Jenny was different. Jennifer, her Jennifer, younger by almost a decade and bright as hell. She was like Rayan, too smart for her age, and too naive. It was never going to last between them. Misato was hungry for deeper space and deeper mysteries, and Jennifer was gorgeous, smart but shallow. Not shallow shallow, just shallow when compared to what lay beyond the ever-expanding human boundaries. Misato hadn’t lived well past one hundred to hole up in a condo on Tokyo Bliss Station and watch younger, hungrier people get what she wanted. Setting up the Io colonists had been the adventure of a lifetime, but she had more than one lifetime in her, she was sure of that.

Coffee. Jenny drank her coffee black, strong and acid, nasty enough to strip the varnish off a rocket. Fake sunlight poured in through the channel of overhead “windows” in the massive library, a loving re-creation of the now-lost Osaka Station. It was half of a low glass pyramid attached to a more traditional ten-story data library. The air in the main study area was always cool and swirling, kicking around the warmed dust smell of hundreds of busy computers. All around them, students typed away, hunched over their tablets and keyboards, eyes red with weariness.

But there was no tablet in front of Misato, just Jenny’s hands wrapped around a steaming silver canister. Her hands were heavily tattooed, Jupiter on one, Mars on the other, exquisitely rendered and as colorful as the actual planets. Two formulas were inked across her knuckles, coffee on the right, ethanol on the left.

Misato watched the letters and numbers deform as Jenny drummed her fingers on the canister impatiently. She needed answers, Misato just needed to look at her. So pretty. A star girl, born in a man-made paradise, never seeing Earth or the Philippines of her mother or the Netherlands of her father. Maybe one day, Jenny would say, maybe one day we can go to Amsterdam together and get high as fuck, wander the canals, eat a stroopwafel or some shit, you know, be romantic. Her black hair was pulled back in a dizzying twist of tight braids, a little dusting of stars tattooed under her left eye.

So pretty.

“It’s not about . . .” And here Jenny squinted, eyes sliding to the side as she read what was open on Misato’s AR display. They had linked displays months ago. “Cortical Dynamics Underlying Implant-Related Seizures, is it? It’s me. It’s us. It’s this bullshit again.”

“I love you, Jenny.”

“That’s a cop-out.” Jenny was thirty-eight, but she may as well have been a decade younger than that. Age didn’t seem to touch her face, as if even her own cells sensed changing that perfect dark skin would be a crime. “Love. Blugh. Okay, genius, get back to work. I’ll stop distracting you.”