and to ask if he’d like the same explanation she’d given me.
He did. It seemed less urgent, though, more a curiosity he wanted scratched than proof that he wanted this match undone. She walked through it as she had with me, collected his signature, and walked us both down to see M4-CH+M4-KR’s impressive server room.
Jackson watched the search. It came out differently this time, which surprised me then and would later influence my opinions about machine intelligence versus a true artificial sentience. No “(NÉ VAN HORN)” beside my name that time, which I’d worried might show up when Elaine ran our search again.
I hadn’t mentioned it, and after what happened with Joan, I hadn’t decided if I would mention it to Jackson at all. It didn’t matter anymore. I never wanted to carry that name’s baggage again. But I’d been willing to if it meant convincing Jackson the match was real.
That would have opened another can of worms, though. The one where I hadn’t told him everything about me. As it was, M4 didn’t force my hand. Almost as if it had showed my birth name the first time just to prove to me it knew, then omitted it for Jackson because it didn’t want to spill any secrets.
Which it somehow knew were secrets. Secrets I didn’t want Jackson to learn yet. Go ahead. Bake your noodle on how it figured that mess out.
We saw the!!!*and Jackson heard the explanation. I tried not to turn into a heart-shaped puddle when he quirked my favorite little smile at the revelation that we wereessentialandexciting.
And I still had to fight down the dread when Elaine Prise said, “That explains what happened, Jackson.” She’d offered to call him Sergeant Sadler, as she’d offered to refer to me as Mister Hendrick, and just like me, Jackson had dismissed it in favor of his first name. “Does that make sense?”
“Makes perfect sense. More sense than I was afraid it would,” Jackson said.
“Good.” Elaine led us through the halls back toward her office. “This leaves us but one question. Now that you have learned about what happened, we would still understand if you chose to decline the match. It will not affect your record with us in any way. We can place you back into the selection pool for another match, one that is not an outlier in our data. I can fill out the paperwork and submit it today, as well as add a priority marker to your file. It opens up certain avenues for M4 to utilize in the name of speed.”
She didn’t explain those avenues. I didn’t ask, because I was sure they’d melt my grey matter.
Jackson seemed to feel the same. “Can we have a minute? Bastian and me?”
“Of course.” Elaine detoured us away from her office to a small conference room several doors down. “Take as much time as you need. When you have finished, come to my office. If you wish to decline the match, I will have the paperwork finished for you to sign and submit right away. If you wish to accept it, we have a chapel on the premises to finalize it.”
The way I figure it, Elaine Prise has to have seen everything. She has dealt with matches in every state of bliss and breakdown, talked nervous suitors down off ledges, and probably negotiated complicated trade agreements between countries. The United States should have hired her to solve that pesky world peace problem. We would have no war on Mars if Elaine Prise were put in charge of uniting all nations.
What I mean is, the woman knew when to bugger the hell off. She all but evaporated the moment the last word left her lips. Jackson and I stood, alone again, in a borrowed conference room.
He sat down heavily in a padded chair at the head of the empty wooden table. I could see the exhaustion radiating off him. He’d run on adrenaline for hours, and now, that fickle hormone had started to fade into the edgy emptiness it leaves in its wake. He was probably exhausted, longing for a shower, and in desperate need of normal quiet.